Dave Smith and Rob Bernstein dismantle Scott Adams' dishonest tactics regarding COVID mandates, exposing them as authoritarian overreach that ruined lives without stopping virus spread. They critique President Biden's NATO commitments, arguing troop movements near Russia constitute aggression akin to provoking World War III while supplying Ukraine. Citing Jimmy Dore, they assert the U.S. military-industrial complex drives wars in Ukraine and China for profit, occupying oil regions like Syria, ultimately identifying the American government itself as the true enemy rather than foreign nations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Two Very Different Claims00:14:27
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
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Let's get into today's show.
So as you're aware, Rob, is a pretty big deal and something that, you know, pretty impactful on what we've been talking about for the last few years here is that it has officially been announced that in May, COVID's over, which it, you know, kind of feels like COVID's over now, if you can announce that it's over in May.
COVID's kind of in a way been over for a while, at least in terms of the craziest aspects of the response to it.
But it is officially declared now that in May, the state of emergency that was first declared by Donald Trump, as much as many of his supporters would like to let him off the hook for that, that that is coming to an end.
And that seems like a big deal.
Even if not that the craziest parts of the policies have already gone away, it still seems, if nothing else, symbolically, that's a big deal to say, okay, we are no longer in an emergency, you know, war on COVID.
What do you think?
I think I'm going to continue to panic for three months.
I think that it's nice that for those in the Panic community, the president has given us the right to continue to live like psychopaths for three more months.
So I appreciate that.
Well, yeah, you want to give people a little bit of a little bit of an out.
Like, I know you can't just stop panicking tomorrow.
So we'll give you three more months.
So at least officially, this whole thing will be over in May of 2023, a little over three years after it started.
And it seems like a good time to reflect on like, okay, what the hell happened over these last three years?
Because that was the most insane thing that we've ever lived through and just the most disastrous, you know, government response to just about anything.
And that's got some pretty steep competition.
So, you know, anyway, as the three years end, it's like, whew, that felt like a really long 15 days.
So let's look back at it and see what we can learn.
And I think, you know, as we've been talking about on some of the last few episodes, it's, I hope that there is some type of reckoning that comes as a result of this.
Like now that you're out of the crisis, even though we've been out of the crisis for quite a while, now that it's officially recognized, we're out of the crisis, we can say, okay, look, who got it right?
Who didn't get it right?
Why did these people get it right?
Why did these people get it wrong?
Maybe, you know, things like we were talking about, Brett Weinstein saying, hey, Sam Harris, why don't you come sit down with me?
Let's discuss this.
Why were we on, you know, why were we seemingly operating on different planets throughout this time?
Whose planet seemed to have had better predictive powers than the other ones, stuff like this.
So it seems like this is a good time to reflect on this.
And God willing, some of the people in positions of power should be held accountable for what they did.
So after them all, big old trials.
So in that spirit, I had a bit of an exchange on Twitter today with Scott Adams, who we had mentioned on this show a couple episodes ago.
I actually gave some credit to Scott, who had kind of at least seemingly partially admitted that he was wrong and that the people who were on the other side of it were turned out to be right.
I gave him credit for that.
You were a little bit less generous to him and you made some fair points as well.
But I ended up getting into an exchange with him on Twitter.
And I do think that, you know, these things are, I think, especially now, kind of symbolically as we come to the end of it, it's important and valuable to have some of these exchanges in this world, in this kind of internet personality world.
I think me and you have been some of the bigger voices really opposing the government response to COVID from the very beginning.
And I think Scott was one of the prominent voices not on that side.
I don't know exactly what his position was, which seems to be a point, a sticking point for him.
I don't exactly understand that.
But I just want to read this exchange and kind of go through it.
And because there was a challenge that was issued to me here.
So let's see if we can't take up this challenge.
So this started as an exchange with other people and I jumped into it.
So first Scott Adams tweeted.
He said, Today I learned that people who can't tell the difference between my opinions on so-called COVID vaccinations and that of Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro are nonetheless excellent at analyzing the risks of vaccines versus novel viruses.
In fact, better than almost all the experts.
So that was his original tweet.
And Eric, Eric John, who's the pizza artist, yes, who's he made, he's great and he made me on a pizza, which was pretty cool.
I believe the first person ever makes me on a pizza.
So I will always be grateful to Eric for that.
So he responded and said, I think comic Dave Smith said it best when he explained that when you start from the premise that the government is lying to you, then you require solid proof for everything they do, which in this case never existed.
So that was his response.
I thought a pretty fair job of summarizing what we were talking about recently.
And then Scott responded to him and said, it's important to ignore half of the risks to get to that opinion.
So that's what he responded to that.
So in other words, you must be ignoring half the risk in order to get to the opinion that you distrust the government as a premise.
And I'd like to see the math on that one.
Which half of the risk?
Which risk?
Are we like, what are you allocating out here?
What would be 50% of that?
It just yeah.
Well, it's it makes no sense.
And so anyway, I wasn't in this thread, but I saw this and because I was tagged in it and it was responding to me and Scott Adams was responding to my argument.
