Episode 1263 Scott Adams: Congress and the Media Compete to be the Most Disrespected Institution on the Planet
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Record low trust of the news and journalists
Aaron Rupar's cognitive dissonance on bleach drinking
Trusting science
Rand Paul vs George Stephanopoulos
Congressional ethics complaints
The Big Lie
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I'm on the other side of the world today for a few more days, and even so, is that a reason to skip Coffee with Scott Adams?
No, no it's not.
In fact, it's better every time.
Every single time.
And what do you need?
What do you need to make it special?
I don't remember either, because I usually read it.
But I think it's something about a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard thing thing, and then fill it with coffee, and then drink it.
I have to admit that I get up just before I do these things, so I'm usually kind of a little bit tired.
I haven't had my coffee, but I know that you will join me now for the simultaneous sip.
You ready? You ready?
It's happening now. Go.
Oh, that's good. That is the good stuff.
So, anything happening?
Yes, there are things happening, and we're going to talk about them.
It turns out that there's a new survey that says the American mainstream media has reached a new record.
What do you think the record is that the mainstream media in the United States has just achieved?
Well, it's a record of low trust.
There's a record for you.
So only 18% of Republicans say they believe journalists.
Just believe journalists.
That's the only statement.
Only 18% of Republicans believe journalists.
Doesn't even matter the journalists.
They've reached the point where it's not even, do you believe the journalists on the left?
Do you believe the journalists who lean right?
Nope. Just 18% of Republicans are all this left who trust journalists.
On the other side, Apparently Democrats, 56% of them believe that journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead, wait, no, whatever the number is, the number of Democrats by a majority actually think that the news is real.
I don't know what to say about that.
How could you be paying attention to anything and think that the news is real in 2021?
I don't know how you would come to that conclusion.
Based on anything that we've been watching.
So that's journalism.
So they're at an all-time low in trust.
Now, as Megyn Kelly tweeted, do you think that journalists and the news business, do you think they take any responsibility for the fact that they have the lowest trust of all time?
I doubt it. I doubt it.
I'll bet every one of them thinks it's President Trump's fault, or partly my fault, for saying bad things about the news.
So how do you think the news will report the story about their own lack of credibility?
Will the news business say, hey, there's a study that says nobody believes us?
I guess there's a good reason for that and let us report to you all of the hoaxes that have been perpetrated through the journalists and you can see exactly why people don't trust us.
Probably not. Probably won't do any honest reporting on themselves.
Although, it was the UK, the Daily Mail that reported on this.
So, oddly enough, the one thing I trust that's in the news is news about how you shouldn't trust the news.
And maybe I should reassess that.
Maybe I should just don't trust anything.
That would be easier. Alright, there's a new study that will be debunked in 10 seconds probably.
This is me looking at my watch, even though my watch is nothing but a naked wrist.
The universal, let me look at the time symbol.
If you're a certain age, you don't know why people are looking at their wrist to determine the time.
It makes no sense, unless you have an Apple watch.
Alright, so there's a study that says that there's a high correlation between the spikes and surges in the coronavirus in Europe, And latitude.
And the implication is that latitude is important because vitamin D from the sun is very correlated with the latitude.
So as the Earth is rotating during the year, the different parts of the sun will get more sun exposure.
But here's the thing that most people don't know.
And maybe I don't know it either because when I tell you this I might be getting it wrong.
The idea is that you think that if the sun is out all year long that you just have to go out in that sun even if it's the winter and it's the sun.
Hey, the sun is the sun.
But it turns out winter sun is almost useless for vitamin D. Did you know that?
Did you know that getting sun in the winter Doesn't help that much for vitamin D, so it has to do with a little latitude, blah, blah, blah.
But getting, say, 20 minutes in the middle of the summer, it's not just because it's hotter or whatever, it's more direct vitamin D hit during certain seasons.
So this study showed that, or it tried to show, of course it was debunked at about a minute and a half.
Doesn't mean the debunk is right, just somebody had some complaints with it.
It purported to show that the vitamin D levels, as highly correlated with latitude and time of year, would be more of a reason for the spikes than some other factors.
What do you think of that?
Here's what you should say.
Here's what I'm saying to myself.
And this is the way you should look at a study like this.
Can you personally look at that study and determine if it had been done well?
Nope. But you can't.
Even if you're a scientist, you can't read a study and say it's good or bad just by reading a report.
You can't do that.
So what percent odds should you put on something That's a report.
It's a scientific. It shows its work.
Low. You know, I think 50% of published papers eventually get debunked.
So the highest credibility you should put on it would be 50% and then start subtracting from there based on any other factors.
So here's the other factor that I put on it.
