Episode 1332 Scott Adams: FDA Approves Rapid Home Tests, Wokeness Emergencies, Hula Hoops, and Fresh Fake News
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Content:
FDA approves rapid home tests for COVID
Nuclear energy included in Biden energy package
Will Biden's 2T infrastructure bill pay for itself?
Vaccination Passports require a government ID
Chauvin trial, more twists and turns
Fentanyl questions
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I will look into alternatives to broaden my exposure, but I've been busy.
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Well, I would like to start out by giving some kudos to the Biden administration.
I'll bet you hate that, don't you?
You know, the trouble with giving presidents credit or blame for anything is that things always slop over, right?
So you never really know, did Was this something that started during the Trump administration and then just slopped over into the Biden administration?
So the news is that the FDA just authorized the first COVID-19 tests for repeated frequent use at home.
In other words, cheap, rapid tests at home.
No prescription. Now, how big a deal is that?
Well, the initial ones will be a little too expensive, so you're going to need rich people to buy them to show a demand.
But I'm pretty sure that the market is going to get saturated and the price will come down.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it comes down from, I think it's $8 a test, which is too expensive.
But people like me would use it, right?
People who have some extra cash.
I would definitely use a home test that cost $8.
I maybe wouldn't do it every day, but I can imagine an $8 home test, I could see me doing it once a week or something like that.
Or maybe more.
But here's the big story here.
I don't know if this started during the Trump administration and it just took a long time.
You may remember that I've been pushing very hard On the FDA and saying in public a number of times that you had to presume they were corrupt for not having done this sooner.
So I'd like to revise my assumption, right?
So the assumption was that these rapid home tests were such an obvious thing to be approved, it just didn't seem like there was any argument against it that could be made once you understood it.
If you didn't understand the issue, you could make an argument.
But as soon as you understood it, all the arguments go away.
And I thought, the only reason, because of course the FDA would understand it, not like the public, they would actually understand it.
So for them not to approve it, I said, somebody's got to be on the take, there's got to be some corruption, there's no other way to explain it.
But, now that it is approved...
We have to add a second hypothesis.
So you have to keep the hypothesis that there might have been some corruption.
But I'm going to add to that the hypothesis that maybe the bureaucracy is just the bureaucracy.
Because we're all talking about how amazing Project Warp Speed was, right?
We wouldn't have vaccinations nearly so quickly.
Except that Trump basically kicked asses and just said, yes, you will do this.
No, you will do this.
No, you will do this.
Until they did it. But I don't think there was a project warp speed for these rapid tests.
It just, for some reason, it didn't make that list.
So it could be that it's just a bureaucracy.
Maybe it just takes a year to do something that should take a day.
Because this should have taken a day.
But it took a year.
Well... Closer than nine months, I think it took.
Something like that. Now, congratulations to Michael Amina.
You've seen me tweet him a number of times.
And I would say he was the primary voice in the country for this option, to do lots of cheap tests to try to get on top of the virus.
Now, I'm...
I can't say enough good things about what Michael Mina did for the country.
One of the strange things about this pandemic, strange in a good way, is that you saw a number of people, and I like to think I'm one of them, who just said, well, what can I do?
Right? I can't do everything.
But what can I do?
So you watched me go through that process in public, right?
I said, well, what can I do to help?
And I tried to help by doing largely what I'm doing and calming people down and making sure people understood the situation, the risks and rewards and stuff.
So a lot of people just sort of jumped into the breach.
Just jumped in and said, what can I do?
Michael Mina probably would be the superstar among them in my Opinion, because he took personal risk, personal time, lots of effort.
I mean, he was doing media, he was doing articles, he was doing social media.
I mean, he pushed as hard as a private citizen could push anything.
And I think he got all the way to Congress and was influencing directly.
So if I had to guess, and it's hard to tell, but I think Michael Mina made the difference.
I think he made the difference.
And I am proud to say that I helped boost him in my small social media way, as well as lots of other people.
And I feel like this is...
To some extent, this is a victory of social media as a form of government.
I told you before that our form of government has transmogrified into a smart person in the public who wants to put enough energy into it gets to be in charge.
In a weird way, Michael Mina was a smart citizen with good intentions, put the work into it.
It was almost like he was in charge.
In a practical sense, because I do think he pushed it over the line.
I don't know how fast or even if it would have happened otherwise.
So I'm going to say kudos to the Biden administration for getting that done.
But with the caveat that it may have already been in the works.
Maybe it just took a long time.
So we don't know. So we don't know how much of that was Trump, how much was Biden, but the person in charge by our system, the person who's in the office, gets the credit and also gets the criticism.
