Episode 1241 Scott Adams: How the Fake News Industry Manufactures HOAXES, Using Today's Fresh Example
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Content:
John McCain bribery claim
Employees at Google forming a union for what?
Lin Wood tweets
Data Integrity Group's intriguing claim
President Trump's call to Brad Raffensperger
Whiteboard: Hoax Creation
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Nope. I'm glad we saved up all the craziness for the first weekday after the holidays.
I feel like I was worried things might get boring, but then we've got the lizard squad.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
I said lizard squad.
That's actually in the news.
The Lizard Squad.
But before we get to that fun news, all you need to enjoy this in the maximum possible way.
And why would you settle for anything less, frankly?
Would you? No.
No, you're not going to settle for less.
So get your cup or mug or glass, tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, and...
Get ready to maximize your experience with the little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
Feeling connected to people all over the world.
Better than even fungi.
Yeah. You think fungi are connected underneath the forest floor?
Well, they are. But not as much as we're going to be connected in a moment with a simultaneous sip.
The dopamine here in the day. Have I built this up a little too much?
Go. No.
No, I didn't build it up too much.
It was just as good as I thought it would be.
Sometimes I think I'm exaggerating, and then...
No. Not exaggerating at all.
Story number one.
A fellow named Tyler Bowyer reports that he was elected to the GOP chair in Maricopa County, and he says he met with then...
Senator McCain, who is now the late Senator McCain, and he said he met with him just out of respect for the office and that, this is what he said, he tried to buy me off by offering local chamber money, chamber of commerce, I guess, local chamber money he said he controlled.
He wasn't shy about it.
It didn't work.
Now what do you think of that story?
Does that sound true?
Well, Senator McCain is not here to defend himself, so it's a little bit unfair because the person isn't here to defend himself.
But I don't see anything about it that strikes me as a lie.
I mean, it Doesn't seem like something you would make up because it's got this detail about the chamber money he said he controlled.
That's not exactly the kind of lie you would make up, right?
If you're going to make this up as a lie, you would say, Senator McCain said he had some money, you know, and he would put it my way or something.
But you wouldn't say something so specific that he controlled the chamber money.
That's pretty specific.
I think he's telling the truth.
And my only comment on this is that I prefer bribers who don't get caught.
And scene.
In other news, some employees of Google and Alphabet are trying to organize to create a union.
We don't know how well they'll do, but I wondered, why do you need a union at Google?
You always hear it's like the best place to work and people are fighting to work there and salaries are good and benefits are great and it's a prestigious job in the middle of the most active industry in the world and a great place to live in many places, depending on where the office is.
Why would you need a union?
And so I looked at the details.
Turns out they're not so focused on compensation.
No. They're not really focused on working conditions.
Some of the things you would expect from a union.
Nope. They're focused on the lack of wokeness at Google.
Because as woke as Google is, it's not woke enough.
Because it's doing contracts for the Department of Defense.
Protect the country, homeland security.
So that's no good, according to these folks at Google.
And what else have they done?
They've profited from advertisements by hate groups.
Now, when I say hate group, I mean a group that somebody else doesn't like.
Maybe that group is a hate group.
Maybe they're not. But if you hate them, well, let's call them a hate group.
It's close enough. So those were the two things that they surfaced as being worthy of note for their major claims are two wokeness items.
Now, how perfect is it that Google could be taken down by wokeness?
I don't know that it'll happen, but it's a fun story.
But not as fun as...
Yeah, I'm going to get to Trump's phone call.
I'm building you up to it.
This is the build-up.
So, attorney Lin Wood, who, as you know, is working for the president's benefit on the election fraud stuff, but that's not all he's doing.
It turns out that Lin Wood has something else to say today.
Totally believable.
And it goes like this.
Now, let me be very clear, this is not my opinion.
What you're going to hear now is somebody else's opinion.
Or fact, we don't know, but it goes like this.
Linwood tweeted, I believe Chief Justice John Roberts and a multitude of powerful individuals worldwide are being blackmailed in a horrendous scheme involving rape and murder of children Captured on videotape.
It's captured on videotape.
Well, if it's captured on videotape, obviously it's true, because there's never anything that's on videotape that's not true.
Hold that thought.
Hold that thought for later.
But given that it's right there on video, And apparently he has access to it.
There's a crypto key and there's a file and something and he apparently has access to it.
Wouldn't you think you might see, I don't know, one screenshot, for example?
I don't have to see the whole video because it sounds like the video is pretty bad, which totally exists.
