Episode 1631 Scott Adams: Lots of Spicy Takes on the News Today. You'll Love it
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Elite plan to depopulate the world?
J6 new info absolves President Trump
Why the world needs to protect Ukraine
New Mississippi anti-racism law
Feb1 progress report
Patriot Front's new fake video
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the best damn thing that's ever going to happen to you in your whole life.
Until tomorrow. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
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Go! Well, like I say, there are some days...
When there's just nothing you can do with the headlines?
They're just not serving up anything that you can work with?
But that's not today.
Let me tell you, today is headline goodness.
We get all kinds of good shit.
Let's start with Arnold Schwarzenegger in a four-car crash.
He's fine. There was a woman who had some cut on her head, but I think she'll be fine.
So no serious injuries, but...
I have to connect these two stories.
I just have to. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as you might know, he's very proactive in climate change.
And so he says he wants the world to do a lot more to fight climate change.
In unrelated news, Schwarzenegger's SUV crushed a Toyota Prius yesterday.
I'm not making that up.
I'm not making that up.
He's one of the biggest advocates for climate change, and his SUV crushed a Toyota Prius yesterday.
Now, it was a multi-car crash, but there's actually a photo of his SUV on a Prius.
Seriously, could that be any better?
Could it be any better, Chandler Bacon?
Now, what have I told you about how to know you have something you can work with to write a joke?
The way humorists know they can write a joke about a topic is if it's funny without the joke.
I don't have to add anything to this.
Right? I literally just described it.
There was no hyperbole, no exaggeration.
I literally just described it.
There's nothing you could add to it.
It's like a complete...
The simulation has provided us with a joke.
And there you go. Well, that was awesome.
My favorite thing about Biden lately is how he keeps dissing Kamala.
First of all, saying that she was doing a good job.
I talked about this before.
You do not want to hear your boss say in public you did a good job.
Great, perhaps? Terrific.
That'd be great. How about awesome?
That's the sort of thing you want to hear your boss say.
But good?
Do you know what kind of a raise you get in corporate America if your performance is rated as good?
For those of you who don't have corporate experience, those of you who do, please inform the others what kind of a raise you get if your performance is good.
Zero. Yeah, zero.
Because you're supposed to be good.
That's just meeting expectations, right?
Or barely. They need you to perform better than that if you want to get a raise.
So that's pretty bad.
But I think he topped it today.
So he appeared with Kamala Harris at an event, and here's what Biden said.
He said, Hi, Kamala, I love you.
Biden said, as he opened his remarks, quote, You always have my back.
You're really amazing.
You're the best partner I could imagine.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong...
But is he talking about her like a lover or a vice president?
I'm going to read it again.
Is it a lover or a vice president?
Hi, Kamala. I love you.
You always have my back.
You're really amazing.
You're the best partner I could imagine.
That's not really about being vice president, is it?
Something tells me he's fantasizing that he's in a relationship with her or something.
But I think that's a pretty good giveaway that her role is not about her vice president competency.
Can we rule that out?
It does seem to be just a personal relationship of some creepy nature.
I think this is the creepiest president-vice president combo.
Can anybody top it?
What is the creepiest combination of president and vice president we've ever seen?
It's definitely the creepiest.
Did he really say this, or are you making a joke?
He actually said this.
I swear to God, I copied and pasted the actual quote.
I'm not making that up.
See, I think that's going to be the theme today.
The theme of today's show is, I'm not making that up.
I'm giving it to you exactly as it happened.
That's all I need today.
All right. Biden's approval.
The AP poll said only 28% of Americans say they want Biden to run for re-election.
And only 48% of Democrats.
The funniest thing about this is I've never seen any president fail this hard.
But Democrats still need to sort of support him.
Now, I'm sure the left felt the same way about Trump supporters.
There had to be some point where they said, are you still supporting this guy?
So, you know, some of it's just team play.
But Trump never had these ratings.
Trump never had this kind of unpopularity or anything close to it.
Sonoma County is reporting that they've tracked their overdoses and their suicides for the pandemic period.
And here's the result.
That for 2020 and 2019, there was an increase in overdoses.
You already knew that, fentanyl mostly.
So everywhere there was an increase in overdoses.
But there was a decline in suicides.
So they said suicides actually went down during the pandemic...
And drug overdoses went up.
Do you see any problems with those statistics?
Does anything jump out at you as a little bit of a problem with those numbers, maybe?
