Episode 1070 Scott Adams: Protests, Fake News Determining Elections, Sandmann Puts Fake News 2 Sleep

Hey, everybody, Come on in. It's time for another exciting and amazing episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. Yep, it's just about the best thing you've ever seen in your life. What is happening? My security camera's going off. There's a mouse outside. I literally picked up a mouse on my security camera. That's good security. So. But enough about me. What about you? How are you doing? Great. Yeah? Good, because it's a great day today, and it's just going to get better. And one of the things that will make it better is a simultaneous sip. And I hope you'll join me. Now, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tanker gels or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including pandemics, economics, you name it. Go. Oh, let's talk about all the things happening today. So yesterday, Trump signed four. Are they executive orders? I guess. And they're all designed to lower pharmaceutical costs in this country. Now, there are a few interesting things about this, aside from the fact that wouldn't it be good to have lower pharmaceutical costs. Number one interesting thing, why wasn't this done before? Even the president says should have been done long ago. Well, he's been president for three years. So long ago also includes the current presidency. And so the question is, why wasn't it done before? Now, let me. I don't know the details of the executive orders, but one of them is to have most favored nation status, which. Which is fairly common in contracts. Common enough that people know it exists. And the idea is that we can't be charged more in this country than some other country. So we don't want to be the ones who are subsidizing other countries by paying high costs so that some other country can have low costs. That's pretty basic contract stuff. But the government had not been involved. Rather, these were private companies doing private things. So why is it that now the President can make this kind of a change which seems to comply to all common sense, and on the surface, it looks like just a smart thing to do. Why did it take so long? Same with buying from Canada. Apparently, we'll have the option now of getting some meds from Canada where the prices are lower, which is similar to the most favored nations thing, and then a few other things that do the same thing. And here's what I think it is. But I need to see some reporting on this by smarter people. Yeah. You're saying in the comments where I was going, could you tell I was teasing for the answer? Because I think the answer is that the Supreme Court has upheld enough executive orders from the past, and I think it was with DACA and maybe Obamacare. So that's the part I'm working on. So somebody can fill me in on the Supreme Court part of it. But I think what's happened is that Trump has discovered he has more power as a president than anybody would have imagined. Meaning that the Supreme Court has now set a standard that says that Trump can do this. Now, because he's doing this, that's about the same size of this ness of other things that the Supreme Court has allowed. And so it gave him room to operate that didn't exist before. So here's the fun part. The Supreme Court, by voting against the president's wishes a few times, has turned him into the dictator that nobody wanted. But as long as he's a benevolent dictator, it's going to be okay. And the same with Obama. Right? Obama did some big executive orders, but as long as society looked at them and said, yeah, well, your intention was good and a lot of people do like it. Not everybody agrees, but it's not like the worst thing in the world. Supreme Court could let that stand. So you can never underestimate. No, you can never overestimate. I always say it wrong. I tweeted that wrong this morning. There's a big impact of the. What do you call it? The accidental consequences of anything. And the accidental consequences of the President losing a few Supreme Court battles is that he can lower our health care costs. You can never underestimate. Thank you. That's what I should say. So the accidental consequences, the unintended consequences were to give the president more power, and then he took his power and he solved one of society's biggest problems with it. Thank you for unintended. Yes. Now, who saw that coming? Who on their prediction card said, president will lose important Supreme Court cases and that will allow him to lower our drug costs. What? And you're going to see a lot of exciting things, I think, happening as we get closer to election Day, because the President has this one gigantic advantage, and it's enormous, which is the president can do things, whereas Joe Biden can't do things. So the president doesn't have to just talk about lowering drug costs. He can just do it. And apparently he's well on his way to doing it. We'll See if this stuff holds. But I'll bet it will. You all had a good laugh or I think celebrated silently when Covington kid Nick Sandbin won his, his suit. Well, he got a settlement which is different from winning, although it's a kind of winning. And so this is his second win in a row he won. He got a settlement, I guess from cnn and he got a settlement of unnamed amount from Washington Post that he's got a few more outlets to sue. And the basic idea here is that the news, the fake news, painted him as the bad guy when in fact he was just standing there and he was sort of the one that was approached, not the one who was causing trouble. So his reputation got destroyed by this sufficiently that a court, or at least it looked like it was something he could win sufficiently that the other side decided to sell. So that's how bad it was. So this raises an interesting question, and it goes like this. Could somebody who had lost their job or had been attacked, let's say physically attacked, and I guess there were a few of them even last night at the protesters at the protest. If people who are Trump supporters are physically attacked or fired for being Trump supporters, here's the question I ask the legal experts. Could those people sue the fake news for the fine people hoax and for the, you know, the