Episode 806 Scott Adams: Coming To You From Space Force, Zero Gravity, Coronavirus, Fake News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Amazingly...CNN continues to take quotes out of context,
S.E. Cupp mischaracterizing Alan Dershowitz
Speculation that Hillary wants to be Biden's VP
Coronavirus virus origins and death speculation
6 additional countries banned from the "Green Card Lottery"
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. . Oxygen good. Artificial gravity turned back on. . .
Well, as you can tell, I'm here in the Space Force Command Center, orbiting Earth, geosynchronous orbit.
A lot of you don't know that Space Force was actually formed decades ago when we found alien technology.
We've been using that at Area 54 for Well, a long time.
And of course, Space Force has been up and running for decades, but only recently.
President Trump decided to try to make it legitimate, so he announced it as if it were just starting.
Not really. The truth, and I'm here to tell you, is that many of us have been in Space Force for a long time.
I'm actually an admiral.
I'm an admiral in Space Force.
But all of the people in Space Force had to take secret identities because the public wasn't supposed to know we have all this alien technology that we've been weaponizing.
And so they said to me, you need a cover, some kind of cover story.
And I was like, I don't know, like what kind of cover story?
And they said, anything you want.
And I said, well, what if it's some kind of job where I'm not even qualified to They said, doesn't matter.
You could be totally unqualified.
Oh, you're thinking of Area 51?
No, Area 54 is where they keep the good stuff.
Area 51 is where they tell you the good stuff is.
But if you were actually going to storm that area, once you got inside, you'd see just cardboard cutouts and stuff, and you'd be like, I swore, I thought there were aliens here.
No, it's Area 54 is where the real stuff is.
51 is just a diversion.
So I've been in Space Force for years.
My cover story is a cartoonist.
Weirdly enough, the fact that I can't draw very well, Didn't tip off anybody that it was just a cover story, but now you know.
So I thought I'd take a few questions later after I talk about some of the news up here in space.
And there isn't much news, probably because it's the Super Bowl day, but I'll tell you what we got.
I am absolutely amazed that CNN continues to do something that you would think just couldn't be done, which is to completely make up news based on taking a quote and a context, even when the rest of the context is publicly available and everybody's seen it.
It's the weirdest thing that they can get away with it.
They are no longer just reporting news that isn't true in some cases.
Instead, they've started conjuring reality out of nothing.
In the case of Alan Dershowitz's testimony, they continue to take that one sentence out of context, where he was talking about a specific example with Lincoln, to act as though he's generalizing that to Trump, which is not what he was doing.
I'm not going to go over the arguments, but let's just say that they completely make a fake argument for Dershowitz And then C.C. Cupp in writing on CNN.com today.
This must be maddening for Dershowitz.
I can imagine what he's thinking.
Imagine Imagine seeing that your opinion, the one that you argued so well in front of the world, has been mischaracterized, and then after they mischaracterize it, this is so clever and despicable, it's just funny. First they mischaracterize them, and that's only stage one.
After they've mischaracterized it into something that's ridiculous, Then they say, the majority of experts say his argument was ridiculous.
And you know what?
The majority of experts would say that the argument that they mischaracterized is ridiculous, at least the mischaracterization is ridiculous, but not his actual argument.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody in the world has actually argued with him.
Well, I can see in the comments that there's something you're missing.
Doesn't it bother you? Doesn't it bother you?
Your addiction is now so deep that you need the simultaneous sip, and all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, a jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go. Oh yeah, and all you need is an S.E. cup, as somebody said in the comments.
So, what did I call her?
C.C. cup? I think I called her C.C. cup, not S.C. cup, which is funnier.
Much funnier. All right, so what does it mean when CNN Can make news and it's stuff that you could just look, anybody can look and see it's made up.
All you'd have to do is listen to Dershowitz explain how they're mischaracterizing his opinion.
You could look at what he said originally.
It's so easy to know that it's completely made up, just like the Charlottesville Fine People thing.
But man, this morning I got into it with somebody who alleges to be an MIT professor.
Now this is interesting because I don't think you can be an MIT professor unless you're pretty, pretty smart, wouldn't you say?
And so this professor apparently has never watched any, I'm just guessing, never watched any news source other than the ones that present the fake news.
At first, this professor thought, oh, this quote from Dershowitz is actually accurate, but it's taken out of context.
It had to do with one example about Lincoln.
It was not a general comment.
I argued with him a little bit because I was curious.
How could somebody that smart be so easily fooled?
It turns out That it's really obvious in the context that he'd never heard the other arguments.
Think about that.
Imagine if you were watching this whole impeachment stuff or even just the whole Trump administration.
Imagine if you had never seen the alternative arguments.
