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Feb. 19, 2021 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:14:21
Episode 1290 Scott Adams: Ted Cruz Warms Texas With His American-Based Tweeting, Helicopters on Mars, Lots More

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Whiteboard: Ted Cruz Pain/Solution White supremacy redefined Black happiness / White happiness How does Facebook make money? Has Biden guaranteed a war between Israel and Iran? NASA put a helicopter on Mars ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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

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Hey, everybody. You're right on time.
I like that about you.
Punctuality will always pay off.
In fact, if you're there on time, you're five minutes late.
Yeah, that's right.
So I'm glad you're all here, but if you would like to enjoy this even more...
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That you could enjoy this more.
It's a big claim, but let me back it up by saying...
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It's called the simultaneous sip.
I'll bet you know how to do it.
It's coming up now.
Go! So let's start with the biggest problem in the country that has been solved.
I'm here to report. A lot of other live streams and news sources will be giving you bad news.
All the bad news makes you feel bad, stresses you out.
Why? Why?
When there's so much good news to report.
For example, I know that you had been suffering from the lack of...
Something called a...
Let's see, what's it called?
A black-footed ferret, I believe.
Yeah. It's called a black-footed ferret.
And they were extinct until this week.
And it looks like this black-footed ferret has been cloned to life.
They named it Elizabeth.
I call it Betty.
Or Liz, just sometimes.
But it's a black-footed ferret.
And a lot of you were saying, really, just last month, people were just talking about this and talking about it.
It's like, there are no black-footed ferrets.
Where are all the black-footed ferrets?
We have white-footed ferrets.
That's not fair. And so not only have we made things more just racially, but we now have a whole new animal.
Brand new animal. I mean, it was an old animal that's, of course, sort of a classic, brought back, but how long before dinosaurs?
I know, we haven't found any intact DNA, but will that stop us?
No. I think we're going to be building some animals.
Maybe build ourselves a dinosaur that never existed before.
Maybe you can't find all the DNA for a proper dinosaur of the past.
Maybe you find, like, a couple of dinosaurs and stick them together.
See what you get.
Frankenstein dinosaurs.
What could go wrong, really?
Is it just me, or is it obvious, like, really obvious...
That there's a gigantic available space for some new political person.
With Trump off the stage, nobody has replaced the size of his voice.
You know, Biden doesn't really leave much of a footprint, and we think he's short-termer on the Democrat side.
But as we're watching the Republicans sort of figure out what life after Trump or with Trump on the outside looks like, it's just not obvious anybody is emerging.
I know all the names that you're going to mention, DeSantis and Ted Cruz, etc.
But when you watch how badly Ted Cruz is being whipped by the media, we'll talk about him in a minute, it's as if they're trying to suppress Ted Cruz because the other side feels like he might be the biggest threat.
They might be right.
They might be right.
He might be at least in the top, certainly in the top four, of the biggest threats.
I mean, he came in pretty close compared to Trump.
So it feels like the news about Ted Cruz, you have to see it through the filter of they're trying to stop him four years from now.
That's what it feels like.
We'll talk about him a little bit more.
If you've been looking at the story, you know that Ted Cruz and his family went to Cancun while he had no electricity.
He was one of the people affected in Texas.
And people said, hey, Ted Cruz, how can you leave the country to warmth when your constituents have to stay here freezing, get back here and be a leader?
And so he rather quickly got back in a plane and got back to Texas, or got back to the United States somewhere.
I don't know where he is. But a lot of you don't understand the importance of this.
People are talking about it as if it's just some kind of a psychological, morale-building, leadership thing.
But it's a lot more than that.
And let me bring you the whiteboard.
And this is an important point.
There's no way you're going to get to the other end of this crisis in Texas unless Ted Cruz has enough pain.
So when he went to Cancun and he got all warm, things just went to hell.
But now, as soon as he's back in the country, suffering a little bit, we hope he doesn't have heat, and I hope they didn't give him a jacket.
Because if he has a jacket, that's just going to postpone the solution.
Because he'll feel okay with at least the jacket on.
So you've got to get rid of his jacket, you've got to get rid of his warmth, and the more pain that we can inflict on Ted Cruz...
The warmer it will get in Texas.
Now that's not obvious to you.
You're thinking it's about psychology and morale.
But no, the forecast actually is that by tomorrow, temperatures are going to start changing.
It might be, you know, at least in Houston, the cold snap is looking like it's going to drop.
And I think that has everything to do with bringing Ted Cruz back.
Not just the fact that he's back.
I'm talking about the fact that he's back and tweeting...
American-based tweets.
Did you see any of his Cancun-based tweets?
It was like they fell apart.
He would send them and they would just...
It was like they would evaporate in the air.
They're useless. Tweeting outside of the United States, I don't even know why anybody does it.
But as soon as he got back on American soil, did you see the power in those tweets?
I'm miles away, and I felt warmer just reading them.
Now, one of the things that you noticed is that as soon as people heard that Ted Cruz had left to safety in Cancun, a lot of the residents of Texas really got kind of hot under the collar about that, didn't they?
And does Ted Cruz get any credit for that?
No. He made every forehead in Texas a little bit warmer.
Because they were so angry about him going to Cancun?
I feel that that helped.
And does he get any credit for that?
No. No, we act like that didn't even happen.
We're all just talking about the bad side.
What about the good side?
People felt a lot warmer.
They were pretty worked up about that.
That's not nothing. Now, Ted Cruz did...
Satisfy the 48-hour rule which I invented.
The 48-hour rule says that if you do a proper, and proper matters, apology within 48 hours of whatever the hell you did wrong, that we should accept it and move on.
Because I want to live in a world where people can mess up and say, oh, I'm stupid.
I'm sorry. I did something wrong.
I know it was wrong.
Won't do it again. You're right.
I apologize. When people do that, they're just being human, and I get it.
