Episode 1112 Scott Adams: Why Everyone is an Ignorant Hypocrite Except for You and Me. And I'm Not so Sure About Me.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
COVID19 complaints and accusations
Minnesota police training manual: Knee on neck
How to tell someone their success strategy won't work
AG Barr: outside agitators are instigating
Governor Cuomo irresponsibly encourages violence
King Leopold killed 10-15 million Black people
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
And it's happening with Coffee with Scott Adams and the Simultaneous Sip.
How good is that?
What a way to kick off a great day.
Have you noticed that 2020 has been generally quite crappy?
I don't like to overgeneralize, but I think you'd agree with me.
2020 a little bit crappy.
Things are going to look up though.
I'm calling today the turn.
Today's the turn. Today's the day when there will be slightly more things going right Then going wrong.
And watch how the number of things going right continues to increase while the number of things going wrong continues to diminish.
2021 is going to be lit!
Off the hook! And any other old hackneyed expression you'd like to put on that.
But first, the simultaneous sip.
What do you need?
You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like, coffee.
And join me now for the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including 2020.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Yeah.
Yeah, that's working.
I can feel the improvement coming.
Well, let's talk about Hairgate.
What could be more important in a time of multiple crises?
What could be more important than Nancy Pelosi's hair?
Nothing I can think of.
So let's talk about that endlessly.
So you know the story.
Nancy Pelosi went to a hairdresser, didn't wear her mask, went inside where people are not supposed to be, claimed that her explanation is that she was set up.
The local hairdresser set her up.
Now, even Don Lemon didn't buy that excuse.
If you can't sell your Democrat If you can't sell your Democrat story to Don Lemon, you can't sell it to anybody.
So Don Lemon even rejected her story.
That was pretty funny.
But here's the question unanswered.
How did Fox News get a copy of a security camera in a specific hairdresser?
Nobody asked that question.
It's like, so even Tucker Carlson had the proprietor on, the woman who owned the shop that Nancy Pelosi was at, and Tucker never asked the question, so whose idea was it to give the security camera footage to Fox News?
Let's just not ask that question, because that doesn't matter.
This is the dumbest story.
I couldn't care less about Nancy Pelosi wearing or not wearing her mask.
And I get it.
It's hypocrisy and everything.
Literally the smallest problem I have.
And by the way, if somebody had told Nancy Pelosi it's okay to be indoors if it's just one person, doesn't that actually make sense?
The whole point of not being indoors Is that you don't want multiple people indoors.
But if the only people indoors are the same person who would have worked on them if it were outdoors, I don't know.
Does that make a difference, that you're indoors?
Doesn't seem like it was a big health risk, but I get why people say it's hypocrisy.
Alright, here's a little quiz for you.
It's a very simple quiz, and I want to see if you can pass it, okay?
And this will be a test to see if I've taught you anything.
If I've taught you anything, you will get this test right.
And if you think, hey, is there a trick to this?
Well, there might be.
There might be. So keep one part of your brain alert for a trick.
And it goes like this.
Suppose you had two opposing armies.
They all had exactly the same kind of gun.
No difference. Same kind of gun.
Whatever gun it is, it's the same one.
One army are sharpshooters.
And every single person in that one army hits their target every time they shoot.
Every time. The other army is not so good at shooting.
They only hit their target 80% of the time.
It's pretty good. It's pretty good, right?
80% of the time.
But they're up against an army that hits their target every single time.
Literally every bullet they fire will hit the other army people in a deadly place.
So they have a battle.
Exactly the same guns.
Let's say, just to keep it fun, exactly the same amount of ammo.
Same guns, same ammo.
They face off two armies.
One is 100% accuracy, the other is 80%.
Who wins the battle?
Go! Have I taught you anything?
Have I taught you anything?
I'll know in a moment when I see your responses.
Alright, it looks like you're still talking about the hairdressing stuff.
So, too much of a lag for a group question.
Yeah, there is a little bit of a lag there.
Here's the answer to the question.
It depends how many people are in each army.
If you didn't get that, I've taught you nothing.
And here's why this is important.
Because imagine, if you will, the army that shoots perfectly has five people in it.
That's it. The whole army.
It's just five people. The army they're up against, who are not as good at shooting, but they're about 80% accurate, has a thousand people in it.
It's not even close. The thousand shooters who are 80% accurate would destroy the five people who are perfectly accurate in the first second.
The entire battle would last less than a second, right?
Now, that's obvious to you once I explain it, isn't it?
But when I first set this up, you said to yourself, probably, if I set it up correctly, well, obviously the people who are better at shooting...
If all the weapons are the same, the good shooter should win.
Why is this important?
Because this is the same mental trick that is preventing us, I think, from having inexpensive saliva strips as coronavirus tests.
So here's the competing sides.
We have these accurate tests that will get the right answer really, really well.
But they're slow.
And they require a healthcare professional, and you need some kind of a device usually.
That means that as accurate as you are, you can't do much.
In other words, your volume is always going to be really low because of the limitations of the testing device.
