Episode 804 Scott Adams: Elaborate Prank on Chief Justice Roberts, Coronavirus Malfeasance, Other Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
The "Best Story" filter for predicting the future accurately
Alan Dershowitz taken out of context all day yesterday
Smirky-face John Avlon misinterpreting Alan Dershowitz
Rand Paul's clever question, CJ Roberts and the whistleblower
Joe Lockhart's CNN crazy talk and crazy eyes
Coronavirus and flights STILL allowed from China
An enormous risk management decision
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Go. Mmm, nailed it!
Nailed it! Well, I don't know if I've ever been more entertained by government malfeasance than I have this week.
It's not all good, but a lot of it is funny.
Happy birthday, Hooper!
I don't know where to start with the funniness, so I'll just start in no particular order.
I've told you before how reality can be viewed through different filters, and still all the facts can make sense.
In other words, you could be imagining the world through your filter, your movie, and all the parts work.
You can still go to the store.
Everything still works. So I'm going to give you a filter that fits all of the facts and is completely different than the one you're watching in the impeachment.
Because the one you're watching is probably...
There's an impeachment trial.
It has something to do with the Constitution.
We're trying to decide whether a president should be removed.
That's probably what you're thinking, right?
But watch how well this completely different filter fits all of the observed facts.
Just imagine that instead of an impeachment trial, what it really is is an elaborate prank on Chief Justice Roberts.
And the prank goes like this.
The Republicans and the Democrats are all in on the prank.
And the job is to see who can get Chief Justice Roberts to read in public out loud the most ridiculous bullshit.
And the competition is pretty, pretty stiff.
So it turns out that Chief Justice does have his limits.
He won't read everything they say.
And with at least one case, his reading of it came with a scowl.
He read Elizabeth Warren's question about whether this whole process is degrading the credibility of the Supreme Court.
And he just reads the question, he just looks at her.
Now, I'm generally a big fan of Of the founders of the country and the framers of the Constitution.
Now when I say I'm a big fan, I don't say I like everything they did.
For example, owning slaves.
Not a fan of that.
But otherwise, you know, making the Constitution, they did a great job creating, well, They were also, you know, sexist misogynists, you know, but if you don't count the slave-owning and the sexism, the racism, if you don't count that, they did a really good job making a constitution.
Well, they also discriminated against poor people.
They weren't going to let them vote unless they had property.
So there were racist, elite, sexists who largely raped their own slaves.
But if you don't count that, They were pretty good at making constitutions.
I think we'd all agree.
But they weren't perfect.
And as you're watching this impeachment process, it makes you think that this was the part that they were too tired to finish.
Have you ever worked on a project where, you know, you've been working, working, you spend days, you're up late, you're working weekends, and you're almost done, and you've almost done a perfect job on whatever it is, your project.
But there's just this one thing left over you gotta take care of, it's a loose end, and you don't give it your best effort.
Kind of typical, right?
You get most of the stuff right, but there's just some little trailing, you know, little details that you don't give it your best effort.
And it seems to me that what we're watching in this so-called impeachment process is not their best effort.
I don't know for sure, but I think by the time they designed the impeachment clauses, they had already been drinking, perhaps.
Because who designed a process where the Chief Justice of the United States sits in front of the public, now on television but in front of the public before, and is forced to read whatever ridiculous bullshit The two sides of the political spectrum decide to hand him on a little piece of paper.
Who came up with that plan?
That is the worst plan I've ever heard.
Now, I think maybe the Senate actually came up with a specific version of it, but the Constitution allowed the Senate to kind of do whatever they wanted.
And what are we all arguing about if we're talking about impeachment?
We're talking about the process.
We're talking about can the Senate be badgered into requiring witnesses or is that just the House's job?
How about the framers of the Constitution do a little less raping of slaves and put a little more effort And to that impeachment part of the Constitution, maybe give us a little more clarity.
Maybe think you through a little bit more, so that we're not arguing dumbass things like, well, it's a trial.
If we use the word trial, that tells us everything we need, because the word, what about the word?
I use the word trial over here, and so, therefore, if it's the same word, Then all the things that apply to the other word in a different context, a criminal context, well, doesn't that apply?
Because it's the word.
How could I be wrong?
What about my logic?
My logic connecting those two things?
