Episode 1400 Scott Adams: It's My Birthday So Come Say Hi
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
CNN knows the future?
Encrypted apps flaw
Colonial pipeline ransom recovered?
VP Harris attempts to speak in public
Obama repeats Fine People HOAX
President Obama and CRT
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Wow! Barbara Bush, Griffin Dunn, Gabrielle Giffords, Rob Pilatus.
Where am I on this list?
There are a lot of famous people with his birthday.
Come on, come on.
50, 100. Well, apparently I'm not in the top 100, but someday I'll make it to the top 100 birthdays on my own birthday.
Would you like to enjoy the Simultaneous Sip?
Special birthday edition?
Yeah, of course you would.
And all you need is a cuppermenger, a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Thank you.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, It's called The Simultaneous Sip and I have us now go!
Oh, just right.
How do you like that sip of coffee when the temperature is just right?
It's perfect, really.
Let's talk about all the things that are coming.
So, I watch with fascination as the evolution toward self-driving cars, and thank you everybody for the birthday wishes, So there's a company called Cruise that is pretty far along.
It's a subsidiary of General Motors.
They've got a self-driving car that has just got permitted to operate in California.
An actual self-driving car, and what's different is this one doesn't require an operator A human operator to take the controls if something goes wrong.
So until now, we did have self-driving cars, but it required a human to be in the passenger seat to take over.
And it looks like this is the first one that's made the next step, and it will be driving literally autonomously.
There will be no human there.
The car will just pull up, you get in, and it goes somewhere.
Now, I don't know if I would be the first one to get in this.
The fly lady, well, you're much too nice.
Thank you. I don't deserve that, literally, but thank you.
And I've been watching this driverless car thing, and what's interesting is there's a whole bunch of companies that are getting into it, and one assumes that someday, I don't know, Apple and Google will have a car, whatever.
But it's not going to be like one day there are self-driving cars.
It's more like one day you'll drive past one.
And you'll think, what the hell?
Was that a car with nobody in it?
And then there'll just be more of them.
But one of the questions that I wonder about is, what's it like to be a human driver on the highway with some self-driving cars and some human-driven cars?
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a big part of driving anticipating what the other driver will do?
When you come to a stop, let's say a four-way stop, Don't you look at the faces of the drivers?
That's one of your biggest variables, right?
You look at their faces. Because if their face is looking at you, you know they saw you.
If their face is looking the other direction and they're inching forward, you stop.
Because you're not looking at the car, you're looking at the face.
What does a self-driving car do?
Self-driving cars don't look at faces.
So they've got one disadvantage that humans don't have.
But also, I can't look at the face of a self-driving car.
How long will it take me to learn when the self-driving car recognizes me?
Because I want the self-driving car to see me, and I want to know that they see me, like a human.
So what do you do? It's almost like the self-driving cars need another, some kind of other option so you can know that they recognize you.
For example, could there be another light?
Or maybe something that shows up in your car?
Something that tells you that this other car now has a full understanding of your existence and what you're doing.
As long as I know the other car knows what I'm up to, I'm okay.
But until I know it knows where I am and what I'm doing, I don't know.
It'd be hard to trust it.
You know, I mentioned this the other day, but it's becoming more and more hardened as a reality.
There will be two histories of the pandemic.
One history will say, hey, there was a big old pandemic.
The other history is what some members of the right are forming into their own reality, which is the pandemic didn't happen.
There was none.
It was just an illusion.
That actually nothing happened.
There was a virus, and the virus was real, and people got it and people died, so that part is not in question.
What's question is, is anything unusual, did anything unusual happen in terms of viruses?
Or was the unusual thing only the way we reacted to this one?
And we're just going to have to live with two realities.
We will have two completely different histories.
One in which the virus never happened, As a pandemic, but it happened as a normal, little extra aggressive seasonal virus that we overreacted to.
How many of you buy into the opinion that the pandemic was largely an illusion and not really much worse than a normal flu?
How many of you buy into that?
I just want to see in your comments if that's becoming a popular view or not.
I'm seeing a yes, thumbs up.
I see a scam, no.
Overreacted, yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Me, me, me. No, no, no, no.