So I responded and I said, that's just not true.
skepticism of government as a starting point doesn't require one to ignore anything it simply requires that you not ignore the risks of authoritarianism which far too many people did um and to just be clear on what i'm saying there it's uh you could think covid was an incredibly risky and still be skeptical of government like there's nothing in that that you know uh requires you not to think it's risky.
I could think many things are very risky and still be very skeptical of government, still know that these are not honest people, that these are it's essentially a legalized criminal organization.
None of those views are in conflict.
So no, it's just, that's just not true.
And there was something kind of slippery about the way Scott Adams responded to me.
His response was, which I don't like when people do this, when they just like move the goalposts like this.
So that's, he made a claim that is logically not true.
I pointed out why it's not true.
You could, you know what I mean?
Like I could even think that COVID was going to wipe out 50% of the human race and still start from a starting point of being skeptical of government.
It's just not true that I have to ignore that.
Also, the point you made, why are you assuming that's 50% of the risk?
Where'd you get this half number from?
I would argue that lockdowns and mandates were way worse than COVID.
So whatever.
But then he said, so his response to that is he goes, how did you calculate your risk of long COVID with and without the shot?
Well, there's fucking la la land here.
How do I quantify my risk about something that probably doesn't even exist?
Yeah, I guess that's a difficult math equation.
You got me.
Yeah.
So I responded by saying back into my house to take more teeth.
I don't know.
I haven't really sat down and thought about that one either, Scott.
It happened.
Exactly.
Yes.
Thank you.
Okay.
So what I said to him is he asked, how do I calculate?
He said, how do you calculate your risk of long COVID with and without the shot?
And I responded to him saying, I'm not pretending to have a perfect calculation of something impossible to calculate.
I said the chances of me getting, quote, long COVID, unquote, and I put that in quotes for an obvious reason, are incredibly small.
And there isn't a shred of evidence that the vax would reduce it.
Not sure what point you're making.
If anything, the evidence would be what evidence do you have that there was any utility in taking this?
And why, and how do you quantify your risk of health concerns four years from now from an endless booster regimen that the government's recommending?
Right.
I mean, but to say this thing of like, how do you qualify?
Like, first of all, he's asking how you calculate this because obviously it's impossible to calculate this.
We don't even exactly understand what long COVID is or if it really exists.
People with depression because of government mandates that change their lifestyles.
Well, like what percentage of the people who are saying they suffered from long COVID are hypochondriacs and this is something psychosomatic.
Like we just don't know.
And it might be the case that there are some people who really got COVID and then suffer.
It certainly is true that there are people who got COVID very bad who got pneumonia in the wake of COVID, who had lung damage.
I mean, that is something that can happen.
So, but what exactly are we considering long COVID?
All these things seem to get like mushed together, but the idea of people who just had COVID and this, like had a mild case of COVID and then claim they got long COVID.
I mean, how would you even know that that was actually from COVID versus some other virus that they got or verse maybe even a jab that they got?
It's just impossible to even get a sense of what the exact odds are and then know what you know what I mean, what the odds of that are, and then what the odds are with the vaccine.
By the way, if someone could actually define these things down and then measure, have a control group of people who are unvaccinated versus vaccinated, I'd be interested to look at the results of that.
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This is where I got into the territory where I was like, oh, I think this guy's being very dishonest.
So his response to this was, he said, you know, your odds of long COVID.
You will have to teach me how.
I was not aware that was possible.
Well, you said you didn't know the odds of it.
This is just being a real weasel cunt because his move is he wants to pretend like there was never evidence.
Like, I really don't understand it.
You know, I guess I really got to do my homework and go back and see specifically what he was advocating for in regards to his position that much.
He's being, yeah, and neither do I.
So it's like, just tell me what you're arguing.
He's being intentionally slippery here because so I said, I'm not pretending to have a perfect calculation of something impossible to calculate.
The chances of me getting long COVID in quotes are incredibly small.
So then he says, you know, your odds of getting long COVID.
You'll have to teach me how.
I was not aware that was possible.
But this is just like silly trickery.
The Prank Conversation00:15:37
I specifically said I don't can't calculate exactly what the odds are.
I said I know that they're very low.
And then he said, oh, so you know your odds.
Go, no, There's a very big difference.
There's two very different claims.
One claim is, I know my exact, the exact, you know, I can calculate the exact risk of getting long COVID.
The other is to say, I know it's very low.
Now, that, let's say, I have no data on getting struck by lightning.
So you'd be like, what, what are your odds of getting struck by lightning?
And I'd go, well, I don't know exactly what the odds are because I don't have the data, but I know they're very low.
And we'd be like, oh, I thought you just said you don't know what the odds are.
It's like, well, yes, no, I don't know exactly what the odds are.
I do know that they're very low.
Very low is also a relative term.
You know what I mean?
Like, what is very low?
If the odds of getting struck by lightning were like 5%, we'd probably consider that very high.
But I think it's reasonable to say, yes, the odds of me having severe negative health outcomes from COVID are very low by any reasonable standard.
So he's just playing a game here.
So at this point, someone sends me a tweet from Scott Adams that he tweeted earlier today when he said, he said, have I taken the prank far enough yet?
