Episode 960 Scott Adams: Fake News, Bad Math, Bad Mind-Reading, Bad Behavior in the News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Is the record unambiguous...it was a coup attempt?
Mind-readers confirm, Schiff is panicked
Tim Graham's visual writing style
Ahmaud Arbery shooting
The Plandemic video
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Some of you, such as Joel, is jogging on the beach right now and cannot join us for the simultaneous sip.
But many of you are prepared.
And all you need is...
A cup or a mug or a glass of a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Happens right now.
Go! Mmm.
I feel the fake news fading away.
The veil is lifted from my eyes.
Yeah. Uh-huh.
So let's talk about a few things.
So as you know, the drug remdesivir has reportedly shown some promise in reducing virus.
But there's no report or no evidence that it reduces death rate.
But we're still pretty darn excited about this drug that It doesn't change the death rate.
But I wonder, how much would this drug cost?
Well, the estimate I saw, I don't know if this is still the case, would be $1,000 per patient.
So $1,000 for remdesivir.
You know, I wonder if that's enough money that it would just potentially corrupt the system.
Is that much? $1,000 per customer times all the people who would need a vaccination?
7.6 billion people in the world, but you don't need to vaccinate them all, let's say.
I don't know. Let's say you do 4 billion.
Let's say you vaccinate 4 billion.
How much profit?
Well, not profit, but how much gross revenue is that if you vaccinate 4 billion people?
At a thousand dollars apiece.
Well, let me do the math for you.
Or actually, allow me to have someone do the math for me.
Alexa, what is four billion times a thousand?
Four billion times one thousand is four trillion.
Four trillion.
$4 trillion.
Has there ever been any product or any company that ever sold one thing and made $4 trillion in the first year?
Now, if you were on the brink of making $4 trillion, Oh, yes.
Thank you. It's not a vaccine, but one assumes that many people would take it if it works.
So it's not a vaccine. That's correct.
So could we worry that maybe our, I don't know, science could be influenced by four trillion dollars?
And somebody says, well, Bill Gates is just an angel, right?
I'm blocking you from being an idiot.
Alright, I'm just going to block all the people who think that Bill Gates is the devil, because I've reached the end of that stupidity.
If you're so fucking stupid that you think Bill Gates is in it for the money, please don't follow me.
Please. I don't know what, you know, I can't read Bill Gates' mind, but he's not in it for the money.
I'm going to block anybody who suggests that.
You just aren't smart enough to follow any of this, if you think that's the case.
Alright. Sorry.
In the news, on Fox News, it says that Schiff is panicked.
He's panicked about the transcripts.
So the interviews about the so-called Russia collusion situation that turned out to be nothing.
Now the interview transcripts are available.
I guess they've been around for a while, but now they're talking about releasing them.
And Adam Schiff has decided maybe not.
Maybe not release them.
Because apparently what they show very clearly is that the FBI knew there was no basis for going after Carter Page because the Steele dossier was the basis and they already knew it was debunked.
So apparently the record is unambiguous that it was a coup attempt.
Now, it doesn't say that, but what would you call it when people are trying to use non-legal means to remove a sitting president?
I don't know what else you'd call it, but that's what happened.
Anyway, so as Jake Novak said, pointed out on Twitter that I always call out when the left mind reads and they act like they know it's in Trump's mind or they know it's in anybody's mind and so it would be fair to call it out when it happens on the other side and let me do that as Jake pointed out we don't know if Schiff is panicked what kind of reporting is that unless Schiff says he's panicked Or we hooked him up to an EKG or something so we could find out that he's panicked?
What basis do we report that Schiff is panicked?
Ridiculous. Now, a reasonable person could say, well, he would be concerned about this.
Yeah. Yeah.
But, I mean, they all play a pretty high-risk kind of a game.
I don't think there's evidence that he panicked, so let's not say that.
Here's some bullshit for you.
You're going to see more and more articles about how the economy is the worst since the 1930s.
The worst since the Great Depression.
This is all ridiculous.
It's all ridiculous. Here's what didn't happen in the Great Depression.
60% of the public making money.
Because I think that's what just happened.
I think 40% of us, and I'm in the category of people who got hit bad by the coronavirus, my income will probably drop 90% this year.
But, you know, I'm not asking for sympathy.
I'm just telling you a fact.
Probably 40% of us took a hit.
But there is a good solid 60% who made money.
That didn't happen in the Depression.
