Episode 1070 Scott Adams - Protests, Fake News Determining Elections, Sandmann Puts Fake News 2 Sleep
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - President Trump's Executive Orders slash medication cost - Can Trump supporter victims sue media pushing HOAXES? - Senator Cotton's anti-1619 Project bill - 5G speeds will change civilization - Did China consulate support/fund BLM and Antifa? - The Queen of Dragons and her eunuch army ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for another exciting and amazing episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. Yep, it's just about the best thing you've ever seen in your life. What is happening? My security camera's going off. There's a mouse outside. I literally picked up a mouse on my security came…
View segment →ay today and it's just going to get better. And one of the things that will make it better is a simultaneous sip. I hope you'll join me now. All you need is a cup or a glass, a coffee chalice or a stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffe…
View segment →terday Trump signed four executive orders, I guess. They're all designed to lower pharmaceutical costs in this country. Now there are a few interesting things about this, aside from the fact that wouldn't it be good to have lower pharmaceutical costs? Number one interesting thing: Why wasn't this…
View segment →timate. I always say it wrong. I tweeted that wrong this morning. There's a big impact of the what-do-you-call-it, the accidental consequences of anything. And the accidental consequences of the president losing a few Supreme Court battles is that he can lower our health care costs. Yeah, you could…
View segment →s nothing in what he did that even indirectly implies race. So if you take away the Charlottesville fine people hoax, which is the one that people said, ah, finally, now we don't have to read his mind anymore. We don't have to think he was thinking something wrong even though he didn't do things w…
View segment →igence to try to thwart the fake news in this country, which will otherwise determine the election. So we have foreign interference. This is literally true. We have foreign interference in our fake news, which will cause the fake news to less reliably throw the election and make it illegitimate. N…
View segment →e. But then other people weighed in and said that this is the most widely debunked conspiracy theory ever. Now I told you before that one of the authors of the Plandemic book lives locally around here, and he's lobbied me. I think he sent me three books so far. He's lobbied me to get him on here t…
View segment →. I don't know what Michael Jackson did or did not do. I do know that a huge part of that story about what he did looks completely not credible. That doesn't mean all the rest of it is not credible. It just means that the fake news basically destroyed this person. All right, if you took the fake new…
View segment →ent to work? I don't know if the police just opened fire on the protesters with the—I think they should shoot to kill anybody who's got a laser that they're putting in people's eyes. That's just my opinion. Now, probably would cause a lot of problems. It may be more problems than it solves. But I th…
View segment →od, you know, because I'm quarantined at the moment in anticipation of some surgery upcoming. And so if I didn't have my phone, I could barely do what I do. I mean, the smartphones, I think you would agree, have transformed civilization, but not as much as 5G. And here's why. 5G is going to give you…
View segment →anies and intellectual property theft and all that, apparently there's some information we haven't seen yet that would suggest that China is backing Black Lives Matter. Now I ask you, does that sound likely? Does it seem likely or unlikely to you that China might have at least tried—I don't know how…
View segment →o do that. It's something the president does great, and most politicians do it well as well. The only thing that bothered me about Dave Portnoy's interview is that it should have been me. And when I say a show to bed, it just means I'm jealous. Yeah, so I'm just jealous because if there was anybod…
View segment →Now if you have less experience in hypnosis and persuasion than I do and your opinion is different from mine about this topic, you should ask yourself, would your opinion change if you knew as much as I did about this specific topic? And that's where I want you to be. I want you to be thinking maybe…
View segment →Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for another exciting and amazing episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. Yep, it's just about the best thing you've ever seen in your life.
What is happening? My security camera's going off. There's a mouse outside. I literally picked up a mouse on my security camera. That's good security. But enough about me. What about you? How are you doing? Great. Yeah, good, because it's a great day today and it's just going to get better.
And one of the things that will make it better is a simultaneous sip. I hope you'll join me now. All you need is a cup or a glass, a coffee chalice or a stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including pandemics, economics, you name it.
Go. Ah.
Let's talk about all the things happening today. So yesterday Trump signed four executive orders, I guess. They're all designed to lower pharmaceutical costs in this country. Now there are a few interesting things about this, aside from the fact that wouldn't it be good to have lower pharmaceutical costs?
Number one interesting thing: Why wasn't this done before? Even the president says it should have been done long ago. Well, he's been president for three years, so long ago also includes the current presidency. And so the question is, why wasn't it done before now?
Let me say, I don't know the details of the executive orders, but one of them is to have most-favored-nation status, which is fairly common in contracts, common enough that people know it exists. And the idea is that we can't be charged more in this country than some other country. So we don't want to be the ones who are subsidizing other countries by paying high costs so that some other country could have low costs. That's pretty basic contract stuff. But the government had not been involved. Rather, these were private companies doing private things.
So why is it that now the president can make this kind of a change, which seems to comply with all common sense? And on the surface it looks like just a smart thing to do. Why'd it take so long? Same with buying from Canada. Apparently we'll have the option now of getting some meds from Canada where the prices are lower, which is similar to the most-favored-nations thing. And then a few other things that do the same thing.
And here's what I think it is, but I need to see some reporting on this by smarter people. Yeah, you're saying in the comments where I was going. Could you tell I was teasing for the answer? Because I think the answer is that the Supreme Court has upheld enough executive orders from the past, and I think it was with DACA and maybe Obamacare. So that's the part that's murky. Somebody can fill me in on the Supreme Court part of it. But I think what's happened is that Trump has discovered he has more power as a president than anybody would have imagined, meaning that the Supreme Court has now set a standard that says that Trump can do this now because he's doing this at about the same size and this-ness of other things that the Supreme Court has allowed. And so it gave him room to operate that didn't exist before.
So here's the fun part. The Supreme Court, by voting against the president's wishes a few times, has turned him into the dictator that nobody wanted. But as long as he's a benevolent dictator, it's going to be okay. And the same with Obama, right? Obama did some big executive orders, but as long as society looked at them and said, yeah, well, your intention was good and a lot of people do like it—not everybody agrees, but it's not like the worst thing in the world—the Supreme Court can let that stand.
So you can never underestimate—no, you can never overestimate. I always say it wrong. I tweeted that wrong this morning. There's a big impact of the what-do-you-call-it, the accidental consequences of anything. And the accidental consequences of the president losing a few Supreme Court battles is that he can lower our health care costs. Yeah, you could never underestimate. Thank you, that's what I should say. So the accidental consequences, the unintended consequences, were to give the president more power. And then he took his power and he solved one of society's biggest problems with it.
Thank you for "unintended," yes. Now, who saw that coming? Who on their prediction card said president will lose important Supreme Court cases and that will allow him to lower our drug costs? What? And you're going to see a lot of exciting things, I think, happening as we get closer to election day, because the president has this one gigantic advantage and it's enormous, which is the president can do things whereas Joe Biden can't do things. So the president doesn't have to just talk about lowering drug costs. He can just do it. And apparently he's well on his way to doing it. We'll see if this stuff holds, but I'll bet it will.
You all had a good laugh, or I think celebrated silently, when Covington kid Nick Sandmann won his suit. Well, he got a kind of settlement, which is different from winning, although it's a kind of winning. And so this is his second win in a row. He won. He got a settlement, I guess, from CNN, and he got a settlement of unnamed amount from the Washington Post. He's got a few more outlets to sue.
And the basic idea here is that the news, the fake news, painted him as the bad guy when in fact he was just standing there and he was sort of the one that was approached, not the one who was causing trouble. So his reputation got destroyed by this sufficiently that a court, or at least it looked like it was something he could win sufficiently that the other side decided to settle. So that's how bad it was.
So this raises an interesting question, and it goes like this. Could somebody who had lost their job or had been attacked—let's say physically attacked, and I guess there were a few of them even last night at the protests—if people who are Trump supporters are physically attacked or fired for being Trump supporters, here's the question I ask the legal experts. Could those people sue the fake news for the fine people hoax and for the Covington kid hoax and the Russia collusion hoax? In other words, could you say the reason I lost my job for being a Trump supporter is because the fake news has run enough hoaxes that I'm demonized just for being a supporter? I lost my job. Could they make the case that the media, by knowingly running hoaxes—and of course the fine people hoax is the classic one where they know the real answer because it's in the transcript. It's not really an interpretation problem. It's right there. You just read it. So could you win a case against the same fake news companies if you had been abused in any way for being a Trump supporter? Because I think it's a pretty solid line from there.
Speaking of which, Rasmussen, who does polling, which you rarely will hear mentioned on the news—apparently Rasmussen is banned from being mentioned on the news. Did you know that? And I think it's banned on both the left and the right now. They claim, and I think there's evidence to support it, to be the most accurate polling company in the country for political stuff. Now, is that true? I think so. I think they're the most accurate, and they can't be mentioned. So there must be a counterargument to that, but I don't know what it is.
But one of the things that Rasmussen tweeted this morning is that if you look at what people believed during the 2018 midterm elections, you'd find that 30 percent—just before the vote for the midterms in 2018—30 percent of the country believed the Russia collusion hoax. Thirty percent of the country believed it, and that includes Republicans. Now, if 30 percent of your country believed the fake news that Russia was controlling the president, what would you expect the midterm to look like? You'd expect it to look like it did. People would vote in Democrats because they think the president is owned by Russia.
Now think about how much that changed the world, because it probably flipped the House. And I haven't even added the second part. If the only thing that happened was the Russia collusion hoax, which you had to know that the media pushing it had some suspicion it wasn't true, or know it wasn't true but they pushed it anyway, what about the fine people hoax? I would say that the fine people hoax was believed by maybe 70 percent of the country when it first came out. Wouldn't you say? I would guess that 70 percent of the country, because that includes a lot of Republicans, believed the fine people hoax. Now that's changed quite a bit.
I tweeted this morning because I periodically tweet that it's a hoax, and a PhD doctor-type guy who wrote an anti-Trump book weighed in to say it's not a hoax. Darth Dilbert. See, that's the funny part, because my critics call me Dilbert, but he called me Darth Dilbert. So that's like really, really funny. Very clever. And he was not aware, according to his tweet, that it was a hoax. And I thought to myself, how could you be an educated person in the United States and think that the fine people hoax was real? Now in 2020 I totally get why people believed it in 2018, because it was fresh and it was being misreported. But after two years of unraveling this thing, you'd think most people would know it's a hoax by now.
But think of those two hoaxes: the Russia collusion hoax and then I would call it the tentpole race hoax, because everything else about Trump would seem different if you took away that one thing that they think they got the smoking gun on, right? Because everything else is sort of, well, 30 years ago there was that full-page ad about the Central Park Five. So what about that? Well, if you were looking at it in isolation and you had not heard the fine people hoax and you're just looking at it on its own, you'd say, well, he wrote an ad that says nothing about race. There's nothing in there about race. It was about crime. The people accused happened to be Black, but it wasn't any part of Trump's point. So if you saw that in isolation, you'd say, yeah, I can see why people are saying it feels racist, but there's nothing there. I mean, there's nothing in what he did that even indirectly implies race.
So if you take away the Charlottesville fine people hoax, which is the one that people said, ah, finally, now we don't have to read his mind anymore. We don't have to think he was thinking something wrong even though he didn't do things wrong. We know he was thinking bad things. Now we have the actual proof. So once you have the proof, it proves all the other things. It's like now that we've heard this, we know all of his secret thoughts are confirmed. So I would say that those two hoaxes actually completely determined the midterm result. And that means that the fake news literally is running the country at this point.
If you're worried about foreign interference, you should rethink that on a statistical basis, because what we have now, it looks like you probably have a Russia which wouldn't mind having Trump again—I think, I'm not sure, but it feels like it—and then you've got a China that absolutely doesn't want Trump because Biden is China-friendly. So it looks like it's a contest between China and maybe Russia intelligence to try to thwart the fake news in this country, which will otherwise determine the election. So we have foreign interference. This is literally true. We have foreign interference in our fake news, which will cause the fake news to less reliably throw the election and make it illegitimate.
Now I'm not coming out in favor of foreign interference. I'm simply pointing out the irony that it might be the only thing that could save us. Again, not in favor of it. I'm not making a pro-Russian statement. I'm just saying that if the fake news was going to do another 2018 job on the country and just completely rig the election by fake information, what if Russia successfully interfered with our election in a way that thwarted the fake news? Would that be bad? In theory it would be bad. Hypothetically it would be terrible to have foreign interference, except that our domestic interference is far worse, right? So sort of a two-wrongs-making-a-right situation. Sometimes it works.
Senator Tom Cotton continues to make news. He's good at making news. And he wants to ban federal funding from any school that has included what is called the race-baiting 1619 Project in the curriculum. Now the 1619 Project—1619 refers to the first date of slavery, I think, the beginning of slavery—and the curriculum would include the fact that the white race is, quote, barbaric devils and, quote, bloodsuckers. So Tom Cotton thinks that schools should not get federal funding if they're teaching that white people are barbaric devils and bloodsuckers. I'm thinking to myself that sounds pretty reasonable.
Tom Cotton, I have to say I haven't always agreed with Tom Cotton. He's got some opinions that are a little outside my range of happiness. But not this one. This one seems right down the center. This one doesn't even look right-wing to me, does it? You could argue that this is, oh, he's a right-wing guy, but not this. This is right down the middle. So will this get passed? I doubt it, but I'm glad he's doing it.
Here's an interesting story that I don't know what to make of it. You know about the book and the movie Plandemic, right? So you know that there's a doctor who's suggesting that, I guess there's going to be—the Sinclair local TV stations are going to air it. And the Sinclair stations, by the way, own a lot of local TV stations, so this is a big deal. They're going to air the Plandemic. It's called a researcher's conspiracy theory. Now, conspiracy theory is what you call anything you don't agree with, so keep an open mind about what's a conspiracy theory and what isn't.
But the Plandemic claims that Dr. Fauci was responsible for creating the coronavirus and they sent it to China, and it's so Fauci's responsible for the coronavirus. Now, I suppose we live in a world where anything's possible, right? Anything's possible. But then other people weighed in and said that this is the most widely debunked conspiracy theory ever.
