Episode 1228 Scott Adams： I Teach You How to Select the Correct Size For a COVID-19 Relief Check
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
157.9836
Summary
In this episode, Scott Adams explains how you can reprogram your brain to make it more productive, and more productive in general, by reprogramming your brain with every experience you have. It's a simple thing you can do, but it's a big change in the way you think about your life.
Transcript
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I didn't see you there. Come on in. Come on in. It's time. You found it. Yeah. It's time
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for Coffee with Scott Adams. The best time of the day. The best. Number one. And what
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makes it so good? Well, it's a participation thing. It's where you become one with people
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around the world simultaneously with the simultaneous sip. Good morning, Omar. Good
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to see you. And if you'd like to participate in the simultaneous sip, the best thing in the world
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today, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chelsea, a canteen jug or a flask,
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a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the
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unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better except for
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your coronavirus checks. It's called the simultaneous sip and it's going to happen right now. Go.
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Ah. Yeah. That was pretty good. Pretty good. Well, here's your lesson for the day.
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Have you ever had this experience where you had some problems in your life, but then you
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drank some alcohol or you smoked some something or you did some hallucinogens and suddenly your
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problems were exactly the same, but you don't feel bad about it. Your subjective, you know,
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your subjective experience could be fine, even though your problems are all the same. Now,
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if you have problems and you're feeling good about yourself, that's a bad situation because if you're
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feeling good, but there are problems you need to solve, maybe you're not going to solve them because,
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well, you feel good. Why should you do anything? So you do want to make sure that you feel bad enough
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about your problems to solve them. But during a 24-hour day, most of that 24-hour days, you're not
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going to have anything that you could do to solve your problems. Sometimes you have to sleep and bathe and
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get other stuff done. So how do you feel good during that time that there's just nothing you can do about
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your problems? You're doing other things then. Well, if you could find a way to hack your brain
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so that when you can work on your problems, you feel bad about them because that would be motivating,
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but the moment there's nothing you can do, you could flip a switch and just feel good about your life,
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even with the same amount of problems. And then when it's time to work about them,
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you go back. Now, what if you could do that? Wouldn't that be incredible, right? Think how
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different your life would be if the only time you worried about your problems were the times that you
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could actually do something. You know, you could work harder or you could try something and do
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something. And I would call that trying to make that happen, I call collectively brain hacking,
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meaning tricks that you use on your own brain to modify it, to permanently restructure it so it's
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more effective. Now, can you rewire your own brain? Yeah. Yeah, you do it all the time. If you go to
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school, for example, and you educate yourself, you're creating a physical change in your brain because
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you can't store memories and learn things without new, you know, new structures literally physically
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growing in your brain. So you physically reprogram your brain with every experience. All I'm suggesting
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is that brain hacking is being a little bit more directive about it, where you're saying, okay,
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what specifically do I do now? And here's your micro lesson on this. I'm not going to solve this whole
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brain hacking thing because it's a big field. I'll just give you one little thing to think about.
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And this one little thing is going to grow. It's a little idea, a little reframing, that even when
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you hear it, you're going to say, uh, I kind of already knew that. But it's not that you didn't know
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it. It's that you may not have used it as your frame or your filter on life, which is a little
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different than simply knowing something is true. Here's what I'm going to add to it. Have you had
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this experience? I'm hoping most of you have had the following experience. First of all, if you've
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ever done any of the hallucinogens or whatever, you've probably experienced having all the same
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problems, but yet you feel happy about it. Likewise, without doing any kind of illegal substance,
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wouldn't you like to be able to reproduce that? And one of the things you'll notice is, and I hope most
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of you've had this experience, have you ever had incredible sex, not just ordinary sex, but like
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incredible sex, the kind that were, where even though you might've had a lot of sex in your life,
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there'll be like a few occasions that you'll remember forever. You ever had that happen? Just,
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I hope so. I hope you've all had that one occasion where it's like, oh my goodness,
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I didn't even know this was possible. Here's what I want you to remember. When you're in that mode
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and after you're done with it and you're still sort of in the, the chemicals are flooding your
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brain and you're feeling good about it, here's the tiny, tiny little tip that will grow. Consider that
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while you're feeling amazing. All of your problems are exactly the same, but you're feeling amazing.
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Now, does that sound like a big deal? Because you already knew that, right? Was there anybody here
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who didn't know it feels good to have great sex? So some of you should be saying, I don't think you
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told us anything. I feel like we all knew that that feels good. The only thing I'm adding is the
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reframing part. Remind yourself, and it's the reminding yourself that's the important part,
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because that's what turns it into a filter over time, repetition. Remind yourself every time you
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can find yourself in one of those situations, doesn't matter if it's because you had great sex
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or just something good happened. Remind yourself that you feel good while all of your problems
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are exactly the same. Now, you might think that's not a big deal, and the first time you think of it,
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it won't be. The second time you think about it, it also won't be. It's a little teeny thing like a
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seed that will grow forever. So think of this little acorn as you're planting it in the yard,
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and you've got a long life ahead of you, and in 40 years you're really going to like that
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oak tree that you planted. But it might take 40 years. I'm saying that over the course of your life,
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you can keep working on that little thought every time you have a moment of peace in this terrible
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world. Tell yourself, huh, none of my problems are fixed, and yet I feel good. And you'll find over
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time that you can reproduce that, and you can find that good feeling even in the context of everything
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going bad because you remember it, and you focused on it, and you filtered on it. And suddenly you'll find
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that you're, well, maybe not suddenly, but over time, you'll find that you can experience a happy day
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even if things are not exactly where you want them. Well, this is a very long way to tell you that I'm in a
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better mood today. But moving on to next topic, there's a thing that's going to happen this year
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in politics that needs a name. So I'm going to suggest a name for it. You know, it's good to have
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a name for Trump derangement syndrome, because if you have a name for it, everybody can refer to it
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without explaining the whole thing again. So here's a concept. I'm going to give a name to it. I'm going
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to call it the Trump Contrast Problem, or the TCP, if you want to, if you like your acronyms,
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the Trump Contrast Problem. And the problem specifically is for Biden. And it goes like this.
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When Trump was, well, he's still in office, but during Trump's administration, no matter what he did,
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he would be viciously criticized, right? So if you're a Democrat, you went through four years of
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everything Trump did was bad, because the media you consumed told you that it didn't matter what he
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did. You know, with a few rare exceptions, right? They did say warp speed was a good idea. But with
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rare exceptions, pretty much whatever Trump does is the bad thing. But what happens when Trump is no
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longer the focus of the story? And let's say he's moved on to another career, and it's just Biden.
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And Biden's just doing his job. There's a problem that Biden is going to run into that you can start
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seeing it form now, but it's going to get bigger. And it's the fact that his contrast with Trump,
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once Trump is no longer the topic, which they have to say bad things about him every moment of every
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day, once he just becomes an historical figure, I mean, moderate historical, because it's recent,
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people are going to look at what he did quite differently. Here's your first example.
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Here's what Biden said about the COVID situation. He said, quote, Joe Biden said,
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our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us, he said. So we need to
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prepare ourselves to steal our spine. Now, how did you feel when Joe Biden told you that the darkest
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days are ahead of us? Do you see it? That's the Trump contrast problem. If Trump had never existed,
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and any president, Biden or somebody else came out and said, our darkest days are ahead of us,
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you know, I'm just getting you ready. So you need to be ready for this. You wouldn't have really
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noticed it was wrong, would you? Because there would be nothing to compare it to. You'd say, well,
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I'm glad he's warning us. He's being perfectly honest. You don't want your president to lie to
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you, right? It looks honest. It looks useful. If there were nothing to compare it to, you'd say,
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yeah, that's pretty, that's good presidenting. He's telling us to shape up and look out for all this
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danger. But because Trump is the optimist of all optimists, when you see Biden's communication style,
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it's such a bummer. It's like, it's all down and negative and things are going to happen.