And evidently he's talking to a bunch of other people about how that he's like pranking the people who are skeptical of the COVID response or something or the anti-vaxxers, whatever he might call us.
So then I responded to him and I said, hey, Scott, someone just sent me your tweet saying this was a prank.
So if your game here is that you're saying things you don't believe, and I'm assuming that you believe them, then you got me.
Good one, I guess.
Like, so what's the prank here exactly?
Like, you don't really, um, to which he responded, you haven't spotted the prank.
Um, this is where I predicted.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
This isn't the next response.
Sorry.
You know how Twitter does this thing sometimes where it's not exactly in the words.
Playing his own game.
Well, so he goes, you haven't spotted the prank yet.
This is where I predicted you would tap out.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't answer my last two questions if I were you either.
So he sent these two tweets and then said, let me see if I can find the other tweets because this is where the meat of what I really wanted to get into.
Oh, okay.
So no, I'm sorry.
I guess that last one was one of them.
The you know your odds of long COVID.
So I guess we already kind of talked about that.
Good luck with the rebranding Scott Adams on becoming wrong and annoying.
I hope that this works well for your career.
For a guy that we praised as being brilliant and obviously being smart enough to create good content, you seem to be going in a new direction of being wrong about stuff and then just annoying about it.
So good luck.
So I think, by the way, I think what he's trying to do here, I think the prank, which I don't know again, but it's like, I don't know, dude, like just tell us what your position is and then tell us what point you're demonstrating through this prank or something.
But I think the prank is something like, I can get all of these people, these people who are against the vaccine to tell me how wrong I was.
But then they're also going to demonstrate that they think they can calculate all of these risks better than the experts can.
And when it comes down to it, they don't really know anything.
You can't tell me what your odds of long COVID with or without the vaccs are.
And essentially, I think, essentially his argument is that it was all kind of just luck.
Like some of us were right, some of us were wrong.
So now the ones who are proven right, which he admits were us, they just happen to get there by luck because they can't really calculate all of these unknowns either.
But again, this is just silly.
And just as I said, he's so this is, by the way, what got me.
The reason that I've responded to all of this is because and why I'm talking about it on the podcast is because he said, which, okay, if you're trying to prank me, are you trying to get at me?
That's a pretty effective way.
Is he goes, I predicted you would tap out at these two questions.
So I'm like, well, Mr. Predictions, not only are your predictions wrong, I'm not tapping out.
I'm going to do a whole segment on this on my podcast.
So if anyone wants to clip this and send it over to Scott, we can do this.
And by the way, very happy to host Scott anytime he wants to come on the show, open invite to him.
We can discuss all of these things and he can explain where he's coming from and I can explain where I'm coming from.
I think as one of the larger platforms who are out here, I'm pretty damn proud of our track record on all of this.
And I think not only were we right about all of the major questions involving COVID, I think we really demonstrated why we were right about them, like exactly what we were looking at and why we could see that this was the correct.
Every step of the way, we looked at the government information coming out and said they're clearly lying about the utility of this.
And now maybe I'm giving us too much credit here, but from what I remember, like I was just out and about, not too concerned with the risks of COVID.
And I was like, this doesn't, I don't understand why I would take this thing of little utility when they don't have the long-term result.
Like I just was looking at it.
Hey, this makes no sense.
So I don't understand him coming forward now and going, well, how could you have possibly made a good decision then?
Well, I looked at the information that came out and it was clear to me that the government was lying.
They were mismarketing the product.
I read the materials of the actual studies.
It was as many deaths in the category of people that were vaccinated.
I read about relative risk reduction versus absolute risk reduction.
I listened to scientists who told me that viruses mutate and that this isn't going to work for the mutations.
These were all things that were known back when the vaccine was released.
So I don't understand this new trickery game of, or yeah, I guess you can ask me specific questions that were irrelevant for making an informed decision.
Yeah.
An informed decision that there was no evidence that this was good.
And that was it.
Yeah.
And even before that, with stuff like with the lockdowns, it was very easy right away.
And I suppose you could argue that this is somewhat philosophical and not empirical, but it was very easy to say that no one was nearly concerned enough with the ungodly amount of authority we were handing over to governors to dictate every intimate aspect of individuals' lives on the promise that this would mitigate the virus.
It was pretty easy to oppose that or at least go like, whoa, we need a real conversation about this.
There needs to be like a healthy debate about this and not just like, oh, we're scared.
So throw our hands up lockdowns.
And then look, there were predictions after predictions about what a disaster reversing the lockdowns in Florida would be, what a disaster not locking down in Sweden would be.
And none of these predictions came true.
And it was very easy to see that if lockdowns were to be justified, there should be a drastic difference.
Like there's it's just so obvious that in order to justify kicking tens of millions of people out of work and closing schools and destroying people's lives and isolating people and all of this stuff, that it's not like, oh, and we did all that and we got one less case of COVID or something.
It'd be like, well, then that's not worth it.
It would the implicit premise of lockdowns was that this will, this has to be substantially better than the places that don't lock down.
And that's just not true.
That just didn't happen.
There's there's lots of like sound arguments we were making all the way throughout all of this stuff.
