Episode 1059 Scott Adams: Twitter Hackers, Biden Plans, Education Improvements, Shy Trump Supporters, More
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Content:
Twitter got hacked
The gun debate is over
The climate change debate is over
Education is evolving quickly now
How MSNBC's Tony Schwartz can test his fear
Does CNN's Kaitlan Collins intentionally analyze incorrectly?
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What you usually see when you come here to visit me at this exact time every day is you think you're gonna have the best time of your day because that's what the simultaneous sip is.
Is really every time.
But today, it's going to be better than that.
I'm going to give you the only thing that's better than the simultaneous sip.
Are you ready? The only thing that's better than the simultaneous sip?
I'm just kidding. There's nothing better than the simultaneous sip.
Come on. Get out of here.
Let's have it. Let's have at it.
All you need is a cover mug or a glass of tank or chalice or a canteen jug or a flask of a vessel of any...
Kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better, including autocorrect, pandemics, pretty much everything.
Go! Somebody was making me laugh in the comments because yesterday autocorrect played a little joke on me.
So I had author Bjorn Lomborg on Periscope yesterday.
Most of you saw it. And when I typed in the title into Periscope, Periscope changed it to Lamborghini.
So, I can't really edit it after it's published in Periscope.
You can change it in YouTube and other places.
But in Periscope, you can't really go back and change it, because it's like a tweet.
So, I have somebody on to promote his book, and I don't even get his name right.
But I'll correct that now.
It's not Lamborghini, it's Lamborghini.
All right.
You probably are all aware that Twitter got hacked.
And boy, did Twitter get hacked.
Talk about a good hack.
I'm kind of, you know, do you ever have that feeling when you hear about a really good serial killer?
I'm not proud of this.
But every now and then, I'll hear a story about some serial killer who, you know, built an underground bunker to keep his victims and he had a plan and he operated for years.
And I'll have two different feelings about it.
One, well, that's awful.
That's the worst thing, you know, I've heard today.
That's one feeling.
And then the other feeling I get is, that's kind of industrious.
You know, if I'm being fair, you know, he's not lazy.
You know, he's good at executing a plan.
Maybe a systems over goals kind of guy.
I don't know. But I'm always impressed when people put a little effort into it.
All right. And these hackers for Twitter, they had a really good plan.
The plan was, and I guess it worked, They somehow, allegedly, we don't know if this part is true yet, but there's some suggestion that they may have bribed somebody within Twitter to give them some access.
They took over some accounts, some big ones like Biden, Elon Musk, and then they tweeted from their accounts, as if they had been tweeting, And they tweeted that, on behalf of some fake charity, that if you would send them $1,000 in Bitcoin, you would get back $2,000.
I don't know how many people in the world are dumb enough to fall for that, but it turns out it's at least 100.
So if you're wondering to yourself, Scott, you said that was a clever plan?
That's not a clever plan.
Who in the world would be dumb enough to send a stranger or a strange charity $1,000 in the hopes that they would send you $2,000 back?
That doesn't even make sense.
Well, it turns out if enough people see that offer, you're going to get a few hundred.
And that's what happened.
And the brilliance of the plan is that because the tweeting came from well-established accounts that would not scam you, you thought, well, Elon Musk isn't going to run some scam and Joe Biden isn't going to run some scam in the middle of an election.
But there it was.
Now, what's interesting is You may not know this, but Joe Biden is not actually the only person who's running for president this year.
There's this other guy, you've heard of him, Trump.
And what does it tell you that Biden was selected but Trump wasn't?
Now, it could be.
It could be that there's a political element to this, but probably not.
Here's what I think.
I think they thought Biden would be more convincing.
I think they just figured that Biden would be more likely to do this and that people would trust Biden more than Trump if it looks suspicious, and they're probably right.
So that was a clever hacker plan.
Probably more clever hacking than it was anything political.
All right. There are new stories about so-called refrigerated trucks to put all the bodies from the coronavirus deaths.
You've heard the refrigerated truck story before.
Maybe it's true this time.
Maybe it was true the other time.
But what do I tell you about persuasion?
I tell you that if you can't make it visual, it's not nearly as good.
So compare these two versions of a story.
One, hospitals are impacted.
They're overloaded.
People are, you know, there's lots of pressure on them, etc., right?
So that's sort of the generic conceptual description of what's happening in the hospitals compared to three refrigerated trucks pulled up to hold all the bodies, right?
Those are not comparable.
One of them is a movie, because you can actually see the trucks pulling up in your head.
That's persuasive.
If you can see it as a movie, you're already half persuaded.
