Episode 1274 Scott Adams: Gamified Democracy, Teachers Unions Unify the Country in a Bad Way, MyPillow Persuasion
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Content:
Teachers Unions are the enemy
A "well funded cabal" and irrelevant voters
The Lincoln Project
Mike Lindell's video
Election transparency, trust and understanding
China is just a competitor?
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Well, it was less than a month ago, That a number of citizens in this country marched into the capital and tried to fortify the republic.
But that didn't go well, and so the people trying to fortify the republic and make sure that we had transparent and fair elections will be rounded up and punished, because that's the way we work in this country.
Yes, they were trespassing.
Yes, they broke some laws.
Yeah, the legal system probably does need to do what the legal system does.
But why are we calling it a coup instead of a bunch of citizens who tried to fortify, to use the words of our leaders, why don't we spin that as a bunch of citizens who tried to fortify the republic?
Because that's exactly what they were trying to do.
They weren't trying to destroy America, were they?
Does anybody think that?
Does anybody think that the people who marched on Washington said, we're going to destroy this country?
Exactly the opposite.
It was a whole bunch of people who wanted their country to be strong and fair and transparent.
And they marched on Washington.
Many of them did bad things.
They have to deal with that.
That's their own problem.
But by any objective measure, the people who went to Washington and protested were trying to fortify the existing republic.
They were trying to make it work better.
Specifically, that's what they were asking for.
A better, fairer, more transparent election.
Our leaders, who are disreputable, decided that the best way to capture that whole situation was that it was an insurrection.
Well, I guess the people who win get to tell you what the history was.
So will the history books report...
The people marched on their capital to fortify the Republic?
Or will they report that there was a coup attempt?
Well, it all looks the same, at least on the surface.
The biggest issue in the country, I would say, is schools reopening, wouldn't you?
Because if the schools reopen, then a lot of parents who couldn't maybe work because they got to watch the kids, Get to go back to work, the economy starts working, but of course there's a big impact, we think, on infections probably will go up if schools reopen.
Anything that creates more contact probably increases infections.
So it's the biggest decision in the country, and who gets to make this decision?
Well... Turns out that the teachers' unions have the most power because they can simply say, hey, our teachers are not going to go back to school.
And then what do you do?
So it's really not up to the country as a whole.
It's not up to the government.
It's actually up to the teachers' unions.
So the teachers' unions are in charge, for all practical purposes, On the most important question in the country, for the governance and health of the future of the United States, the teachers' unions get to make this decision,
apparently. Now, can you imagine a worse system than to pick some people who, by the nature of a union, their job is to protect their members, even if it costs other people a little bit of whatever?
Their intention, their point, the entire purpose is to do what's good for the union.
Do they do that?
Well, they might, right?
If I'm going to be fair, the teachers' unions probably do a great job of doing what a union is supposed to do, get good benefits and good treatment for your teachers.
Unfortunately, That pits them on the opposite side from the rest of the public.
Because the public, be they Republican or be they Democrat, seem to want schools to reopen.
But the teachers' unions are the obstacle.
Now, can we use this issue to unify?
Democrats? Hello?
Democrats? Republicans?
Is there somebody out there who...
For political reasons, think schools shouldn't open up pretty quickly.
Safely, of course, but quickly.
I think we've got, finally, an issue we can unify on.
The teachers' unions are the biggest source of systemic racism because they're the ones who keep competition away from the school system.
And without competition... People in bad schools, typically people of color, are going to be in a bad situation and they're going to stay that way because they don't have a school system that can move people out of a bad situation.
So finally, now that Trump is sort of less important to the news cycle, can we finally agree on something?
That the teachers' unions are the source of all of our problems?
Let me give you the good news.
In the past just few months, support for school alternatives has gone way up.
I think it's like a 10-point increase in the polls.
So we went from a place pre-pandemic where people were kind of sort of okay with the current school system, even though it wasn't perfect.
It wasn't a high issue in people's minds, I don't think.
It didn't seem like it anyway.
But now...
Because of the teachers' unions and the coronavirus and school closing, now it's a big issue.