You'd only watch CNN. You'd probably think it was true, right?
You'd probably think that the way they characterize Trump and his comments and stuff is actually accurate.
So I felt sorry for him.
All right, there's a rumor that, a continuing rumor, that this is a new one.
Instead of Hillary saying that she wants to be president, the rumor is, speculation really, more than rumor, that she would potentially agree to be Hillary's vice president.
I'm sorry, that Hillary would agree to be Biden's vice president.
Now, I'm going to say not.
Now, here's the thinking, and then I'll tell you why it's cray-cray.
The thinking is that Hillary so wants to beat Trump that she would take the vice president position And then bring the entire Clinton machine to bear, and that would be enough, you know, Biden plus Hillary Clinton.
And maybe it would.
I'm not even saying that wouldn't be a strong package.
It would probably be a pretty strong package.
And the speculation goes that she might want to do that because being the first woman who's vice president is still breaking a barrier, so she would own that.
Here's what I think. She's already said that she's not going to run for president.
I don't think she would say that directly, unless she meant it.
Of course, the play would be that she wouldn't bother running for vice president unless she thought she could run the show from there, or she thought that Biden was going to fade fairly quickly and she would just have the top spot because of constitutional order.
Here's why that's not going to happen.
This is my prediction. I don't believe that Hillary Clinton, from a psychological perspective, from an ego perspective, I predict that she could not accept running for the second spot.
I just don't imagine it.
I also imagine that she's enjoyed not being in government these past years.
It's hard to be that age and be sort of retired and enjoying yourself even though you're giving speeches.
It's all just stuff you want to do and it's just fun and you don't really need the money.
I think she's just enjoying herself.
So the first factor is it's kind of hard to get back in the game after you've been out of it for a while and you're that age.
Secondly, Hillary does not solve Biden's problem.
What's Biden's biggest problem?
He's old. He has said himself that he's going to pick somebody young for his vice president.
I think he means it.
I think he would not pick somebody who would be in their 70s, if elected, if what he's trying to show is that, well, I've got a backup plan because I'm too old.
So it doesn't make sense and it wouldn't get the The minority vote, necessarily.
Although, you know, Clinton did get a lot, so it wouldn't be terrible in that way, but it wouldn't satisfy having a person of color on the ticket.
So I say that Hillary is very unlikely to take a second position, and here's the last reason why.
Imagine if she lost.
Imagine how much it hurt to lose to Trump.
But imagine if she lost twice.
Think of that. What if she lost twice?
That would be devastating.
I don't know that she would put herself in that position.
Let's talk about the coronavirus.
I have a very controversial, provocative thought.
I'd like to say in advance, there's nothing racist about this.
At least nothing intended that way.
So if you misinterpret it that way, that's on you.
And here's the thought. Apparently there is now the first report of somebody dying outside of China from the coronavirus.
And the first thing I looked for, and it was easy to find, is that the first person who died outside of China was ethnically Chinese.
And here's the question. I'm just going to put it as a question right now.
Has anybody who is not ethnically Chinese died from the virus yet?
I know people have gotten it, and I'm sure that would include people who are not ethnically Chinese.
But I kind of need to know that fact before I feel I have a full opinion about what's going on here.
Now, I've heard, and I don't know I don't know if this is completely true or sometimes true or it depends on the situation, but I have heard that there can be different viruses that might affect different ethnicities differently.
Don't take that as a fact.
Take that as something I heard.
But, yeah, most of the people dying are going to be compromised or older, which is sort of the same thing.
But I'm just going to ask the question, is anybody going to die who's not ethnically Chinese?
Because remember one of the mysteries that I've been hammering on?
The mystery was, why was the United States not as concerned as we thought they should be, meaning our government?
Why was our government not that concerned Compared to how concerned we were pretty sure they should have been.
And now apparently they're making the right move and banning travel for a few weeks anyway from China.
So at least our government caught up and got with the program.
Why do you think it could have been slow?
Why do you think the United States government is still saying it's a low risk for our country?
Is it possible?
Just speculation. Is it possible they know that it doesn't transmit as well outside of an ethnic group?
I'm just going to put that out there because some of the conversation is about whether or not there's something unique about this virus.
Could it be man-made?
Could it be weaponized?
etc. Apparently there's no evidence of that.
So the rumors you've seen about it being escaped from a bio lab or something, Apparently there's no evidence of that, but let's keep watching.
Maybe it's me, but there's something about the whole situation that just doesn't smell right beyond the fact that it's an obvious big problem.
There's something about it. I don't know what it is.
You can smell it before you can see it.
In a related story that you would not think is related, but it is, So the U.S. has banned six more countries from being able to enter the United States or be part of the green card lottery as it's known.
So those countries are Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Sudan, Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar, Myanmar.
