Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1228 Scott Adams： I Teach You How to Select the Correct Size For a COVID-19 Relief Check

00:00:00.240 I didn't see you there. Come on in. Come on in. It's time. You found it. Yeah. It's time

00:00:08.040 for Coffee with Scott Adams. The best time of the day. The best. Number one. And what

00:00:15.940 makes it so good? Well, it's a participation thing. It's where you become one with people

00:00:21.160 around the world simultaneously with the simultaneous sip. Good morning, Omar. Good

00:00:28.160 to see you. And if you'd like to participate in the simultaneous sip, the best thing in the world

00:00:33.580 today, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chelsea, a canteen jug or a flask,

00:00:38.640 a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the

00:00:46.480 unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better except for

00:00:51.400 your coronavirus checks. It's called the simultaneous sip and it's going to happen right now. Go.

00:00:58.160 Ah. Yeah. That was pretty good. Pretty good. Well, here's your lesson for the day.

00:01:08.920 Have you ever had this experience where you had some problems in your life, but then you

00:01:17.740 drank some alcohol or you smoked some something or you did some hallucinogens and suddenly your

00:01:26.760 problems were exactly the same, but you don't feel bad about it. Your subjective, you know,

00:01:34.320 your subjective experience could be fine, even though your problems are all the same. Now,

00:01:40.240 if you have problems and you're feeling good about yourself, that's a bad situation because if you're

00:01:46.080 feeling good, but there are problems you need to solve, maybe you're not going to solve them because,

00:01:52.180 well, you feel good. Why should you do anything? So you do want to make sure that you feel bad enough

00:01:58.460 about your problems to solve them. But during a 24-hour day, most of that 24-hour days, you're not

00:02:06.860 going to have anything that you could do to solve your problems. Sometimes you have to sleep and bathe and

00:02:12.240 get other stuff done. So how do you feel good during that time that there's just nothing you can do about

00:02:18.900 your problems? You're doing other things then. Well, if you could find a way to hack your brain

00:02:23.700 so that when you can work on your problems, you feel bad about them because that would be motivating,

00:02:30.360 but the moment there's nothing you can do, you could flip a switch and just feel good about your life,

00:02:37.720 even with the same amount of problems. And then when it's time to work about them,

00:02:40.560 you go back. Now, what if you could do that? Wouldn't that be incredible, right? Think how

00:02:48.840 different your life would be if the only time you worried about your problems were the times that you

00:02:54.940 could actually do something. You know, you could work harder or you could try something and do

00:02:58.880 something. And I would call that trying to make that happen, I call collectively brain hacking,

00:03:06.820 meaning tricks that you use on your own brain to modify it, to permanently restructure it so it's

00:03:16.000 more effective. Now, can you rewire your own brain? Yeah. Yeah, you do it all the time. If you go to

00:03:24.280 school, for example, and you educate yourself, you're creating a physical change in your brain because

00:03:30.800 you can't store memories and learn things without new, you know, new structures literally physically

00:03:37.140 growing in your brain. So you physically reprogram your brain with every experience. All I'm suggesting

00:03:44.420 is that brain hacking is being a little bit more directive about it, where you're saying, okay,

00:03:50.780 what specifically do I do now? And here's your micro lesson on this. I'm not going to solve this whole

00:03:59.660 brain hacking thing because it's a big field. I'll just give you one little thing to think about.