How much would I Having talked about vitamin D from the beginning, being an important thing, How much would I like this study to be true?
And the answer is it'd be great for me personally.
It might be great for the world as well if it gives us some other tools for fighting the infection.
But my bias is that since I am on record for publicly talking about the likelihood that vitamin D would be a big factor, wouldn't I love to be right?
I would, right? I want this study to be true.
So, the first thing you should say to yourself when you're looking at information that agrees with you, the first thing you should say is, why do I think this is true?
Do I think it's true because I can read a study like this and I can personally understand that it's credible?
No. No.
I look at it and I want it to be true.
And I think it should be true.
So therefore, I'm willing to buy into a thing that has no better than 50% credibility and probably lower after people have looked at it and debunked its methodology.
So I wouldn't put too much credibility in there, but that's just one thing that's out there.
All right, here is the most fascinating example of cognitive dissonance I've seen in a while.
And you're almost going to have to look at this yourself.
To believe that I'm telling you the truth.
It's a little bit of one of these Yanni and Laurel things, where there's an actual, an illusion of some kind that's in this story, and you're going to see it, and it's fascinating.
So, there was a tweet by Vox.com writer Aaron Rupar, and you've probably seen him on social media.
He's a pretty big presence on social media.
And he's a big anti-Trumper, etc.
And so here's what he tweeted.
Or was this what he was talking about?
It was either what he tweeted or was talking about.
Asked about Trump's...
This is... Face the Nation did an interview with Dr.
Birx. And Face the Nation asked Dr.
Birx about that episode in which President Trump was accused of suggesting drinking bleach.
To fight the coronavirus, which, don't do that, it would kill you.
But, of course, he never said drinking and he never said bleach.
He did say injecting disinfectants in the context of light as the disinfectant.
So, Face the Nation, interestingly, when they asked the question about this, they actually framed it correctly.
I was not expecting that.
So Face the Nation actually couched the question as a discussion about light as a disinfectant.
I think it's the first time I've seen it.
Have you seen anybody else correctly say that he was talking about light?
So Face the Nation gets it right, and they talk about light, and they don't say bleach, they don't say drank, because none of those things happened in any reality.
So, the first thing I'd like to say is, shout out to Face the Nation!
You got something wrong that almost all the other news organizations to this day still get wrong.
So, you know, shout out to you.
So, what does Aaron Ruppar say about that?
He said, asked about Trump's infamous comments suggesting bleach injections could be a treatment for coronavirus.
So this is Aaron Ruppar describing what I just described.
Except he refers to it as suggesting bleach injections, which is not in the story, right?
Brooks tries to push back against the notion that she became an apologist, blah, blah, blah.
So then I tweeted, I said, Face the Nation correctly describes Trump's disinfectant question to be about UV light.
And Aaron Rupar still buys into the bleach hoax.
So I was trying to call out Aaron Rupar on Twitter for buying into the bleach hoax.
And this is the interesting thing.
The thing that he pointed to, never mentioned bleach, wasn't a word.
So once I called him out and a lot of people piled on, he defended himself.
And he defended himself by retweeting an article that also did not have bleach in it.
And also didn't have anything like that in it.
So the cognitive dissonance, you're going to have to see if you go to my Twitter feed for yesterday, you'll see that exchange.
And you'll see that even after it's pointed out that there's nothing in the video that says anything about injecting bleach, he tweeted the clip to me and said, there you go.
There's the thing proving that I'm right.
And it's not in there.
He actually still has, I think it's a hallucination, That there's something about bleach in there because he and much of the people on the left have been told so often that the president said bleach that he thinks it's there on a video clip that he tweeted as evidence of his claim and it's just that word isn't even there.
So it's actually kind of amazing to look at it when you can see how clearly somebody can read You know, nothing about bleach, and then say, look, look, I just proved that he said something about bleach.
It's freaky. It's actually freaky.
Now, if you do not have a background in, say, hypnosis, and most of you know I do, you would say, I think there must be some other explanation for this.
Like, people can't just look at something and actually literally hallucinate?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, they can look at stuff and literally see words that aren't there.
That is a thing, and it's easy, and it's common, and it's almost universal.
It's ubiquitous. We're doing it all the time.
We just don't know it. But when you see a clean example like this, where you say, give me the article that says bleach, and somebody says, here it is, and it's not in it, That'll freak you out the first time you see it.
After you see it enough, you realize it's the common way we operate.
Let me say this directly.
There is nothing wrong with Aaron Rupar's brain.
Nothing. There's nothing wrong with his brain.
There's nothing wrong with how much information he has.
There's nothing wrong with the level of Knowledge he has.
