Episode 1256 Scott Adams: Grading the News Networks on HOAX Reporting, Impeachment Trial Fun, and More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
The "news" industry is actually a propaganda industry
Articles of impeachment for Chuck Schumer?
Biden shutting down Keystone project
An American Revolutionary Guard?
Let's have a HOAX-OFF!
A call for election transparency
A fix for social media censorship
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
This will be the best Coffee with Scott Adams all day.
Guaranteed. And if you'd like to enjoy it to the maximum potential, what do you need?
Well, you need a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or 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 sip.
And it happens now.
Go. Yeah, better every time.
Well, what's in the news?
Shall we look?
There's a Gallup poll out that says that the current breakdown of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents looks like this.
Republicans, only 25% of the public says they are Republicans now.
And only 31% say they're Democrats now.
What's the big number now?
Independents. 41% are independents.
So it turns out that it's become embarrassing to become a Republican or a Democrat.
That's right. It's actually embarrassing to say you're a member of either party according to these numbers because it seems that the independents have swelled in size.
So only 25% GOP but 41% independents.
Now, of course, the independents are all fake.
You know that, right? There's no such thing as an actual independent.
They are actually Republicans, effectively, the way they vote, or they are actually just Democrats, effectively, the way they vote.
So I think this just tells us that we've embarrassed each other to the point where we're no longer willing to say what we are out loud.
Or at least 41% of the people would prefer it that way.
On the super bad news, we're up to 400,000 deaths from COVID. If you were one of the people who early on in the pandemic said, I think this is just the regular flu.
Is there anybody out there who said, I think this is just the regular flu?
Or no worse than the regular flu?
Have any of you changed your minds?
Because I'm kind of curious about that.
It used to be every time I went on social media, there would be, you know, one of the biggest categories of topics were people debunking the pandemic because it's not real.
But... Oh, okay, I'm answering the question I was going to get to.
I answered it before I asked it.
I was going to ask how many people could look at this now and still think that it's not a real pandemic.
And I'm looking in the comments, and a tremendous number of you think that it's all still made up, that it's not real.
All right. We're in a very bad place, people, when we can't tell if we're in a pandemic or not.
I would say that's as bad as you could get in terms of the reliability of your information.
Suppose you lived in a country where the news on both sides was actually attempting to be objective.
What if both the left and the right told you, oh, it's a real pandemic, this one's real?
Would you believe it?
I don't know.
We're at a point where nobody believes anything in the news anymore.
It doesn't matter if your side says it or the other side says it.
Somebody says there's no flu this year.
Yeah.
Now, it could be that there's no apparent flu this year because the social distancing is so good.
And maybe the regular flu is not as aerosol and spready as COVID is.
So would that explain it?
Or, my hypothesis, that the regular flu was never killing anybody anyway, and that they scare you to take the vaccinations, but you've never met anybody in your whole life who ever died from the regular flu.
I'm 63 years old, never even heard of anybody dying of the flu, the regular flu.
But 400,000 people I've heard of dying of this one, and I've heard of real people with real names, people I know, that people know them, etc., who have died just this year.
So I'm pretty sure the pandemic's real, people.
If you're still in the camp that this is all an artifact of bad data, I feel like 400,000 reported deaths would be about the time you should change your mind.
I don't think you will, because that's not how cognitive dissonance works.
But, and somebody says, old people die.
All right, now let me take the counterpoint to that.
There's an estimate out of the UK, I don't know how dependable this is, probably not terribly, but it says that half or two-thirds of the deaths in the UK are people who would have died that year anyway.
They would have died that year anyway.
Was that going to be a good year for them?
Is the final year of your life, is that a good one?
Well, you know, that's subjective, of course.
But if you're looking at how many people are dying from this, is it fair to say that the ones who are going to die that year anyway don't count as much as somebody dying when they're 15, for example?
Now, that's one of those things you're not supposed to say out loud, but we all intuitively think the 15-year-old You don't want to say it's worth more because that's not a place you want to go to, but you could certainly say they have more life left, they have more to contribute, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They may not be loved any more than the 81-year-old.
All right, but I think it is fair to consider when you're looking at deaths that not all deaths are the same.
And in a very real way, if we were making the decisions ourselves, let's say you had to make a decision for your family members and somebody has to die, the teenager or the 90-year-old.
Well, you'd pick the 90-year-old every time, right?
So we're all on the same page there.
So it's hard to get a number that makes sense for this, because 400,000 deaths, what if 300,000 of them were going to die anyway in a year?
Could happen. All right.
Have you noticed there's always this guy on Twitter?
And you're going to recognize this guy as soon as I say it.
So... This guy, who I'll refer to him generically as just this guy, there's always this guy.
If you bring up Lincoln's assassination, there will be a bunch of comments in your thread, but one of them will always be from this guy.
And this guy will say, Scott, Lincoln's death was a tragedy to his family.
Let's just joke about that, huh?
To which I say, no, this guy.
There's always this guy who thinks it's too soon.
Sometimes there are situations which can be part tragic, but there's a part of it that's not tragic, might even be positive, paired with something tragic.
If I say that something tragic happened, say, Lincoln was assassinated, That doesn't mean you need to go into my Twitter feed and tell me that there was some bad news associated with his assassination and that I should consider that a little bit more.
We don't need that guy.
