Episode 1055 Scott Adams: Face Masks, Boycotts, Secret Trump Supporters, Why Everything Will Turn Out Fine
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Tom Fitton's mask science tweet
Executive order on DACA
OpEd supposedly written by Mueller
NYT Charles Blow says cancel culture doesn't exist
Economist (Robert Reich) supports politically driven boycott
Why did Amazon issue TikTok memo and then retract it?
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Will it be, yet again, the best part of the day for you?
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A cup or a mug or a glass.
Here's what's happening today.
Let me start by saying, here's why the world is not going to end.
May I explain to you why things seem dire, but indeed are not very dire at all?
In fact, we probably have never been safer or more stable.
That seems exactly the opposite of what you see, right?
Here's why it looks different to you and why you'll be fine.
Number one, keep in mind that everything you see in the news is attenuated to get your brain chemistry done.
To catch it on fire.
That's how they make money, by getting you excited and clicking and talking about stuff.
So the first thing you need to know is that the news reports an exaggerated version of reality because that's their business model.
So the first thing you do is say, alright, it's not all of that.
It's something less than whatever I'm reading on television.
That's your first context.
The second piece of context is Some of you might know I got married yesterday, and I was talking with a few people afterwards, and I asked this question in a very small group wedding,
as you might imagine, and I asked some people, all right, if you were alive during the 60s, in other words, if you're a certain age or above, Does today look especially scary compared to the 60s?
And the only ones of us who would remember the 60s said the same thing.
No, it just looks like the 60s.
Everything will be fine. So the one thing you don't know if you're youngish is that this just looks a lot like something that's happened before that also didn't ruin the country.
In fact, The so-called hippies who were protesting against the government are now literally part of the government.
They're in Congress and everything worked out fine.
So that's the second piece of context.
The next thing you need to not worry about is the protesters themselves.
So you saw that the looting and the protests and the violence and it looked like it was all going to be the Joker movie all over again.
Here's why it's not.
Number one, the news exaggerated all of the problems that caused the riots.
Would it be fair to say that the fake news caused the protests.
I would say so.
I would say it's not police violence that caused it, because the data on police violence just doesn't show the problem that they're protesting.
Even if the data did show that the Black Lives Matter protests were based on data, it would still be their smallest problem.
Do you get that?
If everything they believed about The police killing black people, if it were all true, and statistically it's just not, if it were true, it would still be their smallest problem.
And if you don't get that they're making the biggest protests and making the most noise about their smallest problem, then you don't really understand what's going on.
Because they're not really complaining about the problem.
There's got to be a bigger agenda or Some people are just worked up by the news.
Some people believe that there is a real problem.
It's probably a variety of reasons.
But here's the thing that's important.
And this will scare you at the same time it might relax you.
So you're going to have both feelings.
Here it comes. Have you noticed that the news on both the left and the right stopped covering the protests?
Meaning that they don't really show video night after night of protesters.
And they could. Because if you're on social media, you know that the protests are happening.
They're happening, I think, every night.
And they're happening in multiple places.
Do you see coverage of it anymore?
No, you don't.
Why? Ask yourself why there's a big domestic news story.
I mean as big as it could be.
It's a big, big, big domestic story.
Why is it not being covered, at least visually and video-wise, from either the left or the right?
Why is that? Let me tell you the answer.
The answer is that the news industry, collectively, For whatever reason, I don't know if the government talked to them, that's possible.
The government might have said, you know, if you just cover it differently, you could tamp down the temperature and that would be helpful.
That's possible. But I don't think so, because I can't see CNN and MSNBC doing anything that the administration wants, even if they had a good reason.
I think they would just say, no, we're the news, we'll do what we want to do, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.
We don't take our instructions from the administration.
So it seems to me that both the left and right, for different reasons perhaps, have decided to make the protests go away.
And they can do it.
Do you know how they do it?
By not covering it.
If the news doesn't cover the protests, or just sort of references them without wall-to-wall video coverage of bad behavior, And good behavior.
If they don't cover it, it's going to kind of go away.
Because the point of the protests are attention.
And if the news media decides collectively to remove attention, it's going to drain the energy out of it.
So, you've got a few things going.