00:04:06.420 And this one little thing is going to grow. It's a little idea, a little reframing, that even when

00:04:14.000 you hear it, you're going to say, uh, I kind of already knew that. But it's not that you didn't know

00:04:19.980 it. It's that you may not have used it as your frame or your filter on life, which is a little

00:04:26.200 different than simply knowing something is true. Here's what I'm going to add to it. Have you had

00:04:31.860 this experience? I'm hoping most of you have had the following experience. First of all, if you've

00:04:37.620 ever done any of the hallucinogens or whatever, you've probably experienced having all the same

00:04:42.540 problems, but yet you feel happy about it. Likewise, without doing any kind of illegal substance,

00:04:49.600 wouldn't you like to be able to reproduce that? And one of the things you'll notice is, and I hope most

00:04:54.620 of you've had this experience, have you ever had incredible sex, not just ordinary sex, but like

00:05:03.800 incredible sex, the kind that were, where even though you might've had a lot of sex in your life,

00:05:10.560 there'll be like a few occasions that you'll remember forever. You ever had that happen? Just,

00:05:17.180 I hope so. I hope you've all had that one occasion where it's like, oh my goodness,

00:05:22.020 I didn't even know this was possible. Here's what I want you to remember. When you're in that mode

00:05:28.980 and after you're done with it and you're still sort of in the, the chemicals are flooding your

00:05:35.280 brain and you're feeling good about it, here's the tiny, tiny little tip that will grow. Consider that

00:05:43.520 while you're feeling amazing. All of your problems are exactly the same, but you're feeling amazing.

00:05:53.540 Now, does that sound like a big deal? Because you already knew that, right? Was there anybody here

00:05:58.200 who didn't know it feels good to have great sex? So some of you should be saying, I don't think you

00:06:04.020 told us anything. I feel like we all knew that that feels good. The only thing I'm adding is the

00:06:10.320 reframing part. Remind yourself, and it's the reminding yourself that's the important part,

00:06:15.840 because that's what turns it into a filter over time, repetition. Remind yourself every time you

00:06:21.600 can find yourself in one of those situations, doesn't matter if it's because you had great sex

00:06:26.820 or just something good happened. Remind yourself that you feel good while all of your problems

00:06:33.040 are exactly the same. Now, you might think that's not a big deal, and the first time you think of it,

00:06:41.300 it won't be. The second time you think about it, it also won't be. It's a little teeny thing like a

00:06:48.940 seed that will grow forever. So think of this little acorn as you're planting it in the yard,

00:06:55.780 and you've got a long life ahead of you, and in 40 years you're really going to like that

00:07:00.180 oak tree that you planted. But it might take 40 years. I'm saying that over the course of your life,

00:07:05.860 you can keep working on that little thought every time you have a moment of peace in this terrible

00:07:12.680 world. Tell yourself, huh, none of my problems are fixed, and yet I feel good. And you'll find over

00:07:20.120 time that you can reproduce that, and you can find that good feeling even in the context of everything

00:07:27.520 going bad because you remember it, and you focused on it, and you filtered on it. And suddenly you'll find

00:07:35.500 that you're, well, maybe not suddenly, but over time, you'll find that you can experience a happy day

00:07:41.600 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

00:07:49.140 better mood today. But moving on to next topic, there's a thing that's going to happen this year

00:07:58.900 in politics that needs a name. So I'm going to suggest a name for it. You know, it's good to have

00:08:05.800 a name for Trump derangement syndrome, because if you have a name for it, everybody can refer to it

00:08:11.800 without explaining the whole thing again. So here's a concept. I'm going to give a name to it. I'm going

00:08:17.380 to call it the Trump Contrast Problem, or the TCP, if you want to, if you like your acronyms,

00:08:24.300 the Trump Contrast Problem. And the problem specifically is for Biden. And it goes like this.

00:08:31.380 When Trump was, well, he's still in office, but during Trump's administration, no matter what he did,

00:08:38.380 he would be viciously criticized, right? So if you're a Democrat, you went through four years of

00:08:45.020 everything Trump did was bad, because the media you consumed told you that it didn't matter what he

00:08:50.240 did. You know, with a few rare exceptions, right? They did say warp speed was a good idea. But with

00:08:56.360 rare exceptions, pretty much whatever Trump does is the bad thing. But what happens when Trump is no

00:09:04.500 longer the focus of the story? And let's say he's moved on to another career, and it's just Biden.

