Episode 1266 Scott Adams: GameStop, China, and How to Lie to the Public

Hey, everybody, come on in. It's time. Yeah, it's time for coffee with Scott Adams. Is it still the best time of the day? Yeah. Yep. Every single time. Some of you are prepared. I know you are. And if you're really prepared, what do you have with you? Well, you probably have a cup or a mug or a glass, maybe a tank of gels or style in a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And even if you have a tiny little hotel cup, it's still going to be awesome. Go. So I'm in Tahiti at the moment, which is a stopover from Bora Bora. It's the big island you go to for your main flights back home. But I also have to get a coronavirus COVID test this morning before I can fly. So am I concerned that I could get a COVID test in Tahiti and actually get a result before I get on my plane? I'm a little concerned about that. Yes, I am. But the worst case scenario is I have to stay in Tahiti for another day. So wouldn't be the worst thing. Let's talk about all the news. Are you ready? Got lots of it. Got lots of good stuff. It's a fun news day. And I'm going to start a new segment I'm going to call the fake news news. It's news about the fake news because the fake news has covered the fake news. I don't need to cover that. I'll just cover the fake news as news. For example, apparently there's a gentleman who's been arrested. I don't know if he's been arrested, but he's being charged or something. As an Iranian agent who apparently has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times. That's right. An unregistered agent of Iran has written opinion pieces in the New York Times. Now do you say to yourself, new York Times? How can they be so whatever they are, to allow some unregistered agent of a foreign country to get through and be putting opinion bases in their publication. I have a feeling that this is so common that probably almost every news organization has been at least a little bit touched by this sort of thing. I feel as if, you know, China and Iran and Russia, etc. They probably all have journalists, don't you think? Either directly or by influence or people People who lean their direction just get the right kind of jobs and they become the writers. So I don't know that this is unusual. I would expect that Iran and lots of other countries would have people they influence who in turn influence you, and you wouldn't necessarily know about it until one of them gets caught and it's a headline. So unfortunately, I think this is more normal than not normal. And when you're reading your fake news, one of the questions you could ask yourself is, hey, is that article being written by an enemy of my country? You don't know. You just don't know. But you have to at least consider the possibility that the person writing the article is literally the enemy of your country. That's a real thing, and it's common enough, I think, that you should sort of have that little program running in the back of your head, hey, is this a real opinion or is this an enemy of my country? Here's more fake news news about fake news. So John Kerry was asked about. I can't think of John Kerry without thinking of a tree. He reminds me of an old growth tree so much that that's all I say. I've told you before that I can't see people the same way if I ever see their animal, because most people look like some kind of animal. You don't realize it until the idea occurs to you and you're like, that person looks a little bit like a. I don't know, a horse, I think. And then you can never see anything else except that person looks like a horse. Well, John Kerry, I just see a tree. And so that's all I can see when I see him. A talking tree. And by the way, I'm sure there's something that I remind you of that's. Yeah, Groot. I am Groot. So he was saying in response to the question about people in the oil industry who might lose their jobs, pretty big deal, right? Oil, the energy business in this country is a giant industry critical for national success. And if we go green and try to keep the oil in the ground, as they say, and the gas in the ground, I suppose it's a big deal and it could have big employment impacts. So what did John Kerry say about the people who would lose their jobs if the oil industry gets squeezed? He said, quote, what President Biden wants to do is make sure that those folks have better choices, that they can be the people to go work to make solar panels. What? Did he really say that in public? John Kerry really said that the people in the energy Business would lose their jobs. They can go make solar panels. There are a few problems with that. Number one, when does that solar panel make kick in? Same day they lose their job. Or would it take years to build an industry that could employ as many people as have been lost to it? Could you have an American solar panel manufacturing industry that would ever be price competitive with making them overseas? There's a reason it's made overseas. We don't know how to do it. We don't know how to do it inexpensively compared to where it could be done somewhere else. So is there going to be a domestic solar panel industry when they can't possibly make them in a way that they can make a profit now? Maybe, and I'd like to think this is true, automation will make it possible to do that and be competitive with China. Because if China needs robots to make stuff and we need robots to make stuff, it ends up being about the same price. It's only when people are making stuff that they get the big advantage. So maybe we can make solar panels cheaply enough, but if we make them with robots, that's also not labor. Right. The only way we can compete on price, and that's the only way the green New Deal energy stuff will work, is if it's economically competitive. Only way you can do it is without