Episode 1292 Scott Adams: How to End Racism, Billionaires Save the World, Fake News and More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
America's dangerous leadership vacuum
A legit, practical way to end racism
Texas disaster, no Biden?
Our "fakenewsocracy" drives our politicians
Masks eliminated regular flu...but not COVID?
COVID and humidity
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Go. Well, AOC collected three or four million dollars for Texas, but that's nothing compared to what Ted Cruz did by returning to Texas and warming the state directly.
So congratulations, Texas.
Happy to see that you're coming out of it.
And just as we all suspected...
Texas is one of our good states.
I don't want to tell you who the bad ones are, really.
Don't want to embarrass you.
Rhode Island. But Texas is one of our more capable states.
And they just took one of the biggest disasters you can imagine, took it on the chin, and almost all of them survived.
There were some tragic deaths.
But good for Texas.
We would expect nothing less of you Texans.
Have you noticed that there's no leaders in the country anymore?
Is that my imagination?
There aren't any leaders anymore?
I mean, there are people in charge.
But it seems as if the moment you take Trump off the stage, love him or hate him, there's not much left, is there?
You know, is Biden really the standard bearer for the Democrats?
Is Nancy Pelosi?
You'd have to go all the way down to, I say down to, but in terms of rank, down to AOC before you get anybody who's got any charismatic firepower, any new ideas, any energy at all.
And I think she's still a little too young to take the position that I think ultimately she will have, which is probably the presidency eventually.
But how about the Republicans?
Who do the Republicans have?
Well, I would have said Ted Cruz toward the top of the list, but you can see that the Democrats are doing a pretty good job of carpet bombing anywhere that Ted Cruz goes.
So they may be able to suppress him.
Yeah, you can name some names.
Rand Paul, Matt Gaetz, Tom Cotton.
You know, you can name a number of people.
But there's nobody that the whole country...
Oh, there's a leader.
Or even the whole party.
You can't even get half of them.
So here's what I would like to suggest.
There's a real danger here.
Because there's a vacuum.
And I don't know that the United States does well when there's a vacuum of leadership.
Right? Because that's sort of what gets you in trouble.
Trump came along at a time when there also wasn't much to compete with in terms of a brand that was obviously a leadership brand.
And that path is still wide open.
Yeah, you can name, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, Ron DeSantis.
These are all good names, all capable people.
But none of them are dominant right now.
Yeah. And I worry that a charismatic figure could take advantage of this.
So watch out for your next Rasputin type of person to come along.
It's wide open.
And I say this without joking.
If I had any interest in this job, it would be dangerous.
Because I think I could get it.
Like, if I actually wanted to be president...
I feel like I could do it under today's conditions.
But seriously, I do not want that job.
That would be, literally, I can't even imagine a worse job.
Can you imagine a worse job than being president?
I can't. And I wouldn't do the commute.
Alright, here's the good news.
I'll give you extra good news.
Two good newses.
Number one, you saw the news about the 777 with the bad engine?
Well, I'm very tuned into all kinds of aircraft problems because most of you know by now, my wife Christina is a pilot.
So she recently got her pilot license as well as her high performance rating, which means that she's qualified to fly an airplane upside down.
So I always think that's funny.
A lot of people are proud that they're pilots.
It's like, my wife is a pilot too, and she can fly her airplane upside down.
Just saying. I don't know if you can do that.
Anyway, you can only do that with certain airplanes, obviously.
Not every airplane. By the way, did you ever take a class in, let's say, science class, or maybe you read it somewhere, to learn how a wing creates lift?
You're all science people, right?
Trust the science.
Can you explain to me how it is that an airplane's wing creates lift in the comments?
I'm seeing the answer here.
The Bernoulli principle.
Right. The Bernoulli principle.
And the way that works is, if you haven't had that explained to you, let's say my phone here is the wing.
Because the wing is curved on the top, but flat on the bottom, The airflow takes longer to get across the top than it does over the bottom, and therefore it's lighter.
There's less air pressure on the top.
Oh, wait for the punchline.
Wait for the punchline.
Some of you are getting ahead of me.
No, I'm not dumb.
I'm not dumb. There's actually going to be a twist here.
Wait for it. Wait for it.
All right. So as you know, and we're all taught, that the Bernoulli principle says the air going over the top will be less air pressure than the air in the bottom because it's the same amount of air, but it's traveling faster over the top.
Longer distance, I mean.
So it's lighter.
And that means that the air in the bottom is heavier, so it lifts the wing.
Right? You've all been taught that.
It's pretty obvious. Okay?
Now, my wife gets in the plane, and then she flies it upside down.
What happened to your brain?