Now, the human part of this story, I actually like Ted Cruz more because of this story, and I'm not kidding.
I like him more because of this story.
Because the reality of it is that the reason he went is that his wife and kids talked him into it.
And he basically says that.
He was trying to be a good father, he said, but he also had a wife.
He's trying to play it toward...
It has more to do with the kids, but he had a wife too.
And I'll bet she had an opinion about how that family went.
So let me tell you this.
If your family is around a fireplace freezing with no electricity, and you decide to take them to warmth, I am not mad at you, Ted Cruz, for taking your family to warmth.
That was one less family that the resources of the United States had to worry about.
He had the money to take them away from the problem.
That was the right thing to do.
Indeed, every single politician in Texas who has the means to send their own family out of state or to someplace warm, please do it.
Please do it.
Because the fewer people who are in danger, the fewer people the system has to support.
There's a food problem.
They're literally running out of food.
Wouldn't you like fewer people eating food if they can afford to go someplace else?
And if it causes maybe some extra economic activity wherever they go, well, that's good too.
But Ted Cruz himself, you have to say to yourself, okay, there's also the leadership thing, you have to be on the front line, etc.
But where's the compassion?
Do you think Ted Cruz had less compassion because he made his wife and children warm?
It doesn't work that way.
You can have plenty of passion and still take care of your family.
Those are unrelated concepts.
So I would say that the Ted Cruz thing says more about us than it does about him.
It says something about Ted Cruz, and he apologized for it directly.
In fact, the quality of Ted Cruz's apology, if you will, was perfect.
It was perfect. He told you why it happened, but not as an excuse, just by background, which we appreciate.
He said it was a mistake, obviously.
Now, that's as clear as you can be.
He didn't say, well, you know, if you look at it differently, it wasn't a mistake, or, you know, you're being political, or you're spinning it.
Didn't do that. He said, it's obviously a mistake.
I felt it as it was happening.
I came right back.
That's as good as you can do for an apology.
Now, you, of course, wish the situation hadn't happened.
But as an apology goes, that was the gold standard.
And when people do a proper apology, where they acknowledge exactly what the problem was, no weasel, no spinning, I like them better.
Because you don't get that from a lot of people.
It's a sign of character, I think.
So Ted Cruz, with his apology, I'm isolating just the apology part, that's high character.
How much do I criticize him for, let's say, satisfying the needs of his family?
Not a bit. Zero criticism.
And to be consistent, had this been any Democrat, just in case you're wondering, had it been any Democrat, I would say exactly the same thing.
If there are any Democrats in Texas who can get their families out, go ahead and do it.
Do it. But there is this need among the public.
You and I. We need Ted Cruz to act differently.
But let's not kid ourselves.
This is about us, right?
It's about some need we have that's a little bit irrational.
Because is Ted Cruz really less effective tweeting from Cancun?
Would he care less about his state?
I don't think so.
There's no evidence that that would be the case.
And what has he done since he got back?
What did Ted Cruz do to make Texas warmer?
Tweet? Appear on TV and apologize for going to Cancun?
What exactly could he do?
So he comes back and he gives the public what they asked for, which is he pretends he's on the ground and being on the ground and being locally makes a difference.
Does it? I mean, does it?
You know, the entire country just learned that driving to work didn't really matter.
Didn't we? Didn't we all just learn That there was never a compelling reason to drive to work in the first place.
We felt there was. But as soon as we couldn't, well, maybe we prefer it this way, don't we?
Suddenly, driving to work isn't even that important.
But Ted Cruz driving to work and being physically there, that's still important.
It's not. It's just something we need.
Now, it's not nothing.
Because if the public needs it, they need it.
But it is based on some kind of a flaw in us that we need it.
I think Ted Cruz does need to, as a leader, he needs to acknowledge, and he has, that coming back matters to us, the public.
And if it matters to the public, he has some responsibility to address that.
It's just an irrational need.
All right. Jake Novak tweeted...
And I didn't see this anywhere else.
There's an article on, I guess our first special forces command is building an information warfare center that will specialize in, quote, influence artillery rounds.
In other words, persuasion.
So our special forces have a persuasion wing now to attack with new persuasion wherever somebody else's persuasion had caused a bad outcome.
Now, militarizing persuasion, it had to happen.
I mean, it's the obvious thing that had to happen.
But just think about how powerful the, let's say, the system of persuasion has become.
Because persuasion as a skill has existed for decades.
We haven't really learned that much in the last 10 or 20 years about how to persuade.
We pretty much had that down 20 years ago, maybe longer.
But what's different is our ability to instantly communicate anything to anyone anywhere.
So once you can instantly communicate that influence, it becomes weaponized pretty quickly.
So the government is creating basically a brainwashing group.
Now, of course, it's under our national defense umbrella, so we assume it's defensive and used for our benefit.
But what happens to the skills these people develop?
What happens to all the people that we're using in our military to protect us when they learn all these skills about how to overthrow governments and change the news and brainwash people?
What do they do after they leave these jobs?
What is their civilian job after they leave with these skills?
It's a problem. It's a problem.
So this is not free, meaning there's a risk to doing this, but we probably do need to do this.
I would imagine this is actually a smart thing to do, to have a weaponized military group to deal with this kind of stuff, persuasion.
Let's talk about white supremacy, because it seems to be the monster under everybody's bed, if they're a Democrat anyway.
Now, I've said this before, but I feel like it needs to be said again, which is that what white supremacy used to be, say when I was a kid, was the belief that white people were better than other people.
But I believe that is extinct as a belief.
Now that's not to say there aren't a pocket of people who believe anything.
So it's extinct in the same way that the flat earth idea is extinct.
Yes, there are flat earthers.
So I'm not going to say 100% of anything is ever true.
It's just hardly ever true that 100% of something is true.
But I've never met one.
I mean, I've never even seen one talking about it on TV in the old way.
