Episode 1248 Scott Adams: Trump's Final Scorecard, Vatican Blackout Conspiracy Theories, and More
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Content:
Whiteboard1: President Trump, Benefits v Costs
Whiteboard2: "Practical" Free Speech
Practical freedom of speech ended this week
Chants of "hang pence" and a shot fired
TDS has been cured
Vatican blackout conspiracy theories
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Go. We do have a double whiteboard.
Yeah. You probably signed on today and you were thinking to yourself, God, I hope there's a whiteboard.
Two. Double whiteboard.
Wait till you see it.
It'll be the best thing of the day.
All right. Here's an interesting factoid to tie things together.
Rob Henderson, who I follow on Twitter, who's got lots of interesting psychology thoughts, and he sent around a study that said that envy, so the feeling of envy, It's above all a phenomenon of social proximity.
So the point being that envy is what you feel about the people closest to you, your neighbors.
So you feel a lot of envy to your next-door neighbor, maybe, if they have more than you do.
But you don't care so much about somebody who's living on the other side of the world because you don't have exposure to them.
You only have envy for the people close to you.
But what happens if you're a species who evolved...
So YouTube is back up.
I think it is.
Anyway, it looks like it's working.
So what happens if you're a species who evolves to have envy?
But luckily for you, it's limited to just the people around you.
So you can kind of handle it.
Well, I got a lot of envy.
But at least it's just sort of the people around me.
And then you get the internet.
Now suddenly you have Instagram and social media.
And your ability to experience envy...
It goes worldwide. So you have this little problem, which is you're envious of your neighbor.
Now you're envious of the whole frickin' world, or at least the ones who are doing better than you.
And that seems to be every single person who posts, because they only post their awesome day.
Here's my vacation, here's my good thing that happened, etc.
So I've got a feeling that one of the ways that social media makes us all mentally sick is that we were not evolved...
To handle that much envy.
We have a certain amount of envy capacity and it's just blown right through.
And so I wonder if instead of regulating social media with a publisher 230 or regulating them in terms of free speech or regulating them in any way, maybe we should regulate them as medical devices.
See where I'm going with this?
Because I think it would be trivially easy to show that social media has an impact on mental health.
Would you even have to do a study?
I suppose if you were talking about having some kind of medical regulation on them, Then you'd have to do some study because you want data on it, but you wouldn't have to wonder how it's going to come out, right?
Do you have any wonder about whether social media is affecting people's mental health?
I mean, not really, right?
Why don't we just regulate it as a medical device?
I mean, all of social media.
Because look at the conspiracy theories, the mental health problems that came out of it.
I would argue even that the attack on the Capitol, you could blame Trump, and we'll do that later.
But I would say that all of these things are a mental health either directly or at least adjacent, right?
Because whatever is happening with the Let's say, the most extreme conspiracy theorists.
Are you kind of all the way into mental health problems?
Or is that just people with different opinions?
At what point does belief in something that is obviously not true go from, well, that's just somebody who's less informed, To actual serious mental health issue.
Where's that line? It's pretty blurry at the moment, isn't it?
So if we wanted to most directly and usefully regulate social media, it would be as some kind of a medical device.
I don't know what that would look like in terms of regulation, but I could easily imagine, for example, children not being allowed to use it or to use parts of it.
Wouldn't it be easy to imagine that children would not be allowed to use TikTok?
It's easy to believe.
When I say children, maybe children under 12 or something like that.
There might be some cutoff where you just don't want kids to have access to it at all.
That would be ruined for life if they did.
I think that would be reasonable.
So all of the other kinds of regulatory things don't really have a chance at this point.
But if we could produce enough evidence that it hasn't medical...
Element to it. Regulate it that way.
A lot of trolls have been coming at me today.
Well, actually, I'll get to that next.
That'll be the other side of the whiteboard.
On the front side of the whiteboard...
I'm having people come at me today and say some version of this.
Scott, now, now Scott, now will you admit that you were wrong all along about Trump.
Now, now you can admit from day one, Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott, you were wrong about Trump and now is the time to admit it.
They say to me, To which I say, unlike my critics, I can do a thing called math.
I can also compare things without being emotionally overwhelmed while doing it.
Watch me do it right now.
Watch how I am not emotionally overwhelmed by simply looking at the costs and the benefits of a situation.
Now, a lot of people can't do this.