Well, so you see, there it is.
There are roughly as many people who think the pandemic didn't exist as there are who think they lived through one.
How do you reconcile two histories that are opposites?
And we both lived through it, right?
It's not like we're talking about something that was hypothetical, and it's in our history books.
You and I, and everyone watching this right now, we're in it still.
We're living through it in real time, and still a large segment of the population thinks it isn't real.
It didn't happen. Well, I'm in the camp that says something happened, and people were dying, and Whether we over-counted them or not, it's still in the millions.
I'm fairly certain it's in the millions.
Was it worth it? Well, we'll figure that out as we go.
There's a survey, a study.
I don't know if you'd call it a study.
Let's call it a survey. Because that's what it is.
A survey about whether more people got the COVID when they were wearing masks or not wearing masks.
This is from Axios Ipsos poll.
And what do you think?
If you haven't seen, for those of you who have not seen it yet, so don't ruin it yet, so many of you have not seen the results.
So they did a poll, and they said, how much did you wear masks, and then did you get coronavirus?
And they determined...
And I won't tell you the answer yet, but what do you think?
What do you think was the result?
Did the people who wore the masks more often get fewer infections or more of them or the same?
In the comments, tell me what you think it turned out.
I see somebody says the same, no difference.
No effect, no.
Less likely to get sick, same, no difference.
So most of you have not seen this survey, obviously.
Same, blah, blah, blah. Fewer.
Here's the answer. Gigantic difference.
Which way did it go?
There was a doubling.
So one of those conditions, either wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, one of those two conditions doubled your risk of getting infection.
Doubled. So we're not talking about a small difference.
Doubled. Which was it?
Was it the people who wore the masks who were safer?
Or was it the people who didn't wear masks who were safer?
What do you think? Because there are a lot of people who think the masks are causing problems, right?
The answer is, according to the Ipsos-Axios poll, that people who did not regularly wear masks had twice the infections.
The people who didn't wear masks had We're twice as likely to be infected based on self-reporting, right?
Now, thank you.
In the comments, somebody says, this is not a gold standard of reporting or a gold standard study.
No, it's not even a study.
It's more like a poll.
I would call it a poll, not a study.
So this does not pass scientific rigor.
Can we all agree on that?
Nobody thinks that this passes any kind of scientific gold standard, right?
So the fact that there's this one survey that does show a really big difference, though.
Here's where I would be more skeptical.
If the masking difference showed a difference of, say, 10 or 20%, let's say, hypothetically, I'd say to myself, I don't know that you could measure that, really.
10-20% sounds like, I don't know, that's too small of a hypothetical difference to be sure there weren't other variables in there mucking up your result.
So 10-20% I would have said, that doesn't tell us anything.
But what if it's double?
Well, you know, let's just say, hypothetically, let's say the polling was done well.
It's still not a scientific study.
It's not a gold standard controlled anything, but double, right?
When I do a Twitter poll, I know it's highly unscientific.
It's as unscientific as you can get, because, you know, my followers are not even close to any kind of a random sample.
And still, if I run a Twitter poll and the results are 10 to 1 in one direction, I still think it means something.
It just isn't scientific.
But if it's a 10% chance, obviously it means nothing.
I don't know. I would say this is not conclusive or close to it, but it certainly agrees with my opinion.
And the best way to know that something is true is if it agrees with your prior opinion.
Now, that's the standard I use.
So, this agrees with what I already thought to be true, which is masks are more likely to work than not.
One of the obvious problems with this Is that people don't wear masks for the same reasons and risks are different.
One of the reasons you might wear masks a lot is because you perceive a risk, etc., etc., etc.
So there's a million problems wrong with the poll.
But I'll bet it will hold up.
If I had to bet, let me put it into money.
If somebody said to you, Scott, you can't avoid making this bet.
We'll kill you if you don't participate.
So you have to participate.
And you have to put all of your money on whether masks made a difference or they didn't.
I would bet all of my money that it made a difference.
I would bet all of it. Now, this is under the assumption that I had to bet one way or the other.
I would prefer not betting, because I'm not that confident.
You know, I'd need something like 99% confidence to bet everything I have.