That guy can retire because I will take it as a stipulation that should I mention anything which also has a tragedy as part of it that the tragedy still counts even if there's something else to talk about.
The tragedy part Still counts, that guy.
So I'm talking to you, that guy.
You just don't need to tell me every single tweet that something bad happened too.
Don't be that guy.
I wonder if controversial police shootings are going to be done for a while.
I wonder if a Biden administration will change the nature of what news gets promoted to the top of the pile.
Because you know those are individual choices.
They're not just because of the news.
Sometimes the news is so big that, of course, it's the headline.
But most of the time, the news is what the news people decide to talk about.
They could be talking about, I'll just pick a topic, the fact that a lot of researchers think that microdosing LSD could be an end to mental illness problems, at least for some large number of people.
That's a really big story.
But it's nothing but a tweet and a minor story today because the people who make the news have decided that's not a story.
To me, if I were the one making the news and I got to decide what you talked about, that'd be right near the top of the list.
Imagine that there's an existing chemical, widely available, basically close to free, it's so cheap to make, LSD, and that it might solve most of the mental health problems in this country.
That's actually what's being talked about by people who are looking into it.
That it's so powerful, it might be one of the most amazing miracle cures, actual cure, of some of the biggest problems in the country.
Not even news.
It's an article.
That's it. Just an article.
But if somebody dies in a police shooting that has some ambiguity, boom, it's a headline, it's a big thing.
So always understand that the news is not because the news is necessarily the important stuff.
It's the stuff that the people who bring you the news have decided they want to be front and center in your brain.
So it's a programming decision, not of...
You ever hear this word, programming?
When they talk about TV schedules and what segments are in those schedules, they talk about that as programming.
Well, you thought that they were programming their show...
And in a sense, they are.
But they're actually programming your brain.
Because what they put in the front of your brain, figuratively speaking, the thing that you think about the most becomes your reality.
Things that you don't think about are not your reality, even though they are your reality.
They're not part of your subjective reality.
You're not thinking about them. So the news is programming you.
Directly and intentionally.
It's not an accident.
When they say, this will be your top story, they're saying, I'm going to put that in the top of your brains, and I'm going to make everybody in the country think about this.
That's just programming.
That's programming of your brain.
It changes the actual physical structure, just like every experience does, of your brain.
And they do that intentionally and daily, and in a way that affects billions.
So I'm wondering if the number of controversial police shootings might be exactly the same, because I don't know that anything has really changed, right?
We haven't come up with any great ideas for making questionable shootings go away.
That hasn't happened. So if we see a great reduction in the apparent number of them, that would be another clue that your news industry is really a propaganda industry.
So look for that.
Unless there's something you can identify that's different about how the police forces are handling situations, which also might be the case.
But if you hear that nothing big is different in terms of police work, but the number of weird shootings and controversial ones goes down, that's probably because the propaganda engine made a decision.
Just keep an eye on that.
Senator Graham, Lindsey Graham, has called on Chuck Schumer to...
Dismiss the impeachment articles against Trump in the Senate so that they wouldn't have a Senate trial.
And Lindsey Graham says, because it will, quote, incite further division.
Now, when you say incite further division, is that much different than inciting violence?
Well, it is, you know, it's technically different.
Inciting division is not exactly the same as inciting violence.
But is there any...
Adult who thinks that if you were to incite further division in our current environment that it would not likely cause, just common sense, likely cause a higher risk of death and or violence.
Of course. Of course they are related, if not exactly the same.
So inciting division isn't inciting violence, but in our current environment it's going to end up being the same.
Would you agree that that's a fair statement?
Now, we don't know.
It's not guaranteed that there will be any violence.
But if you've lived in the real world, it would be reasonable to expect there would be.
How is what Schumer is doing today any different than what President Trump did when the Capitol was being assaulted in terms of his rhetoric and not saying enough to stop it?
Is it functionally different?
Because I don't see it as different.
What I see right now is Schumer and the rest of the Senate, the Democrats in the Senate, doing actively right now, like right now, as I'm talking, are committing the crime or offense, if you will, the offense that they want to impeach the president for.
Actually doing the same offense right now, While I'm talking.
And nobody wants to sort of bring up the obvious that, Schumer, you're doing the impeachable offense right now.
How do you argue against that?
Is there anybody who's a Democrat who's going to say, no, Scott, no.
Doing things that even both sides would agree would be divisive.
That doing these things that we all agree are divisive, during a moment when there's a match and a bunch of gasoline all gathering in Washington, D.C., immediately after we saw that same situation escalate out of control so we don't have to wonder if it could, because it just did.
How in the world does Schumer justify this?
I think he has to be impeached if he goes ahead with it and there's any violence.
And I think the Republicans should tell them that up front.
They should say, look, you have every right to pursue this.
The Constitution allows it.
But we're telling you with complete confidence this will lead to violence.
Do you accept that responsibility?
Now, of course, they'll say no, and we have to do this anyway, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But it's the same standard.
If the Republicans don't nail them to the floor...
To make them stick to their own standard, which means impeaching Schumer the moment he's done.
Or actually, the moment he starts.
The moment Schumer starts the impeachment, Lindsey Graham should introduce, or whoever, should in the House, I guess, introduce articles of impeachment.
And they should be dead serious about it.
And they should play it like they are not kidding.
Because if the standard is that Trump's rhetoric caused incitement of violence, And I think it's a reasonable argument, in my opinion.