Because it's the same word.
T-R-I-A-L. Therefore, logically, everything about that word, in a different context, must apply.
When did the founders of the Constitution Come up with the worst process you've ever seen.
Let's be honest.
The Constitution in general, pretty solid work.
A-plus.
You know, for designing the Constitution.
But the impeachment part?
D-minus.
I can't give you a good grade, founders.
So maybe doing a little less slave owning and a little more work on that part would have been good.
All right, what else is funny about this?
Have you listened to any of the things that the senators are making Roberts read?
You can't listen to them without wanting to punch your television because the whole thing has just turned into a mockery.
Nobody should be proud about participating in this.
Nobody's coming out of this process smelling clean.
Now, I told you before that one of the ways that I predict the future, and it's just one way, and I'm not saying that this is a 100% good predictor, but it's fun.
So I'm going to mention it.
And it's what I call the best story filter.
You could call it a movie filter, but I don't like to confuse things.
So that filter says that if you can anticipate what would be the best story in the future, that's usually the way things go.
I don't know why.
It could be just coincidence or cognitive dissonance or something on my part.
But so often it looks like you can predict based on what the best story would be.
Now, what would be the best story going forward?
Well, you've got two competing stories.
One, by the way, all of my polyp problems came back, but that's another story.
That's the third story, one you don't care about.
So one story says that we'll get witnesses.
And the reason that that would be predicted by the best story is that it makes this impeachment thing go on, and there's more to argue about, and there's more drama, there's more surprise, there's mystery.
So having the witnesses would be a much better movie than not having witnesses.
So the best story filter says we'd get witnesses, Even if the news is reporting that it looks like it's not going to go that way.
But there's a second movie.
And this was really fun.
Howard Kurtz mentioned this in the piece he wrote on foxnews.com.
And I don't know if this is true, but Howard Kurtz is saying it, so it's probably true.
He's a credible voice.
So he's saying that if the Republicans stay on track, President Trump...
This is so delicious.
I almost can't say it.
It's so good. If the Republicans stay on track, President Trump could be spiking the football about his acquittal with Sean Hannity during the Super Bowl interview.
Oh, could that be better?
Because there's nothing that gives more attention than the Super Bowl.
There's nothing that people are more paying attention to than that on that day.
If the way this turns out is that Trump ends up celebrating his total acquittal during the Super Bowl, I'm sorry.
That's just so good.
That is so good.
That we have competing movies now, and they're both pretty good.
On one hand, I wouldn't mind a little bit more of these witnesses, just because I don't think it'll change the result, but it could make things fun.
But if we don't get them, what would be better than Sean Hannity interviewing President Trump during the Super Bowl break, I guess, halftime or something?
After acquittal. There's nothing better than that.
All right. Howard Kurtz also wrote this funny sentence in the same piece.
He said, the media's tone drastically shifted yesterday morning as it looked increasingly like the Senate Republicans would hold the line and block any witnesses from testifying.
The mood on MSNBC was practically funereal.
I didn't even know that was a word.
Is it funereal?
F-U-N-E-R-E-A-L? Now generally, as a writer...
I have a rule as a writer that if you use a word, a vocabulary word, that you can reasonably know your entire audience won't understand, don't use that word.
Generally speaking, don't use a word that your readers are unlikely to know.
But this is a perfect exception.
This is good writing. It's great writing, actually.
It's very good writing. Because you know what funeral means, even if you can't pronounce it.
Okay, it's like a funeral.
It was practically funeral.
All right. Here's some fun.
You want to see some real fun?
Find the Wikipedia page for President Trump.
Somewhere on his Wikipedia page, they'll be mentioned, of course, about the impeachment process.
When the final result comes in, the Wikipedia page will be updated to reflect the result.
Because it happens pretty quickly, right?
This is going to be fun.
Watch what happens.
Because Pelosi is already starting to frame things this way.
She says, quote, you cannot be acquitted if you don't have a trial.
So this is Pelosi saying this.
You don't have a trial if you don't have witnesses.
And documentation and all of that.
Does the president know right from wrong?
I don't think so. So you can tell that Pelosi and the Democrats are already getting ready for their loss.
And in losing, they're going to claim that the president was impeached and that he's still impeached.
And their argument will be that the Senate didn't do its job, so the House impeachment stands.