00:09:10.340 And Biden's just doing his job. There's a problem that Biden is going to run into that you can start

00:09:17.400 seeing it form now, but it's going to get bigger. And it's the fact that his contrast with Trump,

00:09:25.620 once Trump is no longer the topic, which they have to say bad things about him every moment of every

00:09:30.560 day, once he just becomes an historical figure, I mean, moderate historical, because it's recent,

00:09:37.420 people are going to look at what he did quite differently. Here's your first example.

00:09:43.960 Here's what Biden said about the COVID situation. He said, quote, Joe Biden said,

00:09:49.820 our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us, he said. So we need to

00:09:56.240 prepare ourselves to steal our spine. Now, how did you feel when Joe Biden told you that the darkest

00:10:03.620 days are ahead of us? Do you see it? That's the Trump contrast problem. If Trump had never existed,

00:10:14.900 and any president, Biden or somebody else came out and said, our darkest days are ahead of us,

00:10:19.880 you know, I'm just getting you ready. So you need to be ready for this. You wouldn't have really

00:10:25.420 noticed it was wrong, would you? Because there would be nothing to compare it to. You'd say, well,

00:10:30.940 I'm glad he's warning us. He's being perfectly honest. You don't want your president to lie to

00:10:36.420 you, right? It looks honest. It looks useful. If there were nothing to compare it to, you'd say,

00:10:42.660 yeah, that's pretty, that's good presidenting. He's telling us to shape up and look out for all this

00:10:47.720 danger. But because Trump is the optimist of all optimists, when you see Biden's communication style,

00:10:57.640 it's such a bummer. It's like, it's all down and negative and things are going to happen.

00:11:03.380 You say to yourself, I get why Biden is trying to be honest, so that we're not, you know, all

00:11:09.820 Pollyannas. But I kind of did like the Trump optimism, right? Don't you already miss it? When you

00:11:19.280 hear something like that, you miss it. Trump was saying we're going to do Project Warp Speed,

00:11:24.040 we're going to beat this thing. You know, even though there'll be deaths, of course, we'll still

00:11:29.180 get the economy open. So Trump is nonstop optimism, even to a flaw, because you could argue that his

00:11:36.620 optimism cost him his job, right? Because the coronavirus was sort of a mismatch for his optimism.

00:11:44.620 You needed to be a little bit more medical for the public to be comfortable about it. So the fake

00:11:50.960 news turned his optimism into a negative, they could have easily turned it into a positive.

00:11:55.820 Imagine if the fake news had said, yeah, the president's saying it's no big deal, but he's an

00:12:00.640 optimist. So keep that in mind. But here's what the scientists say, make up your own mind.

00:12:06.540 Right? Imagine if the fake news simply framed it correctly. Your president is always an optimist.

00:12:14.120 But be warned, your scientists are saying something that's a little slightly different,

00:12:18.640 a little less positive. You've got two different messages. One comes from somebody you know is an

00:12:23.540 optimist. Keep that in mind. Scientists are saying something different, might be a little less

00:12:29.100 optimistic. How would that be bad? Would you feel underserved by your news if they just said, yeah,

00:12:36.440 you know, the president's going to be on the optimist side? Now, which of those methods works better?

00:12:42.680 Optimism? Or not? Well, it kind of depends, right? If what you're trying to do is Operation Warp Speed,

00:12:51.120 would Biden have done that if the scientists told them it couldn't be done? Because that's what

00:12:57.800 happened. All the experts said, you know, you could go faster, but it's going to take four or five years.

00:13:04.260 That's what the experts said. And Biden says, I will listen to the experts. Biden guaranteed you,

00:13:12.980 he guaranteed it by making his primary, I'd say his primary, really, his primary campaign theme,

00:13:20.860 which I think he will keep, by the way, is that he will be consistent with the experts.

00:13:25.620 If Biden had been president and kept his promise, there would be no vaccine for maybe four years.

