Episode 1472 Scott Adams: I'm Not Just a Lyricist and Vocalist. I Also Sip Coffee and Talk About the News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Deaths per day, in US, from ALL causes?
An0maly, my new mascot
Black support for Biden has crashed
Jeffrey Toobin reveals something else
VP Harris to visit Viet Nam
A new, improved, tolerant Taliban?
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Every one of them. And all you need to make it special is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a glass or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now.
For the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better, is called the simultaneous sip.
And watch it work. Go!
Wait, wait. We have a special request.
I saw this go by on the locals platform.
The special request is that sometimes a sip is not enough.
Can we agree on that? It's not enough.
So today I'd like to introduce...
Thanks to a follower recommendation, the simultaneous slurp.
Everybody, one more time, except go big.
Ah, yeah.
That was both disgusting and exhilarating at the same time.
You don't get that often.
Well, let's talk about all the things.
First of all, I'm now streaming on two platforms, Locals and YouTube.
I tried to stream on Rumble.
Have you heard of it? Rumble is sort of a video streaming service.
It competes with YouTube.
Let's see if I get demonetized.
One, two, three...
Yeah, it should be happening about now.
Um... But here's the process for me to become a live streamer on Rumble.
If you want to be a producer, you click a button to request whatever they need to make you a producer.
And then the way the process works is that after you've clicked that button, nothing happens.
And then the next day, nothing happens.
They may or may not be sending mail to my spam.
I don't know. But if you'd like to see me on Rumble...
Could you talk to somebody at Rumble and say, I don't know how to get on there.
I'll click the button. I suppose you might be sending me an email that I don't see, but your process is not quite connecting the dots.
So I would be live streaming there if I could.
Remember I told you that a lifelong weird dream of mine came true?
This is the weirdest thing.
I've told you too many stories about unusual successes in my life.
Things which were totally unlikely, such as becoming a famous cartoonist, being a number one author, best-selling author, getting invited to the White House.
So I've had all these weird, weird things.
And the weirdest of all, Was I always had a dream to be a lyricist.
And apparently that came true without any effort on my part because some of my podcast stuff has been turned into music by adding music to it.
And the product is called Meaning Wave.
You can just Google it and you'll find the music.
By Akira the Don.
And there's some new music coming out.
But Akira messaged me and reminded me that here I'd been crowing about the fact that I had accomplished this highly unusual goal of being a lyricist with no musical training.
I don't even listen to music much.
I mean, rarely. And it was the most unlikely goal I've ever had in my life.
And it actually happened. But, as Akira pointed out, there's something even more unlikely about it.
Somehow, I didn't even notice that I'm also a vocalist, because it's my actual voice that appears in the songs.
Now it's just samples of my voice.
But what were the odds that I would go from literally not being able to speak...
I'll remind you of this story.
Many of you have already heard it.
A number of years ago, I lost the ability to speak for about three and a half years to a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia.
Long story short, I found the only doctor in the world who had a surgery, experimental surgery to fix it, and I became one of the first people in the world to fix that problem.
But my affirmations at the time is that I, Scott, will speak perfectly.
Now that seemed unlikely because I didn't speak perfectly before I got the spasmodic dysphonia.
I was kind of nasally and nobody really wanted to hear my voice.
But because I did lots of voice training before the surgery and took years to rehab it, the weirdest thing happened.
I'm a professional vocalist now.
Well, not professional because I didn't get paid for it.
But there's an actual commercial song with my voice on it that's actually music.
Literally, my voice is music.
Now, if you told me that that goal could have actually happened, when I couldn't speak...
Just keep in mind, put the context on this, that when I couldn't speak, I had a very specific affirmation that I repeated every day that I, Scott, will speak perfectly.
I'm actually featured on music...
This is blowing my mind so hard that you can't even believe it.
I suppose this is more for me than it is for you.
All right, how about more about you?
So apparently the California governor recall race is really going to be close, and Larry Elder looks to be the leading person to take the job if Newsom does get recalled.
And here's my take on the strangest thing about this story.
It's another one of these, the dog not barking.