It's unresolved, but it's not acquitted.
So, that's going to be their version.
Now, the President's version, of course, will be that he was acquitted, and here's the fun part.
Was it Lindsey Graham who said this?
Somebody smart said this.
I forget who it was. They said that if he's acquitted in the Senate, he can claim, and it would be a valid claim even if you disagree with it, he could validly claim that He was not impeached because it didn't go through to the final removal.
Now, you're going to have two movies that are completely different.
He was impeached totally.
He was not impeached.
Those can't both be true.
But Wikipedia is going to have to choose.
And there's going to be a fight like you've never seen.
Like probably in all the years of Wikipedia, probably there would never be more fighting of the volunteer editors over how to word this situation.
Now I think if everybody was playing fair, and I don't think that's going to happen, but if everybody involved in Wikipedia were just trying to get it in the most accurate way, they would just describe it.
They would say, here's what happened.
The Senate voted this way.
Democrats say it doesn't count.
Trump says it counts. Just describe it.
But I don't know if it's going to go that way.
I think they're going to fight tooth and nail because Wikipedia, whatever you think of its accuracy overall, becomes sort of a depository of what I would call common knowledge or our agreed truth.
An agreed truth is where society says, well, yeah, okay.
Yeah, that version looks...
I'll go with that. Some people might disagree, but it's sort of the consensus truth ends up on Wikipedia.
It's almost a brute force of opinion more than what's right or wrong in some cases.
So watch that.
Wikipedia will be the battleground.
I'd like to see... The news organizations reporting on it in real time?
Because I think you'll be able to watch the edits going in and out so quickly, probably in real time.
I don't know how quickly that could happen.
But that page is going to be just changing while you watch it.
All right. What else we got going on here?
So, do you remember my prediction yesterday morning?
Possibly one of my most accurate predictions.
And I said that the entire day yesterday would be spent with the anti-Trump media willfully misinterpreting what Alan Dershowitz had said at the impeachment proceedings the day before.
Was I right?
Did we not watch the entire media landscape acting as one, misinterpreting Dershowitz in just the most obvious way?
I mean, it wasn't even a clever misinterpretation.
It was just such a heavy-handed, ridiculous misinterpretation.
They all did it.
They all did it the same way.
And Dershowitz, to his credit, he went full Dershowitz on him.
And he actually got back on CNN.
Now, if you didn't see Dershowitz on CNN last night, find yourself a clip.
Okay? Find yourself a clip.
Because it's good TV. And here's what's good about it.
Obviously, Nershowitz, he's mentioned it before, that CNN sort of stopped inviting him when he started saying things that could be construed as positive for Trump.
But they had him back last night because you couldn't not have him on last night.
I mean, I don't know who initiated the interview, whether it was CNN or Dershowitz may have pinged him and said, you know, you've been saying stuff about me, put me on and I'll clear it up.
So I don't know who initiated, but he was such big news yesterday, they couldn't not have him on if he's willing to go on.
So he goes on CNN and says...
As clearly as you can write to their collective faces, you are completely misinterpreting what I said.
Here's what you're saying out of context.
Here's the full context so you can see how completely misinterpreted I have been.
And now you should retract it.
I'm paraphrasing, of course.
But you basically said you're completely misinterpreting it.
What do you think Wolf Blitzer did When the person who knows the most about what's inside Alan Dershowitz's head, which happens to be Alan Dershowitz, he's the one who knows the most about what he said and what he thinks.
He goes on their show and tells them their news reporting is completely wrong on really the biggest story of the day.
And he shows them why in unambiguous certain terms.
Things they can check. They can just go back to the tape and say, oh yeah, that's right.
When you look at the full context, it's obvious.
What did Wolf Blitzer do?
Did he say, Did he say that?
Did Wolf Blitzer say, I would like to apologize to you for completely smearing you on our network all day long, so you have my personal apology, Alan Dershowitz?
Did that happen? No, it didn't.
Did Wolf Blitzer push back and say, No, Alan Dershowitz, I know you think you know your own opinion.
But let me clarify for you why CNN knows your opinion more clearly than you do.
So let me explain what your opinion is and why we got the reporting right.
And don't give us this BS about you know what your opinion is because we know what your opinion is.
We're the news. You're just a guy that we sometimes let on but not very often.