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You say to yourself, I get why Biden is trying to be honest, so that we're not, you know, all
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Pollyannas. But I kind of did like the Trump optimism, right? Don't you already miss it? When you
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hear something like that, you miss it. Trump was saying we're going to do Project Warp Speed,
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we're going to beat this thing. You know, even though there'll be deaths, of course, we'll still
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get the economy open. So Trump is nonstop optimism, even to a flaw, because you could argue that his
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optimism cost him his job, right? Because the coronavirus was sort of a mismatch for his optimism.
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You needed to be a little bit more medical for the public to be comfortable about it. So the fake
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news turned his optimism into a negative, they could have easily turned it into a positive.
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Imagine if the fake news had said, yeah, the president's saying it's no big deal, but he's an
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optimist. So keep that in mind. But here's what the scientists say, make up your own mind.
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Right? Imagine if the fake news simply framed it correctly. Your president is always an optimist.
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But be warned, your scientists are saying something that's a little slightly different,
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a little less positive. You've got two different messages. One comes from somebody you know is an
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optimist. Keep that in mind. Scientists are saying something different, might be a little less
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optimistic. How would that be bad? Would you feel underserved by your news if they just said, yeah,
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you know, the president's going to be on the optimist side? Now, which of those methods works better?
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Optimism? Or not? Well, it kind of depends, right? If what you're trying to do is Operation Warp Speed,
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would Biden have done that if the scientists told them it couldn't be done? Because that's what
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happened. All the experts said, you know, you could go faster, but it's going to take four or five years.
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That's what the experts said. And Biden says, I will listen to the experts. Biden guaranteed you,
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he guaranteed it by making his primary, I'd say his primary, really, his primary campaign theme,
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which I think he will keep, by the way, is that he will be consistent with the experts.
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If Biden had been president and kept his promise, there would be no vaccine for maybe four years.
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Think about that. You don't have to wonder, you don't have to wonder if Biden would have done a
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good job. He wouldn't have, because he's very aggressively telling you he wouldn't have done
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the most important thing which will get us out of this. He wouldn't have done it, right? I mean,
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it would have happened eventually, but he wouldn't have done it. So yeah, you've got a big Trump
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contrast problem. Every time Biden does something now, people are going to say, I remember us
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criticizing Trump for that. But once you see the other way it works, Trump doesn't look so bad,
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does he? You're going to be amazed at how Trump's approval goes up in time. Because once the fake news
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noise dies down, and you can just look at what he did, just get all the noise out and just say,
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well, what did he do? It's going to be impressive, super impressive. I believe Trump, if he does
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nothing else, and it looks like that will be close to true, maybe, he will be one of the greatest
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presidents of all time, just based on record. And I'm sure of that. I'm positive of that. In fact,
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that's one thing that I don't have any doubt. I don't have any doubt that his historical reputation
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will be far higher than his current one. I'm still waiting for that big Trump military coup that
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everybody was warning me about, you know, because he's a big old crazy guy, and he doesn't obey the
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Constitution. And even if he lost the election, he's just going to get the military to surround the
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White House and stay in the job. So are you seeing anything like that for me? This is another one of
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those situations where if you were, probably you were a Democrat, if you thought this, if you thought
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that Trump was actually going to try to stay in office, while the entire process, as corrupt as it
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might be, while the process says he lost, and Biden was the president, if you really thought he was
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going to actually do that, you have to look at your ability to predict, because it's really bad. There
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was never really any risk of President Trump trying to stay in office by force. None. Do you know why?
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Do you want to give me an, do you want to hear an easy reason why? Because his family and his
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business are not protected. Just imagine if you would, that it's, and it's, it's stupid to imagine
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it, because it's so ridiculous, it will never happen. Imagine if you would, that Trump said,
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yeah, I think I lost the vote, or even if I thought I won the vote, I'm going to get the military to
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keep me in office anyway. What happens the day he does that? Every Trump property burns to the
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ground. Am I right? Think about it. The day that a hypothetical Trump, you know, tried to keep his
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position while actually losing on paper the election, the day that he said the military is the only thing
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keeping me in power. Every Trump property would burn to the ground. Every Trump family member
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who was not protected by the military at that moment would be rounded up by the public. The public would
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find all the family members and say, we're going to hold on to your family members until something
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changes, right? There isn't any practical way that a President Trump could hold power with a military,
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because there's just too much exposed everything. It just can't be done. There's no way he would win,
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right? And there would always be enough people in the military to take him out, right? You know,
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imagine, if you will, that somehow a President, whether it was Trump or anybody else, imagine if
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somehow he got a general to agree. Sorry, all right, I got a general to agree, and the general orders his
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troops to do whatever, circle, you know, protect the capital or whatever. You'd still have to get all
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the people, the actual military, they'd all have to kind of be on board, and I don't think that's
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going to happen, right? Even if you get the general to say to do it. Imagine you're in the military.
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You've taken all the oaths of protecting the country, etc. You've taken an oath, an oath to
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protect the country. And then your general says, instead of following the Constitution, we're just
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going to run a coup. So, you know, instead of doing your normal stuff of protecting the country,
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now we're going to attack the country. And you're in the military, and your own management,
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your own leadership tells you to attack your own country, right? Now, they could try to sell it as
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protecting the country, whatever, but it's going to look like attacking the country to some number
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of the people in the military. If you put me in the military, just average person, I'm in the military,
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and you say, Scott, orders have come down. You have to surround the Capitol and keep this president who,
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on paper, lost the election, but he wants to stay. What do I do? Well, I don't go. And they say,
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well, we'll put you in jail. I'll say, as opposed to being a traitor? Okay, I'll take jail. If those
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are my two choices, my two choices are overthrow the United States or go to jail. I'm going to go to
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jail. I'm going to pick that one every time. And let me, and I don't know how to say this without
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getting canceled. So I'm going to say this in an indirect way so I don't get canceled, okay?
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If you took a thousand military people with weapons, and you put them in the general vicinity
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of the president, you can't guarantee that all of those weapons will be pointed at the public.
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That's all I'm saying. I'm just saying that it would be the world's shortest coup because out
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of a thousand patriots, let's say military members who are, you know, hypothetically protecting the
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president, you're telling me out of a thousand ordinary American citizens who are trained in the
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military, patriotic, you're telling me there's not one of them that would take out the president for
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the benefit of the country. Not one of them. That's a lot of guns in one place. They'd all have
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to be on the same side. Now, how does somebody like Iran or Putin get any kind of a military to
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protect them? Well, it's hard. You don't take rank and file military and say, okay, now you're protecting
00:20:30.100
me. Because even Putin and even the Ayatollah wouldn't trust rank and file military. They have
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to create their own like secret police. And you want to make sure that everybody's in your secret
00:20:42.120
military. You know where their family is. So if they turn bad, you kill their family, right? That's
00:20:47.960
how the dictators do it. So in order to have a military force that would keep a dictator in power,
00:20:53.560
you can't use your regular military. You're going to have to use some kind of a, yeah,
00:20:59.160
something like the SS or the Revolutionary Guard. You need some kind of a special military. So none
00:21:06.020
of that exists. So anybody who had a fantasy about Trump staying in power, you just don't know how
00:21:11.220
anything works. Nothing could have worked that way. Actor Kevin Sorbo had a funny tweet. He said,
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this election reminds me of the time all the security cameras outside of Epstein's cell shut
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off. And I thought, that's one of those perfect, if we live in a simulation, there's code reuse.
