Episode 1409 Scott Adams: International Simultaneous Sipping is Coming to Your Device. Be Prepared!
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Florida to aid Texas and Arizona build walls
President Biden's list for President Putin
CNN propaganda, a parody of itself
Hawk Newsome demands apology
Support for CRT in schools
Andrew Tate and his cult attacks
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The part that makes all the other parts of the day look, well, shabby.
Shabby, I'd say. And if you'd like to enjoy, to the maximum extent, The Simultaneous Sip that's coming at you.
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Do you feel that? I think a pimple just went away.
Doesn't work all the time.
But when it does, wow!
So in the news, a Spanish man, according to CNN, a Spanish man has been jailed for 15 years and 5 months for killing and eating his mother at the apartment they shared in Madrid.
When I read that story, I remembered something my mother taught me when I was young, which is, if you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all.
And since I'd like to talk about this, I'd like to say something nice about this man who killed and ate his mother.
I mean, it's not much. You have to dig kind of deep to find something nice to say.
But I feel like we should be balanced.
On one hand, he's a horrible murderer who ate his mother.
Well, I think we can all agree that's very bad.
But is that everything about him?
No. He has some redeeming Characteristics, some qualities that I think need to be called out.
He was resourceful.
I'm seeing this in the comments exactly.
I like to say that he doesn't waste food.
That's not nothing.
So that's that.
Ron DeSantis continues to be The most clever politician that I've seen in quite a while.
You know, he's been killing it as a governor by doing things that are just wildly popular for Republicans, and apparently weren't that hard to do, which is the weird part.
You know, there's a list of things that all Republicans want, and then he just took the list, and he's just like checking the boxes.
Okay, we'll get rid of, you know, critical race theory in schools, bang, you know.
We'll do this. But everything he's done so far had the quality of being local.
He was doing stuff for Florida.
And he just came out with one of the most genius things I've seen a politician do in a long time, at least since Trump was thrilling us with his moves, both good and bad.
And what he did was he decided to answer the call to help Florida, I'm sorry, To answer the call for Texas and Arizona, who both need some help on their borders because of the influx of people coming over the border.
And so Ron DeSantis just went national.
He used Florida resources, and I think it's mostly a personnel thing.
He's going to let them borrow some personnel.
And I don't know how much extra Personnel of this type Florida has, but it looks like they haven't cut their police budget, so they had something to spare.
Now, who knows how much it is, right?
It's a state. It's not the federal government, so who knows how much he can share with them.
But he's making an announcement, he's making news, and he looks like a national leader.
And so he did something, I don't know, can you think of the last time a governor Did something that was clearly a national thing?
Because their job doesn't really let them do that.
You have to be pretty clever to figure out how to be a national leader when you're just a governor.
Just a governor. I mean, it's a pretty important state.
So I would say whoever is advising him, or maybe these are his own ideas, but in either case, he hired the advisor and decided what advice to take.
So you have to give him credit and criticism if things don't work.
He's just killing it.
I mean, it's actually starting to become actually humorous because DeSantis is making leadership look like it's easy.
Right? He's making it look easy.
And we know it's not, because if it were easy, everybody would be doing it, right?
But I swear to God, he's making it look easy.
And so Starrhelm says he's a brilliant guy on his own.
I would say, based on just what we're observing, it's pretty darn brilliant, I would have to say.
And by the way, I would say this if you were a Democrat.
The way he's playing the politics of it, separate from, you know, are these good ideas, etc., is just brilliant.
And I don't think you can overlook that.
He's just killing it.
And he's even doing things on such a regular basis that you can't quite get him out of your head.
You know, you wait a few days, boom, DeSantis does something.
Wait a few days, boom, DeSantis does something.
Who else is doing something?
Oh, Lira Long says Trump is advising him.
Well, I don't know, because Trump is probably competing with him for the primaries, don't you think?
So I don't know how much advising he's doing, unless they maybe have talked about DeSantis being vice president.
Maybe. I mean, he's young enough that he could make the leap to president after being vice president.
