Episode 1171 Scott Adams: Rappers Like Trump, Beware the Dad Jokers Answering Polls, The FBI and Hunter, More
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Content:
Michael Moore's election concern
A predictable stock market dip?
FBI money laundering investigation?
Black male icons and President Trump
Pandemic, a wannabe dictator's opportunity
https://finepeople.org by Ali Alexander
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All right, YouTubers, you missed the simultaneous sip because of technological problems, but we're apparently working right now.
Oh, somebody says it's actually not working.
All right, well, screw that.
We'll just go on. All right, so here's my point.
I think the biggest category of people who are lying to pollsters are not shy Trump supporters.
Looks like he's working on YouTube now.
So I think it's the dad joke category.
Because for every person who is lying to a pollster because they don't want the pollster to know they're a Trump supporter, I feel like there might be four or five people who are lying to pollsters because they think it's hilarious.
And here's the fun part.
As you know, a great deal of people on the left do not have a functioning sense of humor.
And that's part of the reason that they're horrified by Trump, is they literally can't tell when he's joking.
I mean, actually, literally, they don't know when he's kidding.
So they think he has all these dictator tendencies, etc., because they can't tell when he's just joking and when he's serious.
And I think that there probably are four or five to one Trump supporting people who just think it's frickin' hilarious that the polls are wrong.
Am I right about that?
Whoever is saying no sound, I should block you because I think you're a troll.
That's the trolliest thing to say on these live streams.
Don't be that guy.
So I think that lack of sense of humor by the left gives them a blind spot.
Meaning that if I said to Democrats, here's a mental experiment.
There are 10 Democrats and 10 Trump supporters.
You go to the 10 Democrats and you say the following.
Hey, I think Trump supporters are joking, and it's like a practical joke, that they lie to pollsters because they think it's funny, and the result will be Democrats screaming at the sky when Trump wins, and they think that that's worth lying to pollsters about.
What would Democrats say about that?
I believe they would say, well, that's not a thing.
Right? Don't you think the Democrats would say, you, Scott, Scott, Scott.
Don't tell me that there's some massive collusion conspiracy in which there's a whole bunch of Republicans who just magically, they've all coordinated, Scott, who's in charge of this?
Who's coordinating this, Scott, this conspiracy that you see of all these Republicans who are lying to pollsters?
Ha ha ha, Scott, you're so ridiculous.
Right? Don't you think a Democrat would just mock me for even suggesting that a massive amount, not a small amount, a very large number of Trump supporters are lying because they think it's funny?
All right, now I walk over to the 10 Trump supporters and I say, hey, 10 Trump supporters, do you think that Republicans are lying to pollsters because they think it's funny?
What would the 10 Trump supporters say?
All ten of them would laugh out loud.
You know I'm right.
You know they would, because they would recognize it to be true.
They would instantly know, yeah, they're doing that.
That's exactly what they're doing.
Maybe not those ten people, but I'll bet they know people.
I'll bet they know people who are doing it.
So I think this lack of a sense of humor has created this immense blind spot For people on the left, they can't tell when Trump is kidding, but worse, they can't tell when the voters are being serious.
They can't tell.
So it's the perfect prank, because the only people who would fall for the prank are the people who are the target.
Let's fast forward to Trump winning the election.
So that's my prediction.
I will allow that should I be wrong, I'll take it like a man.
If it turns out my prediction is wrong, well, then it's just wrong.
But I expect it's right, as I always do, always more confident than I should be.
And suppose it's right.
Are there any Trump supporters who are going to say, well, that was impossible?
No, no.
There's not a single Trump supporter who's going to say, well, that was impossible, I don't know how it happened.
They all think it's possible, because they all think that the polls are wrong, pretty much universally.
So poor Democrats are going to have a tough time if it goes that way.
So the stock market pulled back quite a bit, at the end of the week especially.
Was that predictable?
Did you predict that the stock market would have a big pullback The week or so before the election, election day.
The election's already going on, but did you predict that?
I did. Now, I don't know if it happened because of the following reasons, which were the basis of my prediction, but you decide.
Here's why I believed the stocks would pull back.
Number one, obviously Pelosi was going to Keep killing the stimulus bills with poison bills so that the economy would be frightened by not getting these relief packages, essentially. And so since Pelosi had the power to stop that legislation, you knew that that was one reason that the stock market would get skittish, right?
So that part, everybody knew about that part.
But here's the part that I submit to you Was obvious and predictable if you understood how the world works.
You know, if you had enough of a talent stack to understand everything from persuasion to politics to business, here's what you would see.
The stock market is tied to CEOs predicting how they will do next year.
Are you with me?
The main driver of the stock market, there are lots of externalities like interest rates and outside shocks, but primarily, primarily, despite all those outside things, primarily the stock market works on what the CEOs say will happen next year.
Which is, is that a fact?
When CEOs say, I think that my Our earnings next year will be up 10%.
Is that a fact?
No, it is not.
It's an opinion.
And it's subjective.
And it is subject to a wide variety of possible things a CEO could say.
And indeed, they could have one opinion and yet express it an infinite number of ways, depending if they wanted you to feel a little bit optimistic, Or a little bit pessimistic.
Am I right? And let's say those CEOs were mostly anti-Trump.
Let's say, and I'll just pick one as an example, and this is not an accusation, I'll just use it as an example.
Suppose you are the CEO of a major tech company.
And let's suppose that you did not like President Trump and did not want him to be re-elected.
And suppose you looked at your earnings And there were two ways that you could describe them.
One was really optimistic.
And let's say the data supported that.
But the other was less optimistic.
And let's say the data also supported that, which would not be unusual.
Because remember, it's very subjective.
It's how much optimism you're going to put on it, what kind of assumptions do you make, etc.