Now I told you before that one of the authors of the Plandemic book lives locally around here, and he's lobbied me. I think he sent me three books so far. He's lobbied me to get him on here to my Periscopes, which makes me think he might be watching right now, so I can't be too lively. So I did get your messages, and the reason that I haven't responded is that I can't vet this sort of stuff. So Eric Bolling apparently had the doctor on there recently and he got some criticism for not knowing ahead of time the other things that they had claimed, etc. And I don't want to make the mistake that Eric Bolling made, which is putting on one side of a controversial scientific claim if I can't argue the claim. In other words, if I don't know enough about the topic or I could push back on a claim, I don't want that person talking in public with my help, because any single claim in a context looks persuasive.
So I don't have an opinion about whether the Plandemic is totally debunked, as other people say, or there's something to part of it but maybe not all of it. Don't know. But I'd also suggest that you don't know. And for the fact that the Sinclair stations are going to run this, I think is completely irresponsible unless it also runs something from the critics. If it's balanced, if they say, well, this is what the experts say, here's what the Plandemic movie says, and let's go back to the experts and see what they say—if they do something like that, then fine. You know, maybe it's a public interest to see both sides. But I don't think that's going to happen.
Let me give you a good example of what happens when you only look at one side of an argument. In the comments, tell me: Was Michael Jackson totally, definitely a child molester or not? In the comments, tell me your opinion and I'll tell you why I'm asking this. I'm asking because this goes to my point about how if you see one side of an argument, it's always convincing. If one lawyer gets to talk and the other side doesn't get to talk, that one lawyer will convince you pretty much every time.
I'm looking at your comments about Michael Jackson and you'll see that they're mixed, which is what I was expecting. You'll see a bunch of yeses, you'll see a bunch of nos. Now, how can it be that we get to this point in time and you've got a bunch of yeses and you've got a bunch of nos? Well, let me tell you my experience. I went from saying, well, gosh, I don't know, could be true, could be not true. And then I watched a Netflix special, I think it was Netflix, in which he showed two of his accusers, now adults, telling their story. Now when you hear the adults telling the story of what happened to them when they were younger, it is 100 percent credible. It would be hard to watch that documentary and walk away thinking that Jackson was innocent. I mean, it would be really hard. It's completely convincing. So therefore Michael Jackson definitely a child molester, right? Very convincing.
Except last night I watched another documentary. Last night I watched one called Square One, and it took the other side and it went through the description of how the initial accuser made the accusation, etc. And I don't want to give it away. Oh, was it an HBO special? Somebody's correcting me. Was it Leaving Neverland? Yeah, that was the name of it. So anyway, I watched the other side of it, and let me tell you, the other side of it that says he was not a child molester is 100 percent credible. Blew my freaking head off. If you had told me that there was another side to this story after I'd seen the completely convincing evidence that he was obviously a child molester, when you see the other side, it'll blow your head off.
Let me give you just a flavor of it, and let me tell you, you should watch this. Because if you believe that Michael Jackson definitely is guilty—and I'm not going to say he is or not, I'm going to only talk about the quality of the arguments. Do I know anything? Yeah, I wasn't there. Let me give you some examples. The very first accuser, who ended up settling—when you hear the story of how that scam came about and you hear that even the kid didn't think anything happened, he talked to his friends and said nothing happened even after the fact—I mean, when you hear the whole story, it really was just a con artist who figured out a way to make Michael Jackson pay.
And here was the part of the story I'd never heard before, and it goes like this. There were two court cases. One was criminal and one was civil. So one tries to get money and one is trying to see if Michael Jackson goes to jail. Typically the way you do those is you do the criminal case first, and then depending on how that turns out that gives you a basis to do or not do a civil suit where you're trying to get money. Now the problem is that in the Michael Jackson case, his civil suit was on a faster schedule, which meant that he would have had to give away his entire defense in the civil suit before the criminal case was run. And if you do that, the experts say that the criminal case people get to craft and recraft their case so that the defense doesn't work. And therefore it's massively unconstitutional, or at least unfair. I think it's actually passed constitutional muster since then, but in my opinion it's unconstitutional because it guarantees an unfair trial in the criminal case. It guarantees it. It guarantees an unfair trial.
And so Michael Jackson had the following situation. He could either settle for something that definitely didn't happen, or he could risk going to jail because he knew that his defense would be laid bare in the civil suit. And when he went to criminal court, basically he would get eaten alive and probably be convicted for something that didn't happen. And so he settled. Once he settled, there became another thing that happened. And here's the key part. The fake news business at the time was paying people who would come forward and say that something bad happened at Michael Jackson's house. What happens when you pay massive amounts of money to people who are willing to lie on television? What happens? You get a lot of people who are willing to lie on television. And the ones who came after were just sort of obvious liars.
So now you've got one case that Jackson settled because he got this weird legal bind that he just had to. The same thing that created the first story that generated fake news paying people for more stories, because they got a lot of clicks. So now you have a pattern. And when you say to yourself, but what about those two older ones that you saw in the other documentary? They're adults. It doesn't seem like they have anything to gain by making something up. Well, here's the thing. They also have some connection to some of the badness, and they won't give it away. But the documentary that excuses Jackson doesn't too directly deal with those latest adult accusations, but it does completely eliminate the bulk of the ones you've heard, and they are absolutely—they look pretty fake. The other ones, who knows?
But let me give you a little anecdote here. Colleen McCulkin was saying this. When you hear the story that Michael Jackson let children they had been visiting sleep over in his bedroom, what do you think? You see them all in the same bed, right? And here's one of the stories that Colleen McCulkin was saying. He goes, the first thing you don't understand is that Michael Jackson's bedroom was two stories. It was two stories. So you could be in his bedroom without even being in the same room. And he told the story about some kid who wanted to sleep in his bedroom, in his bed, and Michael Jackson asked one of the adult staff members to sleep in the room with him. And the two of them slept on the floor and let the kids use the big bed. Now, I don't know how common it was for him to do that, but the fact that it happened even once tells you that Michael Jackson was aware that you don't want to be alone with a kid in your bed. Did he ever do it before? I don't know.
So here's the point. I don't know what Michael Jackson did or did not do. I do know that a huge part of that story about what he did looks completely not credible. That doesn't mean all the rest of it is not credible. It just means that the fake news basically destroyed this person. All right, if you took the fake news business out of the equation, Michael Jackson would still probably be performing today. I don't even know if he'd be dead. So keep that in mind. You have to watch both of those documentaries. If you don't watch them both, you're really not going to get the feel of this two-world situation.
I saw on social media, but I'm looking for a confirmation, that something like half of all coronavirus deaths happen to diabetics. Is that really true? Is it true that half of coronavirus deaths are diabetics, and the diabetics are still walking around just like they have the same risk as everybody else? I mean, I would hope that they're hiding pretty well by now, but it feels like we could really make something happen if that's true.
There are also two movies and two worlds about all the protests. If you look at Fox News, you'll see lots of articles and photos of things burning and things being thrown at police and dangerous lasers blinding them, etc. A bunch of police have been literally blinded by these lasers from the protesters. Now, I'm so angry about that in particular. It's one thing to get hit with a blunt object—I mean, that could be bad enough—but to be blinded just because you went to work? I don't know if the police just opened fire on the protesters with the—I think they should shoot to kill anybody who's got a laser that they're putting in people's eyes. That's just my opinion. Now, probably would cause a lot of problems. It may be more problems than it solves. But I think if you actually saw somebody aiming the laser, that no matter where that laser was aimed, if it's a deadly weapon meaning that it will blind somebody, I think the police should be able to shoot to kill if they even see the laser. You know, the moment the laser comes out, that should be a shoot-to-kill situation, because it would be if it were a gun, right? If somebody brought out a gun, that'd be a shoot-to-kill situation if it looked like they were going to use it. If somebody brings out a laser to blind a police officer, let me say as clearly as I possibly can, you put me on that jury, that police officer is free. Put me on the jury that tries to convict a police officer for shooting somebody who has a blinding laser that they have in their hand. You're a free man or free woman. Yeah, you put me on that jury. No way I'm going to convict the cop for shooting a guy with a laser that blinds people. No way.
If you're wondering what's going to happen with all their urban centers, I suggest you learn about insurance and banking. Because when you see all the shops that were destroyed by the looters in the urban areas, you say to yourself, well, you know, they'll wait for the tension to go down and then they'll rebuild. Or maybe other people will come in, other tenants will take over and rebuild. But there's a problem. You kind of need insurance to have a viable business. If you need a bank loan, the bank's going to want you to have insurance too so that you're covered in case something happens. Now, insurance companies will often, if not always, exclude riots. So riots would not be covered by your insurance. Now that was probably not a big problem in the past, because when you're filling out your insurance policy, you're thinking, well, what are the odds I'm going to lose my business to a riot? You know, that doesn't seem very likely. So you still buy the insurance. But would you buy insurance with no riot protection in the very places that have recently been destroyed by riots and no end in sight?
I would suggest that you can predict what's going to happen to at least the retail parts of the inner cities by looking at banking and insurance and entrepreneurs and how they manage risk. And at this point the risk is just too high, and that's going to persist for years. So I don't see any situation in which the urban areas quickly come back, if they come back at all.
I was tweeting about 5G, and you know people think there might be some health dangers from 5G, which is the new faster technology for phones. Now the first thing I want to say about it is, as I said in my tweet, I don't think society understands that this new faster speed for phones called 5G—because it sounds like 4G and 3G, and you knew what those were, right? Oh, 3G was dated but it was kind of slow. 4G is pretty snappy, pretty fast. 5G is going to be better. It'll be a little faster, right? If that's what you're thinking, you're missing the show. 5G is not a little bit faster data. 5G will change civilization. 5G will just change civilization in a way similar to how smartphones did.
Because I don't know about you, but I'm using my phone for getting all my delivery of my food, you know, because I'm quarantined at the moment in anticipation of some surgery upcoming. And so if I didn't have my phone, I could barely do what I do. I mean, the smartphones, I think you would agree, have transformed civilization, but not as much as 5G. And here's why. 5G is going to give you an augmented reality world. It won't be long before my glasses are connected to my phone and my phone has 5G. That's pretty much guaranteed. There's no way that won't happen, because it's just too obvious that that's going to be a thing.
Once you have enough people who have the types of glasses—or they don't really need them, they could just hold up their phone and see an augmented reality through the camera—those people will be living in a much improved world. Because with your glasses on, you won't just see the things that are there. You'll see a menu for everything there. There's a television across the room. I would see a remote control pop up and I could control my TV in the air, because in the air I would see an actual remote control. So I could get directions on anything. I could find out, you know, really I would have this whole enhanced reality such that when I took my glasses off at night, it would start to feel the way you feel when you accidentally leave home without your phone. Have you had that experience? Ever get in your car and you're driving someplace, you're going to be gone for a while, and you look for your phone and it's not there and you think, oh God, what if I get a problem? It's not the end of the world, but it definitely bothers you, right?
Now imagine if you had an enhanced reality world, an augmented reality, where you're seeing things floating that don't exist. You can call up a screen that floats in front of you to watch a movie that floats in the air that only you can see, you know, because you've got your earbuds in. So you're walking around watching a movie. You meet somebody, their social media profile appears above their head. Try to live without that. It will be so addictive and useful. It'll be like if you didn't have a smartphone. So I think that the world will start to bifurcate into people who are essentially cyborgs. Because once you get to the point where you're living in an enhanced reality with labels and messages and instructions and more detail and all that, you're basically a cyborg.
Now I've argued for a long time, and Elon Musk said something similar recently, that the smartphones already made us cyborgs. So the fact that you can leave it at home and drive away is sort of trivial because you'll wish you hadn't, right? But as soon as you've got the Neuralink, which is also one of Elon Musk's companies, they're going to embed a little sensor in your brain so maybe you could control things just by thinking it. Now imagine if you could see through your glasses an enhanced reality with augmented stuff and you can just think them to change. So you could just look around, you could see a TV and you could just blink at it and it would come on because your brain knew that you wanted it to be on. So put those things together and we are fully into the cyborg era.
But here's the problem. What if everybody doesn't become a cyborg? Will there be a human organic movement of people who don't have any technology? Probably. I just don't know how big it will be. Will it be Amish-country small or will it be a third of the country doesn't want to be a cyborg? Now if you ask me, oh, I can't wait, make me a cyborg as quickly as you can. But anyway, people don't realize what a big deal that is.
But here's the funny part of my story. There's nothing more amusing—well, there probably is, but it's amusing—when you're on social media and people don't know what your background is and they challenge you on a point that you might be the one person in the world who knows more about it than anybody. So it's sort of like that Woody Allen movie, I think it was Annie Hall, where he's standing in line for a show and they're arguing about some public figure, Marshall McLuhan, an author. And Marshall McLuhan ends up in this movie scene. The actual Marshall McLuhan is standing in line right behind him and gets into the conversation and corrects something. And that movie scene always stuck with me because you see that playing out in real life. And it happened here.
So somebody said to me on social media that 5G hasn't been tested because the big companies that are going to roll it out, they would have no interest in testing it to find out that it's dangerous and therefore it's not been tested. Sort of logically you say to yourself, well, logically they don't want to hear that it's bad for you. They want to make a trillion dollars, the phone companies mostly, and the phone makers. So nobody would have studied it. Now that's what somebody said to me on social media. And here was my answer. I used to work for the phone company, and part of my job was doing the economic projections of whether we should do more wireless stuff. I actually personally worked on that. And part of my economic decision was informed by my co-worker, who I often sat right next to, whose job it was to study all the health studies of the cell phones. So that was prior to 5G technology. That was probably a 3G kind of a technology. And we studied it because that's part of the economics.
I wasn't going to give management an economic analysis that says looks like we'll make a billion dollars on this and ignore the fact that it might kill people. I'm not going to leave that out. That's pretty important to the economics of a project. If you leave out the part where it kills 100 million people, I don't think you've done your work right. So this person was arguing with me that a phone company would ignore this part of the economic impact, you know, the health part, which also has an economic impact. And she was talking to somebody who literally was the guy who did it. I actually worked at a phone company. I actually did those economics and I sat next to the guy who did look in detail at the health studies and then summarized them for management so management was comfortable that it wouldn't be killing people.