Same wing, and it only works one way, right?
Because it's got to have the curvy side up.
That's how the Bernoulli principle works.
But my wife gets in the plane, takes off, turns it upside down, and flies.
How? Let me tell you how.
Fake news is how.
The Bernoulli principle?
Bullshit. It's obvious bullshit.
Do you know why it's obviously not true?
Have I mentioned that my wife can get in an airplane and fly upside down?
It doesn't matter which side the wing is on.
And you don't have to wonder if it's true.
Just look up and watch.
You can watch an airplane fly upside down.
Just go to an air show. Are these like special magic wings that have a different shape?
No. No.
And how about an airplane that doesn't have the rounded top?
If it doesn't have the rounded top and the flat bottom, it's not going to work, right?
Except that they exist.
There are airplanes with flat wings.
They don't need that Bernoulli principle.
A lot of you didn't know the answer, but did you see how many people confidently said, oh yeah, it's the Bernoulli principle.
We all learned that in science.
Everybody knows that. You could probably Google it and it would still tell you that the Bernoulli principle is what's going on.
It couldn't be.
Let me tell you what's going on.
The same thing as a water ski.
You know, if you're in the water and you're getting ready to water ski, the reason that you rise up onto your water ski is because the water has more mass, you know, when you're moving against it, than the ski does.
So the ski is supported by the effective mass of the water as you're moving fast.
Same with the air.
That's it. As long as the air has some mass, and you've got this big wing that's moving against it, it'll lift.
That's the whole story.
And how many of you are having this experience right now?
Are you kidding me?
I thought that was obvious, settled science that we've known for decades.
I learned it in school.
Not only was it not true, ever, It was obviously not true.
Obviously. Do you know why it was obviously not true?
Because you can fly upside down.
That's all you need to know.
All right. So, all I was going to say about this, there are like four aircraft crashing stories.
And of course, it's scary if your wife is a pilot to hear any of these stories.
But one of the things I learned from Christina...
Is that if your problem happens when you're pretty high in the air, that's actually safer than if it happens during takeoff or landing.
You don't want a problem that happens during the takeoff or that happens during the landing.
That's when you notice the problem.
That's bad. But if you're way high in the air and you lose one engine, It's not as bad as almost anything else could be, right?
So kudos to the pilot who took it down expertly and kept everybody safe.
But probably, as long as both wings were working and navigation, you know, the controls were working and one engine was working and they were high enough in the air, they were probably going to make it.
So the odds were actually well on their side, and it came through good.
All right. I would like to propose a way to end racism.
Are you ready for this?
And I'm not even joking.
That's the sort of thing you say when it sounds like you're going to introduce a joke or something, right?
I'm not even joking. I'm going to give you an actual, legitimate...
Practical way to end racism.
Now, the first thing, of course, you have to fix the schools.
You've got to get rid of the teachers' unions or at least bypass them somehow.
Because if you don't have good schools, you're not really going to have a chance of everybody having at least equal opportunity and closing gaps in the long run.
But beyond that, there's also the way you feel, right?
There's the real structural stuff, but I think that we can work on that over time.
But on top of that, there's the psychology of it.
So I'm going to be talking about the psychology of it.
Okay? I just saw...
Maybe...
Well, I'll just describe what it is, and then you can put your own take on it.
There's a TikTok video made by a black man, and you have to hear that part first.
We still live in a world where I have to tell you that something was done by a black man or a white woman or something.
So it still matters.
Unfortunately, you still have to like start your story that way or else the story doesn't make sense.
So it's a TikTok video made by a black man in which he puts the audio, I assume he made it himself, puts the audio of Joe Biden somewhat inartfully describing how some people can't get online and he made it sound as if minorities have more trouble operating computers.
Now, I don't think that Biden meant it that way, which I'll talk about in a minute.
But it came out that way.
Just, you know, the words on the surface came out sounding insensitive, you know, poorly constructed.
And a lot of people made fun of it because it sounded like he was, you know, secretly racist and thought that black people couldn't work computers or something.
So whoever the gentleman is who made this video is very talented, all right?
Now again, in order for you not to get mad at me, and for me not to get cancelled, hear this first part.
This is video made by a black man.
If it had not been made by a black man, it would be very inappropriate.
Like, really, really inappropriate.
As in a 10 out of 10, For inappropriate, if anybody else had made it.
But it was made by a black guy, right?
So this matters to the story.
And what he did was, he did sort of like a reenactment almost of the, what movie is it?
2001 Space Odyssey, where a bunch of monkeys find an obelisk, and they're amazed by the technology, and they just start going monkey crazy and going, rah, rah, rah, rah.
Well, this gentleman, who again, for the purpose of the story, you need to know, is black.