So did Wolf Blitzer say something like that?
No. No.
He ignored it. What?
He ignored it.
Alec Dershowitz, the most important person in the whole country yesterday, I mean in terms of the news cycle, the most important person in the country, probably, no not even probably, absolutely the most critical opinion about impeachment on the biggest question in the country, The highest operating, most experienced, you know, best voice on this topic, the constitutionality of impeachment and the president.
And they have him on, and he tells them that they've been reporting fake news all day, shows exactly how and why, and they freaking ignored it.
It was like he hadn't been talking.
It was crazy to watch that and have them just act like it didn't happen.
And then I thought to myself, okay, maybe Wolf didn't know how to react on camera, so he was just playing it down the line and let people make their own decision, which would be fine.
But I thought to myself, now that Dershowitz has gone on their network, clarified what it meant, they will never again report the wrong news.
Wrong. Today, John Avalon, who's one of the big anti-Trumpers, smirking faces on CNN. If you've ever seen him, he's the one with the smirky face.
So whenever somebody else on the panel is reading something that makes the president look bad, he's got his little smirky face.
If you're only listening to this, you can't see the incredible impression I'm giving of John Avalon's smirky face.
I'll do it again. Okay, that was pretty good, I think.
Thank you for bearing with that.
So he writes, with this argument, Dershowitz completely conflates a president's self-interest with the national interest.
Did he do that?
Did Dershowitz conflate the president's self-interest with the national interest?
No. No, that didn't happen.
That did not happen.
If a president thinks, quote, so this is Avalon misinterpreting Dershowitz.
If a president thinks, quote, I'm the greatest president there ever was, if I'm not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.
Dershowitz believes that cannot be impeachable.
So he's putting words into Dershowitz's mouth that are not Dershowitz's words and not his point and completely wrong.
So did Dershowitz succeed in In getting CNN to stop reporting the most obvious fake news, it couldn't be more obvious.
You just have to look at what he says, and then look how they reported what he said.
They're not even close. And they just write another opinion piece like Dershowitz had not just debunked their entire coverage.
It's just mind-boggling to watch this.
Now, even Howard Kurtz It was a little bit tough on Dershowitz.
The way Kurtz put it had more to do with some ambiguity of the way he explained himself that offered the other side a club.
I think he went a little tough on Dershowitz, but he's got a point that Dershowitz did explain things in a way That made it easy to take it out of context.
Now, I don't know if that's a fair criticism.
As someone who is experienced in media interviews, you definitely want to avoid saying things that could be taken out of context.
It took me years and years of practice to be able to do that.
Because you have to be thinking of what you're going to say while the cameras are rolling and you've got pressure, you're in public or whatever.
So you're thinking about what you're going to say, which takes a lot of energy.
At the same time, you've got to run a separate process in your head that's checking what you're saying and taking each sentence out individually and saying, okay, what would they do with this sentence?
Okay, what would they do with this sentence out of context?
So it's really hard.
It takes a lot of skill to talk in public And craft a coherent thought that can't be taken out of context.
I'm only just able to do it at this level of experience.
Now, obviously, Dershowitz has even more media experience than I do, and he would be able to do that.
So he would easily be able to do an interview in which he cannot be taken out of context.
But if he's doing a lengthy interview, This scholarly constitutional argument, I'm not sure that's possible.
Because in order for him to do the lengthy, you know, the big picture where you've got the whole canvas, you can see the examples, you can see the larger context, in order to do that, I don't know that there's any way you could avoid leaving little nuggets that can be taken out of context.
So I don't know it was achievable.
But the context that...
Well, it doesn't matter. It was taken out of context.
You can see it yourself to see why.
All right. The funniest weird thing, I talked about this yesterday, but there's a new wrinkle to it.
So we'd heard the story that Rand Paul had submitted a question that Chief Justice Roberts would have to read in front of the Senate, and in it, he allegedly, according to the news coverage, not according to me, but according to the news coverage, The question would have revealed the name of the whistleblower.
Now here's the clever part that I didn't know yesterday.
Rand Paul's question had the name of two individuals in it, but in the body of the question it did not refer to them as whistleblowers.
It was simply a question about their involvement and whether they had some involvement that was relevant.
