Episode 1277 Scott Adams: There Will be Extra Cursing at Congress Today. Goes Well With Coffee
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Sports are broken
Biden's clever plan to open schools
Bitcoin accepted as payment for Tesla products
Jake Tapper on GOP accountability
Congressional Democrats push for revenge
Running for President
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Yeah. We're so accustomed to having the simultaneous sip that you can almost taste it minutes before it happens.
It is so good.
And what do you do to enjoy the simultaneous sip?
Well, you don't just sit there.
No. You don't just watch it happen.
No. That would be wrong.
You join in. It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen drink or a glass of a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
I think it makes everything better. It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Are you ready? Are you ready for this?
You'd better be ready.
Go.
Yeah, now if you enjoyed that live, you know what the feeling is, don't you?
Yeah, you do. Savor it.
Savor it.
Okay, now we can move on.
Gotta stop and smell the coffee.
That's just good advice.
Well, yesterday there was a big national event, something called a Super Bowl.
Have I ever told you before that one way to predict the future is that the best story almost always wins?
Not every time. But the best story usually wins.
Who was the best story for the Super Bowl?
Tom Brady was the best story.
Because he left a dominating team.
They decided that they didn't need him anymore.
He was too old for them, and so they let him go.
What would you want to do if you had just been the greatest quarterback ever, and you had just been let go from your team while being still a winning quarterback because you were too old?
What would you really, really like to do in that situation?
Well, what you would like to do is win another Super Bowl with a different team.
Because if you do that, what does that tell your old coach?
Tells you it wasn't about him, was it?
What's it tell your old team?
Well, it kind of says it wasn't about them, was it?
Maybe all those Super Bowls weren't because you used to have a good coach.
Maybe the Super Bowls were because of you.
So I can't imagine anything that would be more fun than being Tom Brady this morning.
Can you?
I mean, what would be more fun than not only winning the Super Bowl yet again, seventh one, I doubt anybody will ever match that.
And also rubbing it in the face of all the people who said you were too old.
Guess I don't need that coach.
Guess I don't need that good team that was behind me.
Now, I'm not what you'd call a sports fan.
I'll say some bad things about sports later.
But I had a little thing I was trying to do, just sort of a mental experiment, and it went like this.
I wanted to see if I could get all the way through Super Bowl week, or the two weeks before Super Bowl, and all the way through the game, and all the way to today, without once knowing the name of the quarterback who was opposing Tom Brady.
And I still don't know it.
I actually don't know the name of the other quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Can anybody tell me the name of the quarterback?
Who is the other guy?
Don't even know his name.
Patrick Mahomes?
Somebody say? I don't know.
Okay. I guess that's the name of an athlete.
Patrick Mahomes. Well, Patrick Mahomes did not get a lot of attention relative to Tom Brady yesterday.
How would you like to play in the Super Bowl when people don't even know your name?
I guess a lot of people didn't know his name, the ones who actually watched the Super Bowl.
There were a lot of jokes that came after the Super Bowl, including Brett Weinstein, who said in a tweet, how long before the courts rule on who actually won the Super Bowl?
Now, that was a good tweet and a good joke.
But not as good as all of the comments on this tweet.
So go look for that in either Brett Weinstein's feed or in mine.
I retweeted him yesterday.
Or today. And you should see all the other funny comments.
It turns out this was a really good straight line.
Or at least the situation was a good straight line for lots of good jokes.
All right. Now, do you believe my theory about the best story usually wins?
And Tom Brady was the best story.
So even though he was not favored in terms of the specifics of the betting odds of these games, he had the best story.
So, now, remember I first used this theory when President Trump ran for office in 2016?
He was the best story, by far.
Him winning was the best story.
But when he ran for re-election, what was the best story?
It really wasn't, Trump wins another election, because that would have been sort of expected.
So that's not the best story.
You expect incumbents to win.
The best story would be running somebody who's clearly mentally defective while you're really trying to put in office the vice president who's too progressive, according to a lot of people.
That's a good story, right?
If you compare those two stories of Trump just wins again, and you get more of the same, Or the brain-dead dementia guy who's being really backed by the real president.
I mean, it's not even close. One of them is the good story.
So watch how often that predicts.
There's no reason for that, by the way.
At least that I can think of.
Now, the best reason might be that because our minds are so tuned to stories from movies and books and all the fiction that we consume, that we kind of guide ourselves subconsciously toward the best story.
So maybe even the players on the field with Tom Brady, even the other team, knew that the best story was them losing.