So Biden gets the credit.
He was in office. We know that here's another thing that looks good, actually.
That it looks like the Biden administration will include, prominently, nuclear energy as part of their recovery package, etc., future plans.
So the Biden administration is pro-nuclear, it looks like, and may make even more noise about it.
So again, kudos to the Biden administration for being on the right side of nuclear energy.
I'm not sure that was easy.
Was it easy for Biden to be pro-nuclear in a Democrat party where a big part of the party would be very anti-nuclear?
I think it takes some balls.
I'm going to give him that one.
There's plenty of criticism for the Biden administration, right?
But we're not going to be...
We're not going to be nuts about it.
If some good things happen, some good things happen.
Let's call it out. And then I'll give a third thing, but this is more with a little question mark on it.
Remember I asked you, do we know if this big $2.5 trillion infrastructure package will improve the economy, or will it just run up the debt?
And remember I said, why don't we know that?
Why are we talking about this and we don't even know if it's good or bad for the economy?
Who's doing the calculations?
Well, Biden claims that it will be good for the economy and even lower the national debt in the long run.
Obviously raises it a lot in the short run.
Do you believe that?
Does your gut feeling...
Does it conform with the idea that this $2.5 trillion will end up producing more good and tax benefits than it will cost in the long run?
Long run being 15 to 30 years, I suppose.
What do you think? What does your gut feeling tell you?
More positive or more negative?
Now, the trick here is that you don't all have economics training, right?
Probably most of you don't.
So, seeing lots of no's.
How would you know that, though?
So I'm not saying you're wrong, right?
So without giving you my opinion on this, I don't know if it will or not, to be honest, but why would you be sure?
What would cause you to be sure it's a bad idea?
Because, correct me if I need a fact check on this, but I believe it must have been the management budget office, right, whoever does these scorings.
It must have been scored by a government entity, and it must have scored positively, right?
Because the government does their own calculation for their own plans, and then they tell the public this looks like it will be positive or negative, right?
So I believe real economists have said this is a good idea.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Can you fact check that?
Have economists said this is a bad idea?
CBO, I'm sorry. Yeah, the CBO scores all the bills, and...
I think they've scored it positively.
Can you do a fact check on that?
Now here, why are we talking about this without that being the number one thing that sets the context for every story about this?
What story are you seeing?
So the story you're seeing on the right is that it's not infrastructure.
It's like only a small part of it is roads and bridges.
Is that really a good point?
Well, it's a good point If you make a stupid assumption, and this stupid assumption would be that the only thing that's good is building roads and bridges.
That would be a stupid assumption.
It's good, but would there not be other things that are good?
Now, I'm with you on the points about If they're using it for racial balancing and stuff, those conversations, we need to get into those in a little detail, because I'm not so sure that's well thought out.
But on purely an economic level, forget about the social justice part for a minute, on purely an economic level, my gut feeling is it might be good.
My gut feeling is it might be positive.
Now, I have a background in economics.
I've got an MBA. If you don't have that kind of background, I would look to people who do.
And you should look to people like me, although I'm at the very bottom of people you should trust on a big economic question.
But at least I have more experience than you do, probably.
So I would ask you, if you're on the right and you're concerned about everything from inflation, and you should be, To national debt, and you should be.
These are all things to be rightly concerned about.
Get some advice from economists, which is not to say the economists are right.
I'm just saying they might have some perspective that would make you feel more comfortable with this.
I have a feeling this is more positive than negative.
I just don't know if there's a way to know it, right?
And the social justice stuff, I don't think you can look at that as economics exactly.
All right. So that's all the good news.
Here's a question I asked yesterday, and have you ever noticed that no matter what point you make on social media, somebody will argue with it?
Have you ever noticed that?
It's like a universal truth, right?
You could make a bad point on Twitter, and of course people will say, hey, that's a bad point, and they'll point it out.
Or you could make a brilliant, perfectly supported point on Twitter, and And what will happen?
Exactly the same amount of criticism.
Because people really just criticize based on what team they're on, right?
They're just going to look for something.
But every now and then, and I can't say I can even think of another example, but every now and then, somebody will say something that will just stop the conversation.
It'll just shut it down.
Like people won't even be able to talk about it.
And I managed to do one of those tweets yesterday.
And I want you to look at, if you find the tweet, it wouldn't be hard to find in my Twitter feed, watch how the critics just disappeared.
And here's what I did.
I simply took the rules as they're given to us and applied them.
So I'm not somebody who made up some rules...
All I did was say, okay, what are the rules of society?
Okay, and I'll just apply it to a well-known situation.
That's it. Now, here's the situation.
Vaccination passports.
