Episode 1315 Scott Adams: The Newest HOAX From the Washington Post, CNN Turns on Biden, Shocking Poll
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Governor Newsom's Feinstein replacement
George Floyd City Council settlement...ends trial?
"Find the fraud" was an impeachment HOAX
"Fine people" was an impeachment HOAX
"Rogues' gallery of outsiders and contrarians"
Psychology of COVID vaccination discomfort
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
And may I mention, because I don't know if anybody has said it yet, but you look great today.
Have you lost weight? I don't know, you just look healthier, younger, sexier.
And it could be because you've been enjoying a little thing that's good for your health.
You know what it is. It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it's going to happen now.
But only, only if you have a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, a glass, a vessel of any kind.
And only if you've filled it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
Yeah. It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Have you heard of it? It's big.
It's all over the world.
And it's happening now.
Go!
Suddenly, I feel a psychic, if not a spiritual connection, to every other simultaneous sipper everywhere in the world.
But what about the people who did not sip?
They're dead to me. It's like they don't even exist.
But I'm sure they'll get with the program.
Well, let's talk about the most important thing of the day.
I just tweeted a poll for Women Only.
And I'll ask the same thing here.
So, Women Only, answer me in the comments.
Is it ever okay for a man to wear a v-neck t-shirt?
This is... Looks v-neck because I'm wearing a microphone, but it's not.
So that's the question.
Is it ever okay for a man, women only, only women, is it ever okay for a man to wear a v-neck t-shirt?
Answers are overwhelmingly yes.
Somebody's wife says no.
Sure, yes, yes, yes.
No. I love them.
Yes, yes, yes. Sure.
Prefer them not to work, somebody says.
Well, I've heard it depends on the guy.
So I've heard that if your chest area and your arms are in reasonably good shape, you can pull it off.
But if you're kind of hairy and you haven't worked out, maybe you shouldn't.
All right, well, we've settled that.
Let's talk about something else.
I put a micro lesson on reframing, how to reframe your experience on the Locals platform.
It's a subscription platform for seven bucks a month.
You get all of my wisdom that you can't see anywhere else.
And I was looking at the responses to it, and it looks like it's life-changing.
And I hoped it would be.
But the idea of just looking at things differently, and then how that will change how you feel about things and how you act, is a really powerful thing.
So a lot of people are saying it's just literally life-changing.
But in other news, Elton John has condemned the Pope.
For ruling that same-sex unions are sinful.
And I thought to myself, that's kind of a fair fight, isn't it?
Elton John versus the Pope?
In many ways they're the same person, aren't they?
If you hold on your head Elton John, just do this exercise.
Just imagine Elton John.
And then just think sort of generally about Elton John's vibe.
You know, just feel him just generally.
Hold that in your head. Now think of the Pope.
Same guy. It's the same guy.
Wouldn't you like to see them have a cage fight and the winner gets to decide who gets married?
I'd like that. I mean, it's two people who like flamboyant clothing and being in public.
And I was trying to imagine...
You know, who could referee this fight?
And obviously, God would be the best referee.
And so I'm imagining the Pope praying over this and praying to God, and unlike regular people, if you pray to God, you don't feel him actually talking back, usually.
Maybe some of you do. It's more of a feeling, right?
But if you're the Pope, it's more like a phone call.
And he's like, hey, God, you know, I've got this situation, Eldon John...
He's mad at me because of this same-sex union thing.
I came out against it. And God would say, wait, who?
Who's against you?
Elton John.
Elton John, I love Tiny Dancer.
And the Pope would be, okay, let's not get sidetracked.
Just a question about these sinful same-sex unions.
Who's right, Elton John or me?
And God says...
Have you heard Levon?
It's amazing. I play it all the time up here in heaven.
And the Pope would be, can we stay on the topic?
So anyway, I think Elton John would probably get the nod if it came down to that.
Did you see the shocking video of a small plane in Florida crashing into a car on the ground?
Apparently a few people died.
Yeah, I guess a few died.
It's a shocking looking thing.
But you have to have really bad luck.
I'm not making fun of this.
I'm just saying you have to have really bad luck to die because a plane hit you while you were driving in your car.
Again, I'm not making fun of it, but that is really bad luck.
And one of the little insider things I happen to know from...