So maybe, maybe that's in the offing, but I would think DeSantis would like to jump directly to the top job.
I mean, would. So Biden continues to amuse, and he said that he gave Putin a list of 16 critical infrastructures that he doesn't want Russia to hack.
Now, let me tell you, when I heard that, I had so many jokes that just rushed into my head that I was paralyzed.
I tried to write one down, but there were so many other jokes that were just like burying it.
I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And I turned into like this monkey in a room full of bananas.
And I'm like, ah, it's an embarrassment of riches.
But I did manage to make a joke out of it with Robots Read News, my alternative comic if you've seen it.
And the robot in Robots Read News talks about Biden giving Putin 16 infrastructure targets.
And the robot said the experts expect Biden to give Putin a list of cities we don't want nuked as sort of a follow-up.
Bad news in Portland?
Didn't make the list.
You didn't make the list.
Now, here's your humor-writing tip for the day.
Somebody on Twitter said, hey, I beat you to it, and I said something similar about Detroit.
Now, which is funnier?
Okay, you ready? So in the comments, and I know you're biased toward me or you wouldn't be watching this, but try to be unbiased, right?
It won't hurt my feelings.
What is funnier? Detroit or Portland?
Go. I'm looking at the comments.
I'll read them out. So I'm saying Portland, for sure.
Portland, Portland, Portland, Portland by a mile.
Portland, Portland, Portland, Portland, San Francisco.
Portland, Portland, Portland, Portland, Portland.
All right. So we might all be biased here.
No one's more biased than I am on this particular point.
But the point is that there are words...
That are funnier. And it's not just that the word Portland is funnier.
At least it sounds funnier to my ear.
But because it's more recent, and it's silly, and it's a place that should have been a successful city, but turned to crap recently.
So you got that recency stuff.
Detroit's kind of an old story.
So it doesn't have that recency thing to give it a little extra juice.
So Portland was the right answer.
All right, I'm going to give you a little quiz here.
Are you ready? I'm going to read a tweet, and you have to guess which news organization wrote this tweet.
Okay? You ready?
So I won't tell you the news organization.
You have to guess it. Here it is.
The tweet said, after five months focused almost exclusively on pressing domestic concerns, it was evident at nearly every stop during Biden's travels across Europe that the president was at last in his comfort zone on his first international trip.
What network?
You all got it right.
CNN, CNN, CNN, CNN. Maybe some of you saw it on Twitter, but it was sort of easy to guess, wasn't it?
Now, if you can guess which network wrote the tweet with just the context of the tweet, there's something wrong with our news.
Because if it weren't news, you wouldn't be able to tell, right?
It's the fact that it's propaganda that's obvious.
If it were news, it would sound like Biden took his first overseas trip and talked to Putin.
That's news. But whatever this is, it's not even trying to be news.
So CNN has become a parody of itself, really, and it just continues getting funnier.
So as you know, Biden did not cover America in glory at the G7, and especially with his conversations with Putin.
Not much happened there.
But I have to ask you this question, because I saw a meme that was very funny showing Putin being large and Biden being old and in a chair, basically picked from the meme that showed, remember the Carters, Jimmy Carter and his wife, and they looked tiny in a picture, and somebody else looked big.
Who was in the picture? I forget.
It doesn't matter. But they used that meme, and it was, you know, Putin was big, and then Biden was a little guy in the chair.
And I saw that, and I thought to myself, that's too far, isn't it?
It was very funny.
I don't begrudge anybody from doing a meme, but just from my personal taste, it feels too far.
Oh, that's right.
It was Biden with the Carters.
Thank you. And here's why it feels too far, because that's the power of the visual image.
Have I criticized Biden?
When he was meeting with international leaders?
Yes, I have. Do I feel comfortable with that?
Well, you know, should you ever criticize your president when your president is doing a foreign trip?
It's a little bit on the edge, wouldn't you say?
You know, and I'm kind of in that weird gray area.
I'm not CNN, but I'm also not just an individual because I do this.