Then you just have to use the same standard, or you've got to treat them the same.
That won't happen, but it should happen.
So the Democrats have a new slogan.
It's not really as catchy.
Make America Great Again?
Pretty good. Because it's short enough, and it's catchy, makes a good acronym, MAGA. President Trump really knew how to do branding, but Biden's new slogan, I don't know, I think it needs a little work, I'll tell you what it is, then you see, maybe we could tighten this up a little bit, but his new slogan goes like this, America first, except when getting revenge on Republicans, or if, let's say, China wants something.
So it's a little longer, four words for make America great again, that feels like about the maximum number of words you want in a slogan, but I mean, this is something to work with.
America first, except when getting revenge on Republicans, or if, let's say, China wants something.
I don't think he has the X factor.
I feel like they should work on that a little bit more.
Build back better?
Not any better than this, really.
All right. Jake Tapper...
Refers to the doubts about the election as the big lie.
It's the big lie that the election was stolen.
That would be Jake Tapper's call on it.
But here's the thing.
If the news people who are not just reporting and giving you their opinion, but they're offended.
If you look at Jake Tapper, he looks like he is personally bothered by this stuff.
He's offended. He's outraged.
And you can see the emotion on his face.
And when he talks about people doubting the election integrity as the big lie, it sounds like something he cares about quite a bit, because he does talk about it a lot, and he puts a lot of emotion into it, or at least apparent emotion.
I can't read his mind, but looks like emotion.
So he cares about this issue a lot.
You know what he doesn't mention?
Improving election transparency for next time.
It's weirdly missing, don't you think?
Because somebody who cares this much about this topic of people doubting the election outcome, you would feel that that same person who really thinks this is a big, big issue, and it is, it is, would also be roughly equally as interested in making sure it didn't happen again.
And yet, everything we know about our current system guarantees it will happen again.
Because it still isn't transparent, and I don't see any big effort to make it so.
So, it's interesting that you'd be offended by something you don't want to fix.
Or at least don't talk about fixing.
It's just missing, is all I'm saying.
Morning Joe has decided to go after Facebook.
So I guess Mika and Joe were, they were screeching at Mark Zuckerberg on the show today, and I think Mika said, you need to be, you are pathetic, talking about Zuckerberg, talking about him, not to him.
You need to be shut down.
Nobody needs what you have to offer.
You have destroyed this country.
Now here's the most interesting part.
Nobody needs what you have to offer.
That feels like a true statement.
When was the last time you went to Facebook and got something you needed?
I can't think of any time.
Because, you know, I can put pictures in a lot of different places and I can share them a lot of different ways.
I just don't know what Facebook is for.
And I would say most of my Facebook friends have unfriended me since the age of Trump.
So I only have, you know, like I'll go to check to see if something about my stepdaughter is there or see if Christina posted anything and see if there's any comments.
But otherwise, I don't even know what the point of Facebook is.
Like, every day I wake up and I say, is there a reason for me to use Facebook?
A billion people are using it.
I feel as though if a billion people are using something every day, I feel like I ought to be using that.
And I can't think of any reason.
Now, I can think of good reasons to use Twitter.
Twitter can get you exposure if you're in the political world.
Your opinion can be spread, etc.
But if you want to do those things, do you need Facebook?
I mean, using a photo album for your political conversation just feels like the wrong tool anyway.
At least Twitter feels like exactly the right tool for this stuff.
So when I go to Twitter, or anything like Twitter, it feels like at least I'm doing something useful.
Or potentially.
But it's interesting to see the left go off on Facebook.
And Facebook is one of the few things that I have not invested in that have a monopoly position.
Because I can't really understand Facebook.
I just don't get it.
To me, Facebook is like Do you remember the derivatives, what was it, a bubble, the big derivatives bubble that took out 2009's economy?
Remember, Warren Buffett would look at the derivatives and he'd say, I don't get why anybody would own these things.
These look dangerous.
So he didn't do it.
I just don't understand why people use Facebook other than they're sort of addicted, I guess.
Looks like Biden's going to shut the Keystone project down.
Here's the question I would ask, and you should look for this.
Do you think you'll see any reporting on the left about the number of jobs that will be lost?
I'll bet not. Do you think you'll see any reporting on the left about the impact of making a deal with your most trusted international trading partner and then just breaking it?
Because we have a deal with Canada, and Canada spent a whole bunch of money To get ready for their end of the Keystone project, as I understand it.
And now that they're all worked up and excited about it, we're going to yank it away from them?
Even if you think we should yank it away from them for environmental reasons, that's a tough decision.
If you want to be that country who can make a deal and then just cancel it on your closest trading partner, Canada, that's...
You've got to really know that you want this to do that.
I saw somebody comment on this and saying, yeah, it's bad in the short run with jobs and whatnot, but in the long run, it will save people hardships.
I think the larger point was fossil fuels.
If you reduce them, you'll save people hardships in the long run.
To which I say, even the Green New Deal people don't say that.
The most official UN-sanctioned prediction of what will happen if we don't reduce our fossil fuels is that our rate of growth will be a little less than spectacular.
Our rate of growth will still be spectacular over the next 80 years, but it will be a little less than it could have been.
That's the official number.
So anybody who is reading the news and thinks that fossil fuels will lead to greater hardship...
