Episode 1263 Scott Adams: Congress and the Media Compete to be the Most Disrespected Institution

Date: 2021-01-25 | Duration: 59:58

Topics

Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

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• Record low trust of the news and journalists

• Aaron Rupar’s cognitive dissonance on bleach drinking

• Trusting science

• Rand Paul vs George Stephanopoulos

• Congressional ethics complaints

• The Big Lie

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[0:05]

hey everybody come on in i'm on the other side of the world today uh for a few more days and even so is that a reason to skip coffee with god adams no no it's not in fact it's better every time every single time and what do you need what do you do what do you need to make it special i don't remember either because i usually read it but i think it's about something about a cup or a mug or a glass a tangered thing thing and then fill it with coffee and then drink it i have to admit that i get up just before i do these things so i'm usually kind of a little bit tired haven't had my coffee but i know that you will join me now for the simultaneous step you ready you ready it's happening now go

[1:09]

oh that's good that is the good stuff so anything happening yes there are things happening and we're going to talk about them it turns out that
there's a new survey that says the american mainstream media has reached a new record what do you think the record is that the mainstream media in the united states has just achieved well it's a record uh low trust
there's a record for you so only 18 of republicans say they believe journalists just believe journalists that's the only statement only 18 percent of republicans believe journalists doesn't even matter the journalists they've reached the point where it's not even do you believe the journalists on the left do you believe the journalists who lean right nope just uh 18 of republicans

[2:11]

nope just uh 18 of republicans are all that's left who trust journalists uh on the other side apparently democrats um 56 percent of them believe that journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead wait no
whatever the number is the number of democrats by a by a majority actually think that the news is real
i don't know what to say about that how could you how could you be paying attention to anything i think that the news is real in 2021 i don't know how you would come to that conclusion based on anything that we've been watching uh so that's so that's uh journalism so they're at uh an all-time low in trust now as megyn kelly tweeted do you think that journalists and the news business do you think they

[3:11]

and the news business do you think they take any responsibility for the fact that they have the lowest trust of all time i doubt it i doubt it i'll bet every one of them thinks it's president trump's fault or partly my fault for saying bad things about the news so how do you think the news will report the story about their own lack of credibility will the news business say hey there's a study that says nobody believes us i guess there's a good reason for that and let us report to you all of the hoaxes that have been perpetrated through the journalists and you can see exactly why people don't trust us probably not probably won't do any honest reporting on themselves although was the uk the daily uh the daily mail that reported on this so oddly enough the one thing i trust that's in the news is news about how you shouldn't trust the news

[4:12]

the news and maybe i should reassess that maybe i should just don't trust anything that would be easier
all right there's a new study that will be debunked in 10 seconds probably this is me looking at my watch even though my watch is nothing but a naked wrist the universal let me look at the time symbol if you're a certain age you don't know why people are looking at their risk wrist to determine the time it makes no sense unless you have an apple watch all right so there's a study that says that uh there's a high correlation between the spikes and surges in the coronavirus in europe and
and latitude and the implication is that latitude is important because vitamin d from the sun is uh very correlated with the latitude so as the earth is rotating during the year the different parts of the sun will get

[5:13]

parts of the sun will get more you know sun exposure but here's the thing that most people don't know and maybe i don't know it either because when i tell you this i might be getting it wrong but the idea is that uh you think that if the sun is down all year long that you just have to go out in that sun even if it's the winter and it's the sun hey the sun's the sun but it turns out winter sun is almost useless for vitamin d did you know that did you know that getting sun in the winter doesn't help that much for vitamin d so it has to do with the latitude blah blah but getting getting say 20 minutes in the middle of the summer it's not just because it's hotter or whatever it's a it's a more direct vitamin d hit during certain seasons so this study showed that or i tried to show uh of course it was debunked in about a minute and a half doesn't mean the debunk is right just somebody had some complaints with it

[6:13]

somebody had some complaints with it and it purported to show that the vitamin d levels as highly correlated with latitude and time of year would be more of a reason for the spikes than some other other factors what do you think of that here's what you should say here's what i'm saying to myself here and this is the way you should look at a study like this can you personally look at that study and determine if it had been done well nope but you can't even if you're a scientist be you can't read a study and say it's good or bad just by reading a report you can't do that so what percent odds should you put on something that's a
a report it's a scientific it shows its work low you know i think 50 of published papers eventually get debunked so the highest credibility if you put on it would be 50