Now years have passed. Has anybody died from their cell phone? Can we say that my economic analysis was accurate, that I didn't need to include it? Can we say that my co-worker who studied it got it right? Now if you're telling me that Apple—think about this—you're telling me that Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars, because it'll be something like that eventually, you're telling me Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars on the business plan without looking at the most obvious biggest thing that you should look at? I think they looked at it. Now you can make the argument that whoever's looked at it has looked at the wrong stuff. You could make the argument that the studies weren't good enough. There are lots of things you could argue that I wouldn't argue back. There are plenty of bad studies. But here's what I will not allow anybody to tell me without pushing back. Don't tell me they haven't looked into it. Are you kidding? Don't tell me that they haven't looked into it.
And if any of those things were credible, from the brain cancer to it gives you coronavirus or makes it worse to stunt your growth, if any of that was backed by science, companies like Apple are not going to wade into it with that kind of a risk. That's a company-destroying risk. You just don't take that risk. It's just not a thing. But that's different from saying—let me be very clear, I'm not a doctor. I don't know what causes risk and what doesn't. But I'm telling you they looked into it. That's all I'm going to tell you.
There's some evidence, based on—we don't have much information on it yet. It comes from a tweet from somebody who seems to know a lot of stuff that the Houston consulate that was closed, the Chinese consulate that had evidence apparently of spying on American companies and intellectual property theft and all that, apparently there's some information we haven't seen yet that would suggest that China is backing Black Lives Matter. Now I ask you, does that sound likely? Does it seem likely or unlikely to you that China might have at least tried—I don't know how successful they were—but at least tried to encourage Black Lives Matter to do a little more protesting? Because here's the calculation you should look at when trying to decide if that's true.
Number one, would they think of it? Of course. Of course. So you don't have to wonder, hey, did China have that idea? Had they considered it? Did anybody suggest, hey, maybe you should back the protesters who are making the United States look bad? Of course they thought of it, because if this situation were reversed, we would have thought of it. I mean, I'm sure we've backed dissidents and protesters in other countries. That's pretty basic.
The second thing you should ask for is what would be the penalty for getting caught? And we already know the penalty for getting caught. It's nothing. This consulate closed, but they have other consulates. The penalty is basically nothing. One consulate got closed. It's not as if they don't have computers and hackers and thieves in other consulates. I don't know how much difference does it make if you live in Houston versus you've got a consulate somewhere else. So I don't think there is any risk. It just costs a little money, right? They've got to move a consulate. But it's not like anybody died. It's not like we completely decoupled over this. It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. No risk.
So if there's no risk but there's a potential big reward, and there could be if they're destabilizing the United States, of course it's happening. In the situation where they think of it, there are lots of people involved. You know, in China there's lots of people involved and there's a big payoff and a small risk. It'll happen every time. Every time it's going to happen. I mean, mischief will happen under those conditions.
So CNN continues to be funny in trying to be serious. So Kaitlan Collins, who's one of their loyal anti-Trump voices, she was mocking him in a written article, I think there was a video piece, because he decided to cancel the Republican National Convention, which of course she would agree with because CNN is sort of anti-large gatherings unless they're protests. And then she says that he would cancel his convention despite pushing for schools to reopen. Now the implication is that that would be inconsistent. Why would the president not think it was safe to have a convention if he does think it's safe to send kids to school? Is that a fair comparison?
You know, I complain all the time that people who come up through a journalism or some specific profession, if they don't have a broad understanding of how to make decisions and how to compare things the way an economist or an engineer or scientist would, that they say consistently dumb things but don't know it. And I don't think anything could be dumber than saying I don't understand the consistency. If the president thinks that a bunch of older adults packed into a room is dangerous, why doesn't he think that the group who basically doesn't get coronavirus—why wouldn't he think they're dangerous? They couldn't be more different situations. They couldn't be more different.
Now, is it true that opening schools will also cause spread of the coronavirus? Yes. Yes. Everybody knows that. The president knows that. Nobody's denying it. It's just that we think that's a level that's controllable if you're comparing it to the presumed benefits of getting kids back to school. That there is a risk, but it's one that the president decides is worth it. I don't know how CNN can pretend that they can't see the difference there. And they're looking for these little gotchas.
Five Seattle news organizations were ordered by a judge to turn over their video and photos for protests. So law enforcement wanted to get a hold of all the video and pictures of protests so they could find out who to arrest, etc. News organizations resisted, and now the King County Superior Court said that they have to give it up. Interesting. So all of the news organizations just became weaponized by the police. Will that change? I don't know. So can the news organizations continue to send news crews who will take pictures and video, knowing that those pictures and video will go directly to the police and then the news organizations will be part of what's disbanding Black Lives Matter? Very ticklish position to be in, wouldn't you say?
I saw somebody asking me about what's his name, Portnoy and Barstool. Barstool Sports. He did an interview with President Trump. People are saying, and I would agree with him—I like to use that Trump phrase, people are saying—that that's the best interview with the president that they've ever seen. And I would say I would agree. In terms of entertainment and in terms of humanizing the president and just having fun with it, probably the best one. I would say it's the best interview with the president I've seen.
Now the president was very good at avoiding the questions. So it was this weird situation. Yeah, Dave Portnoy. It was this weird situation where Dave would ask a question such as, you know, do you always use the power handshake with world leaders? Wouldn't you like to know the answer to that question? It was like he asked the question that I've thought about for so long and nobody's ever asked it. Now of course the president completely ignored the question and just talked about handshakes and coronavirus and how world leaders love him and stuff, which was perfectly executed media spin, if you will. In other words, the president is just really good at turning the question into whatever he wanted the question to be, which is what you actually learn when you take media training. You learn how to do that. It's something the president does great, and most politicians do it well as well.
The only thing that bothered me about Dave Portnoy's interview is that it should have been me. And when I say a show to bed, it just means I'm jealous. Yeah, so I'm just jealous because if there was anybody who would give an irreverent interview with the president, they would still be watchable. I would be on that list of people that you should watch interview the president. Now I do have her—informally I did put a request in, but I probably need to formalize that, because I think that between now and November an interview with me with President Trump, I think would be useful for the country. I wouldn't be just entertaining. I'd want it to be useful. So I think I could frame things in a way that you would quite enjoy it. But yes, I'll have to confess there are very few things that make me jealous because it's just not an emotion I spend any time with. But that's why this caught me off guard and it's why I'm mentioning it. That was the first time I genuinely felt jealous. I mean, it's a small thing, right? It has no real impact in my life. But he was that good. So you want to be so good at your job as Dave Portnoy is. You want to be so good that somebody else who does that job goes, oh damn it, damn it, that should have been me. So A-plus. Watch it if you haven't seen it.
I cheekily am continuing to say that—oh, by the way, I just one more thing about the fine people hoax. In the past when I've tweeted that the fine people hoax is a hoax, my comment feed would just fill with people who would say no it isn't, it's totally true, I heard it myself. Today I tweeted that and got almost no people who thought it was true. Now I don't know if that's because all of the Democrats now know it wasn't true or if they gave up. They just suddenly stopped refuting that point. That doesn't make sense. I feel like maybe we made a dent collectively because at least my critics have backed off and just let it go that I'm stating it as a fact that it's a hoax, and then they're letting it go now, which I think is capitulation. But I might be a little optimistic on that, at least for the commenters, not for the—I think Biden still says it.
All right, my last point here. I've said this before, but you cannot—I don't think you could ignore the effect of fiction on how we look at the real world. Because everything you look at needs to fit some model of understanding. And ideally you want the new information to fit some existing model in your head, and you just populate that existing model. That's called confirmation bias, and you see it in everything, right? You see the left agrees with the left, the right agrees with the right. But there's a statement about human beings that I think you would all agree with, which is it's difficult to do something, anything, until you can first imagine it. So you don't really attempt to do things you can't imagine. The Wright brothers invented an airplane because they could imagine it working. I assume they imagined it working and then they worked on it. Now all the things you imagine don't work necessarily when you try to do them, but you're not going to do anything until you can first imagine it's a thing.
And that makes me get to my impression or the filter that I just sort of automatically have on watching the protests. The first filter is it looks very female-led. And I don't know how many of you are also getting that feeling, but Antifa in particular, and I think Black Lives Matter as well, but they seem like they are mostly female leaders, or at least the leaders that are the most vocal or maybe the most effective, most aggressive, seem to be female. So it's like a female-led organization. And the males, at least the Antifa males—not so much the Black Lives Matter males, but the Antifa males—seem to fall into a category of not as manly, if we could say that. And again this isn't an insult. I'm not saying that if you don't have a manly persona you're worth less or anything. Nothing like that. I'm left of burning. So if you want to be every letter in LGBTQ, I'm cool with that. I'm 100 percent cool with that. You can be any letter you want. You can be any lifestyle you want. If it doesn't bother me, you can be whatever you want. So there's no criticism implied here. I'm just observing that there's a certain kind of man who is enjoying this Antifa situation. And they, if I could use the diminutive term, beta males, they kind of fall into that category. Now again this is not an insult because I think that it's a big world. I'm not saying it's a good thing to be an alpha male or that it's a bad thing to be a beta male. They both exist. It's a preference. It's the way you're born or it's a lifestyle. It doesn't matter. It's all okay with me. If you're not breaking the law, if you're not violating the Constitution, it's just none of my business. Period. Could not care less about your personal lifestyle choices if they don't affect me.
So I say that just because my filter is that it looks like Game of Thrones with Daenerys. So you've got the strong female leader, the queen of dragons, and she formed an army of literally eunuchs. So their men had been castrated to make them more docile and obedient soldiers, I guess. I don't know what the theory was there exactly. But it reminded me of that. And it looks like it's the queen of dragons with her unique army, but they're reenacting the Joker movie. And I said this before to great pushback, which I enjoy of course. And the pushback was that if the Joker movie had not been such a universally acclaimed movie and a lot of people saw it, if you hadn't first pictured the Joker movie, would it have been as easy to recreate it? Because that's what the protests and the looting effectively did. It recreated the look and feel of the Joker movie. Is that a coincidence? Is it simply that there are movies and they're in my head and so I just interpret the world through those movies and that's all it is? Or is there a causal relationship? In other words, if you can only do the things you can imagine, and what you could imagine was not everybody's doing well but what you could imagine was that Joker movie, you're more likely to do the thing you could imagine.
So I do think that fiction has a big role in how we're interpreting our reality but also how we act on it, because you just don't act on things you can't imagine. All right, I'm just looking at your comments. Yeah, you know, I don't think that we should make a judgment about what's better or worse when it comes to people's biological situation, but it is fair to say it's different. Nobody would argue with the fact that there are differences among people, but we don't have to put a value judgment on that. Anyone see Zuckerberg's face in Hawaii? Yeah, Zuckerberg uses a lot of sunscreen, but if you've seen his complexion, you know there's a good reason for that.
But where is the imagining from? Well, it's coming from fiction. That's the point. Somebody says you're reaching on the Joker thing. In my opinion, well, you know, the best opinions are the ones that you say to yourself—in fact I try to stay in that space as much as possible. My favorite opinions to present here are the ones where you say to yourself, I'm not so sure that's true. I've got a little skepticism about that. Those are my favorite places to be.
I will tell you that based on everything I know from hypnosis, from persuasion, and living a life in which I've done everything from marketing to selling, that the models that you have in your head of what the world can look like are very persuasive. Now if you have less experience in hypnosis and persuasion than I do and your opinion is different from mine about this topic, you should ask yourself, would your opinion change if you knew as much as I did about this specific topic? And that's where I want you to be. I want you to be thinking maybe, maybe I should look into that. Maybe that's a thing. Or maybe I'll look for it in the future. Look forward in the future and you might be surprised. But you don't have to believe everything I say. I'll talk to you later.