For example, here would be my impression of a Trump hater trying to evaluate the pluses and the minuses of President Trump.
We'll start with the minuses because his critics deal with those most productively.
Now I give you my impression of a Trump critic speaking about the Capitol riots, which most people believe Trump had some role in.
Directly or indirectly encouraging.
This is a critic talking about President Trump's flaws.
Oh, what a flaw.
Whoa, did you see that Capitol?
Oh, yeah.
Look at it right there. I'm not imagining it now.
I'm not imagining it now.
Yeah. Look at the flaw.
It's right on television. Even Republicans, even Republicans are saying it's a flaw.
So that's a Trump critic talking about the Capitol protests.
Man, are they happy.
They're really happy.
Now I'd like to give you an impression of that same protester talking about the good things that President Trump did.
Mr. Trump critic, what do you think of what Trump did for the economy, at least before the coronavirus?
Well, fine people hoax.
Drink spleech.
No, I'm just asking you, just limit it to the economy.
Let's say jobs.
How do you do on just jobs?
Orange man. Orange man.
Orange man back!
Okay. How about, you've heard that he's been nominated for two Nobel Peace Prizes.
So how do you think he did in the Middle East?
Moved the embassy.
Probably going to start a war.
ISIS. So you can't really even have a conversation with anybody on this topic.
You literally can't have anything like a conversation.
So here's the way I look at it, for those of you who are going to ask me.
Do you still think it was a good idea to support the president?
To which I say, all presidents are deeply flawed, just in different ways.
Do you think Jimmy Carter was a winner?
George Bush Jr.
We have a lot of bad presidents.
So here's how I do it.
I make a list of the benefits you got from your president, and this would apply to any president.
So I could be talking about Bill Clinton here.
If I were talking about Bill Clinton, he'd have a pretty big list of good stuff he did.
But he might have some negative things too.
That's the way I would look at any president.
So, do I regret?
Do I apologize for supporting Trump?
Despite the fact that we all agree he had a role in a very bad incident this week in which at least five people died.
Horrible. Horrible.
But it doesn't make the other stuff go away.
You can be against his rhetoric and his personality, and certainly you could be totally against everything that happened this week.
But that doesn't mean that he didn't appoint lots of judges, defeat ISIS, become the first president to take China seriously and push back.
He's got two Nobel Peace Prize recommendations.
He did good work in North Korea.
All of that's real.
I didn't make any of that up, right?
Didn't make it up.
So, to my critics, when you ask me if I feel bad that I supported the president, I say, why are you so bad at comparing things?
Why can't you do costs and benefits?
And then I'll do that impression of a Trump critic, and that won't go well in that conversation, I'm pretty sure.
All right. Um...
I asked this question on social media and was immediately mercilessly mocked.
Mercilessly, I say. But I can take it.
And what I said was that it's too soon to know if the Trump suspension on Twitter will be viewed as one of the biggest mistakes in American history, but it's certainly a candidate.
Now, what happens when you say in public That banning Trump from Twitter might be one of the biggest mistakes in American history.
Do all of my wise and honest critics, do they come in and say, you know, you're right.
Because this could be a landmark point in terms of freedom of speech.
Now, we'll talk about freedom of speech in private companies versus the government's version of it in a moment, but do they say, yeah, you know, you've got a point.
If we were to lose freedom of speech, the effect wouldn't immediately be obvious, but eventually it would destroy the republic.
Wouldn't you agree? Wouldn't you agree that without freedom of speech, you're pretty much putting yourself on a path Do dictatorship or destruction or something.
So to me it seemed like a pretty big deal that something that signals the end of freedom of speech, our most bedrock necessary right, that somehow that looks like it's ending.
And I had a historian come at me and say, Scott, you should stop talking in public because you're embarrassing yourself.
Because there have been much bigger problems.
You've got your civil war, you've got your, you know, Every kind of racism and war and everything.
And so people mentioned all of those various other problems to mock me for thinking that Trump being kicked off of Twitter is somehow as big as the Civil War.
To which I say, would there have been a Civil War if you didn't have freedom of speech?
Think about it. Would slaves be free if there was no freedom of speech?
Would Abe Lincoln ever been elected if they had no freedom of speech?
I would contend that basically everything good that's ever happened is because we had freedom of speech.
And if you get rid of that, which I believe happened, Literally.