labor. I think just economically it makes sense. I don't know how you can do it with labor when our labor is more expensive than other countries. So that's the first problem. There's a timing problem, but it's not really the same people that's the problem. Do you think that the oil industry people who get fired are living in the place where the solar factory will be? Do you think the people in Pennsylvania will say if they lose their job, do you think they're going to say, oh good, pack up the car, we're going to go live in, I don't know, sunny someplace else and make solar panels? Well, some will. But here's the thing that makes it fake news. And I'm sure that cnn, for example, will never say what I'm saying, that it is true that they might create new jobs with this green technology. At the same time, it's true that there will be jobs lost in the more traditional older energy companies. But what he's not telling you, that the people who get the new jobs will be different people. That feels really important to the story, right? Hey, a million people will lose their job. But don't worry, there will be a million new jobs for other people. The people who are going to lose their jobs still have a problem, unless that solar panel factory springs up the same day they lose their job. And, and they have the right kind of skills and it pays the right amount of money. I mean, there is a lot of ifs in this idea. And so what makes it fake news is that leadership is all about tough choices right now. Is it a correct but tough choice to move the economy toward more of a green, green industry? Hard to know. Hard to know in the long run. Of course we need to get there, but it's a question of timing. Do you do it economically or do you rush, etc. So there are very smart people. I think Mark Cuban would be an example of a very smart person who would say that the green new technologies are really good, they're going to be good for the economy, good for jobs, etc. I hope I'm characterizing his opinion correctly that the green new energy business could be quite a hopping thing. But if it's different people and it doesn't happen at the same time, shouldn't you tell the public that? Shouldn't that be one of the things you say, look, public, I know this isn't going to be easy, but we have these reasons we want to do this. We think it's good in the long run for the country, but it's going to take some sacrifice by this group. This other group will get the benefits. They'll get jobs over here. And this state, this state will lose jobs and nothing's going to happen for you. You're just going to lose jobs. But this other state will do great because they're going to build some, build some green factors. That would be honest, Honest leadership would be. It's going to hurt, but some other people will do better. And on average, that's where we need to be as a country in the long run. So there's just no way around it. That would be leadership. But they can't say that because they don't want to lose a state. So they have to lie, lie and say that those people losing jobs, I'll just get other jobs. All right, you're all watching the news about GameStop, right? How many of you understand that story? So the basic story that a bunch of individuals on Reddit got together and decided to massively, collectively buy stock in this one company called GameStop. Now this is having the effect of being a. You can see in the comments there's lots of yeses. Lots of yeses. Wow. I'm actually quite kind of impressed at the quality of this audience. And I mean that. I don't know how many general audiences would have so many people looking at the comments. And most of you say you understand, understand that story. It's kind of impressive, actually. Jesus. Look at the number of people in the comments who say they actually understand that story. It's a complicated story. I thought I was going to have to explain it to you. Wow. Wow. I think some of the smartest people in the Internet are on this live stream now. This is amazing. I'm really very impressed. I suppose it's the people who understand it who are going to comment, but even still, I'm surprised. But let me give you the basic idea. If anybody doesn't know how this works. So there are big companies called hedge funds who try to make money by driving down the price of a stock. This is not good for the company that owns that stock because people are just playing, manipulating their stock. The way they would do that is they would buy a contract, if you will, that says they will make money if the stock goes down. Now, if you see that a bunch of smart investors with a lot of money have just made big bets that a stock will go down, what are you going to do? If all the smart people just made giant bets that a stock is going to go down and you own that stock, you want to get the hell out of there, right? Because it's going down. Not only are they telling you it's going to go down, but they make it to go down. That's. That's the manipulative part, right? There might be some stories that come out about some bad things happening at the company. They may be true, they may be more opinion. You don't know. But the big hedge funds have the power to drive down the price of a stock, which does nothing for you, does nothing for the company. Now, in some cases, they would argue that they're just adding efficiency and they're, they're driving down the price of a stock that deserves to be driven down. In other words, they're not destroying good companies. They're destroying companies that have some issues. But keep in mind, they've gone after Tesla. Imagine if they had driven Tesla and a business. That was a possibility, I think. I don't know if they had that much power, but they did try to drive down the price of Tesla at one point, which makes Elon Musk not their friends. Let me just say that