Covington kid hoax and the Russia collusion hoax? In other words, could you say the reason I lost my job for being a Trump supporter is because the fake news has run enough hoaxes that I'm demonized just for being a supporter, I lost my job. Could they make the case that the media by knowingly running hoaxes, and of course, the fine people hoax is the classic one where, you know, they know the real answer because it's in the transcript. It's not really an interpretation problem. It's right there. You just read it. So could you win a case against the same fake news companies if you had been abused in any way for being a Trump supporter? Because I think it's a pretty solid line from there. Speaking of which, Rasmussen, who does polling, which you rarely will hear mentioned on the news, apparently Rasmussen is banned from being mentioned on the news. Did you know that? I think it's banned on both the left and the right now, they claim, and I think there's evidence to support it, to be the most accurate polling company in the country for political stuff. Now, is that true? Is that true? I think so. I think they're the most accurate and they can't be mentioned. So there must Be a counter argument to that, but I don't know what it is, but one of the things that Rasmussen tweeted this morning is that if you look at what people believed during the 2018 midterm elections, you'd find that 30%, just before the vote for the midterms in 2018, 30% of the country believed the Russia collusion hoax. 30% of the country believed it, and that includes Republicans. Now, if 30% of your country believed the fake news that Russia was controlling the president, what would you expect the midterm to look like? You'd expect it to look like it did. People would vote in Democrats because they think the President is owned by Russia. Now, think about how much that changed the world, because it probably flipped the house. And I haven't even added the second part. If the only thing that happened was the Russia collusion hoax, which you had to know that the media pushing it had some suspicion it wasn't true or knew it wasn't true, but they pushed it anyway, what about the Fine People hoax? I would say that the Fine People hoax was believed by maybe 70% of the country when it first came out, wouldn't you say? I would guess that 70% of the country, because that includes a lot of Republicans, believed the Fine People hoax. Now, that's quite, that's changed quite a bit. I tweeted this morning because I periodically tweet that it's a hoax. And a PhD doctor type guy who wrote an anti Trump book weighed in to say it's not a hoax. Darth Dilbert. See, that's the funny part, because my critics call me Dilbert, but he called me Darth Dilbert. So that's like really, really funny. Very clever. And he was not aware, according to his tweet, that it was a hoax. And I thought to myself, how could you be an educated person in the United States and think that the Fine People hoax was real? Now, in 2020, I totally get why people believed it in 2018 because it was fresh and it was being misreported. But after two years of unraveling this thing, you'd think most people would know it's a hoax by now. But think of those, those two hoaxes, the Russia collusion hoax. And then I would call it the tentpole race hoax. Because everything else about Trump would seem different if you took away that, that one thing that they think they got the smoking gun on. Because everything else is sort of a. Well, 30 years ago there was that full page ad about the Central Park 5 so what about that? Well, if you were looking at it in isolation and you had not heard the Fine People hoax, and you were just looking at it on its own, you'd say, well, he wrote an ad that says nothing about race. There's nothing in there about race. It was about crime. The people accused happened to be black, but it wasn't any part of Trump's point. So if you saw that in isolation, you'd say, yeah, I can see why people are saying it feels racist. But there's nothing there, I mean, there's nothing in what he did that even, you know, indirectly implies race. So if you take away the Charlottesville Fine People hoax, which is the one that people said, ah, finally, now we don't have to read his mind anymore. We don't have to think he was thinking something wrong. Even though he didn't do things wrong, we know he was thinking bad things. Now we have the actual proof. So once you have the proof, it proves all the other things. It's like, aha, Aha. Now that we've heard this, we know all of his secret thoughts are confirmed. So I would say that those two hoaxes actually completely determined the midterm result. And that means that the fake news literally is running the country at this point. If you're worried about foreign interference, you should rethink that on a statistical basis, because what we have now, it looks like you probably have a Russia which wouldn't mind having Trump again, I think. I'm not sure, but it feels like it. And then you've got a China that absolutely doesn't want Trump because Biden is China friendly. So it looks like it's a contest between China and maybe Russia intelligence to try to thwart the fake news in this country, which will otherwise determine the election. So we have foreign interference. This is literally true. We have foreign interference in our fake news, which will cause the fake news to less reliably throw the election and make it illegitimate. Now, I'm not coming out in favor of foreign interference. I'm simply pointing out the irony that it might be the only thing that could save us. Again, not in favor of it. I'm not making a pro Russia statement. I'm just saying that if the fake news was going to do another 2018 job on the country and just completely rigged the election by fake information, what if Russia successfully interfered with our election in a way that thwarted the fake news? Would that be bad? In theory, it would be bad. Hypothetically, it would be terrible to have foreign interference, except that our domestic Interference is far worse. Right? So sort of two wrongs making a right situation. Sometimes it works. Senator Tom Cotton continues to make news. He's good at making news. And he wants to ban federal funding