00:13:34.260 Think about that. You don't have to wonder, you don't have to wonder if Biden would have done a

00:13:40.960 good job. He wouldn't have, because he's very aggressively telling you he wouldn't have done

00:13:47.220 the most important thing which will get us out of this. He wouldn't have done it, right? I mean,

00:13:52.200 it would have happened eventually, but he wouldn't have done it. So yeah, you've got a big Trump

00:13:58.340 contrast problem. Every time Biden does something now, people are going to say, I remember us

00:14:04.640 criticizing Trump for that. But once you see the other way it works, Trump doesn't look so bad,

00:14:11.820 does he? You're going to be amazed at how Trump's approval goes up in time. Because once the fake news

00:14:21.880 noise dies down, and you can just look at what he did, just get all the noise out and just say,

00:14:28.400 well, what did he do? It's going to be impressive, super impressive. I believe Trump, if he does

00:14:36.480 nothing else, and it looks like that will be close to true, maybe, he will be one of the greatest

00:14:42.740 presidents of all time, just based on record. And I'm sure of that. I'm positive of that. In fact,

00:14:49.140 that's one thing that I don't have any doubt. I don't have any doubt that his historical reputation

00:14:55.280 will be far higher than his current one. I'm still waiting for that big Trump military coup that

00:15:01.880 everybody was warning me about, you know, because he's a big old crazy guy, and he doesn't obey the 0.99

00:15:07.180 Constitution. And even if he lost the election, he's just going to get the military to surround the 0.96

00:15:12.680 White House and stay in the job. So are you seeing anything like that for me? This is another one of

00:15:23.240 those situations where if you were, probably you were a Democrat, if you thought this, if you thought

00:15:29.880 that Trump was actually going to try to stay in office, while the entire process, as corrupt as it

00:15:36.600 might be, while the process says he lost, and Biden was the president, if you really thought he was

00:15:42.680 going to actually do that, you have to look at your ability to predict, because it's really bad. There

00:15:50.460 was never really any risk of President Trump trying to stay in office by force. None. Do you know why?

00:16:00.280 Do you want to give me an, do you want to hear an easy reason why? Because his family and his

00:16:06.620 business are not protected. Just imagine if you would, that it's, and it's, it's stupid to imagine 0.99

00:16:13.860 it, because it's so ridiculous, it will never happen. Imagine if you would, that Trump said, 0.99

00:16:19.240 yeah, I think I lost the vote, or even if I thought I won the vote, I'm going to get the military to 0.91

00:16:24.940 keep me in office anyway. What happens the day he does that? Every Trump property burns to the

00:16:33.400 ground. Am I right? Think about it. The day that a hypothetical Trump, you know, tried to keep his

00:16:44.040 position while actually losing on paper the election, the day that he said the military is the only thing

00:16:51.280 keeping me in power. Every Trump property would burn to the ground. Every Trump family member

00:16:57.100 who was not protected by the military at that moment would be rounded up by the public. The public would

00:17:06.000 find all the family members and say, we're going to hold on to your family members until something

00:17:11.480 changes, right? There isn't any practical way that a President Trump could hold power with a military,

00:17:19.620 because there's just too much exposed everything. It just can't be done. There's no way he would win,

00:17:25.220 right? And there would always be enough people in the military to take him out, right? You know,

00:17:32.680 imagine, if you will, that somehow a President, whether it was Trump or anybody else, imagine if

00:17:38.460 somehow he got a general to agree. Sorry, all right, I got a general to agree, and the general orders his

00:17:44.200 troops to do whatever, circle, you know, protect the capital or whatever. You'd still have to get all

00:17:50.980 the people, the actual military, they'd all have to kind of be on board, and I don't think that's

00:17:57.840 going to happen, right? Even if you get the general to say to do it. Imagine you're in the military.

