Episode 1124 Scott Adams： Fake News, HOAXES, Science Denying, Magic Tricks, and Everything You Thought Was True But Maybe Not
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Summary
In this episode, we have some good news and some not so good news, including a new cure for Coronavirus, a breakthrough in the fight against it, and a story about an internet troll who faked a fake F.B.I. raid on a real person.
Transcript
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yes there we are again smoky California I hope many of you live in states where you can breathe
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the air and do all those things but I don't so it looks like it's gonna be weeks of breathing
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whatever that is out there so I'm basically on house arrest I've got a little asthma issue so
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I can't go outside basically I'm just locked inside for weeks weeks and weeks but do I mind
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not what I have all of you here no no it's all good when you're here and I gotta tell you I can't
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quite appreciate I don't think I could communicate how much I appreciate the time we spend together
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in the morning during this coronavirus situation and now the wildfires I gotta say it really helps
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it really helps to have this connection with all of you and speaking of connections wouldn't you like
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to enjoy the simultaneous sip all you need is a cup or mug or a glass a tank or chalice or stye and a
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canteen jug or flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid I like coffee and join me
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now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better
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it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go
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shall we start with the good news everybody everybody want some good news all right we'll start
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with that there's a report that the University of Pittsburgh scientists have discovered a biomolecule
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biomolecule you know you should probably practice saying biomolecule before you say it out loud for
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the first time in your entire life I have never said the word biomolecule out loud until just this
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moment it wasn't it wasn't smooth but anyway this biomolecule may neutralize coronavirus so it's not
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a vaccine it would be some kind of biomolecule if it works apparently it works in animals which
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generally is not enough to get excited there are a lot of things work in animals that don't work in
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people but this particular biomolecule and come on you've probably just said biomolecule at home just
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to see if you could do it didn't you you did say it out loud biomolecule and apparently it's in the
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sort of general category of things that are generally safe so it seems to just rapidly just absolutely
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whack the coronavirus and and uh it looks promising so we might have something that's I don't know how long
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seems promising my favorite story of the day is uh internet uh troll jacob wall uh faked an fbi
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and an fbi raid on some guy I think he works with jack berkman and so the washington post actually
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picked it up as a real story I have to admit as fakes go this was really well done because the
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the videos and the pictures of what looked to be it really looked like an fbi fbi raid somehow they
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got fbi jackets and they I think they hired actors or something and he puts on this whole fake fbi raid
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and the washington post reported it like it was real daily beast was on to him a little bit early
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you know I can't figure out the next part you know I understand the part about okay internet troll
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puts on a prank it's not his first prank and and it worked really well but was that the only point
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was he just trying to see if he could get the the news to report fake news I don't know I'm not sure
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what the point of that was um there will be some interesting news coming out of Rasmussen a little
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later today I got a little heads up um I won't give you the details but let me just give you a little
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tease so Rasmussen of course does polling and uh you're going to find out some details about this but
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it turns out and this might come as a surprise to you this might come as a big surprise so you know
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put your seat belt on because you're never going to believe this it turns out that anybody who lived
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in a town that had protests slash riots not happy about it they're just not happy about it and will
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will it affect their votes well turns out yes yes so the people who live in places affected by the
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riots looting slash protesting not so much the peaceful protesting but everything that often comes with it
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those people are not happy not happy and here's the part you didn't know because it there are so many
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protests and they concentrated on the population centers if you said to yourself well if you added
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together the entire real estate that every protest was taken in the united states it would be like a
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pinprick on the big united states in terms of space that they occupied you know a few streets in each
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city you know 0.001 percent of the real estate was affected by these protests but it's not really about