So I have a platform, and so I've got a little higher standard for good behavior, right, that I impose on myself, because I think it's just reasonable.
And I ask you this, at what point is mocking your own leader in the context of something like a Cold War, not exactly, but you know what I mean, at what point do you go too far?
And I guess my limit was the visual, the meme, because the meme didn't have a reason.
When I'm criticizing Biden, I say, this is what he did, and it's pretty obvious what I'm criticizing.
I'm criticizing a specific behavior, for example, or something about he said wrong, something like that.
But a meme doesn't have any of that.
A meme is just demeaning.
And if you're demeaning your own president and promoting Putin, and you're using a visual element which is, you know, just more sticky than anything that's conceptual, it feels too far.
So I saw it and I laughed and I appreciated it.
But I couldn't retweet it.
And I don't think I would necessarily try to impose that standard on anybody else.
But you have to ask yourself that question.
We do have a president who, frankly, everybody is aware that he's at a certain age.
And we all expect some hiccups because of his age.
It would be naive to think there wouldn't be any.
Even Democrats have to expect that.
So it's fair to call that out.
It matters. But just think about it.
Think about when you've gone too far on that.
Ken says, dementia.
Say it, Scott. Well, I can't give him a medical diagnosis, but if I did, I might think there's a little of that going on.
So did you see the news clip of Biden angrily ripping into CNN's Caitlin Collins?
Because she asked him a question.
And said, why was he confident that he could get Putin to do whatever it is that he wanted him to do?
And Biden gets all angry and he says, basically, he accused her of putting words in his mouth because he had never used the word confident, which he was quite strident in pointing out.
I never used that word.
Look what you're doing. Blah, blah, blah.
And It reminded me of something.
Maybe you can help me, because it's reminding me of something.
And what is it like when CNN makes up something and assigns it to you as if you said it?
What's that called?
It starts with an F, right?
Like a F. Fake news!
Fake news! Fake news, yeah.
So Biden is actually accusing CNN of fake news.
And I feel as if Biden's this close to turning orange and demanding a border wall.
Just saying.
Just wait a few more days.
And the transition of Biden into Trump...
May be complete. I've given him another 90 days for the full transition.
You all remember Hawk Newsom, famously of New York City Black Lives Matter?
And I had blocked him a while ago, and he tweeted when he saw that the Biden administration has said that white supremacy is the biggest domestic hoax.
Hawk tweeted at me, and he said in a tweet, Well, he tweeted at the world, but included me.
He said, when I said this two years ago, Scott Adams blocked me.
I demand an apology.
In other words, he believes that I said that white supremacy was not the big problem and that that's why I blocked him.
But I did not block him for that reason.
The question of whether white supremacy is the big problem is worthy of discussion and people can disagree, but that's not why I blocked him.
I blocked him for being racist and for saying that white people were the problem.
Not white supremacists.
Did he think I was supporting white supremacists?
No, I blocked him because he said white people were bad.
Not white supremacists.
White people. Now, I don't think I remember it wrong.
I believe he said something...
Right on point with what I just described.
He might see it differently, so be aware that there's some subjectivity in this account.
You're hearing my version of it, so to be fair, you should hear his version of it too.
But here's the thing about his data.
One way to look at the future...
of terrorism is that there's a lot of rumbling and it looks like the white supremacists are making a lot of noise.
And so I guess the government has decided that based on recent tragedies, plus the noise that they're making, if you put those two together and apply a little law enforcement logic, That it tells you that white supremacists and that kind of thinking is the main driver of future domestic terrorism.
Okay. You know, when experts tell you something like that, it doesn't mean they're wrong, but it also doesn't mean they're right.
Let me ask you this. What have they been right about before when predicting the future?
Now, it doesn't count That you might say, well, defunding the police caused a rise in crime because everybody saw that one.
You didn't need an expert for that.
But if your experts predict a specific thing will be the big problem in the future, how often are they right?
How many times have they gotten it right?
Did they see 9-11 coming?
So you're talking about a group of people who have no ability to predict.