But in this hypothetical where I had to bet, yeah, I would bet that they work.
Now, I'm also...
Am I unbiased?
Nope. Because I have committed to a position early on in the pandemic.
Do you remember early on when the experts were saying masks don't work?
And I believe, and by the way, I would love a fact check on this.
If there's anybody who can give me a fact check.
I believe, but I can't confirm it yet, that I'm the first public figure to call bullshit on Fauci, etc., saying that masks don't work.
Now, given that I've made such a public commitment to that view, that masks almost certainly work.
This was my view early on, before we had data.
It just seems logically that they would.
Given that I made that commitment, I am no longer able to be objective when I look at, say, a result, like this poll, because I want it to agree with me, right?
Who doesn't want to be right on their birthday?
Everybody wants to be right, especially on their birthday.
So you should not take me as a credible source when I tell you, hey, this poll looks pretty credible because I want it to be true.
I want it to be true because that makes me feel good and me look good.
So I have no credibility on this question.
You get that, right? That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I actually think I'm right.
But in terms of you judging my credibility on this question, it should be zero because I've set up the perfect condition for cognitive dissonance.
I set myself up for that.
By taking a public stand and putting my reputation behind it, and it's a big question, right?
It's not a trivial question.
If it were trivial, I'd say, ah, who cares?
But it's big. People may have lived or died, literally, lived or died on the question of whether they believed masks worked or didn't.
May have, right?
That's unclear at this point.
So yeah, you should not believe me on that topic, but I'll report what I see on the topic.
I will report it if it says masks don't work.
If there's a big study that disagrees with me, I'm not going to like it.
But I promise you I'll report it so you've heard it.
That's the best I can do. You know, I've been reading a lot about China lately.
You've got a fentanyl problem, a Uyghur genocide problem.
They've got a stealing IP problem, maybe not too forthcoming on the virus.
And, you know, when you put it all together, I'm starting to think that China doesn't have our best interests in mind.
Alright, moving on. CNN reports that, I guess now we have a recording of a 2019 phone call in which Rudy Giuliani was, according to the CNN headline, this is how they said it, Rudy Giuliani cajoled and pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Biden.
Now, the reporting of this It's very interesting because it suggests that CNN knows how investigations turn out before they're started.
Is this a pattern?
Well, yes it is.
It is. Because it turns out that CNN has done this with the election audits.
CNN is already reporting the result of the audit that didn't happen yet.
Or at least it's not complete yet.
This is really happening right in front of you.
CNN is telling you the outcome of an audit before the audit's over.
And people are just accepting that.
They're accepting it as if that makes any sense.
Now, it would certainly be fair for them to say, based on everything we've seen and reported, we're not expecting that the audit will come up with any surprises.
That's fair. That's fair.
Completely fair. Based on everything we've seen and reported so far, We have no reason to believe that the audit will kick up some surprises.
I would say that's fine.
But when you say it's baseless, you're kind of suggesting you know how it's going to turn out.
And you don't. They did, I would say, similar things with Russian collusion.
Obviously the Mueller investigation was ongoing, but it seems to me that CNN reported it as a fact all along, before it was done.
And now this Ukraine investigation that never happened, but somehow CNN knows what the result would be for the investigation that never happened.
So these are three clear, I think, clear examples of where CNN knew the result of an investigation before the investigation.
How do they even remain as a TV network?
They are so far into ridiculousness.
Now let me ask you this.
Am I biased in favor of Fox News?
Or is it true that Fox News doesn't do this?
Now I'm not saying that Fox News doesn't do their own stuff you can criticize, right?
So we're not saying Fox News good, CNN bad.
That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying this specific trick.
Where they know the outcome of something before the end?
Isn't that only CNN? I don't know if MSNBC does it, but I can't remember any time that Fox News has ever told us the outcome of a study before the study was over.
Do you have any memory of that?
This seems to be specific to CNN. Here's a scary story but fun.
Turns out that criminal organizations Mafia types, had been using an encryption technology in which you would take a phone that had been crippled for all other purposes except for this one encrypted app, and it could only talk to people who also had a crippled phone with just that app on it.