All the people who made money still want to spend it.
And they've got more than they had before when we go back to work.
So all these comparisons to the depression where basically the entire world went down, it's so inappropriate.
If 60% of the people made money, 40% lost, that really speaks to a quick recovery.
Now, the real wild card is whether people will go back into stores and restaurants and stuff.
That's going to be pretty iffy for a while.
But certainly buying products, they got the money and they want to buy them.
All right. Can you believe that in this most basic question, the experts still don't agree?
Which is, is it safe for kids to go back to school?
You can add this question to the long list of very basic, seemingly basic questions that our best experts don't know, got it wrong, or they disagree.
What the hell good are our experts?
I mean, this is a pretty basic question.
Is it safe for kids to go back?
So some people say, well, kids don't get it.
They probably don't spread it much.
It's a low risk. Go ahead, send them back.
There's some other study that says that that causes spread.
Of course, it would.
Who's right? I don't know.
I guess we can't ask the experts because they disagree.
I tweeted out an article on advertising on the internet and I wondered how many people already knew this.
So in the comments, tell me if you knew this.
Did you know that advertising is not real?
That it doesn't work?
How many of you knew that?
Because we live in a world that's, you know, driven by advertisement.
All of our media, the internet, it's all advertising based.
But did you know it's all bullshit?
I'm going to modify all.
So I'm going to say mostly.
And then I'll go back to some special cases where it's not.
Yeah, some of you did.
Here's how I found out.
The way I found out that advertising isn't even a real thing.
Is I advertised. You should try it sometime.
Whatever your product is, or you can even just try this as an experiment.
Try advertising anything.
It won't make any difference.
I've advertised restaurants.
I've done radio, print.
I've done every kind of advertising that you could do.
Didn't make one dime of difference.
Likewise for startups, etc.
Done advertising.
Didn't make any difference.
Now, the exception is if there's something that somebody doesn't know exists, but they know they have a need for it, then you're telling them about it for the first time.
If you tell somebody about something for the first time and they want it, then it can work, of course.
But they're not necessarily going to find it with a search engine.
That's harder. So the kind of advertisement that doesn't work Is brand advertisement especially.
And the article that I tweeted around this morning gives a perfect example of that.
It talked about somebody who understood statistics and stuff coming into this world and thinking to himself, am I crazy?
Because it looks like none of this was real, and yet everybody's pretending it's real and that our giant platforms all depend on selling it to people who think it's real.
And this guy said, well, why do you think it's real?
And they would say, well, look, we ran this ad.
Let's say it was eBay, because he used them for an example.
We ran an ad for eBay, and then you look at all the people who clicked on the ad, and then you can tell that they bought a bunch of stuff.
It's obvious. We run an ad, people click on it, then they buy.
And the economist says, how many of those people were going to buy anyway?
And they say, well, We don't know, but they clicked the ad and then they bought, so the ads work.
And so the economist said, why don't we try this experiment?
Because the ad that people are clicking on shows up in the search directly above the organic search, the one nobody paid for.
If you were searching for eBay by name, you typed in eBay, the thing that comes up at the top is the advertisement.
That takes you to eBay.
The one right below it that didn't cost you a dime is the organic search and also takes you to eBay.
And now what do people click?
They click the one on the top.
So the economist said, why don't we try this?
Why don't we try picking some regions of the country and not advertising on those and just see if it compares?
So they did that.
What do you think the answer was?
The advertising made no difference.
So eBay was paying, I don't know, 20-whatever million dollars a year for these ads, and in one day, in a very easy test, he showed that they had no value.
But his other examples of people who seem to know that advertising doesn't work, but they still do it, and you say to yourself, okay, I'm confused.
Are you telling me that everybody knows it doesn't work?
But they still do it? What exactly is behind that?
And he explained it in a way that I already understood as the creator of Dilbert and having spent a lot of time in big companies and done a lot of advertising myself.
I knew the answer to this, but it was funny watching him sort of discover it.
And it goes like this.
The marketing department in your big company Isn't just marketing externally.
They're also marketing themselves.
And what the marketing department in your big company wants is the biggest possible budget because that makes them more important.
It's good for their careers. They want to manage the biggest possible thing.
So when they go into their senior management, do they say advertisement doesn't work?
No. They say you need the biggest advertisement budget you could possibly get.
And then they get that, and then the boss is going to ask them, did it work?
And what are they going to do?
