Episode 1325 Scott Adams: Biden's Press Conference Scorecard, I Announce Identifying as Black, The Cargo Ship Genitalia, More
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Content:
Ted Lieu "Rupars" the Drinking Bleach HOAX
Dominion sues Fox News
Rupert Murdoch may end electronic voting
Review: President Biden's press conference
Biden's North Korea strategy
Identifying as Black
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Well, there's a gigantic penis-shaped ship that is screwing the planet Earth At this moment, yeah, you're not going to get your toilet paper.
But we can make that all better with a simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank of chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes, what?
Yeah, everything. Everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and you'll hear it around the world.
It happens now.
Go. I can feel that cargo ship starting to be dislodged.
One sip. That's all it took.
Amazing. Well, let's talk about all the news.
So first of all, let's talk about that giant cargo ship because it's the only fun thing that happened this week.
Now that you don't have Trump in the news so much...
You have to wait for a cargo ship to draw a giant penis in the ocean, but we got it.
We got that, if you haven't watched the story.
Apparently that cargo ship that is lodged in the Suez Canal, prior to that, the GPS tracking showed a path that looked suspiciously exactly like somebody drawing a cock and balls.
Now some say it's a coincidence.
I say that if you get stuck in the Suez Canal right after you coincidentally drew a giant cock and balls, the simulation is trying to tell us something.
I think it's telling us we're screwed.
Because, in a way, and not in a good way, because I think the Suez Canal is sort of the planet's colon, if you know what I mean.
Sort of a tight passage.
See what I'm saying? And this giant object is trying to penetrate that unsuccessfully so far.
So we'll see if that gets unloaded before all your toilet paper disappears.
Now here's a real simulation moment.
I'm not making this up.
I had planned this week to say...
Can you believe that a year ago, a little less than a year ago, we were worried about running out of toilet paper?
And I thought, well, that's crazy.
We'll figure it out.
We're not going to run out of toilet paper.
Well, here we are.
So, Greta Thunberg, you all know her.
How dare you!
She tweeted an article and said, China continues to build coal-fired plants at a rate that outpaces the rest of the world combined.
Combined? They're building more coal-powered plants than all the rest of the world.
Combined. More than three times what was brought in line everywhere else.
So China looks to be wrecking the whole planet with their...
They're coal plants.
But there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it.
So I guess we're just going to watch that happen.
But I feel as though they've got a real problem there, right?
It seems like the air pollution is going to make them do something differently pretty quickly.
Because what would be the point of building a city you couldn't live in because of the air?
But that's what they got.
More about China later.
So Ted Lieu, he tweeted this about the Biden press conference.
He said, President Biden did a terrific job.
Totally objective.
He did a terrific job at the press conference.
He explained the actions of his administration took to help the American people.
And he set bold new goals to move our nation forward.
Well, that's pretty good.
Sounds pretty good. But then he added to his tweet...
Also, he didn't tell people to inject bleach to get rid of the coronavirus.
Okay, that's not so good.
And I asked myself, does Ted Lieu actually believe the bleach-drinking hoax still?
Still? I mean, I kind of understand how you could get Rupard by it temporarily.
You all know what being Rupard means?
It's named after Aaron Rupar at Vox.
If you get Rupard, it means you take a video out of context to make it look different than what really was there.
So the drinking bleach hoax was caused by a Rupar.
They just took the middle of what Trump said, and they lopped off where he said he was talking about light, and then they lopped off the end where he clarified he wasn't talking about injections, he was talking about, you know, light.
So you just get rid of that, and then people like Ted Lieu still believe that there was something about drinking bleach in there.
And even bleach wasn't even mentioned in that context.
So here's what we can do about this.
Here's how you handle the bleach-drinking hoax.
Are you ready? Number one, the existence of the verb to rupar turns it from a concept that's hard to explain Well, you know, they can make it look different if you remove this editing and blah,
blah, blah. But if you put a word on it, just the way our brains are organized, as soon as it has its word to RUPAR, R-U-P-A-R, RUPAR, once you have a word for it, People's brains interpret it as more of a thing, because it's got a word.
Now, this is a persuasion trick that I like to use a lot.
Anything that doesn't have a word, you can't persuade.
It's just got to be boiled down to a word, because words have their own persuasive power.
They carry it with them. So until it's a word, yeah, like bork, exactly.
Somebody's using to bork or...
Yeah. So having the word helps.
Now when people say, hey, he said drink bleach, you say to them, oh, dude, you got Rupard.
Dude, you got Rupard.
You got Rupard and bad.
Do you see how much more persuasive that is?
Because if you say, your facts are not technically correct...
Has that ever changed anybody's mind?
No. No, because they'll just say the facts are wrong.
You'll say, look, I'm making a claim about what he said.
Here's the video.
Here's the transcript.
I'm not making this up.
It says right here he's talking about light in his own words.
