Episode 1333 Scott Adams: Bad Day for China, Gaetz Stuff, and More
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Content:
Marco Rubio's smart boycott maneuver
Corporations and reparations to Black Americans
Rasmussen polling vs CNN, Quinnipiac, others
Matt Gaetz story update
Alex Berenson vs Derek Thompson
https://ChinaNever.com
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It's a holiday weekend and I've got to check the answer to a question I just asked.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Yeah, I was almost 30 seconds late and I know that's distressing for many of you because when you're waiting for the simultaneous sip, Any delay is just unconscionable, isn't it?
Seems this light is making me look bad.
Yeah, turns out it was just the light.
Otherwise, I look great.
Why do I look like I'm lit up like a light bulb?
Alright, well, let's get to it.
You know, if you'd like to enjoy this better than, well, better than everybody else is enjoying anything right now, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stye, a canteen jug, flask.
A vessel of any kind, filling with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
I want it.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and here it comes.
So I told you that because Periscope was shutting down and I was going to look at some other platforms, I checked out Rumble yesterday.
And my understanding is they do not have live streaming yet, but they plan to have it.
Is that true? Because I looked at their interface, both on mobile and browser, and did not see any feature which would allow me to livecast.
So it won't happen on Rumble right away.
I also tried to H-A-P-P-S.TV. And when I tried live streaming to Twitch and YouTube at the same time, just as a test, it didn't have the performance I needed at high quality.
So I think there might be a performance issue if you go to high quality.
And I don't want to step down the quality just to use that tool.
The current situation is there is no sufficient alternative to YouTube at the moment.
The locals' platform will have one at some point, and I'll let you know about that.
All right, here's what's going on.
I was wondering how bad the COVID situation is In terms of your real life.
So forget about the statistics.
How much of it is affecting, like the actual infections, are affecting your real life?
And so I asked a highly unscientific poll on Twitter, and 21% of you who answered my highly unscientific poll, 21% of you say you know somebody that has COVID right now.
It's like, right now, you know somebody who has COVID. And I ask that question because I don't know anybody who has it.
And I haven't heard of anybody, even indirectly, you know, a real person.
I haven't even heard of anybody in about a week.
And I wondered if that meant anything.
But so many people have responded and say they do know somebody, they have it themselves, their spouse has it.
So there's a ton of people, a ton of people who know somebody who has it.
But what's interesting is, That 79% of the people who answered the poll said they don't even know anybody who added in the last week.
Don't even know anybody.
And the ones who said they do know somebody in the last week, given the way people answer questions on Twitter, how many of them answered the right question?
You can tell by the answers.
There's something like a third of the people who read the question didn't understand the question and answered the wrong question.
A lot of them answered that they had once had it, or they knew somebody who had it long ago, or somebody died with it, and that wasn't the question.
So I'm thinking something, I'll bet the 21% is closer to 10%.
So something like 10% of the respondents, again, highly unscientific, Even know somebody who hasn't.
But it's still plenty. So we still have a problem.
There's an interesting thing developing that I feel sometimes when you have an understanding of persuasion, you can kind of see around corners a little bit.
You know what's behind the corner before you look, just because you know how things work.
And there's a thing happening that some major corporations are blundering into that they do not see coming.
But I think I see it clearly coming, and I'm going to describe it to you, and most of you have endured my lessons on persuasion, and I want to see if you see it too.
And it goes like this.
So we've got our Fortune 500 companies, your Coca-Colas and your Deltas, saying that Georgia is a bad state and maybe they should not do business with Georgia or they have some issues with Georgia because of Georgia's changes to their voting rules.
Which put Georgia near the bottom of the list of election security, according to third parties who look at this stuff.
So Georgia went from one of the least secure voting systems to finally up in the middle of the pack with these latest changes.
But of course, that looks like Jim Crow racism to people on the left.
And I have to be honest...
It's both, isn't it?
You know, the way we argue is that there's only one right side and the other side is completely wrong, right?
There's only one side that's right and the other side completely wrong.
There's nothing to their argument whatsoever.
That's definitely not the case in this case.
I think that it can be true at the same time that these election changes are racist and Meaning that they have an outcome which disproportionately, you know, influences some group more than another.
I think that's obvious, right?
And it's not because that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the intention, although you have to worry about that.
But the outcome of any big change almost always has some racial disproportionate outcome.
Anything you do with taxes is racially disproportionate.
Everything, really. Anything big that affects the country has uneven outcomes, racially, no matter what your intention is.
You can have the best intention.
It's just going to work out that way.