Elon Musk is enjoying watching the short sellers get taken. At least that's the reporting. So here's how it works. If I can explain this easily. Let's say you own some stock in a company called GameStop. And I can go to you and I can say, hey, I would like to borrow your stock for X amount of time, specific amount of time. And at the end of that, I will give you your stock back. And you would say, well, why would I let you borrow my stock? Why the hell would I do that? And there are two reasons. One is I'll give you a fee for borrowing it. You could think of it like interest, but it's not. It's like a fee for borrowing it for a while. And so you'd say, okay, I get a fee. But what about when you give it back to me? That stock might not be worth the same amount. I'll give you 100 shares. And when you give 100 shares back to me, are they still worth something? Because if the stock went down in the meantime, I got a little fee, and that's cool. But when you gave me my stock back, it wasn't worth anything. It went down to a dollar or something. So you would have lost. As the person who let me borrow yourself stock, you would be a loser. In that case, why would you do it then? Why would you ever let me borrow your stock? Well, the only reason you do it is that you think the stock is going to go up. So you think that when I give that stock back to you, it'll be worth more than when it was first borrowed and enough more that you come out ahead. Not only did I get a fee for letting you borrow it, but when you gave it back, it was worth more than I gave it to you. Good deal, right? So you always have to have somebody who thinks something's going up and somebody who thinks it's going down to make a trade. One of them is right and one of them is wrong. That's how the stock market works. But you need somebody on both sides, right? So that's why somebody would lend you stock. They think it's going in the other direction. So let's say you're a hedge fund and you've done one of these deals and you say, I, I'm going to give this stock back to this guy. It's just 100 shares of stock. But the people that read it get together and they say, we don't have a lot of money individually, we're just people. But if we all get together and buy this stock like crazy, the hedge funds don't have a choice later of buying the stock at your Higher price, and therefore you make a profit because they have a contract that says on this specific date, I have to go get stock that I've already sold. By the way, I borrowed your stock, but as soon as I borrowed it, I sold it. So as soon as you lend your stock to me, you don't have it anymore, but neither do I. I borrowed it and sold it. All I have is cash. So at the end of that contract period, all I have is cash. But I owe you a stock. You got to get your 100 shares back. So I have to go buy those in the market. But the Reddit people drove up the price. Now I can't afford to buy them. I don't have enough money. I can't get enough money. There's nothing I can do. But I owe this gigantic amount of money because the Redditors drove up the stock price. How do I give you back the shares I borrowed? I can't afford them. So I go out of business. So I go bankrupt. At least. Maybe not out of business ultimately, but. So the Redditors are intentionally driving out of business the hedge funds because they did the math, or somebody did and figured that they could buy enough collectively to actually bankrupt gigantic hedge funds, which they don't really feel are so good for the country. And it's this massive shift in power because the retail small investors found out, hey, if we band together and use these communication tools, we can be as powerful or more powerful than the hedge funds, and we can just drive them out of business and make a profit, too. Now, if you're listening to this and say to yourself, hey, I think I just found a way to make some easy money. I'm going to buy me some GameStop stuff, and that stuff's going to keep on going up, and I'll just make a quick, quick profit. A lot of people did that. A lot of people got in low, probably sold high, made a ton of money with almost no time going by. But don't assume that because it happened to you, there should be, in the long run, about as many losers as winners. Right? Because it always has to be a buyer, always has to be a seller, otherwise there's no transaction. So in the long run, you're going to get. I don't think this is exactly true, but something closer to as many winners as losers. So if you want to flip a coin and bet your entire net worth on it, I would advise against it. Sort of a coin flip. It's not. It's not a guaranteed. It's not safe and if the coin flip doesn't go your way, it's not that you didn't make money, it's that you lost it all. You just lost it. So super risky if you're trying to figure out how risky it is. Super risky. But if you have lots of people putting in small amounts that wouldn't make a difference to their life if they lost them, you know, hundreds of thousands of people putting in a thousand dollars apiece, say, wouldn't change their life if they lost them. So I think this is really. It's not a question of what's right or wrong, good or bad. We do see that the Robinhood apparently stopped letting people buy the stock. They can sell it, but not buy it, which is good for the hedge funds but not good for the retail people. So let's see how much power the hedge funds have, because hedge funds are still trying to. Still trying to manipulate it in their direction. So it's a battle of wills at the moment. We don't know which way it's going to end, but it's an interesting story, and apparently it shows some hatred for the big money people that is bubbling up from the public in a way that we've never seen before. All right, I'm still getting. Still getting weird comments about my tweet in