They're going to show them how many people clicked on the advertisement, and how much they bought, and they're going to say, look at all that extra stuff people bought.
And it's all not real.
Now, somebody says, I'm seeing a lot of people mention MyPillow.
MyPillow is a special case.
And I'll tell you why. Number one, did you know there was such a thing as an improved pillow?
So it's the perfect example of something that can be advertised, because you didn't know it existed, right?
I thought a pillow was a pillow, but there's a better one?
Okay. Now, once you know it exists, then your next question should be, but Scott, I know it exists.
Now that I know it exists, what good is the extra advertising?
Well, Here's what good it is.
Mike Klandell is not like an average advertiser.
What he does is so darn persuasive that you can't compare it to a written ad on the internet.
Listening to him do his real thing and over and over again and showing you examples and here are the people using it and here's my graph and his funny stories and stuff, in a way he's selling himself.
Wouldn't you say? Mike Lindell is sort of selling himself, and you didn't know you needed him, did you?
So that's the part you weren't looking for.
Were you looking to find Mike Lindell?
No, you weren't. But you did.
So now you've found him, and he gives his Made in America stuff, and people like him.
So you like Mike Lindell, and then you say, well, I can always use a better pillow.
And then suddenly that works.
So in the special cases, that can tell you why the normal cases don't work.
So if you just put a little print ad on Google, you know, buy my stuff, you're not Mike Lindell.
They don't know you.
They don't care about you. They didn't fall in love with you.
They weren't interested in your story about how you came from nothing.
They don't care if it's built in America.
None of that's there. But if you can go full Mike Lindell, Yeah, I would think in his case advertising works.
All right. But yeah, so the reason is the internal marketing departments are lying to their management because it's good for their careers.
And then they give the management these fake numbers and say it works.
And then what does the CEO do with that?
Suppose the CEO doesn't believe it.
Suppose the CEO says, you know, they would have bought this much anyway.
I don't think you did anything.
Would the CEO say that?
Or would the CEO say, as all CEOs do, well, it looks under my management we went up this much.
It's because of all the good things we did.
Our marketing's firing on all cylinders.
Our products are good. No, the CEO's going to take it because it makes the CEO look like You know, it makes the CEO look like they did their job as well.
So it's this weird little fiction that companies run that advertising works.
And again, it does work in the special cases, but I'm talking about the general cases.
All right. Keep that in mind when you're looking at stories such as the number of test kits that will be available.
You know, I told you, no, everybody's lying about that.
All the companies are lying because why wouldn't they?
Of course they would lie.
All right, see what else we got.
There was a great line written by Tim Graham who wrote on the Fox News site, and I'm only going to repeat this because I loved The way he put the sentences together.
So just enjoy this for the writing.
It's not even any bigger point than that.
He says, a press conference for Trump has the feel of diving into a tank of hungry sharks.
A press conference for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden carries the vibe of getting free pizza and game tokens at Chuck E. Cheese.
Biden's virtual press conference, April 2nd, only lasted 20 minutes, and he jabbered for seven minutes before he took his first question.
Blah, blah, blah. So here's what I loved about it.
It has the vibe of getting free pizza and game tokens at Chuck E. Cheese.
I've told you before that we're visual people, so this is such visual writing.
A Trump event feels like jumping into a tank of hungry sharks.
You can see it, right? You can almost see the press conference, and you can sort of see them jumping into the shark tank.
It's so visual. And then just the same thing about...
It's like getting pizza and game tokens at Chuck E. Cheese.
Because you've got the pizza, you see it.
You've got the game tokens, you see it.
And then there's the Chuck E. Cheese, you see it.
And then you build the story in your head.
It's brilliant writing.
It's really good. And then in the second part that I read, he uses the word jabbered.
He jabbered for seven minutes.
Now, of course, this is, you know, highly biased...
Political writing, but, you know, it's on Fox News.
You expect that in the opinion pieces on both CNN and Fox.
You know, if it's an opinion, it's an opinion.
So you can say jabbered. But jabbered is a great word.
Jabbered. Because you don't have to defend jabbered.
You can just say it happened, and people go, well, he sounds like he was jabbering.
You don't have to give any examples of what a jabbering is.
All right. So I had an experience yesterday of talking to someone who shall remain nameless, but let's say it's someone who knows a lot about the world.
So somebody who's really well-educated about how things work.
So I'm not talking to a dumb person.
So keep in your mind, smart, smart, super accomplished person.
