Episode 1119 Scott Adams: All the New Fake News, People Who Are Bad at Analysis and Don't Know it, Netflix Should be in Jail, Woodward
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Content:
President Trump's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize
Netflix...somebody should go to jail
Bob Woodward's book claims
Laurence Tribe, "carnage in the suburbs" and leadership
Anderson Cooper acting like his March opinions didn't exist
Huge incentives for cheat-by-mail voting
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Oh yeah.
Yeah. So good.
So, in my opinion, the funniest thing that's happening right now is that President Trump is experiencing just blistering, withering attacks on everything he's ever done.
And at the same time, He's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now, here's the fun part.
It would be easy to imagine that any president could get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
You know, if you're thinking, okay, who is a good candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and they have to give it every year, even if nobody did anything, you say to yourself, well, It's no big surprise that there's somebody in the world who's willing to nominate the President of the United States, no matter who the President is.
There's always something the President did that sounds peace-like.
But what's different is that Trump has the best case for winning a Nobel Peace Prize That maybe you've ever seen.
It's not just marginal.
That's what's funny about it.
You could imagine a situation in which you'd say, I don't know, the things he's done, I suppose you could make a case for it being worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, but we're not talking about a gray area here.
We're talking about the clearest case for a Nobel Peace Prize, maybe ever.
Because the beauty of it is that it's not just the Israel-UAE deal, as big as that is.
It's also that he managed to get rid of ISIS. He's pulling troops out of everything.
He's the first time in 39 years he didn't start a war.
And you look at North Korea is clearly in a better place than it was.
Trump is getting criticized for being too friendly with dictators, but it is exactly why we're not in wars with those dictators.
It's part of the process.
It's part of an explicit The strategy which he told us in advance that he was going to be good to the leaders of these other countries whether they deserved it or not because it would be a good negotiating position to treat them with respect and then maybe you can get something done.
And if you look at his total body of work it's kind of crazy because even his critics are going to have to sort of give it up for the international stuff.
They might complain bitterly about stuff at home, but the international stuff is really, really solid.
So here's the thing I like to keep reminding you.
If you have a worldview or a filter on life, and you're pretty certain that it's the right filter, and it explains your reality well, and you think that other people with different filters on life don't quite see things clearly, the only way you can settle that It's by prediction.
Whichever of those two filters on reality consistently predicts what happens next, you've got to think that's the real one or the one that's closest to truth.
All of the people who said President Trump would create wars and would be completely useless in international negotiations How did your prediction go?
Did your prediction in, let's say, 2016, did you predict that this president would be not just nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, of course it may be political in terms of who actually gets the prize, but that there would be a completely solid and unambiguous case, and really you can't even think of anybody who would be in second place.
It's the most solid case for a Nobel Peace Prize maybe of all time.
Yeah, oh, Serbia and Kosovo.
I forgot an entire major component because he did so many things.
He just sort of drops these little gold eggs as he's going, and you don't realize how many gold eggs there are until somebody nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize, and you say...
Well, what's the justification for that?
Oh, well, there's that golden egg.
That's pretty good. Oh, here's another one.
Well, here's another one.
And suddenly you've got a gigantic basket full of golden eggs that you didn't quite realize what kind of a portfolio he'd put together for this stuff.
So anyway, my point is that my worldview, expressed often and publicly, was that he definitely would be the kind of president who would get a Nobel Peace Prize.
So that was my prediction.
In fact, I predicted it would have happened earlier.
I would have thought it would happen in the first term.
So my worldview predicted exactly where we are on this Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
And anybody who thought it was the opposite, you have to now honestly say to yourself, okay, my worldview did not predict.
You could still think you don't like the president for whatever reasons, But you have to admit, one of those worldviews predicted perfectly, and one of them got it completely wrong.
That's somewhat just objectively true at this point.
Alright, there's a big story that I'm going to mention without talking about.
Now, I wouldn't normally do that, but you'll immediately know why.
There's a big story that Netflix is showing some content that I'm not going to describe, even in general terms.
I'm not even going to tell you the category it's in.
And there are critics who say Netflix should actually go to jail.
Actual jail.
Not a joke. Literally, physically take a person and put them in jail For just running this content on Netflix.
Now, I saw that claim before I saw the clips of the content, and of course I said to myself, that's a little extreme.
Obviously, if it's just going to be on a family entertainment platform, Netflix is sort of for everybody.
They have ratings and stuff, but it's a family entertainment thing.
Surely they're not going to knowingly and intentionally put content on their platform which a reasonable person would say, you should go to jail for that.
Actual, literal jail for putting that on a screen.
