Episode 1155 Scott Adams: Hunter's Laptop and the Disappearing Story, and More

Hey, everybody, come on in. Come on in. It's time. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. Is it the best part of the day? Well, there's a little bit of debate on that, but the people on the side that say it might not be, they're losing the debate. Yeah, they're losing it hard. Everybody says so. That's because the simultaneous sip will get you going like nothing else possibly could. And all you need to participate. Well, you don't need much. No, not much. All you need is a copper mug or glass of tanker jalousestine, a canteen jugger 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 except for the photos on your laptop that you left at the shop. It's called the simultaneous hit, and it happens right now. Sublime. Well, I guess the big story is about Hunter's laptop. We'll talk about that in a moment. We'll let a few more people stream on in here before we do that. But first, I've been watching a documentary on HBO called the Vow. Have you heard of it? It's about the alleged occult so called cult. I'm not sure what the definition is. I think it fits. Called nexium, but it's spelled weird like N X, I V M Nexium with Keith Rainier. When I'm done with the whole thing, I'll do a. Probably do some kind of a tutorial on his technique because he's basically a hypnotist. Basically, I think he probably studied hypnosis. But the interesting thing is that he created a cult that is borrowed off of the techniques of Scientology. And so it's basically a Scientology clone with his own. With his own flavor on it. And it is mind boggling. If you want to learn how persuaded somebody could be, you have to watch this. Remember yesterday we're having the conversation, or the nation was having the conversation about the vocabulary to use to be non offensive if you're talking about somebody's LGBTQ or other orientation. So I believe the correct word is orientation. But we live in a world where nothing's. Nothing is as clean as it could be. Right. There's nothing we all agree on. So two developments on that as there was an online conversation about whether or not you could have a preference for your sexuality. And of course, all the experts says you cannot. You cannot. It's not a preference. It's what you're Born with. Well, if you watch the documentary the Vow, you're going to see a cult in which one leader reprogrammed as many as 50 people's sexuality. It's right there. Now, as a hypnotist, I've been provocatively saying that that's a thing. You're definitely born with an orientation. In other words, you're born with a starter set. But people don't quite realize, and I don't think I'll convince any of you that this is true, by the way. I know I'm out there just, you know, singing alone, but people's preferences of all types, not. Not just in the sexual realm, but a lot of people can be programmed. And if you watch the Vow, you'll see a number of people who were programmed out of a certain kind of sexuality and into an entirely different one. And it was just programming, just brainwashing. And it worked, and it worked with as many as 50 different people. That's not everybody in the cult. The cult was actually like 800 people, I think, at one point. But you'll see that. And then I'm looking at Twitter this morning and I'm seeing some people interacting on that question about whether you have preferences for sexuality or whether they're. Whether you're born with your orientation. Now, just to reiterate, my personal view is that you're definitely born with an orientation, but only people who understand hypnosis and brainwashing at a fairly detailed level. In other words, not just somebody who read a little bit about it, but somebody who really knew this stuff. And there aren't many of us. But I would. I would bet that 100% of the people who have my background would agree with me. Me don't know that, but I think so. Now, that doesn't mean that all hypnotists would agree, because I got into a back and forth with a hypnotist on a trained hypnotherapist on Twitter, and we did not have the same opinion. But it was obvious from just the exchange that that hypnotherapist, let's say understanding of the field, was far less than my own. One of the tells is that if they have NLP in their profile, NLP for Neuro Linguistic programming, Let me just say that's the least credible element of the entire field. So if you put that in there as like your bumper sticker. Yeah, nlp, that usually says that your entry level in understanding the field. So it's not something I would brag about because it's the least credible part of the. Part of it. So here's the other part. So I'm interacting on Twitter on this question, and a woman who shall remain. Remain nameless, she's got a. It's somebody. I know who it is just by coincidence because I live in the Bay Area, so I happen to know who it is. You don't need to know who it is. But somebody notable came in and said, hey, what about me? My sexuality is totally my preference. Now, what do you do when somebody says about themselves. So this is a woman who said, yeah, I'm, you know, depending on my situation, my age, you know, what's going on in my life, I might be into women. And on another