Now, Chief Justice Roberts looks at it and says, The presiding officer declines to read this question without explanation.
Now, of course, most people knew it was because it would give away the name of the whistleblower.
But here's what was so clever.
The question did not accuse anybody of being a whistleblower.
It simply used the name of somebody that the press has, in social media mostly, has continuously reported as being probably the whistleblower.
So, The news reports this.
The same news that refuses to give the name of the whistleblower for ethical, maybe legal reasons, I don't know, but moral, ethical, what's good for the country reasons.
They don't name them because they want whistleblowers to remain private.
But in reporting the story the way they did, by saying we're not going to talk about the names in this thing because we don't want to reveal the whistleblower, they revealed the whistleblower.
There's no way around it.
If they said, you can't say this name that I'm not going to say in public, you can't say this name because it would reveal the whistleblower, and then everybody says, what name?
And then they look at the name, and they say, I can't say this name in public because that would reveal the whistleblower?
Didn't you just tell me the whistleblower in public?
I mean... Sure, I had to connect two dots, but you gave me both of the dots.
I didn't even have to look for the second dot.
Dot one, what did Rand Paul's question say?
There it is. Here it is.
Here's a dot. Hold on to this dot.
Let's see if we can find another one.
Dot number two, the Chief Justice didn't want to read it because the name on there was the whistleblower.
What? What?
Okay, I guess that's morally okay.
That's morally and ethically okay to report that because they didn't say who the whistleblower is.
They just gave you two dots, placed them gently in your hand and said, see these two dots?
Yeah, well, I'm not saying who the whistleblower is, but look at those two dots.
I'm in the clear. I didn't say it, but the two dots said it.
All right, that's enough on that.
In this impeachment process, we keep hearing this claim that our intelligence sources have been saying that Russia is behind the rumor that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
Now, since I don't know enough of the details here, and I know that Politico reported at least four times that there was some alleged Ukraine interference in the election in 2016.
Was Politico reporting based on what our intelligence sources said?
Or did our intelligence sources not know what Politico said?
Or how do you square those things?
How do you square the fact that Politico was reporting Ukraine was meddling and gave specific examples that nobody's questioning?
At the same time, our intelligence sources say, no, no, it's a Russian rumor.
Who do you trust more?
The fake news?
In general. I'm not calling Politico fake news on this story.
I'm just saying in general.
You know, a member of the press, Politico.
Who do you trust? Them?
Or the United States intelligence sources?
Which one would you trust? Neither, right?
Yeah, you wouldn't trust either one of them.
But, was the president justified...
In saying there's something to look into.
Well, according to Politico, he was.
Now, Politico could be right, and they could be wrong.
But there's something there that makes you say, well, I'd like to know more about that.
Whether they're right or wrong, it's enough to look into it.
One of the good questions that came from, I think Ted Cruz was one of the questioners, asked, Why is it so different that the Hillary Clinton campaign can use foreign interference with a Steele dossier?
What makes that different than somebody getting some foreign interference from Ukraine in the process of investigating something that was worth investigating?
So, that's a pretty good question.
Because we think in terms of analogies, even though we shouldn't, So, people's minds say, yeah, what is different about that?
Now, the first thing you say to yourself is, Great Britain is an allied country and Russia is not in the same way.
Does that matter? It doesn't matter at all.
If the United States interfered with an election in France, do you think France would say, what?
The United States interfered with our election?
Oh, wait, you said the United States?
That's okay, they're allies.
Who would say that? Nobody in France.
If you interfere with another country's election, it doesn't matter if you're allies.
That's not really relevant.
And it doesn't matter if you paid for it.
Not really relevant, in my opinion.
So I would say I would not trust our intelligence forces to say that Russia is the only reason That people are looking at Ukraine for interference.
They might have boosted that signal.
But I can't imagine it's the only one.
Have all of you seen Joe Lockhart appear on CNN yet and talk crazy talk?
I think he was going full Hitler on Dershowitz, I guess.
And there's some things you can't stop noticing.
What is wrong with Joe Lockhart's eyes?
You know what I'm talking about?
He has crazy eyes.
Like, you look at him, and before he even talks, you say, well, whatever comes out of that mouth, if that mouth is connected to those eyes, that's going to be some serious crazy talk coming out of that hole.