So it was like a really special, super secret encrypted thing that's better than, you know, Telegram, it's better than Signal, it's better than WhatsApp, because those are just, you know, Encryption apps.
But in this one, you had to have an actual special phone that could only talk to the other special phones.
Pretty well encrypted, right?
Except law enforcement has had that encryption broken for a long time.
And they've been watching the entire criminal enterprises revealing all of their secrets for a long time.
Until they just did a big roll-up and arrested a bunch of people.
But here's my advice to you.
There's no such thing as an encrypted app.
Now, technically they're encrypted in the sense that encryption happens in a math and coding sense.
Yes. Betsy, you skied in my hometown.
I'll be damned. You've seen my house.
If you were on the ski slope in Wyndham, New York, you saw my house because you just looked across the valley and there it was.
But here's the thing.
Here's why there's no such thing as a safely encrypted app.
My goodness, Yujin Jian, you are way too nice.
I certainly appreciate it, but I'm not worth it.
But I appreciate it very much.
So there's no such thing as a really encrypted app, and here's why.
Your encrypted app ends up with a human being.
That's why you sent it, right?
You sent your message to a human being.
The human being isn't encrypted, right?
As soon as the human being gets it, it's no longer a secret message.
It's a message that some damn person can tell anybody they want.
So the moment you think, well, I'm safe now.
I got my encrypted app.
No such thing.
I used to have the Signal app.
Got rid of it. Because the moment you think your messages are secret, you're fucked.
There's no such thing as a secret message.
That doesn't exist. Because the person on the other end is not encrypted.
And let me point out this.
Those companies, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, don't they have human beings working there?
Do you think there's no way to get an insider to figure out how to beat an encryption?
Actually, I don't know the answer to that question.
It might be that there is no way, but I doubt it.
I would think that if you could get an insider who had the right skills, the right access, they could open up any app.
How do you know that insiders haven't already gone to the developers for whatever app you're using and said to them, here's the deal.
If you don't give us a back door to your encrypted app, we will shut your operation down one way or another.
We'll do it legally, But you're basically out of business unless you give us a backdoor.
Did that happen?
How would you know? How would you know?
Is there any way you would know that your app developer had a secret conversation with the FBI? No.
No, you'd have no way of knowing.
So, you would be a sucker to use encrypted apps.
You would be a sucker.
Because an encrypted app is exactly where people are going to look for your secrets.
Now, it might not be That your neighbor can read your encrypted app, but your neighbor wasn't reading your other mail either.
Your neighbor wasn't getting into your text messages.
So you only have two kinds of people.
The people who can't get into your messages at all, or don't care, and the people like the government, who really do want to see your messages, and they can do it.
Right? So this example of the mafia super-secret encryption I don't know if it was easily, but they did crack it.
That should tell you everything you need to know about secret information.
Don't write anything down in any form if it's bad.
Don't ever write incriminating things at all.
Ever. Don't write anything encrypted.
That's private and would get you in trouble.
Alright, and a related story, and I'm not sure what to think about this yet, but did you hear that the FBI managed to somehow get back the ransomware that was paid for the Colonial Pipeline hack?
Is that still true?
I mean, I heard that yesterday, but it looks like it wasn't in the news this morning.
Did something happen to the story?
Can somebody confirm that that happened?
Is it true that the FBI somehow clawed back the, I think it was Bitcoin, and somehow clawed back that money that was paid?
Can I get a confirmation on that?
Partially, some of it, not all of it, somebody says.
Well, probably because some of it already had passed through to another wallet.
They got a portion of it, somebody's saying.
Okay. Now, you might ask yourself, hey, I thought the whole point of...
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is that it was secret.
So how did the FBI get a hold of the secret passcode, the secret code that led them into the wallet of the bad guys to take their money out?
How'd they get it? Because these crypto things are supposed to be all secret and secure, right?
That's why criminals use them.
How secure is Bitcoin?
Well, here's the problem.
Apparently there's a history of the FBI hackers hacking hackers.
So in other words, if you had already known you had a hacker group, you might not be able to get directly into their Bitcoin business, but you can control their network.
So that everything they do, you can see.
In theory, right?
We don't know if this happened in this case.
