Episode 1286 Scott Adams: Science as Propaganda, Democrats Turn on Each Other, How to Apologize to Chris Harrison
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Who was first to use the phrase, "the big lie"
Confusion over Vitamin D for COVID-19
COVID infection rate is falling suddenly, rapidly
Fareed Zakaria's Biden review
Chris Harrison's massive apology
BBC banned in China
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
The best time of the day.
Every single time.
Come on in. Come on in. We've got stuff to talk about.
Fun stuff. Good stuff.
Really incredible stuff.
I hope you have heat.
Omar, good to see you.
Thanks for inviting people.
Let's talk about all the news.
But before we do that, Let's get ready, okay?
You know how to get ready. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Except maybe your vaccination.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
It's famous all over the world, and you're about to enjoy it.
Go! You know, as good as this is, it's still underrated.
Yeah, it still is.
I don't know if there's any way to express how good that is.
Well, let's see if we can do a little bit better on YouTube today.
Those of you watching on YouTube today may have said to yourself, Hey Scott, I was watching you yesterday on a live stream and suddenly your live stream froze up.
Was it because of the content?
Don't know. So I don't believe I got any kind of a written notice from YouTube.
But let me see if I did.
I only read my email about once every few days.
Maybe I should check my email.
See if YouTube was warning me.
YouTube. Let's see.
Nope, I don't see any messages from YouTube.
Looks like it wasn't anything about that.
So, was it because I was talking about the Rasmussen poll in which I used words to describe something that Democrats call the big lie?
Now, I believe I can refer to the big lie, because that's approved speech.
But I can't refer to what the big lie refers to.
Because I think if I say that, the algorithm might be not going to be offline.
But here's a question for you, and I would like to issue a challenge to those of you who are really good at looking for data.
And the challenge goes like this.
I want you to find for me the first use by, let's say, somebody who's at least a blue check.
A blue check Twitter use, or it could be an article, or it could be something you saw on TV. But let's say a major, something on a major network, or from a blue check person, the first person who used the phrase, the big lie... When referring to the election allegations.
Alright? So see if you can find the first use of that.
Here's why I'm mentioning it.
Alright, there's a...
There's a...
What would I call it?
I'm not going to call it a conspiracy theory yet, because that would imply that somebody believes it, I suppose.
But let's say there's a suggestion...
That the Democrats have been pulling from a source...
Let's say that they found a source of power that they used successfully in the past year and especially successfully in the election.
Now, I'm not saying this is true.
So this is not me saying, oh, this is a true thing.
This is me saying, I've heard people say this is true.
Just putting it out there.
I'll probably be kicked off of you.
There is a really good...
Well, how did you get ahead of me?
How did somebody get ahead of me in the comments?
I thought I was going to surprise you all with this, and somebody in the comments is already at the end point.
So let me just skip to the end.
It has been said, and I can't confirm this, but it has been said that if you read the right...
Nazi propaganda stuff.
If you read how the Nazis brainwashed their own public, you will learn their techniques, and it's really strong technique.
Now, I don't know how much, if any, of that would be in Mein Kampf.
I haven't read it. I don't plan to.
Now, as a hypnotist, as a trained hypnotist who has much interest in all things persuasion, When I heard that there is this secret, powerful source of persuasive technique, I said to myself, I'd sure like to know what that is.
And then the smarter part of my brain says, don't go looking for that, Scott.
Don't you go looking for that.
Because sooner or later, somebody's going to say, have you ever read Mein Kampf?
And I don't want to answer yes, and I don't want to lie.
So I'm not going to read it, right?
So that's not going to be on my reading list.
But it has been said by people that I believe are quite smart and well-informed that if one were to go down that dark path, they would find some persuasion techniques that are solid gold.
And, of course, obviously work.
Now, when I hear this phrase, the big lie...
Which obviously has its origins from a quote from Nazi Germany that if you tell a lie that's big enough, a big enough lie, it's easier to sell it than a small lie.
And so we see the Democrats referring to any allegations about the election as the big lie.
So they've sort of taken this imagery from the Nazis and applied it, but that's not what I'm talking about exactly.
I mean, that specific example is not necessarily an example of specific Nazi propaganda.
Then there's also the suggestion that the Nazis didn't invent it, that they actually got it from America.
From our advertising technology.
Bernays, famous guy in that field.
So I don't know if any of that's true.
So I don't know if our marketing came from the Nazis or the Nazis got their technique from our marketing.
I don't know. But there are suggestions that that's out there.
And the suggestion is that the Democrats...
Powered up by studying these techniques.
Now, I don't know if that's true, and I'm not going to say that I've seen any evidence of it firsthand, but I want you to just research this one question.
Who first, who was prominent, you know, prominent person, who first used the phrase the big lie when talking about the 2020 election?
Find that out for me.
Because you might find out where this stuff is coming from.
Now, the person who said it first isn't going to be the person who necessarily came up with the idea.
But you might find out who is talking to the people coming up with the ideas.
So it might tell you something.
Just let me know if you find out where that came from.
Because this big lie thing...
Is suggestive of somebody at a higher level of persuasive talent than the average politician just throwing out insults to the other team.
It has a feel, this big lie thing because it caught on and everybody seemed to be using it, it has a feel of a professional.
Not Cialdini.
And the reason I say that is because, as far as I know, all information that I have access to is that Gialdini is not a bad person.
