right? He did not say this is a skill I have but you don't have it. Now if he had, then we'd have something to quibble with. But if you say none of us have that, you know, except very rarely somebody in the field, then I'm on board with that completely. Yeah, no, nobody has that skill. And even the most qualified people in the field often don't have it. We see this all the time. Yeah. So does that sound like I might have influenced that opinion? I'm just asking because, you know, I've been saying exactly this for like three years. I've said it out loud a bunch of times. Yeah, it's common sense. So that would be the argument that I did not influence it. But the wording of it feels a little Scottish, so to speak.

All right. I'm going to try to introduce a new phrase to politics. I'm going to call them political gooners. Have you ever heard that phrase? A gooner. It comes from another context. All right. I want to see if anybody knows what it is before I explain it. Those of you who know what it is, you're revealing too much about yourselves. All right. Let me tell you. In the naughty world of adult entertainment, when usually a man is so interested in his own self-pleasure that he takes on sort of a zombie appearance, I would give you an impression but it would be the biggest meme that you ever saw, so I can't give you an impression. But imagine a zombie face where one of the hands is busy and you know what a gooner is like. Oh, you know, that sort of thing.

So but I feel like there's a political gooner class. And that's the people who believe hoaxes. They're obviously not true before you research them. Now I agree with Sam Harris. Nobody's good at research even if they think they are. They're not. But sometimes you don't need to research things to know it's true. Am I right? Let me give you an example. If you heard a story on social media that said that Joe Biden was an actual cannibal and we're just finding out and that he eats children every night for dinner, like actual living children, kills them and eats them, would you need to research that? That's a serious question. Would you need to research that? No, no. You don't need to research that. Who would believe that? Only a political gooner. Somebody who is so busy masturbating to their own team that they could no longer think in any coherent way, right?

Now let me give you an example that's almost like that. The gooners actually believe, they believe that the president of the United States wanted premeditatedly and with full intention got in front of the country and said that neo-Nazis are fine people. Did you have to research that? Did you have to go and really look at the transcript? I mean, I did, but not because I needed to know. It's because I was trying to unprogram the gooners. But the gooners can't hear it because, you know, their hand is going furiously and the brain is just turned off. My team, my team. Okay, I'm going to give you the meme. I'm sorry, I have to give you the meme. It goes like this. Oh, my team, my team, my team, my team. Okay, there's your meme. Have fun with it. Have fun with it. I release it to the universe.

All right. So how about if you heard that a president suggested drinking bleach as a solution to COVID? Did you need to research that? No, you didn't. You did not need to research that. You should not have had to research that. That was clearly and obviously something that didn't happen. And if you say, oh, but Scott, maybe it wasn't bleach but it was a liquid disinfectant. No, no. You don't have to research whether he thought Listerine was okay. No, you don't. You don't have to research that. The only people who would be confused by that would be those people. You couldn't possibly see this on the surface and believe that you have to look into it. You don't. You don't have to look into it. All right. Political gooners.

I also love the fact that the people who believe all the Trump hoaxes, they start with the assumption that they're smarter than Trump. And yet they fall for every hoax. It's a weird assumption. If you start with the assumption you're smarter than him, then anything he says that isn't what you say, you say, oh, well, it must be racist or who thinks you should drink bleach or something. No, no. But if you start with the assumption that he's an intelligent person who might in some cases know more than you do, we've seen examples of that. If you start with that assumption, the hoax just disappears. You have to assume that Trump has an IQ of 70 and somehow became president of the United States anyway. And apparently that's a real belief. I've actually talked to intelligent, successful people who believe that Trump has such a low IQ that he only became president by accident, just a weird conflation of events. That's a real opinion. How do you have that opinion? There's only one way. You're a political gooner for your team.

All right. This is funny. Speaking of doing your own research, you're all aware that Brett Stephens from The New York Times did a big article in which he talked about the new study of studies that said that masks don't work. You all saw that, right? So it was a big study of other studies and a paper about other studies. Wasn't exactly a meta study, but it was a sort of a review of all the science. And the conclusion was masks don't work. Well, Eichenwald, also at least an ex-New York Times writer, says in his tweet, the New York Times has published an absolutely reckless and wrong New York Times opinion piece by Brett Stephens about a scientific paper he clearly did not read. He allows one of the authors to state in the article, quote, masks don't work for COVID-19. The paper says no such thing. In fact, you know, so he goes on to say that the paper is pure garbage and etc.

Now do you believe that the New York Times article from Stephens that looked at all the science about masks and found no evidence that they help, do you think, do you find that reliable because you did your own research? Do you know that a lot of the studies were done before COVID? Did you know that they were pre-COVID? It wasn't even tested on COVID. Did you know a lot of the studies were about whether you could contract it versus whether you're going to breathe it out? Yeah, yeah. We are private. Basically the research was garbage. But the research that says masks don't work is garbage, but so is the research that says they work. So do your own research. You can find anything you want. You can find that they work, which I've done, by the way. I've done my own research and I found huge, very reliable evidence that masks work. I've also done my research and found that they don't. You can find both. You can totally find both.

How can I tell the difference? The only thing I would say for sure is that science has not demonstrated that they work with any data that seems useful. If science at this point, especially at this point, if they can't prove they work, well then the qu