I think freedom of speech is actually no hyperbole.
I'm not saying this to make a political point, to be provocative and get some clicks.
This is my honest belief that freedom of speech just ended this week.
It ended. For all practical purposes.
You can still say things that nobody cares about, right?
But if you say something that really would move the needle on social media, you can't.
You can't. So, historians who are the experts believe that the loss of freedom of speech, no big deal.
And they mock me for my belief that it might be.
There's your experts.
Believe the experts.
Has anybody ever told you that?
You should trust the experts.
Because they don't know the difference between somebody getting kicked off Twitter and freedom of speech.
Here's something we're learning that is deeply disturbing, that when Pence and his family, I guess, I don't know why the family was there, but they were in, I guess they were protected in a bunker during the Capitol riots and the incursion, and they were hunkered down in a bunker, while people within hearing distance were chanting, hang Pence.
Can you imagine that?
Imagine the Pence family really didn't cause any trouble to anybody.
If there's anybody who does not deserve to be criticized, in my opinion, I know yours differ.
But I'm no fan of Mike Pence in terms of his politics, especially on the LGBTQ stuff.
But... You can't take away from the fact he's been a damn good vice president in terms of what vice presidents are supposed to do.
So here's this poor guy who's been nothing but a loyal patriot in public service, has to feel the end of his vice presidential career and maybe his political career, listening to people on his own side until then, chanting about hanging him.
Put yourself in that position.
It's scary enough that they're even using these words, but imagine that you've done nothing but serve the country.
You've done nothing but serve the country.
And these assholes are out there telling you that they want to hang you.
I've said again that the people involved in that should be executed.
I don't know if there's any legal way to do that, but I don't think jail is good enough.
I think execution is an order if you get that far.
I don't think there's any legal way to do that.
I'm just saying in terms of how bad it was.
Now, it seems to me that we've got a problem here.
Let me just...
Tie one other point together.
So we all saw the video of the shooting in which some kind of law enforcement person shot a woman who is a protester who is coming through a broken window on a door.
Now here's my revised opinion on that.
My first opinion was, what?
Why are you shooting somebody who doesn't seem to have a weapon, who is a woman, who isn't really that close to you, You know, why would you take that shot?
But now that I've heard this, that there were people chanting hangpins, does that change your opinion?
Let me tell you, if you put me on the jury and you say, this police officer was here and here's the situation.
Suppose, and I don't know that this is true, so I need a fact check on this, suppose the people who were there when that shooting occurred The people in the crowd, suppose they were chanting, or any members of them were chanting, Hang Pence.
Now, do you take the shot?
I would. I would take the shot.
If I heard a crowd chanting, Hang Pence, I would shoot the first one through the door.
Weapon or no weapon. You know what else I would do?
I would shoot the second person through the door, too.
And then I would shoot the third person, the fourth person.
I would shoot every person who came through the door If the crowd is chanting, hang pens.
Now, if they weren't, and that particular guard had heard nothing of the sort, well, then that's a different situation.
But if he even heard it, if he heard it down the hallway, if he heard it from even one person, if you put me on the jury, boom, innocent person.
You get into the Capitol chanting, hang the Vice President.
And by the way, the Vice President didn't do anything.
He didn't do anything that deserves hanging.
If you're in the Capitol chanting, hang the President, yeah, you can shoot the first person through the door.
And that's not even a gray area to me.
Not even a little bit gray.
Now, I think it's tragic.
I don't think she deserved to be killed.
I don't think what she was doing...
Was worthy of, you know, lethal action.
But she was part of a crowd, and if any one of them was inside the building saying, hang Pence, you can shoot the first one through the door.
Does anybody disagree with that?
Because I'm wondering, somebody says only if they are attacking.
I don't think so. No, I think that once you're inside the building, that your threats have to be treated as the actual event.
Somebody said, did I see the video of it?
Yes. What the video doesn't show is if there was any chanting prior to the shot.
If it turns out there was no chanting, I have a different opinion of it.
No one got through the door, though.
It doesn't matter. You shoot the first one who's trying.
Who shoots into a crowd?
Nobody did. He shot the person coming through the door.
I just want to see that's a pretty extremist position.
I don't think it is.
It's not extremist to say that self-defense within the Capitol needs to be fairly extreme.
No proof nor evidence presented of what?
What part don't you believe?