which I asked if it's too late to impeach George Washington for slavery. And I'm watching a technique by the fake news industry to marginalize me as a public commenter because I don't comment exactly the way they would like. And I've seen the technique before. So here's the technique, and this is how Trump. Trump was the victim of this once, and now it's happening to me in a smaller way. Do you remember when Trump made his John McCain statement? They were talking about John McCain being a hero. And I think it was when Trump was running for office, and he said, I prefer people who don't get caught. Now, if you don't know that was a joke, then it looks very disrespectful to anybody who's served. But if you do know it's a joke, well, it's not really disrespectful. It's just a joke. All right? And it was a funny joke. Stop everything. Stop everything. Hold on, hold on. I just had to show you what it looks like out my window right now. That's crazy. Take a look at that. If you're listening on podcast, I'll get back to our scheduled program. But the. The scenery here is just A joke. This is crazy. All right, Back to John McCain. I know that's what you really want to talk about. So what the fake media does is they will misinterpret somebody, say, Trump, and then I'm going to tell you how they do it. To me, they'll start by misinterpreting something that was clearly a joke, and they turn it into, oh, it's a disrespectful thing. If they repeat their misinterpretation enough, the misinterpretation becomes the truth, at least in terms of the public. And the public says, oh, yeah, it wasn't a joke, it was being disrespectful. So once they've sold you on the fake news that Trump was being disrespectful to service people, which is of course not what was happening. He was just mocking McCain, then that becomes the truth, and then they mock you for it, and then the mocking is of the thing that never happened. Right. So the thing that Trump would be mocked for is the thing that didn't happen. Likewise, when I did my tweet about, you know, maybe we should think about impeaching George Washington, the first thing they do is misinterpret it as not a joke. It's a joke. It's a joke. Do you think that I really want to impeach George Washington? No. Now, the second thing they do is, even if they recognize it as a joke, even a joke has a political point to it, and this one does. Now, the point I'm making is that it would be a complete waste of the public's time and the government's time to impeach Trump because he's not going to run for office again. If you think that's going to happen, or at least if he ran, he wouldn't. He wouldn't have a chance of winning at this point. If you're worried about it, that's kind of tedious, because Trump wouldn't have enough support from Republicans to win again. Right. And you need at least your own team. You can't win without your own team. And he would have lots of support, but not enough. So I think Trump would know somebody still thinks he would win. He wouldn't win. He wouldn't have any chance of. He ran again. I understand that you think that's not the case, but my point, which is my opinion is he has the same odds of winning and being in office again as George Washington, meaning none. Right. So my point is it's a waste of time because neither of them will ever be president again. But instead of that obvious point, which I thought was obvious when I made it, the Democrats who are criticizing me have decided to interpret it as me not understanding that the issue of slavery was very different from the issue of inciting people to do whatever they claim Trump did in the Capitol. Now that's a case of not understanding how analogies and jokes work, or at least non jokes the point in this case. But since they can repeat that forever, forever. Now if I do something else that they don't like, they will say and he thought that slavery was the same as so they'll create a story in which I'm so dumb that I made this tweet, but it will be based on misinterpreting a simple point that it's a waste of time to impeach anybody I to their end of office and not going to run again. So that's the fake news play. They'll create a fake narrative and that will be the thing that you'll have to answer for the rest of your life and they can use that against you at any future time. I'm actually surprised. There's so many people who think Trump could win and I don't think there's even the slightest chance he would run for a lesser or such as governor or senator. You don't go from president to a lesser office. I mean you could. I just don't think that's just not anything anybody would do. Somebody says, why purposely try to be misinterpreted? Well, sometimes I do that for fun. And this was a case where I was pretty sure people would misinterpret it and I thought it would be funny. And it was. But they'll use it against me. The trouble is that it just won't have that much effect in my case. Here's a little thing you should know about so some academics from Harvard, Duke and Johns Hopkins got together. Pretty smart people, right? If they're academics at those schools. Harvard, Duke, D. John Hobson, Johns Hopkins. Pretty smart people got together and released a paper in which they claim that the COVID lockdowns will result in a staggering 1 million excess deaths over the next decade and a half due to increased problems with health and health related issues because of unemployment. So what they've done is they say, we know that unemployment unemployment leads to X percent of problems. The coronavirus will cause more unemployment and therefore you can just figure out how much that will affect things. Here's my problem with that. Doesn't that sound like something you want to believe? When you heard this, you said yes. Finally I got science on my side, right? But was it science? Was that