And mostly that has to do with differences in economic situations and education levels and stuff like that.
But here's what's developing.
If we accept the proposition that a big corporation can make it their business what a government is doing, oh, the government is doing this bad thing, therefore we as a responsible corporation cannot be involved with whatever this bad thing is the government is doing.
They've now created that as their situation.
So now, a thing that didn't exist in our heads a year ago is very much in your head right now, isn't it?
A year ago, if you said to me, I think big corporations will start discontinuing business in some states in the United States based on not liking their laws, or that one of the states is a little too racist according to them.
If you told me that a year ago, I'd say, that's not going to happen.
Because corporations just want to make money.
They just want to make money.
That's both the bad thing about them and the good thing about them.
You wouldn't want to change that necessarily, right?
And because part of making money is you have to satisfy the public.
So they can't just make money and screw the public.
They have a, you know, people are watching.
So... Here's what they accidentally walked into, and I'm going to credit Marco Rubio for seeing this and taking advantage of it.
So Marco Rubio watches Delta dumping on Georgia and says, well, not just Delta, but Coca-Cola, I think, but talking about how do you do business in China and When China is putting the Uyghurs in prison camps, and you don't have any problem with that?
I think Coca-Cola would be the bigger offender here.
But think how clever that was from Marco Rubio.
This is the most clever thing I've seen him do as a politician.
And if you don't see it, it looks like it's just one of these hypocrisy plays, right?
You know, hey, you did something bad.
And then the other team says, well, you did something bad too.
So your first impression is it's just a normal hypocrisy claim, which have no effect on anything.
But there's something way bigger happening.
Like, really big.
And it goes like this.
These corporations are...
Making it acceptable to not do business where the government is over the line.
They're going to have to pull out of China.
And it's their own damn fault.
Because if these companies continue to press the point that it would be immoral and therefore bad for their company, bad for the world...
To do business with a corrupt government, they're saying that's Georgia.
Not corrupt, but racist, I guess.
They're going to have to decouple.
They're going to have to.
And they did this to themselves.
If they had just stayed nonpolitical, if the Fortune 500 had said, We're not in the business of politics.
You handle the politics.
We're just in the free market.
We're taking money from anybody who wants to give us money.
We're not looking at anybody's high school report card to find out if they can buy a Diet Coke.
We don't care if you went to jail once.
You can still buy a Diet Coke, right?
That's not our business.
We're just about selling stuff.
If they'd stayed there, They'd be fine.
But they didn't stay there.
They created a situation where they've put upon themselves the expectation that they can't do business with any entity that's a government entity that's too evil.
They have to decouple now.
But it's better than that.
It's better.
I'm only halfway done.
So not only do they screw themselves because they're going to have to lose their China business, I think the pressure is going to be too great.
It's going to build. But here's the other part.
We keep talking about reparations.
What's the big problem?
And you didn't connect these two topics, but watch me connect them.
What's the biggest problem...
With reparations.
Let's say somebody suggested, hey, let's do slavery reparations, and they make a good moral argument for it.
Number one, is there a good moral argument for slavery reparations?
Now, your mileage might vary, but I'm going to say yes.
That if you look at our precedents, we do have a pretty long precedence of saying, okay, the government did this to this group.
Let's say the The Japanese-Americans who were put in internment camps.
So we do have precedent.
So it fits the precedent, and it fits a moral view of the world.
But what's the big problem?
The big problem is where is the money going to come from?
Are you going to tax me?
Because, you know, my family, if you trace them back to New England, you'd find they were anti-slavery.
So why am I paying more when my family didn't own any slaves and we tried to end it?
Here I'm taking credit for John Adams' president and everything.
Kind of my extended family.
So that's the problem, right?
So the big problem is who pays.
You can't take somebody who's just an individual who is completely innocent of anything that had to do with slavery...
And their entire family was, and they didn't get anything, etc.
Now, you could argue all white people benefited by slavery, and I get that argument.
That's an argument.
It's in the mix.
It's true. It passes the sniff test.
But it's not really convincing.
You still can't get people like me to say that it's my responsibility to pay for somebody else's problem.
Because it just doesn't feel like it.
But... The corporations just opened up the possibility that corporations would be the source of that reparations.
Because these corporations do care about racial equality.
Before, I thought it wasn't any of their business.
They were just selling things.
And it was the government's business to make things fair and keep things equal.
And the corporations would simply follow the rules.
That's all they had to do.
But now the corporations have gone beyond following the rules, or the laws as they're set out, and they're trying to change the laws.
They're trying to proactively change something in Georgia, for example.
