Episode 1264 Scott Adams: All the News That's Fit to Sip. Get in Here.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Twitter's new Birdwatch feature
Israel will attack Iran if Biden/Iran nuclear deal
Will Biden clash with teachers unions?
Impeaching George Washington over slavery
Critical Ethnic Studies in California high schools
Aaron Rupar and cannibal dinner invites
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
It's time. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams from across the world.
Well, I suppose it depends where you are.
I might be where you are.
Could be. You could be right next door.
I wouldn't even know it. But I'm in French Polynesia, still, for a little bit longer.
And, oh, by the way, I think there is one day that I know I won't be able to periscope coming up.
So if there's a day this week, I think it might be Thursday morning.
Not sure about that. Either Wednesday or Thursday, I'm not going to be able to periscope.
So, let me tell you about all the stuff that's happening.
All the news that's fit to sip, as I like to say.
But before that, isn't there something you're missing?
Is there something you're missing?
Yeah, there is.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Eric. Eric Finman, good to see you.
And do you have your cup or mug or glass, Eric?
I hope you do, and I hope the rest of you do too.
Because, will I remember the entire toast?
Let's see. Grab a cup, a mug, a glass, a tank, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Everything better. It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go! Yes.
So, there's an awkwardness that I should just call out.
Because I'm vacationing at a very nice place, I hesitate to show it to people because if they can't vacation at a nice place, it's just sort of gross to put it in people's face.
On the other hand, I do like a little bit of transparency in my life, and it would be no secret to anybody that, especially for my honeymoon, I can go to a nice place.
And so I didn't think I would need to hide that from any of you, and I was hoping that some of you would enjoy the tales from Bora Bora.
So last night, Christine and I were doing dinner on the beach.
There were tables there as part of the restaurant, as part of the resort.
And there was this fire dancing group entertaining us.
And here's the funny thing.
There are so few people at this resort.
I don't think I've seen more than 20 people all week.
And this is a place that would normally hold hundreds or a thousand or something.
But maybe 20 people I've seen in the entire resort.
And it's the same couples you see every time.
Now I don't know what the actual number is.
I've only seen the same 20 people.
But, so there are maybe 12 of us total watching this show.
That's it. Just 12 people watching this fire dancing show.
So I thought, well, that's not nearly enough.
These guys put in a lot of work to do this.
They're twirling these lit torches.
So I fired up Periscope, and I just started live streaming these fire dancers, and I didn't know what to expect, but I think already there have been over 100,000 views.
There are two different videos, so between the two of them, 100,000 views.
Now in terms of viewers, probably there will be 100,000 of them by the end of the day.
Right now it's views, but there will probably be that many viewers.
And I thought to myself, I wonder if these guys know That they just went international.
They literally were being streamed all over the planet with just this little thing in my hand and a good cell signal.
And that's it. And suddenly their show was worldwide.
And here's the funny part. I don't think they know it.
So yesterday they gave a show to the entire planet, tens of thousands of audience members.
The only people who don't know it is the people who gave the show.
Nobody told them. So I just think that's an interesting little slice of life there.
Alright. Interesting thing, Twitter is introducing a new feature which is getting mixed reviews before anybody even sees it.
That's the way things go.
And the new feature is trying to get at these censorship problems.
Well, not censorship so much as fake news.
It's more of a fake news solution or attempted solution.
Now, of course, you know from my other periscopes that I'm always Always in favor of testing a new solution.
So those of you who are saying, my god, it's the end of the world.
This new feature will just be bad like everything else in the world.
You might be right.
It's entirely possible that Twitter would roll out a new feature and Might make things worse.
Anything could happen, right?
It's an interesting world.
But don't you have to, first of all, appreciate testing new stuff?
I think you've got to give it to them for that, right?
I mean, you can criticize the social media platforms for a billion different things and it would be valid, but you can't criticize them for testing solutions.
That part I like.
So let's keep that part.
Now, what could go wrong?
Plenty, right?
That's the problem. What could go wrong with this new feature?
So the feature, I don't know the details, but in broad strokes, it allows you to add context to other people's tweets.
So if I understand it correctly, you'd be able to say, here's another story that's the counterpoint to that or some background that would make the story look different.
Now, how is that bad? Now, some people are saying, well, we already have that.
It's called comments.
You can already leave a comment.
But, how often do you read the comments on a tweet?
I mean, seriously. How often do you dig into the comments of a tweet?
I do often, but not as a percentage.
As a percentage of the time, I usually just read the tweets, probably 80% of the time.
Now, I see what you're saying, that some of you often read the tweets.
So I would say 20% of the time I dig in, and it depends on the tweets, right?
If I think I understand the tweet and there's nothing to talk about, I'm not going to dig into the comments.
And those are the dangerous ones.
The dangerous ones are the ones that I think I know the story by reading the headline.
If I'm being honest, half of the news I consume is just the headline.
Because the rest of the story is unnecessary, right?
Most of the time the headline is all you need to know.
There's nothing else beyond the headline that has any value at all.
Usually. Now sometimes you're wrong.
Sometimes there are lots of important nuggets in the story.
But we were busy people.
And I have to decide when do I dig into the comments and look for it, and when do I just read the headline and move on?
So the practical reality of it is that we read the headlines and move on.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if instead of having to dig through some comment that could be in a string with hundreds or thousands of comments, wouldn't it be nice if for every story that had a need for context, it was just right there?
Click this button to see the other side.
Or click this button to see the top-rated counterpoints.