You can see it on video. Would that change anybody's mind about what they saw?
You'd think so, right?
You think that if somebody thought something was X and you showed it right to their face, you let them hear it and see it, that they would then think, oh, okay, not X. I guess I got Rupard.
I didn't know it. That will never happen as long as you're alive.
Once somebody gets committed to the argument, cognitive dissonance will be their path.
I was watching some well-informed Twitter user Who may or may not be watching this at the moment.
Dismantle somebody in the Twitter feed who believed the hoax.
And he was just quoting the actual transcript to just dismantle it.
Now, did the person then say, oh, well, thank you for clarifying.
Nope. Nope.
Did not. You just went into a cognitive dissonance spiral and just became temporarily insane.
And that's what you'd expect.
That's exactly what cognitive dissonance is.
It's like a weird insanity hallucination that pops up when your self-image doesn't match events.
So what this person who was learning that they had been Ruppard, which doesn't feel good, right?
If you've been bamboozled or Rupard, you think, that's a little embarrassing on me, because I was a little gullible.
I got Rupard a little too easily.
So go for the embarrassment of somebody being Rupard, not the facts.
The facts won't work.
But here is my second suggestion for getting rid of this.
If I could be a reporter to ask Ted Lieu some questions, I would ask him this.
Number one, do you believe that President Trump recommended drinking bleach to get rid of the coronavirus?
Presumably, he would say yes.
Yes, I do believe that.
Now, rather than telling him he got it wrong, I would ask the following question.
All right, good. So you believe the drinking bleach story.
I'd like to get your position on a few more things.
What is your position on Bigfoot?
Now, he would say, oh, you're not being serious now.
And I would look at him and say, what do you mean?
We were talking about the drinking bleach thing.
This is just, I'm trying to get some context.
I'm trying to understand how many things you believe are true.
Because then that would tell us if you just believe everything.
Or this is just the one thing you believe that's not true.
Because that's important. Wouldn't you like to know if somebody is fooled by every hoax, or are they only fooled by maybe this one, which wouldn't be so bad, right?
Just one hoax. We can all be taken in by one hoax.
That's just normal. And then he would resist a little bit, and I'd say, all right, all right, let's let that go.
My third question is, what's your feeling about the Loch Ness Monster?
And then he'd be like, come on, come on.
I need to take this seriously.
And I would say, what do you mean?
What do you mean, take it seriously?
I am taking it seriously.
We're talking about all the hoaxes you believe.
I'm just trying to get your opinion on it.
How about the fine people hoax, Ted?
Do you believe that one? You do.
You do. Okay. All right.
And then you just go down the list of hoaxes and you see how many he agrees with.
Trust me, it's better than telling him he's got his facts wrong.
All right. So Georgia, the governor has signed this Georgia election bill It's a 100-page election bill, so there's lots of stuff in it, but it includes stuff such as including a requirement for photo ID, even for mail-in ballots, reducing early voting for runoff elections, and banning the distribution of food and drinks to people waiting in line.
I guess the theory there is that that can influence their votes somehow.
I don't see how.
By the time you're standing in line, are you still undecided?
Or is this just to keep people standing in line?
You give them food and drink, they'll stay there longer?
I don't know. What's the thinking on this?
So, you and I probably don't know all the details of why these are even in the law.
The Democrats say it's voter suppression.
Is it? Are the Georgia laws voter suppression?
Of course they are. Of course they are.
Now, they don't sell it that way, but of course it is.
Just as the rules changes for 2020 were, let's just say they were politically motivated as opposed to fairness motivated.
They weren't so much for the Republic, they were for the Democrats.
So we have a situation where, in all likelihood, I think most smart people would say this is true.
That the 2020 election was decided largely by the rule changes that happened before the election.
Wouldn't you say? Because the rule changes allowed far more people to vote in ways that people questioned.
But there were more of them.
Lots more people voted.
There's no doubt about that. And so some people say that the rule changes is what determined who the president is, as opposed to the public.
Because the public was the same public before the rules as after.
The public didn't change.
It's just how they count stuff and who they can get to the polls and how easily you vote.
The rule changes decided who won.
So Georgia, having apparently a Republican legislature, they just decided to win next time by changing the rules.
So they just changed the rules in a different way.
Okay. So they just changed the rules in a different way.
Would this be enough to guarantee that Republicans do better in the next presidential election?
Well, if it's just Georgia, maybe that's not enough, but will other states follow?
Right? Don't you think other states will follow?
And we may see the Republicans smartening up and just making rule changes that are designed for nothing but winning elections.
Let's face it. This is designed to win elections.
It's not about what's fair or good.
Nobody cares about that. Nobody in the government cares about that.
They want to get re-elected. So I feel as though, given that the 2020 election was based entirely on shenanigans with rules, that if Georgia does some shenanigans with rules, they're playing the same game.
I feel that's fair.