So it could be that we're just too biased toward the best story, that we make it happen without even knowing that we're consciously making any choices.
Maybe. Or it's just a coincidental thing that I think I'm noticing but I'm not.
That's possible. Here's a little mental exercise for you.
And this is a good mental exercise for every situation.
I'll give you a specific one here.
But in general, it's good to do this.
And I talk about this in Loser Think a little bit in my book.
Sometimes, take a situation that you're very familiar with and you have an opinion on, and just say to yourself, what if I'm totally wrong?
What if I've got the wrong filter on this?
What if I'm just looking at it upside down?
What if I've got cause and effect backwards?
And that doesn't mean that you're wrong.
It just means that it's a good exercise to every now and then say, what if everything is just exactly backwards of the way I think it is?
I do that all the time.
I take anything that I'm sure is true, and I just say, but what if it's backwards?
Would it still work?
Like, would all the evidence that I'm looking at still apply and still be perfectly compatible if you took what you thought to be true and literally reversed it?
And sometimes you surprise yourself.
You say, uh-oh, I just found out that all the facts I'm looking at work both ways.
It's scary when it happens, and you realize how fragile your mental process is.
I'm going to do that for you right now.
I'm not going to try to change your mind, okay?
I don't want you to change your mind on the topic that I'm going to bring up.
I'm only going to show you an exercise where you can reverse the truth, and it won't be crazy.
That's all I'm going for, okay?
Just the process. Don't change your mind on anything.
When we look at the issue of...
Don't sign off yet.
I know you're going to turn off this live stream as soon as you hear this topic, because everybody always does.
Transgenders in sports. Stay with me.
Stay with me. Just for a little while.
It's worth it. Just stay.
Stay. Okay.
You know that I am one of the leading voices, at least in terms of being vocal and public about it, for saying that transgenders should have every right to play sports, etc.
But what is the common way to look at this?
The common way that conservatives look at it is this.
This is not my opinion.
I'm describing other people's opinion.
That sports is good, and there's something wrong with the transgender athlete.
That they're broken in some way.
Or they're morally or ethically deficient because they would want to play on a team in which they would dominate because they were born with some biological male qualities that they've been transferring out of.
That's what you think, right?
Wouldn't you say that the most common opinion from the conservative side of the world, again, not my opinion, But a common one is that sports are good, just the way they are, and there's something wrong with the athlete in this case.
Now, I'm just going to ask you this question.
What happens if you reverse it?
And you say that sports are broken, but all the athletes are fine.
What if you just say, how about the world is full of all kinds of different people?
There are short people, tall people, people who have skills, people who are strong, people who are weak, people who have different gender, sex traits, infinite different people.
Can people really be broken?
Is it really the people who are defective here?
Because people come in all kinds.
It's hard to say that any one of them is wrong when it's an infinite variety and none of them are exactly the same.
Why don't we say the sports are broken?
And here's specifically what I mean.
The best kind of sports would be where you're playing with somebody who is roughly equal in ability.
Isn't that the whole problem with having a transgender athlete playing on a women's traditional team?
The whole problem is that you have a mismatch of talent and even physicality, right?
So the problem is not that the athlete is broken.
There's nothing wrong with the athlete who wants to just play some sports.
What's wrong is that the sport doesn't allow people of equal ability to play against each other.
You want another example?
I'm male.
So, according to the rules of sports, the way they exist, I could play on a men's basketball team if I were, let's say, in college or high school.
But could I? Could I play on a men's basketball team?
I'm 5'8".
No. No, I can't.
There should be a sport for me in which I can play basketball against people who are roughly the same height.
That would be a good sport.
What is the point of putting me in a game in which I'm playing with people who are seven feet tall?
There's no point in that.
The sport is broken.
It's not me.
I'm not defective because I'm five foot eight.
I'm kind of in the normal range of human beings.
There are people smaller than me, people bigger than me.
It's completely normal to not be normal, right?
We're all not normal in some way.
Fix the sport. Why in the world do you ever put people of wildly different abilities on the same team?
Does it matter what the gender is?
You shouldn't. I've told this story before.
I played co-ed soccer years ago, and one of the women who played co-ed soccer on our team was really good.
So as a female player, she was extra good at soccer, which made her better at soccer than maybe a quarter of the men that were on the field.
Now, the other men were also good at soccer, and they were physically stronger, so they had some advantages, but she was probably better than a good 25% of the men who were playing.
Should she have to play with only female athletes if she would prefer to play with stronger players?
And the answer is no.
She was perfectly happy playing co-ed soccer with people who were physically bigger than her.
