Episode 1267 Scott Adams: Trump Presidential Library, Traveling With Restrictions, Fake News About the Fake News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Boot on neck of Trump supporters
President Trump's Presidential Library
Is Gamestop a shift in culture?
Kevin Clinesmith's light sentence
China collecting Americans DNA
Jen Psaki, Biden's press secretary
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I guess every now and then I should have a full night's sleep and my body decided that today was the day.
One of the problems with not sleeping much, because I hate sleeping, is that every now and then When I don't set my alarm clock, I'll oversleep by three hours.
Typically, I wake up three, four in the morning and I'm done.
I just don't like sleep.
Don't recommend being like me?
Don't be like me. Instead, be like this.
Be a person who knows how to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
What do you need? Well, you need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that opened me at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the thing you've been waiting for, the thing that was late.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and man, is it going to be good when you finally get it.
Here it goes. Go.
Yeah, just as good as I told you, right?
Yeah. You were thinking, it's not going to be that good, is it?
But it was. Once again.
How about that? Well, let me start by telling you how hard it is to travel during the age of coronavirus.
Most of you know I was just on my coronavirus-delayed honeymoon.
It took us months to figure out how we could do this safely and make it work.
And thanks to my wonderful wife, Christina, who is a genius at making stuff work, She figured out how to get us to the other side of the world safely and back.
It was kind of amazing.
The basic thing you need to know is that it's masks all the way.
We went to Bora Bora, which is in French Polynesia, by Tahiti.
Just sort of leave California and head toward New Zealand.
But before you get to New Zealand, you stop.
And that's where Bora Bora is.
And so we spent a week there.
It was the most amazing week. So here are the things you need to know, the highlights.
It was a high-end resort.
It was the Four Seasons in Bora Bora.
Could not have been better.
It's impossible.
There isn't any possible way this trip could have been better once you get there.
Getting there is hard, but once you get there, it's amazing.
Best scenery, feeling, service you've ever seen.
The other thing that's amazing is that the resort, I don't know if they're going to last because their business was no more than, I don't think there were more than 30 people at the entire resort, which is built to handle hundreds.
I don't know how many hundreds, but I think 300 or so.
And there were maybe 30 of us there.
So entire swimming pools, beaches with zero people except us.
So as a honeymoon, it couldn't have been better.
I'll never experience anything like this in my life again.
Because it was a top-level experience with no other people in a practical sense.
So I worry a great deal about the future of their business, but man, it could not have been better.
If you get a chance to go before the crowds pick up, here's the risk profile.
We got tested once before we flew.
So we had to have a result.
Now, I suppose we had a little bit of exposure, theoretically, before we flew.
But once on the plane, at least I've seen studies that say that the planes are so good with their filtration these days that your odds of getting on a plane are actually really, really low.
People wore masks, but of course they fall asleep and their masks fall off them.
So I would say masking is pretty good on the plane, if you think that makes any difference.
I'll talk about that in a minute. So I wasn't worried about the plane.
And once you get there, there are no people.
And the staff is all masked and they do good social distancing, etc.
So they won't even clean your room if they think you're going to be around it for a while.
So everything was done really, really well.
I think the Four Seasons did everything that they could possibly do.
And then you get another test while you're there.
So you have to do one before you fly there, once a few days after you've been there, and then once right before you come back.
And we did that the same day.
Now you've got to coordinate all this in a foreign country, right?
So you've got to find a place in Tahiti that will give you a test that you'll get a result the same day so you can fly later that day.
Do you know how worried I was that that wasn't going to work?
And you've got four hours to get your test and it doesn't come.
And you think to yourself, I'm in a foreign country and I can't fly home without this test.
And they said it'd be here by now.
And it's not.
You're checking your email.
You're thinking they wrote down a code wrong or something.
You'll never get home. Now, of course, these are silly traveler worries.
Because it's not likely that a place that's a tourist destination has not figured out How to get the tourists home.
That's the part I always forget.
I'm not the first person who ever had to figure this out.
Obviously they have a system.
So the hotel works with you and the hotel will tell you where to get the test and they'll make sure that you can get a cab there and back.
It's all very civilized and easy.
But boy, I'll tell you, the distance they push that swab down your nose in Tahiti, that set a record.
I mean, the American tests were bad enough, but...
The Tahiti test, they really went for some spelunking for depth there.
I think they tickled my brain a little bit.
But the bottom line is, if I had to judge how safe I was, and this is the bottom line of this, how safe I was traveling from the coronavirus versus how safe I would have been just staying home and socially distancing the normal but imperfect amount that we all do, I feel like I was safer on the road.
I don't know if you could measure that in any way, but if I looked at all the testing that I did and all the other people did, I ended up on an island in the middle of the Pacific without anybody who had either not been there two weeks without an infection already, or they got tested within the day that they arrived.
So it was actually probably safer than just normal life, and probably a lot safer.
It probably wasn't even close. Without an actual scientific way to measure that, I can't be sure, so I'm only giving you a sense of it.
I'm not giving you a scientific opinion.
It felt way safer than just staying home.
And that's a big credit to the system that has adjusted that much to make that possible.
So the traveling, I would say traveling with a mask is hard, especially if you have to try to sleep on the plane because it's a long flight.