Literally the first time I've ever said that word, Myanmar, Myanmar.
I've read it many times.
Literally never said it.
All right. So here's why this story about immigration and the coronavirus story are actually the same story.
Because what is the difference between an idea virus and a physical one?
So the reason for banning immigration from these so-called banned countries is that These are places that we imagine bad people could be in the mix and we wouldn't be able to tell if they're bad people.
It's exactly the same as a plane load of people coming in from China.
Regardless of where they're born or what nationality or ethnicity they are, it's a plane load of people and we can't tell Who might be infected with the virus and who can't?
So how do you treat it if there's a big potential risk and you can't tell who's innocent and who's not?
Well, if it's a virus, you quarantine and you temporarily block until you can figure out what's going on, get a handle on it.
If it's the idea virus of being a terrorist, it's exactly the same in effect The effect of it is exactly the same.
It's a big population.
Most of them you assume are fine, just like with the virus.
Plain load of people come in from China.
Almost all of them are going to be free of the virus, but you don't know which ones.
So why is the medical situation so different from the idea virus situation when they both have those same qualities?
Now, I don't like to argue from analogies, but I'm not even sure this is much of an analogy.
It's so exact in terms of how you would handle it.
And now the fact that the United States is handling those two situations roughly similar.
In other words, we're doing something bad for 99% of the people, so we can stop that 1%.
And here's my point.
I believe that it's going to be much easier for the administration to get away with these travel bans from the various countries, the ones that we think have some terrorist risk.
It's going to be a lot easier for that to be accepted by the public because the public thinks in terms of analogies.
The public thinks in terms of stories and Precedents and past examples and patterns.
And since this pattern is being formed with the coronavirus, that pattern is going to, you know, accidentally spill over into immigration.
And here's my prediction.
The outcry over being tougher on immigration is going to be substantially reduced because people watched the coronavirus situation.
And because they agreed that you had to be bad to all the innocent people to stop that 1%, once you've agreed that that's okay to be bad to 99% of the people just to stop the 1%, then it's still okay.
It generalizes, at least in people's minds.
You could argue they're not the same, so you treat them differently.
I wouldn't disagree with you on the The details, but people's minds are going to treat them as the same.
So, that's about all that's going on right now.
I'm going to take some questions. Looks like some people are lining up to ask me some questions.
Let's do them in no particular order.
Cheryl, you're coming at me.
Cheryl? Cheryl, do you have a question?
Cheryl? Cheryl did not have a question.
Cheryl went away.
So I'm going to pick Lina.
Lina, can you hear me?
Hello Lina, do you have a question?
You're live. I am live, but I'm not Cheryl.
I said Lina. Lina?
Do you have a question?
Yes, can you tell me more about how this all...
Yes, can you tell me how that all relates to this anti-vaccine?
Oh, so the question is, how does the coronavirus relate to the vaccination and anti-vaccination?
I'm not sure that we should make too much of that.
I appreciate the argument that says if you're going to be cautious about one thing, you should be cautious about another.
So I think there's a little bit there to make a political argument, but I think you could ignore one when you're working on the other.
So I would just treat them as separate.
There's a little bit in common, but not enough to make something of it.
That's what I'd say. Thank you for the question.
Got a bad connection there anyway.
Let's see if we get a better connection.
From... Aris. So, Aris.
Come at me, Aris, with your question.
Aris? Hello, Aris.
Do you have a question for me? Sales pitch, if you want to let me do that real quick.
Not really. Okay.
Tell me what you were going to sell, and I'll tell you if I want the pitch.
I was going to make the argument that capitalism is already dead, because I have some friends that...
They're more socialist on the socialist side or outright communists.
And I want to get this into a sales pitch form to kind of convince people to kind of drop that a little bit.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't think the audience is ready for that.
But let me engage on that topic.
I have a theory, hypothesis really, that the people who are pushing the deep socialism, the borders on communism and the anarchy and stuff like that, I feel like they're treating it more like a lifestyle and more like theater,
and that if you actually sat anybody down with no witnesses and say, oh, look, look, Bob, I hear what you're saying, I get it, you like to march and stuff, you hate the president, I get it, but do you really think this system would work for the country?
I don't think anybody really thinks it.
So it feels not real.
I have a hard time taking it seriously.
And I'm pretty sure that the serious people in the government don't take it seriously either.
Now, I suppose we could get caught off guard.
It could be that there's a whole generation that's brainwashed to the degree that they don't know it's not serious and that they've bought into it.
So there is risk.
But anyway, thanks for bringing up that point.
I want to hear a little bit more questions so that we can hear more from me.
Thank you. Alright, so the reason I didn't want to do that is I know most of you are watching these periscopes because you want to hear more from me and wherever that's the case.
