Episode 1521 Scott Adams: Probably the Best Coffee With Scott Adams of All Time
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Content:
New DOJ policy on criticism of school officials
Instagram, more dangerous than fentanyl?
Paul Rubin on woke, primitive economics
Corruption? FDA rapid testing long delay
Government mandated behavior
Bank transactions over $600
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Good morning everybody and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams.
One of the highlights of your day and certainly mine.
And I don't know if you can feel it yet.
Do you feel every particle in your being start to get a little bit lighter?
Feel a little better? Things are starting to shape up, aren't they?
Aren't they? Well, it's going to get even better.
It's going to get even better.
What would you need to do that?
Well, amazing content that's coming up.
But also, the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice 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.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Mmm, the breathless anticipation of simultaneous swillage.
Well put. Well put in the comments there.
Well, did you see the...
The viral video of there was some school.
This might be fake news, by the way.
But because it's fun, I'm going to treat it like it's real.
So I think it's fake news, but maybe, maybe not.
So allegedly there was some school that banned backpacks.
That's the sketchy part.
Was there really a school that banned backpacks?
So first of all, I don't believe this story at all.
But the story goes that they banned backpacks and then the kids decided to take advantage of the specificity of the rule to bring things that weren't backpacks...
But could still transport books.
For example, one kid brought in one of those outdoor trash bins, a gigantic trash bin.
He just dragged that into school, filled with his books.
Another brought a baby stroller.
I think one had a dog cage on wheels or something.
Now, I'm going to say I don't believe it's a real story, but it was pretty funny.
If it is real, let me know.
Here's a commercial failure, as in an advertising commercial.
Intel, the company Intel, not the intelligent services, but Intel, the company, had a commercial, and the gist of it was they had people come in and use their new computer, or a computer with their chip in it,
I'm not sure, and the people were amazed and surprised To find out that what they thought was an excellent Macintosh computer, or an Apple computer, was actually a PC. And that was the essence of the commercial.
The people who think Macintosh, or Apple, I keep saying Macintosh, the people who think that the Apple laptops are just the best, when they use this PC, the PC was so good that they thought it was an Apple computer.
That was the commercial. How'd they do?
Is that the worst idea for a commercial?
Let me tell you what teens really love.
And not just teens, but young adults as well.
You know what people really like?
They like to have the cheap imitation knockoff of high-quality goods.
I'm pretty sure that Intel just told their customers that the good one is an Apple laptop.
But if they want, if they can handle the embarrassment of not having an Apple product, they can get something that works pretty well, too.
Other people might not even know the difference.
So that's like the worst commercial idea I've ever seen, to tell people that their product is almost as good as the competition.
Well, we've got a...
There's a new Department of Justice policy in which the people are being reminded, the public is being reminded not to get too aggressive with the school officials.
Because there's lots of complaints about everything from mass to critical race theory, being taught in schools, and I guess parents are getting pretty aggressive, and so the Justice Department decided to weigh in and say, don't do that.
We'll put you in jail if you go too far.
Now, some people are saying, are they just using the power of the state to shut down dissent?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it seems to me this could go either way.
Because who exactly approves of people getting physical, for example, or threatening somebody at home?
I'm not sure I approve of that stuff.
And that stuff needs to probably be illegal at some point, right?
So I'm not sure there's anything to this story.
We imagine this is always the slippery slope toward...
Having parents not have any input at all.
But I doubt it.
I imagine parents because they have as much input as they want as long as they don't push or threaten people.
All right. A lot of hallucinators coming after me today.
People who are declaring my idiocy in a hallucination that they had and then criticizing me for their hallucination.
For example, if I say something about...
COVID or anything in that category.
I got this comment to me.
You don't understand the risks.
Well, shouldn't they be arguing with my argument?
Why are they arguing about some quality of me?
As soon as you see that, what does that signal?
What does it signal when somebody goes after the messenger and doesn't even touch the argument?
Cognitive dissonance, right?
It's cognitive dissonance.
Because if the argument was the problem, well, they would just go after the argument.
They'd just publish a link or say, well, that makes no sense because you haven't considered X or Y. But they can't.
The problem is that they don't know how to do that.
So anybody who has a counter-argument that makes sense uses it.
You'll rarely find an exception.
People don't go after the personality of the person unless they have nothing to say.
Yeah. So here's another one.
Somebody said to me, you don't understand that it's politicians that close the economy, not viruses, because I was talking about the risk of coronavirus would be closing the economy.
Well, yes, I know that the politicians make the decision...
