Episode 1629 Scott Adams: Biden's Disastrous Press Conference, Havana Syndrome, and More Ridiculousness
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Content:
COVID deaths under age 75 without a comorbidity?
Democrats fail to change filibuster rule
AG Letitia James "significant" evidence on Trumps
MKUltra project, controlling human mind
Misrepresentation of Voting Rights Act
Biden's press conference and gaffs
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to, that's right, the best thing that's ever happened to you in your entire life.
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Go. All right.
Well, for those of you who are my local subscribers, you know that last night I revealed to you the secret for authoring the simulation yourself.
Many of you are trying it.
If you're on YouTube, I'm sorry.
That was for local subscribers only.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen has a poll in which one of the questions was, they asked, has Washington become more or less partisan in the past year?
Do you think that anybody's going to answer less partisan?
78% said more partisan.
And it's kind of weird that we've drifted into a place...
Was it Newt Gingrich, who was the first one to make this, I think, a change...
Which is that one party would do nothing but stop the other one from succeeding.
And that's it. That's right.
25% say it's becoming less partisan.
Approximately 25%.
You caught that one before I did.
But was it Newt Gingrich?
Was that where everything changed?
Where he got the Republicans to hold tight?
That's about right, right?
So... I don't know.
It's like we have a government that no longer even pretends they're trying to do stuff.
They're only pretending like they're trying to win.
Tip O'Neill was tough, but he was a dealmaker, right?
Tip O'Neill was very much a dealmaker, I think.
Yeah, okay. Let me ask you this.
In the comments, let's see where your current knowledge is.
Don't look at anybody else's comment.
So before you see what somebody else says, tell me the daily number of deaths from COVID in the United States.
The current number, the daily.
How many people died on average in the past week in the United States?
Give me the number. Let's see if you know the number.
Oh, a very educated group.
Wow! Very well informed.
Very good. Yeah, it's around 1,500.
I think it's closer to 1,700, but I would take anything in the 1,000 to 2,000 range as well informed.
Surprising. Congratulations.
Nicely done. I like it when people who follow me are unusually well informed.
I don't think the general public could have answered as consistently as the comments are here.
I don't think so. But here's my second question.
Of the roughly 1,700 dying per day, either from COVID or with COVID, that's still an open question, but what percentage of them do you think are under 75 and reasonably healthy, meaning they don't have a comorbidity?
So on the 1,700, tell me the number that are under 75 and don't have, you know, let's say obesity or comorbidity.
Well, you're just guessing now, aren't you?
Yeah, you're just guessing.
You don't know. I don't know.
Do you know why you don't know and I don't know?
I don't think it's reported.
Now, the CDC does track by comorbidities and age, but I think they're doing it by a rolling month.
In coronavirus time, a month...
That's like a lifetime, right?
In a month, you could have a whole new wave.
Or you could have a whole wave disappear in a month.
So if you're looking at a rolling month, it's concealing any improvement.
Am I right? And you also have to dig into each age group and stuff.
So it's almost as if it's intentionally concealed from you.
Does it feel that way?
Does it feel like the most relevant number...
Is intentionally being concealed?
It's not hidden, hidden completely.
Like you could suss it down if you really worked at it.
But it looks like they're trying to not let you know what that is.
What is your obligation to comply to mandates in terms of the coronavirus?
What obligation do you have when your government is intentionally not giving you the most relevant data?
Yeah, zero. Exactly.
Yeah, there is no obligation.
Whatever moral or ethical obligation you believed you might have had, this would be sort of the CNN, Howard Stern view of things, that, you know, you've got to be a good moral person to get vaccinated.
Well, if your government, who is asking this of you, is not going to give you the most relevant number, which they have, they have the number, they're not giving it to you, You have no obligation.
You have no moral obligation, no legal obligation, no obligation to your fellow citizens, no obligation.
You are free of obligation because of that.
And February 1, we are done.
The government might take a little while to catch up, but I think the pretty privileged people will lead us.
The people who are attractive will stop wearing masks, and then the rest of us will be able to do it.
It makes sense that pretty people would go first, because people don't ask them to put masks on.
And secondly, it makes more sense for them to take a mask off.
People like me, I actually benefit a little by keeping the mask on, because you don't see this half of my ugly face.
But the pretty will lead us, as they should.
Well... So the Senate Democrats got defeated, as everybody knew, trying to change the filibuster rule so that they could get, I guess, voting rights stuff, as they call it, passed.
And Senators Manchin and Sinema once again became the only ones that mattered.
One of my better predictions was that...
Manchin would actually be running the country because he was the only one willing to be a swing vote.
If you're willing to be the swing vote, you get to run the country.
I felt like he was the only one.
I think cinema is a slightly different question.
I'll talk about that.
But why was nobody else smart enough to know that all they had to do was be flexible and they'd be in control of the United States?
He was the only one that figured that out.
Now, maybe he's the only one who had the flexibility to do it or something.
Yeah, that's true as well.
But it feels like it was an obvious play that he uniquely stands out in taking.
Now, Sinema...
I can't say enough good things about the way she played this.
And Manchin, too. So let me say this is...
As, let's say, aggressively as I can.
I always protect the system over the individual result.
Never destroy the system to get an individual outcome.
That would be dumb. And it seems like cinema is essentially protecting the entire republic.
Because if you make this kind of a change for this one thing, well, then it's in play, and it'll always be made for everything, and then everything just goes to shit.
Now, honestly, I just can't say enough good things about somebody who would be willing to go against their own party to protect the republic.
To protect the republic.
How do you feel bad about that?