And I ask myself, all right, who else in the public political sphere has crazy eyes?
You know, Adam Schiff, of course, Cory Booker, some would say, AOC, some would say.
And then I think to myself, are there any Republicans who have crazy eyes?
I couldn't think of one.
Right? Can you think of a Republican Who, when you look at them, their eyes say, I'm crazy.
Is this a coincidence?
I'm totally open to the possibility that this is just anecdotal nonsense, coincidence, confirmation bias, something like that.
I see some other mentions here, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren.
Ilhan Omar. No, I don't think any of them have crazy eyes.
I would not say that at all.
But the people who do have crazy eyes all seem to be on the same team.
Somebody says Lindsey Graham.
He doesn't have crazy eyes.
Mitt Romney. No, I guess it's pretty subjective, but I can't look at Joe Lockhart without thinking that his eyes are screaming crazy.
Just the way they look.
I don't know. It's an interesting look.
Alright. Let's talk about the coronavirus.
So I tweeted this question, which is, if the US government does not close flights or ban flights from China temporarily until we get a hold on this coronavirus situation, if we don't do that, Would that be Trump's biggest error in risk management?
One of the things I've liked about this president is that he does seem to understand risk management like an entrepreneur.
And he seems to consistently, not every time, but nobody gets it every time, but he consistently seems to go with the best risk management decisions.
That's a longer story, but it's just something I've noticed about him that I've appreciated.
But I'm watching this situation, and I'm totally stumped.
Because he's got the risk management completely wrong.
And let me put it in these terms.
If we don't do anything, and he gets lucky, you know, doesn't close the airport, and he gets lucky, and there's little or no problem in this country, just people get sick, but they recover.
If that's the worst that happens, well, then he got lucky.
But would you make a policy based on having to get lucky?
Because I think that would be mostly luck, because nobody is smart enough to know what's going to happen.
You'd have to be lucky that it didn't turn into a big thing.
But what if it goes the other way?
Suppose a number of people get infected in this country and some of them die.
How many people in this country would have to die from the coronavirus Before you would say that it's a gigantic error by the president.
I mean, just the biggest error probably of his presidency.
How many? I'm thinking 10.
But I also think somebody's job needs to be to explain the cost-benefit to us.
You know, when we have a war or something, you often see the estimates, at least sometimes by the military, sometimes by the pundits or whatever, and we say, okay, we're going to have a war or a military action.
We think the risk to our troops is X. We might lose this many.
There's always an implied, we'll try to get this benefit, but it's going to cost us this much in lives.
And be aware that every big decision the government makes ends up killing somebody or saving somebody.
If the government says bicycles are legal, people die on bicycles.
If the government says, yeah, you can have a swimming pool in your backyard, somebody's going to drown in a swimming pool.
So when the government makes decisions or even decides not to make a decision, which is the same thing, almost anything big It has an implication, and people die.
So the coronavirus would be no different.
But what is different about it?
And here's my big point.
I'm seeing the people arguing against banning flights are saying that, Scott, Scott, Scott, do you not understand, Scott?
You poor, simple bastard.
Don't you understand that the regular virus, the normal flu, Is infecting way more people, like tens of thousands of people in this country alone, or billions.
It's a lot, whatever it is.
And that a bunch of people die from that.
It's usually people with degraded systems, etc.
So, Scott, don't you see that this coronavirus is not such a big deal because our just plain old regular virus is just killing lots of people, and it's way more than this tiny little coronavirus.
So, let's not panic about it.
That, my friends, is a form of loser think.
Loser think, the way I define it, is people who do not have experience in different domains think they know how to think, but they don't know what they don't know.
In other words, if you've never studied economics, you might think your common sense is good enough, but you wouldn't know that there's something important that you didn't know how to consider.
This is a perfect example.
This is an apples to orange comparison.
It's something no scientist would do.
It's something no economist would do.
Nobody who had an MBA would be likely to make a comparison to the coronavirus to the normal flu.
Here's one reason why.
The regular flu, we can't stop.
I mean, you can't stop it by banning a flight.
The regular flu, as far as I know, we do not identify with a certain border in a certain country, and therefore there would be no way to stop it by closing off that country and say, all right, you know, you Albanians are always giving us flu, so we're going to close the airport.
It wouldn't work, right?
Now, I could be fact-checked on this.