Now, it didn't work out well for her.
It turns out I broke her nose.
But if she had not been on a team with larger men, maybe her nose would not have been broken.
I didn't do it intentionally, by the way.
I just cleared a ball fairly aggressively.
Her face was in the way.
A lot of blood happened.
But did she quit playing soccer?
She did, of course, because her face was broken.
But she had the right to play, and she was with people of equal talent, and it's where she wanted to be.
The sports were broken, not her and not me.
So that is my point.
Sports are broken.
Why do you have men's teams and women's teams instead of just teams?
Why can't people just play on the team that's matched to their ability?
Why do sports have to be part of a high school and college?
It's ridiculous. The way high school sports are designed is to make stars out of a few people and to make everybody else feel like a loser.
Sorry! That's the way they're designed.
Sports make most people losers.
And they make stars out of a few people who were born with some lucky combination of things that made them athletically gifted.
And why do we praise people who were born athletically gifted?
I don't know. I don't see a good reason.
I'd rather see somebody who wasn't born athletically gifted do a good, you know, try hard and do good work for what they've got.
All right, so fix sports so that everybody can play in the team that is roughly their ability.
And while you're at it, why don't you fix the rest of sports which are broken?
I'll give you some more examples.
Golf is mostly about looking for your ball.
That's a stupid sport.
Golf should make all of the clubs the same length, number one.
Having clubs of different lengths is just stupid.
I mean, it's just making it extra hard for no reason.
Make the balls easier to find or allow you to just put your ball down wherever is the last place you saw it.
It'd be better. How about tennis?
Tennis used to be fun.
It used to be my favorite sport.
And I would play with people roughly my ability, and so it was a lot of fun.
But then the equipment got so good, the actual tennis racket, that even an average player can hit a serve so hard that a good player can't return it.
So tennis is a completely ruined sport because the equipment got so good that the whole serving part of it, which is so big a part of the sport, is not fun.
It's not even close to fun.
It's just the ball goes past you, or maybe you hit it, but it's just luck.
So tennis is a completely ruined sport because when the equipment got good, it just became not fun to play anymore.
That's why I don't play anymore.
So all of sports are broken.
Stop thinking that the athletes are broken.
There's nothing wrong with transgender athletes.
There's nothing wrong with any athletes.
People are just different.
Give everybody a way to play sports.
And the whole idea that women need to have trophies...
Aren't we over that?
I don't know why anybody needs a sports trophy unless they're a professional.
If you're a professional, then, yeah, I can see...
Having things arranged differently because it's for spectating.
But for school sports, get rid of sports in schools.
Now, those of you who are resisting, it's because your kids do well in sports.
If I had kids who did really well in sports, I would definitely want sports in schools.
But most kids are not good in sports.
So what's good for your kids might not be good for other people.
All right. Apparently two-thirds of voters or citizens, I don't know, maybe it's voters, like Biden's COVID plans.
So that includes a third of Republicans say he's doing okay in COVID. I'll give you my opinion.
He's doing okay. I think he's doing okay.
If I had to grade Biden for COVID response...
Pretty good. Now, there's still things that he needs to do better, but here's something he did really well.
Now, I know some of you aren't going to like this because I know the nature of my audience, but I need you to get used to this so it doesn't bother you in the future.
When Biden does something right, I'm going to call it out.
I'm not about just criticizing him for things I don't like.
So I'm going to do the same treatment that I gave Trump, but I'll do it for Biden.
And he's about to do something that's really, really smart, if he pulls it off.
And that is this. As you know, teachers' unions are the biggest threat to this country.
But the federal government doesn't want to exert direct control over unions because that's politically bad as well as the country isn't ready for that.
You don't want your federal government to put a boot on a union.
It's just not a good look.
But the school unions are the biggest problem in the country.
Because they're keeping the teachers out of schools, which keeps the schools closed.
So Biden is in favor of reopening the schools as soon as you can do that safely.
I think that's exactly what President Trump's opinion was.
Probably exactly what most of your opinions are.
So we can say, okay, good so far.
That Biden is pro-opening schools soon and safely.
But he can't get it done.
So what do you do? Well, what Biden is doing is he said, at least in his interview on CBS, he said that by Wednesday-ish, the CDC will have a, here's the fun part, science-based recommendations about how to open schools.
So presumably it will say if you take the following precautions, science says it's safe enough to open up schools.
So what happens...
When science, which Democrats love, I hear, they love their science.
Everybody loves science, so it's dumb to imagine there's somebody who is anti-science, but that's what they say about Republicans.