So now you're a CEO of a major company.
And you don't want Trump to get elected.
How do you frame your earnings?
You frame them a little bit ambiguously.
And you say, we can't tell what's going to happen next year.
We'd like it to go well, but so much uncertainty, we certainly can't tell.
Now, when the market hears the CEO say that they have uncertainty, what do they do?
They sell their damn stocks.
Because you don't want to own stocks when there's great uncertainty.
Certainty is the best thing you can have, as long as it's a positive certainty, of course.
So, all of your CEOs who are reporting earnings this week before the election, do you think that they chose...
To describe their earnings in the future, the ones that are subjective, that are an opinion, do you think that they maybe took a little off it?
Just pulled back a little bit on the optimism?
Because if you don't think they did that, you don't know anything about people.
Even if they didn't want to do that, even if they didn't consciously say to themselves, I'm going to go out there and I'm going to try to move the stocks because that'll hurt the president, Even if they weren't thinking it, if they were anti-Trump, they knew which answer was the good one for their team, right?
So if you have enough CEOs who have this bias, which is, I don't want to make it look like it's too much good news.
Now, normally your CEO would want to say good news, so the stock would go up and they'd look like a star.
But keep in mind, they only have to keep this illusion of bad news or Ambiguous news or a lack of clarity.
They only have to maintain this for about a month just to get past the election and then say, well, I guess we got some new information and it looks like things are better than we thought.
Very easy to adjust their assumptions.
Very easy to adjust it backwards.
So I predicted that That the stock guidance would get a little bit negative and the stock would fall because of uncertainty.
But if ever there was a buying opportunity, let me take that back.
You should not take any financial advice from cartoonists.
And I mean that as seriously as I can say anything.
You should not.
Make bets or financial decisions based on what I say.
You really shouldn't.
And I'm being very serious about this.
You shouldn't. That said, this has all of the earmarks of an artificial pullback.
And if you were going to buy stock, you would want to look for artificial pullbacks because those are the ones that won't last.
If I had to guess on this one, This looks about as artificial as a pullback could possibly look, because it seems just related to the headlines, which means it probably is not something deep.
We'll see. Why is it that Trump never mentions nuclear power?
Have you noticed that? Whenever Trump is talking about the Green New Deal and And how Biden wants to replace fossil fuels and everything, he doesn't mention nuclear.
But yet the administration is quite pro-nuclear.
So if you look at the Department of Energy and you look at what the government's doing and what they're funding, what they're putting their money behind, they're definitely very pro-nuclear.
But Trump himself, he just doesn't even use the word.
He doesn't even throw it in the list of good things that are happening.
And I'm a little bit curious about that.
Now, I think it's probably completely political, meaning that you don't get any new voters because you say nuclear, I'm just guessing, but maybe you would lose voters if you say nuclear.
So it could be that there's no good political way to talk about it.
It might be that. It could be Because Trump himself is not completely sold as much as members of his administration.
Could be that. I don't know.
But I think he needs to get over that.
I think I'd like to see the president talk about nuclear, even if he doesn't like it.
I feel like we need some transparency there to get his opinion on that.
And it's so conspicuously missing.
Now let me see. If I told you that this happened, would you believe it?
If I told you that Joe Biden ran a campaign ad in which he implied that Jews in America were associated with Hitler, would you believe that happened?
Not associated with, but let's say, compared to.
Would you believe, if I told you that, hypothetically, would you believe that Joe Biden ran a Trump supporting Jews in America to Hitler.
Would you think that actually happened?
That actually happened.
Now, in the ad, he didn't call out any particular group except Trump supporters by implication.
So the ad essentially accused President Trump of being heading in the direction of Hitler.
So the ad compares Trump to Hitler.
What does that compare his supporters to?
Well, automatically, if you're saying that you support Hitler, you're kind of a Nazi by definition or association.
In all practical ways, if you support a Hitler character, You're either a Nazi or you like one, similar to one.
So the Biden ad quite clearly is meant to compare Trump supporters to Nazis, actual Nazis, with a picture of Hitler.
Now, this comes only days after a gigantic pro-Trump rally by Jewish Americans.
So Jewish Americans are having a big rally in favor of Trump, and of course Israel loves Trump, etc.
And Biden is comparing Trump supporters to Nazis.
Connect the dots.
This actually happened in America in 2020, that Biden compared American Jews to Nazis.
Now, not directly.
It's only by the associations that I've set up.
If Trump's a Hitler, his supporters must be Nazis.
And we just saw that there are a whole lot of supporters who are Jewish.
So doesn't that make them Nazis, according to Joe Biden?
It's pretty rugged, Joe.
You need to answer to that.
So here's the story that nobody cares about, even though it's the biggest story in the world.
The FBI has active criminal investigation...
And to the Biden family and their business, and the charge they're looking into is money laundering.
What? So since 2019, the FBI has been looking into the Biden family on some kind of charge.
We don't know the basis for it, but money laundering.
Now, I'm guessing it has to do with either Ukraine or China or both.
And how will we treat that?
Will we treat that like it's the biggest story in the country?
Because it is.
Or will the press disappear it?
The press disappeared it.
They're treating it like it doesn't matter.
Like it's not really there.
And watching this is just mind-boggling.
And you know what weird, weird thought I had?
Are you ready for the full simulation?
All right, when I say this, you're probably going to laugh because it's too on the nose.
So the FBI has this information about Hunter Biden and the Biden family, but we don't know the details, and it's a few days before the election.
Do you know who we need?
James Comey.
We need James Comey to make a public announcement that the Biden family is being looked into for money laundering.
Because that is just like Hillary's emails in 2016.
The fact that there's no James Comey is the reason that the news gets to just ignore it.