And you know why you know it exists?
It comes from a credible source.
The Lizard Squad.
Now, if you are going to be a credible organization, one way to advertise your credibility is to name yourself The Lizard Squad.
There are apparently some hackers who got into these files and have determined that these are actual files showing rape and murder of children.
Wouldn't you expect to see at least a screen grab?
Maybe not something that shows the whole story, but wouldn't you like to know that at least Chief Justice Roberts is on it?
Because if he's not on one of these videos, I'm not so sure there's any kind of evidence.
And by now, wouldn't we see at least a screenshot?
Not the whole video.
Of course. We don't want to see that.
But a screenshot?
Or how about, has he shown it to somebody else?
Let's say a prosecutor.
Has he shown it to a prosecutor?
And has the prosecutor said, yes, I've looked at this video.
Looks real to me.
Or at least something I need to look into to find out if it's real.
Where's that? Kind of missing.
Kind of missing. Well, here's my take on this.
I think the odds that John Roberts is on any kind of a blackmail video are really, really small.
Like really, really small.
Like if you were to take all of the allegations that have ever been made since the beginning of time and rank them from most credible to least, this might be close to least.
Now, Let me say this as clearly as I can, because I know you're not going to hear me.
This is one of those topics where I could look at you and say, 2 plus 2 equals 4, and a lot of you will go away saying, he keeps saying 2 plus 2 is 5.
I don't know what's wrong with him.
And I'll just say, 2 plus 2 is 4, and you'll hear 2 plus 2 is 5.
It's going to happen right now.
Are you ready? It'll happen right now, not to all of you, but some of you watching We'll hear 2 plus 2 is 5 when I say 2 plus 2 is 4.
Are you ready? Here it comes.
I'm guaranteed it's got to be true that there are very important people who are being blackmailed by major intelligence services.
That's got to be true.
Because it falls into the category of something that would have a high upside potential, blackmailing important people, If you're an intelligence agency, your risk of getting in trouble for it is zero.
Because that's actually your job.
Is somebody going to say, hey, intelligence agency, your guy is trying to blackmail me?
And what is the boss of the guy doing the blackmailing going to say?
Is he going to say, oh, I'm going to fire that guy?
No. No, the head of the agency would say, well, that's why we hired him.
He's supposed to be blackmailing you.
And by the way, he did a good job, so you better shut up.
Because we got all the evidence on you.
So if you have a case where there's no risk of penalty, at least for the person doing the blackmailing, because it's literally their job in an intelligence agency, there's a gigantic upside.
And then the third thing that's necessary to be guaranteed that it happens is that there are a lot of people involved.
If there were only one important person in the world...
Well, there's a pretty good chance they haven't murdered or raped anybody.
But if you have lots of leaders, you can guarantee some number of them, and it might be a pretty big percentage, like an alarming percentage of them, 20%, 30%, 50%, it's a big number, have done at least something they could be blackmailed for.
Maybe it's 80%.
But I would say minimum 30% of leaders have something they could be blackmailed for.
So under those conditions, what are the odds that there are sexual predators and rapists, I guess that's the same, in government in major roles?
The answer is 100%.
There's a 100% chance that people in power are doing bad things.
There's a 100% chance that intelligence agencies are trying to find out about them.
There's a 100% chance that in some number of cases they have succeeded.
And there's a 100% chance that it makes a difference.
That some intelligence agencies have leverage over a number of people.
Now, that said, if you were to pick any one allegation about any one person, and here's an example, a An allegation, the worst possible allegation against Chief Justice Roberts, what are the odds that any one specific thing is true in the context of knowing that the larger story is definitely true?
There definitely are people doing bad things, definitely being blackmailed by intelligence agencies, probably more than one of them at the same time.
Those two things are not incompatible.
So do you hear this? It can be definitely true that it's happening, while almost statistically, you know, if you're just going to put an odds on it, any one person who gets accused, very low odds.
So I would say the odds that Chief Justice Roberts is actually doing anything like any of these allegations, vanishingly small.
So small I wouldn't even think of it as being in the category of things that might be true.
That's how small the odds of this being true are.
At the same time, It could be true that there's this stuff going on, but not for any individual.
You can't make that claim. So unless he's got a screenshot of Justice Roberts, I would not look for that to be true.
All right. The Epoch Times is reporting.
There was a data analysis by something called the Data Integrity Group, so I guess they do data analysis.
And they did a time series looking at all the votes coming in on Election Day and make the following claim, that at least over 400,000 votes were switched.