And here's my tweet.
Yesterday I said, isn't it racist to require vaccination passports when so many black citizens don't have government IDs?
If you don't have an ID, how can you prove it was you who got vaccinated?
Don't we have a problem here?
If requiring IDs to vote is racist, requiring IDs to prove you got vaccinated is not less racist.
It's exactly the same.
It's exactly as racist.
So I simply took the rules...
Applied it to this situation.
Well, what are the rules?
Okay, I'll just apply it.
And how much pushback did I get?
I think none.
I think none.
I mean, maybe it's there, but it would probably be in the form of people just insulting me, you know, in general.
I don't think anybody criticized the point.
I don't think so. And so, that's kind of the end of vaccinations, isn't it?
The conservatives would simply have to say it's racist and refuse to participate.
That's it. It's over.
Everybody who's worried about the passports, changing your life and everything, it's kind of over.
You just say it's racist and walk away.
Now, I don't know if anybody will do that, but if you want it to be over, it would be as easy as that.
Now, I got criticized quite a bit on this vaccination passport thing because I noted that it might help you open the economy faster.
And other people said, Scott, you idiot.
There's no evidence that it will help you open the economy faster.
To which I say, hold on, hold on.
You're confusing me with somebody who has certainty in uncertain situations.
That's not me. I would never enter a situation like this with certainty.
That would be the dumbest position.
It wouldn't matter what position you took.
If you entered it with certainty, that's just dumb, right?
So instead, I always go with a systems view, and the systems view looks like this.
If there's something you can test and then quickly abandon, if it doesn't work, it's worth testing.
That's it. You've heard my whole opinion.
So let's say that the government says we're going to require these vaccination passports for a certain type of business.
And then that business ends up failing because so many people resisted it that it was worse than if they'd never implemented that idea at all.
To which I say, okay, you tested it.
You quickly found out it ruined your business.
All you have to do is stop doing it.
It's very easy to reverse.
Let's say you're a gym.
And you say, all right, we're a gyms.
We're a little more close contact in here.
We're going to require vaccination passports.
And the day you require it, your gym goes out of business because everybody says, well, screw you.
I'm just not going to participate.
I'll go to another gym.
And then what's the gym do?
They immediately changed their policy because it was optional.
So to me, if you can test something and then just literally with a snap of a finger, reverse it.
It's like today we require it.
Oh, that didn't work. Instead of opening the economy faster, which was the whole point, it actually opened it slower.
We tested it.
We tried it for two weeks.
It just made everything worse.
It's gone. Snap your fingers.
That's it. The gym just says, oh, take down the sign on the front.
There's a sign on the door that says you have to have a vaccination.
Just take down the sign. You've reversed the entire policy.
That's it. Now, you're talking about the government.
A lot of people said, the government, when the government does something, they don't like to give up on it.
Well, that's definitely true if the government is taxing.
Right? So if you're looking for a situation where the government wants taxed something, I wouldn't expect that to change.
Historically, once somebody's making money, it's hard to change that.
But the vaccination passports don't look like a moneymaker for the government, right?
There's no politician who gets to build a bridge.
Nobody gets a donation or anything.
The government doesn't care.
And the government would like fewer restrictions on themselves.
You don't think AOC wants to go to the gym?
Of course she does.
So I would look at each of these situations individually.
Those who have said, quite reasonably, that the government never does a program or gains power and then gives it back.
To which I say, they do it all the time.
It's the most common thing our government does, is remove our rights and then give them back when the emergency is passed.
When, let's say, there's a curfew because there's been rioting in the city, do you worry that the curfew will become permanent?
Has it ever?
Has there ever been a permanent curfew?
I can't think of one.
How about when there's some kind of emergency declaration because there's a hurricane and the government says, for now you can't do this or that.
When the emergency is over, don't they remove it?
Routinely, right?
Now somebody says the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act has a money element to it, doesn't it?
I believe the Patriot Act, if you looked at it, you would find a lot of companies sort of in the business of making money on the Patriot Act.
And that makes it sticky.
So remember the rule.
Just see if you would agree with this rule.
Whenever a lot of money is involved, it's sticky.
But a vaccine, just let's say legislation that says you need to show a card or if a gym wants to, they can refuse service.
Who's making money?
So if the government is not making money or if there are not big industries that are making a ton of money because of it, I think you're okay.
I think you're okay.
Let's take the FISA courts.
The problem with the FISA courts...
And I don't know the full details here, is that we didn't know what the problem was.
We suspected there would be.
Lots of people said, hey, there's going to be problems.
Sure enough, there were.
Now, once we discovered those problems, we have an opportunity to change them.