And then I looked at the content.
They should actually go to jail for it.
Now, I don't like to even talk about this content, so you may have noticed I tend to stay away from it.
Because it's just so ugly, I don't like to put it in people's heads.
But the fact that Netflix, with impunity apparently, can put content on there that literally you should go to jail for.
Actual, literal, go to jail.
You know, and I wouldn't say that about just about anything.
I mean, you'd really, really have to try hard to get somebody who's as free speech oriented and, you know, hey, let's not get too excited about these little offenses and violations.
I mean, I'm always on the side of, you're making too much of this.
It doesn't matter if it's a Republican thing or a Democrat.
Fairly consistently, I'm the one who says, eh, you're blowing this out of proportion.
Not this time. Not this time.
You look at it as an adult, and you would say to yourself, somebody needs to go to jail for this.
Actual jail. It's mind-blowing.
Alright. Joe Biden continues to run his campaign in which, I guess the main strategy, besides hiding, is to reword Trump's policies Into angry and confused old man language, but make it a little more boring?
And it sounds like a joke, right?
Oh, he's not really running for president by doing, you know, nothing but rewording the current guy's policies.
Couldn't do that, could he?
Well, what's his slogan?
Build back better?
That really is just make America great again, reworded, but boring.
And now he's doing a Buy America thing, trying to convince people to buy America and bring the factories back.
And I'm thinking to myself, in other words, exactly what the president's doing?
And then there are, of course, his coronavirus recommendations from Joe Biden, which are, the president should follow the expert's advice, which is exactly what he's done from day one.
So Biden is literally just rewording what Trump is doing and says he wants to do.
He's just rewording it into confused, angry old man language and selling it.
Amazingly, he's selling it pretty well.
Alright. One of my best predictions of all time, which I don't think it will ever get much attention, but in terms of How accurate it was.
It's really good.
One of my best. And it goes like this.
When the pandemic first started, and maybe I said this in February-ish, but it was early on before we knew a lot.
And what I said was that everybody would look back at the so-called mistakes that our leaders and experts made, and they will criticize them with the clarity of what we learn in the future but it will be completely unfair because leaders were only guessing in the beginning because they didn't have you know really the knowledge of what to do and they knew they didn't know they knew that there were so many unknowns that they just had to do something and see if it worked and if it didn't quickly adjust and try something else and learn as you go and so In my effort to make the world a better place,
which looks like it didn't work at all, I tried to prepare the room, if you will.
So I was saying it loudly and often, in a few months from now, you're going to think that we should have made different decisions because you'll be smarter in the future, you'll know what worked and what didn't work, and you'll be completely full of shit.
Because if you don't know it today...
Don't tell me in August what we should have done today.
All that matters is what did you know to do today?
How did all the leaders in the world do in February?
Not so well.
Not so well!
Because they were all guessing.
Were they all bad leaders?
Probably not. Were all the leaders in the world of similar quality?
Because it seems to me that leaders that you would think are bad in general Seemed to have, in many cases, coincidentally, got something that looked like a better result than some people you might have thought, well, I thought they were pretty good leaders, but they got a bad result.
What you will learn, and what the fake news is counting on, is that the average person will never be sophisticated enough and never have the, let's say, the talent stack to understand how to analyze the situation.
It's hard. I would guess that no more than 2% of the public would be anywhere near the capability, and this is not just raw intelligence capability, but experience in analyzing things.
That's the important part, is the experience.
If you don't have the experience analyzing complicated situations, you might think you can do it.
Because you might say to yourself, well, I just listened to the news, And there were 10 smart people in a row who said that President Trump made big mistakes.
So, what else do I need to know?
I looked at the news.
They seem like smart people.
They all seem to agree that the President made these mistakes.
Therefore, logically, the President did a poor job on the coronavirus.
But here's the problem.
98% of the public doesn't know How do you even analyze this situation?
So the 10 experts you hear almost certainly are not in that 2%.
And you can tell by looking at the way they talk about it.
And I've gone through this before, but the fast version is this.
Leadership, in the end, will look like the least important variable in terms of how things turned out.
If you can't do your analysis and adjust for, hey, the United States has a high population of African Americans, and they have a worse outcome in terms of ultimately dying from coronavirus, did anybody factor that in when they said, how did the United States do?
Did they factor in that we have a high population of unusually vulnerable people?
I didn't see anybody do that.
Have you ever seen anybody do that?
Has anybody ever said, we're going to compare you to Germany, but we're going to do this calculation to normalize it so it would be as if you had similar populations, and then see how you did?
Have you seen that? No.
No. You've not seen that.