And whoever came up with this, whoever came up with this big lie thing, there's some bad people back there behind the curtain.
And I don't think he's one of them.
So I would be surprised, amazed, really, if he had anything to do with this.
So let me support him that way.
All right. Let me summarize my feeling about the impeachment decision, the acquittal.
So, first of all, I'm going to say that Trump is somebody who was acquitted twice of impeachment charges.
Some will say he was impeached twice, and technically that is correct.
But it's also true that he was acquitted both times.
So when I talk about it, just to annoy people, I'm going to focus on the acquitted part.
She says, come on, man, finish.
Well, I did finish. So the theory there is that there might be some Nazi technology that the Democrats are using, but just figuring out where that big lie started might give you a hint as to whether or not they're using any super persuasion.
If I had been in the Senate, I would have voted to convict Trump on this latest impeachment.
So let me say that as clearly as possible.
If I were in the Senate, Republican or Democrat, I would have voted to convict Trump for impeachment.
But I would be completely ignoring the charge.
And I would be completely ignoring the Constitution to do it.
And do you know why I would do that?
I would feel he didn't do enough to save me.
It would just be personal.
So if I were voting, I would just vote personally.
I would say, I don't think you did enough to save me.
It's personal. I wouldn't even care about the Constitution.
I'm being honest. I wouldn't even care about the Constitution.
Wouldn't care about the President.
Wouldn't care if it looked like a lie.
Wouldn't care about fucking anything.
If I had been in the Senate and my President didn't do enough to stop it after it started, Forget about whether he incited it.
I wouldn't convict him for inciting, because I don't think that's real.
I just wouldn't have. But if I didn't think he did enough to save my fucking life, oh yeah, I'd vote to convict.
I wouldn't even care what the Constitution said.
I'm being honest.
I would ignore the Constitution.
I would ignore my duty as an elected official, and I would have voted to convict his ass for not doing enough to save me.
Period. Now, I'm not in the Congress, right?
I'm not in the Senate. So I don't have to vote that way.
And I have the comfort of having some distance.
I don't have any PTSD. It's not personal to me.
And under those conditions, I actually agree with Mitch McConnell's vote.
I agree that it probably is pretty important to at least try to establish maybe a mini-precedent That the Senate doesn't have jurisdiction over people out of office.
Now, the Senate voted that they do have jurisdiction.
Do you like a situation where the Senate can vote to give themselves constitutional powers?
Because it feels like that's what happened, if that's not technically what happened.
But doesn't it feel like the Senate just voted itself some new constitutional powers?
By voting that it was constitutional to impeach a president who's left office.
I think McConnell was the adult in the room where he said everything that needed to be said about the situation.
He expressed his personal disgust, which I would have shared completely had I been in the building and been in the Senate.
Agree completely with Mitch McConnell on that topic.
But I like the fact that he made his final decision based on a point of systems integrity, really.
Systems integrity.
You don't want to be, even if it's legal, you don't want to be impeaching people out of office.
It's just not good for the future.
So, good for him.
Now, the most interesting thing that's happening as a big trend is that the news business...
It has run out of targets, because Trump is not there, and he is the best target for them.
So they're starting to turn on Democrats, because the Democrats have power, and they report about power, and to do their job they're going to be, let's say, appropriately aggressive about challenging power.
And we're seeing that happen in some interesting ways, but it's still kind of polite.
There's a level of politeness now, even though they're going after some Democrat targets.
So here's some examples. Jake Tapper, to his credit, this weekend he went really hard at Governor Cuomo.
Not only for the nursing home decision to release infected people to nursing homes, but also for the cover-up of the number of people who were there.
And it didn't look like, to me, it didn't look like he was pulling any punches.
It looked like, at least Jake Tapper, went hard after Governor Cuomo.
And I feel it was entirely appropriate.
So, I'm going to call it out when something that makes sense happens.
But he also went hard, Jake Tapper did, at the head of the CDC on school openings.
If you haven't seen that clip of Jake Tapper interviewing the new director of the CDC... You have to watch that.
It's really interesting.
Because there are two things.
Number one, it's clear that she wasn't answering the question in a coherent way, and that's her biggest job.
If you're the director of the CDC, you could be right, or you could be wrong, but you need to be clear.
You need to You need to communicate in a way that people understand what it is you're saying.
At least understand what you're telling us.
Could be wrong, could be right.
We get that, right? People aren't right every time.
But man, she was a shipwreck.
And watching Jake Tapper press her, and let me give CNN credit for this.
It felt like they could have cut that...
They could have cut that short.
Because he let her talk for a long time, not answering the question.
And it looked like maybe the producers probably were whispering in his ear, just stay on this.
Like, don't let this go.
And he just stayed on it.
And watching it live, or it was live when it happened, but recorded when I saw it, it was really interesting to watch him press her.
Now, the problem was that he was pressing her To be true to the statement that they would follow science.
Now you know what the trap is, right?
There's a trap.
When you become the party that says we're going to follow science, you just painted yourself in the fucking corner.
Because people don't agree what science is, and guaranteed there will be times when your politics make you take a decision that doesn't look like science.
So the Democrats have painted themselves in a very bad corner, And Jake Tapper just cornered the director of the CDC and just spanked her for like five minutes.
And the problem was that she couldn't explain how we could use science to reopen the schools.