situation, another time in my life, I might go the other way and pointed out that there are other people in that category. So her point is that I think I might be extending her point a little bit, but I think this is fair. There are probably people who are just nailed at birth, and this is just the only way I'm going to be. There are probably other people who are far less nailed down in terms of their orientation. People who are more fluid. I think that's the word she used. Now, I guess you could argue. One argument would be that is her orientation. Her orientation is fluid. So sometimes she's more this way, sometimes she's more that way. And I would argue that anybody who's fluid can be reprogrammed. The people who are just nailed at the extreme, probably not. You know, and indeed, with reprogramming and hypnosis and brainwashing, there's a general rule that about 20% of the public is highly hypnotizable. And 80% can also be hypnotized, but not at the same type and degree. They can learn to relax. They can learn to imagine things better. They can work on lots of stuff. The 80% can, but the 20%, they can actually see something in the room that's not there. You can just say, look at that elephant. And they'll say, oh, yeah, there's an elephant, but it's only about 20%. So could you reprogram somebody's sexual identity permanently if they were, number one, fluid? Let's say they started out a little bit fluid and they were in the 20% that are highly hypnotizable. And the answer is yes. Yes. Now, the other hypnotist will say, and this is the conversation I got into yesterday on Twitter, is that you can't hypnotize somebody to do something they don't want to do something that's deeply against their moral, ethical, or just who they are. You can't get somebody to do something totally counter to their personality that they would object to, something they would object to if they were not hypnotized. You just can't get them to do it right now. That's true. Completely true. And then the hypnotist was using that argument. Look, you can't hypnotize somebody to do something they don't want to do. So therefore, you can't hypnotize them into a different kind of sexual preference in this context. And here's what those hypnotists miss. You can't make somebody do something they don't want to do. True. There's a part missing, though. There's part of the context is missing. You can cause somebody to want something different because people don't generally have a resistance to changing their own mind. If they feel like they change their own mind, they might have a resistance to you changing their mind. But do you know anybody who has a resistance to themselves changing their mind? Not really. If you woke up tomorrow and said, I think I want to be a different kind of person and move to a different country, you wouldn't say to yourself, scott, you can't change your mind. You wouldn't say that. You'd say, oh, I changed my mind. I guess I want to go to another country. You'd be fine changing your own mind as long as you felt you changed it yourself. Right. So that's the back door. That's the loophole. You can persuade people to change their mind without them necessarily knowing that it was you persuading them. If you simply paired something with what you wanted them to like more, they would eventually get that pairing and they would start liking that thing they didn't like so much before. And they would think, huh, I guess I've changed my mind about that thing. Now I like it more than I used to like it. Was that them changing their mind on their own? It wasn't. It was you setting up a situation that would pair two things, something you knew they liked with something they were maybe ambivalent about until they liked both of them. Now, again, it's not going to work with every person. And you would need more technique than just that. Pairing might use lots of language, lots of other things, but you could cause somebody to believe they had changed their mind and then change their behavior and activity into a whole different person, and they would never be aware that they had been coerced. They would simply think they made up their own mind. And that's what a cult would feel like. The people in the cult don't necessarily feel like they were brainwashed. Every one of them feels like they made up their own mind to some extent. Yeah, there would be a little of both, I would think, within a cult. But a lot of the people would think I wasn't brainwashed. I just made up my own mind. All right, let's talk about something else. Ironically, the only people who dropped their masks this week were the media industrial complex trying to make this Hunter Biden story go away. And, man, they're working hard on it. So you probably know this story. Allegedly, Hunter Biden some. Some time ago dropped off three broken laptops for repair. Now, just so you know, we're living in a simulation. The guy who. Who is the repair guy for the Macintosh laptops, his last name is Mac Isaac. So they dropped the Macs off with Mac. I don't know what to say about that. It's just the simulation winking at us. And allegedly the guy is legally blind, so he can't identify him. And he. He's not quite clear on the story of how Rudy Giuliani got a