Episode 1358 Scott Adams: Fake News, Propaganda, Burgers, Bill Gates, Drone Wars and More
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Content:
Democrats and human motivation
Bill Gates motivation
Fake news, burgers and state secrets
Cartel drone bombs
COVID cases exploding in India
New mask guidance
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Come on in. Some of you are really on the ball this morning.
You're here so early.
Well, I guess you don't want to miss a thing.
And how would you like to take it up a level?
Of course you would.
Of course you would.
All you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. 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 if you haven't tried it yet, I feel a little bit bad for you.
But today's your day.
Come on, come on, go.
Ah, yeah.
That's good stuff. I'd like to start by reading a joke I just read.
On Twitter, from Juanita Broderick.
Now, I don't know if she made this joke up, because it's a little bit too good, but I'll read it to you anyway.
You should know that she's not much of a fan of Democrats.
So Juanita says, went into a bookstore to ask if they had Trump's book on illegal immigration.
Clerk said, get the hell out of here and don't come back.
I smiled and said, yes, that's the one.
Do you have it in paperback?
It's pretty funny. Alright.
Getting back to my major theme that Democrats don't recognize incentives and motivation.
That we think we have some kind of a political difference in the world.
You know, we think that there are some people who are on the left and some people are on the right.
I'm not so sure.
Somebody says that's an old joke.
It looks like it was a professional joke.
So I don't think...
I don't think Juanita came up with it because she does not work in that industry, but it's a good joke.
So anyway, I've said that Democrats don't recognize motivation.
So they don't work into their idea of how to build a society.
The humans have motivation.
Whereas Republicans consistently get that part right.
And that's the big difference.
But we think it's some kind of weird...
Philosophical difference.
Or it's a difference in priorities.
And there's some of that.
But mostly it's not.
Mostly it's that Democrats don't know that human motivation is an important variable in building a system.
That's what it looks like to me.
But let's take this hypothesis a little bit further.
There's a new Rasmussen poll saying that 55% of likely voters think politicians' criticisms of the police make it more dangerous for them to do their jobs.
Do you buy that? That when politicians criticize the police, it makes it more dangerous for the police?
Now, what kind of person would believe that?
What kind of person would believe that something that's happening with what politicians are saying would have an impact on how dangerous it is to be A police officer.
Well, everyone who understands human motivation thinks that, right?
Anybody who understands how human beings work would probably think this is true.
But when you do a poll by conservative versus liberal to see what they think of it, 72% of conservatives agree with the idea that politicians criticizing the police makes it more dangerous to the police.
But only 25% of liberals think this has an impact on how dangerous it is to be a police officer.
This is not really a philosophical difference, is it?
Do you see what's happening?
It's just one group thinks that human motivation is a factor, and the other one acts like it just doesn't exist.
That you can make a decision that's somehow free of how humans are wired.
That seems to be the basic difference between the left and the right.
And it gets confused with all these other topics, so we think it's something else.
Somebody says it's IQ difference.
I don't think so. I don't think so at all.
In fact, I don't think there's any evidence for that.
It's definitely not intelligence.
I think I can say that for sure.
Now, do you think it's only the liberals who are a little bit crazy?
Well, let me give you a test case.
The marvelous case of Bill Gates.
And I know what some of you just said.
Oh, don't talk about that again.
Bill Gates.
But almost everything you need to know about humans...
And how we view the world can be understood by the way we look at just this one person, Bill Gates.
And I have a pretty strong opinion about this.
And it is that if you think that Bill Gates is up to no good, or he's in it for the money, it's the worst opinion on social media.
In other words, there are lots of opinions that I could disagree with, but I also acknowledge that the other side has something to the argument, right?
In most cases, you know, take any topic.
I'm in favor of good control of the border, but I certainly understand the argument on the other side.
I happen to prefer the other argument to keep good border security.
And we can open it up as much or little as we need based on economics.
But I get the other argument, right?
I just prefer this one.
This is one of those where there really isn't another argument.
This isn't like the other stuff.
This is purely a psychological phenomenon.
It has nothing to do with how smart you are, how much you know.
It probably doesn't have anything to do with any of that.
But let's walk through it.
My hypothesis is this.
If you believe that Bill Gates is in it for the money, the power, or the control, you do not have a wise opinion.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong.