One is that there was a lot of energy built up because of the shutdown, and there were not many alternative uses for your time.
I would have to assume that some percentage of the protesters, probably a pretty big percentage, maybe a third, wouldn't have been able to do what they did if they had to get up and go to a job in the morning or they were otherwise in school or occupied in some other way.
So it's probably at least one third bigger than it would be just because people are not busy.
It's probably another third bigger than it needs to be just because There was a lot of energy built up and finally the weather was good and it was something to do.
And there's probably about a third of the energy, the last third, is because the fake news created something out of nothing and got people all worked up.
And now it seems that the fake news has decided that it really messed up.
My suspicion is that CNN and MSNBC, you know, the left-leaning news, Realizes that the longer the protests go on, the better it is for Trump.
Now, you could debate that.
I think it would be fair to debate it, because even Trump supporters say things such as, hey, he's not doing enough.
Why doesn't he do more?
But that's really easy to frame that away, and there's plenty of time before the election.
The president could simply say, and it would be Straight up correct.
You just couldn't argue with the facts.
I have offered all of the resources and military, whatever you need.
You just had to say yes.
It's the mayor's decision.
They just had to say yes, and we can stop the violence tomorrow with federal resources.
So I think that it would be really easy for the president to say, you see all these protests that are scaring you to death and ruining the economy?
That's what you get if Biden is elected.
And I would have stopped it if these Democrat mayors had not allowed me to do it.
Then here's the last part that I think is the most important part.
There's always this feeling of a slippery slope.
If things are going in one direction, they'll just keep going until, you know, there's destruction.
But have you noticed that the protests have just stopped cold at the suburbs?
Oh, they tried.
They tried, right?
There was a little bit of attempt to move the protests into the suburbs.
How'd that work out?
Well, the first problem is It's not interesting.
It is not interesting to have a protest in the suburbs.
It's just not interesting.
It's not interesting visually.
It's not interesting for the protesters.
But here's the worst problem.
If they start protesting individuals' homes, like the McCloskeys, the couple that had the guns and there was a warrant for their...
I guess there was a warrant out for them, I guess.
So that's a separate story that I think they're being treated probably unfairly, but we'll see.
I don't think that this can spread to residential areas outside of the city.
Because number one, they're armed to the teeth.
Number two, it looks really different, doesn't it?
Just think how you'd imagine it.
If you see protesters knocking a...
A storefront window down.
Here's the calculation you do in your head.
Well, they've got insurance, right?
Well, they've got insurance.
It's a business. You don't feel the same about a business, even though every business has real people behind it who are really losing a lot.
But it still seems like a property crime.
Like, you think of it more that way than you do about the people who are involved.
You think to yourself, well, they could probably get other jobs, etc.
But if you saw, like we did, a crowd around the McCloskey's house, which wasn't the best example because they had sort of a mansion, so they don't quite get the sympathy that you would get if you were just a normal suburban home.
But if you saw protests assaulting a normal suburban home, let's say just because they had a Trump sign in the lawn, just to pick an example.
If you saw that, that would be the end of the protests.
So there is a natural limit to how far they can go, and they've already reached it in terms of not moving into the suburbs.
They really can't. The suburbs are too well armed, too willing to use them, and there would be too much sympathy for the civilians in this case.
So don't worry so much.
I don't think that there's anything that could make our current protest situations any worse than the 60s, and the country literally just shrugged it off.
If you didn't live through the 60s, you don't know how pervasive it was.
It was just protest, protest, protest, the government is evil, must be replaced.
And the country shrugged it off.
This is like that, the protests anyway.
The country will actually just shrug it off.
And I would say also that if we had not had that weird coincidence that you had to wear a mask because of coronavirus, at the same time the protesters wanted to wear some masks, if you know what I mean.
So except for that little weird coincidence, which won't last forever, I mean masks won't last forever, so the protests will die out.
They have a natural life and I think that it's already on the On the downside, big news, President Trump wore a mask to visit Walter Reed, and the press pool got some good video of it.
Now, if you haven't seen the video or the photographs, it's really kind of, it's the most awesomely scary-looking thing you've ever seen in your life.