Switched meaning removed, I think, at least subtracted from Trump.
I don't know if in this context they mean that it was added to Biden or it was just Removed from Trump.
A little unclear, but it doesn't matter for the point.
All right, the point is, now here's the payoff.
Now, I've been telling you before that simplification is going to be the key, because you've got a whole bunch of complicated claims about all kinds of things in the election.
They all conflate, and did the courts rule on them, or did they only rule on doctrine of latches, and was it only about standing The whole thing is way too complicated for the public to understand.
But if anybody, and I talked about, this is going to sound familiar because I talked about this in a different context, if anybody in that data analysis world who's got a claim can boil that down to one thing that can be checked, that's going to be powerful.
Because you've got a whole bunch of claims that are hard to check.
If you could Take even one important thing, let's say something that affected 400,000 votes, if you could boil that one claim of 400,000 votes down to one verifiable objective fact, you just look at it, and if you're not looking at it, you can't tell, but if you are looking at it, you know.
And apparently this group did that.
They boiled it down to one simple Data fact that you could just observe.
Now, they make a claim that, in my opinion, is probably false.
And I'm saying probably just because the way the world works, right?
It's not based on anything about the data integrity group.
It's not based on the reporting of the Epoch Times.
It's not based on anything of that.
It's just if you live in the world long enough, There are some things you just expect not to be true in the end.
And it sort of fits in that category.
But here's the genius part of it.
All you have to do is check.
And I'm going to tell you what their claim is.
And when you see how simple it is, you're actually going to feel it.
I tell you this sometimes.
Every once in a while, there'll be a little piece of knowledge.
Your understanding of the world you live in just goes up a little bit.
Like you reach a little higher level of awareness, and sometimes you can feel it.
Like you'll get a little goosebumps or something.
I'm going to do that to some of you now.
Most of you won't feel it, but some of you are going to feel it.
Here's your goosebumps. Here's the claim that is so simple.
Just check. It goes like this.
Quote, there were vote movements across all candidates.
Of course, you know, the vote is changing in real time as the candidates are getting their votes counted.
And they say, however, we did not see the same type of negative decrements, meaning votes decreasing in real time, from a total that was higher to lower, to any of the other candidates that we saw with President Trump's tallies.
And they happened repeatedly, the Trump ones, with no explanation, said Linda McLaughlin, a member of the group.
Now, that is a very specific, simple claim Which the data that they have available to them, apparently, shows.
Now, here's my problem.
I'm not telling you to believe this, okay?
So if it sounds like I'm saying, hey, this is a credible one, believe this one, I'm not there.
I'm not there at all.
But what I love about it is that it's a claim you don't have to believe or disbelieve.
You can just check it.
All right? Now, if it's true...
That only President Trump's vote counts showed several times when they went down, and nobody else ever experienced even one issue of where any other vote count, either Biden's or anybody else on the ticket, Republican or Democrat, anybody else, if no other vote count all night ever showed one decrease, But the Trump votes did a number of times.
Easy to check, right?
Because apparently they have the data, they can just look at it and say, okay, here it was, it decreased.
And the other ones didn't.
Now, do you think if that claim is checked, that it would stand up?
Oh, and somebody's saying in the comments that it was true across multiple states.
I believe that's true, that it was not in one place, it was multiple counties.
Now, how do you like the fact that this is boiled down to something that you could just check it?
You don't have to wonder.
Now, based on the claim, you should not believe it.
If all you've read is the claim, zero credibility, just like every other claim about the election.
No credibility.
But if the other side doesn't weigh in and say, you idiots, There's a perfectly good reason why it looked like that was happening, but it really wasn't.
I'd wait to hear that.
But what if you'd ever hear that?
Because, as Linda McLaughlin says, that no explanation has been offered.
Don't you think that would be something they'd want to explain?
And don't you think it wouldn't be hard to explain it if there were an explanation?
For example, and I'll just Brainstorm what it might be.
It could be that they've got different sources reporting, and that every once in a while there's an artifact where there's a slight timing problem, and it looks like something was decreased, but it really wasn't.
It was just decreased before it increased, or something.
Right? You could imagine they'd say, look, this is normal.
We'll show you that it happened in other elections.
We'll show you that it happened to Biden too.
We'll show you that it happened to other candidates.
A defense would be easy.
It would be easy to defend it.
Just tell us why it happened or tell us it didn't happen.
Easy. So, do you think that this exclusive story in the Epoch Times will be picked up by all the major media because now we know a way to find out for sure if the election was stolen?