If it's a concept, your brain doesn't hold it.
It doesn't stick to things as well, because you want to activate your visual part of your brain to get something done.
So, I would ask you, how true is it that these refrigerated trucks are really going to be used and they really exist?
I think in today's world, you just have to doubt that.
That doesn't mean it's untrue.
If it turns out that they're really used, that would be terrible.
And I would say, oh, okay, well, that's what they reported.
But you have to at least put a little bit of skepticism in this story.
I don't know how much.
25% minimum, I would say.
I would say dial up your skepticism to at least 25% on the refrigerated corpse trucks, which might be totally real, 75% chance, but I don't know.
I am amazed and agog.
I don't know what agog means exactly, but I think I'm agog.
Alexa, define agog.
Defined as?
Eagerness and curiosity.
Yes. Okay.
Okay. All right.
That's enough. Calm down.
All right. With eager curiosity, I look at these stories that seem to be settled now.
So, apparently, gun purchases are way up.
And in the past, when there have been gun purchases, because whenever there's a big story in the news about any kind of upheaval in this country, there always are more gun purchases.
But in the past, apparently, those gun purchases were primarily They were primarily for people who already owned guns.
This time, 40% of the gun purchases are people who never owned a gun before.
40%! What does that mean?
40% are new gun owners.
Somebody asked online, somebody asked, how many of them were Democrats?
I would also ask, how many of them did not answer a poll?
But here's the part that's amazing.
The gun debate is just over.
But there are no stories about the gun debate being over, because it would be kind of embarrassing.
Now, if you can think way, way, way back to a year ago and beyond, I'm pro-Second Amendment, pro-gun, and although I'm left of Bernie in general, I describe myself that way, gun ownership is one of those things that isn't really left or right.
A gun is a tool.
Would you agree?
That even thinking of guns as a political topic doesn't exactly make sense to me, because I don't think that my hammer or my saw Are political, right?
I just think of them as tools.
And a firearm for self-defense is just a tool.
So I don't really think of that as either left or right, which is why I give myself the freedom to just say, well, all right, is it a tool I need?
Is it a tool I might need?
Is it a tool anybody needs?
So that's the only way I think of guns.
I don't think of it politically.
And one of the biggest arguments was, what happens if the government goes bad and tries to take over the citizens and become a dictatorship?
And people would argue, well, it's a good thing we all have guns, because that would make that less likely.
And other people would argue, no, you can't go up against the government because they have tanks and nuclear weapons and stuff.
To which I've always said, that's not what the fight looks like.
That's not what it would look like.
What are you imagining?
Are you imagining a line of tanks and soldiers on the right and then the left, a bunch of citizens with their handguns and some rifles and stuff?
That's not what's going to happen if there were any kind of a dictatorship kind of takeover.
There would be more house to house, if you know what I mean.
So anybody who was on the side of the government would get a visit.
By their neighbors. You know what I'm saying?
It would be nothing like some big battle.
It would be, let's visit your neighbor, because your neighbor has a family member who's on the dictator side.
That's what it would be.
And that would be enough to keep the dictator in control, because the citizens would have just too much power.
One of the things I had not specifically thought of, but now you can't unthink it, is what happens if there's a civil war that just comes from the citizens themselves?
Because that's sort of the feeling that you're getting with these protests, is that it's approaching something like a civil war.
My opinion is it's not, and that your feeling about it is way overblown, but it feels like that.
And anybody who's lived through this period is done with the gun conversation.
It's just over. And I don't even think I would address anybody who wanted to talk about it at this point.
It feels like it is so off the table that if somebody said, Scott, do you want to come and represent one side in the gun debate?
Here would be my answer.
What gun debate?
What gun debate are you talking about?
Oh, you mean in the past?
Do you have a time machine where I can go back in the past and have a debate back when there was actually something to debate?
There's no longer a debate.
This ended it.
But the other one that may have ended recently in a very quiet way is climate change.
Have you heard of climate change?
Climate change Just got a little gut punch by Joe Biden being in favor of nuclear energy.
Do you know who else is in favor of nuclear energy?
The Trump administration and the Department of Energy working quite aggressively for nuclear energy.
Do you know what everybody who can actually do math and science, do you know what they think is really the only way you're going to get to some kind of a no-carbon situation?
Nuclear. Pretty much.
I mean, everybody's in favor, I think, of doing more research and if you can figure out, you know, better batteries or better energy or something.
Sure. Sure.
Everybody's in favor of that.
But at the same time, if you're not doing nuclear, Well, you're not trying that hard.
