Episode 1225 Scott Adams: All the Things China did to us This Year, Election Fake News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Declaring martial law, assigning special counsel
Coronavirus good news (fake news?)
Large Chinese study on asymptomatic spread
The Dalton School's 8 page anti-racism plan
Whiteboard1: High Value Thinkers
Whiteboard2: Triangulate
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
There's room. You made it on time, and congratulations.
Those of you who are here at exactly the appointed time, well, you're the self-starters.
You're the ones who know that life doesn't come to you.
You've got to go to it.
And if you'd like to maximize your experience, and I know you do, All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a steinette 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, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sipping happens now.
Go. Ah, divine.
Well, I don't want to get your hopes up.
But this might be the best coffee with Scott Adams.
Thank you, Erica. And the reason it'll be the best is because we've got some good news on coronavirus and such, and some fun news and some laughs.
Oh yeah, it'll be that good.
Let's start. Did you know that we have our first graduate from what I call the...
Well, a graduate with a life strategy degree.
Those of you who have been following me may have seen me talk about this.
It's the idea that you could create a book list, a list of books, that if someone were to read them in order, they could be said to have achieved a degree of sort.
So I created such a list of books that if you were to read all of these books, I would want to hire you.
Now, of course, those are not the only variables in the world, but if somebody told me they had read all of the books that I recommended for a life strategy degree, that person's going to have a superpower.
Literally, they will be like walking gods among regular people if they have all those strategies.
And so we have our first graduate that I know of.
There might be other people who read all the books that I recommended, but Lyle Lula tells me on Twitter, he has read all of the books in the order in which I recommend it.
Now, in the comments you're saying, hey, where is that book list?
Where can I find that book list?
And you would, well, you would imagine, I know what you're thinking right now, he wouldn't bring this topic up unless he could tell us where the link is to that list of books.
But yeah, I would. Sure I would.
I'm way less organized than you think.
I'm seeing in the comments that I put that on the Locals platform.
So you might have to go to Locals to get it.
Locals.com.
And then look for my name there.
It's a subscription service.
But the point is, you don't need to follow my list of books.
I would like to see other notable people.
People you've heard of.
People maybe that you have some feeling of confidence in.
I'd like to see Warren Buffett tell me the 15 books that if I were to read them, he would say, well, you know, if you got a college degree and you read these 15 books, I'd hire you.
I'd like to see maybe Bill Gates.
You know, your list will be different, but there's some people I would trust absolutely to put together 15 books that would change your life.
All right, here are some predictions I made.
Let's see how I did.
And there should be enough of you who have heard me make these predictions to confirm to the rest of you that I really said this stuff.
I told you that if Biden becomes president, the fake news would shift from mostly being on the left, you know, CNN, to mostly being on the right, let's say Fox News.
So, and the reason for this is that if the president in office Is a Republican, then Fox News can say good things about what he did.
So they have plenty of content saying, oh, Trump did something good, Trump did something else good.
But the other team, the team that doesn't have their warrior in office, doesn't have real accomplishments to talk about, because that's not what they want to talk about.
So instead, they have to invent fake news that becomes their content, because otherwise they don't have enough that their audience wants to look at.
So it was predictable that the bulk of fake news would go from certainly CNN, MSNBC, wall-to-wall fake news for four years, and you're going to see a shift.
Has that happened yet?
Is my prediction correct?
Well, here's what we know.
So Smartmatic, which has been under fire from a lot of people on the right, for their voting system technology and alleged vulnerabilities, and they sent a blistering legal threat to Fox News, which caused Fox News to create a package, as they say in the news business.
A package is a video segment that's recorded, and then they can play it in different times.
And Fox News actually had to build a package and run it on three separate shows saying that their own news was fake.
That actually happened.
Now, I'm exaggerating, right?
So Fox News never said our news is fake, but what they did do is create a package in which they took the very claims that people had been saying are likely true, Such as Venezuelan connections, such as George Soros and stuff.
And apparently they did a point-by-point debunking of the claims from their own network.
And I think it ran on three separate shows, Judge Jeanine and I think Maria Bartiroma and Lou Dobbs on Fox Business.
So I would say that's fairly confirming that At least that news was fake news, right?
I mean, just objectively speaking, I know you, a lot of my viewers are right-leaning, but objectively speaking, if you're just going to be objective, don't you see it?
You see it, right?
Now, CNN and MSNBC are still going to have plenty of fake news, but I think just the emphasis will start moving right, and then if things change, they'll go back.
I also predicted that 95% of election claims would be bogus.
Election claims of fraud, for example, would be bogus, regardless of whether there was fraud.
And of course, it was a big election, so there was some.
It had to be. But would you say that's true?
Given that Fox News just did a package debunking their own news on fraud, I feel like that 95% estimate was pretty good.
I feel like 95% has been debunked.
Now, if you're in the comments and you're saying, my God, no.
There's tons of stuff that hasn't been debunked.
I would say to you, you probably haven't seen the debunk.
Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You might not have seen it.
Because if you're watching mostly right-leaning news, you wouldn't see it.
You'd have to see it somewhere else.
But I try to scan the entire environment.
I would say 95% has been debunked.
