Episode 1084 Scott Adams: Teachers Unions Should Pay Reparations, Churches, Peter Navarro and HCQ

Date: 2020-08-07 | Duration: 59:12

Topics

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Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• Payroll and jobs, good news

• Walmart and casino church services

• Kanye should join Presidential debates

• Joe Biden said what?

• Teachers Unions, political activism, anti-school choice

• CNN’s Erin Burnett versus Peter Navarro on HCQ

If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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[0:12]

what a day what a day come on in come on in there's still time still space you can get the best seat if you hurry up make sure your coffee is warm or your beverage is cold depending on your personal preferences unlike joe biden i think everybody is different i don't lump people by ethnicity no i don't i believe we are all special and different and unique and i think that the only thing that could make this morning better well maybe not the only thing but the thing that could make it the best is the simultaneous step and you are going to enjoy that now and all it takes is a copper marker glass attacker challenger steiner canteen chicken flask have a vessel of any
any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better including the fake news it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go

[1:25]

well i would like to share with you something that made me so happy this morning and i tweeted it so that you could be happy too there is a genre of entertainment that i had never seen before that i really liked i mean it just completely made my day and i and i'll call it a genre uh you're i i know you're going to say to me scott scott scott we've known about this forever why are you the last to find out well that's probably true but here's the genre young black men listening to let's call it just for convenience uh old white music that is awesome the first one is these two uh two black teens look uh who look like the most fun two people you'd ever know uh listening to a phil collins song for the first time and it was that uh it was in the air tonight i think now here's the thing if if you've never

[2:26]

now here's the thing if if you've never heard phil collins and yeah yeah yeah i know you all have your opinions some some people love them some people hate them i personally think that his best songs are amazing and watching so so the video is the the two young black kids and for some reason the fact that they're black helps the story right yeah you get that right just because they're listening to something that they had not been exposed to before and here's what makes it amazing so first of all just watching them uh light up and enjoy the music and being maybe a little bit surprised by it is good so that alone is entertaining but here's the part that really sort of got to me music for me is a sympathetic um a sympathetic thing and and what i mean is this the music that i first heard when i was with my

[3:26]

with my college friends is the music that always reaches me the most and probably always will and it has to do with the fact that i'm
i'm i learned very early that i don't seem to have much in the way of independent musical preferences you know i'm not not a big music guy but if you put me in the room with people who really like the music that's playing what i respond to is the other people so if somebody else is getting like just a massive pleasure and a music i don't get it directly from the music but i get it from the person and then the music seems to be what's working but really it's the combination of the the person's influence because humans are mimics you put us in a room with anything and we will be more likely to mimic it music probably more than most things is mimickable so when i watch this video and then there's another one of a uh let's see what's his name uh he goes

[4:28]

uh let's see what's his name uh he goes by
by no life shack s-h-a-q on youtube it's a huge account a couple million followers and it's a uh i don't know 20 something i'm guessing black man who's listening to various musics for the first time and leonard skinner leonard skinner is the one now there's another thing here that's that's useful and by the way this is this is persuasion is sort of the context here so i'm talking about music but it's not really about music it's about how the persuasion works and how we are mimics but i'm working on this hypothesis about what makes music work and it's a really deep kind of complicated hard to understand thing there's there's something in humans where we're wired for some kind of a beat but what i felt when i was watching and again it's important to the story and where i'm going here that the people in the videos were black

[5:31]

that the people in the videos were black so two black yous and then a 20-something black guy and i got to tell you that as as they were enjoying the music and then i started enjoying them and then through them remembering how much i like the music you know from my youth
it is such a bonding experience like i i feel like i'm already friends with the people in the videos never met them don't think ever well but immediately i was bonded to them like if i met them in the street i would feel like it would be really easy to get along with them like i would already be connected somehow and you know in our big you know world full of conflict and protest and such watching the power of music pull people together makes me ask some big questions one of the questions is about the origin of music and the origin of dancing and i'm not too proud

[6:31]

too proud i'm not too proud to say that when i watched no life shaq literally he couldn't he couldn't help himself but move when he was listening to leonard skinner i actually danced i danced with him alone in my uh in my studio office at 4 30 in the morning happier than you could ever imagine like just purely happy and he did that for me so i would recommend his
his um his youtube it's no life shack s-h-a-q quite amazing now here's the other thing i wanted to say about music there's something that i'm just sort of working on this as a hypothesis curiosity is sort of a base impulse for human beings and i've said before that whenever you can invoke curiosity let's say you're an author or any kind of entertainer