You're not really serious.
So I think the climate change argument just sort of disappeared and it got attacked from two different directions in a very important way.
Direction number one is what are you going to do about it, right?
So there's how bad is it and what are you going to do about it are the two questions about climate change.
Would you agree? How bad is it?
What are you going to do about it?
The what are you going to do about it apparently is roughly the same on the left and the right.
Right? Because Biden did not take the extreme Green New Deal stuff like getting rid of airplanes.
He just made some aggressive goals that are, you know, so many years in the future that you don't even care about the deadline.
It doesn't even mean anything so far in the future.
And it's just not that different the way it feels.
From what the Republicans are already doing.
Now, sure, there might be some more investment in green stuff, but I don't know.
Has anything as much come out of it yet?
I'm not sure that the citizens will see much of a difference anymore.
But here's the other part. So that's the what do you do about it part.
The other part is the how bad is it, which drives the what do you do about it.
And that's where I think these two books that I've talked about this week You know, Bjorn Lomborg's book, and here's the important part, and this is the same with Michael Schellenberger's book, Apocalypse Never, which I talked about earlier.
Both books are in the same, let's say, family of criticism, which is, yes, humans are warming the earth.
So both of them start with that assumption.
This is a big deal. They start with the assumption that, yeah, it's true, humans are warming the earth, but then they make a far stronger argument, both Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Schellenberger, both of them with new books, both of them will make a big impact, and it's just eviscerating the argument that there's a problem as big as they say.
They've just eviscerated it.
And as long as these two books are out there, People like you are willing to tell people, hey, check out these books.
You're really completely eliminating the how-big-a-problem-is-it part of the equation.
At the same time, you're saying, it's not that big of a problem if we do everything right, and by the way, we're doing everything right, because we kind of are, which is pursuing every form of energy fairly aggressively is exactly what you should do, every form of cleaner energy.
So I would say that climate change just went from the biggest problem in the world to, oh, that looks like that's heading in the right direction.
So a lot of the energy is just going to come right out of it, I think.
Education is continuing to evolve, and I'm loving the conversations where people are really starting to, let's say, they're picking it apart to redesign it.
A lot of us are doing that in our minds, but there are no doubt lots of people...
Working very hard to figure out which part of the education is the important part, which is really an interesting process, isn't it?
If you think that the education system just was, you know, designed hundreds of years ago and just evolved a little bit, it's still basically reading and writing and sitting in the classroom and listening to a teacher.
And the fact that we're picking that apart now and saying, all right, throw away all the assumptions.
Maybe it doesn't need to be a teacher.
Maybe they don't need to be in the same place.
What about these classes?
Do you need a college education?
Ivanka says companies will train you to do this specific job.
So having everything in question about maybe the most important thing that society does, which is educate, because everything good follows from that, right?
You know, once you get your people up to speed...
Good people create good outcomes.
So the fact that our most basic and important, and I would say our alpha system, can I call it that?
Or the apex system?
The system that makes all the other systems work, education.
It's now going to really probably have a complete overhaul, I think.
Here's my suggestion for how to improve it.
I don't know if this is high school, or this is college, or maybe it doesn't matter, but here are the class categories that I would have.
This is sort of evolving over time, so you've heard a little of this.
One would be a class, or maybe it's even a major, on life strategy.
Things that you would see in such as in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, where I teach things like systems are better than goals and skill stacks are good.
So knowing the user interface for life, It feels like that just should be a course or even a major.
That's so important, because if you don't get the basics of, well, wait, how does the world work?
If you do more of this and less of this, do you get a better result?
And the answer is, if you know which button, yes, but you've got to know which button to push.
I would have a course on how to make decisions.
I do a little bit of that in my book, Loser Think.
Actually, that's mostly what the book is about.
But that could be taken further.
If you look at most of the problems in the news today, from guns to green technology to racism to everything else, they all seem to have a common problem.
What is the common problem with You know, everything.
Guns, racism, green technology.
The common problem is that the differences in our opinions are differences in ability to analyze.
They're not actually political opinions.
These are fake disagreements.
If people knew how to analyze things properly, they just knew how to compare two things.
You know, can I compare this pen to this pencil?
Now you think it's common sense.
Well, you know, you don't need to take a class to compare a pencil to a pen.
It's just obvious.
And that's where everybody goes wrong, because it's not.
It's just not. You've got to take a lot of things into account to do a proper comparison, and you do need to learn it.
It's not something that's common sense.
I would have a course on persuasion, similar to my book Win Bigly, because if you can't persuade, you can't get much done.