Doesn't even know what the official Green New Deal friendly people are saying.
They're not saying anything remotely like that.
They're saying things will be terrific in the future no matter what, but a little less terrific than they could have been economically.
That's the official thing.
And by the way, if you're hearing that and saying, what?
I thought everybody said it's going to be the end of the world in 12 years.
Nobody official said that.
You know, you've heard it reported in the news, but there are no official bodies working on any of this full of experts who say anything like that.
The only officials who are experts in the Green New Deal, even the ones who say it's the worst case scenario, are saying it's just that's a little difference in 80 years.
You'll hardly notice it. Actually, you wouldn't notice it.
Not hardly notice it.
You wouldn't notice it at all based on the actual projections, the official ones.
But we still need to take it seriously.
My opinion on climate change, if you haven't heard it before, is that there's probably something real there that we do need to pay attention to.
But I think we are.
And we're paying enough attention to it that over 80 years will be fine.
But we do need to pay attention to it.
All right. So somebody else got banned by Twitter.
New representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for saying a bunch of things that Twitter believes not to be true enough, I guess.
And violated their terms of service, specifically the election integrity stuff.
And I guess anything that would have suggested any violence would be a violation of the terms of service.
But it's not clear what exactly she said that got her banned.
However, this caught my attention.
That she's being smeared on CNN for her prior conspiracy theories, according to them.
So she was a believer in Pizzagate, apparently.
Reportedly. So that's not a good look.
But she also claimed, according to CNN, incorrectly, that the Charlottesville Fine People rally was an insider job, some kind of an inside job, false flag kind of thing.
Now, there's no reporting to confirm that, right?
So that would be a baseless claim.
So the way the news reports baseless claims is that they're proven not to be true, which is not what baseless means.
Baseless means that you don't have evidence.
It doesn't mean you've proven it didn't happen.
They're very different things.
So let me acknowledge that I'm not aware of any evidence that would suggest the Charlottesville thing was an inside job.
But I will give you some context.
Take another example of right-leaning people who Doing something en masse.
Let's say the attack on the Capitol that happened, the assault on the Capitol.
What are we watching happen with each of the identities of the people who assaulted the Capitol?
Well, we're watching each one of them, because they didn't have masks for the most part.
We're watching each one of them being identified easily, easily identified, and then being ostracized or, you know, there might be some legal ramifications, etc., Do you remember what happened after the Charlottesville Fine People march?
Do you remember how similar it was?
With all the facial recognition being used on all the photographs?
Because they didn't have masks, remember?
They were all just right out there.
Do you remember how all of those people who were marching...
Were tracked down and then there were lots of stories and interviews about their individual cases so that you could see that they were real Americans who just organically got together, with leaders, but got together and that this was an actual legitimate march.
That didn't happen, did it?
Interesting. Years later, we don't know anything about any of the people who marched in Charlottesville.
And yet, we still have facial recognition software.
If you have their photographs, you can just run it against the photograph.
It's that easy. And it works.
So, why is it we don't know all the names of those Charlottesville people?
Now, I'm not saying there's any evidence whatsoever that it's any kind of inside job or anything.
I'm just saying... That's a big notable difference, isn't it?
Now, somebody says there were actors.
I don't think there were actors per se.
But don't you feel as if one situation you're digging down to find the actual identities of these people and the other one you just don't do any of it?
It's kind of a question, isn't it?
I'll just put it out there as a question.
All right, a bunch of pardons coming, according to the news.
Might be a hundred pardons coming, and they're probably all going to make people mad.
You know, there's nothing to this pardon story, except if it's legal for the president to do it, it's always going to look sketchy.
Now, will Trump's look sketchier than others?
Probably. Probably.
Because Trump will just take a bigger risk than other people will.
He'll go further. You know, he just takes everything a little bit farther.
So yeah, his will be more controversial.
I'm not saying I agree with any of them or disagree with any of them because I'm not going to look into them.
But I think we either have to live with it or change that rule that presidents can do it.
But complaining about it isn't going to help us too much.
Here's another question about the dog not barking.
If you believe that the assault on the Capitol was inspired by QAnon, let's say, conspiracy theory type stuff, why are we not currently obsessed with finding out who was sending the most recent QAnon messages?
Let's say recent over the last couple of years.
Why don't we want to know who they are?
And can you tell me that with our NSA that can track basically any digital communication, Are you telling me that our government, our intelligence agencies, don't know who was sending the QAnon messages?
Seriously? We don't know who that is?
Now, my understanding is that the way Q started was more of a fun hoax.
It was a little bit more for entertainment.
A little bit for persuasion, but the people originally involved, reportedly, I don't know what credibility on any of the Q stuff, but reportedly it might be run by different people who originally started it.
Don't know. But why in the world are we not even asking that question as the number one question if we believe, as the news has told us, that the two, let's say the two causes of the Maybe three.
Three causes of the assault on the Capitol were what the president said, what Q said, and what various news and social media people said.
So those were the forces that caused it.
We're talking obsessively about what Trump said and should.
That's fair conversation.
Why aren't we talking about how Q is and how close we are to finding Q? Is that a little bit missing to you?
Here's a general statement.
Over the long term, you should expect intelligence agencies to get control of anything that matters.
That's it, in the long run.
In the short run, you can't tell if it's happened yet.