But we haven't turned off the laws of cause and effect.
Whatever made them to make the decision last time might make them cause it again.
You could argue all day long that they shouldn't close the economy.
But if we know it happens, it's part of the risk.
You can't turn off cause and effect just because you think it ought to be turned off.
And my favorite one is that I used to be smart and have good takes, but suddenly all my takes are crap now.
What are the odds that I went from clever for decades to really dumb on just this one topic?
Possible. Totally possible, right?
Somebody could be smart and general and dumb on one topic.
Probably seen a lot. But it shouldn't be your first guess.
Play the odds.
Play the odds.
I probably didn't guess suddenly stupid.
There's probably just something that...
We differ in the data.
We differ in what is logical.
Tell me what that is.
We'll see what we can do.
Somebody says it's the marijuana, and I got a stupider.
Well, you have no idea how much marijuana I smoked when I was younger.
Let's talk about that Facebook whistleblower.
So this is Hagen, I guess it is.
Hagen? So apparently it's just a fact now that Instagram harms children, especially young girls.
Do we accept that as just a fact now?
Just a fact? And so I asked this in a poll on Twitter.
I said, what do you think will harm the most teens in, say, the next year?
Vaccinations, Instagram, or fentanyl?
Which one of those things is the most dangerous to kids?
I feel like it's Instagram by a lot.
And in fact, that was the poll result.
This is a highly unscientific poll.
But Instagram got 39%, and the vaccinations got 29%, and fentanyl got 31%.
So according to the unscientific poll, Instagram is more dangerous than fentanyl and vaccinations.
Joe Manchin is holding tight, and mostly because of the debt ceiling.
So Joe Manchin says that the $3.5 million would just be too much money.
Too much money. How does Joe Manchin decide that?
What mechanism does Joe Manchin use to know how much debt is the right amount?
Did he talk to economists?
Because they don't know.
The economists don't know how much is the amount of debt that would crush us and how much it's going to pay for itself, for example.
Biden says it's going to pay for itself.
Now, he might be a businessman.
I'm not saying he's dumb.
He seems like a high-functioning person.
But he's holding up the entire country, and frankly, I'm glad he is.
So I'm not anti-Joe Manchin, right?
So understand where I'm coming from.
I'm not anti-Joe Manchin.
And I'm kind of glad he's holding up the vote on the infrastructure thing.
But you have to ask the question, based on what?
What is his reasoning?
I like it.
But what's his reasoning?
He's not an economist, right?
And even the economists don't know how much is the right amount of debt.
So it's kind of a weird situation that we've got one person in charge of Congress, and he is making decisions based on absolutely no expertise or knowledge.
I think he'd probably admit it if you asked him the direct question, what is the right amount of debt?
Because it's not zero. If you say to me, Scott, the right amount of debt is zero.
No, it's not. No, it's very much not zero.
It's some large number.
I just don't know at what point is the breaking point.
I mean, debt is good if you use it right.
Debt is not bad universally.
Sometimes you need to invest in stuff.
Manchin is one of 52 senators, so you can't say he's holding it up.
Yeah, your point is taken. He's one of 52 senators.
But he's the only one that matters.
Because, for all the obvious reasons.
So, you know what I'm saying. But I get your point.
Paul Rubin writes in the Wall Street Journal that the woke...
He calls the woke left's primitive economics.
And his point is that...
The socialism kind of model works good in a tribal situation where your amount of stuff is limited.
If you can only gather a limited amount of stuff or grow a limited amount of stuff or hunt a limited amount of stuff, you kind of have to share it with the tribe.
Socialism. But capitalism breaks that model.
And capitalism... Is where everybody gets more.
So instead of dividing what you have, you just make more, and then everybody gets a little, and then the capitalist gets the most.
That's the incentive.
So do you buy that?
Do you buy that the main difference between the left and the right's views on economics is that the right actually understands economics?
LAUGHTER At least they understand supply and demand, and they understand human motivation.
The right understands human motivation, and they calculate it in all of their systems and policies, and the left doesn't.
They act like it's not a variable, which is wrong every time.
It's never right.
As soon as you ignore human motivation, you're wrong every time.
Every time. You're developing a policy or a system.
Do you buy that?
I would go so far as to say that both the left and the right get science wrong way too often.
It has nothing to do with being on the left or the right.
Getting science wrong just means that humans aren't really good at science.
We think we are. We can get the basics, but then we're done after that.
So I think we're both wrong on the science on different things and different times, but only one side gets the economics wrong.
