Episode 1354 Scott Adams: Is This a Golden Age? Yes it is, But in Disguise. Let's Simultaneously Sip to That
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Content:
Fake News concealing Golden Age
America unified on Chauvin verdict
LeBron James is another fake news victim
The Strategic Advantage path to success
Jake Tapper promotes a Rupared video
Rupared video of Bill Gates
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Unbelievable. I'm coming to you unshaved, unshowered, and dressed poorly.
It's just the way you like me.
Yeah, you do. It's true.
The more comfortable you are, the happier you are.
And suppose, just hypothetically, you wanted to enjoy this experience, which is...
The Doorway to the Golden Age, which I'll be developing as a thesis in a moment.
But to get ready, to be absolutely ready, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a gel, a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's the beginning of the Golden Age.
And... It happens now.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Ready? Go.
Oh, yeah.
So here is the thesis I'm about to develop.
That we have entered the golden age.
Or a golden age.
Maybe we don't have just one.
But that the amazingness of our time is completely concealed by what?
What? What?
You know, fake news.
That's right, fake news. If we did not have a fake news industry assigning people opinions, we'd be in really good shape right now.
And I'm going to walk through the headlines, and I'm going to give you a sense of how misleading things are right now.
Things are way better than ever, I think.
I would bet that this moment is the best moment in human history.
I think so. Let's look at the headlines and find out what kind of horrible problems the news is reporting.
That was weird. One of the big headlines that's trending is that apparently Elon Musk used somebody's meme without permission.
Yeah, that's one of the big stories today.
Just try to hold that in your head.
One of the biggest stories trending on Twitter right now is that Elon Musk used somebody's meme without giving them credit.
That's real.
That's one of our big problems today.
Other news?
Three different agencies put together.
They're launching some astronauts into the International Space Station.
Other news? A device just created oxygen on Mars.
A little bit, but it's a start.
We just flew. We, the civilization, let's say, just put a helicopter on Mars.
That just happened.
All right. So there's some of the good news.
Now, you're worried about Biden's climate plan destroying the economy and taking away your hamburgers.
And you're worried about his tax plan robbing your wallet.
But I don't know if either of those things are going to happen.
And if some version of them does happen, people are really good at adjusting.
You know, I remember when taxes were higher under, was it Clinton?
The economy was great, right?
Now, I don't like higher taxes.
I'm not a fan. But it is true that we're not terribly good at predicting what happens when taxes go up and down.
We're just not good at it.
Warren Buffett famously said that he's never made an investment decision because of the tax rates.
Think about that.
The most successful investor buys and sells companies.
He's never made a decision based on the tax rate.
It's either a good deal or it's not.
And even the taxes doesn't seem to change things.
Because he's looking for really good deals so that taxes won't make a difference.
So you might not see a gigantic difference.
Right now the stock market's looking pretty strong.
Looking pretty good.
Actually, Warren Buffett does sell.
Somebody says he doesn't sell.
He holds for the long term, but he does sell companies.
That's a real thing. He does fairly frequently, actually.
He reduces his stake and stuff.
So I'm going to count on the Republicans in Congress to do what they need to do to stop or modify Biden's climate and tax plans.
And if something happens in that realm, we're not going to die.
We're not. We're just not gonna die if any of those things happen.
We'll adjust. We always do.
Here's a little news from alternate juror on the Floyd case.
I didn't realize this, but apparently the alternate jurors don't know their alternates until you get, I guess, really close to deliberation.
Did you know that? I don't know why I didn't know that, but it makes sense.
Because if you think you're an alternate the whole time, then you feel like you're wasting your time, then maybe you don't pay attention so much.
So it's actually kind of smart that they don't tell you who are the alternates until they're ready to deliberate.
So one of the alternates who was released before deliberation said the following, and it needs to be read in its exact quote so you can understand it.
And this woman said, I had mixed feelings.
Oh, the question was, did you want to be a juror?
And this released alternate said, I had mixed feelings.
There was a question on the questionnaire about it, and I put, I did not know.
The reason at the time was that I did not know what the outcome was going to be.
So, I felt like either way, you were going to disappoint one group or the other.
I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again.
And I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.
Sounds like we don't really have a verdict here, does it?
In the sense that, is there any chance this won't be reversed on appeal?
I think Dershowitz says this is sort of a fairly obvious one that will be reversed.
I don't know if you can predict those things that well.
But to me it looks obvious, and I'm not a lawyer, so what's that mean?
It means nothing if it's obvious to me.
But do you believe this is the one juror and how lucky we are that she was released and she was only an alternate?
Do you believe for a second that the rest of the jurors were completely free of this thinking?
Because if they were thinking what would happen to them based on the decision, that is not a fair trial.
But here's the weirdest thing about this whole George Floyd thing.
As most of you have noted, it should have been the most, and I think it will be actually in the long run, should have been the most healing and unifying thing that ever happened in this country.
