Episode 1119 Scott Adams： All the New Fake News, People Who Are Bad at Analysis and Don't Know it, Netflix Should be in Jail, Woodward
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Summary
Trump has the strongest case for a Nobel Peace Prize in recent memory, and it's not just for his foreign policy achievements, but also for his domestic accomplishments. Scott Adams explains why he thinks President Trump is the most likely to win one.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. I forgot who I was
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there for a moment. Am I the coffee or am I the guy? Well, it's all the same thing. If you drink
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enough coffee, you merge with the beverage and become sort of a coffee person. But enough about
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that. Let us get to the important part of the morning, the part that makes everything better.
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Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or
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gels or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite beverage.
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I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The
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thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
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Oh yeah. Yeah. So good. So in my opinion, the funniest thing that's happening right now
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is that President Trump is experiencing just blistering, withering attacks on, you know,
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everything he's ever done. And at the same time, he's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Now, here's the fun part. It would be easy to imagine that any president could get nominated for
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the Nobel Peace Prize. You know, if you're thinking, okay, who is a good candidate for the
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Nobel Peace Prize, and they have to give it every year, even if nobody did anything, you say to
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yourself, well, it's no big surprise that there's somebody in the world who's willing to nominate the
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president of the United States, no matter who the president is. There's always something the
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president did that sounds peace-like. But what's different is that Trump has the best case for
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winning a Nobel Peace Prize that maybe you've ever seen. It's not just marginal. That's what's funny
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about it. You know, you could imagine a situation in which you'd say, I don't know, you know, the things
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he's done. I suppose you could make a case for it being worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. But we're not
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talking about a gray area here. We're talking about the clearest case for a Nobel Peace Prize,
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maybe ever. Because the beauty of it is that it's not just the Israel-UAE deal,
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as big as that is. It's also that he managed to get rid of ISIS. He's pulling troops out of
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everything. He's the first time in 39 years he didn't start a war. And you look at North Korea is
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clearly in a better place than it was. Trump is getting, you know, he gets criticized for being
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too friendly with dictators. But it is exactly why we're not in wars with those dictators.
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It's part of the process. It's part of an explicit strategy, which he told us in advance,
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that he was going to be good to the leaders of these other countries, whether they deserved it or
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not. Because it would be a good negotiating position to treat them with respect. And then maybe you can get
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something done. And if you look at his total body of work, it's kind of crazy. Because even his critics
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are going to have to sort of give it up for the international stuff. They might complain bitterly
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about stuff at home. But the international stuff is really, really solid. So here's the thing I like
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to keep reminding you. If you have a worldview, or a filter on life, and you're pretty certain that
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it's the right filter, and it explains your reality well, and you think that other people with different
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filters on life don't quite see things clearly, the only way you can settle that is by prediction.
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Whichever of those two filters on reality consistently predicts what happens next,
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is you got to think that's the real one, or the one that's closest to truth. All of the people who
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said President Trump would create wars and would be completely useless in international negotiations.
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How did your prediction go? Did your prediction in, let's say, 2016, did you predict that this
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president would be not just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize? Of course, you know, it may be political
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in terms of who actually gets the prize. But that there would be a completely solid and unambiguous case.
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And really, you can't even think of anybody who would be in second place. It's the most solid case for a
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Nobel Peace Prize, maybe of all time. Yeah, oh, Serbia, Serbia and Kosovo. Like, I forgot an entire,
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an entire major component, because he did so many things. You know, he just sort of drops these little,
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these little, you know, gold eggs as he's going. And you don't realize how many gold eggs there are
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until you, until somebody nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize. And you say, well, what's the
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justification for that? You go, oh, well, there's that golden egg. That's pretty good. Oh, here's
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another one. Well, here's another one. And suddenly, you've got a gigantic basket full of golden eggs
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that you didn't quite realize what kind of a portfolio he'd put together for this stuff. So
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anyway, my point is that my worldview, expressed often and publicly, was that he definitely would
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be the kind of president who would get a Nobel Peace Prize. So that was my prediction. In fact,
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I predicted that it would have happened earlier. I would have thought it would happen in the first
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term. So my worldview predicted exactly where we are on this Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
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And anybody who thought it was the opposite, you have to now honestly say to yourself, okay,
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my worldview did not predict. You could still think you don't like the president for whatever
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reasons. But you have to admit, one of those worldviews predicted perfectly. And one of them
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got it completely wrong. There's that's some somewhat just objectively true at this point.
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All right, there's a big story that I'm going to mention without talking about. Now, I wouldn't
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normally do that, but you'll immediately know why. There's a big story that Netflix is showing some
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content that I'm not going to describe, even in general terms. I'm not even going to tell you the
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category it's in. And there are critics who say Netflix should actually go to jail, actual jail,
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not a joke, the actual literally physically take a person and put them in jail for just running this
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content on Netflix. Now, I saw that claim before I saw the clips of the content. And of course,
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I said to myself, that's a little extreme. Obviously, if it's just going to be on a family
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entertainment platform, Netflix is sort of for everybody. And they have ratings and stuff. But
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it's a family entertainment thing. Surely, they're not going to knowingly and intentionally
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put content on their platform, which a reasonable person would say, you should go to jail for that.
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Actual, literal jail for putting that on a screen. And then I looked at the content.