Cassandra, are you there?
Good morning. Do you have a question for me?
I'll tell you how much I love you and our simultaneous sips in the morning and how much I appreciate you.
Well, thank you. Thanks for telling me.
I appreciate all of you too.
And I'm going to take your question now, Cassandra, but thank you for that.
Have the best day.
You too. All right.
Let's get some questions here.
Be provocative. Come on.
Give me a hard time.
Joshua, I know you can do it.
Joshua, do you have a question for me?
Yes.
Thanks for having me on it.
I appreciate it. My pleasure.
What's your question? As I'm reading the books, I've read all your recent books with you.
Can you just tell me which one has been your favorite and which one you think they would be good for my kids as they were growing up to read?
Which of my books is my favorite?
That would depend on what What aspects of it you're going to talk about.
But my book, Had It Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I hear from people.
I've been wondering how to even tell this story in public.
And I think I can start to tell it now because there are enough people who would back me on it that it doesn't sound crazy.
Every day, I hear from people who read that book, sometimes a few years ago, and tell me that it's changed their lives.
I've heard people losing 80 pounds, people getting off of opioids.
I've heard people getting huge raises, changing their social life around, going from depressed to happy.
I mean, ridiculous stuff, really.
I mean, such kinds of improvements that It's a little bit mind-boggling and I don't even know how to process it.
It's more than I would have ever imagined.
Now, why I like that, not just because people are having great experiences by it, but I wrote it for that purpose.
And there was sort of a deeper purpose on top of that.
I mean, it was meant for anybody to read to improve their life and it appears to be working very well for that.
But it was written specifically for my, at the time, 14-year-old stepson as a way to capture everything I knew in a friendly form that I thought I could get him to read.
He did not finish that book before he died of a fentanyl overdose, but it was written for him for a very special purpose, so I guess I had more of my heart and soul into that book, because even though I was writing it for the public, It's often the case that you write a book for one audience, an audience of one, with the assumption that that is generalizable.
And it was written for that one person, my stepson.
And he's not with us anymore.
So when I hear other people whose lives have been changed, it gives meaning.
It gives meaning to the effort.
It gives meaning to my stepson's life.
Because I'm not sure I would have written it the same or maybe as well.
If I hadn't been writing it for, you know, somebody that I cared about that much.
So, that one's the most meaningful for me, and if you were going to, sort of looking for a starting point for my books that are non-Dilbert books, that's where I would go.
Yeah, that's the one that I read as I started my real estate journey, so thank you so much.
So, yeah, you're another example.
A lot of people telling me that the Talent stack idea and the systems over goals are just life-changing concepts.
Absolutely. That's what I was hoping.
Thank you so much for your question.
Thank you. The reason I have trouble talking about it is that it doesn't sound believable.
If you actually saw the types of messages I'm getting, they don't translate.
If I simply told you what people are telling me, I don't think you'd believe it because they're so ridiculously Transformational, you know, people have changed in very fundamental ways.
All right, caller, can you hear me?
Hey, do you have a question for me?
Any tips about that?
Yeah, I'm an expert.
I've been divorced once.
So I would give you these tips.
You've probably at some point, you could correct me if I'm wrong, talked yourself into the fact that you could never be happy again because you found that one love and it didn't work out and how can you move on?
I would give you this one advice.
I don't know anybody over my entire life.
I've never met anybody who got a divorce and then five years after the divorce said, you know, I wish I hadn't gotten that divorce.
I've never heard of it.
Not a single time.
By the time people make this change, it's time for the change because it's so hard.
Getting a divorce is so much work.
It's so much pain that nobody does it until they're ready.
I'm going to guess you're ready.
Are you ready? Oh, yeah.
I'm actually kind of enjoying the process.
Yeah, enjoying the process.
I can tell you that the first year after being married, when I could wake up and do anything I wanted, just anything I wanted, as long as it was legal, It's an amazing feeling, and I enjoyed it, but you also get to the point where you need something more substantial.
It's sort of like, hey, you're off your diet, you can eat all the junk food you want, so for a couple of weeks you're gorging on junk food, but eventually you say, you know, this isn't the way I want to live my whole life.
Some people might, but it wasn't fulfilling to me, so I'm engaged again.
I'm very happy about it.
So good luck to you. I think your future life looks better than your past.
Well, congratulations on your engagement.
Thank you. Take care.
All right. Let's see what else we got here.
It's funny. I look at your faces before I choose somebody.
I'm trying to pick somebody who will challenge me the most.
Let me see if I Picked correctly.
Hello caller, can you hear me?
Can you hear me? Hi, this is Damon.
I'm calling you from Denmark.
Hi Damon from Denmark.