Because if the head of the FBI did a press conference and said, hey, the election's coming, And I just want you to have all the information.
Which is what Comey did, right?
When Comey talked about Hillary's emails, he didn't say she's guilty of something.
He simply said, as voters, you deserve to have all the information.
I'll just tell you what we know.
That we're looking into something.
Alright? Now, don't you think that we need a James Comey to do the same thing with the Hunter Biden stuff?
Same message. There are no charges against any of the Bidens.
We want you to know there are no charges.
We are, however, looking into this issue, and we just think the public needs to know before you vote.
Why not? Of course, that's not going to happen.
I see somebody prompting me that ABC News did run a story on it this week.
Which was unusual enough that people were tweeting about the fact that a major news organization ran a story.
Now, it wasn't much of a story, but they covered it.
And it really stood out because it hadn't been ignored.
All right, so we need James Comey to fix things here.
Here's what else we need.
Have you ever seen Elon Musk's Company that makes this big machine that bores tunnels.
It's actually called the Boring Company, which is funny.
So it's a giant earth-moving truck device that has a big drill on the front and somehow is optimized for drilling tunnels.
So we have one of those, right?
So that's the first thing you need to know before I get to my actual idea.
Second, I used to work on a farm, a dairy farm, and part of my job was to bring in the hay.
So there would be this big device that a tractor would pull, and it would cut the hay, and it would wrap it into hay bales and wrap a twine around it and then toss it into the back of a wagon.
And I would be in the back of the wagon, usually with my brother, and the hay bale would come flying over and then we would have to stack it neatly so more of them would fit in the back.
And then unload them.
Alright, so you've got a giant machine that can bore tunnels.
We've got a giant machine that can turn grass into hay bales and even tie them up and stuff.
Can we not make a giant machine that builds border wall?
Huh? Because if you've seen the border wall, it appears that there are big segments that are dropped into concrete, and I don't know that there's much else to it.
So you need a trench, you need concrete, and you need the fence parts stuck into it.
Can we not, just asking the question, can we not build a gigantic machine that just drives down the border going chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk, and dropping fence and concrete as it goes?
You know, digging the tunnel, dropping the concrete, dropping the fence, and then she's going to the next part and dropping another segment.
Could we not do that?
Not possible? Somebody's telling me that the ABC story was from 2019.
Is that true? That would be funny if it's true.
Here we were giving ABC credit, but somebody's saying it was a 2019 story.
That might be true. I don't know.
Fact check that for me. So let's get a big wall building machine.
And I think the fiction is starting to fall away.
That all Trump was doing was replacing existing wall.
Now I think it's technically true.
That the funding and the efforts right now are where there is an existing wall and they're upgrading it.
But where they're upgrading it is because the wall was so inadequate, it was basically not a wall at all.
So I think the president is completely within his rights to say this is a new wall.
Because the old wall was so un-wall-like and useless that it was basically no wall.
And the only reason that the old wall was there is that it was an important place to have a wall.
Alright, so we've seen the following pattern lately.
You saw Kanye liking President Trump, Ice Cube willing to talk to the Trump administration, you saw 50 Cent saying some positive things about Trump before some negative things, and now I guess Lil Wayne has met President Trump and endorses him.
Now, as I've said many times, our brains are pattern recognition machines.
That's basically what they are.
That's all they are.
Our brain just recognizes patterns.
And it's not good at it, which is the other part.
The reason that there are things like bias and discrimination and racism and all these things are because our brains are pattern recognition machines, but they're not good.
They don't work very well.
We see patterns that are not real patterns.
We believe we see patterns when there are no patterns.
But we can't turn off our pattern-recognizing function because that's the basis of our intelligence, is recognizing patterns.
So now you have these four famous black male rapper types.
I guess they'd all be called rappers.
Obviously, Kanye is much more than that.
50 Cent is much more than that.
Ice Cube is much more than that, actually.
They all have multiple career paths.
But Your pattern recognition part of your brain, what's it do when you hear that all four of these famous black musical plus other successes, what do you do when you hear that they're all somewhat okay with Trump?
It makes a difference.
It makes a difference.
Because you can't unsee this pattern.
If it had only been Kanye, your brain would say, that's not a pattern, that's one point.
And Kanye's Kanye.
So Kanye breaks so many norms that it doesn't really seem like a pattern.
But then you get 50 cents in the mix.
But then you say to yourself, oh, okay, remember, Kanye's the exception.
So really it's just 50 cent.
And he didn't necessarily say he loves Trump.
He just dislikes Biden's tax plan.
So that's not exactly a pattern.
That's two things that have something in common.
But then you throw in IceCube.
And again, IceCube's not pro-Trump.
He's just willing to talk to them and acknowledges that they did some things for the black community.
But now you say to yourself, okay, It's still three different people, three individuals doing three things for their own purposes, but it sure feels like a pattern, doesn't it?
It's not really a pattern, but it feels like it, and then you throw Lil Wayne on there, and you're just done.
Your brain is done. At this point, you could tell yourself this isn't a pattern, but it's a frickin' pattern.
And again, it's four people doing things for their own reasons, It's probably our racism that even puts them in the same category, right?
If we're being honest, it's only a little bit of racism that says, oh, all these four people have something in common aside from music.
They're black. So your racism says it's a pattern, and then you see it, and then you make a lot more of it than it really is, but I think that that would be affecting the black population as well as everybody else who's looking at it.
I think it matters.
I think that fourth rapper, the addition of Lil Wayne, takes it from, I think I'm sort of almost seeing a pattern, to, oh, there's a pattern.
Even if there isn't, you're now convinced there is.
Okay. Look at all the things we don't know about coronavirus.