Once a corporation becomes active, then they become part of the solution, potentially.
Because they're active in it.
So you think, hey, I hadn't thought about this before, but do you know who can't complain about paying taxes for reparations?
Corporations. The only entity in the United States who has enough money and can't complain if they get taxed specifically just them, not individuals, just a corporate tax.
Now, I'm not saying this is a good idea or a bad idea, right?
That's a separate argument.
We'll talk about whether it's good or bad.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm just talking about who has the money, and would they be in a position where they've created a trap for themselves?
If corporations really, really care about racial equality, and somebody says, how are we going to pay for reparations, will those corporations say, we don't think there should be any?
Good luck. The corporations are going to have to agree that reparations are morally worth doing.
Because that's the position they've taken sort of, you know, in a general sense.
I don't think they can avoid it.
Do you think Coca-Cola could come out and say, yeah, you know, we went hard against Georgia for what we think are these Jim Crow rules, but this reparations, no, we're not going to pay it.
We don't think we should pay that.
Do you think they could do that?
They can't. So here's the situation.
I think corporations have signed themselves up to pay reparations because you can never get individuals to do it.
You'll never get the average white person to pay reparations for something they feel as if they had nothing to do with it.
But you could get corporations to do it.
And I'll bet that's where it's going.
Viva Frey had a fun tweet today.
So, you know, Aaron Rupar from Vox, he was pointing out that Fox News has ignored the Matt Gaetz story for 48 hours.
At the same time, CNN has ignored the latest Governor Cuomo findings for one full week.
Remember when I told you?
Don't start thinking that CNN is the only one who does fake news.
A better...
A better filter on the world is that whichever news organization doesn't have their person in the presidency, they tend to get a little bit off the leash.
So CNN didn't have a president when Trump was president.
They were extra bad.
They didn't cure themselves when Biden became president, but they were extra bad under Trump.
Everybody would agree with that, I think.
But now Fox, I think Fox is a little extra bad because they don't have their person in the presidency.
Just as you'd expect.
It went exactly the way you'd expect.
Somebody says, no, Gates was on Tucker, but was that more than 48 hours ago?
Do the timing. But to your point, I can't verify that either of these facts are true, that either CNN ignored Cuomo or that Fox ignored Gates for that amount of time.
But we're having that conversation.
And I think you can see that being news organizations is a thing of the past.
Let me skip to something else I was going to talk about.
The same topic. You often hear me quoting Rasmussen polls.
If you follow my live stream, I'm often telling you the Rasmussen results.
And if I tweet about anything from Rasmussen, do you know what happens?
You know, if I talk to my audience, you go, okay, Rasmussen poll.
Good information there, Scott.
But if I tweet it, and it goes to the general public, left and right, what happens when I tweet a Rasmussen poll?
The left, universally, will say, ha ha ha ha ha, a Rasmussen poll.
Ha ha ha! Erasmus and Paul.
Really? And it happens every time, right?
Like every time you mention Erasmus and Paul, some Democrat will say, ha ha ha ha.
But today there's a...
A survey that came out showing the polling accuracy on the presidential race in 2020.
Rasmussen is in the top, right?
Not at the top, but it's in the top cluster.
So Rasmussen, one of the best pollsters in 2020 for the presidential election.
Now ask yourself, what type of polling entities were at the bottom in terms of accuracy?
What news entities?
Just guess. Just top of your head.
Who do you think would be near the bottom?
Well, I'll give you a few examples.
Quinnipiac. Quinnipiac's right at the bottom.
I feel as though I've seen a lot of reporting on Quinnipiac.
Mostly from CNN. Right?
But also second from the bottom is the CNN slash SSRS poll.
So CNN second from the bottom.
So the people who are ha ha ha ha ha about the Rasmussen poll, their poll, their preferred CNN poll, right at the bottom.
Also at the bottom, ABC News slash Washington Post.
I like that they combine together to do a poll that nobody trusts.
And then also in the bottom is a Siena College, New York Times combo.
So, at least according to this one study, Rasmussen's doing great, and the fake news create their own polls to create their own fake news.
So the news business...
Is no longer happy just looking at what is happening in the world and then doing the fake version of what's happening in the world.
Your news industries literally have created entirely new entities to generate fake news in the form of polls that are inaccurate.
This is real.
Nothing I just said right there is an exaggeration.
New York Times, ABC, Washington Post, and CNN have all put money and resources into creating separate entities or funding them, right?
Separate entities whose apparent function is to create fake news in the form of bad polls.
That's real. That's frickin' real.
And we're watching it right in front of us.