Can't get a job, can't sell something, can't get a mate.
Yeah, persuasion is pretty important.
And then communication in general, which persuasion might be a subset of.
So that's what I would teach. And then maybe entrepreneurship.
So a little bit about how would you start a business if you wanted to?
And what would you need to do if you started a business?
You know, what's a corporation?
What's a partnership? Just some basics.
And these would be my, at least, the beginning of a core platform.
Now, obviously, you need the reading and writing and science background, etc., so you need some basics, but this is where I'd go.
Here's a little thing that you don't learn in school, but look, just consider, if you will, I'm going to give you a little tip on one topic that is not covered in school.
And yet it could be one of the most basic, important skills that a person can have, and most of you are not good at it.
But you could be, with maybe half an hour of instruction.
And that is sleep.
Sleep should be considered a skill, not the default condition of your body when it's night and you're tired.
We kind of think of sleep as just the thing that sort of happens at night and how hard is it, you know?
There's no skill involved in sleeping.
But there is. Now, there may not have been skill involved in sleeping in the past because it was a simpler world and things weren't complicated.
Maybe it was different. I don't know.
Maybe people didn't drink as much coffee in the caveman days.
But in the modern days, sleep is so important to your performance and really your whole quality of life that if you don't do it right, it makes a big difference and you should.
Now, I've given you sleep tips before, but here's a new one.
And this won't work for everyone.
This is a sleep tip that worked for me.
I would be interested if any of you want to try it out with the open-mindedness of, well, if this doesn't work, I lost a week of trying something that didn't hurt me, right?
So I'd like you to just try it.
But, you know, some of you, this won't work.
You'll know if you're one of the people that it works for.
It goes like this.
If I go to bed, And I can't sleep because I'm just too wound up.
Here's what I tell myself.
You probably tell yourself, or the average person would say, darn it, I can't sleep.
I can't sleep.
What happens when you tell yourself over and over again you can't sleep?
Well, it doesn't help.
Doesn't help, so that would be a bad mindset.
Let me tell you what I do.
When I can't sleep because my body is just wound up and I'm not ready to sleep, I tell my body that I didn't work hard enough that day.
Now, your immediate reaction should be, uh, why does that work?
You need a little more explanation, right?
It goes like this.
It helps me not a bit that night.
So that night, I'm just going to struggle to fall asleep.
So that tip doesn't help me one bit the day that I say it to myself.
I didn't work hard enough.
But the next day, it's like 7 o'clock at night, and I'll say to myself, ah, I have not exercised today.
I got busy, I wanted to, but I didn't.
So now you say, all right, I would never exercise at 7 o'clock at night, but I'm not going to be laying in bed again tonight and tell myself I didn't work hard enough.
So, workout clothes on, hit the road, walk, run, ride your bike, lift some weights, go to the gym.
Back when people had gyms and they could go to them and they didn't die from going to the gym.
So, that mindset, if you start programming it into yourself, Will cause your day to be more productive because instead of saying, what's the easiest way I can get through things, you'll start managing your energy in a way that by the time you hit the bed at whatever your bedtime is, 10 o'clock, you're only going to want to sleep.
I push myself to the point where I know I will sleep well.
That's one of the ways I manage energy.
I've said before, and a lot of people have found this very useful, that you should not manage your time, you should manage your energy.
Now, of course, you have to manage your time to show up to appointments, but think in terms of managing your energy.
To create the best energy for the task and then to make sure that you've used your energy up by the end of the day when it's time to go to bed and that you haven't used it up at noon because it's going to be a tough day.
You use it all up early.
But you've made sure that you did a physical work and mental work That will get you in the sleeping point of view.
So that's the advice.
Sleep is a skill, and that skill starts when you wake up, right?
So your skill of sleeping at night starts when you wake up, and you manage your energy in your day to get yourself in the right condition to sleep.
It's an all-day process.
So if anybody tries that, let me know if it works for you.
I think it's the kind of framing that will appeal to some kind of mindsets that are already in place.
It won't work for everybody.
All right. Tony Schwartz, who's some kind of a political commentator, I think he's on MSNBC, he said this in a tweet, it might sound like a familiar sounding tweet.
Who has ever said something vaguely similar to this before?
See if it rings any bells.
He said in a tweet, Tony Schwartz did, if somehow, someway, Trump is re-elected, I won't consider it safe to continue to live in the United States.
That will be true, I believe, for many of those who have publicly opposed Trump.
Does that sound familiar?
It's kind of what I said if Biden won the election.
Now let's compare the two assertions.