Something like that.
Now, I do think that there's some way to solve this problem.
I'll tell you a way that probably won't work, and I saw Jack Posobiec was tweeting an old tweet of mine in which, side by side, you could see how Wikipedia talks about the fine people hoax, and then you can see the transcript, the actual transcript from the event, and you can see how different they are.
And I don't know the current situation of the Wikipedia story about the Find People Hoax, but I was involved with at least one of the editors who was trying to fix that some time ago, and every time it got fixed, to match the transcript, That's it.
Just fixing it to match what the transcript says, editors would re-edit it and turn it back to the fake hoax.
And it would happen almost instantly, as if somebody was just sitting on it waiting to change it back to the hoax.
Now, I don't know where it is now, but at one point, it was almost just where I would put it.
In other words, it stated that the president said he wasn't talking about the neo-Nazis, etc.
So, once you say that clearly, that debunks the hoax.
So, what happens if this new Twitter feature, this birdwatch, is anything like Wikipedia?
It's a problem, right?
Because this is a very specific, observable example where Wikipedia, because of its business model, if you can call it a business, because of its model, the public can distort the news.
Now, ideally, they can't distort it forever because there will be enough people coming in to correct it that the correction will eventually overcome any errors.
And that normally is the way it works.
But I think in this narrow realm of politics, the trolls or the people who want to protect the incorrect story are just too strong.
There are just too many of them. So this is the one realm in which Wikipedia is difficult to self-correct because there's too much incentive to keep it incorrect, which wouldn't apply to most of its content.
But, I don't think that Birdwatch is heading to the Wikipedia model.
The Wikipedia model tries to get you one story that's correct.
I don't think Twitter is trying to do that, and it would be a mistake if they did.
I think they're trying to show you what people say, if it's a reasonable counterpoint and it can be expressed that way.
So if what Twitter does is surface the points and the counterpoints in the context, maybe they have something.
If what they're doing is looking for the one correct narrative, that's worse.
Can we agree on that?
If it turns into a Wikipedia-like narrative-telling situation where there's one truth that comes out of it, that's worse.
If it shows both sides and doesn't try to play favorites, just, hey, here's the argument, make up your own mind, that's better.
Because if somebody tweets something, let's say they believe something they saw on CNN, and I put a comment on it in our current model without this new feature, who's going to see it?
The people I want to persuade or inform Not likely they're going to see it.
But what would happen if I made the best argument against a tweet that I thought was, you know, a wrong narrative or interpretation?
Well, if I make a really good counterpoint, the odds of my counterpoint floating up to the top should improve, right?
Because it's a good counterpoint.
Other people see it. They say, yeah, that's what I would say.
He's saying this, you know, the way I would say it.
So I have some optimism for this feature, but I'll acknowledge there's a million ways it could go wrong.
Somebody is building a face mask that has a COVID test indicator built into the face mask.
So I think something would change color based on the droplets coming out of your mouth all day.
Eventually they might build up to the point where it could measure them.
And I said to myself, if we can do that, Shouldn't we have rapid tests already?
If you can build that technology into a mask, you can't just put it in a pack of gum and sell it to me over the counter.
And if the problem is that the mask would be, let's say, a lower sensitivity than a proper COVID test, then don't you have a problem with the FDA? Right?
The whole problem with the rapid tests is that they're lower by design, they're lower sensitivity, and that's the problem.
The FDA doesn't want low sensitivity tests out there, even if they would be more useful than high sensitivity tests because you could do them in volume.
So, I don't think this thing about the mask having the test built into it I don't think that can work unless rapid tests can work.
And I don't see how they're going to get improved right away.
Although the Biden administration apparently is doing a better job on that, approving that stuff.
One of the questions that I was asked here is to teach people how to know who to trust in the news, which is a good question, right?
How do you know who to trust?
All the pundits, all the experts, all the news people, what rules do you use?
And there are lots of them, but I'm going to put one of them out there.
Somebody says, trust no one.
Trusting no one is a really good, that's a good starting point, right?
Trust no one is a good starting point.
I agree with that. But there are some situations that stand out more than others.
You're going to end up probably not trusting, but let's say siding with a side.
You're probably going to do that.
So you'd like as much knowledge as you could about who's more credible.
Here's a little tip.
Don't trust anybody who has a brand consistency problem.
Here's what I mean by that.
A brand consistency problem is you've built yourself into a kind of voice.
You always have a kind of slant on things.
You're the person who's known for saying whatever.
As soon as you're the person who's known for saying whatever and you start monetizing that, your credibility goes right out the door.
Because you sort of need to stay that person To be the brand that people are coming to.
And now what do you do?
Because you need to be that person.
And I'm going to mention a specific person, but I want to generalize the point.
So it's not about a specific person.
You've been watching Alex Berenson, who's probably maybe the most notable or famous, I would say skeptic would be the right word.
So when you see him appearing or writing and he's all over the place with the coronavirus story, I believe he worked at the New York Times, so he's a credible kind of person with a credible resume.
And he's been skeptical of a lot of the data science that's coming out of the coronavirus stuff.
Now, in the beginning of the pandemic, Is it useful to have a skeptic?
Yeah, it's really useful.
You really do want some strong voices to say, you say that that makes sense scientifically, but where's your data?
And then you show the data, and then you still want somebody to say, yeah, but I don't think that data says what you think it's going to say.
So a skeptic with credentials, you know, at least journalistic credentials like Alex Berenson, very, very valuable.