Tragedy, of course.
We have no disrespect to the Floyd family, but it's because it's tragedy.
But sometimes tragedies can have a perverse, you know, good impact if it causes you to fix something later.
And I think this was a perfect example.
This was one example where white people and black people looked at the video and largely had the same opinion.
Largely. You know, there's always somebody.
25% of the public will disagree with everything.
But largely... White people, black people, people of color of all sorts looked at the video and said, that ain't right.
Whatever that is, that's not right.
But because the fake news forces us to take sides, it looked like it was more disagreement than it really was.
But Rasmussen has some polling numbers about how people feel about the verdict, and here you go.
Democrats, if you add together the agree and somewhat agree, You could argue whether it's fair to do that, but I'm going to do it in this case.
So I'm adding together the people who are leaning toward agreeing and agreeing.
And Democrats, 87% of them said they agree with the verdict.
87%. Pretty good.
Now, what typically happens when most of the Democrats are on one side of anything?
Typically, Republicans are going to be on the other side.
But not this time. 58% of Republicans also agreed or somewhat agreed with it.
And that's a pretty strong majority.
It's not 87%, but it is two sides that are both strongly on the same side.
When was the last time?
Right? Really, when was the last time That both Republicans and Democrats were strongly on the same side.
Now, imagine if you had scrubbed out the effect of the fake news.
It's probably just about the same.
If you took the fake news effect out, where it sort of drives people to a team instead of looking at the facts, this is probably pretty close.
Pretty close to something everybody agrees on.
Somebody in the comments is saying 9-11 was the last time.
I don't know if that's true, but it might be.
Let's look at some more.
The question Rasmussen asked also is, will the Floyd verdict make race relations better?
21% of everybody, this is likely voters, not everybody in the world, but likely American voters, 21% said it would make race relations better.
31% thought it would make things worse.
That feels like also a difference in what news you're consuming.
That doesn't feel like a real opinion, does it?
It feels like an assigned opinion a little bit, but there's not much difference.
They're both way less than half.
They're both down in that quarter, third range.
And here's another one.
How much did politics influence the outcome of the Chauvin-Floyd trial?
So I added together the people who said politics influenced it a lot and the people who said it influenced it somewhat.
So these are people sort of leading in a direction or in that direction.
GOP said that 71% of...
Republicans. Or, yeah, conservatives.
I don't know. It's about the same.
I'm speaking in messy terms, GOP, conservatives, etc.
But that world, 71% of them said politics influenced the outcome.
And Democrats also said 48% of them said that.
So a little less than half of Democrats, but 71% of the Democrats, Conservatives and Republicans said that politics was in it.
So I would say, in this case, both sides are strongly...
48% is a lot of people, so even the Democrats are kind of strongly accepting that politics was a big part of it.
Now, the people who said that politics was not part of the decision, did they mean it?
This is the kind of question...
Where people kind of answer the way they want the poll to turn out.
I don't know if it's exactly what they're feeling, or if they want the public to think that politics did not influence the outcome.
Because I can't really believe you could get more than one in four people, because the one in four will say anything.
But I can't believe that three out of four people would disagree on the question of whether politics had an influence.
I feel like anybody who acted like it wasn't the case was probably acting.
That's just speculation.
Alright, so my point is that the country is fairly unified.
The George Floyd thing did something to white minds that was invaluable, I would say, for the benefit of the country.
Certainly invaluable if you were a black...
American, and you've been trying to make this point.
And the point is, do you understand what it feels like, what the life is like, what daily life is like, what kind of fear there is, and how real this is?
Do you understand it, white America?
And the answer before George Floyd was, not really.
Not really. I mean, we can hear it.
We can hear you talking about it, but, you know, that's not really persuasive.
You can look at some data, and data isn't really persuasive.
But when you see it on the video, and you see it over and over again, even though, and I know you're going to say this in the comments, even though the video might have been a little misleading, might have been a lot misleading, but it exists.
So I'm not going to talk about the factual element of it.
I'm going to talk about how it makes you feel.
And I think that this was the best...
If George Floyd and his family, let's say his family, wants to feel that his death had meaning, it really did, in a positive way.
You know, you hate to celebrate...
Somebody who might have had a criminal past and was on drugs, etc.
I'm not condemning him for that stuff either.
I'm just saying normally you don't want to celebrate somebody who's got a checkered past.
But the truth is that his life, for whatever reason, became the most accurate communication of how one group Americans were feeling and the other group couldn't feel it.
Couldn't see it. And then that gap was closed by this process.
Is that good for the country?
I'd say yes. Because anything that increases understanding at such a fundamental level and on something that's so important to the psychology and the experience of life, it's a really big deal.
And I would say that it supports the Golden Age hypothesis.
That the news won't let us believe this, but this was, in fact, probably the most unifying experience this country has ever had.
Doesn't feel like it, does it?