So it could be that maybe we do know what countries they come from, but for whatever reason, we don't close those borders.
So here's my point.
You could make a big difference in the coronavirus by stopping flights from one country and checking passports from people who may have tried to do a circuitous route.
You could at least tell that they came from China.
That's completely different.
We don't have a better way to stop than whatever we're already doing.
It's apples and oranges.
You can't compare it to car crashes, alcohol, cigarettes.
They're just different things.
Now, if you could stop those other things by closing the flights for 30 days from one country, I would be in favor of it.
But it wouldn't work. What's different about the coronavirus is that we have a very specific So anybody who's comparing those two things and saying it's relevant that there's some other unrelated flu that's worse, doesn't know how to compare things.
And I almost can guarantee you that the people who are saying that don't have a background in economics, Science, probably engineering, maybe the law.
They're likely to be artists, writers, philosophers, that sort of thing.
All right. The State Department announced a high-level warning on Thursday not to travel to China because of the coronavirus.
So explain this to me.
If the State Department is saying that we should not go there, why would they not ban flights from there to here?
Which, in my opinion, has got to be the bigger problem.
I don't think the problem is that we're sending people over there, as long as they stay there.
It's coming back.
It's the coming back problem.
And I ask you whose job it is in the government to To explain to us, the people, the cost-benefit analysis.
Because that's missing, and that is complete governmental incompetence and malfeasance, in my opinion.
The lack of that explanation guarantees that the explanation is corrupt.
Let me just say that as clearly as I can.
The only reasonable assumption you could make about why our government does not have whatever representative, it might be Health and Human Services, but whoever's sort of the lead person on this, the only way you can explain that they have not come out and said, we've considered closing the airports for flights from China, but here's the cost benefit.
We think if we keep them open, we might have zero to ten deaths in this country.
And on the other side, if we close them, we think that that might have an economic impact of whatever.
And that economic impact also translates into people living and dying.
Because we know that as the economy goes up and down, the people who are sort of on the margin can move from being in a lot of trouble to not being in a lot of trouble with a small move.
So if you have a big impact on the economy from one of your government decisions, It could end up killing people.
But if you don't stand in front of the United States public and say, here's what we're weighing.
We don't know if this would kill people.
We think it would be a low number.
But we don't know if this would kill people either.
We think this could be a low number.
So the reason that we're going with this is that we think the risk management makes more sense.
We can get to the best result through this path, and here's why.
Now, if my government explains that to me, and even if I disagreed, I would say, okay, well, at least it's not corrupt.
It could be wrong, because risk management is about playing the odds.
You can correctly play the odds and still be wrong.
And that's not a crime.
That's just bad luck.
But if your government does not stand in front of you, And say in public, here's why we're doing this, the alternative was this, here's the cost-benefit, as best we can estimate it.
Short of that, you have to assume corrupt, something corrupt.
Either there's somebody with money who's influencing somebody, there's somebody who has, I don't know, political, financial, some kind of interest that is conflicting with your interests.
So your interests and mine are being...
Put it at a lower priority than somebody's profit.
Now, I don't know that, but that is the reasonable assumption because we've gone so long without the obvious thing happening, which is somebody explaining what the reasoning is.
In fact, I just saw Trump being interviewed by Trump.
I guess it was Fox News.
And he was asked about it.
And he just gave general statements about we're working with China and other countries and we're working hard and stuff like that.
And I thought, that's not good enough.
That's, you know, that is not a performance I want from my president.
Now, if the president said, we're looking hard at closing the airports and we're working out the cost-benefit analysis, we'll tell you tomorrow, I would say, okay, okay.
That's on the right track. That's what I would do.
That's the reasonable thing to do.
But he didn't. He just waved his hand at, you know, we're working hard.
And that's not nearly enough.
That's not nearly enough.
So I think President Trump has to explain that.
And if people start dying in this country while the airports are still open to China, I'm not sure I'm going to be okay with that.
Well, I'm not going to be okay with that.
I tweeted today a weird little story in which scientists have created the first living robots.
What? That's right.