Has anyone mentioned that Larry Elder is black?
Right? It's not even a story.
And if it gets mentioned at all, and literally I've never even heard it mentioned, how do you have a black guy running for governor, probably will win, and...
Should we take a moment to celebrate?
Should we take a moment to celebrate that being black wasn't even part of the question?
Or if it was, it was considered an advantage.
Am I right? If you thought about it for a minute, and you said to yourself, hey, Larry Elder's running for governor, he's black, didn't you think that would help him?
You did, didn't you?
I mean, think about it.
Think about how far we've come.
Lots of work to do, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not saying systemic racism is solved or anything like that.
But just think about the fact that the guy who might be governor in just a few weeks, who's a really good shot, he's running as a black man and nobody cared.
And if they did care, they thought it was a positive, at least politically.
So, I don't know. I feel like that's super noteworthy because it's not being talked about, specifically.
Yeah, the less it's talked about, the happier we are.
Where is the narrative about all the racist Republicans?
Aren't the Republicans all supposed to be a bunch of racists?
So how could it be that the moment Larry Elder entered the race, the moment he entered the race, he took the lead?
Where are all the racist Republicans?
Yeah. Is there anybody who cares about his race?
I don't think so, except in a positive way.
Another question. Do you remember it wasn't that many years ago when the biggest debate, it seems like, in public was about teaching intelligent design in schools?
Whatever happened to that?
But... I noted in a tweet that once Elon Musk told you that you were almost certainly a simulated reality and that you were probably programmed by some other intelligence, kind of ruined the whole topic, didn't it?
I feel like you can't have that debate anymore.
As soon as you throw in the statistical near certainty that we are a simulation created by some other form of intelligence, and by the way, that argument is just based on math and common sense, that if one simulation could be created, and we know we'll be able to make one, in my lifetime we'll be able to make a simulation where the creatures in there think they're real, because they were programmed to think they're real.
If we can make one, there are going to be more than one.
It might be millions of them.
It could be trillions of them.
If you make a good enough simulation, the people in the simulation can make their own simulation.
Or they think they did.
So it seems like the question of intelligent design, we can't even have the argument anymore.
Because the simulation theory just ruined the argument.
Anyway, I just point out that there are some things you think are the most important thing in the world and then they can just go away on their own.
I don't even know what happened.
Somebody said...
I'm looking in the comments.
Oh, okay. Well, never mind.
I thought it was a different comment. Question.
Well, before we get to that.
I love watching Fox News and CNN fight.
I don't know. It's one of the most amusing things.
I think I was a...
Probably an outlier in the sense that I liked watching Chris Cuomo and his brother do their little show on CNN. If you don't take it seriously, and you shouldn't, because obviously that's not real news, but just watching the two successful brothers banter, I liked it.
I know you didn't.
I'm not telling you you should like what I like.
I'm just telling you I liked it from an entertainment perspective.
I didn't take any of the news part of it seriously.
But... Here's some more of that little back and forth between Fox News and CNN. So, apparently, Chris Cuomo's show is just hemorrhaging female viewers, which is no surprise, since he sported his brother, and his brother was accused of a lot of Me Too stuff.
So, Cuomo primetime, I guess...
Average 86,000 female viewers in the age group that they want the most.
And last week it was down 33% compared to the second quarter totals.
Wow! A key demographic was down 33% because of what his brother did.
Wow! Wow! And down stunning, as Fox says, a stunning 56% compared to last year.
Now, mostly compared to last year is because Trump was in the news.
That's not anything to do with CNN per se.
But here's what I like about this.
Fox News refers to Chris Cuomo as, quote, CNN's troubled anchor.
Troubled anchor.
Now... Here's my question.
Do you ever see CNN use disgraced?
They'll throw in disgraced in front of somebody's name or title as if it's just the fact that they're disgraced.
What is the dividing line between being troubled, being a troubled anchor, and being a disgraced anchor?
What's the dividing line?
Where does troubled turn into disgraced?
Because you know, if this had been reversed, I feel like CNN would have called, you know, let's say if it happened to, you know, if Hannity had a brother who was a governor, or if Tucker Carlson had a brother who was a governor, I think they would call them the disgraced anchor.
