Episode 1497 Scott Adams: There Isn't Much News Today But Somehow I Make it Fascinating Anyway
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Tulsi Gabbard's Islamic ideology comment
Islamic ideology, virus-like?
Young males are culturally disposable
Mary Quintanilla understands subjective truth
President Trump's LOVE of working class Americans
Elections past and future...and J6
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of every single day, no matter what.
And today, it's a little bit of a slow news day, so I'm going to be taking some questions toward the end, see if anybody's got anything on their mind.
But how can you make an ordinary day special?
Well, it might have something to do with the simultaneous sip, doesn't it?
Yeah. And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or gels or a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including, well, pandemics.
And it's going to happen now.
Join me. Go. Oh, I feel my spike proteins hardening.
I don't know what that means.
So let's see what's going on.
Brian Stelter made news.
I love the fact that the guy whose job it is to comment on the news, or comment on the people who are commenting on the news, which I think is more what Brian Stelter does, that he becomes the news.
You can't become the news if your job is to comment on the people commenting on the news.
And if you're a person commenting on the people commenting on the news, if you become the news, you're three layers away from reality.
Because you got the news.
Let's call that reality.
Then you've got the people commenting on it.
That's one level away from reality.
And then you've got Stelter, who's commenting on the people commenting on the news, usually talking about Fox News.
So he's two levels away from reality.
And we're not even sure the reality was real, if you know what I mean.
So he might be three levels away from reality.
But we're talking about him anyway.
So what did he do? He said that, talking about 9-11 yesterday, he said, network TV anchors were, quote, the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9-11.
They were the moral authority for the country on that first day.
Especially with political leaders in bunkers or otherwise out of sight.
Now... As somebody funny said on Twitter, I forgot to write down the person's name, but somehow Brian Stelter finds a way to make everything about Brian Stelter.
So the news has a great way of making everything about themselves.
Well, there was 9-11, but more importantly...
What did Brian Stelter say?
All right. You know, the funny thing is, I don't even necessarily disagree with the statement.
I mean, obviously, it's a little bit of hyperbole.
But they were the ones that were the face of the country, in a sense, for a number of hours.
But I would say that leadership takes many forms.
And that... When 9-11 happened, there was lots of leadership.
There was lots, maybe more than we've ever had, except for maybe Pearl Harbor or something.
But I don't think there was ever more leadership in this country than on 9-11.
It was just distributed. There was the fire professional, the police person, They all took responsibility.
Now, were they just doing a job?
Well, it's doing a job if somebody's telling you what to do.
But if you have to figure out what to do, and you're making real-time life and death decisions...
It's leadership. I mean, you're basically saying, I've got to figure out what to do and then go do it.
So I would say that leadership was probably at an all-time high.
Yeah, Flight 43, perfect example.
Basically, leadership was instantly distributed.
That's one of the things this country does well.
Maybe other countries do. But one of the things that we do well is that we instantly distribute leadership.
So leadership was sort of sitting there at the presidency or wherever, you know, in its various leadership forms.
But the moment the first tower guy hit, who was in charge?
Well, not really the president, right?
I mean, he didn't make any decisions.
But the fire trucks were moving.
The first responders were moving.
So the leadership was at an all-time high, I would say.
It's just that it was distributed.
Were the people who were doing the news part of that?
Absolutely. And they were a visual part.
So I think Stelter's got a point.
It's one of those points that's fun to argue with because it's not an absolute, so there's plenty of exceptions.
But did the people who gave us the news that day, were they displaying leadership?
I'd say yes. No more...
than the rest of us. I mean, everybody tried to figure out what they could do.
You know, who they could help.
Is there somebody, you know, some way we could donate, you know, drive there and try to dig people out?
So yeah, lots of leadership.
Tragic story out of Georgia.
The Georgia Zoo is treating 13 western lowland gorillas who tested positive for COVID after displaying symptoms.
And there's a lack of context on this story, of course.
So 13 gorillas all got COVID. But, you know, that's the bad news.
But there was a control group.
The raccoons had zero cases of COVID. No COVID among the raccoons.
But the gorillas, 13 cases.
Wow. Why was it the raccoons didn't have any cases?
I'll wait. In the comments, why did the raccoons have no cases?
Come on.
Thank you. The raccoons were wearing masks.
That's right. The raccoons were wearing masks.
Now, I understand that there are some of you in my audience who don't like dad jokes as much as I do.
What the hell is wrong with you?
If you don't like dad jokes, we can't be friends.
You can watch. But we won't hang out.
Because it turns out you would hate me.
If you hung out with me, because you might hear a few dad jokes.
It might be a few.
All right. Tulsi Gabbard made a little news today.
So on the anniversary of 9-11, which this year fell on 9-11...
She noted that, this is her quote, she said, let us never forget that it was the Islamist ideology that inspired the terrorist attacks and declaration of war against America on 9-11.
And it is this Islamist Now, it's bad enough that, according to Tulsi Gabbard, that the Islamic ideology...
is discriminating against Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists.
That would be plenty bad.
But they're also discriminating against et cetera.
And that's a big group, et cetera.
I've heard that the Taliban will line up the et cetera's and just execute them.