That's different. I'm saying you're not even smart enough to be in the conversation yet.
And I shouldn't say smart, because I don't think it's necessarily an IQ issue.
I think that it's a talent stack issue.
I was looking at the people who were pushing back on my statement that the worst take on the internet is that Bill Gates is in it for the money.
I was looking at all the pushback, and the first thing you do is you check the background of the people saying it.
Now the first thing I note, and I don't know why this is, there are a lot of people who seem to be professional trolls who get involved in any kind of a Bill Gates comment online.
So look at a bunch of them.
They have zero followers and seven followers and stuff.
And they immediately pile in to say bad things about Bill Gates.
Why? Why do apparently organized trolls...
Why do they care about this?
I don't know the answer to that.
It doesn't make sense to me. But there are other people who don't seem to be trolls.
They've had accounts for a while.
They comment on other things.
And they also say...
Bill Gates is clearly in it for the money, or the control, or to make things his way, or his ideology.
To which I say, let's sort that out a little bit.
Are there any philanthropists who are not pursuing a philosophy?
No. No.
No. All philanthropists have some kind of philosophy, either helping the poor.
Maybe they have a philosophy that the people who have the most should help the most.
But they all have some philosophy.
So that doesn't make sense as a criticism, unless the philosophy is bad.
I heard one critic say they don't like it because Bill Gates is supporting critical race theory.
To which I say, watch me not Google this.
Here's me not Googling to find out if Bill Gates supports critical race theory.
I don't have to check it.
He doesn't.
And I'm saying that with full risk of embarrassment.
I haven't checked it.
I have no idea if I checked it what I would find.
But I'm pretty confident that I'm not going to find he's in favor of or funding critical race theory, at least not directly.
He might give to somebody who somehow is involved.
But I don't have to check.
That's so ridiculous because he's not that guy.
He's not the guy pushing social issues.
He's the guy pushing scientific issues.
He's pushing what he thinks is just an obvious greater good.
Is anybody arguing that people should be saved from malaria if we can do it?
It's not really a political issue.
Does anybody think that it would be a bad idea for Africans to have working sanitation so that they don't use their water supply as their bathroom, which apparently is a gigantic problem?
Is that a political thing?
I mean, the things that Bill Gates works on are so outrageously nonpolitical You couldn't even get less political than the stuff he does.
I think people conflate him with Soros, and Soros seems to do more, at least as far as I can tell, more political, philosophical things.
Bill Gates is just trying to make stuff work.
He just wants water to be clean, air to be clean, that sort of thing.
You know, people not dying of disease.
So, there's just no...
And when you read the article, the arguments against them, I want to read them to you just so you see how they sound.
Because it's the sound of them that really is the key they hear that there's something going on, some cognitive dissonance or something.
Let me see...
I just want to look at my own tweet and we'll bore you much longer.
All right, so just hear some of the pushback.
All right, says Roly Poly, talking about Bill Gates.
He's corruptible just like everyone else.
No, he's not.
He's the opposite of that.
He's not corruptible like everyone else.
That's the entire point.
Is that you can't corrupt this guy because he doesn't need more money and he doesn't even need you to like him.
Think about this.
Bill Gates never pushes back against criticism.
He doesn't even care if you like him.
Doesn't need his money.
Doesn't care if you like him.
So he's definitely not corruptible because what do people like?
They want reputation, money, power.
He doesn't need any of that.
Let's see what else.
The main thing that troubles me is how soft he is toward the CCP. And he said that talking about the CCP cover-up is a distraction.
Well, I agree with that.
It is a distraction.
Because whether we knew that they had done it or not, it wouldn't make any difference.
That's what a distraction is.
A distraction is that even if you could solve it, it wouldn't make any difference.
What difference would it make?
We know that major countries are experimenting with weaponizing stuff like this.
We know we're doing it.
We know they did it. We know, I'm sure Russia's doing it.
We know that everybody wants that stuff not to get out of the lab, right?
Would China have a different opinion?
Hypothetically, if this had gotten out of their lab, is China thinking, oh, well, let's let another one get out of the lab?
That's not happening. Bill Gates is right.
There's nothing that could come of knowing whether they did it or not, because nobody would act differently.
Nobody would act differently if we knew the answer to that.