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Because it does feel like that, doesn't it? You know, as analogies go, doesn't it feel like this is
00:21:38.220
just the same code? They just took the cameras off of Epstein, and they also took the cameras off the
00:21:44.120
election. It's basically the same story. They just changed the characters.
00:21:48.760
All right. So Trump tweeted this morning the video of the Georgia ballot counting people from
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the video camera. And it shows a woman named Ruby. She's so famous that we know her by her first name.
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Everybody knows who Ruby is if you're following politics. So Ruby, who apparently has lawyered up
00:22:09.860
so we don't get to talk to her, but she is seen there scanning the same group of ballots three times.
00:22:16.760
Now, you've got it on video. It's very clearly, and I would say this is almost certainly true,
00:22:25.140
the video seems to be pretty clear. It's the same ballots. She puts them in, they go through the
00:22:31.040
machine, she walks over, she picks them up, she puts them through again, and she scans them three times.
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Doesn't that look a little suspicious? All right. So if you see the same ballots
00:22:44.120
scanned three times, do you have proof? Proof, I say, or at least really strong evidence
00:22:51.040
that fraud happened? What kind of credibility should you put on a video that shows you the exact
00:22:57.540
crime? Okay. Let's see if I've taught you anything. Have you learned anything in 2020?
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What percent credibility would you put on a video that shows the crime? It's right in front of you.
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From zero to 100%, tell me how reliable the video should be. I'm seeing 50%, 100%, zero.
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Zero percent? Zero, you say. Okay. I'm seeing more zeros. 10, 10%, 10%, 10%, 25%, 15%. The correct answer is
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zero. Zero. Yeah. And I'm actually quite proud of all of you because most of you got the right answer.
00:23:43.340
If you're going to put credibility on it, the credibility of any video, no matter how clear you
00:23:52.760
think you're seeing the events, no matter how clearly you see them, in 2020, the value of direct
00:24:00.920
video evidence of a crime is zero. Now, it's still useful because this should tell you what to look into.
00:24:10.700
If you see this on video, you don't walk away. You find out what happened, you look into it a little
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bit more, right? But on the surface, if the only thing you know is the video, zero credibility.
00:24:25.620
And I would say the same with the George Floyd video, the same with the Covington Kids video,
00:24:31.500
you probably could come up. The same with the Drinking Bleach video, because that's this fake edit.
00:24:35.760
Same with the Find People hoax, because that was a trick edit. Video is nothing when it comes to
00:24:45.400
evidence and proof. It used to be kind of the thing, right? It used to be sort of the gold standard.
00:24:49.900
If you could see it with your own eyes, well, there it is. But that just doesn't apply. We've learned
00:24:55.580
that. So suppose we looked into it. What could we learn? I have questions. Number one,
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what did I see? Let me tell you, I watched the same video you did, and what I saw was no crime at all.
00:25:12.240
I didn't see any crime. So the president tweeted this, and lots of people are reacting to it as
00:25:18.760
though they're watching the crime. But I watched the same video. I didn't see a crime. Do you want to
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watch me recreate the video and show you why I didn't see a crime? Don't you believe, since none
00:25:32.700
of us are experts in the ballot counting process? So I don't know enough about the process, but I'll
00:25:39.240
make some obvious assumptions. Obvious assumptions, right? Things I think have to be true. They have to
00:25:47.400
have some mechanism where you feed through a batch of ballots, and there's an error that you can clear
00:25:53.440
the error and rerun them without double counting. Do we all agree that it has to be true? There's some
00:26:01.000
kind of process for resetting it, but you'd have to push a button, right, to reset it, and then recount.
00:26:09.800
Here's what we see on the video. She stands up. Her body covers her keyboard and her computer,
00:26:18.280
and we don't know what's happening. If she were going to push a button to reset the ballots to
00:26:24.280
count them, can you see it? Here, I'll do it right now. Here's a test. I'm typing, and I'm resetting.
00:26:31.780
I'm resetting the ballots to zero. Can you see it? No, you can't see it, because I'm standing right in
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front of it. I'm standing right in front of the only thing that matters, which is, did I do this?
00:26:42.780
If I did this and hit the button, there's no crime, because it's not a crime to re-scan things
00:26:50.560
that had an error, right? Now, am I correctly describing the process? There's a button. I
00:26:57.760
don't know, but you don't know either, so you don't know if there's a crime. Here's some other
00:27:01.980
questions I would ask. Assuming that the video was capturing all of these workers for the entire
00:27:11.580
night, did you ask yourself why, if this was a big ballot cheating scam, have you asked yourself why
00:27:21.720
only one of the workers on one occasion ran a stack through three times? Because it wasn't a big
00:27:30.720
enough stack to change the election, but you watched them all night, and only one worker ran one little
00:27:38.280
stack two extra times. That's it. If you were cheating, wouldn't you have lots of these? Wouldn't
00:27:46.260
the other workers also be double scanning? Wouldn't Ruby have done this a bunch of times? Why would she
00:27:52.760
do it twice when it wouldn't be enough to change the result? What would be the point of that? Well,
00:27:58.520
I suppose you could say it's a clever, packetized crime where everybody was told, no, you don't want
00:28:03.680
to do too much on your machine. Ruby, your job is to re-scans. Just do that. And then other people
00:28:10.500
will do other kinds of shenanigans, and we'll add it all together, and it'll be enough. But if anybody
00:28:14.920
gets caught, we'll say, well, those scans that Ruby did, they weren't enough. They didn't change
00:28:19.780
anything. So sure, you caught us, but you caught this little thing. So, no, maybe. But that feels a
00:28:27.120
little too complicated, doesn't it? So that's some questions. Here's another question I have.
00:28:33.740
Does the machine not recognize duplicates? So this is like a big lack of knowledge on my part. So fill
00:28:41.680
this in for me. My understanding is that maybe the envelopes that the ballots, the mail-in ballots come in
00:28:48.480
have some identifiers on it. Maybe there's a scan code or something. But does the actual ballot,
00:28:56.940
once it's removed from the envelope, is each ballot individualized with any kind of an identifier,
00:29:03.740
such that if you scanned it twice, the system would say, oh, we've already seen that one?
00:29:07.840
Is that a thing? Suppose the system, and I don't think this is true. So what I'm saying is just
00:29:18.140
speculative, but I'm just saying, suppose the counting machines were such that if an error occurred,
00:29:26.100
it would just tell you to re-scan them. And then you take your pile and you re-scan them. And let's say
00:29:33.340
you picked up too many ballots to re-scan. Let's say you accidentally picked up the wrong pile
00:29:39.600
and tried to re-scan it. Would the system say, oh, these have already been through and just ignore
00:29:47.200
them? Or would it say whatever is the most recent vote is the one that'll count and I'll delete the
00:29:53.340
earlier ones? In which case you don't have to push a reset. All you have to do is run the batch that
00:29:58.660
didn't go through a second time. It deletes all the first votes by the same people, keeps the more
00:30:04.940
recent vote. You don't even have to hit the reset button because the system just knows each one is
00:30:10.220
individual and it just counts the most recent one. I don't know. I would doubt the machine is
00:30:17.900
designed that way, but I don't know how it's designed. So you can't tell if there's a crime there.