I mean, right now, if Sinema ran for president, I'd have a hard time not supporting her.
Because I'm always going to back the system over the individual decision.
Now, I don't know anything else about her, so that's not like some kind of a decision or something.
But this is serious presidential bullshit here.
Not bullshit. Like, this is serious presidential quality.
That's what I want. I don't care what her party is.
Because she voted against her party.
So that shows some independence.
Now, with this crowd, I know it's hard to hear me say that I might back somebody on the left.
But let me state it more definitively.
If it's the best candidate, I would back the candidate on the left.
I know you don't want to hear that.
But if it was the best candidate, I could do it easily.
It wouldn't be any problem at all.
But it'd have to be somebody who wanted the system to work.
Let me give you some more examples of what I think that would look like.
And I'm not suggesting that a cinema or a mansion would have these views, but it's one I'd like to see.
You know my view.
That abortion will never be decided because we'll always be fighting about it.
So if you can't decide what's right, but yet you have to decide, and you can't get everybody to agree, but you have to move on.
You have to get past it somehow.
The default is to default to who decides.
It's the Thomas Sowell view that if you can't decide what to do because nobody will agree, you can still, you know, argue it.
You can still fight it all day long, and of course you should if you think it's important.
But if you can't decide and get everybody on the same side, you have to default to protecting the system.
So who is the best deciders?
Well, I don't think the president should ever be involved in abortion.
That's my opinion. And here's why.
Because the President of the United States should never have any say in who lives or dies unless it's a war situation, really.
But that just shouldn't be the President.
States... Somebody's got to make a decision.
So you want to drive those kinds of decisions as low down into the process as possible, as close to the individual and their doctor as you can get it.
Because that's a better system.
It's more likely to be sustained.
So I think there are a whole bunch of things, like how we do omnibus bills, and how you do the veto, and how do you run elections?
Do you have a transparent election or not?
So there's just tons of stuff...
Or I'd love to have a leader who says, you know what?
We're never going to agree on this stuff.
So I'm not even going to make it my job to tell you what's right.
I'll just make it my job to make sure the republic stays strong and let you guys argue it out.
Once the public comes up with a decision, maybe 75% of you want the same thing, then the system will give it to you.
But I'm going to make sure the system is there.
So that when the public decides what it wants, becomes well informed, forms a consensus, that that will happen within a structure that can support you.
I won't be the one who breaks the system so that even if you made a good decision or one you're happy with, it couldn't be implemented anyway.
So I feel like somebody could make that case and win on that, but maybe not.
Maybe it's too intellectual. The public doesn't like anything that they have to think about too much.
You know, they prefer operating under fear and, you know, hoaxes and that kind of stuff.
Here's some CNN fake news.
So here's how they handle the fact-checker with Biden.
So Daniel Dale at CNN does the fact-checking.
And to his credit...
Although the item on the CNN page was small, I believe it was one sentence, just sort of hidden down at the bottom and the middle, that, by the way, by the way, we also did some fact-checking on Biden's press conference.
There were, in fact, a number of false statements, but...
Nothing to see here. Just look away.
Look! It's Trump!
Look! Look! Over there!
It's Trump! Look, everybody!
How can you believe that?
So that's what CNN's doing.
The old, don't look here.
There's nothing to see. But then Daniel Dale goes on.
To say that, indeed, Biden said a bunch of things that weren't true.
You probably are aware of them all.
I don't need to have to go through them.
But he said a bunch of things that weren't true.
But then Daniel Dale was quick to say that Biden's lies, while dozens, dozens, dozens of lies, that Trump had thousands.
And that you could not compare the mere...
Dozens of lies told by Biden.
I mean, it's just dozens.
How do you compare dozens to thousands?
Do you see any trouble with the way he is presenting that data?
Does any error in analysis jump out at you?
How many times has Biden spoken public...
Right? Versus how many times did Trump speak in public?
And now let me ask you this.
When they say Trump told thousands of lies, or failed to fact-checking, do they mean that he told thousands of individual different lies on different topics?
Is that what that means?
Did Trump really tell thousands of unique and different lies, or did he tell something closer to Dozens of lies that he repeated more often because he talked more often and tweeted more often.
It seems to me that Daniel Dale is trying to get away with comparing one lie repeated three times and count that as three where if Biden doesn't speak in public as often he gets a one because he only talked once.
Is that what happened here?
I think so, right?
Give me a fact check.
That's exactly what happened here, right?
They compared dozens to thousands as if that was actually a fair comparison.
That's fake news.
I fact check your fact checkers and find you fake stamp.
Here's some more fake news.
Letitia James, the Attorney General, says her office has uncovered, quote, significant evidence, quote, indicating that the Trump Organization used fraudulent or misleading asset valuations to obtain a host of economic benefits, including loans, insurance coverage, and tax deductions.
And Michael Cohen, who presumably was privy to any of those discussions, he says he was deeply in the inside.
He was Trump's attorney, and when asked on CNN to give an example of this egregious and illegal, very illegal asset valuation stuff, what was the best example that Michael Cohen could come up with?
Because he did. He came up with a pretty specific example.
Of Trump inflating his property values.
What was the context?
In which Trump inflated his property taxes, not property taxes, his property values.
What was the context?
According to Michael Cohen, this is not me, Michael Cohen said the context was to make sure he looked better on the Forbes Fortune 500 list.
That was the argument.
That when he said what his net worth was for publicity in Forbes, just for publicity, that he allegedly inflated the values of his properties to say that he had a few billion more dollars.
But when he did other things that maybe were getting a loan or insurance, he would give them something closer to the actual value Because that's what you have to do.
