Episode 1272 Scott Adams: The News is Ridiculous so Let's See What Trouble I Can Cause
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
A Trump Show suggestion
Tony Robbins pandemic comments
AOC wasn't close to the capitol assault?
NO efforts to achieve election transparency next time?
Marc Elias says NY vote count discrepancy
Transgender athletes in women sports
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Come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Yeah. That was 100% satisfying.
100%. 100%.
Well, so you may have noticed that there's no news anymore.
Do you remember when I used to get on here and talk about the news?
And then the news stopped.
There just wasn't any more news.
Because the news has always been fake.
Meaning that the news organizations, they're the ones who decide what is news.
And I guess they've decided that we're not going to have any for a while.
We'll just not have any news.
Now, of course, there are still stories, but they don't feel important or news-like.
And it feels like the entire Biden administration is becoming sort of opaque.
I know they're doing stuff.
But I don't know what.
And when I find out what they're doing, I don't know what context it fits into.
Can't tell if it's good or bad.
It's just all sort of very non-Trump boring.
But we'll make it interesting.
Here's how. Number one, you have to tie every story to Trump.
Otherwise, what's the point of even talking?
Because Trump brings the interesting part...
And apparently nothing else does.
Sure, AOC can do her little thing, but she's just sort of female Trump-lite, if you think about it.
So Trump-lite is no substitute for the real Trump, and so I'm going to work him into a story, forcing it in there.
I'm going to force it in there.
All right, you ready? This doesn't even have to be about Trump, but I'm going to make it about him, damn it, to make this story a little more interesting.
It goes like this. You may have noticed that we no longer have in this country anything like a news industry.
It's become fake news.
It's become, you know, biased left and right.
And that has opened up a gigantic lane right down the middle that's completely available.
What is that lane?
The lane is, and I've talked about this should have been done during the Trump administration, there is no show that lets people who know what they're talking about on a given topic debate each other with the right format so that you as a viewer could learn something.
That doesn't exist.
Instead we have the one-minute pundit yakking at each other, they say they're talking points and you don't learn anything.
But what if you had an actual half-hour show?
Let's just say it was hosted by ex-President Trump.
Would you watch it?
I don't even have to tell you what the show is, right?
As soon as I tell you Trump is the host of the show, well, you're going to turn it on, right?
You're going to at least sample it, because he's the host of the show.
You don't need to know what the show's about.
You're already going to watch it.
But here's what the show could be about.
A half-hour hosted conversation between two sides who maybe have some experts with them so they can refer to get the right information if they need it.
And they'll just have a conversation in which the ex-president of the United States calls each side on bullshit.
And that's it. That's the show.
So it's two experts arguing different sides, and then when one expert says something ridiculous, ex-President Trump says, ah, that's ridiculous.
Try again. And it doesn't matter which side was being ridiculous, he could call out his own side for not making a good argument if he thinks there is a good argument.
He could call out the other side for not supporting their case.
But as long as he crushed both sides, Would you watch it?
Oh, you'd watch it.
Yeah, you'd watch the hell out of that if he was mean to both sides.
That would be the hard part, right?
Now, who else could do that?
Can you think of anybody who would draw a big audience for political stuff, right?
Political stuff is not naturally interesting.
Trump could. Trump could get the entire country watching a political show, In which just two people argued the two sides and he slammed both of them for being full of shit.
You would watch that.
Now what have we learned about the power of the media versus the power of government?
Who has more power, your politicians or your news sources?
See where I'm going with this?
Trump could have more power over the direction of the United States with a TV show.
Because there would be no competition.
Nobody else would be trying to give you both sides of any issue.
That doesn't exist anywhere in our news universe, right?
And the problem, the reason it doesn't exist is who in the world could make that interesting?
How in the world can you make a debate on some policy interesting?
Trump could. Trump could do it easily.
He just has to show up and be Trump.
And it would be the most interesting thing you ever watched in your life.
I saw somebody mention Dershowitz.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to also maybe include in the direction of the show, let's say, a jury.
So let's say that you've got a host that's Trump, and he's just being mean to both sides.
So he's being basically Simon Cowell on American Idol, but giving both sides a good shot of it.
Then the jury does their thing, and the jury decides who made the best argument.
So you might put people like Ellen Dershowitz would be a perfect example.
People who have a history of being able to side with wherever the law and the argument go, even if they happen to be associated with one side, if they have a history of being able to cross boundaries easily, as Dershowitz does, perfect juror.
Who else would be a good juror?
Me. I'd be a great juror.
I should be on that show, in the jury.
For not every show, maybe a few episodes or something.
But I also have a history of being on whichever side the data indicates, at least in my opinion, indicates I should be.
So I don't have a fealty to the left or the right, so I could be a good juror.
Not the best in the world or anything, but you'd look for people like me to fill that role.
Now, I think that that would have more impact on the public opinion of policies than anything that's happening now.
It would be a gigantic ratings bonanza.
It would be impossible to ignore.
It would completely control the news headlines every time it happened.