So it used to be, yes, Fauci and others were saying reopen the schools, and now that's morphed into reopen the schools after the stimulus thing gets passed, And then maybe they can buy enough mitigating stuff like masks and shields and stuff that maybe someday under the right conditions, and also if the infection rate got down to a low enough level, if all of this happens, then we can reopen schools.
And Jake, to his credit, was looking for a little more clarity than that, because he's saying, but we probably can't do that stuff effectively.
I'm doing a bad job of paraphrasing.
But the effective pushback was, yeah, but you said we could open schools, science says, but now you're saying that the way to do it is actually functionally impossible.
So are you saying open schools, or are you saying we can't really do it because we can't get to there from here?
There are too many requirements to be met, and it just can't happen, at least within the time that we want it to.
And watching him hammer her was fun, but I have to say, it looked a lot more polite than it would have been in the Trump administration, I think.
I think that the CDC director would have been annihilated if she'd been in the Trump administration.
As it was, Jake was just treating her like she was being obtuse or intentionally wasn't being useful.
And that came across, and I think he was right about that.
All right, so here's what I tweeted this morning, and it's probably the most important thing you need to know.
Nobody is following the science.
And the reason that nobody is following the science, even though some people say they are, is that it's not a thing.
Following the science is like saying, well, Today I'm going to saddle up my unicorn and go for a ride on my flying unicorn.
It's something you can say, but you can't do it.
You can't do it because there's no unicorn that flies.
Likewise, you have no access to science.
You don't. When you talk about science, did you do the study?
Were you there? No!
The only thing you have is if somebody wrote up what happened when you weren't there, and then somebody else read what somebody else wrote about something, and then they interpreted it, and put their spin on what that means, and then you heard it, and then your brain interpreted it again, probably wrong.
You are so many levels away from science.
Is that like three entire levels away from science?
So to say that you follow the science is a lot like saying you ride a flying unicorn.
You can't.
All you can do is listen to what People who read something written by scientists said, who don't know how to interpret it necessarily, who don't know if those scientists were paid, who don't know if that study was going to be repeatable and something that lives or something that dies.
What percentage confidence should you put on a new study that says...
Let's say tomorrow a new study comes out and real scientists review it.
It's peer-reviewed.
It's in a publication. And it says that eating mashed potatoes will protect you from coronavirus.
Now, it doesn't matter what it says.
Just say there's a new study.
What percentage odds would you put on the new study...
That it ends up being true.
You know, it takes more studies and you have to repeat it.
It takes a long time to know if something's true.
But if you hear the first study, mashed potatoes helps you cure coronavirus, what percentage confidence should you put on that?
Zero. Zero.
If you don't know that you should put zero confidence on that and you think you're following science, You're not.
Because if you put more than zero confidence on that, you don't understand science.
Now, here's the best way to look at a new study that makes a claim.
The most productive way to look at it is that that study has entered into the set of possible explanations a new possibility.
So if a study says something's true according to the study...
Your interpretation as a citizen should be that's one more thing that could be true.
It's now in the set of things you should consider.
But the odds of it being true are just small.
That's the way new studies work.
You should put very low confidence in them.
Now, unfortunately, if those studies agree with what you want to be true, like every time I see a vitamin D study that suggests it's going to help with coronavirus, I want to believe that, because I had said early on that I thought it would be true.
So since it agrees with what I want to be true, I'm like, I'm going to believe those studies.
But then you look into them a little bit, And the vitamin D that they're talking about is not the kind you can buy over the counter.
It's not even the kind you can get from being in the sun.
It's like some special, you know, activated kind of vitamin D. I don't even understand the details, which is my point.
What could be easier than this question?
Science says vitamin D helps against coronavirus.
You could understand that, right?
Did a bunch of studies.
We found that the vitamin D is low in people who die from coronavirus on average.
Therefore, what?
We can't even interpret that correctly.
Because most of the people would say, oh, you just proved that taking more vitamin D will help with my coronavirus.
And nothing like that happened.
Here's what was proven.
There's a correlation.
But you don't know which way it goes.
It could be that people who are sickly in general have low vitamin D. So of course they're the ones dying.
It could be that the people were saved by vitamin D in the studies where they gave them vitamin D once they had symptoms.
And you can see that this group didn't progress to get sick.
And then you say, great, I'll go to the store, I'll buy some vitamin D, I'll go in the sun and I'll be good.
But you have misinterpreted.
What they meant by vitamin D, because that's not the vitamin D you can buy.
It's the activated stuff.
Now, is what I'm saying true?
When I say that the studies say it's regular, that when they mention vitamin D, they don't mean the kind you can buy over the counter.
It's like the special hospital version of activated vitamin D, whatever that is.
Is anything I said now true?
How the hell would you know?
How would you know?
Am I a scientist?
Did I do a study on vitamin D? What you should believe about anything I just said about vitamin D is zero.
Zero credibility.
That's what you should put on what I just said.
The only thing you should take away from it is, let's put vitamin D into the set of things which might be important.
That's about it. That's about all you can say.
You can't say it works.
You can't say that taking vitamin D will help you.
You can't say any of those things.
And if you thought that you acquired any sense of certainty by listening to me, I hope you didn't.
Because you shouldn't.
So when we talk about the news, think about the people who...
I'm sorry, when we think about science...
Think about the people who tell you what the science is.
So the same organizations and groups of people who tell you what the science says, they interpret for you the science, brought you the Russia collusion hoax.
They brought you the president says you should drink bleach for coronavirus hoax.
They brought you the fine people hoax, the Covington kid hoax.