And you're seeing quite a bit of good persuasion toward states that are starting to move legislatively toward funding kids instead of schools.
Now, I understand the way that works, and I'll take a fact check on this if I have this wrong, is that the idea is currently the state will give money for schooling to a school.
And they'll say, well, you've got X many kids there, so we'll give you this much funding.
Then if the kid wanted to go somewhere else, well, he'd have to pay for it himself, or the family would, because the funding stayed with the school.
But there are now 17 states that have either already passed or are working on legislation that would say that wherever the kid goes, that's where the funding goes.
So if the kid can find another accredited school, could be private or religious, whatever it is, that the funding would be transferred over to that school, and then you have a competitive situation.
What would be the downside of doing that?
I can't think of one.
It feels like there's no downside.
It feels like it's an obvious good idea.
Because competition makes everything better.
When you don't have it, you have all bad things every time.
It's not like sometimes it works.
Can you think of the one time that having no competition worked?
I can't. You can't think of one example of that, where a lack of competition works in the long run.
It's not even a thing, and yet that's the system we have.
But now many states are getting on board.
It's becoming a thing.
Corey DeAngelis, especially, is doing a great job of making sure people understand the issue, which I didn't quite understand.
I'm just starting to get up to speed on it.
But here's the good news. If this coronavirus turns out to be the final straw that breaks the teachers' unions' control of our schools, the teachers' unions and the teachers who are brainwashing our kids to make them unproductive citizens, in my opinion, that's exactly what's happening.
Teachers are brainwashing kids to make them less productive citizens.
I'll say it directly.
That's exactly what's happening.
So they are the enemy.
The teachers' unions. They're the enemy of every person in this country who is not a teacher.
They are the enemy.
They're not on your side.
And they're not supposed to be.
And that's okay. The whole point of a union is that they're fighting for their own rights.
They're not fighting for your rights.
The union isn't fighting for your children.
They're not fighting for your family.
They're fighting for themselves and should.
Nothing wrong with that.
But as long as they're fighting for themselves, fuck them.
Fuck them, right?
They can fight for themselves.
They have every right to do that.
I respect it. But fuck them.
You can fight for your right, too.
Do you know what your right is?
To lobby your government, get them to change the funding so that the teachers' unions cannot control your kid.
Fuck them. They're the enemy.
They're the enemy of the country.
They just do a good job for their members.
And that's something you can respect.
But they are your enemy, unless you're a teacher.
So don't get that wrong.
They're your enemy. They're destroying the fucking country right in front of you by destroying your fucking children's lives right in front of you, and you're fucking letting them do it.
They're the enemy.
They're not on your side.
They're the fucking enemy.
I guess I made my point there.
So don't let them fortify your kids, is what I'm saying.
If what comes out of this is breaking the teachers' unions and some kind of school choice, it will be one of the greatest things that ever happened in this country.
It will be one of the greatest things that ever happened in this country.
Because China is going to destroy the United States if our teachers' unions continue to be in charge of the next generation.
China will kill us.
Literally kill us.
They will control space.
They'll have better education.
Their economies will surge.
Ours will not. We're dead.
Your teachers' unions will fucking kill you.
Because they're making the country uncompetitive with a country that will kill you.
Because China will fucking kill you.
Not maybe with bombs, but they have no trouble pushing fentanyl and viruses and God knows what in our direction.
So they will fucking kill you if the teachers' unions have their way.
All right. What do you call a system of government in which, according to Time Magazine, a well-funded cabal of people working behind the scenes were the ones who determined who became president?
A well-funded cabal.
What the hell is the name of that system?
A cabal acrossy?
Gamocracy? I think I would call it some kind of a gamocracy, because the way we determine our government, at least the federal government, is by who can play the game better.
The game would be who can do propaganda better, who can control the media narrative better, who can control the rulemaking and the rule changes.
And who can control, let's say, the courts, because the courts have a part of it.
But there's nothing left of the democracy or the republic.
There's just nothing left of it.