science or was that an economic kind of projection? Except with economics it's more of an employment estimate and then related to health care and how people will thrive or not under different employment scenarios. Here's my problem. When you hear a new paper came out that exactly agrees with what you want it to say, that's when you should really crank up your skepticism. Because the best way that you can be fooled is by somebody telling you that science agreed with you. But you got to know that science is wrong in this kind of stuff, maybe more often than right. When it comes to financial predictions. Does this sound familiar in any way? Alright, it might sound like my criticisms of climate change economic predictions. If you've watched me for a while, you know that I don't argue with the science part of climate change. Because what do I know? I'm not a scientist. And their arguments seem to have lots of backing from lots of different directions. No matter how they slice it, it looks like CO2 added to the atmosphere should cause warming, all things being equal. But when they take that, which I can't judge and don't have any reason to think it's false, they take it to an economic projection over 80 years, then it just is ridiculous because nobody can do that. That's not a real thing. That's like a horoscope reading paper. He leaves Nobody can make an 80 year economic prediction. It's just not a thing. But they do anyway to scare you into action today. Now, the reason that economic projection doesn't make sense for 80 years is because there'll be lots of innovation and surprises. Nobody saw the coronavirus coming. A lot of surprises. Could be wars, could be meteors, could be we discover gold, how to make gold out of plastic, I don't know. Anything could happen in 80 years. The same is true of this economic prediction. If you're willing to go with me on the fact that you can't predict climate change economics, which could be bad or could be good, they're just not predictable. You just can't predict that stuff. It should be the same analysis for this. Do you think people can really, really. No matter how smart they are? Because these are smart people working in the right fields, it looks like. And would you trust them? They're very smart. I believe they're almost certainly trying to tell you the truth. Probably credible professionals. Should you believe that there'll be a million excess deaths because of the shutdowns and coronavirus, when it agrees with what you want it to agree with, that's the problem, isn't it? It's the same problem with the economic predictions for climate change. The people who want that to be true so that their argument is true, they're going to see it as true. Somebody says Twitter is ruining conservatives, what do you say, Scott? Well, I don't know that they're ruining conservatives. I would have to, I think I would have to see some examples of conservatives being banned from a social media platform for saying things that are true. If you get banned for being reasonable, that would be a problem. But if you get banned for things that a reasonable person could say is hate speech, I don't know if I can defend that. If you get banned for saying things, things that are clearly not true, you have some explaining to do. But the real problem, of course, is that. It's not applied equally, right? So the people who get to decide what is true will say that when conservatives say something that they don't think is true, they have to go away. Whereas if CNN tells you the fine people hoax was real, or the bleach drinking hoax was real, or Russia collusion was real, and it turns out it's not, nobody gets penalized for that stuff. Adam Schiff, no penalty for lying to the public for years. Somebody says, why did Peter Navarro get kicked off? I don't know the specifics. I know, for example, in the carpe danked them situation, I think that was a copyright issue, wasn't it? Which is just its own issue. And Peter Navarro, if he got kicked off, I don't know the situation. People are telling me he's banned. I would assume he made some claim about the election integrity. And the powers that be have decided that questioning the election is too risky. So where they might allow something to remain on the Internet that is known to be false, as long as it's harmless. But that one could be potentially deadly if you get that one wrong. So should people be banned for saying that the election was stolen? I don't think so. Don't think so. But you don't have to say that. Let me tell you what I said recently. Give you a better way to approach this, which I'm pretty sure I wrote down here. Maybe I didn't. Oh, here it is. So here's something I tweeted which has not gotten me banned yet. This is a technique which I've taught you before, which is you take people's opinion that you believe is absurd and you agree with it and Then you amplify it. So agree and amplify. So instead of saying, I think this election was stolen for which there is no court approved proof, and then getting banned by social media, here's what I say. I agree with the narrative, but watch the way I do it. So here's me agreeing with the narrative. And I tweeted yesterday in my ongoing effort to avoid being canceled. So I've set the stage so people know that whatever comes is because I'm avoiding being canceled. And then I say, I hereby agree that an absence of court approved proof of election fraud is proof it did not happen. Courts are the ideal place for those challenges. Software systems are unhackable and full election transparency already exists. What did my critics say when I said that because I just described the narrative, that's acceptable, but because I'm associated with a political side, well, whether I think that or not I'm associated with it. People are going to need to argue it. Which part of this $100 per word