Episode 1061 Scott Adams: Fake News, Fake Science, Fake Everything
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
153.94447
Summary
In this episode of the Bitcoin and Cryptography podcast, Anton Nilsen talks about the latest fake news story about a fox who is delivering fake news, and why you should be careful what you say in any digital form. Recorded in Baltimore, MD!
Transcript
00:00:00.000
oh hey everybody good to see you come on in it has come to my attention that some people who watch
00:00:17.580
these live streams later on playback fast forward through the simultaneous sip can you believe it
00:00:25.140
oh well just in case you want permission the introduction and the simultaneous sip is for
00:00:34.000
the benefit of the live viewers who want to stream in and catch the beginning those of you watching
00:00:39.860
it on replay fast forward and i also recommend listening listening to me at 1.5 times speed i
00:00:49.220
hear that's the i hear that's the sweet spot but for those of you who are here live the special
00:00:55.060
people the good people the the punctual people the people who like to get it fresh to enjoy this
00:01:01.700
experience in the maximum way you know what you need it's called the simultaneous sip and it goes
00:01:06.340
like this you need a cup or mug or a glass a tank or chalice or stein a canteen jug or flask a vessel
00:01:11.460
of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled
00:01:21.860
pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better including
00:01:29.620
protests pandemics economics you name it it's all good go
00:01:33.860
well here's my favorite story of the day apparently the simulation is winking at us again
00:01:46.980
because there's a photo and a story about a fox an actual animal a fox who keeps stealing somebody's
00:01:55.620
washington post off of their porch or lawn i guess and so we have a literal story of fox delivering fake
00:02:06.500
news i i don't know what are the odds that these are just coincidences but it looks like the author
00:02:14.660
of the simulation is trying to send us a message do you get this one do you get it i'm sending a fox
00:02:23.140
to grab the washington post you get it right does everybody get this well it just feels like the
00:02:32.340
author of the simulation is trying to send us a message do you remember the story about the twitter
00:02:38.020
hackers who uh somehow they got into twitter systems and took over some accounts and tweeted some scams
00:02:46.260
about bitcoin well there are some conspiracy theorists uh and i'm not so sure that i'm not one of them
00:02:55.620
who think that maybe the whole bitcoin thing was a diversion and that the real purpose of the hack
00:03:04.740
wasn't really the bitcoin part although maybe they made some money too but rather they were trying to
00:03:10.500
cover up some deeper mischief which we may not yet know because once somebody has access to uh twitter's
00:03:20.980
innards what else can they do what other things can they discover seems like it would be uh quite a
00:03:29.620
playground there uh one possibility is that they have they had access to the direct messages of lots of
00:03:36.660
famous people and maybe those famous people will get blackmailed i don't know but uh let me suggest
00:03:43.860
that if you are leaving messages in a private place uh there's no such thing so be careful what you say
00:03:53.860
in any digital form because you're now at a place where you should assume you should assume
00:04:00.020
that somebody's looking at them um speaking of mary trump have you seen the latest uh
00:04:10.100
i guess trump's niece and i just i hate that we even have to talk about this because it's yet another
00:04:17.620
you know unverified claims from yet another book so so mary trump the niece her latest bombshell claim
00:04:26.340
which she was sort of badgered into saying on uh what's her name show on msnbc
00:04:35.140
and what mary trump said was that the i guess the trump family she didn't give a time frame but that
00:04:43.300
they may have used the n-word and that trump himself at some time in the distant past had also used it
00:04:50.820
now you know what's missing do you know what's missing from that story any kind of context
00:04:59.940
because let me make a statement in case this comes as a surprise to people
00:05:06.820
did did you know and i know this might come as a shock to some of you did you know that when people
00:05:12.500
speak privately quite often they will say all of the things you're not supposed to say in public
00:05:19.220
no not just some of them but all of them unless you have different friends than i do have have not
00:05:29.300
the people that you know personally at one time or another maybe not all in the same day
00:05:35.860
but have not your personal conversations used every bad word that could be used
00:05:41.380
surfaced every bad idea that could be surfaced and basically talked of every manner of bad thing
00:05:51.300
often in ways that if somebody heard you in public you would be cancelled
00:05:56.980
now in the old days you could say private things and maybe they would stay private because there's no
00:06:02.580
you know nobody's writing a book about you there's no digital record
00:06:06.740
and i would argue that people have two distinct lives one is the things they say privately
00:06:15.140
and the other is the things that they would be willing for the general public to hear
00:06:20.100
and i've suggested that if we were to have a digital bill of rights
00:06:24.820
that one of the rules we should at least consider is this that you should at least consider that if
00:06:31.860
somebody takes a private conversation and moves it into a public sphere that the person who moved it
00:06:39.460
into the other context becomes the author of it now this is a hard one right because you don't want
00:06:48.100
the person who's just reporting what happened to to become the author but i would suggest this if
00:06:54.420
somebody says something in public and then it's reported in public that's fair
00:06:59.460
right that's completely fair said in public reported in public but if somebody said something in
00:07:06.260
private it is universally true that we speak differently in private to people we trust often
00:07:13.460
saying things that are the worst possible thing you can say because that's what makes it funny
00:07:19.460
that's what makes it funny that you're not supposed to say it so people will say things in public
00:07:24.740
that are outrageously inappropriate because they can't they like their freedom it's not hurting
00:07:31.620
anybody nobody's going to hear it it may not be a reflection of their soul they just like to use
00:07:38.820
inappropriate words in private because it's more fun is there anybody who doesn't use inappropriate
00:07:45.380
words or talk about inappropriate things or at least things you wouldn't want other people to know
00:07:50.100
in public in private i doubt it it's pretty universal so i would say and of course this rule does not exist
00:07:59.700
but if it did i would say that mary trump is the only person responsible for making us think of the n-word