[7:31]

author or any kind of entertainer curiosity will just bind people you know whether you're giving a presentation at work whatever you're doing if you can inspire curiosity people will stay around and they'll wait because they kind of need to know how things end we're just built that way and music i think does that because music imagine if you would your music was one beat
and you know where that was going to end at the end of the song it would still be it wouldn't matter how good that b was because it bores you there's no curiosity but the songs you know that if they start slow like leonard skinner does if you're familiar with the song you know it
brown it's actually too slow and watching and watching the the no chat no life shack hear here for the first time what you know as an audience member is oh the good stuff's coming and here's

[8:32]

is oh the good stuff's coming and here's the fun at the slow part he got really excited and really liked the leonard skinner it was free bird actually so it was free bird the song and he's listening to it he really likes the slope art it's like yes and you can tell he's really getting into it and genuinely enjoying it but as a viewer you're saying to see to yourself oh i know where this is going i am not leaving i am not leaving this video until this until the tempo change right and so the tempo changes and he just goes nuts but you can feel it in your body like you get goosebumps and it just goes right through you because you're you're feeling it with him
him it's remarkable and i would go so far as to say that if you are going to invent a new genre of entertainment damn you couldn't beat this because it really has just all of the elements in it
it um so there's that i tweeted both of those so you can enjoy them too i would definitely recommend

[9:33]

recommend that you watch them alone watch it alone with headphones when nobody's watching because you're going to find yourself dancing around all right good news on the payroll and on jobs jobs are down from 11.1 in june to 10.2 is 10.2 good or bad well it's bad in normal times but i have to say do you know where we think back just a few months just a few months ago what were people talking about in terms of unemployment they were talking about 20 they were talking about uh depression now if you're keeping track of who is your better predictors i would like to throw into the mix that i did say no it's not going to be a depression yeah we are going to get out of this and this 10 percent unemployment as bad as it is certainly you know among our biggest challenges right now

[10:34]

challenges right now it's not nearly as bad as it could have been it's a lot closer to what the optimists were saying than the pessimists so keep that in mind oh as well as long as we're as long as we're scoring things to maintain my credibility well as well as i can anyway i like to confess when i get stuff wrong so when i get stuff wrong if i don't say it publicly hey i got that wrong then maybe you know i'll have less credibility in the future so early on when we first were going into shutdown and people said hey you know this shutdown's bad and we thought it would only be maybe a month or six weeks when i thought it would be really short because nobody really knew i mean maybe that was enough maybe it wasn't but when we thought it would be short i actually said you know i think the net deaths if you take out the number of people who won't be dying on the highway

[11:35]

won't be dying on the highway you might come out closer to like 5 000 people dead if it's short but of course it wasn't short so my 5 000 dead could not be more wrong so it's about as wrong as anything can be
be but the wrongness had to do with not knowing how long the short the the shutdown would have lasted because not not a lot of people are gonna let's say end their life or become addicts in four weeks because you can sort of last that out you know maybe you could hold it would be worse but not that much worse but if you extend it for months and people lose their jobs and you know they can't they can't do any of their social things that they normally do
do yeah that's that's expensive that's dangerous people don't get their cancer screenings etc
etc so so that would be a case of me missing by
by about a thousand miles but the part i missed that maybe we all missed is how long we

[12:36]

that maybe we all missed is how long we would be shut down that was the key key element all right though here's a question that i want to ask with respect which is about the church attendance during the pandemic you've seen a number of people have cleverly tried to get around the rules i guess there was one church that did their service inside of walmart because walmart could be open but churches cannot i think it was ralph reed's group who used a casino to do a service because casinos are open but churches are not and i ask this question what would jesus do because it feels like i've always appreciated that question because it does put you you know put you into the view of okay if you were jesus how would you play this and the reason i ask the question it's not a criticism so don't take this as a criticism of religion i'm pro-religion i think it works wonders in many people's lives

[13:37]

wonders in many people's lives i think that's just objectively true so no matter what you believe about religion it's just obvious it's good for people we seem to be wired for it the evidence is overwhelming i think so i'm very very pro-religion while not being a believer personally so i have a complete respect for it for all the right reasons but i have to ask
ask is your constitutional right to to your religion which i would say is unquestionable that is to say those people who say you government you can't tell us to not practice our religion that's that's baked into the constitution i'm with you same as if they had tried to suppress your free speech totally with you if it's in the constitution sorry those are the rules does it you know is could somebody get hurt because of it

