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Dec. 16, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:37
Episode 1220 Scott Adams: Good News on COVID-19, Biden Warned us About Himself, Why Historians are Screwed
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Time Text
You know, it just occurred to me that when I was a kid it would have been hard to do this even if we had this technology because all of our clocks were different.
When I was a kid, most of our clocks were on slightly different times.
So if you wanted to livestream when I was a kid, even if you could do the livestream part, you wouldn't be able to do the starting simultaneous part because people would be like, I don't know, my watch says you're five minutes early.
And half the other people would be, it looks like you're about ten minutes late, according to me.
But thanks to the miracle of technology, every one of you has the correct time.
And here you are. So glad you're here.
And if you'd like to enjoy it to its fullest extent, you know what you need.
It's a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or gels or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip.
And I hope you sipped when I did.
I forgot to say go. But if you did, savor it.
Savor it!
Okay. You gotta stop and smell the coffee sometimes.
Well, have you all heard that Yeah, Periscope is going to be discontinued, but fear not, I will not be discontinued.
I will not be cancelled...yet.
So in March, apparently Periscope will be discontinued, but you have the following options.
Number one, there may, may or may not be, I do not know, a replacement.
So Periscope will go away, but we don't know if Twitter will offer some kind of a replacement.
Let's just say I've heard chatter that would suggest that's at least a possibility.
But in the meantime, I'm always live on YouTube, where I am live streaming even right now, as you listen to me.
And, of course, I'll be on Locals, a subscription platform that has this stuff, plus all of my stuff that I don't show you here, because I would get in trouble.
So the stuff I put on the Locals platform, locals.com, I do the stuff that I think would be maybe a little too edgy here, or extra stuff and lessons on persuasion to turn you into a superstar.
So those are similar options.
And it's also available on podcasts if you want to listen to it.
Hey, there's a bunch of good news on COVID. Oh, and also I'm live on Rumble as well.
So I don't know if...
I think we're updated on that.
So Rumble as well.
And also Roccofin.
So any one of those, you can find it.
Good news on COVID. You've heard this before, but it's going to a new level, which is dogs being trained to detect COVID by sniffing your armpit.
Now, apparently you don't need the dog to actually get up in there.
You can just take some kind of a towelette and swab your armpit.
Make it available to the dog, and the dog, they believe, the people studying this, and there are a number of pilot programs going on, but the people looking into it think the dog would be able to get up to between 75 and 100% effectiveness.
Now imagine how quickly you could test If the dog could do it, let's say you get off an airplane or something, and they want to test you when you reach the ground.
Everybody gets a moist towelette.
Everybody goes rat, rat, rat, stand in line.
The dog just walks down the line.
Boom, the entire plane is cleared.
It's pretty good.
This is one of those weird situations where the The least expected solution might be the one that is just the kill shot.
Because if you can train dogs to do this, there's no technology that's going to come close.
Because literally the dog can just walk through a whole crowd as long as they've, you know, swabbed themselves and made it available.
Test the whole room, you know, 10 minutes.
So, and how long does it take to train a dog to detect a certain smell?
I don't know the answer to that, but I'll bet it's not hard.
I'll bet it's not the hardest thing you've ever trained a dog to do.
So, dogs might be our savior.
There are a number of pilot programs going on and look kind of promising.
Now, of course, the other big, big news is the vaccines being rolled out and all the conversation about who gets the vaccination first.
And all that conversation has been kind of boring because everybody says the same thing.
Let us discuss who should get the vaccines first.
All right, I'll give you my novel opinion.
You may not have heard this before, but I'm thinking...
People in rest homes and nursing homes and maybe frontline healthcare workers?
Just like 100% of the other people in the world?
Why are we even talking about it?
Does anyone disagree?
Now, those are the easy ones, right?
But there's also a big conversation about who should do it in front of the public.
Because wouldn't you like to see Joe Biden get a vaccination in public?
That would be good for, I think, confidence.
And I think that's good, too.
And I'll tell you, in my opinion, I'm pretty sure the vaccine is going to be safe.
But just in case...
You know, again, I'm really sure the vaccinations will be safe.
But just in case, don't you think we should do Kamala before Joe Biden?
Think about it.
Think about it. Just in case.
But the other thing that you should not do when you're deciding who should be on TV getting the vaccination, you should not pick a cartoonist to go first.
Let me tell you how that would go.
Because I thought, you know, I'm a public figure.
So as a public figure, I don't want to jump the line.
In fact, I'd like to go last if I could.
But I thought, well, maybe I have some responsibility, right?
To show the public that I'm willing to get the vaccination.
But I'm really the wrong person to do it on TV or any kind of a live stream because I'm pretty sure I know how I would play it.
And it would be like this.
You know, I'd be like, okay, give it to me.
And I always look away.
I don't like the look. You know, I don't mind getting shots, actually.