00:08:07.700
more than we need to um and one of the things that i've said this before but this bears repeating
00:08:16.420
you know that a third of the country doesn't have a sense of humor like actually literally doesn't
00:08:23.620
have a sense of humor in the same way that maybe about the same amount of the country doesn't have
00:08:29.220
musical talent i would be in that latter category so it's not an insult just people have different
00:08:36.500
skills or distributed all over the place but there are lots of people who literally don't have a sense
00:08:41.700
of humor and one of the things that they might not appreciate from people who do have a sense of
00:08:47.460
humor is uh what they don't appreciate is that sometimes the thing that is funny is the inappropriateness
00:08:56.660
of it so what you're laughing at is not at the subject of the joke let's say it mocks some group or
00:09:04.020
person or whatever if you laugh privately with an emphasis on the privately somebody privately tells
00:09:11.860
you a deeply inappropriate joke and you laugh you're not laughing at the target of the joke
00:09:18.340
if you have actual if you're unless you're a sociopath or you hate that person or something
00:09:23.300
but in general you're laughing at the fact that anybody would say that out loud to me that's hilarious
00:09:29.860
when anybody does something completely inappropriate i always laugh it's automatic
00:09:38.260
but here's the deeper question oh and i've also suggested that a digital
00:09:45.540
a digital bill of rights would include that if you did something more than 20 years ago it just
00:09:51.860
doesn't count it just doesn't count taking things from the past moving them to the present as if
00:09:58.740
as if our current sensibilities you know existed at the same time as the statement
00:10:04.820
it was just illegitimate to me so we should just ignore anything from 20 years ago but here's a more
00:10:11.060
interesting question has mary trump ever met the president there's that this is actually the hilarious
00:10:18.500
part apparently there's some question about whether they've even ever been in the same room
00:10:23.620
so we haven't seen a picture of them in the same room and uh that's funny now what's funnier is
00:10:32.420
uh the the physicality of the interview and i'm gonna have to go there you know you know they say
00:10:38.900
don't go there well i'm gonna go there i'm gonna go there now when you watch mary trump give the interview
00:10:46.180
uh she's not what you'd call a sympathetic character meaning that when you look at her she doesn't look
00:10:55.620
um emotionally stable which is different from saying that she is emotionally unstable the only thing
00:11:03.620
i know i'm not a psychiatrist right so i'm not medically diagnosing her but i have as a viewer i have
00:11:10.660
an impression so i'll just tell you my viewer impression because in the world of politics the
00:11:16.340
viewer impression matters it's not a medical diagnosis i wouldn't do that uh and what she looks
00:11:24.100
like is somebody who has severe mental problems you know emotional mental problems now i'm not saying
00:11:29.860
she does have them i'm saying she looks exactly like somebody who has severe emotional mental problems
00:11:37.380
so that i think works a little bit against her her credibility but here's here's the funniest thing
00:11:44.900
that works against her credibility are you ready for this and if you haven't thought of this yet
00:11:51.060
you're gonna laugh when i tell it to you now let me know if you've thought of this but here's the thought
00:11:58.340
when you're assessing her credibility consider that she looks like trump with a wig
00:12:04.740
she looks like a trump so she has the the face that looks like she looks like president trump
00:12:12.900
you know there's something about it that reminds you of him there's a familial uh you know something
00:12:19.780
recognizable and so you immediately think i feel like i'm listening to female trump talking about
00:12:27.060
the other trump and it's this weird disconcerting feeling that i think works against her credibility
00:12:35.060
for the very part of the segment that they would like to believe it so i think that part's just
00:12:41.620
funny i don't know if that really has any effect um and then as mike cernovich pointed out in a tweet
00:12:48.180
and i would agree that if you were going to say uh if you were just objectively looking at her as a
00:12:54.980
stranger and you didn't know anything about who she was what she was talking about and the only thing
00:13:00.180
you were doing is you turned off the sound and you watched her body language as she answered the
00:13:05.860
question would it look like she was telling the truth or would it look like she was concocting a lie
00:13:14.500
and i would agree with uh mike cernovich's view on that again we're not lie detectors we can't see inside
00:13:22.260
her brain but if i were to judge her from her mannerisms it looks exactly like somebody who's
00:13:28.180
making something up i don't know if she is making something up can't read her mind again it looks
00:13:36.180
exactly like somebody who's not credible so i'm fascinated to see if this story has any legs at all
00:13:43.220
you would think it would play into the whole uh you know the fake news view that the president's
00:13:49.060
a giant racist but i just don't know how much attention this story is going to get
00:13:54.100
because mary trump is so darn non-credible and it was a long time ago and i think everybody
00:14:01.300
probably something tells me that you know even the the black people watching this are saying to
00:14:07.300
themselves oh obviously everybody in the 60s and 70s in private conversations including all black
00:14:17.940
people including all every other kind of person including all people have said things that you
00:14:24.420
wish your your niece wouldn't tell people you said now that doesn't mean he said any of those things
00:14:29.300
uh and there's certainly evidence to suggest that he didn't and it's not credible but those are all
00:14:38.900
the factors i would take into consideration here's a question for you if uh you know i i tweeted the
00:14:49.380
other day that the closer society gets to being able to program a simulation of its own in other
00:14:56.740
words a software world where the characters in the world believe that they're conscious and real
00:15:02.500
people the closer you get to being able to do that the closer you get to understanding that that's what
00:15:09.300
you are now of course i talk about the simulation because it's fun but i will give you this following
00:15:16.500
thought to chew on and it goes like this why would anybody who could create a simulation create one
00:15:24.420
what would be the purpose of creating a software simulation of a world full of people who thought
00:15:31.060
they were real but were not why would you do it because the whole theory of the simulation is that
00:15:38.820
once you could do it you would do it and maybe you would do it lots of times well i would suggest
00:15:45.860