copy. And he thought the Bidens or somebody associated with them might try to kill him if they knew he had the goods, so he tried to give it away to the FBI. And the story's all. All weird. So I don't know what's going on. I also don't know who drops off three laptops and doesn't pick them up. So to say that there are things wrong with this story would be an understatement. There's a lot wrong with this story. Now, is the story confirmed? I don't know. It's somewhere in that gray area between the. Apparently, the Biden campaign has not denied. The Biden campaign has not said that the emails allegedly found on the laptops are fake. So wouldn't you expect that's the first thing the Biden campaign would say? First of all, those are all fake. We talked. We talked to Hunter, asked him about it, and he said, I never dropped off any laptops, and I certainly didn't write any emails of that nature. Wouldn't that be the first thing you'd say if it wasn't true, if it wasn't really his laptop? I think that's all that would matter. Right? You go to the Biden campaign and say, look, this will take you five minutes. Just call Hunter and say, is this your stuff? Is it real? Has anybody done this story about how that story doesn't exist, because wouldn't that be the biggest story today? No, the biggest story is that nobody asked the Biden campaign if they were real. At the same time that the entire country is debating whether they're real, nobody thought to ask the Biden campaign or if they did ask him. I guess they're not responding to the reality of the laptops in the comments, somebody saying that the story is too fantastic to be fake. It does have. It has a little bit of both qualities. It has two qualities that point in opposite directions. One of them is what the commenter just said, that there are some things that are too weird not to be true. Because if you were going to make up a story, it'd be cleaner than this, right? If you were going to make it up, you'd say there's a store owner who definitely recognized Hunter Biden and you just have a clean little story of how it all happened. You wouldn't have all these weird details, etc. And you wouldn't need a blind computer repair guy who can't remember things. It's just weird. So that part makes it seem real. But there's another part that's a little bit too on the nose, which is that a few weeks before the election, we find a laptop with email that's embarrassing to a Democrat. Isn't that a little bit, you know, you know what I'm saying? And, and then there's a photograph on it of Hunter Biden with a crack pipe in his mouth. Allegedly. A little bit, you know, a little bit too close, right? And then the, the nature of the emails is so completely damning. You say to yourself, would you write an email like that? Or would you figure out a way to use an encrypted app or maybe make a phone call? So at least it's not, I guess if you made a phone call, you could get intercepted too. But there's a lot about this that's a little too perfect, don't you think? At the same time, there's a whole bunch of it that's so imperfect it couldn't possibly be false because you just wouldn't make up a story so ridiculous unless the store owner is the one who's freestyling the details. And nobody saw that coming, so that would argue to being fake as well. But there's a bigger story, which is how do we deal with news that is not guaranteed to be true? What do you do with it? And the country is really trying to figure out how to grapple with this, because we've never been in this situation where the news industry can make a story disappear. And by disappear, I don't mean from every consumer, but given the absolute silos of news where people on the left just will never see Fox News, never once, the people on the left will never see Breitbart. They're not going to read the Drudge Report. They're just not going to. So it doesn't matter what that part of the world is reporting or thinks is true. It just will never cross over. So it's this unique situation where they can make news disappear for, I don't know, 50% of the country just make it disappear. And it looks like some version of that is going to happen. They, of course, need to mention stories so they can at least say they mentioned it. But it looks like they're going to going to run for discrediting it. And it looks like the way they're going to discredit is the Washington Post was reporting today that Biden did not absolutely, Joe Biden did not get that prosecutor in Ukraine fired because they were worried that he was going to look into Burisma. Apparently that story, according to the Washington Post, is the opposite, meaning that Joe Biden actually was working with the international community and everybody wanted that prosecutor fired because he wasn't going hard at Burisma. Opposite of the story. He wasn't fired because he was going hard at them. He was fired because he was corrupt at not going after them. One of those two stories is true. Now, if it hadn't, if it had been any place but Ukraine, you might say to yourself, well, I think maybe he wasn't corrupt, but it's Ukraine where corruption is rampant. And so I would think your first assumption would be, yeah, there was probably some corruption going on there, both