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Aug. 11, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:33
Episode 1088 Scott Adams: Kids and School Openings, Herd Immunity, Biden's Cadaver Strategy, Teachers Unions
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*Pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum* *Pum pum pum pum pum pum* *Pum pum pum pum pum pum pum* *Pum pum pum pum* *Clap clap* Hey everybody!
Come on in!
It's time for a Coffee with Scott Adams.
One of, if not the best, moments of your entire life.
Sure, you're thinking to yourself, well what about the birth of my first child?
Well, that was cool, too.
I'm not going to minimize that.
But it was no simultaneous sip, I think we can agree.
And to enjoy the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, preferably with no hole in it.
Fill it with your favorite beverage, like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it's coming up now.
Go! Oh wait, there's a problem.
Usually it makes everything better.
Oh, hold on, hold on. I have to do another sip.
There's something that's not working.
Damn it. It doesn't make everything better.
George Conway is still a big pimple on the president's ass.
I guess there's some things that even the simultaneous sip can't fix.
Speaking of George Conway, he wrote a scathing article, a scathing article in the Washington Post.
And if you saw the tweets about the article, you would know that if you're a Trump supporter, he just trashed you.
He showed you with his sarcasm.
That's right.
The Democrats, by the way, once you see this, you can't unsee it.
The Republicans, by and large, try to argue with data and reasons.
Sometimes their data is incomplete and Sometimes the reasons are not perfect.
But they're at least trying to use reasons, and they're trying really hard to use data, and they're trying to use science.
It's just really hard, because the science is changing, the data is always incomplete, and we're not really that good at using logic.
If you talk about the whole world, we're not all good at it.
But Democrats seem to have completely abandoned That fool's errand, because trying to be rational in the irrational world doesn't work as well as you would hope it would.
But the Democrats have completely abandoned that model in favor of replacing it all with sarcasm.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
They literally use sarcasm as a substitute for reasons.
And you'll see that all the time now that I mention it.
And certainly the whole George Conway article was that.
Included in his article, he's trying to dump on the president for being wrong or being silly or being crazy, and he spreads the fake news that the president suggested drinking disinfectant.
If you're going to spread the most obvious fake news as if it's true, you don't have any respect for the people reading your stuff.
And I can see why he wouldn't.
Oh, I want to call out one of President Trump's best persuasion plays.
And I didn't see it live, but I heard about it.
So give me a fact check on this.
It is true that the President referred to the Green New Deal As a child's plan, that happened, right?
So I want to call out that that is really, really good framing.
Because first of all, you've got Greta, who looks young, and looks younger than she is.
So she's not quite a child anymore.
She's probably pushing 18, not quite 18.
But, you know, she's approaching adulthood.
But because she looks young and because the children are the ones who are protesting, etc., there is very much a young flavor to the Green New Deal.
Even AOC is young for a politician.
So there is, in your biased, irrational mind, it does bias toward young people.
Who want to get the most active in fixing climate change as they see it.
Now what's good about this is that it's what I call a high ground maneuver.
Once you say something is a child's plan, you can kind of walk away.
You don't need to get into the details.
Because once you've so labeled it, it starts looking like it.
Now here's what a child's plan looked like, and I'll tell you from my own child's plan.
When I was a kid, I was very angry at my father.
I don't know how old I was, maybe six.
I was angry at my father that he would not help me build a functional airplane so that I could fly around my town.
And I thought, how hard is it really to build an airplane?
Come on. It's wood.
It's nails. We got wood.
We got nails. Plane needs an engine.
Look, we got lawnmowers.
They've got engines.
How hard is it to put an engine on a little airplane that you build in the backyard?
You've got lumber.
You know how to measure things.
You know what an airplane looks like.
Come on, Father.
Build me a functioning airplane or you're worthless to me.
Really. What kind of a...
What unscientific father do I have who can't build me a functioning airplane and a wood?
Frickin' loser.
That's a child's plan.
A child's plan is build me an airplane and a wood, Dad.
Right? You recognize that as a child's plan.
You don't need to get into the details, Scott, Scott, Scott.
There might be more to this than you think.
I'm not sure your father has all of the lightweight materials and tools necessary to build a functioning airplane.
But you don't even need to get into it.
It's just a child's plan.
Likewise, the Green New Deal, when you throw in the get rid of meat and airplanes and stuff like that, you don't need to argue that stuff.
And I think that it's sort of a waste of time to engage it like it's serious.
Simply calling it a child's plan is really good, because it's not as if we're capable of hashing out the details.
It's not like we're capable of knowing if those long-range projection models are accurate or accurate enough within a range.
We don't know what the economic outcome will be.
We don't know what new technologies will come up, what changes will surprise us.
It's just a child's plan.
It's very good. All right.
One of the things that this whole COVID thing is doing, and I talk about this in the terms of persuasion, Everything that's associated with everything else gets smeared by anything that happens to one of them.