Here's the problem.
How do you distinguish between an overdose and a suicide?
Let me tell you something that I know because I've lived longer than some of you.
So everybody who's lived at least as long as I have...
You all get a pass for what I'm going to say because you already know it.
You already know it.
This is for people who are maybe young or less experienced and just haven't lived in the world enough.
Overdose deaths are often suicides.
Not maybe something they intended at that moment, but it is a practice which has such a high chance of killing you that it attracts people who are suicidal.
Because if you're suicidal to begin with...
Oh, I don't want to say this out loud.
I almost said something really bad out loud, but I'm going to soften it.
And I'm going to say, people who don't have any way to find happiness are going to find a way to find happiness.
If you have no way to be happy, as far as you can tell, I mean, your own mind, you think there's no way, you'll still find a way to do it.
And you'll find a way to do it that might kill you, because you don't care.
So there's a very subtle difference between, all right, I just don't even care if I'm alive, and actively killing yourself.
So if you're doing something that has a real high degree chance of killing you, you know, it's fun while you're doing it, but it's a high chance of killing you, You might have been suicidal before you even went down that path.
Now, some of this is anecdotal, but does anybody disagree with my point, having heard it, that you really can't track these numbers separately?
Agree? Yeah, I think we agree.
Just be careful that when you see those numbers separately, you're not seeing what you think you see.
Those are conflated numbers, or they should be.
How many of you believe that the elites, be they Davos or whatever, or other elites, have a plan or a desire to depopulate the world?
In the comments, how many of you believe there's a secret plan by the elites to depopulate the world?
I'm seeing nos and yeses.
A mix of nos and yeses.
Bill Gates I see.
I see some nos, I see some yeses.
Some nos, yeses, yeses, nos.
All right. There are some kinds of questions like this where we're all just guessing, wouldn't you say?
We're all just guessing on some questions.
There are other questions where some people are guessing, but others are not.
This would be one of those.
This is one of those where some people are guessing, do they really want to depopulate the world?
I think they might. And other people actually know the answer.
Who are the people who know the answer?
How would you describe the people who actually know the answer for sure?
I want to see if you get this before I tell you the answer.
The answer is people who understand economics.
You might know that Elon Musk, who is not dumb, says that the world needs more population, not less.
What do you think of that?
So Elon Musk is, you know, an elite, I guess.
And he says you need more people to keep the economy going, not fewer.
Let me tell you what 100% of the people who understand economics believe.
100%. This would be one with no exceptions.
100% of the people who understand economics want more people.
100%. There's no such thing as a Bill Gates wanting fewer people.
That's not a thing.
That's not a thing at all.
He would never want that.
Because nobody smart wants fewer people.
The only way you can keep an economy humming is with more people.
What's the biggest problem that China has ahead of it?
They reduced their birth rate so that they're going to have this weird bubble of old people and not enough young people.
It's a gigantic problem.
So let me tell you with 100% certainty, there are no elites who want fewer population or fewer people.
Not any way that can be true.
There's no way that can be true.
And if you'd like to test this, because some of you are saying, really?
Really? Because I've seen some things that make me think they do.
And you might even say, well, why did China need to control its population?
Well, they had a specific problem.
The specific problem was they couldn't feed them.
Right? If you can't feed everybody...
You've got to do something drastic.
But you can see that even in that drastic situation, they created a longer-term problem that is its own problem that's pretty big.
But unless you're in that situation where you're going to starve to death, and the United States is certainly not, Europe doesn't seem to be starving, right?
If you're not starving, you want more people.
And indeed, this is one of the reasons, and I don't know if I've ever said this out loud, but let me say it specifically.
One of the reasons I'm less opposed to immigration, and now I don't like illegal immigration.
I think we're on the same page with that.
But I'm not as opposed to immigration as a concept, as long as it's legal, than many of you, because you have to have it.
It's basically a strategic advantage over China.
You know, their economy is going to have a problem, but we'll probably be shipping in immigrants forever.
And China really can't handle that, can they?
China can't really ship in immigrants.
I mean, not in the same way that we can.
They don't integrate as well.
So have I convinced anybody?
If I haven't convinced you...
Then I would like to say, talk to somebody who understands economics, that you believe understands economics.
So if you still think that the elites want to decrease the population, just find somebody with a degree in economics and say, generally speaking, would rich people be better off or worse off with a bigger or smaller population?