in Burisma and with the prosecutor. You would just assume it even if he didn't have a lot of information. So somebody's telling me the Drudge is a leftist now. Yeah, I hear that. I don't have an opinion on that. I don't read it. Yes, check out ground news. As somebody is prompting me there. Ground news will show you if there's a media blackout on the left or the right because it lines up all the reporting and you can, you can see visually who's, who's talking about a story and who's completely ignoring it. And it's really stark when you see it. It's called ground news. Just Google. So do you think that you, if you were a store owner and you found Hunter Biden's emails. Would you be afraid of being murdered? Just wondering how many of you would be afraid of being murdered because you found some embarrassing emails. I feel like you'd feel. I would feel less worried about getting murdered and more worried about just being destroyed economically or reputationally. Because what would be the point of murdering him if the email is already. Is already given to someone else? Once you've given away your material, you're irrelevant to the story. So who would kill the shop owner when he is no longer relevant in any way to the story? Because the only part he has is, you know, hey, did this. You know, did this laptop really come to you this way? I'm not sure that part's important anymore. What's important is, is the laptop real? And I don't know if you need. You don't really need the store owner to determine if the laptop is real. You know, there's plenty of ways to do that. All right, let's see what else we got going here. I love the fact that Trump, in a. In an interview with Newsmax, he said the Bidens are, quote, grifters and crooks. Now, you know why I. I love this? The reason I love this is that whenever Trump takes an argument that's used against him and then flips it around, it doesn't take any magic technique to flip around an argument. But I like when he does it when it fits. Because when you look at this Hunter Biden stuff and then you think of the word grifter, it fits, right? You know, crook is. Crook is sort of a throwaway because it's just sort of generic. But doesn't it feel like the word grifter just perfectly fits Hunter Biden? Now, I've been called a grifter, and everybody who's tweeted positively about President Trump has been called a grifter, probably if you have more than 1,000 followers. And that word, I've always hated it because the people using it are so proud of it. Does that make sense? They're so happy about their word grifter. I gotcha. I got you with that word grifter. That it just bothers me because they're so happy about it. It doesn't bother me because the word. It just bothers me that they're becoming happy at my expense. So when I see the President turn it around and use it so perfectly against the other side, it makes me happy a little bit. I gotta admit. The Joe Biden campaign is claiming that Joe Biden's calendar shows he did not take a meeting with the Ukrainian official from Burisma. Now, if he did take that meeting, it would complete the circuit from the emails saying that, you know, Burisma watts some access and then Hunter Biden being put on the board to provide that access. And then the proof that the, the circuit had been completed would be that there was an actual meeting with the vice president and the Ukrainian. Because if that happened, that's pretty, pretty conclusive evidence of the entire circuit from, you know, swampy influence to actual meeting. But the Biden campaign says that meeting never happened because it's not on the calendar. How many meetings does a senator have that are not on the calendar? Well, every time they have an affair. Has a senator ever have had an affair? I'm guessing yes. I'm going to guess that members of Congress have had affairs, both male and female probably had affairs. How many of their hookups with their mistress or their. Whatever is the male word for that? What's the male word for a mistress? Wait a minute. Why don't I know that word? Is there no word for the male version of a mistress? Just a lover. That doesn't sound right. Anyway, we need a new word for that. Let's talk to Webster. I think they can change language in one day. If we can get Maisie Hirono to say we need that word, it'll be in Webster's by the end of the day anyway. What the hell was I talking about? I don't remember. I have a confession. If today's live stream seems not up to my usual standard, which I think is going to be a safe statement at the moment, it's because I was up late last night. I'll tell you about that. I'll tell you about that later. So, yeah, so I was talking about how that if you were having an affair and you were in Congress, you're not going to put it on your calendar, Right. So you have to assume that there's entire categories of things the senators do have in terms of meetings that are not on their calendars. So it. But if you're an unsophisticated viewer of news and the Biden campaign comes out and says it's not on the calendar, look at this calendar. We've got documentation that meeting never happened. If you're unsophisticated, you might say, well, okay, that's good documentation. It never happened. Then you forget