They figured out how to take unrelated cells.
and sort of just stick them together and I guess cells like to stick together so you can take unrelated cells and just put them together and they stay and then they start acting independently because there are different kinds of cells and one cell will be you know trying to move and another one won't be trying to move or whatever But if they use supercomputers to figure out the nature of all these different kinds of cells,
and then they rapidly simulate all the combinations of how you can put cells together, and they can actually put cells together that can move, you know, under a microscope.
So they can connect them together in such a way that the computer accurately determined it would move forward or move in a circle.
So they're actually programming Robots out of living cells that have different characteristics and they can put them together.
Now, I don't know where that ends up because at some point it might achieve consciousness or something like it.
Something like free will.
That's an illusion, but there could be a robot version of that.
So, that's coming down the line at you.
In the weird story, some element of Antifa, and I don't know what it takes to be an Antifa besides just saying you are, are planning some kind of police subway fair protest In New York City.
And it has something to do with they don't like paying $2.75 for the subway.
So it's going to be some kind of a mass, I don't know, civil disobedience about paying the fares.
And I'm thinking to myself, has Antifa, have they drifted from, hey, I like what they're saying because they're saying bad things about bad people, so I like them, They're against the racists, so that's okay.
Even if they do some bad stuff, at least they're against the racists.
But it seems that Antifa, being an organization which, and by the way, if you ever want to create an organization that's guaranteed to fail, one way to do it is to let anybody join.
If you create an organization that lets anybody join, sooner or later your organization is going to be filled with psychos.
And they're going to be running the show.
So Antifa being their preference for not having a central control.
They don't like the government in general.
They don't like any kind of government.
So of course their organization is sort of independent people doing independent things without a central control.
And what do you get?
Instead of fighting the good fight for, I don't know, social equality or whatever they might like, now they have an Antifa planning to protest paying money for services.
That's right. Antifa is going to protest the concept of paying money for stuff.
I don't know if they've thought this through.
I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I don't know this to be true.
Just a suspicion. Nobody in the Antifa protest against the idea of paying for stuff has a degree in economics.
I'm just guessing.
Probably none of them have an MBA. Probably nobody in Antifa has a history degree.
Because I don't think they know what the alternative is to a world in which people don't pay for services that other people had to pay to create to provide.
I don't think they've thought this through, is all I'm saying.
They're not even communists.
They haven't even thought it through that.
All right. That's about the big and the small of it.
Anything else happening today?
You're all going to be watching for the vote.
If the news coverage is right, we will see the end of witnesses.
We will see a vote to acquit, and then we'll break into two complete different movies in which some people say he was impeached, and some say he wasn't.
Scott, please address how Roberts knew the whistleblower's name.
Well, same way you do.
Roberts reads the news, same as everybody else, I guess.
So everybody in the public has been exposed to the whistleblower's name.
And I wouldn't say that it was Chief Justice Roberts who gave away the whistleblower.
He just knew that it was dangerous territory.
So I think he did the right thing.
I would support what he did.
I'm not sure I support him continuing to put up with what he's putting up with.
Here's what I'd love to see.
I would love to see Chief Justice Roberts, maybe at the end of it or something, say, you know, I just got to give you my feedback on this process.
This was totally corrupt, totally botched, because you made me sit in public and read bullshit for two days and you degraded the credibility of the Supreme Court.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
You know better. You should not have fed me one bullshit question filled with fake news after another and caused me to read it.
In theory, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should be, see if you agree with me, should be the most credible person in the country, period.
Am I right? Who would you want to be more credible, more fair, more nonpolitical than the Chief Justice?
He's it. Like, you know, that's the one person you want to feel confident that that person at least could go either way, follows the facts, is not driven by politics.
And to force that guy, to force him to read lies in front of the country and read them straight without an opinion is grotesque.
I mean, to me, it just felt grotesque.
I think he needed the Silkwood shower after that.
And I know that Chief Justice Roberts is not fond of making himself the story.
He likes to stay out of the spotlight.
And he maybe made a slight exception by not reading the alleged whistleblower question, but I feel like he needs to step up and say something.
Do you? I mean, it'd be okay if he didn't, because at least that would be consistent with staying out of the spotlight.
And there's a lot to be said to that.
But I think he should say that he's disgusted with it.
I think he should present a complete...
If he feels this way, and I'm assuming he probably does, this is an assumption, can't read his mind, but don't you think he's pretty, pretty unhappy with the people who gave him those questions and made him read those out loud?