Certainly not any better than you do, which would basically be guessing.
So the first thing about the data is it's coming from a group of people who don't have any track record of being good at predicting things that sort of come out of nowhere.
And if they're so deeply embedded into the militias and various white supremacist groups, because you know they've penetrated all of them, right?
At least electronically.
So they either have human assets or they have complete digital control of their little white supremacist world.
How much trouble can they cause?
It's probably the most deeply penetrated terrorist group of all time.
I'll bet there isn't one substantial group of white supremacists or anybody who has that kind of ideology.
I'll bet there's not one of them that doesn't have an FBI asset and complete digital penetration.
So I would think If I were to guess, I would say the FBI is going to do a hell of a good job of tamping down things there, because they're just all up in their underpants.
It just feels like stopping al-Qaeda is hard.
It's hard to get an FBI informant in al-Qaeda, but all over the place domestically, because you can fit in and you can get their digital signals and everything else.
So that's the first point.
Here's the second point.
We think that data is objective, right?
Here's the data. Well, now you have the facts.
Data equals facts.
But I feel like in 2021 you should be on to that.
You should realize that the way things are framed is what matters.
And because the data you collect is the data that will populate the frame you've chosen.
So if you choose the wrong frame, You can populate it with accurate data, but it won't help you because you've got the wrong way of looking at the world.
Here's another way of looking at this white supremacist problem.
And I tweeted back to Hawk about this.
By the way, I like Hawk.
As a human being, because I interacted with him a number of times, as a human being, he's delightful.
I could hang out with him.
He's a fun guy.
He's very substantial.
I think he's very serious about making the world better, etc.
But we do disagree on some stuff.
So I tweeted back at him and I said, but about your data.
I said black violence is mostly a teachers' union and economic opportunity problem played out.
White racist violence is mostly a mental health problem played out.
That's my frame.
That instead of saying, hey, black people shoot a lot of black people, or black people shoot a lot of white people, how does that help you?
So? And then what?
You hire the extra special black police to stop the black crime?
What did you get from that?
It's a frame that doesn't help.
So if you put good data into a bad frame, what the hell are you going to do with it?
Well, no policy is going to come out of that.
That's useful. But suppose you said black violence is driven by a certain economic situation.
And that economic situation is primarily perpetuated by bad schools, because if every black kid had a chance for a quality education, nothing would look the same.
It just wouldn't look the same, right?
So if we treat black violence as its root cause, the teachers' unions, then you know exactly what to do.
Problem. Solution.
Let's work on this teachers' union blockade of competition in schools, because that's why they're so bad.
There's no competition. Suppose you took white supremacy and say to yourself, instead of a racism problem, it's a mental health problem.
Because it is, right?
You know, you could be, at least in terms of how we judge these things, you could have good mental health and be racist, Unfortunately.
It's so common that you'd have to say it's in the norm.
But by the time you pick up a weapon and decide to kill a bunch of people over it, that's not racism.
Not really. That's mental health.
That just has racism as a trigger.
And how would you treat things if you said it's a mental health problem?
Well, maybe you would put more assets into mental health.
Maybe you'd find the People who are loners who have no friends, maybe you'd make sure that nobody spends too much time alone.
Do you think that many of the people who became mass shooters, do you think they spent a lot of time around people, friends?
Let's say friends. They might have a few.
Might have a family member or two.
I don't feel like they had a lot of friends contact, right?
Now, I'm not sure that's the solution, but what I'm saying is if you define it as a mental health problem, You still have to do all the FBI law enforcement stuff, of course, but you'd go at it differently.
That's all I'm saying. So Hawke's framing that there's something like a white people problem with violence is no more useful than saying there's a black citizen violence problem.
They might both be true, right?
Does it matter? Because it doesn't help you.
It just makes things worse.
Pick a frame that's useful, and then the data might help you.
Rasmussen has a poll on critical race theory, asking people if they thought race relations would be better or worse if critical race theory is taught in schools.
How do you think that came out?