I just don't like looking at it.
So I look away, and there'd be a little pinch.
You know, they'd be like, you're going to feel a little pinch.
And I'd be like, and I'd be like, oh, oh, you're done?
That's not bad. I really thought it was going to be more than that.
There's just like a little bit of a, you know, you can feel it.
I mean, you can feel that I got the vaccination, but I've been hearing people say it was getting really stiff and stuff.
Actually, I can feel a little stiffness coming.
Yeah, a little bit coming.
Whoa! Whoa!
That packs quite a punch.
Nothing you can't handle, really, but...
Oh, God! Whoa!
I feel like I might pass out here, but I'll be fine, and I highly recommend.
You should all get... Ow!
Whoa! For those of you listening on podcast...
What you missed was a hilarious impression of me becoming frozen.
Now, I will say again, I will get the vaccination.
I'm sure the vaccination is safe.
If you didn't hear the story of how the vaccination process got sped up by Trump, it's really interesting.
So here's a little tidbit that I heard just yesterday listening to the news, which was that the normal process, if they do a big study, is that the FDA, I think it's the FDA, and whoever they work with, looks at the data for something like six months.
I did not misspeak.
After a controlled study, of a new drug, the FDA will look at the data and really study it for six months.
I think I got that right.
Six months. Now, have you ever studied data?
I've studied data.
I've done it for a living. I've never seen any data I needed to study for six months.
The study itself might take six months.
But studying the data took six months until Trump said, not anymore, basically.
Trump basically just said, no.
How about no?
It doesn't take six months to look at fucking data.
What the hell were they doing all the time up until now if it took them months to To look at data.
Do you know how long it should take?
Even if there's a lot of data, how long it should take?
I'm thinking days.
I'm not thinking months.
And now, apparently, The people who do these things said, oh, well, I guess we'll just do it in a more reasonable, compressed amount of time.
I think they got it down to...
I have my numbers approximate, but it was like something like taking it from six months down to one month.
And I'm still saying to myself, a month?
What exactly takes a month?
I can't think of any data that would take a month to look at.
If it takes a month to look at it, somebody organized it poorly.
So you really need to be talking to whoever gave you the data, because there should be things like summaries and totals at the bottoms of columns and stuff.
I feel like they should have done a lot of work for you.
I don't know. I was just amazed by that.
So when you hear that Trump did the impossible with the warp speed stuff...
Maybe it was the impossible for other people, but he just sort of made it happen, and then they just did it.
And that's a lesson in management.
Let me give you the rookie lesson in management, followed by the experienced person's lesson in management.
Here's what young people and people who do not have experience think management would look like.
Manager comes in and says to the The project experts, you know, the manager doesn't know much, but the people working on the project know the details of the project.
And the manager says, I need you to be done in a month.
And the project experts say, whoa, I know that's what you want, but let me show you the timelines, the dependencies on the project.
There isn't actually any way to do this in less than two months.
All right? Now, the inexperienced manager way...
To look at this is, well, the person who knows a lot more than I do, and I hired them and I trust them, says it's going to take two months.
I wanted it in one, but I guess I have to accept two months.
That's the inexperienced person's view of management.
Here's the experienced person's view of management.
I'd like this to be done in one month.
It's very important. Expert says, no way to do this in less than two months, and here's my reasons why.
Manager looks blankly at expert and says, do it in one fucking month.
And then the expert does it in one month, but without the fucking part, because the manager usually leaves that part out.
That's what an experienced manager does.
Because they know that just about everything can be done faster.
And they have a sense of what that means in any particular context, if they're good managers, right?
So when Trump was presented, I wasn't in the room, but one can imagine something like this happened.
You can imagine somebody saying to Trump, here's the process, and the reason it takes all these years to do a vaccine is that it takes six months to look at the data And you can imagine the look on Trump's face.
I don't know if any of this happened in real life, but you can imagine this.
Imagine Trump listening to somebody tell him that the phase of just looking at the frickin' data was gonna take six months.
Just imagine what he said.
Right? I'll tell you what he didn't say.
Well, you're the experts.
I guess it takes six months to look at data.
No! No!
Maybe Biden would do that, because Biden says, listen to the experts, right?
Maybe he would have said, what can you do?
Every single expert just said six months.
If that's what it takes to look at data, and nobody's telling me it could be done faster, what are you going to do?
But I think Trump, like an experienced manager...
And exactly what I would have said, had I been president in the room, I would have said, stop, stop, hold on.
I'm going to need a little more explanation about this six months to look at data, because you're not producing the data, you're just looking at it.
You're going to have to get that six months down to a little bit shorter, or somebody's going to be fired.
I'm guessing that that was a lot of what it looked like behind closed doors, just conceptually.
Anyway, so vaccine's coming.
Today... At 1 p.m.