Now, there's a related question, which is the rate of growth, right?
The rate of growth, I can imagine that the elites would want to control...
Why? Why would the elites want to control the rate of growth, but not the growth itself?
Because the rate of growth could make a difference.
But you always want growth.
You just wanted a controlled growth.
You want everything controlled, right?
It's like everything. You need to put it in the right amount.
So that's my economic lesson.
And I've told you before that if your talent stack, as I like to say, includes economics, you can see around corners.
Because people who have an economics background can just see obviously, just obvious stuff, that if you haven't studied economics, you wouldn't see at all.
I'm going to give you another example of this as we go, of something that if somebody did not study economics, they would make the mistake that you're going to see coming up.
All right, we'll get to that. So it looks like Intel's going to put $20 billion into building a chip factory the size of a village in the United States.
I am so happy about that.
Now Biden did say we're looking to, you know, bring our chips into the United States.
And that's the thing we've got to do first, right?
You've got to bring your key technologies back first.
I would have not really a big problem allowing China to be the place where they make our fortune cookies and our cheap American flags, the plastic ones.
And little cheap goods that are like knick-knacks and stuff.
If China wants to be in the knick-knack manufacturing business, that's okay.
I don't want them to make our chips.
I don't want them to control the rare earth minerals and stuff like that.
I don't want them to have our software and our high tech.
But if they want to make knickknacks and cheap plastic stuff that we buy, that's okay.
They can keep doing that.
So I do think that bringing our key businesses back to the United States, I think that's going to have some legs.
I think that's going to happen, the important ones.
Now, a lot of you know that since the pandemic began, my record of predictions has been much better than the professionals and the doctors.
Now, some of you don't believe that, if you're not familiar with the body of my work on the pandemic.
You're saying to yourself, what?
I heard you say something wrong.
Well, you probably didn't.
You probably heard something out of context or incomplete.
Most of people's opinions about me are not even close to accurate.
But, for example, the reason that I beat the doctors and the experts so consistently is that the only things I had an opinion on were the things where they were obviously lying.
So I just kept my predictions to things where they're obviously lying, and then, you know, you look like a genius.
But this fooled some people into thinking that I might be as qualified as a doctor, and some of my critics are asking for advice.
One of my critics, you might say he's being sarcastic, but I'd like to treat this as serious.
One of the users on Twitter named Katmandu, Do spell D-O-O. He says, Dr.
Adams, Dr.
Adams, what do you suggest I do for this painful rash on my balls?
Thanks, as always, for your educated opinion.
Well, I would like to generalize my advice.
Now, this would be for all of my critics.
For any of my critics, if you have a painful rash on your balls...
My advice, stop licking them.
Just stop licking them.
Come back to me in a week and we'll see if that resolved it.
Now, if you could tell me that your professional doctor could give you better advice than that, I don't think so.
I don't think so. Well, here's a funny story about January 6th.
There are two new pieces of information about it and they both absolved Trump.
Except they're being reported like it's the opposite.
Because if you keep the tone a certain way, they can say good things about Trump that absolve him, but the people watching it think the opposite happened.
I don't know if I can do an example of that.
Let's say Trump saved an orphan from certain death.
CNN would report that with a tone.
Once again, the president narcissist in chief had to make a big splashy show of instead of running the country, instead of taking care of business while things are going off the rails, he decides to take a little detour, saving an orphan, saving an orphan.
Let's talk about all the things he's done financially illegally.
So that's the way CNN would cover it.
There's nothing that Trump could do that won't get the tone of bad coverage.
But here's the new stuff.
So apparently the January 6th committee, and then Politico got a hold of it, there was some draft executive order in which the executive order, if signed, Would have allowed, I guess, the Department of Defense to seize voting machines and name a special counsel to probe the 2020 elections.
Now, if you're asking the military to seize the voting machines to protect them, and then you have a special counsel who would be independent from whoever appointed that person, you know, allegedly independent...
Is that not a very direct statement that they genuinely believe the election was fraudulent?
Now, let me make a distinction.
As Trump's critics have said, and this is a reasonable claim, They said, you know, this executive order, it looks like they believe the election was fraudulent, but their real motive in their head,
the one they didn't tell you, the one that's only in their head but their critics can see from a distance, the real motive in their head was that they didn't think the election was fraudulent and they were really just going to use this to keep power and then figure out a way to keep it permanently.