Right? So the problem with the FISA, if you look at the FISA thing, what was the problem?
A lack of transparency.
So here's a second variable to look at to know why each situation is unique.
Would the FISA court have ever changed if we had not accidentally gotten visibility through this Russia collusion stuff?
If you have visibility and nobody's making money in the government or indirectly or directly, you have a good chance of reversing it.
If you don't know anything's wrong, because you don't have visibility, why would you reverse it?
You don't know if anything's wrong.
And if there's money involved, it's sticky.
So here's my thing.
Don't use bad analogies to figure out what will happen.
Now, also keep in mind that there are some things which both left and right does not like.
And vaccination passports is in that category.
What do you think the black public in the United States thinks about vaccination passports?
About the same as the conservative public, right?
If you put Republicans and black citizens in this country on the same side of an issue, I don't think you have to worry about it.
That's as close as you can get to guaranteeing that something's going to go the way you want it to go.
You put blacks and republicans on the same team, it's pretty strong.
So there's always a risk, and I think you're completely reasonable in worrying about things being permanent.
That's a reasonable risk.
And I don't deny that it's a risk.
I just think you have to put it in context a little bit better.
So... There's that.
I guess we have to talk about this Matt Gaetz story some more.
You know, nobody misses Trump more than anybody who gets in the news lately.
Because you hope that the next story will knock you off the headlines.
But this Matt Gaetz thing is just going to sit there until there's some new news.
And apparently we're not making any new news lately.
Because Trump isn't in it.
So here are the things we know.
And there's so much creepy about this story.
And I don't mean from Matt Gaetz in particular.
I mean, everything about it is creepy.
But there are some interesting questions which have arisen.
Number one, it seems that Gaetz is certainly being hurt by associations.
So there's this guy named Greenberg who has far more specific and damning allegations.
So the allegations against this Greenberg guy, who Matt Gaetz does know well enough, he spent some time with him, the Greenberg allegations look really, really bad.
No doubt about that. The Gaetz allegations are different.
And it also would completely explain why Gates would be, let's say, a subject as opposed to a target.
Because the evidence we have suggests that Matt Gates would have information that would be useful to the Greenberg question.
And I do understand that sometimes, and not rarely, somebody who's a subject can become a target if they find out enough.
But that doesn't have to go that way.
So at the moment, we don't even know if anybody has any bad verified information about Matt Gaetz.
So we in the public don't know that.
But that's a little hidden by the fact that they're doing this guilt-by-association And, you know, maybe this and maybe that, and it's alleged this and reported that.
And there's so much smoke that you can easily imagine that something specific about Matt Gaetz has been said that's illegal.
I don't know that's the case.
And here's why I don't know, and it's because there's some things about the law that I find confusing.
Here... Well, let me deal with this hula hoop thing first.
So there's a story that Matt Gaetz showed somebody a picture of some naked women and one of them had a hula hoop.
Now, that is the most dickish thing I've ever seen CNN report.
Imagine you're one of the women who had spent some time with Matt Gaetz and you heard that he'd shown some pictures of naked women to somebody.
And you say to yourself, uh-oh, I hope that wasn't me.
But at least you can assume maybe it wasn't, which would be at least some comfort.
You'd say, well, I'm sure I'm not the only one who allowed him to take a naked picture.
So it might have been somebody else.
But as soon as CNN throws this hula hoop thing in there, there is somebody in the world who knows that's them.
Now, what was the news value of including the hula hoop detail?
What was the news value of that?
I get the news value of the larger story.
But when you're talking about this poor woman, who not only there's a naked picture of her, so that's bad enough, but they have to mention the frickin' hula hoop.
So that she can know for sure that somebody was looking at her naked pictures.
That is messed up.
When you talk about CNN being the enemy of the people, it would be hard to find a better example than that.
There is no news value to including the hula hoop.
None. It just fucks up this woman's life a little bit extra.
And she wasn't the one we were mad at, right?
She's not the one who got elected.
This is fucked up, CNN. Fucked up.
You just took a normal citizen and just ruined her fucking year.
Right? Real good job, CNN. I mean, this is disgusting.
Everything that we've heard about Matt Gaetz, and you can have your own opinions about that.
I'm not going to argue with you What opinion you would like to have about this story.
Please, you're welcome to it.
I'm not going to talk you out of it.
But if you're telling me that what he did, even if it's all true, even if it's all true, it wasn't as bad as what CNN just did right in front of you.
And we don't even have to wonder if that's true, because CNN just did it in front of you.
They just threw this woman under a bus for fucking nothing.
Just so you would have that little extra thing in your head to feel bad about Matt Gaetz.
