Episode 1119 Scott Adams: Fake News, People Bad at Analysis, Netflix Should be in Jail, Woodward

Date: 2020-09-10 | Duration: 1:00:19

Topics

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Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• President Trump’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize

• Netflix…somebody should go to jail

• Bob Woodward’s book claims

• Laurence Tribe, “carnage in the suburbs” and leadership

• Anderson Cooper acting like his March opinions didn’t exist

• Huge incentives for cheat-by-mail voting

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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[0:10]

hey everybody come on in it's time it's time for us god
god time for coffee was scott adams i forgot who i was there for a moment am i the coffee or am i the guy well it's all the same thing if you drink enough coffee you merge with the beverage and become sort of a coffee person but not enough about that let us get to the important part of the morning the part that makes everything better yeah it's called the simultaneous hip and all you need is a copper mug or glass a tanker gels or steiner canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite beverage i like coffee and 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 it happens now go

[1:11]

so good so in my opinion the funniest thing that's happening right now is that president trump is experiencing just blistering withering attacks on you know everything he's ever done and at the same time he's been nominated for the nobel peace prize now here's the fun part you it would be easy to imagine that any president could get nominated for the nobel peace prize you know if you're thinking okay who is who is a good candidate for the nobel peace prize and they have to give it every year even if nobody did anything you say to yourself well it's it's no big surprise that there's somebody in the world who's willing to nominate the president of the united states no matter who the president is there's always something the president did that sounds peace like but what's different is that trump has

[2:14]

but what's different is that trump has the best case for winning a nobel peace prize that maybe you've ever seen it's not just it's not just marginal that's what's funny about it it would you know you could imagine a situation in which you'd say ah i don't know you know the things he's done i suppose you could make a a case for it being worthy of the nobel peace prize but we're not talking about a gray area here we're talking about the clearest case for a nobel peace prize maybe ever because the beauty of it is that it's not just the israel a uae deal as big as that is it's also that he managed to get rid of isis he's pulling troops out of everything he's the first time in 39 years he didn't didn't start a war and

[3:17]

didn't start a war and you look at uh oh and north korea is clearly in a better place than it was um trump is getting you know he gets he gets criticized for being too friendly with dictators but it is exactly why we're not in wars with those dictators it's part of the process it's part of an explicit strategy which he told us in advance that he was going to be good to the leaders of these other countries whether they deserved it or not because it would be a good negotiating position to treat them with respect and then maybe you can get something done and if you look at you know his his total body of work it's kind of crazy because even his critics are going to have to sort of give it up for the the international stuff they might complain bitterly about stuff at home but the international stuff is really really solid so here's the thing i like to keep

[4:17]

so here's the thing i like to keep reminding you if you have a world view or a filter on life and you're pretty certain that it's the right filter and it explains your reality well and you think that other people with different filters on life don't quite see things clearly the only way you can settle that is by prediction whichever those two filters on reality consistently predicts what happens next is you got to think that's the real one or the one that's closest to truth all of the people who said president trump would create wars and would be completely useless and international negotiations
how did your prediction go did your prediction in let's say 2016 did you predict that this president would be not just nominated for a nobel peace prize of course you know it may be political in terms of who actually

[5:18]

in terms of who actually gets the prize but that there would be a completely solid and unambiguous case and really you can't even think of anybody who would be in second place it's the most solid case for a nobel peace prize maybe of all time yeah oh serbia serbia and kosovo like i forgot an entire an entire major component because he did so many things you know he just sort of drops these little these little you know gold eggs as he's going and you don't realize how many gold eggs there are until you until somebody nominates them for a nobel peace prize and you say well what's the justification for that oh well there's that golden egg that's pretty good oh here's another one well here's another one and suddenly you've got a gigantic basket full of golden eggs that you didn't quite realize what kind of a portfolio he'd put together for this stuff so anyway my point is that my world view expressed often and publicly was that

[6:20]

expressed often and publicly was that he definitely would be the kind of president who would get a nobel peace prize so that was my prediction in fact i predicted it would have happened earlier i would have thought it would happen in the first term so my world view predicted exactly where we are
are on this nobel peace prize nomination and anybody who thought it was the opposite you have to now honestly say to yourself okay my worldview did not predict you could still think you don't like the president for whatever reasons but you have to admit one of those world views predicted perfectly and one of them got it completely wrong there's that's some somewhat just objectively true at this point all right there's a big story that i'm going to mention without talking about now i wouldn't normally do that but you'll immediately know why