[14:37]

because of it yes sorry it's in the constitution same with free speech free speech isn't free people do get hurt all the time but do i think we should not have free speech because somebody might get hurt by it nope it's in the constitution those are the rules we're playing by and until somebody comes up with a better set of rules or changes the rules we're just better off saying hey this is what we agreed on let's stick with it so those people who say it's my constitutional right to express my religious preferences and worship the way i want you know within reason of course i say absolutely 100 support for your constitutional right to avoid to just ignore the government literally just ignore the government if the government passes a law tomorrow that says you know we're going to shoot you if you practice your religion well you have to overthrow the government right i mean you have to overthrow the

[15:39]

right i mean you have to overthrow the government if they do that so legally constitutionally absolutely um and if you want to make the
the uh if you want to make the cost-benefit decision that you've looked at all the data and you've decided that this risk is worth the reward okay you know as long as you've looked at all the risks and all the reward that's all anybody would ask but here's the question how would jesus play it would jesus have said let's say he made the decision and and you said to him look we got you know we got this problem we can't worship the way we want to but we got to work around we're going to use the casino the only downside the only downside is not the risk we're taking on ourselves because we're adults yeah we can take our own risk you know you can't tell me what risk i can take so yeah what do you think of that jesus and jesus jesus would probably say

[16:40]

jesus jesus would probably say i agree you are adults and you can take the risk that you want but then there's this other pesky problem which is what happens if you transmit the virus outside of your group what happens if infections spread because of it and then that that went to people who were not making any kind of a religious decision they were just cutting your hair or whatever they were doing and now they've got the virus somebody dies would jesus say go ahead and do the the ceremony in the casino because you're adults and you're choosing to do it and the benefits you know are greater than the cost or would jesus say you know the people who are going to suffer here are not you you know the the question of whether you should do it isn't about you it's not about you it's not about religion it's not about your god it's about what you what risk you are willing to put other people now would jesus say

[17:43]

other people now would jesus say well yeah maybe a few people will die or would jesus say you know it's temporary let's just hold off you can worship it up like crazy when the churches are fully reopened man we're gonna have a party it'll be the best day ever but for now but for now can you just think of your other humans for a little bit
bit now i'm not a religious scholar i will not pretend to speak for jesus i simply put that question out there because i was raised in the christian tradition and i find it confusing that jesus may have supported something that was real fun and good for the worshipper but might kill somebody who was minding their own business later maybe maybe jesus would take that view and if that's your view that jesus would back that i would say you're on strong you're on strong ground all right

[18:43]

strong ground all right rand paul tweeted a real clear politics article by stacey rudin who you need to know is a litigator active in the grassroots movement to preserve full-time in-classroom education all right so there's a lawyer who is actually litigating so she's i guess she is active in uh in the the effort to get kids back to school and writes an article that says that social distancing and lockdowns have no scientific support and i thought to myself what so there's no scientific evidence at all that lockdowns work uh or that even social distancing which is kind of the same thing that they work now the the thought is that if you know once one percent of your population is infected that there's just nothing you can do that you could be the most cautious

[19:44]

that you could be the most cautious people in the world but basically it's gonna get you it's gonna get you sooner or later however i would note that although the argument is sound and very it's provocative in the sense that what is the argument against hydroxychloroquine the argument against hydroxychloroquine is that there are no studies confirming that it works right there are no studies confirming that it works so they say don't use it but there's also no study confirming that the lockdowns work you know in this kind of situation so who's being anti-science if there's no evidence that something works but you know for sure it'll destroy your economy do you do it there's no scientific evidence that a lockdown works and which i believe to be true only because it would be so hard to do a scientific study and it might be the only reason there's no scientific study because that'll just be hard to study but

[20:45]

that'll just be hard to study but everybody thinks it works and one of the things i loved was this point that rudin makes in the article that human beings will imagine that their leaders made the difference this is a point i've been talking about a lot you think you can tell which leaders are doing a good job because you're looking at the outcomes it's just not a thing it has never been a thing it's not even a thing in business most of the time as the dilbert creator have been writing about this forever my observation in all my business experience is that managers would wait for something lucky to happen that nothing to do with them and they then they would claim credit based on that thing they did they had nothing to do with anything so most of management is waiting for something good to happen on its own and then figuring out a way that you can claim credit for it and that's not even a joke any anybody who's had experience with big companies knows yeah