Look at all the things we don't know about life, really.
But let me just run you through the things that we don't know, which is astonishing, all right?
Number one, I saw there was some pullback on Regeneron.
So that's the drug that the president was touting that he thinks helped him a lot.
But apparently Regeneron is not giving the results that they want if you're in a late stage of disease.
So I think they stopped testing it on people who were at the ventilator stage because it was maybe hurting them more than it was helping, or at least there was an indication it might.
So Regeneron is not Quite the magic pill that you thought it was, because it might only work well if you get it early.
Remdesivir went from, hey, this is great, to, at the moment, the tests are kind of weak on remdesivir, right?
So we thought it worked, but now we think maybe it doesn't, based on some clinical trials.
What about hydroxychloroquine?
If you look at the news on the left and the tweets on the left, they will say it has been proven not to be effective.
But all you have to do is get on Twitter and there will be people tweeting all kinds of studies, usually retrospective, but some of them even clinical trials, which purport that it works just great.
Now both of these bits of data which are opposites, they can't both be true, But they're reported with equal vigor.
There's as much energy around saying hydroxychloroquine clearly works and all the information is supporting it as there is people saying it's been studied to death and there's no impact whatsoever.
Both those truths are existing in full force and they can't both be true.
They just can't be. Now, I'm of the opinion that if it were a big deal, we would have noticed it.
I mean, it would just be so obvious that you wouldn't even need a clinical trial if it were as effective as its initial proponent said.
I don't know if it has no impact.
I just don't think it has some kind of a magic pill impact.
So we don't know about hydroxychloroquine.
We still don't know vitamin D. We know it's good for you, but we don't know how much of a difference that's making.
And we're still arguing about whether masks work.
So yesterday I was tweeting about somebody...
You've seen a bunch of these.
Somebody will show a bunch of graphs of coronavirus infections by state or country or whatever.
And they'll say, here's the point that masks were mandatory.
And you can see that after the masks were mandatory, the infections went way up, and then they sort of started trailing off on their own for reasons that nobody could understand.
Now, let me draw you the picture in your mind.
So you're looking at a graph that's mostly slightly rising.
It's closer to flat, but it's slightly rising.
And then suddenly it zooms up to a mountain And then the mountain crests and it goes back down.
So that's what a surge of coronavirus would look like in a graph.
Now imagine on the graph that at the base of the mountain part, it's labeled masks become mandatory.
And it takes about a month to get to the top of that peak before it trails off.
What would be your conclusion if somebody showed you a bunch of graphs where every time the masks are mandatory, The infections still get way, way worse after the masks are mandatory.
How would you interpret those graphs given that there's a bunch of them, a whole bunch of them?
What would you say? Would you say, masks don't work because every time you have them as mandatory, you can see on the graph that the infections go out of control higher.
Therefore, they don't work, right?
Because that's what the people tweeting those graphs are telling you.
They're telling you, look at the graph.
It's just as plain as the nose on your face that's covered by a mask.
There's the mask.
They're required, and then the infections go through the roof.
Clearly, masks don't work, right?
And I look at these same graphs and I say, uh, that's not what I see.
I'm looking at the same graph you're looking at, and I'm seeing proof that masks work.
Same graph.
Exactly what I just described to you.
Why? Timing.
How long does it take For mandatory mask wearing to work itself through the system.
Remember, you've got some reporting delays, and these delays could be a few weeks.
So it could be that the day the masks are required, you've still got a bunch of infections that have not yet been reported, and they're going to come in after the masks.
So you're going to be reporting a whole bunch of infections that may have been last week's infections.
Secondly, do people immediately wear the right kind of masks and do it universally the same day that you put a mask requirement in place?
No. No, right?
People are not instantly complying.
There's probably a little bit of a time lag before people get the better kind of masks.
Maybe they start out with a With a bad kind of facial covering, but then they buy one and now they've got a better mask.
So you'd expect that the effectiveness would be a week or two before you're really all masked up, right?
Wouldn't you? Then what about the people who are infected and they don't know it yet?
So they got the virus yesterday, but the mask requirement goes in today.
A week from now, we realize that they were really sick, but we just didn't know it.
Where does the infection get recorded?
It gets recorded at the point where you discover it, right?
So it's going to look like that infection came after the mask, but in fact it started before the mask.
So here's my larger point.
Can I look at those graphs and then conclude that masks work?
Because there's a little bit of a time lag, but in every case, in every case on those graphs, the infections would reach a peak and then trail off very quickly.
To me, that's a picture of masks working perfectly, just the way I would have expected them to work.
I would not expect them to work on the day of implementation.
I would expect to see the effect maybe three weeks later, which is about what the graphs show.
Now, is my interpretation accurate?
That these graphs that people are using to show that masks definitely don't work, is my interpretation correct?
That those same graphs are proving that they do work?
Which one of us is correct?
Do you know? Before I started talking about this, did you say to yourself, well, obviously if infections go up like crazy after masks, obviously they don't work.
Did you think that before I started talking?
Now, I'm not going to make a claim that my interpretation is correct.
Because if you know how to analyze data, you should be asking yourself this.
Where is my comparison to that same city or state that had the same problem and then they did not have masks?
Right? Because you would have to compare place to place.
It'd have to be the same place to the same place.
Otherwise, you're not really comparing.
So the real answer is we can't tell from those graphs.
Those graphs don't tell you masks work, and they don't tell you that masks don't work.
They don't tell you anything because we're really, really bad at gathering data, and there are other folks on the internet.
I'm still having conversations with them.
But there's some thought that even the current number of infections and deaths may be lagged by as much as months.
So we don't have data we can rely on in any way about any of this stuff.
It's just useless. And thinking it's useful is kind of dangerous.