Hanging around pilots, is that the type of plane that this was is called a Beechcraft Bonanza.
And it has a nickname.
It has a nickname that the company who makes this airplane really doesn't want me to say.
But I'm going to say it anyway.
Among pilots, they call this plane that crashed, it's nicknamed the Dr.
Killer. I can see it in the comments.
Somebody already knew that. Pilots call that type of plane a doctor killer.
And the reason is that rich people, and doctors just being an example, will often get this plane and not realize that it's a little bit hard to handle.
It's a little bit more powerful than an average plane in that class.
If you were to compare this to, say, a Cessna, this is just stuff I hear from pilots, then a Cessna wants to land.
If you get a Cessna anywhere near an airport and take your hands off the controls, the Cessna will just sort of land.
Now, that's an exaggeration.
You really have to land it.
But it lands really easily.
Whereas the high-performance planes come in at a much higher speed, and they're built for performance, they're not built for the subtleties of landing, and so they're kind of difficult to land.
This one is in the slightly difficult-to-land category, but I'll tell you what really struck me about it, no pun intended, is that when you see the video, the plane comes in at an angle like this and actually hits nose-first.
Now, I feel like it's almost impossible to hit nose first if you're still flying.
So either he lost flight control or the pilot was unconscious.
Because there's almost no way that even if you lost all engine, you still wouldn't hit at that angle.
There had to be a steering problem, I think.
So when it comes out, we'll find out.
All right. This...
I almost cancelled everything I was going to say today just to go on a swearing, cursing streak about the next story.
And this just happened.
I guess Joy Reid was interviewing Governor Newsom about who he's going to appoint to replace if Senator Feinstein were to retire.
And Joy Reid asked if he would appoint a black woman to the U.S. Senate.
If Feinstein retires.
And his answer was, I have multiple names in mind, and the answer is yes.
So the governor just said that if you're white, you're not in consideration for the job.
If you're Hispanic, Hispanic American, you're not in consideration to be a senator.
If you're Asian American, you are not considered...
To be a senator by the governor of New York who gets to make the decision.
Now, I'm trying really hard to not curse, but isn't this everything that the United States isn't?
This is everything we're not.
You've probably noticed that I've been relatively, compared to a lot of people, relatively not much of a critic of Governor Newsom.
I think he's got some explaining to do, right?
There's some things he needs to explain.
But I also generally thought, you know, he was sort of a well-intentioned and he's certainly smart, right?
So he has some qualities. I'm not going to ignore that.
And I was forgiving about coronavirus decisions, because I've said everybody's guessing on that.
And even immigration is just a tough place to be, right?
Because if anybody had a great solution for immigration, it would have been done by now.
So I'm not even too hard on him on the things that clearly he seems to be failing on.
Everything from forest management to energy management.
A lot of failing. But I've been relatively okay.
Well, not okay, but as a critic, I've been holding back a little bit.
I don't know if you've noticed it.
Seems like almost everybody is harder on him than I am.
And then this happened.
All right, I'm not going to get through this without swearing.
So here's your official warning.
If you've got kids in the room, you probably want to put the earmuffs on them right now.
When you tell me, Mr.
Mayor, I'm sorry, not Mayor, but Governor, that I'm not qualified for a job because of my skin color, well, at that point, let's just say, you've gone too far.
Now, I would act exactly the same way if he'd said, he didn't, but if he had, said, I won't appoint a black person to be senator.
Imagine that. How would you feel about that?
Well, I'd be pretty pissed.
Because that's not the country I live in, right?
Would you want to live in a country where your governor said, no, I'll definitely not appoint a black person for this senator job.
You won't get even considered if you're black.
Well, immediately he would lose his job, of course.
But you should be really, really mad.
Like, if that happened in your country, the whole point of the fucking country is that we don't do that.
Let me say it again.
The whole fucking point of America, the whole fucking point, is that we don't do that.
That's the thing we don't do.
You can do every other fucking thing.
Everything. You can murder people.
You can do all kinds of terrible, terrible mistakes.
But in America, that's the one thing we don't fucking do.
If you get that wrong, the whole experiment, you might as well just throw it in the fucking toilet.
The moment the governor can go on television...
And say right to our faces that your ethnicity will disqualify you for one of the top jobs in California.
That's not the country you want to live in.