The one that's not legal yet, the FDA doesn't allow it, are these little saliva test strips, which haven't been built, by the way.
You can build them in the laboratory to know that it's possible.
There's not much to the construction of it.
So we're not too worried that you could make them in volume.
It's just nobody's doing it because it's not legal.
But let's say those test strips were, I think it's more than 80%, but let's say they're 85% accurate.
But they're a dollar.
You can do it at home without a healthcare professional, and you can do it all day long.
You could test every person coming into the building, every person coming into a sporting event, every person everywhere several times a day, because you get an instant result, cost you a dollar, 85% accurate.
There's no competition between which of them is the better method.
They're not even close.
But your brain first says, why would I ever want an inaccurate test when I could have an accurate one?
And that's why I gave you the analogy of the two armies.
It's just like that.
Now, of course, I teach you quite famously that analogies are not persuasive.
There's no persuasion going on here.
Analogies are good for introducing a new concept.
If the concept itself makes sense, then I guess in some sense you'd say, oh, I just learned a new thing, and therefore I'm convinced.
But that's not persuasion.
That's just if you knew more, you might make better decisions.
That's all that is. So I use the analogy just to reorient your brain to thinking of two armies, the bigger army, Which is a zillion test strips that everybody's testing, testing, testing all day long, versus these very pinpoint, very accurate tests that you can't do very many of them no matter what you do.
You just can't ramp them up enough.
So, I still don't know why we're not doing more of these test strips.
I think it's because somebody doesn't understand that the big army always beats the small army, even if they're less accurate.
But maybe there's something else.
So I'll be open-minded. There might be some excuse or explanation that I don't know.
Let me give you an update on my funniest liberal friend who I debate just to see what kind of craziness comes out of him.
He told me yesterday he doesn't watch my periscopes so I can speak with complete abandon.
Now what's interesting about my liberal friend is not that he's dumb.
It's the opposite. What makes it interesting is he's really smart.
Not even just ordinary smart.
I'm talking about way above average smart, but disagrees with me completely on Trump-related stuff.
So here's the tortured path that he takes.
I try to get him to admit just one thing.
At a time, because he likes to do the laundry list approach.
And the one thing I'm trying to get him to admit is that Russian collusion was shown to not exist.
Just that very one thing.
And what do you think is his response?
Oh no. Mueller said there was plenty of obstruction.
And what about all those people who did get charged and went to jail?
And what about the fact that the Russia troll farms tried to interfere?
To which I say, none of that is Russian collusion.
You understand that none of that is Russian collusion.
And as smart as he is, he's conflated all of those things into being something That he's willing to argue is in the same category of Russian collusion, but he won't say that directly because it would be crazy to say it directly.
So this is clear cognitive dissonance because he existed for, I don't know, two years or whatever, thinking that Russian collusion, because he told me, was real.
Once it was proven not to be real or proven that there's no evidence to suggest it's real, he couldn't leave it So he's decided to just redefine it as a whole bunch of other things that are not Russia collusion and just call it that.
And literally just give it a different name.
That is the most classic cognitive dissonance you'll ever see.
But here's the funny part.
He accused me in the same conversation of having cognitive dissonance.
And he gave this following example.
He said, I know you have cognitive dissonance, I'm paraphrasing, because...
100% of the time, you just say that Trump is right.
And since we know that couldn't be possibly legitimate, that Trump is just always right, and everything he does is good, that can't be true.
So therefore, we have proven that you have cognitive dissonance.
To which I said, The very email I sent before this had a long explanation of me viciously criticizing the President on this very question of the test strips.
So without prompting, I had just viciously criticized President Trump for this one topic within the testing category.
And immediately after watching that, my friend accuses me of never being able to criticize the President.
To which I say, I just did that.
I just did that right in front of you.
Very, very noticeably.
I made a big point of it without even being asked.
No prompting whatsoever.
Big, vicious criticism.
And I noted that I've done it many times before.
It's just pure craziness.
Anyway. I asked my friend, and I'll ask you the same question.
So my liberal friend says there are many examples of Trump failing in terms of the coronavirus situation.
And so I try to ask, what are those examples?
And I'm not claiming that there are no examples.
My claim from the start, before anybody had any track record of managing this crisis, I said at the very first start, Everybody's going to be guessing.
And so if you're looking back later and say, oh, these people got it wrong, you're just being a jerk because nobody knew what to do on day one.
Nobody knew. Everybody did different things.
Some were going to work. Some weren't.
It wasn't because they were smart.
It was because everybody guessed differently and somebody was going to get a better result.
So I asked for specifics.
And here are the types of things I get.
And I don't quite understand it.
Here's the biggest one.
There's a belief that if we had been better at testing early on, we could have, in other words, if the president had done something differently in terms of testing, we could have tested our way to safety the way other countries did.
Now, can you do me a fact check?
My understanding is that there were no experts who thought we could test our way to safety.
In other words, my claim, and I want to fact check on this, is that Fauci and Birx, the two experts that we looked at the most, I believe that neither of them thought that we had the testing facilities or could get them quickly enough that we could ever just test our way out.