There's nothing wrong with his thinking.
This is normal.
That's the freaky part.
The freaky part is that he's normal.
Completely normal.
Capable, high-functioning person in society, right?
If you gave him an IQ test, he'd do great.
If I checked his educational credentials, I haven't, but I imagine they'd be real good.
I don't know, but I imagine they would be.
So if you think this is something about somebody who's dumb, it isn't.
Nothing to do with IQ. If you think this cognitive dissonance thing is because somebody is uninformed, it's not.
It's nothing to do with your intelligence or how much information you have.
It is purely whether the thing you believed comes in conflict with the thing you observe.
And when that happens, you have to paper them together with a hallucination.
And this looks like an example.
Now, to be fair, we can't know what he's thinking, right?
It just looks like that.
Could I be wrong?
Sure. All right.
The most interesting thing that Dr.
Birx said, I guess she got kind of shut out from talking to Trump for the last, I don't know, nine months of his presidency or something.
So that's not good.
But she said, I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made.
So I know that someone was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president.
I don't know to this day who.
Now I shouldn't laugh, because it's not good, but apparently the president had at least two opposing sources of data.
Somebody's saying Fauci, but I don't think it was Dr.
Fauci. Somebody says, to be fair, Vice President Pence was in charge of the task force.
That's fair. That is a fair comment, but still, the boss is the boss.
I see some suggestions, Dr.
Atlas, Peter Navarro, people are suggesting.
But they wouldn't be the source of the data.
I mean, ultimately, if anybody was passing along, they'd be passing along.
They wouldn't be making it up.
Now, what have we learned about data?
If President Trump had used only Dr.
Brooks's data, what would be different?
Anything? I don't know.
Is Dr. Brooks's data accurate?
I don't know. How about the alternative data that Trump used?
Was the alternative data better or worse than what Dr.
Brooks would have presented? I don't know.
Do you? Do you have any reason to believe that Dr.
Brooks's data would be better than whatever the other source was?
Well, it depends what the other source was, right?
No, it doesn't. It doesn't depend on what the other source is.
Because we live in a world in which all data is unreliable.
All of it. Dr.
Birx's data would be just as unreliable because almost everything we've learned about the coronavirus has been wrong.
Can you think of a counterexample?
Almost everything we've learned about the coronavirus has ended up being wrong.
Would Dr. Birx have data which would be the only exception to that?
I don't know. And then here's the other thing you have to take into account.
If Dr. Birx was passing along data, does that mean that she is the one who originated the data?
No. And if she passed it along in a certain context, would it have essentially a story or a narrative to it?
Would it be framed or filtered in a way that it's not just the information, but it's what you say about the information and what you compare it to and what context you put it in, right?
Because that's what makes your decision.
So if Dr.
Birx If she had done a good job of being the only source of data, I'm not saying she didn't do a good job, but if she had been the only source of data for the president, would that guarantee, or even give you a high likelihood, that the president was getting good, clean, actionable data and it was telling him what to do?
No! Nothing like that could have happened.
I'm not saying nothing like that did happen.
I'm saying it couldn't have.
Because the president has no way to see science.
He only has a way to see the people who are talking to him about it.
And they're not the ones who did the science.
They're just talking about it.
They're interpreting it.
They're putting it in a context.
Are scientists the ones who always put things in the right context?
No. No.
If you looked at all scientists' communication and statements and things they've said in public, they have a bias too.
You can't be unbiased.
It's not one of your choices.
You don't get to say, hey, I think I'll be unbiased today.
You don't have that option, even if you're a scientist, even if you're Dr.
Brooks. So the point which I say too often is when people say, hey, trust the science, it's not really an option to trust it because I don't have access to it.
I don't know what any science is.
Well, as a non-scientist, and also even if I had been a scientist, I probably didn't work on any specific study that's in the news.
So you're kind of trusting people.
You're not trusting science.
You might be trusting a process, but even the process of science goes from, you know, guesses to maybe to hypotheses to, you know, it takes a long time to get to fact.
And even then sometimes we change our facts with new information.
So this idea that there's this thing called science and all you have to do is pay attention to it, you're going to be fine.
It's so simplistic, it's childlike.
And we've been sold this idea that science is like this magic thing.
And as wonderful as science is, I think we're all pro-science, right?
Is there anybody who's against science?
No. The point is, it's all filtered through humans.
So as long as you're filtering science through human beings, what you get is human beings.
You don't get science.
When it comes out the other end, it's just what people told you that you hope is compatible with science, and you hope that science is right, but those are a lot of ifs.
That said, we don't have a better process.
I can't remember if I talked about this yesterday.