We simply drifted into a new system in which both sides put their dirtiest players in charge of fighting each other, behind the scenes, under the hood, stuff you don't see.
And those people who are battling each other that you don't even know their names.
It's lawyers, you know, Mark Elias, people like that.
And you don't even know their names.
But they're the ones who are battling out with their rule changes and their persuasion and controlling the media.
They get to decide who's president.
The voters are just sheep who vote whichever way they've been influenced to vote.
That's it. So we don't live in anything that should be called a democracy or a republic, right?
And how is it taught in school?
I think that's a fair question.
Would a kid in school be taught today that we have a republic and that we have some kind of a democratic process within a republic?
Is that what we teach the kids?
Because it's not happening.
You don't live in anything like that.
The actual observable country you live in is determined by this game-playing, rule-changing, persuasion stuff behind the screen.
It has nothing to do with the voters.
The voters are largely irrelevant unless they come with a surprise, you know, like a Trump-like surprise.
And you could argue that the reason Trump won is that they played the game better, right, in the 2016 election.
They just played the game better.
Trump was a little bit better at getting attention.
Allegedly, the data gathering and social media used by the Trump campaign in 2016 was better than the competition.
What did that have to do with your vote?
Nothing. You were completely irrelevant to any of this.
You got persuaded.
Rules changed.
Data was used. That was the story.
All right. Without the Trump common enemy, things are looking interesting.
Because as long as Trump is silent, which is exactly his best strategy, so he's playing it exactly right, and he's showing a lot of discipline, by the way.
Don't you think ex-President Trump is pretty disciplined in staying out of the news?
How hard must that be?
It's got to be really hard to stay out of the news.
But he's doing it.
And I think that takes some discipline.
So it must be hard.
But because Trump is not there as our common enemy, watching the Lincoln Project fall apart is sort of my new hobby.
And so I guess there's another member, a founding member of the Lincoln Project who has quit or couldn't make an agreement and now they hate each other and she's leaving.
I guess she asked for a raise, the Lincoln Project, people say, and was denied.
She wanted a lot of money.
So watching this group, who, by the way, should form a band, I think the Lincoln Project should form a band, and if they did, it would be called Rick Wilson and the Grifters.
Because without Trump, the Lincoln Project is sort of just a bunch of grifters, isn't it?
What else are they doing?
What's the point of the Lincoln Project after Trump is gone?
So now they have this organization that takes a life of its own, but they don't have anybody to fight because Trump is gone.
So they turned on each other because they're a bunch of people who are looking for a fight.
So they're just the Fighting Grifters.
So Rick Wilson and the Fighting Grifters would be the name of their rock band.
And let me give you some advice.
If you ever join an organization in which you are sometimes considered a clone of Rick Wilson, think twice.
Think twice about what organization you want to be in.
You don't ever want to be called a clone of Rick Wilson.
I'm just saying that that's not a good place to be.
All right. Bill Maher made a little news.
So as you know, Bill Maher is not a friend of religion.
He's a famous non-believer.
And he's got a take on QAnon that not everybody's going to like.
He equated it to religion, basically.
And I'm not going to make the same point that he did.
I'm just going to sort of riff off of his point.
And his point that people will believe anything, and that can be proven by the fact that they believe in a variety of different religions.
So even if one of the religion is right...
Luckily, it's the one you picked.
So good work on that.
A lot of different religions, but you picked the right one.
You could have gone wrong there, but you got the right one.
So congratulations on that, every one of you, for picking the right religion when so many got the wrong one.
And Bill Maher points out that that is the normal way of human beings.
If you're asking yourself, how could people believe in QAnon, You haven't been paying attention.
People will believe anything.
That's it.
People will believe anything.
And we do it as almost a lifestyle.
We choose a body of things to believe because we think, oh, that's a lifestyle I could be compatible with.
I could say that I believe in this or that and wrap my life around that worldview.
So we are a people who like to believe.
We like to believe.
So we're wired that way.
But Bill Maher will get in a little bit of heat, as he often does, for equating QAnon with religion.
I got a publication from my old undergraduate college.
I went to a college called Hartwick College.