that the creators of the simulation might do it for the same reason that we will do it in other words
00:15:51.380
the closer we get to being able to do it the more we will realize oh yeah there is a reason to do it
00:15:58.180
and that reason is a b testing their own choices in other words if you have let's say a problem you're
00:16:06.740
working through in your life and you're wondering how to deal with it you could create a simulation of
00:16:12.500
yourself in an artificial world testing a lot of different things seeing how it turns out
00:16:20.500
now you'd have to have a really good simulation to think that the things that were tested in the
00:16:25.380
simulation would then translate into your so-called real world but if you had enough simulations and
00:16:32.580
you ran the simulation enough times you might get closer to saying okay every time i do something like
00:16:38.900
this i get a better result than when i do something like this so i would suggest to you to keep this in mind
00:16:46.420
that if we game got to the point where we could create in our civilization a simulation that would
00:16:53.220
test what would happen if we personally act in different ways we'd do it so just think about it we'd
00:17:02.740
probably do it somebody says it would be cruel i wonder if it would be would it be cruel to create
00:17:10.500
software that felt pain what do you think that's a really interesting uh uh ethical and moral question
00:17:19.860
isn't it would it be ethical to create software that thought it was a real creature with real feelings and
00:17:26.980
felt pain maybe not i don't know anyway i put that out there and the other part of that is have you
00:17:35.540
noticed that uh in your life and maybe people you know people have the same kind of problem over and
00:17:41.940
over again have you noticed that that that in your life your entire life even though your situation
00:17:48.340
your relationships where you live the job all of these things are changing but have you noticed that
00:17:54.420
you will have just the same sort of problem over and over and over again whereas all the people
00:18:01.220
around you will have that problem zero times and you say to yourself how could i always have the same
00:18:07.700
problem where other people don't have this problem but yet other people also have a theme problem meaning
00:18:15.540
they have the same sort of problem over and over again but i never have that one what's up with that
00:18:20.100
and that again would suggest that we are simulations testing things for our creators meaning that the
00:18:28.580
challenges that i get seem to be very similar in nature i won't go into it but the similarity i've
00:18:35.220
noticed forever it was like really the moment i solved that problem a new thing jumped up to give
00:18:40.580
me the same problem back in a different way how could that be and uh makes me think that that that
00:18:46.980
that's how you know which problem you were simulated to work through because you keep beating on the
00:18:52.500
same problem in different ways all right um i've suggested uh a lot of people have also that the the
00:19:00.020
best slogan for uh trump's campaign would be jobs not mobs now that that was a slogan that came up in the
00:19:08.500
last campaign but i think it's more appropriate now because we're seeing more mobs
00:19:13.460
companies so that contrast between jobs and mobs is now so big that uh it's just the perfect
00:19:21.540
campaign slogan so i'd be interested to see if the campaign you know tries tries that out what if
00:19:28.580
if if they like it the what you should expect is to see somebody not the president trying it out first
00:19:35.140
just to see how it does that would be a normal way to do it although trump uh has you has tweeted it before
00:19:42.340
so in that case you could assume maybe it's already tested um now i tweeted this i'm no political expert
00:19:51.940
and i don't pretend to be an expert on politics but it seems to me that the democrat strategy
00:19:59.220
uh of effectively legalizing violent crime right before a national election is not the best strategy
00:20:07.380
because what it looks like to me and it looks exactly like this to me is that democrats are
00:20:16.340
removing the controls on crime going into a major election because that's really the whole story
00:20:24.020
about new york city right they the uh there's no uh bail so you commit a crime you can just be released
00:20:32.100
commit some more crimes get picked up get released you know if you have a court date i guess you can just
00:20:37.940
leave uh i don't know what happens um so couldn't you do that forever is there any limit to how many times
00:20:47.460
you can just say well thanks for arresting me i'll see you later and just walk away and i don't know the
00:20:52.100
details but it sounds like you could so i can't see any world in which the democrats even have a chance
00:20:58.820
in november in terms of the presidency because if you're running on a platform of increasing crime
00:21:06.580
and the news is showing non-stop images of increased crime
00:21:12.980
i just don't know how that gets you elected i i just don't see how that could possibly work
00:21:19.700
i've heard people say that the president is basically has no chance of re-election because
00:21:24.260
the polls are so uh slanted but how many people have you heard who have changed their mind from trump
00:21:34.260
to biden in your life are there a lot of people doing that because i i think i have encountered zero
00:21:41.780
people that i personally know although i don't know if they'd mention it to me but it doesn't feel
00:21:48.340
it doesn't feel like uh you know what i'm observing makes sense all right new topic uh kareem abdul jabbar
00:21:58.500
if you're young you don't know he was one of the great basketball players of all time and he's kind
00:22:04.100
of politically active and he he's written a few uh op-eds one of them was about systemic racism i think i may
00:22:11.700
have uh criticized him for that uh i forget what but there was something i i quibbled with but he wrote
00:22:20.180
another uh op-ed just recently and this one really got my attention and so i want to give a shout out
00:22:29.460
and a compliment to kareem abdul jabbar because he wrote uh if if you didn't know he's uh he's black which
00:22:39.060
is important to this story and he wrote an op-ed in which uh he called out hollywood and the sports
00:22:46.180
world for their anti-semitic stuff that hasn't been really pushed back on enough according to kareem
00:22:54.980
now i would consider this one of the great acts of leadership that we've seen lately all right so keep
00:23:04.260
in mind i'm not i'm not a big kareem abdul jabbar fan in fact i thought he ruined basketball for years
00:23:11.860
because he was so good and so tall that watching him play other teams just didn't seem fun
00:23:18.180
because it just didn't seem like you could beat a guy that big and that good
00:23:22.100
so uh to me he sort of ruined basketball for a while so it's not like i'm a fan uh yeah he's one
00:23:29.220
