My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: A back-to-work prediction Back to work models, considerations and decisions Digital pressers suggestion by John Nolte, Breitbart Experts at spotting BS from other experts President Trump's skill at provoking the enemy press --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Come on in. It's only been 12 hours since you saw me last. | |
| 11 if you really think about it. | |
| And I think it's time for more of this. | |
| There's a reason you come here. | |
| It's because it's so darn good. | |
| Get your day kicked off in just the right way. | |
| And might I add, not many commercials. | |
| Have you tried watching anything that has commercials lately? | |
| We'll talk about that in a minute. | |
| But first, first, let's do the important stuff first. | |
| And in order to be prepared for the important stuff, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. | |
| And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hint of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including your pandemics. | |
| It's called the simultaneous sip. | |
| Happens now. Go! | |
| Hmm, just as good as I thought it would be. | |
| Never disappointed. | |
| Speaking of attention spans, Have you tried to watch anything in the form of entertainment lately? | |
| It's really hard. | |
| For example, I've had this experience recently, and maybe you've had it too. | |
| I'll hear of a movie, and I'll say, I got some free time because of this quarantine situation. | |
| I'm going to watch me a movie. | |
| And then this happens. | |
| All right, where will I watch the movie? | |
| Will it be on a device? | |
| If it is, I've got to find a device. | |
| I might have to plug it in. | |
| I've got to find which device already has the app on it that I want to stream the service. | |
| Some of my devices have different apps. | |
| So I sort that out, and then it needs to be charged. | |
| So I've got to find my charger. | |
| I find my charger. And then I need my headphones. | |
| But my headphones aren't charged, so I've got to charge my headphones. | |
| So I'm 20 minutes into it, and all I've done is figure out which device I'm going to watch. | |
| Let's say I've decided I'll watch it on the television. | |
| So I go to the television and I say, um, which streaming service is that? | |
| Because I got the Xfinity, but I got Netflix. | |
| It might be on Amazon. | |
| Is it on Hulu? And then I start looking for it. | |
| And then I can't find it. | |
| And then it's like, oh, it's on the other service. | |
| So I go to the other service, and for some reason the password doesn't work. | |
| Now I have to recover a password. | |
| But I'm watching television, so I have to go get a device to recover the password. | |
| And then I start, you know, looking for things. | |
| And it takes forever. | |
| And then I start it. | |
| I tried to watch this Tiger King thing. | |
| So, you know, I go through the process, and it's 30 minutes in, and I haven't watched anything yet. | |
| 30 minutes of work. | |
| And I have no entertainment. | |
| All I've done is prepare myself to maybe get entertained 30 minutes later. | |
| And do you know what happens after 30 minutes of anything? | |
| Doesn't matter what I'm doing. | |
| Getting ready to watch a movie. | |
| No matter what it is. | |
| Do you know what happens after 30 minutes? | |
| I bail out. | |
| Because 30 minutes is way too long to spend on anything. | |
| You know, our attention spans have shrunk so much. | |
| I can't spend half an hour just deciding what movie to watch. | |
| It's way too hard. | |
| So I find that I watch very little because the setup time takes too long. | |
| Have you tried to watch, say, an HBO show lately? | |
| That if you try to watch it in real time and it's not recorded... | |
| And you turn it on and that long HBO introduction comes on. | |
| It's like there's orchestra music and there's, you know, there's visuals and graphics and everything. | |
| And you just sit there thinking, I really just wanted to watch the content. | |
| Okay, I'm not really getting anything out of the 20 minutes I have to watch the opening credits. | |
| And music. I'm very impressed with it all. | |
| You did a good job. | |
| I'll watch it once. I'll watch it once. | |
| But if it's a series, I can't watch that twice. | |
| So my observation is that things like books and movies could be largely obsolete within just a few years, not because they changed, Well, they did. | |
| They're harder now because there are more levels and options and things just to do a simple thing. | |
| But I think our attention spans are way too short now. | |
| I also tried to do something last night that I advise you not to do, and I reminded myself why you should not do it. | |
| So it's, I don't know, 9 o'clock at night last night. | |
| Had a long day. | |
| I started to work at, I don't know, 2 or 3 in the morning, which is not unusual when I control my own hours. | |