And it has nothing to do with the fact that which ethnicity he decided to prefer for this.
It has nothing to do with which one he picked.
Exactly the same, no matter what he said, as long as he was saying some people can't be senator.
Now, I get that diversity is important.
And if you gave me a choice of having more diversity or less, I would take more.
Certainly in a representative government, I think that's just healthy.
So I want more, but not like this.
Not this way.
Is this the way you get it?
Oh my God.
And the fact, the shocking thing is that he could say this proudly.
He didn't say it like, well, you know, sheepishly might have to go this way.
No, he said it like everybody should be patting him on the back and giving him a raise and re-electing him.
Yeah, I'm going to discriminate by race.
It's amazing. And so I would say that this turned me.
From being, well, if Governor Newsom survives the recall, so be it.
That's what the people wanted in the state.
But now I feel like I have to end him politically.
Now I feel like I can't ignore him anymore.
Like he went from, it's hard to ignore, but I can do it, to I can't ignore this.
I can't ignore this.
It's way over the line.
CNN held a focus group of Republicans who were hesitant about getting the vaccinations.
And they wanted to sort of see what was in their heads.
Like, why is it you'd be hesitant?
And Anderson Cooper, who was talking about this segment, acted very surprised that the Republicans on the panel were being persuaded by science as opposed to politics.
That's right. Anderson Cooper was actually surprised that the Republicans sounded rational, and when they said when the vaccinations first were announced, we were more skeptical because we wanted more science.
As more science comes in, and we can watch the experience and get more and more information, we're more persuaded to take it because we have more scientific information.
And Anderson Cooper...
Acts like he's fucking surprised that Republicans would be persuaded by information and science.
Now, here's the thing.
Are you surprised?
I wasn't surprised.
Because I don't think there's anybody who isn't persuaded by additional information and science over time, right?
And I think he thought that it was Trump or just republicanism or something that was causing these people to be skeptical as opposed to being completely smart and simply being cautious and wanting to have as much information as they could.
So it's amazing that he's amazed, I guess.
There's a story today because the press is just so bored without Trump.
They have to reach into the past and try to pull something back to the present to make a story out of it.
So I guess when Kushner, his last trip to the Middle East or Israel, talking about the Abraham Accords, and he ran up a hotel bill of over $25,000 for room and board.
And that's a big story. Do you know why that's a big story?
Because the public doesn't know what first-class hotel accommodations cost.
It's about that much.
Something like that. So, could he have traveled more cheaply?
Yeah, probably. Probably.
Did I mention that Jared Kushner has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the good work he got done on these trips?
You could argue that he could have traveled cheaper, but you can't argue that he didn't do something worth it.
In fact, I would argue he's the only person who, you know, he and Avi Berkowitz might be the only people in the government who deserve the amount of travel accommodations that they received.
They got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It's amazing. So I certainly don't care about his hotel bill.
David Boxenhorn on Twitter tweeted an article from the Times of Israel saying that they got their r-factor down to 0.78.
I don't think anybody could really measure that.
Do you think any country can really measure their r-factor accurately?
But maybe they can get it in the range.
So if you were not up on what the r-factor is, if your r is one or greater...
It means that each person might be spreading it to enough people that it will spread.
That's the worst explanation ever.
Let me try it again.
If your R is over 1, it means the virus can spread.
If it's under 1, it will probably die out naturally by not having enough people to spread 2.
You know what I'm talking about.
I don't have to do better than that.
But Israel's already under one, reportedly.
I don't know how reliable that is.
I wouldn't say that's the most reliable kind of thing.
But it's not way over one.
And if you're looking for any positive signs, this one's a good one.
Because Israel's doing well on the vaccinations, and they're getting the outcome that is predicted.
So anytime your science says, if you do this, you'll get this outcome...
And then you do this and you get that outcome.
That's pretty good news.
All right. In the George Floyd case, Jack Posobiec reports that juror number 51 admits she cannot be impartial after hearing that the city awarded George Floyd's family a record $27 million.
Now, shouldn't they all say that?
Is there a juror Now, presumably all of the jurors know about this 27 million because one juror talked about it in front of the other jurors.
So if they didn't see it in the news, they heard about it in the courtroom.
Who would be dumb enough to say that they would not be influenced by that?
Because of course everybody would be influenced by that.