Because the news just wants it to be a constant fight.
But this was the most unifying thing I've ever experienced.
You could say landing on the moon in 1969 was unifying, but not in a political sense.
Let's talk about LeBron James.
You know, a lot of conservatives are beating up on LeBron, especially since he made...
I think he would admit it's a mistake.
He tweeted when the young lady was shot recently by police when she was in the act of trying to stab another young woman...
And LeBron was incensed by that and tweeted that that police officer who did the shooting was next, as if he's going to be targeted.
But when people looked at the video, they said, uh, that looks like he just did a good job and saved somebody's life.
That doesn't look exactly like anything like the Floyd thing.
It looked like good police work, not bad police work.
So LeBron deleted his tweet.
I think you probably realized there was a little bit too much of a claim on that one.
But here's my take on LeBron.
When you're a sports superstar, you're kind of pushed to be a leader.
And that's not necessarily what you signed up for.
I mean, you know it comes with a job, but I don't know that he equipped himself or has the right talent stack, shall we say, for political conversation.
Now, does he have the right talent stack for basketball?
Oh yeah! I mean, ridiculous.
He has every talent you could ever have.
You know, psychologically, mentally, mental strength, you know, physicality, training, dedication.
I mean, he has the whole frickin' package.
But what do we know about what he has learned or what education he's had in communicating, leading, understanding the world?
It feels like it's a little short, doesn't it?
Now, not being unkind...
This should not be seen as a criticism.
Because I have great appreciation for LeBron.
Not only that he's...
I think he's genuine.
Meaning I don't think he's trying to fool anybody.
Right? He's completely transparent.
There's no clever trick or anything to it.
He's telling you exactly what he feels.
You can disagree with it.
You can think he's maybe...
Not quite as sophisticated in his opinion as it could or should be, but I don't think you should doubt his intentions.
Have you ever seen anything from him that would suggest his intentions are bad?
And I feel like that has to matter, right?
I just don't think you can judge people who may do things differently than you would do them if they have the same intention you have.
Which is to make things better, right?
Now, okay, I'm seeing people criticizing LeBron for being dumb, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But let me ask you this.
Is he so much different, and I'm going to make an argument here, that he has the same problem that Trump had?
And I use that analogy knowingly, provocatively.
What was the biggest problem that Trump had as president?
It was the fake news, wasn't it?
If the fake news didn't exist, what would Trump's term have looked like?
Completely differently. You know, you would interpret everything he did in a different light if fake news didn't exist.
But, fake news does exist.
And it's affecting all of us.
It's not just affecting, you know, ex-presidents.
LeBron is a victim.
He's a victim. I mean, it seems weird because he's, you know, a zillionaire, famous athlete, top of his game.
But on this specific thing, I believe that the fake news created in him a set of feelings and emotions and beliefs that made it easy for him to misinterpret this next event, the shooting of the young woman.
I think his filter was just off a little bit.
And he knows it.
I mean, he knows it now. But his filter was a little off.
But was that his fault? Was it?
Is that LeBron's fault that the entire news industry is feeding fake news and he believed or sort of bought into the emotional package?
Is that really his fault?
I don't know.
I don't know. I feel as though we should give him a break in this.
He's got skin in the game.
He's trying to help.
He pulled back his tweet when people complained.
He's being responsive. He's fully transparent.
I say give LeBron a break.
I feel he's one of the good ones, even if you would have played it differently.
Now, I see some complaints about him supporting China, blah, blah, blah.
That's a different story.
And I feel like you can treat them separately.
We'll talk about that someday, but that's a tough one.
All right, but it's a different story.
Let me ask you this.
If we're trying to figure out if this is the golden age, and by the way, keep in mind that my larger theme for today is that we're in the golden age, but we just can't see it clearly because of the fake news.
This LeBron story is all positive, but somehow it turned negative because of the way we like to argue about stuff.
Having a famous sports star who is very concerned about an issue of great concern is not a problem.
The fact that he didn't play it the way you would have played it, maybe he made a mistake in public, looks like he's doing what he can to correct it, that's not bad.
This is the sort of conflict you want.
You don't want no conflict.
You want productive conflict, and this is it.
All right. Can both of these statements be true?
Here is me screwing people's psychology up in a productive way.
I'm trying to shake up people's thinking.
And I asked this question on Twitter.
And, man, you should look at the comments.
Talk about...
Yeah, somebody says that LeBron should apologize to the officer, or he should wait until there's an official ruling, right?
Yeah, I think an apology would be called for, but that's a small problem at this point.
All right, so can both of these statements be true?
Number one, systemic and direct racism are serious problems in America.
Now, I'm not saying that you believe that necessarily.
Some of you don't. I happen to believe it's true as I define it, right?
Everybody defines these things a little differently.
But as I would define these terms, definitely true.
That there's systemic and direct racism and it's a serious problem in America.