[7:14]

credibility if you put on it would be 50 and then start subtracting from there based on any other factors so here's the other factor that i put on it how much would i having talked about vitamin d from the beginning being being an important thing how much would i like this study to be true and the answer is it'd be great for me personally might be great for the world as well if it gives us you know some other tools for fighting the infection but my bias is that since i am on record for publicly talking about the likelihood that vitamin d would be a big factor wouldn't i love to be right i would right i want this study to be true so the first thing you should say to yourself when you're looking at information that agrees with you the first thing you should say is why do i think this is true do i think it's true because i can read a study like this

[8:15]

a study like this and i can personally understand that it's credible no no i look at it and i want it to be true and i think it should be true so therefore i you know i'm willing to to buy into a thing that has no better than 50 credibility and probably lower after people have looked at it and and debunked its methodology so i wouldn't put too much credibility in there but that's just one thing that's out there all right here is the most fascinating example of cognitive dissonance i've seen in a while and you're almost going to have to look at this yourself to believe that i'm telling you the truth it's a little bit of one of these yawning and laurel things where there's an actual uh an illusion of some kind that's in the story and you're gonna see it and it's fascinating so there was a tweet by uh vox.com writer aaron rhubar and you've probably seen him on uh seen him on social media he's

[9:15]

him on social media he's pretty big presence on social media and he's a big anti-trumper uh etc and so here's what he tweeted um or was this what he was talking about was either what he tweeted or was talking about i asked about trump's this is a face the nation did an interview with dr burks and face the nation asks asked dr burks about that episode in which president trump was accused of suggesting drinking bleach to fight the crotovirus which don't do that it would kill you but of course he never said drinking and he never said bleach he did say injecting disinfectants in the context of light as the disinfectant so face the nation interestingly when they when they asked the question about this they actually framed it correctly

[10:16]

correctly i was not expecting that so face the nation actually couched the question as a discussion about light as a disinfectant i think it's the first time i've seen it have you seen anybody else correctly say that he was talking about light so so fascination gets it right and they talk about light and they don't say bleach they don't say drank because none of those things happened in any reality so the first thing i'd like to say is shout out to face the nation you got you got something wrong that almost all the other news organizations to this day still get wrong so you know shout out to you
you so what does aaron rupar say about that he said asked about trump's infamous comments suggesting bleach injections could be a treatment for coronavirus so this is aaron rupar describing

[11:16]

this is aaron rupar describing what i just described except he refers to it as suggesting bleach injections which is not in the story right berks tries to push back against the notion that she became an apologist blah blah so then i tweeted i said face the nation correctly describes trump's disinfectant question to be about uv light and aaron rupar still buys into the bleach hoax so i was trying to call out to aaron rupar on twitter for buying into the bleach hoax and this is the interesting thing the thing that he pointed to never mentioned bleach wasn't a word so once i called him out and a lot of people piled on he defended himself and he defended himself by retweeting an article that also did not have bleach in it and also didn't have anything like that in it so the the cognitive dissonance you're gonna have to see that if you go to my twitter

[12:17]

have to see that if you go to my twitter feed for uh yesterday you'll see that exchange and you'll see that even after it's pointed out that there's nothing in the video that says anything about injecting bleach he tweeted the clip to me and said there you go there's the thing proving that i'm right and it's not in there he actually still has
has i think it's a hallucination that there's something about bleach in there because he and much of the people on the left have been told so often that the president said bleach that he thinks it's there on a video clip that he he tweeted as evidence of his claim and it's just that word isn't even there so it's actually kind of amazing to look at it when you can see how clearly somebody can read you know nothing about bleach and then say look look i just proved that he said something about bleach it's freaky

[13:18]

about bleach it's freaky it's actually freaky now if you do not have a background didn't say hypnosis and most of you know i do uh you would say i think there must be some other explanation for this like people can't just look at something and actually literally hallucinate the answer is yes yes they can look at stuff and literally see words that aren't there that is a thing and it's easy and it's common and it's almost universal it's ubiquitous we're doing it all the time we just don't know it but when you see a clean example like this where you say give me the article that says bleach and somebody says here it is and it's not in it that'll freak you out the first time you see it after you see it enough you realize it's the common way we operate there's nothing wrong with let me say this let me say this directly there is nothing wrong with aaron rupar's brain nothing there's nothing wrong with his