It makes you glad they're on our side, because the president is at Walter Reed, it's a military hospital, and he's got the, it looks like the top generals and admirals behind him, And they've all got these dark United States masks that, frankly, look pretty cool. And when you see them walking, it looks like a movie.
It just looks like a movie set.
I mean, it looks like the coolest movie that you haven't yet seen.
Now, one of the things that the president said that everybody laughed at When he was talking about masks some time ago, he said that when he tried one on, that people told him he looked good in his mask.
Now, when you heard that, you laughed, right?
It's like, okay, that's such a typical Trumpism, that people tell me I look better in my mask.
It's just so perfectly what he would say.
But then I saw him in his mask.
He actually looks good. That's actually literally true, that the mask, as a fashion look, it actually made him look powerful, made him look younger, right?
Because if you hide this part of your face, You look younger.
If you have hair, he has hair.
So he looked younger.
He looked more powerful.
He looked, I guess, powerful.
I would just use that word twice because that's what it looked like.
It was a super powerful look, especially with the generals behind him.
So there'll be a lot of jabbering about that.
Now, at the same time, do you know Tom Fitton from Judicial Watch?
You see him a lot on Fox News, etc.?
And he had this tweet, which I take objection to.
He said, again, there's no science to support wearing a mask outside of a healthcare setting.
Now, I'm going to talk about the exact wording of this, so let me read it again.
So this is Tom Fitton.
You know him from TV. You know that he's an attorney.
So that's the first thing to keep in mind, that attorneys are very careful with language.
Some more automatically, right?
So here he is being careful with his language, because he can, and, you know, he has those skills.
And he says, again, there's no science to support wearing a mask outside of a healthcare setting.
Is that true?
Let me see in the comments.
How many of you think that's true, that there's no science to support wearing a mask outside of a healthcare setting?
How many say that is true?
Because it's a very lawyerly thing to say.
Because I don't believe there's science that has directly tested the coronavirus in the United States with a variety of masks.
So I'm seeing a number of people saying it's true.
I believe that it's technically true.
I won't even say technically true.
It's true.
The science has not done a gold standard set of tests, clinical trials with controls and peer review and then have people repeat the study to get to the point of knowledge.
So Tom Fidden is completely correct, if this is what he means, that it has not been demonstrated to the highest level of scientific scrutiny.
Everybody agrees with that, right?
Now, the way he says it, there's no science to support wearing the mask outside of healthcare.
To which I say, what does it mean that there's no science to support it?
I will give you the following analogy.
I've told you that analogies do not persuade, but they can introduce an idea Very effectively.
So the next thing I say will not be persuasion.
I'm just describing an idea using an analogy.
So yesterday, somebody said to me, let's say a mask skeptic, said to me yesterday, you know, scientists say that wearing, especially these cloth masks, the ones that are not the hospital grade, he said that Using those cloth masks to stop a virus, which is so small, would be like using a chain-link fence to stop a flea.
And I thought, that's a really good analogy, right?
Because you can see the chain-link fence, and if you're looking at it, it's mostly open holes.
The amount of space that's covered by one of the wires in the chain link fence is very small compared to the total mass.
So that flea goes right through it.
So that's a pretty good point, right?
If the virus is that small, and science confirms, we do know that, how small the virus is, we do know how many openings there are in a cloth mask, and you do know that the virus is much smaller than those big ol' openings in that mask.
So, that's all you need to know, right?
So here's how I answered it.
I said, but you know, the virus doesn't travel on its own.
The virus travels on the water droplets that come out of your mouth.
You all know that's true, right?
It's not like you're shooting viruses out of your mouth.
You're shooting moisture out of your mouth and riding on that moisture can be viruses.
So here's what I said to the flea and the chain link.
Now it's more like this.
There is a flea and there is a chain link fence.
That part of your analogy is correct.
But the flea is on a dog and the dog can't get through the fence.
And the flea isn't going to leave the dog, in my analogy.
The dog can bump against that fence as many times as it wants.
In this case, the dog is the water droplet.
If the water droplet can't get through, and the virus is on the water droplet, it's at least going to slow it down.
Now, there may be other considerations as well.
But the basic idea is that the people who think that masks are not supported by science Well, I would say that those facts alone support it by science.
Now, is that a judgment call?
