Episode 1171 Scott Adams - Rappers Like Trump, Dad Jokers Answering Polls, The FBI and Hunter

but i don't know if i believe it all right youtubers you missed the simultaneous sip because of technological problems but we're apparently working right now um oh somebody says it's actually not working all right we'll screw that we'll just go on all right uh so here's my point the i think the biggest category of people who are lying to pollsters are not shy trump supporters uh looks like he's working on youtube now so i think it's the dad joke category because for every person who is lying to a poster because they don't want the pollster to know they're a trump supporter i feel like there might be four or five people who are lying to pollsters because they think it's hilarious and here's the fun part as you know a great deal of people on the left do not have a functioning sense of humor and that's part of the reason that they're horrified by trump is they literally can't tell when he's joking i mean actually literally they don't know when he's kidding so they they think he has all these you know uh dictator tendencies etc because they can't tell when he's just joking and when he's serious and i think that there probably are four or five to one uh trump supporting people who just think it's freaking hilarious that the polls are wrong am i am i right about that uh whoever is saying no sound i should block you because i think you're a troll uh that's that's the trolliest thing to say on these live streams don't be that guy all right um so i think that lack of sense of humor by the left gives them a blind spot meaning that if i if i said to democrats uh here's a mental experiment there are 10 democrats and 10 trump supporters you go to the 10 democrats and you say the following hey i think trump supporters are joking and it's like a practical joke that they lie to pollsters because they think it's funny and the result will be democrats screaming at the sky when trump wins and they think that that's worth lying to pollsters about what would democrats say about that i believe they would say that's not a thing right do you think the democrats would say you scott scott scott don't tell me that there's some massive collusion conspiracy in which there's a whole bunch of whole bunch of republicans who just magically they've all coordinated scott who's in charge of this who who's coordinating this scot this conspiracy that you see of all these republicans who are lying to pollsters ha-ha-ha scott you're so ridiculous right don't you think a democrat would just mock me for even suggesting that a massive amount not a small amount a very large number of trump supporters are lying because they think it's funny all right now i walk over to the 10 trump supporters and i say hey 10 trump supporters do you think that republicans are lying to pollsters because they think it's funny what would the 10 10 trump supporters say all 10 of them would laugh out loud you know i'm right you know they would because they would recognize it to be true they would instantly know yeah they're doing that that's exactly what they're doing maybe maybe not those 10 people but i'll bet they know people i'll bet they know people who are doing it so i think this uh lack of a sense of humor has created this immense blind spot for people on the left they can't tell when trump is kidding but worse they can't tell when the voters are being serious they can't tell so so it's the perfect prank because the only people who would fall for the prank are the people who are the target when you let's let's fast forward to trump winning the election so that that's my prediction i will allow that should i be wrong i will take it like a i'll take it like a man you know if it turns out my prediction is wrong well then it's just wrong but i expect it's right as i always do always more confident than i should be and suppose it's right are there any uh trump supporters who are gonna say well that was impossible no no there's not a single trump supporter who's gonna say well that was impossible i don't know how it happened they all think it's possible because they all think that the polls are wrong pretty much universally so poor democrats are going to have a tough time if it goes that way so the stock market pulled back quite a bit at the end of the week especially was that predictable did you predict that the stock market would have a big pullback the week or so before the election election day the election's already going on but did you predict that i did now i don't know if it happened because of the following reasons which were the basis of my prediction but you decide here's why i believed the stocks would pull back number one obviously pelosi was going to keep killing the stimulus bills with poison bills so that the economy would be frightened by not getting these relief relief packages essentially and so since pelosi had the power to stop that legislation you knew that that was one reason that the stock market would get skittish right so that part everybody knew about that part but here's the part that i submit to you was obvious and predictable if you understood how the world works you know if you had enough of a talent stack to understand everything from persuasion to politics to business here's what you would see the stock market is tied to ceos predicting how they will do next year are you with me the main driver of the stock market there are lots of externalities like interest rates and outside shocks but primarily primarily despite all those outside things primarily the stock market works on what the ceos say will happen next year which is is that a fact when ceos say are i think that my our earnings next year will be up 10 is that a fact no it is not it's an opinion and it's subjective and it is subject to a wide variety of possible things a co could say and indeed they could have one opinion and yet express it at infinite number of ways depending if they wanted you to feel a little bit optimistic or a little bit pessimistic am i right and let's say those ceos were mostly anti-trump let's say and i'll just pick one as an example and this is not an accusation i'll just use it as an example suppose you were the ceo of a major tech company and let's suppose that you did not like president trump and did not want him to be reelected and suppose you looked at your earnings and there were two ways that you could describe them one was really optimistic and let's say the data supported that but the other was less optimistic and let's say the data also supported that which would not be unusual because remember it's very subjective it's how much optimism you're going to put on and what kind of assumptions do you make etc so now you're a ceo of a major company and you don't want trump to get elected how do you frame your earnings you frame them a little bit ambiguously and you say we can't tell what's going to happen next year we'd like it to go well but so much uncertainty we certainly can't tell now when the market hears the ceo say that they have uncertainty what do they do they sell their damn stocks because you don't want to own stocks when there's great uncertainty certainty is the best thing you can have as long as it's a positive certainty of course so all of your ceos who are reporting earnings in this you know follow this week before the election do you think that they chose to describe those their earnings in the future the ones that are subjective that are an opinion do you think that they maybe took a little off it just pulled back a little bit on the optimism because if you don't think they did that you don't know anything about people even if they didn't want to do that even if they didn't consciously say to themselves i'm going to go out there and i'm going to try to move the stocks because that'll hurt the president even if they weren't thinking it if they were anti-trump they knew which answer was the good one for their team right so if you have enough ceos who have this bias which is i don't want to make it look like it's too much good news now normally you'd want your ceo would want to say good news so the stock would go up and they'd look like a star but keep in mind they only have to keep this illusion of bad news or ambiguous news or a lack of clarity they only have to maintain this for about a month just to get past the election and then say well i guess we got some new information and it looks like things are better than we thought very easy to adjust their their assumptions very easy to adjust it back upwards so i predicted that the stock guidance would get a little bit negative and the stock would fall because of uncertainty but if the if ever there was a buying opportunity uh let me take that back you should not take any financial advice from cartoonists and i mean that as seriously as i can say anything you should not make bets or financial decisions based on what i say you really shouldn't and i'm being very serious about this you shouldn't that said this has all all of the year marks of an artificial pullback and if you were going to buy stock you would want to look for artificial pullbacks because those are the ones that won't last if i had to guess on this one this looks about as artificial as a pullback could possibly look because it seems just related to the headlines which means it probably is not something deep we'll see um why is it that trump never mentions nuclear power have you noticed that whenever whenever trump is talking about the green new deal and uh and how biden wants to replace fossil fuels and everything he doesn't mention nuclear but yet the administration is quite pro-nuclear so if you look at the department of energy and you look at what the government's doing and what they're funding what they're putting their money behind they're definitely very pro-nuclear but trump himself he just doesn't even use the word he doesn't even throw it in the list of good things that are happening and i'm a little bit curious about that now i think it's probably completely political meaning that you don't get any new voters because you say nuclear i'm just guessing but maybe you would lose voters if you say nuclear so it could be that there's no good political way to talk about it it might be that it could be because trump himself is not completely sold as much as members of his administration could be that i don't know but i think he needs to get over that i think i'd like to see the president talk about nuclear even if he doesn't like it i feel like we need some transparency there to get his opinion on that and it's so con conspicuously missing now let me see if i told you that this happened would you believe it if i told you that joe biden ran a campaign ad in which he implied that jews in america were were associated with hitler would you believe that happened not associated with but let's say compared to would you believe if i told you that hypothetically would you believe that joe biden ran a campaign ad comparing conservative trump-supporting jews in america to hitler would you think that actually happened that actually happened now in the ad he didn't call out any particular group except trump supporters by implication so the ad essentially accused president trump of being heading in the direction of hitler so the ad compares trump to hitler what does that compare his supporters to well automatically if you're saying that you support hitler you're kind of a nazi by you know by definition or association you know in all practical ways if you support a hitler character you're either a nazi or you're like one similar to one so the the biden bad quite clearly is meant to compare trump supporters to nazis actual nazis with a picture of hitler now this comes only days after a gigantic pro-trump rally by jewish-americans so jewish-americans are having a big rally in favor of trump and of course israel loves trump etc and biden is comparing trump supporters to nazis to connect the dots this actually happened in america in 2020 that biden compared american jews to nazis no not directly it's only by the you know the associations that i've i've set up if trump's a nazi or yeah if trump's a hitler his supporters must be nazis and we just saw that there are a whole lot of supporters who are jewish so doesn't that make them nazis according to joe biden it's pretty rugged joe you need to answer to that so here's the story that nobody cares about even though it's the biggest story in the world the fbi has active criminal investigation into the biden family in their business and the charge to look into is money laundering what so since 2019 the fbi has been looking into the biden family on some kind of charge we don't know the the basis for it but money laundering now i'm guessing it has to do with either ukraine or china or both and how will we treat that will we treat that like it's the biggest story in the country because it is or will the press disappear it the trump at the the press disappeared it they're treating it like it doesn't matter like it's not really there and watching this is just mind-boggling and you know what you know what weird weird thought i had are you ready for the full simulation all right when i say this you're probably going to laugh because it's two on the nose so the fbi has this information about hunter biden and the biden family but we don't know the details and it's a few days before the election do you know who we need james comey we need james comey to make a public announcement that the biden family is being looked into for money laundering because that is just like uh hillary's emails in 2016.