They'll say, whoa, whoa, we've got a Christian here, we've got an atheist, we'll handle you.
But look at those et cetera's.
The et cetera's are bastards.
Line them up and take care of them.
So never be in the et cetera category.
You will surely be rounded up.
Now here's the thing that Tulsi did that's kind of clever and provocative.
What she did not say is that Islamic people are the problem.
You got that, right? What she did not say is that Islamic people are the problem.
She said that Islamic ideology is the problem.
Almost as if she's treating Islamic ideology as a...
What? What?
In the comments, finish my sentence.
What is she treating Islamic ideology like?
A virus.
A virus. Exactly.
That's right. She's treating it like a medical problem.
A virus. Is it a medical problem?
Is mental health a medical problem?
I think we would say yes, right?
I think we're at a point where we say mental health is a medical problem, by definition.
So, if you had an Islamic ideology, and that ideology, not the people, people are all great.
There's nothing about people here.
We're talking about ideology.
If the ideology can cause problems, then is it fair to say there's something wrong with the ideology, right?
I think so. I think that's fair.
So I think that Tulsi is both brave and honest and completely accurate because she specifies ideology.
Had she specified the religion or the people, that would be another comment altogether.
So, what do you do about a virus?
You can do what China does.
Social separation.
They put the Uyghurs in camps and separate them from the rest of the public.
They treat it exactly the way they're treating the coronavirus, social isolation.
And at force, forced social isolation.
Now, there's obviously no way that we could do that, but if we don't understand Islamic ideology...
As a mental virus.
Basically, it's a mental problem.
Yeah, it's like a mental illness that travels like a virus.
You can catch it from other people.
I just wanted to see this comment from...
Oh, there's...
What was your take on George W's speech yesterday Was he referring to January 6th when he was talking about domestic terrorists?
Well, if he didn't mention January 6th specifically...
Then probably not. I didn't see the speech, but I think people were assuming he was talking about January 6th.
And I don't think that we can ignore that problem.
Is there anybody that thinks we can ignore that there's a domestic terror threat?
Does anybody think that it's zero?
I think it might be exaggerated.
I don't know, because it would only take one horrible attack, and then we'd all say, whoa, we were underestimating how bad it was.
Let's see. I'm just looking at some of your comments.
He was referring to himself.
Yeah, but do you think that there's a domestic terrorism problem?
Do you think that's something that's on our top, I don't know, 20 things to worry about?
Yeah. In terms of total impact on the country, it's probably pretty small.
But if you happen to be in the building where somebody comes in and starts shooting, you're not going to be happy.
Yeah. Okay. So, Iran...
Apparently, Iran has agreed with, let's see, the IAEA, the watchdog, nuclear watchdog group, nuclear agency, and That they're going to let them service the monitoring equipment.
Now, when you see this story, do you say to yourself, wow, that's good news.
Hey, we've got some progress here.
It looks like Biden's going to pull this through.
Because wouldn't you be happy if Iran at least was not building nuclear devices without us knowing what they were doing?
And it turns out that they say, hey, yeah, maybe we'd be open to letting you service your monitoring equipment.
So good news, right?
We're going to be able...
The countries of the world will be able to monitor their nuclear stuff.
And so this is a good sign that Iran is moving in the right direction, right?
Looks all good? Everybody happy?
Yeah, we have shit you are not monitoring.
I'm reading that. Do you think Iran...
Would agree to allow the monitoring devices to be repaired if the monitoring devices were monitoring anything they cared about?
No. No, this story is the fakest of fake news.
Because nowhere in the story does it mention that maybe we don't monitor the right places.
And I think that's the most important part of the story.
How do we know we're monitoring the right places?
If they're going to let us fix the monitoring equipment, obviously they're not worried about those monitors looking at any secrets.
So I'm not even sure this is anything.
All right, I provocatively, I tweeted this morning that if science ever concludes that vaccinations are dangerous for young boys, specifically that group, but nobody else, we'd vaccinate them anyway.
If the only group that was worse off...
And by the way, I'm not claiming this, but there's some preprint studies showing that young boys get a little myocardiitis or some enlarged heart, whatever it is.
So they get some health problems that are unusual in the public.
So in other words...
They get hit by the vaccine itself might be more dangerous in this case than the COVID. Now, we don't know that, so that's not a claim, so don't ding me for a false claim.
It's more like a question that's out there with some scary information that's making us think it's a good question.
I don't know what the answer is, but it's a good question.
So there's a preprint paper that seems to show that young boys are having more health problems from the vaccination itself than other people are.
Now, will that study hold up?
Will it be duplicated?
Will it pass peer review?
Maybe.
Don't know.
But it hasn't been peer reviewed.
It's still in the preprint phase.
And by the way, it's kind of useful, isn't it, that the pandemic taught us all, you know, the rest of the public, what a preprint publication is?
Because I'm not sure everybody knew that before, right?
And still not everybody.
But a lot of us at least understand that if something is a preprint study, the amount of credibility you should give it needs to come way, way, way down, right?
And if in your mind you're saying, well, sure, it's a preprint, but there's an 80% chance it's right.
Nope. Nope, it's not even close to 80%.