hey everybody come on in it's time for another exciting and amazing episode of coffee with scott adams yep it's just about the best thing you've ever seen in your life what is happening my security camera's going off there's a mouse outside i literally picked up a mouse on my security camera that's good security so but enough about me what about you how are you doing great yeah good because it's a great day today and it's just going to get better and one of the things that will make it better is a simultaneous set but i hope you'll join me now all you need is a copper bunga glass attacker challenger stein a canteen jug or flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day the thing makes everything better including pandemics economics you name it go ah oh let's talk about all the things happening today so yesterday trump signed uh for are they executive orders i guess then they're all designed to lower uh pharmaceutical costs in this country now there are a few interesting things about this aside from the fact that wouldn't it be good to have lower pharmaceutical costs number one interesting thing why wasn't this done before even the president says should have been done long ago well he's been president for three years so long ago also includes the current presidency and so the question is why wasn't it done before now let me i don't know the details of the executive orders but one of them is to have most favored nation status which is fairly common in contracts common enough that you know people know it exists and the idea is that uh we can't be charged more in this country than some other country so we don't want to be the ones who are subsidizing other countries by paying high costs so that some other country could have low cost that's pretty basic contract stuff but the government had not been involved rather these were you know private companies doing private things so why is it that now the president can make this kind of a change which seems to comply to all common sense and on the surface it looks like just a smart thing to do why'd it take so long same with buying from canada apparently we'll have the option now of getting some meds from canada where the prices are lower which is similar to the most favored nations thing and then a few other things that do the same thing and here's what i think it is but i need to see some reporting on this by smarter people yeah you're saying in the comments uh where i was going could you tell i was teasing for the answer because i think the answer is that the supreme court has upheld enough executive orders from the past and i think it was with daca and maybe obamacare so that's the part of murky on so somebody can fill me in on the supreme court part of it but i think what's happened is that trump has discovered he has more power as a president than anybody would have imagined meaning that the supreme court has now set a standard that says that trump can do this now because he's doing this that's about the same size of this-ness of other things that the supreme court has allowed and so it gave him room to operate that didn't exist before so here's the fun part the supreme court by voting against the president's wishes a few times has turned him into the dictator that nobody wanted but as long as he's a benevolent dictator it's going to be okay and the same with obama right obama did some big executive orders but as long as society looked at them and said yeah well your intention was good and a lot of people do like it not everybody agrees but it's not like the worst thing in the world the supreme court can let that stand so uh you can you can never underestimate no you can never overestimate i always say it wrong i tweeted that wrong this morning um there's there's a big impact of the uh what do you call it the the accidental consequences of anything and the accidental consequences of the president losing a few supreme court battles is that he can lower our health care costs yeah you could never underestimate thank you that's what i should say so the the accidental consequences the unintended consequences were to give the president more power and then he took his power and he solved one of society's biggest problems with it thank you for unintended yes um now who saw that coming who who on their prediction card said president will lose important supreme court cases and that will allow him to lower our drug costs what and you're going to see a lot of exciting things i think happening as we get closer to election day because the president has this one gigantic advantage and it's enormous which is the president can do things whereas joe biden can't do things so the president doesn't have to just talk about lowering drug costs he can just do it and apparently he's well on his way to doing it we'll see if this stuff holds but i'll bet it will um you all had a good laugh or i think celebrated silently when uh covington kid nick sandman won his his suit well he got he had a kind of settlement which is different from winning although it's a kind of winning and so this is his second win in a row he won he got a settlement i guess from cnn and he got a settlement of unnamed amount from washington post that he's got a few more outlets to sue and the basic idea here is that the the news the fake news painted him as the bad guy when in fact he was just standing there and he was sort of the one that was approached not the one who was causing trouble so his reputation got destroyed by this sufficiently that a court or at least you know it looked like it was it was something he could win sufficiently that the other side decided to sell so that's how bad it was so this raises an interesting question and it goes like this could somebody who had lost their job or had been attacked let's say physically attacked and i guess there were a few of them even last night at the protesters at the protest if if people who are trump supporters are physically attacked or fired for being trump supporters here's the question i ask the legal experts could those people sue the fake news for the fine people hoax and for the you know the covington kid hoax and the russia collusion hoax in other words could you say the reason i lost my job for being a trump supporter is because the fake news has run enough hoaxes that i'm demonized just for being a supporter i lost my job could they make the case that the media by knowingly running hoaxes and of course the fine people hoax is the classic one where you know they know the real answer because it's in the transcript it's not really an interpretation problem it's right there you just read it so could you win a case against the same fake news companies if you had been abused in any way for being a trump supporter because i i think it's a pretty solid line from from there speaking of which uh rasmussen uh who does polling which you rarely will hear mentioned on the news apparently rasmussen is banned from being mentioned on the news did you know that and i think it's banned on both on both the left and the right now they claim and i think there's evidence to support it to be the most accurate polling company in the country for political stuff now is that true is that true i think so i think they're the most accurate and they can't be mentioned so there must be a counter argument to that but i don't know what it is but one of the things that rasmussen tweeted this morning is that if you look at what people believed during the 2018 midterm elections you'd find that 30 just before the vote for the midterms in 2018 30 of the country believed the russia collusion hoax 30 of the country believed it and that includes republicans now if 30 percent of your country believe the fake news that that russia was controlling the president what would you expect the midterm to look like you'd expect it to look like it did people would vote in democrats because they think the president is owned by russia now think about how much that changed the world because because it probably flipped the house and i haven't even added the second part if the only thing that happened was the russia collusion hoax which you had to know that the media pushing it had some suspicion it wasn't true or no it wasn't true but they pushed it anyway what about the fine people hoax i would say that the fine people hoax was believed by maybe 70 of the country when it first came out wouldn't you say i would guess that 70 percent of the country because that includes a lot of republicans believed the fine people hoax now that's quite that's changed quite a bit i tweeted this morning because i you know i periodically tweet that it's a hoax and a phd doctor type guy who wrote a anti-trump book weighed in to say it's not a hoax darth dilbert see that's the funny part because my critics call me dilbert but he called me darth dilbert so that's like really really funny very clever and he was not aware according to his tweet that it was a hoax and i thought to myself how could you be an educated person in the united states and think that the fine people hoax was real now in 2020 i totally get why people believed in in 2018 because it was fresh and it was being misreported but after two years of unraveling this thing you'd think most people would know it's a hoax by now but think of those those two hoaxes the russia collusion hoax and then i would call it the tentpole race hoax because everything else about trump would seem different if you took away that that one thing that they think they got the smoking gun on right because everything else is sort of a well 30 years ago there was that that full-page ad about the central park five so what about that well if you were looking at it in isolation and you had not heard the fine people hoax and you're just looking at it on its own you'd say well he wrote an ad that says nothing about race there's nothing in there about race it was about crime the people accused happened to be black but it wasn't any part of trump's point so if you saw that in isolation you'd say yeah i can see why people are saying it feels racist but there's nothing there i mean there's nothing in what he did that even you know indirectly implies race so if you take away the charlottesville find people hoax which is the one that people said ah finally now we don't have to read his mind anymore we don't have to think he was thinking something wrong even though he didn't do things wrong we could we know he was thinking bad things now we have the actual proof so once you have the proof it proves all the other things it's like now that we've heard this we know all of his secret thoughts are confirmed so i would say that those two hoaxes actually completely determined the midterm result and that means that the fake news literally is running the country at this point if you're worried about uh foreign interference you should rethink that on a statistical on a statistical basis because what we have now it looks like you probably have a russia which wouldn't mind having trump again i think i'm not sure but it feels like it and then you've got a china that absolutely doesn't want trump because biden is china friendly so it looks like it's a contest between china and maybe russia intelligence to try to thwart the fake news in this country which will otherwise determine the election so we have foreign interfec this is literally true we have foreign interference in our fake news which will cause the fake news to less reliably throw the election and make it illegitimate now i'm not coming out in favor of foreign interference i'm simply pointing out the irony that it might be the only thing that could save us again not in favor of it i'm not making i'm not making a pro-russian statement i'm just saying that if the fake news was going to do another 2018 job on the country and just completely rigged the election by fake information what if russia successfully interfered with our election in a way that thwarted the fake news would that be bad in theory it would be bad hypothetically it would be terrible to have foreign interference except that our domestic interference is far worse right so sort of uh two wrongs making a right situation sometimes it works senator tom cotton continues to make news he's good at making news and he wants to ban a federal funding from any school that has include included the what is called the race baiting 1619 project in the curriculum now the 1619 project 1619 refers to the first date of slavery i think uh the beginning of slavery and the curriculum would include the fact that the white the white race is quote barbaric devils and quote bloodsuckers so tom cotton thinks that schools should not give federal funding if they're teaching that white people are barbaric devils and bloodsuckers i'm thinking to myself that sounds pretty reasonable tom cotton i have to say i haven't always agreed with tom cotton he's got some opinions that you know a little uh a little outside my uh range of happiness but not this one this one seems right down the center like this one doesn't even look right-wing to me does it i like you could argue that this is oh he's a right-wing guy but not this this is right down the middle so will this get passed i doubt it but i'm glad he's doing it um here's an interesting story that i don't know what to make of it you know about the uh the book and the movie plandemic right so you know that there's a a doctor who's suggesting that uh i guess there's going to be a tv the sinclair local tv stations are gonna air and the sinclair stations by the way own a lot of local tv stations so this is a big deal uh they're gonna air the pandemic uh that it's a it's called a researcher's conspiracy theory now conspiracy theory is what you call anything you don't agree with so keep an open mind about what's a conspiracy theory and what isn't but the plandemic claims that dr fauci uh was responsible for creating the coronavirus and they sent it to china and it's so found she's responsible for the coronavirus now i suppose we live in a world where anything's possible right anything's possible but um and and then other people weighed in and said that this is the most widely debunked conspiracy theory ever now i told you before that one of the authors of the pandemic book lives locally around here and he's lobbied me i think he sent me three books so far he's lobbied me to get him on here to my periscopes which makes me uh think he might be watching right now so i can't heck it lively so i did get your messages and the reason that i haven't responded is that i can't vet this sort of stuff so eric balling apparently had uh you know the doctor on there recently and he got some criticism for not knowing ahead of time the other things that they had claimed etc and i don't want to i don't want to make the mistake that eric bowling made which is putting on one side of a controversial scientific claim if i can't argue the claim in other words if i don't know enough about the topic or i could push back on a claim i don't want that person talking in public with you know my help because at any any single claim and a context uh looks persuasive so i don't have an opinion about whether the planet is totally debunked as other people say or there's something to part of it but maybe not all of it don't know but i'd also suggest that you don't know and for the fact that the sinclair stations are going to run this i think is completely irresponsible unless it also runs something from the critics if it's balanced if they say well this is what the experts say here's what the plan dammit movie says and let's go back to the experts and see what they say if they do something like that then fine you know maybe it's a public interest to know to see both sides but i don't think that's going to happen let me give you a good example of what happens when you only look at one side of an argument in the comments tell me was michael jackson totally definitely a child molester or not in the comments tell me your opinion and i'll tell you why i'm asking this i'm asking because this goes to my point about how if you see one side of an argument it's always convincing if one lawyer gets the talk and the other side doesn't get to talk that one lawyer will will convince you pretty much every time i'm looking at your your comments about michael jackson and you'll see that they're mixed which is what i was expecting you'll see a bunch of yeses you receive a bunch of no's now how can it be that we get to this point in time and you've got a bunch of yeses and you've got a bunch of no's well let me tell you my experience i went from saying well gosh i don't know could be true could be true could be not true and then i watched uh a netflix special i think it was netflix in which uh he showed two of his accusers now adults telling their story now when you hear the adults telling the story of what happened to them when they're younger it is a hundred percent credible you could have it would be hard to watch that documentary and walk away thinking that jackson was innocent i mean it would be really hard it's completely convincing so therefore michael jackson definitely a child buster right very convincing except last night i watched another documentary last night i watched one called uh square one and it was it took the other side and it went through the description of how the initial accuser made the accusation etc and i don't want to give it away oh was it an hbo special somebody's correcting me uh and was it something wonderland or yeah that was the name of it so anyway so i watched the the other side of it and let me tell you the other side of it that says he was not a child molester is 100 credible blew my freaking head off if you had told me that there was an other side to this story after i'd seen the completely convincing evidence that he was obviously a child blesser when you see the other side it'll blow your head off let me give you just a flavor of it and let me tell you you should watch this because if if you believe that michael jackson definitely is guilty and i'm not going to say he is or not i'm going to only talk about the quality of the arguments do i know anything yeah i wasn't there it was not there let me give you some examples the very first accuser who ended up ended up settling when you hear the story of how that scam came about and you hear that even the kid didn't think anything happened he talked to his friends and said nothing happened even after the fact i mean when you hear the whole story it really was just a con artist who figured out a way to make michael jackson pay and here was the part of the story i'd never heard before and it goes like this there were two court cases one was criminal and one was civil so one tries to get money and one is trying to see if michael jackson goes to jail typically the way you do those is you do the criminal case first and then depending on how that turns out that gives you a basis to to do or not do a um a civil suit where you're trying to get money now the problem is that in the michael jordan in the michael jackson case his civil suit was on a a faster schedule which meant that he would have had to give away his entire defense in the civil suit before the criminal case was run and if you do that the experts say that the criminal case people get to craft and recraft their case so that the defense doesn't work and therefore it's massively unconstitutional or at least unfair i think it's actually passed constitutional muster since then but in my opinion it's unconstitutional because it guarantees an unfair trial in the criminal case guarantees it it guarantees an unfair trial and so michael jackson had the following situation he could either settle for something that definitely didn't happen or he could risk going to jail because he knew that his defense would be laid bare in the in the civil suit and when he went to criminal court