the fact that there's no james comey is the reason that the news gets to just ignore it because if they had of the fbi did they did a did a press conference and said hey the election's coming and i just want you to have all the information which is what comey did right when comey talked about hillary's emails he didn't say she's guilty of something he simply said as voters you deserve to have all the information i'll just tell you what we know that we're looking into something all right now don't you think that we need a we need a james comey to do the same thing with the hunter biden stuff same message there is no there are no charges against any of the bidens we want you to know there are no charges we are however looking into this issue and we just think the public needs to know before you vote why not now of course that's not going to happen um i see somebody prompting me that abc news did run a story on it this week which was unusual enough that people were tweeting about about the fact that a major news organization ran a story now it wasn't much of a story but they covered it and it was it really stood out because i hadn't been ignored all right so we need uh james comey to fix things here here's what here's what else we need have you ever seen elon musk's company that makes this big machine that bores tunnels it's actually called the boring company which is funny so it's a it's a giant uh earth moving truck device that has a big drill on the front and somehow is optimized for drilling tunnels so we have one of those all right so that's the first thing you need to know before i get to my actual idea second i used to work on a farm a dairy farm and part of my job was to to bring in the hay so there would be this big device that a tractor would pull and it would cut the hay and it would wrap it into hay bales and wrap a twine around it and then toss it into the back of a wagon and i would be in the back of the wagon usually with my brother and the the hay bale would come flying over and then we would have to stack it neatly so they more of them would fit in the back and then unload them all right so you've got a giant machine that can bore tunnels we've got a giant machine that can turn grass into hay bales and even tie them up and stuff can we not make a giant machine that builds border wall huh because if you've seen the board wall it appears that there are you know big segments that are dropped into concrete and i don't know that there's much else to it so you need a trench you need concrete and you need the the fence parts stuck into it can we not just ask them the question can we not build a gigantic machine that just drives down the border going chunk and dropping fence and concrete as it goes you know digging the tunnel dropping the concrete dropping the fence and then just going to the next part and dropping another segment could we not do that not possible somebody's telling me that the abc story was from 2019 is that true that would be funny if it's true here we were giving abc credit but it was somebody saying it was a 2019 story uh and that might be true i don't know fact-check that for me so let's get a big wall building machine um and i think the fiction is starting to fall away that all trump was doing was replacing existing wall now i think it's technically true that the funding and the efforts right now are where there is existing wall and they're upgrading it but where they're upgrading it is because the wall was so inadequate it was basically not a wall at all so i think that i think the president is completely within his rights to say this is new wall because the old wall was so unwall-like and useless that it was basically no wall and the only reason that the old wall was there is that it was an important place to have a wall all right so we've seen the following pattern lately you saw kanye liking president trump ice cube willing to talk to the trump administration you saw 50 saying some positive things about trump before some negative things and now i guess lil wayne has met president trump and endorses them now as i've said many times our brains are pattern recognition machines that's basically what they are that's all that's all they are our brain just recognize patterns and it's not good at it which is the other part the reason that there are things like bias and and discrimination and racism and all these things are because our brains are pattern recognition machines but they're not good they don't work very well we see patterns that are not real patterns we believe we see patterns when there are no patterns but we can't turn off our pattern recognizing function because that's the basis of our intelligence is recognizing patterns so now you have these four famous black male rapper types i guess they'd all be called rappers or you know obviously kanye is much more than that 50 cents much more than that ice cube is much more than that actually they all have multiple career paths but your pattern recognition part of your brain what's it do when you hear that all four of these famous black musical plus other uh successes what do you what what do you do when you hear that they're all somewhat okay with trump it makes a difference it makes a difference because you can't you can't unsee this pattern if it had only been kanye your brain would say that's not a pattern that's one point and kanye's kanye so kanye breaks so many norms that it doesn't really seem like a pattern but then but then you get uh 50 cent in the mix but then you say to yourself oh okay remember kanye is the exception so really it's just 50 cent and he didn't necessarily say he loves trump he just dislikes biden's tax plan so that's not exactly a pattern that's two things that have something in common but then you throw in ice cube and again ice cube's not pro-trump he's just willing to talk to them and acknowledges that they did some things for the black community but now you say to yourself okay there's still three different people three individuals doing three things for their own purposes but it sure feels like a pattern doesn't it it's not really a pattern but it feels like it and then you throw lil wayne on there and you're just done your brain is done at this point you could tell yourself this isn't a pattern but it's a freaking pattern all right and again it's for people doing things for their own reasons it's it's probably our racism that even puts them in the same category right if we're being honest it's only a little bit of racism that says oh the all these four people have something in common aside from music because they're black so your racism says it's a pattern and then you see it and then you make a lot more of it than it really is but i think that that would be affecting the black population as well as everybody else who's looking at it i think it matters i think that fourth rapper you know the addition of lil wayne takes it from i think i'm sort of almost seeing a pattern to oh there's a pattern even if there isn't you're now convinced there is okay um look at all the things we don't know about coronavirus look at all the things we don't know about life really but let me just run you through the things that we don't know which is astonishing all right number one i i saw there was some pullback on regeneron so that's the drug that the president was touting that he thinks helped him a lot but apparently regeneron is not giving um the results that they want if you're in a late stage of disease so i think they stopped testing it on people who were at the ventilator stage because it was maybe hurting them more than it was helping or at least it was an indication it might so regeneron is not quite the magic pill that you thought it was because it might only work well if you get it early rem deserver went from hey this is great to at the moment are the the tests are kind of weak on rem deserve right so we thought it worked but now we think maybe it doesn't based on some clinical trials what about hydroxychloroquine if you look at the news on the left and the tweets on the left they will say it has been proven not to be effective but all you have to do is get on twitter and there will be people tweeting all kinds of studies usually retrospective but some of them even clinical trials which purport that it works just great now both of these bits of data which are opposites they can't both be true but they're reported with equal vigor there there's as much energy around saying hydroxychloroquine clearly works and all the information is supporting it as there is people saying it's been studied to death and there's no impact whatsoever both those truths are existing in full force and they can't both be true they just can't be now i'm of the opinion that if it were a big deal we would have noticed it meaning it would just be so obvious that you wouldn't even need a clinical trial if it were as effective as its initial proponent said i don't know if it has if it has no impact i just don't think it has some kind of a magic pill impact so we don't know about hydroxychloroquine we still don't know vitamin d we we know it's good for you but we don't know how much of a difference that's making and we're still arguing about whether gra whether masks work so yesterday i was tweeting about somebody uh you've seen a bunch of these somebody will show a bunch of graphs of coronavirus infections by state or country or whatever and they'll say here's the point that masks were mandatory and you can see that after the masks were mandatory the infections went way up and then they sort of started trailing off on their own for reasons that nobody couldn't understand now let me let me draw you the picture in your mind so you're looking at a graph that's mostly slightly rising it's closer to flat but it's slightly rising and then suddenly it zooms up to a mountain and then the mountain crests and it goes back down so that's what a what a surge of coronavirus would look like on a graph now imagine on the graph that at the base of the mountain part is labeled masks become mandatory and it takes about a month to get to the top of that peak and before it trails off what would be your conclusion if somebody showed you a bunch of graphs where every time the masks are mandatory the infections still get way way worse after the masks are mandatory how would you interpret those graphs given that there's a bunch of them a whole bunch of them what would you say would you say masks don't work because every time you have them as mandatory you can see on the graph that the infections go out of control higher therefore they don't work right because that's what the the people tweeting those graphs are telling you they're telling you look at the graph it's just as plain as the nose on your face that's covered by a mask it's there's the mask there they're required and then the infections go through the roof clearly masks don't work right and i look at these same graphs and i say uh that's not what i see i'm looking at the same graph you're looking at and i'm seeing proof that masks work same graph exactly what i just described to you why timing how long does it take for mandatory mask wearing to work itself through the system remember you've got some reporting delays and these delays could be a few weeks so it could be that the day the masks are required you still get a bunch of infections that have not yet been reported and they're going to come in after the masks so you're going to be reporting a whole bunch of infections that may have been last week's infections secondly do people immediately the right kind of masks and do it universally the same day that you put a mask a requirement in place no no right people are not instantly complying there's probably a little bit of a time lag before people get the better kind of masks you know maybe they start out with a with a bad kind of facial covering but then they buy one and now they've got a better mask so you'd expect that the effectiveness would be a week or two before you're really all massed up right wouldn't you then what about the fact the people who were infected and they don't know it yet so they got the effect they got the the virus yesterday but the mask requirement goes in today a week from now we realized that they were really sick but we just didn't know it where does the infection get recorded it gets recorded at the point where you discover it right so it's going to look like that infection came after the mask but in fact it started before the mask so here's my larger point can i can i look at those graphs and then conclude that masks work because there's a little bit of a time lag but in every case in every case on those graphs the infections would reach a peak and then trail off very quickly to me that's a picture of masks working perfectly just the way i would have expected them to work i would not expect them to work on the day of implementation i would expect to see the effect maybe three weeks later which is about what the graphs show now is my interpretation accurate that these these graphs that people are using to show that masks definitely don't work is my interpretation correct that those same graphs are proving that they do work which one of us is correct do you know before i started talking about this did you say to yourself well obviously if infections go up like crazy after masks obviously they don't work did you think that before i started talking now i'm not going to make a claim that my interpretation is correct because if you know how to analyze data you should be asking yourself this where is my comparison to that same city or state that had the same problem and then they did not have masks right because you would have to compare it place to place it'd have to be the same place to the same place otherwise you're not really you're not really comparing so the real answer is we can't tell from those graphs those graphs don't tell you masks work and they don't tell you the mass don't work they don't tell you anything because we're really really bad at gathering data which uh and there are other folks on the internet i'm i'm still having conversations with them but there's some thought that even the current number of infections and deaths may be lagged by as much as months so we don't have data we can rely on in any way about