But in theory, you could hack their whole network, and anything they did, including typing in a Bitcoin password, might be known.
So you don't need to penetrate the Bitcoin itself, you know, the blockchain, etc.
You don't need to penetrate that.
That still might be secure.
But you might...
Be able to get their entire network and then catch them when they're typing in their passcode or something.
Now, I think that's the thing, right?
Can somebody who's a little more technically astute tell me the answer to this?
If you could control somebody's computer such that you could see every keystroke, couldn't you get their passcode?
I mean, I think you could, right?
So yeah, a keylogger is what it's called, a keylogger.
So if the good guys hacked the bad guys, they could certainly get a hold of their passcode and then empty their wallets.
Don't know if that's what happened.
Could have been an insider.
Could have been something else.
I don't know. I doubt they've penetrated the blockchain in some way that they could get a hold of a I don't think it's possible to do it directly.
I think they would have to go after the people, not the technology.
All right. Keyloggers are easy to find, yeah.
You would think a high-end to hackers would be protecting themselves from being hacked.
So I doubt it's as simple as a keylogger, but that's the basic idea.
They left it on Coinbase, which is dumb.
But being on Coinbase doesn't automatically...
Give somebody a back door into it.
That alone wouldn't make a difference.
Alright. Vice President Harris made the mistake of trying to speak in public.
Vice President Harris speaks in public as well as Joe Biden climbs stairs in public.
In either case, it's an adventure and you're probably a little nervous when you see it if you're a supporter.
One of these stories that we hear is that she's quietly receiving what's called media training.
In other words, and by the way, did I ever tell you that this would happen?
I told you that sooner or later, somebody was going to be training Harris in how to talk in public.
Because she does not know how to talk in public.
Her biggest problem is her nervous giggle.
It's a really big problem.
And I don't know how hard it is to teach somebody not to do that if it's a lifelong habit.
But man, if she doesn't beat that, I don't know how she could ever be president.
But she did an interview with Lester Holt in which he was asking her about having not visited the border.
And she said, glibly, but I also haven't been to Europe.
So what's your point?
What? Somebody gave her media training and she answered that way, but I also haven't been to Europe, so what's your point?
Oh my fucking God.
I don't know how you could be any worse.
Now, first of all, I assume that she means she's been to Europe personally, but not on official business.
So it wasn't like she's never been to Europe, I assume.
I mean, that was my interpretation of it.
But you need to answer that question directly, right?
That was a fair question.
Why haven't you been to the border?
A completely fair question.
It is also a question you know you're going to be asked.
Fox News reports the number of days she hasn't visited the border.
Every day, the number of days she hasn't visited the border is reported in national news.
She knew the question was coming, and she wasn't ready for it.
Are you kidding me?
She wasn't ready for the most obvious question about her job?
I mean, that's just really bad work.
That's somebody who doesn't look like they did the homework at all.
I mean, you can't even say she tried hard but failed.
This doesn't look like trying at all.
This looks like literally being absent from your duties if you can't answer a simple question like that.
So the direct answer would have been this.
I would like to...
Let me give you the correct media answer, okay?
Vice President Harris, people are concerned that you haven't visited the border, and yet you're in charge of making sure Central America doesn't send more people across the border.
Don't you think you should visit the border?
Here's the correct answer.
I think it's very important that everybody visits the border who's involved in the decision-making.
So yes, I'm definitely going to visit the border.
But in terms of priorities...
My first priority is specifically working with these countries to make sure that there's less problem on the border in the first place.
But yeah, absolutely, I'll visit the border.
We just need to work that into the schedule.
At the moment, frankly, you know, we have enough reporting from the border that I know what's going on there.
But I do think that for the benefit of the public, the public needs to see me there.
So I'm with you.
And as soon as I get done with this stuff, we're going to schedule a trip to the border.
And I'd like to see it firsthand, but we do have good reporting on it.
Compare my answer to, I haven't met the Europe either.
I mean, seriously.
How bad a politician can you be to not be able to answer the most obvious question you'll ever be asked?
All right. Ron DeSantis continues to do almost everything right for somebody who's likely to run for president.
I mean, whoever is advising Ron DeSantis, assuming that this isn't him making up all of his own decisions, maybe it is, I don't know, but he really is doing one right thing after another.