from any school that has included the what is called the race baiting 1619 project in the curriculum. Now the 1619 project, 1619 refers to the first date of slavery, I think the beginning of slavery and the curriculum would include the fact that the white race is barbaric devils and bloodsuckers. So Tom Cotton thinks that schools should not give federal funding if they are teaching that white people are barbaric devils and blood suckers. And I'm thinking to myself, that sounds pretty reasonable. Tom Cotton, I have to say, I haven't always agreed with Tom Cotton. He's got some opinions that are a little outside my range of happiness. But not this one. This one seems right down the center. Like this one doesn't even look right wing to me, does it? You could argue that this is, oh, he's a right wing guy. But not this. This is right down the middle. So will this get passed? I doubt it, but I'm glad he's doing it. Here's an interesting story that I don't know what to make of it. You know about the, the book and the movie Plandemic, right? So you know that there's a, a doctor who's suggesting that I guess there's going to be a tv. The Sinclair local TV stations are going to air and the Sinclair stations, by the way, own a lot of local TV stations. So this is a big deal. They're going to air the plandemic. It's called a researchers conspiracy theory. Now conspiracy theory is what you call anything you don't agree with. So, so keep an open mind about what's a conspiracy theory and what isn't. But the Pandemic claims that Dr. Fauci was responsible for creating the coronavirus and they sent it to China. And so Fauci's responsible for the coronavirus. Now, I suppose we live in a world where anything's possible, right? Anything's possible, but. And then other people weighed in and said that this is the most widely debunked conspiracy theory ever. Now I told you before that one of the authors of the plandemic book lives locally around here and he's lobbied me, I think he sent me three books so far. He's lobbied me to get him on here to my periscopes, which makes me think he might be watching right now. So I can't Heck it lively. So I did get your messages and the reason that I haven't responded is that I can't vet this sort of stuff. So Eric Balling apparently had, you know, the doctor on there recently and he got some criticism for not knowing ahead of time the other things that they had claimed, etc. And I don't want to make the mistake that Eric Bolling made, which is putting on one side of a controversial scientific claim if I can't argue the claim. In other words, if I don't know enough about the topic where I could push back on a claim, I don't want that person talking in public with my help because any single claim and a context looks persuasive. So I don't have an opinion about whether the pandemic is totally debunked as other people say, or there's something to part of it, but maybe not all of it. Don't know. But I'd also suggest that you don't know and for the fact that the Sinclair stations are going to run this I think is completely irresponsible unless it also runs something from the critics. If it's balanced, if they say, well, this is what the experts say, here's what the plandemic movie says and let's go back to the experts and see what they say. If they do something like that, then fine, maybe it's the public interest to know, to see both sides, but I don't think that's going to happen. Let me give you a good example of what happens when you only look at one side of an argument in the comments. Tell me, was Michael Jackson totally, definitely a child molester or not in the comments? Tell me your opinion and then I'll tell you why I'm asking this. I'm asking because this goes to my point about how if you see one side of an argument, it's always convincing. If one lawyer gets to talk and the other side doesn't get to talk, that one lawyer will convince you pretty much every time I'm looking at your comments about Michael Jackson and you'll see that they're mixed, which is what I was expecting. You'll see a bunch of yeses, you'll see a bunch of no's. Now how can it be that we get to this point in time and you've got a bunch of yeses and you've got a bunch of no's. You. Well, let me tell you my experience. I went from saying, well gosh, I don't know, could be true, could be True, could be not true. And then I watched a Netflix special, I think it was Netflix, in which it showed two of his accusers, now adults, telling their story. Now when you hear the adults telling the story of what happened to them when they were younger, it is 100% credible. It would be hard to watch that documentary and walk away thinking that Jackson was innocent. I mean, it would be really hard. It's completely convincing. So therefore Michael Jackson, definitely a child buster, right? Very convincing. Except last night I watched another documentary last night I watched one called Square One and it took the other side and it went through the description of how the initial accuser made the accusation, etc. And I don't want to give it away. Was it an HBO special? Somebody's correcting me. Was it something Wonderland or. Yeah, that was the name of it. So anyway, so I watched the other side of it and let me tell you, the other side of it that says he was not a Child molester is 100% credible. Blew my frickin head off. If you had told me that there was an other side to this story after I'd seen the completely convincing evidence that he was obviously a child molester. When you see the other side, it'll blow your fucking head off. Let me give you just a flavor of it and let me tell you, you should watch this because if you believe that Michael Jackson definitely is guilty, and I'm not going to say he is or not, I'm going to only talk about the quality of the arguments. Do I know anything? Yeah. I wasn't there, Was not there. Let me give you some examples. The very first accuser who ended up settling. When you hear the story of how that scam came about and you hear that even the kid didn't think anything happened. He talked to his friends and said nothing happened, even after the fact. I mean, when you hear the whole story, it really was just a con artist who figured out a way to make Michael Jackson