Does this hilarious, and I mean, you will cry when you see it.
Like, you will actually cry.
It is so frickin' funny.
So the first thing you need to know is, he's really talented, whoever he is, I'd love to know who he is.
But he does an impression of an actual monkey with a laptop on the ground, and I don't want to ruin it for you, But you have to see just his physical comedy of trying to figure out a laptop, making fun of Joe Biden while the Joe Biden audio is playing on the top.
Now, compare.
Compare what this genius did, because if you watch it...
You know, it's funny to say somebody's a genius, you know, acting like a monkey and dancing around a laptop...
But you have to see how well he did it.
Until you see how well he executed the joke, if you will, you can't understand how talented he was.
But watching this is just hilarious.
And the first thing you say is, well, I like that guy.
He seems like somebody you'd want to hang out with because he's so freaking funny.
And I don't think there's a more productive way to deal with racism.
Now, when I say racism, again, there's a separate issue with structural racism and systemic racism.
You have to keep working on those.
But on top of that, the part I'm talking about is the psychology.
Just how do you feel about each other?
Like, what do you feel when you have any kind of racial interaction?
And I've never seen a more productive way to deal with it, which is just to treat it like people are idiots, and it's funny.
That's it. We're all idiots.
Sometimes, right?
Sometimes I'm an idiot.
It's not like you haven't seen that, right?
There's nobody here who can't say that I haven't acted like an idiot.
Sometimes. You've all acted like idiots.
You've all done things that when you look back at it, you just laugh at yourself because you're just sort of irrational.
Kind of an idiot. And the way...
The way this video treats this issue, I don't think it could be better.
And I think we need to find our way back to the point where you can mock yourself.
Right? You should be able to catch yourself being somewhat like accidentally racist and just laugh at yourself for being a dope.
Like, you've got to get to that point where you're not done, right?
We're always going to have this bad feeling.
Like, why can't somebody make just a joke about how stupid we are?
Because we're all stupid sometimes, right?
Now, watching the way this guy handled this, imagine, think about how, like, The Root handled it, you know, this publication.
Probably there were a whole bunch of people who said, that Joe Biden, let's look at his history of things he said in the past that were racist.
Let's climb on top of him.
Hey, even the Democrats are bad, and he's probably a secret white supremacist.
There's a million unproductive ways that Joe Biden's inartful language could have been dealt with, but there wasn't a better way.
And I'd love to know his name just because he was so talented.
But this was sort of genius.
Sort of genius. We should mock racism out of existence.
But you have to do it by mocking yourself.
If you're mocking other people, maybe you're not doing it right.
But in a sense, the guy who did this prank, he was mocking Biden, but sort of also mocking people, I would say.
Alright, that's the first part of my solution to racism.
Again, not talking about the systemic part, which needs real work, but the psychological part.
It goes like this.
Every now and then, you've heard me say this before, you need to introduce new standards of manners, good manners, because the world changes.
So, for example, 100 years ago, you needed no standard of manners for cell phones, because they didn't exist.
But now, you know, you have to come up with a standard of, can you use your phone in a crowded restaurant, and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
So, given that, you know, racism has also evolved, every now and then, maybe you should review your standard of just how we interact.
What is good manners and what is not?
And I would like to suggest the following standard.
Now, by analogy, many of you know I introduced the standard recently of the 48-hour rule, which is you just give anybody 48 hours to clarify or apologize for something they said in public that maybe sounded a little sketchy to you.
And then if they do apologize, just accept it.
So that's just a good standard for life because people say a lot of things on social media.
It would be better if we don't crucify everybody who makes a mistake.
And I also introduced the 20-year rule.
Which is, if there's something in your past, 20 years ago, and by the way, I would shorten that the younger you are.
At my age, I'll take the full 20 years and say, alright, if it was 20 years ago, I was a different person.
But if, let's say, you're in your 30s, maybe it's more of a 10-year thing because you're changing faster during that period.
But the concept is, You shouldn't necessarily have to take responsibility for what a different person did, which is you when you were younger.
You're kind of different, right?
But here's my new set of rules, and it goes like this, to end racism.
Only the wokeness part, not the systemic part.
That the only thing that matters when people are saying things that you think sound racist, the only thing that matters is their intentions.
If you intend to be a good person, but you've accidentally used a phrase that sounded offensive, that's not so offensive, is it?
Because it was accidental. I'll give you an analogy.
If somebody bumped into you and accidentally touched you in your, let's say, crotch area, You might be startled, but you wouldn't be offended because they just bumped into you.
It was just an accident. But if they intentionally touched you there, well, now you've got a fight on your hands, right?