So let's say you were a twin, and your twin causes a horrible murder.
Well, even if you had nothing to do with it, it kind of washes over onto you.
You shouldn't, but people aren't going to look at you the same.
It's just the way our world works, that if there's any relationship with two things, whatever happens to one just bleeds over into the other in our irrational minds.
And look what's happening as we collectively, we citizens of Earth, try to figure out what is scientific and what is not scientific in this COVID situation.
And the more we wrestle with this, and the more we see science failing and failing and failing...
Correcting, failing, correcting.
Now the correcting part is the good part.
And of course, as we all are sophisticated to know, science is mostly about failing, but you're failing forward.
Well, that didn't work, that didn't work.
Hey, try this.
Oops, it couldn't reproduce it.
Try this. Oh, there you go.
You reproduced it. So you're mostly failing until you hit that little nugget of truth that maybe you can hold on to for a while.
But when you're in it, It looks like mostly failing.
If you get to just check out the end result, it's like, hey, good job, scientists.
We figured out gravity and whatever else.
But if you're actually in the process of the science creating the answers and not knowing the answers, it just looks like science is completely incompetent.
It's not. It's not.
Science is every bit as good as it was last year when you trusted it more.
It's just that you're in the fight and you get to see all the ugly stuff because they can't hide it.
Now, what's that do to your thoughts about climate change?
Well, there should be no effect.
If we were rational creatures, we would say, oh, you can't compare these two things.
One is the fog of war.
It's brand new. It's a novel coronavirus.
Trying as hard as we can.
Of course we're wrong more than we're right.
That's how science works.
Until you become more right than you're wrong.
Don't know how long that takes.
We're going to have to test a lot of stuff and make sure we can reproduce those tests and everything else.
But what about climate change?
Suddenly, whatever bad feelings you're going to develop from this about science, and you know you are, right?
I don't care who you are.
If you're watching this, it's hard to be just as confident about scientists as it was a year ago.
A year ago, I'll bet you felt a little bit better about the accuracy of science.
Now you're going to take that to the climate change discussion, and even if you don't acknowledge that that baggage is coming with you, it's coming with you.
It's coming with you, and it's healthy.
Because the problem with the climate argument is that there's a bit of an over-claim about what they can know about the future.
Certainly about the economics of the future and how we'll adjust to higher temperatures, etc.
In case anybody's new to this, I'm on the team that says temperatures are almost certainly going up and that humans are some part of that.
But it doesn't mean it's the end of the world because we're really good at adapting.
So that's my view. Anyway, let me give you an anecdote from my past that will be useful in understanding the present.
We are obsessed with trying to figure out which of our leaders are brilliant and which of them are idiots.
Right? It's sort of our main occupation.
Oh, that Swedish prime minister or whatever they have.
King. I don't know.
What does Sweden have?
Do they have a president, prime minister?
I have no idea. That's how American I am.
I'm so American, I don't even know the form of government of our allies.
That's as American as you can get.
Am I proud of it? Not necessarily.
Alright, here's my story. When I was working at Crocker Bank, a big bank that was bought by Wells Fargo later, but in San Francisco it was a real big bank, and my job was to study the performance of the individual branch managers on a variety of measures that senior management would provide.
They'd say, You have to cross-sell this much and bring in these many deposits, etc.
And then I was in charge of collecting all the data, putting it into some kind of summary reports, doing a little programming to make reports, and to tell management which managers did better.
But, apparently, I'm the wrong person for that job, because that's not how it went.
I went into the senior vice president, who was sort of the person I mostly reported to for this information, and I said, you know, if I'm being honest, you're not really measuring the skill of the managers.
Because if you give them a goal, and some exceed the goal, And some don't meet the goal, but the goal is different for each branch.
Right? So every branch had its own goal that was customized for their situation.
I said, if you find out that somebody exceeded their goal and somebody did not, what have you actually measured?
Have you measured the quality of the manager?
I would say no.
What you measured is the quality of the person who set the goal.
Because whoever set that target, what if they were wrong?
What if it was unrealistically high?
What if it was unrealistically low?
You haven't measured the quality of the management.
All you've done is measured the quality of your measuring.
And you didn't even really do that.
On top of that, I said, you do realize that even the data...
Forget about the fact that measuring against these arbitrary goals that senior management made.
Forget about the fact that that's nonsense.
Even the data is wrong.
And I said to my boss, it's my job.
I guarantee you that the data that's coming in is not reliable.
And I gave reasons.
You know, this data is not reliable for this reason.
I had to use an estimate.
I had to make an assumption, whatever.
And this is when the senior vice president looked at me And gave me one of the biggest red pills I've ever choked down.
You ready for it? You can live this experience vicariously.
This is one of the biggest red pills you'll ever eat.
Big corporation.