So I've said that Trump supporters would be unsafe in a world in which Biden became president and let's say the left became emboldened.
And Tony Schwartz is making the exact same claim except saying that it would be unsafe to be a vocal democrat In a world where Trump is re-elected.
Which of those claims seems more true?
Would it be more dangerous to be on the left or more dangerous on the right if you're not the one whose preferred candidate is in power?
Well, how could we figure out which of those seems more reasonable?
Is there any kind of test you could do before the election to see what the mood is in the country?
Well, I would suggest a test.
How about Tony Schwartz puts on a MAGA hat and goes to a public place?
And then I'll do the opposite.
I'll wear a Biden for president hat and I will visit the same public place.
Or any other place.
In fact, I'll go further.
I will put on a Joe Biden hat and I will attend a Trump rally.
In a Joe Biden for President hat, and I will be completely safe.
Let's just try it.
Let's make it more fun.
Let's say that Tony Schwartz has to wear a Make America Great Again hat to a Biden event, if there ever is one, that's not televised, that's not just digital.
And so he'll take a MAGA hat to a Democrat event and I'll wear a Joe Biden hat to a MAGA-Trump event.
And we'll just do an experiment and see who gets the shit beat out of them.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I would give some mocking and I would give some looks from going to a Trump rally.
But I'll also bet you that the people who are mocking and maybe looking at me at the Trump, wait for it, are smiling.
Right? If you went to a Trump rally wearing a Biden hat, the first thing people would do when they saw you is they would smile, because they would think it was funny.
They would think it was funny.
And they might say, hey, what are you doing here?
You're in the wrong rally. Give me a hard time.
Would I ever feel physically threatened at a Trump rally?
Not even a little bit.
Wearing a Biden hat.
Not even a little bit.
It wouldn't feel the slightest bit physically dangerous.
But of course, they'd give me a hard time.
But I guarantee they would be smiling when they did it.
Do you think it would work the same way the other way?
I don't think so.
All right. Let's see.
Have you watched an interview on live video with Trump's niece, Mary Trump, who's got a book that is critical of her uncle, Donald Trump?
How many of you have seen her on video?
I don't want to be unkind.
I'm just going to say this.
You should see her.
I think she talked to George Stephanopoulos, so there's some clips.
I'm just going to say this.
You should spend 10 seconds looking at a clip of her talking.
And again, I won't be unkind.
I'm just suggesting it's worth 10 seconds of your time.
And I'm not even going to give you my opinion of her book, because in 10 seconds of listening to her talk, you will have the same opinion I do.
So I don't need to talk you into anything.
Just spend 10 seconds.
See if you can get the vibe of what's going on here.
See if you can just get a feel for the person.
And then you're going to have the same opinion I do, and I'm not even going to state it.
Brad Parscale apparently has been replaced as the head of the campaign for Trump.
We don't know what is behind that, but if you believe rumors on On Twitter, there might be some personal relationship situation going on there.
Not between Trump and Parscale, but there might be something personal going on.
And one wonders how that works.
I especially wonder. When there's this suggestion, and I don't know who put this idea into the public's mind.
Can somebody tell me where did this idea come from?
Like, why are people even thinking this?
There's some kind of a widespread thought that there are these secret Trump supporters that are lying to pollsters.
Where does the public get ideas like this?
It's crazy. Oh, wait.
I might have been part of that.
And this is how CNN writes a headline for a story about the belief by voters that there are shy Trump supporters.
So I guess that means that if you're a Democrat, The Republicans are trying to scare you by telling you that there's this boogeyman in the form of these hidden Trump voters that are going to get you.
They're going to get you.
They're hiding. And there was a Monmouth poll, maybe you heard of it, in which they gave Joe Biden a 13-point lead in Pennsylvania.
So you say, wow, he's really doing great in these competitive states.
But then they also asked Pennsylvanians whether they thought there was a secret Trump voter out there, a lot of them, and 57% believe there are hidden Trump voters.
57% of Pennsylvanians think their neighbors are lying to pollsters.
57%. But then CNN, after giving it a headline, calling it a boogeyman, which would suggest it's not real, further down in the story on their website, they say, the idea of, quote, secret voters is not entirely far-fetched.
In the aftermath of Trump's 2016 win, one study suggested, quote, the people who kept their vote a secret overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Did you need to see a survey to tell you that the people who wouldn't tell you who they were voting for voted for Trump?
Look at all the undecided voters.
How many undecideds are there?
Or let's say independents.
Because independents are really fake undecideds.
They're really decided, they just pretend they're not.