Among those things I haven't seen debunked, which doesn't mean they're true, but I haven't seen a debunk for some of the statistical claims.
Now, I've seen a debunk for the one in quadrillion claim that was somewhat easily debunked, but the statistician who says that Wherever there were Dominion and Hart voting machines, there's a clear 5-ish percent bias toward Biden that doesn't make sense in any historical way.
I haven't seen that one debunked.
So it only takes one to be true for the entire election not to be valid, right?
You only need one if it's big enough.
And that one claim would be very much big enough.
I mean, it's way big enough.
So you only need a few to be true.
Doesn't matter that 95% are not.
So we've got some reporting that, who knows, I assume this is fake news.
I'm assuming that it's at least fake-ish news.
And it goes like this.
That President Trump was met with and had considering making Sidney Powell a special counsel to look into the voter fraud.
Does that sound like it's true?
It might be. I don't think that it could possibly make a difference.
Because won't Trump be out of office, allegedly, in a few weeks?
How much could a special counsel do in a lame duck one month?
Kind of nothing. So while I imagine it's true that the idea was floated, so that's probably true.
I think the idea was probably floated, but it looks like it won't happen maybe, and I think maybe it's just not practical, not enough time to make it work.
Then it was also reported that the idea of martial law was raised by General Flynn.
Do you think that's true?
I think that's probably true-ish, meaning that the way they talked about it or the way they reported it might not be exactly the spin that is accurate.
But I would say that it makes perfect sense because Flynn has mentioned this outside of that context.
But here's the part that I don't think the news will tell you.
Do you know...
That martial law has been used lots of times in the United States?
Did you know that? Probably not, right?
Because when you think of martial law, you think of the whole country being sort of locked down and the military is in the streets and, you know, all forms of civilian rule are suspended and stuff.
That's what you think of when you think of martial law, right?
But apparently martial law can be limited to whatever situation is the problem.
So you don't need a martial law that closes down the streets and adds the military instead of the public.
You don't need any of that.
And the ones in the past were similarly limited.
So it's a scary sounding term, but it's not a scary sounding thing.
It's not a scary technique.
It's been used over 60 times, I think, in American history.
You've never even heard of them.
I'll bet there's not one of you who could By memory, without searching for it, I'll bet not one of you could mention a specific case of martial law, even though you've lived through a whole bunch of them.
Right? So, how scary would it be if there were martial law declared about the votes?
Well, probably it would be limited to something like, I'm just guessing, this is speculating, it would be limited to something like using the military to secure the machines.
That's it. That's it.
Just using the military to make sure that you're guarding the machine so you can do a proper audit.
Now, I don't know if that's exactly what Flynn had in mind, but it's an example of how limited martial law can be.
I think I have that right, if somebody wants to correct me on that.
Please do. How would you like to hear some coronavirus good news?
This is all good news.
Some of it is fake news.
Some of what I'm about to tell you almost certainly isn't true, but might be true.
These are things that might be true, and if they are, they'd be good news.
So let me run it by you.
I had been asking provocatively why if hydroxychloroquine, in combination with either zinc or azithromycin or both, If it's so successful, as a lot of retrospective studies say, but not a lot of controlled,
randomized studies say for some reason, I don't know why there aren't many of those, but if it works as well as a lot of people say, but not the officials in control or the experts who seem to have the consensus of things, Wouldn't you see it working in at least one country?
So this was my question.
By now, many months into the pandemic, surely there would be at least one country that would say, we think there's enough here that we're just going to go wild with this.
Everybody's going to get it.
And then you would see if it worked.
It would be really obvious.
Let's say a perfect situation.
France. This did not happen, but I imagine that it could have.
Imagine France said, You know, you're not all convinced about this hydroxychloroquine stuff, but we are.
So for one month, just one month, we're just going to give it to everybody, prophylactically to the extent that we can.
Then just see what France looks like compared to the rest of Europe.
That would tell you something.
I mean, it's not a randomized controlled trial, but I feel like that would be pretty important in terms of knowledge.
But that didn't happen.
However, I was told today that there is a country...
That did that. So we're in good shape, right?
Because there is a country that did exactly that.
The country is Andorra.
You've all been there, right?
Andorra is somewhere in Europe.
It's so tiny, it only has 77,300 people.
It's so small that you have to add the 300.
You know, 77,300 and I think...
The Wilsons just had a kid.
That's 301 for Andorra.
So basically the entire country, tiny country of Andorra, is the size of a small town or a small city, let's say.
And do you think that anything that happens there is representative?
Do they have a good record keeping?
Are they spread out because there's only 77,300 in the whole country?
They're probably not too packed together, I'm thinking.
I don't know anything about Andorra.
But my only point is, why did it have to be, if there had to be one country that did this experiment, why did it have to be the one that doesn't give you good data?
Is that a coincidence?
This is what makes me think the simulation is in effect.
Because it seemed like there were a lot of countries that could have tried this, That would have really had credible record keeping, let's say, South Korea, France, Germany.
But why was it the one place where the numbers are small and it's so different that you just can't tell what you got?
So I'll put this in the maybe good news.
Maybe good news.