Will you go with me on that?
Any human can get science wrong.
That's pretty easy, because we just don't quite have the brains that can grasp the higher-level stuff.
But economics...
Conservatives understand that human motivation's got to be a top variable or nothing works.
They got that part right, and the left doesn't.
So I'd say everybody's bad at science, but only the left is bad at economics.
Of course, these are gross generalizations, obviously.
All right. I saw Viva Frye use the term experimental in a tweet today for the COVID vaccination.
I would like to suggest that anybody who uses the word experimental for the vaccination, and of course, I know what you mean.
You know, everybody understands that it was, you know, A quick job and wasn't tested as long as other vaccinations and stuff.
And also new technology.
But calling it experimental, I would say, is word thinking.
Meaning it's trying to win an argument with a word and that's not how it works.
I mean, it can work, but that's not how you should win an argument with a word.
You know, don't define a word and say you're done.
And I would argue that experimental might be cognitive dissonance.
It might be a tell for cognitive dissonance, if you're using that word.
It's perfectly reasonable to say all the following things.
We don't have as much of a track record, and at least two of the vaccinations are a platform that we have less experience with.
Does that increase your risk?
Well, we don't know if it increases the actual risk, but it increases the perceived risk, which is what you make your decisions on.
So I would argue that you don't want to use the word experimental.
It's sort of a tell that you're not thinking through.
Or let me put it this way.
The way I receive it.
Since I can't read your mind, I don't know what anybody's thinking when they say it.
But the way it's received is, oh, that's just propaganda word.
And then I turn off the rest of the sentence.
So persuasion advice to Viva, who I generally agree with on most things.
I can't even think of anything I disagree with him on.
But just a persuasion...
Suggestion. Don't use the word experimental.
That really puts you in a category, and I don't think you want to be there.
Here's my take. See how much of this you agree with or disagree, and I'll be watching the comments as I go.
I say, without being an expert on any of this stuff, and by the way, you should watch Viva and Barnes.
It's a great... It was one of the best podcasts, in my opinion.
One of the best podcasts out there.
Let me see how much of this, the following, you agree with.
Number one, that every vaccination is a different risk management decision.
By itself. It has to be looked at by itself as its own risk management.
Everybody agree with that so far?
Such that, let's say you had lots of experience with chickenpox vaccination.
What does it tell you about measles vaccinations?
A little bit, maybe, but certainly no certainty because they're different and the risk is different, etc.
Now, I've said that the risk of COVID is a risk to the economy, whereas those other ones are not.
I know I'm going to get a pushback on this, so let me put that out there and see your comments.
COVID is a risk to the economy, but the others were not.
Why? Somebody says why.
Is it because the data suggests that it's a risk to the economy?
Doesn't matter. If you're thinking, Scott, Scott, Scott, we shouldn't have closed the economy, that's the wrong answer.
What we should or shouldn't do is irrelevant to your risk management decision.
What we would do is relevant.
What you should do is not part of the conversation.
Because we're not doing what we should.
We're doing what we're doing.
And everybody might have a different opinion of what we should do.
So should is a word that shouldn't be part of your calculation.
Just look at the cause and effect.
Given the government we have, and we can't change it, right?
The government we have, the public we have, the risks that we have.
If COVID started killing...
You know, way more people than it is at the moment because we just opened everything up and dropped all the restrictions.
And I don't know if that would make a difference, but let's just say it does.
That would close the economy.
Maybe you disagree, and maybe if you were in charge, you wouldn't close the economy.
That's irrelevant. You're not in charge.
The people who are in charge will feel that they'll lose their jobs if too many people die.
So their incentive, as government officials, their incentive unfortunately doesn't align with yours.
Your incentive is to run your life with a risk management that you feel comfortable with.
That's not their incentive.
Their incentive is not for you to run your life with your own risk-reward.
Their incentive is to have the fewest number of people die or get hospitalized.
Because that's how they keep their jobs.
So they're not about the same risk management calculation you're about.
You're not even on the same team.
Similar to drafting you for the war.
You getting drafted might be really bad for you, But that's not why they did it.
They didn't draft you for your benefit.
They drafted you to go in the war for the nation's benefit.
So the individual calculation and the government's calculation will always be different in this kind of situation.
And maybe it has to be. Maybe it has to be.
And you can't change the fact that they will manage to the lowest number of deaths.
That's not going to change. So if COVID went wild or wilder or was completely uncontrolled and there were, let's say, no vaccinations or anything else, would it close the economy?