[7:22]

you'll immediately know why there's a big story that netflix is showing some content that i'm not going to describe even in general terms i'm not even going to tell you that the category it's in and there are critics who say netflix should actually go to jail actual jail not a joke the actual literally physically take a person and put them in jail for just running this content on netflix now i saw that claim before i saw the the clips of the content and of course i said to myself that's a little that's a little extreme you know obviously if it's just going to be on a family entertainment platform netflix is you know sort of for everybody and that they have you know ratings and stuff but it's it's a family entertainment thing surely they're not going to knowingly

[8:22]

surely they're not going to knowingly and intentionally put content on their platform which and a reasonable person would say um you should go to jail for that actual literal jail for putting that on on a screen and then i looked at the content
they should actually go to jail for it now i don't like to even talk about this content so you may have noticed i tend to stay away from it because it's just so ugly i don't like to put it in people's heads but the fact that netflix with impunity apparently can put content on there that literally you should go to jail for actual literal go to jail you know and i wouldn't say that about just about anything i mean you'd really really have to try hard to get somebody who's as you know free

[9:24]

to get somebody who's as you know free speech oriented and you know hey let's let's not get too excited about these little offenses and violations i mean i'm always on the side of you're making too much of this doesn't matter it doesn't matter if it's a republican thing or democrat fairly consistently i'm the one who says ah you're blowing this out of proportion not this time not this time you look at it as an adult and you would say to yourself somebody needs to go to jail for this actual jail it's it's mind-blowing all right joe biden continues to to run his campaign in which i guess the main strategy besides hiding is to reword trump's policies into uh angry and confused old man language but make it a little more boring and it sounds like a joke right oh he's not really running for president by doing

[10:24]

doing you know nothing but rewording the current guy's policies he couldn't do that could he well what's his
his what's his slogan uh build back better that really is just make america great again rewarded but boring and now now he's doing a buy america thing trying to convince people to buy america and bring the factories back i'm thinking to myself in other words exactly what the president's doing and then there of course is coronavirus recommendations from joe biden which are i
i the president should follow the expert's advice which is exactly what he's done from day one
one so biden is literally just rewording what trump is doing and says he wants to do he's just rewording it into confused angry old man language and selling it amazingly he's selling it

[11:25]

and selling it amazingly he's selling it pretty well all right um one of my best predictions of all time which i don't i don't think it will ever get much attention but in terms of how accurate it was it's really good one of my best and it goes like this when the when the pandemic first started and maybe i said this in february-ish but it was what it was early on before we knew a lot and what i said was that everybody would look back at the so-called mistakes that our leaders and experts made and they will criticize them with the clarity of what we learn in the future but it will be completely unfair because leaders were only guessing in the beginning because they didn't have you know really the knowledge of what to do and they knew they didn't know they knew that there were so many unknowns that they just had to do something

[12:27]

that they just had to do something and see if it worked and if it didn't quickly adjust and try something else and
and learn as you go and so in my effort to make the world a better place which looks like it didn't work at all i tried to to prepare the room if you will so i was saying loudly and often when in a few months from now you're going to think that we should have made different decisions because you'll be smarter in the future you'll know what worked and what didn't work and you will be completely full of because if you don't know it today don't tell me in august what we should have done today all that matters is what did you know to do today how did all the leaders in the world do in february not so well not so well because they were all guessing were they all bad leaders probably not were all the leaders in the world of

[13:27]

were all the leaders in the world of similar quality because it seems to me that leaders that you would think are bad in general seem to have in many cases coincidentally got something that looked like a better result than some people you might have thought well i thought they were pretty good leaders but they got a bad result what you will learn and what um the the fake news is counting on is that the average person will never be sophisticated enough and never have the let's say the talent stack to understand how to analyze this situation it's hard i would guess that no more than two percent of the public would be anywhere near the capability and this is not just raw intelligence capability but experience in analyzing things that's the important part is the experience if you don't have the experience analyzing complicated situations you might think you can do it because

[14:29]

you might think you can do it because you might say to yourself well i just listened to the news and there were 10 smart people in the route who said that president trump made big mistakes so what else do i need to know i looked at the news they seem like smart people they all seem to agree that the president made these mistakes therefore logically the president did a poor job on the coronavirus but here's the problem 98 of the public doesn't know how to even analyze this situation so the 10 experts you you hear almost certainly are not in that two percent and you can tell by looking at the way they talk about it and i've gone through this before but the fast version is this leadership in the end will look like the least important variable in terms of how things turned out
out if you can't do your analysis and adjust for
for hey the united states has a high