| And so by 9 o'clock at night, I'm ready to go down, but I'm thinking, yeah, I think I'll try to watch something. | |
| So I call up, you know, it doesn't matter what show, and I try to watch, you know, a movie a little bit before I drift off to sleep. | |
| Now, I tell you, never do that, because you don't want to associate your sleeping routine and being in bed with anything entertaining, unless it's with your partner, because you don't want the bed to be associated with excitement and entertainment. | |
| You want it to be associated with sleep as much as possible. | |
| So I violated my own rule to try to watch a movie, and I think I got 60 seconds into it, and I could tell my entire body was on fire. | |
| Like with stress. Because the whole point of a movie, unless it's a comedy, and even comedies have this problem, at least by the third act, the point of a movie is watching somebody who's got a big problem, and then they try to solve it. | |
| But until they solve it, they're in danger, things are happening to them, they're going to get killed, they're losing their money, they lose their love life. | |
| And I'm thinking, why in the world am I subjecting myself to this? | |
| I get that there's a payoff later, and I'll feel good when the hero survives. | |
| But I've got to watch, what, two full hours of bad news to get to that little good feeling that isn't going to last that long anyway? | |
| There's no way that payoff makes sense. | |
| There's just no way. So I bailed out and watched 10 minutes of a movie, and I wish I'd watched zero of it. | |
| So take my advice. | |
| Don't follow what I do. | |
| Alright, here's a thought experiment for you. | |
| Now, don't read too much into the thought experiment, because I'll acknowledge in advance that it's not a real-world thing. | |
| You couldn't actually do it, and it doesn't apply directly to the point I'm going to make. | |
| But it's still educational. | |
| It'll help you understand your world a little bit better. | |
| It's not the answer, but it'll give you a little context, and it goes like this. | |
| Imagine that instead of the coronavirus, let's say there had been no coronavirus, and instead the government of this country, and other countries too, has simply stated a year ago that there will be a two-month forced vacation for everybody except essential services. | |
| They said it's going to be March and April, it'll be two months, everybody has to stay home, can't even go on vacation. | |
| What would happen to the economy Once we got back, would it be a depression? | |
| If it were planned, it was all planned, would you come back to a depression because you had a two-month pause? | |
| So your intuition is kicking in right now and you're saying to yourself, I don't think it would be. | |
| Because everybody would just go back to work and the worst case scenario is that you, as long as everybody ate, you know, if they had enough to eat for two months, the worst case scenario is that People just go back to work. | |
| They got a little debt that they wish they didn't have. | |
| Maybe some of it's forgiven, however you work that out. | |
| But we kind of fairly quickly get back to work. | |
| Maybe a year later, you'd probably be back to steam. | |
| One year, I think. Now, that's not exactly like this situation, right? | |
| Because in this situation, there are entire industries that are just going to be decimated, and so that's different. | |
| So servers, for example, don't get to just go back to work. | |
| They might not have a job. | |
| I don't get to go back to work to what my old career was, because I think 75% of newspapers will be out of business in a few months. | |
| So my career will change too. | |
| So my thought experiment is not like the coronavirus thing, because we didn't prepare for it in the same way, and we can't just walk right back into our old jobs. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| A lot of us can. | |
| A lot of people can. | |
| They can just walk back into their job like they took a two-month vacation. | |
| So my prediction is that we'll get back to good business faster than a lot of experts are going to predict. | |
| And I always make my predictions based on the thing that you don't see coming. | |
| In other words, I'm not straight lining it. | |
| If I were to straight line my prediction and say, based on what we know now, and if we didn't learn anything new, it would look pretty bad. | |
| That's true. But all of these predictions have the same problem. | |
| Which is, there are all kinds of things you didn't see would happen, surprisingly happened. | |
| And a lot of it has to do with innovation and people inventing ways to solve things. | |
| For example, I just said that restaurants couldn't possibly open up. | |
| Is that true? I mean, is it? | |
| Is it true that there's no way a restaurant can open up, let's say, in a month or so when other people can go back to work? | |
| Because it would be people in a tight space? | |
| I don't know. I think that's exactly the sort of thing that could end up changing. | |