of the great players of all time that's just a fact but he wasn't fun to watch in my opinion
00:23:34.740
and i've disagreed with him on some political stuff but i'm going to give him a plus plus plus
00:23:40.340
on leadership for taking what might have been a fairly unpopular stand i don't know
00:23:46.660
i'm not sure if he got any blowback for it but he came out strongly um against anti-semitism
00:23:53.460
in the middle of uh you know the black lives matter movement he he said hey let's i don't
00:24:01.140
want to say that he said all lives matter because he didn't but in effect kareem abdul jabbar was
00:24:09.300
saying let's not over focus on this one problem this anti-semitism thing is pretty big if you're
00:24:15.700
ignoring this you're not really credible that that's my paraphrasing of it and i appreciated
00:24:22.340
that i appreciated the fact that he stuck up for another group and i think the more of that you see
00:24:29.300
the healthier the country so thank you to kareem all right um people keep asking me why trump is not
00:24:37.220
uh promoting the wearing of masks why is trump not saying and this would be this is not my opinion
00:24:46.100
this is people talking to me they say you know these masks save lives we'll talk about the
00:24:52.900
controversy about whether they do or do not but people say to me they they save lives and it's obvious
00:24:59.460
say some people um why doesn't trump say you wear masks doesn't have to say that you have to doesn't
00:25:06.740
have to make it mandatory but if he just promoted it more people would say all right you know we like
00:25:13.380
trump he's saying wear masks we'll wear masks so why doesn't he do that if you know that people would
00:25:20.580
pick up on it i think that's safe to say if he promoted it more people would wear masks uh on the
00:25:26.660
republican side i think that's fair uh so why doesn't he do it is it a mistake of leadership
00:25:34.500
that he is not pushing masks here's my take on that because i had to think about it for a while
00:25:42.660
imagine if he did let's say he pushed masks what would happen if the president promoted the use of
00:25:50.420
masks it would be like hydroxychloroquine if the president said wear a mask cnn and msnbc would be running
00:26:00.500
non-stop pieces about how they don't work and it's making everything worse now if you don't think
00:26:07.700
that's true you have not been paying attention if you say to yourself scott scott scott the fake news
00:26:15.220
may be fake news but they're not going to run you know stories that would destroy the country with bad
00:26:22.020
medical advice just because the president had the opposite opinion they're not going to go opposite just
00:26:28.500
because he said it yeah they would that's exactly what they would do there's no chance if if the
00:26:35.700
president was promoting masks and if it was very persuasive let's say republicans just all masked up
00:26:43.220
from day one you wouldn't see democrats wearing masks they would say it was fake and he's anti-science and
00:26:50.580
they shouldn't wear a mask but here's the other part that i haven't seen a single person say
00:26:55.620
i have not seen a single person say this and it's the most important thing trump has been painted by
00:27:04.340
the opposition and the fake news as an authoritarian as a dictator if trump is being painted as an
00:27:14.020
authoritarian authoritarian and a dictator how would he be treated if he told everybody they had to wear
00:27:20.740
masks from the federal level he would be treated as an authoritarian dictator and even the republicans
00:27:31.460
would think so right so it would be the first time that the democrats would ever win a point
00:27:38.260
because mostly the two sides you know they send messages but they don't get through but one of the
00:27:43.460
messages the democrats have been trying to send is hey you republicans can't you see he's an authoritarian
00:27:50.820
dictator why can't you see it why is our message not penetrating your bubble get out of your fox news bubble
00:27:57.780
he's a dictator he's an authoritarian if trump told people to wear masks from the federal level that message
00:28:06.420
would completely penetrate the right and the right would say you know actually you got a point there
00:28:13.620
i think you got a point we don't want to hear this from the president now if the president does not
00:28:19.460
do it what happens well the states do it and and the cities do it now they don't all make the same decision
00:28:28.180
but what do you feel about the credibility of the decisions if they're made at the local level versus
00:28:35.700
the federal level it feels different doesn't it doesn't that feel different if your city has decided that you
00:28:44.020
should wear masks even if you don't like it doesn't that feel more legitimate than the president this is not
00:28:53.860
a president decision the fact that the president has stepped back from a little bit i wish he would
00:28:59.220
say it directly by the way the the best thing that the president could do is say you know i'm not your
00:29:04.180
dictator let your local let your local community work it out with you you see what the professionals
00:29:10.900
say you see that i wear a mask when i visit walter reed i'm not going to be the dictator work it out
00:29:17.780
locally but i hope you follow the medical advice that would be a good message i don't think
00:29:23.300
that he has done that uh well but when you're saying he's not doing it right you got to ask
00:29:30.020
yourself what would it look like if he did if he did it right according to the people who say masks
00:29:37.540
work he would have he would have made the democrats hate masks they would have questioned it and they
00:29:43.300
would have called him an authoritarian dictator and it just wouldn't have worked so it's sort of a trap
00:29:49.300
so um here's the other thing how do we judge all of the conflicting science about masks and whether
00:30:04.660
they work so i asked on twitter can somebody send me a good thread that that talks about them and here's
00:30:11.540
what i find uh and people will send me to an article that looks quite scholarly there's a phd or medical
00:30:19.140
doctor involved it'll be an article that says here's all the proof that masks do not work every every
00:30:26.580
study says they don't work and you say to yourself wow well that's pretty convincing it's a looks like some
00:30:33.380
publication that's respectable the person who wrote it looks respectable shows all of his sources
00:30:40.100
every one of them show that face masks don't work so that's it right good source credible person
00:30:48.340
every single every single cited study same direction masks don't work so we're done right except
00:30:58.500
you can go six inches down your twitter feed and find a credible person in a credible publication
00:31:12.900
that and so here's my greater point the old the people you should not believe in any conversation
00:31:20.820
are the ones who are sure those are the ones you should not believe in any conversation at least if
00:31:27.620