So Biden is setting up a situation in which his CDC will say, scientifically, it's okay to open up schools under these conditions, which most could meet.
What happens then when the teachers' unions say no?
Well, that will put the teachers' unions in a public disagreement with, wait for it, science.
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
Because Biden is a little bit handcuffed.
His own party is so close to the unions, he can't stomp on a union, but he needs to.
If you ask Biden privately, would you like to stomp on these unions and make them just agree to open up the schools with you safely?
I'm pretty sure he'd say yes, if I could.
If I had a way to stomp on them, I would.
Because it needs to be done.
I believe he would agree with that statement.
He would agree with most Republicans on that, and most people.
Most parents, for sure.
But he may have found a workaround.
He may have found a workaround.
We don't know yet, but setting up this public battle between science, as it will be presented by the CDC, and the schools that are supposed to teach science, as represented by the teachers' unions, right? Isn't that interesting?
That is really, really good.
If he does this right, and so far he's setting it up just right, That the news that's friendly to Biden, the news that propagandizes and brainwashes the public, what is the news going to do when Biden sets up, teaches unions are anti-science?
What's the news going to do?
It's pretty good.
I think the news is going to have to back science, aren't they?
How does CNN go against science when it's Biden's science?
They can't. I think he's created a situation in which he can use the public as a hammer and also use the news networks as a hammer against the teachers' unions.
And I don't know that there was a better play than that.
It's actually really good.
So if I'm going to be honest, and we're dealing with technique and persuasion, not politics per se, just technique, And persuasion, this is pretty good.
Now, we've got to see if he can take it home, right?
It's not good enough that he just puts it out there and then nothing happens.
He's going to have to sit on this scientific recommendation, and he's going to have to pound it.
But he could. He could do that.
I'm not going to rule him out, I'm not going to say he can't, I'm not going to say he won't, until he tries.
But if he lets this go, and the teacher unions just prevail after he's set it up that science says this and they say that, well that would be a pretty big failure, I think.
I think once he's set it up that science is on the opposite side from the teachers unions, he has to finish them.
He can't wound the teachers' unions.
He has to finish them off, at least on this topic, not completely.
So we'll see if he's got the guts to do that.
He might. We'll see.
And if he does, I will praise him for it.
So the news is saying, this is also something CBS said, Nora O'Donnell, said that at the current rate of vaccinations, it would take like a year to get 75% of people vaccinated, which might be what you need to stop the virus.
Do you think that that tells you something?
What should you think when somebody says, at the current rate, it will take a year?
How should you translate that in your mind?
Should you translate it into your mind as, it's going to take a year?
You shouldn't. Because what you should translate in your mind is that there's a learning curve here, and it's a pretty big one.
Meaning that on day one, you expect everything to go poorly because they've never done this before.
On day two, they're fixing the problems they saw on day one.
On day three, they're fixing the problems they saw on day two.
So by the time you get, let's say, six months into this, your learning curve should have gone through the roof.
And we're seeing now that Biden has been offered by, I guess the NFL offered, all of their stadiums.
Every football stadium has been offered as a mass vaccination place.
Where did that come from?
That just came out of nowhere, right?
And it's because we needed it.
So this is similar to the year 2000 bug when all the experts were saying, at our current rate, there's no way we'll be able to reprogram the computers, they'll crash, and society will be damaged by a lack of computing for a while.
But I said, no, you got it all wrong.
The learning curve suggests that the last few months before the actual year 2000, our ability to reprogram things will be way better than you could even imagine back even just a few months ago.
And what happened? Exactly that happened.
A few months before the year 2000 bug would have been a giant problem, private industry figured out how to rapidly reprogram it.
So they learn to do something quickly toward the end, which is the way you would normally expect these things to go.
So here's my prediction.
If they say that it would take a year at current rates, you could probably cut that in half.
You could probably cut it in half because we're probably a month away from really, really knowing what we're doing wrong and fixing it.
And then the rate of vaccination should just start going straight up.
That would be the normal thing to expect in a normal process of this type where everyone wants the outcome and we're all working toward it.
We just have to get rid of the wrinkles.
And it looks like that's happening.
Alright. Do you own Bitcoin?
How many of you own Bitcoin?
Because there's some news about Bitcoin.
Elon Musk, who continues to be the most interesting person on the planet, has said that Tesla will start accepting Bitcoin as payment for Tesla products.
Now, how important is that?
It's really important.
Because Elon Musk is a big enough player that he can make the currency have a value that it didn't have before.