So there's a big difference between the things that happen and things you intend.
And so it is with words.
If you say something that sounds terrible, but you didn't intend it that way in any sense, I think we need to take that into consideration.
But there's a second part here.
How do you trust anybody's intentions?
Because you can't see them, right?
You can hear what they say, but you can't see their intentions.
So here's the rule which I would promote going forward.
That, number one, only their intentions matter.
And if their intentions don't match the words, you have to go with the intentions.
So if there's any disagreement with what somebody says is their intention and their words, you should always say, oh, it's the intention that mattered.
That's rule number one.
Rule number two, how do you trust they're telling the truth?
Because maybe they're just trying to cover their ass.
Rule number two is, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if it's true.
Now, it's going to take a moment to understand why that's a good rule.
Because do you want to live in a world where we're crucifying each other for misstatements or even bad intentions, or do you want to live in a world where it's okay to improve?
It's okay to be corrected.
It's okay to find out that your opinion is not socially acceptable.
I would rather that somebody makes a mistake, their words maybe do match their intentions, and it's not really a good intention, but then they're corrected, then they apologize, and then they say to themselves, well, that didn't work out for me.
Maybe I won't do that again.
So I don't care if you have bad intentions that you keep to yourself.
This is important to the concept.
I'm not trying to change anybody's intentions, because that would be like brainwashing and manipulation.
You can keep your private thoughts.
I only care about them when they enter the real world.
And if giving you a little bit of a spanking for what you said that did in fact match your intentions, if that causes you not to express this in the real world, the only place it matters, I don't care if it's happening in your head, And you're willing to pretend that you will now be that person who is more polite, let's say? That's fine with me.
If you're willing to pretend to be a good person, even if you've got bad thoughts in your head, you're 100% okay with me.
Because the only thing I'm asking you to do is to act well.
I don't ask you to think well.
It's not even a reasonable thing to ask anybody.
Nor would I want you to ask me to think right, because that would just be your opinion of what to think right, just as my opinion of how you should think should be irrelevant to you.
But the way you act, that might affect me.
Now I'm in on that decision.
So here's the standard again.
If somebody says something such as Joe Biden did, this sounded sketchy, doesn't matter, As long as you know their intentions are okay.
If you don't know their intentions are okay, the only way to investigate it is to ask them.
And then accept whatever they say, even if it's a lie.
You're better off accepting the lie under this specific situation.
Because in the real world, manners are often lies, aren't they?
Sometimes good manners mean sort of a polite lie, such as, oh, I have to get home early because of the babysitter.
Maybe you're just not having a good time, right?
So good manners do include little harmless lies.
We accept that as part of society.
So intentions matter.
The only person who can tell you their intentions is the person who said it, accept it whether it's true or not, because it's the action that matters, and accept apologies when they have them.
So I'm going to do for Biden what I would have done for Trump.
If Trump had said the exact same words that Biden said, The context was talking about underserved communities that don't have maybe Wi-Fi, don't have laptops, can't get on Zoom.
If Trump had said it in a way that sounded like it was a racial comment, what would I be doing the next day?
I would be telling you, that's obviously not what he intended, because nobody would say that.
No president gets up in front of his or her own country and says, I think this group of people aren't good at doing stuff.
That didn't happen.
It wouldn't happen if Trump had said it.
He obviously wouldn't have meant it that way.
And Biden did say it, and he obviously didn't mean it that way.
Now, we had a lot of fun acting like he said something racist, but it wasn't his intention.
I don't think there's any chance it was his thought.
I think that it was just a sort of a gotcha, and I'm going to give Biden the same pass that I would have given Trump, whether you like it or not.
All right. Anatoly Lubarsky, who I mentioned you should follow, Because he's great at the fact-checking stuff.
We're talking about why India appears to be doing so well, but this may not be the full explanation, but it's good to know that only 22% of deaths in India are medically certified, meaning a lot of people die at home or on the streets, and nobody ever does an official doctor cause of death.
So when you're looking at India's stats, know that in some states within India, fewer than 10% of the deaths are even recorded medically.
So if you think you know how many people are dying from COVID in India, we probably don't.
It may be 5 to 10, as Anatoly says, maybe 5 to 10 times more than is being reported.
You can't rule that out.
You don't know it's true.
But you can't rule out that it could be five to ten times more than what they report.
So just put that in the mix with the other things we don't understand about coronavirus.
I told you yesterday, I think, on livestream, that CNN had a problem with their fact-checker.
They had hired an official fact-checker for Trump.
And Daniel Dale is his name.
And he would be on TV all the time, fact-checking the heck out of President Trump.
I mean, he was so busy checking facts.