there's complexity in science involved you and i don't know how to sort it through the science
00:31:33.140
science you do not know how to read those various studies and and say oh you know this is the good
00:31:40.180
one this is the bad one i trust this one i don't trust this we don't have those skills we do not have
00:31:45.780
those skills we only have experts telling us what they've seen because maybe they do have those skills
00:31:54.180
but here's the problem which expert are you going to listen to because they don't agree
00:31:59.860
if the experts don't agree how can you tell which is the good expert because it just takes your problem
00:32:07.300
of not being able to look at the science and come up with a good opinion all it does is transfer it to
00:32:14.580
well i can't also figure out which experts are credible it's all just stuff that you don't have
00:32:20.740
any ability to determine but you think you do the think you do part is the part that makes you stupid
00:32:29.540
if you can look at all these studies and say well looks like there's some people and some studies
00:32:34.660
that go the other way if your opinion is anything but i guess it's unclear that's the only opinion i
00:32:45.300
think you could have on it but you still have to make a decision right you don't get to say well it's
00:32:51.300
unclear so i'll just avoid this situation you're either going to wear a mask or not wear a mask
00:32:57.300
so you've got to pick so what do you do if you can't evaluate the science and you don't know who
00:33:03.460
which experts are credible you are left with some kind of a low information risk management decision
00:33:12.340
here's how i've made mine here are the mistakes that people make when they're looking yeah i'll work
00:33:20.020
into it here are the mistakes that the lay people are making when looking at the studies and even the
00:33:25.780
the question the first one is that they misunderstand the purpose of the mask the the masks for the
00:33:33.780
public are not about protecting the wearer it's about protecting other people all right so that's the
00:33:41.620
first thing so you see a lot of people who are very certain about things and they'll say nope mass will
00:33:47.540
not will not um protect you from getting the virus but that's not really the question so those people
00:33:55.460
don't understand the question because they're analyzing the wrong thing the other thing is some
00:34:00.900
people say the total quantity of air that comes out from around the masks is still the same because if you
00:34:09.300
exhale it's going somewhere so if it doesn't go straight out it's going out the side of the masks it
00:34:15.460
might even be going out in little jets because you're forcing the same amount of stuff out of
00:34:20.100
smaller openings and so some people say well it's the same amount of air that's going in it's all the
00:34:26.900
same this too is bad analysis because the point is not to reduce the quantity of air in the room nobody
00:34:36.500
said that's the point the point is to keep it local the point is that your exhalations are more likely to
00:34:44.260
stay stay local even if it's coming out of the edges to me that sounds reasonable and a lot of
00:34:51.620
experts say that it's reasonable too it is also not about the masks blocking viruses because people
00:35:00.500
will point you to a lot of science that says you know at the microscopic level that the holes of the
00:35:06.180
mask are this big and the particles the viruses are this big and even the smaller water drops are this
00:35:12.740
big and they fit through they fit through so if they fit through the mask the masks do nothing right
00:35:23.060
wrong because the air is what is mostly carrying the virus some of it you could imagine would get
00:35:30.420
stripped off some of it would be on smaller droplets etc but there really is no situation i can imagine
00:35:38.020
in which if you can't blow on a candle that's you know a couple feet away from you but you could
00:35:45.620
if you had the mask off it's doing something it's blocking some of the moisture that's carried in the
00:35:53.380
air and much of that moisture must have a virus attached you know the the worst argument i heard somebody
00:36:00.260
emailed me and said no what happened scott is that it's carried on the water uh droplets until it
00:36:06.980
reaches your mask and then the water is stripped off and then the free viruses go forward into the
00:36:13.380
universe now unburdened by the water droplets i feel like that's not what's happening again we're not
00:36:22.020
experts so we don't know but if virus travels on water droplets and water droplets are in any way
00:36:29.940
impeded or slowed down or kept more local i don't know any situation in which that isn't going to be
00:36:36.500
good in terms of transmission and then there's the question about um there's the question about uh
00:36:43.940
touching your face and a lot of people said if it if it makes you adjust your mask a lot
00:36:51.540
well that's just as bad as having no mask and it might be worse because your face your hand's
00:36:56.500
always going to be up around your face but i don't know about you but if i have a face mask on i do touch
00:37:03.540
my face a lot but i'm sort of touching my cheek with my finger you know i'm doing this and you know
00:37:10.260
maybe my chin once if i'm doing this isn't that like really different than touching the moist part
00:37:16.340
of your mouth because i would think it's sort of your your mouth and your nose and your eyes you know
00:37:22.900
your your moist parts that are the problem so if you cover this big moist mouth and you do touch your
00:37:30.660
cheek a little bit with your finger is that just as dangerous as all the times you touch your mouth
00:37:37.060
because people do touch their mouth a lot when they're not wearing a mask if you've watched
00:37:42.580
so anyway if you're totally certain about masks maybe you shouldn't be but you have to make a
00:37:47.540
decision anyway and i'm going to go with the uh the piss your pants model the piss your pants model
00:37:53.860
looks like this if you're standing next to somebody and they take a piss in their pants do you get as wet
00:38:02.740
as if they were not wearing pants and they were aiming at you now it's a bad analogy because the
00:38:09.620
virus there's no virus in the urine in that bad analogy but it's sort of how i'm thinking about
00:38:16.660
it it must be stopping some of the virus all right um today uh cnn did report on the number of
00:38:26.180
coronavirus deaths now i've been mocking them because they've been talking about the number
00:38:31.460
of infections but they leave out of that same story the number of deaths which is clearly the
00:38:37.460
more important part both important but deaths will always be more important but today they actually
00:38:43.140
reported it and and prominently why do you suppose they did that because it was a record all right
00:38:51.140
so as soon as the deaths were bad news it became part of the article when deaths were good news
00:38:59.060
meaning that the number of deaths were low compared to the number of people infected that actually looked