You want as many of those as you can get.
Smart people, right?
You don't want dumb skeptics.
You want a smart, legitimately professional person who's an actual skeptic.
So from that point of view, he's a national treasure, right?
I always appreciate skeptics.
They're national treasures, especially if they go against the grain and it's going to cost them something professionally.
And it probably did. He probably took a hit professionally.
But I think he was starting out doubting, and maybe still does, I don't know his exact position on masks and social distancing and lockdowns.
Now, is it reasonable to be a skeptic on masks, social distancing and lockdowns?
Yeah! Yeah, it's reasonable.
Completely reasonable.
Is it right? I don't know.
Right? I don't know.
Because we don't have data we can trust, which would be the point of a skeptic, right?
The whole point of a skeptic is, hey, this data you're selling us, it's not reliable.
So when you see somebody like Berenson say your data is not reliable on masks, social distancing, whatever else, I feel like he's in pretty solid ground most of the time.
I think that most of the time that data is not reliable, meaning it's not really nailed down that these facts are telling you what you think they're telling you.
But as time goes by, those things which you should be properly skeptical about, you get a little more clarity over time.
I believe that the consensus of science, and even maybe skeptics, is that masks surely must make some difference.
Not so much protecting you from virus, but from the ones that you might be giving off.
But now we have vaccinations.
Would you take the same level of skepticism for masks and lockdowns and stuff and take that to vaccinations?
You should, because skepticism everywhere is always a valuable asset, right?
Even if it's wrong, you want that point and counterpoint.
You always want that. So Alex Berenson was tweeting, I think the other day, yesterday, that Israel has not yet shown any effect from their vaccinations, and they seem to be the most complete in getting people vaccinated, over 65 at least.
And I saw that and I thought, I don't know, is this where you want to put the skepticism?
I would have waited a little bit, but almost five minutes after he tweeted that Israel's not showing any difference, Joel Pollack and other people who were also following it said, no, actually the data is really clear.
Here's the graph. Three weeks after the vaccination started, you see the hospitalizations, not every other measure, but just hospitalizations just plummeted.
Who's right? Is Alex Berenson's chart and data that didn't seem to show anything obvious happening there, is that right?
Or are the other people who said, no, here's the current information on hospitalizations and their actual stories based on news reports, are they right?
I don't know. The problem is, just because you see data in a news story, it doesn't mean it's right anymore.
It used to make me think it was probably right, but not anymore.
You can't really trust anything anymore.
But if I had to bet, I would bet they're working, and I would bet that the graphs showing lower hospitalizations, I would bet that's accurate.
I would bet that things are going the right direction.
So, to my first question, who should you trust?
Alex Berenson has the problem, which is not necessarily his fault, right?
This is not a criticism.
But once you become the skeptic guy, it's hard to get out of that, right?
Once you're the skeptic guy, that's why you get asked to be on the show, it's why a publisher will publish your book, and it would be easy to overdo the skepticism.
Alright? So, bringing you back to the specific personality.
Is Alex Berenson a credible person?
Yes. Yes, he's a very credible person.
But if you take the most credible person in the world and put them in a situation where they've got a brand compatibility issue, that credibility, you have to mentally adjust it, right?
So that would be one tip for knowing who to trust.
It doesn't matter how credible or smart or well-informed the person is, if they have a brand issue.
And that's what you want to look for.
Now, am I suggesting that Alex Berenson would intentionally say something that was wrong for his brand?
No. No.
I have no reason to believe he would do anything intentionally.
I'm just saying that you should not make any assumptions about people's internal thoughts, and if they have a brand issue, factor that in.
Here's a dog that's not barking.
What is the Biden administration approach to North Korea?
Why aren't we hearing anything about that?
Did North Korea suddenly become no problem?
Because if it is no problem, isn't that Trump?
And if it is a problem, what's he doing about it?
What's the Biden administration take on North Korea?
Wouldn't you like to know? That's going to be a fun one.
Assuming the world doesn't blow up, it's going to be really fun to see how Biden handles North Korea because he doesn't have that same relationship, etc.
So I just wonder why we're not hearing anything about it.
I guess Kim Jong-un would have to do something provocative to make that happen.
So we're already seeing that China is, they did some flexing their muscle, did some flyover over Taiwanese airspace.
I think they're really going to start flexing on Biden.
We'll see what he does.
So Biden did sign some kind of a Buy American legislation, but it only applies to government stuff.
And when I heard that, I said to myself, wait, what?
Joe Biden had to pass some kind of a law or it must have been an executive order.
I think it was an executive order.
He had to change something to make the government of the United States prefer American products?
And I thought, we didn't already do that?
I mean, I get why you wouldn't necessarily do it with the public, but the government?
I feel as if the government should be buying from American producers if there's any product that meets the need.
And I also asked myself, Trump didn't do that?
Are you telling me that Joe Biden had to do the thing that was Trump's brand, which is Buy American?
Why didn't Trump do that?
Can we say that that was a plus for Biden?
Can we be objective?
Oh, by the way, you're watching me model the very thing I was talking about not doing.
One of the reasons that I tell you from the start is that I'm left of Bernie, but I liked a lot of what Trump did, is that it confuses you about what my brand is.
I do that intentionally.
And I do that to make sure I don't get in a brand trap where there's some topics I just can't talk about because nobody would trust me.
They're like, ah, you're the guy who always says that.
So part of my brand risk is that people who have not followed me closely, they think that I always agree with Trump no matter whatever Trump does.