basically he would get eaten alive and probably be convicted for something that didn't happen and so he settled once he settled there became another thing that happened and here's the key part the fake news business at the time was paying people who would come forward and say that something bad happened at michael jackson's house what happens when you pay massive amounts of money to people who are willing to lie on television what happens you get a lot of people who are willing to lie on television and the ones who came after were just sort of obvious liars so now you've got one case the jackson settled because he got this weird legal bind that he just had to do the same thing that created the first story that generated fake news paying people for more stories because they got a lot of clicks so now you have a pattern and when you say to yourself but what about those you know the two older ones that you saw in the other documentary they're adults it doesn't seem like they have anything to gain by making something up well here's the thing they also have some connection to some of the badness and they won't give it away but they don't the the documentary that excuses jackson doesn't too directly deal with those latest adult accusations but it does completely eliminate the bulk of the ones you've heard and they are absolutely they look pretty fake the other ones who knows but let me give you a little uh a little anecdote here uh colleen colleen mcculkin was saying this when you hear the story that uh michael jackson let children they had been visiting sleep over in his bedroom what do you think you you see them all in the same bed right and here's here's a one of the stories that colleen mcculken was saying he goes the first thing you don't understand is that michael jackson's bedroom was two stories it was two stories so you could be in his bedroom without even being in the same room and he told the story about some kid who wanted to sleep in in his bedroom in his bed and michael jackson asked one of the adult staff members to sleep in the room with him and the the two of them slept on the floor and let the kids use the big bed now i don't know how common it was for him to do that but the fact that it happened even once tells you that michael jackson was aware that you don't want to be alone with a kid in your bed did he ever do it before i don't know so here's the point i don't know what michael jackson did or did not do i do know that a huge part of that story about what he did looks completely not credible that doesn't mean all the rest of it is not credible it just means that the fake news basically destroyed this person all right if you took the fake news business out of the equation michael jackson would still probably be performing today i don't even know if he'd be dead so keep that in mind uh you gotta you have to watch both of those documentaries if you don't watch them both you're really not gonna get the feel of this two-world situation um i saw on social media but i'm looking for a confirmation that something like half of all coronavirus deaths happen to diabetics is that really true is it true that half of coronavirus deaths are diabetics and the diabetics are still walking around just like they have the same risk of everybody else i mean i would hope that they're hiding pretty well by now but it feels like we could really make something happen if that's true um there are also two movies and two worlds about all the protests if you look at fox news you'll see lots of articles and photos of things burning and things being thrown at police and and dangerous lasers uh blinding them etc a bunch of police have been literally blinded by these lasers from the protesters now um i just i i'm so angry about that in particular it's one thing to get hit with a blunt object i mean that could be bad enough but to be blinded just because you went to work uh i don't know if the police just opened fired on on the protesters with the with the i think they should shoot to kill anybody who's got a laser that they should that they're putting in people's eyes that's just my opinion now probably would cause a lot of problems it may be more problems than it solves but i think if you actually saw somebody aiming the laser that no matter where that laser was aimed if it's a deadly weapon meaning that it will blind somebody i think the police should be able to shoot to kill if they even see the laser you know the the moment the laser comes out that should be a shoot to kill situation because it would be if it were a gun right if somebody brought out a gun that'd be a shoot to kill situation if it looked like they were going to use it if somebody brings out a laser to blind a police officer let me let me say as clearly as i can possibly can you put me on that jury that police officer is free put me on the jury that tries to convict a police officer for shooting somebody who has a blinding laser that they that they're is in their hand you're a free man or free woman yeah you put me on that jury no way i'm gonna convict the cop for shooting a guy with a laser that blinds people no way if you're wondering what's going to happen with all their urban centers i suggest you learn about insurance and banking because when you see all the shops that were destroyed by the the looters in the urban areas you say to yourself well you know they'll wait for the tension to go down and then they'll rebuild or maybe other people will come in other tenants will take over and rebuild but there's a problem you kind of need insurance to have a viable business if you need a bank loan the bank the bank's gonna want you to have insurance too so that you're covered in case something happens now insurance companies will often if not always exclude riots so riots would not be covered by your insurance now that was probably not a big problem in the past because when you're filling out your insurance policy you're thinking well what are the odds i'm going to lose my business to a riot you know that doesn't seem very likely so you still buy the insurance but would you buy insurance with no riot protection in the very places that have recently been destroyed by riots and no end in sight i would i would suggest that you can predict what's going to happen to at least the retail parts of the inner cities by looking at banking and insurance and entrepreneurs and how they manage risk and at this point the risk is just too high and that's going to persist for years so i don't see any situation in which the urban areas quickly come back if they come back at all let's see um they're uh i was tweeting about 5g and you know people think there might be some health dangers from 5g which is the new faster technology for phones now the first thing i want to say about it is as i said my tweet i don't think society understands that this new faster speed for phones called 5g because it sounds like 4g and 3g and you knew what those were right oh 3g was dated but it was kind of slow 4g is pretty snappy pretty fast 5g is going to be better it'll be a little faster right if that's why you're thinking you're missing the show 5g is not a little bit faster data 5g will change civilization 5g will just change civilization in a way similar to how smartphones did because i don't know about you but i i'm using my phone for getting all my delivery of my food you know because i'm quarantined at the moment in anticipation of some surgery upcoming and so if i didn't have my phone i could barely do what i do i mean the smartphones i think you would agree have transformed civilization but not as much as 5g and here's why 5g is going to give you a augmented reality world it won't be long before that my glasses are connected to my phone and my phone has 5g that's pretty much guaranteed there's no way that won't happen because it's just too it's too there i mean it's too obvious that that's going to be a thing once you have enough people who have the the types of glasses or they don't really need them they could just hold up their phone and see and see an augmented reality through the you know just like a camera but those people will be living in a much improved world because with your glasses on you won't just see the things that are there you'll see a menu for everything there there's a television across the room i would see a remote control pop up and i could control my tv in the air because in the air i would see an actual remote control so i could get directions on anything i could find out you know really i would have this whole enhanced reality such that when i took my glasses off at night it would start to feel the way you feel when you accidentally leave home without your phone have you had that experience ever get in your car and you're driving some place you're going to be gone for a while and you look for your phone and it's not there and you think oh god what if what if i get a problem i want you know it's not the end of the world but it definitely bothers you right now imagine if you had an enhanced reality world an augmented reality where you're seeing things floating that don't exist you can call up a screen that floats in front of you to watch a to watch a movie that floats in the air that only you can see you know because you got your your your earbuds into so you're walking around watching a movie you meet somebody their their social media profile appears above their head try to live without that it will be so addictive and useful it'll be like if you didn't have a smartphone so i think that the world will start to bifurcate into people who are essentially cyborgs because once you get to the point where you're living in an enhanced reality with you know labels and messages and instructions and more detail and all that you're basically a cyborg now uh i've argued for a long time and elon musk said something similar recently that the smartphones already made us cyborgs so we're you know the fact that you can leave it at home and drive away is sort of trivial because you'll wish you hadn't right but as soon as you've got the the what's it called the neural link uh which is also elon musk's one of his companies they're going to embed a little sensor for your brains you maybe could control things um just by thinking it now imagine if you if you could see through your glasses and enhance reality with augmented stuff and you can just think them to change so you could just look around you could see a tv and you you could just blink at it and it would come on because your your brain knew that you wanted it to be on so put those things together and we are fully into the cyborg cyborg era but here's the problem what if everybody doesn't become a cyborg will there be a human organic movement of people who don't have any technology probably i just don't know how big it will be will it be you know amish country small or will be a third of the country doesn't want to be a cyborg now if you ask me oh i can't wait make me a cyborg as quickly as you can but anyway people don't realize what a big deal that is but here's the funny part of my story there's nothing more amusing well there probably is but it's amusing when you're on social media and people don't know what your background is and they challenge you on a point that you might be the one person in the world who knows more about it than anybody so it's sort of like that woody allen movie i think it was annie hall where he's standing in line for a show and they're arguing about some public figure marshall mcluhan an author and marsha mcluhan ends up in this movie scene the actual marshall mcluhan is standing in line right behind him and gets into the conversation and and corrects something and that that movie scene always stuck with me because you see that playing out in real life and it happened here so somebody said to me on social media that 5g hasn't been tested because the the big companies that are going to roll it out they would have no interest in testing it to find out that it's dangerous and therefore it's not been tested sort of logically you say to yourself well logically they don't want to hear that it's bad for you they want to make a trillion dollars the phone companies mostly so you know and the phone makers so nobody would have studied it now that's what somebody said to me on social media and here was my answer i used to work for the phone company and part of my job was was doing the economic projections of whether we should do more wireless stuff i actually personally worked on that and part of my economic decision was informed with by my co-worker who i often sat right next to whose job it was to study all the the health studies of the cell cell phones so that was the um prior to 5g technology that was probably a 3g kind of a technology and we studied it because that's part of the economics i wasn't going to give management an economic analysis that says looks like we'll make a billion dollars on this and ignore the fact that it might kill people i'm not going to leave that out that's pretty important to the economics of a project if you leave out the part where it kills 100 million people i don't think you've done your work right so this person was arguing me with me that a phone company would ignore this part of the economic impact you know the health part which also has an economic impact and she was talking to somebody who literally was the guy who did it i actually worked at a phone company i actually did those economics and i sat next to the guy who did look in detail at the health studies and then summarized them for management so management was comfortable that it wouldn't be killing people now years have passed has anybody died from their cell phone you know can we say that my economic analysis was accurate that i didn't need to include it can we say that my co-worker who studied it got it right now if you're telling me that apple apple i mean think about this you're telling me that apple is going to bet a trillion dollars because it'll be something like that you know eventually you tell me apple is going to bet a trillion dollars on the business plan without looking at the most obvious biggest thing that you should look at i think they looked at it now you can make the argument that whoever's looked at it has looked at the wrong stuff you could make the argument that the studies weren't good enough there are lots of things you could argue that i wouldn't argue back there are plenty of bad studies but here's what i will not allow anybody to tell me and without pushing back don't tell me they haven't looked into it are you kidding don't tell me that they haven't looked into it and if any of those things were credible from the brain cancer to gives you coronavirus or makes it worse to stunt your growth if any of that was backed by science companies like apple are not going to wade into it with that that kind of a risk that's a that is a company destroying risk you just don't take that risk it's just not a thing but that's different from saying let me be very clear i'm not a doctor i don't know what causes risk and what doesn't but i'm telling you they looked into it that's all i'm going to tell you there's some evidence based on we don't have much information on it yet it comes from a tweet from somebody who seems to know a lot of stuff that the houston consulate that was closed the chinese consulate that had evidence apparently of spying on american companies and intellectual property theft and all that apparently there's some information we haven't seen yet that would suggest that china is backing black lives matter now i ask you does that sound likely does it seem likely or unlikely to you that china might have at least tried i don't know how successful they were but at least tried to encourage black lives matter to do a little more protesting because here's the calculation you should look at when trying to decide if that's true number one would they think of it of course of course so you don't have to wonder hey did china have that idea had they considered it did anybody suggest hey maybe you should back the protesters who are you know making the united states look bad of course they thought of it because if this situation were reversed we would have thought of it i mean i'm sure we've backed dissidents and protesters in other countries that's pretty basic the second thing you should ask for is what would be the penalty for getting caught and we already know the penalty for getting caught it's nothing that's nothing this consular closed but they have other consulates the the the penalty is basically nothing one consulate got closed like it's not as if they don't have computers and hackers and thieves and other consulates i don't know how how much difference does it make if you live in in houston versus you got a consulate somewhere else so i don't think there is any risk you know it just costs a little money right they've got to remove move a consulate but it's not like anybody died it's not like we completely decoupled over this it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know no risk so if there's no risk but there's a potential big reward and there could be if they're destabilizing the united states of course it's happening in the in the situation where they think of it there are lots of people involved you know in china there's lots of people involved and there's a big payoff and a small risk it'll happen every time every time it's going to happen i mean mischief will happen under those conditions so cnn continues to be funny in trying to be serious so caitlyn caitlin collins who's one of their local anti-trump voices she was mocking him in a written article i think there was a from a video piece because he decided to cancel the republican national convention which of course she would agree with because cnn is sort of anti-large gatherings unless they're protests and then she says that he would cancel his convention despite pushing for schools to reopen now the the implication is that that would be inconsistent why would the president not think it was safe to have a convention if he does think it's safe to send kids to school is that a fair comparison you know i complain all the time that people who um come up through a journalism or you know some specific profession if they don't have a broad understanding of how to make decisions and how to compare things the way an economist or an engineer or scientist would that they say consistently dumb things but don't know it and i don't think anything could be dumber than saying i don't understand the consistency if the president thinks that a bunch of older adults packed into a room is dangerous why doesn't he think that the group who basically doesn't get coronavirus why wouldn't he think they're dangerous they couldn't be more different situations they couldn't be more different now is it true that opening schools will also cause spread of the coronavirus yes yes everybody knows that the president knows that nobody's denying it it's just that we think that's a level that's controllable if you're you know comparing it to the presumed benefits of getting kids back to school that there is a risk but it's one that the president decides is worth it i don't know how cnn can pretend that they can't see the difference there and they're they're looking for these little gachas um five seattle uh news organizations were ordered by a judge to turn over their video and photos for protests so law enforcement wanted to get a hold of all the video and pictures of protests so they could find out who to arrest etc news organizations resisted and now the king county superior court said that they have to give it up interesting so all of the news organizations just became weaponized by the police will that change i don't know so uh can the news organizations continue to send news crews who will take pictures and video knowing that those