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real estate is it it's about people if you happen to live near or within driving distance of where there
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was looting it changed your vote not every time but man people are pissed so where do you see the
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details in that but the biggest news is well let me put this in another context as impossible as this
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might seem by november we might be kind of over the coronavirus i don't mean over it medically i don't
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mean over it in terms of the economy being back to normal we won't be over it in terms of what it's doing
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to us but quoting my late mother who taught me one of the most valuable things you'll ever know about
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people and it goes like this if you want to understand humans here's the thing we can get used
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to anything including hanging that was a little saying you can get used to anything so the problem
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with the coronavirus from the democrats point of view is that they have this complaint about the
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president not handling it the way they wish it would have been handled but it's really going to seem
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like old news by november even while we're still experiencing it because whatever happened in april
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it just feels like a hundred years ago already and we'll talk a little bit more about that but
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don't discount the fact that you simply get used to the coronavirus you just get used to it and then
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whatever's happening at the moment artificially takes a bigger role because you're you know just
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got used to the other thing so if the protests are still happening and there's still new news about it
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and there's new video every day which seems to be the case people are going to vote on the protests
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way more than they're going to vote on coronavirus and will have only to do with the fact that you just
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got used to one and you haven't yet got used to the other one all right um let's see uh i want to
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give you a little context about what makes me look at the world a little differently than other people
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i get asked about this a lot people say to me scott scott what happened to you that makes you see the
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world differently and i've noticed that there are people who took what i would call my journey
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people who coincidentally were doing similar things and had similar experiences often think
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the same way i do and i thought it'd be useful to show you what that looks like here is my path
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to understanding reality when i was a little kid i loved optical illusions and i loved the fact
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that your brain had this this blind spot you could be looking at an illusion and even though you know
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it's really not that it looks like it and so i was always fascinated by how how easily the brain
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could be fooled by an optical illusion something you're looking right at then then i started noticing
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that people had different religions i was learning one religion but people had different ones and i and
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even at the young age of 11 i'd be saying to myself um okay there i don't know what's going on here
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because these religions are completely different so even if i imagine i got lucky and i got the right
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one so luckily i was born into the family that they had the right religion and all the other people
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were getting the wrong religion but or maybe everybody had the wrong religion so there were
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possibilities but the one thing i could say for sure is that everybody who had a different religion
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you could tell that we were not basing our decisions on religion on facts so much or at least
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not all of the world so we could see the people would believe just about anything didn't know who was
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right and who was wrong but it was pretty obvious that billions of humans were otherwise normal
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can believe just about anything then i got interested in magic when i was a little kid
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little kid doing magic tricks and you start learning that there are there predictable let's say
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blocks in your brain there are predictable gaps and blind spots so that you can craft a variety of
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different magic tricks that take advantage of weaknesses and perception now once you start doing
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enough magic tricks and you see you start seeing all the weaknesses and perception it changes how you
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see the world and you start saying well if you know if magic tricks can fool people so easily maybe i
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should look into this a little more i started looking into hypnosis and then persuasion and by the
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time i started analyzing fake news i gotta tell you it was easier it was easier to analyze fake news
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and let me give you an example of what learning magic tricks does if you can see this here's a penny
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all right it's just a penny you can see it there's nothing in this hand watch this i'm going to take this
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penny i'm just going to put my finger on it and i'm going to squeeze it until it becomes a quarter
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you didn't hear that so learning how easily people could get fooled primed me for looking at the fake