Isn't that good news?
We don't have to wonder.
In fact, we could probably be sure of it in 24 hours.
All you need is somebody who's got the opposite opinion about what this data means, Have somebody qualified, have them look at the same data, and then tell us what they think.
If they look at the data and they have a good explanation, I'm open to that.
Indeed, I'm not only open to it, I'm far more likely to believe the explanation.
Because most of these things are going to be explained away, like 95% minimum will be explained away.
Why would this be different? So I would expect it's not real.
But every day we go, in which the explanation, the alternate explanation doesn't exist, it's a little harder to believe it's not real, isn't it?
Now, do we live in a world where the news can just disappear something this important?
Well, let's talk about the Trump phone call.
So you all saw the news.
Trump made a phone call with, I guess it was the Georgia Attorney General and other People in that office and job in which he was listing his grievances and evidence for why the election was stolen.
And he had a pretty long list of things like dead people voting and people whose addresses don't check out and there were places where he claimed that there were more votes than registered voters, etc.
Now, I listened to the entire hour Because I think you need to, because if you're just a clip coming out, you won't know what to believe.
But I listened to the whole hour, and I have a few thoughts.
Number one, the president is very, very poorly advised at the moment.
I mean, shockingly poorly advised.
Now, do I blame the president?
No. For thinking that there are all these irregularities which have been, in my opinion, mostly debunked.
In my opinion.
There's some room for opinion on this.
But I feel as if he's mixing claims that have not been debunked and are definitely worth looking into and look pretty strong, like this Epoch Times one.
I don't know if that's true, but it looks pretty strong, and it hasn't been debunked as far as I know.
So, wouldn't you like to look into that a little bit?
Of course you would. But by mixing stuff that, at least, again, just in my opinion, sounds transparently and obviously not true, somebody's not telling the president the truth.
There's nobody in his circle at the moment Who apparently feel safe that they can say, um, you got some strong things you can say, and you got some weak things, and maybe just leave the weak things alone.
Because if the strong ones work, that's all you need.
Why would you throw weak ones in there and ruin the whole thing?
So I would say that for those of you who have been following the claims, they seemed almost embarrassingly uninformed.
So that was my take. Now you know, if you've watched me, I could not be a bigger booster of Trump, right?
To the point of a flaw.
I'm a booster to the point of flaw.
But even I didn't think the stuff he was saying about the election was too credible in whole.
There were parts of it that I didn't know and I'd like to know more about them.
Definitely stuff to look into.
But the way it was interpreted by the news is in the form of a hoax.
Oh, here's the other thing I noticed.
He's the President of the United States, albeit lame duck, it looks like at this point, and he could not get the people on that phone call to be even a little bit cooperative.
Not at all. So watching the President of the United States trying to make basically a Karen phone call and complain about the service, and he couldn't get the supervisor to say anything helpful.
It was shocking to see how little power he had.
How did it get reported when we saw how little power the president has?
The president couldn't even get the other people to be polite, basically.
I mean, he couldn't get anything out of them.
And they're his own party. How was that reported?
Obviously a dictator, obviously, trying to force things through.
If you listen to it, man, that was no dictator.
That was whatever you are when you're complaining to the DMV and they're not hearing it.
That's what was happening.
That wasn't Hitler.
That was Karen complaining and nobody cared.
That was it. Now, it was characterized, of course, as that he was pressuring, and it was illegal, and all the bad people say, it's illegal, he's pressuring.
But if you listen to the whole call, there are a few things that are very clear.
Number one, I would say with complete confidence, and I believed this before, but the phone call removes all doubt, and it's this.
I'm not a mind reader.
But that call makes it really, really clear that Trump believes it was stolen.
So if you're thinking to yourself, he doesn't really believe it was stolen.
It was some kind of a trick to stay in power.
In my mind, there's no chance of that.
You hear the phone call. He absolutely thinks he got screwed.
He's got lots of evidence that he believes.
A lot of it I don't. But he's convinced.
I mean, he sounds like a true believer.
And He sells that completely.
So if you're worried about, you know, he's a dictator, that should dispel that, because you didn't see much dictator stuff going on.
But the fake news, CNN has turned it into a scandal because they need Trump for their ratings.
And here's the pattern of how they turn real news to fake news.
You can see it in this example, and you've seen it a number of other times.
Once you see the pattern, it's just kind of funny.
They use the same trick.
First, they'll take an audio or a videotape that's longish, and they'll cut out a quote that's out of context.