Yeah, of course it would.
Of course it would. Because if it did before, I think it would again.
The same forces would be at work.
You'd just have to get the death rate up to a certain level and then everything would close again.
Maybe differently. We might be smarter about it, how we close things, but it's going to be a drag on the economy.
So here's my take.
The COVID vaccination did not have the same risk profile as any of the prior vaccinations.
If we had the luxury of waiting 5 to 15 years of watching the COVID vaccination before making it more mandatory...
Or at least requiring it for certain things, I suppose.
We'd love to do that.
We all agree on that, right?
If we had the luxury to wait 5 or 15 years to just watch this COVID vaccination to feel really safe about it, we'd all love that.
But we don't. That's not one of the choices.
One of the choices is you better do something pretty quick or you're in trouble.
So that risk profile is not like measles.
It's not like chickenpox.
So the moment you say, well, let's treat them like they're somehow this similar class of risk, completely wrong.
They might be a similar risk, but remember, your individual risk has nothing to do with what the government does.
Because they don't care about your individual risk.
They care about the group risk.
So you might say to yourself, well, I've got a kid.
My kids, no way they're going to get COVID and die.
So kids, of course, I think have to be their own class for analysis.
So I agree with that. I don't think you make one rule and it applies to kids and it applies to everybody, but we're not.
We are making different rules for different ages, as we should.
So... Group risk should include economics.
That is correct. Group risk should include the economics.
So, let's see if we can agree with the following statements.
Nobody, including our experts, are super good at evaluating risks.
True? Nobody, including our experts, are super good at evaluating risks.
Who's on board with that so far?
We're all bad at it, even the experts, because there's a little bit of guessing going on.
But there are some things that you as an individual can make a decision on without knowing all the risks, such as your personal freedom.
Do you need to know everything about your risks to make a good decision about your own personal freedom?
Nope. No.
You could be wrong.
It's your personal freedom.
Emphasis on personal.
You could be wrong about your risk.
It's your decision. You get to make that decision unless the government tries to stop it.
I think that comparing the vaccination to any other is bad thinking because the risk profiles are different and we should not expect that we would treat them the same.
If the risk of COVID is more immediate and affects the economy and maybe it's a bigger population of people who die, I don't know if that's true, but if you believe it is true, you would treat them differently.
And one of the things you might do is rush a vaccination.
Something you would never do if you had the luxury of waiting, but you don't.
Alright. FDA approved more rapid testing.
Looks like a big deal.
Cost as little as $10.
Already there are several companies that make them, but this new one, Akon, it's going to double the capacity and you get a, looks like it's a nasal swab and you get a You get an answer in 15 minutes.
Somebody's going to win a Pulitzer Prize for figuring out why this hasn't already been done.
Because here are the problems we didn't have.
We didn't have a problem with money, capacity, science, know-how, anything.
We didn't have any.
We didn't have any obstacles.
I mean, we didn't have any obstacles that would have stopped us from having the same availability as some European countries already have.
We had no more obstacles than they did, and probably more resources.
So why did it take us so long?
It has to be corruption.
Now, I understand that Scott Gottlieb's book may attribute it to bureaucracy.
Not buying that for a second.
And I'm not sure he's talking about the same thing.
I didn't read it. I just heard about it.
So I may be conflating two different stories.
I think I might be, actually. But the point is, we don't know.
Does that bother you? We don't know why this took so long.
And I don't buy the bureaucracy.
Because you know what also would have stopped vaccinations?
The bureaucracy. Are you telling me that the bureaucracy...
Approved super, let's say, provocative or controversial vaccinations on a compressed timeline.
You tell me the bureaucracy got that done, and they couldn't approve tests which would have essentially no risk.
They couldn't do that.
So the bureaucracy can approve the hardest thing you could possibly ever approve, rapid vaccinations, and And they couldn't approve a test that doesn't even affect your body.
Seriously. That's not the bureaucracy.
Trust me. There are few people who appreciate the power of the bureaucracy more than the creator of Dilbert's.
But this doesn't look like bureaucracy to me.
This looks like some kind of corruption.
I don't know who or where, but it's some kind.
So somebody's going to get a Pulitzer Prize for digging into that and finding out who it was and what their benefit was for stopping it.
There's a... You know the book Peril that everybody's talking about by Woodward?
John Dickerson of CBS News...
He says, To which I say, was there really a transcript?
Is there an actual written transcript of an actual private conversation between Pelosi and Milley and an author of a book had access to it?
What? Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
Is there an actual transcript?