All right. I asked on Twitter, I asked how many people have experienced fewer colds and regular flus this season?
And I think this is, again, one of those things where this is purely anecdotal.
But it was the summer, so you shouldn't expect that there would be too many colds and flus in the summer.
But let me ask all of you.
Do you feel like you've had fewer regular illnesses since the coronavirus issue in, say, February?
I feel like there are fewer of them.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
It's probably a bias, but it just feels like there are fewer of them.
There's somebody on Twitter who claims to be in the business of selling cold and flu medicines.
So it's somebody who's in that industry, and they say that the sales of regular cold and flu medicines is down, meaning that regular colds and flus may be substantially down.
Which would make sense, right?
Because we're socially distancing.
Now, if it's true that regular colds and regular flus are way down, and the lack of sales of those products that treat them would suggest that's the case, then wouldn't that be pretty good evidence that masks work for coronavirus?
Now, that's not proof because regular colds and regular virus may be some differences that are not obvious to me as a non-medical person.
But if it were true, just take this as a hypothetical.
If it could be proven that our regular colds and regular flu, seasonal flu, are way down this year, if we could prove that was true, would you be willing to say that masks work or would you still fight it?
Just asking. Now here's the latest good thinking that I've heard on masks, and it goes like this.
If you and I are in a small room, and let's say one of us has the coronavirus, and we both have masks, and you and I stay in that small room breathing our shared air for hours at a time, and one of us has the infection, what are the odds that the other one will get the infection?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
And it's because even though the mask might be blocking some of my direct airflow going directly out, the air is going somewhere.
You exhale, so it's coming out the sides of the masks or whatever.
So it's going somewhere.
So eventually, if you and I stay in the same closed room with the windows closed and bad ventilation, It doesn't matter if we have masks or not.
So in that one scenario, do masks work?
I'd say closer to no than yes.
Meaning that if you stay in that room long enough and the ventilation is bad enough and one of you has coronavirus, the other one's going to get it.
It's just a matter of time, right?
But suppose you and I are at a bar.
And it's a big bar.
And I come up to you drunkenly and I, you know, talk a little too close to you.
And I've got my mask on.
It's a brief encounter.
Do you think that would make a difference?
I think yes. Because the mask would be, you know, It would be dispersing my airflow out the sides and it would be out there, but it wouldn't be like a hose of my bad virus directly into your mouth and your eyes.
So if I'm talking to you from two feet away, I'm not like jamming virus into your face.
It's sort of coming out the sides.
That's got to make a difference, right?
Doesn't common sense tell you that in that scenario, probably it makes a difference, whereas if you're locked in the tiny room with no ventilation, probably it doesn't.
And maybe if you're outdoors, the difference is so small it's not worth it.
But we don't know. All right.
I tweeted a link so you can see how the CDC estimates the number of regular influenza deaths per year.
And the reason I tweeted it is for you to see how ridiculous it is.
So I've been making a claim...
This sounds so ridiculously stupid that nobody believes it.
I don't think I've convinced one person that the following is true.
But I'll say it again. I like being a contrarian.
We don't know how many regular influenza deaths there are every year.
And almost all of our conversation about how bad the coronavirus is is compared to this number we believed was a pretty solid number.
The number of regular influenza flu deaths per year.
Which people say is in the low tens of thousands, but could be in the high tens of thousands if it's a bad year.
So look at the CDC and look at the tortured, convoluted way that they estimate it.
And if you have any experience in data analysis, and I think you would need it to come to this opinion, as I do, there isn't the slightest chance these numbers are good.
Not any. And when I say there's not the slightest chance they're good, I don't mean they're off by 10%.
Do you feel me?
I mean, they could be off by 200%.
They could be off by 90%.
There's just, when you look at how they calculate it, you can't even understand it.
There's a general rule of life that if somebody can't explain something to you, let's say you have average intelligence, If somebody can't explain it to you, it's bullshit.
And if somebody has to explain it to you with a whole bunch of word salad, it's not because they're bad at explaining, necessarily.
It's because there's nothing there to explain.
It's just bullshit.
So the CDC estimates and the way that they go about doing regular influenza is laughingly ridiculous.
And I would like to put this challenge out there.
So if there's anybody who, just look at my Twitter feed, I tweeted that within the hour, look at that link, look how the CDC estimates the influenza deaths, and if you're experienced in data analysis, and that's the important part for this, if you're experienced at it, just look at their explanation, and then tweet at me later, That you think that those are useful estimates or not.
I think you're just going to laugh when you see it.
All right. And here's a little factoid to put on top of this, and I need a fact check on this.
So every year we know that there's a vaccination for the regular seasonal influenza.
But we also know that in each, in various years, that vaccination can either be pretty good, meaning it'll protect a lot of people, or they didn't quite get the right formulation for the virus that emerged, and it's just sort of not that good.
All right, so would you say That on the years that we have the really good and strong version of the vaccine, that the total number of flu deaths should be lower, right?
Because that's the year that the vaccine is working really well.
Compared to a year where we know the vaccine wasn't a good fit for the virus, and it didn't really protect many people, you would expect that those would be the years you'd have a lot of flu deaths, right?
Nope. Nope.
Apparently there's no correlation between how good the vaccine is and how many people die.
Now, I need a fact check on that.
Don't take that as true because you heard it on this Periscope.
I'm explicitly acting for a fact check.
This is just something I heard on Twitter, and it could be untrue easily.
All right, moving on.
Ian Bremmer, who is always interesting, in part because I can't tell his politics, which is a compliment.
Let me give Ian Bremmer one of the best compliments that a Twitter user can ever have.
I've been following him for quite some time.
I can't tell if he's a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent.
Isn't that pretty good?