00:39:04.820
kind of like good news because it made it look like no matter whether you get infected or not we've
00:39:09.860
got something going on don't know what maybe the way we treat it maybe hydroxychloroquine who knows
00:39:15.940
maybe it's vitamin d i don't know but it looked like death was good news while infections were bad
00:39:23.460
news death rate falling being the good news not the deaths and as soon as the death count became bad
00:39:30.180
news because it's a record that's obviously bad news it became a headline and it's just so disgusting
00:39:37.860
138 138 000 people dead so far from coronavirus allegedly some princeton professors uh very cleverly
00:39:48.740
wrote an article in which they said maybe we should change uh july and august change the months because
00:39:56.500
july and august are named after julius augustus caesar and if julius caesar was a slave owner which he was
00:40:06.020
don't you have to change the name of those two months now it was a little bit of a more of a
00:40:11.060
challenging thought they weren't actually in favor of changing them and then they went on to say that
00:40:16.580
you'd really have to change the name of the democratic party because the democratic party up to the 1960s
00:40:23.300
when i was alive you know my actual lifetime uh was was the party of you know segregation and ku klux klan and
00:40:32.820
and all that other stuff so is there an argument that democrats must change their name from democrats
00:40:41.620
i would say yes i mean why would you be a member of a party with the same name as the party that was in
00:40:48.740
favor of all these racial bad things uh one of my other favorite stories in the news is jake tapper
00:40:56.820
having to call uh call bullshit on cnn's own pundits for spreading fake news
00:41:03.540
so kaylee mckinney was misinterpreted when she was talking about school openings she said that the
00:41:12.660
science should not stand in the way of going back to school and then she went on to say that the science
00:41:19.460
and she referred to a study credible study saying that the risks for children were low and therefore
00:41:27.300
the science would not stop us from going to school because the science supports it of course jim acosta
00:41:34.180
and some other people at cnn decided to interpret that as we're going to ignore the science and go to
00:41:42.100
school exactly the opposite of what she said jake tapper to his credit called bullshit on it and even
00:41:49.940
tweeted it bullshit so even he was not willing to accept the narrative which his own network had
00:41:57.060
immediately adopted that the uh the fake news that kaylee mckinney was in favor of ignoring science
00:42:05.540
and putting children back in school so they will die because orange man bad
00:42:10.820
uh and uh so i will give uh uh props to jake tapper for fact checking his own network which isn't easy
00:42:21.940
you know there's no there's no way of any no way anybody thinks that's easy to do and um i will give
00:42:28.820
him a second shout out by saying he's the only one who said about the charlottesville find people hoax
00:42:36.100
he's the only person who said that the context should include that the president um explicitly
00:42:44.100
disavowed the people that the rest of cnn was saying he was talking about as fine people so jake
00:42:50.340
is the only person i know who has called bullshit on his own network for misinterpreting
00:42:56.340
quotes in a fairly obvious way they're misinterpreted so credit him for that
00:43:01.460
that there's a story about portland because there are these uniformed scary looking people in
00:43:09.460
camouflage who are showing up in rented minivans and stuff and grabbing protesters off the street
00:43:16.900
and taking them away now the rumor uh or the way it's being treated on social media is that these are
00:43:24.820
unmarked unnamed unannounced we don't know who these um camouflage military looking people are
00:43:32.980
they have masks on they're just grabbing people off the street it's like the gestapo it's it's like
00:43:39.300
death squads it's like gestapo so that's how the left is uh framing it but they also of course have no
00:43:48.500
access to news from the right so they don't real see real news if they did they would be following
00:43:55.940
jack posavic on uh twitter who would tell you uh they have dhs patches on their uniforms
00:44:04.500
now it's hard to see because it's at night but i think he you know he's just better as spotting the
00:44:09.140
stuff from experience and we know that the department of homeland security said they were going to be
00:44:16.660
operating there they said they would be operating there and people with dhs um you know identification
00:44:25.060
on their uniforms did show up there so there shouldn't be too much mystery about who they were
00:44:32.820
and it should not surprise you that they were in non-military vehicles because you don't want to bring
00:44:38.980
in tanks and humvees and stuff like that it just makes it look too military but here's the part i
00:44:44.660
loved about it it is scaring the living out of the protesters which to me is hilarious let me read
00:44:52.660
this one quote um let's see uh so there was this protester who was frightened uh and he said he was
00:45:02.500
one of the ones that they they they nabbed and they took him somewhere but then they they let him go
00:45:07.540
and after he was let go he said this uh he didn't this is from a news reporter he did not know whether the
00:45:12.580
the men were police or far-right extremists who frequently don military-like outfits and harass
00:45:19.940
left-leaning protesters in portland and the 29 year old resident said he made it about half a block
00:45:26.980
before he realized there would be no escape because he tried to run from them and gave up then he sank to
00:45:33.220
his knees hands in the air and he said quote i was terrified pettibone told the washington post it seems like
00:45:40.420
it was out of a horror sci-fi like a philip k dick novel it was like being preyed upon
00:45:48.420
to which i say good good excellent excellent because i think it's useful for the protesters to feel
00:46:01.300
how the citizens of the city that they're abusing feel about them how happy are you that a protester
00:46:09.460
was afraid of somebody in a mask it's kind of perfect right the fact that the department of
00:46:16.820
homeland security wear masks so you can't see their faces it's really funny because uh we've been saying
00:46:25.060
that one of the things that you know has fueled these protests is the fact that people can wear masks if
00:46:31.300
you can wear a mask because of the coronavirus it's recommended then you can get away with stuff
00:46:37.940
because you figure well nobody's got a picture of me i'm wearing a mask so the masks have so far been
00:46:44.020
only to the benefit of the protesters well it looks like department of homeland security just took their
00:46:50.660
advantage away because if the department of homeland security who do not live in the city for the most part