The old way was that there was actually some kind of genetic superiority.
I don't even see white supremacists saying that.
The people would even call themselves racists.
I don't even see them saying that.
And why not? Because they used to.
And the obvious reason is that observation...
Doesn't agree with that opinion.
You just have to wake up and turn on the TV. Oh, wait a minute.
Obama was the President of the United States?
Wait a minute. Michael Jordan was the best basketball player?
Wait a minute. Kanye West can do just about anything?
Wait a minute. Oprah is the best, probably, who's ever done what Oprah does?
So you can't really live and interact in the world and hold that belief that somehow white people have this superiority like in the old days people used to think.
It's just so obviously not true.
Now here's the dumbest part about white supremacy, which Which is... Well, there's a flip side to it, too.
The dumbest part about white supremacy as a belief...
Let's say you are the white supremacist.
Now, I'm not talking about people talking about it.
I'm talking about this alleged person who's the white supremacist.
Why would you take credit for the work of other people?
So suppose you're saying, hey, white people invented all the good stuff.
Or you're saying, hey, white people accomplished this or built this or build economies or constitutions or whatever.
And let's say that's true.
If you were to just look at the, you know, do a checklist and say, all right, who built the computers?
Okay, more white people than other people.
Who, you know, made the smartphones?
Well, by the time you got to smartphones, companies like Apple had lots of people of all kinds of types working on it.
But let's say you could make the argument that more historically, less in current times, but more historically, that a lot of white people accomplished a bunch of stuff.
What's that got to do with you?
They're not you.
Odds are, you're not even related.
How in the world do you, specifically, take credit for, what, Edison?
Or Tesla? You know, Tesla the inventor?
How do you take credit for that?
They're not you.
It doesn't make any sense.
And likewise, how does black history make sense?
How does that make sense?
Because if you're black and you learn that somebody black invented something, did something, it's good to remind us that everybody can accomplish stuff.
But those people who are black and accomplish things, they're not you.
Why do you get credit for that?
The same way that I don't get credit for Edison, why does somebody else get credit for George Washington Carver?
It's just other people doing stuff.
It makes no sense that somehow that has something to do with me.
It just doesn't.
So, you know, we've drifted more into a situation where I think the way white supremacy is used in 2021 is that it's, let's say, a system has developed primarily through the influence of white people over time, which is optimized for white people.
Now that argument isn't bad.
That's not a bad argument, right?
Wouldn't you say that the United States...
I know, you know, you have your issues with wokeness and blada-blada and cancellation, and those are real things.
But wouldn't you say that's a reasonably true statement?
That the United States...
And not necessarily by intentional design, but it sort of evolved into a place that was optimized for white people.
I don't think it was necessarily intentional, but it just sort of worked out that way.
Now... Not optimized for every white person, right?
If you were a poor white person and you came into a situation where you were trying to get a job and there was some preferential hiring that went to trying to increase diversity, well, that didn't work for you, did it?
Because I was in that situation.
I had two careers that I lost for being white, explicitly.
White and male, explicitly.
In other words, my bosses told me that directly.
They said, we can't promote you because you're white and male.
Now, was I getting the benefit?
It seems like I was being discriminated against.
But the truth is that at the time I could easily get a college education.
And it kind of didn't matter how many companies were bad to me.
I just had other options.
So I just went to my other options.
So it wasn't good for me, but I just went to my other options because I had them.
Was the United States optimized for a person like me in, let's say, the late 70s when I was getting started?
The answer is yes. It was very optimized for people like me.
And I took advantage of it.
So I think that argument has some weight.
But here's a question I have for you.
If you were to actually calculate reparations, we'll just talk about it hypothetically.
I know you're opposed to it, this audience, for the most part.
But let's talk about, there's something to learn by thinking about it.
How would you calculate it?
Now, the way that we automatically think is that the way you'd calculate it is you'd say, well, how are all the white people doing?
Then how are all the black people doing?
Whether or not they descended from slavery or not, they sort of get painted by the same brush and have the same experiences to a large extent, not completely, of course.
So, you know, you could argue there's maybe an economic difference on average, and so what you're trying to do is you know what the gap is, so you base your reparations on maybe closing some of that gap, right?
That would be the common way to do it.
But does that make sense? Is that the way an economist would do it?
Let's say the economist had no racial bias.
That's not a possibility, right?
There's no such person.
But imagine there were, and the economist was doing nothing except a calculation.
What would be the calculation?
Well, I think they'd go like this.
They'd say, you're a black person living in America, and if slavery had never happened, You would be a black person living in Africa.
What is the average income in Africa?
normalized by different dollar stuff, etc.
I get spam all times a day.
So, if you were an economist, you'd say, how are the people doing in Africa, and how are the people doing who were victims, at least their families were victims of racism?
How is their economic situation?
Probably better.
So what do you do with the fact that the victims...
The people who are descended from slavery, and I think victim is the right word.
That's not too strong. What do you do when the victims are doing better than the ones who are not victims?
Now, of course, if you were actually a slave, and you were still alive, that's a whole different conversation.
Because you specifically had a really bad thing.
Your life was stolen from you.
It doesn't get any worse than that, right?
But if you're descended a few generations down...
And you compared where you are today as a person working in the United States, compared to what you would have been if your family had stayed in Africa, which one's the better deal?
I actually don't know.
I mean, maybe you'd have to adjust it for various cultural expectations or whatever, but how would you calculate that?
Now, here's the other thing that makes it even more iffy.
What is more important, money or happiness?
Go. What is more important?
What do we put in the Constitution?
Does the Constitution of the United States say you have a right to make money?
Well, it doesn't restrict that right, so you do, of course, have that right.
But the Constitution is sort of silent on money, isn't it?
It's happiness. The Constitution directly calls out happiness and freedom.
But happiness. So if you're going to pay reparations, should you pay reparations until the monetary situation is closer to being equal?