You know, we'd push back a little bit, but it wouldn't make any difference.
It wouldn't make any difference. So, here's another one.
He's in it to win it.
Question is, what is it he looks like he's winning?
So far, his winning looks like humanity losing.
What kind of a comment is that?
He's in it to win it, but we don't know what he wants to win?
I feel like it's pretty obvious.
He's helping build and design toilets in Africa, solving malaria, Trying to work on solving climate change with nuclear energy, etc.
I don't think it could be more obvious what he's in it for, to help humanity.
Now, what if helping humanity is good for his ego?
Then is it really about his ego?
Who cares? Who cares?
Do you care if he's only in it for his ego, if all the things he does are good for the greater good?
Now, you might disagree that it's for the greater good, but the point is, I don't think that matters.
He's doing it for his health?
No. I assume he wants the praise, admiration, and sense of accomplishment.
Okay. Okay.
You've certainly seen me Do things for you or for the public that seem to be more for other people, right?
They're more examples of generosity.
But nobody's kidding themselves that I get something out of it too, right?
Aren't you all smart enough to know that no matter who you are, if you do something for other people, that you also get something out of that?
What you usually get out of it is you feel good or it's good for your reputation or something like that.
But what's wrong with that?
Those are good things.
Altruism probably doesn't exist.
But altruism in which the person who's the giver feels good about themselves, that definitely exists.
I do it all the time.
You can think of it as selfish or think of it as giving, but it ends up being the same thing.
Somebody else says that Bill Gates is a puppet.
Really? You think Bill Gates is somebody's puppet?
Who? Who has control of Bill Gates?
I don't think that's a thing.
There's no evidence of it.
How about he's in it for the power because the power is addictive.
So? And that's a problem?
Because the power he seems to want has nothing to do with politics.
The power he seems to want is the power to fix things.
Do you want to deny him the power to make things better?
Or the power to maybe work on the next challenge because he did a good job on the first one?
Why would you want to deny him that power?
And Charlie says, what began with the love of money ends in pride.
Really? Really, the whole reason that Bill Gates is doing it is for pride?
What evidence of that?
You have to look at these comments to realize how whack they are.
And Bonnie says, I will stop watching if we continue down this road.
Bonnie, I'm going to solve this for you.
You're going to stop watching now.
Goodbye. I think that only puts your comments in timeout.
I don't like threats.
So, you know, feedback is great.
But if you put your feedback in the form of a threat, I'd rather you just leave.
So, goodbye. All right.
We'll talk about cognitive dissonance a little bit more in a minute.
Let me give you some propaganda alerts, which you call news.
Remember I told you that Fox News was reporting that Biden's climate plan would make you eat no more than one burger a month?
And I told you, you don't really need to look into that to know that's not true.
If you needed to do research to know that it was never true that Biden was going to limit you to one hamburger a month, you have to question yourself.
I mean, seriously.
Take a look at yourself.
Did you really need to wait for the fact check on that one?
I mean, seriously, just step away from it for a moment.
Just give yourself some distance.
Imagine you're just looking down on it like it's a story about other people.
And somebody said that somebody has a plan to limit you to one hamburger a month, and the person who wants to limit you to one hamburger a month is in a party that likes to get re-elected.
Do those two things fit?
Can you make those two things work in your head?
It's a party, Democrats, who like to get re-elected, and they've got a plan to limit you to one hamburger a month.
This could never have been true.
If you needed to Google it to find out it wasn't true, seriously, you have to ask yourself, what kind of stuff are you believing?
I mean, if you believe that on the first exposure to it, if even for a moment you thought, that could be true, you really have to step back and see what's happened to all of us.
I mean, the fact that that was even a little bit suggestive of something that could have been true, you really have to ask yourself what's happened to us all.
Alright, so it turns out that John Roberts on Fox News basically did a correction on that and said that that was not accurate.
By the way, I always make this distinction and I think it's worth making.
If you see the news people report something wrong, get fact-checked, and then just say directly, this was wrong, I don't have a problem with that at all.
Now, I get the argument that people hear the rumor, but they don't hear the correction.
But I would say in this case, the correction was given in exactly the highest form.
I mean, it was an anchor on the news talking about his own network getting a story wrong.
That's about as big a correction as you can make.
I mean, it was done on air. And then it became a story itself.