00:46:58.340
they don't live in that city and if they're wearing masks you're not going to be able to find out who
00:47:03.220
they were because they probably don't have name tags if they do they ought to get rid of them they need
00:47:08.020
to get rid of the name tags so it's reminded me somewhat of the untouchables do you remember the
00:47:14.500
untouchables uh they were people who did not live in i think it was chicago who were brought in from the
00:47:20.740
outside and people didn't know i think people didn't know their identities because then they could work on
00:47:26.500
organized crime and they would not get bribed because it's hard to bribe somebody if you can't
00:47:32.100
find them you don't know their name and they're from out of town but it's easy to bribe let's say a
00:47:38.260
police officer who lives in your town especially if you're threatening their family if they don't take
00:47:43.940
your bribe so it looks like the department of homeland security are the untouchables the people coming in
00:47:51.940
who don't have an obvious identity and you can't get back on them and they're scary super super scary
00:48:00.340
right so i can't think of a better solution than to bring in masked super scary people with unknown
00:48:08.020
identities to clear things out of portland and you have to appreciate that as a strategy
00:48:12.980
but of course their counter strategy is to say you're you're uh gestapo um people worry about
00:48:23.140
we might enter world war three with any of our you know international foes china or russia etc but
00:48:32.180
i don't think you realize we're already in world war three world war three if you count war with russia
00:48:40.180
and china simultaneously as a world war we're in it we're in the middle of it let me give you a
00:48:49.140
a shocking statistic if you added together the number of overdose deaths from fentanyl in the
00:48:56.980
united states and the fentanyl we know comes from china chinese fentanyl has killed x number of people
00:49:03.620
if you add that number to the number killed by the coronavirus those two numbers together both
00:49:10.260
both caused by china have killed more american citizens than died in world war ii that's right
00:49:20.420
so if you believe that chinese fentanyl is intentional meaning they could stop it if they wanted to but
00:49:26.900
they don't and i believe that it's intentional and if you believe that they didn't tell the rest of the
00:49:33.220
the world about the coronavirus intentionally then we have already lost more um people to china's
00:49:43.860
aggression than we lost in all of world war ii think about it now if you're telling me that we're not
00:49:51.700
in a world war i would say you don't know what our cyber uh security people are doing you don't know how
00:49:58.500
much china is doing espionage and cyber stuff attacks against us and you don't know how much
00:50:04.980
we're doing to them because i'm pretty sure it's a lot so at the moment we're in a full-out war
00:50:12.980
that's just a weird war that it's it's being fought in ways that you don't see you know bodies you just
00:50:19.220
see uh in some cases you might see some protests or something that were caused by these this mischief
00:50:26.260
but uh the war is on the war is completely on and we're right in the middle of it it's just a
00:50:33.620
war like none we've seen before pompeo uh told congress that he says hong kong is no longer to be
00:50:43.460
considered autonomous now that doesn't come as a big surprise right the day that great britain decided
00:50:50.340
okay you know the lease is up and hong kong will be returned to some kind of chinese situation with
00:50:58.020
autonomous rule pretty much everybody smart said oh so it'll just be china because eventually
00:51:07.540
just because of geography and because china would want control over it it was obvious that hong kong
00:51:13.140
would lose its independence there's probably nothing that can be done about that but apparently there's
00:51:19.380
a hidden reason for pompeo to tell congress that hong kong is no longer its own autonomous thing
00:51:26.660
and it has to do with the fact that hong kong is a major worldwide uh financial center
00:51:34.020
and the implication is this that if hong kong is not autonomous you can't use it as a financial center
00:51:42.660
and if hong kong loses its role as one of the world's big financial centers and it looks like
00:51:49.140
that's guaranteed now because we're not the the free um the free markets of the world
00:51:55.300
the free uh yeah i guess markets is the right world they're not going to use china as their
00:52:02.020
financial center it just wouldn't feel safe so if hong kong is no longer autonomous as pompeo says
00:52:10.580
then um hong kong is going to lose their status as a financial center that's really big that's big
00:52:18.180
big big big big big big so that's a big deal so that's part of world war three we're in it
00:52:26.180
somebody asked me to rank trump's visual persuasion i guess he had a white house event with a red truck
00:52:33.220
and a blue truck and he put these uh fake weights on them to represent all of the regulations he was
00:52:40.420
going to cut and had the crane pull you know the weight out of one of the trucks etc and i didn't even see
00:52:47.940
that on the news i only saw it when it was sent to me on social media so i would say it was a real
00:52:54.500
good visual presentation but i don't know if it worked because it was sort of standard so i don't
00:53:01.540
know if it got the attention that they wanted to get because i didn't see it but maybe it did
00:53:06.820
um and that is what i wanted to talk about if you missed my uh special podcast last night i did a
00:53:18.180
live stream last night sort of spontaneously um on how to have a socialist system within the confines
00:53:27.380
of our capitalized capitalist system so that everybody can live the way they want and they
00:53:32.500
would not interfere with each other so you don't have to have one system for everybody so it's not
00:53:37.460
a good idea it's just an interesting idea and you might want to check that video out on replay everywhere
00:53:43.460
that my videos are found um so you can see it on youtube etc but if you'd really like to have some fun
00:53:51.300
you want to go to locals uh where my content in addition to this i do a lot of other uh content on
00:54:00.020
locals locals.com it has an app as well as website and don jr has uh moved on to locals which is a big
00:54:08.420
deal uh oh by the way i should tell you that i'm a a very small stockholder uh investor i guess not
00:54:16.260
stockholder but investor in locals so full disclosure i'm on locals i have a small investment in it
00:54:24.740
uh and uh don jr coming over is probably going to give it a lot of attention so
00:54:32.820
um somebody wants me to talk about the double counting and the bad counting of the coronavirus
00:54:40.260
stuff i'm not too interested in that actually because we know stuff is being counted wrong
00:54:47.220
but i think the direction of stuff is all that really matters and if the you know and over time