[21:46]

experience with big companies knows yeah in a big organization it's really about saying that you are responsible for a coincidental uptick in in sales which might have to do with you know nothing let me ask you this so we saw that a number of companies like amazon made tons of money because of the pandemic do you think there are no managers at amazon who are going to say look at what a great job i did because my profits and my my segment are way up yeah they will they had nothing to do with it was the pandemic the pandemic made people stay home and order stuff on amazon but there will be managers claiming credit and successfully they will be compensated for doing such a great job because well leave all those sales made a lot of money you guys are geniuses that have nothing to do with talent likewise when all the governors and the leaders of all the countries at the end of this they're going to be claiming credit for the ones who coincidentally got a good result

[22:47]

coincidentally got a good result and and the ones who coincidentally got a bad result will be blaming it on somebody else because they need to do that but indeed there may be no connection between getting back to the social distancing between any of the leadership decisions and what happens now here's my problem with the ruden look while i accept that there may not be any science for social distancing and the lockdowns that's probably just because it's hard to study almost nothing i do during the day has any science to it after i'm done here i'm going to go downstairs and i'm going to eat a delicious avocado with soy sauce and pepper despite the fact that there has not been one
one single scientific study to say that that's going to be the best thing i can do now might be something else is better to do maybe i should wait to eat maybe i should eat something different

[23:48]

should eat something different but i'm going to do it anyway despite no scientific backing whatsoever because some things just sort of make sense now the other thing that rudin admits is that uh you know if obviously indirectly admits that if you have a vaccine and and you and you can stall until you get to the vaccine actually social social distancing might make sense it might make sense to stall if you knew you were stalling for something but we don't quite know that the vaccines are going to work i have a good feeling about them but i don't know
so i think in the context where you have a real chance of therapeutics a real chance of keeping the hospitals running and a real chance of getting to a vaccine and i think those are all real that that is the one situation in which you don't need that much science to do a shutdown so while the case is strong

[24:50]

so while the case is strong counselor from a lawyer perspective it's sort of a good argument but it's a lawyer argument meaning when i say it's a lawyer argument i mean it sounds good but is missing the biggest part which is the whole point was to stall to keep the hospitals open and to make sure that we had time to get to some better treatments so under those conditions actually i think you don't need too much science to take your to take your shot um
all right how about this why is it that uh kanye west can't debate is it because he's black now of course it's not because that it's because they have rules and he is not he doesn't have enough doesn't have enough voters there's some threshold that he's not going to be anywhere near but still wouldn't you like to see kanye west debate

[25:50]

west debate now even kanye says he's not running for president he's walking you know so he's signaling quite clearly plus the number of states that he's actually running in is limited but he's signaling quite clearly that he's in it for let's say the influence or the positioning or maybe for the message but not so much in it to win still what do you like to see him debate i mean come on can you imagine the ratings for a debate that had kanye west president trump and joe biden it would be the best thing you've ever seen on television and would the public benefit from having a debate that drew more people in the drew drew in more people than normally would watch a political event yeah yeah i think it would be actually really really good for the republic now the fact that there are these rules

[26:52]

the fact that there are these rules about you know when and when they debate i think that's independent of the fact that i could just hold the debate could i isn't it still a free country could i'm not saying i'll do this but can't i just say hey i invite all three of you to my debate it's going to be such and such a time and if all three you know they just have to say yes if they said yes it's a debate it doesn't matter if there was some threshold that someone else cares about if if i'm not a party to that decision i could just have my own debate so there's nothing that would stop it except for the three people not wanting to do it now would kanye want to do it i don't know i don't know it'd be amazing if he did would president trump say yes if kanye said it said yes i think so don't you don't you think president trump would say yes if kanye said you know he'll do one and there was an event that allowed it i think he'd say yes

[27:54]

that allowed it i think he'd say yes i don't know would joe biden say yes well if kanye and trump said yes i think his handlers would try to keep him out of it but it would be fascinating if he said yes
yes anyway i'd like to put that in the mix what's interesting is that kanye seems to be doing exactly exactly the smartest thing because you don't need to be president to have power you just have to find a way that your message and your influence can get you leveraged up so apparently he's he's going to be on the ballot in wisconsin maybe you know the most important of the swing states it could be could turn out that way so he's finding this little area where if he can siphon off black votes from democrats he pretty much puts president trump into office and i think he's largely admitted that that if that happens that's okay with him yeah at least okay maybe better than okay but here's the thing he's now putting

[28:57]

but here's the thing he's now putting himself in a position where he could ask for something right imagine imagine kanye west saying look i'm on the ballot i'm going to change the election if you'd like that not to happen i want one thing and then who knows what the one thing is if it were me i'd ask for something about the school choice i'd say look whoever gives me
me free competition and can fix education for for everybody who's poor not just black people because i think kanye would be the one person who would say how about helping all black how about helping poor people rather than just black poor people so i think he would be a good woman for that message i imagined he would think of it that way and
and uh although i can't read his mind so i don't i don't want to put it i don't want to assume that i can imagine what's in the mind of anybody much less kanye right i mean if you could imagine what was in his mind