[15:29]

hey the united states has a high population of african americans and they have a worse outcome in terms of ultimately dying from coronavirus did anybody factor that in
in when they said how did the united states do did they factor in that we have a high population of unusually vulnerable people i didn't see anybody do that have you ever seen anybody do that has anybody ever said we're going to compare you to germany but we're going to do this calculation to normalize it so it'd be as if you had similar populations and then see how you did have you seen that no no you've not seen that how about obesity gigantic variable united states has a sadly as a fat population we have an unusually obese population so if you compare us to a country that doesn't have an obese population or nowhere near it and you don't do the math to adjust when you're comparing the

[16:30]

math to adjust when you're comparing the two
two have you compared them no no you haven't compared them so all the people that you think are the smart people who are going on television saying look at my graph look at lucitania estonia look at how lubricated did look how this state did compared to this other state 100 of those people are idiots not in general but on this topic there are people who think that because they have a graph and it's real data that they trust and the data came from a good source and they took that good source and they put it on a graph they think they know something no that graph is misleading it's not telling you something you need to know it's not providing information it is reducing your information because it's misleading you it mis leads

[17:30]

because it's misleading you it mis leads you into thinking that's enough to make some kind of a decision it's not we don't know why some states do do fine without masks we don't know why some places seem to need a shutdown and other places didn't we don't know why some group activities seem to create a bunch of new coronavirus and others don't we don't know exactly what anything is doing right it's just you know big ball of guessing and i can guarantee you this that all of the leaders of all of the countries said some version of this early on in the pandemic this feels like a very comfortable thing to to assume is true without you know without knowing and talking to every person don't you think that every leader said to themselves pandemic virology epidemiology i don't know anything about that stuff

[18:32]

i don't know anything about that stuff right so there might there might be a few world leaders who are also doctors but in general don't you think your putin's your she's your your miracles everybody for the most part you know generally speaking don't you think they all said uh i'd better just listen to the experts with me so far that all of the all of the leaders said this isn't my domain i'd better listen to the experts then the experts would you also agree we're largely on the same page worldwide because the experts were really good at sharing information the internet allows that and so the experts everywhere fairly soon i mean not in day one but fairly soon they re they achieve something like a consensus so
so all the world leaders looked at the experts looked at the consensus and said all right we could be right or we could be wrong but it's never going to be wrong

[19:32]

but it's never going to be wrong to do what the consensus of experts say in terms of a rational decision it's never wrong it could be wrong in terms of the outcome because again even the experts were taking their best shot at it they were legitimately you know honestly and professionally giving us their best work but they had to guess a little bit right you can't fault them if they got something wrong because it wasn't possible to know what was right it just wasn't possible so there's my take that only the people who don't know how to analyze things think that they can look at president trump's performance and say well that could have been better and of course there's always the the fact that anything that's good could have been done sooner right now the president's getting uh the the big fake news of the day last 48 hours i guess is the idea that

[20:33]

last 48 hours i guess is the idea that if the president had acted sooner a hundred thousand people would be saved now is that true number one we don't know that's a complete unknown so anybody who says if he had acted sooner a hundred thousand people would have been saved there's no evidence of that there's no evidence of that at all do you know what evidence they use somebody ran a model what what credibility do you give somebody's complicated prediction model none right if we've learned anything it's that complicated prediction models are not really credible so all the people saying oh there's a model that says 100 000 people or whatever would have lived if he had acted sooner a everybody could have acted sooner b nobody knew what to do uh c fauci says and i don't think he would lie about

[21:35]

and i don't think he would lie about this fouchy says that the president did whatever the experts collectively said he should do and when they said it he didn't even delay he did it when they said things should be done so
your uh your situation is that um it's really it's some combination of lying and not knowing how to analyze things so there's some people saying the president did a bad job who know they're lying because it can't be determined one way or the other and there are other people who just don't know they they think it's just a fact because they don't know how to analyze things all right
so and and it you can see how crazy things get because woodward got some criticism for if he learned during this telephone interview back whenever it was if he learned that trump knew it was more dangerous than he had

[22:36]

knew it was more dangerous than he had said shouldn't woodward be telling people you know shouldn't he immediately blow the whistle and say up i was gonna say this for a book but it's so important i need to tell the public because otherwise a hundred thousand people will die
die do you know what woodward said he said that's nonsense in other words the people who are believing woodward's book are holding in their mind these two things to be true which can't both be true that if the president had told the public that it was a big problem and they would take it more seriously we could have saved a bunch of lives but if the president told woodward and woodward told the president and even had it on tape so you don't even have to wonder if it's being mischaracterized it's on tape if woodward had given it to the public it would not have made any difference those two things can't both be true you have to pick either woodward killed