[14:19]

nothing there's nothing wrong with his brain there's nothing wrong with his how much information he has there's nothing wrong with the level of knowledge he has there's nothing wrong with his thinking this is normal that's the freaky part the freaky part is that he's normal completely normal capable high functioning person in society right if you gave him an iq test he'd do great if i checked his educational credentials i haven't but i imagine they'd be real good i don't know but i imagine they would be so if you think this is something about somebody who's dumb it isn't nothing to do with iq if you think this this cognitive dissonance thing is because somebody is uninformed it's not it's nothing to do with your intelligence or how much information you have it is purely whether the thing you believed comes in conflict with the thing you observe and when that happens you have

[15:21]

observe and when that happens you have to paper them together with a hallucination and this is this looks like an example now to be fair we can't know what he's thinking right it just looks like that could i be wrong sure
all right um the most interesting thing that dr burke said i guess she got kind of shut out from talking to trump for the last i don't know nine months of his presidency or something so that's not good um but he said she said i saw the president presenting graphs that i never made so i know that someone was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president i don't know to this day who now i shouldn't laugh because it's it's not good but apparently the president had at least two uh opposing sources of data somebody saying fouchy but i don't think i don't think it was dr fauci

[16:26]

somebody says to be fair vice president pence was in charge of the task force that's fair that is a fair comment but still the boss is the boss i see some suggestions dr atlas peter navarro people are suggesting but they wouldn't be the source of the data i mean ultimately they would you know if anybody was passing along they'd be passing along they wouldn't be making it up now what have we learned about data if if president trump had used only dr brooks's data what would be different
anything i don't know is dr burks's data accurate i don't know how about the alternative data that trump used was the alternative data better or worse than what dr burks would have presented i don't know do you do you have any reason to believe that dr burke's data would be better than whatever the other source was well

[17:27]

than whatever the other source was well it depends what the other source was right no it doesn't it doesn't depend what the other source is because we live in a world in which all data is unreliable all of it dr burke's data would be just as unreliable because almost everything we've learned about the coronavirus has been wrong can you think of an ex counter example almost
coronavirus has ended up being wrong
would dr burks have data would be which would be the the only exception to that i don't know then here's the other thing you have to take into account if dr burks was passing along data was that mean that she is the one who originated the data no and if she passed it along in a certain context would it have essentially a story or a narrative to it would it be framed or filtered in a way that it's not just the information

[18:29]

that it's not just the information but it's what you say about the information and what you compare it to and
and what context you put in right because that's what makes your decision so if dr burks had done a good job of being the only source of data i'm not saying she didn't do a good job but if she had been the only source of data for the president would that guarantee or even give you high likelihood that the president was getting good clean actionable data and it was telling him what to do no nothing like that could have happened i'm not saying nothing like that did happen i'm saying it couldn't have because the president has no way to see science he only has a way to see the people who are talking to him about it and they're not the ones who did the science they're just talking about it they're interpreting it they're putting it in a context are scientists the ones who always put things in the right context no no

[19:32]

context no no they they have a you know if you looked at all scientists communication and statements and things they've said in public they have a bias too you can't be unbiased it's not one of your choices you don't get to say hey i think i'll be unbiased today you don't have that option even if you're a scientist even if you're dr berks so a point which i say too often is when people say hey trust the science it's not really an option to trust it because i don't have access to it i don't i don't know what any science is uh well as i as a non-scientist and also even if i had been a scientist i probably didn't work on any specific study that's in the news so you're kind of trusting people you're not trusting science you might be trusting a process but even the process of science goes from you know guesses to maybe to hypotheses

[20:35]

you know guesses to maybe to hypotheses to
to you know takes a long time to get to fact and even then sometimes we change our facts with new information so this idea that there's this thing called science and all you have to do is pay attention to it you're going to be fine is so simplistic it's childlike and we've been sold this idea that science is like a this magic thing and as wonderful as science is i think we're all pro science right is there anybody who's against science no the point is it's all filtered through humans so as long as you're filtering science through human beings what you get is human beings you don't get science um when it comes out the other end it's just what people told you that you hope is compatible with science and you hope the science is right but those are a lot of ifs that said we don't have a better process

[21:35]

i can't remember if i talked about this yesterday you ever have those situations where you can't think you don't know if you thought about talking about it or you actually talked about it at length and you don't and you can't remember if you did so stop me if i talked about this so uh did you see the the interview with rand paul and george stephanopoulos and it was interesting because stephanopoulos was trying to get rand paul to say that the election there was no fraud in the election and rand paul instead because he's smart would only say we should we should look into the claims of the elections irregularities and we should have more transparency now how do you argue against more transparency in an election what exactly is the counter argument to that right so rand paul is on completely solid ground i mean a solid the most solid ground you could be