[29:58]

what was in his mind then you would be able to do what he could do but since you and i can't do what he can do let's assume we can't read his mind so let's get away from that um it'd be fascinating i'd just love to see him be part of the process and i think he could be deeply deeply important if he wants it to be um let's talk about joe biden joe biden um now obviously he's not a racist um i don't think anybody really could make that case but you can be insensitive you could have a blind spot and you could accidentally offend and i think that's where he's at so as you all know um he made the statement that uh that he thought that the latin american was what was the name he used to work the
the latin american yeah the latino community he said was incredibly diverse and then he said quote unlike the black community

[31:00]

community so he's imagining that the latino community is diverse but the black community is not and when he went on what to try to clarify that because of course that caused the backlash he clarified that the latino community you know it's not just mexico but it's you know the south american country is you know guatemala etc and that that's what he meant to which i say um joe biden you know africa is not one country right in the same way that south america is it's not one country which was your point mexico is not guatemala there yeah there are some differences but you know africa wasn't one country so and and of course the black community like every community is full of unique voices so he's getting some pushback for that i don't think he meant any harm but it's a great political uh political attack and i think it gets more to his mental

[32:01]

and i think it gets more to his mental competence i mean the the way i read the story is uh that he's not verbally capable which is different than having some kind of racial animus i don't think he has that
portland has gone from i don't know scary tragic it's always tragic especially in people getting hurt but it's also kind of funny in a horrible way i'm not proud of it because i'm not i don't want to minimize the pain and suffering and the the real you know the real hurt economically and physically for the the police as well as the protesters so it's a real tragedy but the ted wheeler gets rid of the feds so that the mayor succeeds in getting rid of the feds which the story was the mainstream media was trying to tell you that the cause of the protest was that

[33:03]

that the cause of the protest was that trump had defense there regarding just you know the federal buildings and once they pulled out didn't make a difference at all made no difference so now you can see that the mainstream story about it was the feds that were the problem complete fake news but now the feds are gone so if you didn't like it you get to have whatever is the opposite of that that's what they have so the mayor who at one point actually joined in with protesters to show that he
he he felt sympathy or empathy for their cause that didn't work out well because the protesters were not kind to him but now he is he's he's saying this i'm just going to read his quote so ted wheeler mayor of portland he goes don't think for a moment that you are if you are participating in this activity meaning the protest you are not being a uh well actually the not just the protest but the more violent part of the protest uh you are not being a prop for the re-election campaign of donald trump

[34:05]

re-election campaign of donald trump because you absolutely are you are creating the b-roll film that will be used in ads nationally yes to help donald trump during this campaign yes if you don't want to be part of that then don't show up oh well oh well and watching the the portland protest turn into a campaign ad for trump which is exactly what happened not just approximately exactly what happened it literally transformed into a campaign ad
ad for the other guy you can't that is just too perfect it's just too perfect so on one hand tragic on the other hand comedic
i guess that's all i need to say about that

[35:07]

i tweeted today that i asked people if they thought that the teachers unions should pay reparations because they are the primary cause let's say cause of 80 percent that would be my estimate of systemic racism now they're not the initial cause the initial cause you know you could argue back to slavery and then the ripple into the future but the ongoing cause you know the the current day thing you could change because we can't go back to the past you know if we can't rewind history and fix anything in slavery but we can deal with what's today and what's today is that the primary cause of every disparity income disparity and everything else opportunity would be the teachers unions now at this point and i have to admit i'm i'm very late to this argument because the first time you hear this does it just sound stupid if you had never heard this argument before and and the first time you'd been

[36:08]

and and the first time you'd been introduced to it was me saying you know the teachers unions are the cause of systemic racism you'd say ah i'm not connecting those dots aren't those like completely different things where are you going here but anybody who's dug into it even a little bit learns that the teachers unions are basically a political organization who do a little bit of stuff for teachers which gives them their their power so they do do good work for teachers in the sense that teachers get good negotiating and union union type strength that's all good don't want to change don't want to change the fact that teachers have somebody who can negotiate for them let's keep that part but what you may not know is that the teachers unions have a tremendous amount of money because the teachers pay into that and i thought that that money went to mostly doing stuff for the teachers wouldn't you think but it turns out it's political they literally spend