So anyway, back to this, this was the other thing that Scott insisted that he, or he predicted.
And now I hope maybe we could all agree since he gave at least one, he gave at least one solid view here, which is that he predicted I would tap out after these two questions.
And he's wrong about that.
I'm doing a whole segment on my podcast about it.
Okay.
So again, responding to me when I said, I'm not pretending to have a perfect calculation of something impossible to calculate, the chances of me getting long COVID are incredibly small.
And there isn't a shred of evidence that the vaccs would reduce it.
Not sure what your point, what point you're making.
And then his other response to this was he said, is there a shred of evidence the shots reduced the severity of outcomes for elderly people during alpha and delta?
And did you assume the severity would be unrelated to the long COVID outcomes?
So he's being weasel-in that let's just not discuss long COVID.
There's no reason if we're having a reasonable discussion about risks and we're trying to decide whether or not a vaccines are a good or a bad idea and you're throwing long COVID into that discussion, you're throwing a monkey wrench in, which is you haven't even quantified that it is a risk factor.
You can't even define what long COVID is.
So what are we talking about?
Like I'm just saying, if you want to have a good discussion about risks and vaccines, let's take long COVID out of it because that seems to just be the newest version of government propaganda for the horrors of actually getting sick and the vaccines don't even prevent you from getting sick.
So I don't even know how you could be having a discussion about the vaccine preventing you from getting long COVID.
Do you even know the numbers of people who have been vaccinated or not vaccinated and how many of them have long COVID?
I mean, the fact that the vaccine has reduced long COVID, that seems, that would be an impossible conversation to have.
So if you actually want to have an evidence-based conversation, that's a very stupid thing to be throwing in there.
Yeah.
Look, there's actually a lot of evidence at this point to suggest that the vaccinated, at least a certain amount of time later, are more likely to get COVID.
And so if that's the case and they're in those age groups that he's talking about, he said for elderly people, who knows?
If there is long COVID, then maybe they're increasing the risk.
Anyway, look, I just, to take this on, he said, is there the first part?
Is there a shred of evidence that the shots reduced the severity of outcomes for elderly people during alpha and delta?
Probably.
Just take uncertainty.
Probably.
Yes.
A shred of evidence?
Yes.
There was some evidence that immediately after taking the vaccine, people had some protection.
It does seem that at least for alpha, it does seem like that there was some reduction in the extreme negative outcomes for elderly people right after taking the vaccine.
Now, hold on, let me just say, not as much as they claimed, not nearly as much as they claimed.
Because when you start to scratch the surface of it, they were manipulating a lot of these numbers and examples that we've talked about before, counting the deaths amongst unvaccinated and then starting it at January in 2021, which was before anyone was unvaccinated.
So you were just counting all of those deaths as being the unvaxxed versus vaxed when everyone was unvaccinated.
So it was unclear.
There was a lot of shady things that went on to the numbers that the official government numbers, but that's not to say there wasn't a shred of evidence.
There was.
There was a shred of evidence that within a certain amount of period, which seems to be much shorter than they said.
Like we're talking like maybe three or four months after getting double vaccinated, you had slightly better protection against alpha.
That's what the evidence seems to point to.
But that's far from a justification for any of the vaccine mandate regime.
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And we didn't really take a stance against elderly or people in risk categories getting vaccinated.
Might have made sense for those people.
Probably should have had a conversation with their own doctors.
I don't think that was ever our position.
Yeah, no, certainly not.
I was always somewhat agnostic on that issue.
Like I was kind of like, I don't know if you're like, I kind of just look at it.
It's like, well, if you feel like you're in a high risk category or if you're in a high risk category for COVID, which are really statistically speaking, the only people who have really negative outcomes from COVID.
If you're one of those people and you want to try this new experimental vaccine, you know, like, okay.
I mean, I don't think the that the clinical trials demonstrated too much, but okay.
Yeah, that's that's fine.
I don't really have a problem with someone taking that.
I also think that for, let's say, you know, if you're talking about the risks associated with the vaccine, an 85-year-old rolling the dice on those is a much different thing than a 15-year-old.
You know, it's just like, I don't know, you're already on borrowed time, kind of.
You've already made it past like the expected life expectancy.
It's just a kind of different thing.
I don't know exactly what your risk worst reward there is.
At this point, I'd probably lean toward, I wouldn't, but I don't know.
I think it was probably just going into government.
And generally speaking, just government mandates that restrict freedom in order to try and incentivize or force people to take a vaccine.
That's what we were taking issue with.
Yeah.
And that there were clearly huge swaths of the population that were being forced to take this or have their livelihood ruined or like not be able to participate in society when it made absolutely no sense, like absolutely no sense at all.
I mean, they were like, you know, there's like colleges, people who are at like university, like grad students who had been double vaccinated and had COVID.
So now had natural immunity and a month later had to get a booster if they wanted to return to school.
There's just no defending this, and yet it was mandated.
And of course, we opposed the blatantly unconstitutional, you know, laws that were being pushed.
Think of Biden's, you know, OSHA mandate that was even the Supreme Court said this is blatantly unconstitutional and struck it down.