So we do have one country that used hydroxychloroquine and say they got good results and maybe that will move the needle if it's true.
There's a new hydroxychloroquine study.
It's a retrospective, so it's not the gold standard kind with randomized controlled trials.
Somebody on Twitter was telling me there are 260 studies on hydroxychloroquine that say it worked.
I think almost all of them are retrospective, not the highest quality kind.
I don't know if there's a gold standard out there yet for hydroxychloroquine.
But apparently, so there's a new one today, but it's only 144 people that once again shows a big difference if you use hydroxychloroquine.
So does that mean hydroxychloroquine works?
I'd say that is not demonstrated yet.
And it's annoyingly obtuse.
I feel as though there should have been Some international hydroxychloroquine committee who would just be the ones who would decide if these studies were good enough or not.
What is the point of following the experts when there are 260 studies pointing in one direction and the experts point in the other direction?
How do you process that as a citizen who is not an expert?
Do you process it as a I feel like there's a massive global conspiracy against hydroxychloroquine.
What would be the other explanation?
With so many studies, the other possibility is that there's something about the nature of a hydroxychloroquine's use That makes all retrospective studies look like it works, but whatever it is that makes it look like it works is sort of a phantom that affects all of them.
So there could be one factor that's not obvious, I don't know what it would be, that does just affect all retrospective studies, but when you do a randomized control study, it scrubs that variable out, and so you don't get the same results.
Could it be that? Can somebody explain to me?
Why so many retrospective studies are in the same direction, but we're still not confirmed that it works?
And by the way, my best instinct on this is that it doesn't work.
Because I think the signal would be so strong by now, months into it, that there would be no doubt about it.
There wouldn't be anybody on the other side if it worked as well as claimed.
If it's true that this is some kind of massive global pharma conspiracy to keep you from using ivermectin, which is another thing that has good press, but we don't know if it's 100%, maybe.
If you told me that the big pharma companies were so powerful that they had forced, effectively, the top experts to say hydroxychloroquine and the other one are not the big answer.
I wouldn't rule that out.
Because let's game this out in our heads.
Let's say that it was true, worst case scenario.
We'll just be conspiracy theorists for a moment.
Let's say that the big pharma companies thought that they wouldn't make enough money on vaccines or whatever, therapeutics, if hydroxychloroquine did work, and they actually hired dark arts people to set up a propaganda thing and And maybe influence a few top doctors.
How many doctors would you have to bribe or influence?
Let's say you're a pharma company.
How many doctors would you have to bribe or influence to make sure that you had controlled doctors in general?
Because you don't have to influence them all directly, right?
You have to get the key doctors, the ones that have the most credibility and the most reach.
If you just influenced I'll pick a number.
If you manipulated and influenced, let's say, the 200 most influential epidemiologists and medical professionals, would you have influenced them all?
Somebody says 100.
I feel like if you influenced 200 medical scientific types who were the most credible in this area, You don't have to influence the rest of them, I feel like.
So is it doable?
Could it actually be done?
Do you think that the pharma companies don't already have a major connection with the top 200 people in the field?
Think about it. Do you think the top 200 people don't already have pharmaceutical contracts?
Or at least they think they might work for them in the future?
I feel as if that's not a high bar for the pharma companies to influence 200 doctors that probably already have a relationship with them.
If they didn't already have a relationship, then that's a little extra work, right?
But if you already have a relationship, and your pharma company that's paying you...
I'll just pick an example.
Let's say your pharma company is arranging speaking deals for you, They're actually coming to you with speaking offers and say, hey, there's a group we're working with.
They'll pay you $20,000 to give a speech.
We'll fly you there and put you up in a first-class hotel.
What do you say? And the doctor says, really?
I don't have to lie or anything.
I'll just go and say what I want to say.
And the pharma company says, yeah, absolutely.
Because we're your friend and we like you.
We heard of this offer and we thought you'd be perfect for it.
When that doctor, who might be making, let's say, $80,000 a year extra because a pharma company is bringing him offers, does that person say something that puts the pharma company against him?
Kind of hard. So I don't think you can rule out a massive global conspiracy because it would probably only have to affect 200 people that they already affect.
It might be. Here's the scary part.
It might be.
Really easy. I don't know that, but it might be.
I mean, common sense tells me a pharma company could get to 200 people that they already control pretty easily.
But I'm not going to say that's happening.
I'm just saying that, theoretically, I don't see what would stop it.
Alright, here's the fact that is going to make me lose my shit.
I'm going to keep it together today.
But I'm going to tell you something.
That if this checks out to be true, I'm going to lose my fucking shit.
But I'll keep it together today.
We'll give it a day or so, let people weigh in, tell me if this is true or not, because it might be just not true, or maybe there's a spin on it that I haven't thought of.
But here's the fact that if this is true, you're going to lose your fucking shit too.
You ready? You need to be prepared for this one.
Be prepared. You're gonna get mad.
Okay? There's a Chinese study of 10 million people who had coronavirus.
10 million. 10 million people, all right?
And of 10 million people, they tried to figure out what percentage of them got the COVID from asymptomatic spreading.
So we know that most of the spreading seems to be from people who have symptoms.