He was around all the time, it seemed.
But now that Trump's out of office, and I told you they can't really fire him because that would be too obvious.
It would be too obvious that they were going to ignore Biden's unfactual statements.
But to his credit...
Daniel Dale has at least written about Biden's factual inaccuracies, especially in the town hall.
But I just read an article in Mediaite, or whatever it is, that Daniel Dale hasn't been on the air before.
Much at all, or maybe not at all, but maybe barely since Biden got into office.
So they're just sort of keeping him off the air.
They don't want to fire him.
That'd be a little too on the nose.
But maybe we'll just not put him on the air.
And of course, Daniel Dale is not the one who decides whether he's on the air.
I'm sure he wants to keep his job and keep doing his fact-checking.
But the management decides when he's on the air, and they've decided that maybe there'll be a little less Biden fact-checking than you might have liked to see.
All right. Biden didn't go to Texas.
How much should we care about that?
Don't you think Biden maybe should have taken a visit to a disaster zone of that magnitude?
I believe...
Didn't Trump visit California forest fires?
I believe he did.
Now, I'm not entirely sure that presidential visits of disaster sites is 100% necessary.
So if Biden had other things to do, maybe that's okay.
We don't know what else he was doing.
But it does feel like it's an indication of a lack of, let's say, vitality.
Just a lack of energy, it feels like.
And I guess he's putting the lid on stuff and taking the weekends off, and Kamala Harris is calling world leaders, and I tell you, it looks like the cat's on the roof big time, that we're going to see President Kamala Harris pretty soon.
You know, I've decided that the best name for our system of government is a fake newsocracy.
Because we're not a democracy by design.
We're actually a republic.
But we're not really a republic in the sense that our politicians go and make decisions on our behalf because they're smart and well-informed compared to us.
That's not happening.
The news drives what the politicians can and cannot do.
Now, it's still legal and possible for a politician to vote against, let's say, the majority opinion of their own party, but as a practical matter, it hardly ever happens.
The reality is that the news tells the politicians what they can get away with, because the news brainwashes the public, and then the public demands their politicians do what they think needs to be done, but that all comes from the news.
And the news is fake.
At least the political news.
Mostly fake. So we actually have evolved into a system in which fake news is the basis of our political system.
We make almost all of our decisions based on fake news.
Find an example that's different.
Even a lot of our coronavirus decisions were based on things that maybe weren't right in the beginning, but we hope are getting more right over time.
Certainly two impeachments, as much about fake news as anything.
Almost everything that gets decided by Congress is based on bad information and fake news.
Spin, narrative.
So what a weird world that we have an actual system driven by fake news.
And that is our system.
Until we change it, we have a fake newsocracy.
And here's the weird thing.
It's working pretty well.
It's still better than other systems.
The fake news is literally driving our lives, and it's still better than other systems.
Like, it's better than a dictator, right?
What are the other systems?
Every democracy probably becomes a fake newsocracy if it hasn't already.
So, I don't know.
Maybe it's the best we can do.
There are more reports that keep making me like Mike Pence more and more, because he just is so good at not causing problems that didn't need to be caused.
Now again, I've disagreed with him on LGBTQ stuff, so I'm not backing all of his opinions.
I'm just saying that as a human being, he's a solid citizen.
He was a solid vice president, Didn't do what Trump wanted in terms of the election stuff, but I think Pence made the right decisions there.
But now he continues to be an example to us all.
Because given the situation and the capital assault and the allegations that Trump wasn't caring about him, etc., and the things that Trump said about him directly, Pence is still not complaining.
He's still not complaining.
Nobody's heard Mike Pence throw Trump under the bus.
Is there anybody who had more reason to throw Trump under the bus than Mike Pence?
Nobody. Nobody had a better reason to lash out at Trump.
And he hasn't.
Can you think of any other politician that would have this much restraint?
And why does he have this restraint?
I'm guessing he thinks it's good for the country.
I mean, you don't know. Maybe it's good for him, too.
But I feel as if Pence just keeps making decisions that he at least thinks are good for the country.
You might disagree. The LGBTQ stuff is an obvious example.
But I just feel like he's a model citizen.
I can't say enough about how he just continues on being...
Like a good person in his view of what that takes, like with the exceptions I noted.
It's worth noting.
Alright. Some of the fake news.
How many of you think that the problem in Texas was from frozen windmills?
Just in the comments, tell me.
How many of you think the power problem in Texas was from frozen windmills?
Primarily. Not entirely, but primarily.
How many of you think that's true?
I'm looking at the comments now.
Yes, yes, yes. Not me.
No, no, no. Probably not.
No, partly.
Yes. No.