removal? I see where you're going with that, but that's a different topic. Let me read the pieces of this again. People call this sarcasm or satire. Let me see if you can find any satire or exaggeration or sarcasm. I'll read the parts again. And here's the clever part. There isn't any. There's no hyperbole in here. There's no exaggeration, there's no satire. I literally wrote the mainstream narrative down. First part that I said, I agree that an absence of Cort approved proof of election fraud is proof it did not happen. Now, as you know, absence of proof is not logically proof of absence. But that is the narrative. It's what George Stephanopoulos says. It's what CNN says every day. It's what MSNBC says every day. It's what the Biden administration says every day. I'm agreeing with him that the lack of proof is proof that it doesn't exist. Exist. Now, the fact that that is a famous logical impossibility, not impossibility, a logical fallacy isn't my fault. It isn't up to me to defend having an opinion which is a logical fallacy. And like a famous one, it's not even a remote one that not too many people have heard about. It's like one of the most famous logical fallacies that an absence of proof is not proof that there is nothing there. So I simply stated the exact belief that's coming from every direction with no exaggeration. Are you with me so far? You're with me so far that there's no exaggeration in that. So is that sarcasm? Is that a satire? It's literally what they're saying. If I had. If I had extended it, that would be satire. If I had made it something it wasn't really meant to be, sarcasm, maybe, but this is actually precisely what it is. There's no deviation from what I said, from the actual official narrative that a logical fallacy is the policy of the government and social media. Literally, that's the policy. About the second part. Courts are the ideal place for these challenges, the questions about fraud. Now, do you believe that courts are the ideal place for this? Well, you could argue that the court said we don't have jurisdiction, so that would be a variable. The courts have said it's too late to make this challenge in some cases. They've said that there's a tooth technical problem in some cases. But that's you. I mean, that might be something you say, but not me. I agree with the mainstream narrative that the courts are not just a good place for that. The courts are not just the only option that anybody has. It's way better than that because the courts have shown that there's no fraud. And if they can do something that powerful to show there's no fraud without even looking at the evidence, they're ideal because see how inefficient it would be to have a court case and people would present evidence and it takes months and you need a jury and it's very expensive. Well, that's not very ideal, is it? That's not ideal. The ideal is they don't even have to look at the evidence and they can still conclude with certainty that there's no fraud. That's ideal. It's ideal. So if I agree with the narrative that the courts, they got this, you couldn't even come up with a better place to take these court challenges. It's ideal. And you know that the. And you're thinking to yourself, Scott, they don't think it's ideal. They think in this part, I'm not making up, that the courts have settled it. They don't say the courts have mostly settled it. They don't say the courts have given us an indication that everything's all right. They say unambiguously, completely, the courts have decided on this. It's done. If that's true, and they decided on all of this without even having actual cases where evidence is shown and all that stuff. If they did all that without the expense of the evidence, that's ideal. How can you get better than that? Somebody says the courts did not rule. How does that matter? If they're the ideal place and they said I'm not going to rule, rule on that, then that's all you need to know because it was done at the ideal place. So I'm just agreeing with the official narrative that courts are ideal for that. Now you might say to yourself, but even your critics reading that would say, well, not really ideal. Maybe it's just the only option you had. But that's not their story. I'm just agreeing with their own narratives. Then I also said that software systems are unhackable. That is their position, because there's lots of software involved in the accounting, etc. There's no belief that they were hacked. There's no evidence of that. There's no proof of it. Let's say there's no court approved, present. There's no court, let's say agreed evidence or proof that any software was corrupted. So I want to make sure I don't get sued by Dominion or anybody who's suing somebody. Personally, I have no information that would lead me to conclude that any software system had been corrupted. But I would go, I would agree with my critics here, as I am quite aggressively, that we also know it can't be hacked in the case of the election software, how do we know that it can't be hacked? We know that because the people who are happy with the outcome tell us there's nothing to look at if there's nothing to check, no reason to check. What do you conclude? Can you conclude that you know everything's to going fine without checking? Well, only if you know that it can't be hacked. You would have to know it can't be hacked, or at least can't be hacked without being detected. You would have to know it can't be hacked and is therefore unhackable. To be happy with not checking, I don't see how you could conclude anything else. You would have to assume that software systems, at least some of them, them are unhackable and that this might be one of them. And you would have to assume also that the election had full transparency because if there were, if any transparency problems existed, then