Because that's the law.
Can you fucking believe that we got this far and that's all they have?
They don't have anything.
Well, according to Michael Cohen, who would be the closest to the actual reality, according to Michael Cohen, they literally have fucking nothing.
That he lied to Forbes magazine.
Do you know that Forbes magazine also reports my net worth?
Do you think they got it right?
No! How in the hell would Forbes know my net worth?
Think about it.
Let me think about it. How in the world would anybody calculate my net worth like they know what I've invested in in the last 30 years?
Really? Forbes knows how I invested in the last 30 years.
It knows what happened with my marriages.
It knows that. Of course not.
So the Fortune 500 thing is publicity for Forbes.
And that's how you should see it.
I mean, it's fun. It's like a horoscope, basically.
It's just entertainment. So something that's just publicity for a magazine...
Which Trump wanted to get some publicity for himself.
So it's a double publicity situation, which everybody in the modern world understands as hyperbole.
I mean, that's how getting attention works.
You're a little hyperbolic PR. And that was compared to the legal process where you're getting a loan or paying property tax or whatever.
Wow. If that's all they have, this is one of the biggest hoaxes of all time.
Now, I'm not saying that is all they have, but let me go down to another level.
Suppose you were trying to value your own properties to get a loan.
Okay. You want to value your own properties to get a loan, and you own a bunch of hotels.
One way to do it would be to take your cash flow...
And multiply it by a multiplier.
So you'd say, I've created this much cash flow or this much profit, and you might multiply it by, say, five.
I'm not sure what the multiple is for real estate.
What's the multiple for real estate?
If you saw a commercial property that was giving off, I'll give an example, a million dollars a year in net profit, what would you pay for it if you were going to buy that?
Five times, right?
Somebody says 8. Somebody says 10.
I don't think you'd pay 10. Would you?
Would you ever pay 10? Anyway, the point is there's a multiple.
It doesn't matter what the multiple is.
So you'd say to yourself, my net profit last year, I'll multiply it by 5.
Now, could you support that number if somebody challenged you legally?
Would that be a supportable number?
Your most recent year's profits times 5.
Would it? Well, then you'd have to add the value of the property.
Because it's not just the...
Because you also own the property.
So then you'd subtract your loan values and blah, blah, blah.
So... That would be one way to calculate.
Now suppose instead of taking the most recent year and multiplying it by five, you say to yourself, you know, every year is up and down, it's unpredictable, so instead of taking the most recent year as my most representative, I'll take an average of my last five years, or last three would be better.
I'll take an average of my last three years and I'll multiply that by five.
And that might be very different than just taking the last year and multiplying it by five.
Is that legal? Yeah.
Yeah, because you have a good reason for it.
It's legal if you have a good reason.
That's it. That's the whole standard.
If an accountant or a lawyer can come in and say, well, here's my reason, you don't go to jail for that.
It might be reversed, but if an expert says it's a perfectly good reason, you disagree, I get that, but my reason was okay, that's perfectly legal.
Now, suppose he said instead, I'm going to look at comparables.
I'm going to look at my property.
Compare it to other things nearby that sold recently.
That's entirely subjective.
Because you have to decide what is comparable.
And there's never anything comparable.
You know, a specific hotel doesn't really have a comparable.
There's nothing just like it.
You could do square footage and stuff, but it wouldn't be the same hotel, the same level of accoutrements, etc.
So you basically have a huge subjective ability to say, OK, I think my hotel is just like that one across the street.
But you could have said, no, it's not really like that one across the street.
I think it's more like the one down the road.
And then, completely legally, you can give yourself an evaluation that could be way high or way low.
Completely legal. There's nothing illegal about that.
You just have to be able to back it up.
Now, those are just a few examples.
But trust me when I say there are more ways to do this that are also completely legal.
And you can use different methods for different contexts.
So if you're doing it for PR, you can just make up some numbers.
It's totally legal.
If you're doing it for the bank, you'd better be able to back it up, but it could be anything all over the place.
You know what? You could even say this.
I believe this would be legal.
I would need an opinion on this.
But I believe Trump could say, I just got elected president, so I think the value of my properties will go way up or way down.
And just say, well, there is this external event.
Could have been climate change.
Could have been anything. Some external event.
And this external event will make my properties be worth half as much.
Or twice as much.
Could he back that up?
Yeah. Yeah.
You could back that up.
Because you say, look, we know that my property value will be wildly different because of all this attention as president.
So I don't think it's going up.
I'm going to cut it by half. What actually happened to the values of his holdings while president?
Well, you know, the coronavirus killed everybody.
But before coronavirus, I think it was down, right?
So if he had predicted that the value of his property was half as much as before he became president, would that be illegal?
Half as much, maybe.
That's a little too far.
But there's a great deal of subjectivity in these things.
And from what I've heard so far, they've got nothing on them.
Like, literally nothing.
If they had anything, you don't think Michael Cohen would have given us that example?
Here's what it would look like to do it illegally.
To say, let's call this property worth a billion when you know it's worth three billion and you don't have any argument for why it would be worth one billion.
That would be illegal.
No argument. If you have no argument for it, that's illegal.
It's not even alleged.
What I described is not even alleged so far.
At least publicly, we don't know.
All right. Doc Anarchy on Twitter did a great thread on MKUltra.
And I didn't know that much about it.
I mean, I knew the basics. But here's some things that he puts in a thread.
It's very recommended. You read this.
So there were projects. Bluebird and Artichoke began in 1951.
And this is, in Doc Anarchy's words, the CIA set out to determine if they could control the human mind.