All right. Um...
I continue to be fascinated by the Matt Gaetz story.
Almost as fascinated by what isn't happening than what is happening.
There's a weirdness to it that just permeates the whole story.
I'll just give you a few things.
Number one, I've never seen more smoke for less fire in any story since Russia collusion.
Have you ever seen more smoke that turned into not quite a fire?
Let me give you an example. Here are the things that Matt Gaetz is accused of.
Knowing a guy who did bad things.
So this other guy, Greenberg, there's apparently more credible evidence against this guy, but Gates is really accused of, so far, I'll get to other things, right?
But so far, one of the biggest criticisms against him is that he knows a guy who did bad things.
Now, if we punished all the people in government who had spent time with somebody who did bad things, like really bad things, really bad things, I'm talking about really, really bad things, Who would be left?
It's not a crime.
I don't recommend that anybody hangs out with bad people, but you really couldn't use that as any kind of a standard, and it's not a crime, but it's smoke.
So let's talk about the smoke.
There's also evidence, we don't know how credible, that there's a video camera showing that Matt Gates and this other guy, Greenberg, who had, he worked for the tax collector entity or something.
But anyway, there was a, apparently they were in an office, Greenberg's office, and there was a pile of, it looked like, I think it was fake IDs, they were in just a box or something, and allegedly Greenberg and Gates were looking through the fake IDs.
Now, let me ask you this.
If you were alone with your friend in front of a big box of fake ideas, wouldn't you look through them?
Is there anybody here?
If nobody else is around, right, and there's a big box of fake ideas, are you telling me you wouldn't take a handful and see if you could tell if they're fake and see what kind of people are doing it and stuff?
Just look at them. I couldn't keep my hands off them.
Is that a crime? Is it a crime to, like, rifle through some fake IDs?
Because there's no indication that they then operationalized it and stole them and used them.
There's some indication that the Greenberg guy did, but there's no accusation against Gates that I'm aware of, right?
We're just talking about what the public knows.
What the public doesn't know is a whole other story.
Now, for anybody who's new to my live streams, it is not my job to defend anybody.
And I'm not going to defend Matt Gaetz.
He needs to do that himself.
That's not my problem. I didn't create any problems.
I didn't make his problem.
I'm not going to solve his problem.
But I do like to talk about all the sides of a story.
So let's keep doing that.
The other thing that we know is that there's some suggestion that And I don't know how strong the evidence is.
So we only know that there's an allegation that he may have had sex with his 17-year-old.
Here's what we don't know.
Did he know she was 17?
That's not in evidence, right?
Don't you think that's sort of important?
Like, really close to the most important thing in the story is did Matt Gaetz know she was 17?
Now, part of the story is that he met her through this website.
If she was on the website, she almost certainly, you could fact check this, but she almost certainly had to lie about her age to be on the website.
They're not going to let an underage person be on that website.
So... Right.
So the point is, what is the legal jeopardy for someone who didn't know?
Unless they turned out to be 17.
So I just asked that question on Twitter just before I went live.
That's why I was a little bit late.
And I want to see if there's any lawyer who answers the question yet, so I'm just going to look at the responses they just came in.
All right. So I asked, can someone tell me the legal risk?
And I disguised my question because I thought it'd be funny.
Everybody will know what I'm really asking.
The way I asked it was this.
Can someone tell me the legal risk to a member of Congress if, hypothetically, she had sex with a 17-year-old boy who had credibly lied about his age?
I'm looking at your comment, Duane, and thank you for that.
Alright, so, and then I asked, does not knowing that somebody is 17, does that make a difference to the law?
Now, we all know that ignorance is no defense, but that's a different context.
Ignorance of whether or not something is illegal is never a defense.
But not even knowing that you're committing a crime, you know that something would be illegal, but you don't even know you're doing it.
Is that a crime? If you don't even know you're doing it?
And so I ask that question, because that's what he's accused of.
He's accused of, based on what we know now, Our current information is, if he had to guess, it's more likely he didn't know than he knew.
More likely, right?
It's not an evidence that he knew.
So let's see what people say.
So somebody here who looks like they know what they're saying says that a fake ID would be a defense.
Now that doesn't mean he checked an ID, but what if he just asked and she said she's over 17, looked over 17, and he had no indication to believe that she wasn't?
Alright, it doesn't look like enough people or lawyers to actually answer this question.
Alright, so if there's anybody on here who's a lawyer, somebody says it's still a statutory rape, but let's ask a real-world question.
If the subject involved turned out to be 13 or 14, then I'm with you.