| So I said before that since the warm weather is coming anyway, could the local towns say, Okay, okay, it's an emergency, so we're going to loosen up on some of our restaurant restrictions. | |
| And you can put your tables outdoors. | |
| You can put your tables in a parking lot. | |
| You can take your dog to eat as long as it's outdoors. | |
| We'll even put tables right out into the street. | |
| And maybe close off some blocks so the restaurants can do that. | |
| You'll just park somewhere else. | |
| So if you don't assume that people will figure out how to adjust, then yeah, it's a depression. | |
| Yeah. If nobody can figure out how to adjust, we're in trouble. | |
| But that's not the world you live in. | |
| In the real world, People will make massive, flexible adjustments. | |
| They'll be trying everything, and people will be watching what other people try. | |
| They'll say, oh, that looks like a good idea. | |
| So, it's thoroughly unpredictable, but I always err on the side of saying, I think it'll be better than the worst case. | |
| Like, a lot better than the worst case. | |
| And I'm still going to stick with that. | |
| Doesn't mean it'll be good, but much, much better than the worst case. | |
| I have an ongoing sort of Twitter conversation with Adam Townsend, who's now, I think, my favorite person to disagree with. | |
| It's annoying to disagree with people who are dumb and don't have good reasons, but I find it kind of exciting to disagree with people who I think really know what they're talking about and are smart. | |
| Because it means I might learn something. | |
| Because whatever I'm thinking, somebody smart and well-informed is thinking something different. | |
| I better find out what that is, right? | |
| So with all due respect to Adam Townsend, we have a difference of opinion, and it goes like this. | |
| And I hate trying to characterize somebody else's opinion, because you never get it exactly the way they would say it. | |
| So I'm going to say, I think this is close. | |
| But if it's wrong, I apologize. | |
| And the idea is that closing down the economy was at least potentially unwise. | |
| And Adam offered this clarification when I questioned it on Twitter today. | |
| And this is what he said. | |
| He said, I never argued against a pandemic prophylactic response. | |
| So he never argued that we shouldn't close things down. | |
| And then he goes on, he said, I argued lack of economic models commensurate with trillions of dollars of shutdown and that we've seen imperfect data extrapolated to where it showed disaster by failing to count all of this and exaggerating all that. | |
| So if I can summarize that, he's saying that the data that we're using to make these decisions is terribly flawed. | |
| I think we all agree with that, right? | |
| The data is terribly flawed. | |
| And then he points out that there's no economic model that sort of captures all the badness and goodness of closing down the economy. | |
| What we have instead is just sort of a scientific health model. | |
| So we have plenty of models that show how many people die with or without social distancing, etc. | |
| But Adam correctly points out that we don't have any kind of an economic model That tells you what happens if you close stuff down. | |
| Now here's where Adam and I disagree. | |
| And I don't think we're going to be able to close the distance on this disagreement. | |
| And it goes like this. | |
| There's no way to make an economic model that would capture this. | |
| Can't be done. Now you could build one, and you could tell the public you built one, and you could get people to believe it. | |
| But it wouldn't be real. | |
| The complexity of this is way beyond, way beyond what anybody can reasonably model. | |
| It's way beyond. It's not even close to something that, you know, the smartest person in the world with all of the best resources could even get close to. | |
| It would just be a guess on a spreadsheet, basically. | |
| It would be just a guess. | |
| So, the thing that Adam wants, I want too. | |
| I would love. | |
| A credible economic model. | |
| So we can say, well, if you go this way, you get this. | |
| If you go this way, you get that. | |
| But it's not possible. | |
| It's well beyond. | |
| It's not even close to possible. | |
| It's in a different zip code with possible. | |
| If it were just hard I'd say, well, it's a crisis. | |
| I don't care how hard it is. | |
| Put a team together. Get the best people in the world. | |
| Give them everything they need. | |
| I don't care how hard it is. | |
| Make it work. But it's not hard. | |
| It's actually just not possible. | |
| Now, I come at this from years of experience doing financial modeling. | |
| So it's what I did in my day job. | |
| You hear it too much. | |
| I've got a degree in economics and an MBA. So I know a little bit of what I'm talking about. | |
| I did it professionally, on a smaller scale. | |