00:54:53.620
all these irregularities get worked out you know they'll get scrubbed out of the system in time
00:54:58.820
as long as we know the general direction that's probably good enough
00:55:10.500
how many cases would the u.s have to get for the majority of people to say okay let's all try
00:55:16.180
masks well the problem is that um people have convinced themselves that there is strong science
00:55:23.380
that's saying masks don't work so in theory as long as they believe that masks definitely don't
00:55:29.140
work and we've seen the science and you know i'm not saying that but people say that as long as they
00:55:34.820
think they don't work or that it makes things worse it wouldn't matter how many people died
00:55:41.460
um when policies are being implemented based on wrong numbers we should all care yes we should
00:55:48.740
but i don't think the wrongness that we're talking about is directionally wrong i don't think the
00:55:55.540
numbers are changing the direction of things and if they did they would only do it temporarily
00:56:02.580
um should cdc go to the white house though i don't know what that means
00:56:11.460
all right i'm just looking at your comments see if i missed anything
00:56:15.540
somebody says locals needs to move to a single fee for all access models don't like subscribing to
00:56:22.420
individuals yeah i think that's actually on the uh the board right now so they're actively looking
00:56:28.100
at that model now that model has some implications for creators for example if the the main reason that
00:56:36.500
you joined um locals was for one creator uh sort of unfair because your money would be distributed to
00:56:44.820
the other creators who are not the reason that you were there so it's hard to work that out and make it fair
00:56:50.340
um who won navarro or fauci you know i'm not too interested in the uh palace intrigue stuff that's just
00:57:01.140
somewhat predictable and uh doesn't really change anything
00:57:07.700
talk about new zealand and how well they've done with it well let's talk about uh countries in general
00:57:14.180
that have done well are you amazed that we don't yet know why some countries are successful and some
00:57:20.740
are not oh you think you know you think you know because you saw the chart that said the ones that
00:57:26.020
use hydroxychloroquine early that they all have good results right so that's it i mean you saw the chart
00:57:32.740
all all the countries with hydroxychloroquine early good result all the ones that don't so that's
00:57:38.580
it right that's the whole little thing well except you may have also seen the chart that shows that
00:57:45.300
vitamin d pretty much explains everything so could vitamin d explain everything we're seeing in the
00:57:54.100
other countries when in fact hydroxychloroquine use explains everything we see in the country
00:58:01.540
but also the graphs show that vitamin d does so those are two different theories except that oh wait
00:58:10.740
there are also graphs that show that the degree of mask use is the main variable and it very clearly
00:58:18.340
shows that the ones you use mass got better results
00:58:24.660
so what the hell is going on you'll so my take on this is that we don't know
00:58:30.180
exactly how much is masks how much is better treatment how much is hydroxychloroquine how much
00:58:37.460
is vitamin d that's in the atmosphere but also might be part of the treatment we really don't know
00:58:44.660
and on top of that you really yet and also somebody says immunity we don't know about immunity we don't
00:58:51.380
even know exactly the nature of the virus in terms of how it's spread there's so much we don't know
00:59:00.260
that um yeah correlation is not causation let me here's a here's a uh a brain test i was going to
00:59:08.340
give you so those of you who feel you are good at analyzing the stuff you see in social media so you
00:59:15.460
feel like you have a pretty strong decision on masks or hydroxychloroquine or vitamin d whatever it is
00:59:22.580
you've got a strong opinion let me ask you this this is a thought experiment if i told you there's a city
00:59:31.860
that has um the most strong locks on their doors they have the most bars on the windows they have
00:59:40.820
the most locks on the doors they have the strongest defense of the house and they even have a lot of
00:59:46.820
firearms and they also have the highest burglary rate what does that tell you they do the most to
00:59:56.100
protect their house but they have the highest burglary rate so that proves that protecting your
01:00:01.860
house doesn't work right right is that the conclusion if you have tons of locks and it's the most locked
01:00:10.100
up definitely lock your doors bars on the window and still the highest burglary rate well that proves
01:00:18.100
that locks don't work it proves that bars on the window don't work right no it doesn't prove that
01:00:27.620
it proves that if you have a lot of crime people are going to improve their locks
01:00:34.340
in fact the dumbest thing that people say about chicago gun control is that well it has the tightest
01:00:41.540
gun control and the worst murders so obviously gun control doesn't work no they have the tightest gun
01:00:48.580
control because they have the most murders cause and effect is backwards now did it help
01:00:56.820
how do you know how many murders would there have been if things were different you don't know so if
01:01:04.740
you don't know how things would have been in the alternative situation you don't know anything
01:01:09.700
and we think we do though so we think that well there's a correlation there i guess i guess locks on
01:01:16.900
doors don't work there's still burglaries and that actually as ridiculous as that sounded
01:01:22.500
that's most of the way people are analyzing stuff most of it is reversing cause and effect most of it
01:01:35.220
who are we talking about i know no one who has that situation
01:01:43.700
somebody says proves you don't understand burglars very well proves you can't think
01:01:48.420
because what you're accusing me of is to say that burglars would not
01:01:54.020
prefer to burglarize the less protected house of course they would so we assume that those locks
01:02:02.260
did decrease some amount of burglaries for the ones with the best defenses there's nobody questioning
01:02:08.580
that friction works friction works but correlation and causation are still backwards
01:02:15.940
um do people get murdered with legal or illegal guns well if you looked at the uh the kinds of murders
01:02:25.940
you would find that gun control wouldn't have as big an impact on those murders as you'd like for
01:02:32.900
example gun control probably would not make any difference to gang violence right probably wouldn't make any
01:02:40.020
difference uh what about the hurricanes i don't know what you're talking about all right um but the gun
01:02:50.980
control is ineffective it only stops the law abiding yeah maybe i i don't know if we've actually studied
01:03:00.180
that all right that's it for now and i will talk to you later