It's kind of crazy. So the latest right thing he did in terms of running for president, if that's his ambition, is he's going after China from the perspective of a governor, which is really smart.
Because I don't know who else has done this.
Has anybody done this as directly?
So he's done, I guess, he's blaming the Chinese government for the virus and the way they handled it.
So that's A+. But that, you know, that's a little bit more ordinary.
Other people are doing that. But then he just decided, well, he just passed some laws, I guess, where he's promoting the bill.
That would ban partnerships between the Chinese government and any educational entity in Florida.
So there's something called the Confucius Institute, which, quote, facilitates cultural exchanges and direct deals between foreign governments and Florida's universities and colleges.
And DeSantis is saying, how about China get out of Florida?
Yes, that is the correct approach.
Yes, Ron DeSantis, you are 100% on the right page here.
100%. Not just politically, because it's brilliant politically, because it raises his stature to national leader, but it's also exactly the right thing to do.
This one's not ambiguous at all.
This is exactly the right thing to do.
And then also, there's a second bill.
So these are bills. These are not laws yet.
The second bill that would make theft and trafficking of trade secrets a criminal offense under state law.
They're already federally as a crime, but he's tightening up and making it a state crime as well.
And that, of course, is aimed more at China than anybody else.
So by Ron DeSantis packaging up some anti-China Chinese government, really.
We don't want to say it's about Chinese people.
We love the Chinese people, not the government.
It's just brilliant, politically.
So I'm glad that I have DeSantis to talk about, because I like to talk about good and bad persuasion.
And he's doing it great.
Doing it great. Obama's in the news, and I have a big question about him.
So I guess he's got a book coming out, so he's doing some interviews.
And he repeated the fine people hoax.
And I'm a little surprised by it.
Now, I can imagine...
It's easy to imagine that in the past that all the Democratic figures had repeated that hoax because I think a lot of them believed it in the beginning.
But do we believe...
And I asked this in a poll.
I said, do you think Barack Obama believes the fine people hoax is actually real as recently as yesterday?
Could somebody as well-informed as Obama...
Not know that that's a hoax?
By now. Certainly, I would forgive anybody who didn't know it was a hoax in the beginning.
But now? How do you not know that now?
You know, even Biden stopped saying it.
We haven't heard Biden say it in quite a while, because I think he finally got the message.
It wasn't real. But Obama, does he still believe it?
Or is he morally empty?
Which is it? Because I actually don't know.
I'm actually a little confused.
Because it seems to me that especially from the perspective of an ex-president, I don't have a memory of Obama telling lies this big that are so disprovable in public.
Can somebody remind me of any big lies that Obama told that were just obvious lies?
Now, of course they all do spin, right?
So I'm not talking about spin or A little bit of hyperbole.
Something's worse than something.
Can somebody give me...
Well, that was a promise.
Somebody says, you know, the promise about if you like your doctor, you can keep it.
My guess is that he actually believed that.
I don't think he would say it.
I mean, my guess is that that wasn't a lie.
He actually believed it.
That's a guess. Yeah.
That's more of a campaign promise.
Isn't it? Yeah, and I'm not sure that just being wrong is the same.
The Trevon...
Well, I don't want to get into Trevon Martin.
Yeah, so we don't really have a big history of Obama saying things that are this obviously provably false.
You know, it would be one thing to say something that you can't prove one way or the other, or the statistics are misleading, you could read it this way or you could read it that way.
That's one thing. But when has Obama just said an obviously false thing that you can just look up yourself and tell it's false?
Yeah. So, I have...
My guess is that he actually believes it.
That's my best guess.
I can't read his mind, but I think he actually believes it.
Amazing. He also said that it was laughable, because he literally laughed.
He, quote, chuckled.
When he talks about Republicans thinking that critical race theory and the teaching of it is the greatest threat to our republic.
Now, of course, he's exaggerating a little bit.
But he's acting as though Republicans think critical race theory is the biggest threat to our republic.
Is that...
Is that crazy?
Is it crazy for somebody to think that critical race theory is, in fact, the biggest risk to the republic?
Because I think you could make that argument.