Would you agree with me that this statement is true?
That if science tells us the masks have these big holes, the virus is so small it'll go through, but it has to ride on a water droplet, Which is too big to get through the mask in an efficient way.
Obviously some of it can come out around the sides.
But it doesn't project as far.
Now everything I just said is from science.
Right? Science has told us.
It travels on the water droplet.
Everything I just said.
Would you say that therefore the science doesn't support using masks?
Well it doesn't prove it.
It doesn't prove it.
But does it support it?
So what I said to Tom Fitton's comment is that if science doesn't prove it either way, science isn't helping.
Science doesn't tell you it doesn't work.
Science doesn't tell you it does work.
Science does tell you there are really good reasons to suspect it might.
Now, if science can't tell you yes or no, but it does tell you quite clearly, we don't know, but given these variables, it certainly seems like it should make a difference.
And, on top of that, nearly universal medical professional agreement that yes, we don't have scientific proof, but what we do know strongly suggests it should make a difference, especially There seems to be some evidence that countries that use masks more are getting a better result.
So I think it's really dangerous for a lawyer to speak in lawyerly terms about medical things, because it could easily lead you in the wrong direction to make a decision about yourself, even if the lawyer is completely correct.
So that's the danger of lawyers talking about medical stuff.
Because lawyers know how to say things that are completely correct, but might not be the thing you need to hear, right?
So I'm very concerned about that kind of a message because I think people read it as, as masks don't work.
And this sentence does not say that.
Let me read it again. Again, there's no science to support wearing a mask outside of a health care setting.
True, in terms of confirmed studies that can be repeated, but very unuseful for risk management.
The President has apparently said to Telemundo or somebody that he is preparing an executive order on DACA. DACA is the people who came here as children Most of them are older now, but they've lived and grown up as Americans, but just not technically legally.
So that's one of several immigration-related topics, is how do you deal with that group.
The president is hinting that he's going to have some kind of a path to citizenship.
Now, here's the interesting thing about that.
Probably most people agree that they should have a path to citizenship.
Probably. I mean, there are probably enough Republicans who say, yeah, you know, if they grew up here, you can't penalize a child who was brought here as a child.
I mean, it just doesn't seem, it violates our sense of right and wrong.
But at the same token, you don't want to create a precedent.
Because if you reward people for coming into the country illegally, As Reagan did when he had some kind of an amnesty, you get more of it.
We know that. There's no doubt about it.
But, of course, if you didn't have a border fence, you'd get more of it anyway, I suppose.
Here's what we don't know about that.
We don't know if the president is going to put some kind of conditions on these that are not obvious.
So, for example, And this is not based on any inside knowledge or anything.
I'm just going to toss this out to keep you open-minded until we know what that's about.
Suppose the president said, yes, I would like to make them all citizens with a special, I'm not sure if this is legal, but with some kind of a special requirement that they not have voting rights for five years or something.
I don't know, is that even legal?
Could he do that? Might be unconstitutional.
Or let's say that he says the executive order is that DACA can be a path to citizenship only under the following conditions.
Let me say this.
Suppose he said DACA is approved under the following conditions, that the border wall is funded.
He could do that, right?
And the executive order, correct me if I'm wrong, Can an executive order not have a condition built into it?
Such that he would say, DACA, path to citizenship, totally approved under this one condition.
And what is that one condition?
I'm just speaking hypothetically.
Suppose, he said, the condition is we have to have a functioning border wall, or it has to be funded to build a border wall.
How would you feel then?
Because he wouldn't be saying that they have a path.
He'd be saying they have a path if this other thing happens.
Because you don't want to have a condition where you incentivize people to come in illegally if you don't have a way to stop it from happening in the future, such as a wall.
Now, I don't know that the president has some kind of a plan like that where there's a condition in it or a poison pill.
It could be a trick.
It could be something he's put a poison pill in it So the Democrats will reject it, and then he can say, just as he's running for president, hey, you know, you rejected my DACA plan.
So we don't know what he's up to, but I feel like there's going to be a surprise in that somewhere.
There's a video that I think came from January in which Biden, when he was still running, he was running for president in January, and He was talking to an audience, and I couldn't believe my ears, because I thought, what year did this happen?