I'm in charge of figuring out which branches are doing well and which are not.
I tell my boss that my own data is worthless.
Worthless. Completely worthless.
And worse than worthless, probably harmful.
Because it's so bad, you're going to be firing people who did a great job.
I mean, that's as bad as data could be, right?
And my senior vice president, who was one of these...
I honestly think he was one of these enlightened people.
He wasn't like a regular boss...
There was something different about this guy.
Bill Reilly was his name.
I hope he's still alive. He was a 6'8", bearded elf of a guy.
And there was just something a little bit more aware about him.
You could tell it.
It wasn't just that he was smart.
He was just seeing things a little more clearly.
And when I told him that my data was completely worthless for the intended task of managing his managers, he looked at me And he gave me this red pill that I give to you.
I don't care. I'm only going to use it when it agrees with what I was going to do anyway.
How's that taste? He wasn't kidding.
It's exactly what he did.
When there was a manager that he felt, for his own reasons, was not doing the job, he'd check my numbers.
If they coincidentally said that manager did not meet their numbers, he'd say, well, okay, good.
Hey, you didn't meet your numbers.
You're out of here. Not because of the numbers, because he was going to fire them anyway.
And if he found somebody he thought was doing a good job, but their numbers were bad, he'd look at it and he'd say, damn, we better adjust your goals.
It looks like we messed up.
If you think that data is real, you're not quite out of the children's table.
Data is almost always not real.
I know! I was in charge of inventing unreal data.
It was my professional job to make data that wasn't accurate, and we still used it for decisions.
So, if you don't understand that that's the normal way the world works, That's not the exception.
It's not the exception, because when I changed to Pacific Bell, it was just more of the same.
I had similar kinds of jobs.
And, of course, the Dilbert cartoon was born out of that experience, specifically the experience That the insanity that I experienced at one company wasn't limited to that company.
The moment I changed jobs and I realized, my first thought was, I'm free.
I'm free. I'm getting away from that company that makes irrational decisions.
Finally, I'm at the phone company now.
Now it's all going to be good, rational.
No. Nope.
That's how the Dilbert cartoon was born.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
You all know, let's talk about some doctors.
If you were going to invent a fictional character who was going to appear at this point in history, maybe they existed, but they're going to appear on the scene as a hero, what would be a good fictional name to give somebody who is going to be really smart, but also really strong, and take the whole world on their shoulders?
I might give them the name Dr.
Scott Atlas. Sounds pretty smart and pretty strong, right?
I mean, the Scott part tells you they're smart.
The doctor part helps, but it's the Scott part that tells you they're smart.
And then the Atlas part, literally based on a mythological creature who could hold the entire earth and heavens on its shoulder.
What a great character name for this simulation.
Oh, it turns out that that's the new White House medical advisor on the coronavirus.
Now, my understanding is that he's pro going back to school and a little bit more pro, let's open things up.
I don't know too much about him, so I'm going to look into it a little.
And get back to you. But speaking of doctors, one of your favorite doctors, Dr.
Tadaros. And you know of him from the hydroxychloroquine videos.
You know that he's in favor of at least giving it a chance and letting people prescribe it.
And he weighed in recently on this herd immunity question, which you've been seeing about.
And the question is this.
For this specific virus, do we need to get to 60 or 70 percent infections before we have enough herd immunity?
And there are lots of smart people who are saying it doesn't seem to be the case.
It's not a confirmed thing, I would say.
But there's strong indication that That some people have some kind of natural T-cell immunity that's not the kind of immunity you pick up on a test because it's not specific to this virus.
And that there may be so many people that have it that real herd immunity comes at lower than 20%.
If real herd immunity...
It comes at lower than 20% of people infected.
How would we know that's true?
What would that look like?
Well, it would look a little like Sweden, because Sweden, I think, is under 20% infected, and they seem to have driven their infections down to nothing or nearly nothing.
But that's not a confirmation, right?
That's just one piece of data that is compatible with the hypothesis.
Being compatible with the hypothesis doesn't prove anything.
That's why you have the high-quality studies, because these things can be so misleading, can be confirmation bias, can easily be coincidence.
But let's look at some other examples.
How about the Diamond Princess cruise ship?
Got a bunch of people on the cruise ship in the worst possible circumstances.
So, in the end, how many of the people on the cruise ship got the coronavirus?
19%. 19%.
Now, that doesn't mean that they reached herd immunity.
It doesn't mean that that proves that 20% or so is your limit.
It's just a fact that is compatible with the hypothesis In the same way that Sweden is compatible with the hypothesis, but not proving it.
How about jails?
Do we know of any jails in which more than 20% of the prisoners got the coronavirus?
I don't know, but I don't think so.
If that's true, that even in jails, 20% was sort of the peak, Again, that wouldn't prove anything.
It wouldn't even come close to proving anything.
But it would be compatible with the hypothesis.