So there were a lot of things like this that were just, they were insane.
They did nothing to, you know, help people or save people from COVID.
And they, in reality, destroyed many people's lives.
So anyway, just the final part of Scott's question here, he asked also, and did you assume that the severity would be unrelated to the long COVID outcome?
Once again, fucking talking about with long COVID.
You're literally introducing, hey, let's have a ridiculous fantasy conversation.
Let's talk about the tooth fairy, Scott.
You want to come on the show and talk about the tooth fairy?
Let's do it.
Vaccine Side Effects00:05:39
Yeah.
You know, if you're talking about the severity of, so the first question was, did they reduce the severity at all in the very beginning for the elderly population?
And is severity related to what you call long COVID?
Well, if that's what you're referring to as long COVID, what you're really talking about is like lung damage in when people get pneumonia in the wake of COVID, which is a real thing.
You can get lung damage if you have a very bad pneumonia.
So I suppose I'd say it's possible that it would have reduced that very slightly for elderly people at the beginning of COVID.
But none of that really has to do with what any of our points are.
It's like it's first, what they do is they just lump anyone in who opposes the government mandates as being anti-vax or anyone who's saying, hey, the way these vaccines were sold to people was all bullshit.
And that in fact, it doesn't do everything that they're saying, or there might actually be some risks of the side effects, of the side effects.
And then they say, okay, well, how were you able to calculate that there was never any benefit to anyone of these vaccines?
But of course, that's never been our claim.
I don't know.
It's possible.
It's possible that there were some people who would have had more severe cases of, say, the alpha strain and didn't because they got vaccinated.
But that also on itself wouldn't be nearly enough of an analysis, right?
Because what if they had some negative outcome from that vaccine later?
What if that, and I'm not even talking about like a crazy, oh, their heart stopped or something like that.
I'm saying, what if it made them more susceptible to getting COVID, say, a year later, which there does seem to be a lot of evidence to support.
So if that's the case, then you'd also have to take into account the risk of that ending up being a very negative outcome.
It's just not clear.
It's not clear at all.
What if we kept those people at home and everyone else works so we could actually afford the cost of keeping the vulnerable people at home and then all the non-vulnerable people actually got natural immunity and we kicked the virus the good old-fashioned way.
Yeah.
There you go.
So I don't know of, you know, Scott's position here that, you know, ask these annoying riddles that you can't answer to go, oh, look, you guys got lucky.
Oh, look, you didn't really have a scientific understanding of this either.
You just got lucky.
Nope.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I don't think any of the of the positions that we took were we just got lucky on.
I think we had solid arguments for it.
And those arguments proved to be stronger than the arguments that people on the other side were making.
I'm happy to have Scott on the show anytime.
We can discuss all of this.
He can explain to me what his position is.
But if he's going to do that, then just explain what your position is.
He seems to be doing this thing on Twitter.
Let me ask you a riddle.
Well, and he's going, oh, I bet you can't even tell me what my position is.
And it's like, yeah, I don't know exactly what your position is.
Scott, I don't, I don't follow you that closely.
But I know you've tweeted some things out that seem to be pretty like wrong throughout all of this.
And I'm happy to put like, I'll put in plain English exactly what my position is.
And if there's anything you disagree with this, please explain to me why I'm wrong.
Here are my positions, basically, that lockdowns and government vaccine mandates were wrong and ruined millions of people's lives.
That lockdowns did virtually nothing to prevent the spread of COVID.
And they were absolutely like disaster on every level, that they seem to basically have almost zero effect on the spread of COVID.
And the only lockdowns that you could actually argue really did something to prevent the spread of COVID were like basically like the Chinese style, you know, like lockdowns where like true, like brutal lockdowns that maybe did limit the spread in certain instances.
Of course, once you go to that level of government brutality, the problem you have is now way worse than the problem of COVID.
And it kills more people than COVID would have killed.
And then it seems like as soon as those lockdowns end, the virus ends up spreading exactly as it was going to anyway.
My position is that the vaccines were sold based off lies that they knew were lies, that we have people at Pfizer, doctors on the COVID task force, all admitting that they knew that this claim that it was going to prevent transmission of the virus was complete BS from the book from the beginning.
We know that they didn't even study that in the trials leading up to the vaccine.
They had absolutely no evidence, yet they looked the American people dead in their eye and told them they were going to force them to get this because it would stop them from transmitting it to other people, that transmission was the entire justification for the vaccine passports and the vaccine mandates, and that that was all bullshit and that it was absolutely fascistic authoritarianism to insist that people take a pharmaceutical product if they want to have their natural rights.
That my position is that these pharmaceutical companies are criminal, disgusting companies that are in bed with our government, that there's people on at the CDC who are taking money from the pharmaceutical companies and that the whole thing is corrupt as shit.
And that, yes, if we had just been a free country this whole time, we would have been much better off.
We wouldn't have ruined nearly as many people's lives and we would have done better against COVID.
If you just encouraged people to go for long walks and eat fruit, we would have done better than our response to COVID was.
World War III Fears00:14:48
So that's my actual position.
If you think anything I'm saying there is wrong, I'm more than happy to argue this out.