But in the long run, it should be 100% predictable that intelligence agencies, either your own country or somebody else's, will get control of anything that's important.
Because that's what they do.
That's what they do.
They get control of anything that's important.
Because if they don't, they're not a very good intelligence agency.
So one of the things that intelligence agencies would want to control in the past, we know this, is Hollywood movies.
So you see a lot of patriotic movies when the intelligence agencies want to beef up the feeling in the United States about who we are and our patriotism, etc., To get people to join the military, etc.
So we know that the intelligence agencies want to have control over enough of the media that their messages can get to the top.
Why would the intelligence agencies not want to control Q? Why would they not want to control social media?
Do you think that social media is not already controlled by intelligence agencies?
I'm not saying they are.
I'm saying that if they're not, they will be.
I don't think there's any way that can not happen in the long run.
Now, it just depends how long you wait.
Because if you assume that they're all trying to get control, of course they're trying.
If we are not trying to get control, meaning our intelligence agencies, are not trying to get control of other countries' social media platforms and communication, what are they doing?
You know, maybe they should be trying.
Because I feel like that's pretty basic to the job, is controlling the message and the communication.
So I have no reason to believe that Q is controlled by any intelligence agencies.
I'm just saying that if Q continued on for, let's say, a few decades, it would happen guaranteed.
You just don't know which intelligence agency would do it.
You'd hope it would be your own.
All right. Apparently, the Pentagon's fearing there could be an insider attack at the Biden inauguration.
In other words, somebody involved with the police or the National Guard who maybe is not there to just guard things, but might be a bad actor who gets inside.
Apparently, at least we've seen some ex-military people who were part of the Capitol assault, and at least one National Guard reservist who sounded like some...
Coup-like intentions.
So I would say this is a reasonable fear.
But here's the fear on top of the fear.
Do you know how you end up with a secret army like the Revolutionary Guard?
It's this way.
This is the path toward some kind of a dictatorship.
I don't think Biden is necessarily intending to be a dictator.
I'm just saying that if you had a dictator...
And they wanted to become like a dictator for life.
The number one thing you do is say, you know, the people guarding me are not as loyal as they should be.
That's how it starts.
And then what do you do?
Well, how about I select a hand-picked group of people that will be my more immediate protection, let's say just in Washington, D.C., And then how big does that group end up getting?
Because the group guarding the president would have to have more power than the military, at least in terms of who's got control of a certain situation.
Because otherwise they couldn't guard the president, right?
The highest priority is guarding the president, so they would have to have more authority than any other military over them.
So that's how you get to a secret army, and that's how you end up with a With a dictatorship.
You can't have a coup unless you also have that loyal core army, right?
Castro could take over Cuba because he brought an army with him that was loyal to him.
You know, George Washington can take over the country because he brought an army with him that was loyal to him.
So without that loyal army, you can't really stage a coup.
And as soon as I hear The beginning of, well, maybe we should only have Democrats in our guarding the Capitol if there's a Democrat president.
Every little alarm goes off in my head.
It's like, the minute you're being that selective about who's guarding the president, that's a big problem.
But on the other hand, it could be that since the National Guard will never really morph into any kind of a, you know, I don't see the National Guard ever morphing into a Revolutionary Guard situation.
So I don't think it's a big risk at the moment.
But just talking about that sort of opens the door for that secret army situation, some president in the future.
I'd worry about the future, not so much now.
All right. I guess Parler is the competitor or wannabe competitor to Twitter.
It got shut down. Because their servers got turned off by Amazon, and then Apple dropped them from the App Store, etc.
They think they have a plan to get back online, but I don't know.
But apparently, here's what's interesting.
There's a conservative-leaning, they call it right-wing, web hosting firm called Epic.
E-P-I-K. And Parler is apparently going to move their hosting to this right-wing hosting place.
To which I say to myself...
Okay, great. Now we're going to have two Internets.
We're going to have two Internets.
One for the right and one for the left.
Terrific. What could be less uniting than two Internets?
Because we're heading in that direction.
But isn't it nice to know that the free market has delivered an alternative to Amazon?
And If Epic turns out to be a solid company and dependable, why would you ever put your content anywhere else?
Because they do have a pretty massive competitive advantage if the only thing they're offering is we won't ban you from the service.
That is a real good competitive advantage in a world in which at least a third of the country or so is worried about getting banned.
You don't want to have to redo your whole hosting situation.
It's a mess. So Epic might be an amazing situation.
I don't know if they're a public company.
But if they're not, maybe they will be soon.
I said on Twitter earlier, and this requires some explanation, I said that you'll get farther in life by learning to spot bullshit than you will by learning to spot opportunity.
You'll get further learning to identify other people's lies than you will identifying opportunities for yourself.
Here's why. Opportunities are everywhere.
If you miss one, there'll be another one.
We live in a world in which there are tons of opportunities.
Tons! If you build your talent stack wisely, you can manage your abilities, your skills, To have lots of opportunities.
But if you do something that blows up on you and just sets you back for years, you're in bad trouble.
So learning to not fall for other people's lies can keep you safe while opportunities are coming by all the time.
So you don't need to be an expert at spotting opportunities.
There will be plenty of them.
But you do need to be good at not falling into a hole you can't get out of.
And that's the part about spotting the bad ideas.
You know, the bad investments, the worst of the worst.
So that's my take.
You can think about that for a while.
But learn to spot BS as your sort of a base skill.