I don't know what it is, but I wouldn't be thinking it's most likely true.
It might be closer to a coin flip or even less, really.
So if you hear there's a pre-print paper, think coin flip.
That's about roughly the right probability.
Because about half of all peer-reviewed papers get rejected.
They don't hold up over time.
So if even half of peer-reviewed papers are a problem, imagine one that hasn't been peer-reviewed.
It's not going to be better.
It's not going to be better.
It's going to be less than 50%.
I think the 50% might have been on less hard science.
I think the pandemic would be a little bit more objective science, hard science.
And some of the behavioral studies are the ones that are questionable, especially.
All right. So, what if it turns out that it's true?
So it's just a what if.
That young boys are worse off if they get vaccinated.
Again, that's not established.
But what if it's true?
What if it ends up being true?
I think we would vaccinate them anyway.
Because boys have the lowest value in society.
If it were girls...
Do you think we would treat it the same?
If young girls were the ones who looked like the ones who had had risks from the vaccination, no.
No, we'd stop everything.
Because girls are biologically more valuable, and at the moment, in this point in time, 2021, they're socially more valuable.
I'll just say it out loud.
Boys have the lowest value in American society.
At the moment. That was probably different when I grew up, etc.
But at the moment it's true.
I see Jewel Adora is agreeing with me.
I appreciate that.
Yeah. And there's a reason that boys go to war and girls do not.
Because biologically, the girls slash women are the only ones who can have babies.
And so they're more valuable to reproduction.
It doesn't take many men to impregnate a lot of women.
We're happy to do the work.
You know, if there's a shortage of men to impregnate the women, I think the remaining men would step up.
Maybe put a little extra effort into that impregnating work.
So you can always have too many men.
And it's one of the reasons I think wars are almost evolutionarily necessary to drain off the extra men.
Because there's just too many of them.
But we don't have any kind of process to drain off extra women.
That never evolved, because you don't want to do that.
But yeah, you have all kinds of things that would drain off the extra men.
You've got your extreme sports.
We'll go kill ourselves that way.
You've got your reckless driving.
We do more of that.
You've got your wars. You've got your violence.
You've got your prisons. So we have all of these systems for taking men out of the system, because there are too many of them.
But there's nothing like that for women.
So just... Let's just mess with your minds a little bit to tell you that if we get to the point where vaccinating boys is bad for the boys, but maybe it's the only way you can get to herd immunity, we would kill the boys in a heartbeat.
If you said, well, we're going to save a bunch of adults and a bunch of women, but the cost of that is we're going to kill some extra boys, we'd just do it.
And you know what? I don't even disagree with it.
I want to, because I used to be a young boy.
Right? I would love to disagree with that and say, no, you will not put this burden unfairly on young boys.
That's all we got. We have a system in which young boys are essentially just fodder for a lot of different things.
We throw young boys at all kinds of danger.
This is just another one.
It's just another one. Ken says, wow, Scott, I disagree strongly.
And I respect that.
I think this is a topic in which disagreement is fully worthy of respect.
I just put it out there as a provocative thought.
You can wrestle with it a little bit.
So there's a video on Facebook, Adam Dopamine was pointing to this, in which he thought there was some cognitive dissonance going on, in which a CNN reporter was talking to a Trump supporter and asking this reporter, Trump supporter about, was she asking, vaccinations and stuff like that.
I think the Trump supporter part was irrelevant to the story.
The relevant part was, and in fact, I don't even know if they said she was a Trump supporter.
I think I intuited that.
But it was Mary Quintanilla.
And the CNN person challenges her on some of her posts and points out that they've been fact-checked to be false.
Now, as Adam Dopamine pointed out, are we seeing cognitive dissonance from Mary Quintanilla?
Because after the CNN person points out that her posts have been debunked, instead of saying, oh, wow, I didn't know that they've been debunked, I will immediately research that and possibly change my opinion, you'd say, oh, that would be a person whose brain is operating correctly.
But what if she just digs in?
Well, that feels like cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is when you are revealed to be inconsistent.
In other words, you're not thinking right.
You will torture your reality until it all fits together and makes you look like you're rational, even though you're not.
So you will imagine spontaneously, just spontaneously a false belief will pop up of why you do what you do.
So... Once the CNN guy had said, okay, this is all debunked, are you still going to go with it, even though it's completely debunked?
Instead of saying, oh, okay, now it's debunked, I'll change my mind, she argued to keep it.
Is that cognitive dissonance?
Well, if you wait all the way to the end of the video, and it's where the payoff is, it's the complete end of the video, where she explains her philosophy...
That reality, we have to deal with it as a subjective entity because we can't tell what's real because the fact-checkers are no longer credible.
Boom. Boom.
She's talking to the fact-checker, CNN, and telling him, yeah, that would be a great idea to take your fact-checking and then revise my opinion, except...
You're not a credible source.
And she's right. Now, I don't think she's necessarily right about her posts.
You know, I don't agree with her posts.
I haven't seen them all.
I'm just assuming I wouldn't agree with them.
But is she right that the fact-checkers can't help her and her own research isn't going to help her necessarily except to get to a subjective opinion?