[23:36]

you have to pick either woodward killed tens of thousands of people by sitting on it or the president didn't kill tens of thousands of people by sitting on it in other words nobody knew what to do you know you could always second guess after you have better information all right
one big persuasion mistake democrats are making and i don't know if it could be avoided is that dumping all of these anti-trump books at the same time i think there are three more anti-trump books that are going to hit the next few weeks if you have too many anti-trump books the audience gets snow blind meaning that they they all feel they start feeling the same and if they all start feeling the same they also feel less important because here's a memory trick from the book um from the book guy's name i can't remember but

[24:37]

remember but the trick is this that memory is triggered by contrast so if there was a if you only had one book and has said terrible things about the president people would really notice that and they'd be like whoa well that's a big deal i don't know if it's true or not but i can't stop thinking about this book and i would say the michael wolff book was closer to that right the michael wolf book if you remember that sort of was by itself for a while so it really stood out and became a major news thing but if you have six books that all make sketchy claims and inevitably some of those claims in those books will be debunked if some of them are debunked and and the whole audience says okay that one's debunked but what about these other ones there's still it's just not interesting it's just a big wall of anti-trump books that in your mind just got put in one bucket and then you ignored it so i think the books will have less

[25:38]

so i think the books will have less impact than maybe democrats hope in part because there are too many of them and they they dilute each other all right um so here's the most interesting part i i often tell you that i think i'm watching the news just like a spectator and then all of a sudden the news is about me and i say wait a minute wait a minute i'm supposed to be watching the news why is the news about me and that happened again yesterday so the woodward book part of the promotion of it is i guess he's dropping some of the audio tapes of the interviews and they're getting turned into transcripts and articles and one of them was his interview woodward's interview with jared kushner and jared kushner told him that to understand president trump there were four books that woodward should read that really give you the the complex picture of who president trump is

[26:40]

picture of who president trump is now one of those books was the wizard no i'm sorry the alice in wonderland and specifically the cheshire cat and i had to remind myself what's the cheshire cat's deal i know he's got a big smile and he disappears but i didn't know i don't remember much more and i so i read a description of him and the cheshire cat is described as mischievous smiley and mischievous i thought okay yeah that's actually if you understand that the cheshire cat is mischievous you can say okay that is definitely president trump right you know he likes a little mischief he doesn't it's not an accident that he creates mischief non-stop you know it's not like he can't stop doing it or maybe he can't but you know that that definitely is a pretty good description of them but that's not the whole person right and
and and that would be jared's point that you'd have to read four different

[27:40]

you'd have to read four different books to look in four different windows to understand what the interior of the house looks like so so that's one cheshire cat alice in wonderland but one of the other books was my book win bigly now win bigly the primary theme of it is that the president is a master persuader and uses the tools of persuasion to great effect how did woodward categorize my book now remember the the murray gel man effect the amnesia effect i talk about it too much the idea that there was this physicist who noted that when he saw a story in the press about his specialty he could tell it was wrong because it's his specialty but the moment he would read a story about something else like the palestinian situation or anything else he would uncritically read it as if it's probably right even though when he reads articles that he knows the the content or he knows the field he

[28:41]

the content or he knows the field he knows they're wrong and they're universally wrong likewise uh if you didn't know any better and you're listening you're looking at woodward describe these books he described my book as uh dis as characterizing the president as manipulative that's a word i never used and in fact i went to payne's to make sure i didn't do that so the one thing i can fact check the only thing i can personally check and i can know with complete certainty is wrong coincidentally coincidentally the only area that i'm an expert in which is the book i wrote i know that he characterized it wrong i mean as wrong as you could characterize it
it now do i now say well the one thing i could fact check personally was wrong but i'll bet all that other stuff was good

[29:41]

good [Laughter] i used to think stuff like that not anymore now now i know that the odds of me catching that one little thing that was the wrong you know a wrong characterization it's probably all wrong characterizations you know there's no reason to believe any of us right so here's my definition of manipulation versus persuasion now this is sort of a personal uh personal take on it but i think it works persuasion this is just my own take on it is when you're persuading somebody who wants to be persuaded or at least is no worse off for it for example if you're a car salesperson and your the customer comes in
in the customer knows that the car salesperson is persuading them they know that but it's also very transparent every part of the technique is pretty well known to everybody but it doesn't feel like manipulation