pay. And here was the part of the story I'd never heard before. And it goes like this. There were two court cases. One was criminal and one was civil. So one tries to get money and one is trying to see if Michael Jackson goes to jail. Typically the way you do those is you do the criminal case first and then depending on how that turns out, that gives you a basis to to do or not do a civil suit where you tried to get money. Now the problem is that in the Michael Jackson case, his civil suit was on a faster schedule, which meant that he would have had to give away his entire defense in the civil suit before the criminal case was run. And if you do that, the experts say that the criminal case people get to craft and recraft their case so that the defense doesn't work, and therefore it's massively unconstitutional or at least unfair. I think it's actually passed constitutional muster since then, but in my opinion, it's unconstitutional because it guarantees an unfair trial in the criminal case. Guarantees it. It guarantees an unfair trial. And so Michael Jackson had the following situation. He could either settle for something that definitely didn't happen, or he could risk going to jail because he knew that his defense would be laid bare in the civil suit. And when he went to criminal court, basically, he would get eaten alive and probably be convicted for something that didn't happen. And so he settled. Once he settled, there became another thing that happened. And here's the key part. The fake news business at the time was paying people who would come forward and say that something bad happened at Michael Jackson's house. What happens when you pay massive amounts of money to people who are willing to lie on television? What happens? You get a lot of people who are willing to lie on television. And the ones who came after were just sort of obvious liars. So now you've got one case that Jackson settled because he got in this weird legal bind that he just had to do the safe thing that created the first story that generated fake news, paying people for more stories because they got a lot of clicks. So now you have a pattern. And when you say to yourself, but what about those, you know, the two older ones that you saw in the other documentary, they're adults. It doesn't seem like they have anything to gain by making something up. Well, here's the thing. They also have some connection to some of the badness. And I won't give it away, but they don't. The documentary that excuses Jackson doesn't too directly deal with those latest adult accusations, but it does completely eliminate the bulk of the ones you've heard. And they are absolutely. They look pretty fake. The other ones, who knows? But let me give you a little anecdote here. Colleague McCulkin will say this. When you hear the story that Michael Jackson let children that had been visiting sleepover in his bedroom, what do you think? You see them all in the same bed, right? And here's one of the stories that Colley McCaulkin was saying. He goes, the first thing you don't understand is that Michael Jackson's bedroom was two stories. It was two stories so you could be in his bedroom without even being in the same room. And he told the story about some kid who wanted to sleep in his bedroom and his bed. And Michael Jackson asked one of the adult staff members to sleep in the room with him and the two of them slept on the floor and let the kids use the big bed. Now I don't know how common it was for him to do that, but the fact that it happened even once tells you that Michael Jackson was aware that you don't want to be alone with a kid in your bed. Did he ever do it before? I don't know. So here's the point. I don't know what Michael Jackson did or did not do. I do know that a huge part of that story about what he did looks completely not credible. That doesn't mean all the rest of it is not credible. It just means that the fake news basically destroyed this person. If you took the fake news business out of the equation, Michael Jackson would still probably be performing today. I don't even know if he'd be dead. So keep that in mind. You have to watch both of those documentaries. If you don't watch them both, you're really not going to get the feel of this two world situation I saw on social media. But I'm looking for a confirmation that something like half of all coronavirus deaths happen to diabetics. Is that really true? Is it true that half of coronavirus deaths are diabetics and the diabetics are still walking around just like they have the same risk of everybody else? I mean, I would hope that they're hiding pretty well by now, but it feels like we could really make something happen if that's true. There are also two movies and two worlds about all the protests. If you look at Fox News, you'll see lots of articles and photos of things burning and things being thrown at police and dangerous lasers blinding them, etc. A bunch of police have been literally blinded by these lasers from the protesters. Now I just, I'm so angry about that. In particular, it's one thing to get hit with a blunt object. I mean that could be bad enough, but to be blinded just because you went to work. I don't know if the police just opened fired on the protesters with the, with the. I think they should shoot to kill anybody who's got a laser that they're putting in people's eyes. That's just my opinion now. Probably would cause a lot of problems. It may be more problems than it solves, but I think if you actually saw somebody aiming the laser, that no matter where that laser was aimed, if it's a deadly weapon, meaning that it will blind somebody, I think the police should be able to shoot to kill if they even see the laser, you know, the moment the laser comes out. That should be a shoot to kill situation, because it would be if it were a gun, right? If somebody brought out a gun, that would be a shoot to kill situation, if it looked like they were going to use it. If somebody brings out a laser to blind a police officer, let me say as clearly as I possibly can, you put me on that jury, that police officer is free. Put me on the jury that tries to convict a police officer for shooting somebody who has a blinding laser that they, that