Supports Biden. And we got into a little conversation about that, about supporting Biden.
He's a big anti-Trumper.
And I was curious about why anybody could do that.
What's the thinking?
And I had predicted on Twitter, maybe a week or so ago, That we would hear more and more tortured explanations of why anybody would support Joe when it's obvious his mental health is declining.
I mean, it's really obvious, right?
And here was the first cognitive dissonance example.
Or it's true.
So you get to decide.
So my judgment of it is a little cognitive dissonancy.
No, it's not Duval. You're not going to guess who it is.
It's not somebody I've mentioned before.
So if you're guessing somebody that I've talked about, just forget it.
You're not going to guess. It doesn't matter anyway.
Or is the following thing objectively true?
So you decide, does this sound like crazy talk, which would be a tell for cognitive dissonance, or is it a perfectly reasonable statement?
Here it is. Joe Biden is actually smart and capable when you talk to him in person.
It's just that when he does things in public, he sort of lost his step so he can't keep up.
In a public venue, he can't really keep up anymore.
But there's no problem, because if you talk to him in person, he's perfectly fine.
Brain's all there, everything's working.
Trump, on the other hand, goes the story that he might look like he can function in public, you know, at least to his supporters.
I mean, it looks like he understands the topics and He has a full control of things.
I mean, he's always Trump, but it looks like he does have a full control of his faculties, and he's operating at a high level in public.
But the story goes that in private, it's completely different.
So, one version of what's going on here is that Joe Biden is this unique character who's smart privately, but only recently, He's become incompetent in public.
But you shouldn't worry about that too much, because personally he's fine.
Whereas Trump, and here's a weird coincidence, what are the odds that Trump would be the opposite?
And that Trump would be perfectly functional in public if you don't count what the fake media says he's saying.
If you believe he suggested drinking bleach, Well, then you'd think he's not competent, but of course that didn't happen.
That's just what the media said he said.
So if you ignore what the media said he said and just look at what he says, perfectly reasonable, but behind closed doors, not so much.
Now, as you know, I spent a little bit of time talking to the President in a personal conversation.
I did not detect anything wrong with his brain.
So I have only this much experience, and we weren't talking about any kind of business-y or policy things, so there wasn't anything complicated about it.
But I feel like I would have detected a problem.
We talked about enough things, a broad enough palette of things, that I would have picked up I'm sure I would have picked up a little problem if there was one.
I didn't see anything.
I didn't see anything I even questioned as like, whoa, why did he say that?
Or nothing like that. Perfectly ordinary, functional person like most of us.
So look for further stories about the explanation of why people are okay with Biden.
And at least people are saying directly, yeah, We think maybe he did do that thing with Tara Reade.
We don't like it, but boy, we really don't like Trump.
So in other words, they're throwing their principles to the side to get a better result.
I got into this discussion with a professor of biology on epidemiology.
Now, if you've been following along, With my periscopes for a while.
You probably already know where this is going to end, right?
So I had a little bit of...
I won't call it disagreement.
I was confused at what Carl Bergstrom was saying on Twitter.
Seems like a real well-informed, smart guy.
And he was doing a real good job of explaining stuff.
He was explaining specifically the purpose behind flattening the curve.
And his point was that the purpose is not just...
To keep people out of the hospitals, which is important, but that also, by flattening the curve, you would, in the end, infect fewer people.
And, you know, of course, I raised my hand on Twitter and say, okay, but what you said doesn't support that.
Because I was just looking at his thread and his graphs, and I said, it doesn't support that.
What you've so far presented Simply says it would be spread out, but I don't see the argument for why it would ever be less in the long run.
We would still reach herd immunity one way or another.
And we had a few iterations, and I still said, but I'm not seeing any kind of description of what would cause the flattened graph ever to drop off.
Because if it doesn't drop off, Then it just keeps going flat until you get to the same amount as if it had been a peak, right?
Now, I'm just asking from the point of ignorance.
I'm not yet disagreeing with anything.
I'm trying to understand.
So, yeah, I guess he was doing something else today besides talking to me.
So he said that he had to run.
So we didn't quite finish this, but he did leave me with this provocative thought.
Which could be true.
So let's say there's a good chance that what he's saying might be true.
And here's the argument. Still missing some reasons in it, but at least here it is.
That if you do the unmitigated peak, and you just let it peak, that you will get to herd immunity, same as if, you know, these are my words, not his, same as if you had a flattened curve that would just take longer, But if you let the peak happen, you will go past herd immunity.