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They should actually go to jail for it. Now, I don't like to even talk about this content. So
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you may have noticed, I tend to stay away from it. Because it's just so ugly, I don't like to put it
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in people's heads. But the fact that Netflix, with impunity, apparently, can put content on there that
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literally, you should go to jail for. Actual, literal, go to jail. You know, and I wouldn't say
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that about just about anything. I mean, you'd really, really have to try hard to get somebody
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who's as, you know, free speech oriented. And, you know, hey, let's, let's not get too excited about
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these little offenses and violations. I mean, I'm always on the side of you're making too much of
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this. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if it's a Republican thing or Democrat. Fairly consistently,
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I'm the one who says, you're blowing this out of proportion. Not this time. Not this time. You
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look at it as an adult. And you would say to yourself, somebody needs to go to jail for this
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actual jail. It's mind blowing. All right. Joe Biden continues to, to run his campaign
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in which I guess the main strategy besides hiding is to reword Trump's policies into angry and confused
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old man language, but make it a little more boring. And it sounds like a joke, right? Oh, he's not
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really running for president by doing, you know, nothing but rewording the current guy's policies.
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Couldn't do that. Could he? Well, what's his, what's his slogan? Build back better. That really is just
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make America great again, rewarded, but boring. And now that he's doing a buy America thing,
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trying to convince people to buy America and bring the factories back. And I'm thinking to myself,
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in other words, exactly what the president's doing. And then there are, of course, his coronavirus
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recommendations from Joe Biden, which are, I, the president should follow the expert's advice,
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which is exactly what he's done from day one. So Biden is literally just rewording what Trump
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is doing and says he wants to do. He's just rewording it into confused, angry old man language
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and selling it. Amazingly, he's selling it pretty well.
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All right. One of my best predictions of all time, which I don't, I don't think it will ever
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get much attention, but in terms of how accurate it was, it's really good. One of my best.
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And it goes like this. When the pandemic first started, and maybe I said this in February-ish,
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but it was early on before we knew a lot. And what I said was that everybody would look back
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at the so-called mistakes that our leaders and experts made, and they will criticize them
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with the clarity of what we learn in the future. But it will be completely unfair
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because leaders were only guessing in the beginning because they didn't have, you know,
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really the knowledge of what to do. And they knew they didn't know. They knew that there were so
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many unknowns that they just had to do something and see if it worked. And if it didn't, quickly
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adjust and try something else and learn as you go. And so in my effort to make the world a better
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place, which looks like it didn't work at all, I tried to prepare the room, if you will. So I was
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saying it loudly and often, when in a few months from now, you're going to think that we should have
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made different decisions because you'll be smarter in the future. You'll know what worked and what
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didn't work. And you will be completely full of shit. Because if you don't know it today,
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don't tell me in August what we should have done today. All that matters is what did you know to
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do today? How did all the leaders in the world do in February? Not so well. Not so well. Because
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they were all guessing. Were they all bad leaders? Probably not. Were all the leaders in the world of
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similar quality? Because it seems to me that leaders that you would think are bad in general
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seem to have, in many cases, coincidentally, got something that looked like a better result
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than some people you might have thought, well, I thought they were pretty good leaders,
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but they got a bad result. What you will learn and what the fake news is counting on is that the
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average person will never be sophisticated enough and never have the, let's say, the talent stack
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to understand how to analyze this situation. It's hard. I would guess that no more than
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2% of the public would be anywhere near the capability, and this is not just raw intelligence
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capability, but experience in analyzing things. That's the important part is the experience.
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If you don't have the experience analyzing complicated situations, you might think you
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can do it. Because you might say to yourself, well, I just listened to the news, and there
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were 10 smart people in a row who said that President Trump made big mistakes. So what else
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do I need to know? I looked at the news. They seem like smart people. They all seem to agree
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that the president made these mistakes. Therefore, logically, the president did a poor job on the
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coronavirus. But here's the problem. 98% of the public doesn't know how to even analyze
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this situation. So the 10 experts you hear almost certainly are not in that 2%. And you can tell
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by looking at the way they talk about it. And I've gone through this before, but the fast version
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is this. Leadership in the end will look like the least important variable in terms of how things
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turned out. If you can't do your analysis and adjust for, hey, the United States has a high
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population of African Americans, and they have a worse outcome in terms of ultimately dying
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from coronavirus. Did anybody factor that in? When they said, how did the United States do? Did
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they factor in that we have a high population of unusually vulnerable people? I didn't see anybody
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do that. Have you ever seen anybody do that? Has anybody ever said, we're going to compare you to
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Germany, but we're going to do this calculation to normalize it so it'd be as if you had similar
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populations and then see how you did. Have you seen that? No, no, you've not seen that. How about
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obesity? Gigantic variable. United States has a, sadly, has a fat population. We have an unusually obese
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population. So if you compare us to a country that doesn't have an obese population or nowhere near it,
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and you don't do the math to adjust when you're comparing the two, have you compared them? No.
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No, you haven't compared them. So all the people that you think are the smart people
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who are going on television saying, look at my graph. Look at Lusitania, Estonia. Look at how
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Lubrikenburg did. Look how this state did compared to this other state. A hundred percent of those people
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are idiots. Not in general, but on this topic. There are people who think that because they have a
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graph and it's real data that they trust, and the data came from a good source, and they took that
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good source and they put it on a graph, they think they know something. No. That graph is misleading.