And then you see the Biden for President signs, and I'm thinking, this happened this year?
Biden said this?
This year? And he didn't get canceled?
And what he was saying to the what looked like mostly white audience, he said, our culture is not imported from some African nation.
They went on to say that our culture is not...
It doesn't come from some Asian nation.
It's a European culture.
And I thought to myself, if a Republican said that, that would be the end of their career.
And I look at this and I think, do we just ignore this?
Because the whole point is that culture is sort of a code word for racists, right?
Oh, you say culture, but you really mean brown people, don't you?
I mean, really, don't you?
That's what people say about the Republicans.
And I would say, having met lots of Republicans, that they have a variety of reasons, just like any big group, they have a variety of reasons why they would want immigration halted, but more of it has to do with culture than it has to do with ethnicity.
There's some small percentage of people who do care about ethnicity and immigration, but Most people, as far as I can tell, you know, I'm not a Republican, but I talk to a lot of them.
It does seem like they're mostly just interested in the culture part.
So they wouldn't care so much where you came from, as long as when you got here, you played by the same rules and didn't want to turn it into Sharia law or whatever else.
So the fact that Biden doesn't get canceled for that is just mind-boggling.
Like, there's just no way a Republican could have said those same words.
Fascinating. Boris Johnson has announced that they're looking for data scientists to run a UK government analysis unit.
What? That's right.
So Johnson is setting up some kind of a, they refer to it as like a skunk works.
So it looks like it's not clear if it'll be part of the government or a quasi part of the government or an independent entity that advises the government, but it will have some independence, whatever independence you get as a, quote, skunkworks.
And apparently it's to put people who know how to look at data in one place so that you can get government decisions that are backed by people who know how to look at data.
Now, how important would that be in the United States?
Well, we just had this whole conversation about masks.
Wouldn't you like the data organization of the United States to say, okay, okay, you're all arguing about whether masks work.
Here's the analysis.
This is the best we know.
And wouldn't you like to have seen that all the way through the coronavirus situation?
You'd like to know that if somebody asserted a fact or a statistic, That there was some other skunkworks who'd said, oh, hold on, just a minute.
I don't think you're quite looking at that right, because you're forgetting this, you forgot that.
Now, at the moment, it feels like there are some individuals doing that on Twitter in the United States.
You know, Nate Silver, for example, you'll see him weighing in on that sort of thing.
But as some people noticed, Yeah, and I see some people noting in the comments that just days ago I had suggested that the United States needs exactly this.
Now, I refer to it as maybe it needs to be a cabinet position, but that wasn't an important part.
It just needs to be an entity of people who know how to analyze things, because the public does not.
But the worst situation is that the public doesn't know how to analyze things, but they think they do.
That's the problem. If the public knew they didn't know how to analyze things correctly, it wouldn't be that much of a problem.
They'd say, well, I don't know.
I can't tell what's going on.
It's the fact they're so certain and certain in different directions that causes all our problems.
All right, so yes, you're wondering if the UK watches my periscopes because it would be a gigantic coincidence that But could be a coincidence.
If I had to guess, you know, pretty high chance it's just a coincidence.
But what are the odds that I would suggest this exact idea, like a week before it appears in the paper, that the UK is thinking of this idea?
Could it be? Could it be that someone has watched this periscope?
I do have reason to believe that the government of the UK or at least some members of it do watch this periscope.
So I don't know if that's where the idea came from but I do know there's a connection.
Robert Mueller wrote an op-ed.
No he didn't.
That's what the news is trying to tell you.
There's an op-ed with Robert Mueller's name on it.
So it's being reported that Robert Mueller wrote an op-ed.
No he didn't. I don't know who wrote it.
I don't know who wrote it, but we saw Robert Mueller testifying.
He's not writing any op-eds.
I mean, I don't want to be unkind, but we saw him operating.
He's not sitting down and writing any op-eds.
I just don't believe that's happening.
So somebody wrote an op-ed and asked him to sign it.
Here's one of the...
I don't even know what to say about this.
Every now and then you'll see a pundit with an opinion that's so mind-blowingly...
I don't know.
I'll just tell you what it is and you can make up your own mind.
So this is journalist-writer Charles Blow, who I believe is a New York Times guy.