And I think Trump would effectively control the country just by being the person who let the arguments be heard for the first time.
It would be the only place you ever heard the arguments.
If you're a normal citizen, it's the only time you would hear them.
So there it is.
It's a gigantic open opportunity for the president to control the direction of the country without breaking any laws, without doing anything but entertaining us and educating us.
Why not? Why not?
You know, I've said up to this point that the best ex-president ever was Jimmy Carter.
Not so great in the presidenting department, but as an ex-president, Jimmy frickin' Carter, right?
As an ex-president, he's just going off and building houses for homeless people and stuff.
Let's have more of that.
But I think also President Trump...
Could easily be the most successful ex-president.
I mean easily. It's just available for him.
All right, let's talk about China again.
So there's a story in Fox News asking the same questions I was asking, which is, why don't we quite understand why China was doing, allegedly, so much better with coronavirus?
Now, I think that no matter how much they're lying, and you have to assume that they're lying a lot, even if they're lying about how much they're doing well with coronavirus, we would notice.
I mean, you couldn't miss it if they were doing poorly.
So there's something happening that China is doing that's working out.
And I'm wondering if it comes down to this one thing.
Where they, if you're in a hot spot, they'll make you stay in your home for two weeks.
And I thought to myself, why wouldn't that stop the entire epidemic?
Suppose you just said, hey people, this is what we're going to do.
I want all of you to stock up with food for two weeks.
And for two weeks, we're going to ask everybody to literally stay home.
Don't get in your car.
Don't add gas.
Don't buy food because you've already stocked up.
Or if you do buy food, only use a delivery service.
Let's say the delivery services stay in business.
But everyone else just stays home for two weeks.
Now, you couldn't do it in this country, right?
So in the comments, I'm seeing lots of resistance.
So there's no legal way you can do it.
But let me ask you this.
If you couldn't do it, wouldn't it solve the problem?
Wouldn't you literally be done in two weeks?
I guess the only way you'd have exposure is if somebody in your house...
Gave it to somebody else, and then a week later they gave it to someone else, and then at the end of it, that house would still be infected, I guess, at the end of two weeks.
So I guess that could happen.
But suppose you said everybody lock up for two weeks, or how about this?
You have to lock up for two weeks, or until every member of the house has tested negative, I don't know, once or twice.
Because then you could get out in 24 hours if you got tested, right?
What about that? You have two choices.
Have a positive test that says you're negative, or stay in your house two weeks.
Somebody says this has nothing to do with the virus, for frick's sake.
What do you mean it has nothing to do with the virus?
So there are still people who believe that the epidemic is a scamdemic, And that the reason for the restrictions have nothing to do with the virus, but rather it's a plan by the globalists to control us.
That's not happening.
That might be among the dumbest of the conspiracy theories.
That the reason for the restrictions are all part of a global control, trying to train us to do anything that they want.
There is no meeting where that discussion is happening.
There might be an outcome. It might be one of the outcomes is that the public becomes better, I don't know, trained or something.
But there's no meeting in which somebody is saying, I think if we can get them to wear masks, our master plan will come together.
That's not happening anywhere.
Now, can I prove it?
I can't prove a negative.
I can't prove something isn't happening.
But let's just say, it's so ridiculous.
That if you think that that's happening, you really need to check all your other opinions, because they're probably wrong as well.
I don't know what it is about the people on the right who want to believe the globalist conspiracy stuff.
All you need to know is that people are tribal.
People are tribal. There's nobody in China who's coordinating with the people in Italy for their globalist plan.
People in China are optimizing China.
People in other countries are optimizing their own country.
There's no global elite that's somehow all of these countries, leaders or something, working together.
That's not happening.
You should debate someone on this, Scott.
I don't know how to say this.
I You don't need to debate people on, let's say, the question of whether the government are really secret lizard people from another planet.
I don't need to debate that.
Because there's no fucking way that's true.
Do you know what else is something I don't need to debate?
Don't need to look into it.
Don't need to research it.
That there's a globalist plan to use the pandemic to train the population to do this or that.
It's just not a thing.
Couldn't be a thing.
Can never be a thing. Will never be a thing.
It's stupid. It's just stupid.
It is. Sorry.
We'll see how many users I lose for this.
I would like to shed as many users as possible who would believe that there's some kind of a global conspiracy that this pandemic is part of it.
If you believe that, this is really the wrong kind of content for you.
Because I don't do crazy shit.
If you want crazy shit, I'm sure you know where to find it.
But that's just crazy shit.
And you need to grow out of that one.
Alright. I don't mean to be condescending, but there are some things that are just so dumb, you can't deal with them on a regular basis.
There just isn't a second side to it.
I'm really big on showing both sides of arguments.
You know, I'm the one who will tell you AOC isn't all bad.
She's got good qualities.
Same with Trump. I'm going to try to show you both sides.
But there's no both sides to the global pandemic is fake.
That's just crazy shit.
That's just absolute crazy bullshit.
It is just a real pandemic.
There is a real disease.
It's really killing people.