How about obesity?
Gigantic variable. The United States, sadly, has a fat population.
We have an unusually obese population.
So, if you compare us to a country that doesn't have an obese population, or nowhere near it, and you don't do the math to adjust when you're comparing the two, have you compared them?
No! No, you haven't compared them.
So all the people that you think are the smart people who are going on television saying, look at my graph!
Look at Lusitania, Estonia.
Look at how Lübbergenburg did.
Look how this state did compared to this other state.
100% of those people are idiots.
Not in general, but on this topic.
There are people who think that because they have a graph and it's real data that they trust, the data came from a good source, and they took that good source and they put it on a graph, They think they know something.
No. That graph is misleading.
It's not telling you something you need to know.
It's not providing information.
It is reducing your information because it's misleading you.
It misleads you into thinking that's enough to make some kind of a decision.
It's not. We don't know why some states do fine without masks.
We don't know why some places seem to need a shutdown and other places didn't.
We don't know why some group activities seem to create a bunch of new coronavirus and others don't.
We don't know exactly what anything is doing.
It's this big ball of guessing.
And I can guarantee you this.
That all of the leaders of all of the countries said some version of this early on in the pandemic.
This feels like a very comfortable thing to assume is true without knowing and talking to every person.
Don't you think that every leader said to themselves, pandemic, virology, epidemiology, I don't know anything about that stuff.
Right? So there might be a few world leaders who are also doctors, but in general, don't you think your Putins, your Shis, your Merkels, everybody, for the most part, generally speaking, don't you think they all said, I'd better just listen to the experts?
With me so far?
That all of the leaders said, this isn't my domain, I'd better listen to the experts.
Then, the experts, would you also agree, were largely on the same page, worldwide, because the experts were really good at sharing information, the internet allows that.
And so the experts everywhere, fairly soon, I mean not in day one, but fairly soon they achieved something like a consensus.
So all the world leaders looked at the experts, looked at the consensus, and said, alright, We could be right or we could be wrong, but it's never going to be wrong to do what the consensus of experts say in terms of a rational decision.
It's never wrong. It could be wrong in terms of the outcome, because again, even the experts were taking their best shot at it.
They were legitimately, honestly and professionally, giving us their best work, but they had to guess a little bit.
You can't fault them If they got something wrong, because it wasn't possible to know what was right.
It just wasn't possible.
So, there's my take.
That only the people who don't know how to analyze things think that they can look at President Trump's performance and say, well, that could have been better.
And, of course, there's always the fact that anything that's good could have been done sooner.
Right? The big fake news of the day, the last 48 hours I guess, is the idea that if the president had acted sooner, 100,000 people would be saved.
Now, is that true?
Number one, we don't know.
That's a complete unknown.
So anybody who says if he had acted sooner, 100,000 people would have been saved, there's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence of that at all.
Do you know what evidence they use?
Somebody ran a model.
What credibility do you give somebody's complicated prediction model?
None, right?
If we've learned anything, it's that complicated prediction models are not really credible.
So all the people saying, oh, there's a model that says 100,000 people or whatever would have lived if he'd acted sooner.
A. Everybody could have acted sooner.
B. Nobody knew what to do.
C. Fauci says, and I don't think he would lie about this, Fauci says that the president did whatever the experts collectively said he should do, and when they said it.
He didn't even delay.
He did it when they said things should be done.
So your situation is that it's really some combination of lying and not knowing how to analyze things.
So there are some people saying the president did a bad job who know they're lying because it can't be determined one way or the other.
And there are other people who just don't know.
They think it's just a fact because they don't know how to analyze things.
You can see how crazy things get because Woodward got some criticism for if he learned during this telephone interview back whenever it was, if he learned that Trump knew it was more dangerous than he had said, Shouldn't Woodward be telling people?
Shouldn't he immediately blow the whistle and say, I was going to save this for a book, but it's so important, I need to tell the public, because otherwise 100,000 people will die?
Do you know what Woodward said?
He said, that's nonsense.
In other words, the people who are believing Woodward's book are holding in their mind these two things to be true, which can't both be true.
That if the president had told the public that it was a big problem and they would take it more seriously, we could have saved a bunch of lives.
But if the president told Woodward, and Woodward told the president, and even had it on tape, so you don't even have to wonder if it's being mischaracterized, it's on tape.
If Woodward had given it to the public, it would not have made any difference.
Those two things can't both be true.
You have to pick. Either Woodward killed tens of thousands of people by sitting on it, or the president didn't kill tens of thousands of people by sitting on it.
In other words, nobody knew what to do.