Because he has opinions which seem well-reasoned, that some are anti-Trump, some are pro-Trump, but in all cases they don't seem crazy.
He doesn't seem to have any crazy opinions.
I don't agree with them all, but when I don't agree, it's usually there's some assumption that I differ on, or I have a different view of human beings or something.
But they're not crazy.
So here's one of his not-crazy opinions that I really liked.
President Trump is often being accused of having autocratic tendencies, meaning that if there was any way he could, he'd stay in office forever.
If there was any way he could, he would become a dictator, right?
That's one of the biggest complaints about Trump.
But then, as Ian Bremmer points out, the pandemic came.
Has there ever been a more perfect situation for a would-be dictator to take power?
Never. Never.
This is as good as it gets.
If you want to be a dictator, you want a pandemic.
Pandemic is perfect for taking over power.
You just say, hey, it's an emergency.
Martial law. I guess I've got all the power now.
It's for your own good.
Perfect situation. And it wasn't like the president had to make some kind of snap decision.
It wasn't like he made the wrong decision.
Oops, I wish I'd gone the other way.
I could have been more of a dictator.
Because the pandemic was sort of a slow-moving, even though it was kind of fast, it was slow enough that he would have made the connection, hey, hey, I can start now and become a dictator.
And we saw nothing like that as a Ian Bremmer points out.
You saw Trump doing the opposite of trying to consolidate power.
Literally the opposite.
He didn't use the War Powers Act as much as his critics think he should.
He let the states make lots of decisions, allowed them to have the power, and his biggest critics are complaining that he didn't take enough power Dictator control and let everybody kind of do their own thing.
Even Joe Biden wants to be more of an autocrat and have more of federal guidelines that the states would have to abide by in some fashion.
So I thought that was a great point.
If you thought that President Trump would take the first chance to become a dictator, you can't think that anymore.
Because the first chance came and went, and he didn't even take a sniff at it.
It'd be one thing if he sort of took a run at it, you know, like he felt it down a little bit, dipped his toe in, or, you know, tried to see if he could get a little dictator stuff going.
Nothing. He actually ran In the opposite direction of states' rights.
Now, we'll always argue whether that was the right choice, and his critics will say he should have been more directive.
But what you can't argue with anymore is the thought that if he had an opening, he would try to become a dictator.
You can rule that out, because he has the opening right now, still.
I mean, still, right? If he decided, hey, I'm going to consolidate a lot more power, he could still do it, because people are still worried about COVID. He just has apparently no interest in it.
Ali Alexander put together a website so that you can refer people for the fine people hoax.
It's called finepeople.org, and it's got a variety of resources there, including the full clip of the fine people statements, and I think I'm there with some clips talking about how it was misinterpreted, etc.
So just keep that in mind, because it's real handy.
Every time somebody asks you about the fine people thing, instead of going through that whole debunking hoax thing where they get all confused and everything, just point them at finepeople.org.
And excellent work, Ali Alexander.
A patriot! Because that's just a service.
Just a service to the country.
We appreciate that, Ali.
Twitter has allowed the New York Post to tweet again.
So they looked at their internal policies.
Yes, Ali Alexander, that's correct.
Somebody is asking. They looked at their policies and decided that they would unblock the New York Post.
So that's what people wanted.
That's what observers thought was reasonable.
And that's what they came around to.
And I would like to say this again, And again and again.
I'll say this as many times as I need to for the rest of my life.
If somebody makes a mistake and then they hear your complaint about the mistake and then they look into it, they admit they made a mistake, and then they take actions to fix it, not just this one but in the future, that's good.
And you should just be happy about that.
And I think Twitter satisfied that in this case.
Now, that's not to say that I'm completely happy with the unbiasedness of Twitter.
I would say there's room for improvement, if we can be blunt.
Room for improvement.
But when you see an individual case where you've got a gripe, you make your complaint, they hear it, they acknowledge a wrong, they fix it, It's a few days later.
You wish it had been faster.
But it also comes with a permanent change.
So it's not just a decision on this one tweet or company.
It's a permanent change.
I feel like that's about as good as you can do.
Oh, by the way, I am remiss for not having done this sooner.
And there's no bad intention with this.
It has simply slipped my mind.
I didn't connect these two things.
So let me do it now so that I can close that gap.
I do have investments in Twitter, meaning that as just a stock purchaser.
So several months ago, I said to myself, you know, all these people trying to leave Twitter are We're not having much success because the other services just don't have that network effect because it's no fun to be on a service that doesn't have all the people you want to fight with.
So I thought, you know, there's just nothing that can compete with Twitter.
It's just such a dominant position.
So I bought stock in them about, I forget, six months ago or something.
Turned out to be tremendously good timing and Because they've had quite a bit of growth.
Even though they went down 20% yesterday, I'm still weighing the plus.
So now you know that just for full disclosure.
But having said that, I still maintain that if they fix something that needs to be fixed, we should only be happy about it, just in general.
But there's still big issues that need to be addressed.
All right. Trump did one of the best persuasion plays this week that I've seen.
And I always tell you that he's good at picking up free money.
If there's just money laying on the table and nobody's going to pick it up, he just notices it and says, hey, anybody?
Anybody? Is this free money?
Belong to anybody? All right, I'll take it.
And this felt like that.
And when I describe this, I think you're going to have the same reaction I did, which is, why didn't I think of that?
All right, here it is.
Trump points out, and I'm going to paraphrase his idea, not his words, but I'll paraphrase his idea.
He tweeted that, in effect, and again, these are my words putting on what I interpret as his notion, that imagine that the Supreme Court is asked to rule on the election.
Pretty high likelihood, wouldn't you say?
There'll be something about the election outcome that is likely to get to the Supreme Court.