any of this stuff it's just useless and the thinking is useful is kind of dangerous all right i asked on twitter i asked how many people have experienced fewer colds and regular flus this season and i think this is again one of those things where this is purely anecdotal but it was the summer so you shouldn't expect that there would be too many colds and flus in the summer but let me ask uh let me ask all of you do you feel like you've had fewer regular illnesses since since the coronavirus issue in say february i feel like there are fewer of them now i don't know if that's true it's probably a bias but it just feels like there are fewer of them there's somebody on twitter who claims to be in the business of selling cold and flu medicines so it's somebody who's in the industry and they say that the sales of regular cold and flu medicines is down meaning that regular colds and flus may be substantially down which would make sense right because we're socially distancing now if it's true that regular colds and regular flues are way down and the lack of sales of those products that treat them would suggest that's the case then wouldn't that be pretty good evidence that masks work for coronavirus now that's not proof because regular colds and regular virus may be some differences that are not obvious to me as a non-medical person but if it were true just just take this as a hypothetical if it could be proven that our regular colds and regular uh flu seasonal flu are way down this year if we could prove that was true would you be willing to say that masks work or would you still find it just asking now here's the latest good thinking that i've heard on masks and it goes like this if you and i are in a small room and let's say one of us has the coronavirus and we both have masks and you and i stay in that small room breathing our you know shared air uh for hours at a time and one of us has the infection what are the odds that the other one will get the infection pretty good pretty good and it's because even though the mask might be blocking you know some of my direct air airflow going directly out the air is going somewhere you exhale so it's coming out the sides of the masks or whatever so it's going somewhere so eventually if you and i stay in the same closed room with the windows closed and bad ventilation it doesn't matter if we have masks or not so in that one scenario do masks work i'd say closer to no than yes meaning that if you stay in that room long enough and the ventilation is bad enough and one of you has coronavirus the other one's going to get it it's just a matter of time right but suppose you and i are at a bar and it's a big bar and i come up to you drunkenly and i you know talk a little too close to you and i've got my mask on um it's just it's a brief encounter do you think that would make a difference i think yes because the mask would be you know you know would be dispersing my airflow out the sides and it would be out there but i wouldn't be it wouldn't be like a a hose of my bad virus directly into your mouth and your eyes so if i'm talking to you from two feet away i'm not like jamming virus into your face it's sort of coming out the sides that's got to make a difference right doesn't common sense tell you that in that scenario probably it makes a difference whereas if you're locked in the tiny room with no ventilation probably it doesn't and maybe if you're outdoors the difference is so small it's not worth it but we don't know all right i i tweeted a link so you can see how the cdc estimates the number of regular influenza deaths per year and the reason i tweeted it is for you to see how ridiculous it is so i've been making a claim that sounds so ridiculously stupid that nobody believes it i don't think i've convinced one person that the following is true but i'll say it again i like being a contrarian we don't know how many regular influenza deaths there are every year and almost all of our conversation about how bad the coronavirus is is compared to this number we believed was a pretty solid number the number of regular influenza flu deaths per year which people say is in the low tens of thousands but could be in the high tens of thousands if it's a bad year so look at the cdc and look at the tortured convoluted way that they estimate it and if you have any experience in data analysis and i think you would need it to come to this opinion as i do um there isn't the slightest chance these numbers are good not any and when i say there's not the slightest chance they're good i don't mean they're off by 10 do you feel me i mean they could be off by 200 percent they could be off by 90 percent there's just when you look at how they calculate it you can't even understand it there's a general rule of life that if somebody can't explain something to you let's say you have average intelligence if somebody can't explain it to you it's right and if somebody has to explain it to you with a whole bunch of word salad it's not because they're bad at explaining necessarily it's because there's nothing there to explain it's just so the cdc estimates and the and the way that they go about doing regular influenza is laughingly ridiculous and i i would like to put this challenge out there so if there's anybody who just look in my twitter feed i tweeted that within the hour look at that link look how the cdc estimates the influenza desk and if you're experienced in data analysis and that's the important part for this if you're experienced at it just look at their explanation and then tweet at me later that you think that those are useful estimates or not i think you're just going to laugh when you see it all right um and here's a little uh factoid to put on top of this and i need a fact check on this so every year we know that there's a vaccination for the regular seasonal influenza but we also know that in each in various years that vaccination can either be pretty good meaning it'll protect a lot of people or they didn't quite get the right formulation for the virus that emerged and it's just sort of not that good all right so would you say that on the years that we have the really good and strong version of the vaccine that the total number of flu deaths should be lower right because that's the year that the vaccine is working really well compared to a year where we know the vaccine wasn't wasn't a good fit for the virus and it didn't really protect many people you would expect that those would be the years you'd have a lot of flu deaths right nope nope apparently there's no correlation between how good the vaccine is and how many people die now i need a fact check on that don't take that as uh as true because you heard it on this periscope i'm i'm explicitly acting for a fact jack this is just something i heard on twitter and it could be untrue easily all right moving on ian bremmer who is always interesting in part because i can't tell his politics which is a compliment let me let me give you let me give ian brenner one of the bremer one of the best compliments that a twitter user can ever have i've been following him for quite some time i can't tell if he's a republican or a democrat or an independent isn't that pretty good because he has opinions which seem well reasoned that some are anti-trump some are pro-trump but in all cases they don't seem crazy he doesn't have doesn't seem to have any crazy opinions you know i don't agree with them all but when i don't agree it's usually there's some assumption that i differ on or you know i have a different view of human beings or something but they're not crazy so here's one of his not crazy opinions that i really liked when you know president trump is often being accused of having autocratic tendencies meaning that if there was any way he could he'd stay in office forever if there was any way he could he would become a dictator right that's one of the biggest complaints about trump but then as ian bremer points out the pandemic came has there ever been a more perfect situation for a would-be dictator to to take power never never this is as good as it gets if you want to be a dictator you want a pandemic pandemic is perfect for taking over power you just say hey it's an emergency you know martial law i guess i've got all the power now it's for your own good perfect situation and it wasn't like the president had to make some kind of snap decision it wasn't like he made the wrong decision oops i wish i'd gone the other way i could have been more of a dictator because the the pandemic was sort of a slow moving even though it was kind of fast it was slow enough that he would have made the connection hey hey i can start now and become a dictator and we saw nothing like that as ian bremer points out you saw trump doing the opposite of trying to consolidate power literally the opposite he didn't use the war powers act as much as his critics think he should he let the states make lots of decisions allowed them to have the power and his biggest critics are complaining that he didn't take enough dictator control and let everybody kind of do their own thing didn't have a you know even joe biden wants to be more of an autocrat and have more of a federal guidelines that the states would have to abide by in some fashion so i thought that was a great point if you thought that president trump would take the first the first chance to become a dictator you can't think that anymore because the first chance came and went and he didn't he didn't even take a sniff at it it'd be one thing if he sort of took a run at it you know like he felt it down a little bit dipped his toe in or you know tried to see if he could get a little dictator stuff going nothing he actually ran in the opposite direction of states rights now we'll always argue whether that was the right choice and his critics will say he should have been more more directive but what you can't argue with anymore is the thought that if he would if he had an opening he would try to become a dictator you can rule that out because he has the opening right now still i mean still right if if he decided hey i'm gonna consolidate a lot more power he can still do it because people are still worried about covet he just has no apparently no interest in it ali alexander put together a website so that you can refer people for the fine people hoax it's called findpeople.org and it's got a variety of resources there including the full clip of the fine people statements and and i think i'm i'm there with some clips talking about how it was misinterpreted etc so just keep that in mind because it's real handy every time somebody asks you about the fine people thing instead of going through that whole debunking hoax thing where they get all confused and everything just uh point them at findpeople.org and uh excellent work ali alexander a patriot because that's i mean that's just a service just as a service to the country and we appreciate that ally um twitter has allowed the new york post to tweet again so they looked at their uh internal policies uh yes ali alexander that's correct somebody is asking they looked at their policies and decided that they would unblock the new york post so that's what people wanted that's what observers thought was reasonable and that's what they came around to and i would like to say this again and again and again i'll say this as many as many times as i need to for the rest of my life if somebody makes a mistake and then they hear your complaint about the mistake and then they look into it they admit they made a mistake and then they take actions to fix it not just this one but in the future that's good and you should just be happy about that and i think twitter satisfied that in this case now that's not to say that i'm completely happy with the unbiasedness of twitter i would say there's there's room for improvement if if we can be blunt uh room for improvement but when you see an individual case where you've got a gripe you make your complaint they hear it they acknowledge you're wrong they fix it it's a few days later you wish it had been faster but it also comes with a permanent change so it's not just a decision on this one tweet or company it's a permanent change i feel like that's about as good as you can do all right oh by the way um i feel i'm remiss for not having done this sooner and there's no bad intention with this it has simply slipped my mind didn't i didn't connect these two things so let me do it now so that i can close that gap uh i do have investments in twitter meaning that as just a stock purchaser so several months ago i said to myself you know all these people trying to leave twitter are not having much success because the other services just don't have that network effect because it's no fun to be on a service that doesn't have all the people you want to fight with so i thought you know i there's just nothing that can compete with twitter it's just such a dominant position so i bought stock in them about i forget six months ago or something turned out to be tremendously good timing because they've had quite a bit of growth even though they went down 20 yesterday i'm still weighing the plus um so now you know that just for full disclosure but having said that i still maintain that if they fix something that needs to be fixed we should only be happy about it just in general but there's still big issues that need to be addressed all right um trump did one of the best persuasion plays this week that i've seen uh and i always tell you that he's good at picking up free money there's just something if there's just money laying on the table and nobody's going to pick it up he just notices it and says hey anybody anybody is this free money belong to anybody all right i'll take it and this felt like that and when i and when i described this i think you can have the same reaction i did which is why didn't i think of that all right here it is trump points out and i'm gonna i'm gonna paraphrase his idea not not his words but i'll paraphrase his idea he tweeted that in effect and again these are my words putting on what i interpret as as his notion that imagine that the supreme court is asked to rule on the election pretty high likelihood wouldn't you say there'll be something about the election outcome that is likely to get to the supreme court we all