Do you have a question for me? Yeah, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on this whole virus and it being a bioweapon and having patent on it and all that.
Yeah, I just wanted to know what are your thoughts on it.
Is it something politics or something?
Well, you're talking about the coronavirus?
Coronavirus, yeah. There's no evidence that I've seen, in the news anyway, that it's a bioweapon.
But there is just something about this.
There are all kinds of things that make this a little different.
One is that it seems to be affecting people in China more than here, but it's too early to say that's real versus it's just early in the process.
Secondly, The rate of growth looks unnatural, meaning that you'd expect a bioengineered virus to be more viral than something else because you would make it that way.
It's so extreme And it probably is way worse in China than it's being reported.
I think almost certainly we can say that.
That just the extent of it is concerning.
Because we know we could make such a thing.
But it doesn't make sense that China would make a weapon and use it against itself.
I can't really see some other country trying to infect China in this way.
We do some bad stuff to each other.
The theory that I like.
Like is the wrong word because it would be terrible.
Let me take back like.
The theory that, and this would just be a conspiracy theory, we've talked about how the fentanyl coming from China is revenge for the opium wars.
A lot of people say that.
You can imagine, again, this is just, I'm just None of this has any evidence.
So nothing I say next should be taken too seriously.
But could there be somebody who knew how to make a virus who had a family member die of fentanyl?
Just put that out there.
What are the odds that given, I don't know, 50,000 Americans and who knows how many from Europe or whatever, maybe in China too, How many people have died from illegal fentanyl that came from China?
Just a question. With all those people, was there even one person who was a surviving, let's say, family member of all those people who were killed by Chinese fentanyl, was there even one of those people who knew how to make a virus that would kill mostly ethnic Chinese people?
I hope not.
I certainly don't want to live in a world where that happened, but you can't rule it out.
You can't rule it out. You know, 50,000 people would touch a population of, I don't know, maybe a million people would be a family member of those people who died.
If you count, it's 50,000 a year, so that adds up pretty quickly.
Probably at least a million people.
And of a million people, is there not one of them who is willing to engineer a virus and drop it off in China?
Probably not. If I had to bet on it, I would very easily bet that it did not happen.
It's just an ordinary virus like every other one.
But because of the crazy way the world is, you have to ask yourself that question.
You can't rule it out on the surface.
Now, of course, I don't know how hard it would be to bioengineer a virus like that, so maybe it's so hard that that's a ridiculous theory.
But I'll put it out there. Anyway, that's all I got to say on that.
I don't think we're going to find out it's any kind of bioengineered weapon.
But it's terrible that we can't rule it out.
Exactly. All right, Scott.
Thank you very much.
And just one thing to note.
In Denmark, there's been, as far as I have heard, there's been two cases of the virus, but there's still no China ban.
And that's kind of weird. I just want every country to ban China or the flights until we know what's going on.
But nothing's happening here.
It seems like an enormous political risk because every leader that does not do a ban has to answer why the other countries did.
And if the countries that did the ban have a measurably better outcome than the people who didn't, I don't know how those leaders keep their jobs.
I really don't. To me, that would be a lose-your-job decision because you're seeing the other people doing it the right way.
And I would have said the same thing about Trump.
I think he was way too slow on this, but if he hadn't done it at all, you'd have to ask yourself if he's your president for the next cycle.
Anyway, thanks, Damon. Yeah, you too.
Bye. All right, let's take some more.
Barry looks like he's got something to say.
Barry? Barry, can you hear me?
Hey, what's your question, Barry?
I have a question about what loser think.
In the book, you say there's about a dozen opinion shapers in the country, about six on either side.
You revealed on Twitter that Zucker is probably one on the left.
Can you talk about who the opinion shapers are?
Well, it was more of a conceptual point and it's based on observation.
One of the things that happens when you start dealing in politics and you become, let's say, somewhat notorious, as has happened to me in the last few years, is you start learning things about the nature of reality that are very disturbing and can't be communicated.
They actually can't be communicated.
So there are things I know that I just can't tell you.
And I know they're true.
I mean, they are by their nature something you can determine to be true independently and you don't have to wonder about it.
But the real way the world works is that there are just some people who determine what the news is.
And then within politics, a few people who determine Who's going to run?
Who gets what money? Etc.
Now, there are lots of people who are playing in that game, hundreds and hundreds and thousands, but I believe that the ones who are best at it and the ones who have the positions where they have the most influence, like Jeff Zucker at CNN, He can literally determine what CNN considers the news that day.
As I was talking earlier in the Periscope, they've decided that their news will be to misinterpret what Alan Dershowitz said, so they can continue the fake news that the impeachment was illegitimate, etc.
Probably somebody at the New York Times has that power.
Probably one or two people at MSNBC. And then, of course, Washington Post.