Tony Robbins has bought into the, unfortunately, the conspiracy side of things, which is probably a big problem because Tony Robbins is unusually influential.
He's persuasive.
And he's tremendous at what he does.
You know, his main core job of helping you think better and have higher performance and better success in life, I think that's all real.
I think Tony Robbins is the real deal in terms of helping people improve their life.
So the main thing he does, that's good stuff.
And I would not disparage that.
But when he gets into maybe different fields, I feel that he's not as strong.
And there's a video of him, I just saw today, Tony Robbins saying that his claim is that the death rate for the world It is largely the same as it has been in prior years, meaning that the pandemic is a fake pandemic.
If you believe that there's no change in the death rate, how could there be a pandemic?
What's wrong with that thinking?
Can anybody tell me?
What is wrong with Tony Robbins' analysis?
Let's say he was right.
Now, the first thing is, I think his data is wrong.
I don't think his data is right.
But even if his data were right, why is the thinking wrong?
So Tony Robbins says, if the death rate in 2020 was about the same as, it's pretty close, about the same as 2019 and 2018, how could you say that there's a pandemic in 2020, which allegedly is killing lots of people?
And then Tony Robbins points out that, coincidentally...
Other causes of death went down the same amount as the coronavirus deaths allegedly went up.
What's wrong with this thinking?
Number one, it appears that we're not very good at counting who died of what.
So that's the first thing.
We're probably just not good at it.
We probably don't know.
Somebody says I have a blind spot.
You could fill in the blind spot.
You could tell me what it is I'm missing.
You could just say it. You don't have to say, I have a blind spot.
You could say, Scott, have you considered blah, blah?
And then I would read it, and I would agree with it or not.
But at least you would be useful.
It's not useful to say, I have a blind spot.
Just tell me what it is. We'll talk about it.
So, what would you expect if the coronavirus was a scam?
What would you expect things to look like?
And that it's not really killing anybody beyond normal.
What would that look like?
Would it look like the death toll is about the same as last year?
It would. So Tony Robbins is correct that if it were a fake pandemic, one outcome you might expect...
Is that there's no difference in the death rate.
So, so far he's on point, right?
Good point. If it's a pandemic, where are the extra dead people?
Good point. Except, we didn't have a pandemic that we did nothing about.
What we had was a pandemic which we did a lot about.
For example, we drove less.
Do you think there were fewer automobile deaths because we drove far less?
Almost has to be.
How about other health-related problems?
Do you think people who did not have to commute and go to their stressful Business situation, maybe they worked at home.
Could it be less stressful?
Could people have maybe taken care of their health a little bit better because they were more focused on health because of the pandemic?
Maybe. So the point is, what I would expect if the pandemic were real is there's a really good chance that the total death rate wouldn't change much.
In fact, I predicted that at the beginning of the pandemic.
Does anybody remember me saying that it is very likely we could end up with a lower death rate by locking down?
You know, there's lots of bad reasons to not lock down.
But in terms of the death rate, it would keep people from being active, and being active is in part what kills you, right?
So... First of all, the data is probably inaccurate that the death rate is the same from year to year.
Probably inaccurate. But secondly, no matter whether it's accurate or not, you can't tell from it that the pandemic was real or not real.
All you know is that the death rate stayed the same.
There are two reasons that could happen.
One, the pandemic was fake.
Two, locking down saves a number of lives and it just balances out.
Just like you'd expect.
Or at least as I predicted.
So I would worry about Tony Robbins weighing into this because I think that he's a little too influential just because he's good at this.
He's good at communicating.
So I would worry about that.
All right. I still don't have a confirmation that this story is true, that Adam Schiff is angling to be the new Attorney General in California, and Newsom apparently could appoint him.
Now, we've heard that Schiff is trying to get that position.
We don't know if it's confirmed.
This is my line in the sand.
I'm not interested in local California politics.
I live here, but I just don't get interested in it.
But if this happens, if Adam Schiff actually gets appointed by Newsom to be the Attorney General, I have to get involved.
That would be the point at which I would put a considerable amount of my time and influence in getting Newsom out of office and getting the recall to work.
Now, there's a recall going on.
They're getting close to the number of signatures they need for the recall.
But we still don't know How do you sign that recall?
So I've read a few stories that say there is a recall effort and they're collecting signatures.
So I live in California, and so I said to myself, you know, I'd like to know where to sign that.
Where do I go to be part of this?
And so I look at the stories, and there's no link.
A link that would tell me either how to sign up, is there a way to do it digitally?
Do I have to sign in person?
If there's a place I can go, I'll drive across town.
What's the closest place I could go to physically sign something?
Or can I mail something in?
Can I sign on my own piece of paper if there's a form or something and just mail it in and they just add it to the stack?
How do I do it?
Somebody says online, but where's the link?
So here's my request.
And again, if Adam Schiff does not become the Attorney General, I'm not going to be as interested.
There are lots of things I'd like to see better in California, but this is my bottom line.
If you cross this Adam Schiff line, you have to lose your job.