feel that right not a hundred percent but i feel like i don't know 75 chance something will end up in the supreme court and it might make the difference between who is president we're on the same page trump points out the following and again this this is my description of it not his imagine that the justices have this decision and they can go one way which they know will put trump in office if they go the other way it puts biden in office if they put trump in office life goes on right the supreme court's the supreme court yeah there will be some you know riots in the street but eventually we'll get over it life will go on now suppose they pick biden biden has threatened he doesn't use the word threatened but he suggested he's hinted that there's a good chance that he would increase the number of justices on the court now given that we know the justices do not favor that i'm not a mind reader but we know what ruth bader ginsburg said that nine was the right number and as soon as you start messing around with that number you you delegitimize the supreme court because then it just becomes a captive of the political process because the next president will just you know add some justices until there's control so you're the supreme court and you've got to make a decision and one of them one way will put biden in the presidency and delegitimize your job you're on the supreme court are you going to make a choice that would delegitimize the supreme court because that's what a biden presidency promises to do i mean really that's not even guessing he he's going to do a commission to study uh what's he call it reforming the court which would include term limits maybe or packing the court adding people those are two things that you can be pretty certain the sitting justices do not favor so do you think that the justices of the supreme court will ever find will ever come to a decision that would make the supreme court irrelevant is there now think about the fact think about this think about the fact that you never had that idea don't you feel dumb i did is the moment i read that i read that tweet from trump and i thought oh my god why is he the first person to think of this or you know somebody may have suggested it to him but have you seen this on the news have you seen the news covering the fact that if the supreme court votes on it they will be voting to put themselves into irrelevancy that's what the vote will be and they know it it's not just my interpretation they would know it they would know that a biden a biden supporting vote would make the supreme court and maybe the republic itself irrelevant so for trump to uh i call it working the refs you know he brings up this point so the refs the supreme court it gets in their head because if they weren't thinking about it before they're thinking about it now now i don't think there was any chance that the supreme court would not have had that thought but the fact that he works the refs like this and he does it so well he's really working the refs right and you know that'll be one of the things that trump will probably always be the best there ever was at working the refs but when you read the history books it's not going to say that because it's like it's like a small skill but he's so good at it it feels like it should be in the history books but it won't be all right even bill maher is saying that we that the democrats should not prep for a civil war if they lose the election which suggests to me that at least bill maher is considering a high likelihood that the democrats will lose the election because you wouldn't be talking about the democrats going into a civil war if you believe the polls would you do you think bill maher believes the polls because if he did why would even bring up the possibility of a civil war you wouldn't because biden's going to win according to the polls so i think that bill maher probably believes the polls as much as as much as what's his name as much as michael moore does which is not at all and he's advising people to forget about the civil war and he points out something that's kind of funny that we don't have a mason dixon line that it wouldn't be a civil war where you know the the south goes to war against the north it would be a civil war within your own house it would be a civil war in your neighborhood would everybody just start fighting with their co-workers how would you even have a civil war it's hard to have a civil war when you're all living among each other that would be pretty messy but he's recommending no civil war and i think that he probably i think mar probably represents in many ways the moderate republican view and if moderate republicans are not on board for a civil war there isn't going to be one because there aren't enough radical leftists i feel like all you'd have to do is stop the snack truck and you can stop the uh riots just get rid of that anti-fog snack truck just they'll get hungry here's a question for you you've heard it said that the winners are the ones who write history right it's the winners who write history but what is the history of 2020 and 2019 going to look like and really the whole trump presidency what is that history going to look like who gets to write that because i don't know if there's ever been a time in my life where we couldn't agree you know even among the intellectual class what happened we can't agree what's happening now and what just did happen we can't agree on any of it so forget about the history books how are you going to write for example the history of the russia collusion hoax how do you write that as i say to my smart democrat friend just yesterday you know is he aware that there was an actual coup attempt in the united states by democrats and that it failed and he says there was no coup attempt that's fake news by a bunch of trump supporters so how do you write the history in my opinion i was here i watched the news i watched all the news that would be the subject of whatever history gets written i didn't miss much of the news and what i saw was an obvious well-documented coup attempt what did you see so if i were writing the news i would say well these people in the government tried to do a coup attempt and you know members of intelligence and fbi colluded to try to get rid of the president um so in the comments somebody's saying omg no coup attempt now and i have to say that i acknowledge that people on the left believe there was no coup attempt but it's mind-boggling when when you look at the the evidence that's public and indisputed so if you only take the evidence that's not disputed the coup is right there it's as obvious as it could possibly be now what it probably wasn't is everybody involved meeting on a zoom call to plot the overthrow of the president i don't think that happened i think everybody just knew what to do everybody knew that anything they could do against the president would be useful yeah so to me it looks uh obviously like we observed it we're still observing the aftermath of it and if i were writing the history book i would write it like that i would say there was a coup attempt it was sort of a loosely organized coup attempt but if somebody who is a democrat writes it they're going to say that russia tried to interfere with the election and there's still some suggestion that the trump administration talked to the russians too much and we're not we're not clear what they did or something like that right so this is an honest question how do you write the history if you see biden out there saying that the president called service people suckers and losers which as far as we know did not happen so what do the history books say do the history books say he did say that or the history books say he didn't say that and it was claimed that he said that how about the fine people hoax do the history books write that as a hoax or do they write that like like the hoax actually happened um how about the hunter biden laptop story will the history write it that that was a real thing that got ignored by the media or will history just ignore it the same as the media these are pretty big questions and let me ask you this i don't remember if i if i talked about this before so tell me in the comments if i already talked about this you've heard of the gel man amnesia effect where if you're an expert on a topic and you read a news report about that topic you can tell all the factual uh errors in it because you just happen to be an expert on that topic but you read any other topic in which you are not an expert and you kind of uncritically accept that it's probably kind of true it's only when you read things you know the truth that you can see how bad the news is you have to assume this applies to history as well we know the winners write history right but the things you think are just facts might not be because our history is pretty subjective it turns out now let me give you an example and stop me if i if i already told you this so wall street journal um i had an article about jack dorsey and they mentioned me in the article now there were two facts in this little mention of me in the wall street journal now the wall street journal is pretty reliable publication wouldn't you say if you were to if you were to rank credibility of publications the wall street journal would be very near the top very of the very best in credibility two things that were said about me in there one i was labeled a conservative i'm left of bernie so the so my label was dead wrong complete opposite i support president trump but has more to do with trump's special skills than some alignment and philosophy all right the second thing they said was they paired me with uh deray mckesson i think as people who jack interacts with now i've interacted with jack several times most of them about you know twitter itself and twitter censorship right and you know once on a book he recommended but fairly you know fairly ordinary trivial stuff i've only been in the room with him once in my life for about 20 minutes on a charity related thing and uh that's it and and the wall street journal puts me in the article with deray who is one of the activists for black lives matter as if we are somehow key people in jack's lives i would not be in the top 5 000 of key people that are important to jack dorsey i'm just somebody who's talked to him a few times i like him but that's it now if you read that article you would think that we're hanging out all the time and that somehow somehow my association with them has some importance as much as de reyes who had a long time relationship with him i understand so the only two things about me were very misleading did you know that if you had read that article would you know that those two things were misleading probably not probably not but if it were about you you'd know it so you don't trust your history don't trust your media the only people you can trust are the people here on this on this live stream that's it you're the only people we can trust by the way there's another thing that trump does that's really good persuasion and i laugh every time i hear it because it's so it's so ham-handed and yet it completely works he tells he tells his supporters that they're smarter than the experts now i know that this works because the secret to the dilbert cartoon strip was when i started telling my readers that they were smarter than their boss everybody loves to hear that they're smarter than the experts and they're smarter than their boss are they well i suppose sometimes sometimes you're smarter than your boss sometimes you are smarter than the experts but as a persuasion thing it's really super good you because people are primed to want to believe that they're smarter than experts so trump will say this all the time he said well the expert said this and then he'll look at his audience the rally audience but you're smarter than them you know they say they're the elites but you're the elites it's really good stuff for bonding with his audience it's a plus persuasion all right uh scott sides with the maskers let me i want to see this accusation before i block you it says scott sides with the massacres to to keep his leftist credibility so i'll be blocking you uh somehow that disappeared um if you apply mind reading to me that is incorrect such as that do you really think do you really think that i would back masks just to preserve my leftist credibility i feel like you must be new here do you think i care about my leftist credibility is that high on my list of things to preserve so saying good things about trump literally every day and somebody is on here saying i think he wants to preserve his leftist credibility no that has no bearing on any of my decisions what i would like to destroy is my association with either the left or the right in my perfect world neither the left nor the right would claim me but would understand that i can be fluid based on where the facts and my sense of reason take me so anybody who thinks that i'm pro basket for a political reason doesn't understand risk management i'm pro mask as a risk management decision meaning that there's enough evidence that they probably work that's worth the risk there's certainly a downside i recognize the downside completely but on balance we unfortunately have to sort of guess and none of us are smart enough to know if the masks are a good idea or not we're not if you think you know that mass or bad or you think you know the mass are definitely good you're not smart sorry if you say i have a strong opinion well you're probably reasonable even if your strong opinion is one way or the other it would be reasonable to look at this and have a strong opinion it would be stupid to say you know they work or you know they don't that would just be stupid so let me let me be as clear as i can on that but risk management you could certainly go either way on that all right um i'm seeing warn for secretary of treasury there's some thinking that that would scare wall street too much so maybe we won't see that and i heard somebody smart say that if elizabeth warren took a cabinet job her senate position would be filled by a republican governor and so she doesn't want to leave the senate because that would become a republican senate seat slaughter meter 100 and i will talk to you tomorrow you