00:30:23.080
That's the point. And I also saw somebody in the comments say that Georgia did a hand recount of
00:30:31.460
the ballots. Would not a hand recount tell you if this problem was a problem? Wouldn't the batch that
00:30:38.260
ran through three times produce more votes than ballots? So if they did a hand recount of the ballot
00:30:45.780
and do a fact check on that, did they do a hand recount of the ballot? If they did,
00:30:50.500
then there couldn't have been a crime, right? Or is there some way there still could have been a
00:30:54.760
crime even with a hand recount of the ballots? I don't know. So here's my point. If you don't know
00:31:02.140
how the system works, you definitely don't know you saw a crime. So I would like to be Ruby's defense
00:31:09.160
because even the guilty people deserve a good defense and there's no evidence in my opinion.
00:31:15.140
In my opinion, I have personally seen, and I've watched all the videos, I have personally seen
00:31:22.260
no direct evidence that Ruby created any kind of a crime or even anything inappropriate. Now,
00:31:30.640
I'm not ruling it out. I'm just saying I haven't seen any evidence of it. So if you have, you might
00:31:36.580
be imagining it. Here's another question I have. Suppose the system doesn't have identification on
00:31:43.460
each ballot. I don't know if it does or not. But couldn't you build a system that checks the hand
00:31:49.180
markings because they were done by hand? Does the system keep a digital reproduction of the ballot?
00:31:56.760
Does anybody know that? Does the ballot simply get tabulated and then the only thing that's stored
00:32:01.940
is the result? Or does each ballot actually get copied in addition to tabulated? So there's actually
00:32:08.700
a physical picture of the actual ballot, each one. Does anybody know if that's a thing?
00:32:15.200
Somebody says, yes, the ballot image is permanent. All right, here's the thing. Are you ready for this?
00:32:20.660
I don't know if anybody has suggested this yet, but probably because it's a little bit obvious.
00:32:26.040
If the ballots were done by hand, and I think that's the case, then there would be slight differences
00:32:31.980
in how you would fill out a box compared to how I would fill out a box. Similar to how handwriting
00:32:39.460
would be similar from one person to another. Could you not take all these scanned and saved images of
00:32:45.820
ballots and simply compare them and see if you can find out if one person filled out a lot of ballots
00:32:52.480
because they would be too much of a match in the exact way they were filled out. Is that a thing?
00:32:57.760
So I'm just asking the question, if you have these, could you not tell that they were filled out by the
00:33:04.500
same people just by a good image comparison? Now, it would be like handwriting. So even if the same
00:33:11.460
person did lots of ballots, it wouldn't look exactly the same. But maybe they could find some correlation.
00:33:18.300
I think they could. All right. The perfect way to close 2020 would be with something that's just
00:33:25.160
batshit crazy and only could have happened in 2020. And it looks like that's going to happen,
00:33:33.340
right? Because Trump has now started to crap on the Congress's big omnibus bill that they call a
00:33:42.260
COVID relief bill that has almost nothing to do with COVID. And after all that talking,
00:33:48.620
what they came up with was a $600 check for each person. Now, there's a bunch of other things in
00:33:54.920
the bill. But the direct check to people suffering was $600. Now, the president came out after they'd
00:34:03.260
done their work, the president said, you did it badly. Basically, he said, Congress, you totally messed up,
00:34:09.760
complete. You blew it. The number should be more like $2,000, not $600. But here's the fun part.
00:34:17.940
AOC agreed. And so now President Trump and AOC are on the same page about this specific relief bill.
00:34:30.820
And is it a coincidence that President Trump and AOC normally would be on opposite sides of everything?
00:34:37.880
Is it a coincidence that they agreed on this one thing? Nope. Now, they're not the only ones who agree.
00:34:45.100
I guess Pelosi also said yes, but she was trying to cover her ass. And I think at least one other
00:34:50.480
part of member of the squad agreed with AOC. But let's use AOC as our sort of the star of the story.
00:34:57.920
And I've told you since the beginning of AOC's rise in politics, I think Ilhan Omar said agreed,
00:35:04.180
said yes. I told you that AOC had a political instinct for theater that is similar to President
00:35:14.340
Trump. So these are the things that AOC and Trump have in common. They both have an understanding of
00:35:20.760
the theater of politics, and they do it well, like really well, to good effect. So on that level,
00:35:28.000
AOC and Trump are the same person. They both understand things at a, I would say a higher
00:35:33.420
level, because they understand the importance of the show. That's how I like to call it. Trump is
00:35:39.460
always doing a show. Even when he's really doing the work of government, it's also still a show.
00:35:45.540
And that's what AOC understands better than anybody else on the Democrat side.
00:35:49.520
So the fact that AOC would have the political brain to know that the smartest thing she could do is
00:35:58.100
back the president, or vice versa. So they would both know that the coolest, best, smartest thing
00:36:08.020
that they could do would be to back each other. It's dogs and cats sleeping together. You can't ignore
00:36:14.400
this news. What makes news is things that aren't supposed to happen happening. So they both knew
00:36:21.100
that this would be news. It'd be good for them. It's the show. So AOC and President Trump, for the
00:36:27.800
close of the show, let's call 2020 the show, they brought a really good close to the show. I don't
00:36:35.860
know how this is going to turn out, but it looks like it's going to work. It looks like President Trump
00:36:41.060
did what he does. He waits for the best leverage point, which is when it's so late that people don't
00:36:48.540
want to argue because they want to go home. So Trump is using the deadline, which you always have
00:36:54.880
to use when you're negotiating. If you don't have a deadline, you should create an artificial one if
00:37:00.020
you're negotiating with somebody, because people don't get serious until deadlines. We're just built
00:37:04.180
that way. So Trump waits until the deadline is basically almost passed. Like he got so close
00:37:11.060
to the deadline before throwing in his, you know, giant stink bomb that just not much time, which is
00:37:19.380
really smart. It's really smart. Now, if he pulls it off, it's smart. If it doesn't work, you're going to
00:37:25.900
say it wasn't smart, but at least you'll get your $600, you know, so it won't get worse. So President
00:37:32.540
Trump has a way that he won't make anything worse, but he could make it better. That's the ideal
00:37:39.000
strategy. You won't make it worse, might make it better. Pairing with AOC makes him, makes him leave
00:37:45.500
office as somebody who wasn't so, so divisive, right? It's perfect for his legacy. It's perfect for the
00:37:53.400
show. It's perfect for the people. But here's the thing I wanted to get to. How do you pick the right
00:37:59.560
amount? Well, I'm going to give you a lesson on that because one of the other things that AOC and
00:38:06.860
President Trump have in common is an understanding of business and economics. AOC has a degree in some
00:38:14.000
kind of economics. President Trump has some degree in some kind of business thing, plus all this
00:38:19.640
experience. So in terms of their talent stacks, these are two people who understand economics.
00:38:25.240
politics, they understand the show, and they understand politics. Pretty good package for
00:38:31.680
both of them. But I also have a background in economics, so I thought it would be useful to
00:38:38.360
explain how to select from, let's say, a list of possible checks that you could write to the
00:38:44.340
people of the United States during a coronavirus. And here's how you do it. So let's say you have
00:38:49.460
three choices, and this is roughly the choices that we did have. And you're looking at these,
00:38:53.980
and you're saying, which, from an economic perspective and a political perspective and
00:39:00.300
anything else, which is the right number? And let me teach you how to do this, because this
00:39:05.740
is a little tricky, and I hope you'll bear with me because there's a little bit of math involved.
00:39:11.700
I know you didn't expect math, but I'll try to keep it simple. You know, it's complicated by its
00:39:17.880
nature, but here's the trick. It's sort of an algorithm, and this will work every time. Watch this.