Wouldn't you worry if somebody said they weren't influenced by that?
Because it means they already decided.
If anybody tells you that they would not be biased by this $27 million award, it's only because they've already made up their mind.
That's not the person you want on the jury.
And so I ask you this.
Why are we bothering to have this trial?
Because I don't see any way that the trial outcome could be considered credible or that it wouldn't get overturned by some higher court for saying your trial was ridiculous.
There's no chance in hell that the Chauvin got a fair trial.
So I don't know how this works legally, but shouldn't the judge just cancel the trial?
And try to find a venue that maybe is less likely to be this biased?
I feel as if they have to.
I feel as if they have to end the trial at this point.
I don't know if they will, but they have to.
So there's a Rasmussen poll result coming this morning.
I don't know if it's published yet, but you'll see it.
And they asked the question of whether people believe that Joe Biden...
Was actually making the decisions of the presidency or somebody else was making those decisions for him.
What percentage of the United States...
I don't know if this was likely voters or not.
Because lots of times they limit things to likely voters.
But I don't know if this one was.
But what percentage do you think the poll said are people who believe that Biden is not actually in charge?
If you guessed 47%, you would be right.
It's funny, I'm seeing estimates of like 70% and 60%.
Here's what I think.
I think those are closer to true.
I believe that Republicans all said Biden is not in charge, and that Democrats probably mostly said he is in charge, and that if you actually...
If you were to talk to a Democrat privately...
And nobody would ever hear what you ever said, the two of you.
And you get your Democrat, your Biden voter in a closet, and you say, look, nobody will ever hear this.
Just tell me the truth.
Do you think Biden's in charge?
How many people in the closet, when nobody would ever know what they really said, how many of them would say that Biden's really in charge?
Right? I'm not so sure that the Democrats think Biden's in charge.
I think they don't care.
I think that they think that, oh, maybe it's Obama's behind the curtain or Hillary Clinton or, you know, it's just the technocrats or the money people or whatever.
But maybe they're just okay with it.
So, that's interesting.
There's a brand new hoax has been revealed, and this one's a big one.
The Washington Post, back in January 9th, had reported that Trump had a phone call with the Georgia state elections, with, I guess, the Georgia state, whatever, election official.
And he reportedly said, but it turns out he didn't, but it was reported that he said, find the fraud.
Now, find the fraud was interpreted as, even if it's not there, go find it.
Or give me a result that says there's fraud.
I don't care if it's really there or not.
So that's how it was interpreted.
But it turns out he never even said it, because an audio of the call was just released.
Never said it. And it was one of the key pieces of evidence for the impeachment trial.
Think about that. A key piece of the impeachment trial Was based on a hoax.
No, that's not true.
Did I just tell you that a key part of this big public impeachment process was a hoax?
Because that's not true.
Two hoaxes.
Two hoaxes were key pieces of evidence presented.
One of them was the fine people hoax, which the Republicans debunked in public.
And the other one was this one, which wasn't debunked at the time because we didn't have the audio.
But now we have the audio, and you know that the president never said, find the fraud.
And the actual things he said were not offensive at all.
He was telling them to look into it, and they might find some dishonesty there.
Nothing like, find the fraud.
So, then I said, shouldn't the senators who perpetrated these two frauds For impeachment, shouldn't they be impeached?
Should it not be impeachable to use hoaxes to try to change the government of the United States?
Now, somebody else on Twitter saw that and said, oh, whoa, there's a difference.
Because those senators who used these hoaxes, they did not know that they were hoaxes when they used them.
Do you accept that explanation?
Let's say it's true.
Let's say that the senators who used both of those hoaxes, let's say they thought they were both true.
Is it okay? No.
No, it's not okay.
Because we don't judge them by what they were thinking, do we?
We judge them by what they do.
We don't judge them by what they're thinking.
Because that's what they were trying to do with Trump.
They were trying to say that, well, let me say that differently.
When Trump was giving his speech in which he said, go protest peacefully, people said, yeah, he said peacefully, but he intended to cause more of a riot or an assault.
And so the president, they were trying to impeach him based entirely upon what they believe he thought.
Right? It was based on what he thought.
But ultimately, it was more about what he did, wasn't it?
So regardless of what Trump thought, he would also be criticized by simply doing it.
You know, simply getting people stirred up.