[37:09]

literally spend depends on the union because they're different unions but they could spend 30 to 40 50 percent of their entire budget uh fixing elections in other words putting money into you know especially the local elections where they have so much money they can change who gets elected so the teachers unions extort the teachers get this big pot of money maybe half of it they spend on union e stuff that's good for teachers but maybe the other half and we're talking all about lots of millions of dollars here goes directly into political campaigns political activism and not even directly related to teaching now now if you said to yourself that's got of course they're putting money into political stuff because every group has an interest in what laws get passed etcetera i'm not talking about any of that i'm talking about general democrat policies for just unrelated to school now as long as

[38:10]

just unrelated to school now as long as the teachers unions have money they can affect the political process and as long as they're affecting the political process one of the things that they're also doing is guaranteeing that they that they stay the way they are and the way they are is no competition for teachers so you don't want the union doesn't want the people that are protecting the teachers to have competition from another school that might you know lower the bargaining position of the teachers that part actually makes sense makes perfect sense but it's also just perfect sense for the teachers it's not perfect sense for the union it's not perfect sense for the republic it's not a free market situation and we know that competition and free markets are really the only solution to anything that doesn't work if something doesn't work you've got to be able to offer an alternative and that's what this teachers unions prevent from happening because any politician who who pushed

[39:12]

who who pushed for school choice is going to get the full weight of millions of dollars of teachers union money pushed against them in the next election they'll get primaries and everything else so i would say that if you fixed education you would do the most that could be done among the things that are actually practical it's the most you could do to fix the situation for the black community because good education gets you good income fixes everything better health care outcomes fewer people in jail and even if the police stop you they're going to say oh you know i've i've had only good experiences so it's basically the the alpha problem and i would and i'm going to modestly say that 80 percent of ongoing systemic racism comes directly from the school unions it's very direct there's no indirect argument here it's very direct and uh maybe one percent of the total problem in the black

[40:13]

of the total problem in the black community is police abuse maybe one percent now i'm not saying that you know all police are good or that we shouldn't work on that seems like a pretty big problem especially if if the problem of policing uh affects you you know mentally and emotionally it's a big problem like i don't want to take away from how big that problem is but as big as it is it's about one percent of your total problem in the first systemic racism about 80 school unions is my estimate all right um here's one of those fake news situations where the headline is up of this opposite story and by the way i'm going to get to the part where peter navarro name-checked me on cnn yesterday and and changed my whole day that's covered up next but there's a story uh uh it's one of those uh twitter things where they collect the story and then they put the headline on it
it so here was the headline that

[41:15]

so here was the headline that hydroxychloroquine is not effective according to scientists so what does not effective mean well that's pretty clear right not effective means don't take it all right that's completely clear if a drug is not effective do not take it under any conditions because there's only a downside but then you read the actual details that this headline alleges to summarize and the headlines are that it is unlikely to be effective unlikely to be effective is the opposite because what would be unlikely to be effective 40 percent 40 chance if there was a 40 which would be less likely than you know 60 so if there was a 40 chance it would work and it's completely safe as nothing's 100 but as safe as a drug

[42:15]

as nothing's 100 but as safe as a drug can be and it's really cheap under those specific conditions you would take it so say that it's unlikely says you should take it as long as long as the safety and the cost are just you know dead simple well-known not an issue right so you can see the fake news trying as hard as they can to turn well it might be worth a shot talk to your doctor no obviously talk to your doctors always got to be in there but not effective is opposite of unlikely to be effective in this situation journalists do they know that would a journalist know that they had created a headline that was literally opposite of the details of the story i don't know if they would i don't know if they would because they don't seem to work in terms of probability they seem to work in terms of it's true or it's not true all right

[43:17]

it's true or it's not true all right so after i got off periscope yesterday some of you know this story if you follow me on locals i gave you the the sort of behind the scenes um so yesterday i'm i'm just in my studio right right where you see me and you know i've been working doing something else a few hours had passed and i thought to myself you know i'm going to fire up my computer and see what the news is because you know me i like to follow the news so i think let's see what the news is and i turn to my computer i'm typing away and pull up the news and i'm the news i'm like ugh i want to watch the news i don't want to be
be the news don't make me the news and the news was this so aaron burnett on cnn was in a testy exchange with peter navarro economics adviser to the white house the president and navarro was trying to make his case in the sort of risk management sort of sense