That's disgusting.
That is disgusting.
Anyway, so enough about that.
Here are some questions I have about this whole situation.
You're probably aware that the legal age for consent varies by state.
Did you know that what Matt Gaetz did, allegedly, so we don't know if any of this is true, but if he allegedly was with a 17-year-old, what percentage of states would that be legal?
How many states, as a percentage of all the states, in how many states would that be perfectly legal?
Just guess. I think it's about 80%.
Yeah, it's most.
About 80% of the states don't even have a law against it.
Not even any law.
Now, there's a separate question about payment and a separate question about state lines, and we'll talk about that.
But the first thing you need to know is that he's blamed for something that 80% of the states don't even think should be illegal.
That's important. But I have more questions.
Part of the allegations is that there was money involved, and we'll talk about that separately, but money involved to cross a state line for the purpose of having sex.
What year is this?
I thought this was 2021.
Now, I get that the federal government needs to be involved if something crosses state lines.
So that part's clear, right?
Because the state can't handle it if it's a multi-state thing.
The feds have to do it.
But why is this illegal?
Let me ask you this.
Let's say you were in one of the 20% of the states-ish, where being with a 17-year-old, if you're an adult male, let's say.
Actually, it doesn't matter the genders.
You can reverse the genders.
It's the same legal question.
And let's say that you said, hey, 17-year-old, it would be totally illegal to do what we would both like to do willingly in this state.
So here's what we're going to do.
I'll meet you in Florida where it's legal, and since you don't have money, I'll pay for your trip.
So would it not, and again, this is a question, it's not a statement, would it be illegal to For someone to say, doing this activity is illegal in my state, so why don't we spend a little money and go 10 miles to the east, and we'll be in a different state where it's completely legal, and then we'll do completely legal things, and then we'll drive home.
I think you go to jail for that.
Right? Because that would be paying somebody to cross state lines for the purpose of sex.
Yeah, I'm seeing in the comments, somebody says, it would be illegal to go to a state to do a legal thing.
To do something that's legal would be illegal.
Do you get that? It would be illegal to go do something legal.
Because you crossed the state line to do it.
Now, do you think that was the point of the law?
Do you think that the people who wrote the law said, well, we'll get these people who think they're going to be clever and go do something legal?
So that's my first question, is how does that work?
Secondly, part of the story is that there was one allegedly 17-year-old that Matt Gaetz allegedly had some contact with that would be illegal.
Here's my question. The second part of the story is that this Greenberg guy was the one who found her, and that he found her on a website where women advertise that they will do things for money.
Now, do you think that that website that she was on, where she was originally found, in which the whole point of the website...
Is money for sex.
That's the whole point of it.
Do you think that website let an underage person sign up intentionally?
Do you think that they did?
No. No.
At some point, if this person exists, we don't know that yet, but if there's a real 17-year-old, she had to lie about her age to be on the site in the first place.
Right? So if she lied about her age to the website, which seems almost guaranteed that that had to happen, because they wouldn't let her on otherwise, what would that say about both Greenberg and Matt Gaetz?
Is it illegal if you don't know?
And is it illegal if all the indications are that there's no law broken?
Now, I do understand that ignorance of the law is no excuse.
But that's not what this is.
This would not be ignorance of the law.
This would be ignorance of a fact because somebody lied to you.
Somebody lied to him.
If that's what happened.
We don't know that that's the case.
So, the only thing we've heard about Matt Gaetz is that there's one 17-year-old...
Which would be legal in every state, the act, the paying the money for it.
Here's what's interesting about that.
Am I wrong that the left is pro-sex worker?
Right? It seems to me that the left is very pro-sex work.
So I would think that the left would be defending Matt Gaetz, of course, not in the real world.
But in terms of being consistent, they should say, hey, yeah, we get that it's illegal, but maybe it shouldn't be.
Now, the part about this being 17 would, of course, be illegal, right?
So the part about the 17, that's automatically a problem.
By the way, is there anybody...
I'd like to see if there are any...
I'm going to have a swearing alert.
I should have warned you before.
But is there anybody so dumb that they think I'm defending Matt Gaetz now?
In the comments, let me see.
All the dumb people, will you confess?
How many think I'm defending Matt Gaetz?
In the comments, just go ahead and say it.
Because I want to see how many dumb people are here.
Kinda. One dumb person.
Let's see. Any more dumb people?
Nope, nope. So a lot of smart people.
Okay. Somebody says Florida is 18?
Yeah. The point, of course, is just states are different.
No, no, no.
Are you kidding? No, no.
Okay, good. See, I think that my audience is...
And I say this honestly.