Now, I've been following him for a long time.
He often appears on TV as a pundit, etc., And he has some of the worst takes I've ever seen, fairly consistently.
If you want, like, a bad take on something, well, he's your guy.
But this one is just, wow!
And he was tweeting today, or maybe it was yesterday, that cancel culture doesn't exist.
That's right. A major writer for the New York Times is tweeting in all capitals The cancel culture does not exist.
What he says is that, no, no, no, it's not cancel culture.
It's just well-off people who don't want to be criticized.
Does that sound like the world you live in, where cancel culture doesn't actually exist?
It's simply that if you do something bad in public, And people decide to punish you for it by not shopping or not voting for you or whatever, that there's nothing to note there.
That's just the way the world works.
If you do bad things and people know it, consequences will happen.
So what do you think of his brilliant take?
The cancel culture doesn't work because if people do real problems and they get called out for it, well, that's the way it's supposed to work, right?
Well, as I tweeted this morning, pretty much I think every time that somebody tried to cancel me, and there have been quite a few times over the years, that online mobs have come after me, every time it was a misinterpretation of something I said.
Not sometimes, not once, every time.
A hundred percent of the time that people have come after me, It's for one of these two things.
I misinterpreted something you said, often because somebody else misinterpreted it and they only read the misinterpretation.
So it's either a misinterpretation of something I said that I wouldn't be cancelled for if it was correctly understood, or simply for being associated with saying good things about President Trump.
That's it. So those are the two things that people have consistently tried to cancel me for, Including yesterday.
I'm not talking about some, like, historical thing.
I'm talking about yesterday.
Somebody tweeted that maybe nobody should read Dilbert books.
No, actually, I take that back.
I said it happened once yesterday.
I think it happened more like three or four times yesterday.
Just to me. And I'm not talking about three or four movements, but rather three or four public individuals on Twitter, suggested in public, That people boycott me.
Now what did I do to earn a boycott?
Was it my bad behavior?
No. No, it wasn't my bad behavior.
It was misinterpreting what I'm saying.
And just being associated with liking one of the political candidates.
Liking not everything that he does.
I'm very clear about that.
I don't like everything Trump does and everything he might ever do in the future.
I like certain things he does, especially in the persuasion realm.
So, I'm on the edge of cancellation every day and it has nothing to do with bad behavior.
Nothing. In fact, I don't even have a motive for bad behavior.
Everything that I've been trying to do publicly for the last several years only has the purpose of being a public good because that's sort of the only way I get a payoff.
My only way I get a payoff is if I can produce a public good.
I don't really have a business model where making people angry or unhappy or worse off somehow makes money.
How would that work? I don't even know how you do that.
So, and then as was said in the comments, the CEO of Goya Foods, what exactly was his criminal act that caused the boycott?
What exactly did he do wrong, Charles Blow, besides be polite and considerate to the President of the United States while he had been invited to the White House?
If you can't be polite, To the President of the United States, no matter the party, when you're on the White House grounds and you've been invited?
Come on. Charles Blow would say that guy should get cancelled and boycotted.
I'm assuming boycotting and cancelling are sort of in the same family.
Really? Would he be okay with that?
Now, the great thing, of course, most of you know, is that the Goya products have sold out in a lot of grocery stores.
Have you seen the photos?
You'll see just a big empty shelf where all the Goya products are.
Now, I too, the next time I go to the store, will look for them.
I literally didn't know they existed, but now it's one of the most famous brands in the country.
Isn't that cool? How do you like the fact that Goya Goya was sort of a specialty brand a week ago, and now it's a national brand.
International, I'd say.
Now, what the Conservatives have done for Goya, which is support, basically just support somebody Who supported the president, even though it's somebody who would have supported Obama, and I think did, in terms of being polite and just being a good citizen, etc. So we love the CEO of Goya Foods, but you can't always rescue people unless they happen to be a CEO of a company that makes a product that you might want to buy.
So it was a special case where the public could weigh in directly and fix it.
But let's say if some individual loses their job, well, what can you do about that?
And I'm wondering if...
So there are two ways to fight cancel culture.
And nothing lasts forever, so even the cancel culture will transform to some other thing eventually.