Eastern Time, that would be 10 a.m.
for you Californians, I'm going to do a separate live stream interview with Razeeb Khan, who is a spokesperson for Traitwell, T-R-A-I-T-W-E-L-L. And he's a geneticist, and he'll tell us about Traitwell's new system, I guess you'd say, where you can upload your DNA and some other information, and it will tell you your relative COVID risk.
How cool is that?
Now, does it work?
Is it real? These are the questions I will ask them.
And I don't know the answers to the questions.
We'll find out. But imagine if you're trying to figure out who should get the vaccination first.
We'll also ask them about DNA and privacy and stuff like that.
So I'll get into that.
So imagine if we could find out that some people have much lower risk than other people, and even after you've accounted for comorbidities and lifestyle and age and all that.
That should probably help us, right?
If we could actually say, well, if we're going to do the high-risk people first, it should at least help you identify them.
Other good news.
It's just all good news day.
On COVID. The FDA is actually authorizing its first over-the-counter at-home COVID tests.
You've been hearing me complaining about the lack of the rapid tests for a while now.
Now, I don't think this is exactly the same thing I've been talking about, because this might be a little bit of a higher end, higher, I don't know, but it might be a higher sensitivity, but costs a little bit more.
It still takes only 15 to 20 minutes to get a result at home with just your own nasal swab test.
You don't have to send it anywhere.
It comes with an app.
And I think that'll be available in a few months.
That's huge. Now, the problem is...
Oh, somebody's saying, can he identify adverse reactions to the vaccine?
I'm sure that's not part of what they do at TraitWell.
But it's a heck of a question.
That's a heck of a question.
I'll ask him that. Thank you.
So I had been saying that I thought there must be some kind of either...
Well, I was actually speculating there was some kind of corruption in our government for not already having approved these over-the-counter cheap tests.
I still think that's more likely the case than other explanations for why it wasn't here sooner and why we don't have more of them and maybe the lower sensitivity tests as well.
There's still something going on, but when you hear that it takes six months to look at data, I start saying, oh, Maybe it is possible that incompetence could explain it.
Because I had ruled out incompetence just because it's so long now that you couldn't possibly say, well, things just take a long time.
Like, I was ruling that out.
But now you hear how long it really takes, or used to take, before Trump was kicking their butts.
And you say to yourself, it's actually, maybe it wasn't corruption.
Could it be they were actually just that incompetent?
I didn't want to believe it because it's easier to believe corruption, but maybe.
Who knows? Other good news, COVID-wise, is that Mitch McConnell says that the top leaders in Congress are going to stay behind and not go home from Washington over the holidays until they get an agreement.
So he's talking about the funding for COVID relief in a variety of ways.
But if the rest of Congress goes home, does it matter that the leadership makes an agreement?
Because they can't vote on it because everybody went home.
So isn't it really just an agreement to see if they can agree among themselves so then they can go home?
But when Congress comes back, the rest of Congress might not agree.
So it looks like just a clever way to go home for Christmas without an agreement, or at least without any legislation.
So the whole thing looks like bullshit to me.
But, you know, at least they know the optics look bad if they all go home.
So that's something. What are we going to do with history?
It seems to me that in the old days...
The winning team got to decide what the history was for the country, right?
So if your country won the war, you get to write the history of the war, and you write it your way.
But in the old days, history would have basically one version per country, at least through high school and most of college.
You could find other versions, but there would be a mainstream version.
Now, history is being written and permanently recorded in the internet.
So everything that's happening will just sort of always be there, we think.
So how do you deal with the fact that there are two completely different histories?
How do you write a history book at, let's say, the college level that would include this era?
What would you say about the Trump administration?
Would you say Russia collusion was real?
Would you say the find people hoax actually happened?
Would you say that the president really did suggest drinking bleach?
Because these are the things that will become the permanent record They become the new way the history is recorded.
It's no longer some consensus, you know, winner puts it in one version.
Literally, what do you do when you don't have one history anymore?
There will be at least two histories, minimum.
You know, you argue lots of them.
But I'm thinking that Well, let me put it in concrete terms.
Imagine if history simply followed CNN's reporting.
Right? Imagine if they just didn't vary from whatever CNN reported, and we would allow that if CNN ever, you know, corrected anything, that the correction would stand.
But basically, the CNN's version of the world, suppose you just took that and put it in a history...
Class or textbook and said, here's your history.
It was in the news.
And, you know, the New York Times agreed with them and the Washington Post agreed with them.
There's your news. Yeah, think about it.
Would that be an actual history?
That's scary. I don't even know what they will teach in school.
Like, actually, literally, I don't know how they would teach it.
Because who would agree what the real history was?
So here's what I'm thinking is our current situation.
When it comes to investing, I'll use an analogy here, in investing, one of the few things that everybody agrees on, no matter what kind of an expert you are on investing, pretty much everybody agrees on one thing.
Diversification is really important.