So I'm going to give him the, not just John Roberts, but Fox News, I'll give them the 48 hours correction, clarification, and I would say that that is acceptable.
But it certainly will fool a lot of people.
There's another story in the news about that there's a man named, his last name is Brown, And he was killed in North Carolina a week recently.
Are you having the same problem I am, that you can't keep all the black people killed by police straight in your head anymore?
Because there's a lot of news about police killing black people.
Like, way too much.
In the sense that it makes your hair catch on fire.
Like, what's going on? Now, I'm not saying that all of these stories tell you the story that the narrative tells.
I'm not saying that they all feed into that, but the story is that there's a man who is totally not resisting arrest, had his hands on his steering wheel and was in a controlled environment, and that the police just opened fire and executed him.
Is there any chance that's true?
Again, Think of the story that you believed, if some of you did, about being limited to one hamburger per month.
And if you stepped away from it, you should have been able to know that was not true from the first moment.
Do that with this one, too.
Just do the same thing. Just step away from it for a moment.
Imagine you'd never seen any Floyd stuff.
Imagine you weren't biased by any of the news.
Imagine you were not left or right.
You're just looking at the story.
And the story is that a man who is fully controlled and was causing no trouble at all, police opened up on him and just executed him where he was.
Is there any chance that's true?
I mean, any. Is there even 1% chance that the story, the way it's being reported, is even close to true?
No, right?
It's like the hamburger story.
You don't have to Google this one.
You don't have to Google it.
It didn't happen. I mean, at least the way it's being reported.
There's something else happening here that would explain why we saw what we saw.
Could be a mistake. Could be, you know, maybe they thought he was resisting arrest.
Maybe they thought he was reaching for something.
Who knows? But it's definitely not a story about a black man being executed by police.
It's not that. Right.
Um... So anyway, be careful what you believe.
Alright, here's another fake news, this one from Fox.
So in case you're wondering, do I only call out the fake news on the left?
Nope. Fox has some explaining to do.
So here's another one.
Fox News is reporting that John Kerry shared some secrets Military secrets with Iran.
Here are the details.
So there was this secret recording of the foreign minister, Zarif, in Iran, and in it he said that he learned from John Kerry, but had not learned even from his own government in Iran, that Israel had attacked over 200 sites in Syria that were Iranian-backed sites.
And so the way Fox News is covering this, and it's just fake news, is that John Kerry gave up military secrets to Iran.
Now again, just like the Heerberger story, just take a little distance, right?
Because when you first hear this, you say, my God, we heard it on the video.
Sorry, we heard it on the audio.
There's no doubt about it.
We heard Zarif say that John Kerry gave him military secrets.
It's right on the audio.
So it can't be not true.
We saw the transcript of the audio, right?
Can anybody tell me in the news why this is obviously fake news?
Let's see if I have to tell you the answer to this.
Can you see this one?
You got Rupard. No, no.
I don't think... We don't know.
But I don't think the audio was necessarily edited in any bad way.
Somebody says it's too on the nose.
No, that's not what I'm looking for.
Leaked tapes. You're wondering maybe why they were leaked.
Too on the nose. No, that's not it.
Thank you, Bill. Bill Blodgett got it.
So when I tell you...
Yeah, some of you are getting the right answer now.
It wasn't a secret.
Do you think that Iran's military was unaware that they had been attacked 200 times?
I don't think so. Do you think that Solomon A., the general who is supporting all of these various Iranian proxies and everything, do you think he was unaware that Israel had attacked them 200 times?
Of course not.
Of course not. The story is about Zarif being out of the loop.
That's the story. The story is not that John Kerry gave him secret military information.
The story is that Zarif was the last one to find out in his own country.
Fox News turned this into some kind of a story about John Kerry giving away military secrets.
That's not in the story.
There's no evidence of that.
There's only evidence that Zarif was so out of the loop, he didn't know that his own country or their resources had been attacked 200 times.
That's the story. Now, when I point these things out, are any of you saying, oh my god, you're right.
Of course Iran knew, just Zarif didn't know.
That's it. That's the whole story.
Alright, so there's that fake news.
There's another big story.
Was this on CNN? I think it was on CNN. Probably other places, too.
Where there's some zoning, local zoning commission guy who got fired or quit or something for refusing to call a black woman on a Zoom call with other people doctor.