Somebody says 43% of Pennsylvania voters are poorly informed.
That sounds about right.
Anyway, we'll see how big that buggy man is.
Because... I can't get past this.
See if I'm on the wrong page with this.
The reason that I think the hidden Trump vote is bigger than it was in 2016, and potentially really, really big, two reasons.
One, it's more and more obvious that it could be physically dangerous and economically dangerous to admit you're a Trump supporter.
So the first thing is, That the danger has gone up.
Would you agree? The danger has increased for admitting you're a Trump supporter.
So if nothing had changed but that, there should be more hidden Trump supporters this year than 2016.
But that's not the only thing that happened.
Another thing that needs to happen for persuasion is to think about it.
You have to actually think of it.
So if nobody had ever suggested, hey, maybe you could just lie to the pollster, if nobody had ever suggested that, then people would have to think of it themselves.
Some of them would. Some of them would just say, I'm not comfortable with this, and they would just naturally lie to the pollsters.
But what happens when you suggest it?
What happens when you put it out there as a national story?
You know, last time there were a lot of people hiding, and how'd that turn out for the people who were hiding?
How did it turn out for the people who were hiding, you know, the secret Trump supporters in 2016?
The way it turned out was better than anything that they've ever seen in their lives, politically.
The unexpected win of Trump and the night that you learned it and the way that you felt if you were a Trump supporter, and especially if you were a hidden Trump supporter, was something that I would describe as really, really good.
You would feel really, really good.
Like your whole body would feel good.
You would be exploding with dopamine and serotonin and whatever else makes you feel good.
Those people got a physical reward that lasted for months.
You know, speaking for myself, from the day of that surprise Trump victory, and I had more skit in the game because I had been publicly predicting it for so long, but the feeling that you got with that surprise victory, it lasted months.
All of the people who lied in 2015 and 2016, do you think they're lying again?
Of course. Of course.
Why wouldn't they? Because their reasons to lie are better than ever.
And it worked out.
And if the prank works again, because the first time I think it was just people hiding.
But this time there's another motivation.
The prank. Right?
The prank is really attractive.
And the prank is the surprise.
Because as much fun as you had when it looked like Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance of winning toward the end, and oops, there you go.
I guess 90% wasn't good enough.
We're heading toward a place where the polls are so wide that on Election Day it might be a 99.99% Predicted result that Biden will win.
How will Democrats feel if there's a 99.99% prediction from the experts that Biden will win and Trump wins again?
Again. How are they going to take it, the Democrats?
Well, everybody remembers the screaming voters, the Democrats who lost.
There's this famous, iconic picture of the woman going, ah, and being upset.
You can't tell me if you're a Trump supporter.
You haven't looked at that picture a hundred times since 2016 and laughed every time.
Every time.
So, the situation is sort of picture perfect for the biggest prank Ever played in political history.
If this is what it looks like, and it definitely looks like it to me, I think it's hard to say that's definitely what it is, you know, we don't live in a world of certainty, but if I were going to have to put money on it, I would say that the hidden Trump supporter is far and away bigger this time than it was last time, and maybe bigger than any election ever.
Because there's a genuine fear.
It's in people's minds.
It's a bigger fear than it was before.
And the prank, the prank of it, just the surprise that could be coming, just could be the funniest thing you've ever experienced in your whole freaking life.
Honestly. And that's so attractive.
We'll see. So here's how CNN handled an interview that...
President Trump did, in which he was asked about, was it Catherine Herridge or somebody asked him this question?
So here's the headline from CNN. Trump gets upset when asked about police killing black Americans.
What would you think the story's going to say if the headline is Trump gets upset when asked about police killing black Americans?
Doesn't the headline suggest That the president doesn't care about police killing black Americans.
Doesn't it feel like they're...
They don't say that, but the way it's phrased is sort of suggesting that they can tell his attitude and that he doesn't really care about black people being killed by police.
But is that what happened?
Well, let's talk about what actually happened.
So during an interview, this is from CNN, with CBS News, President Donald Trump responded to a question about why black Americans are still dying at the hands of law enforcement by saying, quote, more white people are killed by police and calling the question terrible.
Now, of course, they took him out of context so that you wouldn't know exactly why he was saying the question was terrible.
It's a little unclear. So they've mucked up the They're descriptions, so you don't know what he was really getting at.
Right? They just took the meaning out of it and put their own meaning on it.
Now, if you saw live, what he was getting at is that the terrible part is that you would focus on only the deaths of one group of people when the larger group of people were white.
Is that an unfair thing for a president to say?
Maybe we should focus on the largest group of people who are getting killed, not the smaller group.