Governor Newsom, if you appoint Adam Schiff, you have to lose your job for that.
That's a firing offense.
That would be a deep, deep insult To anybody living in this state who has been watching any of the Adam Schiff show for the last several years.
A deep insult. And so I would ask if somebody could get me a link or directions, send it to me on Twitter, on how one would go about signing this recall.
I will make sure that I pump the shit out of it if Adam Schiff becomes Attorney General.
If he doesn't, I'll be less interested, but just let me know, okay?
I'm seeing a link there, recallgavin2020.com.
I'll check that out, recallgavin2020.com, it sounds like.
So let's look into that.
AOC is getting some heat.
So she did an impassioned and well-done live stream in which she talked about her, I guess, sexual abuse...
Trauma when she was younger.
We don't have details of that.
But she tied that into the story quite artfully.
About how afraid she was during the Capitol assault.
But, as Jack Posobiec pointed out on Twitter, the place that she was during the assault was not really that close to where the rioters had entered the dome of the Capitol building.
So her building looked like from an aerial photo about two blocks away.
And it was an area in which there wasn't much activity.
There was a law enforcement person who herded them into a safer place, but that's sort of all it was.
So did she have a right to be as scared as she presented?
Well, you can't...
It's not up to us to tell someone else how scared they should be.
You could certainly...
You could certainly make the case that she had legitimate danger.
It just wasn't as imminent as maybe she projected.
But there was danger.
So I'd say close enough.
Remember, I'm judging AOC by the Trump standard, which is if she does a good job of getting attention and focusing attention where she wants your attention to be, that's a good job.
So she's Trump-lite, I think that's what I'll call her, Trump-lite.
And she did a good job of focusing attention.
I don't think anybody's going to care that she was two blocks away and it wasn't as imminent exactly as maybe she presented it.
Here's a story I've seen so far only in Breitbart.
You know, this is one of those reasons that you need to sample news from the left and the right.
By the way, I think you'll see it soon.
You know Ground News?
I tweet them quite often.
Ground News is a site and app that lets you see each story and which news entities are covering it.
So you can see, for example, if the left ignores a story or the right ignores a story.
And it's becoming a big problem that the left or the right will just completely ignore a story That the other finds important.
So here's one that I've only seen in Breitbart.
I don't know if it exists anywhere else.
But Mark Elias, and Joel Pollack reported on this, Mark Elias, the election lawyer who represented Democrat challenges to state rules.
Now, if you haven't heard this name before, Mark Elias, he's probably, maybe, the most important person In the country in terms of how the election turned out.
Did you know that? Did you know there was this one guy, one lawyer, who probably had more to do with the election outcome than any other factor or any other person?
I guess he was really successful in getting states to modify their state rules for the 2020 election.
And those rules favored Democrats.
And he was very successful in getting some of those through.
So that's his history.
And now it turns out he's also representing a congressional person who...
We did not get quite enough votes, and he's arguing that there's some discrepancy with the voting process.
I guess the votes counted by hand did not match the votes counted by the machines, and he's arguing that the voting machines operated improperly.
So the guy most associated with the way 2020 was run He's now complaining that in this case in New York, that voting machines were irregular.
What is it that we can say about that story?
Well, I'll add to this, that you notice that there's no big news story about a bipartisan effort, or even a partisan effort, to fix election transparency for next time.
Is there? Have you seen any reporting on that?
As far as I know, your government, both Republicans and Democrats, have decided to reproduce the problem of 2020, which is the election was not sufficiently transparent for everybody to feel comfortable about it.
And they're going to reproduce that quite consciously.
Won't be an accident, because everybody knows what's happening.
They know exactly what will happen.
And your government has decided, apparently, collectively, to reproduce the problem that almost drove the country into a civil war.
Now, I don't think it was almost a civil war, but it seemed pretty bad.
What do you make of that?
There's not even an attempt.
Not even waving their hands.
Nobody's saying, oh, it's fine the way it is.
They're just going to simply fucking ignore it.
That's it. Your government is just going to fucking ignore the will of the people who say, we just want to know we got a real election.
We just want to know there's some transparency.
Government won't do it.
They won't even try.
Won't even try.
Do you know why? Why is it that your government won't try to give you elections that have clear transparency?
Well, probably a variety of reasons.
It's hard, it's not rewarding, blah blah blah.
But here's the biggest problem.
If the government says we have to fix transparency for next time, what have they told you about the last time?
Yeah, that's right.
They can't fix it until they admit it was broken.
And they can't admit it was broken.
Because even saying it was lacking transparency, which would be very different from saying there was any fraud, lacking transparency is not the same as saying there was fraud.
It's just saying that you could see it if it existed or not.
But they can't go that far either, because even saying that there was not sufficient transparency would tell you that the last election was not that credible.
And they just spent the last several months telling you, oh, it's credible.
Anybody who doesn't think this election is credible is a conspiracy theory, tinfoil hat, traitor.
Traitor to the country. So the government has created a situation, along with the fake news, Where we have the biggest problem in the country, we can't even talk about it.