That's got to be just probably rape, because you would just assume that anybody would have known.
But at 17, are you really going to find a jury or a judge who says, oh, you totally should have known that she was 17 and a half and not 18?
Is that even a thing?
Would anybody know?
I tried to search it on Google, of course, but all that comes up is Matt Gaetz stories, and it would have taken hours to find a real one.
The local age of consent matters.
That's true. Oh, hold on.
Here we go. Rachel Daly says, I'm a lawyer.
Strict liability. Statutory rape.
So you're saying that there's strict liable...
Now, I wonder if that has...
I'm guessing that that has to do with the fact that a minor is involved, so you don't cut any corners when a minor is involved.
But to Rachel, who answered that question, thank you, what is the real-world way that's handled, though?
I hear what you're saying, and I get that I think society is better off if we treat it like it's definitely a crime.
Even if you didn't know.
Right? Because sometimes you have to treat something like a crime, but then at the same time you kind of let it go.
There are those situations.
This might be one of them where you've got to say it's a crime, but when you're actually judging the person who was involved, you say, eh, you know, we understand.
All right. So those questions are out there.
But it's a weird situation because the things that Gates is accused of are all smoke.
So far, there's nothing he's accused of that's a specific thing that I would hold him responsible for.
Now, that's not to say they don't exist.
We'll probably find out a lot more.
So again, I'm not defending him.
I'm just pointing out it's all smoke.
There's actually no flame here yet that the public has seen.
We've only seen smoke.
Keep that in mind. Apparently this guy who was a Capitol Hill attacker for this latest car attack in which a Capitol Hill policeman was killed is apparently a fan of Louis Farrakhan.
So that, of course, matters in our highly racialized world.
So he has Noah Green. So he was a Farrakhan follower, for whatever that's worth.
Just put it in your database.
A lot of people have asked me since the pandemic started, Scott, why don't you tweet Alex Berenson stories, and why don't you interview him, and what do you think of Alex Berenson?
And you've probably watched me be somewhat avoiding that question a little bit.
But I have talked about the coronavirus skeptics in a general way.
So he would be one of the most prominent skeptics of the, let's say, scientific consensus.
Now, he's not a scientist.
He's an author, writer, journalist type.
But he's quite famous now for doubting a whole bunch of different elements and data involved in the pandemic.
Now, as I've said before, skeptics are national treasures.
You want all the skeptics you can get, right?
Skeptics are good.
And skeptics are good even if they turn out to be wrong.
Because if you don't have that tension where somebody's doubting things and somebody has to really, really, really prove it...
You don't have as good a system.
So you want the doubters.
The Alex Berenson's are positive forces in the world, even if it turned out they weren't right.
I just think that's a fair thing to say.
It's a good system to have conflict.
But it has been my feeling since the beginning that maybe his take on things was not the most productive thing.
And there's an article now by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic in which he goes through in some detail showing what Berenson's said versus what we think we know to be true or what the scientists say to be true.
I would advise you to read it.
I would say there are probably more skeptics who would agree with Berenson's take on things on this broadcast than just about anywhere else in the world, based on your comments.
I know a lot of you are very compatible with the skeptical way of thinking, which, by the way, I applaud.
So if you think I'm making fun of you, nope.
Nope. Being skeptical about all of this stuff was exactly the right place to be.
You might be wrong. You might be wrong, but it was a good place to be.
I think you could be quite reasonably...
A reasonable citizen could have been skeptical all the way through.
And still. Even still.
Anyway, but look at that. So I'd like you to see both...
You know, watch Berenson's arguments.
Watch what this one writer, Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, says about his claims, and then judge for yourself.
But my general caution is always be careful of the people who are branded as skeptics, because then they tend to overrun the skepticism a little bit, like a little too much.
So that's just built into the model, unfortunately.
All right, Gordon Chang, who you know as being a A vocal China critic.
He reported, this is just an anecdotal report, he says, a friend tells me, on Twitter he said this, a friend tells me that in Florida people have been returning to a chain store furniture and other goods after they opened the boxes and saw the products were made in China.
And then he said, I salute them.
So I ask you this, and I asked this on Twitter as well, have any of you returned an item because it was made in China?
Let's say in the last year, just in the last one year, has anybody returned an item to a store after they learned it was made in China?
Let's see in the comments. And I did a little poll, and I don't believe...
This is the sort of poll you shouldn't believe at all.
But my own poll on Twitter, 23% of the people said they have returned an item just because they found out it was made in China.
Now, my audience is not like the general public, so this would be higher than the general public, but it's still a big number, right?