You could always second-guess after you have better information.
All right. One big persuasion mistake Democrats are making, and I don't know if it could be avoided, is dumping all of these anti-Trump books at the same time.
I think there are three more anti-Trump books that are going to hit in the next few weeks.
If you have too many anti-Trump books, the audience gets snow-blind, meaning that they all start feeling the same.
And if they all start feeling the same, they also feel less important.
Here's a memory trick from the book I can't remember.
But the trick is this, that memory is triggered by contrast.
So if you only had one book and it said terrible things about the president, people would really notice that.
And they'd be like, whoa, that's a big deal.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I can't stop thinking about this book.
And I would say the Michael Wolff book was closer to that.
The Michael Wolff book, if you remember that, sort of was by itself for a while, so it really stood out and became a major news thing.
But if you have six books that all make sketchy claims, and inevitably some of those claims in those books will be debunked.
If some of them are debunked and the whole audience says, okay, that one's debunked, but what about these other ones?
There's still...
It's just not interesting.
It's just a big wall of anti-Trump books that in your mind just got put in one bucket and then you ignored it.
So I think the books will have less impact than maybe Democrats hope, in part because there are too many of them and they delude each other.
All right. So here's the most interesting part.
I often tell you that I think I'm watching the news, just like a spectator, and then all of a sudden the news is about me.
And I say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I'm supposed to be watching the news.
Why is the news about me?
And that happened again yesterday.
So the Woodward book, part of the promotion of it is I guess he's dropping some of the audio tapes of the interviews, and they're getting turned into transcripts and articles.
And one of them was Woodward's interview with Jared Kushner.
And Jared Kushner told him that to understand President Trump, there were four books that Woodward should read that really give you the complex picture of who President Trump is.
Now, One of those books was the Alice in Wonderland, and specifically the Cheshire Cat.
And I had to remind myself, what's the Cheshire Cat's deal?
I know he's got a big smile and he disappears, but I don't remember much more.
So I read a description of him, and the Cheshire Cat is described as mischievous.
Smiley and mischievous.
And I thought, okay, yeah, that's actually...
If you understand that the Cheshire Cat is mischievous, you can say, okay, that is definitely President Trump, right?
You know he likes a little mischief.
It's not an accident that he creates mischief nonstop.
It's not like he can't stop doing it.
Maybe he can't.
But that definitely is a pretty good description of him.
But that's not the whole person, right?
And that would be Jared's point, that you'd have to read four different books to look in four different windows to understand what the interior of the house looks like.
So that's one, Cheshire Cat, Alison Wendland.
But one of the other books was my book, Winn-Bigley.
Now, Winn-Bigley, the primary theme of it is that the president is a master persuader and uses the tools of persuasion to great effect.
How did Woodward...
Categorize my book.
Now, remember the Murray-Gelman effect, the amnesia effect?
I talk about it too much.
The idea that there was this physicist who noted that when he saw a story in the press about his specialty, he could tell it was wrong, because it's his specialty.
But the moment he would read a story about something else, like the Palestinian situation or anything else, he would uncritically read it as if it's probably right.
Even though when he reads articles that he knows the content or he knows the field, he knows they're wrong and they're universally wrong.
Likewise, if you didn't know any better and you're looking at Woodward describe these books, he described my book as characterizing the president as manipulative.
That's a word I never used.
And, in fact, I went to pains to make sure I didn't do that.
So the one thing I can fact check, the only thing I can personally check, and I can know with complete certainty, is wrong.
Coincidentally, the only area that I'm an expert in, which is the book I wrote, I know that he characterized it wrong.
I mean, as wrong as you could characterize it.
Now, do I now say, well...
The one thing I could fact check personally was wrong, but I'll bet all that other stuff was good.
I used to think stuff like that.
Not anymore. Now I know that the odds of me catching that one little thing that was a wrong characterization, it's probably all wrong characterizations.
There's no reason to believe any of it's right.
So here's my definition of manipulation versus persuasion.
Now this is sort of a personal take on it, but I think it works.
Persuasion, this is just my own take on it, is when you're persuading somebody who wants to be persuaded, or at least is no worse off for it.
For example, if you're a car salesperson, and the customer comes in, the customer knows that That the car salesperson is persuading them.
They know that. But it's also very transparent.
Every part of the technique is pretty well known to everybody.
But it doesn't feel like manipulation exactly.
It feels like persuasion.
It feels like sales.
It's a little icky, but you want the car.
And on some level, you kind of want to get talked into it, right?
I mean, when you go to buy a car, you kind of want to be talked into it.
Because in many cases you've decided just for emotional reasons, and now you need somebody to tell you you were smart.