No. Now, are you puzzled by the fact that there are people who consume similar news, but you see in the comments, a lot of people saying no, but a lot of people saying yes.
Aren't we all watching the same news?
The news is the news, right?
Are you watching news that says windmills are the problem, but other people are watching news that says windmills are not the problem?
My current understanding is that the windmills were a smaller part of the problem than the gas pipelines being not weatherized, so that it was mostly a natural gas problem.
And I believe that the fake news sort of tried to sell it to you as a failure of green technology.
My take on green technology is if you include nuclear energy in green technology, I'm all for it.
If you leave that out, it sort of doesn't make sense economically.
But those of you who said yes, and believe that windmills were primarily the problem, how do you feel now, knowing that that was never true?
It was never true, but you certainly saw it in the news, didn't you?
I'll bet you saw a lot of news that said it's all about the windmills.
Now, here's one of those cases where Looking at the news on two different silos can help you, because I'm pretty sure that news that is right-leaning was heavily windmill, and news that was left-leaning might have been a little less anti-windmill, and they would have turned out to be right in this case.
So sampling both sides can always help you.
Bill Gates has an investment.
He has lots of investments, obviously, but in a hydrogen-powered Airplane company.
So there's somebody who's getting pretty close to developing a hydrogen-powered commercial aircraft.
Zero Avia.
Now, meaning that they have an aircraft they can actually fly with this power source right now.
A lot of work it would take to make it operational.
But I would like to, once again...
Show some appreciation for our productive billionaires.
I don't think you can say enough about what Bill Gates does.
He's building toilets for Africa, which turns out to be the least glamorous job you could ever possibly have.
Fighting malaria, unglamorous, trying to figure out how to get clean water and a poop, literally.
Very unglamorous.
And Bill Gates is taking the hardest, least glamorous problems and dedicating his life to solving them for the planet.
He doesn't need to solve any of these problems for himself.
He doesn't have any problems.
Well, that's a lie, but he doesn't have those problems because he's rich.
He can insulate himself from all of this stuff.
But he doesn't.
And I don't know how much appreciation Bill Gates gets because mostly he gets criticized for people think he's putting chips and vaccines and everything else.
But I really appreciate the things that he's doing for the country.
And I'm seeing the critics here, and you all think it's a Soros problem, etc.
Now the other one, of course, is Elon Musk, and especially the carbon capture idea.
Because the thing I think that maybe the AOCs get wrong is that it just doesn't matter what we do in this country.
If you don't solve it for other countries, it doesn't matter what you do.
So Elon Musk is taking the, what I'd say, the engineer's approach, which is you can't make other people act differently in other countries.
You just don't have any control over that.
But you can suck carbon out of the air, and maybe, if India and China don't stop creating massive amounts of carbon, Maybe there's a way to suck it out of the air.
But what you're not going to do is talk them into using different technology.
I don't think you're going to talk them into it.
So if you can't manage the human part, you have to solve it as a technical problem, and that's what Elon Musk is smart enough to know, you're just going to have to do.
You're just going to have to treat it as an engineering problem because the human part you can't solve.
You can't tell the Chinese they can't use oil if they need it to eat.
It's just not a thing.
So imagining that that's a thing is just fantasy land.
But thank goodness we have real engineers, Elon Musk, for example, and Bill Gates, not technically an engineer, but has a similar kind of mind.
Thank goodness we have people who know that these are technical problems.
In the sense that humans aren't going to solve them, so you have to make it a technical problem.
Those of you who are worried that the carbon will be sucked out of the air at too great a rate and doom the country, that would be kind of dumb.
Because you could just unplug them, right?
All you have to do is unplug them.
If they take too much carbon out of the air, just unplug them.
It's not really a big risk.
All right. I keep hammering this point only because it's a fun mystery, that the regular flu deaths couldn't possibly be real, because the news is that wearing masks basically eliminated the normal seasonal flu this year.
Yet, when we see the differences in masks and lockdowns and stuff with different places, it's not obvious that the masks make that much of a difference.
Now, I do think that masks almost certainly make a difference.
If I had to guess how much of a difference masks make, my non-scientific, uninformed opinion would put it somewhere in the 20% range for the coronavirus, meaning it doesn't, like, shut it down.
That's fair to say, right?
Masks and social distancing, they don't just shut down the virus unless you go full China.
You know, the China kind of social distancing where you'll be arrested if you leave your house for three weeks.
That works. But do you believe that these two things can both be true?
That masks and socially distancing effectively eliminated regular seasonal flu?
At the same time, You can't even see its impact in the statistics for the coronavirus.
Now, as was quickly pointed out, we do know, or science believes it knows, that the coronavirus is extra, extra viral.