And so, I ask you this.
Can you give me a counterfactual?
Can you find a group of people who were as, let's say, in the same place in an extended period of time with massive infections?
I don't know what kind of group that would be.
But they also never exceeded 20%.
Now, it would have to be more than a family.
You know, a family doesn't count because you could imagine that they're so close that just everybody gets it.
But, well, no.
A family wouldn't tell you anything because every family is going to be a special case.
It could be that none of them had those T cells because also they never got colds.
It could be there's something genetic.
Could be, if they're African American, four times more likely to have problems.
So you can't look at a family.
So give me a group of non-family people.
The military.
The military.
Somebody says the Mumbai slums.
They're closer to 50%.
I have heard that they're over 20%.
And then the confounding variable there is lack of nutrition in a general low health.
So could it be that there are other factors?
Old folks homes.
Alright, there's a good one. Are there any senior homes in which over 20% of them got it?
Can somebody get back to me on that?
The USS Teddy Roosevelt?
Don't know what that is.
Alright. Somebody says the homeless community.
I don't know. They're outdoors.
And they also...
The thing about the homeless community is that they are probably so exposed to so many things that are bad for them that I wonder if the coronavirus even has a chance.
I mean, I think if you're a homeless person and the coronavirus shows up, your body is like, coronavirus is here.
You're going to have to get in the back of the line.
Do you see tuberculosis?
Yeah, get behind that.
So I'm not sure that the homeless population can tell us anything about those of us who do not have a persistently challenged immune system, as they do.
Now let's get to the question of kids spreading.
Here's what I believe.
If you have a definite opinion about whether kids will spread to adults, you are not being rational.
You could definitely have a statistical opinion as in, you know, I've looked at it and I feel like all things considered, it's a good risk.
Well, that would be reasonable.
It's reasonable to say, I don't know, but it feels like 90% sure, that would be okay.
I'm not sure the data would support a 90% uncertainty, but you wouldn't be crazy.
But if you say, kids do not give it to adults, you're not qualified for the rest of the conversation.
Because you don't know that.
You don't know that.
And science doesn't know that.
So there's speculation only.
So please remove your certainty about what kids do or do not do.
And if you're talking about the going-back-to-school question, which, by the way, I'm in favor of that we go back to school...
Don't tell me that you know that that won't take the virus home to grandma.
And let me give it to you in these terms.
Would you all agree that there are tens of thousands of children infected in this country?
That fact you can agree on, right?
You can look it up. And would you agree that worldwide there are hundreds of thousands of children infected That are infected.
Do we agree with that so far?
That hundreds of thousands of children are infected?
Secondly, do we agree, I think we do, that the number of them that are asymptomatic and will never have a problem is nearly all of them.
It's not 100%, but it's close.
Do we agree on that?
Hundreds of thousands of kids have it, and almost never do they get sick.
They do. There are cases where they do, but it's very rare.
So that's the part we agree on.
Here's the question.
How'd they get it?
You ready for that?
How did the kids get it?
Did they all get it from adults?
Don't know, do you? Do you think?
Just use your experience.
Think about the kids you know who have ever gotten a cold.
Did the kids get the cold at home?
Sometimes. Sometimes.
Did the kids get the cold from other kids?
Pretty much every time.
I mean, not every time, but I don't know if I would even put it more than 50%.
But I think you all have the experience, if you've had kids in the house, that if something's going around at school, not talking about the coronavirus, but other things, That's a little bit more of an incubator than even at home.
But at home you can get stuff too, of course.
Here's my challenge to you.
Figure out how kids got it.
If kids only get it from parents, but kids can't give it to other kids, and kids can't give it to adults, I would be very, very surprised, wouldn't you?
Do you think that's what it looks like?
Do you think that all those kids got it from adults, but weirdly, they can't give it to adults?
And weirdly, they can't give it to each other?
You think? No.
To me, if I had to place a bet on this, I'd say that kids get it from other kids, They're mostly asymptomatic.
And that the kids who probably have it because they're playing with their friends, you know, when they're not in school, but they're not playing with as many of them.
And they're more likely to be outdoors, I would think, especially since they're keeping away from the adults a little bit.
So if you can answer me how the kids get it, I might be open to the argument that they're unlikely to give it to parents.
But to me, the most reasonable expectation is that kids give it to other kids, that's how they, probably half of them got it, and that of course they would give it to adults.
Of course they would. Are there any cases where teachers have gotten it?
Yes, in Sweden.
In Sweden, there are news stories of a bunch of teachers at some place who got it, but they didn't study it so well.
In other words, they didn't do contact tracing, So we don't know if one teacher got it and gave it to the other teachers or if some student gave it to one teacher.
We don't know. But the question of whether working teachers will get coronavirus and they'll spread it in a school environment, I think, is answered.
The answer is yes.
How often?