If you want to be better at it, you should look at my book, Loser Think, which helps you do that.
All right. CNN is tweeting, Oliver Darcy at CNN is tweeting about somebody else on the air, Alex Stamos, who was saying, quote, We're going to have to figure out the OAN and Newsmax problem.
What? Did you know there was an OAN and Newsmax problem?
Well, the problem, according to CNN and Alex Stamos, is that they're reporting fake news, basically.
And he says... These companies have freedom of speech, but I'm not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.
So he's questioning, and if you didn't know this, these entities travel over public networks, etc., and he's saying maybe they shouldn't.
And then Darcy says in his tweet, just a reminder that neither Verizon, nor AT&T, nor Comcast have answered any questions about why they beam channels Like OAN and Newsmax into millions of homes.
Do they have any second thoughts about distributing these channels given their election denialism content?
They won't say. So CNN is actually reporting with a straight face that maybe their competition, OAN and Newsmax, should be banned from the internet for having said something that CNN believes is not true.
There's a good standard for you.
What would be more opposite of free speech than this?
And so I suggest a hoax off.
Let's have a whole national conversation about which news entities have promoted the most hoaxes.
And then, of course, you're going to have to rank the hoaxes because they're not all equal, right?
Some are sort of minor, stupid things.
Some can move the whole nature of the country.
So, shouldn't we have a hoax off?
See which networks reported which hoaxes.
Let me get started here on a partial list.
And by the way, I'm deadly serious about this.
We do need, completely seriously, a list of each news network and which hoaxes they promoted for the past five years, right?
You could pick whatever time frame.
I'll say five years. Wouldn't you like to know that?
Now, of course, it would be difficult to find an independent observer who could rank these hoaxes.
So maybe there would be multiple ones, or the ones that have some ambiguity could be marked as, well, this is a claim, but, you know, the other side says it's not true.
But wouldn't you like to see how long the list is and to see what's on it?
Let me give you a brief example of what would be on it.
And I'm going to start with the hoaxes on the right.
Some of you are not going to like this, but you'll hang in there.
So from the right, we've seen some wild election-fraught claims, such as the Venezuela Hugo Chavez and the Italian stuff, etc.
Now, assuming that those all, you know, in the fullness of time, let's say that we decide that none of those are true, I think that's where it's heading, that those would be hoaxes associated with the right.
You've got your Pizzagate associated with the right.
You've got your QAnon stuff associated with the right.
But are they really reported?
Are OAN and Newsmax and Fox News and Breitbart, are they reporting what Q is saying as like it's news?
I don't think so. So although there are some conspiracy theories on the right, I don't see the news reporting them.
Do you? Do you remember any time at which Fox News had the news people, as opposed to the opinion people, all right, we're going to make a distinction between the news people and the opinion people, did any of the news people ever report that Pizzagate was real?
I don't remember that.
I mean, it could have happened, so fact check me on that.
But I remember the opinion people noodling about it, But I don't remember any fact people, any news people.
Did Brett Baier ever say Pizzagate was real?
I don't think so, right?
And same with OAN and Newsmax.
Do you think any of them ever reported that Pizzagate was real?
Or that QAnon is telling you real things?
I don't think so. I don't think they're reporting these things as real.
But some opinion people, of course.
The news on the right has reported that maybe the pandemic isn't so real.
That the pandemic is nothing more than the flu.
But was it the news people who reported that on the right?
Or was it the opinion people?
Because I don't remember any news people.
Now, I haven't watched all of these networks every day, so I can't say for certain.
But I don't know if any news people on the right said the pandemic is probably fake.
Did they? Opinion people did.
And then, of course, there was, you know, masks don't work.
I guess we can argue about that forever.
So you could make a list of things which were definitely...
conspiracy theories on the right, but how many of them were actually reported by the news on the right?
I'm not sure I remember any of them being reported by the news.
But let's go to the left's list.
And the left, they're a little bit less clear about who's an opinion person and who's the news.
Is Jake Tapper an opinion person or is he a news person?
I don't know. I mean, I know him personally.
I've had a number of conversations with Jake Tapper.
And even I don't know. Is he supposed to be the news?
Or is he an opinion person?
How about Anderson Cooper?
I don't actually know.
I don't know if he's the news or if he's an opinion person.
Because it's not branded that clearly, is it?
Now, Don Lemon is an opinion person.
When you say that that's branded clearly enough that you're not really confused about Don Lemon, right?
Chris Cuomo, opinion person.
I would put him in with the Hannity's and the Tucker's.
Tucker Carlson says opinion people.
But because CNN blurs that line and the people I think are anchors report the opinion the same as the news quite often, here's what's on their list.
You've got the fine people hoax, which is the biggest one of all time.
The most destructive hoax of all time is the Charlottesville fine people hoax.
You've got the Jussie Smollett, the Covington Kids hoax, the Drinking Bleach, the Russia collusion hoax, which then they tried to change into Russian interference.
Oh, why are you saying, Scott, that there was no Russia collusion when in fact they had those several Facebook Advertisements and memes.
So they try to change that from collusion into interference.
There's the Hunter Biden has no issue.
Well, maybe he does with Ukraine and China, etc.
They've reported that election systems basically can't be hacked.
Now, I have no evidence that they were, but the left reports it like it can't happen.
Is that true? It might be.