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news there is a news or there's a little clip that went around twitter today that i recognized
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immediately as fake news and it was a clip of biden on the view from 2019 and the clip was
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it felt to me like it was obviously edited to take out all of his coherent statements and kind of
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string together a whole bunch of hesitant you know incoherent things now he is a little bit hesitant
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and incoherent but it was clearly edited to get rid of all the coherent parts now i point that out
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because it's the same trick done by the fine people hoax and what did people say when they saw the fine
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people hoax and i said hey that's a hoax they all said the same thing the ones who have been fooled by
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the hoax to a person they said scott it's not a hoax i watched it i saw it with my own eyes
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heard it with my own ears is real but then what about this biden video you watched it with your
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own eyes you heard it with your own ears but it's not real somebody helpfully showed the the full
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video so you can see that it was doctored it's just like the magic trick right you saw a penny in my
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hand so it was a penny had to be a penny you saw it saw it with your own eyes but it was just a magic trick
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once your brain is primed for looking for the magic trick you can see it a lot easier so um here's
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here's the correlation people who were interested in magic tricks when they were kids watch for this
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correlation they're less easily fooled by fake news because they're just primed for it
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all right uh the best freudian slip of the day was kamala harris referring to quote a harris
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administration and then she corrected it uh together with joe biden so here's what she'll do with a
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harris administration uh together with joe biden now what did i teach you
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before this happened all right if you've been watching my periscopes you know one of the things
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you learn in hypnosis class is that these are not accidents now the first i don't know a hundred
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times you see somebody misspeak you say to yourself okay that's like a funny coincidence because when they
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misspoke they said something that it felt like they were revealing some inner truth but you know it's
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just they just used the wrong word nope nope once you start paying attention you'll see it's not an accident
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now i'm not going to say it's never an accident i'm going to my claim will be that um in general it's
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actually meaningful not a hundred percent of the time but it is more meaningful than not do you think it's an
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accident that kamala harris referred to a harris administration you don't say that out loud unless
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you've been thinking it unless it's been part of a conversation so i think she has revealed that at the
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very least there's a conversation going about uh getting rid of biden or how long he'll last or
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something along those lines um there's a story which didn't get big news i don't know if the major
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news covered it but there is a research institute and a researcher who's making a claim that the
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coronavirus that came out of the allegedly came out of the wuhan lab had to be artificial
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that's pretty big news right there's a researcher who seems to know this field who has a claim that
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it could not have been a naturally occurring virus and that she can tell you exactly how they made it
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now that's a pretty big claim not only is she saying that it's man-made but she's claiming she could
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make it herself in other words she already knows the components if you take this you take this i think
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she said in six months you could make this thing is that true well i don't know if it's true but
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there's a claim today that the research institute had some connection with steve bannon now steve bannon
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has been hammering on china for the wuhan you know coronavirus so that's a little flag you have to ask
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yourself huh why is this not you know the headline news and the answer is uh i guess the news business
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has decided it's not entirely credible that doesn't mean it's false remember whenever i use the word
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credible that doesn't mean true or false it just means that the nature of it tells you to be cautious
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about believing it that's all so we'll keep an eye on that um so here's here's another magic trick
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and uh something that people study magic would see the antifa are using a magic trick now most of you
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know this which is and the magic trick is that they they name themselves antifa and then they say
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don't you get it we're anti-fascists so therefore if you're against us you must be a fascist now that's
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a magic trick to force you into thinking a certain way the real trick is that capitalism and fascism are
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the same thing that's the magic trick so instead of saying hey we're going to destroy all capitalism
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which you might say to yourself um that sounds pretty bad because i'm pretty sure if you destroy