She basically said in straight language that her own research would not get her to truth...
It would get her to a subjective truth, and it's the best she can do.
And so I'm watching this, and I'm saying to myself, is this an example of some, let's say, unsophisticated person who doesn't know the difference between truth and reality?
Because that's how CNN presented it.
Or is this somebody operating at a higher level of reality?
Because the higher level of reality is to understand that we don't know the things we think we know.
And she said that directly.
She directly made a statement at a higher level of awareness than the reporter.
And the reporter couldn't recognize it because the reporter's operating at a lower level of reality.
The reporter thinks that the fact check means something or that we should be convinced by it.
That's kind of a low level of reality right now.
It was...
It seemed like a higher level of reality, I don't know, 10 years ago.
Ten years ago, I always said, if you're not doing the fact-checking, or at least finding it a little bit credible, there's something wrong with you.
But now I think in 2021, it's a perfectly reasonable statement to say the fact-checking is shit.
There is no way to know what's true.
That feels pretty close to true, like a fair statement.
And so this is a lovely story of either a Miss Mary Quintanilla operating at a higher level of awareness than CNN, or the opposite.
You get to pick your movie on this one.
But to me, it looked like she's at least somewhere in that ambiguous area.
All right. I was thinking today that think of all the things that Trump has been criticized for.
It's everything, right?
Just everything. I don't think Trump has been criticized for, you know...
I mean, he's been criticized more ways and from more angles than anybody's ever been criticized in the history of criticism.
But here's, weirdly, a criticism that he either doesn't get or if he does, it doesn't stick.
And it goes like this.
Is he sincere in his love for working Americans?
You know, not the elite, but is he sincere in his love?
Love. L-O-V-E, capital L. It's not even lowercase l.
You know, the claim would be that he loves the working class with all capital letters.
And... That every single thing he's ever done in his entire life is consistent with that.
Everything. I don't think I've ever seen him questioned on that point.
And it makes me think of the definition of charisma.
The best definition of charisma I ever saw, I forget who came up with it, but the definition is power plus empathy.
So empathy, in this case, would be a love for the working class and a clear willingness to help.
Does that describe Trump?
Now, forget about your cynical thoughts about, you know, what somebody's really thinking or why they're thinking it.
Just in terms of, does the working class believe that Trump is completely on their side, at least a lot of them, and, at the same time, that he has power?
He has the ability to do something, and he's on their side.
Now, you could argue, oh, he didn't do enough.
But he tried like hell.
He tried like hell.
I saw in the comments he didn't get the wall built.
True. True statement.
He promised to build a wall.
He did not build a wall.
But dear Lord, he tried hard.
He tried harder than anybody's ever tried.
Has anybody ever come close to trying that hard right in front of you while you watched?
No. Nobody's ever come close.
Now it didn't work, but do you doubt that he was trying to build that wall for the benefit of the working class?
I mean, he would imagine that it would help everybody who's American.
But, yeah, I mean, he got it going, but it didn't work out.
So I think it's, again, it's sort of the dog not barking, because Trump gets criticized for everything.
Everything. He is criticized for everything, but he's never been touched on the most important question, which is, does he love, actually love, with capital letters, the working class?
Think of another politician who could...
Be this clean on the biggest question.
Because why is it that anybody would vote for him?
It's this. It's this.
He actually cares, and he has capability.
He has energy and capability.
That's what you want. So, I don't think there's any mystery to why Trump is popular.
Is there? You know, you can look at his policies all day long, but as long as the working class feels bonded to him...
And by the way, that makes me feel bonded to him not because I'm working class, but because I'm bonded to the working class too.
Those are my roots.
Anybody who has roots in the working class...
He's going to be bonded to it, right?
So I'm bonded to the working class.
He looks like a hero to the working class.
And even if I'm not in the, quote, working class right now, I'm closer to the elite, I'm still bonded to that population.
All right. Yeah, Trump's also more popular among non-college educated people.
And all that just makes sense.
So the CNN is saying that Republican-leaning folks are saying they prefer Trump to be the nominee in the next election.
63% say he should be the leader of the Republican Party.
But they're about evenly split over whether that would help the party or not.
They want him, but they're not entirely sure it's the best strategy.
I think that's pretty reasonable, isn't it?
A lot of times you see a poll and you say to yourself, that's crazy.
How are so many people getting the wrong idea?
But this feels right in the pocket.
Two-thirds of the public-ish thinks Trump should be the nominee.
That feels about right. And they're about evenly split over whether that's a good idea.
They want it, but they're not sure it's a good idea.
That's exactly where I'm at.
I would love to see him as the nominee for a number of reasons, entertainment being close to the top.
But I don't know if it's a good idea.
Do you? Because the trouble is, his effectiveness is what causes all the trouble.
You could say it's his provocation and the way he talks, and that's part of it.
But if he were not effective, couldn't actually change anything, then nobody would care.
Scott, have you considered this as the second act?
Yes, I have. Yes, I have.
What would be the Trump third act?
If this were a movie, what would be the third act?
The part where all is lost and you're dead.
The third act would be when he lost re-election.
You could make a lot of third acts out of this.
But if it turns out that Trump loses re-election, But somehow comes back and wins?