And they used morphine addiction with forced withdrawal, hypnosis, and LSD. So those were some of the things they tried to control minds.
And then Doc Anarchy says the project failed in usual government fashion.
In other words, they didn't find something that would control people's minds.
Uh-huh. Didn't they?
Are you telling me that the reason they closed it down is because they didn't find something that would control people's minds?
So they tested hypnosis, and they concluded that you couldn't control minds?
No, that didn't happen.
Let me tell you what didn't happen.
What didn't happen is they tested hypnosis and found that it didn't work.
That didn't happen. Now, I don't know if they...
If they thought it wouldn't work in the way they needed it to.
Because some of what they were testing is to see if you could change somebody in real time, like really quickly.
So hypnosis isn't necessarily going to work for that.
But if you were trying to move the masses, oh yeah.
Oh yeah, hypnosis and knowledge of persuasion in general would totally do that.
So I'm a little skeptical that they didn't find a way to do it, since one of the things they listed would do exactly that.
But like I said, it wouldn't work maybe the hour that you tried it.
So anyway, read the rest of that thread.
It's shocking what horrible things the CIA did, allegedly, as part of that program.
So let's talk about the President Biden's press conference.
I'm going to lean into it with a Jonathan Turley piece on the voting rights thing.
So he has a piece in The Hill.
Now, if you're not familiar with Jonathan Turley, strong recommendation that you follow him on Twitter and read anything he writes.
Basically, he's in this teeny, teeny group of people That anything he writes, you should read it.
Just whatever it is.
Just read it. Just trust me.
I'm not even going to make an argument for it.
Just trust me.
Just read anything he writes.
It's that good. And he's talking about how Biden and the Democrats are pushing what he calls their own big lie.
Basically pushing for voting rights that rarely gets explained.
Why do you think it is that the news is not informing us what's in this alleged voting rights bill?
Do you know why the public doesn't really know what's in there?
Because if they knew, they wouldn't support it.
So of course they don't know.
So by calling it a voting rights bill, it gives them the Democrats' ability to say the Republicans are racist because they don't support voting rights.
But let me tell you what it looks like.
It looks like the voting rights thing is a cover for the Democrats planning to rig an election.
Now, I'm not saying any elections have been rigged.
I'm saying that the most obvious explanation for why this would be their top priority, when it's basically nobody's priority, if you actually look at what the problem is that they're trying to fix, it wouldn't be anybody's priority.
Really. And they're making it their top priority.
Why would they do that? Now, of course, they have the news organizations to back them.
The only reason I could think of for why they would do this is to prime the public for them stealing the next election.
Because if they've made the news all about stopping the Republicans from stealing elections...
That's how you cover your own shenanigans.
So you go first and make a really big deal about accusing the other side of what you're planning to do in a month.
Now, I'm not saying that we could confirm that's what's happening, but I've never seen a clearer indication.
In fact, absent of any confirming or debunking information, and we'll never have that probably, your starting assumption should be that the big lie, as Jonathan Turley calls it, the big lie that the Republicans are trying to stop voting rights because they're going to rig an election, that's almost a guarantee that they're telling you they're going to rig an election.
I mean, it's not 100%.
But it's really close.
I don't know how else to interpret it.
Because we've seen this play so many times that now you recognize it, right?
They blamed Trump for colluding with Russia, and it made it invisible, cognitively invisible, even when it was proven beyond any doubt that the Democrats were working with Russia to change the outcome of the election.
That's proven, guaranteed, documented, and nobody even disagrees with the facts.
And we still don't deal with it like we just saw Democrats colluding with Russia.
Your brain can't kind of hold that in there because they did such a good job of making you think that Russia collusion is just something Trump may or may not have done.
It's really effective.
I would say this is MKUltra.
I would say...
This is the output from MK-Ultra.
I believe if they studied hypnosis, they knew that they could do this, and now they're doing it.
This looks like exactly what one would learn if one were studying how to move crowds.
Now, again, there's a difference between moving an individual and moving a crowd.
It's a different technology.
But, I mean, it's right in front of us.
And, you know, I realize I'm in conspiracy theory.
We're in conspiracy theory territory.
So let me say it this way.
We can't confirm what's happening.
I couldn't do that.
But I think given the history, you can't rule it out.
I mean, you have to almost act like it's the default assumption at this point.
So let me tell you some of the things that Jonathan Turley called out about this so-called Voting Rights Act.
And here are things that Biden has said about it, according to Turley.
He falsely and repeatedly claimed, for example, that the Georgia law, which he described as Jim Crow on steroids, sought to reduce hours to vote.
The law does the opposite.
It actually increases the hours to vote.
Just think about that. The President of the United States, one of his biggest things is to stop this Jim Crow law on steroids in Georgia, which is literally, demonstrably easy to fact-check, the opposite of what he said.
And it's not even an opinion.
Nobody would argue it if they just saw what the law said.
There's no difference of opinion.
But he says it anyway, because people aren't going to check what the law says.
Right? So that's how it works.
He also says...
Now, he's backed away from this, but he used to falsely claim, according to Turley, that of questioning whether ballots would be counted, saying that not as to who can vote, but who gets to count the vote that counts.
In other words, he used to be saying what Trump said, that we can't trust our own elections because it's about who counts the votes.
Think about that. At the same time he's trying to tell us that the 2020 election was completely fine, he's also saying that who counts the votes is the only thing that matters.
But wisely, he backed off from that.
For the obvious reasons.
Let's see. Oh, and then he says that a lot of things that the Democrats have alluded to as problems have actually been adjudicated in courts, and the courts found them to be bullshit.