So that would be persuasion.
Where you're not worse off, unless the salesperson is just a criminal, they're just being persuasive, they're not manipulating you per se.
But, manipulation would be a different situation, and again, this is just my version of it.
Manipulation would be where the person who's doing it has something to gain, And the person who's having it done to them has something to lose.
So if it's a win-lose situation, that's manipulation.
The president, again in my view, doesn't do that one.
He doesn't do manipulation in the context of the presidency and running for the presidency.
What he does is persuasion.
So if he tries to persuade you, for example, that there should be a wall on the southern border, he's not doing it to screw you, right?
You could disagree whether that's a good idea or a bad idea.
But I think you'd all agree that he's not doing it to screw you if you're an American citizen.
He's doing it to help you.
So if he persuades you to get a wall, to fund a wall, are you worse off?
You could be worse off in the sense that maybe you don't like that policy.
But it's not because there was bad intent.
It's only manipulation if you have some evil intention.
If you have a good intention, but it requires you to persuade people to get it done, you can be right or you can be wrong, but it's still good intention.
And that's persuasion.
So I would say Woodward's characterization of my book as calling the president manipulative is just flat-out wrong.
I don't write it that way at all.
All right. There's another fake news today.
Eddie Zipperer tweeted about this.
You probably saw the news.
There's some version of this.
It said that...
I think The Hill reports it this way.
They said, Trump said that he didn't have a responsibility to understand pain of black Americans.
And then they give this quote.
No, I don't feel that at all.
Now, when I first heard this story and I saw the president's quote...
I said to myself, oh, I know how they do this fake news.
There's some context that they're leaving out.
It was obvious by the quote that it had been taken out of context.
And once you see enough things taken out of context, especially when it happens to you, if you're the person the story is about, which has been the case for me in a lot of cases, you can tell when something's taken out of context.
As soon as I saw this, I was like, oh, They just created some fake news by taking this out of context.
The reason I knew it was out of context is they didn't tell you what Trump said immediately after it, and they also didn't tell you exactly what came before it.
And I said to myself, I'll betcha, if I heard what came before that, or I heard what came after it, I would have a completely different opinion on this.
Wake up in the morning, Eddie Zipperer on Twitter, It says in his tweet, this is a flat-out lie.
He goes, the question was, quote, do you have any sense that that privilege, meaning the white privilege, has isolated you and put you in a cave to a certain extent?
And that's what Trump was saying.
No, no way. Now, I would disagree with Trump.
I would say that being the president guarantees that you're taken out of the normal flow of life, right?
Right? I don't criticize, you know, Bush, was it Bush Senior who said he didn't know what a loaf of bread costs?
That's fine. I don't have any problem with the president not knowing what a loaf of bread costs.
Everybody understands that the presidency is not like life.
It's a completely bubble situation.
So I don't think Trump is accurate in saying that He can understand somebody else's situation.
Nobody can understand anybody's situation.
But from a politician's perspective, it would be fair to say, I do understand other people's situation, because you want to say that you can relate to them in some way.
So I don't think his answer was out of lines in terms of what you'd expect from a political entity.
But his answer looks completely different if you know what the setup is.
So that's just fake news created by intentionally bad editing.
Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times that quality of life in the United States, according to some social progress measure, has dropped over the last decade, even while it's risen in other places, and now we're 28th in the world in terms of How good we're doing quality of life-wise.
Now here's what's interesting.
The article did not speculate or give any evidence of what it is that's causing our lower quality of life.
What does that tell you?
Is it sort of conspicuously missing from a story if you say the US quality of life has dropped and there are no reasons even speculated?
It would be one thing not to know.
But it seems like what would be required in a story like this is, experts don't know exactly why, but they mention looking at these areas to see, you know, maybe this is why.
But it's just completely left out.
Right? What do you make of the fact that no reasons are even mentioned, even in casual speculation?
Here's what I make of it.
It's awkward. Meaning that the reason we're doing poorly might have to do with, I'll just pick one example, the teachers' unions.
Do you think the New York Times would write, well, it looks like the teachers' unions are destroying America?
Not completely by themselves, but a pretty big part of it.
No. No.
Probably not. Now, I don't want to make an accusation or read minds of Nicholas Kristof.
That would be unfair. So I'm not going to make any There's no negative statement about him.
But would the New York Times ever say the reason that things are going backwards is because of liberal policies?
They can't.
If the problem that was driving us backwards in quality of life were even maybe, even maybe related to the political right Would it be in the article?
If you could even come up with just a hand-waving reason why this lower quality of life was because of conservatives.