Don't know. Could be not often.
All right. With all of that said, how is it we still don't know if herd immunity is a thing and at what level it happens?
How is it we still don't know if kids spread to adults?
And if you think you know, you really need to talk yourself out of that.
You don't know. That's a little bit of hopeful thinking that it doesn't happen.
I just saw an article that said, There's no evidence of kids spreading to teachers.
There's no evidence of it.
Do you know what there's also no evidence of?
That if we disbanded the military in this country, that we would be in trouble or taken over by another country.
It's never happened. Never happened.
So let's get rid of our military.
Because there's not a single example of Of the United States being taken over by another country.
So, no military needed.
I mean, the fact that there's no evidence of a kid giving it to a teacher, you should discount the value of that information to zero.
Because you know what else we don't know?
Everything. You know what else we don't know about the coronavirus and how it spreads and how to treat it?
Everything. Everything is up.
We don't know if the masks work or not.
I mean, there's still debate on that.
We don't know if hydroxychloroquine works.
We don't know if herd immunity is coming soon or later.
We don't know.
So, as soon as you feel you're certain about any of this, I think you're on uncertain territory.
Well, look at this.
Look at the time. It looks like I can tell you that there's a new poll out on the question of teachers' unions.
Comparing what people think of teachers' unions now compared to how they thought last year.
And this is from Rasmussen.
So Rasmussen asked people their opinions on teachers' unions.
And how do you think that came out?
So this is brand new.
I think it's breaking. It's probably getting published right now as I'm talking.
39% of American adults still think it's a good thing that most teachers belong to a public employee's union.
So at the moment, 39% think it's good that teachers have a union.
That's down from 45% last year.
So they've gone from 45% to 39%.
In one year. That's kind of a big drop.
But it is back to levels measured several years ago.
And 33% now say it's a bad thing that teachers are unionized.
So do you know what I say to the popularity of teachers' unions from people who are not teachers, looking at them from the outside?
Do you know what I say about the declining Approval of the teachers unions?
Here's what I say.
Hold my beer.
Because I'm going to drive that.
I want to swear.
But I'm not going to.
I pulled myself back from the edge.
Please insert a mental swear word where it's needed.
I'm going to leave you a space for it.
Okay? You can put the F word in there.
And you'll feel the space.
It's going like this.
Hold my...
Okay, you filled it in.
Beer. I'm going to drive that...
Fill in the blank.
Statistic into the blank.
Fill in the blank.
Teens. I'm going to blow that number into the teens.
And then we're going to dismantle the teachers' unions.
And we're going to give the black citizens of this country the first break that they've had in a long time, which is maybe a chance at a good education for the majority.
I think we can do this.
So, watch for that.
Have I ever mentioned...
That I always get my way in the long run.
We'll see if that's true.
There's a video of LA County sheriffs pointing their weapons at allegedly three black teens who are allegedly victims of a homeless person allegedly attacking them.
So there's lots of allegedly's in this story.
So the video is of the police who are clearly aiming their They're rifles, I guess, at somebody who's not in the scene.
And the thinking is, hey, hey, hey, they're aiming those rifles at the three black teens, even though they were the victims.
So how do you explain that?
And all the spectators will yell, no, no, no, they're the victims.
Don't aim your guns at them.
If you think that you learned something from that story, you are so wrong.
Video lies a hundred percent of the time.
Video can't tell the truth.
It can't. Because video can't give you context.
Video gives you what it gives you.
It leaves out context.
So does video lie?
A hundred percent of the time it lies.
It's only a question of how much it's lying.
So if you say, I saw the video, duh, it's true.
Well, you don't know how anything works.
That's not how it works.
If you saw the video, well, you should say, yes, I saw the video, I was misled.
That's the way you should say, yeah, I saw the video, so I know what didn't happen.
What didn't happen is whatever you thought you saw with that video.
So, will it come out that there was a reason that they had to worry and a reason that they were pointing their weapons?
Yes. Yes, it's going to come out We're good to go.
They kept pointing their guns for what seemed like too long.
Do you imagine if you'd seen the rest of the scene, whatever was off camera, do you think that the three black youths were saying, oh, okay, glad you're here.
Thank you, officers.
I'm glad you're here. Let us make sure that, you know, you see we don't have any weapons.
It's this homeless guy.
You know, I've got a little cut here.
Can you give me some medical?
Do you think it went like that?
Do you think as soon as they saw him that they immediately broke off from what the trouble was and said, oh, thank God you're here.
Can you arrest this guy?
I don't think so.
I think that there was something happening that made that situation a little ambiguous, and we're going to learn that.
All right. And by ambiguous, I don't mean that the black views were guilty of anything.
I just mean that the situation may have been hard to sort out when you first showed up.
That's all I mean. Let's see what else we got.
How about the...
So apparently Q, or QAnon, has gone worldwide.