It's like super extra viral.
So is that the whole answer?
Do you think that once you've said that one of them is way more viral, that now our observations are explained?
That that's why the regular flu stopped in his tracks, but the more viral one, even with masks, just keeps on going?
Does it feel like that's true?
Because it could be.
Like, I'm not going to say that's impossible, but it just doesn't pass my sniff test, right?
If I had heard that the regular flu had been cut down 80%, I'd say to myself, Okay, that makes sense.
One's more viral.
Didn't make that much.
Maybe one made a 20% difference.
The other one was an 80% difference.
I get that. But what if one goes to basically zero?
Eh, no.
I'm not buying that anymore.
I'm just not buying that anymore.
But again, it's possible, right?
You can't rule it out on any kind of statistic or scientific basis.
But it doesn't feel right.
It feels to me that maybe what's going on, and I'll just put this hypothesis out there, is that the regular flu deaths were never real.
The regular flu deaths were alleged to be in the same category as overdose deaths every year.
Does anybody know anybody, either directly or somebody you know who knows somebody, whoever died from an overdose?
Yes, you do. You do.
Car accidents every year, car deaths, are in that same general range as allegedly the normal seasonal flu deaths.
How many of you know somebody, or know somebody who knows somebody, so you're somewhat directly related, who has ever died in an auto accident?
You all do.
You all do. How many of you know somebody personally who died of AIDS, Almost all of you, right?
Or you know somebody who knows somebody.
So all of these other things that have causes of death that seem to be about in the same number, you all know of people who died of it.
But you don't know people who died of the regular flu.
Okay, now I know the next thing you're going to say.
But Scott, Scott, Scott, the regular flu...
They code it as pneumonia so it doesn't show up.
Maybe. Maybe.
Or maybe people who had pneumonia and they're going to die from it also had the flu at the same time.
But it was the pneumonia that killed them.
I don't know. Is that even a thing?
I don't even know if that's possible.
I'm just telling you there's something going on that we don't understand.
And I don't think it's as simple as masks work really, really well for seasonal flu, but they only work sort of 20% good for coronavirus.
It doesn't smell like that could be true.
I think the regular seasonal flu is bullshit.
I think it's bullshit.
But the other possibility is that the only people dying from regular flu, or not the only people, but most of them are people who are so close to death that the cause of death almost doesn't matter to anybody.
You're 95, you got a cold, you died.
So maybe you just don't notice, because it's people who are going to die anyway.
I don't know. It's a mystery.
Here's another mystery.
When we talk about seasonality of the flu, people talk about heat and humidity.
And humidity in particular, there have been studies that show that I believe if there's more humidity, the water in the air with the humidity will bring the...
I think it will drop the virus to the ground faster, kind of clearer from the air because it gets stuck in the water.
But if your air is really dry and the virus is floating around in what little water there is, That'll spread further.
So the thinking is that humidity can make a big difference to how a virus spreads.
And indeed, we see that, at least in our climate, when people are indoors, and it's winter, and there's not much humidity, there's more transmission.
But here's my question.
If it's true that indoor humidity is a really big factor, What about outdoor humidity?
Because doesn't the indoor humidity follow almost perfectly the outdoor humidity?
Is there any case where your indoor humidity is grossly different than your outdoor humidity, unless you're actively managing your humidity?
It seems to me that they correlate, right?
In the summer, your outdoor humidity finds its way indoors.
Right? So, wouldn't we see that if indoor humidity makes such a difference, wouldn't we see that anywhere that is permanently high humidity, Hawaii for example, that they just wouldn't have nearly the same problem?
And do we see that?
Maybe we do. Maybe we just haven't seen the pattern.
If you look at Africa, are we not surprised that Africa isn't doing worse?
We're a little bit surprised, right?
But what about Mexico and is it Brazil?
Isn't Brazil pretty humid?
Brazil's pretty humid, right?
So do we see a clear correlation with outdoor humidity being all the ones with less spread?
Because I don't know that we see that.
Yeah, so I'm seeing in the comments a lot of you ending up where I am, which is, it seems to me that maybe humidity was a fake-out because it's just correlated with something else, right?
If your AC only runs in the summer, it's only running when there's humidity.
What if the AC is the whole problem, right?
What if the kind of ventilation...
Is what matters. And you're ventilating differently in some seasons than others.
Maybe it's the ventilation. So my feeling is, given masking and all that, that probably ventilation is going to be more important than humidity.
But I'll put that out there as just a fact-check situation.
And the question comes down to, do countries that have high humidity all the time universally do better...
With the coronavirus. And I don't think that's true, is it?
But check it out.
Somebody says, is Christina pregnant?