Even when she clarified that she had a doctoral degree and would like to be called doctor, he called her Mrs.
whatever her last name was. And that was considered very racist.
And so he quit or got fired or something.
I think he quit. But let me put the positive spin on this.
What was the racist part of this?
This was it? This was the thing that this is the racism story of the day?
That's it. There's not even any racism in the story.
There's no racism in the story.
Yet this is the best we can come up with for a national story to show how racist we are.
And there's none in it.
If the best story about racism that you can come up with doesn't have any, you're in pretty good shape.
Because I'm pretty sure the entire news industry is scouring the nation...
For really good stories of racism.
And this is it. A story of somebody who didn't want to call somebody a doctor, because they weren't a medical doctor, presumably, didn't think it was important, didn't like being corrected.
But where was the part about her being black?
There was no evidence that they had anything to do with this guy's actions.
If you had said, is it because she's a woman?
I would have said, well, you know, maybe that's a little bit more of an argument, but there's also no evidence of that.
Although I don't think a man would have treated another man the way he treated her.
But that's speculation, too.
Again, that's in my head.
I don't know that he would have treated a man differently.
But it did look like you wouldn't talk to a man that way, I have to say.
Usually you don't talk to a man that way, even on Zoom.
Because... Ben, can you correct me on this?
If a man talked to another man like that, even on Zoom, wouldn't he feel like he'd be causing some trouble?
Somebody says, George says, I would.
Yeah, maybe you would. Anyway, if that's the worst we have, we're in pretty good shape.
Here's what Salon...
This is the headline.
Wow. That's pretty bad.
This headline. Why does Bill Gates hate the poor?
According to this headline.
Why does he not want to end the pandemic?
According to this headline.
Do you know what the story says?
Do you think the story will support this headline, that Bill Gates says no to sharing vaccines with poor countries?
What do you think? When you read the story, will the story support that headline?
Again, hamburger, one per month.
You don't have to Google it.
You don't even need to read this story to know this headline isn't true.
Why? Because Bill Gates would never say this.
He wouldn't. Nobody would say that.
But if you read the story, what is the real story?
The real story is that even if you give them the formulas, they don't have the resources to make the vaccine.
So what he was saying is there's no point in giving them the formulas because they can't use them.
There's no factory.
That is up to the standards they would need to produce them well.
So if you give them the formulas, and they produce them in substandard factories, did you come out ahead?
Because maybe you made a bunch of vaccines that kill people.
Because they might be hurrying, and it might be worse for them than if they had unfortunately waited.
So if you read the story...
He has perfectly good reasons that you say, oh, that's a pretty good reason.
What's the point of giving them the formula if they can't use it?
Or if they did use it, they would use it in such a speedy way that they couldn't do it right and it would be more dangerous.
Don't you think that should have been the headline?
Don't you think the headline should have been, Bill Gates explains that sharing the formula won't help as much as you think.
Wasn't that the headline? Bill Gates explains sharing the formula won't help as much as you think it would.
Instead, Bill Gates says no to sharing formula with poor people so that they'll die in the frickin' pandemic.
That's what Salon said.
Once you see how much the media is abusing this guy, Bill Gates, it's hard to unsee it.
You see it everywhere. All right.
Project Veritas has filed a lawsuit against CNN. This is pretty interesting.
I would not place any bets on them winning this lawsuit, but the fact that they're turning it into a case is, in and of itself, good constructive pushback.
I do think the media needs pushback, and I do think people need to sue them when there's something that seems way over the line.
And I think you could argue this is way over the line.
So here's the setup.
That Twitter took Project Veritas off over some video that regarded CNN Insider saying some bad things about CNN. And the reporting on CNN about that from Ana Cabrera that said Twitter took them down for posting other people's private information.
Now, was that true?
Well, it turns out that CNN has done exactly the same thing, and Twitter never took them down, which is showing somebody on their own front lawn.
Apparently that's too private.
So we know that Twitter did not apply the standard the same.
CNN can do it.
Project Veritas got taken down.
Then also CNN reported, or it was in a tweet, I think, from Anna Cabrera, that the problem was really repeated violations of privacy information, As opposed to, I think the first reporting was that they had too many inaccuracies or it was false statements or something.