pictures and video will go directly to the police and then they will be the news organizations will be part of what's disbanding black lives matter very ticklish position to be in wouldn't you say i saw somebody asking me about uh what's his name portnoy and barstool barstool sports he did an interview with president trump people are saying and i would agree with him i like to use that trump phrase people are saying that that that's the best interview with the president that they've ever seen and i would say i would agree okay in in terms of entertainment and in terms of humanizing the president and just having fun with it probably the best one i i would say i would say it's the best interview with the president i've seen now the president was very good at avoiding uh and avoiding the questions so it was this weird situation yeah dave portney dave portnoy it was this weird situation where dave would ask a question such as you know do you always use the power handshake with world leaders wouldn't you like to know the answer to that question it was like he asked the question that i've thought about for so long and nobody's ever asked it now of course the president completely ignored the question and just talked about handshakes and coronavirus and how world leaders love him and stuff which was perfectly executed media spin if you will in other words the president is just really good at turning the question into whatever he wanted the question to be which is what you actually learn when you take media training you learn how to do that it's something the president does great and most politicians do it doing well as well um the only thing that bothered me about dave portnoy's interview is that it should have been me and when i say a show to bed b it just means i'm jealous yeah so i'm just jealous because if there was anybody who would give an irreverent uh interview with the president they would still be watchable i would be on that list of people that you should watch interview the president now i do have her uh informally i did put a request in but i probably need to formalize that because i think that between now and november an interview with me with president trump i think would be useful for the country uh i wouldn't be just entertaining i'd want it to be useful so i think i could frame things in a way that you would quite enjoy it but yes i i'll have to confess there are very few things that make me jealous because it's just not a it's just not an emotion i spend any time with but and that's why this caught me off guard and it's why it's it's why i'm mentioning it that was the first time like i genuinely felt jealous i mean it's a small thing right it has no real impact in my life but he was that good so you want to be so good at your job as dave portnoy is you want to be so good that somebody else who does that job goes oh damn it damn it that should have been me so a plus watch it if you haven't seen it i cheekily am continuing to say that um oh by the way i just one more thing about the find people hoax in the past when i've tweeted that the find people hoax is a hoax my comment feed would just fill with people who would say no it isn't it's totally true i heard it myself today i i tweeted that and got almost no people who thought it was true now i don't know if that's because all of the democrats now know it wasn't true or if they gave up you just suddenly they stopped refuting that point that doesn't make sense i feel like maybe we made a dent collectively because at least my critics have backed off and just you know let it go that i'm stating it as a fact that it's a hoax and then they're letting it go now which i think is capitulation but i might be a little optimistic on that at least for the commenters not for the i think biden still says it all right my last point here i've said this before but you cannot um i don't think you could ignore the effect of fiction has on how we look at the real world because everything you look at needs to fit some model of understanding so and ideally you want the new information to fit some existing model in your head and you just populate that existing model that's called confirmation bias and you see it in everything right you see the left agrees to the left the right agrees to the right but there's there's a statement about human beings that i think you would all agree with which is it's difficult to do something anything until you can first imagine it so you don't really attempt to do things you can't imagine can work the wright brothers um invented an airplane because they could well imagine you know they could see it flying you know i assume i assume that they imagined it working and then then they worked on anywhere now all the things you imagine don't work necessarily when you try to do them but you're not going to do anything until you can first imagine it's a thing and that makes me get to my impression or the filter that i just sort of automatically have on watching the protests the first filter is it looks very female lead and i don't know how many of you are also getting that feeling but antifa in particular and i think black lives matter as well but they seem like they are mostly female leaders or at least the leaders that are the most vocal or maybe the most effective most aggressive seem to be female so it's like a female lead organization and the males at least the antifa males not so much the black lives matter males but the antifa males seem to fall into a category of not as manly if we could say that and again this isn't an insult you know i'm not saying that if you're if you don't have a manly persona you're worth less or anything nothing like that i'm left to burning so if you want to be every letter in lgbtq i'm cool with that i'm 100 cool with that you can be any letter you want you can be any lifestyle you want if it doesn't bother me you can be whatever you want so there's no criticism implied here i'm just observing that there's a certain kind of man who is enjoying this anti-foss situation and they you know if i could use the diminutive term beta males they kind of fall into that category now again this is not an insult because i think that it's a big world i'm not saying it's a good thing to be an alpha male or that it's a bad thing to be a beta male they both exist it's a preference it's the way you're born or it's a lifestyle it doesn't matter it's all okay with me alright if you're not breaking the law if you're not violating the constitution it's just none of my business period could not care less about your personal lifestyle choices if they don't affect me so i say that just because my filter is that it looks like the it looks like game of thrones with uh daenerys so you got the strong female leader the queen of dragons and she formed an army of of literally eunuchs so their their men had been cast castrated to make them more you know docile and obedient soldiers i guess i don't know what the theory was there exactly but i don't know why you'd want castrated soldiers it feels like the wrong idea but it reminded me of that and it looks like it's the queen of dragons that are unique army but they're reenacting the joker movie and i said this before to great pushback which i enjoy of course and the pushback was that if the joker movie had not been such a universally you know acclaimed movie and a lot of people saw it if you hadn't first pictured the joke or movie would it have been as easy to recreate it because that's what the protests and the looting effectively did it recreated the look and feel of the joker movie is that a coincidence is it simply that there are movies and they're in my head and so i just interpret the world through those movies and that's all it is or is there a causal relationship in other words if you can only do the things you can imagine and what you could imagine was not you know everybody's doing well but what you could imagine was that joker movie you're more likely to do the thing you could imagine so i do think that fiction has a big role in how we're interpreting our reality but also how we act on it because you just don't act on things you can't imagine all right um i'm just looking at your comments yeah you know um i don't think that i don't think we should make a judgment about what's better or worse when it comes to people's biological situation but it is fair to say it's different you know nobody would argue with the fact that you know there are differences among people but we don't have to put a value judgment on that anyone see zuckerberg's face in hawaii yeah yeah zuckerberg uses a lot of a lot of sunscreen but i don't if you've seen his complexion you know there's a good reason for that but where is the imagining from well it's coming from fiction that's the point somebody says you're reaching on the joker thing in my opinion well you know the the best opinions are the ones that you say to yourself in fact i i try to stay in the space as much as possible my favorite opinions to present here are the ones where you say to yourself i'm not so sure that's true i've got a little skepticism about that those are my favorite places to be i will tell you that based on everything i know from hypnosis from persuasion and living a life in which i've done everything from marketing to selling that the the models that you have in your head of what the world can look like are very persuasive now if you have less experience in hypnosis and persuasion than i do and your opinion is different from mine about this topic you should ask yourself would your opinion change if you knew as much as i did about this specific topic and that's where i want you to be i want you to be thinking maybe maybe i should look into that maybe that's a thing or maybe i'll look for it in the future look forward in the future and you might be surprised but you don't have to believe everything i say i wouldn't talk to you later
[Music]
hey everybody come on in
it's time for another exciting and
amazing episode
of coffee with scott adams yep it's just
about the best thing you've ever seen in
your life
what is happening my security camera's
going off
there's a mouse outside i literally
picked up a mouse on my security camera
that's good security
so but enough about me what about you
how are you doing great yeah
good because it's a great day today and
it's just going to get better
and one of the things that will make it
better is a simultaneous set but i hope
you'll join me now all you need is
a copper bunga glass attacker challenger
stein a canteen jug or flask a vessel
of any kind fill it with your favorite
liquid i like
coffee and join me now for the
unparalleled pleasure the dopamine
of the day the thing makes everything
better including pandemics economics you
name it
go
ah oh
let's talk about all the things
happening today
so yesterday trump signed uh for
are they executive orders i guess
then they're all designed to lower uh
pharmaceutical
costs in this country now there are
a few interesting things about this
aside from the fact
that wouldn't it be good to have lower
pharmaceutical costs
number one interesting thing why wasn't
this done before
even the president says should have been
done long ago
well he's been president for three years
so long ago also includes
the current presidency and so the
question is
why wasn't it done before now let me
i don't know the details of the
executive orders
but one of them is to have most favored
nation status which is fairly common
in contracts common enough that you know
people know it exists
and the idea is that uh we can't be
charged more in this country
than some other country so we don't want
to be
the ones who are subsidizing other
countries by paying high costs
so that some other country could have
low cost that's pretty basic
contract stuff but the government had
not been involved
rather these were you know private
companies doing private things
so why is it that now the president can
make this kind of a change
which seems to comply to all
common sense and on the surface it looks
like just a smart thing to do
why'd it take so long same with buying
from canada
apparently we'll have the option now of
getting some meds from canada where the
prices are lower
which is similar to the most favored
nations thing and then a few other
things that
do the same thing and here's what i
think it is but i need to see some
reporting on this by smarter people
yeah you're saying in the comments uh
where i was going
could you tell i was teasing for the
answer
because i think the answer is that the
supreme court
has upheld enough executive orders from
the past
and i think it was with daca and maybe
obamacare
so that's the part of murky on so
somebody can fill me in on the supreme
court part of it
but i think what's happened is that
trump has discovered he has more power
as a president than anybody would have
imagined
meaning that the supreme court has now
set a standard
that says that trump can do this now
because he's doing this that's about the
same size
of this-ness of other things that the
supreme court
has allowed and so it gave him room to
operate that didn't exist before
so here's the fun part the supreme court
by voting
against the president's wishes a few
times
has turned him into the dictator that
nobody wanted
but as long as he's a benevolent
dictator it's going to be okay
and the same with obama right obama did
some big executive orders
but as long as society looked at them
and said yeah
well your intention was good and a lot
of people do like it
not everybody agrees but it's not like
the worst thing in the world
the supreme court can let that stand so
uh you can you can never underestimate
no you can never overestimate i always
say it wrong i tweeted that wrong this
morning
um there's there's a big impact of
the uh what do you call it the the
accidental consequences
of anything and the accidental
consequences
of the president losing a few supreme
court battles
is that he can lower our health care
costs
yeah you could never underestimate thank
you
that's what i should say so the the
accidental consequences
the unintended consequences were to give
the president
more power and then he took his power
and he solved one of society's biggest
problems with it
thank you for unintended yes um
now who saw that coming who who on their
prediction card
said president will lose
important supreme court cases and that
will allow him to
lower our drug costs what
and you're going to see a lot of
exciting things i think happening
as we get closer to election day
because the president has this one
gigantic advantage
and it's enormous which is the president
can do things
whereas joe biden can't do things so the
president doesn't have to just
talk about lowering drug costs he can
just do it
and apparently he's well on his way to
doing it we'll see if this stuff holds
but i'll bet it will um you all had a
good laugh
or i think celebrated silently when
uh covington kid nick sandman won
his his suit well he got he had a kind
of settlement
which is different from winning although
it's a kind of winning
and so this is his second win in a row
he won
he got a settlement i guess from cnn and
he got a settlement of
unnamed amount from washington post that
he's got a few more
outlets to sue and the basic idea here
is that
the the news the fake news painted him
as the bad guy
when in fact he was just standing there
and he was
sort of the one that was approached not
the one who was causing trouble
so his reputation got destroyed by this
sufficiently that a court
or at least you know it looked like it
was it was something he could win
sufficiently that the other side decided
to sell
so that's how bad it was so this raises
an interesting question
and it goes like this could somebody
who had lost their job or had been
attacked let's say physically attacked
and i guess there were a few of them
even last night at the protesters
at the protest if if people who are
trump supporters are physically attacked
or
fired for being trump supporters here's
the question i ask
the legal experts could those people sue
the fake news
for the fine people hoax
and for the you know the covington kid
hoax and the russia collusion hoax
in other words could you say the reason
i lost my job
for being a trump supporter is because
the fake news
has run enough hoaxes that i'm demonized
just for being a supporter
i lost my job could they make the case
that the media by knowingly running
hoaxes and of course the
fine people hoax is the classic one
where you know they know the real answer
because it's in the transcript it's not
really an interpretation
problem it's right there you just read
it
so could you win a case
against the same fake news companies
if you had been abused in any way for
being a trump supporter
because i i think it's a pretty solid
line from from there
speaking of which uh rasmussen
uh who does polling which you rarely
will hear mentioned on the news
apparently rasmussen is banned from
being mentioned on
the news did you know that and i think
it's banned on both
on both the left and the right now they
claim
and i think there's evidence to support
it to be the most
accurate polling company in the country
for political stuff
now is that true is that true i think so
i think they're the most accurate and
they can't be mentioned so
there must be a counter argument to that
but i don't know what it is but one of
the things that
rasmussen tweeted this morning is that
if you look at what people believed
during the 2018 midterm elections
you'd find that 30 just before the vote
for the midterms in 2018
30 of the country believed the russia
collusion
hoax 30 of the country believed it
and that includes republicans
now if 30 percent of your country
believe the fake news
that that russia was controlling the
president
what would you expect the midterm to
look like
you'd expect it to look like it did
people would vote in democrats because
they think the president is owned by
russia
now think about how much that changed
the world
because because it probably flipped the
house
and i haven't even added the second part
if the only thing that happened
was the russia collusion hoax which you
had to know
that the media pushing it had some
suspicion it wasn't true
or no it wasn't true but they pushed it
anyway
what about the fine people hoax i would
say that the fine
people hoax was believed by maybe 70 of
the country when it first came out
wouldn't you say i would guess that 70
percent of the country
because that includes a lot of
republicans believed the fine people
hoax now that's quite that's changed
quite a bit
i tweeted this morning because i you
know i periodically tweet that it's a
hoax
and a phd doctor type guy
who wrote a anti-trump book weighed in
to say
it's not a hoax darth dilbert
see that's the funny part because my
critics call me dilbert
but he called me darth dilbert so that's
like really really funny
very clever and
he was not aware according to his tweet
that it was a hoax
and i thought to myself how could you be
an educated
person in the united states and think
that the fine people hoax was real
now in 2020 i totally get why people
believed in in 2018
because it was fresh and it was being
misreported
but after two years of unraveling this
thing you'd think most people would know
it's a hoax by now
but think of those those two hoaxes the
russia collusion hoax
and then i would call it the tentpole
race hoax because everything else about
trump
would seem different if you took away
that
that one thing that they think they got
the smoking gun on
right because everything else is sort of
a well
30 years ago there was that that
full-page ad about the
central park five so what about that
well if you were looking at it in
isolation and you had not heard
the fine people hoax and you're just
looking at it on its own you'd say
well he wrote an ad that says nothing
about race there's nothing in there
about race