But the reason for the lockdowns is primarily the asymptomatic people, right?
Because if you only needed to stop the people who had symptoms, it would be a little easier.
You just say, hey, you have a symptom?
Don't come in the store.
You have a symptom? You can't be in the restaurant.
Now, you wouldn't stop everybody.
Some people would still come in with symptoms, but that's the current case.
That's the current situation.
People still cheat a little bit.
But the entire lockdown thing, I think you could say, and again, fact check this, wouldn't you say that the entire lockdown, and even the mask situation, has mostly to do with asymptomatic spread, because you don't know who has it and who doesn't have it, so you've got to do maximum control.
True? So far am I true.
All right, give me a fact check as I go.
Because really, I don't want to lose it on this, but I'm right on the edge.
And I think you're going to be in a minute.
So out of 10 million people that the Chinese checked, so they do, you know, they check to see as best they can where they got it.
And out of 10 million people who got the coronavirus in China, what percentage of them, or even what number, you could do number or percentage, What number of them were determined to have caught it from asymptomatic spreading?
Zero. Zero.
And of 10 million.
Zero. There's a new Journal of American Medical Association, JAMA, whatever they are, They did a meta-analysis of 54 studies with 77,000 participants, and they found that the odds of getting an infected person infecting somebody in the home is 18% if they're symptomatic.
So if there's somebody in your home who has symptoms, there's an 18% chance that at least one other person will get it in the household.
Now, what are the odds, according to these 54 studies, that someone in the household would get it if the only person who has it already is asymptomatic?
0.7%.
Less than 1%.
If you're symptomatic, 18.
Now, who's right?
Is China right that the number is literally 0%?
Or is this a meta-analysis of 54 studies?
77,000 participants, so plenty of people.
Are they right when they say it's 0.7?
In other words, less than 1%.
I'm not sure it matters, does it?
Because those are close enough that I don't believe that they can collect data that would be more accurate than 1%, do you?
Wouldn't you say that you don't really know if you got it from the asymptomatic person or the symptomatic person?
You know, if you know there was somebody coughing, you don't know you got it from that person.
You could have gotten it from the person you're sitting next to who doesn't have any symptoms.
How would you really know?
So the first thing you have to add to this is, can you really do contact tracing?
Is that a thing? Now, it's obviously a thing because people do it, and the experts say it works.
But is it a thing where you can usually tell where you got it?
Or is it a thing where you sort of just got a good idea, right?
Because basically you're asking the person, where have you been?
Maybe sometimes you can check it with digital stuff.
But you're kind of relying on the least credible source, which is a human saying, no, I I think I saw somebody cough at the grocery store.
I don't know. It seems to me you can't accurately collect this data, right?
I feel like when you've got a number like the asymptomatic spreading of 77,000 people was 0.7, that feels like total bullshit to me, doesn't it?
Because it could be 5% or it could be zero, but it's going to be a pretty gross estimate.
However, Ten million Chinese and not one.
Not one? Not one!
Now, I don't believe that.
Do you? Do you believe that out of ten million people there were not a single asymptomatic spread?
No. If you believe that, you're an idiot.
There's no way that that's true.
It may be true that they recorded it that way and that nobody had a story of anybody who was asymptomatic.
But here's the thing.
If this checks out that we can be sure that asymptomatic spreading is well under 1%, everything we did with masks and shutdowns was a waste of time.
Now, if we didn't know this, And we did all those things.
I give that a free pass.
Remember, some of you remember that early on in the pandemic, I said this.
It's going to be fog of war, and we're going to be asking our leaders to make life and death decisions, and they won't have the right information to make those life and death decisions, but we're going to make them do it.
It's their job.
They've got to make a decision.
Do something. You're the leader, but you don't have any good information.
If they get it wrong, is it their fault?
I said in advance we should give all of our leaders a pass for any mistakes during the coronavirus.
Trump probably lost his job.
Trump probably lost his job by being right.
In other words, Trump's, you know, let's say his less Emphasis on lockdowns and less emphasis on schools being closed and less emphasis on masks.
Probably, if this asymptomatic study is right, Trump might have been right about everything.
At this sitting, at this moment in time, there's a non-zero chance Trump was right about fucking everything, including hydroxychloroquine.
Now, I'm not saying that hydroxychloroquine works.
I still think it's likely it doesn't, or at least it doesn't work enough.
But at this point, there is the bulk of science...
The great weight of current science...
Fact check me on this. In my opinion, at this moment, the weight of science is strongly on Trump's side.
Fact check me.
You tell me that that's not true as of today, given that the asymptomatic stuff...
Now, we may learn that there is more asymptomatic spreading than these two studies showed, but at current knowledge, current knowledge, just what we know today, Trump was fucking right about everything, and he lost his job.
He lost his job being right about everything.
That actually happened.
I believe that happened.
Now, we could find out that he wasn't right about everything, because what we think is true just keeps changing.
But that's a kick in the nuts, I'll tell you.
All right, here's some more.
Apparently, here's a little conspiracy theory for you.
I don't know what to believe about this.
I'll just pass it along because it's a fun story.
But, you know, people have been complaining that the current tests for coronavirus were too sensitive.