the people asking for audits and more transparency would be right, because everybody wants more transparency in an election, right? Who would argue against it? So I'm just agreeing with it. The elections must have already complete transparency because otherwise any reasonable person would say, oh, maybe we need a little more transparency. But they don't. So find any part of this in which I'm departing from the mainstream narrative. I don't think I am. I think they literally believe an absence of court approved proof is proof it doesn't exist. I think they actually believe the courts were the ideal place for these challenges. I think they actually believe that at least the election software was unhackable, which you would have to generalize. If there's any software that's unhackable, it's all unhackable. Right? Because unless they invented something that nobody else has, such as a way to keep insiders from ever taking your bribe, then why doesn't everybody else use it? Unless they're just making mistakes, they should use the same unhackable technology that the elections use, if it exists. And I believe it exists, because I'm told it does. And they must also believe there's full transparency in the election, otherwise they wouldn't be arguing and saying that everything's fine. So that would be an example of aggressive agreeing with people. And how much pushback do you think I got on that tweet? It's hard to push back on it, isn't it? The only way you can push back on that tweet is by disagreeing with your own opinion. Because I agreed with your opinion. Everything I said agreed with your opinion. So if it looks stupid to you, you. I don't see how that's my problem. If I agree with you and my agreeing with you looks stupid. Maybe you should have rethought your opinion in the first place before you got me to agree with you. Reuters is reporting that Enrique Terrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, which at least Reuters calls Enrique extremist group. Makes you wonder, what's the definition of an extremist group? Is there a definition of that? Or can the news just tell you somebody? Is. Are Democrats an extremist group? Is AOC an extremist for wanting to radically change the economy with the Green New Deal? I don't know. Is an extremist always somebody who has bad intentions? What's that mean? Anyway? So they. They just label the group extremists now? I'm not supporting the group or denying the group or disavowing them. I feel like they got some. They've got some good things, but a lot of problem things with the Proud Boys. So it's not. It's not to me to defend them, but you can condemn things they do, which is different from condemning all the members. All right. And by the way, I would apply the same standard to every group. There's got to be some good people in Antifa. Probably. There's probably at least one person in Antifa who's not a complete loser. So anyway, he's being accused of being an informer, a past informant, informer for the feds and local law enforcement. And apparently they say he's repeatedly worked undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript from 2014 from federal court stuff. So what do you make of the fact that the leader of the Proud Boys is a well known informer, police informer or law enforcement informer? Do you think he was doing the same thing with the Proud Boys or is that the biggest coincidence in the world? Is that the biggest coincidence in the world? That's a big one. That's a big coincidence. Yeah. Somebody saying it's a psyop. Can't rule it out. I don't have any reason to believe he was, but he's an interesting character. And I would, I would say if, if I were a member of the Proud Boys the day that I learned this, I would not be a member of the Proud Boys anymore. Yeah, you could do whatever you want. I suppose just getting a new leader might be all you need. But if I found this out that my leader was a well known police informant, pretty sure I would change organizations or form a new one or something. Gordon Chang, who is very anti China, maybe as much anti China as I am, he writes in the Hill that the Chinese leaders did not test Trump militarily. They didn't push him, but they're already pushing, pushing Biden. And this part blew my mind. This is what Gordon Chang writes in the Hill. He says that Xi, President Xi looks like he is going after Biden. As it is clear Chinese leaders think, or at least thought they could bully the new American president. Now that's the kind of statement where you say, how do you know what anybody's thinking? Right. And that's kind of a stretch. But Gordon Chang supports that statement by saying, how do we know that he goes the derisive. Derisive. Is it derisive or derisive? The derisive comment of D. Dong Cheng, a professor at Renmin University, were recorded and publicly circulated around China. D basically claimed that China would be able to determine outcomes in Washington him if Trump lost the election. That's pretty shocking, right? So in other words, we actually have a recording where somebody who's a professor at a university that's well controlled by the Chinese government. And he was willing to say in public that China would be able to determine outcomes in Washington. If true, Trump lost the election. What they're saying it out loud that if it's Biden, they can push him around and that Trump, they weren't willing to push him around because it was too risky. Wow. Now, will you see this story in Reuters? No. Will you see this story in cnn? No. Msnbc? No. No, you won't. So it's left to pundits and people like me and people like Gordon Chang to tell you that story. I think we've reached a point, especially with the ability to communicate anywhere, anytime. Adding to that, the fact that humans are bribeable and there's a lot of mother money in the world. I feel as if