23% of the people who answered have returned an item.
You know it doesn't have to be 100% before China is in big trouble, right?
What percent of Americans would have to stop buying Chinese products before China's got a real problem?
It's not 80%.
It's not 80%, it's probably 20%, right?
So it doesn't take that much to put China in a bad situation, but there's more.
Oh, China's also being bad.
Kyle Bass, another China critic, says that China has installed more coal-burning power plants in 2020 than continental Europe's entire installed capacity.
Let me say that again. Just in 2020, China put into production, brand new, more coal-burning power plants than the existing entirety of all of Europe's installed existing capacity.
Any questions? There's nothing else to say about that, right?
Everything about that is in that number.
That's all you need to know. And Kyle Bass asks where Greta Thunberg is on this, and that's a good question.
But wait, it gets more fun.
Today, it turns out, was a very bad day for China.
Very bad day. And it's because this was the day that somebody tweeted at me a website which compiles products made in the United States so that you can avoid products made in China.
We may have a solution, because you're not going to see it on Amazon, right?
Amazon.com can't really label its products made in China, because if they did, they'd have a problem with their manufacturers in China, and they just couldn't do it.
But a private entity can.
I don't even know who's behind this.
But there exists now, and the website is called ChinaNever.com.
So ChinaNever is one word,.com.
And then if you're looking for, let's say, some furniture...
You can start there and you can see all the brands that are not made in China.
And this is why it's a bad day for China.
Because I just learned this thing exists.
I might be pushing it a little bit.
For those of you who are new, I did lose my stepson to a fentanyl overdose in 2018.
I blame China.
And if I can destroy China's government, not the people, people are fine.
I'd like the Chinese people to thrive, but their government, I don't like their government any more than they do.
So expect China to have some trouble going forward.
That's what I say. Somebody says, mostly cheap furniture is now imported from Vietnam.
You know, I can't think of anything more than furniture that should be a U.S. industry.
Try to think of any industry that would be better for, let's say, the harder-to-employee segment of this country, the ones who are fine for doing physical labor if you teach them how to do it.
Learning how to make furniture, how to reupholster, upholster, and stuff like that, That feels like exactly the kind of industry we want to absorb the kind of workers who are just perfectly situated for that.
And what reason would we have not to be able to make it here?
I mean, we should be making furniture like crazy here.
Somebody says China is laundering their products through Vietnam, so it looks like made in Vietnam.
I'd need to know more about that, but I don't doubt there's some of that going on.
Somebody says it's too labor-intensive, and that's why you can't make furniture in this country.
Here's the thing. We can certainly compete if we use robots to make it, but if we wanted to employ people, I believe that people could make furniture way faster than they're making it now.
All right. And then you also have to take away the shipping costs.
It's pretty expensive to ship furniture.
Italy, too. Somebody says Italy.
A lot of furniture, I guess. All right.
Yeah, North Carolina. I think North Carolina is the major furniture state in the United States.
Yeah. $15 an hour?
Yeah, depends on the minimum wage, whether that's economical or not.
Alright, it's a weird weekend, and it's just getting weirder.
I would love to tell you how weird my life is right now, but you wouldn't even believe it.
You wouldn't even believe it.
But we'll get into that later.
Alright, I don't have much else to say today, because we've got sort of a slow news weekend.
Has everybody got some plans for the holidays?
Stay safe. Alright, we're just looking...
Well, yeah.
Just looking at your comments.
Somebody says, the odds of China going full capitalist...
You know what's interesting? China...
Apparently, China has the opinion that democracies can't last because we'll be fighting with each other, whereas the dictatorships, or whatever they would call their own form of government, will be the ones that prevail because you need a strong leader as opposed to everybody fighting about everything from racism to you-know-what.
And on the surface...
On the surface, it does feel like he's got a point.
I've often said that the best form of government would be a benign dictatorship.
Somebody who has the power of a dictator, but they're empathetic and they're not using it to hurt anybody.
They're just making the best decisions they can.
Now, China doesn't fit into that because their dictatorship is building prison camps and social credit systems and everything wrong.
But it might make them powerful.
There's no question that they're growing quickly and their power is ascending.
But what would it take for our country to compete?
What would it take?
Well, I think it's happening.
It's not happening fast enough.
But part of what is happening is that citizens are taking control where the government can't.
I gave you an example yesterday of a citizen, Michael Mina, Who had this idea about rapid testing being better than, you know, the expensive slow testing.
And he pushed it in the social media.
I helped boost it.
Next thing you know, he's talking to Congress.
He's writing articles.
And then the FDA is approving it.