But while we're dealing with it, it seems there are two ways to go.
One is to cancel back as hard as you can until you have...
Mutually assured destruction.
But that's not ideal, right?
If you could have some other better way than mutually assured destruction, that would be preferred.
Maybe the other way is that anybody who gets cancelled gets rich.
Suppose you did that. Suppose getting cancelled made you rich, or at least better off.
So let's say if it's an individual who loses their job, The conservatives immediately contact that person if they're in the area and say, hey, put in your resume.
I'd like to take a look.
So suppose you could get a promotion, or at least a good other job if you got canceled.
If you make products, maybe you could sell more of them, or you could become more famous.
So I would look for increasing ways that people who are unfairly canceled...
Could come out ahead and then canceling doesn't work after that.
The Goya situation has got to put in the minds of the cancelers, wait a minute, I wasn't planning on making Goya a ranch.
That wasn't the plan.
I saw that Robert Reich was in favor of the boycott of Goya and I thought, what the hell happened to that guy?
How could you be an economist Like a public economist, meaning that you have a public, let's say, interest and influence upon, how can you be an economist and ever be in favor of a boycott of an American company because of the political, just normal political leaning of the CEO? How in the world can you justify that as an economist?
It just feels crazy.
But maybe there's some argument there.
I don't know. Let's see.
I did a little online poll, and I asked for Trump supporters only.
I said, have they ever lied about their support of the president, either a direct lie or a lie by omission?
And last I checked, there were hundreds and hundreds of responses, and approximately, last I checked, 60% of the people answering said that they had lied about their support of the president.
Now, that could be a lie by omission.
You know, they just stay silent during the conversation or whatever.
But let me ask you this.
Do you think you've ever seen a number like that before?
60% of the supporters of a sitting president are unwilling to say it even to co-workers.
Have you ever seen anything like that before?
What are the odds that the polls are correct?
I feel very low.
And the setup here seems unmistakable.
If it turns out that this is another 2016, And that there were really a lot of hidden Trump supporters, which I believe is a certainty.
We don't know how big it is, but it's a certainty that it exists.
I would say, just to put some numbers on it, if the polls are, let's say, 12 points apart now or 10 points apart, Biden is leading Trump on a national basis, I would say that you could guarantee That at least 2% or two basis points of the 10 points, you could guarantee that at least two of the 10 are because people are lying.
But it could be a lot more.
It could be a lot more.
Now keep in mind that if there's a 10 point, just think about this, there's a 10 point difference between Biden and Trump.
How much does Trump have to make up To be tied.
Is it 10 points?
No. It's not.
Trump only has to make up half the difference.
Because if half of the people go from Biden to Trump, he's tied if he gets half of them, right?
Did I do that right?
I'm not saying that wrong, am I? So it looks like there's this big difference, but I would say he only needs to close the gap of maybe five, And two or three is just already in his pocket.
He's probably two points away from a lead or something like that.
So my guess is he's a little bit behind nationally.
It only matters what the battleground states are.
I don't know if he's a little bit behind battleground states.
It's a little harder to tell. But I feel like it's really close, is my guess.
And there's a lot of time to go.
All right. Amazon had this weird situation yesterday, I think it was, where they put out a company-wide memo, and then they retracted it saying it was put out in error.
Now, ask me, who would put out this particular message in error?
Like, it's a weird error.
And the message that was in error was that...
Employees of Amazon needed to take the TikTok app off their phones, but they could still use it on other devices.
And then they withdrew that.
Now, the reason for that was that TikTok is a Chinese company.
The Chinese government has a backdoor to it, of course, which means that they could use it to massively spy and or collect data about Americans, and we assume that they are.
Why did Amazon have that company memo and then pull it back without much explanation?
Here's what I think.
I don't know this for sure.
Just a guess.
I think it's a certainty that our government will ban TikTok in this country.
Wouldn't you say?
Because India has already done it and nobody is arguing that India got it wrong.
I don't believe there's anybody except maybe China who is saying, India, India, how could you be so racist to block a Chinese app that was doing nothing to nobody?
Nobody's saying that, right?
Unless I'm missing it.
But I believe everybody just said, well, it's about time.