Somebody says, wrong again, Scotty.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.
I was going to block you, but I think you're just joking.
Can somebody confirm that?
And why is it that I don't...
Somebody says I'm being correct.
Yeah. So my understanding is if you had a little island country and you've got a dozen people with it, You could pretty well do some contact tracing in that situation.
But I don't think that our experts ever told Trump that with the testing we did have, what was possible at the time, again, the limitation is we just didn't have enough testing of the right type, which isn't exactly Trump's fault, is it? How could you be ready to test something that didn't exist yet?
I don't know how that would even work.
And I would point out That if we didn't have the ability to rapidly ramp up new kinds of tests, that we also didn't have that during the Obama administration.
So wouldn't they be identical?
Obama didn't have an ability to rapidly ramp up for a test for a coronavirus that didn't yet exist.
Trump also didn't have the ability to quickly ramp up to test for a coronavirus that didn't exist.
How are they different? Alright.
So that, I think he's just uninformed.
But maybe I'm the one.
Here's another one. He didn't have enough PPE and ventilators.
Right. But wouldn't it be true that we didn't have any in the warehouse from Obama either?
Did Obama have any?
Was there any other country that had stockpiled enough PPE and ventilators?
I think the answer is no.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think every single country in the world didn't prepare in the way that we ultimately wish we had of with the PPE, etc.
So I don't think he was any different than any other leader, was he?
Unprepared. Some say he should have used the War Powers Act sooner, but what exactly would that have gotten us?
Because there's no evidence that shows that that would have therefore done what?
I don't know. Nobody died for a lack of PPE. Therefore, the way we did it worked.
Nobody imagines that the War Power Act could have created enough testing fast enough.
I don't think. Does anybody think that?
I didn't see Fauci and Birx recommending that.
There's the argument that Trump disbanded some, whatever it was, some epidemiology group or Pandemic group in the government.
I think that it's true that they were disbanded, but I think it's fake news that it made any difference, because my understanding is those functions just were distributed to existing departments.
So it wasn't a real change.
It was a sort of a change on paper.
It wasn't a change in function.
So it probably didn't make any difference.
What about the, you know, you should have shut down more aggressively?
Well, that ignores the fact that the economy is the other part of the equation.
Nobody really knows what was the right amount to shut down, do they?
I don't think anybody knows that.
Because you'd have to wait for the economy to play out over years to find out if more people died from the shutdown and the economic disruption than died from the coronavirus.
So that's sort of an unknown.
All right. Let's talk about Black Lives Matter and all that.
Jack Posobiec on Twitter yesterday was tweeting that, and actually showed, the Minnesota Police Training Manual specifically shows using your knee on a suspect's head exactly the way Chauvin, was it, put his knee on George Floyd's neck and or head.
In other words, the Minnesota...
Police training has an actual photo of how to do it, and he's doing it exactly the way the George Floyd thing went down.
And so I tell you again, there's just no way they're going to get convicted or murdered with the fentanyl in George Floyd and the fact that they asked him if he...
I mean, consider this.
They asked him two or three times if he was on anything, and he said no each time.
If he had said yes any one of those times, they would have been alerted to treat him as more of a medical problem and less as a resisting arrest.
So maybe George Floyd could have said, yes, I have something in me, and that might be a factor.
So a lot of mistakes were made.
Cheryl Ackeson, you all know, a writer on political stuff, and She noticed some friend of hers was automatically unfollowed from her account, and I saw her tweet on that, and I tweeted to ask other people if they had had the same experience on her account.
What do you think we found?
Yes, of course.
Lots and lots of people thought they had been following her, but now they're not, and they had to refollow.
Now, What are we supposed to do with the fact that it's so blatantly obvious that the social media algorithm, or at least who is following who, is clearly being manipulated?
It couldn't be more obvious.
It's public.
We can all check it ourselves.
You can have massive confirmation, because you've seen it on my account.
You've seen it on Richard Grinnell's account.
You've seen it on Matt Gaetz's account.
You've seen it on Sheryl Atkinson's account.
Now, I still don't know if it's happening to any liberals, but I haven't heard of any.
So, we certainly have election interference in the context of Twitter, but no action.
Shouldn't there be something happening such as Twitter being regulated or some kind of investigation.
Why is the FBI not already in Twitter?
I don't understand, and this is an honest question, I don't understand why literally Twitter hasn't been taken over by the FBI at this point.
They should actually be on the floor of Twitter trying to figure out why this is happening.
Is there some law that says that there's no reason that there's any law broken?
I don't know. Given the context of election interference, I would think that the FBI would be all over Twitter, but I don't understand what's going on there.
Speaking of I don't understand, that was the main line that Joe Biden used when he made the mistake of taking questions in public.
He kept saying, I don't understand why this president...
I just don't understand. I'm confused.
I just don't understand.
And let me tell you, if you're being blamed, or at least accused, of having some kind of mental slowdown, you don't want to get in public and repeat the phrase, I don't understand, over and over again.
It's a really bad look.