Did you know that?
So instead of being a silly American thing, Q has apparently gone worldwide.
And it's becoming, I would argue, a bit of a religion.
Now, not quite yet, but it's moving in that direction.
And you might say to yourself, I don't quite understand why that's spreading.
Isn't that so obviously not true that it couldn't possibly spread?
I mean, how do we not have herd immunity against Q? You know what I mean?
There should be enough people in your family or your social circle to say, yeah, Bob, I know you're interested in this stuff, but I've got to tell you, it doesn't look too credible to me.
Well, let me suggest this for context.
Let's bring science into it.
Does science say that you will be more addicted to something if it gives you a reward every single time?
Or does science say that you will be more addicted to something if it pays off sometimes, but you can't tell when?
Answer, you will be more addicted if the payoffs are unpredictable.
Meaning, sometimes you get a payoff, Sometimes you don't, and you really can't tell in advance when that's going to be.
That one causes addiction.
What is Q? Q is a bunch of predictions, often with enough vagueness that you could fit them to different situations.
But does Q get big things wrong, such as, I think, arresting Hillary Clinton was one of them.
Yes. Does it matter that they get things wrong?
Because you say to yourself, if you see them getting things wrong, doesn't that disprove the whole we have insider information thing?
I mean, they'd never be wrong if it was insider information, or rarely wrong.
But that's not how the brain works.
If you bought into Q, and you see them get one thing right, and three things wrong, Will you be more attracted to it or less?
You want to say less, don't you?
You want to say, well, if it got three and a four things wrong, any reasonable person is going to walk away.
Nope. Nope.
Opposite. If it gets one and a four right, you make people addicted.
It becomes a religion at one and four.
How often do your prayers get answered?
One in four. If you pray for a promotion, one in four times.
If you wait long enough, you might get one.
Was it the prayer?
Well, that's for you to decide.
But what I'm saying is that the nature of religion, which gives you unpredictable payoffs for your praying and your religiosity, and the rest of the time you say, well, God is not an ATM. I don't just put a prayer in and take money out.
He works in mysterious ways.
That's part of the process.
If I get one in four prayers, I'm addicted.
Likewise, Q. If he gets one in four, you're addicted.
The other thing that it has in common with religion, and again, I'm not going to...
If this sounds like I'm mocking religion, then you're hearing it wrong.
I'm just telling you that there are things which bind things to a movement, and they're fairly common and universal, and it works for religion, and it works for Q, which is not to say that either of them are false, it's just the way people think.
So the vagueness of the predictions is very powerful.
Because when you have vague predictions, people do the work for you.
And so let's say you had four predictions.
One of them is clearly right, but could have been right by coincidence.
Could have been a good guess.
And let's say two of them are a little bit ambiguous.
Well, to a believer, it's going to look like three out of four were right.
Because they're going to say this one is definitely right, and these other two, well, you know, if I didn't have this one that was right, maybe I wouldn't believe that those vague things are true.
But since I got one right, I'm going to say these other two were close enough.
The way they were worded allows for me to say that this thing that happened fits.
And now suddenly you're three out of four.
Three out of four. So vagueness works in favor of belief, because it lets you fill in the blanks.
This is, by the way, a standard hypnosis trick.
I use it all the time.
I use it when I create my comic.
The reason that Dilbert doesn't have a last name, company doesn't have a name, Dilbert's boss doesn't have a name, not a first name, not a last name.
It's all intentional.
Because it allows the reader to read into it and fill in those open spots, and it makes you more addicted to the property.
Here's the other thing that religion and Q gets right.
If you spend time working on something, you will be more addicted to it.
It's just natural.
Just the things you focus on become more important to you over time.
The nature of Q is that they say, do your own research.
So you take the cue as your starting point and then you go off and do a bunch of work.
You invest your time.
Once you've invested your time in something, you're done.
You've married yourself to the movement because once you put time into it, you can't explain it to yourself except that you believe it.
And that's part of what you do.
So religion, like cue, asks the people who are believers to do their own work.
Read this Bible.
It can be interpreted in many ways.
Go listen to how different religious people are interpreting it.
Find your own connections.
Figure it out yourself.
And I think there's something nerdily delicious about trying to unwind these mysteries, be they religious or be they Q. So I think the operative things are that you get unpredictable rewards.
There's vagueness.
And that last thing.
So there's a reason the Q is growing.
It's not an accident. Alright.
Let me ask you this.
Remember 2016?
I think you remember it.
And the take on Trump was that he was a mentally unstable Russian agent who will destroy the economy and lead us to nuclear war.
So you remember 2016, those were the things.
Mentally unstable, Russian agent, destroy the economy, lead us to nuclear war.
Oh, and racist, of course.
Racist in there. So that was 2016.
What is the big problem with Trump after we've observed him for three and a half years?
Here's the big complaint about him lately.