In other words, if you creep up to herd immunity, maybe you can sort of hit it wherever that number is, 60% of people having it.
But if you don't creep up on it, you're going to overshoot the mark because it'll just be so vicious that just too many people get it before herd immunity even gets to be a thing.
To which I said, okay, I will accept that people say that, but I still don't see why.
And then I asked this question, which is still hanging out there.
I haven't got an answer. I said, I can see why that might be a thing with a quick-killing, fast-moving virus.
If it's moving fast and it's killing people fast, I can see how that would make sense, that having a spike could get you past herd immunity and then too many people died.
But I said, with the coronavirus, since you can be asymptomatic for a week or two, even if you got all the infections in the United States to zero, all it would take is one traveler to come in and my town would be infected before anybody even got a test.
So I said, in the very specific case of the coronavirus, where you can be asymptomatic for a long time, how do you ever not get to the same herd immunity?
There could be something to this thought that if you get to it quickly and just all at once, you can shoot past it.
But I've not yet seen the argument for it.
But there's a punchline to all this.
And here's the punchline.
So after a few of my ignorant non-scientist questions, Professor Bergstrom left me with this thought.
He said, Scott, it's entirely possible that thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists are mistaken or lying, or maybe your intuitions are wrong.
So he sets it up as, it's my ignorant cartoonist intuition.
Which he says, hey, could be right, and maybe thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists who agree with him, maybe they're all wrong.
Which I thought was a pretty good line, under normal circumstances, right?
Good line, right?
Here's what I said.
I said, well, it wouldn't be the first time this year I was more right about this virus than nearly every health professional in the world.
It would be the third time.
Because it would be.
It would be the third time my intuition was better than, what did he say?
Thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists?
Yes. Yes, my intuition was better in public than thousands of epidemiologists.
I told you the masks would help when they said it wouldn't.
Fact check me if I'm wrong, and now they all agree with me.
I told you that we should shut the airports on January 24th when the experts said, eh, not yet.
Who was right?
My instinct or thousands of infectious disease epidemiologists?
And the answer is my instinct.
Professor Bergstrom, he seems well-informed and smart, and I hope he gets back to me, because I think he has something there.
I just think that he had maybe some assumptions that he may have assumed, other people assumed, and so I was a little bit in the dark about that, but I appreciate him working with me.
I just think it's funny that even at this point, People would still doubt my intuition over their thousands of experts.
What's wrong with them, I say?
All right. Let's see.
So remember I taught you how to spot fake news?
And one of the ways that you do it is you look for a story that's a little too perfect because it fits a political narrative.
And then secondly, fake news is when you think you can read minds.
So it turns out we have this story about Ahmoud Arbery, a young African-American guy, 25, ex-military I think.
The story is, I'll just say the story is because I wasn't there, that he was just jogging in a Brunswick, Georgia neighborhood and that there were two, and this is Twitter's explanation.
Two white supremacists chased him down and shot him.
Now, I have many comments about this.
Number one, the story from the people who did the shooting is that he looked like somebody who had been burglarizing some homes that they'd seen on a video from before and they were just trying to talk to him and he was running away and they wanted to talk to him, but they had guns. And if you look at the video, there's a video of the actual event.
I don't know if people see the video differently, but what I saw was the, I saw Arbery attacking the guy with the gun.
I did not see the guy with the gun shoot first or attack the other guy.
I only saw the person who died attack the person with the gun and run right at him and not let go while the guy with the gun had the gun in his chest.
Like the gun was actually pointed at the guy's torso while the guy was still fighting with the guy.
I'm no hand-to-hand expert.
I am not a battle expert.
I have never been in the military, but I don't know.
If somebody's pointing a gun at me and they just want to ask me a question, I'm not going to try to take that gun out of their hands because I would be afraid I would be shot.
Now, I think I have to insert at this point of the story to keep me employed and out of jail and stuff.
I'll have to insert this.
This will be the part that people take out when they take me out of context later.
I doubt there was a good reason to shoot this man, meaning a situation was created that probably didn't need to get created.
So I'm not forgiving anybody.
I would say, however, it is not an evidence that these two people who did the alleged crime were white supremacists.
I don't think that's an evidence.
And if they were white supremacists, which I haven't seen any evidence of that, That doesn't seem to be the motive for this, because there was no part of it where they would have said, you know, there's a white guy jogging, and we saw this white guy in the video, and we think this white guy has robbed our neighborhood several times.