Or, since money is not your top priority in life, not anybody's, happiness is.
Should you not create a situation where your happiness gets to the same level?
What do you think is the general happiness level of black people in America compared to white people in America?
Go. In the comments, without looking it up, don't cheat.
I know you can Google this instantly.
But without any cheating, what do you think?
Is the average black person and the average white person in America about the same level of happiness?
Or is there a difference?
Go. What do you think, without looking it up?
People are saying the same.
Same, same, same, same.
I'm looking at... Now, why would you think that?
How could it possibly be the same?
I only got one no.
Somebody says black happiness would be lower.
Somebody says black people are more upset on average.
I don't think you can make that claim.
That feels a little bit racist.
A little bit racist. You know, even if it's right...
I don't know if it's accurate, but even if it's accurate, it's a little bit racist.
And by the way, it's my belief that 100% of humans are biased by design.
Your brain is a pattern recognition machine.
It doesn't turn off.
And you're not good at recognizing patterns.
We see false patterns all the time and we think they're real.
I mean, it's a continuous thing.
So you can't really turn off the fact that every now and then you think or say something that somebody else thinks is a little racist.
That's not a thing. And we should stop pretending like we could do it.
It's just not a thing.
People can't turn that off.
You can deal with it with your better moral and ethical fiber.
You can overcome it You can become a better person, but you can't turn it off.
That's not a thing. So the answer is that, at least in the last internet search of some survey I saw, that black and white happiness is similar.
But here's the weird part.
Black happiness used to be higher.
It used to be higher than white happiness not too many decades ago.
What's up with that? What's up with that?
And what if that had persisted?
What if you did a survey today?
This is not the case, I understand.
But what if you found out that black people were a little bit happier than white people on average?
What the hell do you do with that, given that happiness is literally our highest goal?
I don't know. But at the moment, it's equal.
But black happiness has fallen.
Is there a reason to believe it will continue falling?
I think so.
Because whatever caused it to fall in the first place, I doubt it changed.
Did it? I mean, what made it fall in the first place?
I don't know. I would imagine that social media isn't helping, is it?
Do you think social media is making black people happier?
I doubt it. I doubt it.
I don't know if it's making anybody happier.
Why would it make them happier and not everybody else?
It doesn't make sense. So I would definitely like to know what it is that's lowering the average happiness of African Americans, but it does coincide with smartphones.
It does coincide with social media's rise.
Coincidence? Maybe the best form of reparations is to get rid of social media.
Because if social media is what caused the higher black happiness to reduce to the level of white happiness, maybe the social media platforms are part of that.
I mean, not intentionally, obviously.
So... Did it fall or did white happiness rise?
According to what I saw with low credibility, white happiness has stayed about the same for a long time, and black happiness had been higher but was reduced.
Now, you can't really trust necessarily that any of that was polled correctly.
You can't trust that the question was asked correctly so it didn't have a cultural bias.
You can't really be sure that's true.
But what I can be sure of...
is that there's no evidence that white people are happier than black people, on average.
We can be sure we don't know there's a difference.
We can't be sure we know it's the same.
So I just throw that in the mix to say that if we try to calculate this on an economic basis, it would be an irrational act.
But it could be an irrational act in the same way that Ted Cruz returning to the United States Was, in my opinion, irrational, but he's dealing with an irrational problem, which is how people felt about it.
So sometimes you have to deal with irrational problems with irrational solutions.
That's not even unusual.
It's sometimes just the only way you can do it.
All right. One of my favorite follows on...
Twitter, and this guy drives me frickin' crazy in a positive way, is Anatoly Lubarsky.
I think he's a game designer.
But he follows a lot of my tweets and then comes into the comments and debunks a lot of what I say and a whole lot of what other people say.
I've never seen a more productive debunker or anybody who could do it as quickly And make a solid case of it.
So if you're not following him, look him up.
So his last name is Lubarsky.
L-U-B-A-R-S-K-Y. First name Anatoly.
Now, I don't know anything about him except his tweet activity.
But his tweet activity is so rational and well-informed that you're really missing a lot if you don't see his take On the same things that you see me give an opinion on.
Especially to see him take an opposite opinion from me quite often.
Now he's probably one of the few people who disagree with me that I will happily tweet.
Because his disagreement is so well done that I'm happy to be called out on it.
He just does a good job on it.
So here's something he said that is so funny.
Because I think it's just so right.
Everybody's talking about why it is that the infections and coronavirus are plunging.
Because shouldn't February be a bad month?
Seasonality, blah, blah, right?
February should be a bad month.
If the cold has anything to do with anything, or seasonality has anything to do with anything, this should be our worst month.
But in fact, the infection is plunging everywhere.
How do you explain that? And so everybody's been arguing about, oh, it's, you know, the vaccinations are kicking in, other people saying there's natural immunity, which I think there's something to that argument, by the way.
But there are different explanations.
And then Anatoly Lombarski comes in and he says, all we're doing is reverting to the mean after the holidays.
And I thought, well, it can't be that simple.
And then you look at the chart, and all we're doing is reverting to the mean after the holidays.
That's it. That's the whole freaking thing.
Now, of course it matters that we're trying hard to socially distance and wear masks and stuff.
I'm a believer that those things matter, that they make a difference.
But we were doing that before the holidays, and it was keeping us at a certain level of infection.
Then the holidays came in and it was this huge thing which we said was seasonal.
But was it seasonal?
Maybe it was only seasonal because the holidays are clumped in one season.
You know, the big ones.
Where you travel to your family.
So, just think about this, that all of these explanations you heard, it's like, wait, maybe they're secretly using hydroxychloroquine and it really works.
Think about all the explanations you've heard for the unexplained drop in infections.
Completely unexplained.
And then Anatoly says, no, it's just reverting to the mean because the thing that caused the spike went away.
And I read that and I thought, uh, I think that's the right answer.