Disgraced. So this is a little persuasion trick for you.
Just insert disgraced in front of anybody you don't like.
Let me give you an example.
Disgraced President Biden talked about the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle.
Pretty good, huh?
Oh, well, it looks like I'm already getting some help connecting on Rumble.
Thank you, Amanda.
Back to the news. Can we all get doctor's notes to wear no masks?
And if we can't, why not?
Why not? Why can't you go to the doctor and say, let's say I'll use myself as an example, doctor, I'm fit and healthy and I've been vaccinated and Recently, so it hasn't even worn off.
And I find it very disturbing to wear masks, and it itches my face, and makes me psychologically unhappy, etc.
Can I get my doctor to write me a note that says, oh yeah, okay, you don't need a mask?
Because yes, it would help.
Perhaps it would help. But...
All things considered, you've looked at your risks, your rewards, and as your doctor, I certify your choice.
Yes, there's some extra risk of not wearing the mask, would say my doctor.
I imagine my doctor would say that.
But it's a low risk.
And I signed your note saying that you can take that risk.
It's a reasonable risk.
Why can't I do that?
And if I did do that, who's going to fight with my doctor?
Right? Let's say you go into your employer and your employer says, you have to wear a mask or you can't come in.
You say, oh, yes, I know that.
Here's my note from my doctor.
Can your employer override your doctor?
I mean, they can, right?
Because if it's a private company, they make their own rules.
They can. But would they?
Turley says no. Oh, interesting.
I'm seeing in the comments that Jonathan Turley says no.
Now, the reason I stopped...
It's because there are just a few people in the world who, if they have an opinion, I just stop and say, okay, they're probably right.
Oh, thank you. So they're probably right.
Sorry. I'm getting a lot of help here today.
So if Turley says that a doctor's note would be good enough not to wear a mask, and I think he's right, right?
How do you overrule a doctor's note?
What employer is going to overrule a doctor's note?
I just don't see it happening.
So I feel like...
I guess I better turn off my alerts.
I'm getting a lot of help on Rumble today.
I feel as if we could all get a doctor's note.
Now... Have you ever tried to get a doctor's prescription for weed?
If you live in a state where you need a doctor to get weed, you probably already know this.
There are specialists.
That's right. There are weed doctors, at least in California, probably other places.
So a weed doctor basically just does one thing, and you just go in, hey, I need some weed.
They do a brief question about your health and look at your health records, and then they say yes or no.
Now, why couldn't we have mask specialist doctors?
Let's say a retired doctor Who just wants to put in an 800 number, do telehealth, right?
Do it by phone. And you call your doctor and you say, hey, here's my situation.
Can I get a note?
Why not? Would we see that popping up?
I mean, it would be short-term business, we hope.
But you would expect the market to respond to that.
I looked at the headlines today.
I was looking for all the deaths.
How many of you can answer the following questions?
How many people, on average, so in the comments, I want to see how informed you are.
In the comments, tell me, how many people per day die in the United States from all causes?
So we're not talking about the pandemic yet.
But from all causes, how many people per day die in the United States?
Go. Put it in the comments, and let me see if you're close.
All right, so your guesses are all over the board.
The answer is about 1,000.
So about 1,000 of the 8,000 people who are dying every day, at the moment, one out of eight is dying of COVID. Now...
Do you count that one out of eight the same as you count the other people?
Well, probably, because that seems fair.
But we have to also include the fact that these are people who might have only lived another year.
If they're elderly, for example, they might have had only a few years left.
So that thousand people is dying is a little misleading.
Because if you looked at life years denied...
A child would have maybe 80 years ahead of them.
A senior citizen might have one.
So what happens if of the 1,000 people who died, what happens if 800 of them only had a couple years left?
It's more like a few hundred people dying, isn't it?
It's more like a few hundred.
Because the people who only lost a year or two You have to count that.
I mean, if you're doing life and death math, you don't get the choice of, oh, everybody lives.
Unfortunately, you've got to make choices.