Do you think they would not have tried to stop the white guy?
I mean, that's the assumption, right?
That if everything was different, no, everything was the same, except the young man had been a white guy, Do we assume that these two people with the guns would not have tried to stop him if they had recognized him on the video?
Or thought they saw him?
I don't know that he was actually on the video.
So there's no evidence of a racial motive and there's plenty of evidence that it wasn't.
So of course on Twitter that makes them way supremacists.
LeBron James says that African Americans are, quote, literally hunted every day every time they go outside.
Would somebody get with LeBron James and teach him what the word literally means?
Because I mean, I could be wrong.
Fact check me on this.
If we have some African-American viewers on Periscope, would you say it's literally true that you are hunted every day, every time you go outside?
Are you hunted? It feels extreme.
I mean, I get the point, and I certainly think that if I were African American, I might be arguing it the same way they are.
You know, because a lot of these arguments are about power and safety, and, you know, it's not really about the specific situation.
You know, people are trying to generalize a specific situation to get some political gain.
If I were African American, And I thought, you know, I think I'd like to improve my situation.
I might use it this way.
If I thought, well, it's not exactly in evidence, but I can spin it this way, and maybe something good comes out of this.
The weirdest part of this story that the simulation has served up is that the people who did the shooting suspected this young man of robbery.
And his last name is Arbery.
What are the odds that somebody whose last name is Arbery would be accused of robbery?
I don't know. I suppose anything is possible.
But I like to think it's the simulation working on code reuse, even though that's probably not what's going on.
So the -- Lindsey Graham was saying that the Steele dossier just completely lays bare I'm sorry. He said that the Steele dossier was discredited before Rosenstein even said to investigate Carter Page.
And with that now documented, so we don't have to wonder about who said what or when it was said, And Lindsey Graham says basically it's just plain now that there was a plot to get rid of the president.
I don't even know how to process this.
Are you having the same mental problem that I am?
Which is apparently law enforcement and the FBI did actually try to remove a legally elected president under With, you know, inappropriate means.
How is that not just blowing our mind and the only thing we're talking about?
Now, part of it is the coronavirus, of course.
And part of it is it took so long to get here that we got sort of exhausted by the story.
So I think we got exhausted by the story before we found out how bad it was.
And now we can't generate the outrage that you would get if it was the second week of the story.
Imagine finding out one month into the story about the Russia collusion.
Just fantasize with me.
Imagine in one month you had found out everything it took us two years or whatever to find out.
We'd be calling for the execution of Comey and some of the others, wouldn't we?
I mean, actually the execution?
Would we not? Because what is the crime for trying to overthrow the country?
Or, I don't even know, is that treason?
It's treason if you're helping your enemies, but suppose you're just doing it for your own purposes.
What exactly is the penalty for that?
You know, there might be penalties for not doing your job right and the details of You know, maybe you violated somebody's rights and stuff, so there could be some legal recourse on the details.
But what about the big picture?
Is there no big picture?
Where an actual coup was attempted?
But it's not treason exactly, is it?
Alexa, define treason.
Treason is usually defined as the offensive acting to overthrow his government or to harm or kill his system.
For more, Oh, okay.
Yeah, treason fits.
I was thinking that treason was more helping an enemy, but according to that definition, it just has to do with trying to overthrow your own government.
So, did they try to overthrow their own government?
I think so.
If you found out, let me ask this just hypothetically.
If you found out that this was treason, And then it could be demonstrated.
I don't know what the actual penalty in this country is for that.
Would you favor the death penalty for the people involved?
So that would be Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe.
So make the assumption that the legal system does its thing, and let's say they found that they did, in fact, try to overthrow the government.
Let's say that that was demonstrated in a court of law.
Is that a life sentence?
30 years? Execution?
Capital offense? I don't know.
Because I can't think of a bigger problem.
You know, what would be more of a crime than that?
Would a terrorist act be more of a crime than that?
I don't know. It's a pretty big crime.
Feels like the biggest crime I've ever seen, maybe, that's not actually violent.
So I'll just put that out there.
If there's any companies that are looking for KN95 masks and some other protective equipment and you're lost in the wilderness of all these pirate and scam organizations who are trying to study things and not delivering, check my Twitter feed for a tweet by Tom Sauer, S-A-U-R, who has...
Located a number of supplies that he can deliver.