Basically, he just made it a legitimate currency.
He has the power of a government.
Because it's a government that makes a currency a currency.
The government says, you can always pay us in dollars for your taxes.
So as long as the government will always take your dollars, your dollar always has a value, because you always have to pay your taxes.
They'll take your dollar, that dollar will always have a value.
But Bitcoin was not something that anybody had to take.
The government didn't take it in terms of taxes, and there weren't any big companies that would say, we'll only take Bitcoin.
And still are not, as far as I know.
But when somebody as big as Musk and a company as big as Tesla says, we will take it for our cars, a big-ticket item, Elon Musk just made Bitcoin a currency.
Like, a real currency.
He just did that with a frickin' tweet.
The richest, or second richest, he'll be richest at some point, probably.
Yeah, he'll be richest when he owns space.
He's on his way to be the richest, for sure.
Unless, say, Amazon gets there first, or Bezos gets there first.
So, that's a big deal.
I don't own any Bitcoin at the moment, and I don't make financial recommendations.
But I'm definitely going to be looking at Bitcoin a little harder.
Now, I used to own Bitcoin. I sold it when it was up at one point.
So it's not like I haven't made money in Bitcoin.
I just don't have any at the moment.
But I might change that.
We'll see. Meanwhile, Jake Tapper did a...
Did a, what would you call it, monologue or something about how there's been no real accountability for several prominent GOP leaders after the Capitol riot.
Now, I don't know what has happened to Jake Tapper, but I just don't know what's happened to him.
He looks like something's happened in his personal life or something, because his...
His demeanor on camera when he's talking about the Republicans and the need for accountability, it just feels demented and revenge-y and broken in some way.
He doesn't look like he's calling for justice.
He looks like he has a personal mental problem of some sort.
Now, I'm not saying he has a mental problem, because how would I know what's happening in anybody's head?
I'm telling you, the way it comes across is not like opinion.
It comes across as a mental problem.
That's how I read it.
Now again, I'm not saying he has a mental problem.
I'm saying that I perceive it that way.
That's just the way it looks.
It looks like he has some kind of a mental issue or emotional problem.
But when he talks about the no real accountability for several prominent leaders, here's what I hear.
I hear him looking to punish anybody who had a different opinion on this and extend that.
By extension, he didn't say this directly, but by extension, you would think that he would apply this to Trump supporters.
Including people like me.
Now, he didn't say that, so that's not something Jake Tapper says directly, but that's the message I hear.
That's what I hear when he talks about it.
But here's the interesting part.
In order for Jake Tapper to maintain his righteous indignation, he has to assume that this election was fair and free.
And that's making you think past the sale.
Because to the best of my knowledge, nobody could determine, given the lack of transparency of this election, and probably all of our elections, there is no way to know that it was fair and free.
There is only a way to know that it has not been proven in any court, That there was widespread fraud.
So those things can both be true at the same time.
We don't know if it was fair and free, but we do know for sure it hasn't been proven that it was fraudulent in any widespread way in a court.
Now we also know that courts are the wrong tool for doing that, because they reject the cases on different grounds than the fraud.
So that's our situation.
But for people like Jake Tapper to illegitimately claim that it would be, or at least the implication of making you think past the sale, is that we know for sure that the election was perfectly, perfectly good.
And we don't know that.
We only know that there's no proof it was bad.
Which is quite different.
When I see him gaslighting the public like this and calling for essentially revenge against a class of citizens, this is the worst fucking thing I've ever seen.
Did I warn you that there would be a little extra cursing today?
We're getting to the extra cursing portion of the program.
So this would be the part where you maybe want to take the kids away.
Jake Tapper has turned into a horrible, horrible person.
And the way I read this is an attack on part of the public, the viewing public.
Now, I am perfectly okay with Democrats mocking Trump supporters for being on the losing side of the election.
I mean, the Trump supporters did the same to Hillary supporters.
That's just all part of the process.
But Jake Tapper...
With all seriousness, talking about the real accountability of prominent GOP leaders, accountability for what, exactly?
Because he's calling this fucking takeover of a Viking horn guy and another guy with some twist ties, occupying some empty rooms in the Capitol building, he's calling that an insurrection or a coup.
What do you think the people who did that wanted?
Jake Tapper and CNN. What do you think they were asking for?
Were any of them asking for an illegitimate government to be installed?
No. Every one of those fucking people wanted the Constitution to be followed and the election to be fair.
Did any of them say, we would like a different president even though the election, we believe, was fair?
No. What were they asking for?