to ask the question, are there any other things that don't go on calendars? Is 100% of what a senator does. Does that end up on a calendar. If something had once been on a calendar and then deleted, would we know the difference? Has anybody looked at the logs of the computer system that had the calendar or have they just looked at the entry to see that it doesn't exist? Because I kind of want to know when that entry went away, if it went away. But anyway, so at this point, it looks like the swampy nature that the emails that I heard on Tucker Carlson's show last night, if those emails are real, and I'm leaning toward yes, by the way, check your intuition on this. I'd be very curious in the comments. Tell me if you believe the emails are real. All right, so this will be, this will be a good way for all of us to test our ability to consume news and be, you know, sophisticated consumers of news. I'm going to say I'm leaning toward real. So I'm going to say more real than not. I'm not 100% on those being real, but I'm a solid 65%. Let's say 2/3, 2 to 1 chance they're real. I gave a little lag so that I can see. So I'll check your comments and see how many of you think they're real versus fake. All right. Is it my imagination or is everything that Rudy Giuliani is involved with, it just has a little extra flavor to it, doesn't it? Have you noticed that whenever there's a story and Rudy Giuliani is any part of the story, the story is just so non standard. There's just something about putting Rudy Giuliani into the story that just blows it up into this whole different creature. So that's part of the fun, too. We don't exactly know how that worked out. So it looks like the story that the Democrats are going to go with is that the dad, Joe Biden, was not aware of what the son was doing and therefore don't blame the dad because the son was doing that. All right, I'm looking at your comments and almost universally there's a few undecideds, but mostly very dominant toward people thinking they're real. Yeah, the people who say 100%, I would dial that down a little bit. You know, I would dial your 100% down to. Yeah, I'd dial that down under 90% if I were you. You could be right, but I don't think you could say you're 100% likely to be right. It's close to that might be, but we'll see. We'll see. How our collective intuitions are. And I always tell you that. That it's useful. It's useful to commit in public to what you believe will happen and then track it later and say, okay, I was sure it was true. It wasn't true. And now you can adjust your credulity a little bit. All right, and who is asking the Ukrainian, how hard is it? Let me. This should be. This should be shockingly obvious when I say it. You ready to hear something that will make your. It'll make you angry because. All right, now, maybe some of you thought of it, but this will be a good test of media manipulation. There's something missing in the story about Hunter's laptop and the alleged meeting between the, I guess, number three person from Burisma and Joe Biden that Joe Biden says didn't happen, but the emails indicate were at least planned. So what is missing from the story? What is the most obvious thing that a legitimate news entity should be able to do in probably less than an hour, less than an hour and wouldn't even have to leave the house? Something you could do with just a telephone that would be a big part of the story that is missing from the story. Anybody? What is the big gigantic thing that's missing from the story? When you hear it, it's going to make you mad. Here's what's the gigantic thing missing from the laptop story? Who called the Ukrainian guy and asked him if he met with Joe Biden? Right. Do you think that you can't get that guy on the phone? It's 2020. I could probably get that guy on the phone. Like literally, literally, if I picked up my phone and spent the next hour trying to contact Burisma and then I could probably contact Burisma. Right. How hard would that be? It's a gigantic company. Now, there might be a language issue or whatever, but I could. I'm sure I could find an English speaker at Burisma and I would say, hey, this number three guy, I'm trying to get a hold of him, like to ask him a question about the biggest story in the United States. Can you get my message to him, have him call me back? Because we'd like to get him on record to tell us if he actually had a meeting with Joe Biden. Where's that story? Do you feel it yet? Do you feel how obviously missing that is in the story? Because it would be one thing. It would be one thing if. If your news organization said, we've been trying to get a quote from this Ukrainian Executive, he's not returning our phone calls. You know, we, we've tried him twice yesterday. We're still trying to get a hold of him. That's kind of what you'd expect, wouldn't you? And, oh, and then in the comments, somebody else is saying that you could identify the travel. If that guy traveled, there'd be a record of it. But I think you'd probably need warrants and law enforcement to know whether he traveled. Right. I don't think there's a way for the news industry to find that out by themselves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a news entity can find out