The chanting? Somebody says, I saw videos and didn't hear that on any of them.
Yeah, that's why I need a fact check.
If it turns out nobody was saying that, I do have a different opinion.
But think about it.
Let me ask you this.
In retrospect, was the shooter right no matter what people were chanting?
In retrospect. Now, when the shot was first taken, it was in the fog of war when we heard about it, and it looked like on video that it was a bunch of harmless, largely unarmed Trump supporters.
That was my first impression.
And I thought that the way they got through the security was simply by having numbers.
I didn't realize that there were some with lead pipes who were actually, in one case, killing a police officer, seriously injuring others.
So it was way worse than, you know, it looked on video.
But suppose we know now that a number of them have said they had plans to do harm and had weapons.
There were guns that got into the Capitol.
There were guns. Mace, these twist ties and all that.
Now that you know that some members of the group were armed, had intended danger, even though it was a very small percentage, but you know they were there, what's that tell you about the shooting?
Again, you put me on the jury and And I say that that guy used good judgment, because he's the one who knew that that crowd was dangerous, and he stopped it by shooting the first person through the window.
Now, tragedy, we all wish that that hadn't happened.
But when we first heard the story, you were kind of thinking there were no weapons there, right?
The guy who took the shot, he was right.
He was right. If they had gotten through that barrier, it would have been people with weapons who got through the barrier.
Now that you know that, that they had weapons, What do you feel about the shooting?
Put me on the jury, I get him off completely.
I don't even have a slight whiff of doubt that that was a proper shooting.
So I support completely the guy who took the shot.
Under the new information that people were armed, he apparently took a big risk, personal as well as professional, right?
He took a really big risk, But, he was right.
Right? Now, you probably wouldn't advise somebody in that situation to do what he did.
But you can't ignore the fact he was right.
Right? That counts.
Being 100% right has got to be a good defense.
So, absolutely, that was an appropriate shooting, even though the individual who got shot was not the right person to shoot.
But I don't think it mattered under the situation.
It's a mob. I saw at least one video of some uniformed law enforcement person as they were letting in the people in the side door.
I don't know who opened the door, but it was clear that the uniformed police were supportive of the protesters.
But I think they also miscalculated.
Thinking it was a bunch of peaceful MAGA people just like any MAGA rally.
And they figured, well, they're not going to be armed.
You know, these are the ones who don't burn things and riot.
But they were wrong.
They were wrong. There were some people in the group who absolutely were going to do bad stuff.
So that looks like a massive police failure, and it's good that the leadership of at least the Capitol Police resigned.
That was appropriate.
Let's see. What else we got going on here?
A lot of people telling me that Trump getting kicked off of social media is not a blow to free speech, because free speech, and let me explain it to you like they explain it to me, Scott, you're so dumb.
Don't you know that free speech is the government?
It's not about private industry.
Private industry can do anything they want, if it's legal.
But they don't have to guarantee your freedom.
Walmart doesn't have to guarantee your freedom.
Social media doesn't need to guarantee your freedom.
There's nothing in the Constitution that would require that.
Scott, Scott, Scott, you low-information idiot.
So that's what I've been listening to for the last 48 hours.
Let me add a little to that argument.
First of all, to my critics who explained to me that freedom of speech is a feature of government and not private industry, let me respond to you this way.
No! No!
I knew that.
Pretty much most people were smart enough to be in the conversation.
They knew it too. So why are you telling me something you know and I know, and you should know I know it, as an argument?
It's not an argument to tell me something I already know.
You need to add something to it.
Here's my argument, because I'm not pedantic, and I live in the real world, and it goes like this.
If you look at the arc of time from, let's say, 1776 to today, lots has changed.
For example, the media has consolidated.
Back in 1776, freedom of speech, if your newspaper didn't want to print it, I suppose you could go to another newspaper.
Or you could write it on a scroll, or you could yell it in the town hall.
Those were the only tools you had, but at least you had options, right?
As the media consolidated, Coming towards 2022, it became certainly your right to have free speech, but in a practical sense, if you don't have free speech on the dominant speech platforms, you don't really have freedom of speech.
What you have is a legal right that you can't use.
Let me give you an example.
If you were in a coma, do you have freedom of speech?
The answer is, yeah, you do.
You're in a coma, but you have freedom of speech.
Does it help you? What are you going to do with your freedom of speech when you're in a coma?