Now, did that make a difference?
Would the FDA have acted exactly the same if a Michael Mina did not exist and was not doing such an amazing job of pushing that one item?
I don't know. But I got a feeling that he made a difference.
Probably a big one.
It's hard to know. But that's the model that I think allows the United States to win.
Let me give you another example.
When the pandemic happened, you know this example, The pandemic happened.
A number of people, including me, were approached by some member of the government, you know, not the president, but just somebody in the government was reaching out and saying, literally, do you have any ideas?
Do you have any ideas of what we should do now?
Because there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done, but we're looking for ideas because, you know, it's not the government's job to think up the ideas.
They're more in the implementing.
And so I had an idea, and I submitted it through my government contact.
And I got to watch it in real time.
It actually got to the chief of staff of the president, I think in hours, just a few hours later, I think.
Or maybe less.
It might have been within an hour, if I remember.
I think it might have been within an hour.
I already had feedback that my one suggestion...
Which was that doctors be allowed to practice telemedicine across state boundaries, that they be allowed to do it.
Just do an executive order.
Just make it legal, because it's a pandemic.
You probably couldn't get away with it in ordinary times.
And the next thing you know, the President of the United States is issuing an executive order, and the entire online healthcare industry transformed.
Now anybody can be a doctor across state lines.
Online. And that was just like one example.
That was just like one example of citizens who became like an active arm of the government, if you know what I mean.
So that was a case where I'm not elected official, but I could do a thing.
Michael Mina is not an elected official, but he could do a thing.
Gordon Chang, Kyle Bass, they are not elected officials.
But if you watch them pushing the ball on China, they're really doing a good job.
They're really doing a good job.
And, of course, I help boost their signal whenever I can.
So who is pushing on China?
Is it the government? Well, the government's doing its thing.
Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, to name a few, are quite outspoken against China.
But they can't do it without us.
Even in the government, they need some strong voices, your Gordon Changs and your Kyle Basses and such, to lend some weight to any of that.
So I think we're at a point where there are individuals in the public eye who are almost like unelected, unpaid...
What would you call them?
Accessories? Now that sounds like accessory to a crime.
Boosters? Participants?
It's almost like you need another name for it.
Because the citizens are taking on government functions, usually just persuasion.
But let's take the case of this China Never website.
I assume that's a non-government entity, just citizens who said, if this website exists, it's good for the country.
So the number of times that you see this, and it's only possible because of the internet, right?
If you take the internet away, there's no Gordon Chang, there's no Kyle Bass, there's no me, there's no Michael Mina, right?
So you leave the internet and social platforms, but in effect, it weaponizes the public so that the...
Usually the stronger voices, I like to think.
The stronger voices rise up.
The government can't ignore them.
They become, you know, part of the solution.
And I would argue that if China is looking at our government in isolation, it's a hot mess.
So if you just said, how is the government of the United States?
You'd be looking at Congress, right, and the president?
And you'd look at Congress and you'd say, well, that's a mess.
There's no way this piece of shit Congress is going to compete with China Watch us make a decision.
Boop! There.
Watch us make another one.
How about that?
While our Congress is still arguing about who's the biggest racist, what they don't see is that our government is not isolated to the people in that building.
Our government is you.
That's different. So China has a system in which the government is maybe the elites and the people in the party, but our government is anybody who's got a better idea.
It's true. What did Michael Amina have?
A better idea.
So simply having a better idea made him our government for all practical purposes.
He had as much influence on this decision, the thing he knew about the most, He had as much influence probably as anybody in the government.
And it's only because he had the ability.
So the weird thing about our system is that we do let people who have unusual ability do their thing.
Now I would say that Greta Thunberg, like her or hate her, she's a perfect example of this.
Greta is an unelected official.
Not American, obviously, but in her own country, democracy, a democratic system, and she was allowed to rise up because she had the capability to do this thing.
So I think that's what China gets wrong.
China might be right that our elected officials are kind of pathetic sometimes, collectively, not as individuals, but when you put them together, they become pathetic.
But they underestimate...
Elon Musk. Am I right?
If you're looking at the government of the United States and you don't include Elon Musk, you're missing the story.
Because Elon Musk, here I'm sort of going too far and reading his mind, right?
So I shouldn't do that. But just for the purpose of rounding out my point, if NASA, if a government-funded NASA couldn't get us to Mars, And couldn't get us to the point where we can dominate space, we're in big trouble if China does.
So you've got an Elon Musk who just, you know, I'm oversimplifying a complicated thing, but you have an Elon Musk who just says, I can get you to space.