00:18:02.620 You've taken all the oaths of protecting the country, etc. You've taken an oath, an oath to

00:18:10.080 protect the country. And then your general says, instead of following the Constitution, we're just

00:18:15.760 going to run a coup. So, you know, instead of doing your normal stuff of protecting the country,

00:18:21.520 now we're going to attack the country. And you're in the military, and your own management,

00:18:26.740 your own leadership tells you to attack your own country, right? Now, they could try to sell it as

00:18:33.960 protecting the country, whatever, but it's going to look like attacking the country to some number

00:18:39.200 of the people in the military. If you put me in the military, just average person, I'm in the military,

00:18:47.380 and you say, Scott, orders have come down. You have to surround the Capitol and keep this president who,

00:18:52.980 on paper, lost the election, but he wants to stay. What do I do? Well, I don't go. And they say,

00:19:00.580 well, we'll put you in jail. I'll say, as opposed to being a traitor? Okay, I'll take jail. If those

00:19:10.080 are my two choices, my two choices are overthrow the United States or go to jail. I'm going to go to

00:19:18.220 jail. I'm going to pick that one every time. And let me, and I don't know how to say this without

00:19:24.640 getting canceled. So I'm going to say this in an indirect way so I don't get canceled, okay?

00:19:31.140 If you took a thousand military people with weapons, and you put them in the general vicinity

00:19:38.160 of the president, you can't guarantee that all of those weapons will be pointed at the public.

00:19:44.180 That's all I'm saying. I'm just saying that it would be the world's shortest coup because out

00:19:50.900 of a thousand patriots, let's say military members who are, you know, hypothetically protecting the

00:19:56.420 president, you're telling me out of a thousand ordinary American citizens who are trained in the

00:20:03.860 military, patriotic, you're telling me there's not one of them that would take out the president for

00:20:09.260 the benefit of the country. Not one of them. That's a lot of guns in one place. They'd all have

00:20:15.440 to be on the same side. Now, how does somebody like Iran or Putin get any kind of a military to

00:20:22.720 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

00:20:37.240 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,

00:21:18.760 this election reminds me of the time all the security cameras outside of Epstein's cell shut

00:21:24.640 off. And I thought, that's one of those perfect, if we live in a simulation, there's code reuse.

00:21:32.640 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

00:21:55.820 the video camera. And it shows a woman named Ruby. She's so famous that we know her by her first name.

00:22:04.600 Everybody knows who Ruby is if you're following politics. So Ruby, who apparently has lawyered up 1.00

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.

00:22:36.220 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?

00:23:04.360 What percent credibility would you put on a video that shows the crime? It's right in front of you.

00:23:13.380 From zero to 100%, tell me how reliable the video should be. I'm seeing 50%, 100%, zero.

00:23:23.660 Zero percent? Zero, you say. Okay. I'm seeing more zeros. 10, 10%, 10%, 10%, 25%, 15%. The correct answer is

00:23:35.900 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

00:24:17.160 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,

00:25:02.160 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

00:25:25.760 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, 1.00

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 0.99

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

00:26:36.960 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 1.00

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 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.93

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, 0.96

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. 0.99

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.

00:47:43.400 That's good work. That's good work. All right.

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 0.96

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 0.98

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

00:58:02.600 Mexican immigrants, getting the job instead of a black person replacing a black person is as tone 0.99

00:58:09.880 deaf as you can get. That is really tone deaf. And do you know who never makes this mistake? Obama. 1.00

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 0.73

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. 0.62

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. 0.98

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 0.70

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, 0.96

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 0.90

00:59:46.540 gap you could get between the white experience and the black experience would be slavery. 0.56

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 0.60

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 0.98

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 0.99

01:03:14.640 their money, or some money, right? It's going to be pretty expensive. And then what would Black Lives 1.00

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 1.00

01:03:48.720 wins. Imagine what will happen if Detroit actually gets some money from Black Lives Matter. Do they have 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.79

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.

01:13:56.700 Have I filled Christina's stocking?

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 1.00

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.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - December 23, 2020

Episode 1228 Scott Adams： I Teach You How to Select the Correct Size For a COVID-19 Relief Check

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