It's bad enough when I do it, but most people are not accusing me of dementia.
Alright, so here's an awkward question.
How do you tell somebody that their strategy for success is completely wrong?
In other words, they've developed a strategy that guarantees failure, but they think it's a strategy for success.
How do you tell them that it's all wrong?
What I'm talking about here is Black Lives Matter.
I made a list of all the things that they're doing wrong strategically that no one would argue with.
So this is specifically a list that I believe something close to 100% of people who understand management, leadership, success, anybody who has any expertise in how to get stuff done, I believe would agree with me.
That these are strategy mistakes.
Here's the list. Selling past the close.
Have I ever talked about that?
It's when you've already closed the sale.
The buyer has agreed to buy.
You've agreed to sell.
Now all you have to do is take their money.
The biggest strategic mistake you could make, if you're the seller, is to keep talking.
Because anything you say at that point can't make you the sale because you already have the sale.
But it could lose you the sale.
And that's what happened with the George Floyd thing.
The moment the country saw the video of George Floyd, the sale had been made.
Oh my goodness, we have to fix this.
Every white person, every black person, every Republican, every Democrat, complete sale.
Sale has been made.
What happened? They kept selling.
They kept protesting until there was danger, cities were destroyed, Now, wouldn't you say that the George Floyd initial reactions, which could have been one of the best things that ever happened in this country, it was a gift in a sense, a tragedy, of course, but it was a gift to the country, almost like George Floyd died for our sins kind of thing.
There was almost a Jesus-like, I know that's offensive, but just follow the analogy, his death could have been In sort of an analogous way that Jesus' death could have been a positive.
In the Christian religion it is.
His death, as tragic as it was, could have been a positive.
Because we all were on the same side, but it turned into a gigantic negative.
People are fleeing the cities.
It's the worst situation.
So that's the first mistake.
Selling past the close. Here's the next one.
Putting the least capable people in charge.
What expert would say, let's scour the earth and find the least capable leaders and we'll put them in charge?
I'm pretty sure that's what's happening with Black Lives Matter because of all the other mistakes of leadership that I'll mention.
So clearly the worst people are in charge.
Nobody would make that mistake if they knew how to do anything.
How about this?
Seeing the world as a zero-sum situation, meaning I can't win unless you lose, Versus an abundance situation, which is, I'm glad you have yours.
Now I'll work on getting mine.
Hey, look, we can both have as much as we want if we all do the same.
If we all do the right stuff, we all get benefits.
I don't know that there's any successful anything that has ever started with the zero-sum, I can't win unless you lose motivation.
In the long run, that always fails.
Always. And that's what you're seeing with Black Lives Matter.
Nothing about let's build something together.
It's all about how can you give me something.
Zero sum. How about canonizing your criminals?
How about the idea of making your heroes the people who are literally criminals?
Now, I think you can hold both thoughts simultaneously.
You can certainly hold the thought that somebody should not be shot by the police because of some past criminal behavior if it wasn't part of the actual incident.
We all agree with that.
There's no argument with that.
You don't get shot today for something you did a year ago.
Nobody wants to live in that world.
But Is it a good strategy to hold up your criminals as your heroes?
No. Martin Luther King was the example of doing it right.
Holding up as your hero somebody who had the right set of values.
That was a good idea. Holding up the people who have been killed by police that have records.
Very bad idea.
Nobody has ever made a good outcome out of making heroes out of the people who they should not.
Now, the weird thing about this is the whole controversy about, let's say, Confederate statues.
The whole point of that is you don't want to hold up as role models people who have a sketchy past.
And nothing could be sketchier than being a past slave owner.
So if you know the concept Of getting rid of Confederate statues because it sends a bad message as a role model.
Why are we making role models out of slave owners?
That makes no sense. But how about extending that to your own population?
How about bringing that forward into current times?
How about making heroes out of Thomas Sowell or anybody who's got a positive view of abundance or strategy?
So you got that problem.
How about always voting for the same political party?
Has anybody ever made that work?
Always voting for the same party reliably is guaranteed to take away your political power.
It's guaranteed. And what are they doing this year?
They're trying even harder to make that strategy that never works, can't work, has never worked for anybody.
They're doubling down on a strategy they know can't work because it takes away their own power.
If you always vote for the same side.
How about the idea of never taking personal responsibility?
Yes, the police should be better trained, have more options.
We should look into every possibility for better police service to the community to keep us safer, etc.
Nobody argues with that.
It's 100% agreed that anything can be done better, especially that.
But... Does that take away your responsibility to teach your kids how not to resist arrest?
If you can't even have the conversation about, you know, maybe we should resist arrest a little bit better.
If you can't even discuss it, you have a failing strategy.
Because nobody ever succeeded by saying all the problems were with somebody else.
It's just not a strategy that's ever worked.
For anybody ever, in the long run.
How about this?
Not asking to do small tests.
Do you know what works almost every time?
Well, if you don't know exactly what to do to make something better, you say, hey, if we can't agree what to do, can we at least agree to test some things and see if those work?