we're reaching the point where every government is just going to be controlled by outside money because they can. And the way it looks like, the way governments will be controlled is through the news. So if you try to control the government by, let's say, bribing or directly controlling an American politician, well, you can do that, but that's a little risky, isn't it, controlling a politician? You know, if somebody finds out the politician took a check or did a paid speech for some other country, yeah, you're probably going to find out there's going to be a record of it somewhere. It's a bad look. But suppose instead you create an army of influenced journalists who, little by little, seep into the, you know, the mainstream media and become your news. What happens when you've got some influential journalists. Influential journalists and they're creating the news narrative and it's just based from China or Russia or Iran or something? That looks to be what we have. Because what would have stopped China or Iran or anybody else from capturing journalists in this country? What would stop them from doing it? I can't think of anything because there'd be probably a hundred different ways that you could bribe somebody. And why wouldn't they? I'm sure we're doing it. We must be doing it in other countries. Right. So the, the new war, if you will, is an information war. I hate to say infowars, but maybe somebody who came up with that term understood what was coming better than anybody else. And that is World War 3. Essentially. World War 3 is what we do with cyber plus what we do with information warfare. So we are in deep information war with China and Iran and our other adversaries. And I don't know if we know it, it's hard to win a war you don't know you're fighting. Right. So China could actually conquer the United States. Just with changing the news narrative and, you know, looking at, at the way things are going, it looks like they have a good shot at it. Right. So our country is given its information by stooges. So here's a question for you. Do we know how much influence China in particular has on different news organizations? Do we know? I don't know. Somebody's mentioning Andy Ngo Gno. No. And apparently he had to move out of the country or he did move out of the country because of death threats against him and his family for just reporting. That's it. He just reported mostly on Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests. Before that, you know, his family was targeted, got lots of death threats and is moved out of the country. Are there any Democrats who've had to move out of the country yet because of death threats? Nope. Do you remember when I told you that Republicans would be hunted? Now, I don't know if Andy would. I don't think he would classify himself as a Republican. I don't know. I don't know one way or the other. But since he was clearly reporting on stuff that the left didn't like and I think he gets, you know, Andy probably has more followers on the right. He would be associated with them. Now, when I said Republicans would be hunted and people would say to me mockingly, give me one example of that. Well, there it is, Andy. Now he was hunted, literally. They found his family, they found his home, and they did threats against him and his physical home. He was hunted. He had to leave. They moved to Canada and Spain on their own when Trump won in 2016. Oh, yeah, that didn't happen. Somebody says, yeah, yeah, nobody really moved. Rand Paul was hunted by his neighbor. Right. Steve Scalise was haunted by that shooter. But that was different situations. Twitter must really be afraid of Peter Navarro's Navarro report. You say, well, you know, the trouble with the Navarro report and the trouble with anything that does a laundry list of election allegations is that if you do, if you do a list of things that you're alleging about the election credibility, that list is guaranteed to have some bullshit on it. Guaranteed. Because we don't know what's true and what isn't. If you put together a bunch of allegations and let's say there are 10 things on the list, there's no way all 10 of those things are going to be true. No way. They might. None of them be true. But with the one thing you can guarantee is that not all 10 of them are true. There's going to be an explanation for something. And if you do, if you do that approach, it makes you very non credible because it guarantees you're saying at least something that's not true about the election and then you can get banned. So if I were to give you advice, I would say do maybe one claim at a time. If you think it stands out as one, one that hasn't been addressed in any way, then you would live and die on that one claim. So maybe you feel like you've got a good case there. I wouldn't recommend it actually, because it's actually a little too dangerous to question the election. But if you do a laundry list, you're definitely dead because the laundry list will have enough wrong stuff in it, guaranteed that that will be enough to get rid of you. All right. I think some of the math claims are interesting, but they don't guarantee anything. The statistical stuff would have to have been backed up with some more detail to be meaningful. It raises questions, but that's all it does. Am I moving to Texas? I think I have too many reasons to stay here. Here being California, not here. Here. All right, I'm going to give you one more look. We're here in Tahiti on the way home to the States tonight. Late flight. Oh. So tomorrow morning I should be still flying or at least unavailable if I land before it's time for the periscope. Maybe I'll try doing it from the car or something if I have a signal. But chances are you will not see me tomorrow, but you'll see me the day after. And I'll try to do it tomorrow if I can see you later.