So you very quickly, after the first five or six media outlets, you get down to people who are just not that important.
Once you're down to the third or fourth level of news outlet, they're not news makers.
The firms like CNN and New York Times and Washington Post are considered the ones who decide what the others cover.
There are about six on each side.
Now Trump, of course, is one of the people who just is shaping reality.
And they're probably, I don't know, I couldn't name them, but they're probably half a dozen people who advise him or have some influence on the process.
You know, somebody at Fox News, obviously, etc.
So yeah, something like 12 people are the ones who have the most influence over everything.
Not the only influence, but by far the 80-20 influence.
Does that answer your question?
Oh, you went away.
I lost him. All right, let's look at...
I'm going to take Carl.
Carl, can you hear me?
Carl? Carl?
Hi, do you have a question for me, Carl?
At one time you said the slaughter meter was at 0% that Trump would win because of the media, and I never heard you explain why you took it back to 100% the other direction.
I don't remember what I was saying when I said it was 0%.
I don't remember the context for that.
The media was going to kill him.
They decided all the media and all the social networks were against him, and he had no chance to beat all that.
You were saying that for a while.
That doesn't even sound like something I've said, so I can't speak to that, but I'll tell you what the current slaughter meter is at.
I think it's over 100%.
Sometimes I jokingly say it's 400% or whatever, but I can't see a scenario where he loses because the illusion Is that the Democrats have an idea of an ideal candidate, which might have a name. They might say, my ideal candidate is Bernie or Biden or whatever.
But they have sort of an idealized version of their team.
Trump hasn't even started.
As soon as Trump has one individual target, and more importantly, all of the opposition research has one target, and it's going to be a bloodbath.
I think Trump Is going to just destroy whoever it is.
Now at the moment, he's laying down suppressive fire.
He's sort of hitting everybody who does well in the polls.
So he's going after what he calls mini Mike Bloomberg now, who as Trump said at his rally, I've had it up to here with him.
So apparently he's going after mostly his height.
Now if somebody had said this 10 years ago, That a politician is going to strictly focus on his opponent's height.
You'd say, well, he's not going to win with that.
But we did watch him take out the entire Bush dynasty with one word or two, low energy.
So could the height thing work against Bloomberg?
It might, but you won't know because he's gaining in the polls because he's spending a lot of money, so you don't know if he would have done even better if not for Trump's attacks.
That we'll never know. I just don't see anybody in the race giving him a serious competition, so 100% plus.
Thanks for the question. All right, let's take Nancy.
Nancy looks like she's enjoyed a simultaneous sip or two.
Nancy, do you have a question for me?
Nancy, do you have your mute on your phone?
Because I can't hear you.
Nancy, we're going to move on.
You missed your chance. Let's try.
Let's try. Facts are safe.
Facts are safe. Can you hear me?
Do you have a question for me?
All right, so I've learned from the master, obviously, but I want to know, when in Trump's second term do we seriously start talking about repealing the 22nd amendment?
Remind me what the 22nd amendment is.
Term limits for presidents.
We're never going to talk seriously about that.
I could easily see Trump supporters, and even Trump himself, running that as a four-year practical joke, because it would be a practical joke.
At least half the country would believe it's true.
But I've never met, have you?
Have you ever met even one Republican or one Trump supporter?
Have you met even one?
Who would seriously be okay with him staying beyond two limits?
Not one, right? What's going to happen to CNN's business model afterwards?
No, but seriously, answer to the question.
Have you met even one who would seriously want that?
Like, it's a joke, but anybody really wants that?
I don't think so. I doubt it.
You know, if for no other reason he'd be too old.
All right, but thanks for the question.
All right. Let's go with Perry.
What's your name, Perry?
Perry, are you there? Perry.
Hi. Do you have a question for me?
I'm wondering why in the trial the President's attorneys never brought up the fact that You know, first of all, the Obama administration spied on a candidate because the FISA court already had come out and said that two of the four applications are invalid.
But what's that got to do with the Ukraine situation?
Well, that's what I was going to say, too.
I mean, I know it kind of sounds like whataboutism, but it sounds like even the president's attorneys are – what's that term, pass the sale?
Where they're just assuming Russia even meddled.
There still isn't a shred of evidence in the Mueller report or anywhere that Russia even meddled.
No, that's not true. That's not true.
You apparently have been stuck in a news silo.
It is not true that there's no evidence of Russian meddling.
I'm not saying the evidence is accurate.
I'm just saying that there's plenty of evidence that their troll farm was doing something extraordinarily trivial, but they seem to know.
Beyond that, there's a question of the hacker who got the emails.
So far, the government seems to be unified in saying that those were Russian hackers, so much so that they know the names of the organization and the people who were involved and they have details.