Now those of you who follow me know that that's not even close.
And here's an example. As far as I can tell, just looking at it from, you know, you never know the details, but it looks to me like this was a Biden success to require that our government only buys American.
That looks like a Biden success.
And if Trump had done it, I would have said that's a Trump success.
And it looks like it was something Trump could have done.
And didn't do. Now, if you dug into this story, you might find out that there's nothing there.
It might be all smoke and mirrors, which might be why Trump didn't do it.
It could be that we'd be better off buying, let's say, a French generator if no American makes that product.
It could be that we already buy American whenever it's an option.
Don't you think? If you're the procurement person for the government, no matter what part of the government you're in, and you have a choice of the Lithuanian product or the American product, and they both do the same thing for about the same price, don't you think you were going to buy the American product anyway?
So I don't know if it makes any difference.
It may be entirely just for show, but let me be consistent.
If Trump had done this, and even if it were just for show, I would still say it's the right thing to do.
Because it's part of, let's say, how you change minds about what is right and smart.
So even if it didn't make any practical difference to have the government required to buy American stuff, because they probably were pretty close to doing that anyway, it sends us a message.
And it's a good one. You know, that this is the direction we're going.
Everywhere we can find an opportunity to buy American, we're going to do it, even if it's a small opportunity.
So that's a Biden success, in my opinion.
I'm going to give them that one. CNN, being more entertainingly ridiculous than ever, had a chyron, which is the name for the little message that appears at the bottom of the screen.
It's called a chyron, C-H-Y-R-O-N, in case you wondered.
And so on CNN's Reliable Sources, you know that, sorry, the chyron was below a picture of Biden's spokesperson Jen Psaki, and it said that Psaki promises to share accurate information, and then in parentheses, how refreshing.
So CNN, their coverage, their critical coverage of the Biden presidency is that Biden's spokesperson promises to share accurate information.
How refreshing. Oh, my God.
Glenn Greenwald came in to dunk on them in a tweet.
And Greenwald says, I once again humbly submit that this would be a bridge too far even for North Korean state television, which is usually a bit more subtle and discerning than this.
And I think he nailed it.
CNN obviously wants access to government people.
Because they can't report.
The worst thing would be to be CNN and have no access to interviews because they don't like you.
So apparently they're in the business of getting liked by the Biden administration so they have access.
But it's actually, it's literally funny to watch how fawning they are.
Now somebody's saying it's like Fox to Trump, and you're not wrong, so I'm not going to defend anybody else on this, but this is actually pretty funny.
I told you yesterday that if you saw Vice President Harris getting a portfolio, like a special job for a Vice President, like Al Gore had a special job fixing the government's processes and Mike Pence has a special job or had with the Coronavirus Task Force.
So if you see a Vice President get a special portfolio, That would be an indication that that person is going to stay a vice president for a while.
But I told you that if you see that Harris does not get a portfolio, it might mean that they're grooming her to be a step in fairly soon.
And then the news, within hours of me saying that, I saw an article, and I don't know, maybe the article came out even before I said that, but I hadn't seen it.
It said, according to the New York Times, Harris has not been assigned a specific portfolio.
The exact thing I said, she's not been assigned a specific portfolio as of now.
She will serve as, and listen to this phrasing from the New York Times, a governing partner to Biden on his top priorities.
She's gonna be a co-president.
She's gonna be a governing partner.
Now, that's not exactly a co-president, but feels like it.
Doesn't it have, don't you feel that vibe?
Now, I don't expect my predictions to usually be that accurate that quickly.
And again, I don't know if this information was out there before I even made that prediction, which would make it not a prediction.
But that's what I was expecting.
So I expected that she would not get a portfolio.
And I do think that that indicates they're trying to The problem with giving the Vice President a portfolio is that it diminishes them.
Does that make sense? If you get a portfolio, it's sort of like, aw, vice president, a little pat on the head, aw, what a cute vice president.
You could never be president, but we'll give you a project.
Here's a little project, yeah, yeah, you little vice president.
That's what it feels like when you get a portfolio.
But when you become, when you don't get one, it makes you look like you're a governing partner.
Right. Yeah, so clearly she's being positioned to take over.
Now that doesn't mean they have a specific date to do it.
I've heard people suggest they would do it after the midterms, which would not surprise me.
Israel is saying that if the United States drops the sanctions with Iran and gets back into some kind of Iranian nuclear deal, that Israel says it will attack Iran.
Now, that's not an official pronouncement.
I guess this is just reports from people who are part of the government.
So it's not an official government statement.
But apparently they're saying it fairly directly.
Now, when they say attack, they don't necessarily mean a full war.
They mean attack their nuclear facilities.
And when Israel says, we will attack, That doesn't mean maybe, right?
Has there ever been a case where Israel said, under these conditions we will attack, and then they don't?
Has that ever happened in the history of Israel?
I don't know, but I would certainly trust them if they said we're going to attack.
So what does Biden do?
Biden would guarantee war, or at least something that looks a little like a war, between Israel and Iran based on the stated policy that he's pursuing.
And Israel is saying, it's not maybe.
It's not maybe military action.
It's military action. So that's quite a pressure on Joe Biden.
How will he manage this, being the statesman that he is?
So keep an eye on that.
Here's a little crack in the Democratic front.
So there's a reporter for CBS, a White House reporter, named Katherine Watson.
Now, it's important to the story that she works for CBS. Because you think of CBS as sort of left-leaning.
And here's what she says in a tweet.