In Oneonta, New York, in upstate New York.
And they still, of course, they want their alumni to give them money and stuff, so they keep the alumni connected.
And I get this publication once a month or so about how the college is doing.
And I hadn't really looked at it in a while.
Oh, somebody else from Hartwick?
Really? Wayne?
Is that true? So I get the publication, and I'm looking at it, and...
Oh my God. I would never give money to this college again.
I did in the old days.
But I look at the publication and it is basically anti-white male now.
Now they don't say, we don't like adult white men.
They don't say that.
But if you look at the publication, it's pretty clear that adult white men are not welcome at this college anymore.
Nor are attractive people.
And by the way, nothing against unattractive people.
I'm a proud member of the unattractive people category.
But I remember in the old days, you'd see the pictures with lots of happy co-eds, and it would be all these good-looking people.
Like, they'd be healthy and energetic and good-looking.
And now...
Looks are not the main thing, right?
You don't want to be sending out that message that your physical beauty is important.
So now the publication is full of smiling pictures of students, but let's say not the ones who exercise and eat right, for example.
And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, they sort of have to sell their college this way now, because it's the way people expect it, I guess.
And it... It became just this weird caricature of what the college is probably like.
Now, unless something's changed, that college is 80% white people.
Now, it may have changed, but I don't think so, because it's an expensive private college that mostly New York City are the people who go there.
I don't think...
It changed to 80% women and minorities.
But if you look at the folder, good luck finding a white man pictured anywhere in the entire folder.
Now, there's nothing wrong with, obviously, nothing wrong with them showing the student population as it actually exists.
It wouldn't make any sense to show a bunch of good-looking white people in college if they're not representative of the college.
That wouldn't make any sense.
So, of course, they should show the variety of all the people there.
But I don't think that's what they did.
I have a suspicion that they did not show a representative cross-section of the college.
I think they emphasized the 20% of the college that...
That were the ones they thought they could sell the best.
So Lou Dobbs lost his job at Fox Business.
Apparently he was, I guess he was the highest rated show on Fox Business, but I didn't know that.
What do you think of that?
It seems that CNN is taking a lot of scalps.
And CNN had a really good year.
Apparently 2020 was one of CNN's best years.
So they're going to miss Trump, I would think.
I can't imagine that CNN still has good ratings after Trump is gone.
It must be dropping.
But Fox News is trying to figure out who they are.
And it looks like they're getting rid of Lou Dobbs.
And that was over the election claims.
Speaking of election claims...
How many of you have seen the very banned, I think it's banned, Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, how many of you have seen his long-form video where he talks about his allegations, allegations of election irregularities?
Have you seen it? I almost wasn't going to watch it, because it was kind of long, and I thought that I would know what was in it.
But what Mike Lindell is most famous for is being the best marketer and salesperson, maybe, of our generation, right?
I don't know, one of the best, let's say.
So I thought to myself, what would happen if you took a topic that the public thinks is thoroughly debunked, at least much of the public, half of it anyway, thinks is thoroughly debunked, but you have one of the most persuasive salespeople saying that it isn't, saying the opposite.
What would win? So that's what I was watching it for.
I wanted to see if Mike Lindell could be so persuasive that he could sell you something.
In other words, the story of election irregularities.
Could he sell that to you in a persuasive way under the current conditions?
And... I turned it on, and the first thing I thought was, he's got pretty high production values here.
He's got a lot of money.
And if I didn't want somebody to be on the other side for me, one of the people I wouldn't want on the other side is Mike Lindell.
Because say what you will about him.
I know he's got his supporters and his critics.
Say what you will. The one thing that we could all agree on is the man knows how to put on a show.
He knows how to do an infomercial.
He knows how to make content.
He knows how to be persuasive.
He knows how to sell. So he clearly has lots of ability.
And so I turned this thing on to see how well he sold it.
He starts out with showing long lists of claims, of specific claims of irregularities in the election.
I recognize some of the claims as being already debunked.
I don't know if the others have been thoroughly debunked or not, but I recognize some of them as being debunked.