if somebody traveled anywhere in the world. Is that public? I hope not. So I don't know that the press could get the travel information given that there's no, you know, legal process going on there that would uncover that. But they could certainly call the guy. If we know his actual name, we know where he works, how in the world hard would it be to just get him on the phone and say, hey, hey, did you meet with Joe Biden? Now, it's entirely possible that the guy would say something like no comment. Right. And if he said no comment, what would you conclude? Do people who don't have meetings say no comment? No, you would never say no comment. You would never say no comment. You know, if, if. Well, you would only say no comment if you'd had the meeting and you didn't want somebody to have it confirmed. That's it. I'm seeing somebody say the Hunter Biden story is fake. It's fake. It might be, yeah. You know, if it turned out that the whole thing, that the whole thing was fake, it could turn out that way. Right. And by the way, I wonder how many news professionals are watching this right now and just got on the phone to Burisma, because if you didn't, what else are you doing today? Was there some bigger story today? Why don't you call Burisma, see if you can find this guy, get a comment on the record. And I think that he would have trouble, the executive would have trouble lying because it's not impossible that at some point somebody else could confirm whether he traveled. You know, it might be either we find his travel records or there's just somebody else who was a witness who knows he traveled. So I don't know if he'd want to lie in public. So notably when, when the truth could be found. All right, here's a, here's a follow up for you on masks. Every time I bring up the question of masks, and we don't know for sure how well they work or in what cases they work. But I've stated that as a risk management proposition, it probably is worth wearing them. Because to me, my common sense to the extent that that exists tells me that they probably work. Not every time, you know, not perfectly, but probably make a difference. Now people say to me, scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scotty, don't you know that if you fart, that fart will go right through your pants? So if a fart will go through your pants like it doesn't even exist, how could you expect these tiny viruses that can't be much bigger than a fart particle, how can you expect that a mask is going to stop them? So it's the fart defense. I've seen it quite a bit. Here is my counter to the fart defense. And it goes like this. Put on your mask, hold a lighted candle in front of you. Now blow out the candle without taking off your mask. If you can do it, if you can blow out the candle without taking off your mask, then I'm going to say, huh, you got me. I will accept the candle blowing thing as well as the fart defense. Because if the air, if the air just goes right through the mask and blows out that candle, even if it just stops a little bit of it, that's not enough. I would admit under that situation that probably these masks are not doing much good. But if you are unable to blow on a candle right in front of your mouth when your mask is on, I would propose that if you had been talking to a human being, that the amount of air coming out of your mouth, which is the carrier for the water particles, which is the carrier for the virus, that there would be a direct flow of virus from your mouth into the facial area of the other person who is not wearing a mask. If you're not wearing one, if you put on the mask and you cannot blow out a candle that's right in front of you, no matter how hard you try, it probably means that that air is coming out the sides or other places. Now, is it true that the air doesn't go somewhere and just stay there, but the moment it reaches the room, it permeates and fills the entire room with the same amount of virus in every part of the room? Well, maybe, I suppose if you stayed in a room long enough with one person and it was a small enough room and you talked long enough, it wouldn't matter where the air was coming out of the mask or what direction. Eventually you would fill the whole room with your aerosol virus. But that's not how most interactions work. Mostly our interactions are brief and then away. So if you can stop all of the air that would blow on a candle from going directly into the face and mouth and eyes of the person you're talking to and go out the side instead, I have to feel that the odds are that's buying you something. So if you get the fart. The fart mask argument, that would be the counter. The counter is the blow out the candle argument. And there you go. Somebody says, I know what I'm trying. Later, you're going to try to fart a candle out. If you can do that without blowing up your home, give it a try. All right, so I was going to do a little experiment today in which I open up CNN on my phone and then I see how many of the stories are fake in order. And by the way, I haven't done this experiment, so I'm just going to go to cnn, going to go to the homepage, and I'm going to see how many of these stories appear to be actually real stories. Oh, there's breaking news. Kamala