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capitalism we all die or we're conquered by china etc and but the antifa gets to say oh capitalism
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who said capitalism i said anti-fascist i didn't even mention capitalism what's what's capitalism got to do
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with it but here's here's how you know that's the magic trick have you ever seen the regular news
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interview somebody from antifa and ask them this question can you tell us is there such a thing as
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a capitalist system that you would not consider fascist there isn't bernie sanders vision of a socialist
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version of capitalism would still be fascist and this is the thing that the news if they did their
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job if we had a real news business they would be calling antifa leaders or representatives just
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somebody who could you know i realize they don't have leaders in the traditional sense that they're
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they're public and identified they do have some kind of coordination but they don't seem to have
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anybody who's the spokesperson but still you could find people who would be willing to talk about it
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so if we had a real news business they would call them on and they say trying to understand anti-fascist
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so i have one question could there ever be a capitalist system that is not fascist and the answer is not
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really now they might try to finesse it by saying sure sure you know if you did everything right
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but you really can't build that system because it would remove incentives human incentives so it
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would it would fall apart so the fact that this dog is not barking meaning that the news business is
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not giving you any any look not an approximate one not a not a glance not anything about what does
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that mean to be anti-fascist nothing it's just not a topic that tells you that the magic trick is
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working because as soon as they focused on it it would fall apart uh all right um do you remember
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some of the things that i said in the beginning of the coronavirus i told you i thought vitamin d
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would be important and now studies seem to be validating that vitamin d might be not just important
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but like really really important uh it's unconfirmed but it's looking that way and now there's a
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a forthcoming study from 23andme showing that your genetic code could affect how how much the
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coronavirus affects you so remember i told you early on you know i've got a feeling there's a genetic
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correlation here and that if we knew what that genetic correlation was we could do way better in
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protecting ourselves because we'd know who needs to be protected and now sure enough so i say this
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because i always tell you that you should watch who is predicting well so on day one practically i was
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saying look at genetics look at vitamin d and correct correct so so you have to give me you give me
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those check marks that doesn't mean i'm right on everything and when i'm wrong you should point it
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out and yeah obesity and uh being african-american and you know there are a whole bunch of things that
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increase your risk all right trump talked to was in california yesterday talking to gavin newson
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and people about the forest fires etc now here's a little fact that you may not have processed when
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you're watching that it's kind of interesting that trump and gavin newson treat each other with an
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unusual amount of respect wouldn't you say you know they they differ no doubt about that but there's
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there's a level of respect there that you don't really it fools you a little bit because he doesn't
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seem to be as nice to every other governor but he's really nice to gavin newson and vice versa
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but you might not know that gavin newson's ex-wife kimberly guilfoyle is has of course been with
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don jr in a relationship for some time now and i'm pretty sure fact check me on this i think that
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gavin newson and kimberly guilfoyle have children right or one child i don't know what the situation is
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but at least one which would mean that president trump basically has a um in effect you know the
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who knows what the relationship will will be in the future but in effect it's like he has a grandchild
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um in law what would you call it uh you know a virtual grandchild a stepson a great a step
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grandchildren or something so gavin newson and president trump share family they actually share
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family and i think that you have to really have that filter on when you see how they interact with
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each other i'm getting confirmation that they they have a son and you can't you can't discount how
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important that is the the personal relationship and the president has been always good with the
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personal relationships anyway what's interesting here is that uh gavin newson was very diplomatic by
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saying yes forest management is a thing that needs to be done better i think we'd all agree but he asked
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the president to be open-minded to the difference of opinion about the importance of climate change