No. I don't know why you're asking that.
HVAC recirculates the problem.
But there are HVACs that have now UV type of light to kill viruses.
So we'll probably see more of that.
Somebody says, sorry, Adam, the two are largely separable.
The two to what? Are you talking about outdoor air and indoor humidity?
So I would need more on that comment.
You may be right. I just need more on that comment.
Because you want a little Dilbert?
You know, I have to be honest.
I've never thought that I should reproduce.
That's it. And I'll tell you why.
My childhood... Was not good.
Mostly for health reasons, not other reasons.
And I wouldn't want to bring somebody into the world who could possibly have anything I had.
I think I have too much empathy.
I've told you before that I would make a terrible leader.
Because a leader has to make people do things that are bad for them, some of them, so that it's good for everybody.
A leader has to target people, unfortunately, like, okay, you soldiers will go die, And that's bad for you, but it'll be good for the rest of the country.
Or you have to have more taxes, but it's better for the rest of the country.
I'm not good at taking any group and targeting them for victimhood.
I don't have the lack of empathy that you need to say, all right, you're going to suffer, but it'll be good for these other people.
And it's the same with children.
I don't think I could handle...
Having a biological child that I brought into the world that had anything like the problems that I've had.
I don't know if I could handle that emotionally.
Maybe I could. There's probably a biological thing, which when you're in that situation, you figure it out.
But that's been on my mind.
All right. Yeah, I think a lot more people are deciding not to have children these days.
That could be a problem.
Speaking of that, it's occurred to me that as we watch our society and civilization evolve, and it's not always evolving in a way that we plan, Things just sort of happen, and then we say, hey, how'd that happen?
There's a weird thing that's happened that I've mentioned before, but you're seeing more and more of it.
On social media.
Given that we've lost all faith in our news and our institutions, everything from our intelligence agencies to the FBI, a lot of credibility has been lost.
A lot of that has to do with just figuring out what's true and then what to do about it.
And it feels to me that our system is inexorably being drawn toward an outcome.
And it looks like the outcome is something like internet dads.
I'm going to use that word.
You can throw in moms, right?
But because more of them are male than female, I'll use the sexist definition and say it's internet dads.
And I would say I'm one of them.
I would say I'm an internet dad.
Now in the case, dad of stepkids, but...
Still a dad. Meaning that there is a dad vibe, which is somebody needs to take care of the ugly problems.
And it's always dad.
Like if there's a snake...
In the garden? It's going to be dad who gets rid of it.
If there's an intruder, probably dad.
Now, it won't be sexist.
Of course, there's no reason that women can't get rid of snakes.
But just socially, traditionally, some things you imagine being more dad.
Yeah, and I feel like there is a group of dads that are sort of growing up with the internet.
And that people are gravitating toward them because what they, and I'll say we, because I'm in that group, what we do doesn't happen anywhere else.
Meaning that we're the ones telling you who's lying to you, who to trust, who's a scam.
Did your dad do that for you?
I remember my dad thought everything was a scam.
My dad thought that the house had been burglarized every other day.
Hey, this lock looks like it's been jimmied.
Who's been playing with this lock?
I think somebody's been in here.
So, yeah, if you have a dad...
Who was the one telling you everything was a con and maybe there's a trick behind this.
It's really useful stuff.
And if you didn't have a dad who was telling you to be a skeptic about everything all the time, you'd be a little unarmed going into the world without that little recording playing in your head of, I think they're trying to put one over on you there.
So I always have that recording.
I think they're up to no good.
And that's my dad's voice.
Alright. House was broken into all the time in Houston.
Sorry about that. Alright, so I feel as though you are seeing the somewhat organic growth of internet dads.
And... Maybe that's useful.
We'll see. Alright, that's all I have for now.
I'll talk to you tomorrow. Alright, YouTubers.
Hit that subscribe button if you care to get notified when I'm on.
Very soon, Periscope will go away, so YouTube will be...
I think the locals platform will also have live streaming pretty soon.
And by the way, if you would like to support people like me, I'm on the locals platform.
And even if you don't want to watch that content, it's a way to support voices that are not part of the corporate badness.
Somebody says YouTube notifies you five minutes late.
Well, you know, if you follow me on Twitter, if I remember, I don't always remember, I do tweet the live stream just before I get on.
So if you set an alert for my tweets, that would be a second way to do it.
The only person you can trust is yourself.
No, you can also trust people who don't have any motivation to screw you.
There just aren't many of them, but they exist.
And I think family members can be trusted more often than not.
Set up YouTube stream further ahead of time.
Maybe. I don't know if that's real.
All right, just reading your comments and that's all for now.