We had a four-hour delay followed by a seven-hour flight on the way there.
If you add in the travel time and the taxi time and everything else, you know, 12 hours in a mask, it's a long day.
But a lot of people who have just regular jobs are doing that every day, so...
I'm not going to complain about it.
So it was all good. So here's a question that people keep asking me.
I have apparently spoken differently about how we should look at business close downs, the lockdowns, versus wearing masks.
And it's actually a fair question.
In one case, I say that the business closures, the forced closures, do not have scientific backing to suggest that they work.
Would you agree with that? That we don't really have scientific backing to suggest that closing businesses, as opposed to keeping them open with all the right restrictions, we don't have evidence which one of those makes a difference.
Now, I just told you I did a very complicated, extensive travel, and I did feel safer.
I don't know, but it felt safer than normal life because it was so designed to be controlled where normal life is messy.
But if it's designed to be controlled, maybe they can do it better than your normal messy life.
That's what I think.
So I don't have a feeling of whether we can tell that closing businesses helps or hurts.
So we don't have science, because it's hard to measure and it's kind of too early to even know if you did.
So what do you do? You don't have science, but common sense kind of can point in both directions, can't it?
You could make a case that social distancing would be better served with business closures, but then how do you factor in the fact that it wouldn't be normal business?
It would be opened under You know, certain careful restrictions.
Would that make it safer than normal life?
It might. Who knows?
So I would say business closures are unproven scientifically, and so you should really pause to see if you want to do that, because we know the cost of it could be gigantic in terms of extra poverty and all the things that that causes.
But I say the opposite, or something very different about masks, and people have pointed out that that looks like an inconsistency.
Why is it that I say I can't make a determination about whether closing businesses make sense, but my common sense of it, which is largely an illusion, common sense is an illusion, but my feeling of it, having observed it up close, my feeling of it is it's a mistake to close businesses.
There might be some exceptions, like possibly a gym.
No, even a gym, they would do good procedures.
So I would say anybody who is willing to open up and do careful procedures, my logical, just experienced brain that sees the world says probably opening businesses would be a better way forward.
And California is starting to open up a little bit starting this week, so that's good.
But I don't say that with masks.
Now, masks also have this problem that we don't know exactly what masks are doing in the context of the coronavirus.
We know they've been measured in different contexts for different purposes in the past.
We know that the experts overwhelmingly say you should use masks.
We know that other people point to other studies and say, no, these studies show masks don't make a difference.
So why is it that I would have a different opinion about masks in which I say you should go ahead and wear them, take the recommendation of the experts, whereas the business opening stuff I'm a little squishier on, and it looks like maybe we should just open the businesses and not do that.
Why do I make that difference?
And the difference is this. Here, first, some context.
You live in a life and a world in which you don't have scientific studies for almost anything you do.
You don't know that waking up a little early will make your life better or worse.
You don't know that this meal you ate is a smart one or not a smart one.
You don't know much about anything.
You don't know the house you might buy, the job you might take, the commute you choose.
Almost everything you're doing all day long is stuff that nobody studied.
You've just lived in the world long enough where you say, I think this looks like a better choice than this, but there's no way to know.
You've just got to take your shot.
Masks are a little like that.
And there's a rule that I use that I apply to just about everything, which is that friction pretty much always works.
Now, I'll leave a little wiggle room because I'm sure there's some case where it doesn't.
But if you've lived long enough, you see that wherever friction is applied, or wherever it's removed, it has exactly the predictable impact.
If you tax something, people will do less of it.
If you build a wall, it'll be harder for people to get over it.
It won't stop it, but it'll be harder.
It might reduce it. If you restrict anything, you get less of it.
And with my living in the world, without the science, just living in the world, I say, hey, if the problem is stuff shooting out of your mouth, and we know that that's a far bigger problem than what you're touching, that seems to be the common understanding, If it's stuff that's shooting out of your mouth and you can put some friction on that thing, does it stop every bit of the virus?
No. No, we know it doesn't stop all of the virus.
But we do know that the amount of the viral load makes a big difference in what the outcomes are.
So as long as we know that the degree of viral load makes a big difference, And common sense and living in the world says, well, this mask probably limits some of that.
Does it stop all of it?
No, nobody thinks that.
Nobody thinks a mask stops a virus.
Nobody thinks that.
There's no expert who thinks that.
They think it might slow it down.
It might add a little friction.
Now, do you need to do a scientific study In every situation in your life in which somebody is applying or taking away friction to know what kind of effect that will have.
You would be right 99% of the time if you just said that friction is a real thing and wherever it is added, you get less of a thing.
Wherever it's subtracted, you get more of a thing.
That's it. Now, could I be completely wrong?
Could we learn someday in the future that masking was more bad than good?
Absolutely. You could totally learn that.
So if you think I'm telling you, I know with my great brain certainty 100% that masks are definitely the reason, I don't think that's knowable, and anybody who has that opinion, I would respect that.
But I do think that if you're doing a risk management assessment, given how high the stakes are, I would say it's a good risk, and that the consensus of experts is still solidly pro-mask.
If you see a growing number of experts who tell you masks don't work, I would take that seriously.
But right now, I don't see that.
