cognitive dissonance and you also know that you might be easily triggered by it because I'm in a situation where I could be triggered into it. So you should always look for the trigger if you're trying to decide who's got cognitive dissonance and who doesn't. You look for the trigger. And the trigger would be that something happened that was the opposite of what you believed was possible or could happen, right? Now did that happen? Is there anybody who believed the opposite of what was proven to be true? And here's the problem. It's everybody. Every everybody everybody believed something that was the opposite of true. No matter which side you were on. Do you know why? Because truth bifurcated.

So if you thought that vaccinations were a good idea, there's plenty of studies and proof to show you were wrong. If you thought they were a good idea, there's plenty of evidence to say you were right. So both sides have evidence that confirms they're right and other equally strong looking evidence. You know we're bad at knowing what's strong evidence. But to many people it looks like the opposite. So you have a situation where a hundred percent of the public could be potentially triggered into cognitive dissonance. But you don't know which half it was. At least half. Probably both. I'm not sure anybody is in a situation where they can say for sure they have no trigger.

So let me give an example of no trigger. If you predicted something correctly. So you're the only one who said, let's say you know, let's say I predicted that Trump would get elected in 2016 and then I was right. Was cognitive dissonance triggered? No. No. Because what I thought would happen happened. But suppose you thought it was impossible he'd get elected in 2016. Well then you think there must have been something like Russian interference because your cognitive dissonance couldn't allow that. You simply saw something happen that you thought wouldn't happen.

Now fast forward to 2020. Trump supporters were positive, many of them positive, that he was going to win that election. And then things reversed late at night and that looked sketchy. And that was the trigger. So everybody who thought that Trump really won and the election was rigged, I don't know what the truth of this question is so we're not going to talk about what's true and what's false. That's unknowable to me. You know some of you think you know it but I don't know. So under those conditions nearly 100 percent of Trump supporters should have been triggered into cognitive dissonance.

Now there's a deep assumption in this. The deep assumption is that the election was something like fair. But we don't know, right? We only know there's no court approved proof that it was anything but fair. That's all we know. But if you believe that you obviously saw something that went wrong, then cognitive dissonance would kick in.

So can you tell the difference between, let me ask you here. This will be a test to see if you've learned anything. Could you individually, not other people, we're not talking about other people, could you tell the difference between a stolen election and your own cognitive dissonance? Go. Yes or no. Could you tell the difference between a stolen election and your own cognitive dissonance?

The Locals people all have the correct answer, right? The answer is no. You cannot tell the difference. But we act like we can, don't we? And I'm no exception. But we sort of have to act on our beliefs.

All right, I got a smattering of yeses. So there's a small smattering of people who say yes, I can tell the difference between a stolen election and cognitive dissonance. But there are far more people. So on Locals, listen to this. On Locals you should know that your answers are far more, let's say, intellectually valid than on YouTube. There should be a difference and there should be because I spend more time talking to the Locals people. They would be far more educated on the fact that you can't tell the difference. Cognitive dissonance, by definition you can't tell the difference. By definition. So it's not a question of whether you can use your power to power through the cognitive dissonance. It's just what the word means. The word means you can't tell. If you could tell you wouldn't be in it. So it's just a definitional thing.

All right. I don't think anybody should be taking a victory lap about the pandemic. But we're all going to do it. And this is one of those beautiful times when, once we're after you know in my opinion we're post-pandemic, you know there's lingering problems forever but we're kind of post the worst part of the pandemic, and what could be better than everybody thinking they were right the whole time? Because I do. I believe that my choices were probably as close to the smartest risk-reward choices I could have made in my specific situation. Not yours. You know yours was different. But in my specific situation. Now others would disagree with me but the beauty is I will now be able to go forward and say I did all the right things. I was so smart. And the people who did the opposite of what I did, I could do the same thing. They'll say they were smart and they got the right answer and I'm an idiot. So we all win. It'd be bad if we were in the pandemic but once you're over it you both get to celebrate how right you were even though half of us were not. Don't know which half though. We'll never know.

Don't you love it when the Democrats try to make things different by just changing their names? You know the Inflation Reduction Act that was anything but, etc. Well here's the newest entry. Did you know that if you remove or destroy any military information it's espionage? So there's something called the Espionage Act that Trump is being threatened with because of the documents at Mar-a-Lago. But apparently if you read it, if you accidentally, well I guess you'd have to do it intentionally, if you destroyed any military records, which is a pretty big category isn't it? Military records, like that's a lot of stuff. Anything that's military related. I'm not talking about like their actual records but anything that references the military. If you move it without using the right process I guess or you destroy it, you're guilty of espionage.

Is that the word you would have used? Would you have used the word espionage for mishandling classified information? Now I get why they would because they don't want to leave any opening that you know moving documents could ever have a good reason. So I get why they're going extreme on that. But when you see the news reporting that Trump is being considered for Espionage Act charges, is that news that doesn't feel like news? I mean it's new but it feels like pure propaganda. If they were even a little bit honest they would say the Espionage Act is written to be intentionally broad and it captures even things like moving things without using the right process. Or you would say Trump might be accused of doing something with moving documents, you know secure documents. He may have used the wrong process to move secure documents. Which weirdly, if you were writing the story honestly you say which weirdly is included in this big category called the Espionage Act even though obviously the intention would not be espionage in these cases.

Now there's no way you can call the news honest when they call this a problem of espionage. Am I right? And by the way I don't know if Fox News covers it this wrong way but when you see like the trending stuff and a lot of the headlines you'll see might be guilty of the Espionage Act. Now espionage seems a little too close to Russia collusion doesn't it? Doesn't it? You know he was. I don't think so.

Now let's dig into this. By the way here's the best Mar-a-Lago joke so far. The best Mar-a-Lago joke was not mine. Twitter user Greg Marchand MD tweeted this: Actually we're all good now because Trump declassified the documents the FBI planted so they cancelled each other out. Okay that's really good. Yeah it's so good I'm pissed off that I didn't think of it first. Like why didn't I think of that one? Yes, yes that was perfect.

But here's the funny part. Obviously you know it's not literally true but it could have been true. You can imagine that if Trump had said everything in these boxes is declassified and let's say there was some record of that, just hypothetically, if there was some record of