You have to make a movie out of this.
I mean, it just has to be a movie.
And there's so many great ways you can make a movie out of this.
By the way, if you made a movie about the Trump experience, you would need...
I think you would need some characters in it who are not just the politicians.
So you would need some ordinary people to really give the character of the movie.
Who would be the best character who was not Trump himself to be in a Trump movie that would give you a really good sense of it?
Who would that be?
Oh, Sertovich. That's a good one.
Yeah. I think I would be in that conversation, actually.
Because as an observer, I think I observed him correctly from the beginning.
So if I were writing the movie, I would put Cernovich in it, and I would put me in it, and, you know, Jack Posobiec.
I'd put half a dozen people who saw it early.
The people who saw it early and knew why he was going to prevail, I think that's the angle that makes it the most interesting.
Because, yeah, Joel Pollack would be another one.
Ann Coulter would be in it, of course.
Yeah, and I think it would be interesting that way.
But if you had to pick one of those, who would it be?
Just one of those characters?
I don't know. But Cernovich would be a heck of a good choice.
I think I'd be a good choice, and I'm not bragging, because in this case it's just who was where or when.
I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with my skills.
But I think I had a weird vantage point on this that would be an interesting movie point of view.
All right. What do you think?
Let me ask you. Do you think Trump is going to be president again?
In the comments, give me your prediction.
Will Trump be president again?
I'm looking at the locals as a faster response time.
I'm seeing way more yeses than nos.
Actually, it looks about the same as...
It looks about two-thirds yes.
Over on...
So this is interesting.
So difference in the audience. On YouTube, I'm seeing more no.
But a lot of yeses, too. Yeah, I think your responses are pretty much like the poll.
About two-thirds yes. Somebody says DeSantis is a wild card.
DeSantis is a wild card only in one sense.
He's only relevant if Trump doesn't run.
If Trump runs, DeSantis doesn't have a chance of getting the nominee.
I don't think. I think Trump would just walk right into it.
But if Trump didn't run...
DeSantis is certainly in the top three of people you would consider.
I think Tom Cotton's got to be in the conversation.
Let me ask you this.
We'll throw out this name.
I probably have more right-leaning audience, even though I'm not personally right-leaning.
But... What do you think of Tom Cotton?
Just that.
Give me a Tom Cotton flash opinion.
Too young.
Somebody says too boring.
A bit cold.
Too neoconish, somebody says.
Not charismatic enough.
Big balls.
I agree with that one.
Uh, truthful, no charisma.
Well, if you say he has no charisma, why are we talking about him?
I mean, why is he in the top three names that you think of for president if he doesn't have charisma?
I don't think...
I'm not sure that that's a fair comment.
I think he does have charisma.
Um... But we also haven't seen him in full presidential mode.
Because, you know, people can take on a different personality a little bit.
So if he takes, for example, Al Gore.
Al Gore seemed a little stiff.
But he loosened up during the campaign a little bit.
Did his best. Not completely.
Anyway, I'm very pro-Tom Cotton.
If Trump doesn't run...
Because he's strong on opposing China.
And I think that's our biggest challenge.
And I haven't seen him being completely wrong on too many topics or anything that I can think of, actually.
So he seems reasonable and patriotic, and I like where his brain ends up on a lot of stuff.
Yeah, picking cotton would just sound funny, yeah.
You know, it's not a joke.
I don't think that black people will vote for a man named Cotton.
That's not a joke. You think that, like, okay, ha-ha, they know it's just his name, they're not going to vote against him because his name is Cotton.
No, they will. They just won't know it.
It's one of those things that would be that little bit of thing in the back of your head that causes you to think there's some other reason you're not voting for him.
Don't take a good senator out of the Senate?
Well, unless he could be replaced easily.
Superbubble says, I'm black and don't like him.
But why? Yeah, why haven't they fired any generals yet?
I'm seeing that comment there.
Why have no... Let me give you a little update of something that happened locally.
I'm not going to name the business.
So I'm going to talk about a retail establishment that I happened to visit the other day.
And for reasons that I also won't mention, it was super crowded.
So it was an indoor space in which people were just bumped up against each other like a party.
Zero masks.
Zero. Now, we have full mask mandate for indoor stuff.
The employees all had masks on.
Zero people had masks in the establishment.
Why? The answer was that there were too many people without masks.
If one person isn't wearing a mask, you can imagine the staff would say, oh, do you notice everybody's wearing masks?
Put on a mask or we'll have to ask you to leave.
But if you have 100 people without masks, you're done.
You're done. And 100 people without masks walked in the door.
And then they just said, alright, what do you want to buy?
And they just sold it to them.
100 people. No masks.
Now, it wasn't really civil disobedience.
It was just young people and they saw other people without masks and they just did the same.
So, Here's the thing that you can't predict.
The tipping point.
Right? Because there is a tipping point where enough people will show up without masks for any given situation that it can't be...
it just can't be enforced.
So the only way it can be enforced is if only a few people don't wear masks.
As soon as you get to, I don't know, what, 10%?
20%? If you had consistent 20% people just not wearing a mask and making a thing out of it, making you make them throw you out of the business, it's too much.