Where have you seen that done?
You saw that with the Covington kids.
You saw it with the fine people hoax.
And you saw it with the drinking bleach or injecting disinfectant hoaxes.
In each case, if you had heard the entire piece, you would have said to yourself, uh, that's the opposite of what the news said.
For example, in the fine people hoax, before the quote that was taken, Trump talked about the people who were there who were not racist, just there for the statues.
And then after that, he made sure that you knew that he was condemning totally the neo-Nazis and the racists who were there.
But if you take out the clarification And also the context they started, and just show the clip, looks like he called Nazis fighting people.
If you look at the Covington kids clip, all they do is clip out the parts, you know, before and after, and it looks like the kid is the bad person, but if you see the whole clip, it's obviously the person he was with, or the guy who claimed to be a Native American, or who was, I don't remember the story, you could tell that he was the aggressor.
Likewise with the drinking bleach hoax, if you hear it in all of its context, you hear the first part where the president sets it up as talking about light as a disinfectant, then he talks about it, and then he clarifies about light.
So if you don't hear that he set it up as light, and then he wrapped it up as light, and all they take out is injecting Disinfectant.
That's how they create the hoax.
Now, the fake edit is not enough by itself.
Alright? That's not enough by itself.
You need the other steps and I'll get to them.
Alright, so in the case of this phone call, what they took on a quote, they took little pieces on a quote where he's saying stuff that makes it sound as if he's pressuring him to cheat.
Now, the opposite is happening.
Trump is pressuring him To look into allegations to make sure that nobody cheated.
That is literally the opposite of asking him to, as CNN reports it, find votes.
So the second part of this is that the fake news will use persuasion primers.
These are words, wit, and phrases which, if you hear them at the same time you've heard the story for the first time, they prime you to see the story a certain way.
These are brainwashing persuasion primers.
None of this is an accident.
They know how to do this.
It's the fourth time in a row you've seen it.
Same pattern every time.
So the primer words that they use in this case are pressured to find votes.
Here's another way to describe exactly what you heard on the audio.
The president...
He forcefully was promoting his idea that the people in charge should look into the allegations of fraud so that the public can understand that the election was either clean, which would be good, or they'd find out it wasn't, which would be good in another way.
So, did that sound like pressuring to find votes, meaning manufacture, you know, manufacture about nothing?
Did that sound the same? Because what I said was just objectively true.
You listen to it. He's making his case.
He's presenting his claims for fraud.
He says, we just want a fair vote.
We just want to know.
I just want you to look into it.
That's all. But if you hear pressured and fine votes, and you pair it with a clip which doesn't have the rest of the context, It looks like what?
A mob boss talking.
They like to use the things that you've believed before.
Now because the whole he's a mob boss was already a meme, they just take a meme that is already active in your mind and they just attach a new thing to it.
It's much easier to attach a Fake news to an existing meme.
Oh, he's like a mob boss.
Yeah, whenever he makes a private phone call or thinks it's private, he talks like a mob boss.
And here he is making a phone call like a mob boss.
Now, if you listen to it, there wasn't anything even close to talking like a mob boss.
I mean, not even close to anything like that.
The tone was not that.
It was just asking for For something to be looked into.
That was it. And the boldness with which they try this is amazing.
Here's some more phrases from CNN. The president was caught on tape.
Caught on tape.
Now, what do you imagine is true of somebody who was caught on tape?
Well, they're guilty.
What does it mean To be on a recording if you were caught.
They're signaling that he's guilty before they've even told you what the content is.
That's a primer. That's brainwashing.
So he was caught on tape.
No, he wasn't caught on tape.
There was simply an audio tape which has been available to the public in which not much of anything happened.
That's not even close to being caught on tape.
And by the way, I prefer presidents who don't get caught on audio.
Here's another sentence directly out of CNN's coverage, that the tape, quote, exposes the depth of his corruption.
Suppose you knew there was a long tape, you only heard one part of it, which was something about finding votes, and then you read CNN saying that this tape exposes the depth of his corruption.
Wouldn't you kind of think that the parts you didn't hear were more confirming the depth of his corruption?
Nothing like that on the tape.
Not even close.
Nothing even in that general category of corruption.
Not even close. It's just him asking for data to be looked at, because they've got some claims.
They would like some data to be released by the state to make sure the claims are true or false.
Just nothing like exposing a depth of corruption.
He literally just asked questions.
That's it. They said it was a smoking gun.