Can't even talk about it.
Because talking about it makes this last election look less credible.
Could you even imagine a less capable government than one who created a situation where they can't even talk about, much less fix, they can't even talk about fixing the problem.
The biggest problem in the country.
The biggest problem.
Because if you don't get the election part right, eventually it's all going to fall apart.
That's the baseline.
You've got to get the voting credibility right, or you don't have anything in the long run.
So there's that.
Let me defend John Kerry and his private jet.
As you know, John Kerry is some kind of a climate czar now.
He's been fighting for climate change remediation for a long time.
And I guess he went to collect some kind of an award for his work.
Award for his work, but he went there in a private jet.
So people are saying, why the hell is somebody calling me at this time of day?
Seriously, I just have to look to see who would call me at this time of day.
Unknown. So he's got a private jet.
And people are saying, how could you care about the environment when you've got this private jet?
And then the reporting on it is that his family's private jet Spent over 20 hours in the air over the past year, which creates a lot of metric tons of carbon emissions.
20 hours?
That's the family private jet only had 20 hours in the whole last year.
That's, what, two flights across the country?
That's it? 20 hours?
That's really not very much.
Now, I would like to say that...
Our leaders who are doing important work, be they CEOs or presidents or cabinet members or senators, I think they should fly private.
I think John Kerry should fly private.
And do I care that the topic he's worrying about is climate change?
No. It's a perfectly...
Acceptable investment to spend a little bit on CO2. Let's say you think CO2 is a problem.
It is perfectly acceptable to spend a little CO2 on our leaders who are doing the most work on reducing it overall.
I don't see any problem with that.
I don't have a problem that the President of the United States has a good salary.
I don't have a problem that the President of the United States gets Secret Service protection and you don't.
I don't have a problem that the president gets to live in a really nice house, and you don't.
I don't have a problem that the president has a nice, presumably, a pension or a retirement fund with other budget to get stuff done.
No problem with that at all.
I think our leaders should be doing what is most efficient, even if that's not the most role-modely thing they can do.
If you had a choice, Let's say you believe that climate change is real and it's a problem.
Just accept that as the hypothetical for now, even if you don't believe that.
If you believe that climate change is a real problem, then you want your leaders who are doing the most about it to be as effective as possible, efficient, don't waste any time.
Yeah, flying private makes perfect sense.
So the hypocrisy claim against Kerry, that he's flying a private jet while complaining about using too much fuel, it's a true statement.
It's just bullshit.
It's just bullshit. You do want your CEOs and your leaders to travel more efficiently than you do.
That's exactly what you'd want.
So imagining that you don't want that is just, it's really not adult.
So it's fun to talk about, but it's a small point.
Rand Paul seems to be a leading voice these days about transgender sports.
And his main complaint, if I can summarize it accurately, is that if transgender sports Folks are allowed in sports to play, at least if transgenders are allowed to play in women's sports, that it would be unfair to women.
Now, I've made this argument before, but I'm going to make it again and see if I can do it better.
Why do we have an obligation to make sure that there are some women who can also win athletic scholarships or excel in sports?
Now, I have no objection to doing it, but I'm asking you, why is that important?
Why would we as a society need to carve out a little area where women in particular can win sporting things?
Do you know who also can't win any sporting awards?
I'm going to give you an example of a person who Who, like the women would be if transgender athletes were dominating their sports, let's say if that happened, who else would be in the same boat as all of those women who could now not really have an expectation of excelling at the top of their sport?
Who else would be in that same boat?
Me. Me.
Why is it fair that I can't win any awards for sports?
Why is that fair? Now you say to me, but Scott, you're a senior citizen practically, depending on your point of view.
You're a senior citizen and you're not very large and you're not very athletic and there's an obvious reason that you don't win any sports.
To which I say, oh, are you saying that my inability to excel at sports is what's keeping me from winning?
How is that fair?
How is it fair that people who are my age and my size and my level of talent can't win awards and get scholarships to college?
Why is that fair?
Why am I being shut out from sports?
Now, what you should be saying is, uh, that's kind of ridiculous.
You're not being shut out from sports.
You're just not good at sports.
To which I say...
That would be the same situation if transgenders are playing on traditional women's teams.
There will be some number of women who, under that scenario, would have ordinarily maybe been winning something, but now they're no longer the good ones.
And so they don't win stuff.
Is that unfair?
Because to me, if you count out the number of people who won, it's the same number.
You say you have the same number of people winning and the same number of people losing as before.
Why is it fair that I can't be a winner, but it's unfair if the woman who got displaced by the transgender athlete in this scenario, why is that not fair?
I mean, why is one unfair and the other one isn't?
To me, sports are an unfair thing.
I see people yelling Title IX. I know what the law is, but why does the law need to be that?
Why do we have a weird law that carves out this little area and says, okay, this protected group gets to have a sports winner.
Why can't we have a Title IX for people under six feet tall who are male?
If you're male and you're under six feet tall, You're kind of closed out from a lot of sports.