| In my case, I was projecting what would happen to a company under different economic scenarios. | |
| So this would be much harder, because the economy has got far more variables, and that's the big problem, way too many variables. | |
| So here's where Adam and I disagree. | |
| I don't think that there was an option of having good data, and I don't think there was an option, or even good enough, because I'm totally in favor of using, you know, directionally accurate data. | |
| So if all of your guesses still point in the same direction, it's still useful that you studied it. | |
| If you study it and sometimes it points in different directions, you've got another problem. | |
| So here's what I think. | |
| I think the whole question of closing the economy down and how long you close it and how you open it up and the trade-off with the deaths and the politics of it, I don't think it can be modeled. | |
| Not even close. | |
| And it's one of those cases where real leadership matters. | |
| That is, somebody's going to have to peer into this fog of uncertainty, and here's what you don't get to say. | |
| Hey, I wish there were no fog. | |
| Well, you can wish it. | |
| We all wish that, but it's not real. | |
| And if you wait, there's not going to be less fog. | |
| I mean, maybe in trivial ways, but you're still not going to know. | |
| So the real leadership question is, how do you make one of the most important decisions in the history of humankind? | |
| And I think this is one of those. | |
| Whatever decision Trump comes up with, ultimately, about going back to work, will be one of the biggest decisions in all of humanity. | |
| It's true. For a single decision. | |
| There are lots of things more important, maybe, but there was lots of people making lots of decisions. | |
| I don't know if we've ever seen one person make a decision with this weight. | |
| Obviously, experts will help. | |
| In a situation where you can't have a model that tells you what to do, there's extreme uncertainty. | |
| It's life and death. | |
| I mean, it's the biggest stakes you could possibly have. | |
| What do you do? So how do you make a decision? | |
| Well, I'll give you some hints. | |
| The first thing you do is look for ways you could test it small. | |
| Ever hear me say that before? | |
| So, for example, in this case, instead of saying, let's send everybody back to work under these criteria, you could say, how about this week, we send everybody in Toledo back to work, and we'll ask you not to do any traveling. | |
| Because we just want to see what Toledo looks like. | |
| Let's just run that for a week. | |
| Just see what it looks like. | |
| You might have to run it for two weeks for infected people to start showing up. | |
| But if you can test it, I'm not sure it's practical, but it feels like it might be a little bit. | |
| If you could test it somewhere, go ahead and test it. | |
| Then you don't have to wonder which way to go. | |
| Just test it. The other thing is, you can decide who takes the hit. | |
| For example, we could say, we're going to close the economy, and if you can't eat, well, that's on you. | |
| And that would put the heat all on people who didn't have money, and that would be his own set of problems politically, morally, and everything else. | |
| So you can make decisions based on who gets hurt the most, even if you don't know how it all plays out. | |
| So, for example, the government seems to have made the decision that it will put pressure on the rich, basically. | |
| Because it's the rich who ultimately will pay any debt that we run up. | |
| It's the rich who are being asked to retain employees. | |
| It's the rich who are going to lose half of their net worth. | |
| They're still going to be rich so you don't feel bad about them. | |
| But it looks like the government is putting so much as they can, shifting it toward the rich, shifting it toward banks. | |
| Now that would be a good decision. | |
| Even if you don't know how everything plays out, it still makes more sense to put your risk in the banks. | |
| Now, you say to yourself, my God, you don't want to put risk in the banks, because if the banks fail, it's all done. | |
| But I would suggest flip that around. | |
| Because if the banks fail, it's the end of everything. | |
| I mean, really, it would be. | |
| That's why they won't fail. | |
| Because the government will put 100% effort into making sure the banks don't fail. | |
| We've already seen them do that. | |
| Because that's so important. | |
| So if you sort of move your, let's say, the risk over to the banks, you've also moved it to the place where there will be most attention to solving it. | |
| Whereas if you said, well, let the poor people work it out. | |
| They'll find food somehow. | |
| A lot of poor people are not going to work it out. | |
| And they're going to suffer. | |
| So the closest you can get is some informed guesses, some feelings about... | |