I don't know that this is a mystery at all, is it?
Is there any mystery here?
It literally just returned to the mean.
That's it. Now, I'm seeing somebody say wow in the comments.
Are you having the same feeling that I had when I first read this?
Which is, not only is it right, but it's obvious?
But it wasn't obvious until I read his tweet?
What the hell is wrong with me?
How hypnotized have I been that something this obvious wasn't obvious to me?
I mean, I've looked at those graphs over and over again, and you can very clearly see here's the baseline, here's the spike, and then it's going back to the baseline.
Now, of course, there are lots of other things happening.
We're getting better with therapeutics, and some people say there's something about the testing that's changed, and maybe it's Biden is in office, so they're looking at it differently.
I don't know. I don't know.
It just looks like nothing happened, except that we stopped going on holidays where we mingled with each other.
Let me ask you this.
Suppose you said, hey, United States, here's the deal.
For three weeks, you can only physically interact with people that you have interacted with already in the past one week.
Just say that's the rule.
You can interact with everybody you've interacted with in the past week, but for the next three weeks, nobody else.
Nobody else goes inside your house.
You never go into a room in which there's even one person in that room that you've not already been with in the past week.
How hard would that be?
Well, I don't really meet many new people during a pandemic, do you?
That would be really easy for me.
I would just make a list of the people I've seen in the last week.
I'd be like, that's pretty easy.
Now, I would still let a plumber in my house.
I'd just make sure I'm not standing in the same place.
I would still maybe have somebody deliver DoorDash or something.
But somebody says, stop it.
Stop what? Stop what?
Could you be a little more specific?
Now, I'm not suggesting that we do that, because there's no practical way that's going to happen.
But aren't we sort of at the point where we kind of know what caused the problem?
And the problem is people interacting who don't normally interact.
That's what the holidays did.
As soon as you take away people interacting that don't interact on a normal weekly basis, infections just fell off a cliff.
Couldn't we just do that for three weeks?
Is that the Chinese secret?
Nah... Is China's secret that they didn't socially distance that much, but they did it with only the same people that they hang out with?
I mean, could it be that simple?
Maybe. I'd like to know.
All right. Then there is the question of whether half the country is already immune from either other T-cell stuff or whatever.
I think that hypothesis is still very much alive, but I think the big drop is probably just we stopped mixing with strange people over the holidays.
Here's a question for you.
How does Facebook still make money?
There's something going on here, isn't there?
I've told you before that a background in economics is like a superpower.
For anybody who doesn't know, I've got a degree in economics and an MBA. So when you have that talent in your talent stack, it lets you just see things that other people can't see.
For example, I use this example a lot.
I avoid speeding tickets because I understand economics.
So I say to myself, would a police force use a valuable resource, because everybody's got a budget problem these days, and put it somewhere where there would be no real danger from speeding?
Let's say Sunday morning at 9am.
Nobody's on the roads, it's 9am.
Would a police force have a speed trap at 9am on a Sunday morning when absolutely nobody's getting in an accident?
And the answer is no.
Because economically it wouldn't make sense.
So there are all these situations in which you can use economics to actually see through walls.
I can actually see around a corner and know that there's not a speed trap if it's Sunday at 9am.
So my economics ability literally, figuratively, but almost literally, allows me to see around the corner on the road and know that there's no speed trap there.
Think about that. It's like a superpower.
Now, every now and then, this superpower lets me see things in other realms as well.
And here's what I'm seeing with Facebook.
I log on to Facebook, and I look for posts by the few friends that I have remaining, and there are none.
There are maybe two people in my feed who still post because they're Republicans.
Or two families, I guess.
And they still post because at least one of them is still traveling, you know, literally every day.
And so it's travel pictures, but only one.
And then another Republican who, you know, does his hobbies and stuff like that.
But almost everybody else is not posting.
Yeah, I'm looking at other comments as other people are saying the same stuff.
Now, how do they make money If people stopped posting?
Because there's no way.
Somebody says, I see my friends post on Facebook all the time.
Are they posting about their travel?
Or their parties that they're at?
Because probably half of Facebook was where you went and the group of people you were with.
Or even pictures of your food at that nice restaurant you went to.
And then there's also pictures of people just, you know, looking good.
But if you're wearing your mask, nobody really wants those pictures to be part of their permanent record, except as the novelty of it, right?
Somebody says, my friends just post memes and jokes, but I'll bet not more of them, right?
Probably not that much more.
So you've got Facebook, who has the pandemic, in my observation...
Their number of posts are probably down 60%.
At least 30%.
Am I completely wrong?
I'm talking about individuals just posting pictures of their life.
Is that not down 60%?
Could somebody tell me?
I'm looking at the comments to see if people are agreeing.
Is this just my observation?
Now, I'll get that there's more activity in the lists and the groups.
I'm hearing that people who are advertising...
Just anecdotally. Anecdotally, I'm hearing that advertisers, not advertisers, people who are advertising their services are still doing great.
So they seem to be getting just as much response.
So you're seeing a lot of people sharing articles.
Somebody says wrong completely, but you don't give any details.
Somebody says the gamers are keeping it afloat.
Somebody says I stopped posting.
Some no longer use it.
So most people are agreeing with my observation that there's less activity, at least on the posting part.
So do you believe that other activities magically increased to fill the gap?
Do you think so? Do you think that people are spending as much time on Facebook, but they're just doing other things, and that just magically Their interests went from the thing they were doing, which is, you know, showing their vacations and whatnot, suddenly they like memes and groups and lists.
Maybe. I mean, it could have happened.
People are spending more time at home.
Maybe they've got a little more time.
But it doesn't smell right to me.
All right, here's the other thing to add to this.
They don't have election campaign ads because the election's over.
That had to be a huge source of revenue, right?
And it just stopped, at least until the next election.