Do I have to go on?
I could just list hoaxes all day long.
And then I can list things that they said wrong that they corrected.
For example, the New York Times is correcting the story that one of the capital assault rioter people killed a law enforcement guy by hitting him with a fire extinguisher.
So that was the actual news.
Officer Sicknick, I think.
So that was the news and the paper of record for how long?
And now the news is, well, none of that happened.
None of that happened. This is the same news that reported that this was a coup attempt on January 6th, or an insurrection.
Nothing like that happened.
But it was in the news.
I mean, it was certainly a riot, and it was bad, and it was bad in all the ways that violence and illegal activities are bad.
But it wasn't a coup.
They weren't going to haul the United States because they captured a room, right?
So if the science that you have access to is filtered through the least credible organization in the world, well, no, the least credible organization...
No, maybe the world. I'll put that out there because I've got another point about that.
You're literally getting it from professional liars, and that's what we're believing.
Hey, let's trust the science, as interpreted by professional liars with a gigantically long track record of serial hoaxing.
So I've started to think that anybody who says follow the science is operating at a low level of awareness.
Doesn't mean they're dumb.
Doesn't mean they're dumb.
Doesn't mean that their IQ is low.
Doesn't even mean that they're not well informed.
It's just a low level of awareness.
If you're not aware that people don't have access to science, that's a pretty low level of awareness.
A higher level is that you could have all the access you wanted.
It wouldn't make any difference because you can't understand the papers, and it's being interpreted by other people that will influence you.
All right. Speaking of science, now the CDC says that more than 38 million Americans have received their first dose of the vaccine.
That's what, a little over 10% of the country has the first dose.
So somewhere between 5 and 10% of the country probably is vaccinated, which honestly feels pathetic.
Doesn't it? It honestly feels pathetic.
Now, I think the Biden administration maybe takes a little responsibility because they're new, but I'd say that's on the Trump administration, that we don't have enough of it.
So when we decided, was it impossible to make more of it that quickly?
Maybe this is just the most you could make.
So it could be that we shouldn't be blaming any administration for Maybe it's just hard, and everybody was trying as hard as they could, and that's just all you could do.
But here's what else the CDC says, at least one person from it.
Quote, it's what we're doing right, staying apart, wearing masks.
So the point was that the infection rate has dropped considerably.
So infection rates have dropped a lot recently.
Does that make any sense to you?
Why would infection rates drop a lot when vaccinations are not really even about infections?
Well, a lot of people thought it was maybe the vaccinations were already starting to work, but the rate of infections dropping was way too big for the few amount of vaccinations relative to the population.
It didn't really make sense.
So now they're saying that the reason that we're dramatically lowering Infections is that people are doing a better job of staying apart and wearing masks and not traveling and not mixing with others.
Endorse says Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the...
Oh, former director of the CDC. So it's not the CDC. It's the former director.
Now, that's science, right?
So did you just learn some science?
And now an official person just gave you some science.
So do you buy it?
This isn't science.
This is people talking about science and speculating and guessing, blah, blah, blah.
But here's what's obviously wrong with this.
In the comments, answer this.
Your personal observation.
Forget about the rest of the world.
Just talking about your friends and family, your co-workers, people in your immediate vicinity.
Are they doing better or worse lately?
Let's say the last month.
Better or worse as social distancing and masking?
So in your comments, just say better or worse.
Are people doing better or worse lately in social distancing?
I'm going to vote worse.
That's my experience.
That people are socially distancing less, not more.
So I'm looking at your comments now as they're starting to come in.
I'm saying, I'll just read them.
Same, worse, worse, better.
Let's see, lots of them going by.
Same, worse, worse, no change.
Worse, worse.
Same, same, same.
Better. Exactly the same.
Worse, same. Worse by far.
No change. Definitely worse.
Worse, worse, worse. All right.
So the... It looks like the impression, on average, people are different, but on average it looks like our observations, and keep in mind, we're people from all over the country, in many cases all over the world.
I don't see better masking.
I don't see better.
Not at all. So, this is our science, right?
Here's a guy who is Dr.
Tom Frieden. He was a former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So, that's science, right?
But it doesn't match your observation.
So what are you going to believe?
Doesn't this sound a little political?
Or maybe it's about keeping you masked?
Does this sound like science?
Or does this sound like propaganda?
It's propaganda, isn't it?
Because this is somebody who, let's just say, has good intentions.
Because I do think everybody involved in the coronavirus stuff, there's nobody who has bad intentions, unless China does.
But, you know, there's nobody working on this who has bad intentions.
They're trying to help.
But is he trying to give you science?
Or is he trying to help?
Because sometimes they're different.
If he had told you the science, maybe you wouldn't behave the way that is best for you.
So it looks like he may be trying to get people to behave a certain way, and that's not science.
That's politics, persuasion, opinion, yeah.
So, all right.
Benjamin Weingarten tweeted this, and this is like such a big point.
It's like a small tweet.
You'll miss it, but such an important point.
He says, the New York Times casually asserts Russian intervention was a factor behind Trump winning in 2016.
So there was a recent story in which they just threw it in a list of factors of why Trump won, including Hillary Clinton being a bad candidate, etc.
But Russian intervention was one of the reasons.
And as Benjamin points out, he says, this will be how the history is written.
And it's an absolute farce.
But when you casually insert the lie over and over, it becomes my truth for the ruling class.
This is literally history...