So if you're a corporation and you want to, let's say, get some KN95 masks for your staff, you could buy them in big, big bunches from him.
I'm only mentioning him because there are so many frauds out there.
And since Tom is well known, at least a conservative Twitter knows Tom well.
A lot of you who are watching this follow him on Twitter.
So he's a real person doing a real thing, ex-military.
So I feel you could trust him to be straight on the transaction, which is the hardest thing to trust right now.
All right. I watched the Plandemic video because so many of you asked me to.
Now, if you don't know what that is, there's a video going around that it looks like an interview that might be a setup or publicity for something that's a full-length movie that I haven't seen.
So I watched the interview part, not the movie.
And Plandemic, I guess, is the movie.
And here's my bottom line on the video.
It's mostly, as far as I can tell, this is just my initial opinion.
It looks like conspiracy theory bullshit to me, right?
But it does look like a number of the facts in it are probably true, almost certainly true.
So I'm not saying the facts are all untrue, but there's a way that they're tied together and some assumptions and some mind reading That turns it into a bigger conspiracy.
The net of it is it looks like this.
That Fauci is actually some kind of a bad guy and that he is associated with an organization that funded the Wuhan lab and And a year or more ago, he warned that there would definitely be a coronavirus.
And how did he know?
And by the way, he's got some patents for some vaccines or something.
And those patents on things, he might profit from them if he can get...
You know, his vaccine or his company with a therapeutic to do it.
So there's this whole thing that Fauci, I don't know, somehow he might have been behind the virus.
And so that's the conspiracy crazy parts.
The less crazy part about that is that the pharmaceutical industry could be corrupting things and lying and trying to make four trillion dollars.
So there's I did not find any credibility in the person who was interviewed, the principal character there.
I would say that she had every...
Let's see, based on experience, I'm going to say that people who look and act like her, in my experience, have some issues that go beyond the facts of this situation.
So I didn't find her credible.
But, in the same breath, here's something else I didn't find credible at one point.
That the FBI tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
When I first heard that, I just thought, come on people, is there anything you won't believe?
Yeah, the FBI tried to overthrow the government.
You bunch of ignorant, what?
We have documents?
We have memos. We've got handwritten notes.
It's all true.
Apparently it's all true.
It's all true. Now the part I doubted early on primarily was the The level of coordination.
Was there like a ringleader and everybody was sort of working for the ringleader?
Because that's the way it was sort of portrayed in the beginning.
I don't see evidence of that yet.
I do see evidence that lots of people have the same motive and thoughts and maybe they acted in a way that any one of them would have acted if they'd been in that situation.
But it's a little different than an organized Plot.
But not much.
It's not like they didn't all know each other, have the same goals, probably talked to each other.
You know, people signed off on the same stuff.
So you can't rule out the fact that it was kind of organized.
I'm just saying that that's not in evidence based on the documents.
So I didn't believe that because that seemed just way too wild.
I mean, just way beyond the You know, the pale of likelihood.
But turns out it's true.
Turns out it's true. So are the claims made in the plandemic video and interview, are they true?
Doesn't look like it to me.
You know, if I had to put my own money on it, I'd say, ah, there are two facts in there, but the way you've woven it together, no, that's just misleading.
That's what I'd bet on. But I also would have bet the FBI was not trying to remove a legally elected president.
I would have been wrong about that.
So, I like to remind you when I'm right, but it's also just as useful to remind you when I'm wrong.
And I would say that even though I can make an argument that I shaded a little bit about how organized it was, I would have to say overall that I was just wrong on that one.
So, count that one on my...
Incorrect predictions.
Alright. I think that was everything I wanted to talk about.
Just checking my notes.
Yes, it is. That's it.
That's all I had.
Did President Obama know?
Well, that would certainly make things interesting, wouldn't it?
Wouldn't that be interesting?
Here's my best guess on that.
Now, even though all these people were professionals, and you would think that they would be smart enough not to write stuff down, right?
Wouldn't they be smart enough not to write down the things that are going to get them in jail or whatever?
But I have to think that Obama was never that dumb.
My impression of Obama, you can love him or hate him for his policies or whatever.
I don't care. But I don't know that anybody has questioned his intelligence.
To me, he always seemed like a really smart guy.
So would a really smart guy leave any kind of a trail of this kind of activity?
I don't think so.
I think that if he was involved, it would have been verbal and probably only with, you know, one person who he knew he could trust.