You ever have those situations where you don't know if you thought about talking about it or you actually talked about it at length and you can't remember if you did?
So stop me if I talked about this.
So did you see the interview with Rand Paul and George Stephanopoulos?
And it was interesting because Stephanopoulos was trying to get Rand Paul to say that there was no fraud in the election And Rand Paul, instead, because he's smart, would only say we should look into the claims of the election's irregularities and we should have more transparency.
Now, how do you argue against more transparency in an election?
What exactly is the counterargument to that, right?
So Rand Paul is on completely solid ground.
I mean, the most solid ground you could be is that everybody wants the election to be transparent and fair, and he's saying, we're not there.
We're not there. And nobody else thinks we're there either, really.
I mean, at the very least, even if you think everything was fair, at the very least, you would like everyone else to believe it too, right?
And we're not there.
So if we could get everyone else to believe it's fair, that would be great.
And that's what Rand Paul is asking for, and why isn't that reasonable?
But Stepanopoulos, being more of a narrative guy than a news guy, is just insisting that Rand Paul say in public that the election was fair.
But here's the problem, and that the reason that it was fair is because all of the court cases and the challenges failed.
Now, the problem is, this is a national news opinion kind of person, Stephanopoulos.
So his opinions and the things he does on ABC, I guess, would carry a lot of weight.
You know, it gets a lot of attention, etc.
And he was actually going in front of the world and saying that an absence of proof is proof of absence.
One of the most common logical fallacies in the world.
Now, what would happen if a major person went on television and made a claim that the most logical fallacy, one of the most common logical fallacies that there ever is, that just because you don't have, that the lack of evidence is evidence that nothing happened.
It just isn't a thing. It's completely irrational thinking.
And because the public can't tell the difference, the public generally is not educated enough to know what is a rational or logical, you know, irrational thing, they just accept it.
They go, okay, there's no proof, so I guess that's proof it was good.
Related to this, speaking of that, so Rudy Giuliani finds out that Dominion voting system is suing him for, I guess, over a billion dollars for saying things that was bad for business for Dominion.
And here's my question about that.
Now, first of all, I think Dominion didn't have much choice, right?
Because their business did get really, really hurt by all the news from Sidney Powell and etc.
But, is that something that you can sue somebody for?
Well, I don't know much about the law, but I'll tell you what I do think.
In defamation suits, since I'm a public figure so I end up dealing with this question a lot, my understanding is that defamation suits, you're going to have to prove that the person intended to hurt you or somehow knew that they were lying, I suppose. A defense for defamation is that you thought it was true.
Because your free speech allows you to say things that aren't true, as long as you believe they're true.
So I think that's a complete defense, is that Rudy believed it.
Now, since lots of other people believed it, it's pretty good defense, right?
If you're on the jury and you saw Rudy say, you know, I actually thought it was true, and lots of people thought it was true, and here's why I thought it was true, and here's my sources.
I think I'd believe he thought it was true because I don't get a sense That he's the kind of guy who would have taken that case unless he believed it was true.
It doesn't feel like the sort of thing, based on his history and what we know about him, it doesn't seem like something he would have done as just a technique to just make up a wild story, defame some company that would be essential to our election systems, just to win the day for Trump.
I don't feel that Rudy is that guy.
So if you put me on the jury, how in the world am I going to believe that he did this out of anything except believing it was true?
Now, should he have believed it was true?
Well, if you're talking about the Venezuelan stuff, I told you from day one, that doesn't look true.
If you've been with me for a while, can you, in the comments, can you maybe confirm that just on the surface of it, I told you it wasn't true.
The moment I heard it, I said, whoa, that is a thing that is exactly like something that's not true.
And then, of course, We've got no confirmation of it.
It feels like that's something that could have been confirmed by now, if it had been true.
So I will take some credit for getting that one right.
By the way, I do plan to do a report card on myself to see how my predictions have been, let's say through the Trump era, because it would be a good time to do it.
And I don't know if I can.
Because I thought about it and I thought, okay, the first problem I'm going to have is I'm going to forget all the times I was wrong, right?
The most normal thing you do, you remember when you're right, you forget when you're wrong.
So being complete would be a problem, so I'd have to rely on the public to remind me what I said that was wrong.
But my experience with that is that when people remind me what I predicted that they say was wrong, they Always remember it wrong.
And if I go look back, I said something kind of different than that.
So it's really hard to know what you said, and then it's also hard to score them.
Because a number of things I might score as an accurate prediction that a totally reasonable person could say, I don't know, I wouldn't score this as accurate.
So I don't know how you could do it exactly, but I think I'll take a run at it with the understanding that it's more of an exercise than some kind of accurate data.
I think it's a good exercise.