Anytime you hear any of these phrases, you're being brainwashed.
These are not news phrases.
They're not even close to news.
It's just straight up brainwashing at this point.
And then step three, they Bernstein it.
So, you know, you bring in...
Bernstein? It's Bernstein, right?
So they bring in Bernstein just to say it's worse than Watergate.
Literally, just to say that.
Now, have I taught you the trick of having a big opening offer?
So if you're negotiating, which is in a way similar to persuading, at least in the way I'm going to use it now, if you start with a big opening offer, it anchors people to the first thing they hear it.
So if I say to you, I'm going to sell you my car, and it's worth a quarter of a million dollars.
The first thing you think is, there's no car you drive that's worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Well, that's true. It's not worth that, or anywhere near it.
But it's the first number you hear.
So now I say, alright, maybe it's not worth a quarter of a million, but man, I'd like to get $100,000 for it.
Now the $100,000 doesn't sound so bad.
Because you got primed with the $250.
And even though the thing is only worth $35,000 used, suddenly the $100 doesn't sound so bad because you got primed with that $250.
That's what Bernstein does.
The worse than Watergate guy comes in to give you the first offer.
Worse than Watergate.
And in your mind you're like, whoa, whoa, that's big.
Now later, when you get more, let's say you get more information about what was on there, you're already primed.
So maybe you come down a little from worse than Watergate in your mind, but you're like, yeah, I'm not sure it's quite worse than Watergate, but sounds like it's pretty bad.
See? So that's how the brainwashing works.
Start with a big offer. It's worse than Watergate.
And then it's hard to get you off that, no matter how much data comes out later.
They use repetition because if they say it enough, you'll think it's true.
If you hear a news story or item a hundred times, you're going to believe it's more true than if you heard it once.
It's just how your brain is operating.
They make you think past the sale.
So you've got things like exposing his depth of corruption or caught on tape.
Those are manipulation phrases to make you think past the sale.
The sale is whether anything bad happened.
And they're making you think it is exposing the depths of its corruption by making you think of all the other corruption it's like.
But they haven't made the sale.
They're making you think past it.
There's no sale that anything bad happened.
They're making you think all the way to not only did it happen, but it's like this other stuff.
That, turns out, didn't happen either.
All right. Then, of course, you do the mind reading.
What is the president's state of mind?
Yeah, he's thinking like a mob boss, and he's trying to pressure this guy.
He's not trying to get justice.
No, in his mind, it's not about justice, because CNN can read his mind.
You can't, but they can.
They've got pundits with powers.
And they read his mind, and they find out that, no, despite all of his words...
That clearly and repeatedly say he just wants to know what happened, and can we see the data, please?
Now, there's some legal reasons it's hard to give him the data, but that's a separate story.
But if you mind-read him, none of that's happening.
He's just trying to be a dictator.
And then the most important part, which is disappearing the debunks.
So this video, which is debunking it thoroughly, Will not be highly rated on social media.
And so anybody who's going to do what I just did will just sort of get disappeared.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, that's CNN, right?
CNN's crazy, but at least people will go over to Fox News and they'll read the real story.
They might even agree with you, Scott.
They might even be on the same side.
So you go over to this Fox News and you look for the story and...
Good luck finding it. Now, I don't know what's up with Fox News, but I would think this would be like one of the big stories, as opposed to not mentioned.
So take that for whatever it means.
I would think this one would be mentioned, but must be a story there.
I'm sure Fox News will cover it eventually, and the opinion shows later today will cover it, of course.
But it's sort of suspiciously not there at the moment, unless it happened in the last hour.
Alright, so here's some more CNN bad behavior.
They also say, quote, legal experts say Trump broke the law by pressuring blah blah blah blah.
Well, if he pressured him, maybe he broke the law, I don't know what law they're talking about, but if he was just talking to him and asking for data, Is that breaking the law?
So here's CNN acting like a law has been broken when you can just listen to the tape and it's obvious no laws are broken.
All right, here's another story just because the simulation loves us and gives us lots of code reuse.
All six members of the congressional group we call the squad, you know, the progressives, AOC, etc., they all voted to put Nancy Pelosi over the top as speaker.
Unanimous they were. So Nancy Pelosi must be doing something right.
The squad loves her. Now, I have to admit, when I first saw that the phrase lizard squad was trending, I thought, well, that's not a nice thing to call AOC and The other people in that squad, I feel it's unkind to call them the Lizard Squad, but it turns out that Lizard Squad was a different squad.
I got that wrong.