00:39:23.140
What you do is you look at these numbers, and then you look for the size of them, right? So if you
00:39:31.700
were, say, to compare this one to this one, C to B, $600 to $1,200, you, and this isn't obvious,
00:39:39.840
this is why you have me, this one is bigger. It's a larger number, and that's better than the smaller
00:39:50.480
number. Now, the first time you see this, it's not going to be so obvious, so I'll have to give
00:39:55.100
you another example. Maybe you can start to see the pattern, so stick with me, stick with me. Then
00:40:00.420
let's say if we were to compare two different numbers, let's say a $1,200 check to, let's say
00:40:06.560
a $2,000 check. How would you know which is the right one? Well, again, use your algorithm, all right?
00:40:12.640
I know it's math, but use your algorithm, and determine which of these is the larger, larger
00:40:19.900
number, and if you can determine what that is, and I'm going to jump ahead. You don't need to go
00:40:25.860
calculators, but the larger number of these two is the 2,000. It's actually the 2,000. So if you were
00:40:32.760
to compare the A to the B, you'd pick A. Now, if you were to compare B to C, you'd pick B. Why? In the
00:40:43.760
comments, tell me why. Yeah, that's right. It's the bigger number. It's the larger number. That's how
00:40:49.840
you employ the algorithm. But now, here's the test. I don't know if everybody's paid attention yet, but
00:40:55.660
now, here's the comparison. If you get this one right, I think you have the concept. What if,
00:41:01.920
what if, hold on, what if, this is your final exam, what if your choices were $2,000 and $600?
00:41:12.860
Go. In the comments, which, use your algorithm. You can use your calculators at home if you need to.
00:41:21.160
This is a test where you can use your calculator. Yeah, that's right. I've seen a lot of you are
00:41:26.360
getting the right answer. The right answer is A. Do you know why? It's the big one. Yeah, it's larger.
00:41:33.580
It's a larger amount of money. Let me explain this to the people in Congress. Because apparently,
00:41:40.640
all of Congress couldn't figure this out, but they don't have the right talent stack, right?
00:41:46.160
AOC has got some talent. President Trump has a lot of talent in his stack. So they saw this
00:41:50.780
immediately. I had to work on it a little bit. I have to admit, when I first heard this story, I was
00:41:55.320
like, God, how do they even decide these things? I don't even know where to start. But eventually,
00:42:02.720
I started digging in, and then I learned the algorithm, and I was like, oh, oh, you could just
00:42:09.440
pick the big one. Now, you're probably saying to yourself, but what about the downside? Because it's
00:42:17.620
not all upside, right? If you pick the big one, doesn't that create like extra debt and stuff?
00:42:24.920
Aren't we a little bit past the extra debt problem? Because if you, let's compare these two things.
00:42:33.560
The $2,000 is some extra debt on top of a lot of extra debt. All right? So it's a little extra debt
00:42:42.180
on top of a giant pile of extra debt, which matters, right? You don't want it to be the last
00:42:50.100
straw. But if the giant pile of extra debt isn't going to kill you already, probably the difference
00:42:59.920
between $600,000 and $2,000,000 won't kill you. Which is the better political decision? Let's say you
00:43:07.300
told the public, hey, public, we're looking to save the people in the worst shape, and we're thinking
00:43:14.360
of three numbers. $2,000, which would put you in pretty good shape. $1,200, not so bad. $600, well,
00:43:22.660
that's not so good. And we've decided, we've thought about it, we've decided on this one.
00:43:28.840
What do you think, public? No, no, I know you think it's the little one. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
00:43:34.860
I get it. I know you wanted the big number. But we rich people have gotten together. And we've
00:43:40.820
decided that you poor people, given the options, you're better off with a small number. What?
00:43:48.120
Yeah, yeah, I know you don't understand. But the big number would also increase the debt.
00:43:53.920
And that's bad for you too. But wait a minute, who pays off the debt?
00:44:00.220
Poor people? Are the people, are the poor people who get a check, the exact same people who are going
00:44:08.760
to be paying off this debt? Well, in an indirect way, yes, if the economy suffers. But in a direct
00:44:16.160
way, poor people don't pay debt. It's rich people. The people who can afford to pay taxes, pay taxes.
00:44:22.880
It's not the people who didn't make any money. They don't pay taxes. So if you're a rich person in
00:44:29.960
Congress, and the public is watching you decide how much rich people are going to suffer effectively,
00:44:37.680
because they're the ones who will have higher taxes to pay off any debt, if there is any higher
00:44:41.640
taxes to pay off any debt. Because we're in this weird situation with low inflation, where you can
00:44:49.140
kind of just print money. But we don't know how far we can take this. Nobody really does. But we're
00:44:54.540
just sort of printing money and getting away with it so far. Anyway, you don't want to tell people if
00:45:02.220
you are a rich person in Congress, you don't want to tell them that you considered 2,000, but you
00:45:07.280
decided, you know, what's good for poor people is 600, because we rich people don't want to pay extra
00:45:11.740
taxes in the future. Not during a pandemic. In normal times, in normal times, everybody's being selfish
00:45:20.180
and arguing for what's good for their group. That's just politics. Is this just politics?
00:45:28.180
Did I use the word pandemic yet? This is a pandemic. This isn't regular politics. So you don't do regular
00:45:39.200
politics during a pandemic. Do you know who was smart enough to know that you don't do regular
00:45:44.240
politics during a pandemic? AOC. She was smart enough to know that you don't do regular politics
00:45:52.360
in a frickin' pandemic. Do you know who else was smart enough to know that? Ilhan Omar,
00:45:59.760
Representative Tlaib, right? Now, I'm probably going to spend, you know, a few years mocking and insulting
00:46:07.980
those same people that I just praised. But unambiguously, they are the smart ones in the room.
00:46:14.240
With President Trump. The four of them have just proven to you that they're smarter, at least
00:46:24.340
they're willing to do what the people need. All right? That's pretty impressive. Pretty impressive.
00:46:31.860
And so I would like to, I just want to call this out as an amazing way to stop, to end 2020. The worst,
00:46:38.340
you know, the worst year ever, in my opinion. And to see our leaders on opposite sides find this
00:46:46.720
common ground that is unambiguously the right decision. Yeah, Tulsi Gabbard, too, is saying the
00:46:52.740
same thing. All right. Somebody's saying, but AOC voted yes on the bill. That is not a good point.
00:47:01.300
So anybody who says, but AOC is complaining about the bill, but she also voted for it. That is not
00:47:07.900
a good point. Because when she voted for it, she said, this is a hostage situation. And there's not
00:47:14.240
enough time to fix it. So we're going to take a bad bill over no bill. That's not the wrong decision.
00:47:21.600
On top of that, she was working behind the scenes to see if they could augment it with an amendment,
00:47:26.580
which she did. Now, if somebody complains about something and then puts in the work,
00:47:32.520
she put in the work. She didn't just complain about it. She put in the work. They made an amendment.
00:47:39.540
They got the president to agree with it. Now, I don't know what's going to happen with the vote.
00:47:46.860
Here's, so we've got a bunch of pardons coming. And one of the pardons, the pardons are not very
00:47:59.380
interesting because it's, you know, there'll be a bunch of people who did bad things that maybe are
00:48:04.820
too many Republicans getting out. You have to assume that every one of these stories has some
00:48:10.560
kind of an advocate who's making it easy for them to get where they need to go. So I'm not too
00:48:16.880
interested in the individual cases of who's getting pardoned in this case, but one of them really
00:48:22.200
jumped out. And it illustrates a point I've been trying to make. So there was this Representative
00:48:27.060
Collins. And he was, I guess, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump. But then he got in a
00:48:32.980
little trouble. And he got sentenced to over two years in federal prison for admitting he helped
00:48:40.840
his son dodge 800,000 in stock market losses when he learned that a drug trial by a small
00:48:46.680
pharmaceutical company had failed. In other words, insider trading. So insider trading means you have
00:48:52.700
some secret knowledge that the public doesn't, and you use it to buy or sell stocks in a way to make
00:48:59.300
profit. Now, here's the point I want to make about that. And I'm going to generalize the situation.