You should do it yourself. You should, every now and then, literally write down what did you predict, did you get it right, and then you would know.
I see somebody saying that I score 7 out of 10 correct.
That's about what I would guess.
If I had to guess where it would come out, I'd say something like 7 out of 10.
Then further, I would say that the average person might get 5 out of 10.
You know, if you were to compare me to just all citizens and pundits in general, I think 5 out of 10.
That would be the average of most people.
I think I'm higher than that.
I'm nowhere near 9 out of 10.
But 7 out of 10 would be ridiculously good if it's actually 7 out of 10.
But we don't know. That's why we'll check.
I'm sure that I'm biased, so I may be giving myself too much credit here.
We'll see. So here's my other question about Rudy and this lawsuit, and maybe I need a lawyer to answer this for me.
If Dominion sues Rudy for claims he made about the voting system being rigged, and as far as I know there's no proof of such a thing, Would that give Rudy the ability to look at their code and to bring a case against them in the process of defending himself?
Or will Dominion be smart enough To limit their claim to this one Venezuelan thing, which they don't have to show their code for that.
They can just say, show us any evidence that we have a Venezuelan connection.
If you can't, then that's defamation.
Or that would be their argument, it would be defamation.
They still have to prove intent, I think.
Again, I'm not a lawyer, so check with your lawyer.
Yeah, so would the discovery phase include looking at the code if the thing they were suing them for didn't really involve the code?
Because the claims about the Venezuelan connection, I don't know that they would have to show the code to defend that.
That would be interesting. And I can't imagine that Dominion would have such bad lawyers that they would put themselves in a situation where, if they had something to hide, that it could be shown.
So I would say it's probably a strong play from Dominion to do this lawsuit, especially if there is some risk of discovery, because then it shows some confidence on their side.
I think they have to do that.
There's no way around it.
They kind of had to sue him.
No matter what, they kind of had to do it for the purpose of their business.
So I don't like to live in a world where everybody's suing everybody, but in this case, they kind of had to do it, I feel like.
And I'll be interested to see how that comes out.
And if Rudy gets into their code, they won't be happy if that happens.
They won't be happy just because it's proprietary.
So Biden's already having some trouble getting his relief package passed.
I guess he's going to delay it.
And at this point, don't you think that it is a fair statement that Congress working on the impeachment of Trump after he's left office is slowing down the essential business of the country?
We can say that for sure now, right?
Now, my understanding is that Biden wisely got the impeachment postponed so he could get some other business done first.
Now just hold that thought in your head.
That Biden thought that the Congress couldn't do the business of the country and impeachment at the same time.
Congress agreed and then delayed it for that reason.
Because they couldn't do the business of the country and the impeachment at the same time.
So what happens when that delayed impeachment happens and then they get to the impeachment?
Have they not told the country That they can't do their regular job at the same time.
They just told us that. They told us that in the clearest possible way.
They said it directly.
We're not going to do this now because we won't be able to do the work of the country.
How's that going to change later?
Later when they do it, it's still the work of the country that they're postponing, right?
So every day that goes by that Trump is out of office and remains quiet, the trap gets deeper.
And the trap is this.
Congress has admitted that they can't do impeachment and the work of the country.
We saw it, arguably, we saw it during January of 2020 when they were doing the impeachment, when they should have been paying attention to the coronavirus problem.
So the longer you go when Trump is silent-ish and out of the job, he becomes less and less important.
And what the Congress would be doing Might not even be constitutional to impeach somebody out of office, probably won't succeed because the Senate is unlikely to go that far, is a complete waste of time and they tell you directly.
They've actually told you that they can't do their job while they're doing this and there's nothing good that can come out of it for the country.
Nothing. Nothing good could come out of it for the country, and yet they're going to do it, and it's on the schedule.
We elected these people, and they're going to do something which even they admit is not useful, and they're going to do it instead of useful work, and they're going to do it right in front of you.
Are you freaking kidding me?
How much more useless can you get?
That's like all-time useless, you know, Olympic gold medal useless.
That's Nobel Prize level uselessness.
Speaking of uselessness, as you know, Democrats have lodged ethics complaints against Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley for their role in what they say is, I don't know, according to the Democrats, overthrowing the country or something like that.
Their complaint is so stupid that I won't even describe it.
But I will tell you that Josh Hawley decided to respond by filing an ethics complaint Against the people who filed an ethics complaint against him.
So, I finally figured out why Congress has more than one person.
You've heard the joke about the, let's see, the airplane that is so sophisticated that it practically flies itself.
And all you need to fly it, this highly sophisticated airplane, is one pilot and one dog.
It's all you need. The dog is there to make sure the pilot doesn't touch any of the buttons because the thing flies itself.