I don't think the rules are fair.
Because fairness isn't a real thing.
It's just subjective.
But it's a good strategy, and I think it's perfectly acceptable in the context of the rule changes being the only thing that determines an election.
All right. This is fun.
So Dominion, the election software...
Do they have hardware and software?
Or is it just software? But Dominion...
I guess it's both hardware and software.
It's suing Fox News for $1.6 billion because they say that Fox was claiming that the Dominion stuff was intentionally rigged.
That was the claim.
There's no court evidence of that whatsoever.
No court proof.
No court has ruled that Dominion did anything wrong.
But here's the interesting thing.
Have you ever heard the phrase, a Pyrrhic victory?
I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it right.
It might be Pyrrhic.
It's spelled P-Y-R-R-H-I-C. Have you ever heard that?
I'm teaching you that because you hear that by people talking on TV. If somebody uses this phrase, They're bad at talking on TV. Because if you're talking on TV, you shouldn't use phrases that 75% of the public or more have never heard of, right? But I'm going to teach you, so when you hear it on TV next, you'll know what it means.
A Pyrrhic victory, it's a historical reference To an army that won the battle, but so many of their soldiers were injured or killed in the battle that they ended up losing the war because they used up too much of their resources winning a battle.
So the idea here is you can win the battle, but be careful that that didn't cost you the war.
It feels like dominion...
Might win the battle.
Because they might prevail in the court case.
That's possible. But what is Fox's defense?
What do you think?
Will Fox use the Sidney Powell defense, which is, well, you can't take anything we say seriously.
Didn't it work for MSNBC? What's her name?
When she got sued, didn't she actually win her case by saying you shouldn't take anything I say seriously on a news channel?
Because she's an opinion person.
Rachel Maddow, right?
I believe she used that defense.
Sidney Powell is going to use the defense.
I think it'll work.
I think it's a solid defense.
But there's another thing that's about to happen.
That I don't know if Dominion has calculated it, unless this is actually part of their exit plan to leave the business.
Because it looks like it could be.
I'm not saying that's the case, because they'll sue me.
I'm just saying if you look at it from the outside, it looks like a company that plans to go out of business, but maybe they can win some money on the way out.
Because here's what's going to happen, I think.
At least it's what would happen if I were the...
The lawyers and I had at least the freedom to introduce this.
I would put electronic voting machines on trial.
If you can get away with it.
I'm not sure what will be allowed as evidence here.
But Fox News, if I were them and I were trying to come up with a strategy, I would try to destroy the idea of electronic voting no matter who it is.
I wouldn't even make it about Dominion.
I wouldn't even say, this isn't even really about them.
You could change the name of the company, and the argument would be exactly the same.
Which is that it's a system that isn't transparent, and therefore, reasonable people can have an opinion that it wasn't fair, or there were issues with it.
Now, if they do that, they could probably salt the earth so effectively that our government can no longer support...
Electronic voting. So one of the things that might come out of this is the death of electronic voting everywhere.
Now, I don't know if Dominion knows that that's one of the outcomes, that the entire market for their product could disappear because of this.
Now, as high-powered as Sidney Powell is, when they take on Sidney Powell, they are taking on one person.
Very high-skilled, experienced attorney.
That's pretty dangerous by itself, right?
You take on an attorney at that level, you'd better have the kill shot.
You go after the king, you know the saying, right?
You try to take out the king, you better finish the job, because if the king survives, you're in a lot of trouble for trying to take out the king.
Well, I think that Dominion is sort of bigger than or more powerful than Sidney Powell, despite her firepower, which is considerable.
So that was probably a good play to take her on.
But Fox News is another animal.
Fox News, I don't think they understand how much firepower can come from that side of the world.
I just don't think they understand what they're getting into.
I don't know. But I would think that the Rupert Murdoch group, especially supported by Fox News, who are professional communicators, right?
They're sort of the best communicators in the world.
Not just because they're right-leaning, but that's their job.
They do it professionally.
And between what Fox News will report about this...
Because they can report it.
It's news. Even though it's about them, it's still news.
So they can report it.
What do you think Fox News is going to start running as specials?
Just guessing.
They're going to run a lot of specials about how voting machines in general are a really big problem.
I've got a feeling that Rupert Murdoch is going to end electronic voting.
As a legal defense, basically.
Now, he might lose the case.
Fox News might lose this case.
But I think he's going to kneecap the entire industry as just part of the natural process of the defense.
So we'll see. Let's talk about Biden's press conference.
Before the press conference, I had tweeted that I was asking people to write humorous reviews of his press conference before it even happened.
Knowing in advance that the friendly press would say he did incredibly well.
So let's see how close we got.
Here are some of the actual comments after the press conference.
This from the Drudge Report, who used to be right-leaning, but I guess not so much anymore.
It said, Not bad.
The Washington Post says, in an opinion piece, Biden excels at his first news conference.