I see people who are not experts Looking at studies they don't understand, which are usually on slightly different things, you know, whether it works in a, let's say, a surgery setting, etc., for different kinds of diseases, I would wait for a pretty big consensus of experts to say they don't work before I would even consider that they don't work.
And we don't have anything like that.
Now, if you've seen Actual medical experts, a consensus, not a rando doctor person, but actual growing consensus of doctors saying masks don't do anything, I would take that seriously, but that doesn't exist.
And you've got to ask yourself why, right?
Because there are people on every side of everything.
You don't have enough doctors to form sort of a movement away from masks.
You don't. That means something.
You should take that seriously.
Now, does that mean that the experts are right?
No. But since it matches with my common sense, if you want to call it that, it's always an illusion, then I'm willing to take that as a reasonable risk to wear the mask.
Here's the funniest, scariest thing in the world.
There's some reporting that Trump is getting stronger.
By being out of the news.
I think everybody has made the same observation, that Trump, if he just stopped talking for a while as president, if he had just stopped talking for a while, that his popularity would have gone through the roof.
If he just stops being a little bit as Trumpy as he is.
Now, that's a ridiculous thing to hope for, because the whole point of electing Trump is that he wasn't going to change.
He wouldn't have even been elected in the first place if people thought he was going to be a different person when he took office, right?
That's part of what you expected, that Trump is Trump.
Excuse me. That said, he's sort of, let's say, involuntarily forced into some silence after his office, his term ended.
And the less he talks, I feel like the more popular he's going to get.
Because you've got this big populist energy, if you will, that suddenly became leaderless.
What happens when you have this much energy, Let's say the populist, whatever the Trump movement was, you have that much energy and then the leader goes silent.
What happens? Does the energy just dissipate?
Well, I guess the people on the left hope that would happen.
Does it transfer to another leader?
It could, but who is that?
Don't you think we'd know by now?
Who is the natural inheritor of the energy that the Trump movement or the populist movement created?
I don't know. I mean, there are some good Republican candidate potentials for 1994, some of them more Trump-like than others, but there's not really a natural, you know, there's not a name where every one of you would say, well, what about X? Not really, right?
Yeah, Matt Gaetz, I think, is his own person.
I don't see him as exactly a Trump clone, but he would be, at least in terms of the populist policies, would be very close to that.
Yeah, Ted Cruz has some problems politically at the moment because he's being branded as being part of the insurrection.
So here's the interesting part.
If you thought...
That Trump was a problem before the Democrats decided to crucify him.
Let me say that again so you won't think I chose that word accidentally.
If the Democrats thought that Trump was a problem before they decided to crucify him, and then he went silent for a while.
How many days?
Hmm. And the only problem is, if you thought that the so-called insurrection was a problem, wait till you see the resurrection.
Because the resurrection's going to be a bigger problem if you're a Democrat.
Now, I'm not going to predict that Trump, after having been legally and politically crucified, Would go away effectively as if dead for a while.
While the movement that he led grows in his absence, grows.
If he were to return, it's a big fucking problem.
Now, I predicted he won't.
That I had predicted that he would not be politically viable because he wouldn't be able to get the same people who supported him the same way before.
And I'm going to stick with that.
I'm going to stick with my prediction that he will not run for office again.
So I'm going to stick with that.
But if you wanted to guarantee that he did run for office and win, just keep doing what you're doing.
Because every time you hear somebody who was associated with Trump get taken down, At first you say, oh, okay, that's a special case.
That's somebody who did something illegal, and of course the law is the law, so I understand that one.
Oh, there's another one? Oh, it's somebody, okay, well, okay, they did something else.
Yeah, I guess that was pretty bad, so I guess that's a special case.
You know, they were a Trump supporter, but that's a special case.
Well, there's another one? There's another one in the headline?
There's three more? Every time you hear another Trump supporter being taken down...
It starts with, yeah, I guess they had to do that.
They broke some laws. And then it starts to be people taken down for things they may or may not have thought.
People being taken down for signing up to have a Parle and Gab account.
That just happened. That was just in the news.
Somebody got fired for simply having an account on Parle and Gab.
That's it. That was the entire accusation.
They had an account in an alternative social media platform.
Every time you hear about that stuff, it feels as if the people who are associated with it and all that populist energy might be picking up power.
It's exactly what the Democrats don't want to happen, but I think they're doing it as aggressively as they possibly could, and it's building up this sort of resentment, revenge-y energy.
You don't want to build up too much resentment, revenge-y energy.
And that's what the Democrats are doing.
Because the more revenge they put into the system, the more it's going to come back.
Wouldn't you agree? We have a system in which the more revenge you put into it, the more it's coming back.
There's no way around it.
The Republicans are not going to sit there for four years of revenge being taken out upon them.
Without an equal and opposite reaction.
There isn't any way that can happen.
And so, the Democrats are creating a situation for Trump's resurrection that is the one you don't want.
That's the one you don't want.
And I don't even think I want that one.
Because that's going to be too much energy in not exactly the right place.
That's too much energy.
And they have a real problem here.
This is a real problem.
I'm still going to stick with my, like I said, my prediction that he won't run for office again.
But, man, are they making it dangerous.
They are really making it dangerous.
Because if they don't take the boot off our neck pretty soon...
Let me put it this way.
I don't know if this is...
I have a Republican quality.
I don't identify Republican, as you know.