Or maybe we should at least include the larger group in the conversation.
He didn't say you should focus on the larger group.
He said it should be in the conversation, which is completely fair.
So, how did Caitlin whatever on CNN report on that?
She summed up the piece, because it was part of a video package on Jake Tapper's show, and she sums it up by saying that police kill black Americans at a rate of 3.5 times more than whites.
Is that true?
No. It's fake news.
Because she does the same data analysis mistake that caused all the protests.
It's the same mistake.
Do you think it's really a mistake?
Or do you think it's an intentional lie?
Well, what she says is technically correct, but it's used to mislead, obviously.
And I'll tell you why. So what she's doing is saying that if you just look at the percentage of the population, black citizens are killed at 3.5 times more higher rate than whites.
That's true. It's also the wrong thing to measure because the only...police are not stopping people for no reason and killing them.
The only time anybody gets killed is if they have a police encounter.
So the only thing you should count is the number of police encounters.
If you do that, it turns out white and black deaths are comparable as a percentage.
So she's simply making a data analysis error that you have to ask yourself, is she really so dumb that she doesn't know she's doing this?
I don't know. Do you?
Is, I forget Caitlyn's last name, Caitlyn something?
The correspondent, the White House correspondent for CNN? Caitlyn Collins.
Caitlyn Collins.
I can't tell if she's actually not good at analyzing or if she's intentionally ignoring the useful number in favor of the one that just causes riots and is not useful.
Don't know. And so the question I ask for you is this.
We're big on free speech, and should be, But doesn't this get really close to shouting fire in a crowded movie theater?
So you know the old saying that we have freedom of speech but you still can't yell fire in a crowded theater because that kind of speech would certainly cause people to be hurt as they try to get out of the theater and there'd be pandemonium.
So, if we take as a standard that you have complete freedom of speech unless it's going to immediately cause people to hurt themselves, that's sort of where we draw the line, no, no, no, you can't do something that people are going to get killed.
That's not the free speech we're talking about.
But here, CNN is spreading a obviously fake or misleading data that is driving protests, looting, and deaths all over the country.
Why is it legal?
Think about it. Why is it legal For CNN to report data that clearly drives protests and violence all over the country while we're having it.
It's not even a hypothetical theoretical question.
It's happening right now.
And they put this on the air as a respectable allegedly news organization.
It is really close To yelling fire in a crowded theater, isn't it?
Because imagine if they had said this.
I know it's hard to imagine, but imagine if they had said this.
If you look at the number of police stops, it's fairly comparable, and we haven't asked anybody in Black Lives Matter to respond to that, but we'd like to get an interview on that.
How different would the world be if CNN were reporting the data analyzed correctly?
Pretty different. Yeah, it seems that CNN has blood on their hands.
The trouble is that you could take this argument pretty far and it would close down the news business because it would be easy to say, well, what about Hannity saying something medical that people believed?
To which I'd say, good point.
Right? Yeah.
The trouble is that if you made it actually illegal to do that, what CNN is doing that is clearly killing people, you'd have to extend that to the news saying anything that gets people killed, and unfortunately it's so common, both on the left and the right, That, you know, not because they're necessarily doing it intentionally, although I think CNN is doing this intentionally.
That would be my guess.
It's hard to know, but it feels intentional.
Because I'd hate to think they're this dumb.
What do you think? Do you think Caitlin Collins actually doesn't know that she is analyzing it wrong?
Do you think she doesn't know?
In the comments, tell me your opinion.
Because we can't read her mind, and I'm trying to catch myself from doing the thing I most criticize in other people, which is, no, you're not a mind reader.
You don't know what a stranger is thinking.
So I'm going to pull back my statement that it seems obvious it's intentional, because I'm not sure it is obvious.
I don't know that it is obvious.
I'm looking at your comments.
Yes, no, no.
Of course they know.
Yes, they know. Dumb.
Swalwell secretly loves Goya beans.
Okay, that's kind of funny. She doesn't know.
She doesn't know. Others saying it's intentional, clueless, 50-50.
She knows. She knows. I think they know.
She's not trained. Yeah, so she may not have the type of analytical background necessary, But I wonder if she's ever even heard the argument.
Because I even wonder that, don't you?
It makes sense that people who only watch CNN don't see the arguments on Fox, but do the commentators and the professionals who actually work there, do they also not see the argument on the other side?
Somebody says she has a boss.
That's true. Yeah, Kaylin Collins has a boss, and CNN is coordinated enough that if anybody at CNN knew it was wrong, she would hear about it, right?