So basically, you have a law that's, as it's being described, is completely misrepresented by the people promoting it, and based on things that the court has found aren't even real.
And then one of the biggest ones is that it wants to avoid...
I guess it's trying to block voter identification with ID. And 80% of the public is in favour of the thing they're trying to block.
80%. Can you think of anything else that the public is in favour of by 80%?
And to this day, we have never met the one voter who wanted to vote and couldn't figure out how.
Not one. Not a single living human being has come forward and said, you know, the way things are now, I can't figure out how to vote, and I want to.
Not one. So I think you have to see the voting rights thing as a complete fraud and a diversionary tactic from a party that is losing badly.
Now let's talk about all the things that happened with his speech.
So I guess this gentleman, Clint Ehrlich, was on Tucker Carlson last night.
I didn't see it, but I saw his tweet thread about it, and oh my God, you have to see this thing.
He did this beautiful tweet thread showing the crazy responses to...
I guess he was on Tucker and he was probably...
fact-checked me, but I assume the context was that he was not in favor of going to war with Russia.
Was that fair to say?
Over Ukraine.
So I think Tucker and his guests were against going to war with Ukraine.
The reactions to that from the Democrats were just batshit crazy.
I mean, they're just crazy.
But you can see in them all of the tells for cognitive dissonance.
You've got the mind readers, like their opinions based on reading somebody's mind and seeing something crazy in there that isn't there.
You've got the people who just insult them.
With no point. They just insult him.
The ones who do the, oh, why don't you kiss Putin?
Well, if you love Putin so much, like, what?
What? Why does not wanting to go to war with somebody that you don't have a reason to go to war with, how is that like you're in love with Putin and you're supporting him?
Like, these are just crazy comments.
And when you see them, you can see what I deal with every day, which is if you say something reasonable in public, It will trigger massive cognitive dissonance, and you get this kind of response.
But to see them all together is pretty fun.
All right, let's talk about his press conference, Biden.
I'm going to tell you what he did right first, okay?
So I was listening to it in my car, and when you don't see Biden, you don't see him looking frail.
You just hear his voice.
So my first observation is he sounds better when you don't see him.
Have anybody noticed that?
If you just listen to his voice, it's actually much stronger than the visual.
So part of me thinks, oh, you know, if you didn't watch him, you might have a different opinion about how...
How he did. So that was my first thing, is that when I listened to him, he was much stronger.
When he was doing his prepared stuff and he was defending some things he was being attacked for, I thought he actually did a strong job.
I'm going to get to the things he did wrong, and they're pretty massive.
But I want to start by saying that I thought that his persuasion game If you don't count the gaffes, which were horrible, but if you don't count the gaffes, his persuasion game was really good.
It was really good.
I mean, there were prepared comments that people may have told him what to say, etc.
But let me give you some examples.
You're worried about inflation as, of course, you could.
So here's his defense to it, which I found incomplete, but judged only as persuasion.
Not bad. He had an answer for it.
He said that...
He said, what do you say about inflation?
Oh, he said, for example, that it's global.
And that's actually a pretty good argument.
If he says, wait, inflation is global, then you think, oh, wait, maybe it's not because of some of his own policies.
Now, of course it's because of some of his own policies.
But it's a really good defence that it's global because he doesn't tell you what's the difference between the global inflation and his.
So if you don't know that there's a difference, and I didn't look it up, it sounds convincing.
Oh, it's a global thing. It can't be you.
So that's a good defense. Forget about whether it's true.
I'm just saying if it's a good defense.
Then he said that cars are a big part of that, and the cars are super expensive, but it comes down to we can't get chips.
And that he's working hard to bring chip making back to the United States.
So there he actually turned a negative into a positive.
Oh, it's, you know, China won't give us chips.
And if you knew that it was China or Taiwan or wherever they're coming from, I don't even know where they're coming from, actually.
But we don't have them. But you think, oh, this is going to be a reason for us to build our own chips.
For a while it'll be expensive, but it'll just go away because then we'll have cars.
So he turned that into a positive.
Pretty well. And then he blamed the pandemic for the rest.
So I'm not saying that he passes the fact check.
When I look at this thing, there are three levels.
I look at, are the policies he said good?
Is he lying?
You know, the fact check part.
And then, is he persuading?
And they're all different. On persuasion, he actually did a pretty good job on the inflation question.
Now, a fact check?
I don't think he passed as a fact check.
But persuasion was pretty good.
Also, when he started talking about Russia, he did a good job.
He completely screwed the pooch later.
We'll talk about that. But when he first started talking about Russia, he said very close to what I used to say, That they're asking for...
He didn't say it this way, so I'm paraphrasing.
But he sort of said that they were asking for reasonable things that we wouldn't bother giving them anyway.
For example, we don't think Ukraine will ever be uncorrupt enough to be in NATO, at least for so long that you don't have to think about it.
So Russia wants a guarantee that Ukraine won't join NATO, and we don't think we want them in NATO anyway.
But there is a difference between being forced to say you won't do something in the future versus saying, well, I wasn't going to do it anyway.
How hard would it be to make a deal if we don't want to do the thing they're asking us not to do?
It should be really easy to make a deal on that point.
Do you know how you do it? You just say, oh, okay, we agree not to allow Ukraine into NATO. What happens if you change your mind someday?
You just break the agreement.
Right? The only reason you would need to break an agreement that was a military agreement was for pretty serious military reasons.
If not, having Ukraine and NATO worked out fine.
Well, why would we break the agreement?
If it didn't work out and it became a military necessity to put Ukraine into NATO, well, we would just break the agreement.