So now CNN has tried to misreport this at least two times.
Stelter said that Veritas got taken down from Twitter for violating multiple rules, but Project Veritas is only aware of one rule that they violated, and it was the same one that CNN violated.
So CNN's reporting on this is just pure fake news.
Pure fake news. I mean, just the purest of fake news, just a fact that's not true, they just report it like it's true.
That's not even trying to be accurate.
And I think the evidence suggests there's no real intention to be accurate from CNN. But I don't know if being intentionally inaccurate is enough to Why is Joe Biden not walking from Marine One to the White House?
Apparently they had a car service picking him up from the helicopter and taking him to the White House.
And you remember, of course, that Trump famously would always be walking across that span.
You'd see all the video of that.
And so Richard Grinnell's asking, huh, Why is Joe Biden not walking that short span that everybody else walks?
Well, here's the fun part.
Are you ready? Do you think we could push this question of why Joe Biden was not walking for Marine One until CNN is forced to run another manly video package of Joe Biden?
Because remember, Project Veritas showed us that one of the technical directors...
Admitted that they were trying to make Biden look manly and vital by showing video of him riding a bike and video of him in his classic sports car and riding up and down the driveway and wearing his aviator glasses and stuff.
But I wonder if we could make CNN create another manly, manly package for Biden just by talking about this a lot.
Because if social media ramps up the Richard Grinnell's question...
Of why Joe Biden had to walk?
Won't CNN just have to respond with another propaganda package about him chopping wood or fighting a grizzly bear?
I want to see if we can get a video on CNN of Joe Biden wrestling with something.
Like wrestling with a grizzly bear or something.
Let's see if we can do that.
In other news that's scary, the cartels, the Mexican cartels, are using their own drones...
The quadrotor ones, the ones with like four little helicopter rotors.
And they're strapping a C4 to it and using them as basically guided missiles.
So cartels have their own flying bombs now that they're killing each other with.
And so I ask you this question.
What is our technology for identifying the operator of a drone?
Can somebody help me out here on the technology?
If, let's say, a state actor knocks down a drone, can we tell who the operator was?
You might be able to tell who owned it at one time or where it was purchased, but could you know who was actually on the controls at the moment the bad thing happened?
I don't know that you could, right?
Now, if you can't tell who's at the controls, what does that tell us about the future?
Well, it at least opens up the possibility that private people will be funding mercenaries to run drones to take out the cartels.
Now, I'm not suggesting it.
I'm predicting it. So, cartels don't need to come after me.
I'm just predicting it. How long will it be before there's some kind of a mercenary group that says, look...
You can go onto your computer and you can make our...
We'll sign you up and you can operate one of our drones and you can bomb the cartels yourself.
Nobody will ever know.
You could be the one who personally takes out the cartel.
What if you don't need to be operating them, but rather you just put in a little GPS coordinate and you send off your drone and it just flies to its designated place and blows up?
Well, you know that's coming.
There's nothing that's going to stop that from happening.
So, at the moment, you still need a person, and you need to be close enough that the person is controlling it with their controls.
But the next obvious step is you just put a GPS destination in it, throw it in the air, and go have lunch.
And the thing flies for five miles, finds its destination, comes straight down, boom.
I feel as though the cartels have opened up a can of worms here in which superior technological forces will be using this weapon against them fairly soon.
So I think that the cartels will be destroyed by mercenary drone armies.
That's my prediction.
Cartels will be destroyed by mercenary drone armies.
Somebody says it's illegal.
Yeah, I know it's illegal.
Yeah, I know that.
I did a search on Google Trends for cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance.
What do you think the trend of how often people are Googling the phrase cognitive dissonance, what do you think is happening to that?
Well, it turns out that the searches for that term are have been increasing every year for, I don't know, 10 or 12 years.
But around the election of Trump, and then around the next election, the search terms, you know, it peaked.
And it's still going up.
So here's my question.
Did I have anything to do with that?
Because a lot of you heard the term, or at least heard it in common use, about politics from me, I think.
But I saw just, there's a video of Rose McGowan.
Apparently she just appeared on Fox News, and people give her a hard time for it.
And she said in response to that that she sparked cognitive dissonance.
Now when you hear somebody who's in the entertainment field...
Using a phrase like that, do you say to yourself, huh, this has now entered the mainstream.