A change in who was the president based on non-constitutional methods?
No. They were asking for constitutional processes.
They were protesting too aggressively.
They need to pay for any too aggressive actions.
The legal system still has to do what it does.
But for people like Jake Tapper to sell this fucking thing as a coup when it wasn't, It was an attempt to make sure a coup had not happened in this country.
And people like Jake Tapper are selling the fucking coup, meaning, you know, at least the allegation that the election was not appropriate.
So branding these Democrats, I'm sorry, branding the GOP leaders who were asking for A little extra time for an audit.
And by the way, they didn't ask for anything to be delayed.
Ted Cruz was simply asking to use the time we have to do a little auditing.
That's it. That simple request, fair and reasonable, has been turned into.
They're a bunch of insurrectionist, treasonist people who need to be punished forever, and so do you if you support them.
You fucking piece of shit, Jake Tapper.
You fucking piece of shit.
I hope you see this.
I'm sure somebody will send it to you.
Jake, I used to like you, but you've turned into a very bad person.
As a human being, you should have something to think about.
You've gone way beyond telling the news, and you've gone way beyond having an opinion on the news that I don't agree with.
You've gone into fucking evil.
You are painting your fellow citizens with lies and fake fucking news from the fine people hoax to the drinking bleach fucking hoax in your whole fucking illegitimate fake news organization and now you've made it fucking personal.
It's personal now, fucking Jake Tapper.
This is personal. You fucking asshole.
You've made it personal.
Because, I'll tell you, the way people listening to you are going to take it is not...
I don't know what way you mean it, but if you're talking about generating violence in this country by your speech, you're doing it now, fucking Jake Tapper.
You are causing some real fucking problems.
These are real problems.
You're causing them with your way of talking.
What you could have done to help the country heal would be something along the lines of, hey, I know a lot of people had questions with the election, but it'd be better if we moved on now, try to fix them next time.
Maybe, Jake Tapper, you could be talking about what the country is doing to fix the election for the next fucking time.
Jake Tapper, do you have anything to say about that?
Do you have anything to say about the fact that you're not reporting on anything being done to fix the election for next fucking time?
How about that being the most important thing in the country and you don't even fucking mention it?
Because you're still on revenge.
You're still on getting back at these fucking Republicans.
You small fucking piece of shit.
Do something good for the country.
Do something good for the country.
Speaking of pieces of shit, Congress, the Democrats, seem unable to read the fucking room.
Because here's my feeling.
Was it appropriate for Democrats to criticize Republicans and protesters?
Sure. Criticism is always appropriate.
Always. We like a good free speech and give and take.
So no problem with anybody's opinions.
And I don't have any problem with anybody who broke any laws being punished to the full extent of the law, although there is a real question about free will here and brainwashing, etc.
So I wouldn't give them anything like bad sentences.
I mean, I would do suspended sentences if I were in charge of that.
But there has to be some response from the legal system for sure.
But here's the problem.
There's a limit to how far normal people are willing to be pushed.
And I think I just reached my limit.
So it's one thing to say, you know, you're a bad person because you were associated with Trump or whatever.
Okay. That's just free speech.
It's just opinion. But when you start making it like it's some kind of national priority to punish people, People who had a different political opinion, and punish people who don't think that our election system was transparent, you've gone too far.
And when you take President Trump, who is out of office and is no risk to anybody, and there's no chance he's going to run and win an election, there's no chance.
And you're just making this a complete waste of time, and you've decided that you can't do your regular work, which is essential.
Essential! The normal work of getting out the stimulus stuff, getting people nominated so they can do the work of the government.
Somehow, without all these nominations, there's no chaos in the Biden administration.
It's amazing. It's amazing.
Or it could be that there's just bad reporting.
We don't know. But here's my bottom line on this.
Going hard at Trump when he's in office?
Perfectly acceptable.
Going hard at him as hard as you want to go while he's in office.
Makes sense. We have that system.
I wouldn't object to it. But going hard at him after he's out of office is really going after me.
And many of you.
Because this isn't about Trump anymore, is it?
It really isn't. This is about the people who supported him.
This is about the public.
This is personal.
Criticizing politics?
Well, that's just politics.
This part of the Trump saga, the part where they're going to take two weeks out of the public's time for Congress, and they're going to grind on him, just to grind on you.
This is personal.
This has nothing to do with politics.
It's personal. And I take it personally.
So to the Democrats who are pushing this completely fucking useless waste of fucking time, I take it personally.