Lizard Squad was the hackers, as opposed to the squad, who are also lizards, but they go by a different name.
Also lizards because they're part of Congress, not because they're...
See this taken out of context?
Imagine that quote...
Becomes the part they take out of my livestream.
And miss the part where I say, no, it's because they're in Congress.
They're lizards. It's not because it's these few people in the squad that are lizards.
They're all lizards. But you take that part out.
My Twitter friend Zach says that watching the Biden presidency is going to be like watching a bad spinoff.
Of a TV show. You know, the Trump TV show is just so awesome and top-rated show.
But then, you know, they do the spin-off of the minor characters.
So it's like, Trump was the TV show Friends, and Biden is going to be like Joey.
You know, the spin-off show about just Joey.
It's like, yeah, we're going to watch it by habit and reflex, and maybe it'll remind us of Friends, but it's not Friends.
It's not Friends. Alright.
Here's a little tip for you.
I don't know how much backing this has by science, but there was a study saying that if you drink alcohol soon after getting the vaccination, it will make the vaccination way less effective.
There's something about alcohol that makes the meds and the vaccination a little less active.
So don't drink alcohol within several days of getting the vaccination.
So you have all been made more safe by watching this live stream.
Here's a question for you.
Remember Howard Schultz, who was the founder of Starbucks, and he was running for president for a while?
What if he had been elected?
Would Howard Schultz, could you trust him to make decisions about whether Starbucks should be open?
How do you do that? I feel as if Howard Schultz, although I have lots of confidence in him as a smart operator and capable and all that, I have only good thoughts about him, but he would be in quite a bind, wouldn't he? Because one of the biggest questions in the pandemic is, does a place like Starbucks stay open or just go out of business?
How could he make that decision or even be part of it?
I mean, I don't see how that would have worked.
But short of having a pandemic, he would have been fine.
But as soon as it's a pandemic, he's the wrong match for the job, right?
Remember I've told you that there's no such thing as bad presidents and good presidents?
They're just presidents who coincidentally are matched for a task.
Trump Perfectly matched for a whole bunch of tasks, mostly international.
But Howard Schultz would have been a bad match for a pandemic, just because you would never know if he was doing something because of Starbucks.
You just wouldn't be able to know that.
And I'm not casting any aspersions on Schultz.
Like I said, I have only good feelings about him, but it would be a bad position to put him in.
Gordon Chang, who talks quite a bit about North Korean Chinese, an expert in that region, is recommending that we cut all ties with China.
Think about that.
Cut all ties with China.
Now, Gordon Chang is not random crazy guy on Twitter.
He knows what he's talking about.
And if Gordon Chang is telling you we'd better cut all ties with China, You need to take that seriously.
Now, I know that the president listens to him, so he probably is taking you seriously.
And it's not very easy.
And I made the case just briefly.
When we say cut all ties with China, it's because every interaction we have with them is militarily bad for the United States.
I say militarily because anything that kills Americans...
At the hands of our enemy that we're in a hot war with.
It's a cyber war, but it's a hot war.
Anything that your enemy does to kill people in your country is an act of war.
So whether it's they send us fentanyl, they do trade deals that are illegal, they steal our IP, they send spies over.
You know, you can just go down the list.
Every contact with China Is militarily negative to the United States.
So we should delist their companies from the stock exchange.
The president did that. We should send all of their residents home that are trying to get educations here.
We should stop trading with them.
We should have an order to bring all of our companies home.
Now, and I just don't know.
Oh, and this other news thing is that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and multi, multi, hundreds of billions, I don't know, he's a super rich guy, I guess he criticized the regime and he disappeared so far for a week.
Now, it's really hard for a billionaire to disappear.
If somebody like, you know, Elon Musk or You know, Bill Gates were not seen for a week, and it were a national story.
It wouldn't take long to find him.
You know, hey, he was at the retreat, or he just took some break from social media or something.
But it's been a week, and we don't know where one of the richest people in China is, and very public guy.
Like Jack Ma is always on TV. He's, like, very public.
So what if he never shows up?
Because that's possible.
We might never see him again.
He could be making shoes with the Uyghurs right now.
Anything could happen. Now, I imagine he will turn up soon, but his attitude will be adjusted, is my guess.
I think the regime probably will talk to him and say, you know, if you'd like to stay alive and a billionaire, let me tell you how to do it.
And it's not the way you're playing it right now.
But the other thing that's interesting is that Jack Ma is no ordinary guy.
Whatever it was that turned him into one of the richest people in the world was not an accident.