At the same time, I've seen some allegations that Facebook, now I don't know if this is true, it's just allegations, that Facebook had been aware that its statistics it was giving to advertisers were inflated.
I don't know if that's true.
It's just an allegation that's in the news this week.
Now, let me ask you this.
Let's say you work for Facebook and you sell ads.
It's your job to sell ads.
Do you go to the advertisers and you say, here are our statistics from the last week, and you can see the traffic is way down, so the amount we'll charge you for your ad will be based on this traffic being way down.
So we're going to have to give you a big discount.
Do you think that it goes that way?
Is that how salespeople work?
Let me explain how a salesperson works.
They work for commissions, usually.
I don't know if that's the case in Facebook, but in any case, everybody wants to do a good job.
And the salesperson says this.
They say, look at my traffic for 2020, which might have been high.
And we'll base your advertising fee based on the traffic from that last year because that's the full year we have.
We're not going to base it on the last month because, you know, it was an unusual month and blah blah blah blah blah.
Don't you think that advertisers are overpaying?
I feel like they might be.
Do you think that the advertisers are aware that people aren't posting as much on Facebook?
Does Facebook tell the advertisers that?
It's like, hey, Hey guys, it's okay.
People are posting way less because of the pandemic.
They can't show a picture of their...
Ted Cruz is not going to show the pictures from Cancun on Facebook, right?
And then you can extend that to other people who also don't want to do that.
Now, when I had my delayed honeymoon recently, went to Bora Bora, we did post some pictures.
But I didn't feel comfortable about it, let me tell you.
I didn't feel comfortable about it.
We were trying to Preserve some sense of normalness, but maybe it was inappropriate.
I felt a little bit like Ted Cruz did, which is that if I were not suffering enough, I wasn't enough of a team player.
You know what I mean? But I powered through it.
I managed to enjoy it anyway.
So I've got a big question about Facebook.
I'm not so sure their business is as solid as maybe their stock price would indicate.
All right. Ed Martin tweeted this, and I love this thought.
He tweeted that the Russia hoax, which is sort of an election-based hoax, right?
Something about the election in Russia.
So the Russia hoax...
And the fine people hoax, which was about white supremacy, got together and basically had sex and created the Pelosi insurrection hoax.
So if you look at the capital insurrection hoax, the idea that they were actually literally trying to conquer the United States with their Viking horn hat and their zip ties, if you look at that hoax, it is literally the combination of Of an election-based hoax, the Russia hoax, and the fine people hoax, a white supremacist hoax.
They actually married two hoaxes and made a new hoax.
And I love this observation, because it feels like exactly what happened, doesn't it?
Anyway, so, good tweet, Ed Martin.
Looks like Nancy Pelosi hired a racist to hunt down MAGA people.
That's what Matt Gaetz tweeted this morning.
So this was a general honorary or whatever.
I'm just going to say this, that he looks like a nut job and probably a racist, just based on what we can see of him and some clips about things he said.
And remember I told you, was it maybe in the spring of last year?
And I tweeted that if Biden got elected...
Republicans would be haunted?
Do you remember how much shit I got for that?
All the Democrats just grabbed that tweet and it got republished in various left-leaning publications.
Look at this idiot.
Can you believe it?
The cartoonist says if Biden gets elected, the Republicans are going to be haunted.
They're going to be haunted.
It's happening. It's happening.
Now, didn't you think that was the weirdest prediction?
Probably not. Some of you probably were already there.
But if you look at how weird some of my predictions have been that have come in, this one was pretty weird.
But I would say that it is now proven right.
All right. New news.
Secretary of State Blinken.
Under the Biden administration says they're willing to meet face-to-face with Iran and talk about it, and they want to get back with the other United Nations countries that are part of the conversation with Iran.
Now, is that good?
Now, if you were to just read this story on the surface, it sounds pretty good.
You got a nuclear issue, but Iran is willing to talk about it and negotiate, and Now Biden's team is willing to talk about it and negotiate.
Pretty good. On paper, right?
If you didn't know any context, pretty good.
Because you certainly would rather be talking about nuclear war than building toward it.
So it's all good, isn't it?
Well, here's some context that was left out.
And Joel Pollack pointed this out in a tweet.
That if the Biden administration starts negotiating with Iran and gets back to something like Obama's old nuclear deal with Iran, it's basically a green light to Israel to attack Iran and change the regime and get rid of their nuclear weapons program.
Now, would you say that?
Would that be your opinion?
That Israel would now have a green light to take out the regime of Iran if Biden's team looks like they're going to sign on to a deal that would doom Israel in the long run, according to Israel.
I think so.
I think this is a green light to attack.
So, was the Trump approach more likely to create war or less likely?
Remember I told you?
I'm going to remind you of this so many times.
You're going to be so sick of me.
You're already sick of hearing it.
The longer Trump is out of office, the smarter he will look.
As long as he sort of stays out of things, right?
As soon as he gets back into things and becomes part of the headlines, then we're back to where we were.
But it does look to me like Biden has set up a With at least one nuclear power, Israel.
And one, you know, fledgling nuclear power.
Am I wrong?
Is this not a fair analysis?
That it seems pretty clear that whatever Trump was doing was likely to cause flare-ups of maybe some terrorism, but it looked like he'd even scared Iran out of some of their terrorists.
Not all of them, of course, but it looked like they had tamped it down a little bit, right?
Now, as soon as Biden's in, one of their proxies hurts Americans in Iraq.
It's not a coincidence.
It looks like Biden has just created a clear path to a major war.
Are you surprised? Well, a lot of people said that Biden was part of the war party, you know, associated with the industrial-military complex, and various people who like war because it's profitable.
So Trump looks like the smart one.
Trump looks like the smart one on this topic, period.
He looks like the smart one.
And I don't know that that's going to change.
There's a new book alleging that Jelene...
Or is it Gislaine?
I never know. Maxwell.