Because if you're not diversifying, putting your money in lots of different bets so that if some of them go bad, by luck, you'll have some that went extra well to compensate.
So in finance, if you're trying to pick one winning stock, you're just a sucker because people can't do that.
We know that people don't have any skill to pick individual stocks.
Even really, really good people aren't good at it.
But everybody can diversify.
So diversification fixes most of the problems that you would have in the way you think about investing.
Just get that one thing right and you're in pretty good shape.
And I think the same thing is going to be true for the news and for history.
Meaning that you will have to read a diverse bunch of sources To actually have any idea what was going on.
So you no longer can take a source and say, well, here's my news.
You've got to diversify.
If you're not watching the news on the left and the right, you're not watching anything.
And I wouldn't say that either of them get it right.
They get different things wrong at different times.
But if you're not seeing both, you don't know what's going on.
You really don't know what's going on.
So Congress, I mentioned this yesterday, reached this big energy deal, it looks like, that includes nuclear energy, some new technologies for that, promoting that stuff, and also carbon capture.
Now, every person who's, let's say, in the middle, the political middle, thinks these are good ideas.
I'm exaggerating a little bit, but I would say that people in the middle are Whether they're Democrats or Republicans, if they're in the middle, they probably like nuclear energy.
Now, on the right, they might like nuclear energy all the way from left to right, but pretty much it's a good middle position, nuclear power.
No matter what you think of climate change, you still probably think nuclear energy is required.
And carbon capture...
I don't think anybody disagrees with it.
If some company wants to capture the carbon out of the air, which is a thing, and turn it into commercial products, why not?
How could that be a bad idea?
So here's my point that I'm working toward.
I feel as if we get lost in what Greg Goffeld often refers to as this prison of two ideas.
That you've either got your Republican or you've got your Democrat.
You've got your lefties or your righties.
And your government is going to be one of those two things.
Or, if you're lucky, it could be deadlocked.
But I think there might be something that's even better than that.
Which is alternating Trump-like presidents with Biden-like presidents.
In other words, the best situation might be not a Trump-like candidate forever and not a Biden-like candidate forever.
It might be, and I would make a strong argument for this actually, and I'm going to right now, that your best situation is to alternate.
And the reason is that they have different skills and there are some problems that some of them can solve, the other cannot.
So let me give you an example of some things that I think Trump was uniquely qualified for.
And if he hadn't done what he had done, much of it will be lasting, I think.
If he had not done those things, another president I don't think could have done these things.
But I'm going to tell you that also there might be some things that Biden can get done that you would want to get done.
Things that you would want that even Trump couldn't get done because he was sort of polarizing, to say the least.
So here are things that Trump probably did that are close to impossible.
So the Middle East peace deals, making North Korea sort of a little buddy that doesn't bother us too much, Project Warp Speed, incredible success, decoupling from China.
I don't think you would have seen that from...
Really, anybody else.
I don't think anybody would have been as effective with ISIS, and we haven't had much terrorism problems, have we?
I don't think anybody would have done as good a job with Iran, if you think that that approach to it was the right way to go, to put them in a position where they'll have to negotiate, which is about where they are now.
Trump got not just good employment, he had record low unemployment, I don't know if another president could have done that.
You know, he did the NAFTA deals, he's done other trade deals that probably wouldn't have happened.
He broke records for appointing judges.
If you like that kind of judge, probably, you know, you needed Trump to have...
If Trump had not gotten elected against all odds, all of those positions would have gone the other way.
And that's a pretty big, big deal if you like that kind of judge.
And I would argue that even Trump's wall design for the wall with the border of Mexico, that even if Biden says he doesn't like it and doesn't want to build a wall, he's a little bit stuck.
And here's why. You can get rid of bad policies, but it's hard to get rid of bad design.
And what Trump did was good design, working with the experts.
So the specific kind of wall that Trump is putting up, even though it's a replacement for a bad wall that even the Democrats thought should be replaced, his good design is probably so good it's going to make a difference compared to the little walls and fences they had before.
I would expect that Biden is going to end up making noise about tearing down the wall We're not building it, and it will sort of drift and morph into, okay, we're only going to put wall where we had wall before, which turns out to be the best place to put it.
Because where we had wall before, it wasn't a good wall.
But the only reason there was any wall there at all is because we really needed one.
So if you replace the bad wall with good wall, which even Democrats would agree with, because you'd say, we're not building more wall, we're just making sure that these particular places don't have an issue, and hey, we've got this good design, and even the experts are still saying it's the best design.
It wasn't Trump's personal...
It was the experts that Trump approved.
So I think Biden is going to have to keep even the wall design, because it just was a better wall.
They just figured out how to do it better.
I think that'll last.
And I think even Biden will not be as tight as Trump on the border, but even he's going to have to do the obvious stuff.
How about nuclear energy?
Oh, let me go down the list.