He's got skills.
And he's got billions of dollars.
And skills. And did I mention skills?
And here's my question.
As strong as the Chinese Communist Party is, I mean, it's immensely strong, I don't know if they're messing with the right person right now.
Because if he's already got a little problem with the leadership, and they're doing something with him right now, you don't want to let him out.
Let me say this a different way.
If China is doing something bad to Jack Ma, they better finish him.
Because you don't want that guy loose with his billions and really, really mad at the regime.
Because he is important, you know, he has enough probably inside knowledge, contacts, people he could bribe.
He could probably take down the government.
Because I think that any billionaire in this country who was like really serious about taking down the government could have a good shot at it.
Now China, of course, you assume that they would close him down the minute he tried anything.
He'd obviously have to leave the country and he'd have to get most of his money out if he could.
But if he gets out of the country with his money, and they tortured him, Jack Ma could take down China.
I think they've got a dangerous situation on their hands.
I don't think they can ever let him out if they're doing something bad to him.
Now, they might reach some agreement where they don't do something too bad, maybe just some house arrest, and then when they've talked to him enough, he just feels like, I don't want to go through this again.
It wasn't that bad.
It was just house arrest for a week.
But I don't, you know, next time it could be bad, so I just won't say bad things about China.
I would think that's the way it's going to go.
I think that he's a smart guy, and they'll just figure something out, and he'll just shut up about China.
But did I mention he's Jack Ma?
Now, I don't know much about him.
I just know that you don't get where he is by not having skill.
Not being brave.
Not doing things that people don't expect.
Not being able to push through a brick wall as if it didn't exist.
So I don't know what his real capabilities are, but one assumes they're pretty good.
China might be in trouble.
We'll see. That is my show for the day.
And I've got some things to do, so I'm going to run off and do those things.
Somebody says Zuckerberg took down Trump.
You could make that argument.
There are too many other variables to isolate one thing, but if Zuckerberg and Facebook did not exist, Trump would probably be president.
I mean, that's not an unreasonable thing to think.
All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers, you've got another minute.
Why do you think the Trump tape was leaked?
Well, it was because his enemies probably thought that they could make something out of it.
Now, the interesting part is that a lot of people are going to hear the president make a lot of claims about election fraud.
So there's at least some thought that maybe the president's team released it, because by turning it into national news, which just has to be covered, All of his allegations get out there, so it might be good for the president to do that.
Explain lead stories.
I don't know what that means. Calendar drama.
So, as somebody pointed out on Twitter, the Dilbert calendar is printed in China.
And so the question was, hey, if Chappelle can get Netflix to take his old show off the air, can't I get my publisher to use a different printing company?
That's not exactly a good analogy.
If I were Chappelle, and I had an ancient show that I probably made little or no money on at this point, and all Netflix had to do was just, you know, Click a box and it doesn't appear anymore?
Because it's probably as simple as that, right?
Just click a box and that little part of their business just doesn't exist anymore.
Probably doesn't make much difference to Chappelle because the way Hollywood deals are made, even though it was his show, I doubt he had profits going forward.
I doubt it. Or if he did, they weren't much.
So he didn't give up anything.
So Chappelle basically gave up nothing of any value.
And in order for Netflix to give him what he wanted, they probably just had to check a box.
And they couldn't even tell the difference in their profits, because it's one of thousands and thousands of properties.
By comparison, my publisher, I believe, does all of their printing for all of their properties in China.
It's not easy for them to stop doing that right away.
They can't just check a box, and then there's no printing in China.
Do you have any idea how hard it would be for a major publishing company to change where they publish all of their books?
It's a big deal. Now this is why I promote an executive order that just orders companies out of China, American companies.
Because your publisher, it's not really fair to ask a publisher, why don't you decrease your profits by 30% and spend your entire next year trying to figure out how to do this thing that There probably isn't even enough capacity in the United States to get that.
Or, you know, you'd have to take it somewhere.
So the Chappelle thing was the smallest possible ask.
There was no real cost.
I mean, immeasurably small.
And just check a box.
Mine would be an entire publishing company working for a year, changing everything that they do.
Maybe there would be no Dilbert calendar, so it would make a big impact on me.
It's not the same thing.
But I'm on board with getting the Dilbert calendar out of China.
So if you wonder what I want, it's that.
But I also work in the real world, and it's not really fair to ask a publisher to make that kind of a change until it's either legally necessary...
Or there's some kind of alternative that doesn't look so bad.