I don't identify even conservative, as you know.
But I have this quality, and I think it might be common to the right.
So I might have this in common.
Which is, I am really, really flexible.
Really flexible.
Until I'm not.
And I can't even tell you where the knot kicks in, because I'm always surprised.
In my normal life, I'm exactly the same, not just my political opinions, but the way I live my in-person life.
Very flexible.
Very, very flexible.
Until I'm not.
And when I'm not, it just falls off a cliff.
When I'm not, it's absolute.
There's no negotiation once I hit a certain point And I scare people because I don't have any warning before that happens.
I worry that that's what's happening with the political right, which is they're flexible.
They're taking it. All right, all right, we gave it to you pretty hard when Trump was in charge.
You know, okay. All right, a little slap.
All right, a little slap. We had that coming.
We said some bad things, too.
Okay, another little slap.
You know, turn the other cheek.
Not looking for trouble.
Okay. That's three.
That's three. I'm going to shake that up.
That's four. That's four.
Still okay. Holding it down.
Don't want any trouble. That's five.
You know where this is going, right?
There is a psychological atomic bomb that's being created by the actions, the revenge-y actions of the left, That they can push a little bit.
You know, they can get away with that.
And even people on the right, I think at some level you're saying, yeah, elections have consequences.
I wish our side won.
Yeah, we gave it to them pretty hard.
It's a political game.
They're giving it back a little bit.
But there is a limit.
There is a limit.
And if they reach that limit...
They're going to get a leader of the populist movement that they didn't want.
Could be Trump again.
That would be a big problem.
Could be Trump again.
A big problem for the left, anyway.
But it'll be somebody else.
And you don't want it to be me, that's for sure.
You don't want it to be me.
All right. The funniest story in the news is the talk about the Trump Library.
Somebody wrote an article in the, or an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Saying that Trump should not have a presidential library.
He should not have a library?
Come on! Well, Joel Pollack called that out and wrote about it.
And here's just something that Joel wrote in Breitbart.
He said, the paper, who's talking about the Washington Post, he said, the paper, whose motto is Democracy Dies in Darkness, presented in Argument Thursday by an art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, Well, game on.
Not only, as Joel points out, not only should Trump have a presidential library, but it needs to be the best one.
At least in terms of popularity.
It needs to be the best one.
And the best way to do this would be to make a commercial.
Would you not pay a small entry fee to see a properly designed Trump presidential museum?
Oh, yeah, you would.
Yeah, you would. You'd pay for that if he did it right, right?
If it's just a boring museum where you walk through and see some photos and stuff, you don't care about that too much.
But if he made it funny...
Imagine, if you will, as Joel points out, one wing being the Russia collusion mental hospital wing.
Imagine going into a Trump museum and you go into one room and it's nothing but a bunch of videos playing in a loop of Adam Schiff and other Republicans making accusations of the Russia collusion hoax.
You could have one room for every hoax.
You could have the fine people hoax room, you could have the drinking bleach hoax room, but you could also have the CNN fake news room, where it's an entire exhibit Of only the fake news that just was on CNN. It'd be clips and examples and then the debunk of...
You'd have the fake news and then the debunk of it, why it's wrong.
And then kids could go learn there.
And as a school outing, you could go and you could learn how the news is all made up.
You tell me you wouldn't buy a ticket to that?
You would buy a ticket to that.
Now add in an animatronics...
Not animatronics. Let's say...
A deepfake Trump who actually has some AI built in so it can interact with you.
It's like a 3D hologram of Trump, but it's actually programmed I guess Google and some other companies now have some AI that's a whole next level.
So by the time it gets built, maybe some of that will be available, where it can really, really understand the context of conversation.
Then you build a hologram Trump who can speak back to you basically using tweets or things he's said before.
So he matches them to your content, but it's Trump's actual words.
He'd be saying what he tweeted or what he said in public at some point.
You could totally build that.
You wouldn't want to see that? You wouldn't want to go up and talk and have a conversation with deepfake, holographic Trump?
You would do that. You would do that.
So yeah, Trump needs a presidential library and it needs to be commercial.
It needs to be huge.
Hugely popular, I mean.
And it just needs to be awesome.
I would mostly look forward to how they would name the restrooms.
Because I think Adam Schiff needs to be part of that.
Or at least, you know, the new green new toilets have two buttons, depending on what your business was.
You get the little button for, you know, number one and big button for number two.
Well, I think the big button should be named Adam Schiff, and the little button should be whatever.
But then there should also be a, I'd like to see a Stormy Daniels interactive exhibit.
Sort of like a ride.
Well, you can use your imagination there.
I don't have to fill in the blanks.
All right. This is a predictable problem.
Apparently, there were a bunch of vaccinations available in Washington Heights, a part of New York City, which has a high minority population.
I think mostly Hispanic, if I'm correct.
And a bunch of white people came in and got those shots.
So they were available for people over 65, and a bunch of old white people went in there and took those shots so they weren't available for other people.
Now, wouldn't it be better that maybe we didn't divide our healthcare by race?
I don't know how this could possibly go well.
I said this before, I think on a tweet.
I'm completely on board with the fact that African American citizens should give some priority because they have worse outcomes.
I get that. But there's such a big difference between asking me personally if I would mind waiting for other people to go ahead, in which case I'll say, yeah, I will.