I think my audience is like five times smarter than the average public.
Right? So...
You can talk about things without defending them.
You can say there's something good about this and there's something bad about it without being an apologist.
I'm glad that most of you are smart enough to understand that.
A lot of the world does not.
All right. So we don't know what Matt Gaetz did or did not.
That's his business. It's not for me to defend him.
He's on his own on that.
And he is. He's on his own.
But I just have these questions about why...
What makes it illegal if you didn't know he was doing it?
I feel as if you'd have to know you were committing the crime to be punished for it.
So, that's that.
On the vaccine passport stuff, I'm seeing some people online saying that they believe my opinion was based on my own fear of mortality.
And that some people think I was more favorable in concept to vaccine passports because the real problem is I'm afraid of dying because I'm old.
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
I've had a good run.
I don't fear death at all.
Not at all. I spend zero time worrying about death.
I really do. Not from the coronavirus, not from crime, not from disease.
I don't spend any time thinking about it.
You know, it's going to come.
We all get our chance, right?
We're all going to die. But I really don't think about it.
And I certainly am not worrying about the coronavirus killing me at the moment.
You know, yet... Somebody says they don't believe me.
Now, I suppose...
I suppose...
But you do get that my risk of death is so small that being concerned about that particular risk of all the things I could die of in the next years...
What are the odds that I would die of coronavirus?
You know that I know the odds of that are vanishingly small.
You know, I'll probably get my vaccination within a few days.
My risk is just almost nothing.
I only care about the economy opening up in a good way, because that's good for everybody.
So now I'm not worried about my personal death.
It's literally the last thing I'm worried about.
Let's talk about the Floyd trial.
You know, I didn't think there would be lots of twists and turns in this thing, but you're always surprised.
When lawyers get involved, it's like reality just starts changing right in front of you.
You hear the defense, and Reality changes, you hear the prosecution, it changes again.
And I didn't think there would be twists and turns, but here's one.
It turns out that when George Floyd was calling out for his mama, which is not funny, like, don't think I'm making fun of this, this is all serious, that he was calling for his mama as he was taking his last breaths of life, apparently, that we found out that that's the nickname he uses for his girlfriend.
And while that's not important to the crime, it might be important to how people processed it.
The amount of energy and emotion that they put into it, somebody crying for their mother is different from somebody crying for their girlfriend, right?
Now that doesn't mean he wasn't crying for his mother, because it does seem sort of more likely that that would happen, right?
Maybe he just likes this word mama.
He calls everybody mama. I don't know.
But we didn't expect that.
Not that this should change.
I don't think that'll change the verdict in any way.
Now here's the thing. We talked about what makes something murder.
And I would say that there's no chance that Derek Chauvin was intending to murder him.
And in fact, the charges don't even include premeditated.
But rather the charges assume that a person in that situation would know they were putting someone else in a situation where the risk of death was high enough that they shouldn't have done it.
Like they should have known not to put somebody in that situation.
So that's what makes it murder.
Okay, you didn't try to kill them.
You just put them in a situation you knew could result in that and you didn't care.
So you're sort of a murderer if you did that.
Now let's say we accept that as a standard.
I'm not arguing for it or against it.
I'm just going to ask you this.
How would you not apply that to the person who sold them fentanyl?
Because here's my point.
A drug dealer generally knows that they're selling fentanyl.
But the person who buys it might not.
Now I'm going to correct something I said on a tweet.
I may have said it out loud, too.
I said, and this is what I'm going to correct, but I first said, no one knowingly takes fentanyl.
Dealers put it in pills, they sell as Xanax or bars, as they call them, and in other drugs.
Dealers know they're selling it, but buyers don't know they're buying it.
They think they're getting some other drug that's safer.
Now, under that condition, would that be murder?
If the dealer knows they're putting a buyer in a situation where the odds of death are pretty high and they don't tell them, have they not murdered them should they die of an overdose?
I say yes.
I say that's murder because they willingly put them in a situation that is likely to die and the person in that situation didn't choose it.
They did not choose to be in the unlikely to die from fentanyl situation.
So, Why does law enforcement not arrest the dealer under exactly the same terms?
And wouldn't it be interesting if there were two murder trials, one for the police officer, just as we see, and a separate one for the fentanyl dealer under exactly the same terms?
Now, I heard somebody say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you don't prosecute the dealer...
Because there's so many other things involved.
You know, the person willingly took the drug, but which I say, they didn't willingly take the drug.
They willingly took what they thought was some other drug.
And by the way, the part I'm going to correct is when I said that the buyer never knows they're getting fentanyl.
I did hear from somebody who knows more than I do saying, no, sometimes the buyer does know they're getting fentanyl.