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and he the way he worded it was just really good i have to admit really good in the sense that he
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needed to be super diplomatic but still get his point across i think he did i'd say that communication
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wise he did a good job and then the president because he can't go five minutes without controversy
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you know i listened to this and i was thinking to myself don't say it don't say it you know i'm talking
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about trump i'm waiting for him to respond about the climate change stuff and the whole time i'm just
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no don't do it don't do it and then the president smiles and he goes he goes uh it will get cooler
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and i'm like oh no oh no oh no it will get cooler he didn't have to say that but i think we're all
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used to it by now that that whatever is the provocative thing he's going to say it if there's a if there's a
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provocative way to say something in a non-provocative way you might get the provocative one
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now here's what's interesting my criticism of that is only in the way it's going to make people feel
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and you know the politics of it my criticism of that is not that he's wrong because my guess is
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that you know temperature will will probably modulate up and down i happen to be on the on the
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side that says in all likelihood temperatures are going up on average i don't think it's the end of
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the world i think we'll figure out how to mitigate and you know the disasters have gone down every year
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because we're better at managing everything from hurricanes to floods to you name it forest fires
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even we're better at managing in a weird way um there's more to that story but the point is that
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we would figure out how to deal with it even if it's getting warm which it probably is the president
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goes for the provocative statement that it'll get cooler you just watch
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now is that true well it might we might have a few years where it's a little cooler
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on average but i don't think in the long term it's going to stay cool um i could be wrong
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you know science science can surprise you but at this point i would say the the the weight of
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science suggests that the temperatures will probably go up we just don't know what that looks like
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all right so i wouldn't have said that if i were the president but i doubt it changes anything at this
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point um and i would say this is another example where and i say this often if you think there's
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such a thing as a good president and a bad president i think you're wrong there's no such thing as a good
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president and a bad president there are presidents who are well suited to certain tasks and maybe not
00:26:48.220
well suited for others the president is just absolutely not suited for anything but optimism
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he just doesn't have a non-optimism mode he doesn't give bad news now does that mean he's a bad president
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no it means for some things where maybe we should be a little more worried people would like to hear
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him give a little more negativity but if you want to get your economy back who do you want it's like
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ghostbusters it's like okay if you want some fake optimism about something he's just not always the
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right guy because sometimes things need to be treated more seriously but if you want to goose the economy
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if you want to get a peace deal with another country if you want to win three or four nobel prizes
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he's your guy nobody does what he does well better than he does it let me let me put it in let me frame
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it in the way you have already said before in my opinion the president is bad at easy stuff
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right the president president trump in my opinion is bad bad does a bad job at easy things now an easy
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thing would be saying telling the country oh things are going to be bad i have great empathy for you
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let me say things about you know to end divisiveness etc all of the stuff that biden says every day
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is the easy stuff this president you know waves his hand at the easy stuff but i don't think he's good at
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it i don't think he's good at it but here's the thing the president and the reason that i've supported
00:28:36.140
him from the start he can do things that are impossible so so here's the frame the president
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can do things that are literally just impossible he's just not good at things that are easy
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now the good news is the easy stuff doesn't seem to matter as much does it matter that he he turned
00:28:58.140
the entire psychology of north korea around so that they're not really our enemy anymore yeah who thought
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he could do that it seemed impossible and then he did it did you think that there would be two
00:29:11.900
peace deals in the middle east nope it seemed impossible and then he did it did you think that
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when he pulled the the forces out of the area that the kurds were in in syria and all the smart people
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said no no no they will be slaughtered that'll be the worst thing in the world and then it didn't
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happen it was impossible to pull our troops out without a slaughter and then he did it it was