And every one of you fucking assholes who wants to make this personal vendetta, this revenge-filled fucking bullshit, if you want to waste my fucking time doing this, punishing me, go ahead.
But read the fucking room, because this isn't going to be free.
If you think you have a free punch, you're fucking wrong.
Because I don't get mad that easily, but I'm there.
If you can't make this impeachment thing trial go away...
You're fucking pieces of shit.
You don't care about the country.
You don't care about a fucking thing except revenge.
And you suck.
And there should be some way to make a penalty for this.
An editor for the Daily Beast wrote at me when I said the Democrats should read the fucking room.
He tweeted back a picture of one of the protesters with a Confederate flag standing in the Capitol building.
And he said, this room...
To which I say, fuck you, Daily Beast.
Fuck you. That wasn't me in there with a flag.
It's not clever.
We know there were people in a room.
You know that's not the point.
Just fuck you.
Just fuck every one of you who thinks that punishing these people to punish the rest of us is a good idea.
It's not a good idea.
It's a really bad idea.
Fuck. I'm going to have to run for president.
All right. That is my angry screed for the day.
Can you reflect on the immediate 60-day stand-down?
I don't know what that is. There's a 60-day stand-down of what?
Somebody says the person with the flag was Antifa.
Well, I doubt it.
But there could be some...
There could be some Antifa element there, but I don't think that's the whole story.
Jake's going to get you, somebody says.
You and Candace?
All right, I'm just looking at your comments.
I have your vote.
You know, the thing is that if anybody who looked at me on paper would say to themselves, well, there's no way he could get elected, but you have no idea what my capabilities are.
You have no idea.
One of the weird things about having my weird skill set for persuasion, and once you become a hypnotist, one of the things that occurs to you is that you can't use your full power.
Now, if there's anybody out here who has studied hypnosis and you've actually become a hypnotist, I'll bet you've had the same thought, haven't you?
Which is, it's a little bit too much power for a person.
And you have to make this decision about how much to use your persuasive ability.
Because if you use it too much, you're just eliminating people's free will, basically, if you took it to the max.
And I would not find that ethical or moral.
So in my case, I make a conscious effort to not be as persuasive as I could be, depending on the topic, right?
And I do that because I'm aware of, it's like being a prize fighter.
You know, you can't get in a street fight if you're a prize fighter.
Where's that old-time term come from?
If you're a professional boxer, you can't get in a street fight, because if you kill the guy, you had a deadly weapon because you're a professional boxer.
Blah, blah, blah. So hypnotists have a similar thing.
Which is, you have to make this decision about whether to change people's minds and whether you have the right to do that.
Do you have a right to change somebody's mind?
It's an interesting question, isn't it?
I mean, we do. I mean, legally we have the right.
But is it morally and ethically right to change somebody's mind about something?
Within reason it is, but there's a point beyond which it is no longer reasonable.
All right. I can't wait to see your campaign ads.
I don't know if I would campaign.
If I ran for president, I don't think I would even leave the House.
Because why should I? What is there that I could do in person that I couldn't do on video?
Nothing. I could run the entire campaign without leaving the House.
How would you debate Trump?
I wouldn't. If Trump were in the election, I wouldn't run.
Go after China?
Yeah, well, China would have to kill me.
If it looked like I were going to become president, China would probably have to have me taken out somehow.
Because China would not be in for a good run if I were president.
Where does the Republican Party go from here?
Well, the Republican Party has a real problem that they don't have a leader.
Now, on paper, Trump is sort of a leader, but he's missing in action.
Who exactly is the leader of the Republican Party?
Because if you don't have a leader, it doesn't really have a brand, per se.
And nobody has emerged.
It's a little too early.
There's too much Trump hanging over everything.
So it's a little too early for anybody to emerge.
You're seeing Tom Cotton.
Tom Cotton is clearly trying to make some space for himself.
Matt Gaetz. You see Rand Paul.
So those are the ones who are sort of floating up in prominence, but we'll see.
Would you admit the President can't control CO2? Well, why would I admit that?
Because the President can control CO2. A little bit.
The President can't control most of it, but they can control a little bit.
Biden didn't even campaign.
Yeah, you know, if you look at the Biden example, campaigning didn't seem that important.
It didn't seem that important.
You know, if I ran for president, all they would talk about is that I'm a hypnotist.
It would just make everybody crazy.
Because they wouldn't know.
The stories would be, we can't tell, is he hypnotizing us?
Is this hypnosis? Wait a minute.
Does he believe this, or is he just saying this?
It would make the news business would be crazy.
Let me tell you, since...