That's a good argument.
Some other people should go ahead of me.
I mean, we're all doing that, right?
Everybody's saying, if you're over 80, you go first.
If you're doing frontline healthcare, you should go first, etc.
So I don't have any problem with the concept.
As a citizen, of letting other people go first.
And black citizens would be at the top of my list because they have worse outcomes.
So of course, yeah, I'm completely on board with that.
But what happens when your government tells you that's the rule?
That's different, isn't it?
If you ask me personally, I'm fine with it.
But if you tell me it's the law that my race will determine my health care outcomes, at least in this way, I've got a problem with that.
I just don't feel that that's where the government should be getting involved.
But if you ask me voluntarily, you know, if even, let's say, Joe Biden, who is legally acknowledged as my president, I don't have to agree with him politically.
If he simply said, look, The only way this is going to work is for you citizens to step up and make some sacrifice.
You know who you are.
Don't get your shots first.
I'd say let us work that out.
Because there are people whose psychological condition is such that they probably need to get it sooner because they can't deal with things psychologically.
Or they don't have the ability to socially isolate as well as I can.
If I can socially isolate better than 95% of the world, and I think that's actually true in my case, shouldn't I wait a little bit longer?
Makes perfect sense to me.
You just have to ask. One of the things that's, I think, deeply missing in this country is just asking.
When was the last time somebody did that?
When was the last time your leaders said, look, I don't want this to be a law because it's a bad precedent.
I don't want to make it a law that white people go last for shots.
It's just not a good precedent.
But I will tell you, you know what the risks are, and I want you to act like good citizens.
I want you to do what's right.
Use your conscience.
Look at your own risk and reward.
Nobody can make that decision for you.
And you decide what's right.
And then act on it.
That's all we're going to ask of you as citizens.
You just decide what's right.
Now, I don't know how that would turn out.
Maybe... Maybe that wouldn't work out.
But I feel like that's where we should be on this.
Joe Biden should be asking people like me, because I'm sort of on the bubble.
I'm not old enough that I can get into the shots, but I could make an argument about comorbidity.
I've got asthma, so maybe I should be at the top of the line.
But I wouldn't mind waiting, because I can socially isolate better than most people.
So, special case, I'll wait a little bit.
All right. Just ask.
That's a direct request to Joe Biden.
Just ask. Seriously, just ask.
I think a lot of people would be willing to help out.
So I guess we have to talk about GameStop, and I guess I have a different opinion about this whole GameStop stuff.
I'm watching it with the same level of entertainment you are I also don't care if the billionaire hedge fund people lose some money.
I don't know how that works for the people who invested with them.
I feel as though they're ordinary investors who would get it in the shorts no matter what happens.
But that's true of the stock market in general.
So I watch it with amusement.
But here's what I'm not seeing that other people are seeing.
That it's marking some kind of a shift.
Or it's telling us something about the larger society or the little people versus the rich.
I don't see any of that.
I just see sort of a one-off thing that somebody discovered they could do.
It grew in popularity.
Of course, part of that is the political climate and our history of the rich people getting richer, etc.
But to me, it doesn't feel like the beginning of some kind of giant...
Shift in culture or change or anything.
It just feels like a thing that happened.
I don't see it having a large carryover.
Now, as I saw in the comments, apparently a lot of Chinese youth are getting into this as well.
I would imagine that this will result in some kind of rule change, because otherwise these large group of organized investors will destroy the market.
Because you could pretty much target any company and manipulate it in this way, and apparently it's legal.
Hedge funds are not that different.
But I guess this only works as a legal process if not too many people do it.
So that might be the long-term change, is that if the hedge funds have been doing it, and now other people can organize to do it, there's too much of it.
And if there's too much of it, then maybe it has to be regulated away if there's some way to do that.
I don't know if it's even practical.
So they might break this opportunity for the hedge funds?
Maybe. Or probably not.
So my best guess about where this all comes out is it just becomes a news story that fades away.
Maybe there's a rule change that stops it later.
But I see it more as a prank than anything else.
And, you know, there's, of course, there's this sub-story about, I guess the SEC said it was going to review how some of the brokerage firms acted when they stopped trading, which disadvantaged the little investor.
So that has to be looked into, but it looks like the legal system or the government regulation system will look into it.
So I don't know that there's as much there as other people are thinking.
It feels like This feels like the kind of story that's a story because Trump is no longer in office.
You know, something is going to fill the news cycle no matter what.
You take out Trump and there's this giant empty spot that has to be filled.
I don't know. This story isn't interesting to me, but it's capturing the imagination.
Who do you think would be the natural leader of the populist movement if, let's say, if Trump does not resurrect Who would be the natural leader?
Give me some names.
I've heard, you know, Matt Gaetz.
I've heard, well, who do you think?
Who would even qualify to take that role?
Yeah, you know, there wouldn't be a better president than me on some level, but I would never want that job, so it's never going to happen.
The only thing that would make me a good president, I probably had more bad qualities than good, so don't vote for me for president.
But the one good thing I would bring is, I wouldn't feel the need to lie to you.
Maybe if you take the job, suddenly you have all kinds of reasons to lie.
But I wouldn't really feel the need to.
Because I don't think there's anything I couldn't explain in a way that I just wouldn't need to.