The media embarrasses themselves.
And there were other glowing, glowing reports.
Ted Luce, for example.
So let me give you my opinion here.
It wasn't bad.
It wasn't bad. Now, I thought that he would do okay.
Now, I'm only going to talk about performance here.
If you're new to my live streams, This is the thing you need to know.
I'm not talking about how accurate he was with facts, because he didn't pass the fact-checks.
Neither did Trump. Presidents typically fail the fact-checking at press conferences.
Biden did too. So how do I hold that against him?
I don't. I don't.
The news did what it does.
Even CNN fact-checked them.
So how much do I care...
That he got some facts wrong.
Not any more than I cared when Trump got some facts wrong.
They all do that.
That's what the news is for.
They're supposed to fact check him, and they did.
Even CNN fact checked him.
So, don't care about that.
How about his verbal miscues, where he would start a sentence and it would just trail off to nothing?
Pretty scary, right?
This guy's got the nuclear codes, and he's the President of the United States.
And he can't finish his sentence without running off into bumbling confusion and just saying, ah, well, that's enough.
Scary? Nope.
It's not. Because we're used to it.
It was already baked in.
In the same way that much of Trump's personality very quickly just got baked in and no longer became important to your mind anyway, it was always the same amount of importance...
But the way your mind processes it is if you're used to it.
And we're just sort of used to it.
And we are told that Biden's little verbal miscues are nothing but Joe Biden.
Yeah, he's older, he's a little less fast, but it's not that different than he's always been.
Or at least how he's been for years.
So how much do I hold that against him, that a lot of his sentences were bumblingly, incompetently ended without an ending?
Not much. It's sort of everything we knew he was.
So I would say that didn't move the needle.
It may have confirmed what you thought, but it didn't move anything.
I doubt there was any Democrat who watched that and said for the first time ever, oh, the way he talks, now I'm worried.
Do you think any Democrat did that?
Probably not, right?
But every Republican said, oh, that's just what I thought.
Look at him, he can't finish the sentence.
So nobody's mind was changed by that.
How do you feel about the fact that the news is reporting that the questions were known in advance and that he had answers literally written out in notes and that he came very close to reading verbatim his notes?
As is answers to the questions.
What do you think of that? Well, I have a contrarian view on that.
I'm one of the people, and you probably did too, who praised Kayleigh McEnany for being well prepared and having a whole binder that she could refer to so she could be really quick and sharp on all the answers.
Now, if we complimented Kayleigh McEnany, For being very prepared and organized and having it written down so she didn't miss any good points, why isn't that the same for Biden?
You know, it's being reported by mostly people on the right that this is a sign of his declining capabilities, etc.
And it might be. That's a perfectly reasonable opinion.
It looks exactly like that, actually.
But at the same time, he was really well prepared.
Right? Now, you could say that there were some questions he didn't answer.
I think there was a gun control answer that he went into immigration or vice versa, and there were things he avoided.
But how much do you count against a president for avoiding a direct question?
Well, they all do it, right?
So you can't give him a pass for it, but you would say in context, it's pretty common that they avoid questions.
I would say Trump probably didn't do that.
I think Trump is maybe the only one who would answer a question, like, without trying to just change the topic.
Has anybody else ever done that?
Is Trump the only president we've had who would answer a direct question?
Maybe Obama did, you know, in his own way.
There might have been more.
But, so, performance-wise, he stayed awake.
He didn't... He didn't say anything that was clearly dementia.
It was just more of what we expect of him.
And he looked like he had some command of the facts.
Yeah, I am being generous.
So somebody in the comments says, I'm being too generous to Biden.
I'm being generous. I don't think I'm being too generous.
I'm trying to use the same amount of generosity I would have used had it been Trump.
Just trying to make some kind of a comparison.
Now, I'll tell you that I would say it's very clear that Biden is not making the decisions.
It looks pretty clear that there's a power behind Biden.
But given that they prepared him very well, whoever they are, I feel at least a little bit of confidence that there are actually smart people who are in control.
We just don't know who they are.
Which is a problem.
Wouldn't you like to know who's in control?
I kind of would. Now, I was trying to think the difference between what a Biden meeting looks like and what a Trump meeting looks like.
We have lots of examples where the advisors said, Trump, you've got to do X, and then Trump said, yeah, but I'm not going to.
I'm going to call you an idiot in public, and then I'm going to do the opposite of what you just recommended.
Hey, we need to stay in Afghanistan with major forces.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying.
We're not going to do that.
I'm going to pull people out of Afghanistan.
Hey, we can't possibly have vaccinations quickly.
Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but you're going to do it anyway.
So how many times did Trump tell his experts that he wasn't going to take their advice?
I feel like we've got enough examples of that that was fairly common.
Now, is that the president you want?
Do you want the president who goes against the advice of experts?
Or do you want a Biden-like president who tells you directly he will take the advice of experts?