Number two, can this also be true at the same time?
That being black in America in 2021, which is important to the point, Is an economic advantage if, and if is important here, if you approach it strategically.
Can both of those statements be true?
That there is lots of racism and a serious problem, but being black in America is an economic advantage if you approach it strategically.
Now what that means, I'll just give you one example.
A strategic way to approach it would be To try to become...
Let's say you had a background in communication and political theory or something.
What would be the most strategic thing you could do if you were black in America in 2021 and you wanted to find your advantage?
Become a Republican.
Right? Right? Have you noticed?
It's hard to notice that 100% of black Republicans are doing well.
Has anybody noticed that?
I mean, obviously I'm lying when I say 100% because nothing's 100%.
But whenever I see anybody who has a Republican point of view and is also black, how well are they accepted by Republicans?
100%. Tim Scott is, you know, going to give some big speech if he ran for president.
Could Tim Scott, a black Republican, could he become elected president in this party of all these racist Republicans?
Of course he could.
Totally. He just has to have the philosophy.
Republicans don't give a rat's ass about anything, but are you following the same set of rules?
Do you like our Constitution?
Are you going to take it seriously? We're done.
A little religion on top?
Bonus. Bonus.
Didn't need it. Wasn't necessary.
I don't bring you any religious beliefs, and you accept me.
Most of you are conservative or Republicans, if I know my audience.
So it's really easy.
To be, you know, not 100% compatible with Republican thought, but if you buy into the Constitution part and the, you know, self-determination and some of the just basics of, you know, taking responsibility, Republicans love you.
There's no problem at all.
And it's just the fake news that would make you think this would ever be a problem.
Now, let's say that you're black in America, but you don't want to become a Republican.
You know, there's some issues there.
What would be another strategic thing you could do?
Get your education as best you can.
Our school system is terrible.
But as best you can.
And then find out that corporate America prefers you.
Every time. Because corporate America is under-diversified.
They know they have to fix it.
A qualified black candidate walks in the door and gets a job every time.
It's first in line for promotion.
Now, that doesn't change the fact that Then maybe there are infinite small businesses that would discriminate.
I'll just pick one random example.
If a black man walks into a Korean grocery store in an urban area, can the black guy get a job in the Korean grocery store?
Sometimes yes. But there might be a little extra racism involved in the hiring.
So nobody would doubt that.
But then just use your strategy and go where it's the opposite, where you would be picked first.
Strategic advantage.
So I put this out here because it's the fake news that wants to hide this important point, which I believe is a good indicator of the golden age.
Somebody says, that's why you didn't get promoted, Scott.
Yeah, if you're white in America...
And you're in a corporation, you do have a disadvantage.
That's just a fact.
It's a disadvantage.
But if you were anywhere outside of the corporate world, maybe it's an advantage.
Because maybe racism works in your favor somehow.
It's not obvious how, but I can imagine there's an argument there.
So there's that.
All right. What would happen, I'll just put out this idea, what would happen if the people who don't believe in hoaxes, in both the left and the right, got together?
Now it's not going to happen, because the fake news will keep us apart.
Both parties are trying to paint the moderates in the party as belonging to the extremists who are crazy and believe in hoaxes.
So there are some crazy hoaxes on the right, there are some crazy hoaxes on the left, and both sides would like you to believe that their opponent is all the believers of hoaxes, when in fact it's probably just some.
What would happen if the people who don't believe in any hoaxes, left or right, decided to get together?
Could they move the needle?
Now, I don't know if it'll ever happen, but we are seeing, I'm seeing this in the comments too, we're seeing that the fake news business is losing a lot of its power.
Because people like me, people like Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, anybody who would be more independent, It is becoming a growing force.
And as those independent voices get bigger, the power of the fake news will just...
It will start to look increasingly ridiculous.
I mean, it looks pretty ridiculous now.
Yeah, Bill Maher, a free thinker.
So I think the free thinkers are maybe starting to organize.
You know, I have to tell you, there's this thing going on under the hood...
The thing that you don't see, in which the independent thinkers are self-organizing, meaning that people like me are being introduced to other people like me, and there's this sort of network forming, an informal network of people who just know other people who are not hoax believers.
And it's a thing.
Now, how powerful that becomes?
I don't know. But I can tell you that if I see another independent voice, whether it's Matt Taibbi, whoever it is, that I will amplify it.
If it's a good point and it's an independent voice, I'll amplify it.
Likewise, a lot of those people will amplify me.
And so you're seeing a growth of the reasonable middle, That you don't notice yet.
Because what you can't see is how networked we are.
And as that networking increases, it's all under the hood.
You can't see any of it. Because it's just one-to-one.
You know, some person introducing somebody, etc.
Somebody follows somebody on Twitter.
You don't see it forming.
But there is a big, reasonable...
Non-hoax-believing center.
I don't want to say intellectual.
That's too smarmy sounding.