Like it was recorded and then released?
That's not true, is it?
Oh, somebody says a FOIA. Maybe?
Yeah, I doubt it. So we don't know the details of this story, but let me add a generic, which is this.
Are you aware that when people are quoted in books, it's rarely what the person actually said?
How many of you know that?
How many of you know that when you see somebody's exact words in quotes in an article or a book, chances are, very high, like maybe 85%, that they didn't say that?
Did you know it was high?
That's just my experience.
85% of the time, it's a manufactured quote.
They're manufactured. In other words, the journalist or writer talks to the subject for a long period of time and then says to himself, well, he said three or four things about this topic, but they were kind of long and they don't fit into a quote.
So I'm going to bake them into a little quote.
I'm going to put quotes around it because I feel like I've captured the essence of what he was trying to say.
And I'll just put a quote around it so it doesn't look like I'm saying it.
Super common. Do you know how many times I've seen my own words with quotation marks around them in articles?
A lot. Hundreds.
Hundreds and hundreds, many hundreds of times I've seen myself quoted in the news.
How many of those times did I actually say the actual sentence that's in the quote?
Ten, twenty percent?
That's it. The rest are literally made up.
And as a consumer, if you don't know that, you're really going to be confused about what's really happening.
All right. Let's talk about the good news for the golden age.
You know the Adams Law of slow-moving disasters?
It says that if society can see a big problem coming for long enough, we've got lots of warning, we always fix it.
We always do. We didn't run out of food.
We didn't run out of oil.
And we closed the ozone hole.
We'll fix climate change.
That's my personal optimistic view.
Yeah, because we had enough time.
Even though it looks like we don't have enough time and we're rushing against the rising temperatures, I think we have enough time.
But here are a few things that are happening.
Number one. A company called Dimensional Energy.
They're making jet fuel, which is the hardest thing to replace if you're trying to get to a low-carbon situation.
It's hard to replace jet fuel because you can't do it with a battery, except for small planes.
But for a big jet, we don't yet have a battery capacity for that.
But this company, Dimensional Energy, sucks the CO2 out of the air, puts it through a chemical process, and creates jet fuel.
Out of the air. They suck jet fuel out of the air.
Now it's not jet fuel when they suck it out, it's just CO2. But they chemically translate it into jet fuel.
And apparently they are going to power this whole thing with the sun.
So they'll have a big sun factory out in the desert somewhere or someplace remote.
And the sun will burn down and create enough energy to translate this CO2 that they've sucked out of the air into jet fuel.
Now, jet fuel is one of the bigger contributors to climate change.
So it's a big deal.
And it's even better than you think.
They think that at a scale, once they build a bigger operation, they can get the cost of a gallon of jet fuel down to a dollar.
Follow the money. If the economics of this are accurate, this is the only way we're going to make jet fuel.
We're not going to make jet fuel any other way if you can make it for a dollar a gallon.
I don't know what jet fuel costs, but I'm sure it's as much or more than a tank of gas for your car that's five bucks in California.
So that's good news.
And it's already working at small scale, so we don't have to wonder about the technology.
All we have to do is scale it up.
It's now an engineering problem.
Let me say that again.
The solution to climate change...
If this is true, if you can actually do this as inexpensively as they claim, if that's true, we're done.
Climate change is just an engineering problem now.
It's not a political problem.
It's not a scientific problem.
It's just an engineering problem.
You get a bunch of engineers to build a bunch of these plants, they suck it out of the air, boom, we're done.
Here's another one.
Good news. A company called...
I don't know the name of the company.
But they've built a gigantic warehouse, like really gigantic, using AI and robotics and stuff like that.
And apparently it's in the Appalachian Mountains.
And if you do it right, and it's a high-tech operation, you reduce the water use by something like 90%.
So we've got this gigantic water problem and also a gigantic cost of living problem.
And they can substantially reduce the cost of food, substantially reduce the use of water, which is a big deal because agriculture uses most of your water, and probably bring down the cost of food.
As well as the shipping costs.
Because in theory, you could build one of these facilities or more in every population center, and then suddenly you don't have to ship it.
I mean, as far.
So, this is gigantic.
Are you worried about climate change making it too hard to grow food?
Problem solved. And again, all this has to do is be economical.
And you're done. We'll just build more of them.
Just keep building. And I think this is part of the answer to housing and just an inexpensive life that doesn't break the bank.
This might be part of it.
Well, there's news that Dan Scavino is missing in action and they can't serve him the subpoenas they want to to have him testify about January 6th.