That's how I'd play it. If I were trying to overthrow the government, I would not leave any kind of a record of it.
So I know a lot of you are saying, you know, probably he did.
I would have to go, if I'm going to put a, let's say a percentage on it, the odds that Well, here's the problem, though.
We know that the FBI knew that they were doing something sketchy.
What we don't know is if that was ever transmitted to Obama.
We do know that he was the boss.
But we don't know that if when they gave a status report to Obama, did they say, you know, I know you want this guy out of here, so what we're doing is we're going to pretend that Carter Page has something, maybe we can find something, we'll dig around.
I don't know that they ever told him that.
It feels like something you don't tell the president because you don't want him to know, right?
So I would guess that Obama will never be identified as a co-conspirator.
So let me put an odds on it.
I would say the odds that he actually knew that something just blatantly illegal was happening.
What are the odds he knew something illegal was happening?
Then you'd have to define knowing.
Did he know because he just sort of knew?
Or did he know because they told him?
I think knowing because they told him probably didn't happen.
Knowing because he, you know, he's experienced and he just knew, maybe?
70%? 70% chance?
Something like that? Yeah, I'll give you a 70% chance that Obama knew.
Will you be satisfied with that?
I know some of you want 100%.
Elon Musk is on Rogan.
Really? It's dropping at 9 a.m., somebody says.
Well, that would be interesting.
Somebody says he knew, but he looked the other way.
Yeah, we would never be able to prove something like that.
Lisa Page was quoted as saying, somebody's saying in the comments here, quote, POTUS wants to know everything we are doing.
Well, him wanting to know everything you're doing and you deciding to tell him that you're doing something illegal are very different things.
So I don't doubt that the President wanted to know.
I do doubt that they told him everything.
Somebody points out that Watergate started without direct knowledge by Nixon.
Good example. So I think in general you would find that your presidents are smart enough to not commit things to writing.
Here's something that I have a hypothesis that nobody like Trump could ever have ever made it to the presidency if he had ever used email.
That's my statement.
That Trump would never be our president If he had a habit of using email all of his life.
There's just no way.
Because sooner or later those emails would come out and God knows what would be in them.
My understanding is that Trump made it a career-long practice to not write stuff down.
Now, how well did that pay off?
Really well. I mean, not writing stuff down is a pretty solid Solid strategy if you don't want somebody coming after you.
Somebody's asking about Kim Jong Un's body double.
All right, so you know that I've called bullshit on the video of Kim Jong Un and bullshit on the photo as well.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm right, right?
So I like to always deal in probability.
But I'm going to go with the prediction that Kim is either, let's say, degraded or dead.
Probably not dead, more likely degraded, because I think we'd know if he was dead.
But we wouldn't necessarily know if he were in a coma.
Here is my evidence, in case you didn't hear it before.
Just prior to the video being shown, the president was acting like he definitely knew what the situation was, and he was wishing Kim well.
But then, right after that, Kim was chipper, walking around, visiting the fertilizer plant.
Did that happen?
Did that happen? And then the president just immediately said, oh, it's great to see, you know, happy he's doing well.
I don't know.
So either the president had bad information, or he had correct information and he knows this video is fake, but he's trying to help them get away with it, because maybe it's just better for everybody for the short term.
Of course, videos can be faked.
To me, it looked like a video that was spliced together from maybe a prior trip or something, and then the still photographs just looked Photoshopped to me.
Now, experts have looked at the photo that I say clearly looks Photoshopped, and people who know way more than I do about that stuff don't see it.
And a lot of people are convinced the video is true because they see it with your own eyes.
But we're not in a world where videos can be true.
So here's my further prediction.
It's going to be a long time before you see Kim in public again.
Now, I don't know what his normal pattern is in terms of how long he would normally go before he's seen in public again.
But here's my prediction.
The length of time that he has not seen in public will reach a new high coming up.
In other words, if you don't see him just pop up again in a month, those are fake videos.
Six months from now, if you've seen no new videos of Kim, those were fake videos.
If in one month he pops up and he's looking fine, Then I'll revise and I'll say, oh wow, I guess I was fooled.
Those were probably real videos.
I mean, they could have still been faked, but more likely they'd be real.
If a month from now he's up and walking around and it's obvious it's a current video, maybe he's shaking hands with somebody we know is over there.
You know, if it's current and it's in a month, then I'm definitely wrong.
Six months from now, if we still haven't seen him on video, I'm right.
