t you thought the news was real? I came to this one sooner than you did because I've said this before but because I'm often the subject in the news I have a front row seat to see how inaccurate it is. Because when they're talking about me I know if it's accurate. I'll be like I didn't do that. I didn't say that. That's all inaccurate. But most of you are just observers. You're just in the audience watching people like me get ripped apart by the media and you think well it's probably true. Yeah well they wouldn't say anything that wasn't a little bit true. It's probably true. But now you all know that the news is made up, right? Basically everything you thought about the legitimacy of the media, that's all gone, isn't it? I don't think we think there's any legitimacy to the media at this point.

Here's another one. This is also really new. This is a fresh one. Long-term prediction models don't work. This might be my favorite because I've spent ten years of my life arguing that whether or not climate change is a big problem or not a big problem, the prediction models are not science. They're whatever assumptions you put in there. They're not science. And I think that this week the entire world is ready to say, both Democrats and Republicans, I think the entire world is looking at this and saying wait a minute, where have we seen this before? All the experts were on the same side. They had a complicated prediction model which they used to convince the politicians and the public of something very expensive. But then those models seem to be not as accurate as we had hoped. What's that remind you of?

Well I think that one of the big changes that's going to come out of this is that it's almost impossible to argue for climate change anymore. Because in order to make the argument you're going to say we got to do some climate change and here's my argument. Here's my long-term prediction model for eighty years. And people are just going to say put that down. Put it down. Put it down. And they'll say no, I'm going to model that. You see my graph? Put it down. We're not going to listen to your long-term models anymore.

Now even if Fauci said that he didn't use the models to decide to close down or to agree to close down the travel from China, they were to agree to close down the economy rather. He said that the striking things were the experience that they observed in China and Italy. So even if Fauci said they don't use the models, in fact he said no I just looked at what happened in other places and said that's a problem. Now I think climate change is similar to that. I wouldn't put too much credibility in the models but it might be true that the experts can just look at the data and say hey it's getting kind of warm and we think we know why. Maybe we should be worried about that. But the model part, the models are not going to be accurate.

All right, here's another thing I learned. Did you know that money can just be printed? Did you know that? Now on some level you knew that, right? You knew that we have printing presses and most of you are educated people watching this so you knew that the United States could always just print more dollar bills. Just print more money, put it in circulation. So you knew that we could do that. But didn't you think it was a bad idea? Didn't you think that you could do it physically, you could print more money, but you don't want to do that because it would create inflation? The simple reason for that is if there's more money in the system then people are willing to pay more for their goods and services and then the people who sell them say hey I've got a lot of demand. I think I'll raise my prices. So if you flood the system with too much cash you can cause inflation. So there's no point doing it. So there's no way you can just create money out of nothing. Except I think we just did it, didn't we?

Because in an environment in which inflation is basically impossible, with the exception of the hoarded goods or there's some price gouging for normal goods, nobody's going to be able to raise a price. So the United States just printed, I don't know, do we literally print it or have it as a digital? I'm not sure exactly how that works. It's probably a digital process. But we created, I know, trillions of dollars. And the only downside of creating trillions of dollars was that it might cause inflation which under this special condition can't. It can't, right? Nobody can raise the prices. Not enough demand for a while anyway.

So I feel like I'm missing something obvious because I actually have some background in this stuff and I'm pretty confused. But did we find a trillion dollars of free money? Can somebody work that through me? Because I think there are greater implications than the simple ones that I'm explaining. So there must be some downside that's a little more than I think. But you know I always say that President Trump is good at finding free money on the table and picking it up like hey free money. Yeah, anybody want this? And when I heard that we were going to fund this stimulus, if you want to call it that, not by borrowing but rather by printing money, and then I realized that inflation isn't going to go up even though we print the money, I think Trump found two or three trillion dollars laying on the table. Am I wrong? I have to be wrong, right?

Is Joshua Gans, if you're watching this, an actual real economist, what am I doing wrong? I mean did we just create three trillion dollars and nothing because we had this weird opportunity where there was no chance of inflation? Did that just happen? I mean I'm actually curious. I don't know but it might have. If you had to bet on this you should bet that I'm wrong about this by the way. You should bet that there's some big variable that I'm not thinking about that would explain it all. But otherwise we just created three trillion dollars out of nothing. How does that change your view of reality? It's messing with mine. I'll tell you my view of reality has taken a beating if we just created three trillion dollars out of nothing.

Now how hard is it going to be to argue against health care for all and paying off student loans when we just created three trillion dollars out of air? How are you going to argue against Bernie's big-ticket stuff as Biden is carrying it forward? How are you going to argue against it because you don't have enough money if you just printed three trillion dollars? I see somebody saying yes you were wrong. Well normally I block people for just saying you're wrong without giving a reason but I'll give you a special dispensation today because I also think I'm wrong. I just don't know why. All right so maybe somebody can fix that for me.

So just to make things fun the anti-Trump press has designated an official race baiter. So it looks like they, I don't know if they pick teams or how they do this, but somebody works for PBS named Yamiche Alcindor apparently gets to sit in the White House press corps and try to start race wars. So she asks all the dumbass questions that make the headlines because you shouldn't ask these questions and it's the wrong place and it's just dialed. So she was askin