There's a rumor that Dan Scavino went hiking in the Carlton Preserve.
Anybody? Anybody?
There's a rumor that he went hiking in the Carlton Preserve.
Some of you got that joke.
Some of you got that joke.
It's not true. But I'm not even going to explain it.
Ask a friend if you didn't get that joke.
All right, let's talk about Taiwan and China.
So as you know, China's sending a bunch of warships flying over Taiwan.
And Jack Posobiec tweeted about the Taiwan stuff.
He says it's heating up more than people realize.
He says this isn't just posturing.
There are Chinese generals telling Xi they want the green light to attack Taiwan.
What's your interpretation of this story?
Let's take it as a given that Jack Posobiec has good sources.
That's been my experience.
He has good sources. So I'm going to take it as true that we have some intel on this.
And he's heard it. How do you interpret that?
Do you interpret it as, oh my God, war is going to break out at any moment?
Because the generals are itching to do it?
I don't. Here's my interpretation.
If you're a general, you need to tell Xi you're ready to go.
Give me the green light. Isn't that just good generaling?
Generals being generals.
Don't we have an attack plan for basically everything?
Don't our generals have a plan for attacking just about anything, including China?
Of course they do.
And don't those generals probably tell their commander-in-chief in the United States, not on this topic, but on other topics, let us do it.
They said that in Afghanistan, right?
Yeah, let us stay.
Let's keep some people there forever.
The most ordinary thing in the world, bordering on nothing...
Is generals wanting to fight wars, or at least telling the boss they want to fight a war.
Telling the boss, you know, put us in the game, just seems good politics.
I'm not sure I could go so far as to say that that's telling us they're ready to strike.
Because I can't imagine that China would benefit from it.
I think their economy would be crashed for 100 years.
And I think they'd know that.
CNN has a story that says in several states, Texas, Idaho, Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arkansas, and North Carolina, have 15% or less of their ICU capacity available.
So ICU capacity in those states I mentioned, 15% or less capacity.
Anybody? In the comments?
In the comments, why is that fake news?
Come on, you're all trained.
You know this one. You all know this one.
That's the normal amount of capacity in an ICU. 15% of capacity is a lot, actually.
It's not tight.
That means that they wish they had more.
Because the ICUs try to operate close to that level because they're expensive.
So you want to utilize them as much as possible.
So you build them such that they're always...
Close to capacity. So CNN reports this without ever telling you what the normal capacity is for an ICU. Somebody in the comments says 90% is the goal.
This is the fakest of fake news.
Now, I'm not telling you that that's enough capacity, because you could crash that with a wave, I guess, of COVID. But they need to add a little context here, please.
All right, Monica Lewinsky is...
I think there's some documentary about Monica Lewinsky now.
So she's in the news again.
She says, Bill Clinton's role in the affair scandal was wholly inappropriate.
I guess we all agree with that, as was hers.
And she says the same thing.
Her own role, she's not defending.
But what about the part about going public?
Those are two different...
Crimes, if I could use crime in a generic sense, not a technical sense.
Because Bill Clinton made one bad mistake, which was Monica Lewinsky.
Monica Lewinsky made two bad mistakes.
One was getting involved in the affair.
She was an adult. Yes, I understand the power differential and all that, but she was an adult.
We don't give adults a pass.
We don't give adults a pass.
Clinton lied, and he should have.
I approve of his lie.
I approve of his lie.
For the country. Was the country better off if you found out that the affair was real?
Did that help you in some way?
No, it just caused us to be caught up in some impeachment drama.
It didn't help the country.
So, this is my opinion.
Bill Clinton, yes.
What he did, he has to answer for, and he has.
What Monica did in terms of the affair, she has to answer for it, and she has.
And she takes responsibility, and I appreciate that.
But the real crime here was the making it public.
Am I wrong? That that was the bigger crime?
Because that's the part that paralyzed the country.
They could have had sex all day long in the Oval Office if they just didn't tell us about it.
Still would be wholly inappropriate, but at least, you know, the Commander-in-Chief would not be so tense.
Yeah, so her friend Linda Tripp, who talked her into it, certainly has some responsibility there, too.
But I can't give Monica Lewinsky a pass for making this public.
That is one of the worst things any citizen has done to this country, short of terrorism.
Is that hyperbole?
It's one of the worst things a citizen has done to the country, short of terrorism.
And, you know, mass shootings and stuff.
Somebody says not even close.
Their affair was outed by Drudge.
That's not the way I remember it.