She says, teachers unions, I'm sorry, she said, in her tweet she said, if Biden is really serious about getting kids back to school within 100 days, he's going to have to clash with teachers unions at some point.
So that's CBS saying that.
That if Biden wants to get kids back to school, he's going to have to go up against the teachers unions.
Interesting, right? Because the teachers' unions are really, really powerful, they really support the Democrats, and Biden is completely beholden to them.
But if he wants to keep the country intact, he has to destroy them, or at least push them aside temporarily.
Is he the right president to do that?
Nope, he's not.
He's exactly the wrong president to do that.
I've told you a number of times there's no such thing as a good president or a bad president.
Now, that's an exaggeration.
Of course you could have one that's bad.
But, in general, you have presidents that either fit a situation or don't.
I thought that Trump fit the North Korean situation.
He fit the peace in the Middle East situation.
He fit the ISIS situation.
He fit the China situation.
There's a whole bunch of stuff that Trump is a perfect fit for.
Healthcare? Maybe not so much, right?
Not the right fit. Did some good things in terms of reducing regulations, and that cannot be ignored.
But it's the fit that matters.
Who would have been a better fit to take on the teachers' unions?
Trump, who did not get support from them, or Biden, who does get support from them, and it's really, really important.
The answer is Trump. Trump, for this situation, getting kids back to school, is unambiguously the better president.
Unfortunately, he's not the president.
So what does Biden do?
Does he let the teachers' unions continue with their being the source of all systemic racism, which they are?
And the argument there is that by preventing school choice, they lock every poor community into remaining a poor community.
Because those kids can't go to a better school.
There's just no choice.
They have one bad school and that's what you got.
So that, of course, makes systemic racism continue on in ways that it should not.
If everybody had a good job because of a good education, you'd have a lot less discrimination, right?
But now they're actually hurting children because we know children are being damaged by being kept out of the social school situation.
They're not learning as much.
They're not socializing right.
They're getting damaged.
It's real. It's important.
But likewise, the economy really depends on getting the kids back to school because you've got two parents that can't work at the same time necessarily if kids are there.
The teachers unions have become the biggest problem in the country.
And we have a president who's the only one who can't do anything about it.
That's a bad situation.
He can't even talk about it right.
Can't even talk about it.
That's a problem.
So keep an eye on that.
On the plus side, if you're following Cory DeAngelis on Twitter, you see lots of reports and you should, by the way, you should follow him, Cory DeAngelis.
You'll see him in my Twitter feed if you're looking for him.
He reports on various states and localities looking into funding students directly, and apparently there's a lot of movement in that direction.
Now, I don't know exactly how well that's going to work, but anything that looks like it's breaking the monopoly that the teachers' unions have is worth looking at.
It's worth looking at.
So directly funding students instead of funding the school gives the students who are directly funded at least the option to take their education somewhere else.
And then maybe the free market can fix things in a way that teachers unions cannot.
I got a question for you.
Is it too late to impeach George Washington over slavery?
Because I don't know about you, but I am opposed to slavery.
Totally opposed. Not even any wiggle room.
I can't speak for the rest of you, but just for me, no slavery.
Totally against it.
And George Washington, having been a slave owner, I don't think we can let that slide.
Can we? Now, there was a time when I thought, well, what can you do about it?
He's dead. It was hundreds of years ago.
Yeah, and Thomas Jefferson, that asshole, he's got to be impeached.
He's got to be impeached.
But now that I know that you can impeach a president after they're out of office, I don't see any reason you can't impeach them when they're dead, can you?
I'm not aware of anything in our Constitution that would prevent Congress from impeaching a dead president like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.
And they did some bad stuff.
Slave owners, that's about as bad as it gets, right?
Short of a Holocaust, owning slaves has got to be number two on the list of bad stuff you can do.
So I think we need to stop doing the business of the country.
By the way, Joe Biden has acknowledged that impeaching Trump will damage the effectiveness of the Congress.
So that while the impeachment of Trump is going on, the impeachment trial, he acknowledges that they won't be able to do the work of the country as efficiently.
But he's okay with that.
Because he says it's really, really important to impeach Trump.
It's very important because of reasons.
It's very important to impeach Trump because of that he's going to run for office again.
I would think they would be very, very happy to have him run for office again.
I would think that Trump plus four years of age, I think they would be happy to have him run for office because it would look like President Harris for sure.
But I think the real reason they say they want to do it is not that.
If you ask the Democrats, why are you doing it, they won't say, well, we want to keep them out of office in the future, because that would sound petty, and also sound like not doing their job, it would sound political.
So instead they say things like, it's very important to send a message to Well, if it's important to send a message, let's send a message to all of those past presidents who've had some issues we don't like.
I feel as if most of our presidents could be impeached.
Do you know what JFK did in the White House?
He defiled the White House a little bit, just a little bit.
Let's just say he was doing a lot of defiling in that White House.
So impeach him for that, too.
Impeach them all. I've told you, of course, that I'm on another platform called Locals, L-O-C-A-L-S. You can find them, just go to onlocals.com.
And Apparently it's just taken off.
Not apparently, it's taken off like crazy.
So a lot of people who are looking for some kind of platform where the censorship is not going to be political are going there.
And I'm on there and you can subscribe to me.
And because it's a subscription service, I don't get I just don't get trolls.
So I have a whole other experience on locals in which everybody who is there wants to be there.
They're literally paying a subscription fee to be there.
Seven bucks a month or more if they want to message me.