You could definitely make that argument.
It goes like this. The most important thing that holds the country together is, if you're not a dictatorship, the most important thing that holds the country together is the culture.
The set of beliefs that everybody shares.
If you get these set of beliefs wrong that everybody shares about who you are and what your country is about, then the whole thing falls apart.
Critical race theory attacks the central premise of America that we're a melting pot and that we shouldn't be obsessing over people's race and anything else.
So I would say that the DNA of America, which is we don't obsessively focus on race, we try to ignore it while still also doing everything that the legal system and good people can do to eliminate bias and bigotry and prejudice and all that.
So yeah, you work hard to eliminate it, but you don't say this is who you are.
You don't change your identity to a bunch of assholes who hate each other.
Keep the melting pot.
So I would say that to Obama, I don't think you understand what holds the country together.
It's a shared set of beliefs.
That's it. You get rid of the shared set of beliefs, and there's nothing that would hold the country together.
At all. You know, the Constitution won't do it.
The laws won't do it.
The military won't do it.
The political system won't do it.
You've got to start with that or nothing works.
So he is looking to erase the DNA of the country, and I've got to think that is the biggest risk to the country.
And it's hard to imagine he doesn't see that.
Rasmussen reports that only 42% of moderates think Fauci was telling the truth about the gain-of-function Funding in Wuhan.
Now, I tell you only what the moderates think, because I don't have to tell you what the left thinks or the right thinks.
Would you be surprised to know that the people who identify as the left largely believe that Fauci is telling the truth?
Would you be surprised to know that people who identify with the right largely believe that he's lying?
So I just look at the moderates, and if you lose the moderates...
Well, you lost the argument.
And the moderates, only 42% believe him.
So even the moderates have left at this point.
Now, my view on Dr.
Fauci is a little bit more nuanced.
Which is, there may in fact have been some cover your ass activity going on here.
But that doesn't mean that they're guilty of something wrong.
You can cover your ass Even if you didn't do anything wrong, and you could rightly be blamed for covering your ass.
And there are two reasons to cover your ass.
One is that you're guilty and you don't want people to find out.
And the other is that you're not guilty and you don't want to be unreasonably blamed for something.
So you cover your ass. So was Fauci trying to cover his ass by the...
The way he talked about the gain of function to try to downplay it and make it look like, no, not directly, and it was only a little bit of money, and it wasn't that kind of gain of function.
Yeah, he did all that.
But that doesn't mean he's guilty of a crime.
Because whether you're guilty or not guilty, you're going to kind of cover your ass.
We'd expect it in both situations.
So... I think that there probably is something technically true about funding that ended up in the wrong place.
But I don't know that that being technically true makes Fauci a bad person or a liar, necessarily.
So I'm not quite of that opinion yet.
My opinion is that he might have been wrong a lot, like everybody.
You know? Unfortunately, this was not the kind of emergency in which we could say, well, the public is dumb.
But thank goodness we have experts.
It wasn't that kind of problem.
It was a problem where the experts didn't know.
But they were doing the best they could.
So I'm going to be consistent with what I said at the beginning of the pandemic, which is that at the end of the pandemic, we're going to be blaming our leaders for making bad decisions.
And I think it's a little bit harsh.
You sort of have to do it anyway, because people have to be accountable.
But it's a little harsh because people were guessing and it was fog of war.
Some were going to get it right by luck.
Some were going to get it wrong by bad luck.
And criticizing the people who got it wrong, there's just not much to gain in that.
All right. Somebody say he actively suppressed the lab leak theory.
Well, here's what I ask about the lab leak theory.
Given that we know now that there is a place on the genome where you look, specifically a place to look to see if something has been engineered, all of those opinions about it not being engineered, they had not yet looked at the place that you could look to find out if it was.
What? How do you explain that?
That we had a strong opinion about it before looking at the one thing that would actually tell us if it happened or not.
Well, that's your world you live in, and I am going to go off and enjoy the rest of my birthday.
Derek! My goodness, you're much too nice.
I do work hard to try to make a difference.
That is true. So it is my intention, it is always my intention to work hard to make something better.
So I try, and I appreciate very much you recognizing that.