[22:36]

could be is that everybody wants the election to be transparent and fair and he's saying we're not there we're not there and nobody else thinks we're there either really i mean you know at the very least even if you think everything was fair at the very least you would like everyone else to believe it too right and we're not there so if we could get everyone else to believe it's fair that would be great and that's what rand paul is asking for and why isn't that reasonable but stephanopoulos being a more of a narrative guy than a news guy uh is just insisting that rand paul say in public that the election was fair but here's the problem and that the reason that it was fair is because all the court cases and the challenges uh failed now the problem is this is a a national news opinion kind of uh person stepping office so his his opinions and the things he

[23:37]

so his his opinions and the things he does in on abc i guess would carry a lot of weight you know it gets a lot of attention etc and he was actually going in front of the world and saying that an absence of proof is proof of absence the most common uh one of the most common logical fallacies in the world now what would happen if a major person went on television and and made a claim of um that the most logical fallacy one of the most common logical values that there ever is that just because you don't have uh the lack of evidence is evidence that nothing happened it just isn't a thing it's it's completely irrational thinking and because the public can't tell the difference the public generally is not educated enough to know what is a rational or logical you know irrational thing they just

[24:37]

you know irrational thing they just accept it they go okay there's no proof so i guess that's proof it was good
related to this speaking of that so rudy giuliani finds out that dominion voting system is suing him for
i guess over a billion dollars for saying things that was bad for business for dominion and here's my question about that now first of all i think dominion didn't have much choice right because their business did get really really hurt by all the news from you know sidney powell and et cetera
but is that something that you can sue somebody for well i don't know much about the law but i'll tell you what i do think in defamation suits since you know i'm a public figure so i end up dealing with this question a lot

[25:37]

end up dealing with this question a lot my understanding is that defamation suits you're going to have to prove that the person intended to hurt you or somehow knew that they were lying i suppose a defense for defamation is that you thought it was true because your free speech allows you to say things that aren't true as long as you believe they're true so i think that's a complete defense is that rudy believed it now since lots of other people believed it
it it's pretty good defense right if you're on the jury and you saw rudy say you know i actually thought it was true and lots of people thought it was true and here's why i thought it was true and here's my sources i think i'd believe he thought it was true because i don't get a sense that he's the kind of guy who would have taken that case unless he believed it was true it doesn't feel like the sort of thing based on his history and what we know about him it doesn't seem like something

[26:39]

about him it doesn't seem like something he would have done as just a technique to just like make up a
a wild story uh defame some company that would be you know essential to our election systems just to win the you know win the day for trump i don't feel that rudy is that guy so if you put me on the jury how in the world am i going to believe that he did this and if anything except believing it was true now should he have believed it was true well if you're talking about the venezuelan stuff i told you from day one that doesn't look true
can i if if you've been with me for a while can you uh in the comments can you maybe confirm that just on the surface of it i told you it wasn't true the moment i heard it i said whoa that is a thing that's exactly like something that's not true and and then of course we have not we've got no confirmation of it it feels like that's something that

[27:40]

it feels like that's something that could have been confirmed by now if it had been true so i'll i will take some credit for getting that one right by the way i do plan to do a report card on myself to see how my predictions have been let's say through the the trump era because it would be a good time to do it um and i don't know if i can because i thought about it and i thought okay the first problem i'm going to have is i'm going to forget all the times i was wrong right the most normal thing you do you remember when you're right you forget when you're wrong so i so being complete would be a problem so i'd have to rely on the the public to remind me what i said that was wrong but my um experience with that is that when people remind me what i predicted that they say was wrong they always remember it wrong and if i go look back i said something kind of different than that so it's really hard to know what you said

[28:41]

said and then it's also hard to score them because a number of things i might score as an accurate prediction that a totally reasonable person could say i don't know i i wouldn't score this as accurate so i don't know how you could do it exactly but i'm going to take it i think i'll take a run at it with the understanding that it's more of an exercise than some kind of accurate data i think it's a good exercise you should do it yourself you should you should every now and then literally write down what did you predict did you get it right and then you would know
i see somebody saying that i score 7 out of 10 correct that's about what i would guess if i if i had to guess where it would come out i'd say something like 7 out of 10 and then further i would say that the average person might get 5 and a 10 you know if you were to compare me to just all citizens and pundits in general i think 5 out of 10 would be the average