We should have a separate category for short men who can't win anything unless they get some help.
We should have our own category so we can win some awards.
The people who are saying, you are so wrong, you're wrong.
It's men, it's women.
I would argue that your argument is based on reflex and history and just what you're used to.
It's not based in any way on anything logical or fair or sensical or mathematical or logical or strategic.
There is no basis for your argument except that you're used to a certain situation and once you get used to it, it's hard to change.
Now, would it be unfair to, let's say, biologically, whatever is the non-offensive term?
You know, I say this whenever I talk about transgender stuff.
If I use a term that's offensive, it's not intentional.
So just know it's not intentional, right?
So if I accidentally use some offensive term.
Somebody says, how about a white basketball league?
Exactly. Exactly.
How about a Jewish basketball league?
How many Jewish NBA superstars are there?
Might be a few. I don't know.
I don't really follow sports.
But don't you think there are lots of other categories that need to get carved out?
What about blind athletes?
Why can't you win a first place in a sport if you're blind?
Seems like they should have their own category, right?
So here's my point.
I don't think it was ever a mistake to have a special sports category for women and for girls.
I think that made sense.
If you could have sports for boys, you damn well ought to have sports for girls.
Duh. I think that's just basic.
But the thinking was that if you had sports for boys and you had sports for girls, you've covered all the bases.
That was the old thinking.
And then the transgender situation caused that simple model to be a little bit questioned.
It's a simple adjustment.
All we were trying to do with women's sports and men's sports is make sure everybody had sports.
Why would the transgenders not get to have a sport?
Now you're probably saying to me, Scott, why don't the transgender athletes who were born biologically male, why are they not forced to play on the male teams?
To which I say, I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that. That would make perfect sense.
Indeed, there are examples of female athletes who are so skilled that it makes more sense for them to play on a man's team.
I'm okay with that, too.
I think that I'd rather see people who are roughly the same level of skill play on the same teams.
So if that means that a transgender athlete who would prefer to play on the women's team...
is caused by the school administrators to play on the men's team as a different gender.
I don't see what's wrong with that.
Why can't the school say that we're going to make some adjustments based on talent level and maybe physical size, and that it has nothing to do with being men or women?
So the transgender athlete has every right to play a sport just like everybody else, but maybe it's the coach who decides which team they're on.
How's that wrong? Would you have a problem with that?
Let me say just this one change.
Just this one change.
That the coach gets to decide which team you play on.
The traditional women's team or the traditional men's team.
And that's it. But otherwise, transgender can be an athlete just like everybody else.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
Just the coach gets to decide.
And it's based on safety alone.
It has nothing to do with gender.
They just say, oh, this female athlete is so good, she might even hurt other women playing on the team, so we'll put her on the women's team.
It doesn't matter if this athlete is transgender or not.
That's irrelevant. It's just based on safety and quality.
So I would agree that we should try to get everybody into sports or nobody, but it should be the same.
I just think there's an easy way to do it.
All right. Ilhan Omar has said this about the Republican Party.
The Republicans truly have lost their way.
They've destroyed their base.
And she says now the base of the Republican Party is conspiracy theorists.
It's cowards. It's opportunists.
It's grifters. And sadly, they've become the Looney Tunes.
These are people we can't take serious.
She means seriously. They're not here to do the people's business.
They're not to just be obstructionists and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I say to myself, when leaders treat the entire opposite party like they're all the same person and it's the worst of those people, that's not a leader you can support.
And I would say that no matter if it were a Republican saying this about Democrats.
I mean, is there any Republican who would say...
That the base of the Democrat Party are cowards and grifters and whatever?
Do you feel that?
Do you feel like the base, like the main Democrats are just crazy?
I don't feel that.
And when you hear a leader saying stuff like that, that should be disqualifying.
Just any statement that takes any large group of people and says they're all the same and they're bad.
That's what she's basically saying.
That the base of the Republicans are kind of the same, all these crazy, loony-tuned people, and it's bad.
That should be automatically disqualifying for public office.
If you say that about any group, it wouldn't matter if it were Republicans or anybody else.
If they're Americans, you just shouldn't be able to talk like that and keep your job.
Anyway, I'm not talking about wokeness or political correctness.
I'm saying that you can't be a leader if you're accusing your own people that you're leading of being terrible people.
That's kind of basic.
Have you noticed that China treats Islam and COVID the same way?
With quarantines?
I've said this before, but it's sort of remarkable...
In terms of the difference of how China thinks of things like religion and the rest of the world does.
And I'm not even going to say they're wrong or right.
It's just an interesting contrast.
So China treats a mental virus, if you will, just like a medical problem.
And in their opinion, the Uyghurs, being Islamic, have essentially a mental disease.
That's the way the Chinese are treating it.
And they're treating it by quarantine and re-education.
It's basically the way you treat a virus.
And here's the weird thing.
Suppose China went the other way.
It's not going to happen.
Suppose they went the other way and said, you know, freedom or religion...
Well, I would imagine that the Islamic population within China would expand over time.