Being incorrectly written right in front of you.
Because is it true, is it a true statement that Russian intervention was a factor?
Well, what do you call a factor?
Would a few bad memes on Facebook be a factor?
Well, suppose they changed one vote.
How small does the impact have to be before you don't call it a factor?
I feel as though it might be technically true that there was Russian intervention because we've seen that there are some memes that looks like they were behind.
But some of them were pro-Hillary Clinton.
And some of them were pro-Trump.
I think more were pro-Trump.
But there weren't many of them.
I don't know anybody who saw one.
I've never heard of anybody who says they saw one, because there's a list of which ones were the Russian memes.
I never saw one until I looked at the list of Russian memes.
And when you look at them, it's obvious that they wouldn't have changed any votes.
They looked like they were done by high school students as part of a class project.
So when the New York Times just throws that in there, like it's just now common knowledge, and one of the reasons was the Russian intervention, blah, blah, blah, blah, It just becomes history.
And it's not even close to true.
As far as we know, it's not even close to true.
And the New York Times just turned it into the truth by repetition and just throwing it in there like everybody knows this.
It's common knowledge, Russian intervention.
It's amazing to watch this happen right in front of you.
And then apparently the New York Times did a little...
Correction on their story about the police officer killed by the fire extinguisher.
So they had reported that until the...
Until the impeachment trial was over.
So before the impeachment trial, the Democrats had made a big deal about Trump supporters allegedly killing this guy with a fire extinguisher.
Now, I'm not for any trolls watching.
I'm not defending anybody who did anything bad in the Capitol.
They all need to answer to the justice system for whatever they did.
Nobody's arguing that.
But this was a lie.
It just wasn't true.
And it was reported by the paper of record, as the New York Times has been called in the past.
I don't think they deserve that title anymore, because they've done enough fake news that you can't really say if it's in the New York Times, it's likely to be true anymore, unfortunately.
So there you see it.
Major propaganda happening right in front of you.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Minneapolis decided that they were going to increase their budget to recruit more officers, police officers, because of the sharp rise in crime and the fact that a number of officers quit.
So the whole defund the police turned into fund the police more because defunding the police didn't work.
Now, is it a coincidence that That after Biden is elected and after the trial, that all of this news starts coming out to show that maybe Trump was a little bit more right than you thought, and maybe the Democrats were a little bit more wrong than you thought.
You know, it's just in little ways the truth is sort of, if it is the truth, starting to come out that you say to yourself, huh...
I wonder if we had known this truth some months ago, if things might have gone a different way.
I've told before that one of my favorite news people is Farid Zakaria, even when I don't agree with him.
He is wracked with a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome, but he puts on a really good show.
There's a lot of good content on there.
And he was criticizing Biden...
Now here's the funny part.
He started out with his criticism of Biden's foreign policy by saying that Biden was so far a giant success in domestic policy.
And I thought to myself, he is?
What giant success are we talking about?
Because I haven't seen any.
And Fareed's example of a giant domestic success is that Biden focused on defeating the coronavirus.
To which I said, okay, I like the fact that he's focusing on it as a high priority, but what'd he do?
What's different? What did Biden do that would not have happened under Trump?
Was Trump going to stop giving vaccinations?
And what about opening the schools?
Right? Trump wanted to open the schools.
And now Biden's not so keen on that idea.
So I don't see any big domestic success.
I don't see any of them.
At all. Nothing you could call that.
But then Fareed goes on to criticize Biden for having said that they would get back into the Iran nuclear deal and that they've been saying that for years.
But then when it was time to do it, because Biden now has the power, what do you think they decided to do?
They put it under review.
That's right. One of the main things that Biden was running on, he's not sure he wants to do.
So for years they've been criticizing Trump, and then when it was their turn to make the decision, they said not, well, we better do what we've been saying for years we should do.
No. They said we better look into it.
What the actual fuck?
They can't even make a decision on one of their main international things?
That's pathetic.
Now, I'm actually happy that he's not making the decision.
I'm happy that he's reviewing it.
It's always good to review things.
I think they're going to end up very close to where Trump was.
I think they're going to end up adopting something pretty close to Trump's policy on Iran, which is the opposite of what they said we should do.
So give Fareed credit for calling this out.
This was a good point.
But there's more.
Of course, Trump was tough on China and he wanted sanctions on trade, which we have.
So Biden takes over and he was the gigantic critic of trade wars.
Big critic of trade wars.
It's a huge mistake to have a trade war with China.
Now he's in charge.
Did he immediately reverse the trade sanctions?
Nope. What he did was he said the sanctions would be, quote, under review.
Under review.
Now, he ran for office saying it was a gigantic mistake and it's obvious to everyone.
But now when it's his job, he's not so sure.
What did we elect?
Did you elect somebody with policies?
Apparently not.
All you elected was somebody who would study, who would look into it.
All you got was the guy who said he'd look into it.
That's it. That's it.
I'd look into it. How about the Cuba policy?
He was going to be not as hard on Cuba as Trump was.
But nothing's changed.
But they've got it under review.
It's under review.
So remember what I told you as soon as it looked like Biden was going to be the president-elect?
I told you this.
He's going to have a real problem reversing a lot of Trump's stuff Because Trump's stuff, a lot of it, was right.
No matter how much you think he did wrong, there was a whole bunch of stuff Trump did right.
And they were criticizing everything he did like it was all the same.