You don't have real freedom of speech.
Technically you do, but in all practical ways, do you have freedom of speech?
When, let's say you're in jail, and you're not allowed to talk to the outside world, and you're in solitary confinement, do you have freedom of speech?
Well, legally. Legally, yeah.
But in a practical sense, do you?
Not really. Not in any practical sense.
If the only way that people communicate in any effective way, in other words, communicate with lots of people, if the only good way to do that is social media, and that's the way it's evolved, and you can't use it, do you have freedom of speech?
Technically, you do.
Technically you do.
But do you have it in a practical sense?
No. Not even close.
So here's the question. Do the way we think of freedom of speech, or the way we thought of it in 1776, is it the way we should still be thinking of it?
Or, and I'll just put this out here, should we take into consideration a changing environment?
Is that crazy? Because my critics will say, it's not in the Constitution.
I know that.
I know that. I know it's not in the Constitution.
But thanks for telling me over and over.
I'm telling you that we should adjust so that our rights are compatible with the reality on the ground.
And the reality on the ground is if you get kicked off of social media, you're effectively closed out from freedom of speech.
And so, we should consider whether we want that to be the situation or not.
Now, I've heard the argument, Scott, Scott, Scott, if you don't like these platforms, just go start your own.
Go over to Parler or Gab, go over to Rumble.
You've got options, just like these guys.
In fact, you probably have more options than they had because of all the new social media platforms.
But really? Really?
Let me tell you what that sounds like to me.
It sounds like if I tell you that the local energy company that has a monopoly in your town, if they decide to stop selling you electricity, do you have options?
You do, yeah.
You could take a balloon and rub it on your hair.
And it would create static electricity.
So why do you need the electricity from the power company when you could just rub a balloon on your hair?
That's the argument that my critics are giving me about social media.
Scott, you don't have to be on Twitter.
You could shout from your porch.
You could go on Parler where nobody hears you, except the people who already agree with you, so there's no point in talking to them.
So, do you really have options?
Technically, yes.
And if you're really, really fucking stupid, you think that those options matter.
They don't. They don't matter.
If you're not on Twitter, you just don't exist in our world or the other social media.
So, if you think rubbing a balloon on your hair is the same as having electricity, then yeah, going to parlor is just like being on Twitter.
But it's a stupid fucking argument, because in the real world, these are monopolies.
They're good ones. I love Twitter.
Twitter's awesome. But they're monopolies, for all practical purposes.
Again, maybe not in a technical sense, but in a practical sense they are.
Should we update our school textbooks to reflect the end of free speech that just happened?
Don't you believe that we should not be teaching kids that we have freedom of speech in a practical sense?
Because we don't. As of today, if your kids are taught in school that they have freedom of speech, that's not true.
They only have freedom until some big company tells them they don't.
And then they don't. And by the way, do you think that the social media companies would have done what they did without pressure from the government?
No fucking way.
This was the government suppressing your free speech.
You tell me that those social media companies could all make their own private independent decisions?
Yes they can. Do you think they did?
Not a fucking chance.
Not a chance.
The government, or members of it, Pressure the social media companies, and then the social media companies cave and do what the government wants.
The government being Democrats.
So, what do you argue with me that the government is not the one who is suppressing your freedom of speech?
It's Twitter. You're a fucking idiot.
That's not what's happening.
It's the government...
Pressuring the companies and the companies being compatible with or agreeing with the government go along with it.
Not one of those companies was going to ban Twitter because they wanted to.
Right? Well, maybe.
I mean, I don't want to be a mind reader, so I suppose anything's possible.
But if you're telling me that the government is not pressuring The Democrats in this case.
If you tell me they're not pressuring the social media companies to get rid of Trump, well, that's just stupid.
Because you can see it.
It's right in front of you.
They're actually doing it in public.
Am I wrong that the government is in public calling for the social media companies to ban freedom of speech for a member of the public?
This is happening right in front of you.
I'm not making anything up.
You're watching it. Everything I've said, except the internal intent part, It's something you can just observe.
On the plus side, Trump derangement syndrome was cured.
I don't know if you've noticed it, but TDS has actually been cured.
And here's why.
For four years, Trump haters were sure that he was the devil and Hitler, but every time he did something, it So if your opinion doesn't match your observation, it's like, he's a racist.
Wait, he did what with prison reform?