[29:44]

i think 5 out of 10 would be the average of most people and i think i think i'm higher than that i'm nowhere near 9 and a 10 but 7 out of 10 would be ridiculously good if i actually if it's actually seven and ten
ten but we don't know that's why we'll check by i'm sure that i'm biased so i i may be giving myself too much credit here we'll see um so here's my other question about rudy and this lawsuit and maybe i need a lawyer to answer this for me if dominion sues rudy for claims he made about the voting system being rigged and as far as i know there's no proof of such a thing would that give rudy the ability to look at their code and to and to bring a case against them in the process of defending himself or will demanding to be smart enough to limit their claim to this one venezuelan thing

[30:44]

their claim to this one venezuelan thing which they don't have to show their code for that they can just say show us any evidence that we have a venezuelan connection if you can't then that's defamation or that that would be their argument it would be defamation they still have to prove intent i think again i'm not a lawyer so check with your lawyer yeah so would the discovery phase include looking at the code if the thing they were suing them for didn't really involve the code because the claims about the venezuelan connection i don't know that they would have to show the code to defend that so that would be interesting if and i can't imagine that dominion would have such bad lawyers that they would put themselves in the situation where if they had something to hide that it could be shown so i would say it's probably a strong play from dominion to do this lawsuit because it especially if there is some risk of discovery

[31:45]

if there is some risk of discovery because then it shows some confidence on their side i think they have to do that there's there's no way around it they kind of had to they kind of had to sue him no matter what they kind of had to do it for the purpose of their business so uh i don't like to live in a world where everybody's suing everybody but in this case they kind of had to do it i feel like and i'll be interested to see how that comes out and if rudy gets gets into their code they won't be happy if that happens i won't be happy just because it's proprietary
so biden's already having some trouble getting his relief package passed i guess he's going to delay it and at this point don't you think that it is a fair statement that congress working on the impeachment of trump after he's left office is slowing down the essential business of the country we can say that for sure now right now my understanding is that biden

[32:46]

my understanding is that biden wisely got the impeachment postponed so he could get some other business done first
now just to hold that thought in your head that biden thought that the congress couldn't do the business of the country and impeachment at the same time congress agreed and then delayed it for that reason because they couldn't do the business of the country and the impeachment at the same time so what happens when they when that delayed impeachment happens and then they get to the impeachment have they not told the country that they can't do their regular job at the same time they just told us that they told us that in the clearest possible way they said it directly we're not going to do this now because we won't be able to do the work of the country how's that going to change later later when they do it it's still the work of the country that they're postponing right so every day that goes

[33:47]

postponing right so every day that goes by
by that trump is out of office and remains quiet the trap gets deeper and the trap is this congress has admitted that they can't do impeachment and the work of the country we saw arguably we saw during you know january of 2020 when they were doing the impeachment when they should have been paying attention to the coronavirus problem so the longer you go when trump is silent ish and out of the job he becomes less and less important and what the congress would be doing might not even be constitutional to impeach somebody out of office probably won't succeed because the senate you know is unlikely to go that far is a complete waste of time and they tell you directly they've actually told you that they can't do their job while they're doing this and there's nothing good that can come

[34:47]

and there's nothing good that can come out of it for the country nothing nothing good could come out of it for the country and yet they're going to do it and it's on the schedule
we elected these people and they're going to do something which even they admit is not useful and they're going to do it instead of useful work and they're going to do it right in front of you are you freaking kidding me how much more useless can you get that that's like all-time useless you know olympic gold medal useless that's nobel prize level uselessness speaking of uselessness as you know their democrats are lodged ethics complaints against ted cruz and josh hawley for their role in what they say
say is uh i don't know according to the democrats overthrowing the country or something like that their complaint is so stupid that i won't even describe it but i will tell

[35:48]

won't even describe it but i will tell you that josh hawley decided to respond by filing an ethics complaint against the people who filed an ethics complaint against him
him so i finally figured out why congress has more than one person uh you've heard the joke about the let's see the the airplane that is so sophisticated and that uh it practically flies itself and all you need to fly it this highly sophisticated airplane is one pilot and one dog that's all you need the dog is there to make sure the pilot doesn't touch any of the buttons because the thing flies itself and if the pilot touches anything he can only make it worse so the dog is there just to bite the pilot so he doesn't do anything well that's what congress has become like so i think the only reason there's more than one person in congress is so the other person can sue them or