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It's not telling you something you need to know. It's not providing information. It is reducing your
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information because it's misleading you. It misleads you into thinking that's enough to make some kind of a
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decision. It's not. We don't know why some states do fine without masks. We don't know why some places seem to
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need a shutdown and other places didn't. We don't know why some group activities seem to create a bunch
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of new coronavirus and others don't. We don't know exactly what anything is doing. It's this big ball
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of guessing. And I can guarantee you this, that all of the leaders of all of the countries
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said some version of this early on in the pandemic. This feels like a very comfortable thing to
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assume is true without knowing and talking to every person. Don't you think that every leader said to
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themselves pandemic, virology, epidemiology, I don't know anything about that stuff, right?
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So there might be a few world leaders who are also doctors, but in general, don't you think
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your Putin's, your Xi's, your Merkel's, everybody, for the most part, generally speaking, don't you
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think they all said, I'd better just listen to the experts with me so far? That all of the, all of
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the leaders said, this isn't my domain. I'd better listen to the experts. Then the experts, would you
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also agree, were largely on the same page worldwide because the experts were really good at sharing
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information. The internet allows that. And so the experts everywhere fairly soon, I mean, not in day one,
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but fairly soon they achieved something like a consensus. So all the world leaders looked at
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the experts, looked at the consensus and said, all right, we could be right or we could be wrong,
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but it's never going to be wrong to do what the consensus of experts say in terms of a rational
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decision. It's never wrong. It could be wrong in terms of the outcome because again, even the experts
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were taking their best shot at it, they were legitimately, you know, honestly and professionally
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giving us their best work, but they had to guess a little bit, right? You can't fault them if they
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got something wrong because it wasn't possible to know what was right. It just wasn't possible.
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So there's my take that only the people who don't know how to analyze things think that they can look
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at President Trump's performance and say, well, that could have been better. And of course, there's
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always the fact that anything that's good could have been done sooner, right? Now the president's
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getting, uh, the big fake news of the day last 48 hours, I guess, is the idea that if the president
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had acted sooner, a hundred thousand people would be saved. Now, is that true? Number one, we don't
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know. That's a complete unknown. So anybody who says if he had acted sooner, a hundred thousand people
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would have been saved. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence of that at all. Do you know
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what evidence they use? Somebody ran a model. What, what credibility do you give somebody's complicated
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prediction model? None, right? If we've learned anything, it's that complicated prediction models are not
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really credible. So all the people saying, oh, there's a model that says a hundred thousand people or whatever
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would have lived if he had acted sooner. A, everybody could have acted sooner. B, nobody knew
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what to do. Uh, uh, C, Fauci says, and I don't think he would lie about this. Fauci says that the
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president did whatever the experts collectively said he should do. And when they said it, he didn't even
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delay. He did it when they said things should be done. So your, uh, your situation is that, um, it's
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really, it's some combination of lying and not knowing how to analyze things. So there's some people
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saying the president did a bad job who know they're lying because it can't be determined one way or the
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other. Uh, and there are other people who just don't know. They, they think it's just a fact
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because they don't know how to analyze things. All right. So, and, and you can see how crazy things
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get because Woodward got some criticism for if he learned during this telephone interview back whenever
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it was, if he learned that Trump knew it was more dangerous than he had said, shouldn't Woodward be
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telling people, you know, shouldn't he immediately blow the whistle and say, Oh, I was going to say
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this for a book, but it's so important. I need to tell the public because otherwise a hundred thousand
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people will die. Do you know what Woodward said? He said, that's nonsense. In other words, the people
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who are believing Woodward's book are holding in their mind, these two things to be true, which can't
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both be true. That if the president had told the public that it was a big problem and they would
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take it more seriously, we could have saved a bunch of lives. But if the president told Woodward and
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Woodward told the president and even had it on tape, so you don't even have to wonder if it's being
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mischaracterized, it's on tape. If Woodward had given it to the public, it would not have made any
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difference. Those two things can't both be true. You have to pick. Either Woodward killed tens of
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thousands of people by sitting on it, or the president didn't kill tens of thousands of people
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by sitting on it. In other words, nobody knew what to do. You know, you could always second guess
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after you have better information. All right. One big persuasion mistake Democrats are making,
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and I don't know if it could be avoided, is that dumping all of these anti-Trump books at the same
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time. I think there are three more anti-Trump books that are going to hit in the next few weeks.
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If you have too many anti-Trump books, the audience gets snow blind, meaning that they all feel,
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they start feeling the same. And if they all start feeling the same, they also feel less important.
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Because here's a memory trick from the book, from the book guy's name, I can't remember.
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But the trick is this, that memory is triggered by contrast. So if there was, if you only had one book
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and it said terrible things about the president, people would really notice that.
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And they'd be like, whoa, that's a big deal. I don't know if it's true or not, but I can't stop
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thinking about this book. And I would say the Michael Wolff book was closer to that, right?
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The Michael Wolff book, if you remember that, sort of was by itself for a while. So it really stood out
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and became a major news thing. But if you have six books that all make sketchy claims,
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and inevitably some of those claims in those books will be debunked.
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If some of them are debunked, and the whole audience says, okay, that one's debunked,
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but what about these other ones? There's still, it's just not interesting. It's just a big wall
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of anti-Trump books that in your mind just got put in one bucket and then you ignored it.
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So I think the books will have less impact than maybe Democrats hope, in part because there are
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too many of them and they dilute each other. All right. So here's the most interesting part.