| You'd have to make some assumptions without data about, let's say, the attitude and morale of the country, because you can't make a smart decision that the public hates so much that it blows the politics apart. | |
| It wouldn't help to do the right thing if the public was sure it was the wrong thing. | |
| So you've got the persuasion, the politics... | |
| The guessing about what the economics would be, shifting the weight onto who can handle the pressure the most, and then you just gotta guess. | |
| Now, you also have to guess in a way, ideally, that you could easily reverse. | |
| So, you know, if you make a decision that you can pull back as soon as you find out it's a mistake, well, that helps a little bit. | |
| So, here's what I think. | |
| Since the medical experts are saying that an extra month, or whatever it's going to translate to me, would make a really big difference. | |
| But if I were modeling the economy, I'd say to myself, I'm not sure one month would make that much difference compared to the month we already left. | |
| I don't know if it's the extra month. | |
| You know, if you said it's an extra six months, I'd say, oh, that's too long. | |
| But an extra month? | |
| I don't know. I don't know if that'll actually make a difference. | |
| So my intuition would be to keep things locked down, at least for a few weeks, and then start phasing people in, in a way that, ideally, if you have enough test kits, you can measure whether you're doing it correctly and adjust. | |
| But I would certainly be sending some low-risk people back to work pretty quickly, or at least I have a plan for doing it. | |
| I think, I don't know his first name, is it Nick Nolte at Rights for Breitbart, tweeted, why doesn't Trump hold a digital presser where he answers questions from people outside the media group think, and then he names me. | |
| So as a person who might ask a question of the president who's not in the press room. | |
| And I thought, that's a really good idea. | |
| Because the questions that the press are asking are just Bad questions, aren't they? | |
| Oh, John Nolte. | |
| John Nolte, who writes for Breitbart, not Nick Nolte, who is the actor. | |
| Thank you for that correction. | |
| I looked at his profile, but he doesn't list his first name in his profile, so I was guessing. | |
| I think that's a really good idea, because the press are trying to ask gotcha questions, and the public wouldn't even think in those terms. | |
| If I thought of a question to ask the President, it wouldn't even occur to me to ask it as a gotcha question. | |
| I don't care about that as much. | |
| I just want to know the answer. | |
| So, that's a good question. | |
| I'd like to see that implemented at least a little bit. | |
| Let's see, what else we got going on here? | |
| Checking my notes. Did you see that tweet by Eric Erickson? | |
| So Eric Erickson, a well-known conservative type, he tweeted a picture in which he was talking in a complimentary way about two brothers who went to school with his kids, and the two brothers in the neighborhood are making and selling something for $20 a piece. | |
| And then they're taking that money and they're buying snacks for area hospital break rooms. | |
| And I thought, wow, that's great. | |
| That's tremendous. His kids got a little business. | |
| They're selling some kind of item. | |
| And then they're taking their money to the hospitals. | |
| That's all great. Until you see the picture of the item in which... | |
| Eric says that he added lights to it. | |
| So the item was a cross, a wooden cross. | |
| And I guess the kids were making wooden crosses and selling them to people that they could put in the yard. | |
| And then Eric, apparently according to his tweet, he decided that maybe you could see them better at night, so he added white lights in a fairly dense pattern, and then took a picture of it at night, To show how good it looked with the white lights and the dense pattern around the cross that's in his neighbor's lawn. | |
| You probably see where I'm going with this. | |
| Don't you? Because it looks like a digital version of the KKK burning a cross in the neighbor's lawn. | |
| Now, I only know of this story because Eric Erickson was trending. | |
| And I click on all the famous people who are trending to see if they got coronavirus. | |
| I mean, I hate that I do that, but I do. | |
| And he doesn't have coronavirus, as far as we know. | |
| But he's the only person who didn't recognize that adding a burning cross to the neighbor's lawn might not come across as the Charitable act that he had hoped. | |
| Now, of course, they're not burning. | |
| They're lit with these white lights. | |
| But when you take a picture of something that's tightly lit at night, you know what it looked like. | |
| I'm starting to get the kind of critic that disappeared for a while. | |
| I'm starting to wonder if the trolls came back. | |
| I told you that for a while my critics just disappeared. | |
| There were a few weeks where I didn't get any of the really horrible trolls. | |