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fine it was impossible to move the embassy to jerusalem he did it it was impossible to recognize
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the the golan heights and they just did it it was impossible to get um unemployment down to what it
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was before the coronavirus and then he did it how about uh telehealth just just a tiny little example
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from a mountain of things that he changed with executive orders did you think it was possible
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that we would have telehealth that's now legal across state lines where it had been banned before
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i didn't think so i mean technically anything's possible but i didn't think it was going to happen
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and he just signed a piece of paper and it happened and that was like the law of the land essentially
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and so that's the frame not so good on little unimportant stuff that where you have to say
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things just the right way but when it comes to things that are literally literally considered
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impossible he does it routinely how do you not notice that right how do you not notice that
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somebody says uh where is kim jong-un uh i haven't thought about that the other day
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i need a fact check on this but i think i saw the president the other day out of the blue
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with no prompting i don't think anybody had even asked the question he tweeted that kim jong-un was
00:31:10.380
completely healthy that happened right did we not see president trump tweet that kim jong-un is healthy
00:31:18.780
just the other day when nobody was questioning it what's that mean well i think it means that kim jong-un
00:31:30.460
either asked for a favor because maybe he wanted that reported or the president is just clever enough
00:31:38.140
that he knows that treating kim jong-un with even more respect than you'd expect
00:31:44.220
giving him a little extra respect in public and basically having his back because that would be a
00:31:51.420
case of having his back the president just stepped up and he just had kim jong-un's back now do you
00:31:58.460
think that kim jong-un is healthy i don't i i think that his sister maybe maybe is getting groomed to take
00:32:07.500
over we we hear the reports of that there's probably something going on and it might be a pretty big deal
00:32:14.540
so but the president played it perfectly played it perfectly he just give he just has the kim jong-un's
00:32:20.780
back and that will be good for the country all right um the the thing that i wish trump had said about
00:32:29.660
the forest fires is that we need nuclear energy but i think that's just sort of a people can't quite
00:32:36.460
understand the topic yet probably eighty percent of the country still thinks you can't deal with the
00:32:41.580
nuclear waste you can it's not that big a deal a lot of the country thinks it's dangerous it's not
00:32:49.420
they just are not up to date and i think the president maybe just doesn't want that fight
00:32:54.300
again i'm not a mind reader i would be only speculating but it would be the obvious thing to say
00:33:00.780
and it would be provocative so you would expect him to go there but not uh here's something that
00:33:06.460
somebody noticed when uh gavin newsom was blaming climate change for the fires if you see the map
00:33:13.900
the fires go from the bottom of california to the the top of uh the country and then the fires of
00:33:22.540
which there are dozens or hundreds and like the whole state of california looks like it's in fire in
00:33:28.300
different places and you go right up to the border of canada and there's no fires so after the canadian
00:33:35.340
border no fires now is the climate that different a mile on the other side of the border versus a mile
00:33:45.980
on our side i don't think so i don't think it's that different so you have to ask yourself is it
00:33:53.660
management of the forests or not now the thing that i would like to see is that our forests that have the
00:34:00.140
biggest risk we should be cutting these i don't know 50 yard paths crisscrossing them so that there
00:34:07.020
will be a natural fire break should something start but i would also like to see those 50 yard fire
00:34:13.420
breaks through the forest turned into what what am i going to say what should all those fire breaks that
00:34:20.620
we need to build across all these forests what should they be in addition to fire breaks that's right
00:34:27.740
they should be bicycle paths you should be able to go anywhere in california on a bicycle without
00:34:34.300
reaching traffic you should it just used to be bicycle paths that are also coincidentally
00:34:41.660
good for the forest could you charge people a toll to use the bicycle paths and use that money to help
00:34:48.620
pay for the forest forest fire forest fire remediation i would say yes if i can ride a hundred miles
00:34:57.580
on a bicycle path through through cool woods and stuff you know as long as i had a paved path
00:35:03.660
yeah i'd pay for that absolutely i'd pay for that a little bit of a toll um here's a uh here's an
00:35:13.180
update cnn after reporting for months and months and months yes cnn has been reporting that every
00:35:22.060
expert will tell you that mail-in votes are fine they're fine there's no problem with mail-in votes
00:35:29.820
the president's a big old liar there's no problem mail-in votes they've worked in other countries
00:35:35.420
they've worked in other states they've been working for years nobody's finding a problem
00:35:41.740
therefore the president is completely wrong about the risk of mail-in votes well until yesterday
00:35:48.700
when cnn here's the important part cnn is reporting that mail-in votes are a total nightmare
00:35:57.980
and that they're completely inaccurate and there's plenty of evidence that they don't work
00:36:05.180
what did you see that cnn just did a complete 180 a complete 180 and they act like they had never
00:36:15.900
said the other thing they just they just pretended that months of reporting about how safe it was
00:36:23.500
just doesn't exist anymore and now the report is wait for it it gets better this isn't the whole story
00:36:31.020
it gets better part of the report on cnn said that one of the reasons that mail-in votes are so
00:36:38.460
and i quote one university of florida study found black and hispanic voters in the state
00:36:46.460
were twice as likely to have their ballots rejected as white voters
00:36:59.500
right now this doesn't have anything to do with being black or hispanic
00:37:03.980
all right let me be clear about this this difference almost certainly has to do with
00:37:08.700
economics almost certainly has to do with education which is related right so if you're
00:37:14.620