We all feel that, right?
Not 100%, but I feel like, I don't know, 75% chance something will end up in the Supreme Court, and it might make the difference between who is president.
We're on the same page.
Trump points out the following, and again, this is my description of it, not his.
Imagine that the justices have this decision.
And they can go one way, which they know will put Trump in office.
If they go the other way, it puts Biden in office.
If they put Trump in office, life goes on, right?
The Supreme Court's the Supreme Court.
Yeah, there will be some, you know, riots in the street, but eventually we'll get over it.
Life will go on.
Now, suppose they pick Biden.
Biden has threatened, he doesn't use the word threatened, but he's suggested, he's hinted, that there's a good chance that he would increase the number of justices on the court.
Now, given that we know the justices do not favor that, I'm not a mind reader, but we know what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, that nine was the right number, and as soon as you start messing around with that number, You delegitimize the Supreme Court, because then it just becomes a captive of the political process, because the next president will just, you know, add some justices until there's control.
So, you're the Supreme Court, and you've got to make a decision, and one way we'll put Biden in the presidency, and delegitimize your job.
You're on the Supreme Court, Are you going to make a choice that would delegitimize the Supreme Court?
Because that's what a Biden presidency promises to do.
I mean, really? That's not even guessing.
He's going to do a commission to study, what's he call it, reforming the court, which would include term limits, maybe, or packing the court, adding people.
Those are two things that you can be pretty certain about.
The sitting justices do not favor.
So do you think that the justices of the Supreme Court will ever come to a decision that would make the Supreme Court irrelevant?
Is there? Now think about the fact, think about this.
Think about the fact that you never had that idea.
Don't you feel dumb?
I did. The moment I read that, I read that tweet from Trump and I thought, oh my God, why is he the first person to think of this?
Or, you know, somebody may have suggested it to him.
But have you seen this on the news?
Have you seen the news covering the fact that if the Supreme Court votes on it, they will be voting to put themselves into irrelevancy?
That's what the vote will be.
And they'd know it.
It's not just my interpretation.
They would know it.
They would know that a Biden supporting vote would make the Supreme Court and maybe the Republic itself irrelevant.
So for Trump to, I call it working the refs, you know, he brings up this point so the refs, the Supreme Court, it gets in their head.
Because if they weren't thinking about it before, They're thinking about it now.
Now, I don't think there was any chance that the Supreme Court would not have had that thought, but the fact that he works the refs like this, and he does it so well, he's really working the refs right.
And that'll be one of the things that Trump will probably always be the best there ever was at working the refs.
But when you read the history books, it's not going to say that, because it's like a small skill.
But he's so good at it, it feels like it should be in the history books, but it won't be.
All right, even Bill Maher is saying that the Democrats should not prep for a civil war if they lose the election, which suggests to me that at least Bill Maher is considering a high likelihood That the Democrats will lose the election.
Because you wouldn't be talking about the Democrats going into a civil war if you believe the polls, would you?
Do you think Bill Maher believes the polls?
Because if he did, why would he even bring up the possibility of a civil war?
You wouldn't. Because Biden's going to win, according to the polls.
So I think that Bill Maher probably believes the polls as much as...
What's his name? As much as Michael Moore does, which is not at all.
And he's advising people to forget about the Civil War, and he points out something that's kind of funny, that we don't have a Mason-Dixon line, that it wouldn't be a Civil War where, you know, the South goes to war against the North.
It would be a Civil War within your own house.
It would be a civil war in your neighborhood?
Would everybody just start fighting with their co-workers?
How would you even have a civil war?
It's hard to have a civil war when you're all living among each other.
That would be pretty messy.
But he's recommending no civil war, and I think that he probably...
I think Maher probably represents, in many ways, the moderate Republican view.
And if moderate Republicans are not on board for a civil war, there isn't going to be one.
Because there aren't enough radical leftists.
I feel like all you'd have to do is stop the snack truck, and you could stop the riots.
Just get rid of that Antifa snack truck.
They'll get hungry. Here's a question for you.
You've heard it said that the winners are the ones who write history, right?
It's the winners who write history.
But what is the history of 2020 and 2019 going to look like?
And really the whole Trump presidency.
What is that history going to look like?
Who gets to write that?
Because I don't know if there's ever been a time in my life where we couldn't agree, you know, even among the intellectual class, what happened.
We can't agree what's happening now and what just did happen.
We can't agree on any of it.
So forget about the history books.
How are you going to write, for example, The history of the Russia collusion hoax.
How do you write that?
As I say to my smart Democrat friend just yesterday, you know, is he aware that there was an actual coup attempt in the United States by Democrats and that it failed?
And he says there was no coup attempt.
That's fake news by a bunch of Trump supporters.
So how do you write the history?
In my opinion, I was here.
I watched the news.
I watched all the news that would be the subject of whatever history gets written.
I didn't miss much of the news.
And what I saw was an obvious, well-documented coup attempt.
What did you see?
So if I were writing the news, I would say, well, these People in the government tried to do a coup attempt, and members of intelligence and FBI colluded to try to get rid of the president.
So in the comments, somebody is saying, OMG, no coup attempt.
And I have to say that I acknowledge that people on the left believe there was no coup attempt.
But it's mind-boggling.
When you look at the evidence that's public and indisputed.
So if you only take the evidence that's not disputed, the coup is right there.
It's as obvious as it could possibly be.
Is everybody involved meeting on a Zoom call to plot the overthrow of the president?
I don't think that happened.
I think everybody just knew what to do.
Everybody knew that anything they could do against the president would be useful.
Yeah, so to me it looks obviously like we observed it.
We're still observing the aftermath of it.
And if I were writing the history book, I would write it like that.