[30:42]

but it doesn't feel like manipulation exactly it feels like persuasion it feels feels like sales it's a little icky but you want the car and on some level you kind of want to get talked into it right i mean when you got to buy a car you
you kind of want to be talked into it because you in many cases you've decided just for emotional reasons and now you need somebody to tell you you were smart so that would be persuasion where you're not worse off if you know unless the salesperson is just a criminal they're just being persuasive they're not manipulating you per se but manipulation would be a different situation and again this is just my version of it manipulation would be where the person is doing it has something to gain and the person who's having it done to them has something to lose so if it's a win-lose situation that's manipulation the president again in my view doesn't do that one he doesn't do manipulation in the context of

[31:44]

manipulation in the context of of the presidency and running for the presidency what he does is persuasion so if he tries to persuade you for example that there should be a wall in the southern border he's not doing it to screw you right you could disagree whether that's a good idea or a bad idea but i think you'd all agree that he's not doing it to screw you if you're an american citizen he's doing it to help you so if he persuades you to get a wall to fund a wall are you worse off you could be worse off in the sense that maybe you don't like that policy but it's not because there was bad intent it's only manipulation if you have some evil intention if you have a good intention but it requires you to persuade people to get it done you could be right or you could be wrong but it's still good intentions and that's persuasion so i would say woodward's characterization of my book as calling the president manipulative is

[32:46]

calling the president manipulative is just flat out wrong i don't write it that way at all all right
um there's another fake news today eddie zipper uh tweeted about this you probably saw the news there is some version of this uh it said that uh i think the hill reports it this way they said trump said that he didn't have responsibility to understand pain of black americans and then they give this quote no i don't feel that at all now when i first heard this story and i saw the president's quote i said to myself oh i know how they do this fake news there's some context that they're leaving out it was obvious by the quote that it had been taken out a context and once you see enough things taken out of context especially when it happens to you you know if you're the person the story is about which has been the case for me in a lot

[33:46]

which has been the case for me in a lot of cases you can tell when something's taken out of context as soon as i saw this i was like oh they just created some fake news by taking this out of context the reason i knew it was out of context is they didn't tell you what trump said immediately after it and they also didn't tell you exactly what came before it and i said to myself i'll betcha if i heard what came before that or i heard what came after it i would have a completely different opinion on this wake up in the morning eddie zipperer on twitter says in his tweet this is a flat out lie because the question was quote do you have any sense that that privilege meaning the white privilege has isolated you and put you in a cave to a certain extent and that's what trump was saying no no way
way now i would disagree with trump i would say that being the president guarantees that you're taken out of the normal flow of life

[34:48]

normal flow of life right yeah i don't criticize you know bush was a bush senior who said he didn't know what a loaf of bread cost that's fine i don't have any problem with the president not knowing what a loaf of bread costs everybody understands that the presidency is not like life it's a completely bubble situation so i don't think uh i don't think trump is accurate in saying that you know he can understand to somebody else's situation nobody can understand anybody's situation but from a politician's perspective it would be fair to say i do understand other people's situation because you want to say that you you know you can relate to him in some way so i don't think his answer was out of lines in terms of the what you'd expect from a political entity but his answer looks completely different if you know what the setup is so that's just fake news created by

[35:50]

so that's just fake news created by intentionally bad editing all right um nicholas kristoff writes in the new york times that quality of life in the united states according to some social progress measure has dropped over the last decade even while it's risen in other places and now we're 28th in the world in terms of how good we're doing quality of life-wise now here's what's interesting the article did not speculate or give any evidence of what it is that's causing our lower quality of life what does that tell you it is is it sort of conspicuously missing from a story if you say the u.s quality of life has dropped and there are no reasons even speculated it would be one thing not to know but it seems like what would be required in a story like this is experts don't know exactly why

[36:52]

is experts don't know exactly why but they they mentioned looking at these areas to see you know maybe this is why but it's just completely left out right what what do you make of the fact that no reasons are even even mentioned even in casual speculation here's what i make of it it it's awkward meaning that the reason we're doing poorly might have to do with i'll just pick one example the teachers unions do you think the new york times would write well it looks like the teachers unions are destroying america not completely by themselves but a pretty big part of it no no probably not now i don't want to make an accusation or read minds of nicholas kristoff that would be unfair so i'm not going to make any there's no negative statement about him but would the new york times ever say the reason that things are going