And this is three years of just destroying not just this country, but nations around the world.
And like we're coming up on the end of it now, and all of it was for nothing.
And so I'm pretty damn happy to put my track record up against anyone's and argue any of those positions.
But then you'd actually have to come on here and tell me what your position is, and we could talk about it.
So happy in the, in the spirit of what Brett Weinstein said to Sam Harris, I'm happy to do that.
I do it with the moderator.
We could do it on your show.
We could do it on my show.
And also, I will say what Brett Weinstein said too.
I won't be hostile or shitty or anything like that.
Let's just talk about the ideas and see who has a more solid more solid argument.
Okay.
So.
And to clarify, I'm less respectful and I won't be involved.
So it's not going to be committed.
Yeah, there you go.
Don't worry.
Rob won't be there.
Okay.
So the other thing that I wanted to talk about on today's show is a couple other clips that I wanted to play.
Here was one.
This has been resurfacing around.
This was Biden about 10 months ago, I think, talking about the war in Ukraine shortly after it.
It first throws.
It's very hard to know where Joe Biden's feelings begin and end and drift into official policy.
Like he feels like we would militarily defend Taiwan if they were invaded by China.
But is that actually a policy?
Does Joe Biden know how to put his pants on?
There's a lot of questions up in the air right now.
But here's what Joe Biden said about the war in Ukraine way back last year.
I want to be clear, though.
We're going to make sure Ukraine has the weapons to defend themselves from invading Russian force.
And we will send money and food aid to save Ukrainian lives.
We're going to welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms if, in fact, they come all the way here.
And as we provide this support to Ukraine, we're going to continue to stand together with our allies in Europe and send unmistakable message that we will defend every inch of NATO territory, every single inch, with a united galvanized NATO.
One movement.
That's why I've moved over 12,000 American forces along the borders with Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, etc.
Because they move once.
Granted, if we respond, it is World War III, but we have a sacred obligation on NATO territory, a sacred obligation, Article 5.
And we will not, although we will not fight the Third World War in Ukraine.
Putin's war against Ukraine was never going to be a victory.
Democrats are rising to meet the moment, relying, rallying the world on the side of peace and security.
We're showing a strength and will never falter.
But look, the idea, the idea that we're going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand.
And don't kid yourself, no matter what you all say, that's called World War III.
Okay?
So there he was, in pretty plain English.
Of course, now, seems like we're doing all that.
We're doing what Joe Biden himself said would be World War III.
I hate to defend Joe Biden.
There's a slight technical distinction and it might even be accidental, but he does say pilots and tanks with American forces, yes.
So I guess technically we're sending in like these arms without the American forces.
Well, that's not exactly clear, to be fair.
But yes, there is a technical distinction that you could make there.
I agree with you that everything that he's doing is an absolute mistake and we seem to be getting closer to World War III.
This is a goofy dance that we're sending tanks over there.
And it's like, like, what happens if the Russians attack the tanks before they get there?
Do they have to cross a magical line before they're considered at war with Ukraine?
Also, while Biden's saying that we're not going to be sending over planes, one of the manufacturers said that they'll sell them the drones for a dollar a piece and then a $10 million shipping cost, which is like a fraction of, I think, what they actually go for.
You've got Israel's going doing secret missions in Iran to blow up now equipment that was supposedly headed for Ukraine.
This is not flowing in a good direction.
And it's absolutely Biden and his administration's fault that we're not de-escalating this.
But I guess he still stood by the not sending planes thus far.
And he's saying not sending planes.
And I know that's technical, but here we're saying, hey, that would mean World War III by his own admission.
He hasn't violated like what would be with his own admission, which would include the Americans.
Yes, if you take him at in the most generous interpretation, he's saying all of these things would mean World War III.
He's listing things off and then saying that would mean World War III.
It's fair to say we've done about half of the things that he's listing off.
He just also just said sending in offensive weaponry.
We're way past that one.
Then he mentions tanks.
We're doing that now.
The planes, I guess, a little bit of a gray area.
Then he also does say operated by Americans.
Okay, fine.
But even if you wanted to take the most generous interpretation and say, he means you have to do all of those things or it's World War III.
Seeing as how World War III, you know, as horrific as World War I and World War II are, pale in comparison to how horrific World War III would be when you're talking about nuclear-armed countries going to World War.
What exactly does that look like?
And how is it not the extinction of the human species?
He wouldn't it just at least if the if you're saying, well, if we did all five of these things, then we're gonna, that's extinction of the human species.
So we're just gonna do three and a half of them.
Yes, stupid.
Wouldn't you still be like, oh my God, there is an incredible risk that this could lead to World War III.
And I just don't even understand.
You know, there are some people out there and they make these tired, just ridiculous arguments.
Like they're just like, well, like, you know, NATO, if countries in NATO want, if other countries want to join NATO, then that's their right.
They have a right to have a collective defense agreement with whoever they want to.
And or they say this shit like, it's a defensive alliance, which is just, I don't know, just demonstrably not true.
Like, was it a defensive alliance when it launched a regime change war in Syria or a regime change war in Afghanistan or a regime change war in Kosovo?