So right off the bat, I was like, oh, this isn't so good.
It is persuasive to see all these claims All these allegations.
It's a laundry list persuasion.
I've told you that the laundry list can be persuasive, and it's hard to argue against the laundry list.
So he started with the laundry list.
That's good persuasion. But in my specific case, I recognized some things on the list as already debunked, so that worked against his credibility.
But if you didn't know those things were debunked, and you just saw the list, you'd say, that's a lot of stuff.
It would be persuasive.
So then he had on some experts.
Dr. Shiva was on there and another computer expert talking about what they'd seen with the computers.
Now here's the thing.
You and I don't really have the ability to watch this computer expert guy saying what he was saying, making claims about the election security.
Specifically, he was talking about the software hardware component of it.
And he had some real specific claims...
I can't tell if they're true or not true, but there were really specific claims about a specific program found on a specific device.
The program is known to grab your credentials.
So it was really specific stuff.
Is it true? I don't know.
How in the world would you know?
The claims, if you just heard them without any context, If you heard them without hearing anybody with a counterpoint or anybody trying to debunk it, if you're just listening to the expert, he sounded 100% credible.
That doesn't mean it's real, but boy, was it credible.
I mean, they were very specific claims.
And the more specific the claims...
The more credible it looks because you can just say to the other side, well, what about this?
It's a very specific claim.
Is this piece of malware on that piece of hardware, like they said, or not?
So here was my takeaway.
I don't have any way to know what's true and what's not true in terms of election claims.
I've told you before that at a minimum, at a minimum, 95% of all the claims of election fraud will in fact be garbage.
In other words, they will not be credible claims.
They will be easily debunked.
So if you're looking at any specific thing in that Mike Lindell thing, at least 95% chance that every one of them is not true.
But is it also true that there was nothing on that entire presentation that would not be found to be true if you looked into it?
That I don't know.
But I will tell you that it didn't look crazy.
Didn't look crazy. And he presented it well.
So we'll see if he can make a dent.
I would hate to have Mike Lindell on the other side from me on anything, because he's pretty darn good at this stuff.
Now, I hope he didn't destroy his whole company with this.
He might have. He might have actually destroyed his whole MyPillow empire.
But I like that people like him exist.
You know? If the people who are trying to debunk Mike Lindell have trouble doing it, That's okay, isn't it?
If it's hard to debunk him, that's okay, because that's the system we have.
You want people who are fighting it out in public on opinion stuff, and then the public watches and says, okay, who won that battle?
And watching Mike Lindell go to battle against the entire mainstream narrative is a lot closer to a fair fight than you think.
I can't think of too many other people who could have made this a fair fight.
Trump is one of them, of course.
But Mike Liddell might be one of the people who could make this a fair fight.
Now, his trouble, of course, is that he'll just be closed out from the conversation.
He's getting cancelled all over social media.
So, just to be clear so I don't get cancelled, I have no reason to believe any specific claims on the video are true.
I wouldn't know.
I'm just telling you that if you watch it, you're going to feel they're true, even if they're not, because it's persuasive.
Alright. Are we in this weird point in America...
Where everybody knows that there was not transparency about the software and hardware that ran the entire voting system.
Nobody thinks there was transparency.
But it's the one situation in which we've decided to accept that it's a system that could be hacked but wasn't.
Isn't that weird?
What is it about us, besides cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, I guess, that explains it all.
How is it that an intelligent, let's say an intelligent democrat, they exist.
Let's say an intelligent democrat, and you say, look, just privately, just the two of us, Nobody else is going to see this conversation, but just us, just the two of us.
Nobody will know what we say.
Do you really believe that there is such a thing as a hardware and software system that can't be hacked?
Now, I think an intelligent Democrat would say, well, no, there's no system that can't be hacked, because all you would need is to bribe a human who has control of the system, right?
So as long as you can bribe human beings, and you know you can do that, you can bribe them, you can blackmail them, you can coerce them, that will never change.
Humans can always be bribed.
So as long as that's true, you can get into any system, because it just requires somebody on the inside to let you in.