Now, I don't know that you could say those have to be true.
But it is an absolute false statement to say there's no evidence of Russia interfering in the election, because those two pieces of evidence are the official government positions.
So it could be not true, but there's certainly evidence.
Right, it wasn't the Russian government that did the ads.
And then, as far as the hacking goes, they didn't give us any evidence.
They're just telling us, basically.
Well, there's an assumption with the ads that the guy who owns the troll farm is a good buddy with Putin.
So that part we know. So the odds that he would do this without Putin's support Seems low, which is the thinking.
Now I happen to think that's not necessarily the case.
Meaning if you're a troll farm, you probably take contracts from whoever is going to pay you.
So if the manager of the troll farm got a contract and said, hey, can you make, it doesn't matter who it came from, Can you make a bunch of fake ads and do this?
They'd probably just say yes, because it's just a job.
I'm not positive that the troll farm was coordinating with Putin, but they're Russian, and they are associated with an oligarch, and you'd have to say that the oligarchs are part of the government effectively, even though not officially, effectively they are.
I can see the validity of the accusation.
Well, a judge actually ruled that Mueller was not allowed to say that they were associated with the government because there is no evidence.
He wasn't even saying that.
That's right. There's no direct evidence.
But the argument is still strong that we know the person who owned it is connected to him.
Yeah, I have my suspicions about that as well.
I think they probably just didn't want to bring the Mueller stuff in there too much.
It was just a distraction.
It wasn't directly on point, I think.
Everyone should watch Ukraine Revealed by Oliver Stone.
Amazing film that will teach us all a lot.
I'll take a look at that. Thank you.
Bye-bye. Bye. All right.
Let's take another question or so.
Michael? Michael Cantor?
Come at me, Michael. Our technology did not work.
Fail? Or Michael went away?
Let's talk to Doc.
Doc Wilson, are you there?
Doc Wilson went away.
Maybe it's Periscope itself.
Could be that these people didn't really want to talk to me.
That's the other possibility.
Let's do Jordan.
I'm intentionally picking men with beards.
Jordan, are you there? Do you have a question for me?
I started dating a girl. She is a moderate, so she voted for Rami.
Can you turn down...
I think you've got some volume up on something, so I'm getting some feedback.
Is that better? That's better.
Now, you're dating a girl, and?
So, she's a moderate, so she voted for Rami, so Obama.
But she has a thing against Trump, so she considers Trump negative for women.
So, I'm really wanting...
Good persuasion advice to go ahead and try to sway her.
Protection. So you should go with the protection persuasion.
If you were a woman, imagine going outside and every time you walk outside, no matter where you are, you walk outside and you're basically in danger.
Because men are dangerous to women in a way that they're not exactly dangerous to other men.
So I don't live in that world because I'm never afraid anywhere I go, just period.
Because if you're a man, it just doesn't come up that often.
But women are in a perpetual Worried about security.
About physical safety.
And they have to be. It makes perfect sense.
So that's probably the most base thing you could do.
So if you make the argument that Trump is all about that, which he is.
He's all about military being so big that nobody will mess with us.
He doesn't want to start a war.
He'd rather finish them.
He'd rather kill the terrorists so the terrorists doesn't come here.
He'd rather be strong on crime.
There's probably nothing that women need more than to know that the government and society is going to protect them.
I would go with protection.
I would contrast that, since she's not going to have a choice of voting for Romney, for example, contrast that with what any of the progressives will offer, which is really risky.
It's risky for the economy, which could be more dangerous for women.
It's risky for security, because he would probably open the borders and reduce the size of the military.
I would go for the danger element.
I think that's real. I would consider that such a perfectly valid point that you would never be worried about being disingenuous.
That's the way I'd go.
I'd go with risky and dangerous.
And Trump, before people thought he might be risky and dangerous, but now we have some track record.
He's put the economy where you need it, got his trade deals.
And I was going to mention earlier, what does the public think about the fact that it's been a few years now that we've had these bans on the countries that we can't vet the terrorists?
We haven't really had a major terrorist attack in this country.
Now, those are not necessarily related.
It's not a one-to-one relationship.
But in people's minds, they're going to say, okay, I really hated it because he was going to do something more extreme than I thought was prudent.
But I've got to say, it looks like something's working, whether it's that alone or that plus other things.
So I think in people's minds, it's going to look better as time goes on.
So that's my best answer.
Thanks for the question. Thank you, Scott.
Have a nice day. You too.
All right. Let's take another one.
Christy. Christy, do you have a question for me?
Christy is not there. I will find somebody who is there.
Matt Cannon. What a name.
I'd like my last name to be Cannon too.
Matt, can you hear me? Do you have a question for me, Matt?