They might have more children if they followed their religious, let's say, cultural patterns.
And eventually, Islamic conflict of their belief system with the Chinese government's belief system, quite incompatible.
And it would be a growing and growing problem, sort of like a tumor.
Growing within China.
Now, I say that regardless of who the group is.
Now, we're talking about the Uyghurs and we're talking about Islam, but it would be the same if it were a Christian group that were doing a lot of missionary stuff and trying to grow their numbers.
A Christian group growing within China would also be incompatible with the Chinese system.
So eventually that small problem would become bigger.
So China deals with it.
By trying to eradicate the disease.
The disease of religion, as they would see it.
And ask yourself this.
Are they wrong?
Are they wrong? And let me say it this way.
We in this, certainly in the United States and most of you watching this, would put freedom of thought and freedom of religion, freedom of speech as our highest principles.
So of course it's wrong by our standards.
It's as wrong as you could get.
And we seem to have figured out how to make a country work with all this, you know, different views of the world.
But in China, given the size of their country and how hard it would be to control a country of that size, I feel like it's a different risk level.
That their risk of letting another religion become big enough to conflict with the government's control, that may be a risk that risks, I don't know, millions of deaths, if it became a big civil war at some point in the future.
It could actually threaten the entire existence of China as a good functioning body.
So I think China is almost treating it in a war-like stance, that you can't allow that level of freedom because it weakens the country.
In the long term, it would weaken the country.
And again, I'm not saying it weakens the country because it's Islamic.
I'm not saying it weakens the country because it could be Christian or it could be Judaism or any other religion.
I'm saying that anything that's incompatible with the Chinese government way of doing things eventually is going to be a problem.
And it's a big country, so it could be a big problem.
So is China wrong to eliminate that risk?
By our standards, 100% wrong.
If you said what will save the most lives, I don't know.
That is a little less clear.
They might be doing what will save the most Chinese lives, at least, but at the great risk of essentially perpetrating a Holocaust.
Not essentially. It's basically a Holocaust against the Uyghurs.
And we, the rest of us, we just fucking watch it.
Just like it's not happening.
We watch it, we mention it, we tweet about it, but we don't care.
Let's be honest.
The rest of the world is perfectly willing to let another Holocaust happen right in front of us.
So if you thought that the original Holocaust in Nazi Germany, if you thought that that really was a never-again situation, maybe never again for the Jewish population.
Maybe they have enough power now that they could make that never happen again.
But it is happening.
So it's happening right now.
Will China kill more people with fentanyl or will they do it with propaganda or economic warfare or with COVID? I asked that question on Twitter.
And interestingly, COVID was the lowest response.
So obviously a very unscientific poll.
But the public answering it thought that China will kill more people with their other ways of killing people as opposed to the pandemic.
All right. That is what I wanted to say for today.
Just to make you extra unhappy with me, I'm putting together a list of things that, for reasons I don't quite understand, conservatives don't get about the pandemic.
So when I'm done with my list, I will present it for maximum...
Anger, I suppose.
Provocation. And I think I'm going to do it in two passes.
I'm going to do one pass, which I put out there, just what I think conservatives are not understanding about a pandemic.
And by the way, I'm sure I could do it for the left as well.
It's just that there's a special set of things that conservatives seem to believe that is limited to conservatives, it seems like.
I want to put that together so you can get a sense of what things your own side is not telling you.
Because if you don't sample the news on both sides, it would be easy to imagine that some of these things conservatives believe are true.
Because you would never hear the counterpoint.
So I will be the counterpoint.
And I will put that out there, and then I'm going to let you respond to it.
Because I don't think I'm necessarily going to get everything right, and there might be some context I should add, etc.
So I'll do that. I'll put it out once.
It'll make everybody mad.
Everybody is a conservative.
You all get mad. Then you'll tell me what I got wrong, and then I'll revise it and see how close I can get to something useful.
Now, the reason I'm doing this is that a lot of people, especially privately on Twitter, have asked me questions or made points that I shake my head and say...
How can you be even asking that question in 2021?
There are things that I thought had been answered months and months ago to everyone's general understanding, and yet the information is not getting where it needs to get.
So I'm going to try to fix that.
Somebody says, please, no lists.
Well, sometimes you need a list.
Somebody says, I know about COVID. I think we all do.
You're going to be surprised.
You're going to be really surprised.
There are some basic, basic things that the vast majority of conservatives, as far as I can tell, are not aware of and have never heard even once.
Things you've never heard even once that are common knowledge about the pandemic.
Well, the argument will be a series of points.
And if you would like to use my own technique against me, then you should do this.
Pick out my strongest point when I make them and debunk it.
Because if you can debunk my strongest point, that could tell me that my other points are not so strong.
Because you're in California doesn't mean you know everything about COVID. Well, remember, I just told you That I don't know everything about COVID. Did you hear that part?
I was pretty clear about that.
Because I told you I'm going to present it once, I'm going to get your feedback, and then I'm going to correct whatever I got wrong.