[37:53]

the reason that things are going backwards is because of liberal policies they can't if the problem that was driving us backwards in quality of life were even maybe even maybe related to the political right would it be in the article if if you could even come up with just a hand waving reason why this lower quality of life was because of conservatives don't you think that would be in the article i mean it's it's so conspicuously missing you've got to ask yourself why all right
the the worst take on this whole coronavirus and how the president did is i'm hearing people say some version of this the public could handle the truth so the

[38:53]

the public could handle the truth so the president should have just told us the truth as opposed to trying to calm our fears it's not the leader's job to calm our fears we're adults just tell us the situation and we'll decide what to do i think that's the worst take because that's not what leaders do and i'll give you you know another version of this from lawrence tribe you know him from a professor at harvard and a big hillary clinton fan and a big hater of the president he's fairly famous as a critic of the president now remember he's a harvard guy
guy highly educated and here's what he says
um he says about trump uh oh well he quotes trump saying i'm the leader of the country i can't be jumping up and down and scaring people and that's trump told sean hannity that i don't want to scare people i don't want people not to panic and that's exactly what i did

[39:54]

that's exactly what i did and that lawrence tribe calls him out for that calls down trump and says this from the guy who screams about carnage in the suburbs now the implication here is that the president is getting people uh not scared enough about the virus and that's inconsistent because he's getting us too scared about carnage in the suburbs which i take within the cup within the context i take to mean that lawrence tribe thinks that's not a big risk here's what's completely bad about this take it is exactly the leader's job to dial up and dial down how scared we are or concerned we are about topics that is exactly a leader's job in fact maybe more central to the job of a leader than anything else they do is telling the people they're leading how much to worry about this versus that and you don't treat everything with the

[40:55]

and you don't treat everything with the same amount of worry nor would you be a good leader if you treated the amount of worry by the number of deaths or the number of deaths you could predict or the number of deaths that have already happened that's not how things work here's how leadership works if you think the public is not worrying enough about something you ramp up their worry so that they'll put more effort into it if you think people could panic and maybe do a run on the stores and run on ppe and there's nothing good that could come from it only bad could come from it nothing good then maybe that's a situation where you want to dial it down so for larry lawrence tribe to act as though the leader of the country should treat different situations with the same amount of concern that's the opposite of a leader the president should treat every situation

[41:55]

situation like its own thing and then say are you worried enough if not i'll raise it or are you worried too much and that's causing trouble in that case i'll lower it that's what leaders do that's the whole job now this guy lawrence tribe is teaching children you know college kids but um now and let me reiterate in the my book loser think i introduced the idea that the amount of raw intelligence you have doesn't really help you in many cases unless you also have a good exposure to different fields and lawrence tribes case he may just be a partisan so he knows he's saying something stupid and he doesn't care if it works so you can't read his mind so you don't know what he's thinking but it could also be that he's a brilliant legal scholar who doesn't understand how leadership works because he's not teaching i don't think he's teaching any mba

[42:55]

i don't think he's teaching any mba classes he's teaching the law so i think it's just a gap in his understanding i'll give him the benefit of a doubt um
the the news is so insane now it's almost hard to wrap your head around it but there's video of uh trump talking to jim acosta in march and the march part is the important part and which trump is saying directly and as clearly as you possibly could that he is purposely trying to uh downplay the the pandemic because he doesn't want to panic the country if there's no good in that in other words if there's no upside from panicking in the country but there definitely would be a downside he doesn't want to have the downside so in march he's saying it in public in the most public way you could a press conference of the president of the united states to cnn's primary guy extended conversation on

[43:55]

primary guy extended conversation on this topic very clear and then when the woodward book comes out let's say march april may june july august six months later the press acts as though it's the first time they've heard that the president is intentionally downplaying the risk and and gives his reasons why how do we sit here and and watch these idiots pretend that this was somehow new information when it was the most public thing the president ever did when i first heard the the woodward thing i thought uh that fat this feels like not only not new news but the oldest news you could possibly have i it felt to me like march news when i heard it the first time and it wasn't until i saw the actual video that i saw this morning i tweeted it so you can see it too that i realized just how exactly exactly

[44:59]

that i realized just how exactly exactly and publicly trump had said the same thing to the public if you say it to the public in public as the president should the public be surprised that he's giving us the cheery version of things um
um as joel pollock pointed out in a tweet today i guess uh joe biden had claimed that over 6 000 military people had died from the coronavirus the actual number is seven so we missed that by a little bit not so much six thousand as it is seven people now the funny thing about this is that you can add it to the body of joe biden lies now you could argue that the trump number of fact-checking problems is greater than the number of joe biden lies maybe but are they the same type