[44:18]

sense but you know tv is very limiting especially if the person you're with is talking over you so neither of them could quite say what they wanted to say they're sort of on top of each other and time was limited etc
etc so toward the end navarro said um and i will quote so imagine me imagine me just looking at the news and seeing this if you've never had this experience it's just so trippy because you feel like the news should be separate from you but then when you turn on the news oh damn it it's me i i am the news today and uh this is what navarro said he said i reach out to all your viewers scott adams you know scott adams right he's the guy who wrote the dilbert cartoon he did a beautiful 10 minute video on twitter and the thesis of the videos that cnn might be killing thousands because of the way they've treated them so i would just ask i'll let scott adams video be my defense on this now if you thought that went over well

[45:19]

if you thought that went over well you have you haven't been following things closely so so aaron burnett says with an angry look at her face uh can i just say something i find that to be offensive because he's a comic strip writer said burnett uh i just said that because i want to be clear i just said that dr fauci then she she said she wanted to hear from the experts now uh of course it took about five minutes for the daily beast to create a story that says navarro uh you know refers to dilbert cartoonist for hydroxychloroquine now think think of that headline that the white house refers to the dilbert cartoonist for their argument about hydroxychloroquine not so good right but it's okay because obviously an article about a video would have a link to the video well i saw it's there today but i don't think it was there yesterday maybe i

[46:19]

think it was there yesterday maybe i missed it in the hill they treated it the similar way and didn't link to the video so not only did a story about my video not talk about the video at all but it didn't link to it in most of the uh most of the hit pieces that came out immediately after now what does that mean can you imagine can you even imagine that if i had said something in that 10 minute video that was crazy is there any chance that wouldn't be a headline no because once the white house says look at this it sort of ties them to my presentation you don't think that they would that cnn and
and the others who came out to marcus you don't think that they would like to mock what was in that video don't you think that they'd like to say and then he said the craziest thing and here it is here's the clip of adam's being stupid no

[47:20]

of adam's being stupid no no they all treated it as if i was giving medical advice do you think i gave medical advice well i would say that i gave risk management advice and that i broke down the arguments for and against hydroxychloroquine with respect to experts on both sides so i would say that what i did is what aaron burnett does right i'm not a doctor i'm simply letting the public know what doctors are saying that's what aaron burnett was doing she and i were doing the same job the only difference is i did it way way better if you saw the video now
navarro his background is economics and that's his job my background is also economics i've you know i've got an economics degree in mba and i did financial analysis and you know prediction models and stuff for 16 years

[48:21]

for 16 years at least i had a 16-year career much of that was that stuff so i'm not only you know completely educated in the right way to look at this stuff but i have a vast experience in it i mean a lot of experience looking at stuff like this and breaking it down to what the argument is and then just looking at the risk management so what i presented of course was not medical it was just framing the argument and showing it as a cost benefit in which you should look at all the costs and all the benefits and do a you know a risk analysis a risk management analysis but was there anybody who covered the story who said the white house economist wanted you to see something written by somebody who has a you know background in exactly this stuff that breaks down the argument there's no medical you know recommendation it just breaks down the argument in a way that you can see what the point is did anybody report that no no but and

[49:23]

no but and i looked at my traffic and impressions and it really looked like uh there was something happening there i i'm not going to make that accusation yet but it did look like there was a lot of suppression now here's what uh here's what navarro did completely right and i've taught you this so many times the
the one of the keys well fifty percent of persuasion i like to say is getting your attention you can't persuade somebody if they're paying attention to something else i mean i suppose you could cleverly but it's you know not much of a thing now and i've taught you that the way president trump um gets attention is what i call a little bit wrong so if you say something that you want people to focus on but you insert into it something that is unambiguously going to make people say oh that's wrong i got a question about that part then that's a home run trump does it over and over and over again which is why you can't turn away

[50:24]

again which is why you can't turn away everything he says you say i i know what you're trying to make me think about but why is that one thing bother me so much it just feels non-standard i got to look into this and you've seen other people who are good at persuading do the same thing you see me do it well you saw you just watched it today with the black lives matter question about the teachers unions if you take the teachers unions and just say oh they're doing a bad job people might pay attention or might not but if i add to that they should pay reparations what's that do to your brain the reparations part is the part you're supposed to say that doesn't sound right right and that's what binds you to the topic it's the thing the thing that i added that doesn't fit that makes it perfect now that's intentional in my case i designed my message to add the little bit of wrong right into it and you saw that that's very intentional very designed you see mike cernovich do this you know