Yeah, that was exactly the right thing to do.
So if you're Amazon, do you think you already have some insight where the U.S. government is going to go?
And I think the answer is yeah.
You probably have some insight on that.
There's probably somebody involved with Amazon who is also involved with the government decision about TikTok.
Almost certainly.
It's a small world. At that level of knowledge, because you'd have to be technically and security-wise, you'd have to have a lot of knowledge to really weigh in on TikTok at a technical level.
Amazon might just know more than we do.
They just might. Maybe they were just trying to get ahead of it.
All right. And that is about what I have for you.
I will give you a little update.
So I did get married yesterday to the lovely and beautiful Christina, now Christina Adams.
And I got to tell you, getting married in the age of coronavirus is really complicated.
It's really complicated.
Even little stuff, like getting a marriage license, not so easy when the places are closed.
So there are a lot of steps that...
I'll tell you, your government does not make it easy to do anything.
Anyway, just looking at your comments...
So, Navarro is on Maria Bartiroma discussing it, somebody says.
India and China just had a border battle.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to get out of control.
I think the border battles between India and China are two countries that know they can't have a war.
They just can't.
India and China just can't have a war, and they know it.
So, I wouldn't be surprised if you have infinite skirmishes, but full-out war, I don't see it.
Couldn't VPNs get around the block?
It's a good question. If you had a VPN on your phone, could you use the TikTok app anyway?
Maybe? I don't know.
Thank you to all of you who are giving congratulations.
Yeah, Tucker Carlson's head writer was fired for some comments he made.
You know, and I made this...
I think I'm going to have to go ahead and write up the Digital Bill of Rights.
But one of the items on the so-called Digital Bill of Rights that I've proposed should exist but doesn't exist would be that you could not lose your job or get cancelled for something you did in an anonymous account that later got uncovered.
Because the things that people say anonymously are closer to the things they might say behind closed doors, which are almost universally inappropriate in public.
So if you're the one who took the context into the wrong context, I think the person who uncovers it has to take the responsibility.
And I'm not saying that, therefore, I'm not making any comment about Tucker as a writer, so this isn't about any individual.
I'm saying that as a general statement, You should be allowed to say awful things in private.
You should be allowed to say awful things under an anonymous account as long as you mean them.
It could be a joke.
That would be fine, too. As long as you're someplace where anonymous accounts are okay.
It's an acceptable standard.
I think that people should have the right to act grotesquely in private While not being grotesque in any kind of professional or public way, and that it should be fine.
The myth that I do not accept, do not accept, is that there are some people who don't say bad things in private.
I just don't accept that.
I believe That everybody's got some bad thoughts that if you dug down a little bit, you'd find something you didn't like.
One of the reasons that I object strenuously to canceling people just by association, hey, you took a picture with this person, so you're canceled.
Or you're in the same group with this person, so you're canceled.
Or you talked to them or you supported them on this one issue, so you're canceled.
There's nothing more important Than allowing people to have whatever associations they want.
Because the assumption about the association is somehow you pick up all the bad qualities of the person you're with.
It doesn't work that way.
If I spend time with a bad person, am I likely to become more bad?
Or is the other person likely to become more good?
Right? I'd like to think that That I have a good influence on people, as opposed to them turning me to the dark side, which hasn't happened yet.
So, yeah, like Pierre Delecto.
I think that as long as anonymous accounts are a thing, in other words, let me say it this way, as long as there can be anonymous accounts, as long as it's a thing, and society agrees it can be a thing, you should never be able to be cancelled If you get uncovered in your personal, your private account.
It just shouldn't be a thing. Alright.
Do I support fakery?
I don't think it's fakery to have an anonymous account.
Because you're being clear about what you're doing.
In a sense. So everyone will have an anonymous account.
Yeah, I mean, that doesn't change the fact that platforms still have standards.
So if you're an anonymous account and you say something terrible, Twitter can still kick you off.
I don't have a big problem with that, if it's so bad.
You know, there's some limit.
All right. Will we see more of beautiful Christina?
Someone asks. You just might.
If you mean more of her, she might be making some more piano videos, for example.
She's got her Chopin pretty much nailed now, which is pretty hard.
If anybody's a musician, you know how hard that is.