It would overwhelm any enforcement capability.
So about 10%, 20% disobedience and it's all done.
How close are we to a 10% disobedience?
Probably always pretty close, right?
At the moment, it looks like people are completely compliant.
I mean, 99%, right?
And it makes you think that it would take a lot for that 99% compliance to even waver because it's just so solid.
99% of people do wear masks where they're told to wear masks.
But 10% is all it would take for the whole thing to fall apart.
I feel like we're closer to 10% than we think.
And at the moment, there is just enough trust and goodwill in the country, and people don't want to be the one to cause trouble, that we're barely limping by with this mask mandate stuff.
But it could fall apart in a heartbeat.
Big stores in Westchester, New York, have 10% no masks.
We're getting there. You know, the sign that would make the mask problem go away, if you put it on your retail establishment, would be, and I'm seeing this in the comments, the sign would say, masks are mandated by the state.
They did not provide resources for enforcement.
How about that? Masks are mandated by the state.
We ask you to wear a mask.
The state has not provided us with any resources for enforcement.
And you're done. Because those are just true statements.
It's required.
We ask you to wear them.
They gave us no resources for enforcement.
You don't have to tell people what to do.
They're going to figure it out pretty quickly.
All right.
I'm going to take some questions because, as I said, today's a little bit of a slow news day.
We're thinking backwards this week to 9-11.
So let's think forwards a little bit.
Does anybody have any predictions they'd like me to go out on a limb for?
Any clarifications or...
Complaints about anything I've said.
How does Trump overcome the persuasion that he's a racist if he runs again?
Well, it didn't stop him from winning last time.
You know, there's so many things that could change what happens in 2024, and probably a lot of them will happen between now and then.
One of those things is, what happens if one of the audits finds out there is a problem?
That's like a gigantic wild card, isn't it?
Because between now and 2024, I feel like we'll know for sure if any audit found any big problems.
What if they do, or what if they don't?
Well, if they don't find any big problems, it's going to be hard for Trump to win.
Because his claim was there were big problems, and if we haven't found any in four years, it's not going to look very credible.
And I think that's really going to work against them, especially with the January 6th thing hanging over his head.
But what if...
And I'm predicting this won't happen, by the way.
But what if they find it?
Let me ask you this, a direct question.
Under the hypothetical possibility...
That I predict won't happen.
But let's say it does. And there's some massive fraud found in one of the key states.
Could Trump possibly lose under that scenario?
I don't think so.
I think he would just walk into the presidency.
What do you think? I think that if some shenanigans were identified that were of scale, you know, big enough that it could have made a difference, I think he will walk into the presidency.
Because under that situation, January 6th looks completely different, doesn't it?
What does January 6th look like if you're sure that the election was fair?
It looks like an insurrection, doesn't it?
Even if you're on Trump's side...
If you thought the election was fair, then the people trying to change the result, they look a little insurrection-y, don't they?
But what if you knew, let's say, hypothetically, some audit found some big problems.
What's it look like then?
Doesn't look like an insurrection, does it?
It looks like a bunch of patriots stopping an insurrection.
Do you know why it would look like that?
Because it would be. That's exactly what it would be.
If we find that the protesters on January 6th were right, and it was a stolen election, it's not an insurrection.
It's stopping an insurrection.
And that would happen instantly.
The moment you knew that the facts were different than presented, it would immediately turn into a different situation.
Let me put it this way.
What would happen, hypothetically?
Hypothetically, what would happen if we found out that the election was stolen and we had a whole bunch of prosecutions for serious crimes?
I mean, people, you know, injuring police officers and stuff.
Serious crimes. I would pardon all of them if I could.
If we find out the election was stolen, I think every one of the insurrectionists, even the ones who did violence, even the ones who did violence, I think they all have to be pardoned.
But that's a big standard, and I don't think we'll reach it.
So my prediction is we will not find massive fraud.
I'm not saying it wasn't there.
I just don't think we'll find any.
What if there are prosecutions for the Russian hoax?
I think that's...
Too much in our rearview mirror at this point.
There's another Scott belief.
Yes. Midterm prediction.
Well, the trouble with the midterms is we still don't know if the voters have any impact.
It might be just the rule changes that matter.
In the same way that gerrymandering is the only thing that matters in many cases.
So it's not really the voters who make much difference.
So if the voters made a difference, I would think that the 2022 election would go for the Republicans.
But if the voters don't make any difference, because, I don't know, elections are rigged or gerrymandering or anything else, then things stay about the same.
All right.
Let's see.
Mark Twain said, if voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.
What are your options once you recognize somebody who's having cognitive dissonance?
What are your options? I don't know that anybody's ever solved that.
Once somebody is triggered into cognitive dissonance, it's like you're talking to an insane person.
You know, any facts or anything...
They'll just bounce off. So usually when cognitive dissonance happens, you just have to walk away.
Now, I never do that.
Instead, what I do is I point out the person's cognitive dissonance and explain what the trigger was and how I don't have a trigger.
So if you're wondering if I'm the one with the cognitive dissonance, you can look to see what triggers cognitive dissonance, and you can see I don't have any.