00:49:05.160
If you have a situation where it's possible to cheat, it's private, meaning that nobody's watching
00:49:13.680
when it happens. In this case, it was probably a private phone call or conversation with Collins and
00:49:19.700
his son. So it was private in the sense that it's not happening right out with cameras watching.
00:49:24.500
And so if it's possible and profitable and private, how often does crime happen?
00:49:33.740
And here's what I'm adding to it, the PPP, that the crime is possible, it's private, meaning it's
00:49:40.540
hard to discover, and it's profitable, like really, really profitable. Under those three conditions,
00:49:46.840
how often does massive crime happen? Every time. Not sometimes, not most of the time,
00:49:56.660
not a lot of the time. A hundred percent of the time, if you have the PPP, it's possible,
00:50:03.120
it's private, and it's profitable. Yeah, it's going to happen. In fact, it's so easy to do that I can't
00:50:09.100
figure out how he got caught. If you dug into the story, you'd probably find that the way they caught
00:50:14.420
him was probably some coincidence or accident, right? Because I would imagine that this exact crime
00:50:21.320
is massively being perpetrated all over the financial world, just massively. I'll bet insider
00:50:30.000
trading is, I wouldn't be surprised if dollar-wise, it's almost as big as legal trading. We just wouldn't
00:50:37.500
know, right? It's legal if only he was a congressperson. I don't know what that means.
00:50:50.240
So Pelosi is waiting to hear from the House on the $2,000 checks. So yeah, so I think that what's
00:50:55.020
happening is the House is working on the check thing. And by the way, if they don't come out with
00:51:00.880
exactly $2,000 for the check, I'm going to be surprised. Because there's one right answer now.
00:51:09.540
Because the people have watched this, right? The public has watched. And if you put forth the
00:51:15.220
$2,000 number and you're serious about it, you don't have an option to go lower. You don't. Because
00:51:21.400
you've already sold the $2,000. The public is saying, oh, I think I might get $2,000 and I might need it.
00:51:26.080
You kind of have to go with that number now. Anyway, so my point on the crimes that are
00:51:34.300
possible, private, and profitable is that whenever that happens, you can guarantee there's crime.
00:51:39.620
That is the exact situation with our election system. Is it possible to cheat in our elections?
00:51:48.000
Yes. We can't know how much cheating happened in our election, but I don't think there's any adult
00:51:56.080
who hasn't learned this year that cheating is possible. I mean, it's certainly possible to hack
00:52:01.580
software, right? Is anybody arguing that it's impossible to hack a software? I don't have any
00:52:08.480
evidence that it happened, but it's not impossible. It's probably pretty easy for somebody motivated
00:52:13.760
enough. So is the election system private in the sense that there are things which happen which are
00:52:19.220
not observed? Well, that's exactly what happened. There were things that were happened that were not
00:52:23.740
observed in the election system. So it's possible to cheat. There are lots of places where it's not
00:52:30.140
observed, and it's super profitable. In this case, profit being power. They're sort of similar. You can
00:52:37.160
trade power for money. You can trade money for power. So power and money are substitutes. So what are the
00:52:45.500
odds that our election system is not riddled with fraud? Zero. Zero. There isn't any chance. There isn't
00:52:53.660
any chance at all that our election system is not riddled with fraud. We just don't know how much
00:52:59.660
and how much of a difference it made. That's the hard part.
00:53:02.560
A lot of people who don't understand how things work are complaining that there's too much pork
00:53:12.480
in the omnibus bill. In other words, the coronavirus bill has lots of stuff in it, and everybody throws
00:53:19.080
their little thing into it. And so the public hears this and says, wait a minute, what does giving money
00:53:26.280
to Pakistan for gender studies? How does that help us fight coronavirus in the United States? Are we just
00:53:34.720
wasting all our money with this pork? Well, here's the thing people don't understand about our system.
00:53:41.340
The trading for this pork is the only thing that gets anything done. If you took the pork out,
00:53:49.200
I don't know if anything would get done. The pork is unfortunately how you bribe
00:53:54.960
people who weren't inclined to vote for you. So you might say, Senator, whatever, I know you want
00:54:03.380
to vote against this because it would be bad for you for re-election, but suppose, just suppose,
00:54:11.460
we also funded a military project in your state that created a lot of jobs. Now the Senator says,
00:54:18.520
okay, you bribe me. You know, we need military bases anyway, so we're going to build it somewhere,
00:54:26.140
so you might as well put it in my state. How about some money for a foreign country?
00:54:30.940
Does it ever make sense to give any money to another country? I don't know. Do you? Do you know
00:54:38.440
anything about this gender research money or whatever it is for Pakistan? I don't. If somebody were to
00:54:47.240
bring you just that case and say, look, we got this special case over in Pakistan, there are some
00:54:52.900
people we can influence, and if we give them what they want, which is this thing, they will be our
00:54:58.440
friends in the government, and we're going to need some friends in the Pakistan government for fighting,
00:55:03.340
you know, terrorism and everything else. So really think of this as a small investment
00:55:07.760
to essentially bribe some people in foreign countries that are critical to our success.
00:55:14.040
Now if somebody brought you that individually and said, you know, I think we've got a clever way
00:55:20.020
to bribe somebody. We're going to do it through this program. They've got some way they're going
00:55:24.480
to skim some money off, and basically it's going to look like we're doing one thing, but really we're
00:55:29.200
just bribing somebody in the government, and it's good for us. Now I'm not saying that any of that
00:55:35.460
had anything to do with this Pakistan thing. What I'm saying is that if you were to hear the arguments
00:55:40.740
individually, they might be pretty good for the foreign stuff anyway. So we hope that our government
00:55:48.020
is picking really, you know, laser-like opportunities where a relative little amount of money
00:55:56.080
would get us some big impact, and if we don't do it, China will bribe the same people. So if we're not
00:56:02.520
drunk, if we are not bribing Pakistan, China will. Do you want that? Do you want China to have more
00:56:09.200
influence on Pakistan, for example? So the way that all the horse trading happens is one senator
00:56:17.360
will say, well, I'm not going to vote for this unless I get this thing or that thing, and those
00:56:22.560
things are not necessarily bad. Now if your senator is putting in something that really doesn't have any
00:56:28.520
value, well, that's bad. That's bad. But as long as they're picking things that individually would be
00:56:35.720
good, I wouldn't worry about them being summed up in a big omnibus, because that's just the only way
00:56:41.940
you get anything done. It's not ideal, but I don't know if there's a better way to do it.
00:56:46.720
So Governor Newsom in California has selected a replacement for Kamala Harris. So the governor gets
00:56:53.080
to pick a temporary senator when a senator is removed between elections, and he has decided that
00:57:00.840
he would pick the son of Mexican immigrants, Alex Padilla. So he's picked a Hispanic son of
00:57:09.720
immigrants to be the sitting senator. And what did Mayor London Breed say about this? She said that
00:57:18.280
it's definitely this is a real blow to the African American community, Breed said.