It didn't matter, it was just Trump did it, it must be wrong.
And now they've got a real problem.
They've painted themselves into a corner in which they either have to do something that I think at this point they would even admit would be stupid and bad for the country...
Or admit that they were lying the whole time.
Keep in mind that Biden ran to get rid of the liar.
That was just about the most important thing besides the fine people hoax.
Those were like his two pillars.
Where get rid of the liar and get rid of this guy who said this fine people thing.
Which never happened.
So Biden ran...
On honesty.
And apparently he's breaking a lot of promises.
Now, one of the things that I don't think Trump gets enough credit for is that, well, I would not defend his fact-checking.
You know, 20,000 whatever, however many things he said that didn't pass the fact-checking.
I don't argue against that.
I'm sure that that's a big number, whatever it is.
But... He did keep his campaign promises better than just about anybody ever has in the history of the world.
If you had a choice of somebody you think is nice and tells you the truth, but they don't keep their campaign promises, or somebody who tells a bunch of hyperbole and bullshit, but they keep their campaign promises, which one do you pick?
I think I'd take the campaign promise keeper every time.
I think I would.
And I don't think Trump will ever get enough credit for that.
I would say his attempt to keep his promises, even if you count the border wall as not successful, you could make a case either way.
But he certainly tried like hell to keep his promises.
He tried like hell to do what he said he was going to do.
I feel like that was one of the most, I don't know, probably some of the best leadership of all time.
You know, that doesn't take away from anything you want to criticize him about for the capital assault, etc.
But he did keep his promises like a mofo, and I'm not going to forget that.
Alright. So, even if you didn't like what he promised, at least he kept his promise.
There's a really funny video that I tweeted about somebody, I think they were on a bicycle, going around New York City looking at the outdoor dining.
Have you seen it? It is really funny.
Because a lot of the restaurants have built outdoor dining enclosures, some of them better than others.
Now, in my town, where the weather is relatively, you know, doesn't get super cold, they can put little heaters in there, and they can have an open flap, so you're actually a little bit closer down doors, even though you've got some material-like, you know, tent material up.
But you've got one side that's completely open, that's a lot of airflow.
Not bad. But in New York City, apparently a number of restaurants have just built a separate building on the sidewalk.
It's got actual walls, like wooden walls, real windows.
You go to the store and you buy a window.
You just put it, actually, glass window.
A physical door.
But in some cases, they'll leave the door off.
But it's otherwise just indoors.
But it doesn't have air conditioning.
It doesn't have air circulation.
So the fact that the door is open, how is that really different than just having the restaurant itself open and leaving the door open?
Just leave the door open.
How is it exactly different?
What if we just said restaurants can have outdoor seating and outdoors is now defined as anything with the door open.
And the windows. Maybe windows and or doors or something like that.
But I suppose if you were to turn off the heat and the air conditioning indoors, open at least one door and one window.
Maybe you need some kind of a cross-current.
I don't know. I would think that we should just make that change.
Somebody says outdoors equals no doors.
Yeah. So the fact that New York is doing that is hilarious, but you have to see this video of the guy looking at them.
Chris Harrison, TV host of The Bachelor, got in trouble for saying...
He said this about one of the contestants who had, in 2018, appeared at a plantation-themed party, or antebellum or something, party about the Old South, and people said, hey, that's... Effectively, that it makes light of slavery, because that was the era of slavery, etc.
So the contestant was getting heat, and then when Chris Harrison was asked about it, he said something about 2018, we looked at things differently than we do in 2021.
But it was sort of a weak non-comment.
He wasn't going hard at her, which I understand, but he also...
Wasn't going too easy on her.
He was just saying, well, you know, you have to understand the context.
Well, that was enough to get him cancelled, and he had to take some time off from the show.
We don't know how long. But here's the part that I loved.
His apology, his public apology, for an infraction that I would call, on a scale of 1 to 10, a 1, maybe?
I'm not going to say it wasn't a mistake, but on a scale of 1 to 10, a 1, 1.5, something like that.
But what he did was he gave an apology that was a 10.
So he apologized like he had just slain an entire orphanage.
Like he went way above what you would expect for a crime that was a 1.5 out of 10.
And to the point where I thought it was hilarious.
And this has given me my idea for when I get cancelled.
Because you know I'm going to get cancelled.
Right? Sort of a matter of time, wouldn't you say?
And I don't know that I'll be cancelled for something I said or meant.
I'm likely to be cancelled for something that somebody misinterpreted that I said or meant.
You all see this coming, right?
It's like this giant train light coming right at me down the tunnel.
I mean, if I don't get cancelled, I'd be amazed.
But it looks like it's coming sooner or later.
I think they just have to wait for the right day, meaning my enemies, many.
They have to wait for the right opportunity.
They've come after me many, many times, but haven't quite got the kill shot yet.
So I know it's coming. It's coming.
But when they cancel me, I will be issuing an apology.
And I'm going to tell you right now, it's going to be the funniest apology you've ever read.
And do you know why it's going to be funny?
Because I'm going to play it serious.
I am going to apologize so hard that you will be screaming with laughter.
I will do an apology like nobody's ever apologized.
And I'm going to make the apology so out of whack with the size of the imagined infraction, whatever they come up with for me, that you are just going to laugh your fucking ass off.
And you'll read it over and over.
But I got the idea from Chris.
Chris Harrison, I swear to God, I can't tell if he's kidding.