Well, of course, it lined up, as you might expect, by political party, but the sum of it is that 24% said it would make things better.
That's right. Only 24% of likely voters, including all parties, including independents, only 24% of them think it would make things better.
43% say it would make things worse, and 17% wouldn't make much difference, which also tells you not to do it, right?
Because you don't want to put time and resources into something that doesn't make a difference.
So if you add together the ones who say it's worse and the ones who say it's not much difference, and presumably they would all want it not to happen, you get 60% saying don't do it.
Why are we doing things where 60% of the public, including all the parties, 60% of the public say it's the worst thing ever?
They don't say it's the worst thing ever.
But 60% of the public say don't do it, basically.
In effect, they say that.
Now, when I look at a poll like this, I don't care too much about what Republicans said versus what Democrats said, because they're so predictably on their sides that the only people who matter in terms of finding out where things are going or how things might lean are the independents, the people who are not aligned with either party, or the moderates.
Let's say the moderates...
That are between the extremes.
And the moderates say only 20% of them think it would be better for race relations.
33% say worse and 27% say no difference.
So you get exactly the same.
60% of the moderates say it's either worse or it doesn't help, which is also don't do it.
I don't know if I've seen Can you think of an example where something was this unpopular and also pretty well understood?
I guess you could argue that The public doesn't know exactly what critical race theory is all about, and I'm in that category as well.
I mean, I haven't looked at the details of the syllabus or anything.
But I think we know the basic idea, right?
That it's framing things as race and white people are the enemy in this framing.
I think we know that. So when you have an issue that people sort of understand, as opposed to trade deals, we don't understand that stuff, right?
The economy? We don't really understand that stuff.
How does debt work? I'm not so sure when it's a country, because it's not like a personal debt.
So there are a lot of political things where the public doesn't even understand the concept of what's going on.
So their opinions are just meaningless, you know, political jibber-jabber.
But what happens when people do understand the topic, and 60% of them are against it?
Rustic says, Scott is playing dumb on critical race theory.
No, I am dumb. I'm not being modest.
I have not looked into the details.
But I understand the big point, right?
That it frames things on racial grounds, and that's all you need to know about it.
I don't need to dig deeper to know this is a toxic idea.
So anyway, if you can think of any example where something this unpopular and this well understood...
Somebody says the border.
Yeah, that might be right.
Is it about the same number of people who want the border to be more controlled, right?
Voter ID. That's a good example.
You know what I'd love to see?
Maybe Rasmussen can pull this together.
I'd love to see the list of things where the government's policy opposes the will of 60% or more of the public.
Let's say 50%.
How often does that happen?
Because I'm okay with it when the government is overriding stupidity.
Marijuana might be another example.
You're right. Those are good examples.
Prohibition is ancient history.
All right.
Here is my take on masks.
Yes.
I understand there are some people who turn off this mask This livestream the moment I mention the pandemic.
I'm not going to change that because it's sort of the biggest thing happening and it has all kinds of meaty stories.
So I saw the feedback, but no, that's not going to change.
Here's my take. Yeah, as you know, I thought masks were certainly a good risk-reward thing to try out early in the pandemic.
It didn't mean masks should be worn when you're jogging.
I just thought there are places that make sense, places that doesn't make sense, etc.
And we're at the end of the pandemic, people are vaccinated, and this would be the time to get rid of the masks, at least in America.
I've suggested that July 4th will be the last time I wear a mask.
I realize that the California governor has said that masks are not required, but still businesses require them in some cases.
My take is that I'm not going to frequent any business that requires a mask after July 4th.
I think it's good to just pick a date.
Because then that just adds a little clarity to a point.
That's the main reason to do it.
And, you know, it's symbolic because it's Independence Day.
Now, I get it.
Lots of you have already thrown away your masks.
Lots of you are already on that side.
And depending on the state you're in, that certainly makes sense that you're already ahead of everybody.
But in California, we're sort of laggards in the opening up.
I give my government actually pretty much leeway, like to be wrong, because there's a lot of guessing involved, and some of it's going to be wrong.