but i don't know if i believe it

all right youtubers you missed the

simultaneous sip because of

technological problems but we're

apparently working right now

um oh somebody says it's actually not

working all right we'll screw that we'll

just go on

all right uh so here's my point the i

think the biggest category of people who

are lying to pollsters

are not shy trump supporters

uh looks like he's working on youtube

now

so i think it's the dad joke

category

because for every person who is lying to

a poster because they don't want the

pollster to know they're a trump

supporter

i feel like there might be four or five

people

who are lying to pollsters because they

think it's hilarious

and

here's the fun part

as you know

a great deal of people on the left do

not have a functioning

sense of humor and that's part of the

reason that they're horrified by trump

is they literally can't tell when he's

joking

i mean actually literally

they don't know when he's kidding so

they they think he has all these you

know uh dictator tendencies etc because

they can't tell when he's just joking

and when he's serious

and i think that there probably are four

or five to one

uh trump

supporting people

who just think it's freaking hilarious

that the polls are wrong

am i

am i right about that

uh whoever is saying no sound i should

block you because i think you're a troll

uh that's that's the trolliest thing to

say on these live streams

don't be that guy

all right um

so

i think that lack of sense of humor by

the left gives them a blind spot

meaning that if i if i said to democrats

uh here's a mental experiment

there are 10 democrats and 10 trump

supporters

you go to the 10 democrats and you say

the following

hey i think trump supporters

are joking and it's like a practical

joke

that they lie to pollsters because they

think it's funny and the result will be

democrats screaming at the sky

when trump wins and they think that

that's worth lying to pollsters about

what would democrats say about that

i believe they would say

that's not a thing

right

do you think the democrats would say you

scott scott scott

don't tell me that there's some

massive collusion conspiracy

in which there's a whole bunch of

whole bunch of republicans who just

magically

they've all coordinated scott who's in

charge of this

who who's coordinating this scot this

conspiracy that you see of all these

republicans who are lying to pollsters

ha-ha-ha scott you're so ridiculous

right

don't you think a democrat would just

mock me

for even suggesting

that a massive amount not a small amount

a very large number of trump supporters

are lying because they think it's funny

all right now i walk over to the 10

trump supporters and i say

hey 10 trump supporters do you think

that republicans are lying to pollsters

because they think it's funny

what would the 10 10 trump supporters

say

all 10 of them would laugh out loud

you know i'm right

you know they would because they would

recognize it to be true

they would instantly know yeah they're

doing that

that's exactly what they're doing maybe

maybe not those 10 people but i'll bet

they know people

i'll bet they know people who are doing

it

so i think this uh lack of a sense of

humor has created this immense blind

spot for people on the left they can't

tell when trump is kidding but worse

they can't tell when the voters are

being serious

they can't tell

so so it's the perfect prank because the

only people who would fall for the prank

are the people who are the target

when you let's let's fast forward to

trump winning the election so that

that's my prediction

i will allow

that should i be wrong

i will take it like a i'll take it like

a man

you know if it turns out my prediction

is wrong

well then it's just wrong

but i expect it's right as i always do

always more confident than i should be

and

suppose it's right

are there any uh trump supporters who

are gonna say

well that was impossible

no

no there's not a single trump supporter

who's gonna say

well that was impossible i don't know

how it happened they all think it's

possible because they all think

that the polls are wrong

pretty much universally

so poor democrats are going to have a

tough time if it goes that way

so the stock market

pulled back quite a bit at the end of

the week especially

was that predictable

did you predict that the stock market

would have a big pullback

the week or so before the election

election day the election's already

going on but

did you predict that

i did

now i don't know if it happened because

of the following reasons which were the

basis of my prediction but you decide

here's why i believed the stocks would

pull back number one obviously pelosi

was going to

keep killing the stimulus bills with

poison bills

so that the economy would be

frightened by not getting these relief

relief packages essentially

and so since pelosi had the power to

stop that legislation you knew that that

was one reason that the stock market

would get skittish right

so that part everybody knew about that

part but here's the part

that i submit to you

was obvious and predictable

if you understood

how the world works you know if you had

enough of a

talent stack to understand everything

from persuasion to politics

to business here's what you would see

the stock market

is tied to

ceos predicting how they will do next

year

are you with me

the main driver of the stock market

there are lots of externalities like

interest rates and outside shocks but

primarily

primarily

despite all those outside things

primarily the stock market works

on what the ceos say

will happen next year

which is

is that a fact

when ceos say are i think that my

our earnings next year will be up 10

is that a fact

no it is not

it's an opinion

and it's subjective

and it is

subject to a wide variety of possible

things a co could say

and indeed they could have one opinion

and yet express it

at infinite number of ways depending if

they wanted you to feel a little bit

optimistic

or a little bit pessimistic

am i right

and let's say those ceos were mostly

anti-trump

let's say and i'll just pick one as an

example and this is not an accusation

i'll just use it as an example

suppose

you were the ceo of a major tech company

and let's suppose that you did not like

president trump and did not want him to

be reelected and suppose you looked at

your earnings

and there were two ways that you could

describe them

one was really optimistic

and let's say the data supported that

but the other was less optimistic

and let's say the data also supported

that which would not be unusual because

remember it's very subjective it's how

much optimism you're going to put on and

what kind of assumptions do you make etc

so now you're a ceo of a major company

and you don't want trump to get elected

how do you frame your earnings

you frame them a little bit

ambiguously and you say we can't tell

what's going to happen next year

we'd like it to go well but

so much uncertainty we certainly can't

tell

now when the market hears the ceo say

that they have uncertainty

what do they do

they sell their damn stocks

because you don't want to own stocks

when there's great uncertainty

certainty is the best thing you can have

as long as it's a positive certainty of

course so

all of your ceos who are reporting

earnings in this you know follow this

week

before the election

do you think that they chose

to

describe those their earnings in the

future the ones that are subjective

that are an opinion

do you think that they maybe took a

little off it

just pulled back a little bit on the

optimism

because if you don't think they did that

you don't know anything about people

even if they didn't want to do that even

if they didn't consciously

say to themselves i'm going to go out

there and i'm going to

try to move the stocks because that'll

hurt the president

even if they weren't thinking it

if they were anti-trump they knew which

answer was the good one

for their team right

so if you have enough ceos who have this

bias which is i don't want to make it

look like it's too much good news

now normally you'd want your ceo would

want to say good news so the stock would

go up and they'd look like a star but

keep in mind they only have to keep this

illusion of bad news or ambiguous news

or a lack of clarity they only have to

maintain this for about a month

just to get past the election and then

say well i guess we got some new

information and it looks like things are

better than we thought very easy

to adjust their

their assumptions very easy to adjust it

back upwards

so i predicted

that the stock guidance would get a

little bit negative and the stock would

fall because of uncertainty

but if the if ever there was a buying

opportunity uh let me take that back

you should not take any financial advice

from cartoonists

and i mean that as seriously as i can

say anything

you should not

make bets or financial decisions

based on what i say you really shouldn't

and i'm being very serious about this

you shouldn't

that said

this has all all of the year marks of an

artificial pullback

and if you were going to buy stock

you would want to look for artificial

pullbacks

because those are the ones that won't

last if i had to guess on this one

this looks about as artificial as a

pullback could possibly look

because it seems just related to the

headlines which means it probably is not

something

deep we'll see

um

why is it that trump never mentions

nuclear power have you noticed that

whenever whenever trump is talking about

the green new deal and uh

and how biden wants to replace

fossil fuels and everything he doesn't

mention nuclear but yet the

administration is quite pro-nuclear so

if you look at the department of energy

and you look at what the government's

doing and what they're funding what

they're putting their money behind

they're definitely very pro-nuclear

but trump himself

he just doesn't even use the word he

doesn't even throw it in the list

of good things that are happening

and i'm a little bit curious about that

now

i think it's probably completely

political

meaning that you don't get any new

voters because you say nuclear i'm just

guessing but maybe you would lose voters

if you say nuclear so it could be that

there's no good

political way to talk about it it might

be that

it could be

because trump himself is not completely

sold as much as

members of his administration could be

that i don't know

but i think he needs to get over that

i think i'd like to see the president

talk about nuclear

even if he doesn't like it

i feel like we need some transparency

there to get his opinion on that and

it's so con conspicuously missing

now let me see if i told you

that this happened would you believe it

if i told you that joe biden ran a

campaign ad

in which he implied

that

jews in america were

were associated with hitler would you

believe that happened not associated

with but let's say

compared to

would you believe if i told you that

hypothetically

would you believe that joe biden ran a

campaign ad

comparing conservative

trump-supporting jews in america to

hitler

would you think that actually happened

that actually happened

now in the ad he didn't call out any

particular group except trump supporters

by implication

so the ad essentially

accused president trump of being

heading in the direction of hitler

so the ad compares trump to hitler

what does that compare his supporters to

well automatically if you're saying that

you support hitler

you're kind of a nazi by

you know by definition or association

you know in all practical ways if you

support a hitler character you're either

a nazi or you're like one

similar to one

so the the biden bad

quite clearly is meant to compare trump

supporters

to nazis

actual nazis

with a picture of hitler

now

this comes only days after a gigantic

pro-trump

rally

by jewish-americans

so jewish-americans are having a big

rally in favor of trump and of course

israel loves trump etc

and biden is comparing trump supporters

to nazis

to connect the dots

this actually happened in america in

2020

that biden compared american jews to

nazis

no not directly it's only by the you

know the associations that i've i've set

up if trump's a nazi

or yeah if trump's a hitler his

supporters must be nazis and we just saw

that there are a whole lot of supporters

who are jewish

so

doesn't that make them nazis according

to joe biden

it's pretty rugged

joe

you need to answer to that

so here's the story that nobody cares

about even though it's the biggest story

in the world the fbi has active criminal

investigation

into the biden family in their business

and the charge to look into is money

laundering

what

so since 2019 the fbi has been looking

into the biden family

on some kind of charge we don't know the

the basis for it but money laundering

now i'm guessing it has to do with

either ukraine or china or both

and how will we treat that

will we treat that

like it's the biggest story in the

country

because it is

or will the press

disappear it

the trump at the the press disappeared

it

they're treating it like it doesn't

matter

like it's not really there

and watching this is just mind-boggling

and you know what you know what weird

weird thought i had are you ready for

the full simulation

all right when i say this

you're probably going to laugh

because it's two on the nose

so the fbi has this information about

hunter biden and the biden family but we

don't know the details and it's a few

days before the election

do you know who we need

james comey

we need james comey

to make a public announcement

that the biden family is being looked

into

for money laundering

because that is just like uh hillary's

emails in 2016.