[36:50]

is so the other person can sue them or not sue them but impeach them or do an ethics complaint against them if you only had one person who would file an ethics complaint against that person but yeah if you have two
two they can file ethics complaints against each other and they can impeach each other so you need at least two people in congress i learned today because you can't really reach the full limit of thorough worthlessness until you're spending all of your time on impeachment and ethics complaints against each other now here's the good part you would think to yourself an ethics complaint wow an ethics complaint that would be something that would involve a violation of let's say ethics to pick you know an obvious example so what would be the ethical violation that josh hawley is being accused of

[37:51]

that josh hawley is being accused of well he's being accused of objecting to the electoral vote through a completely legal process that democrats have used in the past multiple times with no problem whatsoever that's considered an ethics complaint so he has bad ethics for doing what is completely within the rules and it's within the rules because the rules were written specifically to put that in there it's not it's not accidentally within the rules they wrote the rules to put it in there it's not a josh hawley didn't use a technicality he used the law exactly as written for the purpose it was written for the reason it's been used before by the democrats routinely everything completely legal normal and in fact i would say desirable and that's an ethics complaint and so that's his argument his argument is if you're bringing up an ethics

[38:51]

is if you're bringing up an ethics complaint for doing something that routine i mean completely routine then i will bring up an ethics complaint against you for bringing up an ethics complaint about me that doesn't have any backing to it completely acceptable i always say that josh josh hawley has a completely acceptable argument that they are wasting time and being unethical it's a good argument but they don't have any argument against him what case would they make would they say it was unethical every time we did it no this is what they'll say they'll say the election was not stolen and by the way you've seen that cnn is calling this the big lie with a capital b and a capital l so talk about the election being stolen is described by uh the pundits now the anti-trump pundits as being the quote the big lie

[39:52]

quote the big lie which makes it sound sort of sort of nazi-ish right which is why they do it so uh the the fact that the mainstream media has basically formed a narrative around a a logical problem let's say an illogical truth is amazing that they sold it the illogical truth is that a lack of proof is proof that there's nothing there completely irrational and they call it the big lie if you to believe that a computer system could be hacked think about that think about the fact that the idea that a that a software system could be vulnerable to hacking that that idea which is the most common thing we see we see it with a i mean it's literally the headline that some of our secure systems get hacked all the time but to believe

[40:54]

get hacked all the time but to believe that it happened in this particular case would be a big lie
when you live in a in a world in which this level of uh propaganda is just common uh it's it's just shocking and the thing that the only thing i think is who are these 18 percent of republicans who still trust the media how in the world could you still trust the media in a world like this where they're using a you know illogical thought and calling it the big lie basically if you if you agree with logic you bought into the big lie and that's the narrative and they actually sold this to most of the public amazing
all right um the funniest thing is watching the uh people on the left tear each other apart

[41:55]

people on the left tear each other apart i was just reading an article now bill maher who of course had been i'd say taking common cause with all anti-trumpers for the last four years but now that trump is a little bit off the stage um now now the left has turned on bill maher and i'm looking at the things that they're accusing him of and they are ridiculous so one of the accusations is that he used the n word now when you read that in the story without context what do you think about it well you think well maybe that's pretty bad
bad are you kidding me he used the n-word wow i guess we have to hate him for that and by the way i hate that word so if he if anybody had used that word and let's say it's native offensive way then i'd have some bad feelings about it but that's not the context that he used the word he used the word in talking about the

[42:56]

he used the word in talking about the word i believe i believe his context was talking about it or quoting somebody else or one of those contexts he certainly was not using it as just a word right he was using it in a context about the word i i remember i remember reading about it but whatever it was it was completely more of a free speech thing he was just expressing his freedom to say the word in the in a non-insulting context but i guess he's not allowed to do that are you allowed not are you allowed to be non-insulting and completely respectful and just use a word and talk about the word you can't do that seriously now i'm not the guy who needs to or defends bill maher's opinion because i've disagreed with him as much as i've agreed with him probably but come on going after him for this

[43:59]

is just completely it's completely unacceptable so uh by watching the the left no longer have a common enemy and then turn on each other it was predictable the most predictable outcome is that this wokeness is going to take so many people out in the left that they're going to rethink it and you're seeing that happen now bill maher's kind of a special case because uh i um you know he may lean closer to progressive and stuff but i think he's an independent thinker and he would go where the goer you know he could go wherever he wanted on an opinion
they're eating their own that's right so you're seeing now a number of cases where businesses have decided that they'd like to
to in the words of michael jordan uh he would say you know republicans buy sneakers too so my
my my favorite was the yeah the katie couric one where she was gonna