There are going to be mistakes. People are going to die.
It's like any war, right?
You could have the best general in the world, but people are going to die, and there are going to be mistakes.
So I'm kind of an easy grader.
On the governments, and I told you I would be at the beginning of the pandemic.
I told you many times over a year ago that after we were done with this, I was going to be grading our government, all the governments, easily because they were guessing.
They were doing the best they could.
Everybody had experts advising them.
Mistakes were made. They're not bad people necessarily.
Governor Cuomo may be a special case because of the nursing homes, but even that probably had some You know, mitigating circumstances if you dug into it.
I doubt there was anybody in New York who was quite aware of what they were doing.
There had to be something there about the bureaucracy or something.
So there was a horrible mistake, but I don't think we know exactly the nature of the mistake.
Like, was it just a communication or bureaucracy?
Could have been a lot of things.
Anyway. And so July 4th, I think, is generous.
Because as you're already thinking, why are you waiting so long, right?
And I am giving them a nice, generous kind of cushion.
But after July 4th, I'm done.
I'm done. So you may have noticed that when I tweeted that, a cult leader named Andrew Tate He came after me on Twitter for changing my mask view.
And in his view, I went from a dumb, dumb guy who thought masks would help to an enlightened person who agrees with what Andrew Tate apparently has thought since the beginning, that masks were a bad idea.
And of course, nothing like that happened, right?
So he was just wrong, and we're at that point in the pandemic where people will be misinterpreting or misremembering what opinions I have expressed and then viciously attacking me for their imaginary opinion of what I said that I'd never said.
Now, let me ask you this.
Did I ever change my opinion?
Because I feel like my opinion was always masks are a good idea and In situations where it's obvious they're a good idea and it's not a good idea for, say, taking a walk in the woods by yourself.
Have I ever been inconsistent about that?
I've always said there's a place that they make sense and then a whole bunch of places where they probably don't.
And I'm saying now that conditions have changed and we're achieving a situation where it doesn't make sense.
Completely consistent.
You just look at the risk-reward as you move and adjust accordingly based on facts and changes and things.
But according to this cult leader who has a manly man cult that involves smoking cigars and bragging and saying manly things, and he and his supporters, I think there are some of them here, came at me today saying that I was a coward.
A coward. And then I was justifying my cowardice with all of my talking and stuff.
To which I say, what the hell's wrong with you?
Since when is doing a risk management assessment and acting according to risk management data, as best you can surmise when we're not all right about the risks, but when did that become cowardice?
When did it become really manly to do things that could get you killed with no particular benefit?
When did it become more manly to ignore a risk which could be completely eliminated without killing you?
So anyway, the cult came after me.
I think this is another example.
See how many times you see this.
When somebody says that they were in favor of masks or that masks work, what do the critics say?
Sometimes they say, oh, I saw some studies that say they don't work.
But why is it that every major medical group in every industrial country hasn't seen what you've seen?
Because all the people who really know this field and are in it and the experts everywhere, the whole world, every country, so the politics is different everywhere, but all of them said masks are a good idea, right?
Or at least that they would have an effect.
Now, in the case, let's say, Sweden, they may have thought, well, it might make a difference, but not enough for For us, given all things considered, which is a different decision.
But I think that people conflate it with the lockdowns.
Now, help me with my own memory, will you?
Tell me in the comments what you believe my opinion has been, since the beginning, about the value of lockdowns.
Tell me what you thought, just from your memory of what I said, what do you think?
What do you think I said about lockdowns?
Because I think we're going to see.
I said they were necessary for time.
Probably don't work.
I'm just reading your comments. You honored it.
Overreaction flattens the curve.
Necessary at first. Don't work.
Not good. Good in the beginning.
Yeah, I think most of you are pretty close.
Right? So you've been paying attention.
Which is, in the fog of war, when it was originally going to be something like a few weeks, I thought, well, maybe.
Right? How could social distancing not work?
I mean, it seems like it was worth a shot.