Don't you think that would be in the article?
I mean, it's so conspicuously missing.
You've got to ask yourself why.
The The worst take on this whole coronavirus and how the president did is I'm hearing people say some version of this.
The public could handle the truth, so the president should have just told us the truth, as opposed to trying to calm our fears.
It's not the leader's job to calm our fears.
We're adults. Just tell us the situation, and we'll decide what to do.
I think that's the worst take.
Because that's not what leaders do.
And I'll give you another version of this from Lawrence Tribe.
You know him from a professor at Harvard and a big Hillary Clinton fan and a big hater of the president.
He's fairly famous as a critic of the president.
Now remember, he's a Harvard guy, highly educated.
And here's what he says.
He says about Trump, Oh, well, he quotes Trump saying, I'm the leader of the country.
I can't be jumping up and down and scaring people.
And that's Trump told Sean Hannity that I don't want to scare people.
I want people not to panic.
And that's exactly what I did.
And then Lawrence Tribe calls him out for that, calls out Trump and says, this from the guy who screams about carnage in the suburbs.
Now, the implication here is Is that the president is getting people not scared enough about the virus, and that's inconsistent because he's getting us too scared about carnage in the suburbs, which I take within the context I take to mean that Lawrence Tribe thinks that's not a big risk.
Here's what's completely bad about this take.
It is exactly the leader's job To dial up and dial down how scared we are or concerned we are about topics.
That is exactly a leader's job.
In fact, maybe more central to the job of a leader than anything else they do is telling the people they're leading how much to worry about this versus that.
And you don't treat everything with the same amount of worry, nor would you be a good leader if you treated the amount of worry By the number of deaths.
Or the number of deaths you could predict or the number of deaths that have already happened.
That's not how things work.
Here's how leadership works.
If you think the public is not worrying enough about something, you ramp up their worry so that they'll put more effort into it.
If you think people could panic and maybe do a run on the stores and So for Lawrence Tribe to act as though the leader of the country should treat different situations with the same amount of concern, that's the opposite of a leader.
The president should treat every situation like its own thing, And then say, are you worried enough?
If not, I'll raise it.
Or are you worried too much?
And that's causing trouble.
In that case, I'll lower it.
That's what leaders do.
That's the whole job. Now, this guy, Lawrence Tribe, is teaching children.
You know, college kids, but...
Now, and let me reiterate, in my book, Loser Think, I introduced the idea that The amount of raw intelligence you have doesn't really help you in many cases unless you also have a good exposure to different fields.
In Lawrence Tribe's case, he may just be a partisan, so he knows he's saying something stupid and he doesn't care if it works.
So you can't read his mind so you don't know what he's thinking.
But it could also be that he's a brilliant legal scholar who doesn't understand how leadership works.
Because he's not teaching I don't think he's teaching any MBA classes.
He's teaching the law.
So I think it's just a gap in his understanding.
I'll give him the benefit of a doubt.
The news is so insane now, it's almost hard to wrap your head around it.
But there's video of Trump talking to Jim Acosta in March.
And the March part is the important part.
And Which Trump is saying directly, and as clearly as you possibly could, that he is purposely trying to downplay the pandemic because he doesn't want to panic the country if there's no good in that.
In other words, if there's no upside from panicking the country, but there definitely would be a downside, he doesn't want to have the downside.
So in March, he's saying it in public, in the most public way you could, A press conference of the President of the United States to CNN's primary guy.
Extended conversation on this topic, very clear.
And then when the Woodward book comes out, let's say March, April, May, June, July, August, six months later, the press acts as though it's the first time they've heard that the President is intentionally downplaying the risk And gives his reasons why.
How do we sit here and watch these idiots pretend that this was somehow new information, when it was the most public thing the president ever did?
When I first heard the Woodward thing, I thought, uh, this feels like not only not new news, but the oldest news you could possibly have.
It felt to me like March news when I heard it the first time.
And it wasn't until I saw the actual video that I saw this morning, I tweeted it so you can see it too, that I realized just how exactly, exactly and publicly, Trump had said the same thing to the public.
If you say it to the public, in public, as the president, should the public be surprised?
He's giving us the cheery version of things.
As Joel Pollack pointed out in a tweet today, I guess Joe Biden had claimed that over 6,000 military people had died from the coronavirus.
The actual number is seven.
So he missed that by a little bit.
Not so much 6,000 as it is seven people.
Now the funny thing about this is that you can add it to the body of Joe Biden lies.
Now you could argue that the Trump number of fact-checking problems is greater than the number of Joe Biden lies.
Maybe. But are they the same type?