But you can see that you do.
That's the best you can do.
Do you think that that causes people to say, oh, you know, that's a good point.
Now that you've taught me how to spot cognitive dissonance, I can clearly see that I had a trigger, and so I got triggered into it, whereas you had no trigger, and so therefore, presumably, you were not.
Has anybody ever said that to me?
Nope. No, they just get angry because they're pretty sure they don't have cognitive dissonance.
Sky has some dissonance on certain topics.
You should assume that to be true.
Yeah, of course. It worked on you?
Really? Somebody says that worked on them.
Sound quality is my trigger?
Yeah. All right.
Does Tulsi run again in 2024?
And if so, what party?
I don't know. Running for president seems to be good for her.
And I think people like her voice to be part of the mix.
So I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that just both people on the left and the right have support for her.
So she's a unicorn like that.
I saw the latest polls say that the recall isn't going to work.
So apparently, Newsom has so much support in California that it went from looking like a close race to not so close.
Now, I don't know if the polls are right.
They could be suppression polls.
but we'll see.
Let's see.
I'm just looking at some of your comments.
That's why I'm being quiet here.
You're a refugee in Caiparicia?
Okay. All right.
I know this part is not entertaining, because when you're just watching me read comments, you're sitting there saying, where's my entertainment?
Damn it. Why is poetry persuasive?
I didn't think it was. Did I break my not voting rule for the recall election?
No. No, I haven't voted in years.
Micro lesson on mentoring.
Okay, I can do that.
Yeah, I guess Yang is starting a new party, I read.
I don't know the details of that.
Vaxshedding, I haven't heard of that.
Yeah, if the glove fits, you must acquit.
Rhymes are persuasive, but not poetry in its large form.
All right. I see some requests for mentoring tips, how to get a mentor.
And I will do that.
Why not vote third party?
It's a waste of time. The future of Bitcoin.
You know, I don't know if anybody's good at predicting the future of stuff, but I would just say this.
I think Bitcoin has gone from a speculative asset to an asset.
So if you're looking at your whole portfolio and you're a certain age, I think it doesn't make sense to not have crypto in your portfolio.
So I have some that have crypto at various times.
But I think we're talking about something in the 5% range.
If you have more than that, I feel like you're getting ahead of the risk-reward curve a little bit.
But no doubt people have gotten rich doing exactly the opposite of what I just told you to do.
But if you want to play conservative, which I recommend, diversification is the only thing that ever makes sense.
So you're woefully uninformed.
On which topic?
I don't think you're wrong, by the way.
Over on YouTube, somebody says I'm woefully uninformed.
That's just true of everybody.
So I accept that.
I embrace that comment as 100% true.
Gold... I've never wanted to own gold, even in the context of a diversification.
Because I don't think gold can go to the moon, but crypto can.
So, for the same amount of risk, crypto...
Well, let me say this.
Here's something I've never said in public before.
For the same amount of risk, crypto has a bigger upside.
Because, you know, the crypto could just keep growing, but gold has sort of a little bit of a natural limit.
Because, you know, you can only use it for so many things...
There's only so much of it.
I don't know.
At least with Bitcoin, you can keep taking smaller fractions of it forever.
Is that because gold is physical?
Yeah. The physical element of gold puts a limit on its upside potential.
Yes, that would be one of the things.
Where is warp speed for rapid tests?
Well, in a sense, we have warp speed for rapid tests.
So let me give Biden some credit.
Biden did what I think Trump failed at.
And I don't use the F word about Trump too often, right?
Because I'm more pro his policies than not.
But when it came to the rapid testing stuff, the government under Trump was silent about it.
Which, to me, seemed like a gigantic failure, if not an evidence of corruption.
I don't mean Trump himself, but some corruption in the administration.
But Biden is apparently doing the, what is it, the Military Powers Act or something?
So he can basically force private industry to make more of these tests, and I imagine they're subsidizing.
War Powers? War Powers Act, right?
So Biden is using that, and that's...
Oh, Defense... I'm sorry.
Defense Production Act.
Thank you for correcting that.
It's the Defense Production Act.
And Biden is using it.
Trump should have...
I don't know what changed, unless there's some improvement in the quality of the test or something.
But I think that was probably the biggest mistake Trump made, is not pushing hard on rapid testing.
And if Biden is getting that right, and he might be, he's certainly putting effort into it the right way, I think you're going to say that's a clean win for Biden and a clean failure for Trump.
There are a lot of those.
I wouldn't say there are too many of those, but that's a big one, based on what we know.
Now, there might be other information, because we're not fully informed on what's going on there, but from the surface, it looks like a gigantic Biden win and a gigantic Trump failure.
But I would be open to an argument that there's something I don't know about that situation.
Yeah, and I'm hearing somebody say that having too many rapid tests would make it look like the infection is worse, maybe, because more people would get tested.
I don't know.
But that's not a good enough reason.
Economy will collapse soon because there's too much cash in the system.
You know, the one thing that you can predict about the economy, and you'll be right every time, there's only one thing you can predict about it and know you will be right.
You can't predict it. That's it.
You can't predict it. Most people who are smart would say, well, we've put so much cash into the system, it has to collapse.