the fact that there's no james comey

is the reason that

the news gets to just ignore it because

if they had of the fbi did they

did a did a press conference and said

hey

the election's coming

and i just want you to have all the

information

which is what comey did right when comey

talked about hillary's emails he didn't

say she's guilty of something

he simply said as voters you deserve to

have all the information

i'll just tell you what we know that

we're looking into something all right

now

don't you think

that we need a we need a james comey to

do the same thing with the hunter biden

stuff same message

there is no there are no charges against

any of the bidens we want you to know

there are no charges

we are however looking into this issue

and we just think the public needs to

know

before you vote

why not

now of course that's not going to happen

um i see somebody prompting me that abc

news did run a story on it this week

which was

unusual enough

that people were tweeting about about

the fact that a major news organization

ran a story

now it wasn't much of a story

but they covered it and it was

it really stood out

because i hadn't been ignored

all right so we need uh james comey to

fix things here

here's what here's what else we need

have you ever seen elon musk's

company that makes this big machine that

bores tunnels it's actually called the

boring company which is funny so it's a

it's a giant

uh earth moving truck device

that has a big drill on the front and

somehow is optimized for drilling

tunnels

so we have one of those all right so

that's the first thing you need to know

before i get to my actual idea

second i used to work on a farm a dairy

farm and part of my job was to

to bring in the hay

so there would be this big device that a

tractor would pull and it would cut the

hay and it would wrap it into hay bales

and wrap a twine around it and then toss

it into the back of a wagon

and i would be in the back of the wagon

usually with my brother and the the hay

bale would come flying over and then we

would have to stack it neatly so they

more of them would fit in the back and

then unload them all right so you've got

a giant machine that can bore tunnels

we've got a giant machine that can turn

grass into hay bales and even tie them

up and stuff

can we not

make a giant machine

that builds border wall

huh

because if you've seen the board wall it

appears that there are you know big

segments

that are dropped into concrete

and i don't know that there's much else

to it

so you need a trench

you need concrete

and you need the the fence parts stuck

into it

can we not

just ask them the question

can we not build a gigantic machine

that just

drives down the border going chunk

and

dropping fence and concrete as it goes

you know digging the tunnel

dropping the concrete

dropping the fence and then just going

to the next part and dropping another

segment could we not do that

not possible

somebody's telling me that the abc story

was from 2019

is that true

that would be funny if it's true

here we were giving abc credit but it

was

somebody saying it was a 2019 story

uh and that might be true i don't know

fact-check that for me so let's get a

big wall building machine

um

and i think the fiction is starting to

fall away

that all trump was doing was replacing

existing wall

now i think it's technically true

that the funding and the efforts right

now are where there is existing wall and

they're upgrading it

but where they're upgrading it is

because the wall was so inadequate it

was basically not a wall at all

so i think that i think the president is

completely

within his rights to say this is new

wall

because the old wall was so unwall-like

and useless that it was basically no

wall and the only reason that the old

wall was there is that it was an

important place to have a wall

all right so

we've seen the following pattern lately

you saw kanye liking president trump

ice cube willing to talk to the trump

administration

you saw 50 saying some positive things

about trump before some negative things

and now i guess lil wayne has met

president trump and endorses them

now

as i've said many times our brains are

pattern recognition machines

that's basically what they are

that's all that's all they are our brain

just recognize patterns

and

it's not good at it which is the other

part the reason that there are things

like bias and and discrimination and

racism and all these things are because

our brains are pattern recognition

machines but they're not good

they don't work very well

we see patterns that are not real

patterns we believe we see patterns when

there are no patterns

but we can't turn off our pattern

recognizing

function because that's the basis of our

intelligence is recognizing patterns

so now you have these four famous black

male

rapper types i guess they'd all be

called

rappers or you know obviously

kanye is much more than that 50 cents

much more than that ice cube is much

more than that

actually they all have multiple career

paths but

your pattern recognition part of your

brain

what's it do when you hear that all four

of these

famous black

musical plus other

uh successes

what do you what what do you do when you

hear that they're all

somewhat okay with trump

it makes a difference

it makes a difference

because you can't you can't unsee this

pattern

if it had only been kanye

your brain would say that's not a

pattern that's one point

and kanye's

kanye so kanye breaks so many norms that

it doesn't really seem like a pattern

but then

but then you get uh 50 cent in the mix

but then you say to yourself oh okay

remember kanye is the exception

so really it's just 50 cent and he

didn't necessarily say he loves trump he

just dislikes

biden's tax plan so

that's not exactly a pattern that's two

things that have something in common

but then you throw in ice cube

and again ice cube's not pro-trump

he's just willing to talk to them and

acknowledges that they did some things

for the black community

but now you say to yourself okay

there's still three different people

three individuals doing

three things for their own purposes

but it sure feels like a pattern doesn't

it

it's not really a pattern

but it feels like it and then you throw

lil wayne on there and you're just done

your brain is done

at this point you could tell yourself

this isn't a pattern but it's a freaking

pattern

all right

and again it's for people doing things

for their own reasons

it's it's probably our racism that even

puts them in the same category right

if we're being honest it's only a little

bit of racism that says oh the all these

four people have something in common

aside from music

because they're black

so your racism says it's a pattern and

then you see it and then you make a lot

more of it than it really is but i think

that that would be affecting the black

population as well as everybody else

who's looking at it i think it matters

i think that fourth rapper

you know the addition of lil wayne

takes it from i think i'm sort of almost

seeing a pattern to oh there's a pattern

even if there isn't you're now convinced

there is okay

um look at all the things we don't know

about coronavirus look at all the things

we don't know about life really

but let me just run you through the

things that we don't know

which is astonishing all right

number one i i saw there was some

pullback on regeneron

so that's the drug that the president

was touting that he thinks helped him a

lot but apparently regeneron is not

giving um the results that they want if

you're in a late stage of disease so i

think they stopped testing it on people

who were at the ventilator stage because

it was maybe hurting them more than it

was helping or at least it was an

indication it might

so regeneron is not

quite the magic pill that you thought it

was

because it might only work well if you

get it early

rem deserver went from

hey this is great to

at the moment are the the tests are kind

of weak on rem deserve right so we

thought it worked but now we think maybe

it doesn't based on

some

clinical trials what about

hydroxychloroquine

if you look at the news on the left and

the tweets on the left

they will say it has been proven not to

be effective

but all you have to do is get on twitter

and there will be people tweeting all

kinds of studies

usually retrospective but some of them

even

clinical trials which purport

that it works just great

now both of these

bits of data which are opposites they

can't both be true but they're reported

with equal vigor

there there's as much energy around

saying hydroxychloroquine

clearly works and all the information is

supporting it

as there is people saying it's been

studied to death and there's no impact

whatsoever

both those truths

are existing in full force and they

can't both be true they just can't be

now i'm of the opinion

that if it were a big deal we would have

noticed it meaning it would just be so

obvious

that you wouldn't even need a clinical

trial if it were as effective as its

initial proponent said i don't know if

it has

if it has no impact

i just don't think it has some kind of a

magic pill impact

so we don't know about

hydroxychloroquine

we still don't know vitamin d we we know

it's good for you but we don't know how

much of a difference that's making and

we're still arguing about whether gra

whether masks work

so yesterday i was tweeting about

somebody uh you've seen a bunch of these

somebody will show a bunch of graphs of

coronavirus infections by state or

country or whatever

and they'll say here's the point that

masks were mandatory

and you can see that after the masks

were mandatory

the infections went way up

and then they sort of started trailing

off on their own for reasons that nobody

couldn't understand

now

let me let me draw you the picture in

your mind so you're looking at a graph

that's mostly

slightly rising it's closer to flat but

it's slightly rising and then suddenly

it zooms up to a mountain

and then the mountain crests and it goes

back down so that's what a what a surge

of coronavirus would look like on a

graph now imagine on the graph that at

the base of the mountain part

is labeled

masks become mandatory

and it takes about a month

to get to the top of that peak

and before it trails off

what would be your conclusion if

somebody showed you a bunch of graphs

where every time the masks are mandatory

the infections still get way way worse

after the masks are mandatory how would

you interpret

those graphs given that there's a bunch

of them a whole bunch of them

what would you say would you say

masks don't work

because every time you have them as

mandatory you can see on the graph that

the infections go out of control higher

therefore they don't work right because

that's what the the people tweeting

those graphs are telling you they're

telling you look at the graph

it's just as plain as the nose on your

face that's covered by a mask

it's

there's the mask

there they're required and then the

infections go through the roof

clearly masks don't work right

and i look at these same graphs and i

say

uh

that's not what i see

i'm looking at the same graph you're

looking at

and i'm seeing proof that masks work

same graph

exactly what i just described to you

why

timing

how long does it take

for mandatory mask wearing to work

itself through the system remember

you've got some reporting delays

and these delays could be a few weeks

so it could be that the day the masks

are required

you still get a bunch of infections that

have not yet been reported and they're

going to come in after the masks so

you're going to be reporting a whole

bunch of infections that may have been

last week's infections

secondly do people

immediately

the right kind of masks

and do it universally the same day that

you put a mask

a requirement in place

no

no right

people are not instantly complying

there's probably a little bit of a time

lag before people get the better kind of

masks you know maybe they start out with

a

with a bad kind of facial covering but

then they buy one and now they've got a

better mask so you'd expect that the

effectiveness would be a week or two

before you're really all massed up right

wouldn't you

then what about the fact the people who

were infected and they don't know it yet

so they got the effect they got the the

virus yesterday

but the mask requirement goes in today

a week from now we realized that they

were really sick but we just didn't know

it

where does the infection get recorded it

gets recorded at the point where you

discover it right

so it's going to look like that

infection came after the mask but in

fact it started before the mask

so here's my larger point

can i can i look at those graphs and

then conclude that masks work

because there's a little bit of a time

lag but in every case

in every case on those graphs

the infections would reach a peak and

then trail off very quickly

to me that's a picture of masks working

perfectly

just the way i would have expected them

to work

i would not expect them to work on the

day of implementation

i would expect to see the effect

maybe three weeks later

which is about what the graphs show

now

is my interpretation accurate

that these these graphs that people are

using to show that masks definitely

don't work

is my interpretation correct that those

same graphs are proving that they do

work

which one of us is correct

do you know

before i started talking about this did

you say to yourself well obviously if

infections go up like crazy after masks

obviously they don't work

did you think that before i started

talking

now i'm not going to make a claim that

my interpretation is correct

because

if you know how to analyze data you

should be asking yourself this

where is my comparison to that same city

or state

that

had the same problem

and then they did not have masks

right because you would have to compare

it place to place it'd have to be the

same place to the same place otherwise

you're not really

you're not really comparing so the real

answer is we can't tell from those

graphs

those graphs don't tell you masks work

and they don't tell you the mass don't

work

they don't tell you anything because

we're really really bad at gathering

data

which uh and there are other folks on

the internet

i'm i'm still having conversations with

them but there's some thought that even

the current number of infections and

deaths

may be lagged by as much as months

so we don't have data we can rely on in

any way about any of this stuff it's