| The ones that say things that make your head explode because they're so stupid. | |
| They just all disappeared for a few weeks. | |
| But they just started creeping back. | |
| And I don't know if it's because they're paid trolls or if the crisis made them go away and act good for a while. | |
| I don't know. But they came back. | |
| And one of the things that they seem to be pointing out is that my opinion should be ignored because I'm a cartoonist. | |
| I did a long tweet thread in which I compared my predictions on the coronavirus to the experts. | |
| You've already heard that, so you know that the experts were not bathing themselves in glory, but there were a number of us who were not experts on these topics who have been right consistently from the beginning. | |
| And I would like to add this to the conversation. | |
| So, I will never tell you to ignore the experts. | |
| Because that would be dumb. | |
| So I'm never going to say ignore experts as some kind of general statement on any topic. | |
| You should never ignore the experts. | |
| Which is different from saying the experts are always right. | |
| What I would like to add to the conversation is this fact. | |
| There are also experts As spotting bullshit from other experts. | |
| Now, that's not a college degree and it's not a job title. | |
| There's nobody whose job title is, I spot bullshit from other experts. | |
| But nonetheless, there are people who have such a clear track record of doing it in public that you would have to say they're experts. | |
| I mean, at some point you just say, okay, you just keep doing this over and over again. | |
| Let's call you an expert. | |
| For example, I like to use Mike Cernovich as my standard example of a lot of things, partly because most of you are aware of him, partly because he stands apart from the crowd in so many ways that he just makes a good example for lots of stuff. | |
| But Mike Cernovich has a very long track record that you could check for yourself, and it's all public, of recognizing bullshit really early. | |
| I would say he's an expert. | |
| Same with some other names that I mentioned. | |
| Naval, Balaji, Srinivasan, Greg Goffeld, Joel Pollack. | |
| There are other people that you can watch and you can see that they also have a track record of being able to spot expert bullshit. | |
| I think I'm one too. | |
| And I would say that my skill stack is what allows me to have that visibility. | |
| I've simply been around lots of experts who are right and wrong in lots of different fields. | |
| I'm a certain age, so I've seen enough of it. | |
| I've got a background in persuasion and economics. | |
| So I could just look through more windows and spot BS a little bit. | |
| Yeah, Jack Posobiec, I should have mentioned him, on my list of people who see things early. | |
| So, I just put that out into the world as there are experts and they should be listened to. | |
| That doesn't mean they're right. | |
| You should always listen to the people who are experts at spotting bullshit from other experts. | |
| If you've listened to both the spotters and the experts, well, then maybe you have enough to form your own opinion, right or wrong. | |
| All right. So, the President, I said this last night, but it's so much fun that I have to say it again. | |
| The President loves provocation, especially if it's the press. | |
| I think we all know that. | |
| He likes provoking the enemy press, because it always works for him. | |
| Whenever he provokes them, it seems to turn out good for him in the long run. | |
| And his latest thing is, and I know he knows he's doing it, I can't read his mind, but I think you'll agree he knows he's doing this. | |
| This is not accidental. | |
| He's overselling a little bit, at least in his choice of words and the amount he talks about, etc., the potential for the hydroxychloroquine. | |
| Now, if you're new to the topic, it hasn't been verified by good, robust studies. | |
| But there's lots of anecdotal evidence that it's safe enough and probably useful. | |
| So we don't know, but maybe it's useful. | |
| And the president is sort of mentioning it. | |
| Now, he also says the same thing I did, which is that it's not proven. | |
| But he goes a little bit further in saying that he's optimistic about it. | |
| He thinks it could be a game changer. | |
| So even though he's very careful to say, it's not scientifically proven. | |
| The other words he uses makes people believe that he doesn't care about that. | |
| It makes people think, ah, he doesn't care if it's scientifically proven or not. | |
| That scientifically illiterate guy, he just wants us to use this untested drug. | |
| But of course it's not about that. | |
| He's not giving you medical advice. | |
| He's doing a risk assessment using information that the professionals have provided. | |
| So he looks at their input and he says, well, on a risk-reward basis, we don't know if it works or not, but we do know it's been used for a long time for other stuff, and we know that For short-term usage, even the experts say that the downside is probably vanishingly small for short-term usage. | |