If you're not suggesting, let's do some trials and some tests, you don't have a strategy that can work.
You don't. Don't even pretend you're doing something useful if you're not talking about how to create a small test.
It's the only way you can improve if people don't automatically agree on what's the right thing to do.
How about this? How about turning it into a racial problem instead of just figuring out how you can fix it?
How could it ever work to turn it into a hate problem instead of a what-do-you-do-about-it problem?
Because, again...
They're selling past the close.
If you're talking about how it's racist or not racist, you're already in the wrong conversation.
Because all the people you're calling racist have already said, I think we agree with you that we could do this better.
Why are you still talking?
You're just making it worse.
Bad strategy.
How about focusing on your smallest problem instead of your biggest problem?
Has anyone ever made that work?
Let's make a list of all our priorities and we'll spend all of our time on the lowest one.
What's the lowest priority?
Police mistreatment of the minority community.
Is it real? It seems like it.
It seems like there's definitely a disproportionate thing.
Should it be worked on?
Absolutely. Should we put a lot of attention on it?
Sure. But should you ignore the biggest problem?
Which is obviously the school system is not serving a lot of communities, and therefore they get off to the wrong start.
And of course you'll have more crime.
If you have more crime, you have more police action.
Just everything falls apart from that one thing, and that's of course caused by the teachers' unions rejecting competition in the schools.
So nobody ever made working on your smallest problem successful.
How about this one? Violence.
Is there a long history of minor violence working?
There's a long history of major violence working.
The Civil War.
I mean, you could say that worked in a sense.
How about the American Revolution?
That was violence. That worked.
But what case has violence worked in individual cases?
Like where I'll just shoot this guy or I'll kill this person.
When has that worked?
That just feels like the worst strategy in the world.
How about ignoring the concept of reciprocity?
It's like the white person superpower, that people will do things for you for nothing, and then maybe someday it'll come back.
It's very similar to the idea of abundance versus a zero-sum world, but the idea of reciprocity works every time.
What are the Black Lives Matter people doing?
The opposite. They're asking somebody else to give them stuff.
They have their arguments.
But that's the opposite of any strategy anybody's ever made work.
Reciprocity works. I do something for you, and something will come back to me.
Forcing you to give me stuff with no end in sight, because I can never get enough to be equal to you, that's never worked.
I mean, it might have some temporary gain, but in the long term, it's a terrible strategy.
How about developing systems that ignore human motivation, such as socialism and Marxism?
They've never worked, not in their pure form.
You can have a little socialism on top of capitalism, but they've never worked in their pure form anywhere, because they ignore human motivation.
That's a bad strategy.
How about the fact that Black Lives Matter, they have leaders, but they don't seem to be present?
In other words, I couldn't even give you the name of the head of Black Lives Matter, or were there three of them, or were they just founders, but now they're not running things?
Is it a local organization?
I don't even know. So if you can't identify the leaders, there's nobody to negotiate with, there's nobody to negotiate for you, there's nobody to get you what you want.
They don't have a structure which would allow them to get anything.
Because there's nobody to talk to.
And the demands are all over the place.
Until you have a leader who can solidify demands, you don't have anything.
How about ignoring free markets and school choice?
How about believing the news?
That's a bad strategy.
A lot of the Black Lives Matter stuff comes from believing the news.
That there's some kind of...
Epidemic of black people being hunted and shot by police.
If you believe the news, then you believe that's a problem and you orient yourself to fixing that problem.
If you didn't believe the news, in other words, you understood that their business model causes them to make things look worse than they are because that gets them clicks.
If you understood that, it would be a better strategy to look at the data, etc.
All right. The obvious outcome of doing literally everything wrong is segregation.
And you've seen that, but we're not calling it that yet.
When you see these news stories about all the rich people who are moving out of New York City, what is your brain translating that into?
Maybe you have to be a certain age for this to happen.
This isn't exactly about rich people moving to where it's safe.
This is a lot about rich white people moving away from black people.
Can we be honest?
If you ask them privately, hey, why are you getting out of New York City?
They'd probably give you, let's say, politically correct sounding answers.
They'd say, well, there's too much crime and it's unsafe, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But in their little prejudiced racist minds, These are people who were the most, let's say, politically allied with the black world four months ago.
So four months ago, the very people who were probably packing up and leaving New York City would be the greatest advocates for the black community.
They would be elite Democrats, very reliably pro-black community, as I am.
I would consider myself very pro-black people In the sense that if you can help the black community, everybody's better off.
So I buy into that completely.
But now, now that they're moving out of the city that they love, I feel like you've converted them into racists.
And that privately they're thinking that they're just getting away from black people.
Don't you think that that's probably true?
I'm not saying that's good or bad.
I'm not endorsing that.
I'm not saying they should think that.
Nothing like that. I'm just saying, predictably, this is making everything worse.
Somebody says it's mind-reading.
It's not mind-reading if you present it as speculation.
If you present it as fact, it's mind-reading.
If I said that's what they're thinking, that would be mind-reading.
If I say What would you be thinking in that case?