If anybody at CNN knew that number was wrong, they'd tell somebody else and say, hey, hey, I heard you say that on the air.
You should correct that.
So does nobody at CNN know that's wrong?
Yeah, that would be a bigger reach, wouldn't it?
All right, that is what I have to say for today.
I would like to give you a little encouragement.
Ask yourself...
Who have been your most reliable public figures?
One of the things I told you early on was, when the pandemic first started closing things down, one of the things I told you is that nobody in the United States would starve.
Right? I told you that directly.
I said, no, no risk.
Nobody's going to starve in this country.
Nobody did. Now, it's, you know, it's hard.
But everybody's eaten.
I told you that we would probably be able to borrow, or not borrow necessarily, but print money massively because we're in this unique situation where demand is so low that inflation can't happen, and that's the main reason you don't want to print money.
Sure enough, we printed gazillions of dollars And nobody's sounding the warning about inflation because I had accurately deduced that we could just print money and print our way out of it in this weird, unique situation.
That's exactly what happened.
Who told you way before we started getting serious about China that China was an enemy, not a trading partner?
I did. I told you that two years before it became obvious to basically the entire United States.
Who told you that when the recovery started, the economic recovery, that it would be faster than the experts predicted?
I did. The President did too.
But I told you clearly and often, when the recovery starts, It's going to be impressive in a way you've never seen before.
It'll be jaw-dropping.
And it is. Right?
So, when you were following me when I was doing my evening periscopes, a lot of what I was doing was trying to I tried to talk you off the ledge that things aren't as bad as they look.
And the reason I'm pointing this out is not just to brag, although bragging is good.
I'm never opposed to bragging.
If you ever hear me say anything like that, I would be lying.
I do think that it is functional and useful for people to, especially in the public, to tell you what they got right.
As I get things wrong, I'll tell you that too.
I'll probably spend less time telling you what I got wrong.
Why wouldn't I? But think about that.
Now, the other thing that I said, I didn't say it often, but Those of you who are regulars will back me up.
I also said you better not wait for vaccinations.
You better not wait for medical science because I don't think you're going to have a vaccination in time to save the economy, etc.
And then we're just going to have to live with the virus.
And it looks like it.
It looks like the situation is we're simply going to have to adapt To living with the virus until, who knows?
Maybe it's a year and a half from now when we've got something.
So, yeah, the stock market's at an all-time high.
And here's the other thing which I predicted.
It'll take a little bit longer for this to unwind, which is the total shaking of the box of the economy and the rethinking of everything from education to the food supply to really everything.
The rethinking of all that will actually be an economic stimulus because it creates all kinds of new businesses to wind up, etc.
So I think the economy is going to be a good spot.
I think that there really isn't much option except to live with a grotesque amount of coronavirus deaths.
And we're just going to deal with it because we're at war.
We're at war with the virus, and it's the weirdest kind of war because the civilians are all in.
And the most vulnerable among us are on the front lines, in a sense, because they have the most vulnerability.
So, somebody says it's too soon to tell about inflation.
That is correct. You always have that risk of future inflation.
But let me say this as clearly as possible.
If we get to the point where inflation is a problem, We've really done well.
Moderna has a vaccine that they think will work.
Looks promising. Need a little extra testing.
We'll see how that goes.
Fingers crossed.
And the election will be the end.
I don't know what that means. Oh, and you mean if a Democrat gets elected?
Yeah. So let me update the slaughter meter.
The slaughter meter is at 100%.
If nothing changed between now and the election, the slaughter meter says there's 100% chance of Trump being re-elected.
But of course, lots of things will change.
So it's not a prediction.
It's just a fun little point in time that says unless something changes, But it will change.
I mean, I started doing the slaughter meter always with the caveat that until something changes, and it will, before the coronavirus.
I mean, really. It was so obvious that there would be big things between now and November, but I didn't think it would be that big.
Why should we have to live with the deaths?
Other countries are managing it much better.
Let me answer it this way.
Those other countries that have gotten it under control, it's not going to stay that way.
There is no scenario that anybody can think of in which the countries that get it under control don't lose control of it pretty soon.
You get that, right?
If any country got their infections down to zero, they would also have to close all travel.
It's the only way it would stay to zero.
And the first thing you do when you get it down to zero is you say, hey, let's open things up.
If there's any international travel, the odds of all the countries getting the infections under control is zero.
There's no chance. There's no plan.
Nobody has a way to do that.
Nothing. There's nothing you can do.
All right, so Slaughter Meter at 100% until something changes, but you know it will.