Cognitive dissonance is a term that most of the world didn't understand 10 years ago.
But I would say at the moment, a celebrity can use that term in public and expect enough people to understand it that it doesn't sound weird.
I told you before that Trump entering politics, back in 2015 I famously said that he was going to change more than politics.
I said he was going to change how we understand reality itself.
Do you remember that prediction?
That Trump would change how you understand reality itself.
And this is it.
This is the signal that somebody in the entertainment industry, not a psychologist, not a scientist, can use the term cognitive dissonance properly.
And by the way, she used it properly, used it in exactly the right way, in the right exact context, and that it's just normal conversation now.
It's a big deal.
It's a really big deal.
Somebody says there's no cognitive dissonance, but that's sarcasm.
All right. Now, here's a real question.
So this morning somebody accused me of having cognitive dissonance about, I don't know, Bill Gates or something.
And I ask you this question.
If you think I have cognitive dissonance on a topic, but you hear me say I think you have it, how can you sort that out?
If two people, let's say it's not you and it's not me, it's just two people, and one says, you have cognitive dissonance, and that's why you're seeing this wrong, and the other says, no, you're the one with cognitive dissonance.
If you are the objective observer, how can you sort it out?
Well, the one thing you couldn't do is say, well, which one do I agree with?
Because you might have the cognitive dissonance too.
So you can't just say which one is smarter or which one I agree with.
That doesn't work. And you can't ask them because they both think it's the other one.
And the way cognitive dissonance works is when you have it, you don't know.
That's what it is.
You don't know. So here is what I would suggest.
Number one, look for the trigger.
There's no cognitive dissonance unless there's a trigger.
And the trigger is very specific.
It has to be something that you thought was true that is proven to be untrue, but you couldn't accept the new truth.
And so you created a weird world where you patched together some illogic to make it all hold together.
That's cognitive dissonance.
So if you don't see a trigger for one person, but the other person's trigger is obvious, let's say some new information came out, that would be a strong indication that the one with the new information...
That violated their prior beliefs probably hasn't.
Not proof. Oh, somebody's saying the prediction.
Yeah. Whoever can predict better is likely to be the more accurate worldview.
But that takes a while, right?
You have to wait for the predictions.
So that, yeah. So prediction would be one of them.
And finding the trigger would be the other.
But I'd like to introduce a third one today.
Which is the breadth of your talent stack.
So let's say you have two people.
One is a poet and the other is a scientist with an MBA and lots of economics and business and, you know, quantitative stuff.
And the two of them disagree.
One has a talent stack in poetry and the other has a talent stack in all kinds of quantitative things, statistics, economics, but they disagree.
Which one has the cognitive dissonance?
Can't tell, right?
You really can't tell. But it's more likely that the person who can see a topic from more angles has a better view.
It doesn't guarantee that the more educated person doesn't have it.
But if you're going to try to guess from the outside, I would usually give a little more weight to the person who has at least enough experience.
And you see this with the Bill Gates stuff.
I have an experience that is rare.
And my experience is traveling from not rich to rich.
If you haven't done that journey...
There's something missing in your experience that I have.
And what I have is that once you get a certain amount of money, and everybody's different, right?
But a certain amount of money, your motivation changes.
And I felt it in myself.
Now, if you haven't experienced that, where you just don't need more money, so you start looking outward and say, okay, well, what can I do?
I made my money.
What can I do for somebody else?
Bill Gates is the ultimate example of that.
He made his money. It's not going anywhere.
He has more than he could ever spend.
He's trying to give it away.
His motivation is very, very unlikely making more money.
Very unlikely.
And I know that because I just have exposure to this very unique situation of going from poor and knowing that all I wanted was more money to going to rich Where suddenly your motivation changes.
So look for the talent stack and the experience.
I guess the Governor Newsom recall is on.
Got enough signatures for that, so he will be in a recall race.
And one person running against him will be Caitlyn Jenner as a Republican.
How much do you love the fact that Caitlyn Jenner will be running as a Republican in California?
I love everything about this story.
Now, I don't think Caitlyn Jenner will win, but I love that this is going to be part of our context.
And I've got to tell you, Caitlyn and the entire Kardashian group, they sure know how to get attention, don't they?
They really know how to get attention.