That's the part that the news never tells you.
When Trump does, let's call it Let's say he does something that the fact-checkers say is false.
Lots of times it's hyperbole that you recognize.
Like, oh, okay. Trump said that this has never happened before.
Have you not watched enough politics to know that doesn't literally necessarily mean it's never happened before this well?
It just doesn't mean that.
If you're so unsophisticated that you ever believed it to be literally true, At some point you just have to look at yourself and say, uh, okay, I got fooled 20,000 times in a row, but I think this one's exactly meant to be accurate.
No, 20,000 times in a row should alert you to a pattern, which is if the president says, I've done the best in this in 100 years, then maybe it's not 100 years.
Maybe he did a really good job And maybe it's the best in 10 years, which would still be terrific.
But if you don't understand that he always talks like that about everything, you shouldn't even be in the conversation.
You should just quietly close your Twitter account and just sneak away.
Because if you haven't figured out this pattern yet, you're not really at the adult table yet.
But the same people who will say, 20,000 fact-checking problems with the president, We'll look at Joe Biden basing his campaign on the biggest lie in American politics, the fine people hoax.
Also pushing the Trump suggested drinking bleach.
One of the most debunked hoaxes of all time.
And then this claim about the military stuff.
Basically, there are probably dozens and dozens of major claims that Biden has made that are clearly and unambiguously untrue.
So anybody who says, I don't like this President Trump lying business, so I'd better go to Joe Biden, you're the dumbest people in the game.
Now, I would acknowledge that you could make a legitimate argument for why you like either of these candidates.
You know, I have a preference, but I think a reasonable, smart person could say, you know, Here are my priorities.
This is why I think that Joe Biden, with all of his flaws, is still better than Trump.
A reasonable person could have that opinion.
It's not my opinion, but a reasonable person could have it.
Here's what's not a reasonable opinion.
I'm going to vote for the guy who doesn't lie.
I mean, that's just...
I don't even know what to call that.
If you haven't noticed that Joe Biden lies, again, you probably shouldn't vote if you haven't noticed that.
Sometimes you might wonder, are the hosts on CNN good people who sometimes get things wrong?
That would be the best case scenario, right?
That the CNN hosts are trying as hard as they can to give you the real news, But like everything, some people make mistakes.
You get some stuff wrong. That's life.
Or, are they intentionally lying to you in a way that is awful?
And I think we've got an answer to that.
Because, you'll see the clip, I also tweeted this today, in which Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta are talking about the virus early on, And they're talking about it as being no more dangerous than the regular flu.
Now, I completely get how it is newsworthy to say the president downplayed this early on and he should have been more concerned about it.
But if you're CNN and you did exactly that, exactly that, and it's on video, and we can all look at it.
You can look at it today.
I just tweeted it. And you see Anderson Cooper talking to Sanjay Gupta...
Now again, I do not criticize them for being wrong in March.
Because I don't criticize anybody for being wrong early on.
Remember, that was my rule, and I'm going to stick to it.
So Anderson Cooper was not wrong.
Sanjay Gupta was not wrong when they said, hey, it looks like it's no worse than the flu.
We should be more worse.
They weren't wrong in the sense of being irresponsible.
Because everybody was guessing.
The experts were, I think, genuinely trying their best.
You knew that a lot of people were going to get it wrong.
I don't hold it against them.
But from today's perspective, if they're holding it against...
It's the major piece of news on CNN. The biggest piece of news is that they're holding it against the president For telling the public the wrong message early on, it's the same message they told the public early on.
The same one. If you don't include that in the story, yeah, we're criticizing the president, but if we're being honest, man, did we do exactly the same thing.
The president really messed up on this, just like we did.
Here's a video of us making the same mistake.
You know, got to be transparent.
Nobody's perfect. Wish we hadn't done it In hindsight, it looks like a mistake.
At the time, we didn't know any better.
Just like the President.
Let us show you how nobody knew what was the right answer in March.
That would have been fine.
But to simply act like that didn't happen, and that the President was the only one who was wrong in March or February, that is just evil.
You can't say that Anderson Cooper is a good person.
A good human being. Because that is so clearly a case of despicable moral conduct in public that I could not have less respect for that, really.
And again, I would be perfectly okay with them if they were simply wrong and now they know why it was wrong and they talk about it in context.
No problem.
Completely forgiven for being wrong.
But today...
You know you were wrong.
Today, how about a little transparency, or else you're just being assholes, really.
It's hard to say it any other way.
So there's some news out of Michigan that Biden is up in Michigan, which would be pretty important, right?
One of the battleground states.