I do. And first of all, I just want to say your simultaneous sip is pretty crazy.
The other day I was in a meeting and I got out around 10 o'clock and I was trying to get away to get the sip and I missed it.
And then today you purposely, I think, made the sip go a little bit later.
So I thought that was pretty slick of you to do that.
I don't know if that was direct or if it was an accident.
Well, that was a little bit of an accident today because I was doing the waitlist thing in the beginning.
But the science says that addiction is caused by unpredictable rewards.
So if you knew that the simultaneous sip would happen every day for sure, it would be less addictive than if you have some scares or you miss one, you know, that sort of thing.
So anyway, what was your question?
My question is, I was going to first ask a shoe-on-the-other-foot test question about Alan Dershowitz, but I figure since today is Groundhog Day and it's a palindrome, do you have any thoughts on that, that today is 02-02-2020, which is the same forward and backward, as well as being Groundhog Day?
And we're in a simulation with you, too.
I'm generally oblivious to random digital coincidences, so I don't have a comment about that other than we humans love to find patterns even when there's nothing interesting there.
So no, not much to say about that, but thanks for the question.
All right, let's find another one.
Let's talk to...
Some of you have very funny names.
I'm going to go to, oops, Bob.
I think Bob wants to ask me a question.
Bob, are you there? Bob, do you have a question for me?
I can, go ahead.
I've read all your books, and I love them, that's not a question.
But my question to you is, what books do you read for entertainment?
Or what periodicals, or more generally, what do you read for entertainment?
Oh, you know, it's embarrassing to say, but there have been years in my life where I've written more books than I've read.
And that's literally true.
I've sometimes published two or three books in a year and read one.
Part of it is that my attention span has reduced, just as most of you have, because of modern life.
So reading a whole book is hard for me.
I also have a physical difficulty reading books, which is that I fall asleep.
When I read on the plane, I'm not good for more than four pages and I'm sound asleep.
It doesn't matter what the book is, it doesn't matter how interesting, four pages and I fall asleep.
I think the problem is, if I had to guess, I'm visual and I like lots of Lots of inputs.
And even though I'm a very fast reader, literally studied speed reading.
I mean, I can read very quickly, but I can't read nearly as quickly as I think.
So when I'm reading, I feel like I'm in mental jail because my desire for input is so much greater than the amount I can get by reading.
That I feel just deprived.
And I'm just starved of intellectual excitement.
And I just fall asleep.
I just fall asleep.
So for me, reading a whole book is hard.
But the alternative is that I read a tremendous amount of stuff, mostly online.
But I do a quick dip.
I'll see an article and I'll say, oh, that's something I didn't know about, let's say, how viruses spread.
And I'll jump through that article, pick out the few points, and then move on to the next one.
So I can get these mini lessons from news articles and articles about topics and Googling stuff.
But if you read a whole book, I hate to say it, but not every book is filled with winning pages.
But if I'm picking on the internet what to read, I get a winner almost every time because you can kind of tell right away if it's something that you'll find interesting.
That's my answer. I don't read a lot of books, but the ones that have influenced me the most are, ironically, one is named Influence.
Thinking, Fast and Small, those kinds of books are transformational.
So I hope that was a partial answer.
I'm just not the one to recommend books.
But if you want to read about persuasion, Google Persuasion Reading List, and you'll see the list of books that I can read.
Alright, let's take one more.
Let's make it good.
I need the best question-asker of all times.
It's going to be Riquet?
Riquet, can you hear me?
Riquet, do you have a question?
Good. What's your question?
I wanted to ask you about Latin America and the Americas, right?
Originally, the area around the United States, which I believe has been put on the back burner for way too long.
I know that China is very important and everything, but there's a lot happening on this side of the world and it's actually affecting us in terms of the border of fentanyl, right?
Also, when it comes to maybe Iranian influence in Venezuela, Cuba's influence around the region, what can I do?
How can I persuade people, etc.?
Yeah, you know, I would say I'm not an expert on anything south of our border, but I've had the same feeling that you have, which is that it would be in our best national interest to make sure that our closest neighbors are doing as well as possible and there's, you know, less crime and cartels and stuff.
So it does feel like our resources have been in the wrong place.
Now, there was reason for that, because we needed oil, but now that we're Not dependent on Middle East oil.
I would say the natural arc of history is that we'll move out of there and I think we're going to end up getting more interested in things south of the border but maybe that's wishful thinking.
But I agree with you. We should be working more directly on improving things south of the border for our own self-interest.
That's where our greatest interest is.
Thanks for the question. No problem.
Thank you. Alright, I think I've done it all for today.
I hope you're going to enjoy the Super Bowl, and I'll be maybe dipping into that a little bit and watching it.