And when people pay to be somewhere, They act quite polite.
They're happy to be there.
So I have this whole other experience where the people are posting, like, interesting things because they came there, you know, because of some intersection with my points of view.
And so the things they post tend to be extra interesting.
And apparently the locals is taking off.
Traffic-wise, it's just...
It's on a nice growth right now.
Full disclosure, I have a small amount of stock in locals.
Just so you know that.
Small amount, not enough to change too much in my life.
According to the IEEE spectrum, the only way we're going to be successful in space and getting to Mars in particular quick enough is if we use nuclear engines in our rockets.
Now, have I told you before that our domestic energy policy needs to have a robust nuclear energy component so that we're developing the right kind of skills to transfer to space?
Because space is gonna be nuclear, right?
Probably they won't use nuclear engines to take off.
That might stay similar to how it is now.
But once you get into space, You're gonna need some serious energy, right, to stay up there for a while, to go to Mars and back, that sort of thing.
You're gonna need a lot of energy.
And so the idea is nuclear thermal propulsion.
So it uses the nuclear reaction to heat liquid to some god-awfully high number, which causes the propellant to expand and shoots out the nozzles and whatever.
So if you use nuclear energy in rockets once they get to space, Not only could you get to Mars, is it two years, they think, maybe?
It's twice as fast. But when you get there, you've got a nuclear energy source.
So not only does a nuclear engine allow you to travel, but should you try to colonize something, you'd have a nuclear energy source.
Just plug in your devices to your spaceship, I guess.
Alright, so that's good.
And again, I point that out because if the United States doesn't dominate or at least be a major presence in space, we don't have a future.
Whoever owns space, that's who is going to control the future.
That's it. And without nuclear, that doesn't happen.
And without a robust A civilian nuclear program, you're not going to have the talent to do it in space.
So we have to pursue that.
Now, what would happen if we tried to find unity in this country?
What would that look like?
What would it look like if we tried to have unity?
Well, Joe Biden's call for unity involves impeaching Trump.
So he just said again that he wants to do it even though it's bad for the country.
Revenge? I don't know.
So is that good for unity?
Is impeaching Trump at the expense of the business of the country for unity?
That's not much unity.
I was watching Alan Dershowitz's podcast, which is really good, called the Dershow, one word, as in the first part of Dershowitz's name, Dershow.
And he had asked people for ideas and suggestions on how to build unity with the political left and right.
And I tweeted yesterday a caller who called in to suggest that maybe the best way to get unity would be for Joe Biden to correct and apologize the fine people hoax.
Now, I was a little bit concerned.
That Alan Dershowitz would say, that's no hoax.
That's a real thing, as most Democrats would say, right?
Now, remember, Alan Dershowitz identifies Democrat.
He voted for Hillary Clinton, has never wavered.
He's a Democrat to the core.
And as a Democrat, he said unambiguously that the fine people hoax is a hoax, and went through the reasoning and said it as clearly as you could possibly say it, and I felt really good about it.
Because I've told you before that I'm never confident in my opinion until I hear Dershowitz agree with it.
Or I hear him first and then I just agree with him, because it's easier than coming up with my own opinions, because his are better than mine.
So I just wait until Dershowitz says something and I go, what did he say?
Okay, that's my opinion now.
Now I do think about it a little bit, but he's so damn logical.
That once he says his opinion, I just look at it and go, ah, ah, who else has an opinion that's going to top that?
I don't think so. I feel as if we should pick a thing and push it forever.
And I think the thing, we meaning anybody who wants Biden to pursue unity, I think we should push the fine people hoax as the thing that needs to be corrected.
It's the thing in my life that most needs to be corrected.
I need the people on the left to know they were lied to about that in particular, because it was so important.
They need to understand they were lied to about that.
That's a big change.
There's nothing else unity-wise that I can think of, nothing, that would come close to that in terms of making the people on the right say, okay, okay, that sounds like unity, right?
Stop calling us racist.
That would be a start.
Yeah, there's the other hoaxes too, the bleach-drinking hoax, et cetera.
Brendan Straka apparently has been picked up by the FBI. I don't know if he's arrested, per se, but he's in some trouble for being allegedly part of the Capitol insurrection.
And by being part of it, the reports, which you should not treat as credible yet, is that he may have been inside the Capitol and may or may not have been saying things, inciting other people to go inside.
I have a real problem with somebody like him getting swept up in any legal problems.
On one hand, I totally oppose the people who entered the Capitol and caused any damage and threatened our government, etc.
The legal system has to do what the legal system needs to do.
If laws were broken, it has to be addressed.
I guess there's just no way around that.
Even if you have some empathy for the people who did it, our system just doesn't let you commit crimes and get away with it.
Unfortunately, you just can't do that.
Or fortunately, you just can't do that.
But the problem is, I do think there is something about the idea of being swept up in something.
If everybody is doing something, it doesn't look so wrong if you're in the crowd.
And somehow that has to matter, right?
You can't let people get away with crimes, but it has to matter how you got there.
And I think the legal system does take that into consideration, at least for sentencing.
So I'd hate to see somebody like Brandon Stracca Get any kind of a permanent problem in his life from the legal system for what I doubt he ever had any violence, anything.
Probably thought he was doing a free speech thing.
Didn't think he was getting anybody with a club, so he was just there for free speech.
I just have a real problem if he gets hit hard by the legal system.
So that's just a shout out to the legal system.
Be smart about this, right?
You've got to be smart about this.