But it would be the worst job in the world, so I wouldn't want it.
Alright. In the news, FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, you heard of him, on the Russia collusion hoax business.
He forged an He forged email in Carter Page's FISA process, and he forged an email.
Just think about that.
A U.S. attorney forged an email, ruined the life of this Carter Page guy for all practical purposes.
His professional career just got kneecapped, and all he received for that was a 12-month probation, 400 hours of community service, and A hundred dollar fine.
Now, I don't know what is typical for what kind of a sentence you get for that kind of a crime.
I suppose they probably say something along the lines of no prior crimes.
Maybe they argued he thought he had a good reason.
I'm not sure that should make a difference.
Maybe they just said this is similar to Similar to other crimes?
Oh, I'm seeing people say Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, for a populist leader.
Maybe so. So, but what do you think of this?
12 months of probation, no jail time, for throwing the entire country and people's specific lives into a horrible situation.
I feel as if this is not even close to appropriate.
If you forge something in the role of a government professional, especially an FBI attorney, that's got to mean something that's different from a regular crime, right?
Can you treat a government action against a citizen the same as you could just do citizen-to-citizen crimes?
I feel as if he's being sentenced as if this were just a regular white-collar crime.
I This was not a regular white-collar crime.
This almost destroyed the whole frickin' country.
And it destroyed some people's lives for sure.
This should have been five to ten years.
That feels about right to me.
Five to ten years. Wouldn't you say?
If you were just going to compare it to other crimes that you're aware of?
Five to ten years.
Completely inappropriate.
And This is the sort of thing, in the context of the Trump energy or populist gaining momentum while Trump is sort of absent from it at the moment, this is the sort of thing that's adding energy to that.
Because this seems so blatantly, I hate to say unfair, but that's how people will register it.
There's no such thing as fairness.
But people will register this as unfair.
In other news, the Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, which is interesting for a movement which many would consider a racist movement.
Now, obviously its intention is to be anti-racist, but in application it became an overt racist movement, I would say.
Now, that is not to say that the people in it Or bad people, but in terms of just how it evolved and what it turned into, I would say that it turned from an anti-racism thing into just a completely racist movement, even though the goals of it, of course, most people would agree with, of all that Black Lives Matter, of course.
So, I think the Nobel Peace Prize has become just ridiculous at this point.
I mean, yeah, it always has been ridiculous, but it went to a new level of ridiculousness.
I suppose we say that every year.
Funniest thing I'm seeing lately in the news is, do you remember Daniel Dale, who I guess works for CNN as their fact checker?
So during the Trump administration, he would come on and fact check Trump and say everything that Trump said was wrong.
And now he's in the role of defending Biden for things taken out of context about Biden.
So he claims that this was taken out of context, that when Biden was talking about executive orders, he said something along the lines of, you shouldn't do a lot of executive orders unless you are a dictator.
Now apparently that was completely taken out of context, and it was.
It was taken out of context.
How is that different from every CNN story about Trump?
Pretty much all of the news about Trump was just stuff taken out of context.
So, poor Daniel Dale.
His job just got demoted to Biden apologizer.
Apologist, I mean. Apparently China had this clever scheme to...
One of the big companies was offering to build test labs in this country, and the accusation here is that that would have allowed them to collect a bunch of DNA from Americans, and that China is in the process of collecting as much American DNA as they can.
Now, I can't think, there are probably a whole bunch of ways you can misuse DNA, and of course the scariest one is any kind of a weapon that would be DNA specific, which we do worry could be possible.
I think it might be possible, actually.
So that's a pretty dangerous thing, but here's the question that this raises.
Why is it in the year 2021, Chinese companies have something close to free reign in the United States?
I'm sure they have restrictions, but Chinese companies can do business in the United States in a way that American companies can't do business in China.
Now, you can do some kinds of business, but it's not anywhere close to equal.
Why do we let that happen?
Why in the world would we let our rival, China, do something closer to unrestricted business in our country with this kind of risk?
If they put any technology into your company, you've got a risk that they're stealing your secrets through the technology.
If they do any kind of medical thing, you've got a risk that they're going to steal your DNA. If you do any kind of other thing, there's going to be some other risk.
Every time the Chinese are buying into this country, it opens up some kind of a risk.
Why do we let them do business here?
Why is that legal?
Does anybody have any idea why that's legal?
I can't think of any reason why that should be legal if we can't do it in their country.
Now, if they opened up and said, hey, let's just make it the same.
You can do whatever we do there, you can do here.
But that's not going to happen.
If we can't do business in their country, they should not be able to do business in our country.
They should be the same. And why is that even controversial?
Who's on the other side of that argument?
Is there somebody in the United States who says, yeah, yeah, we really do want the Chinese to be putting their money into our economy?
Are they putting so much in that we'll go into a depression if they stop investing?
I don't know. I guess I need to know more about that, but I've never heard a reason why China should do business with us when we can't do the same kind of business with them.
If there is an argument for that, I'd love to hear it.
But I think it's just stupid.
From a security perspective, it just seems stupid.
Are you having the same impression I have with Joe Biden's spokesperson, Jen Psaki?
Here's my take on her.
Day one, oh, she seems pretty capable.
She seems bright and looked like a perfect choice for the job, really.