And I think the fact that this isn't in the headline, and instead we're talking about ICU beds, should tell us that the news is manipulating us and trying to tell us it's a bigger problem than it is.
Now, is the ICU beds problem a problem?
Well, I think the New York Times said I think 20% of the hospitals are having capacity problems with the ICUs.
But what does that mean?
Well, in many cases it means that they just repurpose other space.
It doesn't mean that they turn you away.
If you go to the hospital, you'll still get treated, even with the hospitals that are over capacity.
They'll just open up another...
They might keep you in the emergency room.
They might open up another wing or something.
It will impact other stuff, but the other hospitals that are not impacted, probably you could still go there.
So there's at least some flexibility.
So... Definitely the ICU beds are a problem, but what we don't get is reporting on how much capability hospitals have to handle surges.
If you're looking at one of the other benefits of the pandemic, it's that we learned how to handle surges.
Think about it.
Every major hospital in every city probably, I'm guessing, by now has a pretty detailed plan of what it looks like to have to surge your ICU capacity.
Up by 30% or something.
I'll bet every hospital knows how to do it now.
They know exactly which space to use.
Now, of course, staffing would be a problem.
You can't surge staff too easily.
But anyway, that's the full situation.
I got a new mascot.
Now, a lot of you say, hey, you're a podcaster.
Why do you need a mascot?
Well, I didn't really need one, but I got one.
Somebody says Norway tested and found out that the R for this is lower than the regular flu.
I don't know about that.
Anyway, my mascot is Twitter user Anomaly.
Some of you have heard him. He's my critic, but he refuses to tell me what we disagree with.
He's very, very sure that if he were to debate me in public, he would embarrass me.
But he gave me four things that he disagrees with me.
Let's go through them. Number one, he says, anomaly says to me, you were wrong about Sweden and I was right.
To which I say, wrong about what?
That Sweden exists?
Can you give me a hint?
What was it that I said that you disagreed with?
I don't even know.
So number one is something about Sweden.
I have no idea what that is, so I can't respond to that.
Number two, he said, you're wrong about saying that the unvaccinated are in a pandemic, and you're not.
Well, that was my opinion of how I feel when I'm vaccinated.
When I got vaccinated, I felt as though I was no longer in a pandemic.
Well, you guys are, if you're unvaccinated.
Now, was that a fact?
No. Was it reasoning?
No. It was literally how I feel.
So Anomaly is arguing with me about how I feel.
I feel like I could win that argument.
Anomaly, I think he feels this way.
Scott, how do you feel?
Not that way. End of debate.
Number three, that says Anomaly, you need to get in line for your booster shot soon.
Okay. And what was the part I disagreed with?
Was I arguing that I like booster shots?
I sure wish we had booster shots.
Or was I arguing that they would never happen?
I don't recall even thinking about it.
So what exactly are we disagreeing about?
I don't know. And then number four, Israel is having more cases and deaths this August than last August without the jab.
Now this is obviously a cherry-picked data, but let me ask you this.
Do you think Israel wishes they had not vaccinated?
Do you think that the experts in Israel, anomaly, do you think that they're not happy they vaccinated as much as they did?
Do you think that they think it was a mistake?
Why is it that nobody in the medical profession in Israel knows what anomaly knows?
That it was all a big sham and I guess those vaccinations didn't help.
But Israel itself doesn't know that?
Anyway, so I would like to call Anomaly a critic, but he doesn't actually criticize anything that's even slightly sensible.
So I'm going to call him a mascot for now.
Rasmussen did a poll on voter regrets for 2020, the presidential race.
So I guess conservatives and liberals were about the same.
6% of conservatives and 5% of liberals had some regret.
But 12% of moderates...
Who decides elections?
Moderates, right?
It's the moderates that at least have the ability to swing both ways.
The liberals and conservatives mostly not.
But the moderates, 12% regret, that's pretty big.
Let's dig down a little bit.
Turns out, according to Rasmussen, that 70% of the people that they surveyed, that's not the national thing, but of people that they surveyed, 70% said they voted for Biden.
70% of black citizens.