Maybe I do need a fact check on this, but I remember it as maybe Drudge outed it, but it wouldn't have been a thing unless she admitted it, right?
I think it was the admitting it that made it a thing.
Because presidents being accused of having affairs is kind of, you know, One news cycle and gone.
That's not really the big problem, just being accused.
It's the admitting it that's the problem.
All right. And I also think that this whole thing infantilizes women.
It infantilizes women.
Let's do the Alan Dershowitz test, okay?
Here's the Alan Dershowitz test.
Imagine the affair happened, but the 22-year-old in the story was male.
Would we treat a male 22-year-old who had an affair, let's say, with Angela Merkel or something, would we treat that 22-year-old as like, oh, there was a power differential?
Even though there would be.
And even though it does matter.
I'm certainly agreeing it matters.
But would we treat these situations the same?
I'm going to say no.
I'm going to say no.
I think we're infantilizing women here.
I think it's insanely sexist to imagine that Monica was just a victim to the power and the situation.
I just don't think a man would be treated like this.
I think a man would be treated with more respect, frankly.
And I don't think that's cool.
Bill Gates is part of fake news.
Some of you might have fallen for this.
The story is that in a 2010 TED Talk...
He talked about using vaccinations to reduce population growth.
People interpreted that as killing people to reduce the population.
No, he didn't say that.
He also did not say we'll vaccinate people to make them unable to have children.
No, he didn't say that.
The context was that vaccinated societies do better, and when countries do better...
Economically, their birth rate goes down automatically.
So what Bill Gates said was sort of a big nothing.
If you vaccinate better these developing countries, they would be part of a package of things that make them do better.
And as they do better, they have fewer kids.
Is that controversial?
Now, you might say we shouldn't get vaccinations.
That's a separate question. But it's not really controversial to say that the population might self-regulate if the country does better.
All right. Birth rate goes down, but infant mortality improves, so does Wash.
I mean, you could argue that he has the math wrong.
That's a separate question.
How much market share is Apple versus Android?
Quit selling Apple products.
You sell out a lot.
Now, I'll say it again.
As many times as it takes.
We can't treat the companies that have established business in China the same as a company that's planning to go there.
That's just not the same analysis.
You have to let the big companies unwind at their own speed, whatever makes sense economically.
But I think you can be assured that Apple and their management team, they're looking at alternatives to China.
If you think they're not looking pretty hard at alternatives to China just to minimize their own risk, you're crazy.
But I'm just saying that we don't need to make them leave today.
It would be enough to just give them their flexibility to get out at their own speed.
A question about Boo, my cat.
I have only bad news about Boo, unfortunately.
She's not eating on her own.
I thought she did for like a day.
She was licking some food, but she stopped.
It's not looking good for Boo the cat.
But that's another story.
All right, so... Let's see.
I got some pushback on Twitter for mentioning that vaccine mandates would not be unique.
And the problem is we just got used to it.
Everything you do is mandated in terms of the...
You know, the guardrails of what you can and can't do.
And I used seatbelts as my example, and everybody did the analogy thing.
Where if you say, oh, Scott, that's a bad analogy, because here are the differences between a seatbelt and a vaccination.
Now, did anybody think I didn't know that seatbelts and vaccinations were actually different things?
I will stipulate that everything about a vaccination...
Everything is different from everything about sea belts.
Except one thing, which was my point.
Just one thing. The government makes you do it.
That's all. That's all.
I'm not saying they're the same.
I'm just saying you live in a world in which the government makes you do all kinds of stuff that maybe you don't want to do.
So if your argument is the slippery slope, well, you've been sliding that slippery slope forever.
Which doesn't mean I'm in favor of mandates.
I'm opposed to mandates.
Hear that part. I'm opposed to mandates.
But I'm also opposed to bad arguments.
I'm opposed to mandates and bad arguments.
We live in a world in which we have willingly given the government all kinds of control over our bodies.
And we just got used to it.
So we don't notice it, really, I guess.
It's just that when it comes to this, we notice it.
Now, let me ask you this. Why is it that we're treating this particular risk and mandate so different?
Don't our other mandates have potential to kill us or make us lose money also?
This isn't the only mandate that has a negative impact on people, is it?
For example, instituting the draft.
And that's a pretty big impact on people.
But we allow that under the right conditions.
So I'm going to make a provocative statement that your opinion on vaccinations was probably assigned to you.
You don't know it.
Your opinion on vaccinations was probably assigned to you by the media, because that's where our opinions come from.