Sometimes they do know.
I think that is more typical when it's not a pill.
If you're buying a pill It's usually counterfeited to look like something else, like a Xanax, for example.
So in those cases, I don't think that people know they're buying fentanyl.
That's probably what killed my stepson.
He had fentanyl in him.
He would never, in fact, he told me a week earlier, he would never touch something that had fentanyl in it.
He knew that. He knew it cold, and a week later he was dead from it.
Because he didn't know what was in it, I guess.
I don't know that for sure. But that's the fair assumption.
But there are people who are addicts who do know what they're getting, but they also tend to be operating at a higher level, and they're going to be a little more careful with it because they know they have something deadly.
Now, I don't know what the stats are, but my guess is that the people who know they're buying something deadly probably treat it like it's deadly and may not have as many ODs as someone who didn't even know they had it because they're not trying to They're not trying to protect themselves.
I'll give you a specific example.
I was told once that what kills fentanyl people if they overdose and pass out is their head goes down and they cut off their own air supply without waking up because their head drips, drops down.
And so my understanding is if you're an experienced addict and you know you have fentanyl, you make sure that you're sitting in a chair with your head back when you fall asleep.
The odds of dying in that position are way less.
This is what I've been told, and I'm not 100% confident about this.
And that there might be some stats that show that if you know you have fentanyl, you're much less likely to die from it.
Don't know that's true, but I would look for that stat.
Anyway, I would say this.
We don't... We don't prosecute the gun manufacturer if somebody buys a gun and shoots somebody, because we say those are different things.
It's legal to make a gun, it's not legal to shoot somebody, so it's the shooter that matters.
In this fentanyl case, the fentanyl dealer was the last person in the chain.
It's like firing the gun.
The fentanyl dealer is more like the person who pulled the trigger, because they're the last person that gave you the bullet, and the bullet being the fentanyl.
Alright. Here's another question that I have.
If you're on two knees, let's say one knee is on the ground and one knee is on somebody's neck, can you transfer your weight such that your knee that's on the ground is absorbing most of the weight And your knee that's on the suspect is less.
You know, just enough to make sure he doesn't jump up, but, you know, far less than it would be to kill him.
And I was looking at the most famous photo of Shaven on the back of the...
on Floyd.
Take a look at all the photos.
And I don't know if this will be in the defense, so it's just a question.
If you look at the photos...
You'll see that Shaven is not directly upright on his knees.
You'll see that he's cheating to one side.
He's actually leaning. Now, is the leaning something that would cause the weight to be non-distributed in the right way?
Does the leaning show that he's putting most of his weight on Floyd, which would be the worst thing?
Or does the way he leans Suggests that maybe he's intentionally not putting maximum force there.
You can't tell exactly.
But here's a test I would do if I were the defense.
I would take a weighing device, some kind of a scale that you put weight on and it measures.
Let's say the scale is about this tall, similar to a neck.
And I would say, client...
Derek's shaven. Put one knee on the ground in front of the jury and put one knee on the scale.
Now, push down on the scale.
And, you know, it would show, you know, 100 pounds of weight or whatever he weighs, half of it.
And it wouldn't be 100 pounds, right?
And then they would say, okay, now put most of your weight on the floor and let's see what the scale says.
And then Derek would just do this.
You basically wouldn't even be able to tell.
And you would see that the scale goes from, you know, five pounds of pressure to nothing or whatever.
So I feel as if you're arguing reasonable doubt...
Chauvin weighs about, somebody says, maybe 150 or so.
Yeah, he looks at it.
I would think that if you're arguing reasonable doubt, you would have to know how much pressure each knee was putting down...
And that there's no way to know.
If the coroner didn't find any damage to the neck, and visually you can't tell, because remember, the defense has to defend against the videos and the photos.
So people think they're seeing something that they know what they're seeing on the video and the photos.
All you have to do is say, look at my client.
He's right in front of you. Can you tell what pressure he's putting on the scale just by looking at him?
No. You can't tell.
And once you can't tell it live in person, you would understand that you also couldn't tell when you saw the video.
So, if the defense proves that the fentanyl was enough that it could have killed him, I just don't see how anybody's going to get convicted for murder.
Might be some other lesser charge, I guess.
All right. Is there anything else happening?
I'm going to look at your comments for a moment.
Floyd's face was ground into the pavement, somebody says.
Uh, But I don't know that...
I would imagine that abrasions are fairly common in arrests where there's some resistance.
I don't know that that's the big problem.
Somebody's saying that Floyd had three times the amount it would take to overdose.
Here's my question. There was some suggestion or allegation...