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I often tell you that I think I'm watching the news just like a spectator. And then all of a sudden,
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the news is about me. And I say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm supposed to be watching the
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news. Why is the news about me? And that happened again yesterday. So the Woodward book, part of the
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promotion of it is, I guess he's dropping some of the audio tapes of the interviews, and they're
00:26:18.600
getting turned into transcripts and articles. And one of them was his interview, Woodward's interview
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with Jared Kushner. And Jared Kushner told him that to understand President Trump, there were
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four books that Woodward should read that really give you the complex picture of who President Trump
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is. Now, one of those books was the Wizard, no, I'm sorry, the Alice in Wonderland, and specifically
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the Cheshire Cat. And I had to remind myself, what's the Cheshire Cat's deal? I know he's got a big
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smile and he disappears. But I didn't know, I don't remember much more. And so I read a description
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of him. And the Cheshire Cat is described as mischievous, smiley and mischievous. And I thought,
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okay, yeah, that's actually, if you understand that the Cheshire Cat is mischievous, you can say,
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okay, that is definitely President Trump, right? You know, he likes a little mischief. He doesn't,
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it's not an accident that he creates mischief nonstop. You know, it's not like he can't stop
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doing it. Or maybe he can't. But, you know, that definitely is a pretty good description of him.
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But that's not the whole person, right? And that would be Jared's point, that you'd have to read
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four different books to look in four different windows to understand what the interior of the
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house looks like. So that's one, Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland. But one of the other books was my
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book, Winn-Bigley. Now, Winn-Bigley, the primary theme of it is that the president is a master
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persuader and uses the tools of persuasion to great effect. How did Woodward categorize my book?
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Now, remember the Murray-Gell-Mann effect, the amnesia effect? I talk about it too much.
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The idea that there was this physicist who noted that when he saw a story in the press
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about his specialty, he could tell it was wrong because it's his specialty. But the moment he would
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read a story about something else like the Palestinian situation or anything else, he would uncritically
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read it as if it's probably right. Even though when he reads articles that he knows the content or he
00:28:39.780
knows the field, he knows the wrong and they're universally wrong. Likewise, if you didn't know
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any better and you're listening, you're looking at Woodward describe these books, he described my book
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as characterizing the president as manipulative. That's a word I never used. And in fact, I went to
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Paine's to make sure I didn't do that. So the one thing I can fact check, the only thing I can
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personally check and I can know with complete certainty is wrong. Coincidentally, coincidentally,
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the only area that I'm an expert in, which is the book I wrote, I know that he characterized it wrong.
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I mean, as wrong as you could characterize it. Now, do I now say, well, the one thing I could fact
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check personally was wrong, but I'll bet all that other stuff was good. I used to think stuff like that.
00:29:44.640
Not anymore. Now I know that the odds of me catching that one little thing that was the wrong, you know,
00:29:51.320
a wrong characterization, it's probably all wrong characterizations. You know, there's no reason to believe
00:29:58.160
any of it's right. So here's my definition of manipulation versus persuasion. Now, this is sort
00:30:05.600
of a personal take on it, but I think it works. Persuasion, this is just my own take on it, is when
00:30:16.220
you're persuading somebody who wants to be persuaded, or at least is no worse off for it. For example,
00:30:24.280
if you're a car salesperson, and the customer comes in, the customer knows that the car salesperson
00:30:31.340
is persuading them. They know that. But it's also very transparent. Every part of the technique is
00:30:38.580
pretty well known to everybody. But it doesn't feel like manipulation exactly. It feels like persuasion.
00:30:45.200
It feels like sales. It's a little icky, but you want the car. And on some level, you kind of want to
00:30:52.620
get talked into it, right? I mean, when you go to buy a car, you kind of want to be talked into it.
00:30:59.540
Because you, in many cases, you've decided just for emotional reasons, and now you need somebody to
00:31:04.680
tell you you were smart. So that would be persuasion, where you're not worse off if, you know, unless the
00:31:11.840
salesperson is just a criminal, they're just being persuasive. They're not manipulating you, per se.
00:31:16.820
Okay. But manipulation would be a different situation. And again, this is just my version
00:31:23.920
of it. Manipulation would be where the person who's doing it has something to gain, and the
00:31:29.480
person who's having it done to them has something to lose. So if it's a win-lose situation, that's
00:31:35.180
manipulation. The president, again, in my view, doesn't do that one. He doesn't do manipulation
00:31:42.900
in the context of the presidency, and running for the presidency. What he does is persuasion.
00:31:49.480
So if he tries to persuade you, for example, that there should be a wall on the southern border,
00:31:54.300
he's not doing it to screw you, right? You could disagree whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
00:32:01.620
But I think you'd all agree that he's not doing it to screw you, if you're an American citizen.
00:32:09.440
He's doing it to help you. So if he persuades you to get a wall, to fund a wall, are you worse off?
00:32:18.180
You could be worse off in the sense that maybe you don't like that policy. But it's not because
00:32:23.060
there was bad intent. It's only manipulation if you have some evil intention. If you have a good
00:32:29.440
intention, but it requires you to persuade people to get it done, you could be right or you could be
00:32:35.500
wrong, but it's still good intention. And that's persuasion. So I would say Woodward's
00:32:41.760
characterization of my book as calling the president manipulative is just flat out wrong.
00:32:51.100
There's another fake news today. Eddie Zipper tweeted about this. You probably saw the news.