And if you have access to the Internet, you don't even need that, right?
You can just hack your way in.
But would there be any Democrat who would say, yes, it's a real thing, you can develop a system, That can't be hacked even if you got some human being blackmailed and on your side.
Even then, you would catch it as soon as it happened.
Would a Democrat say that?
Because I don't think you could find any, not one, intelligent Democrat who in a private conversation would say to you, yeah, I think you can totally protect a hardware and software system.
Yeah, we can do that.
That's the thing. That's the thing we can do.
And if you can't, if we know you can't, because every system in the world can be hacked, why would this be different?
Why do we feel that it wasn't?
What would be the argument for it could be done, but it wasn't?
Why wouldn't it be?
With all the people who have the maximum capability, you know, state actors and rich people who would take a bribe to do this kind of work, right?
Rich hackers. Or a hacker who would take a bribe to do this kind of thing from rich people.
So, why wouldn't it be hacked?
What would be the argument that by now, because a lot of time has gone by with these systems out there, people would have, you know, presumably at least tried to hack them.
Why... Why would this be the one thing that wasn't hacked when it's the thing that people would most want to hack?
So it's the most valuable thing you could ever hack, except maybe a bank, I suppose.
And this is the one that didn't get hacked?
The one that's most valuable to hack?
I guess it's possible.
But it seems to me obvious, at this point, that the people in charge, roughly speaking, the people in charge of our government, don't seem to be interested in election transparency.
It doesn't seem like anybody's interested.
Because I think they like the under-the-hood game Where the operatives and the persuaders and the dirty tricksters are the ones who are making things happen.
I feel as if both Republicans and Democrats maybe like the dirty trick gamocracy and fixing it and turning it into an actual democratic republic.
Maybe it looks worse.
Maybe that looks worse than the current system to them.
All right. Somebody says, Shiva has the evidence.
Well, I would caution you all with the following.
If the smartest person in the world, who is very qualified, says to you, I have the evidence and it's right here, what would you say about that?
Assuming that the claim is, I don't know if you would call it an extraordinary claim, but it would be, let's say, a big claim.
It would be a big claim that proof of election fraud was, you know, attainable and somebody had it in their hands and could show it to you.
How would you know what you were seeing?
I wouldn't. There's nothing that anybody could show me about the election that would make me say, oh, there's proof.
Nothing. Because what would you show me?
You would show me a printout of a log of the data and maybe how it changed.
But I wouldn't know why it changed or if you got this from the right place or if you edited it after you downloaded it or who are you.
There is no way...
That you could convince me that the election was either fixed or not fixed.
It just can't happen.
There's no way you can convince me either one is true.
Because I wouldn't know what I was looking at.
You can't prove something didn't happen by simply not finding it, right?
So I could never be convinced there was no fraud just because nobody found it.
That doesn't make sense.
The only thing you know is nobody found it or nobody proved it.
Let's say nobody proved it in court.
That doesn't mean it's not there.
And if somebody found it, or said they found it, and handed to you, private citizen, a whole bunch of really solid-looking information, and it was in a big binder, and it had sources, and statistics, and smart people had looked at it, and they said it looked pretty good, what would you know if you had that in your hand and you could read it?
Nothing. You would know nothing.
There is no way to communicate this information, because we don't trust anyone, and what they show us, we wouldn't understand, because we'd be seeing it in a context.
We might think we understood.
That's the dangerous part.
We might get in and say, well, this is pretty obvious.
It says this was done.
Here's the witness. I guess it was done.
But how accurate are witnesses?
Really, really inaccurate.
There's nothing less accurate than an eyewitness.
They're terrible. And we have tons of history to know that an eyewitness is really unreliable.
Really unreliable. I have some direct experience with that.
When I was a bank teller, I got robbed at gunpoint, and the description that I gave of the robber wasn't even close.
And I know that because I saw on video later what the actual robber looked like because I could watch him robbing me on video.
And I didn't describe him even close.
Not even...
I think I had the age off by 30 years, the hair color, everything.
Just all wrong. Very normal.