Why don't I do it?
The government can't get you there, or can't get you there right, or can't get you there economically or something.
So I guess I'm the government now.
So if you would say that Elon Musk is not part of the governing structure of the United States, you're wrong.
He is. He's just not elected.
And he's leading based on competence.
We do have a country where if you exhibit extreme competence, the country will get out of your way.
They'll just get out of your way.
Because we do like competence.
Like, as a country, we...
We almost worship capability, like individuals who can do stuff.
Now, this is my big complaint with many of you.
My big complaint with many of you is that you don't appreciate Bill Gates as much as I do.
Now, is Bill Gates right about everything?
No. Is anybody?
No. But if you had to have a contest of pick anybody else in the world, politicians, scientists, anybody you want, and just put them in the same room with Bill Gates and figure out which one of them is right more often, I'm going to vote for Bill Gates every time.
Right? He's right about a lot.
And he has tremendous capability.
So he takes his Gates Foundation, he's aiming at the world more than the country, But doing plenty for the country.
So the people who say Bill Gates is an awful person, you really have to check that assumption.
I know that I can be wrong about stuff.
You've seen it, right?
You've all seen me be wrong about stuff.
So I'm not right about everything.
But I am so positive and so confident of the following opinion that I would be amazed if I'm wrong about this.
And it goes like this. Bill Gates has the right intentions, the right skill set, and he's working for you.
He's working for you. He doesn't need much for himself.
He's kind of working for you with the greatest capability and brain and good intentions maybe we've ever seen in our lifetime.
That's my opinion, right?
So all the rumors about putting chips in your vaccinations and wanting to blot out the sun and all that, those are all in a context.
Pretty much everything you think badly about Bill Gates is just out of context.
If you knew the whole story, you wouldn't be bothered by it at all.
That's my opinion. Anyway, so, as long as we've got your Musks, your Gates, your Kyle Basses, your Gordon Changs, your Michael Minas, and I like to do what I can in that same realm, as long as you've got these people as part of your not-quite-government, but sort of, China, you better be worried.
You better be worried, because that's a pretty good package.
All right. Why is Bill Gates buying up land?
I can think of lots of reasons.
One of the reasons that a Bill Gates would be buying up land is that he's buying up everything.
When you have a When you reach a certain amount of wealth, you just have to start shooting it in every direction to get diversification and stuff.
So it could be that if you have so much money, you just run out of things to buy.
And so you think, well, land always works.
I'll buy a bunch of farmland.
How could that go wrong? Now, it could also be that he's buying it to protect it.
Could be that he's buying it to make it available to low-income people someday when he dies.
Who knows? We don't know why he's doing it, but I would definitely not worry about it.
So one thing I wouldn't do is worry about it.
It's the last thing I'd worry about.
In fact, the more farmland that Bill Gates owns, the safer you are.
Because China doesn't own it, and somebody bad doesn't own it.
So if you could give all of the farmland to Bill Gates, you'd be safer.
I'm not suggesting that.
I'm just saying to make the point.
That's how much I trust Bill Gates.
Now, I could be wrong.
And by the way, he would be very near the top of my list of somebody I would interview To help him get his version out.
One of the things I also appreciate about Bill Gates is that he never defends himself.
Think about that. The same thing I liked about Richard Gere when that Was it a gerbil rumor came out?
He never defended it.
And I'm going to take that model.
So in the future, should you see me get accused of some heinous thing, I'm telling you now, I probably won't defend it if it's funny.
So if I get accused of something that's funny, like a gerbil or something, I'm not going to defend it because it's just funnier to keep it out there.
In fact, there's something like that happening right now.
Some of you already know it, and you've watched me not defend it, and it's only because it's funny.
All right. Somebody says, all right, this is a good point.
So Tyrone says, and this is a reasonable thing to ask, he says, yeah, anybody else think it's a good idea to have one guy who owns all the farmland?
If he fails, we all starve.
Great idea, Scott. That's not how the world works.
If one guy owned all the farmland and he wasn't using it productively, we'd just take it away from him.
Don't worry about it. If the government looked around and said, hey, wait a minute, one guy bought all the farmland and he stopped growing food?
It would take ten minutes and they'd say, well, you'd better grow some food or we're going to take it away from you.
You don't really have to worry about that.
That's the sort of thing that, first of all, it wouldn't happen.
That he would buy all the farmland and stop producing food.
That's not going to happen. But even if it did, we would just fix it in five minutes.
We'd just say, well, we can't have that.
We'd just fix it. Bill Gates doesn't have more power than the government.