The only way I'd run for president is if I were so mad that I didn't care what happened to myself.
Like, if I lost all fear of personal harm, and that happens to me if I get mad enough.
I'm not there yet, but I'm getting close.
But you would have to know that you would be destroying your own life to run for president.
I think that's kind of built into the process now, unfortunately.
So being president of this country is sort of a kamikaze pilot run.
You don't come back.
It's sort of a one-way trip.
so maybe it's better if you're a certain age because your life is over when you're done in the current system you would not win trust me I would. Alright.
If you were that good, the media would never criticize you.
No, the media criticizes.
That's what they do. It doesn't matter what you do.
If you think that criticism follows actions, you haven't been paying attention.
Criticism follows team.
The team criticizes the other team.
That's just how the game is played.
It has nothing to do with what the other team is actually doing.
So let me make you this promise.
If I ran for president or somebody decided to take me out, there would immediately be a number of stories about my personal life that you would hear that would be very interesting.
Meaning that it would be things that would be designed to make you say, he did that in his personal life?
Well, I can't vote for that.
But here's the rule you should take.
You've heard the, what you call it, the gel man amnesia.
Theory that if you happen to be famous and you see stories about yourself in the news, you know those stories are false.
In fact, I just Googled something yesterday and it brought up some stories that included me.
And I'm reading the stories and every bit of it is just wrong.
I know it because the story is about me.
But I mean, just basic biographical, you know, what year things happened or why something happened, just completely made up crap.
And I know that stories about me are just made up.
But you don't.
You think stories about famous people are probably usually mostly true, right?
Not even close. Stories about famous people are usually false.
Usually. Because at least there's context left out.
And the stories about me are usually false and have been for 30 years that I've been tracking it.
Usually false. Very misleading.
Usually. Not sometimes.
Usually. If you don't understand the usually part, you don't understand anything about the news.
So, if I ran for president, you would see a bunch of stories about me.
How would you know if they were true?
Because you would hear stuff that would be just like shocking.
I don't even know what it would be, because most of it wouldn't be true.
Or it would be stuff that's true, but it's out of context, so it looks bad when it really wasn't, right?
So what percentage of those would you guess are true?
Probably not many, if any.
So here is the advice I would give you.
If I run for president, Someday.
You should assume that all of the stories about my personal life are true.
All of them. Just assume they're all true.
Except anything that alleges I broke a law.
Because that's probably not true.
But anything that looked like it wasn't breaking a law, but it was just really bad behavior, just like really bad behavior, assume it's true.
Because if I couldn't win the presidency anyway, I'd be surprised.
You could assume every bad thing about me that isn't against the law.
It's completely true.
It won't be. Of course it's not going to be true.
It's going to be 75% false, at least, if not 100.
But I wouldn't even talk you out of it.
If somebody said, oh, Scott, you did X or Y, and it was just like the worst sounding thing you'd ever heard in your life, but it wasn't illegal, do you know what I'd say?
I prefer you believe that.
I'm not going to talk you out of anything interesting.
If you think I did something with a gerbil that didn't hurt the gerbil, okay.
Fine with me. Go ahead and believe it.
In fact, if it makes me more interesting, A+. So yeah, just make up any story you want.
The thing that makes me dangerous is that I'm not beholden to anybody.
I'm just not.
So I don't know how often you can get a president who is not beholden to anybody, but I would be one.
Taking people out of it is the whole point of a smear story.
Yeah. Christina would be an elegant first lady.
She'd be terrific. She'd hate it.
I don't think she would like the job, so...
I'd really have to be angry to run for president because it would be bad for the marriage.
All right, that's all for now, and I will talk to you later.
Remember that Periscope will go away, I think, in March.
And so you'll always find me live on livestream on YouTube, which I run simultaneously.
And so when Periscope is gone, just look for me on YouTube.
Just Google. Real Coffee with Scott Adams or look at my Twitter feed.
It'll always be there near the top.
And that is all.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers. I've got another minute with you.
Aloha. How's Hawaii?
They'd say I left my ex-wife for a younger woman.
Yeah, they would say all of that stuff.
How do they...
All right, just looking at your comments.
All right, thanks for all your comments.
I'm not ready to run for president yet, but that would be fun.
You know, if I picked a vice president, I would have to do what Trump did.
So Trump picked Pence so that there was one person who knew how government worked in the team.
And I would do the same thing.
If I ran for president, I would pick as a running mate a traditional, probably a congressperson or a governor or something like that.
But I can't imagine any real politician who would want to be my running mate.