Now, can you rule that out?
Is there anything that would rule out the hypothesis that the secret intention was to just keep power and not to check that the vote was correct?
Right? But here's the thing.
The only thing that's in evidence, the only thing that's written or has any kind of testimony, completely absolves them.
Because the only thing written...
Very clearly indicates a belief that the election was fraudulent.
That doesn't mean it's true.
It doesn't mean that's what they were secretly thinking in their minds.
But the only evidence we have very consistently shows that they believe the vote was fraudulent.
Now, wouldn't that be exculpatory?
Because that's the opposite of an insurrection.
An insurrection would be you're trying to take over illegally...
What this EO indicates is that there was at least the thought that was popular enough that somebody could write up an EO, there was a common thought that there was an actual problem, and they were trying to fix it.
Now, I think that that was based on, you know, cognitive dissonance probably.
The thought that Trump thought he couldn't have possibly lost if everything was copacetic.
He might not be wrong about that, by the way.
Because I had the same feeling.
I don't see how he lost.
But, you know, like the critics have said, we have not seen evidence, or at least I haven't seen evidence, of massive fraud.
Doesn't mean it didn't happen, because we're not allowed to look for it, at least in the technology parts.
So here's the first interesting thing, that the evidence of bad intention would be entirely based on mind reading.
The evidence of good intentions is clearly spelled out in the document.
We think the elections are sketchy.
We'd better take a pause and make sure that we have a clean election.
So why is that not being reported as exculpatory?
Why is it being reported like they found a smoking gun?
It's the opposite. It's the opposite of a smoking gun.
Now, let's talk about the EO itself.
If they had done this, do you imagine that everybody would have been happy about it?
No. And there's question whether getting the military involved was even close to being legal.
But here's the thing.
It was not signed.
Here's the thing that a lot of people don't understand about first drafts.
In this situation, if somebody comes to the boss and says, all right, I've got this complicated plan.
We're going to do this and this, and then this will happen, and we'll do this and this.
What does the boss say?
Usually the boss says, whoa, whoa, whoa, write that down.
That's kind of complicated.
Write that down as if it were in executive order, and let me look at it in context.
So it looks like somebody wrote down an idea.
Probably there were a lot of ideas floating around.
Somebody wrote down one set of ideas of a way to go, and then it didn't get signed.
So what does that tell you?
Well, it tells me, because I used to be in the business of writing that kind of thing, first drafts for strategies for corporate stuff, one of the reasons you write stuff down is to see if it still makes sense.
And quite often, like really often...
When you go to write it down, you go, I don't know, well, it sounded better in my head, but now that I wrote it down, I see a hole.
But also, writing it down allows you to show it to people who are smarter than you are.
Probably some of them were lawyers, and probably some of the lawyers said, okay, this was an interesting idea, but no.
No. Legally speaking, no.
So then they just put it away.
That is called a thought crime.
Somebody was thinking about something, decided against it, probably for the right reasons, because it wasn't legal.
Probably, right?
If it had been perfectly legal, I kind of imagined they would have done it.
Because I don't know what it would have stopped them.
So you have to think that the fact that it was illegal is exactly why it never got signed.
So it's a story about a process that worked exactly right, Which is, somebody floated an idea, smart people looked at it, said, nah, nope.
And then they went on and did something else.
That's exactly what you want.
That's not a problem.
Now, I wonder if they'll ever find out who wrote that executive order.
I'm guessing they will not.
So we've got two pieces.
Oh, and then the other piece we got was a video of Ali Alexander, generally considered, because he was, the organizer of the January 6th event.
And here's what you need to know.
The organizer of the event has not been charged or even implicated in any unlawful act.
Now, that's not me.
I think this was CNN reporting it.
So even CNN is saying that the organizer...
Was not even implicated.
Now, it would be one thing not to be charged.
That wouldn't tell you much.
But even CNN says nobody has any information that he did anything wrong.
But what is it he's being accused of in this new charge?
He's being accused of considering having security at the event...
That two, CNN calls them extremist groups, and that would be the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
Apparently they were available or made themselves available for security.
And Ali Alexander was considering using them.
I think that plan didn't exactly get executed, but I think the Oath Keepers did provide some security for the event.
I don't know if Ali Alexander made that happen or they just did it.
But, and then I guess that plan didn't happen, or at least through Ali it didn't happen.
Now, what do you know about the Proud Boys?