it was about crime the people accused
happened to be black but it wasn't any
part of trump's point
so if you saw that in isolation you'd
say
yeah i can see why people are saying it
feels racist but there's nothing there
i mean there's nothing in what he did
that even you know
indirectly implies race
so if you take away the charlottesville
find people hoax
which is the one that people said ah
finally now we don't have to
read his mind anymore we don't have to
think he was thinking
something wrong even though he didn't do
things wrong we could
we know he was thinking bad things now
we have
the actual proof so once you have the
proof
it proves all the other things it's like
now that we've heard this we know all of
his secret
thoughts are confirmed so
i would say that those two hoaxes
actually completely determined
the midterm result and
that means that the fake news literally
is running the country at this point
if you're worried about uh foreign
interference
you should rethink that on a statistical
on a statistical basis because what we
have now
it looks like you probably have a russia
which wouldn't mind having trump again i
think
i'm not sure but it feels like it and
then you've got a
china that absolutely doesn't want trump
because biden is china friendly
so it looks like it's a contest between
china and maybe russia intelligence
to try to thwart the fake news
in this country which will otherwise
determine the election
so we have foreign interfec this is
literally true
we have foreign interference in our fake
news
which will cause the fake news to less
reliably
throw the election and make it
illegitimate
now i'm not coming out in favor of
foreign interference
i'm simply pointing out the irony that
it might be the only thing that could
save us
again not in favor of it i'm not making
i'm not making a pro-russian statement
i'm just saying that if the fake news
was going to do another 2018 job on the
country
and just completely rigged the election
by fake information
what if russia successfully interfered
with our election
in a way that thwarted the fake news
would that be bad in theory it would be
bad
hypothetically it would be terrible
to have foreign interference except that
our
domestic interference is far worse
right so sort of uh
two wrongs making a right situation
sometimes it works
senator tom cotton continues to make
news
he's good at making news and he wants to
ban a federal funding from any school
that has include
included the what is called the race
baiting 1619 project
in the curriculum now the 1619 project
1619 refers to the
first date of slavery i think uh the
beginning of slavery
and the curriculum would include the
fact that
the white the white race is quote
barbaric devils
and quote bloodsuckers
so tom cotton thinks that schools should
not give federal funding
if they're teaching that white people
are barbaric devils
and bloodsuckers i'm thinking to myself
that sounds pretty reasonable tom cotton
i have to say i haven't always agreed
with tom cotton
he's got some opinions that you know a
little
uh a little outside my uh range of
happiness but not this one
this one seems right down the center
like this one doesn't even look
right-wing to me
does it i like you could argue that this
is oh he's a right-wing guy
but not this this is right down the
middle
so will this get passed i doubt it but
i'm glad he's doing it
um here's an interesting story
that i don't know what to make of it you
know about the
uh the book and the movie plandemic
right
so you know that there's a a doctor
who's suggesting that
uh i guess there's going to be
a tv the sinclair local tv stations are
gonna air
and the sinclair stations by the way own
a lot of local tv stations so this is a
big deal
uh they're gonna air the pandemic
uh that it's a it's called a
researcher's conspiracy theory
now conspiracy theory is what you call
anything you don't agree with
so keep an open mind about what's a
conspiracy theory and what isn't
but the plandemic claims that
dr fauci uh was responsible for creating
the coronavirus
and they sent it to china and
it's so found she's responsible for the
coronavirus
now i suppose we live in a world where
anything's possible right anything's
possible
but um and and then other people weighed
in
and said that this is the most widely
debunked
conspiracy theory ever now i told you
before that
one of the authors of the pandemic
book lives locally around here
and he's lobbied me i think he sent me
three books so far
he's lobbied me to get him on here to my
periscopes which makes me uh think he
might be watching right now
so i can't heck it lively so i did get
your messages
and the reason that i haven't responded
is that i can't
vet this sort of stuff so
eric balling apparently had uh
you know the doctor on there recently
and he got some criticism for
not knowing ahead of time the other
things
that they had claimed etc and
i don't want to i don't want to make the
mistake that eric
bowling made which is putting on
one side of a controversial scientific
claim if i can't argue the claim
in other words if i don't know enough
about the topic or i could push back on
a claim
i don't want that person talking in
public
with you know my help because at any any
single claim and a context
uh looks persuasive so i don't have an
opinion about whether the planet is
totally debunked as other people say or
there's something to
part of it but maybe not all of it don't
know
but i'd also suggest that you don't know
and
for the fact that the sinclair stations
are going to run this
i think is completely irresponsible
unless it also runs something from the
critics
if it's balanced if they say well this
is what the experts say
here's what the plan dammit movie says
and let's go back to the experts and see
what they say if they do something like
that then fine
you know maybe it's a public interest to
know
to see both sides but i don't think
that's going to happen
let me give you a good example of what
happens when you only look at one side
of an argument
in the comments tell me was michael
jackson
totally definitely a child molester
or not in the comments tell me your
opinion and i'll tell you why i'm asking
this
i'm asking because this goes to my point
about how if you see one side of an
argument it's always convincing
if one lawyer gets the talk and the
other side doesn't get to talk
that one lawyer will will convince you
pretty much every time
i'm looking at your your comments about
michael jackson and you'll see that
they're mixed
which is what i was expecting you'll see
a bunch of yeses
you receive a bunch of no's now how can
it be
that we get to this point in time and
you've got a bunch of yeses and you've
got a bunch of no's
well let me tell you my experience i
went from
saying well gosh i don't know could be
true
could be true could be not true
and then i watched uh a netflix special
i think it was netflix in which uh he
showed
two of his accusers now adults telling
their story
now when you hear the adults telling the
story of what happened to them when
they're younger
it is a hundred percent credible
you could have it would be hard to watch
that documentary
and walk away thinking that jackson was
innocent
i mean it would be really hard it's
completely convincing
so therefore michael jackson definitely
a child buster right
very convincing except last night
i watched another documentary last night
i watched one called uh
square one and it was it took the other
side
and it went through the description of
how the initial
accuser made the accusation etc
and i don't want to give it away oh was
it an hbo special somebody's correcting
me
uh and was it something wonderland or
yeah that was the name of it so anyway
so i watched the the other side of it
and let me tell you the other side of it
that says he was not
a child molester is
100 credible
blew my freaking head off
if you had told me that there was an
other side to
this story after i'd seen the
completely convincing evidence that he
was obviously a child blesser
when you see the other side it'll blow
your head off
let me give you just a flavor of it and
let me tell you
you should watch this because if if you
believe that michael jackson definitely
is guilty
and i'm not going to say he is or not
i'm going to only talk about the quality
of the arguments
do i know anything yeah i wasn't there
it was not there
let me give you some examples
the very first accuser who ended up
ended up settling
when you hear the story of how that scam
came about
and you hear that even the kid didn't
think anything happened
he talked to his friends and said
nothing happened even after the fact
i mean when you hear the whole story it
really was just a con artist
who figured out a way to make michael
jackson pay
and here was the part of the story i'd
never heard before
and it goes like this there were two
court cases one was criminal and one was
civil so one tries to get money and one
is trying to see if
michael jackson goes to jail typically
the way you do those
is you do the criminal case first and
then depending on how that turns out
that gives you a basis to to do or not
do
a um a civil suit where you're trying to
get money
now the problem is that in the michael
jordan in the michael jackson
case his civil suit was on a
a faster schedule which meant
that he would have had to give away his
entire defense
in the civil suit before the criminal
case was run
and if you do that the experts say
that the criminal case people get to
craft and recraft
their case so that the defense doesn't
work
and therefore it's massively
unconstitutional
or at least unfair i think it's actually
passed constitutional muster since then
but in my opinion it's unconstitutional
because it guarantees an
unfair trial in the criminal case
guarantees it
it guarantees an unfair trial
and so michael jackson had the following
situation he could either settle for
something that definitely didn't happen
or he could risk going to jail because
he knew that his defense
would be laid bare in the in the civil
suit and when he went to criminal court
basically he would get eaten alive and
probably be convicted for something that
didn't happen
and so he settled once he settled
there became another thing that happened
and here's the key part
the fake news business at the time
was paying people who would come forward
and say that something bad happened
at michael jackson's house
what happens when you pay massive
amounts of money
to people who are willing to lie on
television
what happens you get a lot of people who
are willing to lie
on television and the ones who came
after were just
sort of obvious liars so now you've got
one case
the jackson settled because he got this
weird
legal bind that he just had to do the
same thing
that created the first story that
generated
fake news paying people for more stories
because they got a lot of clicks
so now you have a pattern and
when you say to yourself but what about
those you know the two older ones that
you saw in the other documentary
they're adults it doesn't seem like they
have anything to gain by
making something up well here's the
thing
they also have some connection to some
of the badness and they won't
give it away but they don't the the
documentary that excuses jackson
doesn't too directly deal with those
latest adult accusations
but it does completely eliminate the
bulk of the ones you've heard
and they are absolutely they look pretty
fake
the other ones who knows but let me give
you a little uh
a little anecdote here uh colleen
colleen mcculkin was saying this when
you hear the story that
uh michael jackson let children
they had been visiting sleep over in his
bedroom
what do you think you you see them all
in the same bed right
and here's here's a one of the stories
that colleen mcculken was saying he goes
the first thing you don't understand
is that michael jackson's bedroom was
two stories
it was two stories so you could be in
his bedroom
without even being in the same room and
he told the story about
some kid who wanted to sleep in in his
bedroom in his bed
and michael jackson asked one of the
adult staff members
to sleep in the room with him and the
the two of them slept on the floor and
let the kids
use the big bed now i don't know how
common it was for him to do that
but the fact that it happened even once
tells you that michael jackson was aware
that you don't want to be
alone with a kid in your bed did he ever
do it before i don't know
so here's the point i don't know what
michael jackson did or did not do
i do know that a huge part of that story
about what he did
looks completely not credible that
doesn't mean all the rest of it is not
credible
it just means that the fake news
basically destroyed this person
all right if you took the fake news
business out of the equation
michael jackson would still probably be
performing today i don't even know if
he'd be dead
so keep that in mind
uh you gotta you have to watch both of
those documentaries
if you don't watch them both you're
really not gonna get the feel of this
two-world situation um i saw
on social media but i'm looking for a
confirmation that something like
half of all coronavirus deaths happen to
diabetics
is that really true is it true that half
of coronavirus deaths are diabetics
and the diabetics are still walking
around
just like they have the same risk of
everybody else
i mean i would hope that they're hiding
pretty well by now
but it feels like we could really make
something happen if that's true
um there are also
two movies and two worlds about all the
protests if you look at
fox news you'll see lots of articles and
photos of things burning and things
being thrown at police and
and dangerous lasers uh blinding them
etc
a bunch of police have been literally
blinded
by these lasers from the protesters now
um i just
i i'm so angry about that in particular
it's one thing to get
hit with a blunt object i mean that
could be bad enough but to be blinded
just because you went to work
uh i don't know if the police just
opened fired on
on the protesters with the with the
i think they should shoot to kill
anybody who's got a laser that they
should that they're putting in people's
eyes
that's just my opinion now probably
would cause a lot of problems
it may be more problems than it solves
but i think if you actually
saw somebody aiming the laser
that no matter where that laser was
aimed if it's a deadly weapon
meaning that it will blind somebody i
think the police should be able to shoot
to kill
if they even see the laser you know the
the moment the laser comes out that
should be a shoot to kill situation
because it would be if it were a gun
right if somebody brought out a gun
that'd be a shoot to kill situation if
it looked like they were going to use it
if somebody brings out a laser to blind
a police officer
let me let me say as clearly as i can
possibly can
you put me on that jury that police
officer is free
put me on the jury that tries to convict
a police officer
for shooting somebody who has a blinding
laser that they
that they're is in their hand
you're a free man or free woman yeah you
put me on that jury
no way i'm gonna convict the cop for
shooting a guy with a laser that blinds
people
no way if you're wondering what's going
to happen with all their urban centers
i suggest you learn about insurance
and banking because when you see all the
shops that were destroyed by the the
looters in the urban areas you say to
yourself
well you know they'll wait for the
tension to go down
and then they'll rebuild or maybe other
people will come in
other tenants will take over and rebuild
but there's a problem you kind of need
insurance to have a viable business
if you need a bank loan the bank the
bank's gonna
want you to have insurance too so that
you're covered in case something happens
now insurance companies will often if
not always
exclude riots so riots
would not be covered by your insurance
now that was probably not a big problem
in the past
because when you're filling out your
insurance policy you're thinking
well what are the odds i'm going to lose
my business to a riot
you know that doesn't seem very likely
so you still buy the insurance
but would you buy insurance with no riot
protection
in the very places that have recently
been destroyed by riots
and no end in sight i would i would
suggest that you can predict what's
going to happen to
at least the retail parts of the inner
cities
by looking at banking and insurance
and entrepreneurs and how they manage
risk
and at this point the risk is just too
high
and that's going to persist for years so
i don't see any situation in which the
urban areas
quickly come back if they come back at
all
let's see um
they're uh i was tweeting about 5g
and you know people think there might be
some health dangers
from 5g which is the new faster
technology for phones
now the first thing i want to say about
it is as i said my tweet i don't think
society understands that this new
faster speed for phones called 5g
because it sounds like 4g and 3g
and you knew what those were right oh 3g
was dated but it was kind of slow
4g is pretty snappy pretty fast
5g is going to be better it'll be a
little faster right
if that's why you're thinking you're
missing the show
5g is not a little bit faster data
5g will change civilization
5g will just change civilization
in a way similar to how smartphones did
because
i don't know about you but i i'm using
my phone for getting all my delivery of
my food
you know because i'm quarantined at the
moment in anticipation of
some surgery upcoming and so if i didn't
have my phone
i could barely do what i do i mean the
smartphones i think you would agree
have transformed civilization but not as
much as 5g and here's why
5g is going to give you a augmented
reality world it won't be long before
that
my glasses are connected to my phone and
my phone has
5g that's pretty much guaranteed
there's no way that won't happen because
it's just too
it's too there i mean it's too obvious
that that's going to be a thing
once you have enough people who have the
the types of glasses or they don't
really need them they could just hold up
their phone
and see and see an augmented reality
through the you know just like a camera
but those people will be living in a
much
improved world because with your glasses
on you won't just see the things that
are there
you'll see a menu for everything there
there's a television across the room i
would see a
remote control pop up and i could
control my tv
in the air because in the air i would
see an actual remote control
so i could get directions on anything i
could find out you know
really i would have this whole enhanced
reality such that when i took my glasses
off at night
it would start to feel the way you feel
when you accidentally leave home without
your phone
have you had that experience ever get in
your car and you're driving some place
you're going to be gone for a while and
you look for your phone and it's not
there
and you think oh god what if what if i
get a problem
i want you know it's not the end of the
world but it definitely bothers you
right now imagine if you had an enhanced
reality world
an augmented reality where you're seeing
things floating that don't exist
you can call up a screen that floats in
front of you to watch a
to watch a movie that floats in the air
that only you can see
you know because you got your your your
earbuds into so you're walking around
watching a movie you meet somebody
their their social media profile appears
above their head
try to live without that it will be
so addictive and useful it'll be like
if you didn't have a smartphone so i
think that the world
will start to bifurcate into people who
are essentially
cyborgs because once you get to the
point where you're living in an enhanced
reality with you know labels and
messages and instructions and
more detail and all that you're
basically a cyborg
now uh i've argued for a long time and
elon musk said something similar
recently
that the smartphones already made us