If you have an opinion that doesn't match anything that you're reading in the media, it might be your own opinion.
If your opinion exactly matches stuff you're seeing on social media...
Could be because you're all smart.
I don't think so.
I think it's more because your opinion got assigned to you and you accepted it.
So not only are you accepting mandates, it's worse.
You're accepting opinions.
You're actually taking the governments, or in some cases, some other entity like Fox News or whatever you're reading, and you're letting them give you an opinion.
That you think is your own now.
I know, you think it's your own opinion.
That's how it works. It always feels like it's your own opinion.
But unless it's unique, you can't tell.
Scott's trying to label people.
What? What?
Where did I just label people?
South Korean doctors on YouTube are a good source?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, I'm asked, do you believe Hunter is actually painting the pictures he is selling?
I don't think you can assume it.
But I don't think that they're so good that I would rule it out.
How about my opinion?
Is it a sign? Well, my opinion, I believe, does not match to any of the major opinions.
My opinion is that the vaccination is a good idea for lots of people.
And I'm in that category where the risk-reward, based on, you know, incomplete information, but it looks like it might be a good decision for people in my category.
It might be a bad decision for somebody in some other demographic.
But I don't think we should have mandates.
So I don't know which side is telling you that the vaccinations might be a good idea, but you don't need mandates.
So I suppose there are plenty of people with that opinion, too.
Scott's opinion seems like things we've heard before.
I don't know that you've heard my opinion breaking down the risk management before.
I think I'm the only one talking about it that way.
Yeah, you know, the government tracking down to $600 in transactions in your bank account, that's going to change a lot of behavior.
Because here's the problem.
A huge part of the American economy is criminal.
Small business.
One of the dark secrets of small business is that they're...
Mostly criminal enterprises.
No matter what they look like on the surface, they're almost certainly cheating on their taxes.
Sorry. Almost.
Not all of them. You know, there could be small businesses that are just playing it totally straight.
But small businesses have a lot of flexibility to take cash.
Pretty much all of them do.
Pretty much all of them don't declare it.
But they've got to put that cash somewhere.
So they put it in the bank. So what's going to happen with this bank thing?
Let's make a prediction.
What's going to happen? Will the small businesses stop taking cash or just start paying taxes on it?
Probably not. Will they take that money and still put it in the bank where they will easily be caught because their deposits outweigh their income so it'll raise the flag?
Probably not. Here's what's going to happen.
You're going to create a secondary market for cash.
And it won't be banks.
You're going to create this underground cash network where people will be laundering their cash through friends.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say I made a $5,000 cash deposit in my bank.
Would it raise any flags?
Nope. Nope. Because the amounts of my transactions are large-ish.
And even if I have never made a...
I don't think I've ever made a $5,000 cash deposit.
But even if I did, people would say, well, that's within the range of what he does.
So I could launder your money.
You could come to me and say, hey...
You know, I got this $5,000.
Could you put it in your bank and we'll trade something that can't be noticed?
I'd say, sure. Because I have no problem depositing it.
It just looks like normal business for me.
So you're going to find these money laundering will just be pervasive.
You know, cash laundering.
And then crypto is probably part of the answer.
Yeah, I'm seeing. I'm being prompted for that.
Crypto will have some impact.
I don't know exactly what that will look like.
Look at Europe to see where this goes.
Don't try to guess. Interesting.
Somebody says in Europe it's already there.
So... Repeat after me.
I just sold my boat. Exactly.
But... If you sell your boat every week, they're going to notice.
See, that's why I could put 5,000 in the bank and say I sold the boat.
Nobody's going to look at it twice.
Yes, the Dilbert calendars are made in China, and almost all of the products I use probably are made in China.
For those of you who want to do a gotcha on me, it doesn't work.
Because I'm telling you I'm not going to stop buying Chinese products if I need them and it's the only place I can get them, or even just convenience.
I'm telling you that we have to stop new business going in.
That's practical. And stopping buying everything from China is impractical, and making all the companies move out right away is impractical.
So I'm in favor of practical things.
I realize that this creates an inconsistency philosophically, but you're not catching me.
I'm telling you I'm doing that.
There's no gotcha here.
Yes, Dilbert products are printed in China.
I hate it. It's not going to change overnight.
Will I talk to my publisher about it?
Of course. Do they have options?
Probably not. All right.
Yeah, I mean, we can be practical.
We don't have to be absolutists.
All right, that is all I needed to say today, I'm pretty sure.
Yes, it is. And that means I've got to go do something else.