The other things that Trump did that I think wouldn't have been done, he took a swipe at the pharma costs.
I don't know if that's going to be successful, but that thing where you get the most favored nation's pricing, I don't think anybody else would have even tried that.
There's the telehealth across state lines, I don't think anybody else would have changed regulations as readily as Trump did.
So there's a whole bunch of things that you just couldn't have gotten that are either permanent or at least sticky, and you get to keep that stuff.
Now here's what a Biden could bring you, even if you're a Republican.
You ready?
I think Biden could do more for nuclear energy than Trump.
For whatever reason, Trump didn't like to speak about nuclear energy.
He was in favor of it.
He's mentioned it sort of in a list of stuff.
But Biden probably wouldn't get as much pushback from the left.
So maybe he can make something happen, sell nuclear energy as it properly should be sold to the left, as green energy.
That's really all he has to do.
If Biden comes out tomorrow and says, hey, you need to know that nuclear energy is green energy and it's not just important, it's probably the most important thing.
If Biden said that out loud, suddenly you could have a pretty robust, more robust nuclear energy thing.
He might do something with health care if he's a little less polarizing.
Maybe he'll get something done with transportation.
Maybe he can do more to tamp down BLM and Antifa, who are really just a...
they felt like a Trump response.
So there might be a bunch of stuff you don't like about Biden, and I'm not going to argue that.
There was also a bunch of stuff you probably didn't like about Trump, even if you supported him.
My only point is that if each of these people do sticky things...
Meaning that if each of them do what they can do that are good things, the good things stick.
And then maybe it's time to try something else next time to pick up those holes that the other one left behind.
Here's my take on the Eric Swalwell Chinese spy lover story.
Now, I don't know if the lover part is just alleged or confirmed.
I know that his staff, at least at one point, refused to deny that they were intimately involved, which doesn't mean they were.
It just means that that's, I guess, you have to just say that's part of the story.
I don't like to say that about anybody, you know, unless I saw it with my own eyes, you know, and I wouldn't want to see it with my own eyes, but it's just part of the story.
Now, let's say that you believe that Swalwa was too close to the Chinese spy, and some people are saying he should be removed from the Intelligence Committee, because that sounds bad, right?
Chinese spy, Intelligence Committee, pretty bad.
But the defense against that is that there's no evidence that he revealed any secrets.
Now, I'll bet that's true.
You know, whatever you want to say about Swalwell, he is also smart enough, and he's in background as an attorney.
I think that he would be smart enough That he would not have revealed any intelligence secrets to even somebody he was close to.
And I have no reason to believe that he did.
But, is that your only problem?
I don't think that's your only problem.
Now, even if you could imagine That he was smart enough not to let any state secrets get to any civilian.
It shouldn't matter whether it was a spy or just a civilian.
It should have been the same standard of, you know, no way, no how for the secret stuff.
And I feel like he probably did that.
But here's the real risk.
If you were a planted Chinese spy, now I'm using the word spy.
I think that's fair, right?
Wouldn't you say? And If you were a planted spy, would you be untrained?
Or do they just say, hey, Christine Fang, Fang Fang as we like to call you, your assignment is this young politician and your job is to go help China.
Then what would she say?
Help you in what way?
Well, you're going to go do things with Swalwell and get close to him and see what you can do.
And then she would say, see what I can do in what way?
Can you be more specific?
Am I stealing secrets?
What am I doing? Well, yes, if you get an opportunity to find out any secrets, that's part of it.
But here's the part the news leaves out.
Don't you think she was trained to persuade?
She's not just a receiver, right?
If you're going to go through all the trouble to plant Chinese spies all around the world in key positions, are you going to send them there untrained?
You're not going to send her there untrained.
Now, let me give you a full scary thought.
Now, since I don't know if she is trained or trained in what way, this is all speculation.
All right? Somebody's calling me a Democrat apologist.
You might want to wait.
If you think I'm a Democrat apologist, you're a fucking idiot.
And you shouldn't be watching this live stream.
You should really find some other content that's less challenging.
Because that's not what I do here.
It's not my job to be an apologist for anybody.
And anybody who's been around long enough knows I will take any position that seems reasonable, no matter where that is.
I don't need to be anybody's fucking apologist.
So just go away.
Go watch some other content that's more to your liking.
So here's my take on Swalwell.
If you want to be frightened of what's the worst-case scenario, imagine if Fang Fang had my skill.
Just for persuasion.
Now, I don't mean just, you know, me specifically, but anybody who was trained the way I was, or indeed anybody who's even read my books.
Would you want a Chinese spy getting close to one of our politicians who had read any of my books?
Right? It's kind of dangerous.
So what do we know Swalwell was doing?
At least at one point, he was selling the idea that there was Russia collusion.
And you know how I'm always surprised when I find out that Democrats believe what they're saying?