And you can see the work of the experts in his presentation.
The experts sort of packaged up his answers for each topic, and then he presented it.
So he basically was a mouthpiece for the experts in some way.
Did you see any evidence that Joe Biden would be capable of telling an expert to go pound salt?
Trump did it every day.
It was like, there probably wasn't a day that went by when Trump didn't call bullshit on an expert and say, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
I hear what you're saying. That's not going to happen.
Does Biden ever do that?
And what do you think about that?
Which one's the better president?
Is the better president the one who calls bullshit on the experts?
Because if you look at Trump's record of calling bullshit on experts...
It's really good.
Now, it's not 100%.
It's not 100%.
I don't make that claim.
But if you were to look at all the things, you know, don't cherry-pick, just look at all the things that Trump called bullshit on, pretty good record.
His hunches, you know, his lived experience, etc., do give him some kind of an advantage in identifying bullshit.
I think he was very good at it.
I don't know if Biden has that.
He might, but I don't know.
So here's the thing that's just mind-blowing, that Biden is getting basically a pass on this from the friendly side of the media, that when he was asked if photographers and the press would have access to the border...
Holding facilities where we know there's a bad situation, you know, with people overcrowded, etc.
And he basically said no.
He said, we'll give you access after we fixed it, so there's nothing to see.
And he said that right in front of the public.
Like that was okay.
How's that okay?
Even the left was saying, are you serious?
That's not okay.
That's not okay for anybody.
That's not okay on the right.
It's not okay on the left.
That's not okay with anybody.
Right? But he just got away with that.
He's still president.
No blowback whatsoever.
You know, the people on the right or blah, blah, blah.
But it doesn't matter. It's just words.
He actually got away with telling you he wasn't going to give you transparency on, hold on, a human crisis.
Now, he's the guy who cares the most about, you know, that's his brand, right?
He cares the most about the humanity of the actual migrant sewer in a bad situation there.
And yet, he won't let the press see the bad situation.
It's amazing that he's getting a pass on this.
There's no way that Trump would have.
So I think that was his worst point, was the immigration stuff.
He was boring.
Trump is more interesting, definitely.
And here's another thing I think he got wrong.
On North Korea, he says that, you know, they're basically talking about what to do about it because North Korea fired some missiles.
Test missiles. And Biden is doing the old thing where you say they won't negotiate with North Korea unless North Korea commits to negotiating toward denuclearization.
Is that going to work?
Is that going to work?
Do you think North Korea is going to say, oh, oh, well, I didn't know about this whole denuclearizing thing.
Yeah. Well, now that you mention it, we'll just get rid of our nukes and then everything's good, right?
How about that? I feel as if Biden, and really the way we've always treated North Korea in the past, is all wrong.
And Trump was the only one who got that right.
And it goes like this.
North Korea isn't going to get rid of their nukes.
It's not going to happen.
I mean, even if they toned down their testing or whatever, they're still going to have some capacity that they could ramp up if they had to.
The smarter option is to talk to North Korea to talk them out of being our enemy.
And just remove the threat.
Because we don't have a reason to threaten them.
We have no reason to do anything bad to North Korea now or ever.
As long as they don't do bad things to us.
And I think that was the Trump magic.
That he convinced North Korea.
It's like, we're not even in your game.
We don't even care about you.
If you'd like to make some money, we can help.
But that's the only thing we care about you, is if you'd like to make some money with us.
We can help some investments and stuff.
Now, it's going to be hard to do if you're on war footing with South Korea, but that's your business.
Our business is we'd like to do some business with you.
We don't want to attack you.
And what happened? North Korea seems way less aggressive or did under Trump.
Now, that's probably the best you can get, but I would take it to another level.
I would tell North Korea, you know...
We don't think you should build nukes and aim them in our direction, but we can't make any promises about China.
If I were you and I were that close to China, you might want to keep those nukes, because you're going to need to aim them at Beijing.
Because China is a real threat to North Korea, don't you think?
Because China has absorbed Hong Kong, as was their legal right, more or less.
I mean, they may have taken it too far.
They probably will absorb Taiwan within the next 10 years, just because it's close and because they can.
Does North Korea think that America is a bigger risk than North Korea right on the border of China?
I don't think so.
I think China is a way bigger risk to North Korea.
And the way China would take over would be infiltrating and buying and bribing and doing their soft long-term influence thing to control North Korea.
There's no way that Kim Jong-un should be on their team.
He should be on our team.
And then you're fine.
Because people don't nuke their own team.
He should be on our team against China.
China's the threat to the world.
It's got to be a threat to North Korea.
Now, they can't treat China like a threat because they're still dealing with them.
But realistically, from a long-term military perspective, North Korea and China are the problem with each other.
We're not. So I would make that case.
I think Biden's got that wrong.
Alright, so overall, if you said Biden had a very low bar for expectations, I would say he exceeded it.