I'd love to see more information about that.
And by the way, I would be delighted if that were true.
Can't be hacked. Can't be hacked in any way that wouldn't be detected.
That'd be great if that were true.
But they sort of report that as true.
Let's see. They report climate change being an economic disaster when even the UN says the opposite.
Here's one that would be on your list but not mine.
I know if you were making this list, you would say something like, oh, the left believes that there are multiple genders.
And then you would get into this whole gender thing.
I don't have that conversation.
Number one, I'm more respectful to that entire situation than many of my audience.
But number two, I think that's just a definition thing.
That's not about the news.
If you want to call somebody a man or a woman and somebody else wants to call them a different word, that's just definitions.
We're not talking about different things.
There was the Russian bounty on American soldiers hoax, the feeding koi fish in Japan hoax, and the list goes on.
Now, suppose you took the list of hoaxes that are reported on the left and the ones on the right, And now subtract out the ones that are just opinion people.
So you subtract out Hannity, subtract out Don Lemon, and the other opinion people.
And then you've got, I think it would be fair to say, but I'm open to an argument on this, that your Jake Tappers and your other hosts, your Anderson Coopers, they have to stay on the list.
Because you don't know if they're opinion or not.
So which of these lists would be more damning?
I actually don't know.
If you ask me which would the right or the left have more hoaxes reported by their so-called legitimate news sources, I actually don't know.
And if you were to count the number of them, would that tell you anything?
Or should you also look at the importance of them?
Because some hoaxes cause the Capitol to be attacked, and some hoaxes like the fine people thing cause riots in the street, or at least as part of it.
So you can't really say that all the hoaxes are the same value, right?
You'd have to somehow rank them by importance.
So you'd rank them by importance, and then you'd see which news people reported them.
How do you think CNN would come out on that?
I don't know, because I'm a little too biased to just sort of look at it and know the answer, but I feel as if CNN would be the biggest purveyor of hoaxes compared to the news that they think should be taken off the air.
I think so, but I would be open to that not being the case if somebody had a better list of hoaxes.
Here's a topic I've wanted to talk about, but I keep forgetting, which is that People like Trump are energy monsters.
And you can think of this as being sort of the third dimension.
You know, the three-dimensional chess that I always talk about and four-dimensional chess and all that.
And I think that has to do with moving emotions, which are really energy.
When Trump looks at a situation, I observe, can't read his mind, but just I observe, that he seems to be energy-centric.
So when he talked about Jeb Bush, he said you have low energy.
When he talks about the size of his crowds at his rallies, it's not just bragging, it's that too, but it's talking about the energy and making sure there is energy.
When he tries to get the economy moving, he's moving the energy of the economy.
When he tries to get the energy, literally the energy, like oil and stuff, when he tries to make the United States energy independent, again, it's energy.
So whether it's human energy or physical energy, Trump seems to simply have a superior understanding, and I'm going to say that unambiguously.
Trump has a superior understanding of reality.
Weird, right? Because he's failed the fact-checking more than anybody ever has, and maybe anybody ever will.
Even I agree with that.
That statement's just true.
But he doesn't deal in that realm.
He's not dealing with the specific accuracy of claims.
He's dealing with energy.
He's moving energy where it needs to be, and that has worked.
It made him president, and many would claim that he got a lot done that they like, even if there's some parts that they don't like, especially recently.
Now here's the fun part of that.
What the Congress has done, and what the Democrats have done, is they've created this situation where First, they took all of Trump's energy away from him.
So he won't be the second-term president, so that takes away a lot of energy.
He's kicked off Twitter and other social media, so that takes out a lot of his energy.
So they finally figured out the right way to attack Trump.
It wasn't on the details.
It was on his energy.
So they went after the energy and succeeded, because they cut off all of his...
Paths for expressing energy.
And then they made this one little mistake.
I think it's a mistake.
We don't know yet.
But I would say it's a strategic opening for Trump that is just a giant pile of free money laying on a table and they just left it there for him.
And it's in the form of this Senate trial.
That may or may not happen, because I saw Jonathan Turley, one of your smarter, most independent thinkers, saying something about Trump should just skip it and just not even put it on a defense, because it doesn't matter.
He'll be out of office anyway.
Now, I'm not sure if it doesn't matter to Trump.
He might have other reasons to do it, which would be fine.
But here's my point.
The Senate trial, if Trump decides to put on a defense...
Will return his energy.
Now, we don't know how he'd use that energy, and it would be used through whoever he puts there to be his representatives, because I don't think he would make the case himself.
But he could. He could.
Now, here would be the mistake, and here would be the right way to play it, in my opinion.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
If you're putting on a defense in the context of the Senate, there is not going to be a judge telling you that you're off topic.
Is that true? Would it be true that in the Senate trial you have your time, and as long as you don't say anything, I don't know, expressing violence or something, I suppose you can use your time to talk about anything you want.
So I need a fact check on that.
That would be the case, right?
So would it be the case that Trump and his representatives would have an Have an opportunity in front of the whole country, because it would be nationally televised, to say whatever they want to say.
Right? Now I think it has to be a little bit on topic, but kind of they can say anything they want to say.
I think that's true, but I need a fact check on that.
Now, what could Trump do?
Well, if he wants to completely destroy his legacy, What he could do is repeat all of the least credible election fraud claims.
And then, you know, legacy is gone forever, basically.