is in their hand. You're a free man or free woman. You know, you put me on that jury, no way I'm going to convict the cop for shooting a guy with a laser that blinds people. No way. If you're wondering what's going to happen with all their urban centers, I suggest you learn about insurance and banking. Because when you see all the shops that were destroyed by the looters in the urban areas, you say to yourself, well, you know, they'll wait for the tension to go down and then they'll rebuild. Or maybe other people will come in, other tenants will take over and rebuild. But there's a problem. You kind of need insurance to have a viable business. If you need a bank loan, the bank's gonna want you to have insurance too, so that you're covered in case something happens. Now, insurance companies will often, if not always exclude riots. So riots would not be covered by your insurance. Now that was probably not a big problem in the past because when you're filling out your insurance policy, you're thinking, well, what are the odds I'm going to lose my business to a riot? That doesn't seem very likely. So you still buy the insurance, but would you buy insurance with no riot protection in the very places that have recently been destroyed by riots and no end in sight? I would suggest that you can predict what's going to happen to at least the retail parts of the inner cities by looking at banking and insurance and entrepreneurs and how they manage risk. And at this point, the risk is just too high, and that's going to persist for years. So I don't see any situation in which the urban areas quickly come back, if they come back at all. Let's see, There I was tweeting about 5G and you know, people Think there might be some health dangers from 5G, which is the new, faster technology for phones. Now, the first thing I want to say about it is, as I said in my tweet, I don't think society understands that this new faster speed for phones called 5G, because it sounds like 4G and 3G. And you knew what those were, right? Oh, 3G was data, but it was kind of slow. 4G is pretty snappy, pretty fast. 5G is going to be better. It'll be a little faster. Right? If that's what you're thinking, you're missing the show. 5G is not a little bit faster, Data. 5G will change civilization. 5G will just change civilization in a way similar to how smartphones did. Because I don't know about you, but I'm using my phone for getting all my delivery of my food because I'm quarantined at the moment in anticipation of some surgery upcoming. So if I didn't have my phone, I could barely do what I do. I mean, smartphones, I think you would agree with, have transformed civilization, but not as much as 5G. And here's why. 5G is going to give you an augmented reality world. It won't be long before my glasses are connected to my phone and my phone has 5G. That's pretty much guaranteed. There's no way that won't happen because it's just too. It's too there. I mean, it's too obvious that that's going to be a thing. Once you have enough people who have the types of glasses or they don't really need them, they could just hold up their phone and see an augmented reality through the. You know, just like your camera. But those people will be living in a much improved world because with your glasses on, you won't just see the things that are there. You'll see a menu for everything there. There's a television across the room. I would see remote control pop up, and I could control my TV in the air, because in the air I would see an actual remote control. So I could get directions on anything I could find out. You know, really, I would have this whole enhanced reality such that when I took my glasses off at night, it would start to feel the way you feel when you accidentally leave home without your phone. Have you had that experience? Ever get in your car and you're driving someplace, you're going to be gone for a while, and you look for your phone and it's not there, and you think, oh, God, what if I get a problem? You know, it's not the end of the world, but it definitely bothers you right? Now, imagine if you had an enhanced reality world, an augmented reality where you're seeing things floating that don't exist. You can call up a screen that floats in front of you to watch a movie that floats in the air that only you can see because you got your earbuds into. So you're walking around watching a movie, you meet somebody, their social media profile appears above their head. Try to live without that. It will be so addictive and useful that it will be like if you didn't have a smartphone. So I think that the world will start to bifurcate into people who are essentially cyborgs, because once you get to the point where you're living in an enhanced reality with labels and messages and instructions and more detail and all that, you're basically a cyborg. Now, I have argued for a long time, and Elon Musk said something similar recently, that the smartphones already made us cyborgs. So the fact that you could leave it at home and drive away is. Is sort of trivial because you'll wish you hadn't, right? But as soon as you've got the. What's it called? The neuralink, which is also. Elon Musk's, one of his companies, they're going to embed a little sensor for your brain so you maybe could control things just by thinking it. Now imagine if you. If you could see through your glasses an enhanced reality with augmented stuff, and you can just think them to change. So you just look around, you could see a TV and you could just blink at it, and it would come on because your brain knew that you wanted it to be on. So put those things together, and we are fully into the cyborg era. But here's the problem. What if everybody doesn't become a cyborg? Will there be a human organic movement of people who don't have any technology? Probably. I just don't know how big it will be. Will it be Amish country, small? Or will it be a third of the country doesn't want to be a cyborg now, if you ask me, oh, I can't wait. Make me a cyborg as quickly as you can. But anyway, people don't realize what a big deal that is. But here's the funny part of my story. There's nothing more amusing. Well, there probably is, but it's amusing when you're on social media and