Or what do you imagine people are thinking?
What's the likely thing that some number of them are thinking?
Then that's just speculating.
Which is fair. All right.
Peter Navarro tweeted about a new hydroxychloroquine study that's a retrospective, meaning that it's not a gold standard study, but rather they looked at the experience of whether people got better or not.
And it showed that with these older patients, the ones who are most at risk, there was another retrospective study that found that the people who got the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin did better, had better outcomes.
So I tweeted, why is it that 95% of the retrospective tests, which are admittedly not as good as gold standard randomized tests, Why is it that even though they're not great kinds of studies, why is it that 95% of them all lean in the same direction?
Is it because there's the same analytical mistake every time?
And Andres Backhaus, who's my go-to person for understanding data and how to analyze data, so he's the most rational person that I I've seen yet on Twitter in general, in terms of just picking out what's logical and what isn't.
And he makes this observation that made me slap myself in the head and go, okay, yeah, that's a pretty good point.
And it goes like this. If you don't have a randomized control study, then the doctors are deciding who gets hydroxychloroquine and who doesn't.
Given that there is a suggestion that That there could be more of a side effect problem if somebody is close to death.
Who do you think the doctors give the hydroxychloroquine to?
Yeah, they don't give it to the people who are the sickest because the assumption is that the side effects might push them over the edge.
So there's a very good reason to believe that the doctors have self-selected to give it to people who have less of an illness and are less at risk.
And therefore, when you look at the results at the end, it's like, oh, all the people who got hydroxychloroquine, on average, they did better.
But it could be just a selection bias, that the only people who got it in the first place were people who didn't look like they were going to die five minutes after getting hydroxychloroquine if they had some side effects, which we don't imagine the side effects are bad.
Now, I don't think that applies to any early studies.
It might not apply to getting it early versus getting it later in the disease, but there still could be a selection bias.
There still could. So beware of the selection bias.
I'm still going to be at 30% odds that hydroxychloroquine, in the end, we'll find out was a good thing and we didn't use it as much.
All right, here's a question.
William Barr is indicating that We are certain, meaning the government is certain, that outside agitators are coming in for these protests to cause trouble.
We don't have a lot of detail on that, but Bill Barr says we have plenty of evidence that that's happening.
I have a question, and I think there were like three new police shooting stories on CNN just alone this morning.
One of them is, there's something called a spit bag.
If somebody's spitting on you, the police will put a bag over your head.
They put a bag over a guy's head because he had mental illness or something.
He was spitting on him. And then he died like a week later, and they're being blamed for some asphyxiation-related complications that lasted a week.
I don't know. Maybe.
But here's my take on this.
We have a zombie apocalypse that we think is a police problem.
The zombie apocalypse is that people who are on drugs or have mental illness don't know how to not resist arrest.
They are not in their right minds.
And if the police are shooting people who are on drugs or have mental illness and that those are the ones who are doing the most resisting arrest, that's a problem that needs to be solved.
And we definitely need some more Non-lethal means of doing that.
Somebody sent me on Twitter a video of this bolo rope.
I guess they shoot it at some kind of special gun and it just wraps around your legs almost instantly.
And I thought to myself, okay, the bolo gun that sort of captures somebody by the legs, that's good.
But in a lot of these cases, I don't think they would have had a chance to use it because it seems like people...
Grab a gun that you didn't know they had or they reach in their pocket.
It seems like I'm not sure the timing would be right to use that bolo rope.
And I can't imagine that you would use it if somebody's running toward you with a weapon.
You're not going to want to try the bolo rope first.
You're probably going to want to shoot.
So treating it like it's a crime problem entirely is probably a problem.
It's more of a zombie apocalypse.
A new study out of Australia suggests that venom from honeybees and bumblebees can totally kill breast cancer without injuring the cells around them.
Now, this is like a billion other studies that I've seen in the past that don't end up working out, but it's always good to hear these things.
It seems painful to have all those bees stinging you in your breasts, But maybe they have some other way of administering it.
Just joking. Of course they do.
Sarah Sanders has a new book out, and one of the anecdotes is funny.
Apparently, Kim Jong-un winked at her when they visited with him, and Trump later joked to Sarah Sanders that she might have to leave her family and go live with Kim Jong-un to, quote, take one for the team, which is pretty funny Governor Andrew Cuomo who I was surprised to find out is younger than me
I feel like he looks older, but I think that's just because I think I fooled myself into thinking I look younger.
But after President Trump was noodling on the idea of withholding federal funds from cities that are just not taking care of the chaos...
Cuomo didn't like that, and he said that, quote, talking about Trump, he can't have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City, Cuomo said.
Forget bodyguards.
He'd better have an army if he thinks he's going to walk down the streets in New York.
Now, he went on to explain that he meant the president is unwelcome in New York.
But is that the way you say somebody's unwelcome?
You literally talk about killing him?
I've never seen Democrats go completely so obviously into, let's murder the president.
It's the most irresponsible thing I've ever seen from a governor, and I would think you should be removed from office in an impeachment, Governor Cuomo should, just for saying that.