But only 54% said they would now.
The black support for Biden just crashed.
Why? What happened?
Wasn't Biden the antidote to Trump?
Except what happened. I think the only thing that people know about Biden is he's trying to get him vaccinated, and a lot of them don't like it.
Maybe, maybe what happened was everything you heard about Trump, you realized was bullshit.
Maybe. Maybe all those things you thought would go wrong under Trump turned out to be, like, you know, opportunity zones he funded, and, you know, Trump funded the historically black colleges.
You know, he had...
I mean, he didn't do anything you don't like.
Trump actually killed it for, you know, prison reforms.
Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.
Trump consistently rolled out one thing after another that sounded pretty good to black people.
Because it was. What's Biden done?
Well, Biden has one accomplishment.
He made Black Lives Matter stop protesting.
But nothing changed.
They just stopped protesting.
So maybe the black population is noticing that they got taken by the news industry.
Well, the golden age is still possible.
It turns out that Moderna, of course, they created one of the mRNA vaccines.
They're going to start human trials for an HIV vaccine because it uses the same technology.
So I guess everything we learned about HIV after 37 years of studying it Made us smart enough to create the mRNA platform for the pandemic, but then what we learned in the pandemic made us smart enough that we could circle back and work on AIDS. And apparently there's some kind of virtuous circle of science that somebody else pointed out, not me, I didn't write down the name I wish I had.
But this is kind of cool.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this platform has some potential for cancer, or some forms of cancer.
So this is big.
Let me tell you another one that you didn't see coming.
I didn't see it coming. Do any of you have any kids in school?
What happened when your kids went back to school after a year of virtual learning?
Tell me in the comments.
First week of school, kids happy or unhappy?
Tell me in the comments. What?
Let's see. Just tell me happy or unhappy in the comments.
First, happy. Look at that.
Yeah, happy, happy, happy, happy.
Happy, happy, happy, happy.
Well, yeah, you're getting some colds, I guess.
Yeah. You know what else happened?
At least this is anecdotal, but I'd love to hear it from you.
A lot of the cliques, you know, the little groups that kids form, they dissolved.
And people were able to make new friends that maybe they could not have penetrated before.
There's something about the pandemic that rebooted the social structure of the kids.
Because they lost their friends during the pandemic, or they modified their friend group, and now they're going back almost like it's new.
Because you can get really locked out of a group.
But I'm being told that everybody's being more welcoming than they normally had been.
So here's some advice for your kids.
Do you have any kids in school?
Here's the advice. More for the teens.
Go make some friends.
Go talk to some people who wouldn't have talked to you two years ago.
Everybody seems to be more open and it might be a limited window where everybody's just a little more flexible because they're just so damn happy to see other people.
So go make some friends.
You'll never have, if you're a teenager...
Your whole life, you'll never have a better time to make a friend.
This could be the best time to make a friend.
All right. Jeffrey Toobin.
So you may remember, I might be the only person who gave a full-throated defense of Jeffrey Toobin's job.
When he got in trouble for his little Zoom masturbation thing, I said, let's not make that a career-ending thing.
Let's just call that a human moment.
Let's not make that about his job.
And I don't know anybody else who said that.
I don't know. Did anybody else say, let him keep his job?
But I did. And now I'm glad.
Because he came out with an article on CNN in which he says he doesn't think Trump should be charged with any crimes for the January 6th stuff.
Boy, did people not like that.
Do you know what reasons Jeffrey Toobin gave for why Trump should not be charged with a crime?
There wasn't any evidence of a crime.
He wrote this for CNN. So CNN spared Jeffrey Toobin, and I don't think this is literally true, but it looks like, I'll just say it looks like, for fun, it looks like they said, okay, we're going to spare you, but you need to do one suicide mission for us in return.
And he was like, I don't like that deal, but it's the best I'll get.
And the suicide mission is, Toobin has to explain, are you ready for this?
This is fun. Toobin has to explain on behalf of CNN why everything they've reported about Trump breaking all the laws was not true.
So Toobin has to take the arrows for informing CNN's audience that everything they've told them about Trump so far is a lie because there's no chance of him getting prosecuted for anything.