So that is me telling you in the clearest possible way that I don't believe I have the great final knowledge about COVID. It is just very clear to me that I know way more than the average consumer.
Way more. Not even close.
We'll test that. What if I'm wrong?
What if I'm the one who is wrong?
And then when you correct me, I say, oh man, I got a lot wrong.
Could happen, which would be interesting.
All right. Live virus found with electron microscope examination of allele walls, biopsies, and long haulers.
Yeah, the long haulers is something that people don't understand.
They don't understand the virus travels on water particles.
They don't understand friction.
They don't understand a lot of stuff.
Lincoln Project and Weaver.
Well, watching the Lincoln Project self-immolate because one of their founders...
Had some alleged sexual improprieties or messages with some young males.
And I would say the same thing for the Lincoln Project that I would say for everybody else.
Your worst members do not represent your group.
Your worst members do not represent the group.
It's true for the Lincoln Project.
It's true for Republicans.
It's true for Democrats. But...
Because the Lincoln Project was all about making Republicans look like the worst of the Republicans, it is fair in their case.
In this special case, where their primary brand was to do the very thing that is being pushed back on them, I think is fair in this case.
But in general, it's not a reasonable thing to do.
And by the way, they all look like bad versions of Rick Wilson.
If you're gonna clone yourself, or if you're gonna clone anything, don't start with Rick Wilson.
That's just my ethical advice for anybody who's gonna clone.
Find someone else to clone.
Don't clone Rick Wilson.
You know who else you should not clone?
I'll give you some ideas. Adam Schiff.
If you're making a list of who to clone first, don't put Adam Schiff at the top of the list.
Eric Swalwell?
Don't clone him.
Do not clone Eric Swalwell.
Jeffrey Epstein? Nope.
Nope. Harvey Weinstein?
Do not clone him.
Do not clone Harvey Weinstein.
I'm sure there's some Democrats to put on, or some Republicans to put on the list.
Nadler, do not clone Nadler.
Do not clone him.
Bad idea. Nancy Pelosi, you could clone.
She seems pretty cool.
You could clone her.
I don't agree with Nancy Pelosi on a lot of things, but at least she's a functioning human.
So you could clone her, even if I don't agree with her.
AOC you could clone.
You're saying don't clone AOC? But yeah, sure, clone AOC. I think AOC is more of a national asset than you do.
And while I don't agree with her policies, in all cases, I do think she wants what's best for the country, and she does have skill.
And maybe there's a way to help move that energy in the right direction.
So I tend not to be hard on people who have skills and can move the country in a direction and have good intentions.
That's what I thought about Trump as well.
I think Trump's intentions were good, his skill was high.
That's something you can work with.
I think AOC is the same.
All right. McConnell and Romney, yeah.
Well, I'm just saying that you could disagree with everything that Pelosi wants and says politically, but she's still like a normal human being.
I wouldn't say don't clone her.
All right, that's all I got for now, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Right, YouTubers? Don't clone Yoko.
Don't clone Yoko.
That's like a blast from the past.
Do you disagree with AOC?
If you're an ultra-liberal, what do you disagree on with AOC?
Well, I always say that I'm left to Bernie, but better at math.
And that gets to the Green New Deal stuff.
The Green New Deal stuff just doesn't work math-wise.
If it did, I'd be in favor of it.
And generally speaking, anything that understands human motivation, I tend to appreciate those systems.
But any system that ignores the obvious impacts of human motivation, That's where I would disagree with AOC. So I wouldn't mind getting to the same place she would like to get to, which is poor people have a lot more.
Wouldn't that be great?
Every poor person gets a good education in healthcare.
I want to get there, just like Bernie does, just like AOC does.
But their method to get there lacks some structure.
All right. Where's Parler?
Well, did you hear the CEO of Parler got removed by the board, interestingly?
Somebody says, list audit of how COVID deaths are counted.
Yeah, that would be useful.
At some point, there should be some kind of an audit of how we counted deaths.
But now that we're around half a million deaths, I think we'll be hitting over half a million pretty soon.
I don't think that the argument that the deaths are not real is just crazy at this point.
You know, there was a point where a reasonable person could have said, you know, I don't think these deaths will be over 100,000 or over 200,000 and therefore we should treat it like that's the maximum size of the problem.
There was a time when a reasonable person could say that and did.
But I think we're well past the point where you can say that COVID isn't real.
If you're still saying that, I think you need to catch up.
Alright. Did I give up on net deaths?
So early on, I made a prediction that we might have fewer net deaths because of the lockdown.
Because we would save a number of lives in different ways than we would lose.
But that prediction was based on a faulty assumption that the lockdowns would be limited in length.
If you have a two-month lockdown, I think you probably have net negative deaths, or net fewer deaths than before.
If you have a one-year lockdown, Then I think the equation changes because the lockdown itself is going to start to wear on people.
You get the extra suicides, everything.
So I think it's how long you're locked down.
A two-month lockdown, I would still go with probably would reduce net number of deaths.
But a one-year with a pandemic that's lasted that whole time, I don't know that that's going to be net.