Appeared, appeared to admit, appeared being a key word here, appeared to admit that Jeffrey Epstein was taping Donald Trump and the Clintons, visiting, I guess, Epstein's island and whatever, during a 26th meeting with...
So this alleged admission...
It happened with a 2016 meeting with former CBS producer Ira Rosen, who writes this in his new book.
All right, so here's what we know.
And then apparently Jelaine said that she didn't want to admit where the Trump tapes were because then people would ask for the Clinton tapes, and she wanted Clinton to win.
So that's what's reported, and the source of this is a book with no tapes or no text messages, just somebody who said he heard it.
Now, what level of credibility do you put on a story that's in a book, and the most interesting thing in the book is this story, which is what sells the book?
What credibility would you put on that?
Zero. Yeah, exactly zero.
Now that doesn't mean it's not true.
And I'll say this every time I use the word credibility.
Credibility just says how you should treat it.
It doesn't say whether it's true or false.
But the credibility is zero.
There's no credibility.
If you give this any attention, You're a sucker.
Because this is a pure sucker play right here.
Now, aside from the fact that there's no credibility because of the source it's coming from, an author selling a book with no documentation to support it, right?
But could it be true?
Well, anything could be true, but I feel like we would know it by now.
So I imagine that whatever happened was probably he heard it wrong or remembered it wrong or She answered unclearly.
It's probably something like that. Alright.
Here's a question.
Why is California doing about the same as Florida when the way that they're handling the coronavirus is completely different?
So California had strict lockdowns.
Florida was more permissive with opening schools and business.
But the curve...
Looks about the same.
How do you explain it?
Well, let's go back to my previous note.
Anatoly will explain it by the only thing that mattered was that it's not Christmas anymore.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe none of the other stuff makes much of a difference.
Maybe. Now, the other thing you have to factor in is that California might have had far worse infections.
So it could be that if California had not locked down, And done stricter things, that they wouldn't have been similar to Florida.
It would have been much worse.
Now, why am I saying that Florida, that California might, and this is speculation, this is pure speculation, why am I saying that California might have more infections?
Because they're locking down harder, right?
Oh, it's a thing I'm not allowed to say, isn't it?
What's the thing I'm not allowed to say?
You can say it in your head now.
What does California have as far as the situation that Florida doesn't have?
Forget about the politics and forget about the rules for the pandemic.
What else is there about California that's a little bit different?
Oh, I'm seeing a bunch of racists saying stuff in the comments.
Somebody's saying it's because we have an open border with Mexico.
So a lot of infected people, presumably, might be coming over the border and making it impossible for California to control the infection, whereas Florida has at least a little bit of a water boundary there, so fewer people streaming infected.
But that is very racist of you, and I would never say that.
So racist.
But back to Anatoly Lubarsky's comment, it might be that the only thing that really matters is that we're not having holidays at the moment.
Could be. That that's 80% of everything.
But there's a solid 20% we don't understand, at least.
And that 20% could have to do with immigration being more permissive in California.
Can I say that out loud without being cancelled?
What do you think? Is that just a statement of statistics?
Or is it just automatically racist because it has something to do with immigration?
We live in dangerous times.
I don't know if you can make an obvious statement that if your border is open and people who could be infected are coming across it, that you're in worse shape than if you didn't do that.
Isn't that fair to say?
But we don't say that much out loud.
Alright. So what else we got going on?
How about...
I guess Johnson& Johnson announced that they filed with the World Health Organization for emergency use of its single-dose COVID vaccination.
So now there will be a one-dose vaccination.
I'm guessing that it will not be as effective, but I think it's both in the 90% range.
Like one's in the low 90%, one's in the mid 90%, something like that, right?
So it might be a little less effective, but not so much less that it would matter that much, right?
So I told you that everybody asked me, are you going to get the vaccination when it's available to you?
And I always said, I'm going to wait until the last possible moment.
When I have the most possible information.
Because we might find out that one of the vaccinations is better than the other.
Right? I mean, that seemed obvious that we would at least hear a story about that, even if it's not true.
We might find out that one has some side effects that we didn't know about.
So I'm waiting until the last minute to make my decision.
I'm leaning toward getting it.
So I'd be really surprised if I don't get the vaccination.
But this is the kind of thing I'm waiting for.
Now, did you know that within the time that we're waiting for the vaccination, we might get approval for a single vaccination?
That was worth waiting for, right?
So, I didn't have an option of getting it, but that's why I wait on the decision.
Alright, so I would be far more likely to favor the single shot than the double shot.
Here's the good news. NASA just put a helicopter on Mars.
You know, I tweeted and live-streamed on this, but I just can't stop being happy about this.
NASA put a helicopter on Mars.
And I guess it's a little helicopter that's built for their atmosphere.
How do you build a flying device for another world?
I mean, how incredibly awesome is this?
And if you understand the number of technical challenges that all had to be solved just right and nothing could go wrong, I mean, everything had to work just right to get this thing to land safely in one of the most hardest places to land.
This is a big deal.
And I've said this before, but again, I can't say this enough.
Whoever controls space will control everything.
Because if you control space, you've got a good chance of controlling the planet.
Because whoever has the high ground controls the planet.
There's probably more wealth ultimately in space.
Ultimately, not right away.
Whoever gets up there is going to own the United States.
Now, how big is it?
I think we're the first, the United States, to put a flying object on Mars.
Because you don't control Mars unless you control the sky on Mars.
We put the first flying device on Mars.
We are the closest, so far, to controlling the sky, militarily, on Mars.
You don't think that matters, do you?
It's going to matter a lot.
Now, it might not matter to you, but it's going to matter to your grandkids because whoever controls the sky and the air and Mars controls Mars.
And whoever controls Mars has a base in space that would be unparalleled.
The moon might even be better, but Mars is pretty important for controlling space.
So militarily, it's gigantic.