And if the pilot touches anything, he can only make it worse.
So the dog is there just to bite the pilot so he doesn't do anything.
Well, that's what Congress has become like.
So I think the only reason there's more than one person in Congress is so the other person can sue them, or not sue them, but impeach them or do an ethics complaint against them.
If you only had one person, who would file an ethics complaint against that person?
But if you have two, they can file ethics complaints against each other and they can impeach each other.
So you need at least two people in Congress I learned today.
Because you can't really reach the full limit of thorough worthlessness until you're spending all of your time on impeachment and ethics complaints against each other.
Now here's the good part.
You would think to yourself, an ethics complaint?
Wow. An ethics complaint, that would be something that would involve a violation of, let's say, ethics.
To pick an obvious example.
So what would be the ethical violation that Josh Hawley is being accused of?
Well, he's being accused of objecting to the electoral vote through a completely legal process that Democrats have used in the past multiple times with no problem whatsoever.
That's considered an ethics complaint.
So he has bad ethics for doing what is completely within the rules, and it's within the rules because the rules were written specifically to put that in there.
It's not accidentally within the rules.
They wrote the rules to put it in there.
It's not a... Josh Hawley didn't use a technicality.
He used the law exactly as written for the purpose it was written, for the reason it's been used before by the Democrats routinely, everything completely legal, normal, and in fact, I would say desirable.
And that's an ethics complaint.
And so that's his argument.
His argument is, if you're bringing up an ethics complaint for doing something that routine, I mean, completely routine.
Then I will bring up an ethics complaint against you for bringing up an ethics complaint about me that doesn't have any backing to it.
Completely acceptable.
I would say that Josh Hawley has a completely acceptable argument that they are wasting time and being unethical.
It's a good argument.
But they don't have any argument against him.
What case would they make?
Would they say it was unethical every time we did it?
No, this is what they'll say.
They'll say the election was not stolen.
And by the way, you've seen that CNN is calling this the big lie, with a capital B and a capital L. So talk about the election being stolen is described by the pundits now, the anti-Trump pundits, as being the quote, the big lie, which makes it sound sort of Nazi-ish, right?
Which is why they do it.
So, the fact that the mainstream media has basically formed a narrative around a logical problem, let's say, an illogical truth, is amazing that they solve it.
The illogical truth is that a lack of proof is proof that there's nothing there.
Completely irrational, and they call it the big lie if you to believe That a computer system could be hacked.
Think about that. Think about the fact that the idea that a software system could be vulnerable to hacking, that that idea, which is the most common thing we see, we see it with the... I mean, it's literally the headline that some of our secure systems get hacked all the time.
But to believe that it happened in this particular case would be a big lie.
When you live in a world in which this level of propaganda is just common, it's just shocking.
And the only thing I think is, who are these 18% of Republicans who still trust the media?
How in the world?
Could you still trust the media in a world like this?
Where they're using an illogical thought and calling it the big lie.
Basically, if you agree with logic, you bought into the big lie.
And that's the narrative.
And they actually sold this to most of the public.
Amazing. All right.
The funniest thing is watching the people on the left tear each other apart.
I was just reading an article, Bill Maher, who of course had been, I'd say, taking common cause with all anti-Trumpers for the last four years.
But now that Trump is a little bit off the stage, Now the left has turned on Bill Maher, and I'm looking at the things that they're accusing him of, and they are ridiculous.
So one of the accusations is that he used the N-word.
Now, when you read that in a story without context, what do you think about it?
Well, you think, well, maybe.
That's pretty bad. Are you kidding me?
He used the N-word? Wow!
I guess we have to hate him for that.
And by the way, I hate that word, so if anybody had used that word in, let's say, its native offensive way, then I'd have some bad feelings about it.
That's not the context that he used the word.
He used the word in talking about the word, I believe.
I believe his context was talking about it or quoting somebody else or one of those contexts.
He certainly was not using it as just a word, right?
He was using it in a context about the word.
I remember reading about it, but whatever it was, it was completely More of a free speech thing.
He was just expressing his freedom to say the word in a non-insulting context.
But I guess he's not allowed to do that.
Are you allowed to be non-insulting and completely respectful and just use a word and talk about the word?
You can't do that? Seriously?
I'm not the guy who needs to or defends Bill Maher's opinion because I've disagreed with him as much as I've agreed with him probably.
But come on, going after him for this bullshit is just completely unacceptable.
But watching the left no longer have a common enemy and then turn on each other was predictable.
The most predictable outcome is that this wokeness is going to take so many people out on the left that they're going to rethink it.
And you're seeing that happen.