[45:01]

couric one where she was gonna i think she's still going to host jeopardy and made some comments you know anti-republican conservative comments and her employer said uh they watch the show we'd like them to keep watching the show so i don't know if they cancelled her i would imagine probably not but it's the kind of pressure that you're seeing and i i told i've been telling you for a while that unless there is uh mutually assured destruction that the wokeness thing you know will just go forever until we're all dead but of course there will be there there always emerges a counter force so the reason that things do not become a slippery slope forever is because the counter force almost always is going to pop up and the counter force seems to be this the moment somebody insults conservatives in public conservatives stop buying their stuff like immediately right and every time you see

[46:04]

immediately right and every time you see it happen you don't need too many examples of it right you just need a few examples where somebody who is let's say associated with a big company insulted a third of the public you know the let's say the republicans and and their and their ceo fired them or the board of directors removed them or or they lost their job or something you don't need to see too many examples of that before you know you shouldn't do it right so the the attacks we're seeing against republicans if you're worried that it turns into a full civil war um economics will stop it and you're seeing it happen now the free market just stepped in and said whoa whoa politics is great politics is great but get that out of here so the free market basically just became the police the free market just said yeah you know

[47:06]

the free market just said yeah you know you can you can do all these political things that um are terrible but uh it's going to cost you it's going to cost you more than you want to pay and it's going to cost you fast you're going to get fired that day so that's where we needed to be um yeah somebody mentioned mike lindell the the my pillow guy that's a special case because the in the case of mike lindell he did wrap himself around the president pretty closely he got he got really into the politics that's different from just saying something in a tweet right so he took it to kind of another level
but i don't think his pillows should pay for that i don't think his employees should have you know less work because he he got he got politically involved

[48:07]

involved so it's terribly unfair but we live in a world where if you are if you started a company and you get into politics it's going to cost you
you unfortunately so i hope he's okay with that uh his pillows are are excellent in case you wondered um
this what's his what is a scotty vest somebody's asking me a question but i don't understand it
all right don't buy ben and jerry's blah blah well i don't know how many republicans it would take to boycott something but it doesn't take much right it wouldn't take much if you know if 10 percent of republicans just immediately stopped buying something i think any big company would say that's a big enough number that we need to fix this so it doesn't have to be a gigantic number as long as they can see it on the bottom line they're going to have to fix it

[49:12]

the scotty vest is a travel vest with lots of products oh yeah i've seen that i have to i have to admit i've wanted it if you travel by plane and i know that's hard these days i want a thing where all of my items that i need go into some kind of a long case that that unrolls and i could just hold it up and it goes you know like an accordion i could take out the pieces i want and put them back in
in you know your phone your your boarding ticket and stuff
um have you tried to watch a hollywood movie lately i mean there aren't that many new ones but oh my god they're bad i i don't know how anybody can watch a movie anymore i still like documentaries but regular movies are like god they're so boring now and they hurt you your typical movie plot something bad has to happen to somebody in the beginning so that you've got a plot for a movie i hate

[50:13]

plot for a movie i hate watching fictional content in which something really bad happens to somebody because then that gets in your head and even if it has a happy ending the bad part's still there i just don't want to watch content where i watch bad things happening to people as part of my entertainment that's just sick in an entertainment i'd rather you know not um
you're rediscovering old ones yeah that's exactly what i'm doing i i find i'm rediscovering uh like old movies and uh in i don't know if you're having this experience but i find that youtube is the
the about the only form of entertainment that i can handle these days and the reason is that you can watch you know unlimited seems unlimited number of short form content so that you don't have to commit to a three hour movie and you get like a nice little hit of

[51:15]

and you get like a nice little hit of dopamine or something you like into that half hour it could be even five minutes and
and i would rather watch a whole bunch of youtube clips and they're pretty good at suggesting what the next clip would be uh than any any kind of scripted
anything um so politico is reporting that biden has trouble remembering his speech stuff yeah i'll tell you everybody who thought i was going to have a bad time after trump left office my critics were mockingly telling me how unhappy i must be
be and i kept thinking to myself no i have a preference i had a preference but i'm not really feeling unhappy i'm actually feeling surprisingly relieved honestly um i i you know i told you a long time ago that i thought