[51:26]

you see mike cernovich do this you know routinely you know people who know how to persuade will put a little bit of provocation into it to just lock your attention onto it when navarro pointed to my video it was not only a good summation of his argument so that that part is just good sense but because i'm the dilbert cartoonist you can't look away you can't look away because that part's just wrong yeah uh excuse me why is uh why is a comic writer i guess that's what aaron burnett called me why does a comic writer talk about you know u.s policy and medicine and uh how does that make sense so it was that bit of wrongness which guaranteed it would be stories on multiple fronts but the fake news thwarted both of us it was an excellent excellent play because what should have happened is it should have drawn attention to the video people would go in with all the wrong impressions about maybe i said

[52:27]

wrong impressions about maybe i said something medical they would look at it and they'd say oh this is actually just a pretty clean breakdown of risk management that's all it was and it should have been this perfect moment where everybody came in mad and found out oh i was mad at the wrong thing this is
is this is just an argument uh but instead the fake news suppressed it
it and gave headlines that are completely misleading now i've talked before about the uh uh the uh the the the the gel man effect the gel man effect is uh he was a physicist who noticed that when stories about physics were there he knew they were wrong but if there was a story on some topic he was not already an expert on he thought well it's probably right which of course doesn't make sense you know statistically probably the news in general is wrong which would make more sense now i experience this daily right because there's always some story or report about me and i know if it's true or false but you

[53:30]

and i know if it's true or false but you don't you don't so when other people were watching the story they probably believed the headline they probably believed that there was a crazy cartoonist who was making medical advice probably medical advice so anyway if if i had the ability to be embarrassed maybe i would be but i just don't have it um and then here's the here's the best part so it's been a full day now or close to a full day and not one critic who watched the video had a complaint with it do you hear that nobody who watched the video nobody so it was peter devaro pointing to my video and while his arguments were you know they were attacking like crazy and he says well you know look at this video as like a summation of the argument nobody criticized it not a single point not a sweeping generalization

[54:31]

not a sweeping generalization nothing because there's nothing in it to criticize it doesn't really take a stand which is much to disagree with it just it just clarifies the existing risk management decision and then in the article in the the i think it was the daily beast and they were talking about navarro when he
he and they're they're quoting him and this is an actual sentence about a u.s official uh in this country and this and they're quoting him and they say quote this is peter navarro let me tell you why i got involved with this he barked he barked what kind of writing is that i'm pretty sure he talked let me say what this should have said let me tell you why i got involved with
this he said how about he said because that's what happened i watched it
it it was it was there were words they came out of his mouth he talked he said it

[55:33]

he talked he said it did he bark it so words like barked and botched and stuff or how the fake news takes no news at all and turns it into something so uh i might i was thinking about doing a parody fake news article in which you just use uh insults instead of news because if you think about the the fake news mostly replaces the actual news with personal insults think about it once you see that filter that news has been replaced with insults it's hard to unsee it because that's basically what happened insults get clicks news maybe not all right somebody says ezra pound botched civilization yeah botched and barked yeah they're kind of similar they're they're just such powerful words uh all right yeah i need to do a robot reason news again

[56:33]

reason news again uh i gotta get back to that he mansplained it yeah yeah mansplain does another one you you can make something look dumb just by saying instead of he explained it
it well he mansplained it it's like uh that guy
all right slaughter butter is at a hundred percent um at the current time it is hard to imagine any outcome except trump winning i mean um i have to admit in other elections i could imagine the future with a you know a president from other either party whichever candidate but i don't even have a like a vision of what a president biden would look like it's just like this empty space i literally can't even imagine it so that might be influencing my opinion but i saw a teaser from rasmussen this morning that the president's approval was up i think the president's approval is

[57:34]

i think the president's approval is going to continue improving i think the economy will approve will improve i think people will just sort of get acclimated to whatever the virus situation is and i think that biden will continue to decline i heard there's a rumor that biden has selected his vice president but we'll wait to hear about that now if it's kamala harris i'll probably get on periscope as soon as i see the announcement if it's not well i'll wait until the regular periscope and i'll say well got that one wrong uh but if it's kabul harris you're gonna have to give it up for me all right you're gonna have to give it up because i i called her as the head of the ticket as the nominee in 2018 and stuck with it if she becomes the vice president with the biden administration the candidate she's effectively the the top candidate

[58:35]

top candidate and that would be my best prediction ever all right people are still saying it's michelle obama and still saying it's going to be hillary clinton let me let me bet everything i have that's not michelle obama i will i will bet my entire net worth and i will borrow i will borrow money just to bet it's not going to be michelle you know she's the most popular woman in the world i understand but i i believe she has zero intentions for for that kind of a life all right that's all i need and i will talk to you tomorrow