No recover from that.
What he could do is send in lawyers to technically argue whether this was incitement or not.
How does that work for Trump?
Probably doesn't work for him because his argument is a technical one.
Technically, technically it's not a crime, so let's just move along.
No energy. Now, what would be something that Trump could do that would be positive for his legacy, would bring tons of energy, would be good for the country, And could redeem him partially.
There's some things that just live forever on your permanent record, but what could he do?
Oh, here's an interesting idea.
Somebody says apologize.
I hadn't even thought of that.
It's funny because you don't even think of that as the option set.
He could apologize.
Now, that's not going to happen, so don't expect that.
But that was an interesting suggestion.
Here's what I suggest.
If he complains about the election fraud, he loses, worse than he's already lost.
But here's what he could do.
He could make a call for election transparency and use the entire time to argue that while nobody can determine whether fraud happened or did not, we can all agree that the citizenry, the voters, are not satisfied with the amount of transparency.
Now, who argues with that?
Does CNN say, the president is claiming that a lot of the public wants more transparency in the next election?
What do you say about that?
No, we're not going to have that transparency.
No. Do they say, that's an unreasonable thing to ask for?
It isn't. It's completely reasonable.
They'd say, that's just good for Republicans.
No. But it isn't.
It's good for everybody.
What would be the most unifying thing that could come out of the four years of Trump plus the four years we haven't had yet of Biden?
What is the single most unifying thing that anybody could do?
President, non-president, anybody.
The single most unifying thing would be to fix the election for next time.
Fix it for next time.
Make the entire argument about the lack of transparency.
Because if you say to me, there's a whole bunch of fraud and it has to do with Chavez in Venezuela, I say, get the fuck out of here.
Just get the fuck out of here.
We're kind of done with that.
That didn't happen. Bring us some good claims.
Because there are some. There are actually some stronger statistical claims.
Probably wouldn't hold up in court, but they'd sound good in public.
I think the president could bring some statistical anomalies and say, we don't know if this means anything.
But the problem is our system doesn't tell us if for sure it means something or if it doesn't.
We don't have the transparency needed.
And so I'm going to use my time during this impeachment trial...
To say, yeah, the situation was caused by a number of bad things and maybe I said the wrong thing or could have done something better.
But if we don't fix this for next time, we got nothing out of this.
We got nothing out of this if we don't fix it for next time.
If my president, President Trump, still my president, If, let's say after he's out of office, decides to do one more patriotic act for the country, because I don't know what else he'll be able to do out of office.
He'll be a little bit limited.
But he has one more mission he can do for the country.
And if he accomplished only that, if it was the only thing he accomplished in his whole four years, and it would be after the four years, Was to get people serious about election transparency so we're not in this problem again.
It would be one of the greatest accomplishments of a president.
And it would happen after his end of office.
Now, will he take that path?
Because he does have a path to partially redeem his reputation.
He has a path to be 100% unifying.
Because who's going to argue with transparency?
He shouldn't. And And just let the impeachment part just do what it does.
If he gets impeached or he doesn't, just forget about it.
It's unimportant.
And he could just treat the second impeachment as unimportant, because it is.
So do you think he would do it?
Somebody says he could also take on big tech.
He could, but what do you do about it?
I don't think he has an idea of what to do about it, but we'll see.
The best idea that I've heard about what to do about it, about big tech, actually came from Jack Dorsey.
So, in our weird upside-down world where everything's backwards half of the time, the only person who's come up with an idea that I've heard For how to fix this censorship by the platforms is to have some kind of an independent platform that holds the data.
So anything you post is there forever.
It can never go away. But you've got a competitive situation for picking which filter looks at that data.
So in other words, imagine a Twitter in which you could have a different Twitter interface, one that sees what Twitter wants you to see because they don't want you to see the violence and stuff.
Another one that says all filters off, but it might be a different company.
It's just looking at the same data and perhaps it's on the blockchain so that it lives forever.
Now I don't know where Twitter is on that, but Jack talks about it as Twitter becoming a client and Of this third-party system.
I don't know how that would ever allow Twitter to survive, because it feels like Twitter would be giving away their entire advantage and business model to do that, but maybe I don't understand the details.
So, I don't feel as if Twitter can pull that off because there would be a stockholder revolt, if I understand it correctly.
Now, I probably don't understand it correctly, because I don't Because I think Jack would know that.
That would be obvious. So there must be something I don't know about this situation.
But there could be some other company that is not Twitter that builds something that's sort of a blockchain that has a different way to look at that same data.
You can slice it any way you want.
I might get rid of people who have a certain quality that I don't like.
You might filter it a different way.
And then you just decide which filter you're going to use.
That would be your app. So your app would just be the filter On the same set of data that everybody in the world is looking at.
Because it's just all available all the time.
All right. And that would give, I think, Twitter protection.
Because then they're just one filter.
You could pick another one if you like.
And then I think everything's fixed.
Right? You just need somebody to build that thing.
All right. That's all for now.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
One warning. I will give you that...
Yeah, the story about Putin critic Navalny who got poisoned but recovered when he goes back to Russia and is immediately arrested and will be jailed for years.
What was he thinking?
Any updates on locals creator bundles?
Not a useful update except that it's still a top priority and And those conversations are ongoing right now.
But I'll keep you updated on that if anything changes, and I'll talk to you later.