people don't know what your background is and they challenge you on a point that you might be the one person in the world who knows more about it than anybody. So it's sort of like that Woody Allen movie, I think it was Annie hall, where he's standing in line for a show and they're arguing about some public figure, Marshall McLuhan, an author. And Marshall McLuhan ends up in this movie scene. The actual Marshall McLuhan is standing in line right behind him and gets into the conversation and corrects something. And that movie scene always stuck with me because you see that playing out in real life and it happened here. So somebody said to me on social media that 5G hasn't been tested because the big companies that are going to roll it out, they would have no interest in testing it to find out that it's dangerous and therefore it's not been tested. Sort of logically you say to yourself, well, logically, they don't want to hear that it's bad for you. They want to make a trillion dollars. The phone companies mostly, so, you know, and the phone makers. So nobody would have studied it. Now that's what somebody said to me on social media. And here was my answer. I used to work for the phone company and part of my job was doing the economic projections of whether we should do more wireless stuff. I actually personally worked on that. And part of my economic decision was informed by my co worker who I often sat right next to, whose job it was to study all the health studies, the cell phones. So that was the. Prior to 5G technology, that was probably a 3G kind of a technology. And we studied it because that's part of the economics. I wasn't going to give management an economic analysis that says, looks like we'll make a billion dollars on this and ignore the fact that it might kill people. I'm not going to leave that out. That's pretty important to the economics of a project. If you leave out the part where it kills 100 million people, I don't think you've done your work right. So this person was arguing with me that a phone company would ignore this part of the economic impact, the health part, which also has an economic impact. And she was talking to somebody who literally was the guy who did it. I actually worked at a phone company. I actually did those economics. And I sat next to the guy who did look in detail at the health studies and then summarize them for management. So management was comfortable that it wouldn't be killing people. Now years have passed. Has anybody died from their cell phone? Can we say that my economic analysis was accurate, that I didn't need to include it. Can we say that my co worker who studied it got it right? Now, if you're telling me that Apple, Apple, I mean, think about this. You're telling me that Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars because it'll be something like that, you know, eventually you tell me Apple is going to bet a trillion dollars on a business plan without looking at the most obvious, biggest thing that you should look at. I think they looked at it. Now you can make the argument that whoever's looked at it has looked at the wrong stuff. You could make the argument that the studies weren't good enough. There are lots of things you could argue that I wouldn't argue back. There are plenty of bad studies. But here's what I will not allow anybody to tell me without pushing back. Don't tell me they haven't looked into it. Are you kidding me? Don't tell me that they haven't looked into it. And if any of those things were credible, from the brain cancer to gives you coronavirus or makes it worse to stunt your growth, if any of that was backed by science, companies like Apple are not going to wade into it with that kind of a risk. That is a company destroying risk. You just don't take that risk. It's just not a thing. But that's different from saying, let me be very clear, I'm not a doctor, I don't know what causes risk and what doesn't. But I'm telling you they looked into it. That's all I'm going to tell you. There's some evidence based on, we don't have much information on it yet. Comes from a tweet from somebody who seems to know a lot of stuff, that the Houston consulate that was closed, the Chinese consulate that had evidence apparently of spying on American companies and intellectual property theft and all that, apparently there's some information we haven't seen yet that would suggest that China is backing Black Lives Matter. Now I ask you, does that sound likely? Does it seem likely or unlikely to you that China might have at least tried, I don't know how successful they were, but at least tried to encourage Black Lives Matter to do a little more protesting? Because here's the calculation that you should look at when trying to decide if that's true. Number one, would they think of it? Of course. Of course. So you don't have to wonder, hey, did China have that idea? Had they considered it? Did anybody suggest, hey, maybe you should back the protesters who are making the United States look bad. Of course they thought of it. Because if the situation were reversed, we would have thought of it. I mean, I'm sure we've backed dissidents and protesters in other countries. That's pretty basic. The second thing you should ask for is what would be the penalty for getting caught? And we already know the penalty for getting caught. It's nothing. It's nothing. This consulate closed, but they have other consulates. The penalty is basically nothing. One consulate got closed. It's not as if they don't have computers and hackers and thieves in other consulates. I don't know how much difference does it make if you live in Houston versus you got a consulate somewhere else? So I don't think there was any risk. It just costs them a little money, right? They got to move a consulate. But it's not like anybody died. It's not like we completely decoupled over this. It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. No risk. So if there's no risk, but there's a potential big reward and there could be if they're destabilizing the United States, of course it's happening in the situation where they think of it, there are lots of people involved. You know, in China, there's lots of people involved and there's a big payoff and