Imagine, if you will, that the reason that Swalwell was so convinced there was Russia collusion was Is that maybe that had been suggested to him by somebody who was really, really well trained as suggesting things.
Think about it.
We just went through years of this pissant, Eric Swalwell, looking the public straight in the eye and telling us he was pretty sure this was all Russia collusion.
What if he fucking believed it?
Now, was there any point when you thought he actually believed it?
Because you say to yourself, they don't believe that.
It's just something they're saying, right?
He might have believed it.
He might still believe it.
Because if you spend enough time with somebody who is trained as well as, let's say, I am, just as an example.
I'm not like the world's greatest persuader.
I just am trained.
If you spend enough time with somebody who's trained, you will believe anything.
There's almost no limit to what a trained persuader could make a Swalwell believe.
You want to even be more afraid?
Here it goes.
20% of all people, politicians, smart people, dumb people, educated people, uneducated people, people in all countries, about 20% can be convinced of anything.
They can be convinced there's something in the room that isn't even there.
They can be convinced that it's cold when it's hot.
They can be convinced of anything by a trained hypnotist.
Now, could China detect who are in the 20%?
I don't know, but probably.
I don't know, but probably.
In other words, there's probably some signal that even hypnotists haven't figured out, by the way.
Even a trained hypnotist can't reliably know who's going to be in that 20% short of actually trying it out.
It's very misleading.
You think you would, because your common sense says, well, it's going to be the people that you imagine have weak minds, but it isn't.
There's no correlation with intelligence, education, gullibility.
There's just no correlation with anything.
And hypnotists know that.
They know there's no correlation.
But suppose you had massive amounts of data, and you could study what influenced some people, and then you could find out what signals they give off in advance that would tell you That they're the type of people who could be signaled.
For example, suppose you did a mass Chinese experiment on your own public and you tried to influence people to believe something ridiculous but not harmful because you're just testing.
It's ridiculous but not harmful.
Then you find out who believed it.
And you figure out, what is it about these people who believe the most ridiculous stories?
What signal do they give off in other realms?
The way they talk, some experience they've had.
If China has looked for that, they may have found it.
I'd love to know what they found, because if a hypnotist ever learned that...
You'd be in real trouble.
If they found some signal or some tell where I could just learn it and learn who the 20% are just by observing the public, I would rule the world.
I don't even think that's an exaggeration.
Imagine I'm the only one who knew the secret.
If I could tell who the 20% were, I could form an army, I could rule the world, That's how powerful this stuff is.
Now, if Swalwell was in the 80% and Fang Fang did not have any special training, it's still super dangerous.
But there is a possibility that she had some serious training, and it is a possibility he's in the 20%.
And if he's not, they've got a lot of agents in a lot of places.
Do you know how many times they got the 20% by luck?
Twenty percent. Twenty percent of all of those Chinese agents are with somebody who can be convinced of anything.
And then they will be running our government, completely unaware that they did not make up their own opinions.
And did the news cover this story, which I would consider one of the biggest potential holes in security I've ever seen in my life?
And there have been some big ones.
CBS gave it zero minutes.
NBC, zero minutes.
ABC, two minutes.
MSNBC, zero minutes.
CNN, three minutes.
So, there you go.
Joe Biden, back in 2007, there's a clip of him on the internet.
This is like one of the great historical clip finds of all time.
You know, you love going back and finding that hypocritical statement.
But this one goes way beyond hypocritical.
There are some things that are just hypocritical, but listen to this, and tell me if hypocritical captures it.
Because I think it's hypocritical.
Plus, there's a little extra going on here, I'll tell you about it.
And this is a direct quote from Joe Biden on camera, talking to the public.
In 2007, quote, he's talking about electronic voting machines, which he was not in favor of at the time, unless they had paper backup.
And he said, quote, how are you going to keep it from us being able to be in a position where you can manipulate the machines, manipulate the records?
I think we should pass a federal law mandating that the same machines have paper trails that are mandatory, blah, blah.
Let me read this first part again.
How are you...
Who's you? How are you...
He's talking to the public.
So, how are you, the public, going to keep it, meaning the voting machine situation, from us?
Us? Who the hell is us?
He's talking to the public, and the public he has just referred to as you.
But when he says us...
That's a subset of the public that includes him.
Does that include Democrats?
Or does it include politicians?
I think it at least includes politicians.
We'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he was not limiting that to Democrats when he says us.
But at least politicians.
Being able to be in a position where you can manipulate the machines...
So in 2007, he knew that these were at great risk to be manipulated by politicians and thought it was a tremendous risk.
Nothing happened, apparently, so his warning was not heeded.
And so, allegedly, he used the loophole that people refused to close on his request to He used that loophole to become President of the United States.
Now, that's, of course, only under the assumption that there was some fraud here, and as you know, we do not have proof of such a thing.
Proof, I say, as opposed to evidence.
We don't have court proof of fraud at a level that would reverse the election.