And this would be sort of a dividing line, like he's an edge case, where what you do with Brandon Straka and other people who are in the same situation, I feel like how you treat that is going to make a big difference, especially to unity.
So, Joe Biden has prioritized racial inequality as one of his top things to battle.
And here's my take on that.
Of course, racial equality is something I think we all want, don't we?
Is there anybody here who doesn't want racial equality?
So, as a concept, of course, we all want that.
If you're a good person, you want that.
But my problem with it is, it's the easiest con.
Because talking about it does the least.
And it might even be, you know, in some cases, might be counterproductive.
And so making it a priority, but not doing anything about it, it just feels like a con.
Compare that to what Trump did.
He didn't talk about it.
But he did things about it.
He did prison reform.
He worked on the economy, which is good for everybody.
As I said earlier, he didn't seem to be a supporter of the teachers' unions, which are the biggest cause of racial inequality in the long run.
So Trump was all action.
He did a lot of funding for the historically black Colleges, he did Opportunity Zones with Tim Scott.
Every part of that was action directly related to making the world a more equal place racially, etc.
All action. But what exactly is Joe Biden going to do, having made it a priority?
I feel like that's about talking.
I feel like it's a con, that it's a way to make people think something is happening, but what's happening is talking.
And I feel bad, honestly, for black voters who thought they were getting more than that.
I don't know that they're getting more than that.
We'll see. But it looks like that's all they're getting.
Speaking of that, speaking of that priority, here's the scariest thing that you'll see lately.
In the California high schools, they're going to embrace the CRT, or Critical Ethnic Studies.
So I guess instead of Critical Race Theory, it's Critical Ethnic Studies.
And within that studies, apparently, reportedly, they talk about who has a privileged position in society.
And what would be the point of saying that some group has a privileged place in society?
What would be the point of that?
Now some of it is education and context, etc.
But wouldn't the express point be to discriminate against that group?
Isn't that the point? Now when I say discriminate, if you're discriminating against the group that's in power, well that doesn't feel so bad, does it?
You're discriminating against the strong.
What would be bad would be discriminating against the weak.
As a general concept, right?
Without getting into the details.
Generally speaking, doing something against the strong, not so bad.
Doing something against the weak, very, very bad.
As a general rule.
Now, even better, don't do bad things to anybody.
Can't we agree on that? Best situation?
Don't do bad things to anybody.
But I think the critical ethnic studies and critical race theory essentially put white people as a privileged class, which is very close to putting a target on their back.
Hear what I'm saying? If you mark somebody as the privileged people, you have marked them as the ones who should have less in the future.
They're targeted. Now, I don't mean targeted for violence.
I'm not talking about that. I'm about targeted for maybe you should have a little less of this privileged thing in the future.
Maybe other people should have more.
But the only way you get there is you have less.
So in the sense that it's the group targeted to have less relative to the other people, they're targeted.
Is that a fair statement?
That they would be targeted to have less in the future compared to other people to make things more fair, as the theory goes.
But here's where they made a small little mistake Something that maybe they could have seen coming.
And it goes like this.
They decided to throw Jews into the category of privileged people.
Do I need to finish the sentence?
Critical ethnic studies in California high schools are going to call out Jews as targeted for privilege.
Meaning that they should have less in the future relative to other people.
There are some things which defy words, so if you're only listening to this on the podcast, I'm going to have to do this with a physical expression that you won't be able to hear.
So when you don't hear me for a moment, it's because I'm doing something hilarious and spot on to the people who are watching it.
And it goes like this.
That's it.
What words could possibly express how bad this is?
Right? As a direction you're going anyway, right?
Unbelievable. Now, I get the point that there are certain groups who are economically doing better than others, right?
And I'm guessing that that's where they're coming from.
But I think it has more to do with they've just decided, let's throw the Jewish Americans in with everybody else who's white, call them all privileged, ba-ba-boom, and we're done.
I don't feel like that's a good path.
I feel like that's not going to work out.
So, there's a little bit of unity that needs some improving, wouldn't you say?
I think we can improve our unity on this question.
A little bit. A little bit.
Now, I've told you that the obvious direction for wokeness is self-destruction.
Because the whole wokeness thing, when you start breaking people into categories, you can't stop.
There's no logical place to stop.
Once you start categorizing people, which is why you don't want to do it, right?
Either treat everybody the same or you categorize until you get this kind of problem.
So this was the most predictable thing that could have possibly happened.
Totally predictable. So we hope that there will be some force that pushes back on that.
All right. I think I had one other point I was going to say, which is Remind me, did I talk about Aaron Ruppar and Vox and the bleach drinking hoax?
The amazing thing about this hoax, I think I did talk about it, is that...
I think people don't understand how communication works, which is interesting for someone who's a professional writer, that he doesn't understand how communication works.
Let me explain to you how communication works.
It's a very basic concept, and apparently some people don't get this.
It goes like this. You have to assume what a speaker is thinking in order to understand what they're saying.
So you have to consider the source.
So if your best friend mocks you, you say, ah, that's my best friend.
In my best friend's mind, they're not being mean to me, they're just having fun.
So who says it and what they're thinking completely determines how you accept it, right?
So let me give you an example.
Let's say I said to you, hey, I'd like to invite you over to my house for dinner.
How would you interpret that?
If somebody said, I'd like you to come over for dinner tonight, What would be the logical assumption about what the person who said that was thinking?
You'd probably say to yourself, well, I think that what they're thinking is that they would like to entertain, and they will make a meal, and they will serve that meal, and I will sit at the table with them, and we will eat that meal.