in a low socioeconomic group what are the odds that you're good at filling out paperwork
00:37:22.380
right i have a terrible time filling out any paperwork even the simplest form i fill in the wrong
00:37:28.620
blocks and i got the wrong date and i i signed my name in the wrong place so you would expect it's
00:37:35.980
completely predictable that the higher educated you are regardless of ethnicity has nothing to do with
00:37:42.460
that but the higher educated you are you would expect you're more likely to fill out a form correctly
00:37:50.860
is that is that even controversial the more educated the more likely you can fill out a form
00:37:56.060
the more likely you can do anything that requires a little bit of thinking so i wouldn't make this a
00:38:05.020
black and white or hispanic thing has more to do with education but the practical impact of it is that
00:38:11.660
it's racist mail massive mail-in votes are according to cnn this isn't me according to cnn mail-in votes the
00:38:22.940
thing that they've been promoting for months are racist because that would be the outcome the black
00:38:29.340
voters would be disenfranchised without knowing it because their votes would be rejected and they
00:38:34.220
wouldn't know they were rejected all right here's an update on my who i call my smartest uh democrat
00:38:41.100
friend who is suffering from tds here's a list of things he believed a few weeks ago all right these
00:38:48.060
are all the things he believed to be true he believed that the president suggested drinking
00:38:52.780
bleach to cure coronavirus not he believed the fine people hoax he believed that um that biden doesn't
00:39:01.020
lie that trump does he believed that mail-in voting was dependable because cnn told them that last week
00:39:08.780
before this week uh he uh let's see he believed that the protests were probably about trump yeah trump
00:39:18.140
was the cause of the protest uh he believed the russian bounties on american soldiers which a report
00:39:23.740
today says they don't have evidence of that yet don't know if we ever will but they don't have evidence
00:39:28.780
of it and he believed that he still believes as of this morning that hydroxychloroquine was proven
00:39:35.260
dangerous so not so much that it doesn't work against coronavirus but he still believes as of today
00:39:43.900
the coronavirus or that hydroxychloroquine was shown to be dangerous by science none of it's true
00:39:51.500
absolutely none of it so i've been i've been chipping away at him so you know i sent him the reports about
00:39:58.460
the uh the uvc light in a ventilator that's injecting a disinfectant so now now he understands that the
00:40:06.700
drinking bleach thing was a hoax i also sent him the cnn update about the mail-in votes so now he believes
00:40:16.140
that mail-in votes are in fact racist and undependable so once you take somebody's firm belief and you
00:40:24.140
completely obliterate it what do they do do they say you know i was quite fooled by that fake news
00:40:31.580
now that you've informed me i changed my opinion and i acknowledge that you were right and man was i
00:40:38.700
completely wrong up until now thank you for correcting me did that happen no no but here's the fun part
00:40:48.860
what didn't happen is cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance is when somebody finds
00:40:54.940
their worldview is wrong and then they just spout word salad instead he simply softly redirected the
00:41:03.020
conversation and here was his answer uh he talked about voting rights as a partisan issue he talked about
00:41:11.100
vote suppression uh and how not enough people vote so his answer to everything you believe from the news
00:41:20.220
about mail-in voting being dependable from the same sources that told you it was dependable
00:41:25.660
they now say unambiguously it's a mess he didn't say oh gosh i was wrong he said there are other problems
00:41:34.140
with voting unrelated now what that means is and if you study persuasion you can kind of see where
00:41:42.300
this is going that is somebody who's been persuaded someone who has not been persuaded would say something
00:41:49.660
still on the topic but it just wouldn't make sense here he's saying things that make complete sense
00:41:55.580
but he's quite intentionally changed the conversation without without mentioning it that means
00:42:00.860
bullseye that he understands that he has been fooled and i gave him some other debunks we'll see if that
00:42:08.300
makes any difference um i still think the biggest issue about the coronavirus is the question whether
00:42:15.420
the president did enough testing and when i found out more about other countries and how they did
00:42:22.540
allegedly superior testing i say to myself let's dig into that a little bit why is that there's some
00:42:30.620
other country did better testing then here's south korea the reason that south korea did so well in
00:42:36.460
testing there was a private company who when the news first came out about the coronavirus
00:42:43.820
they realized that they had the capability to quickly and ahead of time i think they started in
00:42:50.380
january maybe even sooner i think they started in january but they quickly ramped up because they
00:42:56.140
were a private company and apparently there was nothing stopping them from doing it so they ramped up
00:43:02.060
now would you say then that south korea their leadership did better than the united states to
00:43:10.460
which i say well okay you're not analyzing this right if that private company that did so well and did a
00:43:17.980
really good job in south korea what if that was just an american company what if an american company had been
00:43:24.460
as clever as this private company would an american company have said you know they haven't asked for
00:43:30.540
it yet but i'm going to get busy on this because i think there could be a billion dollar opportunity
00:43:34.460
so we're just going to we're just going to start making test kits nobody asked us to it's not approved
00:43:39.980
by the fda or the cdc but we're going to do it is that a leadership thing because i'm not sure that
00:43:48.780
leadership is even part of the question if south korea got their solution because a private company
00:43:55.580
acted both aggressively and early and wisely it took a good risk management approach that
00:44:01.100
was probably good for their profits as well that has nothing to do with management that has nothing
00:44:05.420
to do with leadership they just had a company that was pretty smart i think germany had a similar
00:44:13.180
situation in which they just had uh i think germany had a private company that was also big in this
00:44:19.740
space so the private company was able to do something quickly with testing now in the united states i don't
00:44:27.580
know the full detail but i guess the cdc's kits were incomplete it didn't have all the parts so there
00:44:33.500
was a part where the cdc fell apart but where were our private companies i think our private companies
00:44:40.460
were probably limited by maybe fda and cdc uh red tape so if there's a criticism about the president
00:44:48.700