Because military agreements we break every day.
I mean, I'm exaggerating.
But anybody would break a military agreement if keeping it made them susceptible.
Am I wrong? Is there any country that would...
That would not break a treaty if their national defense was legitimately at risk.
I don't think. I don't think any country would.
So how could we not make a promise about Ukraine that, of course, we could change if the situation changes?
Of course you could change your mind.
So I thought that his take on that was spot on.
How could we not make a deal on that?
Now, what was the second point?
Remind me, was it putting offensive weapons or defensive weapons in Ukraine?
There was a second point about not just Ukraine, but maybe the neighboring countries putting offensive weapons there.
And I thought to myself, do we really even need any of that?
Like, how militarily necessary is any of that stuff?
So when he described the fact that there's actually no reason to be at war with anything, I thought he was spot on.
Now, later he blew it.
We'll get to that. I thought he also did a good job of, in the beginning, showing that he was strong and he was bragging about how long he would go and he would go longer than the reporters themselves and stuff.
But I did detect, as others noted, a little bit of sundowner toward the end.
Did anybody else detect that?
Did anybody watch the whole thing so you could see how he starts strong and he's definitely weaker at the end?
Yeah, most of you can see it.
And at one point, somebody asked the question, a reporter asked, what do you do with the fact that even Democrats...
I don't know that this is true, but I feel like the reporter said that even Democrats think he was cognitively impaired.
And how did he answer the question, why do even your own team think you're cognitively impaired?
And he said, I don't know, and took another question.
That was painful to watch.
Did you have the same impression?
It was a little painful to watch.
Because he didn't even have an answer to why the people who know him best think he's cognitively impaired.
I think the answer, I don't know, might have been more honest than we give him credit for.
He might not be processing this right.
No, no. Alright, one of his biggest gaffes was essentially, indirectly, admitting that the 2020 election he won was unfair.
Now, the reason he wants to do voting rights is that he believes that if he doesn't do this, Republicans will use legal means to win the election.
Legal means. In other words, whoever it is that controls the rules in a local election, you know, the state, states in charge of the elections, that the states, if they don't pass the voting rights law, the states could make legal, completely legal changes that would disadvantage Democrats and therefore be unfair.
Doesn't that indicate that that was the case every other year before, right?
2020 and before? Thank you.
I can go long today.
So it seems to me that although...
And here's the pushback on this point.
The pushback is that the Republicans are contemplating specific changes that the Democrats know would make things unfair from their perspective.
But... Isn't it a matter of public record that the Democrats and maybe Zuckerberg's money, I'm not sure if these are the same story, don't we know for sure that the Democrats used the pandemic to get in place completely legally a bunch of rule changes that advantaged them and maybe won the election?
So why would it be unfair that the Democrats used completely legal means To manage an election that did, in fact, change the outcome, we would imagine.
But why is it suddenly unfair if Republicans do exactly the same thing?
Now, it's not the same changes, but there are a set of legal things that you can do to change the structure of how the vote is taken.
Why is one unfair and one is fair?
To me, it seems like he just admitted the 2020 election was rigged, but legally.
Because he's not saying that the Republicans are planning to do something illegal.
That's not part of the accusation.
He's saying they're planning to do something completely legal that would disadvantage them.
I don't know. To me, that's an admission that his own election was unfair.
Then he insulted his vice president.
Did you catch him insulting his vice president?
I've never seen this before.
Actually, it's something Trump would do, I suppose, because he would insult anybody.
But when asked how Harris was doing in her job, this is what he said about being his running mate.
He said, she's going to be my running mate, Biden said, and then he went on to say, without being asked, he'd think, I think she's doing a good job.
A good job?
She's going to be his running mate And the best he could come up with was good.
Is it just me, or is this a situation in which great was the right word?
I'm pretty sure that this called for great or terrific or amazing or successful.
Do you know what it didn't call for?
Good. Hey, you're doing a good job.
If your boss told you you were doing a good job, would you go home all happy?
I don't think you would.
I don't think you would.
I think you would go home and say, I better take it up.
I don't even get a raise for a good job.
Then the Russia gaffe, which was the worst.
He said, quote, talking about Russia, you know, threatening to go into Ukraine.
He said, it's one thing if it's a minor incursion and we, meaning in NATO, end up having to fight about what to do and what not to do, etc.
And they said, but if they actually do what they're capable of doing, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine.
And then somebody thought, wait, it's only going to be a disaster if they further invade them.
Wait, what? If they do a minor incursion, that NATO might just be arguing with each other and nothing would happen?
Did Joe Biden just invite Russia to invade?
Now... It looks like it, doesn't it?
It kind of looks like he's inviting them in.
Well, you know, we'd just be arguing about it.
I don't know what we could do. It's not a NATO country anyway.
Now, I don't think he meant anything like that because later when he was asked to follow up, he did follow up correctly by saying that, you know, there would be massive financial implications of an invasion.
But, man, the way he worded it certainly suggests that they would tolerate a minor incursion.
But here's the context.
I think he only means tolerate it militarily.
Right? But that's not the threat.
I don't think he's ever made a threat that he would respond militarily.
So if he says that NATO might not respond militarily, I think that's just true.
I think the threat was always financial.
And then he...
I thought he did a good job, almost a Trumpian-like job, of describing how bad the repercussions would be financially.
I think he did that well.
There's a real clarity there, which is, if you do this, we will crash your economy, and he made sure they knew it wouldn't be temporary.
He did a real good job of saying it wouldn't be temporary.
We're going to take you down for decades, basically.