But that's not said, right?
That's all just assumed.
In your head, you're filling in all the blanks.
Stop getting ahead of me in the comments, you damn smart people.
My clever point was just coming up, and you beat me to it in the comments.
Would you ever assume that if they said, I'd like you to come over for dinner, that their real intention was to eat you, and that they are cannibals?
And if not, Why not?
Why would you not make the assumption that they're cannibals?
Because the words fit both meanings, right?
How do you not assume they're cannibals?
What evidence do you have that they're not cannibals?
And the answer is, because nobody does that.
Nobody. Nobody invites you to their house to eat you.
Now, I'm not saying it's never been done.
Jeffrey Dahmer, You know, got close to that.
I don't think he used those words.
But you have to make an assumption that the person speaking is not an absolute, crazy, insane monster, unless, obviously, they are.
So when Aaron Ruppar was, when I was questioning him and saying there's nothing about drinking bleach in President Trump's statements when that event happened, he points me to the place where he says he sees it.
And I think, how can you see the thing that isn't there?
And so I read the words, and he says, Rupar says, quote, in a tweet back to me, he was clearly talking about household cleaning products when he refers to disinfectant.
Now, if you read the words exactly the way Aaron Rupar did, could you interpret it to mean household cleaning products?
And the answer is yes. Yes, you could.
You could interpret the exact words, and specifically the word disinfectant, you could interpret that to mean bleach, right?
But should you Is it completely reasonable to think that the President of the United States, someone who had been, you know, handling the office fine, seems to operate in public,
went to college, is an actual operating adult in the real world, is it reasonable to think that he was suggesting putting household disinfectants directly into your body?
In what world do you make that assumption that the word disinfectant, especially when it's in the context of talking about light, it's light, light, light, light, light, disinfectant, light, light, light as a disinfectant, disinfectant, light, light, light as a disinfectant, disinfectant.
What logical reason would you pick that word disinfectant, which is used, you know, a light is a disinfectant.
Why would you just pick a word end of a sentence and say, all those other times, before and after it, he was talking about light, because he used the words specifically.
But this one time, this one time right in the middle, when he used the word disinfectant, that was the time he meant, let's put some bleach into your body.
That's what Aaron Ruppar assumed the President was thinking.
He made the assumption that the President of the United States quite literally would stand in public and suggest ingesting bleach.
Why would anybody be that dumb?
And I'm not talking about Trump.
How could you be so dumb That you think that the president would say that?
That that's even possible? If you were making a list of all the things that could have happened, would that even be on the list?
Because it's just like somebody inviting you over for dinner.
You don't assume they mean cannibalism.
Ever. Ever.
It's never the right assumption.
But a lot of people did, just like Aaron Rupar did.
He's not alone, right?
Tens of millions of people made that same assumption.
Why? Because the fake news had drawn such a caricature of Trump that that seemed possible.
In other words, the fake news was so thoroughly convincing that if President Trump had invited Aaron Ruppert over for dinner, Aaron Ruppert could reasonably assume it was meant to eat him.
Because that's how bad Trump is.
That's the world we live in.
That somebody would assume that that was even something that the president would say out of his mouth and that it's even possible that that could have happened.
You've got to assume that wasn't possible if you're going to understand how language works, right?
Language doesn't work if you make the dumbest assumption about what the person is thinking.
It never works. Nothing would make sense if you made the dumbest assumption about what somebody is thinking.
Let me do that with Joe Biden.
Joe Biden, his highest priority is getting rid of racial inequality.
Therefore, he wants to kill all the white people.
Why would I assume that?
Wouldn't that be stupid?
Does anybody think that Joe Biden wants to kill all white people?
Well, it's right there in what he said.
He wants racial equality.
How else are you going to get it?
Boom, boom, boom. Logical.
So, watching Democrats not know, especially a professional writer.
I mean, Aaron Rupar is a professional writer at a pretty big publication, Vox.
He knows how language works.
He knows how talking works.
He knows how communication works.
He's literally a high-end professional.
And even he thought that Trump maybe suggested drinking bleach.
That's how bad the fake news is.
I mean, that's bad.
That's as bad as you can get.
All right. Anything else we need to cover?
I don't think so. Somebody says it's intentional, but you can't rule that out.
But honestly, I don't get that vibe.
Because we had some back and forth, and he did not defend himself like somebody who knew he was wrong.
He defended himself exactly like somebody who thought he was right.
Now, I can't read his mind, so if you're going to say to yourself, but you don't know, he might have been acting, yeah, I guess that's possible.
I'm just giving you my best judgment is that it looked genuine.
DDS is real. Why did he say he was being sarcastic?
Oh, why did Trump say he was being sarcastic?
Again, we can't read his mind.
But my guess is that he got so much heat for that, he just wanted it to go away.
So he just said, I was just playing around, being sarcastic.
I think that's the best explanation.
But there's no chance that he sarcastically suggested drinking bleach.
There's no chance that he sarcastically asked about injecting household disinfectants into a body.
He did not sarcastically say that.
But he did. He did say that he was being sarcastic, and we know that he sometimes He has a history of trying to make an issue just go away, so I think he just tried to make it go away.
What is up with Newsom?
Well, it looks like the number of signatures for the recall is getting up there, and somebody smart pointed out, I forget who it was, so I can't give you credit, that if Newsom demands that the signatures be audited, The idea of auditing elections is going to look good.