Apparently you can dial up the sensitivity or dial it down.
And using the technical words, it's, I don't know, the RCT or the cycles have to be, you know, under 25 or 30 or all that.
So the details don't matter.
But apparently the World Health Organization has just said that the tests had been running at too high a sensitivity.
And so, the conspiracy theory goes like this.
Did the World Health Organization not know, before vaccines were available, did they not know that these tests were being set to be too sensitive?
Meaning that they found a lot of people who had Apparently, coronavirus, but they didn't.
Meaning maybe they had some dead viruses in them from the past, but they didn't have coronavirus, and they weren't symptomatic.
But the World Health Organization now says, oh, you've been testing, too sensitive.
So there's some potentially huge number of people who did not have coronavirus in a way that they could spread it anyway, who were diagnosed as having it.
Is it a coincidence that they revised their thinking so that the vaccines will look really, really effective?
Because it's a coincidence.
I mean, it could be just that this is the normal timing of things.
But the conspiracy theory is around, you knew this before, the vaccines.
Why are you only telling us after the vaccines?
Is that a coincidence? It might be.
Now, suppose that this is true and that while the virus is real, you know, it's a real virus, it's really killing people, but the degree of how many people are affected was completely fraudulent because the tests were set in the wrong way.
Is that possible?
Well, the World Health Organization is indicating it is.
That a lot of people are setting the test too high.
Do you know what that means?
It means Trump is fucking right again.
That the reason there are so many apparent infections is because of the testing.
And maybe not exactly the way he said it, but it would mean that we had over-tested too sensitively and artificially shown numbers too high.
I'm not going to give... I'm not going to give Trump an A-plus on that, but his instinct that testing was misleading us, he might have been right.
He might have been right.
All right, here's another example where my complete lack of embarrassment comes in useful, and I talk about this as a superpower, something I've learned over the years.
It's not something you're born with, because we're born with an ability to be embarrassed quite easily.
You have to really work To make it not bother you and not be a thing in your life.
But at this point, I would say I can report that I don't really get embarrassed.
I just don't.
And it really works well.
Here's an example. So in a recent live stream, I made a completely inaccurate statement that our air conditioning systems...
Do not use this UV light, the special far UV that we know kills the virus.
There might be some other kind of UV light in some units, but basically it's not a thing.
Turns out it's a thing.
Turns out I'm completely wrong.
So everything you heard me say, and again, here's where my lack of embarrassment comes in handy.
One of the ways you can attract right information and help is by doing something wrong in public.
I do this a lot and it works really well.
When I do things wrong in public, there's no cost to me because I don't have embarrassment.
But the effect is that all the people who know I did something stupid, they flow in and say, oh, let me correct you.
Here's the link. Here's some knowledge you didn't know.
And then I share it with you.
So we're all going to get smarter because I lack embarrassment.
You see how this works? My lack of embarrassment will now educate you because it caused people to flow in and correct me.
So Christian Holler tells me this.
I'll just read what he said because he said it well.
He said he was surprised about my comments about UV systems not having that.
He said this is incorrect. All that we have checked, so he's involved in this industry, he says all that we have checked use UVC. Which is the correct term for far UVC. So I think one of my problems was that I didn't recognize that UVC is synonymous with far UV. So I think that was part of the reason I thought it wasn't the same light.
And then there was some Duke study that says that many of the commercial and residential systems have two UVC devices on them.
And that you would see them in purifiers for hospitals and stethoscopes, sterilizers, and there are vendors testing it.
It's a big thing. And there are a few different technologies.
So it's not just the UVC light, but there's also some kind of hydrogen peroxide and O3, but it's not legal in California because of ozone or whatever.
So there are a few different technologies.
But here's the problem.
They're expensive, so they're not going to be in your house.
So they're expensive, you can put them in a big system in a hospital, but maybe too expensive for your house.
Here's what I'd like to know.
Do we have enough data yet that we can determine that the locations that have this technology have less spread than the places that don't?
Now, you won't be able to check households, but it looks like at this point you could check maybe a hospital, You could probably check a senior home.
You could check any facility that has one of these and say, how do they compare to the ones that don't have them?
So this, again, is something that I feel like if nobody's working on finding out that, if you can tell the difference, the places that have it versus that don't, that's a big, big deal, isn't it?
Like a big, big, big, big deal?
If it works. Because if it works, that means it's just a case of money.
Now, what Christian said when he was correcting me, he said that, I believe that they've had this technology in his home, and they haven't had, we no longer get colds.
It's been 10 years now.
So his family has been 10 years without a cold.
I don't know how that works if you ever leave the house, but good for them.
Apparently, we have learned that China employed a vast army of propaganda people to manage the coronavirus messaging.
When it became clear that it came out of China, China said, uh-oh, we've got a PR problem, and they mobilized, apparently, an enormous army of people to manage the message.
And some of the words that they did not want to be in headlines were these.
Incurable. Fatal.
And lockdown about travel articles.
So the Chinese presumably were managing even our press.
I don't know how directly or how much they could do it, but it was their job to manage the press and the world.
So one assumes that they were at least trying to influence our local press.