But there's something forming, and it's a good thing.
All right. Banzai Sharma, in his tweet, his Twitter name is Banzai Sharma, talks about a new Pew research in which the Banzai says this.
This survey tells you a lot about how Democrats think.
Now, I would add to that because of the opinions that have been assigned to them by the media.
And Banzai goes on and says they are terribly concerned about gun violence.
So the survey shows that gun violence is at the top of concerns for Democrats.
So they're very concerned about gun violence, but They're not much concerned about violent crime.
So the Democrats came out in the poll, right at the top, gun violence, yet the issue of violent crime, very low, and a bunch of stuff in between that they care about more.
Now, is this not an obvious case where you can see that these opinions are manufactured by the fake news?
Because the fake news has told them to care about guns, but it didn't tell them to care about violent crime.
If it had, those two things would be at the top.
But because of the way the coverage works, these two things, which really should have moved exactly together, they got separated.
One's at the top and one's at the bottom.
It's actually laughably absurd to imagine that Democrats are forming their own opinions on these topics.
It's obvious they're not.
The press coverage completely made two things which are the same, the top and the bottom of a survey.
And you can see it as clearly as day.
So I feel as if the people on the left can't ignore forever that this is happening.
And, you know, the people on the right, it's happening too.
But, you know, since I don't have an example to show you today...
Actually, I will show you an example later.
Believe it or not, I do have one.
So Jake Tapper tweeted today that it was a year ago, and then he showed the video that is RUPARD. RUPARD meaning that is edited to reverse or change its meaning.
And the RUPARD video seemed to show President Trump suggesting drinking or ingesting disinfectants for COVID. That, of course, never happened.
What happened was that Trump knew about a new experimental technology involving UVC light, in which it would be injected into your trachea by a ventilator-like device.
And there was talk about maybe you could extend it into the lungs, but that wasn't what was being worked on at the moment.
So Trump actually knew more than Dr.
Birx about this new experimental thing.
That's just a fact. Because he talked about it very specifically.
You know, could he use a type of light, inject it into the body?
It was in the news that month.
I tweeted it.
I know it was in the news because I discussed it on Periscope, and I tweeted it a few times.
So it was a real thing.
Trump knew about it.
Dr. Birx did not.
And so the news tweeted it as though Birx, who did not know about it, was the smart one.
And the Trump, who actually knew about it, was the dumb one.
They totally Ruppart it.
They reversed the meaning.
And the way that they did that is they edit out the beginning of what Trump said, where he clarifies he's talking about light, says it directly, and then he makes a bunch of comments, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then at the end, he bookends it by making sure you knew he was talking about light.
If you take off the end and the beginning, where he clarified he was talking about light, all you have is the middle in which he uses the word disinfectant.
And then that became the fake news.
All right. If you didn't know that.
So, here's what gets interesting.
So I, of course, tweeted this to correct it, and I included the article showing that researchers at Cedars-Sinai...
We're actually testing it.
It has a name. It's called Healite Platform.
They were inserting it into the trachea, exactly as I said.
But here's the just mind-boggling, amazing thing.
When I went to look for a link to include in this story, because it was a Twitter exchange, I found the USA Today fact-check on it.
And I'm still shaking my head, because it's like...
This is amazing.
All right, here's how USA Today, no friend of the president, President Trump, I mean, here's how they handled this.
Do you think that they said, oh, President Trump was completely right, there is a technology that exists?
Do you think they did that?
Let me tell you how they handled the fact check.
And if this doesn't make your head explode, I don't know what will.
Alright, you ready for this?
This is mind-boggling.
Alright, so here's the claim.
So USA Today sets it up this way.
The claim that researchers are exploring a medical device that would use UV-A as a potential tool for treatment in COVID-19 patients is true, according to statements from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
So they start by saying that it's true...
That this technology exists, the one that President Trump was referring to.
But the presentation of that news includes a false headline because it's premature to say at this point that the technology is, quote, to be used as a treatment.
So apparently there was a Hollywood LA News headline that That said that it was to be used as a treatment, but it was only being tested.
So they fact-checked it as false because some headlines, which had nothing to do with what Trump said, just somebody wrote a headline somewhere, so the headline had the wrong use of words for a true story, which President Trump was right about In the context of his own advisors and the entire news industry being completely wrong about.
Here's how that fact check should have run.
The president made a claim about some technology, or asked some questions about it.
It exists.
Here it is.
Interestingly, his advisors, the experts, were unaware of this thing that Trump knew about accurately.
That's what the fact check should have said.
But they found some way to turn it false.
And the way they did was launder it through an obscure publication called the Hollywood LA News, never heard of it, to say that their headline was slightly wrong, and therefore the fact checking says it was a false claim.
What? It was the most true claim ever, and they found some weird way to make some element of it that had nothing to do with Trump untrue.