That is so bad that And the impact it has on people who will literally now think, oh, I guess we can attack Trump supporters.
So Andrew Cuomo, I haven't warned you all about swearing, so I'll hold back for now.
But Andrew Cuomo, you just made my life more dangerous.
You made the chance of me getting attacked a little bit higher.
That's what the governor of New York just did.
Now, I get that he doesn't like what Trump is doing, but he did just make violence more acceptable.
And I don't know what would be more impeachable than that, if that's not the most impeachable thing in the world.
I don't know what is.
All right.
So apparently the Russians, we have some information, That the Russians are trying to spread misinformation about Joe Biden's health.
Now, and apparently CNN is using this, the fact that the Department of Homeland Security, they quote, withheld an intelligence bulletin warning of a Russian plot to spread misinformation about Joe Biden's health, which they note mirrors the president's own attacks.
Now, let me ask you this.
CNN has said some dumb things before, but if you're alive and you're in the United States and you're following politics, or even if you're not, were you unaware that President Trump and all Republicans are saying that Joe Biden has some kind of mental decline?
Did you need to wait and hear that from Putin?
Is there anybody in the United States Who has somehow missed an avalanche of non-stop news about Joe Biden's mental capacity.
They've missed all of that.
Wall-to-wall coverage of it, it seems like, every day.
But they did see something that the Russians did that suggested the same thing.
And it was that Russian suggestion that flipped them.
It's like, oh, oh, I hadn't noticed that, but I saw this meme on Facebook That looks like it was made by a sixth grader in Russia.
Oh, now I'm convinced.
Now I think Joe Biden has a mental problem.
I don't think this is quite the problem that CNN thinks it is.
Barr said when he was talking to Wolf Blitzer in an interview, he said, quote, this is playing with fire.
He was talking about mail-in ballots and how they're not dependable.
He said, we're a very closely divided country here, and so it's playing with fire.
And he said it's just logical that votes could be faked.
Now, here's the really fun part.
The president, apparently, in his speech, I guess, in Pennsylvania, where the polls, by the way, are showing it's pretty tight, the president suggested that if everybody is so sure...
There's nobody else in the world who would have done this.
Because... It's either brilliant or reckless, and even I can't decide which one it is.
So President Trump has suggested that if everybody is so sure that mail-in votes are secure, then why don't you try to vote twice and see what happens?
Try to vote once in person and once with the mail-in and see if, in fact, the system flags it and gives you only one vote.
Now, that's either brilliant Or is really, really reckless.
It's one of those two things.
Maybe it's both. I don't know.
But when you hear that and you hear the president say, well, just try it.
Do you think that the government records in every state are good enough that they will be able to determine in a timely fashion that you voted twice?
Now, what makes this reckless is that it's a federal offense.
Right? Right? But I can't imagine you would be necessarily convicted if your grandmother votes twice and the system allows it when we had been told that the system wouldn't allow it.
See, here's the cool part that makes this maybe genius.
Could you be convicted of voting twice, once at a voting booth, but also once separately you dropped your ballot in the mail, If you had been told that there's no scenario in which your vote would be counted twice.
Did you hear that?
You have been told non-stop by your respected media that there's no chance that voting twice would work.
So what if you tried it?
The President suggests.
What if you tried it? Could you go to jail For a crime that you've been told by your own government and the entire media can't happen.
In other words, you would have a complete expectation that you did not vote twice.
Even if you went through the steps of voting twice, you would have the expectation, reasonable, completely reasonable.
You've been told by CNN and others that they got this locked down.
There's no way that fraud happens.
It's all good. You would be able to say, it is my belief that I've only voted once.
Because every expert told me that only one of them would count.
I just wanted to make sure that my vote didn't get lost in the mail, so I voted in person.
I also voted by the mail, just to make sure one of them got through.
Obviously your database will immediately detect it, toss one out.
No harm, right?
It's going to be a messy situation.
Alright, so it might be terrible that the President said that, but on the other hand, once he did say it, you could really see the problem in a way you couldn't see before.
I would say that that provocative way of putting it really solidifies in your head that you've been lied to.
Because there's nobody in the world who is dumb enough to think that all the states have good records And that the timing would work, that they could line up your mail vote with your in-person vote.
There's nobody who thinks your government is that efficient.
And when the president puts that out there, it's really hard to argue that this is going to be a credible outcome.
All right. The father of Jacob Blake, the person who was killed with seven bullets in the police stop that caused a lot of the riots, Apparently he is anti-Semitic.
Now, here's my take on that.
I'm not Jewish, so I'm going to rely on people who are to tell me whether this guy is being anti-Semitic.
Because I have a rule that I don't get offended on behalf of other people.
I might get offended on behalf of myself.
I don't know if it's ever happened.
I don't really get offended by much.
But I'm not going to get offended on behalf of other people.
They have to tell me they're offended and then I'll deal with that.
But, you know, I can't judge it myself.
So, credible people have said they've looked at Jacob Blake Sr.'s social media stuff And it's important because there's some thought that Joe Biden will go meet with him.