cyborgs
so we're you know the fact that you can
leave it at home and drive away
is sort of trivial because you'll wish
you hadn't
right but as soon as you've got the the
what's it called the neural link uh
which is
also elon musk's one of his companies
they're going to embed a little sensor
for your brains you maybe could control
things
um just by thinking it now imagine if
you
if you could see through your glasses
and enhance reality with augmented stuff
and you can just think them to change so
you could just look around you could see
a tv
and you you could just blink at it and
it would come on
because your your brain knew that you
wanted it to be on
so put those things together and we are
fully into the cyborg cyborg
era but here's the problem what if
everybody doesn't become a cyborg
will there be a human organic
movement of people who don't have any
technology
probably i just don't know how big it
will be will it be you know
amish country small or will be a third
of the country
doesn't want to be a cyborg now if you
ask me
oh i can't wait make me a cyborg
as quickly as you can
but anyway people don't realize what a
big deal that is but here's the funny
part of my story
there's nothing more amusing well there
probably is but it's amusing
when you're on social media and people
don't know what your background is
and they challenge you on a point that
you might be
the one person in the world who knows
more about it than anybody
so it's sort of like that woody allen
movie i think it was annie hall where
he's standing in line
for a show and they're arguing about
some public figure
marshall mcluhan an author and marsha
mcluhan
ends up in this movie scene the actual
marshall mcluhan
is standing in line right behind him and
gets into the conversation and
and corrects something and that that
movie scene always stuck with me
because you see that playing out in real
life and it happened
here so somebody said to me on social
media
that 5g hasn't been tested because the
the big companies that are going to roll
it out they would have no interest
in testing it to find out that it's
dangerous
and therefore it's not been tested sort
of logically you say to yourself
well logically they don't want to hear
that it's bad for you they want to make
a trillion dollars
the phone companies mostly so you know
and the phone makers
so nobody would have studied it
now that's what somebody said to me on
social media and here was my answer
i used to work for the phone company and
part of my job
was was doing the economic projections
of whether we should do more wireless
stuff
i actually personally worked on that and
part of my
economic decision was informed with by
my co-worker
who i often sat right next to whose job
it was
to study all the the health studies
of the cell cell phones so that was the
um prior to 5g technology that was
probably a 3g kind of a technology
and we studied it because that's part of
the economics
i wasn't going to give management an
economic analysis that says
looks like we'll make a billion dollars
on this and ignore the fact that it
might kill people
i'm not going to leave that out that's
pretty important
to the economics of a project if you
leave out the part where it kills 100
million people
i don't think you've done your work
right so
this person was arguing me with me that
a phone company
would ignore this part of the economic
impact you know the health part which
also has an economic impact
and she was talking to somebody who
literally was the guy who did it
i actually worked at a phone company i
actually did those economics
and i sat next to the guy who did look
in detail
at the health studies and then
summarized them for management so
management was comfortable
that it wouldn't be killing people now
years have passed
has anybody died from their cell phone
you know can we say that
my economic analysis was accurate that i
didn't need to include it
can we say that my co-worker who studied
it got it right
now if you're telling me that apple
apple i mean think about this you're
telling me that apple
is going to bet a trillion dollars
because it'll be something like that
you know eventually you tell me apple is
going to bet a trillion dollars on the
business plan
without looking at the most obvious
biggest thing that you should look at
i think they looked at it now you can
make the argument
that whoever's looked at it has looked
at the wrong stuff
you could make the argument that the
studies weren't good enough
there are lots of things you could argue
that i wouldn't argue back there are
plenty of bad studies
but here's what i will not allow anybody
to tell me
and without pushing back don't tell me
they haven't looked into it
are you kidding don't tell me that they
haven't looked into it
and if any of those things were credible
from the brain cancer to
gives you coronavirus or makes it worse
to
stunt your growth if any of that was
backed by science
companies like apple are not going to
wade into it with that
that kind of a risk that's a that is a
company destroying risk
you just don't take that risk it's just
not a thing
but that's different from saying let me
be very clear
i'm not a doctor i don't know what
causes risk and what doesn't
but i'm telling you they looked into it
that's all i'm going to tell you
there's some evidence based on we don't
have much information on it yet
it comes from a tweet from somebody who
seems to know a lot of stuff
that the houston consulate that was
closed the chinese consulate that
had evidence apparently of spying on
american companies and intellectual
property theft and all that
apparently there's some information we
haven't seen yet
that would suggest that china is backing
black lives matter
now i ask you does that sound likely
does it seem likely or unlikely to you
that china
might have at least tried i don't know
how successful they were but at least
tried
to encourage black lives matter to do a
little more protesting
because here's the calculation you
should look at
when trying to decide if that's true
number one
would they think of it of course of
course so you don't have to wonder
hey did china have that idea had they
considered it
did anybody suggest hey maybe you should
back the
protesters who are you know making the
united states look bad
of course they thought of it because if
this situation
were reversed we would have thought of
it i mean i'm sure we've backed
dissidents and protesters in other
countries that's pretty basic
the second thing you should ask for is
what would be the penalty
for getting caught and we already know
the penalty for getting caught
it's nothing that's nothing this
consular closed
but they have other consulates the the
the penalty is basically nothing one
consulate got closed
like it's not as if they don't have
computers and hackers and thieves
and other consulates i don't know how
how much difference does it make if you
live in
in houston versus you got a consulate
somewhere else
so i don't think there is any risk you
know it just
costs a little money right they've got
to remove move a consulate
but it's not like anybody died it's not
like we
completely decoupled over this it didn't
tell us anything we didn't already know
no risk so if there's no risk but
there's a potential big reward
and there could be if they're
destabilizing the united states
of course it's happening in the in the
situation where
they think of it there are lots of
people involved you know
in china there's lots of people involved
and
there's a big payoff and a small risk
it'll happen every time every time it's
going to happen
i mean mischief will happen under those
conditions
so cnn continues to be
funny in trying to be serious so caitlyn
caitlin collins who's one of their local
anti-trump
voices she was mocking him in a written
article i think there was a
from a video piece because he decided to
cancel the republican national
convention
which of course she would agree with
because cnn is sort of
anti-large gatherings unless they're
protests
and then she says that he would cancel
his convention
despite pushing for schools to reopen
now the
the implication is that that would be
inconsistent
why would the president
not think it was safe to have a
convention if he does think it's safe to
send kids to school
is that a fair comparison you know i
complain all the time that people
who um come up through a journalism
or you know some specific
profession if they don't have a broad
understanding of how to make decisions
and how to compare
things the way an economist or an
engineer or scientist would
that they say consistently dumb things
but don't know it
and i don't think anything could be
dumber than saying
i don't understand the consistency if
the president thinks that a bunch of
older adults packed into a room
is dangerous why doesn't he think that
the group who basically doesn't get
coronavirus why wouldn't he think
they're dangerous
they couldn't be more different
situations they couldn't be more
different
now is it true that opening schools will
also cause
spread of the coronavirus yes yes
everybody knows that
the president knows that nobody's
denying it
it's just that we think that's a level
that's controllable
if you're you know comparing it to the
presumed
benefits of getting kids back to school
that there is a risk
but it's one that the president decides
is worth it
i don't know how cnn can pretend
that they can't see the difference there
and they're they're looking for these
little
gachas um
five seattle uh news organizations were
ordered by a judge
to turn over their video and photos for
protests
so law enforcement wanted to get a hold
of all the video and pictures of
protests so they could find out
who to arrest etc news organizations
resisted and now the king county
superior court said
that they have to give it up interesting
so all of the news organizations
just became weaponized by the police
will that change i don't know so
uh can the news organizations continue
to send
news crews who will take pictures and
video knowing that those pictures and
video will go directly to the police
and then they will be the news
organizations will be part of what's
disbanding black lives matter very
ticklish position to be in wouldn't you
say
i saw somebody asking me about uh
what's his name portnoy and barstool
barstool sports he did an interview with
president trump people are saying and i
would agree with him
i like to use that trump phrase people
are saying
that that that's the best interview with
the president that they've ever seen
and i would say i would agree okay in
in terms of entertainment and in terms
of
humanizing the president and just having
fun with it
probably the best one i i would say i
would say it's the
best interview with the president i've
seen now the president was very good at
avoiding uh and avoiding the questions
so it was this weird situation yeah dave
portney
dave portnoy it was this weird situation
where dave would ask a question such as
you know do you always use the power
handshake
with world leaders wouldn't you like to
know the answer to that question
it was like he asked the question that
i've thought about for so long
and nobody's ever asked it now of course
the president completely ignored the
question
and just talked about handshakes and
coronavirus and
how world leaders love him and stuff
which was
perfectly executed media
spin if you will in other words the
president is just really good
at turning the question into whatever he
wanted the question to be
which is what you actually learn when
you take media training you learn how to
do that
it's something the president does great
and most politicians do it
doing well as well um
the only thing that bothered me about
dave
portnoy's interview is that it should
have been me
and when i say a show to bed b it just
means i'm jealous
yeah so i'm just jealous because if
there was anybody who would give an
irreverent uh interview with the
president they would still be watchable
i would be on that list of people that
you should watch interview the president
now i do have her uh informally i did
put a request
in but i probably need to formalize that
because i think that between now and
november
an interview with me with president
trump i think would be useful
for the country uh i wouldn't be just
entertaining
i'd want it to be useful so i think i
could
frame things in a way that you would
quite enjoy it
but yes i i'll have to confess there are
very few things that make me jealous
because it's just not a it's just not an
emotion i spend any time with
but and that's why this caught me off
guard and it's why it's
it's why i'm mentioning it that was the
first time
like i genuinely felt jealous i mean
it's a small thing right it has no real
impact in my life
but he was that good so you want to be
so good at your job
as dave portnoy is you want to be so
good that somebody else who does that
job goes
oh damn it damn it that should have
been me so
a plus watch it if you haven't seen it
i cheekily am continuing to say that um
oh by the way i just one more thing
about the find people hoax
in the past when i've tweeted that the
find people hoax is a hoax my
comment feed would just fill with people
who would say no it isn't
it's totally true i heard it myself
today i
i tweeted that and got almost
no people who thought it was true now i
don't know if that's because
all of the democrats now know it wasn't
true
or if they gave up
you just suddenly they stopped refuting
that point that doesn't make sense
i feel like maybe we made a dent
collectively
because at least my critics have backed
off and just
you know let it go that i'm stating it
as a fact that it's a hoax and then
they're letting it go now which
i think is capitulation but i might be a
little
optimistic on that at least for the
commenters not for the
i think biden still says it all right my
last point here
i've said this before but you cannot um
i don't think you could ignore the
effect of fiction has
on how we look at the real world because
everything you look at needs to fit some
model of
understanding so and ideally you want
the new information to fit some
existing model in your head and you just
populate that existing model that's
called
confirmation bias and
you see it in everything right you see
the left agrees to the left the right
agrees to the right
but there's there's a statement about
human beings that i think you would all
agree
with which is it's difficult to do
something
anything until you can first imagine it
so you don't really attempt to do things
you can't imagine
can work the wright brothers um
invented an airplane because they could
well imagine
you know they could see it flying you
know i assume
i assume that they imagined it working
and then
then they worked on anywhere now all the
things you imagine don't work
necessarily when you try to do them but
you're not going to do anything
until you can first imagine it's a thing
and that makes me
get to my impression or the filter that
i just sort of automatically have
on watching the protests the first
filter is
it looks very female lead and
i don't know how many of you are also
getting that feeling
but antifa in particular and i think
black lives matter as well
but they seem like they are mostly
female leaders
or at least the leaders that are the
most vocal or maybe the most effective
most aggressive seem to be female
so it's like a female lead organization
and the males
at least the antifa males not so much
the black lives matter males
but the antifa males seem to fall into a
category of
not as manly if we could say that and
again this isn't an insult
you know i'm not saying that if you're
if you don't have a manly persona
you're worth less or anything nothing
like that
i'm left to burning so if you want to be
every letter in lgbtq i'm cool with that
i'm 100 cool with that you can be any
letter you want
you can be any lifestyle you want if it
doesn't bother me
you can be whatever you want so there's
no criticism
implied here i'm just observing that
there's a certain
kind of man who is enjoying this
anti-foss situation
and they you know if i could use the
diminutive term
beta males they kind of fall into that
category
now again this is not an insult
because i think that it's a big world
i'm not saying it's
a good thing to be an alpha male or that
it's a bad thing to be a beta male
they both exist it's a preference it's
the way you're born
or it's a lifestyle it doesn't matter
it's all okay with me
alright if you're not breaking the law
if you're not violating the constitution
it's just none of my business period
could not care less
about your personal lifestyle choices if
they don't affect me
so i say that just because my filter is
that it looks like the
it looks like game of thrones with uh
daenerys
so you got the strong female leader the
queen of dragons
and she formed an army of of literally
eunuchs
so their their men had been cast
castrated
to make them more you know docile and
obedient soldiers i guess
i don't know what the theory was there
exactly but i don't know why you'd want
castrated soldiers it feels like the
wrong idea
but it reminded me of that
and it looks like it's the queen of
dragons that are unique army but they're
reenacting the joker movie
and i said this before to great pushback
which i enjoy of course and the pushback
was that if the joker movie had not been
such a universally
you know acclaimed movie and a lot of
people saw it
if you hadn't first pictured the joke or
movie
would it have been as easy to recreate
it
because that's what the protests and the
looting effectively did it recreated the
look and feel
of the joker movie is that a coincidence
is it simply that there are movies and
they're in my head
and so i just interpret the world
through those movies and that's all it
is
or is there a causal
relationship in other words if you can
only do the things you can imagine
and what you could imagine was not you
know
everybody's doing well but what you
could imagine was that joker movie
you're more likely to do the thing you
could imagine
so i do think that fiction has a big
role in how we're interpreting our
reality but also
how we act on it because you just don't
act on things you can't imagine
all right um
i'm just looking at your comments
yeah you know um i don't think that
i don't think we should make a judgment
about what's better or worse
when it comes to people's biological
situation
but it is fair to say it's different you
know nobody would argue with the fact
that you know there are differences
among people
but we don't have to put a value
judgment on that
anyone see zuckerberg's face in hawaii
yeah
yeah zuckerberg uses a lot of
a lot of sunscreen but i don't
if you've seen his complexion you know
there's a good reason for that
but where is the imagining from well
it's coming from fiction
that's the point somebody says you're
reaching on the joker thing
in my opinion well you know the the best
opinions are the ones that
you say to yourself in fact i i try to
stay in the space as much as possible
my favorite opinions to present here are
the ones where you say to yourself
i'm not so sure that's true
i've got a little skepticism about that
those are my favorite places to be i
will tell you that based on everything i
know from hypnosis from persuasion
and living a life in which i've done
everything from marketing to selling
that the
the models that you have in your head of
what the world can look like
are very persuasive now if you have less
experience
in hypnosis and persuasion than i do
and your opinion is different from mine
about this topic
you should ask yourself would your
opinion change
if you knew as much as i did about this
specific topic
and that's where i want you to be i want
you to be thinking
maybe maybe i should look into that
maybe that's a thing or maybe i'll look
for it in the future
look forward in the future and you might
be surprised but you don't have to
believe everything i say
i wouldn't talk to you later