When you see how much torture they have to do to themselves to make Trump look bad, I tell you, history will not be kind to the fake news.
Alright, here's another one.
This is another Rupar.
So there's a video in which Bill Gates is talking about the economic profit from vaccinations.
Whoa, that's trouble, right?
Because Bill Gates is pro-vaccinations, and he's talking about the 20-to-1 economic profit.
This is bad, right?
Because this indicates that he's in it for the money.
And so then safety is not important.
That's what it says, right?
So that's what somebody said to me.
It said, well, Scott, you keep defending Bill Gates, in effect.
But here he is, in his own words, saying he's in it for the money.
No. No, he didn't.
This is a Rupar.
The video in which he's talking about the 20-to-1 economic benefit is for society, not for Bill Gates.
He's saying that there's a 20-to-1 economic advantage for any country or society that vaccinates.
It's obvious that's the context.
You don't even have to go research it.
Anybody should know that's the obvious...
Well, not anybody. Here's where it helps to have a background in economics.
He couldn't have been talking about himself.
It's just ridiculous to imagine that that was the context.
So I don't even have to research it to know the context was society.
And I tweeted it if you want to look for yourself.
So here's somebody who got totally Rupard.
They saw a video and a context and believed Bill Gates was saying in his own words he was in this vaccine thing for the money.
Let me say something as clearly as I can.
If you think Bill Gates is in any of this, anything, anything he's doing right now, if you think any of it is for his own personal profit, you're really misled.
I mean, you're seriously, you're on the wrong planet.
Because he doesn't need money.
That's the one thing he doesn't need.
He's trying to give it away.
He's giving away 90% of his wealth.
And he's talking other rich people into doing the same thing.
Nothing could be more opposite than Bill Gates is in it for the money.
There is no more false claim that has ever been made in the history of the world than Bill Gates is in it for the money in 2021.
Obviously, when he made his money, he was in it for the money.
Here we see Craig.
Hell no, he's a eugenicist.
There is no evidence of that.
And if you think that he's a eugenicist, in light of zero evidence of that, and lots of evidence that he's sort of left leading and wants everybody to do great, it's amazing that you could have that opinion.
Just amazing. And I would say that you're not in the group of reasonable people who don't believe hoaxes.
If you believe QAnon is true, if you believe...
That Bill Gates is in it for the money, and he's a eugenicist.
And I'm seeing people yelling in all caps, open your eyes!
Look at my track record of calling out hoaxes, and then look at your own.
Compare. If I'm wrong about this, and this one's easy, this one's not hard.
Bill Gates is not in it because he's a eugenicist.
He might like birth control.
That's pretty far from being a eugenicist, right?
A lot of people think birth control is a good thing, and they don't believe they're eugenicists.
Somebody says abortion is eugenics.
Well, you can disagree all you want with abortion, but you're making crazy arguments about Bill Gates.
Anyway, so...
Bill Gates is helping the world, but half of Republicans think he's got some evil plan.
Here's some more good news.
David Boxenhorn is reporting on this a lot on Twitter.
The mRNA vaccination, the platform and the technology, looks like there's a new vaccination that looks promising, 77% effective against malaria.
Wow. So, one of the things that's going to come out of this pandemic is that this mRNA technology might cure a bunch of other stuff, and malaria is right at the top.
So, malaria kills 400,000 people a year, so if you take a 77% bite out of that, that's a pretty good deal.
Let's see. The other thing that's good is I believe the public is finally coming around to understanding the news is not real.
And that's a big deal.
Because if we keep believing the news is even intended to be real, as in accurate and unbiased, you're going to be real confused in life.
You have to achieve that level of understanding that the news is not even intended to be real and Before you can make any progress, really.
I mean, you'll just be locked in a weird little fake world if you think that's the case.
But technologies or services like Substack, where independents can say what they want.
Locals, I'm an investor in that.
Locals is another subscription service where I can say what I want.
You wouldn't believe the things I can say on Locals that have never gotten into the wild.
I was complimenting the people who follow me on Locals the other day.
Because I've said and done some pretty provocative things that you just couldn't do on Twitter without getting cancelled, but that group has not released any of that to the wild.
Somehow they've been, and there are thousands of them, right?
There's 64, 6,500 followers on Locals, and none of them have copied my content from there and put it in Twitter where I would get cancelled.
Now, I don't know how that's gone so long without that happening.
It feels like some bad apple will get in there somehow just to do that.
But so far, it's completely worked.
And I'm surprised. So the economy's doing great.
We're worried about the deficit, but I just don't know how much to worry about that.
We've got doctors on video now.
We didn't have that a year ago.
So medical advice, at least, is going to be more universal.
We've got remote work.
I don't think people are going back.
I think remote work is a thing.
It's going to have a good effect on traffic.
I think that the school choice thing is starting to come into its own.
Corey DeAngelis, especially, doing a great job persuading on that.
I do what I can.