00:33:03.440
There's some version of this. It said that, I think the Hill reports it this way. They said,
00:33:09.600
Trump said that he didn't have responsibility to understand pain of black Americans. And then
00:33:15.340
they give this quote. No, I don't feel that at all. Now, when I first heard this story and I saw the
00:33:23.500
president's quote, I said to myself, oh, I know how they do this fake news. There's some context that
00:33:31.920
they're leaving out. It was obvious by the quote that it had been taken in a context. And once you see
00:33:38.620
enough things taken in a context, especially when it happens to you, you know, if you're the person the
00:33:43.360
story is about, which has been the case for me in a lot of cases, you can tell when something's taken
00:33:49.020
out of context. As soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, they just created some fake news by taking this
00:33:55.480
out of context. The reason I knew it was out of context is they didn't tell you what Trump said
00:34:01.020
immediately after it. And they also didn't tell you exactly what came before it. And I said to
00:34:08.140
myself, I'll betcha, if I heard what came before that, or I heard what came after it, I would have
00:34:15.100
a completely different opinion on this. Wake up in the morning, Eddie Zipperer on Twitter says in his
00:34:22.920
tweet, this is a flat out lie. He goes, the question was, quote, do you have any sense that that privilege,
00:34:30.280
meaning the white privilege, has isolated you and put you in a cave to a certain extent? And that's what
00:34:36.300
Trump was saying. No, no way. Now, I would disagree with Trump. I would say that being the president
00:34:43.760
guarantees that you're taken out of the normal flow of life, right? I don't criticize, you know,
00:34:51.320
Bush, was it Bush senior who said he didn't know what a loaf of bread costs? That's fine. I don't have
00:34:57.480
any problem with the president not knowing what a loaf of bread costs. Everybody understands that the
00:35:03.900
presidency is not like life. It's a completely bubble situation. So I don't think Trump is
00:35:12.980
accurate in saying that, you know, he can understand somebody else's situation. Nobody can understand
00:35:20.140
anybody's situation. But from a politician's perspective, it would be fair to say, I do
00:35:26.740
understand other people's situation, because you want to say that you, you know, you can relate to
00:35:31.860
him in some way. So I don't think his answer was out of lines in terms of what you'd expect from a
00:35:37.620
political entity. But his answer looks completely different if you know what the setup is. So
00:35:46.980
that's just fake news created by intentionally bad editing. All right.
00:35:54.560
Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times, that quality of life in the United States, according
00:36:04.440
to some social progress measure, has dropped over the last decade, even while it's risen in other
00:36:11.960
places. And now we're 28th in the world in terms of how good we're doing quality of life wise. Now,
00:36:19.480
here's what's interesting. The article did not speculate or give any evidence of what it is
00:36:26.620
that's causing our lower quality of life. What does that tell you?
00:36:33.640
Is it sort of conspicuously missing from a story if you say the U.S. quality of life has dropped and
00:36:41.140
there are no reasons even speculated? It would be one thing not to know. But it seems like what would
00:36:47.460
be required in a story like this is experts don't know exactly why, but they mention looking at these
00:36:54.740
areas to see maybe this is why. But it's just completely left out. Right? What do you make of
00:37:03.180
the fact that no reasons are even mentioned, even in casual speculation? Here's what I make of it.
00:37:12.100
It's awkward. Meaning that the reason we're doing poorly might have to do with, I'll just pick one
00:37:21.660
example, the teachers unions. Do you think the New York Times would write, well, it looks like the
00:37:28.380
teachers unions are destroying America? Not completely by themselves, but a pretty big part of it. No,
00:37:35.780
no, no, probably not. Now, I don't want to make an accusation or read minds of Nicholas Kristof. That
00:37:42.720
would be unfair. So I'm not going to make any, there's no negative statement about him. But would
00:37:49.460
the New York Times ever say the reason that things are going backwards is because of liberal policies?
00:37:57.760
They can't. If the problem that was driving us backwards in quality of life were even maybe,
00:38:07.700
even maybe related to the political right, would it be in the article? If you could even come up with
00:38:17.300
just a hand-waving reason why this lower quality of life was because of conservatives? Don't you think
00:38:26.740
that would be in the article? I mean, it's, it's so conspicuously missing. You got to ask yourself
00:38:34.020
why. All right. The, the worst take on this whole coronavirus and how the president did is I'm hearing
00:38:48.080
people say some version of this. The public could handle the truth. So the president should have just
00:38:54.880
told us the truth as opposed to trying to, um, calm our fears. It's not the leader's job to calm our
00:39:03.480
fears. We're adults. Just tell us the situation and we'll decide what to do. I think that's the worst
00:39:10.580
take because that's not what leaders do. And I'll give you, you know, another version of this from
00:39:17.100
Lawrence Tribe. You know him from a professor at Harvard and a big Hillary Clinton fan and a big
00:39:25.020
hater of the president. He's fairly famous as a critic of the president. Now remember, he's a Harvard
00:39:30.280
guy, highly educated. And here's what he says. Um, he says about Trump. Uh, oh, well, he quotes Trump
00:39:41.400
saying, I'm the leader of the country. I can't be jumping up and down and scaring people. And that's
00:39:46.640
Trump told Sean Hannity, uh, that I don't want to scare people. I want people, uh, not to panic.