Here are the reasons.
It's ambiguous that he wanted any violence because he said, go march, but don't be violent.
How do you get prosecuted for inciting violence when you said, don't be violent?
And Jeffrey Toobin correctly points out, I mean, I'm no lawyer, but it sounds pretty logical to me, that if you didn't say do violence and you said don't do violence, it's going to be hard to say you were in favor of violence.
Right? It's ambiguous.
It's certainly well beyond the reasonable doubt standard.
And let's see, what else?
So he didn't do that.
And anything he told, let's say, the Attorney General to do, if Trump believed what he was telling the Attorney General to say, which is that the election was fraudulent, that's what Trump wanted him to say, if Trump believed that was true, there's no crime.
Telling your attorney general to tell the truth, as you see it, even if you're wrong, is not a crime.
Not a crime. So, as Toobin correctly points out, there's literally no evidence of a crime.
Now, that doesn't mean no crime happened.
I'm just saying there's no evidence of one.
And he had to be the guy, the sacrificial lamb, and told CNN's audience, you know, everything we've been telling you for a while, it's kind of bullshit.
There's no crime here.
And he did a good job.
Anyway, so I find that I am proud to have supported Jeffrey Toobin's career, and still am, because I think he gave us a straight story on this.
Somebody says it was a stroke of genius.
All right. Yes, the puns fall like water.
So, of course, CNN has to target whoever is the strongest GOP candidate for president next time, which is Ron DeSantis, if not Trump.
So if Trump runs, of course, he'll get nominated.
But DeSantis would be the obvious number two.
And so Crystalis is going after Ron DeSantis for getting rid of mask mandates in schools.
I guess a few schools are getting sanctioned or something by the state for having them anyway.
But I read the article about Crystalis' hit piece on DeSantis, but all he had was sarcasm.
He didn't have any reasons.
Imagine a hit piece on CNN against a Republican, and the best they could do was sarcasm.
No reasons. So, for example, DeSantis said that Florida was in, quote, COVID season.
Now, what he meant was that when it's hot, people spend more time indoors where you get more COVID. So DeSantis was basically saying, yeah, you know, we expected a spike because people are getting their air conditioning and they're inside.
And Chris Saliza uses sarcasm to say...
There's no COVID season.
There's no COVID season.
No, there's no COVID season.
There's just a season in which the COVID is expected to be more, for an obvious reason.
People are indoors. That's it?
That was his best hit on DeSantis, was something that you completely agree with, and he actually said he agreed with him.
But before he agreed with him, he treated it sarcastically, like, well, there's no COVID season.
COVID season. That's it.
Are you kidding me?
That's the best they could come up with, is that DeSantis did something popular?
Oh, well. In the bad timing news...
Bad timing news!
Kamala Harris had long planned a trip to Vietnam...
Which is going to coincide with the fall of Afghanistan.
The withdrawal of Afghanistan.
Now, just a coincidence that that was planned.
But how bad is the timing that we're going to be made to think about Vietnam at the same time the Biden administration wants you to think about anything but Vietnam?
Can you see the meeting?
It's like, all right. Guys, this is the Biden administration.
We've got quite the PR problem with the Afghanistan thing, but we'll be okay if people don't make the Vietnam comparison.
As long as we keep Vietnam out of the news...
I think we can manage this crisis and spin it.
So, all right, everybody, what are you doing?
Joe Biden, what are you doing? I'll be hiding, and I'll make one statement to say I made no mistakes.
Good, good, that's good.
Everybody else? We'll be saying whatever Joe Biden says.
We'll just... Good, good, you're good.
Anybody? Anybody else? Kamala Harris, what are you going to be doing?
I'll be traveling to Vietnam.
No.
Bad timing.
Okay.
All right. Do you remember when you became a military genius?
It was this week.
I remember not going to school for military planning, and yet, despite my not going to school for military planning, I, like everybody else in America, this week...
Military geniuses.
And let me tell you, let me tell you, when I look at this Afghanistan pullout, I say to myself, you know, I have no experience in logistics.