Eyewitness reports of anything are just almost close to useless because they're so unreliable.
So there you are. There's nothing that your government could do or will do that would make you feel comfortable with any of this because you won't understand what you're seeing.
President Biden has said that China, who you might think is a big problem for the future of the country, is, what do you call it?
He said it was our biggest competitor.
That's right. So the country that the United States has said is involved in genocide against the Uyghurs, like right now, they're involved at the moment with genocide for an entire ethnic group in their country.
And Biden's characterizing of China is their biggest competitor.
Competitor? What, are we trying to kill the Uyghurs too?
What are we competing for?
I don't believe we were trying to kill an ethnic group, so we're not in that competition.
I think they're alone in that competition.
And when it comes to the economy, competitor is sort of underselling what's going on.
If they're stealing your stuff, it's more like you're the victim.
So it's more like an abuser-victim situation, where we're the victim in the United States and China's the abuser.
That's not so much your best competitor.
If you were bullied in school, and a bully beat you up every day and took your lunch money, do you go home to your mom and say, I tell you, I've got a pretty big competitor at school.
And your mom says, what are you competing at?
Well, I'm competing to try to keep my lunch money.
Not doing well so far.
I'm competing to try to not get beat up every day at lunch, but I'm not doing that too well either.
But it's my biggest competition.
You wouldn't call them competition.
You would have other words for it.
Now, if Biden is doing what Trump was doing, which is praising a dictator to try to create a situation where you can negotiate...
So if the next thing you heard is that Biden was speaking nice about China, but the policies were really hard-ass, for example, Biden just sent a heavy-armed cruiser, I think, through the straits between Taiwan and mainland China.
Which is a provocative military thing to do.
So that's good.
So score one point for Joe Biden.
And whether you hate it or not, I am going to credit Joe Biden for anything that looks like was well done.
I think sending the heavy cruiser into those semi-disputed waters was well done.
Show of force. So I'll give him the compliment.
That was probably just right.
And if you see him being friendly the way he talks about China, but he keeps doing that kind of stuff, it's like, well, China's just our competitor.
Hey, we're going to send a heavy cruiser through your disputed waters.
That's okay. Talking nice and dealing very hard, totally okay.
That would be a Trump style of business, actually.
So... So that part I'm not going to complain about.
So will the U.S. defend Taiwan when the Chinese attack them?
I don't think the Chinese will attack.
I think that they have a very long view of things and that in the long run they think that Taiwan, one way or another, will get back under the full mainland Chinese control.
So I think it's like Hong Kong.
They're just going to wait as long as it takes.
Yeah, I do think they'll take over one day, but it'll probably be through bribes or something.
Do other Muslims care about the Uyghurs, you ask?
Well, I guess you'd have to ask them.
Has Biden been on Marine One?
I don't know what you mean by that.
Did you see the Uyghur lady interview?
I saw the highlights from it.
It was pretty rugged.
Now, should you believe everything that you hear from a Uyghur refugee who says what's happening there?
I would say that would be an unreliable source.
A direct eyewitness.
Think about it.
If you were a member of the Uyghur population, and you knew that you were being put in concentration camps by the Chinese government, and you got free, wouldn't you exaggerate a little bit how bad it was?
I mean, it's really bad just by itself, but wouldn't you add a little bit, add a little bit of a kicker, make the torture sound a little worse, the The rape is a little more common than it really is.
You would. You would if you were smart.
And I have no reason to think that that lady was dumb.
So I would expect any normal person in that situation to exaggerate what was going on.
But even if you exaggerated it, whatever it is, is still a genocide, right?
So it's not like there are good genocides and bad ones.
I guess you could make the argument, but It doesn't make the genocide not happen, even if anybody was exaggerating about the specifics.
The genocide is happening.
It's a real thing. And somebody's saying it's much worse than we imagined.
It could be. Yeah, I think the odds of it being worse than we imagined are pretty high.
Pretty high, like 90% high.
You're asking me a provocative question, and you know the answer, and I'm not going to give it to you.
Um...
Do you believe China and the media?
Why would I? Why would I believe China or the media?