No matter what anybody thought, it resulted in maybe more activity or rioting than would have happened.
We don't know, but that's a reasonable assumption.
And So why should the senators, who allegedly did not know these were hoaxes, why should they get a pass just because they didn't know?
I think we should judge them on what they did, not on what they knew.
Take the coronavirus performance.
President Trump allegedly lost the election because of coronavirus performance.
Did anybody know the right answer?
Do you think that the President knew that his actions would have a suboptimal outcome?
No. So if the President allegedly made a mistake, but he didn't know he was making a mistake, does he get a pass?
Because he didn't know he was making a mistake?
No. We don't judge people that way.
We judge them what they actually did.
And what these senators actually did was trying to change the government of the United States on the back of two hoaxes.
It doesn't matter that they didn't know they were real.
It doesn't matter. They should be removed from office because they did the thing.
They did the thing.
That's it. All right.
I love this story.
If you don't mind, I'm going to be a little self-indulgent.
I'll tell you about the news here.
It's a big story. But I'm going to be a little self-indulgent.
Just warning you. There's a big article that you should read in New York Magazine by David Wallace Wells in which he goes through all the various countries of the world and how they dealt with the pandemic and And he's trying to figure out why some did better than others.
You know, the big mystery that we all have.
Now, the bottom line, in a very large article that's really good, you should read it.
I think it does one of the best jobs I've seen of really putting things in context of who did what and what worked and what didn't.
But here was the bottom line.
Nobody knows what worked.
That's the bottom line.
When you compare countries, and one had a good result, one had a bad result, there's no pattern.
There's no pattern.
You just can't tell that what people did made that much difference.
Now, there does seem to be a big difference Between the Asian countries' performance, which was generally good, and the European, Western, United States, South American countries, which was generally mediocre or bad.
But we don't know exactly why, because even within the Asian countries, Japan did not do aggressive mitigation, but had a great result.
So you're tempted to say, well, all the Asian countries did everything right.
The other countries did everything wrong.
Duh! Of course the result is different.
Except that doesn't hold up.
You just look at Japan and you say, they didn't do everything right and they got a great result.
And then you look at New Zealand...
And you say, well, maybe it's more because of being an island.
Maybe the island thing makes a difference.
So it looked like the bottom line was that it might be just chance.
Just chance. Yeah, there's a big factor of obesity and age.
So I think youth and lack of obesity explains Africa.
Basically, I think African can be completely explained by lack of obesity and youth, in my opinion.
Now, genetics, we haven't determined yet how big a factor that is, but surely that's a factor.
Surely it is, but I don't know if it's an ethnic factor or a factor within ethnicities.
I would say that's an open question.
So, do you remember that early on in the crisis...
I made a prediction that I believe nobody else in the world made.
And that prediction was that the leadership decisions would not be determinant of the outcome.
Did you hear anyone else in the entire world ever say that?
Just me, right? And this article kind of makes that case as well.
That now that we kind of know how things turned down, mostly, mostly we know, There is not a correlation between how people acted and how the outcomes were.
And we don't know why.
The experts are actually baffled.
Now, they do know a whole bunch of things that make a difference.
We know the vitamin D makes a difference, the weight, probably the genetics.
There's a big difference maybe in just where you are located, what kind of travel patterns you have, are you a travel destination.
When did it hit your shores?
How close were you to Italy?
It turns out that proximity to Italy is probably one of the biggest factors.
Because Italy, well, you know, was sort of the second hot spot after Wuhan.
But there was something else in this article that caught my attention, and I would like to read it to you.
Okay? And you'll see why I'm reading it to you.
It'll be obvious in a minute. So this is from the New York Magazine, David Wallace Wells writes.
By American standards, Cuomo, talking about Governor Cuomo, did move quickly, putting his state in lockdown just 20 days after the first confirmed case, three times faster than Washington State or California.
But he waited for cases to arrive on his doorstep to act, and even then, his first instinct was to reassure rather than disrupt.
In that, he was far from an outlier.
Through the winter, the guidance from America's public health establishment was clear.
Beamed to the public through columns and op-eds, like those in the New York Times, warning, quote, And in the Washington Post, arguing, Quote, we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus.
Other headlines from the time.
Quote, we should de-escalate the war on the coronavirus.
That was from Wired. Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier.