00:39:52.280
And that's exactly what I did. And then Lawrence Tribe calls him out for that, calls out Trump and
00:39:58.900
says this from the guy who screams about carnage in the suburbs. Now the implication here is that the
00:40:05.720
president is getting people, uh, not scared enough about the virus. And that's inconsistent because
00:40:12.960
he's getting us too scared about carnage in the suburbs, which I take within the, within the context
00:40:19.940
I take to mean that Lawrence Tribe thinks that's not a big risk. Here's what's completely bad about
00:40:27.860
this tank. It is exactly the leader's job to dial up and dial down how scared we are or concerned we
00:40:36.800
are about topics. That is exactly a leader's job. In fact, maybe more central to the job of a leader
00:40:44.200
than anything else they do is telling the people they're leading how much to worry about this versus
00:40:52.440
that. And you don't treat everything with the same amount of worry, nor would you be a good leader
00:40:58.580
if you treated the amount of worry by the number of deaths or the number of deaths you could predict
00:41:05.860
or the number of deaths that have already happened. That's not how things work. Here's how leadership
00:41:12.240
works. If you think the public is not worrying enough about something, you ramp up their worry so
00:41:19.900
that they'll put more effort into it. If you think people could panic and maybe do a run on the
00:41:25.640
stores and a run on PPE and there's nothing good that could come from it, only bad could come from it,
00:41:31.800
nothing good, then maybe that's a situation where you want to dial it down. So for Lawrence Tribe
00:41:38.980
to act as though the leader of the country should treat different situations with the same amount of
00:41:47.960
concern. That's the opposite of a leader. The president should treat every situation like its own
00:41:55.980
thing and then say, are you worried enough? If not, I'll raise it. Or are you worried too much?
00:42:02.700
And that's causing trouble. In that case, I'll lower it. That's what leaders do. That's the whole job.
00:42:08.020
Now, this guy, Lawrence Tribe, is teaching children, college kids. And let me reiterate that in my book,
00:42:21.800
Loser Think, I introduced the idea that the amount of raw intelligence you have doesn't really help you
00:42:28.000
in many cases unless you also have a good exposure to different fields. In Lawrence Tribe's case,
00:42:34.100
he may just be a partisan, so he knows he's saying something stupid and he doesn't care if it works.
00:42:40.160
So you can't read his mind so you don't know what he's thinking. But it could also be that he's a
00:42:45.640
brilliant legal scholar who doesn't understand how leadership works. Because he's not teaching,
00:42:53.440
I don't think he's teaching any MBA classes. He's teaching the law. So I think it's just a gap in
00:43:00.100
his understanding. I'll give him the benefit of a doubt. The news is so insane now, it's almost hard
00:43:11.020
to wrap your head around it. But there's video of Trump talking to Jim Acosta in March. And the
00:43:18.200
March part is the important part. And which Trump is saying directly and as clearly as you possibly
00:43:25.640
could, that he is purposely trying to downplay the pandemic, because he doesn't want to panic
00:43:33.680
the country if there's no good in that. In other words, if there's no upside from panicking the
00:43:38.900
country, but there definitely would be a downside, he doesn't want to have the downside. So in March,
00:43:45.160
he's saying it in public, in the most public way you could, a press conference of the President
00:43:50.140
of the United States to CNN's primary guy, extended conversation on this topic, very clear. And
00:43:58.320
then when the Woodward book comes out, let's say March, April, May, June, July, August, six months
00:44:07.960
later, the press acts as though it's the first time they've heard that the President is intentionally
00:44:15.360
downplaying the risk, and gives his reasons why. How do we sit here and watch these idiots
00:44:24.740
pretend that this was somehow new information, when it was the most public thing the President
00:44:30.960
ever did? When I first heard the Woodward thing, I thought, uh, this feels like not only
00:44:39.700
not new news, but the oldest news you could possibly have. It felt to me like March news
00:44:47.360
when I heard it the first time. And it wasn't until I saw the actual video that I saw this
00:44:52.140
morning, I tweeted it so you can see it too, that I realized just how exactly, exactly, and
00:44:59.620
publicly, Trump had said the same thing to the public. If you say it to the public, in public,
00:45:07.580
as the President, should the public be surprised that he is giving us the cheery version of
00:45:19.020
As Joel Pollack pointed out in a tweet today, I guess Joe Biden had claimed that over 6,000
00:45:26.280
military people had died from the coronavirus. The actual number is seven. So he missed that
00:45:34.880
by a little bit. Not so much 6,000 as it is seven people. Now, the funny thing about this
00:45:41.800
is that you can add it to the body of Joe Biden lies. Now, you could argue that the Trump number
00:45:52.440
of fact-checking problems is greater than the number of Joe Biden lies. Maybe. But are they
00:46:01.140
the same type? That's the part that the news never tells you. When Trump does, let's call
00:46:07.900
it, let's say he does something that the fact-checkers say is false. Lots of times it's hyperbole that
00:46:15.780
you recognize. Like, oh, okay. Trump said that this has never happened before. Have you not
00:46:23.580
watched enough politics to know that doesn't literally necessarily mean it's never happened
00:46:28.900
before this? Well, it just doesn't mean that. If you're so unsophisticated that you ever believed
00:46:35.060
it to be literally true, at some point you just have to look at yourself and say, uh, okay, I got
00:46:42.180
fooled 20,000 times in a row, but I think this one's exactly meant to be accurate. No. 20,000 times in a
00:46:51.320
row should alert you to a pattern, which is if the president says, I've done the best in this in a
00:46:58.540
hundred years, then maybe it's not a hundred years. Maybe he did a really good job and maybe it's the
00:47:05.660
best in 10 years, which would still be terrific. But if you don't understand that he always talks
00:47:11.480
like that about everything, you shouldn't even be in the conversation. You should just quietly
00:47:18.540
close your Twitter account and just sneak away. Because if you haven't figured out this pattern
00:47:23.980
yet, you're not really at the adult table yet. But the same people who will say, uh, 20,000 fact
00:47:31.400
checking problems with the president will look at Joe Biden basing his campaign on the biggest lie
00:47:37.280
in American politics, the fine people hoax, also pushing the Trump, uh, Trump suggested drinking
00:47:45.060
bleach, one of the most debunked hoaxes of all time. And then, you know, this claim about the military
00:47:53.540
stuff, basically, there are probably dozens and dozens of major claims that Biden has made that are
00:47:59.780
clearly and unambiguously untrue. So anybody who says, I don't like this, President Trump
00:48:07.000
lying business. So I'd better go to Joe Biden. You're the dumbest people in the game.