But I think we fairly quickly reached a point Where it wasn't flattening the curve, but it was killing us, it was flattening our economy.
And then that was different.
And of course, I was never against businesses operating outdoors or having some kind of mitigation, one person in the store at a time, whatever, but not lockdowns.
So I think when people criticize me about masks and say, masks don't work, they're usually saying lockdowns didn't work, but they're conflating it with masks.
That feels like what happens every time I get into this conversation.
So look for that. So in censorship news, you've heard this story.
You know, Brett Weinstein was talking to a doctor who was saying some positive things about ivermectin, which has caused...
Brett Weinstein's Dark Horse podcast to get two strikes so far, and one more strike, and he's off the platform, and there goes his family income.
So stakes are high, right?
And when I saw that, I thought to myself, what kind of terms of service did he violate?
I mean, I'm just thinking of it sort of as a logical person without knowing the details of the terms of service.
I thought, Well, what rule do you violate by just talking to a medical expert who has an opinion that's very different from the mainstream?
Isn't that almost the purpose of communication?
The purpose of communication is not just to give the standard view.
The purpose of communication is to give the non-standard view and make it compete with the standard view.
Right? That's the whole point.
Is there anything that social media should be doing that's more important than what I just said?
Show us the standard view.
Now show us the competition and let them fight it out.
Now, when the new one loses, let's see another one.
Fight it out. Okay, the standard keeps winning.
Show us another one. All right, fight it out.
Ooh, whoa.
This time the new one's a little bit stronger.
Didn't see that coming, right?
Now the standard one maybe drops away.
That's how all progress is made.
If you get rid of the non-standard opinion, civilization just stops.
Nothing happens.
It's the problematic conversation that's the only thing that can drive you forward, the non-standard stuff.
So I asked Andres Backhouse.
We had an exchange privately on Twitter.
And I was just questioning what terms of service could possibly be broad enough to cover this description of a doctor promoting a therapy that is not mainstream.
Like, what? How could that be?
I mean, these are serious people, right?
Brett Weinstein? You know, he didn't just, like, walk out of the pumpkin patch, right?
He's got some serious academic credentials, and he was talking to somebody who was an expert in the field.
It's not like crazy people.
So Andres sends me the Terms of Service, just a screenshot of the Terms of Service, and I swear to God, I did not know this.
It specifically blocks ivermectin conversation.
Specifically. I thought it was going to be something general, like don't say things that will get people hurt, or don't Don't promote a cure that'll kill somebody.
Okay. But it's actually named by name.
Don't promote ivermectin or you'll be kicked off the platform.
So here's my thought experiment.
Suppose someday, and it's my understanding, Andres said this, that there are at least two high-quality studies In the pipeline for ivermectin.
What would happen, and this is just a hypothetical, what would happen if they showed it worked?
You couldn't say that on YouTube because the World Health Organization presumably would not immediately change things.
They might look at it and they might change things eventually.
But between the time that a study came out, And the time that the organizations that control our medical knowledge decided to bless it, would you get kicked off the platform?
Because that's what the terms of service say.
They say even if this high-quality study comes out, until the World Health Organization says yes, you're out of luck.
You're off the platform. So this is pretty chilling.
You know, I felt a whole different level of badness when I saw it was called that one specifically.
Yeah, and I see what you're saying.
The World Health Organization, presumably in the pocket of China, what would happen if a cheap therapeutic, doesn't matter what it is, turned out to just be a killer therapy, according to a really high-quality study?
Do you think that the World Health Organization would say, well, there you go.
Okay, we favor that now.
Or would it depend on what China wanted them to do?
And China might not want everybody else to think there's a cheap therapy, although they might use it themselves, but they might not want everybody else to use it.
So these are some big questions.
Will there be a moment when a critical mass of Democrats come out in favor of free speech?
Could Jon Stewart help break the dam?
Yeah, you all saw the Jon Stewart joking about the fact that the Wuhan lab, actually the name of it is something like the Coronavirus Study Lab, and what are the odds that it wasn't from that lab and really came from a bat kissing a turtle?