How it makes us feel as a country is gigantic.
Is this a Trump accomplishment or a Biden accomplishment?
Well, I think it probably has been started even before Trump, I would imagine.
So I'm not sure you can give people credit, but at least Trump must have funded it.
At the very least, he funded it, right?
So I This is the sort of thing that I think Trump has the smart, strategic advantage.
If Biden is not working on nuclear power really hard and working on conquering space really hard and making sure that we have flying technology in space, flying technology, both for the outer space part but also on planet, if those aren't highest priorities for the future, Biden isn't getting it right.
I think Trump understood that.
Don't you? Yeah, and I think Elon Musk, of course, understands it.
So, yeah, and Trump did Space Force, right?
Space Force was not just because it's going to look good on his resume.
Space Force is because he understood power.
If there's one thing that Trump understands that nobody should be arguing about, he gets power.
Right? He knows how power works.
All of the ins and outs of power.
And he looked at space and said, uh-oh.
If somebody else has that power someday, space, we're doomed.
We have to have that power.
And so he went out and created the seeds, and we're seeing it start to come to fruition, of that power.
I think Trump is beyond...
Smart president. He's visionary, if you look at Space Force as an example.
So I don't know if he'll ever get enough credit for that, but he should.
And the other good thing I was saying on a live stream yesterday, I did a little impromptu walk in my neighborhood, if you saw that.
And I noticed yesterday, for the first time, that one of the facilities near me, there's a big fairgrounds facility not too far, And they've put up giant tents and they've built a vaccination center.
Now, of course, there have been vaccination centers for some time in other places.
And we know that the vaccinations have been rolling out, of course.
But I have to tell you that when you see a giant human-made vaccination center pop up in your town, it'll change you.
It doesn't feel the same as just knowing it's happening.
I actually cried when I saw it.
Because this was the point where the humans go on offense, right?
Defense is putting on your mask and socially distancing and closing your schools.
That's just defense.
I don't really want to be in the military that only plays defense.
I want to fucking win.
And winning requires offense.
Now, of course, I'm speaking just figuratively, but vaccinations look like offense to me.
That doesn't look like defense.
And the psychological morale thing that that did to me Watching my town go on offense for the first time.
So maybe your towns have been on offense for a while, if you got it first.
But my town just went on offense.
I'm very, very happy about that.
It happened about the same time that my country put a helicopter on Mars.
Who put the helicopter on Mars?
Was it the politicians?
Well, they helped.
But it was the engineers.
American engineers, and they did work with people born in other countries, etc.
So different national origins were involved in the landing.
But let's say mostly American engineers...
Just saved our bacon in the future.
Or they're on a path to doing it, meaning giving us some military assets in space.
At the same time, our scientists built these vaccinations in record time.
Politicians helped, right?
Politicians did their job on both cases.
But we're watching our best scientists and our best engineers We re-engineer our whole frickin' civilization right in front of you.
We watched our engineers say, wait a minute, you can't commute?
Well, we got this other technology.
Now, a lot of those engineers were in China, I suppose, the Zoom people.
But the point is, the engineers and scientists are really pretty big heroes.
Not to take away from the frontline responders who are in a category of their own, hero-wise, but I don't think we give enough credit to the engineers and the scientists.
You know, we complain about the science all day long, but usually we're complaining about what journalists told us about science or what politicians told us about science.
We're not really complaining about science because we don't have access to it directly, but they're doing some stuff.
I'll tell you, that stuff we can't see directly, the science, they're doing some stuff.
Just put a helicopter on Mars if I haven't mentioned that before.
So, is the golden age here?
Might be. What do we have in front of us?
Probably peace in the Middle East.
There might be a war with Iran before we get there, but it will be short if it happens.
Probably space colonization is entering its golden age.
Probably the way we manage future pandemics is forever changed.
Taking that risk, which was a gigantic risk, and probably figuring out how to put that back into a smaller box.
So it's easy to get caught up on who got cancelled and what's in the headlines and who's arguing with who and our country is divided and stuff.
But we're working on nuclear fusion, space exploration, You know, vaccines like we've never seen.
I think education will be...
I think there are now...
Corey DeAngelis does the best reporting on this about school choice.
I think there are 23, if I have it right, 23 state legislatures...
We have put forth legislation for funding to follow the child instead of the school.
The effect of that is if your child decides to go to a non-public school, that the funding would follow the child and help fund the other entity.
So almost half of the country.
Now, is that a big deal?
Yeah. Yeah, that's really big.
Because the teachers' unions...
are the primary source of systemic racism.
And systemic racism is probably the biggest problem in the country, at least domestically.
And it looks like we're marching pretty quickly towards solving it by taking money away from their control and allowing the student to go where they want with the parents, of course, and take the money with them.
This is so big.
It's almost incalculably large if it keeps going the way it's going.
So you still need to get there, but it's going the right way.
So who promoted that?
Yes, I think Trump was one of the louder voices, and the Republicans in general were the louder voices on that topic.
Somebody says, no, systemic racism is not the biggest problem.
It's the biggest problem in terms of disunity in the country.
Now, if you're saying that it's not real, here's my definition of systemic racism, which is that if you can't get a good education, because you're, let's say, in a depressed part of the country, if you can't get a good education and you don't have a choice...
That does suggest that there's a ripple effect all the way from slavery to the current world, and even though it's true that black people can succeed, of course, there is an average difference.
That's real. There's an average difference, and of course there's a ripple effect from slavery.
How could there not be? So, that doesn't mean it's your fault, and it doesn't mean you have to lose your job to fix it.
That's a whole different conversation.
I'm saying that if you could fix the schools, you would eventually, and it wouldn't take that long, maybe one generation, probably stop talking about systemic racism, because everybody would have an education that wanted one, and the economic disparity would close on its own, etc. So, it's a big deal.
It's a big deal. Alright, that's all for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
I've gone on too long.
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