I just don't know if he's joking.
I think he's serious, but I don't know, which is beautiful.
That's what I want to go for, too.
So he says, in his statement, just a few parts I point out, by excusing historical racism, as if he had done that.
So the first part of his statement is, by excusing historical racism, he didn't do that.
So the very first thing he's doing is confessing to something that clearly didn't happen.
He never excused historical racism, or even close to it.
Nothing even in that universe.
But he's going to take credit.
He's going to take responsibility for this thing he didn't do.
He goes, I defended it.
No, he didn't.
So that's the first thing I'm going to do.
I'm going to agree...
That I did all the things that obviously I didn't do.
And I'm going to agree to even more than that.
I will confess to more than I'm even blamed for.
So that's the first thing. That's what he did.
And I invoked the term woke police, which is unacceptable.
Oh, yes. That's unacceptable.
The woke police.
Because that's another crime by itself.
It wasn't bad enough that he excused historical racism, which never happened.
But he also used the term woke police.
And he's feeling pretty bad about that.
And he goes on. He goes, I am ashamed over how uninformed I was.
I was so wrong.
Is he serious?
I was ashamed over how uninformed I was.
I was so wrong. He goes on.
What I now realize I have done is cause harm.
By wrongly speaking in a manner that perpetuates racism, and for that I am so deeply sorry.
I also apologize to my friend Rachel Lindsay for not listening to her better on a topic she has a first-hand understanding of, and humbly thank the members of Bachelor Nation who have reached out to me to hold me accountable.
I promise to do better.
And then here's the topper.
He goes, quote, I am dedicated to getting educated on a more profound and productive level than ever before.
I want to ensure our cast and crew members, to my friends, colleagues, and our fans, this is not just a moment, but a commitment.
To much greater understanding that I will actively make every day.
Is he serious?
Is he? I actually can't tell.
I feel like he took it just a little bit over the line so that people like me could have a benefit of the doubt and know that he's kidding.
Or is he?
Or is he? It could be that he just got beat up so badly, he just said, just tell me what to write.
Actually, why don't you write it for me, and I'll just say I said it.
Like, you wonder how that conversation went.
So I've seen people say he caved.
Well, let me say this.
When you see me cave, and you will, I'm going to cave a lot funnier than this.
And this is pretty good.
This is pretty good.
Alright. Lindsey Graham has said he predicts if the GOP ever get back in power in the Congress, that they will impeach Kamala Harris for bailing out the Black Lives Matter rioters.
Why not? Do you see any problem with that argument?
Lindsey Graham, that they would impeach Kamala Harris for bailing out the Black Lives Matter rioters?
Because she did that. She organized funds to bail out rioters.
How could that not lead to more violence?
How could that not incite more violence?
Letting out the very violent people who did the violence?
Showing them that you support them from a government level?
How could that not create more violence?
So, Lindsey Graham is now on my good list.
Because I said I could never support a Republican who doesn't at least talk about impeaching Biden for the fine people hoax.
But I think this is in the same realm, right?
Whether it's over the fine people hoax, which I'd prefer, or I think he's being practical.
If he went after Kamala Harris for the BLM rioter thing, you don't have to wonder if somebody knew the truth.
With the fine people hoax, Biden could always argue, well, I thought it was true, because the news told me it was true.
And that would be a good enough defense, actually.
In fact, I would even vote to not impeach.
If Biden got an impeachment process against him for the fine people hoax, which clearly incited violence, and his defense was, I heard it on the news, so I believed it was true, I would actually acquit him.
Because that's actually a good defense.
Right? Right? It's a good defense.
But Kamala Harris doesn't have any I was confused defense because she was actively coming up with the idea on her own of bailing out the rioters.
So she knew exactly what they did.
She knew what she was doing.
There's no ambiguity about who did what or who believed what.
So I think Lindsey Graham is smart to pick that one instead of the fine people hoax because that takes too much explaining.
And you have to make some assumptions.
The BBC has been banned in China.
It looks like it's a retribution for the UK banning a Chinese state media.
So here's a question I asked on Twitter.
I'll give it a little meat here.
Do you think that the press in the United States is better or worse than the press in China In the comments, who do you think does a better job?
The press in the United States or the press in communist China that is controlled by the government?
Which one does a better job?
I'm seeing in your comments, same, same, same, worse, worse, same, same, same, no idea, BBC is propaganda, somebody says, far worse, no way to tell, not anymore.
Alright, here's a way to look at it.
If you are a citizen in China, and this is more of a question than a statement, if you're a citizen in China, do you know that your news is controlled by the government?
Does the average Chinese consumer of news know that their news is controlled by the government?
I think so, right?
Wouldn't they all know that?
So when they read a story that says, your government says we did a great job on this or that, how does the average Chinese consumer of news process what is obviously fake news from their government?
I'm not there, so I don't know.
But I'll make an assumption.
My assumption is that they know to discount it in their heads.
And so they don't believe it because they know it comes from a non-credible source, their government, who wants you to believe a certain thing.
So in that case, and again, I would take a fact check on this because I don't know enough about the culture.
I've never traveled to China.
So if I'm completely wrong on this, let me know.
But it seems to me that it would be a healthy situation to know that your news is fake.
Like just to know it's fake.
Are you going to be misled if you know it's fake?
And then you also have, if you have a VPN, you have at least some way to get news from other sources, and you can check that your government may be telling you a story.
So are Chinese news consumers, are they more confused than American consumers?