More widespread from U.S. today.
The flu is far bigger threat to most people in the U.S. than the Wuhan coronavirus.
That's from Business Insider.
And before flu comparisons became a talking point of the pandemic denier right, they were the reassuring focus of the establishment left.
So the first point is that the left-leaning people in the establishment were all telling you that the pandemic should not be worried about.
Keep that in mind, right?
And here's the money paragraph.
Perhaps the short-sighted and self-interested president, meaning Trump, would never have moved more quickly or more emphatically in response to a different kind of warning.
But governors might have, and mayors, and the public at large.
Instead, the cause of the alarm was picked up not by those in positions of social authority or with the power to enact preparatory measures, But by a rogue's gallery of outsiders and contrarians.
Peter Navarro, Trump's personal China hawk.
Scott Adams, the Dilber guy.
Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency evangelist from Silicon Valley.
Eric Feigl Ding, a nutrition-focused epidemiologist, then affiliated with Harvard.
Who got a bit out over his skis in a series of panic-inducing tweets, then came in for a professional drubbing by his colleagues.
Now, I could not enjoy this more.
Because in this long article about all these world leaders getting everything wrong...
I got called out by name as one of the few people in the country who got something right.
Now, I would like to make a few comments in the Murray-Gell-Man way.
You know the Murray-Gell-Man amnesia theory, that you can always tell what's wrong with an article if it's about you or about something you're an expert on.
Now, in this case... I have a little insight.
So let me tell you what the news may have gotten not wrong, but maybe could have put a little more context on here.
Listen to the descriptions of these people.
Number one, Peter Navarro, Trump's personal China hawk.
Is that how you would describe Peter Navarro?
As a China hawk?
If you were just going to do one description.
China hawk? How about economist?
How about famous economists?
So that's what they left out about Peter Navarro.
Then they talked about Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy.
What'd they leave out?
They left out my degree in economics, my MBA. I'm just the cartoonist now.
I'm the Dilbert guy. So the first two people...
That are listed in the rogues gallery to make us look like we're fringe nuts.
They left out that we're both trained economists.
This matters because this was a math question, basically.
The spread of the virus and how to do risk management, it's kind of closer to an economics question than a medical question.
And if you leave out the qualifications of the two people who got it right, you know, being alarmed at the right level of alarm at the right time, they both had the same education.
That's not an accident.
If you leave that out of the story, it makes it look like we're lucky, crazy people or something, instead of people who had exactly the right training to know what to do in this situation.
And got it right. Isn't that a big difference in how you see this story?
Because it seems presented like, oh, there were some crazy outliers who guessed right or something.
And then the next one's even funnier.
Balaji Srinivasan, he's described as a cryptocurrency evangelist from Silicon Valley.
Now, is that true?
Yes. That's a true statement.
He would probably embrace it himself.
I think Balaji would agree that he is a crypto evangelist and he's from Silicon Valley.
True enough. Here's what they left out.
Calling Balaji a crypto evangelist is like calling Einstein Jewish.
Actually, I don't know if he's officially called himself Jewish.
But it would just be like picking one little thing...
And of somebody's life that might be the least important thing about Balaji.
Now, I won't get too much into Balaji's qualifications, but let's just say that if you added up all of the brains of the people watching this, and all of your skills and all of your talents, and you could somehow sum together all of our skills and intelligence, it would roughly equal one Balaji.
Right? He's not normal.
Like when you just refer to Balaji as a crypto guy, you're missing the story.
He's not a crypto guy.
He's a guy who knows more than you know about more things than you know even exist.
He's not normal smart.
He's like the kind of smart Where it's, you know, I'm the dog talking to a person.
Like, if you talk to Balaji for five minutes, the recording that starts playing in your head is, I don't think I'm the same species.
I can't be the same species.
Because I'm not that smart.
And so they leave that out.
Literally, Balaji is literally famous in Silicon Valley as being one of the smartest people on the planet, right?
Right? They just call him a crypto guy.
Somebody said spell his name, so I will.
First name is Balaji, B-A-L-A-J-I, and Srinivasan is S-R-I-N-I-V-A-S-A-N. You should follow him on Twitter.
So... Ah, God, I want to make some news here, but I'm not sure if I should.
Yeah, what the hell? What the hell?
Do you want to hear some news?