So good luck to Caitlyn Jenner running as a Republican.
I have no idea what kind of policies are involved there, but this is a fun situation.
On the opposite of fun, the very opposite of fun, India has some estimates say up to a half a billion cases of COVID. And India is really one of these situations that should make you question your ability to understand anything.
Because didn't India go from, hey, India's doing great and we don't know why.
Maybe it's because they're all taking hydroxychloroquine, right?
Do you remember when we thought, is it because they're all taking hydroxychloroquine because they have malaria issues?
Well, I never believed that because I couldn't believe there would be enough Even if it worked, it would make any difference.
But the hospitals are being overrun.
They're running out of oxygen or have run out in some places.
And things in India went exactly the way we'd expect, but it took much longer than we thought.
And I don't know if that's just because they were slow on testing or just the data was always bad.
We know that data was bad, but...
Did you ever think that India was going to escape this?
Now, we still don't understand China, do we?
I still don't understand how China is escaping this.
That doesn't make sense, does it?
If you saw that China managed to get coronavirus under control and keep it that way, and then you also saw that India did that, which would have seemed impossible in both cases, I mean, China getting it under control just seems impossible.
But somehow, did they?
India doing it seemed also impossible, but now we know they didn't.
So at least India makes sense, right?
Your common sense about the virus is now compatible with the data coming out of India, but it wasn't compatible before.
Don't know why. Yeah.
Somebody says it makes total sense.
Well, even if you factor in that India has less obesity, a young population, lots of vitamin D... Even if you factor all of that in, it shouldn't have been enough.
And now we know it wasn't enough to keep them safe.
So you got that going on.
Are all of you having the same Trump withdrawal problem that I am?
That every day I wake up and the news is just not that interesting anymore?
Have you noticed that?
And in fact, most of the news is just propaganda now.
Maybe it always was. Lockdowns are starving India.
So I guess Biden's coming out with a new mask guidance today.
Yesterday I was driving around and I was observing the people where I live to see how many people who are walking outdoors completely alone wore masks.
What do you think was the percentage?
In my neighborhood, people walking completely alone.
And when I say alone, I don't just mean there's nobody walking with them.
I mean there's nobody else on the sidewalk.
Where I live, you could walk for a great distance without encountering another person on the sidewalk.
About half.
About half of the people, completely alone, like isolated in the middle of nothing outdoors, about half of them were wearing full masks.
People were exercising, running in masks, biking in masks.
You can almost see people's IQ at this point by mask wearing outdoors.
Now, I will make an exception.
I saw some elderly people who were masked outdoors.
I'll give them that.
I don't think it makes any difference.
But if you were elderly and you hadn't had your vaccination and you were just concerned, well, throw on a mask if it makes you feel better.
But I don't think it would make any statistical difference.
No more mass talk.
Yeah. This was my point.
We need Trump to give us more fake controversies so we have other things to talk about besides masks.
One out of ten here.
Somebody says 1 out of 10.
Yeah, we do live in dumb times, so we'll see what's happening.
You know, Tucker Carlson, I guess, was encouraging people to...
Get in the faces or be critical of people wearing masks outdoors, especially if a child is masked outdoors.
And I wouldn't go that far, but I do think there's a tipping point coming.
Feels like we're almost there.
The tipping point being, I just don't see the public putting up with it.
Now, in my town, people are back to playing basketball in the public park without masks, but I don't know if it's just not being enforced or if it's legal now.
I don't know the difference. But I see people playing in the park without masks every day now, so I don't know what the situation is.
All right, and still, as far as I know, I still don't have access to the vaccine.
I believe it's fake news.
That the vaccine is sort of available for people in my age group.
There's definitely lots of people getting it, but available would suggest that I could go to a website and sign up and stuff.
But right now we just have websites where you can fill out all your information and then it will tell you it's not available.
That's all we have.
I'm hoping that changes soon.
The last person I talked to waited five hours for a vaccine in line.
So since I'm not going to do that, I say it's not available.
All right. Somebody says the definition of IQ means that 50% are below 100.
Yeah. Have you ever had a conversation with somebody whose IQ is below 100%?
We must have, right?
Because a lot of people are in that category.
But if you're 40%, let's just say, 40% smarter than the person you're talking to, that's a pretty tough conversation.