Of course not. Exaggerating like AOC and the Capitol riot?
Yeah, you know, AOC is just Trump-lite, so she had some hyperbole there about her Capitol experience.
To me, it's the smallest story in the country, but we ran out of Trump things to talk about.
I don't think AOC... Sure, she exaggerated maybe how close she was to the action, but it's only for AOC to say how scared she was.
So if she was really scared, and if she described it accurately, that's her feeling to have.
It's not us to say, you should not have been scared.
I mean, maybe you could say you wouldn't have been scared, but you can't tell her how scared she can be.
That's not your job.
Somebody says AOC is a nut job.
I don't think so.
I tell you, if you're looking at AOC and saying that she doesn't have capability, you are so wrong.
She has a lot of capability.
You could not like her policies, but a lot of capability, and she's definitely not crazy.
Scott, you have lost it completely.
Okay.
Scott, you lost it completely, says Aaron before being blocked.
Hide user on this channel.
Goodbye. So just a reminder, any kind of disagreement is welcome.
But statements about me, you get blocked.
So you could say your fact is wrong or your thinking about it is wrong.
But if you just say, Scott, you've lost it.
Scott, you're wrong.
Then you just get blocked. Read the Time magazine article, yeah, about how the election was rigged by the cabal of well-funded people.
I don't read that story the same way a lot of you read it.
So the Time magazine article that admitted there was this cabal of well-funded people who allegedly caused the election outcome by their behind-the-scenes machinations with the rule changes, etc., And the persuasion and the media manipulation and all that.
But none of it was illegal.
Right? There's nothing claimed in that Time article that anybody did anything illegal.
They just used the rules as they exist.
Same way Trump used them to surprisingly win in 2016.
So you can say, I hate living in a country where that's the way elections are decided.
But those are the rules.
People played within the rules and got a good result for their team.
I don't know, I can't be mad at that.
Scott has early onset dementia.
You know, one of the interesting things about aging is what your brain does.
Watching your own brain develop.
And There's no doubt if you were to measure the quickness of my mind or the ability to learn a new thing, it wouldn't be close to what it was in my 20s.
In my 20s, I was just a machine.
I could absorb entire fields of content like a vacuum cleaner.
But at my current age...
I assume my brain is not as nimble as it used to be, but that's largely compensated for by my skill stack improving every year.
So every time I have a new skill or a new filter or a new way of looking at something, that more than compensates, it feels like.
It feels like it does, but that could be an illusion.
But it feels like it more than compensates for what I'm losing in nimbleness and just mental, let's say, firepower.
Short-term working memory does decline, somebody says.
Yeah. So my mind is not as nimble, but it has a much better skill stack.
And I feel as though it's working the best it's ever worked, if you include all the ins and outs.
So do I have dementia?
I don't know. And the user says, your wife is beautiful.
True. Fact check?
True. My wife is beautiful.
Have you all made your Valentine's Day plans?
Make your plans now.
Make it good. Might not have a restaurant to go to.
Alright, that's all for now. I will talk to you.
Oh, Bitcoin's on fire?
That's good.
And I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Studying to be a CPA at age 57.
Good for you. You're saying AOC's entire account of what happened was a lie.
You know, what's the difference between a lie and hyperbole?
You could say they're the same thing.
But I spent four years saying that Trump's hyperbole should be obvious to anybody who's watching it, and therefore it's not like a lie, because you know hyperbole when you see it.
I feel as if I should make the same argument with AOC. When she tells a personal story like that, should your brain say, oh, she's trying to tell you exactly the way it happened?
Or should your brain say, oh, I get it.
It's hyperbole. This is what she does.
She's good at it. And it's, you know, the general truth of it is true.
So with the capital thing...
She may have been, let's say, inaccurate on the facts or left out some facts that you think are important.
But was it directionally wrong?
I think directionally it was true.
Directionally she was one of a number of people who were scared during the whatever that was, the fortification of the republic.
It was her story to tell.
I think if you put a filter on it and say she's a politician, so dial it down a little bit to understand what really happened, you're fine.