As Jon Stewart quite cleverly said.
Well, I don't think he can move the needle that much, but he's definitely a big contributor.
And it made me miss him, right?
I mean, we could use more Jon Stewart.
How does this end?
Well, it's a good question.
How does it end? You know, the locals platform that I'm on, and I'm a small investor in it as well, and it's a subscription service, and all of the things that I can't say here, I can say on there.
So that's one way it might end.
It might end with more subscription services, because when you've got that going, you can just do more.
How do you convert someone from their current religion?
I'm asked. I've thought about that a lot.
I'm not sure it's a good idea, though, unless you're talking about, let's say, extremists who are going to kill you.
Here's how I would approach it.
Let's imagine it's ethical.
It's not. But if you're just going to talk about what would work, we'll talk about the tool, the ethics of it, completely unethical, which is changing somebody's religion just because you can.
I would start with, if you could get people to pay attention, a lesson about world religions so that they can see that there are lots of religions and they have a commonality to them, yet they're all different, and people believe them just as strongly as everybody believes them.
Because until you see that everybody can believe anything, anybody can believe anything, until you know that, you can't really get over the fact that maybe yours isn't the real one.
So, you have to understand that even if your religion is right, how do you explain 75% of the world, or whatever, depending on which religion is yours, how do you explain 75% of the world looking at the same information you are but getting a different answer?
It should give you a little bit of humility, but that's not enough to change anybody's mind.
So you'd have to do a lot of work to explain how religions occur and how people believe them and how easily people believe things that aren't true.
So I think you'd have to start with a whole education about how people believe things that aren't true.
And that would probably go a long way.
But, like I said, I'm pro-religion.
I'm not a believer myself, but I'm very pro-religion.
And I think it clearly has utility and helps, and people get benefit from it, makes people have some purpose in their life, gives them sort of a program of what to do.
It has all kinds of good stuff.
You meet people, it's a social thing, etc.
Yes, you can see into my bathroom from here.
You believe the simulation, somebody says.
I do. Conversion is a capital offense.
Yeah, you don't want to be converting anybody from Islam.
That would be kind of a dangerous thing.
That's a death sentence, depending where you are, of course.
Any developments in housing and the tiny house story?
Well, I don't like the way you asked that question because it assumes that an inexpensive house would be tiny, and I resist that vigorously.
I think we have the ability to make very low-cost housing that's as good as any other housing.
All right.
And so I have to tell you one story about the service here at the hotel.
The service is tremendous.
It's so good that it's actually almost funny.
But I think I told you this story, We have a butler assigned just to us.
He probably has some other people he works for.
But he just seems to appear weirdly.
Even when we're not calling him, right now they have this cool system where there's an iPhone that they leave in the room and you just text the butler using their iPhone and he gets back to you in like 30 seconds and does pretty much anything you need him to do.
And so it's amazing. It's just the best experience.
But he has this weird way of showing up exactly where he needs to be.
So I went to the lobby yesterday and I was there.
So instead of asking the butler, which would normally be the single point of contact, I'm standing by the lobby.
So I ask a question, and I swear to God this happened.
The woman stands up, and there's a wall that's just sort of a decorative wall, but there was a fake door built into the wall.
She opens the fake door, and the butler walked out.
What? This was in the lobby.
It wasn't like in my room, or it wasn't where the butler lives, I don't think.
He was behind that false door.
Today, I went for a walk and then wanted to grab some food at the little place you get food.
What would you call it? A little bar area that they sort of food by the pool.
So, you know, this is like the one time that I'm not going through the butler to order food.
And I'm like, oh, I guess I'm talking to other people now.
So the server comes over, and I'm like, can I have the menu?
I'd like to order some food.
She turns around, and the butler walked down to the kitchen.
He was there!
Now, I randomly picked a place to eat.
Just randomly. It's like, oh, this is open.
I think I'll go over there. And the butler was there.
How? I don't know.
But damn, they have good service here.
That was the butler just confirming something for me.