[46:03]

maybe but are they the same type that's the part that the news never tells you when trump does let's call it uh let's say he does something that the fact checkers say is false lots of times it's hyperbole that you recognize like oh okay trump said that uh this has never happened this before have you not watched enough politics to know that doesn't literally necessarily mean it's never happened before this well it just doesn't mean that if if you're so unsophisticated that you ever believed it to be literally true at some point you just have to look at yourself and say uh okay i got fooled 20 000 times in a row
row but i think this one's exactly meant to be accurate no 20 000 times in a row should alert you to a pattern which is if the president says i've done the best in this in a hundred years then maybe it's not a hundred years maybe he did a really good job

[47:04]

maybe he did a really good job and maybe it's the best in ten years which would still be terrific but if you don't understand that he always talks like that about everything you shouldn't even be in the conversation you should just quietly close your twitter account and just sneak away because if you haven't figured out this pattern yet you're not really at the adult table yet but the same people who say uh 20 000 fact-checking problems with the president will look at joe biden basing his campaign on the biggest lie in american politics the find people hoax also pushing the trump uh trump suggested drinking bleach one of the most debunked hoaxes of all time
and then you know this claim about the military stuff basically there are probably dozens and dozens of major claims that biden has made that are clearly and unambiguously untrue so anybody who says i don't like

[48:05]

untrue so anybody who says i don't like this president trump lying business so i'd better go to joe biden you're the dumbest people in the game now i can i would acknowledge that you could make a legitimate argument for why you like either of these candidates you know i have a preference but i think a reasonable smart person could say uh you know here are my priorities this is why i think that you know joe biden with all of his flaws still better than trump a reasonable person could have that opinion it's not my opinion but a reasonable person could have it here's what's not a reasonable opinion i'm going to vote for the guy who doesn't lie i mean that's just i don't even know what to call that if you haven't noticed that joe biden lies again you probably shouldn't vote if you haven't noticed that

[49:09]

all right sometimes you might wonder are the hosts on cnn a good people who sometimes get things wrong that would be the best case scenario right that these cnn hosts are are trying as hard as they can to give you the real news but like everything some people make mistakes you get some stuff wrong that's that's life or are they intentionally lying to you in a way that is awful and i think we got an answer to that because if you you'll see the clip i also tweeted this today in which uh anderson cooper and sanjay gupta are talking about the virus early on and they're talking about it as being no more dangerous than the regular flu now i completely get how it is newsworthy to say the president downplayed this early on and he should have he should have been more concerned about it but if you're cnn and you did exactly

[50:09]

but if you're cnn and you did exactly that exactly that and it's on video and we can all look at it you can look at it today i just tweeted it and you see anderson cooper talking to sanjay gupta now again i do not criticize them for being wrong in march because i don't criticize anybody for being wrong early on remember that was my rule and i'm going to stick to it so anderson cooper was not wrong sanjay guptu was not wrong when they said hey it looks like it's no worse than the flu we should be more worth you know they weren't wrong in the sense of being irresponsible because everybody was guessing the experts were i think genuinely trying their best you knew that a lot of people were going to get it wrong i don't hold it against them but from today's perspective if they're holding it against this is the major piece of news on cnn the biggest piece of news is that

[51:11]

the biggest piece of news is that they're holding it against the president for telling the public the wrong message early on it's the same message they told the public early on the same one if you don't include that in the story yeah we're criticizing the president but if we're being honest man did we do exactly the same thing the president really messed up on this just like we did here's a video of us making the same mistake you know got it got to be transparent nobody's perfect wish we hadn't done it in hindsight it looks like a mistake at the time we didn't know any better just like the president let us show you how nobody knew what was the right answer in march that would have been fine but to simply act like that didn't happen and that the president was the only one who was wrong in march or february that is just evil you can't say that anderson cooper is a good person

[52:12]

good person a good human being because that that is so clearly a case of despicable moral conduct in in public that i could not have less respect for that really and again i would be perfectly okay with them if they were simply wrong and now they've you know they know why it was wrong and they talk about it in context no problem completely forgiven for being wrong but today you know you were wrong today how about a little transparency or else you were just being you're just being really there's it's hard to say it any other way
way and so there's uh some news out of michigan that the biden is up in michigan which would be pretty important right one of the battleground states so and i think rasmussen is showing that biden is up eight points or something six or eight points something like that