just useless

and the thinking is useful is kind of

dangerous

all right

i asked on

twitter i asked how many people have

experienced

fewer colds and regular flus this season

and i think this is again one of those

things where this is purely anecdotal

but it was the summer

so you shouldn't expect that there would

be too many colds and flus in the summer

but let me ask uh

let me ask all of you

do you feel like you've had fewer

regular illnesses since

since the coronavirus issue in say

february

i feel like there are fewer of them

now i don't know if that's true

it's probably a bias but it just feels

like there are fewer of them

there's somebody on twitter who claims

to be in the business of selling

cold and flu medicines so it's somebody

who's in the industry and they say that

the sales of regular cold and flu

medicines is down

meaning that regular colds and flus

may be substantially down

which would make sense right because

we're socially distancing now

if it's true that regular colds and

regular flues are way down

and the lack of sales of those products

that treat them would suggest that's the

case

then wouldn't that be pretty good

evidence that masks work for coronavirus

now that's not proof

because regular colds and regular virus

may be some differences that are not

obvious to me as a non-medical person

but if it were true just just take this

as a hypothetical

if it could be proven

that our regular colds and regular

uh flu seasonal flu are way down this

year

if we could prove that was true

would you be willing to say that masks

work

or would you still find it

just asking

now here's the latest good thinking that

i've heard on masks and it goes like

this

if you and i are in a small room and

let's say one of us has the coronavirus

and we both have masks

and you and i stay in that small room

breathing our you know shared air

uh for hours at a time and one of us has

the infection

what are the odds that the other one

will get the infection

pretty good

pretty good and it's because even though

the mask might be blocking

you know some of my direct air airflow

going directly out the air is going

somewhere

you exhale so it's coming out the sides

of the masks or whatever

so it's going somewhere

so eventually if you and i stay in the

same closed room with the windows closed

and bad ventilation it doesn't matter if

we have masks or not so in that one

scenario do masks work

i'd say closer to no than yes

meaning that if you stay in that room

long enough and the ventilation is bad

enough and one of you has coronavirus

the other one's going to get it

it's just a matter of time right

but

suppose you and i are at a bar

and it's a big bar

and i come up to you drunkenly and i you

know talk a little too close to you

and i've got my mask on

um

it's just it's a brief encounter

do you think that would make a

difference i think yes

because the mask would be you know

you know would be dispersing my airflow

out the sides and it would be out there

but i wouldn't be

it wouldn't be like a

a hose of my bad virus directly into

your mouth and your eyes so if i'm

talking to you from two feet away i'm

not like jamming virus into your face

it's sort of coming out the sides that's

got to make a difference right

doesn't common sense tell you that in

that scenario

probably it makes a difference

whereas if you're locked in the tiny

room with no ventilation

probably it doesn't

and maybe if you're outdoors the

difference is so small it's not worth it

but we don't know

all right

i i tweeted a link so you can see how

the cdc estimates the number of

regular influenza

deaths

per year

and the reason i tweeted it is for you

to see how ridiculous it is

so i've been making a claim that sounds

so ridiculously stupid that nobody

believes it i don't think i've convinced

one person that the following is true

but i'll say it again i like being a

contrarian

we don't know how many regular influenza

deaths there are every year

and almost all of our conversation about

how bad the coronavirus is

is compared to

this number we believed was a pretty

solid number

the number of regular influenza flu

deaths per year which people say is in

the

low tens of thousands but could be in

the high tens of thousands if it's a bad

year

so

look at the cdc and look at the tortured

convoluted way that they estimate it

and if you have any experience in data

analysis

and i think you would need it to come to

this opinion as i do

um

there isn't the slightest chance these

numbers are good

not any and when i say there's not the

slightest chance they're good i don't

mean they're off by 10

do you feel me

i mean they could be off by

200 percent

they could be off by 90 percent

there's just

when you look at how they calculate it

you can't even understand it

there's a general rule of life that if

somebody can't explain something to you

let's say you have average intelligence

if somebody can't explain it to you

it's right

and if somebody has to explain it to you

with a whole bunch of word salad

it's not because they're bad at

explaining necessarily it's because

there's nothing there to explain

it's just so the cdc estimates

and the and the way that they go about

doing regular influenza is laughingly

ridiculous

and i i would like to put this challenge

out there

so if there's anybody who just look in

my twitter feed i tweeted that

within the hour

look at that link look how the cdc

estimates the influenza desk and if

you're experienced in data analysis and

that's the important part for this if

you're experienced at it just look at

their explanation

and then tweet at me later

that you think that those are useful

estimates or not

i think you're just going to laugh when

you see it

all

right um and here's a little uh factoid

to put on top of this and i need a fact

check on this

so every year we know that there's a

vaccination for the regular seasonal

influenza

but we also know that in each

in various years

that vaccination can either be pretty

good

meaning it'll protect a lot of people or

they didn't quite get the right

formulation for the virus that emerged

and it's just sort of not that good all

right so would you say

that on the years that we have the

really good and strong version of the

vaccine

that the total number of flu deaths

should be lower right because that's the

year that the vaccine is working really

well

compared to a year where we know the

vaccine wasn't wasn't a good fit for the

virus and it didn't really protect many

people

you would expect that those would be the

years you'd have a lot of flu deaths

right

nope

nope

apparently there's no correlation

between how good the vaccine is

and how many people die

now i need a fact check on that don't

take that as uh as true because you

heard it on this periscope i'm i'm

explicitly acting for a fact jack this

is just something i heard on twitter and

it could be untrue easily all right

moving on

ian bremmer who is always interesting in

part because i can't tell his politics

which is a compliment

let me let me give you let me give ian

brenner one of the bremer one of the

best compliments

that a twitter user can ever have

i've been following him for quite some

time

i can't tell if he's a republican or a

democrat or an independent

isn't that pretty good

because he has opinions which seem well

reasoned

that some are anti-trump some are

pro-trump but in all cases they don't

seem crazy

he doesn't have doesn't seem to have any

crazy opinions

you know i don't agree with them all

but when i don't agree it's usually

there's some assumption that i differ on

or you know i have a different view of

human beings or something but they're

not crazy

so here's one of his not crazy opinions

that i really liked

when you know president trump is often

being accused of having autocratic

tendencies

meaning that if there was any way he

could he'd stay in office forever

if there was any way he could

he would become a dictator

right that's one of the biggest

complaints about trump

but then as ian bremer points out the

pandemic came

has there ever been a more perfect

situation

for a would-be dictator to to take power

never

never this is as good as it gets

if you want to be a dictator

you want a pandemic

pandemic is perfect

for taking over power

you just say hey it's an emergency

you know martial law i guess i've got

all the power now it's for your own good

perfect situation and it wasn't like the

president had to make some kind of snap

decision

it wasn't like he made the wrong

decision oops i wish i'd gone the other

way i could have been more of a dictator

because the the pandemic was sort of a

slow moving even though it was kind of

fast it was slow enough

that he would have made the connection

hey

hey i can start now

and become a dictator

and we saw nothing like that

as ian bremer points out you saw trump

doing the opposite of trying to

consolidate power

literally the opposite

he didn't use the war powers act as much

as his critics think he should

he let the states make lots of decisions

allowed them to have the power and his

biggest critics are complaining that he

didn't take enough

dictator control

and let everybody kind of do their own

thing didn't have a you know even joe

biden wants to be more of an autocrat

and have more of a

federal guidelines that the states would

have to abide by

in some fashion

so i thought that was a great point if

you thought that president trump

would take the first

the first chance to become a dictator

you can't think that anymore because the

first chance came and went and he didn't

he didn't even take a sniff at it it'd

be one thing if he sort of took a run at

it you know like he felt it down a

little bit

dipped his toe in or you know tried to

see if he could get a little dictator

stuff going

nothing he actually ran in the opposite

direction of states rights

now we'll always argue whether that was

the right choice

and his critics will say he should have

been more

more directive but what you can't argue

with anymore

is the thought that if he would if he

had an opening he would try to become a

dictator you can rule that out

because he has the opening right now

still

i mean still right if if he decided hey

i'm gonna

consolidate a lot more power he can

still do it because people are still

worried about covet

he just has no apparently no interest in

it

ali alexander put together a website

so that you can refer people for the

fine people hoax it's called

findpeople.org

and it's got a variety of resources

there including the full clip of the

fine people statements and

and i think i'm i'm there with some

clips

talking about how it was misinterpreted

etc so just keep that in mind because

it's real handy every time somebody asks

you

about the fine people thing

instead of going through that whole

debunking hoax thing where they get all

confused and everything just uh point

them at findpeople.org

and uh excellent work ali alexander a

patriot

because that's

i mean that's just a service

just as a service to the country and we

appreciate that ally

um

twitter has allowed the new york post to

tweet again

so they looked at their uh

internal policies

uh yes ali alexander that's correct

somebody is asking

they looked at their

policies and decided that they would

unblock the new york post

so that's what people wanted that's what

observers thought was

reasonable

and that's what they came around to

and i would like to say this again

and again and again i'll say this as

many as many times as i need to for the

rest of my life

if somebody makes a mistake

and then they hear your complaint about

the mistake

and then they look into it

they admit they made a mistake

and then they take actions to fix it not

just this one but in the future

that's good

and you should just be happy about that

and i think twitter satisfied that in

this case now that's not to say that

i'm completely happy with the

unbiasedness of twitter

i would say there's

there's room for improvement if

if we can be blunt

uh room for improvement

but

when you see an individual case where

you've got a gripe you make your

complaint they hear it they acknowledge

you're wrong they fix it it's a few days

later you wish it had been faster but it

also comes with a permanent change so

it's not just a decision on this one

tweet or company

it's a permanent change

i feel like that's about as good as you

can do

all right oh by the way

um i feel i'm remiss for not having done

this sooner and

there's no bad intention with this

it has simply

slipped my mind didn't i didn't connect

these two things so let me do it now

so that

i can

close that gap

uh i do have investments in twitter

meaning that as just a stock purchaser

so several months ago i said to myself

you know all these people trying to

leave twitter are not having much

success because the other services just

don't have that network effect because

it's no fun to be on a service that

doesn't have all the people you want to

fight with

so

i thought you know i there's just

nothing that can compete with twitter

it's just such a dominant position so i

bought stock in them about

i forget six months ago or something

turned out to be tremendously good

timing

because they've had quite a bit of

growth even though they went down 20

yesterday i'm still weighing the plus

um

so now you know that just for full

disclosure

but

having said that

i still maintain that if they fix

something that needs to be fixed we

should only be happy about it just in

general

but there's still big issues

that need to be addressed all right

um

trump did one of the best persuasion

plays

this week

that i've seen

uh and i always tell you that he's good

at picking up free money there's just

something if there's just money laying

on the table and nobody's going to pick

it up

he just notices it and says hey anybody

anybody is this free money belong to

anybody all right

i'll take it

and this felt like that

and when i and when i described this i

think you can have the same reaction i

did which is

why didn't i think of that

all right here it is

trump points out and i'm gonna i'm gonna

paraphrase

his idea not not his words but i'll

paraphrase his idea he tweeted that in

effect and again these are my words

putting on what i interpret as as

his notion

that imagine that the supreme court is

asked to rule on the election

pretty high likelihood wouldn't you say

there'll be something about the election

outcome

that is likely to get to the supreme

court

we all feel that right not a hundred