None of those were defensive wars.
None of those wars were fought because Gaddafi didn't attack a European country.
Milosevic didn't attack a European country.
That was a civil war.
It was a war within their country.
So it's not just a defensive.
No, it's an aggressive military alliance.
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Even as you hear Biden talking about how, like, well, listen, we will defend these countries.
We take Article 5 so seriously and we will defend every inch of NATO.
You know, it'd be one thing if like they were talking, he's like, the countries he was listing off were like, you know, that's why I've sent all these troops to the border of France and England or something like that, you know, which I still don't, I don't agree with any of these entangling alliances and war guarantees and stuff, but like, you know, but he's going like, even as he says it, just going Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia.
And you're like, like, what?
You're talking about literally Russia's sphere of influence.
So we're amassing troops like a few miles off of Russia's border.
That's our great defensive alliance.
Like just, I just don't understand ever.
This has always been so easy for me.
And maybe this is why I just like, I connected with Ron Paul and with this whole movement so early on, was that it was always so easy for me to see when he was talking about the Middle Eastern wars.
And he would just make the obvious, you know, point of like, well, how would we feel if this was happening to us?
It's like the most basic level.
It's around four years old that normal people are able to do this.
That's the, that's the truth, by the way.
It's about when you're four.
If you ask like a three-year-old to put themselves in the other person's position and tell you how that would feel if you were them, they struggle with that.
By four, they can do it pretty well.
Like my four-year-old daughter can do that pretty well.
You can explain to her if she goes and takes a toy that my one-year-old's playing with, I can explain to her like, well, you wouldn't like it if he took your toy, right?
And she's like, yeah, I wouldn't like that.
And she'll give it back to it.
Like she can get that at her age.
So it always just seems so easy to me.
This is the most basic like empathy test.
I just go like, okay, so like, I don't know, if let's say some country in the Middle East had overthrown our government and propped up a brutal dictator and then they were bombing us and killing civilians and like they killed other family members of yours, you'd probably be ready to pick up a gun and go fight them too, right?
Like, yeah, that's kind of, that's like fairly easy to wrap your head around.
And in the same sense, you're like, I don't know, how would we feel if like Vladimir Putin was amassing troops around Quebec and Mexico City?
And like, we'd be like, whoa, this is, this is pretty aggressive, right?
We'd feel pretty threatened.
He led a regime change, you know, in Quebec and overthrew the pro-American government and propped up a pro-Russian government.
We'd be like, whoa, that's an act of aggression.
Then he's shipping in tons of offensive weapons to Quebec.
Like, hey, that's a provocation.
And if you're acknowledging that the end result of this provocation at a certain point would be World War III, does the risk, if you're saying, he's saying that if we sent in planes, tanks, and offensive weaponry operated by Americans, that's World War III.
So are you telling me if we just send in offensive weapons and tanks, what does the probability go to zero?
It's 100% in his scenario, but what?
It's zero now?
Right?
That can't be right.
So it's got to be something.
So why on for what?
For what are we playing with this giant risk for?
So what?
That the most war-hungry country in the world, the United States of America, is doing this.
What?
Because we just hate war so much?
We just hate aggressive war so much.
We can't stand it because it's so evil that we have to go risk nuclear annihilation to prevent it.
That doesn't seem right.
That doesn't seem that plausible.
Yeah, it's just so goddamn crazy.
Anyway, speaking of how crazy war is, we got to give a shout out to the great Jimmy Dore, who went on Tucker Carlson's show the other day and had just one of the most phenomenal rants about all of this stuff.
And particularly the fact that he was talking about China and this general there who what did he announce?
We're going to be at war in China in, I think, 2026, maybe he said or something like that.
So we got a few years.
But anyway, I know it's just rhetoric, but it's still pretty disturbing rhetoric.
But Jimmy Dore had this rant.
I want to play it on the show and just give him some props.
So let's hear Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson the other night.
We're the ones provoking this war.
Just like we provoked the war in Ukraine, we are now provoking a war with China.
And what, who, who benefits?
I'll tell you right now.
Your enemy is not China.
Your enemy is not Russia.
Your enemy is the military-industrial complex, which has been fleecing this country to the tunes of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.
How many times are we going to have a defense secretary say, hey, we can't account for $2 trillion in the Pentagon again?
Which is what happened twice now in my lifetime.
So again, people are being the war machine cannot be stopped.
Who's running this country?
The war machine.
It certainly isn't Joe Biden making these decisions.
I would like to know who is making the decisions.
And I just want to remind everybody: the United States is the world's terrorists.
We just set the Middle East on fire in the last 20 years.
And now we're doing a proxy war in Ukraine, which we provoked, NATO provoked, and it was just admitted that we provoked it by the former prime minister of Germany.
And now we're trying to sable ratter with China and they're predicting a war.
Again, China's not going to invade us.
China's not our enemy.
We might have an economic war.
That's what these are.
These are economic wars.
These are wars for in Ukraine.
It's about liquefied natural gas and making sure Germany and Russia never come together because we fear Russia's natural resources and manpower and we fear them getting together with Germany with their technology and their capital.
And so that's why we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
That's why we're doing the Ukraine war.