00:48:15.500
Now, I can, I would acknowledge that you could make a legitimate argument for why you like either
00:48:21.980
of these candidates. You know, I have a preference, but I think a reasonable, smart person could say,
00:48:27.980
all right, you know, here are my priorities. This is why I think that, you know, Joe Biden with all of
00:48:34.080
his flaws still better than, than Trump. A reasonable person could have that opinion. It's not my opinion,
00:48:41.680
but a reasonable person could have it. Here's what's not a reasonable opinion. I'm going to vote for the
00:48:47.380
guy who doesn't lie. I mean, that's just, I don't even know what to call that. If you haven't noticed
00:48:56.900
that Joe Biden lies, again, you probably shouldn't vote if you haven't noticed that.
00:49:05.500
All right. Sometimes you might wonder, are the hosts on CNN good people who sometimes get things
00:49:14.560
wrong? That would be the best case scenario, right? That the CNN hosts are trying as hard as they can to
00:49:22.780
give you the real news. But like everything, some people make mistakes, you get some stuff wrong.
00:49:29.080
That's, that's life. Or are they intentionally lying to you in a way that is awful? And I think we've
00:49:38.760
got an answer to that. Because if you, you'll see the clip, I also tweeted this today, in which
00:49:46.060
Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta are talking about the virus early on. And they're talking about it as
00:49:52.300
being no more dangerous than the regular flu. Now, I completely get how it is newsworthy to say
00:50:00.980
the president downplayed this early on. And he should have, he should have been more concerned
00:50:06.260
about it. But if you're CNN, and you did exactly that, exactly that, and it's on video, and we can
00:50:14.320
all look at it. You know, you can look at it today, I just tweeted it. And you see Anderson Cooper
00:50:19.160
talking to Sanjay Gupta. Now, again, I do not criticize them for being wrong in March.
00:50:28.240
Because I don't criticize anybody for being wrong early on. Remember, that was my rule,
00:50:34.260
and I'm going to stick to it. So Anderson Cooper was not wrong. Sanjay Gupta was not wrong
00:50:40.880
when they said, hey, it looks like it's no worse than the flu. We should be more worse. You know,
00:50:46.400
they weren't wrong in the sense of being irresponsible, because everybody was guessing.
00:50:52.620
The experts were, I think, genuinely trying their best. You knew that a lot of people were going to
00:50:58.360
get it wrong. I don't hold it against them. But from today's perspective, if they're holding it
00:51:05.900
against, it's the major piece of news on CNN. The biggest piece of news is that they're holding it
00:51:12.180
against the president for telling the public the wrong message early on. It's the same message they
00:51:19.200
told the public early on. The same one. If you don't include that in the story, yeah, we're criticizing
00:51:25.680
the president. But if we're being honest, man, did we do exactly the same thing. The president really
00:51:31.920
messed up on this, just like we did. Here's a video of us making the same mistake. You know,
00:51:37.480
got to be transparent. Nobody's perfect. Wish we hadn't done it. In hindsight, it looks like a
00:51:43.880
mistake. At the time, we didn't know any better. Just like the president. Let us show you how nobody
00:51:49.480
knew what was the right answer in March. That would have been fine. But to simply act like that didn't
00:51:57.380
happen, and that the president was the only one who was wrong in March or February, that is just evil.
00:52:07.480
You can't say that Anderson Cooper is a good person, a good human being, because that is so clearly a
00:52:15.960
case of despicable moral conduct in public that I could not have less respect for that, really.
00:52:25.780
And again, I would be perfectly okay with them if they were simply wrong, and now they know why it
00:52:32.580
was wrong, and they talk about it in context. No problem. Completely forgiven for being wrong.
00:52:39.740
But today, you know you were wrong. Today, how about a little transparency, or else you're just being
00:52:48.200
assholes, really. It's hard to say it any other way.
00:52:52.480
Right. And so there's some news out of Michigan that Biden is up in Michigan, which would be pretty
00:53:01.440
important, right? One of the battleground states. So, and I think Rasmussen is showing that Biden is up
00:53:08.120
eight points or something, six or eight points, something like that. And that's a lot.