I thought it was a good choice.
Although I feel like they should have chosen a woman of color.
But, you know, she looked very capable and qualified, and she had a good background, etc.
But as time goes by, do you know some personalities, the more you see them, the less you like them?
But there are others, the more you see them, the more you like them.
You know, some people don't wear well, if you know what I mean.
There's something about Jen Psaki...
Who is, let's say, whatever is the opposite of Dana Perino.
I'll just pick her as my example.
The more you see of Dana Perino, who had been spokesperson under Bush, the more you see of her, the more you like her.
She just has one of those personalities.
The more you see, the more you like.
That's why she has a lot of time on Fox News.
The public likes seeing her.
But the more I see of Jen Psaki, and this has nothing to do with being a Democrat, has nothing to do with being a woman, so if you're looking for any isms, I don't think it has anything to do with any of that.
She just has a personality that the more you see of it, the less you like it.
Am I right? And the reason I use Dana Perino as my opposite example is because she doesn't have that.
And I would say Kayleigh McEnany, Even if you hated how she treated the press, she's also one of those personalities where the more you see of her, the more you like her.
And that's just not true of everybody.
The more you see of Adam Schiff, the less you like him.
Now, could it be that I'm being biased simply by political leanings?
And I'm thinking to myself, no, I'm just agreeing with people I want to agree with, and I'm just having some bias about people who might have a different opinion from me.
Could be. I mean, it might be that that's all that's happening here.
But I put the question out to you.
It seems like there's something about her that a little bit lasts a long time, if you know what I mean.
Is anybody getting that same vibe?
Very capable, very smart.
But a little bit of her goes a long way.
And I don't know if that's going to be a factor going forward.
But the story related to this is that when she was asked whether they're going to see Joe Biden some more for these press conferences, and she only answered cleverly, oh, are you eager to see him?
Is that what you're saying? And the reporter said, sure.
And then she didn't answer the question.
Don't you think it's going to be more and more of a story the longer Biden goes without opening himself up to unfriendly questions?
Because the whole point of these presidential press conference things is that it opens you up to unfriendly questions.
Is Biden going to avoid unfriendly questions for four years?
Can you get away with that?
Probably can. Here's something I recommend to you on CNN. I've said this before, but while I criticize CNN's news coverage quite a bit, CNN as a network does some non-news programming that often is really good.
So a lot of these CNN specials that are just about, say, a certain topic, they're quite well done.
And I recommend them quite often.
They've got one coming up that's being teased.
I think Anderson Cooper is running this, and they're talking to some Q supporters to sort of dig down and figure out what's up with the Q believers.
And there's a teaser where Anderson Cooper is talking to a completely rational-looking guy, a guy who you'd say to yourself, and first of all, he looked like he might have...
I'm guessing...
I don't want to guess somebody's ethnicity, but I'll say the person he's talking to is not a typical white bread looking guy.
Let's just say that, but I won't guess what his ethnic background is.
But that makes it interesting too, because you're imagining the Q believers as a bunch of super white people.
But here was one that Anderson was talking to, who was not in that category, and said that he believed at one point that Anderson Cooper ate babies.
He said that to Anderson Cooper, and then he apologized for thinking that Anderson Cooper ate babies.
And then he went on to say other things he believed about cubing, working with interdimensional blue bird-like creatures.
What? What?
And here's the amazing thing.
The guy he interviewed looked like a completely normal, smart person who could operate in the world and do just about anything.
A very capable, reasonable-looking person.
And that person looked right in the camera and said to Anderson Cooper, yeah, I believed you ate babies.
Sorry. Blue avians is what I guess the Q people call it.
Now, what do you make of this?
Do you say to yourself, well, that's a crazy person?
Or do you say to yourself, there are lots of crazy people?
Do you imagine that the Q people are mentally weak?
Do you think that the Q people are extra gullible?
Do you think that the Q people have some kind of strange mental defect that makes them believe these things, whereas you do not?
Here's the bad news, people.
They're completely normal.
That's the bad news.
The bad news is the people who believe the Q, the stories that Anderson Cooper was eating babies, the people who believe that, completely normal.
Or at least average or typical or routine human beings.
How do I know that?
You're not going to like this.
I'll probably lose a few followers in the next few minutes because people believe every religion.
No matter what religion you have, which I think we can agree, can we stipulate something?
That whatever religion you have is the true one.
Let's just agree with that.
Now, I don't know what your religion is.
They're probably different.
But just say that the one you have, that's the right one.
But, now that you know that you have the right religion, lucky you.
You could have gotten it wrong, but you didn't.
You got the right one. That means that there are billions of regular people who got the wrong religion.
Do you know what you would believe if you got the wrong religion?
It might involve magical-sounding stuff, a little bit, for the wrong religion.
Now, your religion is the right one.
So, lucky for you.
You're smart and wise, and you don't fall for gullible stuff.
But yours is a good one.
But you can observe that there are people who look otherwise normal, who've got all the wrong religion.
People thinking you're reincarnating.
Well, unless you believe that, in which case it would be right.
But if other people believe that you don't, that's crazy.
So you have religions in which there are people walking on order and resurrecting.
Maybe that's the real one.
But you've got other ones in which somebody's riding a flying horse to heaven.
Maybe that's the real one, and maybe the other one's not.