I would say there was a coup attempt.
It was sort of a loosely organized coup attempt.
But if somebody who is a Democrat writes it, they're going to say that Russia tried to interfere with the election, and there's still some suggestion that the Trump administration talked to the Russians too much and we're not clear what they did.
Or something like that, right?
So this is an honest question.
How do you write the history?
You see Biden out there saying that the president called service people suckers and losers, which, as far as we know, did not happen.
So what do the history books say?
Do the history books say he did say that?
Or do the history books say he didn't say that, and it was claimed that he said that?
How about the fine people hoax?
Do the history books write that as a hoax?
Or did they write that like the hoax actually happened?
How about the Hunter Biden laptop story?
Will the history write it that that was a real thing that got ignored by the media?
Or will history just ignore it, the same as the media?
These are pretty big questions.
And let me ask you this.
I don't remember if I talked about this before, so tell me in the comments if I already talked about this.
You've heard of the Gelman amnesia effect, where if you're an expert on a topic and you read a news report about that topic, you can tell all the factual errors in it because you just happen to be an expert on that topic.
But you read any other topic in which you are not an expert, and you kind of uncritically accept that it's probably kind of true.
It's only when you read things you know the truth that you can see how bad the news is.
You have to assume this applies to history as well.
We know the winners write history, right?
But the things you think are just facts might not be, because our history is pretty subjective, it turns out.
Now, let me give you an example, and stop me if I already told you this.
So, Wall Street Journal had an article about Jack Dorsey and They mentioned me in the article.
Now, there were two facts in this little mention of me in the Wall Street Journal.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is a pretty reliable publication, wouldn't you say?
If you were to rank credibility of publications, the Wall Street Journal would be very near the top, the very best in credibility.
Two things that were said about me in there.
One, I was labeled a conservative.
I'm left of Bernie. So my label was dead wrong.
Complete opposite.
I support President Trump, but it has more to do with Trump's special skills than some alignment in philosophy.
The second thing they said was they paired me with DeRay McKesson, I think, as people who Jack interacts with.
Now, I've interacted with Jack several times, most of them about, you know, Twitter itself and Twitter censorship, right?
And, you know, once on a book he recommended, but fairly, you know, fairly ordinary, trivial stuff.
I've only been in the room with him once in my life for about 20 minutes on charity-related things, and that's it.
And the Wall Street Journal puts me in the article with DeRay, who is one of the activists for Black Lives Matter, as if we're somehow key people in Jack's lives.
I would not be in the top 5,000 of key people that are important to Jack Dorsey.
I'm just somebody who's talked to him a few times.
I like him. That's it.
Now, if you read that article, you would think that we're hanging out all the time, and that somehow my association with him has some importance as much as DeRay's, who had a long-time relationship with him.
I understand. So, the only two things about me were very misleading.
Did you know that?
If you had read that article, would you know that those two things were misleading?
Probably not. Probably not.
But if it were about you, you'd know it.
So, don't trust your history.
Don't trust your media.
The only people you can trust are the people here on this livestream.
That's it. You're the only people we can trust.
By the way, there's another thing that Trump does that's really good persuasion, and I laugh every time I hear it because it's so ham-handed, and yet it completely works.
He tells his supporters that they're smarter than the experts.
Now, I know that this works because the secret to the Dilbert cartoon strip was when I started telling my readers that they were smarter than their boss.
Everybody loves to hear that they're smarter than the experts and they're smarter than their boss.
Are they? Well, I suppose sometimes.
Sometimes you're smarter than your boss.
Sometimes you are smarter than the experts.
But as a persuasion thing, It's really super good.
Because people are primed to want to believe that they're smarter than experts.
So Trump will say this all the time.
He'll say, well, the experts said this, and then he'll look at his audience, the rally audience, but you're smarter than them.
They say they're the elites, but you're the elites.
It's really good stuff for bonding with his audience.
It's an A-plus persuasion.
All right. Scott sides with the maskers.
I want to see this accusation before I block you.
It says, Scott sides with the maskers to keep his leftist credibility.
So, I'll be blocking you.
Somehow that disappeared.
If you apply mind reading to me that is incorrect, such as that, do you really think that I would back masks just to preserve my leftist credibility?
I feel like you must be new here.
Do you think I care about my leftist credibility?
Is that high on my list of things to preserve?
So, saying good things about Trump literally every fucking day, and somebody is out here saying, I think he wants to preserve his leftist credibility.
No. That has no bearing on any of my decisions.
What I would like to destroy is my association with either the left or the right.
In my perfect world, neither the left nor the right would claim me, but would understand that I can be fluid based on where the facts and my sense of reason take me.
So anybody who thinks that I'm pro-mask for a political reason doesn't understand risk management.
I'm pro-mask As a risk management decision, meaning that there's enough evidence that they probably work that it's worth the risk.
There's certainly a downside.
I recognize the downside completely.
But on balance, we unfortunately have to sort of guess.
And none of us are smart enough to know if the masks are a good idea or not.
We're not. If you think you know That masks are bad, or you think you know that masks are definitely good, you're not smart.
Sorry. If you say, I have a strong opinion, well, you're probably reasonable.
Even if your strong opinion is one way or the other, it would be reasonable To look at this and have a strong opinion.
It would be stupid to say you know they work or you know they don't.
That would just be stupid.
So let me be as clear as I can on that.
But risk management, you could certainly go either way on that.
All right. I'm seeing Warren for Secretary of Treasury.
There's some thinking that that would scare Wall Street too much.
So maybe we won't see that.
And I heard somebody smart say that if Elizabeth Warren took a cabinet job, her Senate position would be filled by a Republican governor.
And so she doesn't want to leave the Senate because that would become a Republican Senate seat.