Now, Bill Maher is kind of a special case, because he may lean closer to progressive and stuff, but I think he's an independent thinker, and he could go wherever he wanted on an opinion.
All right. They're eating their own, that's right.
So you're seeing now a number of cases where businesses have decided that they'd like to, in the words of Michael Jordan, he would say, you know, Republicans buy sneakers too.
So my favorite was the, yeah, the Katie Couric one, where she was going to, I think she's still going to, host Jeopardy!
and made some comments, you know, anti-Republican conservative comments, And her employer said, uh, they watch the show.
We'd like them to keep watching the show.
So I don't know if they canceled her.
I would imagine probably not.
But it's the kind of pressure that you're seeing.
And I've been telling you for a while that unless there is mutually assured destruction, that the wokeness thing, you know, will just go forever until we're all dead.
But of course there will be.
There always emerges a counterforce.
So the reason that things do not become a slippery slope forever is because a counterforce almost always is going to pop up.
And the counterforce seems to be this.
The moment When somebody insults conservatives in public, conservatives stop buying their stuff, like, immediately, right?
And every time you see it happen, you don't need too many examples of it, right?
You just need a few examples where somebody who is, let's say, associated with a big company, insulted a third of the public, you know, let's say the Republicans, and their CEO fired them.
Or the board of directors removed them or they lost their job or something.
You don't need to see too many examples of that before you know you shouldn't do it, right?
So the attacks we're seeing against Republicans, if you're worried that it turns into a full civil war, economics will stop it.
And you're seeing it happen now.
The free market just stepped in and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, politics is great.
Politics is great, but get that shit out of here.
So the free market basically just became the police.
The free market just said, yeah, you know, you can do all these political things that are terrible.
But it's going to cost you.
It's going to cost you more than you want to pay, and it's going to cost you fast.
You're going to get fired that day.
So that's where we needed to be.
Somebody mentioned Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy.
That's a special case.
Because in the case of Mike Lindell, he did wrap himself around the president pretty closely.
He got really into the politics.
That's different from just saying something in a tweet, right?
So he took it to kind of another level.
But I don't think his pillows should pay for that.
I don't think his employees should have less work because he got politically involved.
So it's terribly unfair, but we live in a world where if you started a company and you get into politics, it's going to cost you, unfortunately.
So I hope he's okay with that.
His pillows are excellent, in case you wondered.
What is a Scott E-Vest?
Somebody's asking me a question, but I don't understand it.
All right. Don't buy Ben& Jerry's, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I don't know how many Republicans it would take to boycott something.
But it doesn't take much, right?
It wouldn't take much. If 10% of Republicans just immediately stopped buying something, I think any big company would say, that's a big enough number that we need to fix this.
So it doesn't have to be a gigantic number.
As long as they can see it on the bottom line, they're going to have to fix it.
The Scotty vest is a travel vest with lots of products.
Oh yeah, I've seen that. I have to admit I've wanted it.
If you travel by plane, and I know that's hard these days, I want a thing where all of my items that I need go into some kind of a long case that unrolls and I can just hold it up and it goes like an accordion and I could take out the pieces I want and put them back in.
You know, your phone, your boarding ticket and stuff.
Have you tried to watch a Hollywood movie lately?
I mean, there aren't that many new ones, but oh my God, they're bad.
I don't know how anybody can watch a movie anymore.
I still like documentaries, but regular movies are like, God, they're so boring now, and they hurt.
You know, your typical movie plot, something bad has to happen to somebody in the beginning so that you've got a plot for a movie.
I hate watching fictional content in which something really bad happens to somebody, because then that gets in your head.
And even if it has a happy ending, the bad part's still there.
I just don't want to watch content where I watch bad things happening to people as part of my entertainment.
That's just sickening to entertainment.
I'd rather not.
You're rediscovering old ones.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing.
I find I'm rediscovering old movies.
I don't know if you're having this experience, but I find that YouTube is about the only form of entertainment that I can handle these days.
And the reason is that you can watch unlimited, seems unlimited, number of short form content so that you don't have to commit to a three hour movie and you get like a nice little hit of dopamine or something you like out of that half hour or it could be even five minutes.
And I would rather watch a whole bunch of YouTube clips, and they're pretty good at suggesting what the next clip would be, than any kind of scripted anything.
So Politico is reporting that Biden has trouble remembering his speech stuff.
Yeah, I'll tell you, Everybody who thought I was going to have a bad time after Trump left office, my critics were mockingly telling me how unhappy I must be.
And I kept thinking to myself, no, I have a preference.
I had a preference, but I'm not really feeling unhappy.
I told you a long time ago that I thought maybe Trump should be a one-term president in a positive way.