And I don't remember seeing a lot of the word incurable and fatal, but we did use lockdown a lot, at least on social media.
So I don't know how much effect they have, but here's a question I have.
Our media reported nonstop, the fake news media, not the real news, but the fake news reported that President Trump had recommended drinking bleach.
Anderson Cooper and CNN, they actually report it with those words.
The actual words, drinking bleach.
Now, I have a question for you.
How do we know that didn't come from Chinese influence?
Is it possible that China, when they heard that people were saying, you know, the president suggested drinking bleach, would the Chinese propaganda people say, whoa, what did we just hear?
What did we just hear?
Let's amplify this one.
Is it possible that the reason half of the people in the United States literally believe that the president once speculated about drinking bleach to cure coronavirus, as if that actually happened, is that because of China?
I don't know. But don't you have to ask the question at this point?
If we know that they were influencing our understanding of the coronavirus, and we know they didn't like Trump, and we know that that's not true that he said anything about drinking bleach...
Did it come from China? Or did they at least push it?
I think it probably happened naturally in terms of the story, but I'll bet they pushed it a little.
So as you know, Pompeo has said that our big hack that got into all of our systems in the United States, you know that story, the solar wind hack, he says that it's, quote, pretty clearly Russia behind it.
Pretty clearly it's Russia.
But President Trump has speculated now in public that Maybe it was China.
Are these two statements in conflict?
Is there any conflict to say that it's pretty clearly Russia, where Trump says maybe it's China?
Well, they're not exactly conflicting, but they're not really compatible either.
It would be better if the message had been cleanly one or the other or some hybrid, but it's not exactly contradicting it.
Because you could be pretty sure that it was Russia and then later find out it was actually China.
So I don't think Trump is wrong about that.
And his instincts on stuff are shockingly good in a lot of ways, wouldn't you say?
You make all the criticisms you want about Trump and his tweets and whatever.
But I don't think at this point you can really question his instincts.
I feel like he proved that.
I feel like he proved his instincts are good.
And here's my instinct about that hack.
I don't feel like Russia would have been very smart to be behind it.
Given all of the attention on Russia, and specifically this exact problem, especially if it got into the election stuff, I feel like it could have been Russia.
Clearly it could have been Russia.
You can't say that's a low likelihood.
It clearly could have been Russia.
But doesn't China want Trump out of office more than Russia?
That would be the common thinking, right?
I don't know. I think that Trump just assumes China would be more of a malign influence than Russia at the moment.
He could be completely wrong, but I don't think he can rule it out.
I'd say maybe.
How about Biden is using what I would call the pointy-haired boss technique.
Now, in Dilbert, the comic, I write about corporate strategies for getting ahead at the expense of other people and stockholders.
And there's something I'd call the pointy-haired boss technique.
Now, that's a general term, but this fits under it.
So what we're going to watch is that during the context of the vaccines being rolled out, Joe Biden needs to do something artificial that he can later claim was the real reason the virus was conquered.
Because the vaccinations will take care of the virus.
Don't you all think that?
I mean, I think everybody agrees that at some point, I don't know how long it'll take, but at some point, the vaccinations will actually eradicate the virus.
Could happen maybe by June, but it's definitely going to happen during the alleged potential Biden administration.
So Biden has to do the pointy-haired boss technique.
He has to do something that doesn't have anything to do with vaccinations while he's also working on the vaccinations.
Because the vaccinations are sort of a Trump success.
And he needs to say that he did something else that was really important to the success.
So if he pushes masks and lockdowns, and let's say he gets some action there, after the vaccinations cure the problem, he will be able to look the public in the eye and say, thank goodness we had that lockdown.
It made all the difference.
Thank goodness I was tough on wearing masks.
It might be that none of that makes a difference.
As long as you control the symptomatic people, maybe it doesn't make a difference.
But that's a really good play.
So from the perspective of, is it smart?
Yeah, it's really smart.
So what Biden should do to create the false impression that he solved the pandemic is anything.
Just do anything. And then say that's the thing that mattered.
Of course you'll say the vaccinations also mattered, but you'll be able to claim some credit.
So in New York City, there's a private school called the Dalton School.
And they have made a bunch of proposals.
I guess this is a response to the George Floyd situation.
So they made a bunch of proposals about making the school more, let's say, less systemic racist, I guess.
And so I want to give you my impression of, I'm guessing, there might have been some white people on the committee.
And I will play the part of an average white person on the committee...
When the committee is making the following proposals and we're discussing them.
And the first proposal is...
I've got an idea.
We'd like to assign a staffer who will be dedicated to helping black students who are having some trouble or complaints in what is a predominantly white institution.
Does anybody have a problem with having one assigned staffer who's just there as a resource To help our black students who might feel a little in a place or might need a little advice.
Everybody, let's go around the table.
Scott? Scott, what do you think of that?
Just one staffer who's sort of a resource for our black students.
What do you think? I'd say, oh, it's not bad.
You know, we don't know if that's going to make a difference, but it's not much of an expense.
I would say that's a strong proposal.
Yeah, I'm good with that.
I say yes. So yes on idea one.
Having somebody who's a resource.
Idea 2. We want to hire 12 full-time diversity officers and multiple psychologists to support students who are, quote, coping with race-based traumatic stress.