That Floyd may have taken some pills when he got stopped so that they wouldn't be discovered.
That's the assumption.
Now, I don't think that's been demonstrated, right?
Somebody can tell me, has the trial presented any evidence that he took any pills when he got stopped?
Because even if he did, I don't know that they would work that quickly.
I don't think they would kill him in nine minutes, would they?
Even if it was too much fentanyl.
Would it happen that quickly?
Alright, I don't know. Yeah, the dealer is the real killer.
Exactly. I think the dealer should be tried for murder.
In fact, I think every fentanyl dealer should be tried for murder.
Drug tolerance varies considerably.
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, we know he was high before the stop.
We just don't know if he added to it during the stop or if enough time had gone by that it made any difference.
All right. Lots of comments today.
All right. Okay, that's all I got for now.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
I added some more micro-lessons to the Locals platform, if anybody would like to subscribe there.
Yesterday's lesson was how to tell a good story.
Now, by the way, what I'm doing on the Locals platform is sort of a, in a way, it's a lot of things, but one of the things it is, is a test of how to educate people.
Using video as a tool.
And I'm trying things while educating my followers in a bunch of micro lessons that are designed to be specifically very useful in your life, right?
So very practical stuff.
And I'm going to give you a preview of how that's going.
Number one, keeping them really short seems to be really important.
It also makes them easily searchable, and then you can go back, etc.
The other thing is...
What online teaching usually gets wrong is they just take a regular teacher and say, okay, do what you were doing before, but just do it in front of a camera.
Bad idea. And even if you take, say, an Ivy League instructor and say, well, this person's teaching at Stanford or Harvard, they must be one of the best people there is.
Not necessarily. They could be good at publishing.
Right? Because that's how you keep your job.
Publish a lot of papers. So, I'm going to say something deeply immodest.
And I do it for the point of making the point.
Right? If I don't do that, I can't make the point.
And the point is this.
I'm unusually good at explaining things.
Probably world class.
Right? I would guess.
And it has a lot to do with the fact that it's what I do for my job, right?
I simplify to make a comic.
I simplify for books.
I explain things in public.
So I'm kind of a 30-year experienced explainer.
People like me are kind of rare, but you only need a few per topic, and you've got all the topics, right?
So if you found somebody who is one of the best explainers and put them on video, you're not going to get the same outcome as somebody who just...
Got a good job at a good university being an instructor.
Big difference.
Big difference between the best explainer and somebody who just has a job in that field.
It would be like you played basketball and Michael Jordan played basketball.
But you're not really the same, even though you both play basketball.
You can't say there's anything in common, right?
So the thing that online training has as the greatest long-term potential is that the very best explainers eventually will gravitate toward it, but not until there's an economic incentive.
And I think these micro-lessons will become a standard for education in general.
I think that a class will be a series of micro-lessons.
A 45-minute class will turn into three or four micro-lessons, plus some gabbing about them.
And then when you go to study, you just look at the two-minute clip.
Oh, got it. Two minutes.
Got it. So I think that's where everything's going.
And the experiment, I would say, has been a huge success.
If you looked at the comments from the people who were looking at the micro-lessons, they don't get bored because they're short.
It's on point with something that's useful.
And I guess here's the takeaway.
And I would say the pioneer in this was the TED Talks.
How many of you have watched a TED Talk and thought to yourself that the reason you're watching it is just entertainment?
Probably quite a few of you, right?
But a TED Talk is information.
It's education.
It's a knowledge transfer.
But you go to school, and it's also education and facts and knowledge transfer, and it's deadly boring.
What did the TED Talks do to change education into entertainment?
It's pretty obvious what they did.
They kept it short, and they didn't get somebody who's just Pretty good at explaining things.
They got the best person in the world, ish, for each topic.
So when you're watching a TED Talk, you're watching the best explainer for that topic you might ever see.
And they keep it in 15 minutes.
Fifteen minutes is too long.
Fifteen minutes did seem short when TED started, because we all had longer attention spans.
TED is 20 years old?
25 years old?
Back then, we could watch three-hour things, so when they said, hey, it's only going to be 15 minutes, people said, what?
How are we going to jam it all in 15 minutes?
And then it was easy. They all could do it.
Why? Because you're not asking bad explainers to do it.
You're asking the best explainers in the world to get it into 15 minutes.
They can do it. They can also get it into 5.
If you watch a TED Talk by 2021 standards, It looks sort of like too long.
Somebody says 18 minutes?
I don't know if it is. I thought it used to be 15.
So that's where everything's going.
The TED Talk started it.
I'm just extending it.
It makes a huge difference.
And I think that's going to be great for education in the future.