a small risk. It'll happen every time. Every time it's going to happen. I mean, mischief will happen under those conditions. So CNN continues to be funny in trying to be serious. So Caitlyn Cat, Kaitlyn Collins, who's one of their local anti Trump voices, she was mocking him in a written article. I think it was from a video piece, because he decided to cancel the Republican National Convention, which of course she would agree with because CNN is sort of anti large gatherings, unless they're protests. And then she says that he would cancel his convention despite pushing for schools to reopen. Now, the implication is that that would be inconsistent. Why would the president not think it was safe to have a convention if he does think it's safe to send kids to school? Is that a fair comparison? You know, I complain all the time that people who come up through a journalism or some specific profession if they don't have a broad understanding of how to make decisions and how to compare things the way an economist or an engineer or scientist would, that they say consistently dumb things but don't know it. And I don't think anything could be dumber than saying, I don't understand the consistency. If the president thinks that a bunch of older adults packed into a room. Dangerous. Why doesn't he think that the group who basically doesn't get coronavirus, why wouldn't he think they're dangerous? They couldn't be more different situations. They couldn't be more different. Now, is it true that opening schools will also cause spread of the coronavirus? Yes, yes. Everybody knows that. The president knows that. Nobody's denying it. It's just that we think that's a level that's controllable. If you're, you know, comparing it to the presumed benefits of getting kids back to school, that there is a risk, but it's one that the President decides is worth it. I don't know how CNN can pretend that they can't see the difference there and they're looking for these little gotchas. 5 Seattle news organizations were ordered by a judge to turn over their video and photos from protests. So law enforcement wanted to get a hold of all the video and pictures of protests so they could find out who to arrest, etc. News organizations resisted, and now the King County Superior Court said that they have to give it up. Interesting. So all of the news organizations just became weaponized by the police. Will that change? I don't know. So can the news organizations continue to send news crews who will take pictures and video, knowing that those pictures and video will go directly to the police and then they will be. The news organizations will be part of what's disbanding Black Lives Matter. Very ticklish position to be in, wouldn't you say? I saw somebody asking me about what's his name? Portnoy. And Barstool. Barstool Sports. He did an interview with President Trump. People are saying, and I would agree with him, I like to use that Trump phrase. People are saying that that's the best interview with the President that they've ever seen. And I would say, I would agree in terms of entertainment and in terms of humanizing the president and just having fun with it, probably the best one. I would say it's the best interview with the President I've seen. Now, the President was very good at avoiding the questions. So it was this weird situation. He had Dave Portnoy. Dave Portnoy. It was this weird situation where Dave would ask a question such as, do you always use the power handshake with world leaders? Wouldn't you like to know the answer to that question? It was like he asked the question that I've thought about for so long and nobody's ever asked it. Now, of course, the President completely ignored the question and just talked about handshakes and coronavirus and how world leaders love him and stuff, which was perfectly executed media spin, if you will. In other words, the President is just really good at turning the question into whatever he wanted the question to be, which is what you actually learn when you take media training. You learn how to do that. It's something the President does great. And most politicians do it, do it well as well. The only thing that bothered me about Dave Portnoy's interview is that it should have been me. When I say it should have been me, it just means I'm jealous. So I'm just jealous because if there was anybody who would give an irreverent interview with the President, they would still be watchable. I would be on that list of people that you should watch interview the President. Now, I do have, informally, I did put a request in, but I probably need to formalize that because I think that between now and November, an interview with me, with President Trump, I think would be useful for the country. I wouldn't be just entertaining. I'd want it to be useful. So I think I could frame things in a way that you would quite enjoy it. But, yes, I have to confess, there are very few things that make me jealous because it's just not a. It's just not an emotion I spend any time with. But. And that's why this caught me off guard and it's why I'm mentioning it. That was the first time, like, I genuinely felt jealous. I mean, it's a small thing, right? It has no real impact in my life. But he was that good. So you want to be so good at your job as Dave Portnoy is, you want to be so good that somebody else who does that job goes, oh, shit. Damn it. Damn it. That should have been me. So a watch it if you haven't seen it. I cheekily am continuing to say that. Oh, by the way, one more thing about the Fine People Hoax. In the past, when I've tweeted that the Fine People Hoax is a hoax, my comment feed would just fill with people who would say, no, it isn't. It's totally true. I heard it myself today. I tweeted that and got almost no people who thought it was true. Now I don't know if that's because all of the Democrats now know it wasn't true or if they gave up just suddenly they stopped refuting that point. That doesn't make sense. I feel like maybe we made a dent collectively because at least my Critics have backed off and just, you know, let it go, that I'm stating it as a fact that it's a hoax and then they're letting it go now, which I think is capitulation. But I might be a little