and there could be by the way i just don't quite understand this this issue yet if there's an issue
00:44:53.820
with president trump's performance i would think it would be in the in the area of not getting rid of
00:45:00.220
red tape maybe maybe there was something our private companies couldn't do fast enough because maybe
00:45:07.180
they were barred from doing it is that a thing so um there are a lot of people will base their
00:45:13.980
decision on what they believe about the president's leadership on testing and they won't know anything
00:45:20.460
about what actually happened they won't know that it was probably just private companies making good
00:45:25.420
decisions in other countries that might be it that could be the whole story we don't know
00:45:31.500
uh christopher ruffo is reporting that you know we thought that the president did a executive order
00:45:40.140
banning critical race theory training but apparently the cdc is just going to move ahead and do it anyway
00:45:46.860
so the cdc is going to have training classes on critical race theory i think they tried to
00:45:53.260
finesse it by not calling it that but it is and i have to wonder at what point does this go to the
00:45:59.580
supreme court at what point does the supreme court say you can't teach this critical race theory stuff
00:46:06.860
because it's just racist because it is racist it's obviously racist it's gigantically racist
00:46:14.220
so what is that going to happen all right um would you like to be scared about the future of humankind
00:46:22.140
i can deliver that and it goes like this in my opinion the protests and riots that you're seeing
00:46:29.500
around the country could not happen without artificial intelligence now there could have been some protests
00:46:37.260
there might have been some things but in terms of the extent of what we're seeing and the way it's
00:46:41.580
affecting the country we would not have this if not for ai here's what i mean now you're going to
00:46:49.580
tell me but scott the kind of ai we have now and our algorithms etc is still controlled by people
00:46:57.660
people program them people tweak them it's people people making decisions they're just using ai as a
00:47:04.780
convenient tool that i believe is a mistake in perception what's really while it is true that the
00:47:12.460
humans are tweaking them the way you know in a variety of ways what's also true is the algorithm
00:47:17.900
forces the humans to do what the humans do once the algorithm through trial and error has determined
00:47:24.700
what gets you the most profit the human doesn't have a choice of not following it because the human
00:47:30.780
will be fired if they don't pursue profit so you say to yourself but the human has a choice
00:47:37.340
they don't have to do what the ai says just because the ai says let's feed these ads or this this news to
00:47:44.220
people because it'll get them all worked up and they'll be angry and then they'll click more the
00:47:48.940
human you could say in some technical sense they could decide not to do it but then they would be
00:47:56.140
fired and then the next person would do it so you don't really in a practical sense have any way to
00:48:02.940
fight the artificial intelligence once it decides that this is how you make money
00:48:07.900
you're gonna do it that's the way humans are wired so we are already at the point
00:48:19.500
humanity you know a lot of people are worried like what happens someday when the ai gets smart enough
00:48:27.020
that you know it's it's sentient and then it's making our decisions well i don't think you could
00:48:31.820
argue it's sentient but it's already making the decisions that is literally true ai is determining
00:48:40.460
how mad you are what news you saw and what you clicked on and that will determine the government
00:48:48.380
because our government has to react to what the the news and the public collectively want
00:48:54.460
right the government in some cases you know in limited cases can do something the public isn't
00:49:00.940
demanding but for the most part they have to do what the public demands and the public is only
00:49:06.220
demanding what the news and social media tells them to think and it only does that because the ai
00:49:13.100
is telling them what to think so for all practical practical purposes
00:49:17.900
artificial intelligence is running the united states it is that it's already done so there's that
00:49:25.900
blue mike bloomberg is going to spend 100 million dollars in florida trying to make sure that the
00:49:36.060
democrats win florida and i i thought to myself all right i believe in free speech and people should
00:49:42.860
be able to use the money the way they want but when when the founders of this country were designing a
00:49:48.700
system at what point did they understand that one person could spend a hundred million dollars
00:49:55.740
in a swing state and determine the election would that be legal do you think if the founders knew
00:50:03.500
that could have happened i mean i don't think they could have conceived of somebody with so much money
00:50:09.020
that would have been hard to imagine although you could argue that george washington was one of the
00:50:13.900
richest people in the world if you normalize it um but uh why is that legal i understand that it is legal
00:50:25.420
but shouldn't we look into that a little bit could you know i feel like there should be some kind of
00:50:31.340
limit on what one person can do you know if you said to me well mike bloomberg can put in up to 10
00:50:38.060
million dollars that's still a ton of money but i'd say all right all right because there'll be other
00:50:42.940
billionaires that put 10 million the other way but to have one person put a hundred million into one
00:50:49.260
swing state or one that could be a swing state that's that's a big risk to the republic i'm surprised
00:50:57.820
that that's legal all right um that is all i wanted to talk about somebody says you don't even vote
00:51:07.260
so uh this year i am going to vote i registered to vote this year the only reason i'm registering to
00:51:14.380
vote this year is for self-defense because i do think that this is this year is unusual and i think
00:51:21.580
that uh anybody who supported trump um would be in a lot of trouble if he doesn't win there could be
00:51:28.700
violence there could be discrimination there could be any any norm any number of things that could be bad
00:51:34.940
so just for self-defense i'll be voting for trump there you go all right um
00:51:43.740
what does he get in return what does bloomberg get in return yeah it's a good question isn't it
00:51:51.500
somebody says kimberly's son was from a prior marriage marriage you mean before gavin newsom we'll
00:51:58.060
do a fact check on that because i might be wrong about her her son but uh there's still there's
00:52:04.620
still a connection with gavin newsom even if it's indirect
00:52:11.660
all right the slaughter meter is the slaughter meter is at about 200 at the moment
00:52:17.580
um almost every day that goes by it looks better for trump and worse for biden and i
00:52:24.700
until that changes this slaughter meter is at about 200 all right that's all i got for now and i will