| So that's just a risk-reward assessment. | |
| Is the president the right qualifications to make a risk management judgment Which takes into account the different opinions of different experts. | |
| And I would say, yeah, that's exactly his skill. | |
| Remember, Trump was a real estate developer. | |
| How many of the individual skills of all the people involved in that did Trump himself have? | |
| Was he a trained architect? | |
| No. Was he... | |
| You know, was he the guy who knew how to put up drywall? | |
| Well, he might know how to put up drywall, but the point is that the contractor had lots of subcontractors, a lot of skills there, and Trump was not the expert on all of their expertise. | |
| He was simply a guy who could pick out who was lying and BSing, so he'd know when he needs a new expert or a second opinion, and he was good at incorporating all this expert opinion into one Executive decision. | |
| So for all the critics who are saying, you don't know what you're talking about because you're a cartoonist, they're the dumbest people on the internet today. | |
| Because first of all, how did you not notice that all the experts were wrong and the only people who were right about substantial parts of this coronavirus stuff, the only people who were right were the people who didn't have qualifications. | |
| But they were pretty good at spotting BS from experts. | |
| So I guess my point is that there is expertise in spotting BS. Trump has it. | |
| I think Trump has it. | |
| Let's hope he makes the right decision. | |
| All right. That's about all I have today. | |
| Any of you have any questions? | |
| Only listen to you, not about you. | |
| Don't know what that means. | |
| Yeah, you know, there are a lot of people who have very limited skill stacks who I think believe other people do as well. | |
| So, if you only had one skill, you probably wouldn't know how useful it is to have more than one. | |
| Because you can only see the world through your little hole. | |
| Mail-in voting. You know, I think the experts have to weigh in on the mail-in voting, because my understanding is it's too easy to do ballot harvesting, which is you agree to carry somebody's ballot and hand it in for them, and that sort of gives you a little bit of control over the votes. | |
| So I would say that there's a guarantee There's a guarantee that vote harvesting and some shenanigans will happen with mail-in votes, but it's an emergency. | |
| Is there no way that we can figure out how to do voting without going in person? | |
| Let me ask you this. | |
| I've said this before, but can you honestly tell me that you can't make an app To vote by app, now this isn't going to help all the senior citizens, but can you really tell me that you can't make a vote by app that guarantees that the right person voted? | |
| Let me tell you how. | |
| Let's say I've got a paper ballot that normally I would mail in, but I also have an app, and the app would let me mail it in with a guarantee that there's no shenanigans. | |
| And all the app does is take a picture of the ballot. | |
| That's it. You just put it on the table. | |
| You just take a picture of it. | |
| Boop. Then it prompts you to turn the camera toward yourself. | |
| And it says, you know, say these words. | |
| And you just read the words. | |
| And then you turn on the camera. | |
| And you say, my name is blah, blah, blah. | |
| Here's my social security number. | |
| And this is my vote. | |
| And it just gets stored. | |
| So if anybody ever questions whether this vote is actually how you voted, they can audit it. | |
| Just call up any vote, look at the vote, look at the person, contact them, make sure it's the same person, and say, was this your vote? | |
| So you could audit enough of them to know that nobody was cheating. | |
| So here's what I'd say. | |
| You want to pair the person's actual biometric essence, whether they do it with a fingerprint or facial recognition or whatever, as their identity. | |
| And then check with them after the fact and make sure that what they say they voted for is actually what got recorded. | |
| Somebody says they don't trust virtual. | |
| Why wouldn't you trust that? Who's guaranteeing it? | |
| Talk about voter suppression. | |
| No, this would be an option. | |
| So the app would only give you an option. | |
| You wouldn't have to vote that way. | |
| So you probably still would have to have some mail-in options. | |
| You probably have to have some in-person options, especially for the elderly. | |
| But it would be easy to imagine that a younger relative could come over and say, Hey mom, instead of mailing it in or going to vote, why don't you just fill out your form and I'll take a picture of it with the app and then I'll point it at you and make sure that you register that way. | |
| So, that's how I do it. | |
| Venezuela, what's your take on that mess? | |