percent

but i feel like i don't know 75 chance

something will end up in the supreme

court and it might make the difference

between who is president

we're on the same page

trump points out the following

and again this this is my description of

it not his

imagine

that the justices have this

decision

and they can go one way which they know

will put trump in office

if they go the other way it puts biden

in office

if they put trump in office

life goes on

right the supreme court's the supreme

court

yeah there will be some you know riots

in the street but eventually we'll get

over it

life will go on

now suppose they pick biden

biden has threatened

he doesn't use the word threatened but

he suggested he's hinted

that there's a good chance that he would

increase the number of justices on the

court now given that we know the

justices do not favor that i'm not a

mind reader but we know what

ruth bader ginsburg said that nine was

the right number and as soon as you

start

messing around with that number

you

you delegitimize the supreme court

because then it just becomes a captive

of the political process because the

next president will just you know add

some justices until

there's control

so

you're the supreme court

and you've got to make a decision

and one of them one way will put biden

in the presidency and delegitimize

your job

you're on the supreme court

are you going to make a choice

that would delegitimize the supreme

court because that's what a biden

presidency

promises to do

i mean really

that's not even guessing

he he's going to do a commission to

study

uh what's he call it reforming the court

which would include term limits maybe

or packing the court adding people

those are two things that you can be

pretty certain the sitting justices do

not favor

so do you think that the justices of the

supreme court

will ever find will ever come to a

decision

that would make the supreme court

irrelevant

is there

now think about the fact think about

this

think about the fact that you never had

that idea

don't you feel dumb

i did is the moment i read that i read

that tweet from trump and i thought

oh my god

why is he the first person to think of

this

or you know somebody may have suggested

it to him but have you seen this on the

news

have you seen the news covering the fact

that if the supreme court votes on it

they will be voting to put themselves

into irrelevancy

that's what the vote will be

and they know it it's not just my

interpretation they would know it they

would know that a biden

a biden supporting vote

would make the supreme court and maybe

the republic itself

irrelevant so for trump to uh i call it

working the refs you know he brings up

this point so the refs the supreme court

it gets in their head

because if they weren't thinking about

it before

they're thinking about it now

now i don't think there was any chance

that the supreme court would not have

had that thought

but the fact that he works the refs like

this and he does it so well

he's really working the refs right and

you know that'll be one of the things

that

trump will probably always be the best

there ever was at working the refs

but when you read the history books it's

not going to say that because it's like

it's like a small skill

but he's so good at it it feels like it

should be in the history books but it

won't be

all right even bill maher is saying that

we that the democrats should not prep

for a civil war if they lose the

election

which suggests to me that at least bill

maher is considering a high likelihood

that the democrats will lose the

election because you wouldn't be talking

about the democrats going into a civil

war

if you believe the polls would you

do you think bill maher believes the

polls

because if he did why would even bring

up the possibility of a civil war

you wouldn't because

biden's going to win according to the

polls so i think that bill maher

probably believes the polls as much as

as much as

what's his name

as much as michael moore does which is

not at all

and he's advising people to forget about

the civil war and he points out

something that's kind of funny

that we don't have a mason dixon line

that it wouldn't be a civil war where

you know the the south goes to war

against the north

it would be a civil war within your own

house

it would be a civil war in your

neighborhood

would everybody just start fighting with

their co-workers how would you even have

a civil war it's hard to have a civil

war when you're all living among each

other that would be pretty messy

but he's recommending no civil war and i

think that he probably

i think mar probably represents

in many ways the moderate republican

view

and if moderate republicans are not on

board for a civil war

there isn't going to be one

because there aren't enough radical

leftists

i feel like all you'd have to do is stop

the snack truck

and you can stop the uh riots

just get rid of that anti-fog snack

truck just they'll get hungry

here's a question for you you've heard

it said that the winners are the ones

who write history right

it's the winners who write history

but

what is the history of 2020 and 2019

going to look like

and really the whole trump presidency

what is that history going to look like

who gets to write that

because i don't know if there's ever

been a time in my life

where we couldn't agree

you know even among the intellectual

class

what happened

we can't agree

what's happening now

and what just did happen

we can't agree on any of it so forget

about the history books how are you

going to write for example

the history of the russia collusion hoax

how do you write that

as i say to my smart democrat friend

just yesterday

you know is he aware

that there was an actual coup attempt

in the united states

by democrats and that it failed

and he says there was no coup attempt

that's fake news

by a bunch of trump supporters

so how do you write the history in my

opinion i was here

i watched the news

i watched all the news that would be the

subject of whatever history gets written

i didn't miss much of the news

and what i saw was an obvious

well-documented

coup attempt

what did you see

so if i were writing the news i would

say well these

people in the government tried to do a

coup attempt and you know members of

intelligence and fbi

colluded to try to get rid of the

president

um

so in the comments somebody's saying

omg no coup attempt

now

and i have to say

that i acknowledge that people on the

left believe there was no coup attempt

but it's mind-boggling

when when you look at the the evidence

that's public and indisputed so if you

only take the evidence that's not

disputed

the coup is right there it's as obvious

as it could possibly be

now what it probably wasn't

is everybody involved meeting on a zoom

call to plot the overthrow of the

president i don't think that happened

i think everybody just knew what to do

everybody knew that anything they could

do against the president would be useful

yeah so

to me it looks uh obviously like we

observed it

we're still observing the aftermath of

it and if i were writing the history

book i would write it like that i would

say there was a coup attempt it was sort

of a

loosely organized coup attempt

but

if somebody who is a democrat writes it

they're going to say that russia tried

to interfere with the election and

there's still some suggestion that the

trump administration

talked to the russians too much and

we're not we're not clear what they did

or something like that

right so

this is an honest

question how do you write the history

if you see biden out there saying that

the president called service people

suckers and losers

which as far as we know did not happen

so what do the history books say do the

history books say he did say that

or the history books say he didn't say

that and it was claimed that he said

that how about the fine people hoax

do the history books write that as a

hoax or do they write that like like the

hoax actually happened

um

how about the hunter biden laptop story

will the history write it

that that was a real thing

that got ignored by the media or will

history just ignore it the same as the

media

these are pretty big questions

and

let me ask you this

i don't remember if i

if i talked about this before so tell me

in the comments if i already talked

about this

you've heard of the gel man amnesia

effect where if you're an expert on a

topic and you read a news report about

that topic you can tell all the factual

uh errors in it because you just happen

to be an expert on that topic

but you read any other topic in which

you are not an expert and you kind of

uncritically accept that it's probably

kind of true

it's only when you read things you know

the truth that you can see how bad the

news is

you have to assume this applies to

history as well we know the winners

write history right but the things you

think are just facts

might not be

because our history is pretty subjective

it turns out

now let me give you an example and stop

me if i if i already told you this so

wall street journal um i had an article

about

jack dorsey and they mentioned me in the

article

now there were two facts

in this little mention of me in the wall

street journal now the wall street

journal is pretty reliable publication

wouldn't you say if you were to if you

were to rank

credibility of publications the wall

street journal would be very near the

top

very of the very best in

credibility

two things that were said about me in

there one i was labeled a conservative

i'm left of bernie

so the so my label

was dead wrong

complete opposite i support president

trump but has more to do with trump's

special skills

than some alignment and philosophy

all right

the second thing they said was they

paired me

with uh deray mckesson i think

as

people who jack

interacts with

now

i've interacted with jack

several times most of them about

you know twitter itself and twitter

censorship right

and you know once on a book he

recommended but fairly

you know fairly ordinary trivial stuff

i've only been in the room with him once

in my life for about 20 minutes on a

charity related thing

and

uh

that's it

and and the wall street journal

puts me in the article with deray who is

one of the activists for black lives

matter as if we are somehow

key people in jack's lives

i would not be in the top 5 000

of key people

that are important to jack dorsey i'm

just somebody who's talked to him a few

times i like him

but that's it

now if you read that article you would

think that we're hanging out all the

time and that somehow somehow my

association with them

has some importance

as much as de reyes who had a long time

relationship with him i understand

so

the only two things about me

were very misleading

did you know that if you had read that

article would you know that those two

things were misleading

probably not probably not

but if it were about you you'd know it

so

you don't trust your history don't trust

your

media

the only people you can trust

are the people here on this

on this live stream that's it you're the

only people we can trust

by the way there's another thing that

trump does that's really good persuasion

and i laugh every time i hear it because

it's so

it's so ham-handed

and yet it completely works

he tells he tells his supporters that

they're smarter than the experts

now

i know that this works because the

secret to the dilbert cartoon strip

was when i started telling my readers

that they were smarter than their boss

everybody loves to hear that they're

smarter than the experts and they're

smarter than their boss

are they

well i suppose sometimes sometimes

you're smarter than your boss

sometimes you are smarter than the

experts

but

as a persuasion thing it's really

super good

you because people are primed to want to

believe that they're smarter than

experts so trump will say this all the

time he said well the expert said this

and then he'll look at his audience the

rally audience but you're smarter than

them

you know they say they're the elites but

you're the elites it's really good stuff

for bonding with his audience it's a

plus persuasion

all right

uh

scott sides with the maskers let me i

want to see this accusation before i

block you

it says scott sides with the massacres

to to keep his leftist

credibility

so

i'll be blocking you

uh

somehow that disappeared

um

if you apply mind reading to me that is

incorrect

such as that

do you really think

do you really think that i would back

masks

just to preserve my leftist credibility

i feel like you must be new here

do you think i care about my leftist

credibility

is that high on my list of things to

preserve

so saying good things about trump

literally every day

and somebody is on here saying i think

he wants to preserve his leftist

credibility

no

that has no bearing on any of my

decisions

what i would like to destroy

is my association with either the left

or the right

in my perfect world neither the left nor

the right would claim me but would

understand

that i can be fluid based on where the

facts

and my sense of reason

take me

so anybody who thinks that i'm pro

basket for a political reason

doesn't understand risk management

i'm pro mask as a risk management

decision meaning that

there's enough evidence that they

probably work

that's worth

the risk there's certainly a downside i

recognize the downside completely

but on balance

we unfortunately have to sort of guess

and none of us are smart enough to know

if the masks are a good idea or not

we're not

if you think you know

that mass or bad or you think you know

the mass are definitely good

you're not smart

sorry

if you say

i have a strong opinion

well you're probably reasonable even if

your strong opinion is one way or the

other it would be reasonable

to look at this and have a strong

opinion

it would be stupid

to say you know they work

or you know they don't that would just

be stupid

so let me let me be as clear as i can on

that

but risk management you could certainly

go either way on that

all right um

i'm seeing

warn for

secretary of treasury

there's some thinking that that would

scare wall street too much so maybe we

won't see that and i heard somebody

smart say that if elizabeth warren took

a cabinet job

her senate

position would be

filled by a republican governor

and so she doesn't want to leave the

senate because that would become a

republican senate seat

slaughter meter 100

and i will talk to you

tomorrow

you