[52:16]

that i thought maybe trauma should be a one-term president in a positive way the positive way is that he's such a disrupter that sometimes you need the disruption and i feel like a lot of the disruption he brought was entirely good um but you can't have that much disruption forever you you need a period of calm and then maybe you get a little disruption later after you've had calm for a while that would be the ideal pattern for a country and so i liked him as fitting into that pattern better than anybody ever has as a disrupter but you just can't do the disruption forever that it pulls the fabric of your country apart and we saw that but i appreciate all the good that came out of it but we have to we have to accept i mean i think you have to be an adult about it and accept that it wasn't all good
yeah we'll see how long uh biden stays in in the office before

[53:16]

in in the office before kamal harris takes over here's something i'm expecting but we haven't seen yet um maybe you can help me if it has happened and i don't know about it there is a there's a bit of a let's say a tradition in which the vice president takes on some specific portfolio so in the case of al gore he was in charge of re-engineering government to make it more efficient you know automating things and getting websites for things and and all that and by all accounts he did a tremendous job by the way true story al gore um if you haven't heard this story it's worth telling you so years ago um i got invited into the white house uh during the clinton administration and i was getting a behind-the-scenes tour uh of the uh the facility apparently some of the writers who worked for uh the speechwriters for gore um were familiar with some of my my

[54:19]

gore um were familiar with some of my my work and we had some contact so when i was in town for something else they said hey stop by and we'll give you a tour of the the uh the white house so while i'm in the white house um the vice president at the time al gore heard i was in the building and he knew of me in fact i think he had a dilbert cartoon on his wall um in fact i knew he did yeah because i was asked for it and i gave it to him so he and he asked me to help out communicating what he'd done for re-engineering the government which apparently was quite good so i declined i declined helping because i was the wrong person for that but i did
did hook him up with somebody who did a good job who was the right person for that so vice presidents often have a portfolio like that do you see mike pence in charge of the coronavirus etc what will kamala harris's portfolio be or will she have one this is what i'd be

[55:21]

or will she have one this is what i'd be looking for if you see kamala harris get a portfolio that feels like a sort of a make work kind of a thing something like what al gore had well that wasn't make work let me come up with a much better word for that not make work but rather let's say something that's important but not sexy so what al gore was doing was
was super important making government more efficient really important but not sexy which is why he asked me to help him with the communication because it was just so dry and boring
and even the coronavirus that's really important but i don't know task force it just doesn't seem like a sexy job so will kamal harris have some kind of a special job that doesn't look like the highest priority in the country necessarily although i guess the coveted task force might be

[56:24]

or will they leave her a generalist because what i'd be looking for is if they leave her as a generalist meaning she doesn't have a specific portfolio i feel like they're getting ready for her to take over you know to take the top job whereas if they say hey you're going to work on this special project i feel like that would be people signaling that it's not imminent that she needs this other thing to like build up her resume you know have a little accomplishment as a vice president
so that i would look to that as like a little signal of how they're thinking internally about where she's going
she'll be in charge of making government more woke somebody says
you know uh i still see see people doing the uh you know calling her heels up harris and referring to her uh let's say her best in which willie brown was a you know i guess they've admitted that

[57:26]

you know i guess they've admitted that she that he helped her politically and they were lovers or whatever i don't think any of that matters and i think that if you think that saying that stuff somehow denigrates her or helps your team i would just leave that alone it just doesn't have any persuasive power and it doesn't it's not a good look if that's the stuff you care about it's not it doesn't it doesn't make you look good as a person who's commenting if if what you care about is her sex life 20 years ago however she got there she got there right everybody who got where they got had some luck maybe did some weasley things you know maybe his chance you know everybody got there the way they got there and uh it's just this is not relevant and i also think it's super sexist um so there's that uh

[58:31]

evangelicals are powerless now somebody says it do you think so evangelicals are powerless now well the person is not in power that's for sure
what's harris's weakness then her weakness well i think her weakness is her personality actually i hate to say it but she has that thing where she laughs at her own jokes too hard and that's she just needs to work on that in my opinion but hey she she got all the way to where she is so maybe she doesn't need to do anything i i recommend somebody says i successfully used my attractiveness in business without regret why wouldn't you everybody should use whatever tools they have right um so somebody says it's not sexist because they made fun of john kerry for marrying into uh
uh and to catch up money um yeah i'm not sure those are exactly the same but i

[59:31]

sure those are exactly the same but i take your point
um does not debate well blah blah all right i don't have much else to talk about so let me just show you what it looks like outdoors i'll be going out in that in a minute and uh it's pretty darn nice
that's all for now and i will talk to you tomorrow