[53:13]

points something like that and that's a lot but i saw an analysis by bruce stanford all right on twitter i don't know who bruce is but i'll just give him credit because this is a real good analysis and he says that although biden is clearly headed in the polls here's the experience in michigan in 2016 and 2018. so we've seen this the most two recent elections same experience and it goes like this every undecided vote went to trump or to republicans in the case of the 2018 midterm election let me say that again every undecided vote went to the republicans okay and i want to make sure that you heard that right in michigan in 2016 and 2018 every undecided vote went to the republicans now i don't think it was every vote it must have been just most of them but uh the point the point stands if you take out the absolute part there there had to be some exceptions

[54:14]

there there had to be some exceptions but
but what does that tell you about shy trump voters
yeah the the way this is shaping up uh and yeah i i suppose i could be wrong right you know it's it's easy to be blindsided and and think you're right and you know dunning krueger and all that so let me tell you that i'm completely aware that i could be very confident in my prediction and my rightness and be wrong you know it wouldn't be that big of a it wouldn't be a shocker in the world of you know strange events but this looks like a gigantic blowout shaping up it looks gigantic i could be wrong but it's sure looking like the president's got a you've got a victory here coming up all right those are the things i wanted to talk about today yeah the the vote by mail stuff the fact that the the mainstream press

[55:17]

the fact that the the mainstream press is
is trying to gaslight us if you want to use that term it's the wrong term but they use it a lot uh the mainstream press wants us to think that it's crazy to think that mail-in voting could be could be illegitimate because it's already been done in states for years etc some states but this is again just being bad at analyzing things the thing that you should say is what's different about 2020 from any other situation in which we had mail in votes and what's different is the incentive to cheat is through the roof you know if there is a penalty for cheating on voting and people don't really care too much who wins it's like yeah i prefer this candidate but it's not the end of the world if the other one wins in that case you would expect a little bit of cheating because there's just not that much to gain but there might be a few people who think they have something to gain

[56:18]

think they have something to gain but when you talk about trump in 2020 the press has hypnotized the masses into thinking there's a hitler in charge and it's the end of civilization if if you thought that the alternative to cheating at the election box or cheating on a mail-in vote if you thought the alternative to cheating was the destruction of civilization would you be tempted i hope so i if you're a good person and you think that you could change or alter the course of history and that you could save a civilization from being destroyed which is the claim of the mainstream press basically wouldn't you cheat it's the same the same question of if you thought an actual hitler had come to power in the united states and you could personally kill him you know like you could be the assassin don't you have a responsibility to do it you know if if the badness is bad enough

[57:20]

you know if if the badness is bad enough you're forgiven you're forgiven for whatever you do about it because the badness is so bad that you would be allowed to do bad things to get rid of the bigger bad
so here's my here's my i guess the bottom line is that the people who are bad at comparing things are going to act like 2020 is just like any other election people don't care that much who gets elected yeah we have a preference but we don't care that much no that was gore versus bush gore versus bush people had a preference but not that much trump versus biden oh that's not the same that is not the same because nobody really thought that if gore got elected versus bush getting elected it was the end of civilization nobody thought that but with trump they have been hypnotized to believe that's an
an actual real world risk so that and the fact that we don't have any

[58:22]

that and the fact that we don't have any baseline to know what mail-in votes should look like in any given county because we've never had a coronavirus we've never had trump running for re-election we've we've never had a press that was this illegitimate we've never had anything like 2020. so anybody who tells you history tells us the history with those several states that have been doing mail-in votes and the history with a different kind of mail-in vote which is where you request it which is much safer anybody who tells you that those two histories or the fact that there was a commission that looked into those histories and that those histories are telling you what's going to happen in 2020 which has nothing to do with the situation that was common to those histories anybody who tells you that that analysis makes sense is either a liar or doesn't know how to analyze things it's hard to tell which

[59:26]

so that is what we've got did you see the the latest joe biden gaffes oh my god i don't know how anybody can look at those videos i'm not sure how often the people on the left even see the the biden gaff videos but i don't know how you could look at any of those and think he's ready i think it was a joe rogan who did the analogy that recently that biden was like a flashlight that was low on batteries and you were taking it on a long hike at night and you're just getting like a little yellow glow out of your your flashlight and you're thinking this might be a bad idea maybe i won't take a long hike at night with a flashlight with a dying battery all right that's all i got for now and i will talk to you later