Harris Travel halted after two associates with campaign test positive for COVID 19. Huh. But that, of course, would be people who, I wonder, Joe Biden's campaign is halting the travel of his running mate. So probably it's only the running mate, Kamala Harris. Oh, my goodness. If, if 2020 serves up. Well, let me, let me put it this way. If, if Kamala Harris's staff is spreading the coronavirus around and they're all wearing masks, what does that do to the story? Because the biggest knock on Trump is that he's careless with his mask and then he got the coronavirus. What happens if the people wearing the masks also get the coronavirus? If you were logical and rational, it should mean nothing at all. Because there are people with masks who get coronavirus. There are people without masks who get it because we know that the masks are not 100% protection. So it shouldn't mean anything. If you were being rational, you'd say, no, this isn't a controlled study. This is just some anecdotes of people who got the infection just the way you'd expect it to happen. But the way our mind will process this is that it matters, even though it shouldn't. And you're going to start feeling, hey, people with masks get the. Get the virus. People without masks get the virus. Maybe Trump isn't So wrong after all. Maybe. I think Trump's play on this is quite, quite brilliant because I think he can wear people down on the notion that we're overmassed. Now, that may not be true, and it may be dangerous to have that feeling, but I feel like he can actually persuade that because we. Remember I was talking earlier, it's easier to persuade somebody into something they want to believe. Do you want to believe that you could take your mask off and you'd be okay? You do, you do. This is a real, real important point. Okay. You know, if somebody is primed to want to believe anything, you can persuade them pretty easily. If somebody's really primed against it, you're going to have to work for a long time to. To get any movement on that person. But we all want to be told there's some fake. Because I call it a fake reason. I don't need a real reason. Just give me a fake reason and I'll be fine with the fake reason because I already want to do the thing. I just want you to give me a reason. And Trump is doing that by example. So I would not count out his ability to persuade. Although health professionals might tell you it's going to get us all killed. So this Kamala Harris business, that's going to be interesting. I don't know if that's true or not, but I assume it's true. Then there's something about Chris Cuomo responding. There's an analysis that Trump argues that the pandemic is over to avoid accountability. That's a headline. Do you think it's true that Trump has argued that the pandemic is over? That's the headline on cnn. Trump argues pandemic is over. If I were to click into this story, do you think I would find a quote from Trump to suggest the pandemic is over? No, that's not the story. I don't even have to look at it. Obama CIA director says we wear Trump's criticism as a badge of honor. Okay, that's just propaganda. Here's an opinion piece. How paranoia in presidential politics went mainstream. What? That's just a weird opinion. Then there's Trump needs this pivotal county to win Pennsylvania. That's a nothing. Oh, this analysis. Another massive. This is in quotes. Massive Trump conspiracy theory totally fizzles out. And the story is about the unmasking. So because there will be no charges filed, no charges filed on the unmasking situation, then that's being called a massive Trump conspiracy theory. That totally fizzled out. Is that what happened. Do you think that Trump's, Trump's theory, which they would call a conspiracy theory about the unmasking being directed at the Trump campaign. Do you think that that conspiracy theory is eliminated by the fact that no charges are filed? No, this is fake news. The fact that no charges were filed means no laws were broken in a way that anybody could get a conviction. That's completely different from saying it was okay. These are not related concepts except, you know, by coincidence. But you could certainly have all the badness in the world, but it didn't technically break a law. I was talking about that yesterday. Everybody involved in whatever this, this coup attempt was to get rid of Trump, the people are all lawyers. It's a whole bunch of lawyers probably knowing exactly what they can and cannot do. And so they just, they just made sure that they did things that weren't technically illegal. They were just kind of swampy. Hunter Biden, like there's something about Pete Buttigieg appearing on Fox. I don't know what that story is. Twitter suspends fake accounts of people pretending to be blacks, Trump supporters. That's an old story. And then more fact checking on the President and something about Q because that, because Q embarrasses the Republicans, so they have that story. All right. I feel like all of our stories are conspiracy theories or who has coronavirus. The entire news industry has, has been reduced to two questions. Who has coronavirus and conspiracy theories. That's it. That's all we got. Yeah. All right, so that's what we got for today. It looks like