00:57:24.220
And I thought to myself, this is such bad politics. Imagine you're in California, and I think this is
00:57:35.380
true, that there are more Hispanic residents of California than black. That's true, isn't it? Give
00:57:41.800
me a fact check on that while we're waiting. But in either case, they are big, big minority
00:57:47.380
populations. They should have as much representation as possible. I think everybody's in favor of that.
00:57:54.600
On a general level, we're in favor of that. But complaining about an Hispanic American, a son of
00:58:02.600
Mexican immigrants, getting the job instead of a black person replacing a black person is as tone
00:58:09.880
deaf as you can get. That is really tone deaf. And do you know who never makes this mistake? Obama.
00:58:19.280
I say this all the time. One of the things that makes Obama one of the great politicians of our time
00:58:26.020
is that he ran for president. He was black, but he didn't run for being our black president.
00:58:33.040
Brilliant. He so easily could have made a big deal about the fact, oh, I'm the only, I'm the first black
00:58:40.620
president. You need me. Nobody else will do it for you. But he didn't. So Obama is gifted and smart
00:58:47.560
on this stuff. And Mayor Breed of Oakland is the opposite. She is neither gifted nor smart on this stuff.
00:58:55.820
All right. And let me explain more conceptually what I'm talking about.
00:59:02.460
So let's say you want to have less racism in your country. Good idea. And you need a strategy.
00:59:09.120
What I'd like to add to that is that you would use a different strategy based on how big the problem is.
00:59:15.600
So just conceptually not drawn to scale, I said the white experience in the United States has always been good.
00:59:23.400
But if you're in the United States and you're white, good for you. You've had a pretty good experience
00:59:30.180
the whole way. Some will argue that it's getting worse. But let's just say it's been a good experience
00:59:35.000
if you're white in this country. Now let's say you're black. And what is your experience of, let's say,
00:59:41.000
the black history? Well, you started with slavery. That's as bad as it can be. And that's the biggest
00:59:46.540
gap you could get between the white experience and the black experience would be slavery.
00:59:50.440
The tool you would need to fix that is a civil war. Big problem, big tool. As things improve,
00:59:58.560
maybe you need a civil rights movement, which is really about employing the law to close the gap.
01:00:05.700
And let's say that did a good job and closed a little bit more of the gap. But of course,
01:00:09.800
you're never going to get to exact equal. Life doesn't work that way. But you can keep getting
01:00:14.960
closer and closer. I would argue that the third phase, the tool that you use should not be a war.
01:00:21.520
It should not be necessarily the law. You're going to use the law where it makes sense.
01:00:26.180
But it's a persuasion play. President Trump, I'm sorry, President Obama knew where he was in history.
01:00:34.920
He knew he was in the persuasion phase. And he knew that the very best thing he could do for black
01:00:41.160
America is run for president as a black man and don't mention it. Now he did mention it a few times
01:00:48.160
it came up, but it was never a theme. President Obama understood that running away, I wouldn't say he ran
01:00:56.440
away from it, but he didn't emphasize that he's the first black president. That is A plus. A plus.
01:01:04.920
That's how you close the gap. This last gap doesn't get closed by complaining. And it doesn't get closed
01:01:13.080
by rules changes that favor any group. We're at the point where if you make a rule change that favors a
01:01:20.560
group, it might work against you. So everything that you did back here would be anti-productive
01:01:27.740
at the moment. And if you don't understand that shift, or where you are in history, you can't be
01:01:34.980
an Obama level persuader, which I would consider at the highest level of being good at that. So Mayor
01:01:41.920
Breed, take a lesson from Obama, who really has something to teach you on this. I've told you before
01:01:49.520
that one way to predict the future is understanding the insurance market. Because things which can't be
01:01:55.360
insured eventually go away. Because if you can't insure something, sooner or later, they will get
01:02:02.620
sued out of business. It's just a guarantee. Because the reason that you can't insure something is that
01:02:09.720
there's too much risk. So if you watch the insurance market, you can often tell in advance what's going
01:02:14.960
to happen. And here's a story that really signals in advance what's going to happen. Apparently Detroit,
01:02:20.260
the city of Detroit, has filed a lawsuit against Black Lives Matter activists. Didn't see that
01:02:27.060
coming, did you? And they allege that there was a civil conspiracy. And they say that the protests
01:02:34.900
in Detroit, quote, have repeatedly turned violent, endangering the lives of police and the public.
01:02:40.140
And that the activists, the Black Lives Matter activists, were participating in a conspiracy to
01:02:48.740
quote, that defamed the mayor and police. And they say that the city should be awarded damages.
01:02:58.140
Now, who bet that by the end of 2020, Detroit would be suing Black Lives Matter? Didn't see that
01:03:07.860
coming, didn't you? Now, what happens if they win? If they win, Black Lives Matter has to give up all
01:03:14.640
their money, or some money, right? It's going to be pretty expensive. And then what would Black Lives
01:03:21.160
Matter do to avoid the other cities from successfully suing them? They try to get insurance,
01:03:28.620
but they wouldn't be able to get it. They can't get insurance, I'm guessing. Now, I'm not an insurance
01:03:35.720
agent, but I'm guessing that if you're an insurance company, you're not going to give any insurance to
01:03:41.460
the Black Lives Matter activists who are taking people to the street and destroying things if Detroit
01:03:48.720
wins. Imagine what will happen if Detroit actually gets some money from Black Lives Matter. Do they have
01:03:56.160
a case? Feels like they do. It feels like they do, right? Because you could have argued that the
01:04:02.720
organizers of Black Lives Matter could not have known there would be violence in the beginning.
01:04:09.260
That's fair to say. You don't want to get rid of freedom of speech just because there might be some
01:04:14.200
violence. In our country, we don't say that's a good enough reason. But over time, once the leaders
01:04:22.040
of these groups could clearly see that promoting some movement in the city would destroy lots of stuff
01:04:29.020
and get people hurt, once it was obvious that that was going to happen, what's more important?
01:04:34.840
Freedom of speech? Or does Detroit have a point that it was organized and they could have known for
01:04:41.820
sure that it was going to cause this damage? This is a big one. This could be the end of Black Lives
01:04:48.800
Matter. It could be the end of, I don't know if it could be the end of Antifa because you need a
01:04:53.040
leadership. Somebody specific in charge, I guess. So the United States military has announced a new
01:05:00.520
upgrade in their tank cannon systems. So they've got this big-ass cannon that they can put on a tank
01:05:08.500
that will shoot, I don't know what you'd call it, a round or it would shoot some kind of munitions,
01:05:14.400
43 miles and hit an exact target. You believe that? I mean, I believe it, but it's unbelievable.
01:05:24.880
We have the technology to put a tank on the field that will shoot a munition 43 miles and it says
01:05:33.560
hit a target. Now, I don't know what a target means at 43 miles. Does that mean you could hit another
01:05:39.780
tank? I mean, is the target that small? Could you hit a building 43 miles away? You could specify a
01:05:48.440
building? I don't know. If I were going to build this system, this is how I'd do it. I don't know
01:05:53.840
if this is possible. So you engineers tell me if you could do it. If you didn't want your munitions
01:06:00.200
to be rockets, where they're self-propelled rockets, so you wanted to do it cheaper, I would make
01:06:06.480
munitions that were semi-smart. So it's not as smart as a rocket, but it can do one thing. You fire it
01:06:14.160
43 miles and it's mostly in the air and your initial firing just gets it sort of in the range
01:06:20.540
of your specific target. And then once it's up there and it's starting to fall and it starts to
01:06:26.260
lose altitude, could you put enough electronics in the munitions so that the only thing it does is
01:06:34.560
move its fins so that it's, you know, it's pretty high in the air. So it's got lots of time to adjust
01:06:40.240
to an exact GPS strategy. Is that how they designed it? Because that's how I would have done it. I would
01:06:46.240
have done it so it's just a, it's launched high above the target, but then once it's up there,
01:06:52.680
it has enough time to adjust to find the specific target. And it wouldn't need any, it wouldn't need
01:06:58.560
any kind of jet engine because it's being shot out of the cannon. Anyway, do you think that makes a big
01:07:06.980
difference that we've got a tank that can shoot 43 miles? Well, it's not really going to help us
01:07:13.220
against a superpower, is it? It might, it might help a lot against, let's say, if there's another ISIS
01:07:18.880
flare up, it might help a lot. But I don't see it helping against, you know, Russia or China
01:07:25.040
China because a tank is only going to last a minute and a half in a war against superpowers.