This is all about hegemony, imperialism, and economics.
And if there's a Marines somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country.
As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United States is currently occupying a third of Syria.
And which third is that?
It's the third that has the oil.
And how do I know we're there to steal their oil?
Because the president of the United States said so.
We're not even benefiting economically.
That's, I mean, of course, that's the rubber.
Jimmy Dore, appreciate it.
Yeah, that was just incredible, man.
I don't know what to say.
Just excellent.
And I think it was so great that he said it on Tucker's show to Tucker, who I do think, I love Tucker and I think he's the best thing out there in the legacy media, but I do think he's a little bit too hawkish on China.
Mask Mandate Goals00:02:51
And I hope he, you know, Tucker, one of the things that was really interesting about Tucker Carlson through the COVID thing is that, and now this really aged very well for him.
But he was, if you remember, at the beginning of COVID, pre-emergency in January and February, Tucker was one of the people really sounding the alarm on it.
And now part of this is because he's a little hawkish on China.
And he's like, look at what China's doing to us, you know?
And this is when Nancy Pelosi was going down to Chinatown and not wearing a mask.
I don't wear a mask.
There's nothing to worry about.
Fauci was like, oh, masks, masks are stupid.
You know what I mean?
Like when they were, and he was like, no, no, no, this is actually a lot of epidemiologists are saying this is a real dangerous thing that's really going to like, you know, be like a problem for the world.
And then as soon as they switched and went into the lockdown regime, he immediately became skeptical of that.
And I think that aged really well because he could have, first off, he was right that COVID was a big concern and it was much more concerning than when they were downplaying it.
Forget even people like me and you who like, you know, are completely opposed the COVID regime could certainly say that.
That's one thing I'll acknowledge that I got wrong in all of this.
I thought it was just going to be another like bird flu, swine flu, Ebola type thing that would be here and be gone.
But no, it did get a whole lot of people sick and kill a lot of people who are very vulnerable and stuff like that.
But Tucker could have easily played that and just been like, see, I was right about this from the very beginning and kind of had that feather in his cap.
Like, I was right.
Now you guys want to do lockdowns and all this.
But immediately he started pointing out how the lockdowns were stupid and weren't going to work.
And I'm hoping in a way that like Tucker would be able to, even though he's so hawkish on China and look what China's doing so wrong.
They're our big enemy.
They're screwing us over in all these different ways that when these generals start saying we're going to war with China, he would be like, oh, wait a minute.
That's not the response to this.
So just really great that Jimmy Doer was able to get up there and like talk to him about that and go, yeah, it's the same people who are, you know, screwing us over in the Middle East, screwing us over in Ukraine.
Those are the same ones who are trying to push this war with China.
My God, like it really is something like, what is the goal?
Is the goal here just to, you know, destroy the human species?
Because we're provoking wars for no reason with two nuclear armed powers, two nuclear armed powers who pose absolutely zero threat to us.
Could you think of a more insane policy?
And of course, pushing them into, yeah, and of course, pushing them into each other's arms.
I mean, if you're Russia and China right now, wouldn't you almost be like, well, we got to make an alliance, right?
I mean, we have to.
America's threatening war with both of us.
Okay.
What are we going to do?
And what has been happening over the last year?
Well, more and more of that.
They've been pushed toward that.
Just insane.
All right.
We're going to wrap up there.
Catching Up With Robbie00:02:10
Catch me and Robbie the Fire.
Or you're out this Saturday, right, with Justin Silver.
I'm out of this Saturday with Justin Silver in Fairfield, Connecticut.
That's a cool little room in a hotel.
I actually used to work at, worked the late night shift at that place.
Got all the rooms for hookers.
It was a good time.
I was just a sweet high school kid at the time, though.
But I was like, dude, these guys are getting late in the middle of the afternoon.
This is awesome.
They got money.
I thought you were going to be like more interesting than that.
That's so nice.
This lady, this gentleman paid this lady to hang out in a hotel room with him for a while.
And four other guys paid her too.
She must be a really good conversationalist.
No, I wasn't that sweet of a kid, but no, it's going to be fun.
And then I think the weekend after that, I'm with opening up for Ryan Long along with BK Chris up in Buffalo.
And of course, you and I got a whole bunch of gigs.
And then, of course, check out what.
I thought the weekend after that?
I thought the weekend after that, we're in Dallas.
Two weekends after that.
I don't know.
You guys can.
We're in Detroit.
You can go look up the dates.
Yeah, February 10th and 11th, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be out in Detroit and Fort Worth.
And we got a lot of stuff coming up.
Let's just go over it real quick.
February 10th, 11th in Fort Worth, Dallas, Texas.
February 17th and 18th in Detroit at the House of Comedy there.
Potts Town, Pennsylvania, Providence, Rhode Island, Chicago at Zaney's there.
Tampa, Florida at Side Splitters.
Just added dates in Syracuse and Albany and more to come.
So comic Dave Smith for all of those all of those dates.
And of course, if you're not supporting the show already, please go over to gasdigitalnetwork.com.
Use the promo code P-O-T-P.
That gets you a free trial, a seven-day free trial.
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