Is that fair? The bar was so low that he exceeded it fairly easily.
So I would give him a good mark on his performance.
Performance. He gets the usual failing grade on accuracy, they all do.
He gets a bad grade on handling the border, bad grade on handling North Korea.
Didn't really answer a lot of questions.
But he didn't need to accomplish any of those things I'm criticizing.
So if you were to make a list of all the things that don't matter, he didn't do them very well.
Being accurate, it doesn't really matter.
And he didn't do it very well.
But it doesn't matter. What did matter?
That he didn't decompose in front of the public.
What did matter is that he had details on all of the questions.
What did matter is he spoke with some authority, active presidential.
I think he pulled it off.
I think he pulled it off.
All right, but certainly not giving him a total pass.
Now, interestingly, two left-leaning journalists did not agree with each other.
So when Alcindor, Yamiche Alcindor, I think she's NPR, was...
When she asked the question, embedded in the question was the assumption that, or maybe accusation, depending on what you want to call it, that because Biden was a nice guy, that that was what caused, and he was talking nice about immigration, that that caused more immigration.
Whereas Rubin tweeted, Yamiche makes the statement unproven, that his words set off the surge.
This is factually wrong.
Now, Rubin, of course, is not like other journalists.
She's a little more of a team player than even people who are team players.
But I would say that Biden and his media who are trying to say that the surge is not because of Biden, they did a good job.
Now, here was the argument, if you haven't heard it, I think you've heard it, that the surge is actually no different than prior years.
And then if you add the fact that the coronavirus caused what would have been a surge to not happen last year, that all you're seeing is this year's normal surge plus a little excess surge because people would have come the year before, but they couldn't. So now they're just coming this year.
So it's just a big year for surges, but not because of anything.
It just would have happened anyway for economic reasons and seasonal reasons and everything.
Is that true? Is it true?
Yeah, I'm seeing in the comments, I see you saying that it's just not true.
That the way they're counting it is wrong.
If you talk to the migrants, they'll tell you they're coming because of Biden.
The interviews I've seen, they say it directly.
Would you have come if Trump had still been president?
Maybe not. Did you come because Biden said, you know, things would be better?
Yes. They say it directly.
Now, so I'm not saying that Biden is accurate when he defends himself by saying that the surge is no worse, and that he also says that there were facilities in place to handle the surge, that Trump dismantled.
That's probably a little bit true.
So if you were simply to judge whether Biden defended his practice as well, just rhetorically, he actually did.
With the help of the media, and I'm totally surprised, right?
I'm totally surprised.
And I'm not buying their statistics.
I do think it's a real surge that really comes because of Biden.
Now, that's a belief, but they did a good job of defending their situation.
You don't have to believe they were being honest.
But it was a good defense. I was surprised.
It was better than I thought it would be.
And even Rubin and Elsin are on the different sides about whether there was anything to that.
All right. There's a weird thing happening in the world with cotton.
You know, I've told you that one of the things about this simulation is that there's some themes that once you see them, they just keep repeating.
And it could be just a coincidence.
It probably is. But it's always interesting.
So cotton is in the news for all different reasons.
So I guess H&M and Nike are being boycotted in China because they've been always opposing the slave labor that picks the cotton that goes into the products.
So American companies are being boycotted.
Are they both American? H&M? I don't know.
Are being boycotted for opposing slavery.
You know, the Uyghurs, forced labor camps, etc.
And China's pushing back.
They're pro-slavery.
And so you've got that happening.
Then at the same time, you've got Tom Cotton, who's making some news I'll talk about in a moment.
And he also talks about China all the time.
And then we're also talking about slavery reparations.
That's in the news a lot lately.
Which, of course, is the legacy of the cotton plantations and everything.
Why is it that cotton suddenly became one of the most common words in the news?
What's up with that?
Speaking of Tom Cotton, I guess he's introducing legislation to ban critical race theory training in the U.S. military.
Once again, I say, are there other senators...
The only senators you see doing anything, it's like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and we're done here, right?
Is it just the same people doing all the work?
I'm not sure I would even consider voting or even supporting, let's say, for president anybody who isn't one of these people.
Josh Hawley. He's making some noise.
Yeah, Josh Hawley. But it's just a handful of people.
They're doing all the things that matter, it seems like.
And everybody else is doing what?
What the hell are they doing?
What's Rubio done?
I'm seeing Rubio's name there.
What's he done lately?
I don't know. But I would say, at the moment, if you were to judge just on who's...
Taking on things and who's introducing legislation and who's moving the needle and who has their priorities right.
It's kind of Tom Cotton's looking pretty good.
And he's also not making what I'd call the Rand Paul mistake.
The Rand Paul mistake is that he's dying on the hill of these face masks.
And you just can't win that fight.
I mean, he can be right.
I'm not arguing he's wrong.