12? I don't know how big the school is, but it feels like a lot.
So let's go around the table.
What do you say? Scott, what do you think about this?
Well, I like the concept.
Concept's okay, you know, directionally.
But 12?
Do we need 12 of these plus some psychologists?
Whoa, Scott!
Oh, we invited you on this committee hoping you would try to be helpful.
We didn't expect you to go full Hiller in the first meeting.
And I say, I'm not really even much objecting to the idea.
I'm just saying that Maybe 12 is a big number, plus the psychology.
I'm just talking about the number of them.
I'm not even really pushing back on the concept so much.
Yeah, that's pretty much how racists act.
Good try. Good try trying to pull it back now, because it's out.
I mean, you've said it.
Let's move on to the next thing, racist.
Next proposal is...
We want to compensate any student of color who appears in Dalton promotional materials.
Let's go around the table.
Scott, what do you think of that?
I'm not sure I understand this.
Are you saying that if a white student is in our promotional materials, they won't get paid?
But a person of color, if they're doing exactly the same work, that they would get paid?
Am I hearing this right?
Yeah, that's the idea.
That's exactly the idea.
I'm a little...
I'm a little bit uncomfortable with this one.
I sort of like where you're going with the other ones, but...
I'm now feeling a little bit uncomfortable.
Get the fuck out of here, you fucking racist.
You racist.
Hitler, get out of here.
You are off the committee.
Scene. Imagine, if you will, literally...
Some white person trying to push back on any of this bullshit.
Now, when I call it bullshit, there's actually some good stuff in here.
Some of it is completely well-meaning, and I look at it and go, oh, yeah, it would be.
It looks like a good idea to have a dedicated staffer, you know, somebody that you could go to.
But look at some of these other ideas.
Requiring anti-racism statements from all staffers.
So every staffer will be forced to say what they're told to say.
Seem good? In America?
How about abolishing high-level academic courses by 2023 if the performance of black students is not on par with non-blacks?
So just stop being a school if black people don't perform well.
How about this one? They'll donate 50% of all their fundraising to New York City public schools if Dalton is not representative of the city in terms of gender, race, and socioeconomic background and immigration status by 2025.
So they're saying that all the private citizens who are donating to the schools, because usually they either went to the school or their kid is there, so they will take those donations that are meant for the children's school, And they'll take half of them and give it away to something else that people did not want to donate to, and is in fact funded by the government, if they don't match the demographic profile of the city.
Some of the worst ideas I've ever seen in my life.
These are really some of the worst ideas I've ever seen.
And there's a whole list of these, and every one is worse than the one before.
But we have reached a point where you cannot show your opinion In public.
It's quite obvious, it's really obvious, that the reason you get this Dalton School thing is that there was nobody at the school who could tell you their real opinion.
Nobody. There was not a single white person involved in that who had any power or had the ability to simply disagree and say, you know, I think this makes things worse.
None. Free speech At the company level.
It used to be when I was in the corporate world, the most basic thing was you don't criticize when you're brainstorming.
So that part's good.
But you could pretty much say anything you wanted.
If you believed it and it was true and you could back it up.
You were free to say that a bad idea was bad.
But you're not able to do that anymore.
You actually can't say a bad idea is bad In a meeting in which you've been asked to give your opinion on the idea.
You just can't do it anymore.
If it's this topic, anyway.
And... All right.
No free speech, no freedom.
That's true. Sums up today's curriculum.
This is my show for today.
I think I hit everything that I wanted to do.
Got you plenty. That's all you want.
Oh, um...
That's all. Alright, here is the payoff.
Let's go to the whiteboard. Are you ready?
I want to teach you how to know what is true and what is not true, at least in the terms of things that are in the political news.
And here's an approach I would like to promote.
And it goes like this.
You should create your own list, and I'll give you my starter list, of what I call high-value thinkers.
Now, I don't want to call them like the The intellectual dark web.
I don't want it to be a club.
So it's not a fraternity.
It's not a club. It's not some group that's, you know, a fixed group.
But rather, it's in my experience and opinion, a number of people, I'm just using Twitter as my field here, my canvas, a number of people who I would say are unusually credible and also well-informed.
So you would have to be credible and And well-informed.
What makes you credible? The only thing that makes you credible is that you have a history of sometimes taking the opposite opinion.
In other words, if you're associated with the left or the right, have you ever, even once, agreed with the other side in public?
All right? Now, this list is not complete.
I literally ran in a room, and so if you see somebody who Belongs on the list and isn't here.
I see a lot of people saying, where's Ben Shapiro on the list?
And maybe he belongs on the list.
Cheryl Atkinson's on the list.
I see you suggesting that.
So it's not complete.
You can add other people.
But let me just run through these to tell you what it is that makes this group special and why I think they're high-value thinkers and why, if you're trying to decide if something in the news is true or not, These are the people to go to.
But then there's going to be a second part of this that will be on the other side.
So, for example, you've seen Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley know everything there is to know about the law, it seems, anyway.
Both of them are capable of supporting something on the left or something on the right.
They do it all the time.
They're really smart, and they usually are really good.