And I think Rasmussen is showing that Biden is up eight points or something.
Six or eight points, something like that.
And that's a lot.
But I saw an analysis by Bruce Stanford on Twitter.
I don't know who Bruce is, but I'll just give him credit because this is a real good analysis.
And he says that although Biden is clearly ahead in the polls, here's the experience in Michigan in 2016 and 2018.
So we've seen the most two recent elections, same experience.
And it goes like this.
Every undecided vote went to Trump or to Republicans in the case of the 2018 midterm election.
Let me say that again.
Every undecided vote went to the Republicans.
Okay? And I want to make sure that you heard that right.
In Michigan in 2016 and 2018, every undecided vote went to the Republicans.
Now, I don't think it was every vote.
It must have been just most of them.
The point stands, if you take out the absolute part, there had to be some exceptions.
But what does that tell you about shy Trump voters?
The way this is shaping up, and I suppose I could be wrong, right?
It's easy to be blindsided and think you're right, and Dunning-Kruger and all that.
So let me tell you that I'm completely aware That I could be very confident in my prediction and my rightness.
I'd be wrong. It wouldn't be that big of a shocker in the world of strange events.
But this looks like a gigantic blowout shaping up.
It looks gigantic.
I could be wrong, but it sure looking like the President's got a victory here coming up.
All right. Those are the things I wanted to talk about today.
Yeah, the vote by mail stuff.
The fact that the mainstream press is trying to gaslight us, if you want to use that term.
It's the wrong term, but they use it a lot.
The mainstream press wants us to think that it's crazy to think That mail-in voting could be illegitimate because it's already been done in states for years, etc., some states.
But this is, again, just being bad at analyzing things.
The thing that you should say is, what's different about 2020 from any other situation in which we had mail-in votes?
And what's different is the incentive to cheat is through the roof.
You know, if there is a penalty for cheating on voting and people don't really care too much who wins, it's like, yeah, I prefer this candidate, but it's not the end of the world if the other one wins.
In that case, you would expect a little bit of cheating because there's just not that much to gain, but there might be a few people who think they have something to gain.
But when you talk about Trump in 2020, the press has hypnotized the masses into thinking there's a Hitler in charge and it's the end of civilization.
If you thought that the alternative to cheating at the election box or cheating on a mail-in vote, if you thought the alternative to cheating was the destruction of civilization, would you be tempted?
I hope so.
If you're a good person and you think that you could change or alter the course of history, And that you could save civilization from being destroyed, which is the claim of the mainstream press, basically.
Wouldn't you cheat?
It's the same question of, if you thought an actual Hitler had come to power in the United States, and you could personally kill him, like you could be the assassin, don't you have a responsibility to do it?
If the badness is bad enough, you're forgiven...
You're forgiven for whatever you do about it.
Because the badness is so bad that you would be allowed to do bad things to get rid of the bigger bad.
I guess the bottom line is that the people who are bad at comparing things are going to act like 2020 is just like any other election.
People don't care that much who gets elected.
Yeah, we have a preference, but we don't care that much.
No, that was Gore vs.
Bush. Gore vs.
Bush? People had a preference, but not that much.
Trump vs. Biden?
Oh, that's not the same.
That is not the same.
Because nobody really thought that if Gore got elected vs.
Bush getting elected, it was the end of civilization.
Nobody thought that.
But with Trump, they had been hypnotized to believe that's an actual real-world risk.
So that and the fact that we don't have any baseline to know what mail-in votes should look like in any given county, because we've never had a coronavirus, we've never had Trump running for re-election, we've never had a press that was this illegitimate, we've never had anything like 2020.
So anybody who tells you, history tells us, the history with those several states that have been doing mail-in votes, and the history with A different kind of mail-in vote, which is where you request it, which is much safer.
Anybody who tells you that those two histories, or the fact that there was a commission that looked into those histories, and that those histories are telling you what's going to happen in 2020, which has nothing to do with the situation that was common to those histories.
Anybody who tells you that that analysis makes sense is either a liar or doesn't know how to analyze things.
It's hard to tell which.
So that is what we've got.
Did you see the latest Joe Biden gaffes?
Oh my God. I don't know how anybody can look at those videos.
I'm not sure how often the people on the left even see the Biden gaff videos.
But I don't know how you can look at any of those and think he's ready.
I think it was Joe Rogan who did the analogy recently that Biden was like a flashlight that was low on batteries and you were taking it on a long hike at night.
And you're just getting like a little yellow glow out of your flashlight and you're thinking, this might be a bad idea.
Maybe I won't take a long hike at night with a flashlight with a dying battery.