But it does look like both the left and the right are saying, we need more school options or better schools, schools a mess.
There's even an LGBTQ activist who say that the current public schools are no good because they get bullied, etc.
I agree with all of that.
I think the LGBTQ community, as well as conservatives, as well as lots of people, need more options.
They need more options. Now, I'm not saying that you want separate schools for LGBTQ. That seems like a very bad idea.
But wouldn't it be a good idea for some people to have the option?
Right? And there does seem to be some movement on this, the teachers' unions.
So we'll see. A lot of work to be done.
There don't seem to be any wars on the horizon.
Am I wrong about that?
You know, the news is sort of working hard to find us at war, but they're failing.
They can't get us into war in Afghanistan.
We're done with it.
The Middle East, it's a flare-up now and then.
But even Iran, it looks like that's going to be Israel's problem maybe, and it'll be a short process if they decide to take out their nuclear facilities.
I feel as if we have never been safer.
I think that Russia and Ukraine will not turn into a world war.
I think that China and the South Pacific Sea will not turn into a world war.
Because the superpowers with nukes just don't want to fight each other.
I just don't see it's going to happen.
So, yeah, you know, Israel dropped some bombs on some Syrian missile batteries.
That'll happen forever.
But, yeah, even if you look at the hottest of the hot spots, you know, Taiwan, Ukraine, none of them look like they're going to become a world war, and none of them look like they're necessarily going to bring, drag America into it.
We'll see. I mean, anything could happen, right?
But I feel as if we're in the most peaceful time, maybe, of my life.
Let's hope it holds.
You know, you've got the Abraham Accords in the Middle East.
We're probably one ayatollah away from a better situation with Iran.
The ayatollah isn't going to live forever.
Now, whoever replaces them might be just as bad or worse, but at least that's an opening.
Something might happen. And I would argue that people are starting to understand the subjective nature of reality.
Do you remember five years ago, the first time you heard of the idea of the simulation?
It seemed ridiculous, and it's already entering the mainstream of thought.
Do you remember when you first heard that the news is fake?
You probably didn't believe it.
But now you know it's true.
How many times have you thought something was true and then had your mind completely changed a day or a week later?
A bunch of times.
And I would argue that our understanding of our reality as being subjective is more so than it's ever been, which is a good thing.
Nextly, not a word, but let's say it is.
Nextly, I'm going to claim that the idea of systems versus goals is really big and it has changed America.
Does anybody want to argue with that?
I want to see some pushback on that.
It's a big claim. So I'm saying that my book, Had It Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, has changed so much in America that That it's a major force.
That it actually is something that you can talk about as being a big deal and a trend.
I think if you saw how many books it influenced and how many people talk this way now that didn't used to.
Five years ago, if you said passion was the most important thing for success, what would people say?
They'd say, yeah, that's true.
You need your passion. What do they say now?
Now they say passion's bullshit.
If anybody talks about it at all, there's about a 50% chance they're going to talk about it negatively.
Five years ago, it would have only been positive.
It's a big, big change.
Now, I'm only part of that, but I am part of it, part of the passion being overrated.
What about the fact that persuasion is more important than facts?
Five years ago, everything was facts don't care about your feelings, right?
Let's get the facts. The facts are important.
Five years ago. How do people feel today?
Today, pretty much everyone knows that the facts don't matter.
When we talked about the George Floyd case, the Chauvin case, didn't everybody agree that the facts would not be the determinant of the outcome?
When have you ever seen that before?
The left, the right, everybody.
We all agreed that people would ignore the facts, even though This was one of those cases with more facts than just about anything.
Mike Rowe also talks about passion being BS, etc.
So I would say, not taking some kind of universal credit for any of this, I'm saying that I'm part of a larger trend of systems being more important than goals.
Habits being more important than objective.
Subjectivity of our experience.
Passion being bullshit.
These are all things that really weren't big five years ago, but they're big now.
And I think I'm one of the larger reasons for that.
Let me see what you said.
The fact that he didn't die of an overdose got Chauvin convicted.
Well, I don't understand that comment.
Sorry about that.
Okay. My devices are all talking to me today.
Alright, so that's what's going on, and I would say that we are entering the Golden Age.
We're putting stuff on the moon.
We don't have a war happening.
My... My stocks are higher than they've ever been.
And I would say that our understanding of the world is better than it's ever been.
And I believe that our racism level in this country is the lowest it's ever been.
And going lower.
I would say it's trending lower.
Now you could argue, but no, they've just replaced it with racism against white people.
That's true. That's true.
There's way more racism against white people, but we can handle it, right?
We can handle it.
It's not the worst problem in the world.
It's annoying.
It's inconvenient.
And probably some people are going to go to jail that didn't need to.
But it's not the biggest thing that's happening.
All right. Somebody say it's the golden age until...
I love this comment.
Brian says, it's the golden age until Franz Ferdinand gets assassinated.