Oh, Robert Barnes.
I would put Robert Barnes on there as well.
So there are a number of names that do belong on here.
I was just trying to give you a starter list.
Cernovich, you can guarantee that Cernovich is giving you an actual opinion, not a political, I'm on a team kind of opinion, because he does it all the time.
Now, Are all the people on this list right about stuff?
No. You'll see some people on this list who are famous for getting stuff wrong, but they don't get most things wrong.
You can still get something wrong, no matter how smart you are.
Oh, I did have Ben Shapiro on the list.
I forgot. So the people on the left are people who have experience in the law or law enforcement, in the case of Bongino.
So if you have anything that has a legal element to it, This is a good list of people.
Andres Backhouse, I use him as my go-to for anything data or logic or economic related.
He's just an extraordinary source.
I don't even know if he's left or right, which is amazing.
Imagine interacting with somebody on a regular basis about politics and you don't know what their opinion is, left or right.
That's like a home run, right?
If you can pull that off, Interact on politics extensively, and when you're done, people go, I don't even know, does he lean conservative?
I can't even tell. That's good, right?
So Andres Backhouse, Molly Hemingway, I put on the list just as one of the clearest thinkers with the best, you know, full historical understanding of issues and politics, etc., Dana Prino, you can see her on both sides of issues all the time.
You would never expect her to say anything that she knew to be untrue.
It just wouldn't happen. But you do see lots of pundits say things that you think, I think even they know that's not true.
But you would never get that out of the people on this list.
Glenn Greenwald, tremendous voice, different look on a lot of things.
Matt Taibbi, associated with the left, but he's willing to cross over.
I put Smirconish on there from CNN. Smirconish, I'm going to keep giving him props for being nonpolitical on a political show.
Again, he is so fair-minded that he really stands out on CNN. He's actually quite special that way.
Greg Gottfeld, you'll see him follow the data and the issues wherever they go.
Dr. Drew for medical stuff, if I've got a nuclear energy question, Mark Schneider.
If it's anything about climate change or the environment, Michael Schellenberger and then Cheryl Atkinson.
A great political investigative voice.
So anybody on that list would be strong, but since not all of them are right all the time, here's the second part.
You want to triangulate.
I'll use that word.
Pick three people from your list, and here's just an example.
So if there's a specific topic, and let's say you pick three people and they all agree.
You've got a Mike Cernovich, he says, yeah, that's true.
You've got a Molly Hemingway, she says, yeah, that's true.
And you've got Andres Backhaus who says, yeah, the data looks right, the economic argument looks right.
If these three people say something's true, bet on it.
Bet on it. And you can replace any of these three people with the correct choices from the other side of the board.
So it doesn't have to be these three.
These are just three examples. If it were a legal question, you'd want Dershowitz to be in one of these boxes.
If it's an environmental question, you want Mike Schellenberger to be in one of these boxes.
So this is the technique.
I'm seeing a lot of suggestions of people I definitely do not believe belong on the list.
I don't want to call out the ones that I think don't belong on the list.
Because I don't need to be insulting anybody.
But there are definitely some suggestions you made that I wouldn't get anywhere near this list.
And the reason is that they have a history of taking a political side Even if the data doesn't quite support it.
So that's sort of my tell for somebody who's not going to be a credible person.
Now, let's say you picked your three people and any two of them said, yeah, that's true, but one says it's not.
Well, if the one who says it's not is the subject matter expert, maybe you would weigh that.
But if they're all, say, equally qualified for whatever this question is, two out of three probably tells you it's likely...
But not guaranteed. So I think that would be meaningful.
You don't need to have three out of three, but three out of three is better.
Alright. Somebody says Rush is always right.
So actually, let me use Rush Limbaugh as an example of somebody who's tremendously knowledgeable and qualified in lots of ways.
But he does a political entertainment show.
So he does take a side.
He does a great job of defending his side, but he's really about a side.
So he would not be on my list, even though he's tremendous for the specific thing he tells you he's doing, which is entertainment.
He does that really well.
So here's the technique.
Look for people who can be on both sides of an issue.
Let me take just one example.
Mark Levin. I saw that name go by.
Mark Levin, super smart in the law and in politics.
So if you want somebody who knows the topic, Mark Levin would be great.
But ask yourself this.
Have you seen him take a Democrat side of anything?
Personally, I haven't.
If I had, he'd be on the list.
If you've seen him take the other side of an issue ever, Then you should put him on your list.
I just haven't personally seen it.
So I don't have that assurance yet.
So he's not on my list. So the importance of this is this.
We live in a world of super fake news.
Can't trust the network news.
Can't trust your favorite news source.
Can't trust anything you see on social media in isolation.
So if you're trying to creep toward the truth, I recommend this system.
Get yourself a list of credible people.
Pick any three of them that make sense for the topic.
And make sure that those three people are on the same side.
Otherwise, some uncertainty would be in order.
All right, that's all for today.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, there's your lesson for the day.
I like all the suggestions that people are making on different people to add to that.
You know, I didn't put any straight news people on there.
If I had, I would have put, well, there are a number of straight news people that you could put there, but the straight news people, I feel like they've already told you what they know.