01:07:32.760
There's a, I guess there's a provision in the new omnibus bill for a 10-year penalty
01:07:39.260
for streaming other people's copyrighted content. Now you can go to jail for 10 years,
01:07:46.600
but you'd have to be in the business of, you know, streaming a lot of it. It's not for somebody who
01:07:51.680
just has some music on in the background. It's not for, you know, trivial cases of some user has
01:07:57.120
some copyrighted material. It's not about that. It's about a big ongoing system that just takes
01:08:04.980
your copyrighted material and uses it. Such as, let's say adding, let's say if I live streamed and
01:08:11.900
I played somebody else's music as my opening and I didn't pay them for it, then I would be subject to
01:08:18.140
this, I think. And as a creator, I say, maybe that's not a bad idea. I don't know. It's not as bad as it
01:08:26.060
sounds. Here's an example of a phenomenon I talk about in Winn-Bigley that you can get used to
01:08:32.920
anything. One of the most basic elements of being a human is that no matter what is happening,
01:08:39.780
yeah, you can get used to it. Could be something terrible, yeah, just get used to it. Here's a clean
01:08:45.640
example. Horrible. It's a horrible example and tragic. So I think it was yesterday that 3,400
01:08:53.320
Americans died from the coronavirus. 3,400 people in one day. That's bigger than 9-11.
01:09:02.620
We have the equivalent of a 9-11 death count every day. Now, when 9-11 happened and 3,000 plus people
01:09:12.860
died all at once, how did that change your day? Completely. Your brain was changed. Your life
01:09:21.020
was changed. The country was changed. Your wealth was changed. It changed a lot. The whole freaking
01:09:29.240
world changed because of those 3,000 whatever people on 9-11. But here we are in the coronavirus,
01:09:35.600
and it's, you know, in less than a year, we've become numb to 3,400 people dying a day from what
01:09:44.880
might have been China mischief. At least a China mistake. Maybe a little more intention in it than
01:09:52.280
we know. We don't know. No direct evidence of that. But we actually got used, we just got used to it.
01:10:02.580
Now, I'm not really making a point about this, right? It's not about the coronavirus, and it's
01:10:08.280
not about 9-11. It's a larger point that if you're trying to predict, one of the things you can always
01:10:14.780
predict, it's very consistent, is that whatever is going on, we'll get used to it. We're practically
01:10:22.380
getting used to masks. I'm definitely not used to that yet. But I feel like I'm getting there.
01:10:26.620
You know, you just get used to anything. So let me see if I've talked about everything I want to
01:10:33.280
talk about here today, because I think it did. I think it did. Yep. I think it did. Okay. Looks
01:10:40.320
like we did a good job. Somebody says 8,000 people die every day anyway. That is not a good point,
01:10:46.920
because we often make this mistake. It was like on day one of, let's say, the AIDS epidemic.
01:10:55.900
So it's day one of the AIDS epidemic. Only three people died. Let's just say hypothetically. Only
01:11:02.000
three people died of AIDS. So therefore, we can ignore AIDS, right? Only three people died.
01:11:08.260
8,000 people died of other things. Only three people died of AIDS. So just ignore it, right? No,
01:11:15.500
you don't ignore a little problem that is guaranteed to become a big problem if you ignore it.
01:11:21.120
It's guaranteed. It's, you know, it's a virus. You know, there's no way it's not going to get
01:11:27.280
bigger. So when you say, but Scott, you know, that 3,400 is much less than the 8,000 people who die
01:11:34.100
every day. I say that's true. But the reason the 3,400 is still news is that we have to do everything
01:11:41.720
we can to make, to not make that 10,000 a day. Somebody says BLM has hidden their money in
01:11:53.720
offshore accounts. Well, I hope they have by now. Will I do, I'm being asked if I'll do one of these
01:12:00.760
on 7 a.m. on Christmas Day, to which I say, do I look lazy? Of course I'm going to be doing it on
01:12:08.800
Christmas Day. Duh. Better question is, will I be doing it on 7 a.m. New Year's Day after all my
01:12:20.400
partying on New Year's night? Yeah, I'll be partying until, I don't know, maybe 9 or 10 o'clock
01:12:26.760
that night. So I think I'll be up on time. Somebody says the U.S. death rate for 2020 is not changed.
01:12:35.020
I believe you'll find that is fake news. I believe you'll find that the death rate is higher and it
01:12:43.060
is coronavirus. And news that you see that suggests otherwise is probably fake. Not probably fake,
01:12:50.260
it is fake. The death count is higher. That's just a fact. If anybody has any different evidence than
01:12:56.840
that, it's probably from a bad source. Will I dress as Santa? I might be wearing a Santa hat.
01:13:05.020
Apologist. Apologist. Oh, your son is getting married today on Zoom. Congratulations.
01:13:19.220
Somebody says fewer people died in 2020 than 2019. Well, I doubt that's true.
01:13:27.020
A lot of the evidence, or a lot of the data that you see, especially on social media, you'll see a chart
01:13:36.580
that says, hey, deaths are the same or less than last year. Those charts are generally, if not all of
01:13:43.140
them are bad or fake, so I wouldn't believe any of them. And Elisa, happy birthday.
01:14:01.140
Well, I sure did. That was just last night. Well, that's enough for now.
01:14:08.640
Do I count abortions and death? That's a perfectly reasonable question. I don't, but it's a reasonable
01:14:16.480
question. All right, that's it for now. That is it for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
01:14:25.880
Just kidding. I was only talking to the Periscope people that I just turned off. I'm not done with
01:14:29.900
you yet. Somebody's saying I made a deal with YouTube so I could stay on the channel.
01:14:38.160
Just to clarify, the only thing that YouTube did to me that was in the news was they suppressed
01:14:44.900
one video, right? A number of them have been demonetized in the past. They're demonetizing
01:14:50.840
far fewer of them at the moment, which is good. That's progress. But there was one video in
01:14:56.820
particular that was suppressed. All right, why is somebody, why are so many people mentioning
01:15:08.480
Q? Paul, you keep mentioning Q, and I don't know why. If there's a question there, let me
01:15:16.660
know. Let's see your decorations downstairs, please. Oh, okay. You want to go for a walk?
01:15:23.660
Let's go for a walk. I'll show you my decorations. Let me take off that. All right, come with
01:15:33.460
me. I'll give you a little extra. Somebody says, Steve Wozniak voting machine. Did Wozniak
01:15:43.840
invent a voting machine? If he did, I would take that very seriously. Please add to the shelves.
01:15:51.200
All right, here you go. So, you can't see it too well, I guess. Not too impressive from here.
01:16:07.740
All right, well, you can't see it that well, but trust me. Trust me, it looks good down there.
01:16:16.460
Yeah, it's a gas fireplace, of course. All right, that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.