I thought that was pretty good. But in the long run, the gaffe about minor incursions, that's really hard to excuse.
That's a really big mistake.
All right. And Biden is being hit with his own fine people hoax, which is, in other words, something taken out of context to make him look bad.
The fine people hoax was caused by removing the clarifier in Trump's speech.
And in this case, what Biden said was in a prior day, he had said something about...
Let's see if I can read the exact quote...
He said, at consequential moments in history, they present a choice.
I think this was talking about voting for or against the voting rights bill, so-called voting rights.
He said, do you want to be on the side of Dr.
King or George Wallace?
The president said, do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?
Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy.
And that was characterized by Fox News as saying that if you voted against the Voting Rights Act, that Biden thinks you're comparable to these segregationists, these bad people, like Bull Connor and George Wallace.
Now, let me give you a tip on fake news.
The word comparable...
Anytime you see the word comparable, it's a lie.
In this context, right?
In this context, comparable means that his enemies, in this case Fox News, made up a hoax.
Essentially a mirror to the fine people hoax.
But, you know, payback is a bitch.
And so they're going to say that what he meant was that if you're against it, you would be comparable to racists.
Meaning that you'd be a racist.
You'd be comparable. Now, is that what he said?
Did Biden ever use the word comparable?
No, he didn't, because that's not what he was talking about.
He was saying you'd be on the wrong side.
Is being on the wrong side being comparable?
There were many people in...
Let's use the universal reference.
There were many people in Nazi Germany who probably thought they had to play along for their own safety.
Were the people who were playing along, or had their own reasons, comparable to Hitler?
No. No.
But they were on his side.
They were on his side.
And what they were doing wasn't even illegal.
I mean, in the end, a lot of it wasn't illegal.
They were just taken aside.
So his point is, you don't want to be on the wrong side of history because you don't think you're a racist and you don't want to be accidentally on their side.
That is not calling you comparable to a racist.
I'm sorry. This is complete hoax.
Fox News, I'm calling you out.
Complete hoax. And anybody who supported the idea that he was saying that you're comparable to these people, that's a hoax.
Now, completely fair...
Completely fair hoax, because it is the compliment or the mirror of the fine people hoax.
In the same way that Trump was not saying that everybody there was marching with Nazis, he was saying that they had their own reasons for being against statues.
So in a way, you could say they're on the same side.
But were they comparable?
No. Really?
Was somebody who just thought history is more important than offending people?
Is that person comparable to a neo-Nazi?
No! They're not comparable.
So whenever you see the word comparable, you are being fake newsed.
Or you should assume it and look for some details.
Maybe not every time. But that word comparable is a really big flag for bullshit.
If you're wondering why I'm so...
Worked up about that word comparable is because it's been used against me a lot of times.
I can't tell you how many times people have made the comparable argument with me when comparable was the wrong word and not what I said.
So absolute, disgusting, fake news that I enjoy because it's the payback for the Fine People Oaks.
Well, the CIA has come out and said...
That Havana Syndrome and that secret sonic weapon idea are not the result of sustained campaign by hostile power.
In other words, the CIA has looked into it and decided that there is no sonic secret weapon that anybody can detect.
All right. How many people do you know who told you on day one that this story was obviously, and every other day after that, obviously a fake news and that it was clearly mass hysteria?
I only know of me.
Now, there had to be other people, right?
There had to be. But I only know of me in terms of a prominent, let's say, blue check or more.
In terms of a blue check Twitter person...
I think I was the only one that I saw.
Now, somebody said Glenn Greenwald was all over it, and I don't know if he was, but I'd be surprised if he were not, right?
Because he can sniff that shit out pretty fast.
And I'm sure a lot of you maybe thought it was BS. But was I the most prominent person who put myself out there?
Because I put myself way out there.
Would you agree? I put myself as far out on a ledge as you can be on a topic as clearly as possible, emphatically, and I followed up about once a month for, I don't know, two years or whatever it was, to make sure you knew that every time they said, we've got more evidence, it's a secret sonic weapon, every time I told you, nope, Nope.
You're seeing mass hysteria.
Every time. And...
Can you give me credit for this one?
Now, I realize that I'm, like, asking you to praise me.
I'm not blind to that.
But in the context of what we do here, we make predictions, and then we see how good we are.
I feel as if I should make a big deal about this.
Because this was a very non-standard prediction.
One of my best, by far.
And it was based on a reason.
The reason I said Trump would get elected in 2016 is that I had a little extra insight into the persuasion level.
So that helped me make that call.
With the sonic weapon, it's the same skill set.
If you know what mass hysteria looks like, you see them right away.
If you haven't studied mass hysteria, you might say, I don't know, a lot of people say this is happening.
I've got doctors saying it's happening.
It looks like it's happening.
But if you've studied mass hysteria, it's just, you see it like that.
It's really obvious. So all I'm claiming is not magic powers.
I'm claiming that if you had a skill set in persuasion, that this would jump out at you.
Now, I saw a tweet from Mike Cernovich saying, you know, I forget the context, basically something like, we should have known it was bullshit.
I would guess that Cernovich had this pegged as bullshit early on.
Why? Because he has a skill set in persuasion.
Have you ever heard Trump say it was real?
Think about it. Has Trump ever said the secret sonic weapon was real?
I don't know. But I'm going to bet he didn't.
Do you know why? Because he knows bullshit when he sees it.
He's really good at that.
He's good at creating bullshit, but he's really good at spotting it.
You know, takes one to know one sort of thing.
I think he spotted it on day one.
I don't think he even once talked about it like it was real.
Did he? Yeah.
So, I don't know.