the, the Trump strategy of dominating the news with this Hunter Biden thing is working. Now remember, the President doesn't, doesn't need to completely sell the Hunter Biden story to win. He's got two ways to win. One way is if you believe everything about the Hunter laptop story, you believe that the dad was involved or could have been or should have stopped it or anything like that, then Trump wins. If you buy into the story the way it's presented. But suppose you don't. Suppose you're a die hard Democrat and you've decided it either doesn't matter or, or it's false, Trump still wins because every minute that is spent talking about this story is a minute that's not being spent talking about something that would be bad for Trump. So by controlling our focus, and it looks like there might be a continual drip of new emails, I don't think it's an accident that on day one, we didn't get everything that could be gotten out of the emails, I think you're going to see some more emails, probably some more embarrassing pictures come out of that. So it's going to be pretty ugly. And it's totally working for Trump. Now, does it work well enough to get him elected when these polls are absolutely saying that he won't? Scott, can you predict late October surprise? Well, what do we have a little less than three weeks before election? Three weeks is a long time. The odds of us not having another surprise one way or the other, the odds of that not happening seem vanishingly small. The only question will be whether it will be natural or manufactured. Because what we've learned is that the left can manufacture a rumor and it will be completely covered by the press. But if the right manufactures a rumor, it won't be covered. So there is an advantage for the left to come up with a good, juicy, impossible to verify rumor about Trump right around two weeks before election where there might be a few people left who haven't made up their mind they could be, could be influenced. So I would say yes, something's happening. And that is all I have to talk about today. So I will talk to you tomorrow. All right, Periscope is off. Talking to you YouTube viewers only the slaughter meter. I'll tell you that I was ready to move the slaughter meter to 25% yesterday, but this, and I would have done it on the strength of Trump not performing on health care. There is still nothing that you can identify as a Trump health care plan or Republican plan. Let's say that would be the immediate replacement for whatever is in Obamacare that they want to get rid of if the Supreme Court goes ahead and gets rid of it. So I'm going to say this as directly as I can. If Trump loses the election and it turns out that health care was the big topic that made the difference, I'm going to say that was a fair election. I would not argue one minute against the public kicking Trump out of office for not giving us a health care plan. That's the obvious replacement. Now, I don't believe the Democrats criticism that the Republicans would get rid of Obamacare and at the same time they would just not replace it with anything and people would just lose their health care. And you know, they wouldn't, they'd have pre, they'd have conditions which pre existing conditions and they can't get health care. I think the odds of that worst case scenario are pretty close to zero. It's about as close to zero as anything is in politics. But if people are afraid of it, it's real. The fear is real, even if the actuality is not. So here's how I'll feel. Somebody was asking me how bad I would feel if Trump lost the election, and I'll tell you, if he loses the election because of the media, and the only reason is that the fake news was believed to be real news, I think I'd be pretty upset about that because I'd feel like I lived in a broken country and that lies were the determinant of who was the president. But if I can be convinced that people voted against Trump and for Biden primarily because of concerns for health care, which would include anything coronavirus related, I would call that a fair result and also deserved. In other words, Trump has created a situation completely knowingly that one of the, the top, the top concerns in the country, health care, he's just sort of letting it dangle. So that's on him, and there's no forgiveness for that. I do acknowledge that he's done a number of things which are good for the competitive situation with health care, very good things, and I won't take those away from them. But on the whole, he's leaving the country and the seniors out there, just dangling. If you're a senior citizen and maybe you're not worried about losing your health care, but anybody who's got some risk of losing health care, you should probably vote for Biden. Honestly, if I had concern about losing my health care, I probably would vote for Biden. I probably would, because that would be a big enough topic. All right, so if the president doesn't fix that in the next little less than three weeks, I would say that he deserves to lose because that's such an obvious high priority topic that just hasn't been handled the way it should be handled. So I would say he deserves to lose if it's over healthcare. That's my opinion. And I will talk to you tomorrow.