Who'd he pardon? He hates the Jewish people.
He did what with the embassy?
Wait, Israel's going to name a town after him?
So we've had four years of the worst imaginations of who Trump was being completely opposite of Of observation.
And in order to square the circle, they had to patch it up with hoaxes.
So they would put in the find people hoax to prove the thing that was observably not true.
So they'd patch it up with a hoax.
And that's what your cognitive dissonance is.
So cognitive dissonance, which is Trump derangement syndrome, is when your observation and your belief don't match, so you have to connect them with a hoax.
Or an illusion or a hallucination.
So that's what it is. Now, what happens if you get to this last part, last week of Trump, and finally, finally, for the first time...
Is my dog asleep barking if you hear that?
Hey, Snickers! I have to wake up my dog.
She's ruining my whole periscope.
Okay. So what happens when you finally get a situation where somebody who thinks Trump is dangerous can observe how he acted about this Capitol protest stuff, and they can say, finally, finally, finally, my opinion and my observation.
Oh, they finally failed.
So good.
So good. Now, because they're also idiots, they believe that this one observation cancels out all four years of his accomplishments.
So the belief from the TDS recoverers, because they are recovering, it's the first time their observation matches their belief.
Now they're revising the last four years to say, well, nailed it.
Nailed it. Yeah, maybe Trump...
Did accomplish more than any president in the history of presidents.
I think that's true.
For the economy and for world peace and for trade negotiations and prison reform and all kinds of stuff.
But, well, he sure screwed up that last week.
That's for sure. So I think in a weird, weird, unexpected way, and I mean this literally, I think Trump derangement syndrome was kind of cured.
Accidentally. Now, they still have crazy thoughts about the past, but as long as it's cured at the moment, it will probably be cured going forward.
There's a big story on social media that is so delicious.
I was worried that things would not be interesting after Trump left, but maybe we're just in a world of things are more interesting.
So apparently the lights went off in the Vatican.
And when I say apparently, I mean I don't believe anything.
I don't know if the lights really did go out in the Vatican.
It's being reported.
It's on social media, but I don't necessarily believe it happened.
But let's say it did. It's being widely reported.
This has caused all manner of conspiracy theories, and they're all good ones.
So the popular one seems based on one obscure publication with zero credibility, and it makes a claim that I'm telling you now is not true.
I think I can stay on social media if I tell you in advance that I'm talking about a claim and it's not true.
Which is that the Pope has been arrested and charged with 80 counts of pedophilia.
Now, not a chance in the world, that's true.
Not a chance in the world.
Other people are saying that it's related to the other conspiracy theory, that Italy had something to do with our election data, and something went through Italy, and then the numbers changed, and it went back, and so somehow Italy was involved with rigging the election, and this is the response to that.
Nope. No.
Nope. Lights also went out in Pakistan.
Somebody said they went out around the Eiffel Tower.
I don't know if any of those are true.
Certainly more likely coincidence.
Now, some people are saying, hey, maybe it's that solar winds hack, and some country is just testing their ability to turn off the electricity in different countries.
I doubt you would test it.
It doesn't seem like testing it would be smart, because you should test it against your actual enemy, not the Vatican.
So that would be a weird way to test that, because if you tested it and you could see that it worked and people found it out, then they would be able to harden their own systems against it.
So it's not really the thing you should test.
You should just do it when you're ready to start World War III. So I don't believe any of the conspiracy theories.
I think just they had a grid problem is my guess.
And how would they get past the The guards, the Swiss Guard.
How would any security force turn off the lights and get past the Swiss Guard without gunshots?
None of it makes sense.
So don't believe any of the Vatican stories.
But they're fun. I saw an interview with, remember that horned protester, the one who got into the Capitol?
He had the big Viking horns and he was shirtless and stuff.
Well, I saw an interview with him, and the reporter said, you know, why are you here?
You know, why are you protesting?
And the guy with the Viking horns looked right at the reporter, and he said, freedom.
Now, the touching part about this story is, I don't even think he knew what the word freedom means.
But even so, in his simple, uneducated way, even he knew it was important.
Before he even knew what the word meant.
And so he was there protesting for his freedom.
And I just thought it was poignant, so I just pointed it out.
All right, let's see if I talked about everything I was going to talk about.
Probably did. I believe I did.
All right. Poor guy wants to be an actor.