I don't know if this will get outside of my little atmosphere here.
So here's something that you've never heard reported.
I probably shouldn't even tell you this.
Let me think about it.
No, I'm not going to tell you. I can't tell you.
All right, sorry about that.
I apologize for that. All right, there's a story about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister, and apparently she's responding to the Biden administration, and she said, About the Biden administration.
If it wants to sleep in peace for the next four years, it must refrain from causing a stink as its first step.
And I thought, I wonder if this is just how North Korea opens up a dialogue.
That the...
It looks like I made everybody mad.
I'm looking at the comments. All right, I'll tell you.
You want me to tell you? Alright.
When the news first came out that the coronavirus had broken out in Wuhan, and we started to see the video of what the Chinese were doing, as you might imagine, the White House was trying to decide what to do.
No surprise, right?
There was, also you might not be surprised, this would not be news, that there were two sides.
There were factions within the White House who were arguing we should close travel with China, and there were factions who said, no, no, no, it will kill the economy, etc., travel especially.
And here's the part you don't know.
Somebody at the White House, who shall remain nameless, contacted me, And said, we're having this discussion in the White House, and a lot of people in the White House watch your show.
Can you make your argument, basically?
So the White House did ask me to weigh in to try to influence the internal debate by having somebody external to the White House lay it out in a way that, you know, is outside of the system.
So that it's no...
No, it wasn't Don Jr.
And so I did.
And some of you probably watched live the day that I just came unhooked on closing travel from China.
And it was soon after that that the president, just a few days after that, the president actually closed travel from China.
Now, when you first heard me talking about it on livestream, did you say to yourself, that's never going to happen?
Because the first time you heard somebody say, we should close all travel to China, you might have heard it from me.
If you were watching this, I probably was the first person to talk about it.
And even when I was saying it, I was saying we absolutely have to close travel from China and have to do it right now.
But even as I said it, I didn't think it could happen.
Honestly, I just didn't think it could happen.
But I knew it had to.
Like, it was important. I'm seeing in the comments people are guessing famous names that you know who work there.
It's not one of the famous...
You won't be able to guess it based on somebody who's in the headlines.
I'll just tell you that. So it turns out that a number of the people in the White House follow this live stream, or they did in that administration.
And occasionally...
And by the way, this is not that unusual...
It wouldn't be terribly unusual for factions within any administration to reach out to somebody, you know, in the public to get an assist.
Pretty normal stuff.
So, it was fun to see that this article in the New York Magazine sort of called me out on that.
But they don't know the real backstory.
So there you have it.
Was that news? Yeah, they do it all the time.
It is a normal process.
And I don't know who else was part of that.
But yeah, there's more to that story.
All right. CNN looks like they're doing this slow turn on Biden, because they have to have some bad stuff to say about him so they can produce news.
And Stephen Collinson, who's the Designated Trump hit person who does frequent articles that are all anti-Trump forever.
This is what he said about Biden's handling of the child migrant surge.
So this is CNN coming down hard on Biden for basically kids in cages but without the cages.
And this is an exact quote from CNN. But it's hard to argue that the Biden administration's handling of the politics...
Of the child migrant surge has been adept.
That's pretty biting.
Compare that to things he said about Trump.
Let me read it again.
If this isn't the weakest criticism you've ever seen, I don't know.
But it is hard to argue.
Why do you have to soften the first part of this sentence?
It's hard to argue.
That the Biden administration's handling of the politics, the politics of the child migrant surge.
Oh, oh, it's not a problem with this surge itself that Biden caused.
It's not a problem with all the children who are being in this bad situation, which I thought was the whole point, that it's bad for children.
No, no, no.
It's hard to argue that the Biden administration's handling of the politics of Of the child migrant surge has been adept.
It's hard to argue that it's been adept.
Biting, biting commentary.
I don't know how the Biden administration will be able to sleep at night after this takedown by CNN. So it looks like there's reports that Senator Rick Scott is preparing some kind of a DACA amnesty deal that would, if we can build the rest of the wall, a bunch of people could be given citizenship.
That doesn't have any chance, does it?
Is there any chance for a bipartisan anything in this country?
I don't think so.
It feels like immigration can't be solved with a bipartisan anything.
Because just nobody will do it.
So, I'm not saying it's a bad play.