I'm just saying it's The kind of fight that's really a bad one if you want to run for president later.
Because people are going to remember it.
They're going to say you were wrong.
You're anti-science or whatever.
But I don't see Tom Cotton even making an issue of it.
He's going after, you know, the racism in this country.
Good. He's going after China really hard.
Good. Good stuff.
Alright. There is, in Oakland...
They're doing a program where they're going to give $500 checks to low-income families.
So I guess this is like a UBI kind of a thing.
I'm not sure how long it's going to go.
But there's a restriction to it.
So if you're poor, if you're low-income and in Oakland, you'll get a $500 check unless you're white.
So you can't get the check if you're white.
Other ethnic groups, I guess, are okay, but not if you're white.
And so I'd like to give this financial advice to young people, and I follow my own advice.
If you're young, you should definitely hold Bitcoin.
Even if Bitcoin goes into business, it looks like it could grow fast in the future.
So when you're young, you should get things that are a little riskier, but they could go big, because even if you lose all your money when you're young, you have plenty of time to make it up So if you're young, you should hold Bitcoin.
And then secondly, you should identify as black.
And I'm always saying to do it for the money, not for any other reason.
And I'm going to announce today that going forward, I do identify as black.
And I had my DNA analyzed by 23andMe.
And I do have origins in Africa.
Now, I don't know how much your origins have to be But I think you just have to identify that way.
Those are the rules. Now, I told you that the best way to break a system you don't like is to embrace it.
So I embrace it.
I do believe that people who don't, let's say, look exactly black can identify as black, right?
Because there are lots of examples of that.
There are plenty of people who If you looked at them, you'd say, I don't know if they're black.
You know, just looking at them, I can't tell.
But if they identify as black, those are the rules.
That you can identify as black, and then you are.
So I'm going to identify as black.
I've got a little bit of African American in me, according to 23andMe.
And I also have a lived experience, which I think fits the model.
Most of you know the story that when I was working for a big bank early in my career, my boss called me in the office and told me that I couldn't be promoted because I'm white and male.
Now, when I tell this story, people say, that didn't happen.
Or they say, I think you're making that up.
Or they say, maybe you thought that's what was happening, but they certainly wouldn't say it directly.
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
My boss said it directly.
You can't get promoted here because you're white and you're male.
Directly. So I quit.
Of course. What would you do if your company tells you you can't be promoted because of your gender and your race?
You quit. So when that happened, I of course had plenty of other opportunities to go to.
Things worked out for me. But I did feel for a moment what it would be like to have racial discrimination determine your career options, because it literally happened.
So I left the bank and I took a job at the local phone company, the Pacific Bell at the time, and I got on the management track.
So they had an actual program that if you're identified as somebody who might be able to rise to the ranks, They would put you on the program so that you would get extra mentoring and stuff, and people would know who you are.
And so I got on the program, and it looked like I was going places, finally.
Finally, I could rise based on my skill and not the color of my skin.
But one day, my boss called me into his office, and again, I'm not making this up.
There's no hyperbole here.
Told me directly...
In clean, direct language, I'm afraid we've been told we can't promote white males because we don't have enough diversity in senior management and we'll never get it if we just keep promoting white males.
And I said, well, how long is this going to last?
And my boss, to his credit, said, I don't know.
I don't know. I mean, it's not going to go away soon.
I don't know if it ever went away.
So, two major careers I lost because of my race and my gender.
Now, again, before you bring out your tiny violins, white man complaining who went on to get rich easily because he's a white man in America, tiny little violin, I hear you.
I hear you. I'm not saying that I didn't have options.
Things worked out pretty well for me.
I'm not even saying that companies should not work hard for affirmative action.
I think they should. And I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But I had options.
So again, I'm not complaining in the sense that, oh, my life is over.
I don't work that way.
I just go where I have opportunity and And leave where I don't.
I think everybody should do that.
And so, I know people think that I'm joking about this, or that I say it for a fact, or I say it just for persuasion, but when I say I know what it feels like to lose a job because of your race or your gender, I literally know what that feels like.
Twice. And these are major careers.
This wasn't, I took a job as a bagger at the grocery store for a year and it didn't work out.
Both of these were supposed to be my career.
And I was bumped out.
So, that's it.
So I identify as black going forward.
I would encourage all of you to do the same.
I'm not kidding, by the way.
I'm not kidding. Just in case you thought I was, I'm not.
Pelosi was making some news today, I guess the last few days, and she says, is it right as a speaker, she says, to seat or unseat any member of Congress she wants, even if the election is certified?
Now, a lot of people are saying, doesn't that make you sort of the empress of the country?
But I guess she is.
But the interesting part is you have to see her video talking about that.
Because I don't know what she's done recently, cosmetically, but her eyebrows are trying to escape her mouth area, and they just keep getting higher on her head until I think the eyebrows and the hairline have just become one.