No experience in military anything.
But you know what?
Despite my complete lack of information and experience, I could have done better in Afghanistan.
And so could all of you.
Right? Right?
Because we're pretty smart with our complete lack of information about what was really happening on the ground and all of our military genius.
Now, isn't it weird?
Think about this. What are the odds of this?
You think the simulation theory is weird?
What about this? Seven-plus billion people in the world.
How many of them are military geniuses?
Almost all of them.
Almost all 7 billion are military geniuses.
Because they all told you what went wrong in Afghanistan.
But what are the odds?
There was 7 billion military geniuses.
Not one of them was involved in anything in Afghanistan planning the withdrawal.
Because it seems like even just one genius would have made a difference.
But none. They had no geniuses.
Is that what you believe?
Do you believe that all the geniuses were everywhere else except Afghanistan?
Take a moment. Just take a moment and think about that.
How fucking stupid are we?
Really? Do you think that the people who are in charge of the Afghanistan withdrawal, do you think they didn't think of what you thought of?
Do you think there's anything that you thought of That the planners in Afghanistan, they didn't think of it.
Really? Really?
They didn't think of it.
They had not considered the Taliban coming in.
Really? But you thought of it.
But nobody there thought of it.
Let me suggest that there's another explanation of what happened.
And I think it's the obvious one.
Now, you don't know, right?
Because we're all speculating. So I'm speculating as much as you are, right?
We're both kind of guessing here.
But I'll tell you what seems most likely.
Did you hear about the president of Afghanistan's departure?
He made it kind of quickly.
And why did he leave Kabul?
As the Taliban were coming in, why did the president of Afghanistan leave Kabul?
Well, obviously, part of it was he didn't want to be killed.
But what was the other part?
He didn't want a bloodbath in Kabul.
Because if the president stayed, there would be fighting and it would get bloody.
And then what would be the outcome?
Kabul would fall anyway.
Right? Kabul was going to fall anyway.
And what did the intel for the United States say about the Taliban taking over when we left?
Our own intel said that in six months they were going to take over.
So the one thing we knew is that the Taliban were going to take over.
Sometime within six months.
Why do you wait?
What was the benefit, exactly, of waiting?
Now you say to yourself, well, you'd avoid all that airport stuff.
But what would you not avoid?
What you wouldn't avoid is six months of civil war.
Do you think that six months of civil war would have created more or less death...
than a terribly planned hasty withdrawal.
It's not even close.
The Civil War would have been much worse.
The hasty withdrawal, as bad as it was for everybody, as bad as it was, it was better than staying.
I think Biden was 100% right.
Faster is better. You have two choices.
Fast disaster, get it over with.
Slow disaster, That's it.
We had two frickin' choices.
Slow disaster or fast disaster.
Biden chose a fast disaster.
Good leadership. I'm sorry.
I'm never going to change that opinion.
It's good leadership, if you have two choices, slow disaster or fast disaster, good leadership picks the fast one.
Because bad leadership lets you just string it along, do what you were doing, don't get in trouble, slow disaster, oh, it wasn't my fault, we did what we could do, too bad the Taliban did better than we thought.
Pull that band-aid off.
Biden did it, and he didn't apologize for it, and I will always give him credit for that.
Now, Could we have done a better job of preparing to get our allies out?
Probably not. Probably not.
You, as a military genius, believe that if we had done a lot more to protect the people that we wanted to protect, and we do want to protect them, if we'd done a lot more to protect them, we'd be in better shape.
But what would have happened if we had worked really hard to protect the people who were escaping with us?
The government would have fallen.
Like right away. Because you would have sent the signal that you're all doomed.
If you start massively deporting the people who helped us, the government falls right away.
And the Taliban just walks in.
You didn't have a choice of winning.
The moment you think there was a good way out...
You're just in crazy land.
Do you think that there was some good way out and the experts in logistics and military strategy couldn't find it?
Really? Do you know that our military is pretty well trained, right?
Our military is really, really well trained.
Somebody thought of the way to do it and figured out that it wouldn't work.