And he said some things about Jews that if you looked at it, you would say to yourself, okay, I can see why people are uncomfortable with this.
But again, I'm going to let other people decide what's wrong and what's offensive in that mode.
But certainly you could look at it and say, okay, I see what they're talking about.
However, I happened to read through Jacob Blake Sr.'s posts and comments, and one of them really stuck out.
If you could pick out the one good thing that's coming out of all this badness, I mean, there's a lot of badness coming out of all this protest situation, but at the same time, I feel like I've learned things that would make me feel a little more empathetic or more understanding.
And oddly enough, Jacob Blake Sr., whatever his other flaws might be, laid down a little red pill on me That I'd never heard before.
Well, I take that back.
I think I'd sort of heard it, but it didn't really register.
And it went like this.
And this is in an anti-Semitic context from Jacob Blake Sr.
But he points out that everybody's aware, I'm paraphrasing here, but he points out that everybody's aware of the Holocaust.
You would agree, right?
Everybody's aware of the Holocaust.
And any informed adult would even know the number.
Six million-ish, you know, dead in the Holocaust.
And then Jacob Blake Sr.
asks, but why don't you know about King Leopold, the Belgian king, and the Congo?
And when I read that, I said, who?
Who is he talking about?
Who's this King Leopold, Belgian king?
Why do I care about him?
And what did he do in the Congo?
So I checked it out.
Did a little Google search.
Did you know that King Leopold, the Belgian king in the late 1800s, killed 10 to 15 million black people?
10 to 15 million in the Congo?
He basically took over the Congo, turned everybody into slave labor, And between directly killing people and harsh conditions, etc., 10 to 15 million people died.
Now, did you know that?
Did you know that?
Now, the way Jacob Lake Sr.
puts it, he's comparing it to the Holocaust, and then it becomes anti-Semitic because of the context.
But does he have a good point not to diminish the Holocaust, of course, But rather to say, why didn't you learn this in school?
I mean, seriously.
Somebody says, shame on you, Scott.
You could put more of a reason on that.
You get blocked for saying, shame on you, Scott, without a reason.
If you included any reason, you would not be getting blocked, even if I disagreed with the reason.
That's my rule. Somebody says, no agenda had it on a month ago.
Yeah, and...
If there's one thing you can do in this situation, you should spend at least a hot minute trying to put yourself in the head of your fellow citizens who are greatly distressed and just try to understand, what would it feel like to live in a country that had statues of people who were slave owners?
What would that feel like?
Would you like it?
I wouldn't like it.
So that's why I agree that the Confederate statues of the ones who supported slavery anyway should at least be put in context, if nothing else.
And should we not teach more about this King Leopold so that that's not general knowledge?
Because I feel like that is a little bit, you know, it fits right into the do black lives matter if we're not...
If that's not common knowledge, that King Leopold killed 10 to 15 million black people, I feel like that's something we should know about.
If you're being fair, you should know about that.
So we will not excuse Jacob Blake Sr.
of any other opinions which you may think are offensive.
They do at least feel that way to my uncritical eye.
All right. CNN's Van Jones is urging Democrats to only protest during the daytime because the nighttime stuff is where all the bad stuff happens and is just going to help Trump get re-elected.
He is correct.
That is exactly what's going to happen.
Are you having trouble figuring out what any of the political polls mean?
It's really hard to figure out If Trump is ahead or behind, you can't even really tell.
Because the idea of the...
I guess Kellyanne Conway called them the undercover...
What did she call them?
The undercover Trump supporters?
Because there's a lot of data that says people don't want to give their opinion to anybody, including a pollster.
So it seems to me that Trump within 4% is a Trump landslide.
It feels like that.
Is that the number? What number would you put on it?
Trump within 2% is a definite victory.
Trump within 4% of, let's say, the average of the polls, as opposed to the ones that tend to be accurate.
Rasmussen tends to be accurate, and a few others.
But if you just took the average and it came out to about 4% advantage for Biden, I feel like he loses with a 4% advantage because of the hidden vote situation.
All right. Yeah, Joe Biden.
Joe Biden. I think I talked about everything I want to talk about.
I think I did.
Yeah, Stalin and Mao killed millions, but they killed mostly people like themselves, which feels different.
Somebody says the betting odds are now in Trump's favor.
Did it cross over?
Oh, somebody says how many Armenians killed.
Good question. Yeah, the Armenian genocide is so-called.
Actually, I don't know the alleged death count on that.
But yeah, why don't we know about all the Holocausts?
Somebody says Proud Boys are going to Portland at the end of September.
That's a long ways away, end of September.
Do you think we'll still be doing the protests?
Probably. Somebody says 7%.
7% would be tough.
Somebody says, why does Van Jones not support Trump?
Well, you can't ask a lifelong Democrat to support a Republican.
Republican.
It's just not realistic.
All right.
That's all I got for now, and I will talk to you a bit later.
I believe you should all be looking for an Adam Townsend.
He's going to be doing a live stream with Mark Schneider.