The positive way is that he's such a disruptor that sometimes you need the disruption, and I feel like a lot of the disruption he brought was entirely good.
But you can't have that much disruption forever.
You need a period of calm and then maybe you get a little disruption later after you've had calm for a while.
That would be the ideal pattern for a country.
And so I liked him as fitting into that pattern better than anybody ever has as a disruptor.
But you just can't do the disruption forever.
It pulls the fabric of your country apart and we saw that.
But I appreciate all the good that came out of it, but we have to accept.
I mean, I think you have to be an adult about it and accept that it wasn't all good.
Yeah, we'll see how long Biden stays in the office before Kamala Harris takes over.
Here's something I'm expecting, but we haven't seen yet.
Maybe you can help me if it has happened and I don't know about it.
There's a bit of, let's say, a tradition in which the vice president takes on some specific portfolio.
So in the case of Al Gore, he was in charge of re-engineering government to make it more efficient, automating things and getting websites for things and all that.
And by all accounts, he did a tremendous job, by the way.
True story, Al Gore.
If you haven't heard this story, it's worth telling you.
So years ago, I got invited into the White House during the Clinton administration, and I was getting a behind-the-scenes tour.
Of the facility.
Apparently some of the writers who worked for, the speech writers for Gore, were familiar with some of my work and we had some contact.
So when I was in town for something else, they said, hey, stop by and we'll give you a tour of the White House.
So while I'm in the White House, the Vice President at the time, Al Gore, heard I was in the building and he knew of me.
In fact, I think he had a Dilbert cartoon on his wall.
In fact, I knew he did because I was asked for it and I gave it to him.
And he asked me to help out communicating what he'd done for re-engineering the government, which apparently was quite good.
So I declined helping because I was the wrong person for that, but I did hook him up with somebody who did a good job who was the right person for that.
So vice presidents often have a portfolio like that.
You see Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus, etc.
What will Kamala Harris's portfolio be?
Or will she have one?
This is what I'd be looking for.
If you see Kamala Harris get a portfolio that feels like sort of a make work kind of a thing, something like what Al Gore had, well that wasn't make work, let me come up with a much better word for that, not make work, but rather let's say something that's important but not sexy.
So what Al Gore was doing was super important, making government more efficient, really important, but not sexy, which is why he asked me to help him with the communication, because it was just so dry and boring.
And even the coronavirus, that's really important, but...
I don't know, task force.
It just doesn't seem like a sexy job.
So will Kamala Harris have some kind of a special job that doesn't look like the highest priority in the country necessarily, although I guess the COVID task force might be, or will they leave her a generalist?
Because what I'd be looking for is if they leave her as a generalist, meaning she doesn't have a specific portfolio, I feel like they're getting ready for her to take over, to take the top job.
Whereas if they say, hey, you're going to work on this special project, I feel like that would be people signaling that it's not imminent, that she needs this other thing to build up her resume, have a little accomplishment as a vice president.
So I would look to that as a little signal of how they're thinking internally about where she's going.
She'll be in charge of making government more woke, somebody says.
You know, I still see people doing the, you know, calling her heels up Harris and referring to her, let's say her past in which Willie Brown was a, you know, I guess they've admitted that he helped her politically and they were lovers or whatever.
I don't think any of that matters.
And I think that if you think that saying that stuff somehow denigrates her or helps your team, I would just leave that alone.
It just doesn't have any persuasive power, and it's not a good look.
If that's the stuff you care about, it doesn't make you look good as a person who's commenting if what you care about is her sex life 20 years ago.
However she got there, she got there, right?
Everybody who got where they got had some luck, maybe did some weaselly things, maybe his chance.
Everybody got there the way they got there, and it's just not relevant.
And I also think it's super sexist.
So there's that.
Two evangelicals are powerless now.
Somebody says, do you think so?
Evangelicals are powerless now?
Well, their person is not in power, that's for sure.
What's Harris's weakness then?
Her weakness. Well, I think her weakness is her personality, actually.
I hate to say it, but she has that thing where she laughs at her own jokes too hard, and she just needs to work on that.
In my opinion. But, hey, she got all the way to where she is, so maybe she doesn't need to do anything I recommend.
Somebody says, I successfully used my attractiveness in business without regret.
Why wouldn't you?
Everybody should use whatever tools they have, right?
So somebody says it's not sexist because they made fun of John Kerry for marrying and to catch up money.
Yeah, I'm not sure those are exactly the same, but I take your point.
Does not debate well, blah, blah, blah.
All right, I don't have much else to talk about, so let me just show you what it looks like outdoors.
I'll be going out in that in a minute, and it's pretty darn nice.