You are totally right.
Things can change in a moment.
Just like that.
But, I believe that the pandemic was absolutely necessary to get us here.
What did the pandemic give us?
A whole bunch of new technologies for handling pandemics.
That's pretty big.
A whole bunch of new technology for vaccinations from malaria to, God knows, AIDS. What's next?
That's gigantic!
Remote work as now a standard as opposed to an exception?
That's really big.
That is so, so big.
I mean, I've been writing about cubicles for 30 years.
A lot of people got out of their cubicle recently.
That's big. And like I said, the Floyd trial put people on the same side.
It's the first time white people really, really got to feel the emotional part of the argument, not just statistics.
Yeah, and the economy is doing well, and I think we've never been better.
School choice. Would we have as much school choice if the pandemic hadn't messed up the school habit?
No. Would we have doctors available by video across state lines?
Nope. These are all things that happened in the last year because of the pandemic.
The pandemic is a crisis that Which created amazing opportunities which are permanent.
This is the best time we've ever been in.
Now, unfortunately, like everything, it is not distributed evenly.
It is not distributed evenly.
TJ says, wow, delusional talk.
What part is wrong, TJ? See, I would argue that anybody who thinks things are bad...
Is being hypnotized by their news source.
The news only exists by telling you bad news.
The news could not make money telling you good news.
And I have also a hypothesis that every time a new video camera is added to the world, you think the world is worse.
Because what is the video camera going to show you?
Good news? Never.
Video shows you bad news.
That's what's interesting. Good news isn't as interesting.
Oh, sure, we see some puppies and stuff, but mostly bad news.
So every time there's a new camera that enters the world, there's a new possibility that people will see more bad news.
So your impression of the world might be at the all-time worst.
The world itself is Is that an all-time best?
So those of you who are saying, my God, this guy's crazy.
Everything's falling apart.
Can't he see it? No, I can't.
I can't see it, because it's not there.
The world is by far better than it's ever been.
Not even close.
And this year, the one we're entering, we hate the masks.
We honor the dead, if you will, the people who did not make it through the pandemic.
But the fact is, this shook the box in exactly the way the box needed to be shaken.
And we've never been in a better situation.
All right. Yeah, if you're not looking for the golden age, you won't see it.
If you're believing the news, you'll never see it.
Where China has the most power on Earth, this is your paradise.
Well, TJ, did you say that about Japan in the 60s?
I did. Was it the 60s, 70s, 80s?
Whatever it was. When it was obvious that Japan was going to be the world power, because they were growing fast, and you could just look at the curves and say, uh-oh, Japan's going to eat our lunch, they'll have all of our technology.
What happened? Didn't happen, did it?
Didn't happen at all. Why is China doing so well?
Stealing our technology.
They're doing so well because we're letting them.
What happens if we stop letting them?
Meaning, stop letting them steal our technology, stop exporting our jobs, stop buying their cheap stuff, stop letting them abuse our industries.
What happens if we stop?
Because even Biden's, you know, going to be cautious about China.
Yeah, if you straight-line any problem, oh, China's getting bigger.
If nothing ever changed, pretty big problem.
But something always changes.
So don't worry about a straight-line trend.
It always changes. And I would argue that if you're worried about one of those problems, you're probably consuming too much news from one side.
Although the China thing is real, it's easily handleable, in my opinion.
Japan does not want to kill us, and somebody says that China does.
Not true. China doesn't want to kill anybody.
Where did you even get that?
China wants to dominate, and China wants to control its own fate, but do you think China wants to own Denmark?
I don't think so. I don't think China wants to own Denmark.
I think their ambitions are really about their area, just like everybody else's is.
Bobo says, uh-oh, is this a racist comment?
Let me read it first.
What is your opinion on hypothetical, oh this is so provocative, free therapy for black people, sounds a little racist, hold on, as a form of reparations.
Well, you're making a big assumption there.
You're making a big assumption that, A, that somehow black people will be extra benefited from therapy.
I don't know that that's the case.
I would guess that everybody needs therapy lately.
But I don't think therapy is the right word or the right way to frame it.
Could black Americans be happier If their situation were presented to them in a strategic framework, which gives them all the opportunity in the world, it's just there's a bunch of things that are still bad.
Or a victim framework in which everybody's doomed.
So we should certainly go from victim to strategy.
But I don't think therapy is the right approach.
That's just insulting and racist feeling, even if you didn't mean it that way.
Somebody says, so fentanyl's not a problem.
Well, fentanyl's a big problem, yeah.
So the country is not free of problems.
But, you know, I think we'll figure a way around all of it.
Do you believe China's trying to kill us with fentanyl?
Oh, that's true.
Yes, but I would say that that has more to do with harming us economically.
I don't think China wants us dead.
I think they don't care.
But they want us less powerful, and fentanyl is part of that.
So yes, they are the cause of death in America, that's true.