00:53:14.500
But I saw an analysis by Bruce Stanford on Twitter. I don't know who Bruce is, but I'll just give him
00:53:22.420
credit because this is a real good analysis. And he says that although Biden is clearly headed in the
00:53:28.640
polls, here's the experience in Michigan in 2016 and 2018. So we've seen this, the most two recent
00:53:37.080
elections, same experience. And it goes like this. Every undecided vote went to Trump or to Republicans
00:53:45.740
in the case of the 2018 midterm election. Let me say that again. Every undecided vote went to the
00:53:52.380
Republicans. Okay. And I want to make sure that you heard that right. In Michigan in 2016 and 2018,
00:54:01.360
every undecided vote went to the Republicans. Now, I don't think it was every vote. It must
00:54:07.040
been just most of them. But the point stands. If you take out the absolute part, there had to be
00:54:13.680
some exceptions. But what does that tell you about shy Trump voters? The way this is shaping up,
00:54:25.800
and I suppose I could be wrong, right? You know, it's easy to be blindsided and think you're right,
00:54:32.300
and, you know, Dunning-Kruger and all that. So let me tell you that I'm completely aware
00:54:38.160
that I could be very confident in my prediction and my rightness. I'd be wrong. You know, it wouldn't
00:54:44.620
be that big of a, it wouldn't be a shocker in the world of, you know, strange events. But
00:54:50.720
this looks like a gigantic blowout shaping up. It looks gigantic. I could be wrong, but it sure
00:55:01.100
looking like the president's got a victory here coming up. All right. Those are the things I wanted
00:55:08.640
to talk about today. Yeah, the vote by mail stuff. The fact that the mainstream press is trying to
00:55:19.380
gaslight us, if you want to use that term. It's the wrong term, but they use it a lot. The mainstream
00:55:25.540
press wants us to think that it's crazy to think that mail-in voting could be illegitimate,
00:55:34.780
because it's already been done in states for years, et cetera, some states. But this is, again,
00:55:42.400
just being bad at analyzing things. The thing that you should say is, what's different about 2020
00:55:48.400
from any other situation in which we had mail-in votes? And what's different is the incentive to
00:55:54.820
cheat is through the roof. You know, if there is a penalty for cheating on voting, and people don't
00:56:02.520
really care too much who wins, it's like, yeah, I prefer this candidate, but it's not the end of
00:56:08.040
the world if the other one wins. In that case, you would expect a little bit of cheating, because
00:56:13.740
there's just not that much to gain. But there might be a few people who think they have something to
00:56:17.680
gain. But when you talk about Trump in 2020, the press has hypnotized the masses into thinking
00:56:24.720
there's a Hitler in charge, and it's the end of civilization. If you thought that the alternative
00:56:31.680
to cheating at the election box or cheating on a mail-in vote, if you thought the alternative
00:56:37.560
to cheating was the destruction of civilization, would you be tempted? I hope so. If you're a good
00:56:46.800
person, and you think that you could change or alter the course of history, and that you could save
00:56:53.580
civilization from being destroyed, which is the claim of the mainstream press, basically,
00:56:59.180
wouldn't you cheat? It's the same question of, if you thought an actual Hitler had come to power
00:57:07.500
in the United States, and you could personally kill him, like you could be the assassin, don't you have
00:57:14.260
a responsibility to do it? If the badness is bad enough, you're forgiven for whatever you do about it,
00:57:24.380
because the badness is so bad that you would be allowed to do bad things to get rid of the bigger
00:57:29.360
bad. So here's my, here's my, I guess the bottom line is that the people who are bad at comparing
00:57:39.280
things are going to act like 2020 is just like any other election. People don't care that much who gets
00:57:46.000
elected. Yeah, we have a preference, but we don't care that much. No, that was Gore versus Bush.
00:57:52.060
Gore versus Bush. People had a preference, but not that much. Trump versus Biden. Oh, that's not the
00:58:02.260
same. That is not the same, because nobody really thought that if Gore got elected versus Bush getting
00:58:09.540
elected, it was the end of civilization. Nobody thought that. But with Trump, they have been
00:58:16.240
hypnotized to believe that's an actual real world risk. So that, and the fact that we don't have any
00:58:22.280
baseline to know what mail-in votes should look like in any given county, because we've never had a
00:58:28.020
coronavirus. We've never had Trump running for reelection. We've, we've never had a press that
00:58:33.480
was this illegitimate. We've never had anything like 2020. So anybody who tells you, history tells us,
00:58:41.800
the history with those several states that have been doing mail-in votes, and the history with a different
00:58:47.880
kind of mail-in vote, which is where you request it, which is much safer. Anybody who tells you that
00:58:52.960
those two histories, or the fact that there was a commission that looked into those histories, and that
00:59:00.040
those histories are telling you what's going to happen in 2020, which has nothing to do with the situation
00:59:06.980
that was common to those histories. Anybody who tells you that that analysis makes sense
00:59:13.220
is either a liar, or doesn't know how to analyze things. It's hard to tell which.
00:59:22.340
So that is what we've got. Did you see the latest Joe Biden gaffes? Oh my god.
00:59:31.980
I don't know how anybody can look at those videos. I'm not sure how often the people on the left even
00:59:38.140
see the the Biden gaff videos. But I don't know how you could look at any of those, and think he's
00:59:44.380
ready. I think it was a Joe Rogan who did the analogy that recently, that Biden was like a flashlight
00:59:52.940
that was low on batteries. And you were taking it on a long hike at night. And you're just getting
00:59:59.660
like a little yellow glow out of your your flashlight. And you're thinking, this might be a bad idea.
01:00:06.140
Maybe I won't take a long hike at night with a flashlight with a dying battery. All right,
01:00:12.060
that's all I got for now. And I will talk to you. Later.