optimistic on that, at least for the commenters, not for the. I think Biden still says it. All right, my last point here. I've said this before, but you cannot, I don't think you could ignore the effect that fiction has on how we look at the real world, because everything you look at needs to fit some model of understanding. Ideally, you want the new information to fit some existing model in your head and you just populate that existing model. It's called confirmation bias. And you see it in everything, right? You see the left agrees with the left, the right agrees with the right. But there's a statement about human beings that I think you would all agree with, which is it's difficult to do something, anything, until you can first imagine it. So you don't really attempt to do things you can't imagine can work. The Wright Brothers invented an airplane because they could, well, imagine. They could see it flying, I assume. I assume that they imagined it working and then they worked on it and it worked. Now, all the things you imagine don't work necessarily when you try to do them, but you're not going to do anything until you can first imagine it's a thing. And that makes me get to my impression, or the filter that I just sort of automatically have on watching the protests. The first filter is it looks very female led. And I don't know how many of you are also getting that feeling, but antifa in particular, and I think Black Lives Matter as well. But they seem like they are mostly female leaders, or at least the leaders that are the most vocal or maybe the most effective, most aggressive seem to be female. So it's like a female led organization. And the males, at least the antifa males, not so much the Black Lives Matter males, but the antifa males seem to fall into a category of not as manly, if we could say that. And again, this isn't an insult. I'm not saying that if you don't have a manly Persona, you're worth less or anything. Nothing like that. I'm left to burning. So if you want to be every letter in LGBTQ, I'm cool with that. I'm 100% cool with that. You can be any letter you want, you can be any lifestyle you want. If it doesn't bother me, you can be whatever you Want. So there's no criticism implied here. I'm just observing that there's a certain kind of man who is enjoying this anti foz situation and they, you know, if I could use the diminutive term, beta males, they kind of fall into that category. Now, again, this is not an insult because I think that it's a big world. I'm not saying it's a good thing to be an alpha male or that it's a bad thing to be a beta male. They both exist. It's a preference. It's the way you're born, or it's a lifestyle. It doesn't matter. It's all okay with me if you're not breaking the law, if you're not violating the constitution. It's just none of my business, period. Could not care less about your personal lifestyle choices if they don't affect me. So I say that just because my filter is that it looks like the. It looks like Game of Thrones with Daenerys. So you get this strong female leader, the Queen of Dragons, and she formed an army of literally eunuchs. So their men had been castrated to make them more docile and obedient. Soldiers, I guess. I don't know what the theory was there exactly, but I don't know why you'd want castrated soldiers. Feels like the wrong idea, but it reminded me of that. And it looks like it's the Queen of Dragons and her unique army, but they're reenacting the Joker movie. And I said this before to great pushback, which I enjoy, of course. And the pushback was that if the Joker movie had not been such a universally acclaimed movie and a lot of people saw it, if you hadn't first pictured the Joker movie, would it have been as easy to recreate it? Because that's what the protests and the looting effectively did. It recreated the look and feel of the Joker movie. Is that a coincidence? Is it simply that there are movies and they're in my head and so I just interpret the world through those movies and that's all it is? Or is there a causal relationship? In other words, if you can only do the things you can imagine, and what you could imagine was not, you know, everybody's doing well, but what you could imagine was that Joker movie, you're more likely to do the thing you could imagine. So I do think that fiction has a big role in how we're interpreting our reality, but also how we act on it, because you just don't act on things you can't Imagine. All right. Just looking at your comments. Yeah. You know, I don't think that. I don't think we should make a judgment about what's better or worse when it comes to people's biological situation. But it is fair to say it's different. You know, nobody would argue with the fact that, you know, there are differences among people, but we don't have to put a value judgment on that. Anyone see Zuckerberg's face in Hawaii? Yeah, yeah. Zuckerberg uses a lot of sunscreen, but I don't. If you've seen his complexion, you know, there's a good reason for that. But where is the imagining from? Well, it's coming from fiction. That's the point. Somebody says you're reaching on the joker thing, in my opinion. Well, you know, the best opinions are the ones that you say to yourself. In fact, I try to stay in this space as much as possible. My favorite opinions to present here are the ones where you say to yourself, not so sure that's true. I've got a little skepticism about that. Those are my favorite places to be. I will tell you that based on everything I know from hypnosis, from persuasion and living a life in which I've done everything from marketing to selling, that the models that you have in your head of what the world can look like are very persuasive. Now, if you have less experience in hypnosis and persuasion than I do, and your opinion is different from mine about this topic, you should ask yourself, would your opinion change if you knew as much as I did about this specific topic? And that's where I want you to be. I want you to be thinking, maybe. Maybe I should look into that. Maybe that's a thing. Or maybe I'll look for it in the future. Look for it in the future and you might be surprised. But you don't have to believe everything I say. I wouldn't talk to you later.