We can't tell if he's joking about Mount Rushmore.
So, since we can't tell if he's joking about Mount Rushmore, and by the way, that's the biggest problem at the moment, we'd better nominate a cadaver to run against him.
That's actually happening.
I mean, Joe Biden isn't quite a cadaver, but I don't think I'm getting too far ahead of myself.
Isn't that a big change?
And I asked myself, why aren't they using all the things they were using before?
Well, the things they were using before, in many cases, were debunked, such as the Russia occlusion thing.
But what about the other stuff?
The other stuff seems like they would just be evergreens, right?
You could always go with mentally unstable, and you could always go with, you know, he's a racist, and he lies, you know, all the basic stuff.
Why are you seeing as much of that?
Well, let me suggest here's a reason.
Joe Biden's campaign is making it really difficult to criticize Trump.
Here's why. Biden lies in every ad.
Every one. And it's usually like a real blatant, obvious lie.
And they're the kind of lies that even the Democrat fact-checkers would say, I grudgingly agree, that's a complete fabrication.
So how do you run against the guy who your biggest complaint is that he's a liar when every one of your campaign ads and a lot of stuff you say in public are clearly demonstrably obvious, easy to Google lies?
It kind of takes that away from you a little bit because you know it would come right back.
How about the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable?
Well, if you had any other candidate running against Trump, you'd probably trot that one out and say, look at my completely reasonable, completely mentally healthy candidate.
Compare that to Trump.
Look at what he's saying about Mount Rushmore.
That's crazy. Right?
You'd hear that if you had a candidate who was demonstrably an You know, inarguably mentally healthy.
Biden's not. He's just not.
I mean, he's mentally unhealthy in an old-person way, not a specifically crazy way, but it kind of takes that approach away.
So they can't accuse the president of lying, because Biden is lying in every ad.
It's hard to say the president's Crazy, because that just brings up mental health, and you don't want to go there.
How about the argument that Trump doesn't take his job seriously?
Like, he doesn't care about it.
He's just, you know, golfing.
Well, sure, he's still golfing a lot, and he's still Trump.
But if you're looking at the other guy who doesn't leave his basement, and he sends his wife out to talk for him once in a while, does he look like he's taking this job seriously?
No, no.
Biden doesn't look like he's taking it seriously.
It looks like he's hiding in his basement and waiting for whatever it is to be over.
It just feels like he's waiting it out.
How about the charge that Trump would be a puppet for some other power, let's say Russia?
Well, that's a little difficult because Biden is literally a puppet for another power.
Which is, you know, whoever's controlling him on the Democrat side.
And he's pro-China.
So the whole puppet of a foreign power thing doesn't really work when the person you're running against, Trump, is literally a hollowed-down puppet.
How does that work?
So that's not a good attack anymore.
It used to be. And then I'm going to quote Trey Gowdy.
I don't know if he made this up, but it's just a perfect term.
He said that Biden keeps committing, or saying, a bunch of, quote, racially curious comments.
Racially curious.
Now, isn't that just the dog whistle?
What's the difference between, you know, it's a racist dog whistle versus a Racially curious statements.
They kind of sound the same, don't they?
So Biden, by his own inability and terrible campaign, has removed from the attack list lying because he lies, acting mentally unwell because he acts that way, not taking his job seriously – he doesn't leave the basement much – a puppet for other powers – He's even running as a puppet.
I mean, the man is saying, I'm not even going to make it four years, barely.
Don't count on me for that second term.
I'd better bring in a whole cabinet to support me.
Look at my vice president.
He's running as a puppet.
And then, of course, he says racially curiously, which partly takes that off the table as well.
So I think the candidate himself is just absolutely torpedoing the campaign.
And the campaign is torpedoing itself, I guess.
Here's a question for you.
Russia apparently is claiming that it has the first vaccine, but of course it has not gone through the longer, more rigorous trials that you would do if you really, really wanted to be careful.
And apparently it's already been given to Putin's daughter or daughters, and this is really going to challenge What it means to be anti-science, isn't it?
Because this is going to bleed over into the whole vax or anti-vax thing.
Now, if you think you're hearing my opinion on vaccinations, it's not going to be here.
So I don't want to even hint my opinion on this topic while I'm talking about it today.
Someday I might. I'm not sure I have a fully formed opinion there.
But this is not it.
So I'm just going to talk about the story.
Don't make some assumptions about my opinion.
The big knock against vaccinations has been that they're not fully tested.
The vaccinations are not tested when they're put in combination with other vaccinations.
They've been tested individually, but not in combo.
So that's one of the big problems.
Now Russia It comes out with this vaccine that all the people who are in favor of vaccines are going to say, oh no, you don't want that one because it hasn't been tested sufficiently.
And by the way, line up for your vaccinations that haven't been tested sufficiently.