Because remember, Americans got the Russia collusion hoax, we got the fine people hoax, the drinking bleach hoax, the overfeeding goldfish hoax, and of course our politics is just a team sport that has no semblance to anything like objective news anymore.
I don't think our news is better than China's news.
I don't think so.
I think it's similar and might be worse.
And the might be worse part is that the problem with our news is that half of the country believes it.
No matter what the story is, let's say just political news.
So when I'm talking about the news, I'm talking about political news.
I'm not talking about, you know, hurricane news.
I feel as if a news organization which legitimately lies to half of the country consistently might be worse, because they believe it, half of the country, might be worse than a Chinese press in which nobody in the country, I'm exaggerating, right, but nobody in the country believes it.
I feel like that might be better.
I don't know.
I mean, there's no real way you could compare those two things.
Because it depends on the topic, etc.
But it doesn't feel like we have better press than Communist China.
And I'm being serious now.
This is not just making a point.
I'm not just finding a clever way to insult our press.
I just don't see how it's necessarily better.
It might be. I'm open to the idea that it's better.
Just not sure.
It's not obvious to me that it's better.
Alright. That is what I wanted to talk about today.
Somebody says, why do you think it is the way it is?
It's team sport and TDS and sometimes for the money.
It's all of those things.
Yeah, it's not one thing. Um...
Somebody says, CNN is owned by AT&T. Cancel your contract.
Well, you know, I'm not big on canceling anything.
I'm not big on boycotting things because you don't like the politics of the people involved.
But I am big on rewarding people who were canceled unfairly.
It's like Gina Carano, the actress who got canceled from The Mandalorian by Disney.
I'm happy to give her a little extra attention and suggest that people watch her future work and support her, because I think she got cancelled over bullshit.
And likewise, the CEO of Goya Foods, I think we should just support people who get cancelled, not cancel people the same way the other side is.
Now you may say to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, if you don't fight back with maximum force, they will just take over everything.
I'm sensitive to that argument, but I do think that there's a path to just make the cancelled people rich, and then that takes away the incentive to cancel them.
There's no point in cancelling somebody if they're going to come out ahead.
That ruins the whole cancellation process.
So I'd rather ruin it by making those who get cancelled rich, even if I hate the people who got cancelled.
I might even agree with the people who cancelled them.
I might be offended by what they said.
You know, if somebody gets cancelled for using an offensive, let's say, ethnic term, I'm not in favor of that.
But I might be in favor of commerce not being affected by it.
Somebody says, I respect your stance, but I cancelled Disney+.
Well, you know, the problem with all the streaming services is after you watch that one show that you bought the streaming service for, you don't really need it.
So I think a lot of people just cancel the service after they watch their one show.
I just got Hulu just to watch the Britney Spears special, the documentary.
And now, once I watch that one show on Hulu, I thought to myself, well, now at least I've subscribed, so I've got all this other content I can watch.
I'm looking through it last night.
Nothing really else I want to watch.
I might watch Schlitz Creek or something, but basically, all of the streaming services have one thing I want to watch.
So once you're done with The Mandalorian, maybe you don't need Disney Plus so much.
By the way, speaking of the Britney Spears thing, you should watch that documentary.
It's really interesting how she lost the rights to her own money and that her father was the executor.
That recently was reversed.
So now there's a professional organization that has to work with her dad to manage her money.
So at least the professionals are a little bit of an audit on his actions.
And the saddest part was that Britney Spears was saying, effectively, there's only one person in the world I don't want to be in charge of my money, and it's my father.
And she couldn't get that done right away.
She did get that done, finally, at least shared responsibility.
But it was amazing that that could happen to a human being In this country that the court can just Take control of your life and give it to somebody else.
Now, obviously there are times when that's necessary, so I don't know that I want to lose that ability if somebody's elderly and they can't manage their money, etc.
But giving it to the one family member that you hate or that you don't trust, that's just a crime.
It certainly makes sense that some people need some help temporarily or permanently.
That part's cool.
But having the person who helps the one person that person doesn't want to be the one?
That's not cool. That's not cool.
Somebody says, try going through a divorce.
I've gone through a divorce.
It's not fun at all. But we didn't fight in our divorce.
I just made it easy.
All right. You'll manage my money?
Sure. Sure. You know, there's this weird thing with making a lot of money.
And I would label myself as rich but not mega-rich.
So I'm on the low end of rich people.
I'm nowhere near a billionaire, right?
I suppose if I wanted to, I could have a private jet, but I wouldn't spend that much of my total net worth on a jet.
So, I'm sort of below the private jet level of wealth, although I suppose I could do it if I wanted to.
It doesn't mean that much to me.
And at my level, and given my background in economics, I've got an MBA, etc., I can manage my own money.
But at some level, like say you were a billionaire, you kind of have to have other people managing your money at least a little bit.
And I'm not comfortable with that at all.
The one time I tried it for a little while, it was just a disaster.
So having other people managing money is just a terrible idea.
So I actually worry that if somehow something happened to turn me into a billionaire, that it would just be more work.
I don't know that I would be happier.
It would be more work.
Alright, that's all for now, and I will...
That's a funny comment that I'm not going to read, and I'll talk to you later.
Okay, YouTubers, we made it all the way to the end today without getting a glitch.
I don't have any reason to believe that the glitch yesterday was intentional or human-inspired, but it was a big coincidence if it wasn't.