Some people believe in reincarnation, as I said.
Some people believe in heaven. Some people believe there's nothing there.
One thing you can say for sure is that regular, normal human beings with completely functional brains will believe anything.
It's actually just built into our nature.
We will believe anything.
But here's the only thing I want to add to that, because on some level you knew that, right?
The thing I want to add to that is that The way humans believe is almost like choosing what clothes you're going to wear.
I think that, and you can see it with this person who was talking to Anderson Cooper, the ex-Q believer, the way he spoke of it was almost like a lifestyle choice to adopt a set of beliefs, because adopting that set of beliefs had some benefits.
Maybe it made you part of a group, maybe it made you interested, maybe it It was intellectually stimulating, but whatever the reason was, it was just a choice.
And I would submit to you that people choose their filter or the set of things they believe based on what just feels good.
The same way you decide, well, I'll wear this shirt or this other shirt when you get dressed.
How do you make that decision?
Which shirt to put on? Say, well, I like this one.
This is a better shirt today.
I feel like this shirt. And that belief is more like that.
That we pick the belief that sort of gives us some benefits, makes us feel good, makes us feel connected, whatever.
And that we don't actually say, are these beliefs based on science or truth?
Can I prove it? Am I being gullible?
What about those other people?
Why do they believe something different?
It's nothing like that. It's simply a lifestyle choice.
To buy into a set of beliefs and then treat them as though they're true, even on some level knowing that you just made a choice to treat them as true, as opposed to them being objectively true.
Anyway, you should watch the Q special.
I think you're actually going to learn a lot about how completely normal people can choose to believe something crazy.
I'll give you an example of that.
When I watch the...
One of my favorite shows is about ancient astronauts and ancient aliens allegedly building the pyramids and allegedly interacting with lots of different early cultures.
Speaking of which, I'll show you a picture if I can do this on camera.
So in Tahiti, they've got all of these Let's see if I can do this.
If I can hold it just right, you can see it.
There's a little totem-looking picture all over the place in Tahiti, where it looks like an alien, like this big-eyed alien thing, and they're all over the place, as if the early Tahitians were Had had contact with an alien race, and now they're building them into all their imagery.
And I thought to myself, well, maybe they just liked creating imaginary creatures that looked identically to how we would imagine an alien looks.
It was just a coincidence. Maybe.
Maybe that's what's going on.
But when I watched those shows...
I suspend my critical thinking and I allow myself to live in a reality in which the aliens did come down and taught people how to build pyramids and those are why the cave drawings look like advanced aliens with spaceships sometimes.
Now, when I do that, when I accept that reality for the point of entertaining myself by watching this, am I really accepting it as an actual reality?
Or am I accepting it as an entertainment reality?
And I feel like it's different.
My inner sense of it is that if you put a gun to my head and said, all right, now you're going to have to bet with your real money, or we're going to kill you if you're wrong, you have to bet.
Did the aliens teach the early people how to build the pyramids?
All right, you've got to put your real money on it now.
I'd bet against it.
I'd bet against it.
And I wouldn't feel too unsafe when I did.
I'd feel confident that I could bet against the aliens having built the pyramids or helped on them.
But when I watch those shows, I like to accept it as true because it makes it more fun.
So I find that I can wear reality like a shirt.
I can just put on my alien astronaut shirt And I can just wear it for a while.
And then I can just take it off.
And if somebody says, now you have to bet your real money, I'd say, oh, real money?
Real money, okay, let me take off this shirt.
Once you learn that people can change their religion, basically, like they can change a shirt, because it's more of a lifestyle decision, it's not based on what you really think is true in many cases.
Once you realize that distinction, it starts explaining a lot of what you see.
That people are adopting a belief that just feels good.
And they can lose that belief if there's something that makes it stop feeling good.
And the Q stuff had this business in the capital, which was an event that made it stop feeling good.
And the moment it stopped feeling good, there were some people, such as this guy talking to Anderson Cooper, who said, okay, it doesn't feel good anymore.
Now I'll change my belief.
Alright, who killed more people, the CCP or Q? Well, that's easy.
All right, that's about all I've got now.
I was just looking at your comments.
People love the ancient alien stuff.
It just captures your imagination.
Alright. Was it a good honeymoon?
Yes, it was. Yes, it was.
I'd show you some pictures, but you'd feel bad.
Alright, I'm going to put together some of my best, I think.
I've had some time to plan.
Micro lessons on how to program your brain.
Now, it's my favorite topic, how to reprogram your brain, but I've got another take on it that I think will be useful.
That will be on the Locals platform only for subscribers and some other micro lessons that will be on there this week.
Somebody says, if aliens were real, we'd have seen photos by now.
Yeah, given that all we have is we have cameras in every pocket in the civilized world, yeah, I think we would have a picture of an alien by now.
I think so. Yeah, Locals is a platform in which subscribers can subscribe to my content that you don't see otherwise.
So I have the stuff that you do see, but I add I add useful content that you wouldn't see otherwise.
I'd like to know how to sleep.
I think I did.
Did I not do a micro lesson on that already?
If not, I will.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers. Sorry I was not streaming on YouTube while I was out of the country.
The button disappeared.
So there are some things you just can't do outside the country, and for some reason I didn't have that option.