Yeah, a lot of those people are being rolled up.
By the way, if you ever do a public illegal thing with cameras rolling, you're going to get caught.
I believe we will catch 100% of the bad actors who were in the protests who also had no masks.
If they didn't have a mask, definitely getting caught.
Let me tell you something that Antifa learned.
That apparently the MAGA protesters did not learn?
Those masks can come in handy.
Don't rule out the mask if you're going to be going and doing something illegal in front of a thousand cameras.
Somebody's saying that the Viking horn guy is an actor.
I think he's also an actor.
But he seems to like protests.
So here's a little factoid that many of you don't know.
There are people who just like going to protests.
And so there are people who go from protest to protest.
It's almost like a vacation hobby.
I spoke to one a few years ago.
I talked to somebody who literally would say, hey, there's protests happening.
I don't think he even cared too much what it was about.
He was just all down for protests.
So he just liked traveling and being part of the protest and stuff like that.
So I think there are people who, perhaps the Viking horn guy, just likes the ambience, just likes the practice.
All right. Civil disobedience means no masks.
Well, you have a good point.
If it's really civil disobedience, Where you're not doing a crime, then no mask is better.
Yes. If you don't have a pandemic, it's better.
It's also being reported, coincidentally, that the Pope's personal doctor died of coronavirus.
I guess yesterday or today.
So there's a lot happening in the Vatican, but I don't think we have to worry about it.
All right. That's all for now.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
Okay, YouTube. You will be happy to know over on YouTube that I finally got my adapter so that I can charge my iPad at the same time I've got my microphone connected.
So thanks to several of you who suggested I get that adapter.
The five died of COVID. No, they didn't.
John Brennan could be charged with treason if there was an insurrection.
You know, I just don't think the deep state's going to get charged with anything.
Why does your YouTube get more time?
I'm sort of training people that Periscope's going to go offline in a month or two.
A few months, I guess. So Periscope will not be a product pretty soon.
So I'm slowly accustoming people to Maybe they should be on YouTube, but I don't want to push it yet, so I just give them one more reason to be here, and they can choose for themselves.
Oh, Poland is passing laws against big tech suppressing speech.
I don't know what kind of law you can pass.
The problem is, any law you pass is just going to be a problem.
That's why I think we have to treat it as a medical problem, because at least then you can have data and say, you know, this hurts and this doesn't, maybe.
Bring in Rumble when it goes live.
So Rumble doesn't have a live option, huh?
I don't think it does.
And when you're dropped from YouTube, then what?
Well, I'm on the Locals platform.
It's a subscription platform.
If I get dropped from Twitter, I would probably lower my price on Locals.
Right now it's $7 a month for content that you won't see anywhere else.
I do a lot of micro-lessons on Persuasion and And systems for your life.
So if you like those things, I think the people who are paying $7 a month think they're getting wildly more value than that.
At least that's what they say.
Let's see. We regulate private companies all the time.
Yeah, but it's hard with opinion stuff.
And freedom of speech and what's appropriate is just too subjective.
A bundle package would be good.
We're looking into that, actually.
We might do some bundle packages.
And Locals will have a livestream option, I think, at some point.
It doesn't have it yet. But if I had to guess where my fate is, probably getting kicked off of the major platforms and probably only doing things on Locals eventually.
But I'll stay on the other platforms as long as they'll keep me.
By the way, it is my intention...
To never say anything that would get me kicked off a platform.
Because I don't think I have to.
I don't think there's any necessity to say anything in a way that would get me kicked off of any platform.
And if I do, that's on me, isn't it?
Because if I don't intend it...
Well, I guess it could be on somebody else if they just decide to get rid of me.
Alright, what's a locals?
So locals.com is where a number of creators go.
If they have content that is maybe not quite appropriate for the general public.
So a lot of stuff that I do, especially the political stuff, is nuanced.
So in the general public, you can't say, hey, somebody did a good job on this but a bad job on this.
You just can't do it.
In the general public, you just have to take a side and say, your guy did everything right, the other guy or gal did everything wrong, and that's it.
So if you want to see anything smart...
You're going to have to go somewhere that the general public doesn't exist.
All right. Yes, Patrick Byrne and others have said Italy was involved, but I'm not looking to that.
I'm not expecting that to prove out.
Could be wrong. Yeah, I'll do more Robots Read News.