And I think we may see other portions of her face, likewise trying to escape the mouth area, because the things that come out of her mouth are pretty scary.
And if I were her eyebrows, I'd make a run.
I'd make a run for it.
If I were the ears, I'd try to get, like, around to the back a little bit.
If I were the nose, I don't know.
The nose is going to be hard.
If I'm the eyes, I might want to try to keep them closed.
But you want to get as far away as you can from this, like, mouthful area.
And the eyebrows are leading the pack.
All right. So...
And that...
It's my show for the day, unless I can think of something right now.
Wait, Princeton, are you kidding me?
Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber, somebody in the comments is saying, is promoting the fine people hoax.
Princeton? I have a friend from Princeton who believes all the hoaxes.
He graduated from Princeton, believes every hoax.
There is not a hoax he doesn't believe.
And believe me, you can't talk him out of it.
So Princeton's got a problem.
Princeton's got a problem.
Um... What's happening this weekend?
Somebody asked. Alright, I'm going to turn off Periscope, and I will talk to you later.
Alright, YouTubers, because you're special at the moment.
Somebody asked what years my career was scuttled.
Yeah, that was the 80s.
Correct. 80s and early 90s.
Late 80s, early 90s, actually.
Bigfoots are real, somebody says.
Yes.
Start hanging out with Bill Maher.
I don't think Bill Maher wants to hang out with me.
You know, I was on his show, and let's just say We didn't have chemistry.
I'll just say that. But he was in a hurry.
He had to get somewhere after the show.
So he just came in, did the show, and ran.
We didn't really chat.
Oh, yeah. You know, I somewhat missed the details.
There's some kind of story about Hunter Biden...
What was it? His girlfriend threw away his handgun in a trash can by a school, and then there was maybe a form that he filled out when he got it that he lied on, and maybe he should go to jail.
I don't know what to say about that story.
It isn't big enough to matter.
It's just one guy with a problem.
Would like to see another conversation with you and Sam Harris.
Wouldn't that be interesting? Wouldn't that be interesting?
Yeah. I'm not doing any media right now, so I wouldn't do it right away.
But at some point, when I start doing media again, that would be an interesting conversation.
I'd love to catch up with him.
Because the fun thing about Sam Harris is that he's super smart and well-informed.
So if you disagree with somebody who's super smart and well-informed, that's just always fun.
Maybe you'll learn something watching that.
All right. Oh, there's a bigger story about the Secret Service, et cetera, with the Hunter story.
Okay. Got it.
And yes, as people said, if that had been Don Jr.
instead of Hunter, it would be a whole different story.
Yeah, we all agree with that.
But there's also, you know, the difference is if you're pro-gun or not.
So it wouldn't be exactly a good analogy.
Yeah, lying on a gun purchase is a felony.
It probably should be a pretty big one, don't you think, as felonies go?
But wouldn't it be interesting if his defense was that the Constitution allows him to own a gun?
Imagine if he said, yes, I admit I did lie on this form, because that's probably going to be easy to prove, but I lied on this form because I have a Second Amendment right to own a gun, and your form can't stop me from my Second Amendment right.
Would that work? That would be interesting.
Somebody says it's automatic jail.
I don't know. I'd like to know...
Oh, I didn't do the Clubhouse event.
I postponed that again.
I'm just having a little bit of a scheduling problem with me and my guests being available at the same time.
The one thing I like about Clubhouse is you just jump on and do it.
You don't have to schedule.
So here's a little thing that just happened in my neighborhood.
This tells you how weird the world is right now, because there's a bunch of people who got rich during the pandemic.
At the same time, a whole bunch of people lost everything.
So it was this weird situation where some people were doing great while other people were just getting hit hard.
But one of the things that happened is, where I live, I'm outside of San Francisco.
And I'm outside of all the bad parts of San Francisco.
Like, everything that's bad about San Francisco, the city...
I'm just outside that because I'm in the suburbs outside.
And so as people left the city, they came here.
There's a 2,300 square foot home around the corner that just sold for half a million dollars over the asking price.
What? One before that just sold for $400,000 Over the asking price.
And there are almost no homes that are even available to buy here.
And the reason is that all the city and the valley people, once they could work remotely, as soon as you could work remotely, they came to my town because this is the perfect place to work remotely.
And there are people who sold homes that were worth, you know, whatever millions in the city or in the valley.
And they had tons of money because they sold their homes.
And then they came here and raised all of our prices.
But have you ever heard of that?
Have you heard of multiple homes selling for half a million dollars over the asking price?
Now we're only talking about a home that was selling, I think it was listed for 2.2 million.
We're not talking about like a 50 million dollar home that sold for half a million over the asking price.
It was listed for 2.2.
And sold for 2.7.
And 2.2 was a market comp.
It sold for half a million dollars over the comps for the neighborhood.
I mean, that's just crazy.
Alright, so that's what's going on in my neighborhood.