| Well, the Venezuela mess, I keep wondering when things are going to break. | |
| Meaning, how much further can Venezuela go without overthrowing their alleged leader? | |
| So, I think it's just a waiting game. | |
| When things get desperate enough, it seems like that'll happen. | |
| Wrong. There's somebody on here who obviously is new, who decided that a good comment to give to me would be just one word. | |
| Wrong. Unbeknownst to them, that's an automatic block. | |
| Cool, then I can hack it and punish those. | |
| How could you hack that? | |
| So for those of you who say it could be hacked, how could you hack that? | |
| Now you could hack it ahead of time, but the audit would catch it. | |
| So the vote would just be thrown out. | |
| I don't think you can hack it. | |
| We'll see. Somebody says that's a third-party vote. | |
| Well, it's not a third-party vote if your grandmother puts in her social security number and your grandmother says on camera, you know, hi, I'm grandma, blah, blah, blah, this is my vote. | |
| It doesn't matter if somebody else is holding the phone and photographing them. | |
| Putting the social security openly on an app, is it safe? | |
| It's 2020. Think about that question. | |
| Is it safe to put your social security number in an app? | |
| Let's say a government-approved app. | |
| Is there no place you've ever typed your social security number online? | |
| Has nobody ever called you? | |
| You've never had to put that on a form? | |
| The most common thing in the world is writing your social security number down if you're dealing with the government, especially. | |
| And of course, that could be encrypted. | |
| But... Soviet Union held out for years. | |
| Threatens with a gun? Yeah, you could threaten somebody to vote with a gun, I suppose, but you could do that with a mail-in vote, too. | |
| Relaxation tips that you use daily for tonight? | |
| Yeah, I could do that. I'll give you all of my relaxation tips tonight. | |
| Random auditive millions? | |
| No, that's not how random works. | |
| Random means you only have to check some. | |
| You don't have to check them all. | |
| And by the way, you could check them all with... | |
| Well, you could do some of the checking with facial recognition. | |
| So you could check all the people who just lied about who they are. | |
| You can check that. | |
| Just run a program against it. | |
| So, you know, you just look at the face and then compare it to the name and then the facial recognition says, that's the wrong face for that name. | |
| You can pick those up right away. | |
| It is not safe to put your social security number in an app. | |
| Again, it's 2020. | |
| Your social security number is all over the place. | |
| And certainly the government has it. | |
| So if your app is encrypted and it's going to the government, yeah, somebody could get it, but there are about a million other ways they can get it as well. | |
| So, you know, if you were to just vote by mail, do you put your social security number on the mail? | |
| Can somebody answer that question? | |
| If you vote by mail, do you have to put your social security number on your mail-in ballot? | |
| I'm guessing yes, but suppose it's just a driver's license. | |
| Well, whatever it is for the mail-in, you just do the same thing for the app. | |
| So if the mail-in requires two IDs, well, then the other one does too. | |
| So it's just the same. Oh, somebody had a great sleep last night? | |
| Two out of three. Good. | |
| Illegals can get social security numbers, but the illegals would get caught by the facial recognition software. | |
| So the illegal who tried to vote with the app would say, hello, my name is Scott Adams, and I'm voting. | |
| And then the facial recognition Recognition app would run against it. | |
| It would pick up his face and it would say, you are not Scott Adams. | |
| That's somebody else. | |
| And that vote would be questioned or thrown out. | |
| I had to submit my social security number for my teaching certificate. | |
| Yeah. It's everywhere. | |
| Fingerprint to vote. | |
| Why not? I mean, you can use your fingerprint on your digital device. | |
| So yeah, that could be one form of identification. | |
| Maybe you just add another one. | |
| Somebody says it's not on form. | |
| No, they don't ask for it. | |
| Okay, so here's updated information. | |
| On the mail-in form, they do not require a social security number. | |
| Therefore, I would also not require it for an app. | |
| But it would be the same risk is all I'm telling you. | |
| Whatever risk the mail-in has, you just take the same risk with the app. | |
| It shouldn't be that different. How will I spend V-Coronis Day? | |
| Is that Victory Day? What's that? | |
| Do you hear that? Some kind of alarm going off in my house. | |
| I don't know what it is, though. | |
| It's not my fire alarm. | |
| Hmm. I'm going to have to sign off because I've got a little emergency here. | |
| I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound good. |