We might... It might be on the way, but we do not have it as of this speaking.
So this is one of the most just jaw-dropping, shocking things.
And I have to say, if it were true that Biden knew this was a way to rig an election...
And if it were true that, let's say, his operatives rigged it for him, you know, we'll give him the benefit of a doubt that he never gave an order to rig any machines.
I think that's fair.
But if the irony is that he was not heeded in his warning and he became the President of the United States because he was not heeded in his direct warning, that's kind of cool.
You know, this is sort of like my appreciation for serial killers who are also industrious.
You can hate the killing part, but still, they're very industrious.
Quite creative. And if Joe Biden pulled this off, you've got to give him a little bit of credit for using the loophole that he warned you.
Hey, he warned you.
Here's the funniest thing in the news.
CNN's trying to mock Trump about his shower water standards.
So I guess this finally got put into law or whatever, some kind of rule, that your shower head will now, if you wanted to, I guess you can get one that has more volume of water.
But here's the funny part.
CNN reports things that Trump says at his rallies Without adding the context that when he's giving a rally talk, he's there for entertainment.
When he gives a tweet, he tweets like people tweet.
And he just does a better job of it than anybody else.
When he talks to a head of state, he talks to them like a head of state.
And he does that well too.
So he adjusts his communication and his style for each of these Forms of communication better than anybody's ever done, in my opinion.
Far better than anybody's ever done.
If you look at all the different realms, you could pick any one realm and say somebody does a better speech or something.
But there's nobody who communicates as well across multiple realms of communication.
But what CNN does is they will act as though they're all just one.
If you don't understand that the things he says at a rally are meant for entertainment, and you see it reported as if it's a presidential statement of fact, it looks funny.
And that's what I'm going to read to you.
So these are Trump's actual words as reported by CNN from, I don't know what, rally.
Quote, We have a situation...
Where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms.
Now, right away, he already has me.
Because never before has any president shown a genuine concern for your bathroom inconveniences.
Now, if you tell me that's not the best example of the common touch you've ever seen, I will argue with you.
Nobody has ever applied, let's say, what we call the common touch, better than you're going to hear right now.
This is the common touch.
You can't do this better.
Okay. So, other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on, and in areas where there's tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea, because you could never handle it.
And you don't get any water.
The president said last December during a roundtable with business leaders.
Oh, so is during a roundtable.
Then the president went on.
You turn on the faucet and you don't get any water.
They take a shower and water comes dripping out.
Just dripping out. Very quietly dripping out.
The president continued.
Lowering his voice as he spoke about the drips, People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.
Now, I stand corrected.
He said this in the context of a roundtable, but he used his rally speech.
He just did it at the roundtable because it was a...
Now, the fact that anybody could read this and think that he was serious when he says people are flushing their toilets 10 to 15 times.
I mean, I give up after six.
I don't know about you. I've never flushed a toilet 10 to 15 times.
And I figure if this is an average number and it's accurate, there must be people flushing their toilet 25 times to make up for my low number.
But you have to love the way he makes this visual.
So let me read it again, but only listen to it for the extraordinary choice of visual persuasion.
So first of all, you can feel it.
You can feel this, because you can feel the water, as he talks about it.
You can feel it. You can see it.
And those are the two important things.
All right, so we have a situation where...
Talking about the sinks and showers, where you turn the faucet on, all right, so you can already, you know, you're seeing the movie, you turn the faucet on, and in areas where there's tremendous amounts of water, and now you're seeing like this rush of water coming at you, where the water rushes out to sea.
Now I'm seeing the ocean.
I'm seeing the ocean, and I'm seeing this pipe with all the water that came from my house that I couldn't handle.
I couldn't handle that kind of water.
I'm not meant for that kind of water.
I can't handle that. But all this water is rushing through, And it rushes out to the ocean, the sea.
And then you turn the faucet on and you don't get any water.
And now I'm seeing the faucet and there's like nothing coming out.
And it's just dry or sand is coming out.
And it's just dripping out.
Very quietly dripping out.
It's not just dripping out.
It's dripping out so slowly that the drip is quiet.
You can't even hear the drip.
It is such a silent drip.
Now you see the drip, right?
You see it. Now you hear the drip.
You hear the frickin' drip.
It's quiet. Drip, drip, drip.
It's not one of these drip, drip, drip things.
The president is very clear on this.
It's not a big drip. It's a low drip.
They're so bad. All your water, it's rushing out to sea.
It's rushing out to sea, and all you get is...
And you're flushing your toilet, and you're flushing and flushing.
And the flushing the toilet 10 times to 15 times, it's like a little movie within a movie, because you put yourself right in that scene, and you're standing in front of your toilet, and you're like, nope.
Nope. That's 11.
I think four or five more times might get it.
Nope. Anyway.
This is some of the best communication the world has ever seen.