I'm guessing. Now, of course, I'm speculating as much as you are, right?
Could we find out tomorrow that it really was just massive stupidity?
Yeah. Yeah, we could.
But I don't have any evidence of that.
I see no evidence of failure.
And I believe I'm the only one saying this.
I don't know if I've heard even one person say anything close to what I'm saying.
There is no evidence of failure.
It could be. Very, very, very possible.
I'd even give it, you know, maybe more than 50% chance.
But we don't see it. It's not in evidence.
All right. Will the Taliban support terrorists setting up camps?
I don't know.
All the smart people are telling you that the al-Qaeda and the bad guys are all just going to reconstitute under the Taliban.
But does the Taliban want that?
Did the Taliban learn nothing?
Does the Taliban want us to come back?
I feel like the Taliban might do a little self-policing for their own interests.
Don't know yet. But I wouldn't rule out the fact that the Taliban doesn't want al-Qaeda there.
So, of course, the big question is, is it Trump's fault or somebody else's?
Rasmussen did a poll on that, found 51% think it's Biden's failure, Afghanistan, and 33% think Trump.
Now, I think that 33% is sort of a rock bottom for politics.
I don't think you can dislodge a third of the public from their opinions no matter what.
But apparently Trump is being faulted for believing the Taliban might keep their end of the deal.
Did he really believe that?
Or did he just sell it?
So we know he sold it.
In other words, he told people, hey, you know, I think I got to deal with the Taliban.
But do you think he believed it?
Thank you.
I don't think it mattered.
We were still going to bug out, right?
One way or another. He got the Taliban to say, yeah, we'll do some things, and then they didn't do them.
But I don't think it mattered. So was that Trump's fault for believing the Taliban?
I would say it's not in evidence what he believed.
It's only in evidence what he tried to sell, and that might have been a good strategy, just to figure out a way to get out of there.
I also think that there's going to be a big question mark about what happens with women in Afghanistan.
Because I don't know you can put the toothpaste back in the bottle.
Now, they did it once.
The Taliban did oppress women once when they were in charge.
I just think it's going to be harder.
It's going to be harder. And I don't know what that does.
Remember, the Taliban is acting weirdly non-Taliban-y in some ways.
They said they would respect women's rights within the boundaries of Islam.
Who knows what that is? So, you know, I think the odds are it's a disaster for women.
But I'm not so sure.
I think there's at least some chance...
That the Taliban is going to change.
Remember, it's been 20 years.
Even the Taliban might morph a little bit in 20 years.
Don't know. All right, so those were the things that I wanted to talk about today, but I'm going to throw this in.
There's a new study by Yale School of Management.
They studied which mitigation strategies for the pandemic worked.
And they studied masks and mask effectiveness.
If you haven't seen it yet, what do you think they found?
Yale School of Management.
So let's assume that they know how to do statistics, right?
It's Yale. So let's assume it's smart people who did it.
What do they think that they determined about mask effectiveness?
Go. Without seeing it, what do you think?
Boom. Pandemic mitigation.
Did it help in the pandemic?
Masks. 12%.
They say 12% of deaths were avoided.
Now, 12% of deaths, let's see, we had over 600,000 deaths.
So let's say maybe 65,000 deaths were avoided.
Was that worth wearing masks?
No. In the comments, if it was true...
Now, of course, you have to be skeptical of any kind of science.
And those who criticize me for not being skeptical of things that agree with me, this would be one of those cases.
So, yes, be skeptical of this, even though it agrees with me.
So that's about what we expect it best to be, 15%, 12%, somewhere in that range.
So if this is true...
That's a big if. If it's true, I would say that masks were a smart idea that have now reached the end of the trade-off where it's worth doing.
In my opinion, saving 12% of 1,000 deaths a day may be not worth it for the lack of freedom that it gives you and the lifestyle change it gives you, etc., So I throw that out there for Anomaly, my mascot, who doesn't believe that that study will be valid.
And maybe he doesn't, like every other study.
So don't assume that's the final word, but maybe someday we'll find out.
And by the way, this study did find that closing down non-critical places didn't matter.