But it should have collapsed already.
We should have all been dead a long time ago.
For some reason, and I'm not sure anybody understands it totally, national debt, especially when you're in nuclear power, Doesn't seem to be the same as personal debt.
It operates differently, and we don't know exactly where it can go or how bad it can get.
But if you have nuclear weapons, you don't always have to pay back your bills.
So we'll see. Somebody says they'll get the vaccine if I personally inject them.
Challenge accepted. I've never given anybody an injection, but it would be kind of funny to stick a needle into somebody's arm.
I don't think that's legal, but if it's legal, I'll come give you a jab.
You might not like it.
Will I get a booster?
I will wait until the last minute so that I have the most current information.
So telling you in advance whether I'd get one wouldn't make sense.
What kind of a decision would that be?
Because in advance, I don't have as much information as I'll have later.
So since I was late to get vaccinated, I waited also to get as much information and other people's problems known as possible.
I'll just do the same thing with the booster.
So at the moment, my immunity should be at a peak.
Because of when I got the second shot.
So I think I'm at my peak right now of immunity.
Six months from now?
Yeah, I'd probably look at the booster.
But I'll know more by then.
Yeah, wait until your antibodies drop.
Why doesn't Biden mandate anybody getting federal money must be vaccinated?
Yeah. I don't know.
Is that an option? Will you antibody test first?
Oh, that's a good question.
I think the antibody test...
I don't know. Can you just get one?
Can you just request an antibody test?
I'd have to know more about that.
If it's possible and you can get them on demand, maybe.
But, oh, yeah, no, I'll probably get the booster just for social reasons.
My wife has to take a vaccine against her will or lose her job.
What would you do? Quit or take the jab against your judgment?
I would take the jab.
Now, so let me restate that question.
The question is, if your employer says you have to get the shot or you're fired, what do you do?
If your conviction is you don't want the shot.
I told you what I would do.
I would get the shot.
Why? Why?
Because I always take the money decision.
So people ask me, hey, I've got this opportunity for a job that would pay more.
What should I do? I always say, take the job.
Because it pays more. I had a friend who said, you know, two ways to calculate my taxes.
Which way should I calculate it?
I think they're both legal. Which way should I calculate it?
And I say, calculate it the way that you pay the least amount of taxes.
I learned that from somebody else, by the way.
Yeah, the thing that you can measure with certainty is the job.
The part you don't know anything about is the risk.
So if you have one thing that definitely matters, a job, and you have another thing that, I don't know, I can't really compare these two risks, the risk of getting the vaccine...
Station versus the risk of the COVID, both under 1%.
So if you have two unfathomable risks, both way under 1%, but you have this big, looming, honking, real-world thing called your job and your paycheck, I would make all of my decisions based on the real parts.
The job and the paycheck.
That's the part you know.
And that matters.
The part you don't know is a risk that's so far under 1% that you should just ignore it.
Now, I would love to know what happens when you tell your wife that.
Because that's more a decision about how to make decisions.
She should put her own opinions into that framework.
But how you make the decision is to ignore anything that's a tiny risk...
And you're comparing it to some other tiny unknown risk that you can't possibly calculate for you specifically.
So in those cases, always favor the thing that is real and also big.
Your job. Now, could that advice get you killed?
Did I just kill some guy's wife?
Maybe. Maybe.
And you shouldn't talk in public if you can't take that chance.
You know, one of the risks of what I do is that I could actually kill somebody.
But you have to be comfortable with that.
All right.
Get the jab, keep the job.
Yeah, it's jab or job.
Are you the first one to realize that it's jab or job?
I feel like that's going to be a bumper sticker.
Did he get the jab or the job?
All right.
Pompeo for president?
I don't know if he...
I don't dislike Pompeo.
He's a smart guy.
I don't know if he's got quite the charisma or something.
Maybe he does. He trimmed up Did Trump lose weight, by the way?
Because he does look younger.
Or, I don't know, did he have some work done or something?
He looks younger. I think Jack Posobiec noted this, that he actually looks younger.
He does, right? He lost 15 pounds?
You wouldn't even notice 15 pounds.
Did he decide not to use the name Dill Dog for dog burp, or was it pressure?
I made that decision myself.
You lost 30 pounds in the last nine months Good on you. Okay, here's my last question of the day, okay?
I'm going to ask you if during the pandemic you lost weight or gained weight.
You can give me the numbers if you know them, but just say lost or gained.
Let's see what we did. And I'm going to make a prediction...
That the Locals platform lost more weight than the YouTube.
Let's watch. On Locals, you can't see it if you're watching on YouTube, tons of people lost weight, but also lots of people gained.
Lost 90 pounds?
Really? 30 pounds?
20 pounds? 10 pounds?
15? These are lost.
Down 30. Down 30.
Lost 12. This is all in the locals platform, by the way.
Looking over on the YouTube.
Lost 25.
Lost. Lost 20.
Lost Jesus.
I'm sorry. I know you don't like it when I use that word.
Holy cow.
I feel like I need to give you a standing ovation.
And I think I will.
I think I will. Damn.
Damn. Standing Ovation.
This is all those people who lost weight during the pandemic.