And when I tell you that Trump will be appreciated more every year after his term or terms, however many there end up being, I am really serious about that.
I'm as confident as I could be that as the noise and the fog clears and you just see the things he pulled off, The things he did that other people can't do, won't do, have never done, and will never do again, it is truly extraordinary.
Even if you allow every criticism to be true, the things that he did are just simply extraordinary.
Here's big news.
I guess this was news from June, but I didn't see it until recently.
66 million years ago, an ancient marine reptile That they think was a mosasaur, which is a really big dinosaur, I guess, crawled down to the water and left a football-sized egg in Antarctica, which has been discovered.
So scientists have in their possession a dinosaur egg from an extinct giant marine reptile.
Now, I'm glad I didn't find it first, because...
I would have been tempted to make an omelette out of it, because you don't want to leave it for somebody to clone this egg.
I don't know if it has enough material in it to clone us a proper dinosaur, but I feel like we're getting closer to that, Jurassic Park-wise.
So we're going to maybe have a dinosaur, but I would have just sort of eaten it as an omelette.
I know, you can't really make an omelette out of a fossil.
Come on, come on.
Yeah, I didn't see in the story whether they got any useful DNA out of it.
That would be the big question, right?
And then lastly, President-elect Biden.
Can we call him that? Let's just call him prospective, maybe President Biden.
Probable President Biden.
He picked for his Department of Energy former Governor Jennifer Granholm.
Now here's the fun part of the story.
I've seen Jennifer Granholm as a pundit on CNN, I think just CNN, lots and lots of times.
I didn't know she was a governor.
So I knew she had some role that made her a capable pundit, but I didn't know she was governor.
I only just knew her from lots of appearances on CNN. But here's the funny part.
While I often disagree with people on CNN, I don't often think they're batshit crazy.
So for example, if I see Jake Tapper say something, I might disagree with it, but I don't think he's batshit crazy.
He seems completely sane.
But Jennifer Granholm, and I'm not saying this because she's female, I know, you want to jump on that, right?
Oh, you said a man's not crazy, but why has the woman got to be crazy?
There are plenty of crazy men.
Do you need me to list all the crazy men?
Will you feel better, then, if I do that?
I'm not going to. But there are crazy people all over the place.
But I remember watching her and thinking, well, she is just batshit crazy.
I guess she was a big Russia collusion truther, so she does have a history of being really, really gullible.
Here's the punchline.
She'd be in charge of our nuclear energy, which I think includes nuclear weapons, at least the civilian aspect or scientific aspect of it.
I don't know if Joe Biden could have made a worse choice if he's trying to make me feel comfortable about that area.
I actually can't think of anybody who would make me feel less confident than a serious people.
I mean, really, you can name a lot of people, even people that you're annoyed by, who are, you know, let's say on CNN, but they don't look crazy.
Don Lemon doesn't look crazy.
I mean, unless you count a little bit of TDS. But I think that's a sketchy choice there.
Bye-bye fracking, maybe.
We'll see. I think even fracking is going to be too sticky.
The problem, like I said before, and it applies to a lot of different areas, there are a whole bunch of things that Trump did that even if you wanted to reverse them, they're really sticky.
Take North Korea.
What will Joe Biden do with North Korea?
I don't know if he'll have a meeting with Kim Jong-un, but he's probably not going to want to modify the current situation too much, right?
It's sort of sticky, the way it is.
Adam Schiff looks psychotic.
Well, what would you think if we found out that the main Russia collusion advocates all had some connection with a Chinese spy?
Now, I'm not saying that's the case.
I'm saying... It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?
You know, because you would assume that China would want to redirect our attention toward Russia and away from them, right?
So if it turned out, and I think I tweeted about this as soon as I found out about the Swalwell thing, I think I tweeted that if Adam Schiff doesn't have a close connection to a Chinese spy, I would be surprised.
I don't have any information that that's the case.
But he acts in a way that you look at it and you go, what's going on there?
Is he a 20 percenter?
If I had to guess, probably is.
Probably is. But there's no way to know.
All right, that's all for now. And I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, Periscope is off.
You YouTubers, still here for now.
Yeah.
All right, do you have any questions for me?
uh Am I happier today?
Well, I'm really stoned right now, so that really worked.
People usually think I'm high when I do my morning periscopes.
But I assure you, except for today, that has not been the case.
Alright, thank you.
That is all for now.
Oh yes, and Season 5 of The Expanse, thanks for reminding me.
Season 5 of The Expanse is on tonight, and I will be watching that.
Thoughts on dueling electors?
Well, you know, I guess technically Trump still has some whiff of a chance, but I don't think having a path...
To victory makes any difference at this point.
Because I think the system has decided that it doesn't matter if he has a path or not.
It doesn't matter if the election was thrown.
It doesn't matter how much fraud they find at this point.
I think it's just too late.
All right. That's all for now.
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