I think Senator Scott is making exactly the right move.
Because you want to see that your senators are at least trying.
And, you know, I'm never bothered...
By somebody putting on a deal offer.
You know, you do this, we'll do this.
Even if I hate part of that deal, that's what a deal is.
So kudos to Senator Scott for trying to be productive.
I don't know that this is going to succeed, but at least it's adult behavior.
You know, I don't mind people failing doing the right stuff.
And at least bringing up the topic, getting people to talk about it, see what can and cannot be done, I imagine it will fail.
But it's adult, and so I appreciate that.
I keep saying that we only have a handful of senators who do anything.
Am I wrong about that?
Every time you hear somebody doing something, it's the same handful of people.
It's Tom Cotton, it's Rand Paul, Senator Scott...
It's just like five, six people doing everything.
Everybody else is just watching as far as I can tell.
All right.
All right, just looking at your comments.
And I would like to suggest a following psychological phenomenon.
It goes like this.
I've told you that we're seeing not much reporting on the discomfort of getting your vaccination.
Now, it was reported by even the people who make the vaccinations that there would be some discomfort.
But aren't you surprised that the news business, both left and right, are just not really reporting on that?
Really, not at all.
And that feels like a decision...
To make sure that people don't get talked out of doing it, right?
But here's an interesting thing.
Even though a lot of people know that, they know it hurts, and I've talked to people personally, so I've had personal conversations with people who just got their shit kicked out of them with the second dose.
So I guess the first dose gives you like a sore arm, but by the second dose, you're going to miss work.
You know, you're going to miss 24 hours recovering.
But here's the thing.
I'll bet if you talk to anybody who had a really tough time, they're not complaining.
And that's the psychological part.
And you say to me, Scott, you're going to get this shot, and I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have a bad day.
The next 24 hours for you are going to be pretty bad.
What do I say in reaction to that?
Give me the shot. What do I say when I'm writhing in whatever discomfort it is?
Not writhing, it's not that bad.
But, you know, when I'm all, let's say, shaky and, I don't know, sore or whatever it is the next day.
How do I feel psychologically when my body is having all these reactions and I'm not having a good time?
How do I feel? Terrific.
It's the weirdest thing.
But if you could say right now, I'll give you that second shot, you're going to be writhing in pain, I would only be happy.
There's not one part of that that would make me unhappy.
Number one, I would know that the pain would be done in a day.
That always helps, right? If you know there's an end date to your discomfort, that makes it easier.
But the fact that I would feel free, or soon to be free, From the risk of the pandemic.
That psychological comfort is so much bigger than missing a day at work that people aren't even complaining about it.
You know, think about it.
In the United States, we'll complain about anything.
There's nothing we don't complain about.
Zero people I've heard complain about the vaccination taking them out for a day.
I've heard nobody complain.
I've heard people say it was bad.
But even when they describe it, it's not really a complaint.
It's interesting. I've never seen anything like this, where people can be physically, you know, sickened by something temporarily, and they won't complain.
Because we feel so good about getting to this point we've all been waiting for.
It's like, give me the shot. It's interesting.
Well, I still don't know where I can get the shot.
I found out that I'm eligible.
Yay for me. I didn't realize that hypertension can get you there, especially if you're close to the age anyway.
So I'm bumping up against the age, but I also have hypertension, so I guess that got me in.
But I can't get it.
As far as I know, there's no availability of this shot whatsoever for me personally.
My health provider doesn't have it.
It doesn't seem to be available anywhere else.
So I told you before that people being, let's say, concerned about getting the shot would never be the problem.
That the problem will only be supply.
Because there will always be enough people to use up all the supply, and then those laggards will watch everybody else get the shot, and they'll start to convert.
And you're not going to have... In the end, I predict you won't have a problem getting enough people vaccinated.
Maybe 80%. I don't think we'll get to 100%.
Oh, actually, we could get to 90, but we'll never get to 100.
All right.
Somebody says Mississippi gives it to anyone above 18, but they probably don't have it.
It doesn't matter that they say they will.
Yeah, the Alameda Fairgrounds, you need to...
That's where I would get it.
It's the closest to me. But you can't get an appointment.
Alright, that's it for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
Alright, YouTubers. Walgreens.
Yeah, I know all the places that do give the shots, but they just don't have appointments.