I think that's my best work yet.
Let's talk about trans athletes.
I will remind you that my take on trans athletes, when I wasn't just being provocative, because sometimes I was just having fun, was that sports are broken, not the athletes.
That the thing that needed to get fixed was not what the trans athletes were doing.
It's that the sport itself needed to be adjusted so that people were always playing people of comparable ability, however you get there.
So the NCAA just announced a big change in their trans policy, In which each particular sport's national governing body, if you have one, some of them don't, will be responsible for determining transgender athlete participation.
Now, on some level, they're just kicking the responsibility to other people, but it seems like the essence of it is that each sport will decide how much it matters.
See what I mean? So, for example, if there's a, I don't know, a skeet shooting sport and nobody thinks that gender makes a difference, then that sport can say, yeah, trans, doesn't matter, whatever you want.
But if it's, say, boxing, then the boxing commission could say, oh, the physicality matters, so we'll, you know, we'll make some adjustment.
Now, this is not exactly what I was talking about when I said sports need to be adjusted.
And at the professional level and NCAA level, that's different.
But it's in the right direction.
I think we have to realize that the sports are broken, not the athletes.
Because just put them with people who have the same ability.
Why is that a problem? Why do we have to have this artificial structure that creates some people who get ribbons and awards and some people don't?
I mean, it's all kind of random.
Somebody says wrong. Now, the only issue that I haven't solved is how women could still protect their sport.
Right? So if you're talking professional sports, I actually don't really care.
Because professional sports are just for your entertainment.
So if it's just for your entertainment, well, you know, let them work out what's more entertaining in whatever they do.
But if you're talking, let's say, school sports, let's take this to high school sports, I think in high school, it shouldn't be entertainment.
That should be for the benefit of the kids.
And the benefit of the kids is that everybody gets to play a sport that they like with people who are comparable to ability.
Because it's not entertainment.
I mean, not primarily. It's for the kids.
So just give them teams they can play on, however you need to do that, so that nobody gets hurt and they play equal abilities.
I think that's where it's heading.
Somebody says, Scott, on sports is out of his league.
How hard is it to understand sports, really?
I mean, that is such cognitive dissonance.
Now, do you imagine that...
I didn't play sports or something.
I mean, I played like every sport...
I would play three sports a day, typically.
Three different sports a day when I was a kid.
Yeah, everybody understands sports.
There's nothing mysterious about it.
Why no trans trying to play men's sports?
Well, who cares? Who cares?
Who cares about that question?
As long as everybody's playing on the team that's comparable...
Why does anything matter? So I'm not for or against trans playing in any particular sport.
So let me...
I don't know if this is a revision or a clarification or what it is.
I'm not in favour of automatically saying any trans person can play on any sport just because they want to.
Would you be happy with that?
Which probably sounds a little different from what I've said before.
Would you agree with this?
That I do not support trans people just getting to choose the sport that they play on.
I think the sport needs to decide, not the trans player.
But the only thing that I add to that is that the sport needs to fix itself so everybody can be accommodated.
Now, if you couldn't do it easily, Then maybe I wouldn't be in favor of it.
Because I don't think everything has to change to accommodate everybody all the time.
That would be crazy. But given that this isn't really a hard change, you know, intramural sports already solve it.
If you wanted to play intramural sports, you would just find a team that was your ability, and you would just play on it.
So trans don't have any problem with intramural sports, because I'm pretty sure they can just find a team that they fit on and, eh, okay, and play.
So I will...
I think I can support you this far, which should be all you need.
This should be all you need.
Which is, it shouldn't be up to the trans athlete.
It should be up to the sport. Are we good with that?
Would that be a compromise where you can be comfortable with my opinion?
It's not up to the athlete, it's up to the sport?
Now, did you see what I did there?
I favored the system over the decision.
When I started this, I was talking about Sinema supporting the system over this specific decision.
I'm using the same principle here.
I want the system to work.
I don't really care too much about the trans athlete, specifically.
You know, they don't get the choice of whatever they do.
I mean, I care about them having a sports play.
That I want. So let me be clear about that.
I definitely care that every kid can have a sport if they want to.
That I care about, because that's important.
But I don't think they should get their own choice all the time.
All right, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm pretty sure this is the best live stream you've ever seen in the history of the universe.
Oh, yeah, Biden yelling at reporters.
That's fine. And it looks like the Biden administration is the most failing administration, although you still see arguments that he's killing it and things are doing well.
You can definitely always make an argument that your president is doing well or poorly.
All right, is there anything that I didn't cover today?
Let me look at...
I thought there was a way that I should be able to look at the super chats after the fact.
But why don't they show up?
Is there a trick to it? I see it listed at the top, but it's not clickable.
That's that boomer thing.
CRT, please.
What is there to say about it that we haven't already said?
Is the whisper-yell effective?
Yeah. Yeah, the whisper ale.
When Biden does the whisper, as hokey as it looks, persuasion-wise, it's actually pretty good.
Because you end up talking about the thing he emphasized.
So if Trump did it, I'd say it was a good technique.
I'll say the same thing. Yeah, so, Carpe, I saw your superchats go by, but I didn't want to interrupt.
And I was trying to get back to them.
And if somebody could tell me, is there...
Let me see if I've got a prompt down here.
Top chats, super chats.
Oh, okay. I think I have it.
Wait. No, that didn't do anything.
That just made all your chats go away.
I had a super chat and nothing happened.
That's interesting. Well, if somebody could tell me how to make that work, it'd be great.
Okay, I'm going to...
Well, do you think Biden said they didn't have McCain anymore to go to?