So it's going to cause the pro-science, shall we say, you'll argue whether they're pro-science, the pro-science, pro-vaccination crowd...
We're going to have to explain why you can't have the Russian vaccination, because it's just another vaccination that hasn't been fully tested.
That looks good, hasn't been fully tested.
So, I don't have an opinion on this.
I'm just saying that this completely messes up the whole, you know, what does it mean to be anti-science?
Because now everybody can be anti-science.
You know, you don't have to be on the pro-science team, because apparently there is none.
There's no pro-science team.
The vaccination question doesn't have a pro-science team.
It only has a, well, we feel pretty good about it.
Eh, cause-benefit.
Eh, we're fairly sure.
Eh, we like the odds.
But I'm not sure there's a pro-science team anymore.
Here's a question that Mike Cernovich first, you know, he...
He inspired me to ask this question by one of his tweets yesterday.
Would the protests have started without all the fake news?
If you imagine a world, and it's hard, imagine a world where the news was just accurate.
And that's it. No agenda, no team, just accurate news.
Would we be having these protests?
And the scary answer is no.
These protests are 100% created by fake news.
And what I mean by that is that even the initial George Floyd stuff, the Michael Brown stuff, it's all fake news.
In the sense that while a tragedy did happen, that part's real, the interpretation of what happened has all been fake.
We know that in the Michael Brown situation, which sparked riots in the creation of...
Was it the creation of Black Lives Matter?
Did it happen after that?
But now we know that two sets of officials, the state and now the federal, looked at it and said, it looks like a justified shooting.
The whole thing was fake news.
And then the George Floyd thing comes.
This guy's, you know, full of fentanyl.
He's going to die no matter what.
I'm not saying the police did the right thing.
Because it looks to me like the police have some explaining to do about, you know, the way they handle things.
But clearly we're not out to murder him.
There's nothing that would suggest there was a racial component to it.
And if the news told the news accurately...
As soon as the issue of systemic racism became a national phrase, they should have said, well, where do we find it?
And how do we dismantle it?
And that should have led them straight to, wait for it, the teachers' unions.
The teachers' unions, I have estimated, are 80% of systemic racism.
Because if the teachers' unions did not prevent competition in school...
Competition and free market work always improves things.
We've never seen the opposite.
You always get a better product with free markets, but the teachers' unions prevent that.
If they didn't, we'd have more free markets, we've had better schools, and then while you can't get rid of racism, if your black candidate comes in for a job and you look at the racism and it's a good college, solid college performance, And you'd like to get some diversity in your business anyway, you'd say, oh, hell yes.
Hell yes. Look at this.
This is a good, educated person.
That's what we're asking for.
So racism will always exist because our brains are just wired for pattern recognition, but we're not good at it.
So we see patterns that are not really patterns, and then we act on them.
So you're always going to have that.
But you can make it a lot less important.
In other words, as I like to say, Michael Jordan doesn't worry about racism much during his day.
He might worry about it for other people's benefit, and I guess he does, but I doubt he thinks about it in his personal experience today.
Maybe in his past, but not today.
And the point is, you can't all be Michael Jordan, but if you're financially successful and you're doing well, racism isn't going to hurt as much.
So you could take away 80% of the pain of systemic racism by getting rid of the teachers' unions.
And I'm going to drive their popularity into the teens if it's the last thing I do.
So, yeah, it is literally true, in my opinion, that the fake news is causing all of these protests.
And now the fake news is trying to stop it because they realize that they've created a monster that will get Trump re-elected.
And it will. Let's be honest.
The protests will get Trump re-elected.
If that doesn't happen, I'm going to have real questions about the accuracy of those polls or the accuracy of the vote.
At this point, it's kind of a layup for the president.
I don't even know if the challenge is still in it because the public is really done.
The public is done with lawlessness.
And there's only one candidate promising an end to it with a specific solution.
I've got the National Guard.
They're waiting. Now, what's the other thing that everybody said about this president a month ago, but they stopped saying?
He's a dictator, right?
Would your dictator have already sent troops into Chicago?
Yeah, of course he would.
Would your dictator have already sent troops into Portland to calm that situation down?
Yeah, probably on day two.
It wouldn't be day 55.
Any dictator would have taken care of that stuff right away.
But he's not.
And it's so obvious that he's not Because of this very thing, that he just won't send the troops until they're requested.
I think that argument is gone, too.
So there's not much left.
All right. So let's see if I covered everything, and...
Well, it looks like I did.
It looks like I did.
Enjoy your last months of relevancy, cartoon boy.
Says this guy in all caps.
I hate to block the all caps shouting trolls, but they will be missed.
Yeah, I think everybody's saying what I'm saying now.
I don't believe there's anybody who thinks that the looting is going to do anything except get Trump elected.
It's pretty...
It's a pretty direct line at this point.
Happy birthday to Sue.
Happy birthday. Alright.
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