Here's one of these fake news situations.
The people on the right are more likely to know that the Proud Boys are people who like to fight and drink.
And they go places where they can fight and drink.
And the stories about them being racist, etc., there might be some racist members.
That wouldn't surprise me.
But they're not really about that.
It's more like a social group, almost.
Now, the Oath Keepers, I know less about them.
So I don't have an opinion on them.
Anyway, so if you're associated with the political right and these groups volunteered to help keep security and you knew that security was important, I can see that they would consider it.
And I can see why they'd rule it out because it might be a bad look.
But I can see why they'd consider it.
I will tell you that I once considered the Proud Boys for my own security.
Have I ever told you that story?
At one point I talked about giving a talk in Berkeley or something.
It was years ago. And a member of the Proud Boys contacted me and said, hey, we'd be happy to give you just free security so you don't get beaten up by the lefties in Berkeley.
Now, I didn't do the event, so it was never an issue.
But I have to tell you that at the moment, when they offered, my only reaction was, oh, that's a nice offer.
That's about all I thought about it.
In my personal case, I would not take security to an event.
I would either not go, or I would go without security.
But I wouldn't take security to an event.
I just wouldn't put myself in that position.
Because I... I could probably handle things better than security.
On a minor level, I could handle it better than somebody had brought too much muscle.
And on a big level, I just wouldn't be there in the first place.
Anyway, let's talk about Ukraine.
I did a little bit of research to figure out what the hell is going on.
Because I couldn't figure out what does Putin really want.
And part of the problem is that we don't agree on what Putin wants.
So I'm going to give you...
I guess the quick version of my semi-deep dive here.
And here are some related things about this story that you need to know.
Former German Chancellor, do you remember Gerhard Schroeder?
So he was the German Chancellor.
And after he left office, and while he was in office, he had advocated working with Russia.
So he was a German Chancellor.
Who is sort of pro-work with Russia.
After his term, where did he go?
He later joined Russian oil company Rosneft as chairman.
What? Did you know that?
Did you know that the chancellor of Germany left the job and became the chairman of the Russian oil company Rosneft?
Some of you knew that.
Good for you. You are more informed than I am.
Here's another one. Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon and former Australian Foreign Minister Karen Nisi, after they served in their governments, they joined the boards of Russian state-owned companies.
So that's three examples of major leaders of major companies that left their jobs and took Russian money after they were gone.
Apparently that's legal.
Now, just keep this in mind, that Putin apparently can bribe anybody to do anything because he's got enough oil company money.
That's a bad situation.
Now, we hear that Russia has 100,000 troops massed at the border of Ukraine.
Does that sound like an invasion to you?
Go. 100,000 troops.
Invasion or no invasion?
I'm no military expert.
But let me give you some context.
This was one of the funniest tweets that I saw today.
It's funny because it's true.
Somebody tweeted, just for context, how many troops did the USSR have versus Afghanistan?
Did Russia have a numerical advantage in Afghanistan?
I think they did.
The point is, you need a lot of troops to take over a country and hold it.
You know, maybe 100,000 would do a lot of damage.
But if you want to take over a country and hold it, it's not the number of troops you have, necessarily.
Now, how many troops do you think Ukraine has?
So there are 100,000 who want to attack.
And, of course, they'll be backed up by many, many more if they needed to replace them or augment them.
But how many does Ukraine have?
Like 1.5 million or something like that in the military.
So it's 100,000 troops invading the country with 1.5 million.
And Ukraine would have the freedom to basically mass all of their forces on their border because Russia is only going to come through one border.
So Ukraine doesn't have to defend its entire border because those are friendlier countries.
So I'm not sure that these numbers suggest an invasion.
Is there anybody who has any military understanding?
Am I completely wrong?
These numbers look like negotiating numbers.
They don't look like invasion numbers.
But, you know, it's not like I'm a military expert or something.
Russia's on multiple sides of Ukraine.
Ukraine.
Multiple sides? Yes, but not all the sides.
The troops are apparently on one border in particular.
It depends on the goals.
Yeah. So anyway, to me it looks like negotiating, but I'm not the expert.
What is it you would want to negotiate?
What does he want? Well, here's some more background.
It was a 1994 agreement.
I don't know if you knew about this.
It was between the U.S., the U.K., and Russia.
And the agreement was that we'd all respect Ukraine's sovereignty if Ukraine would give up its nuclear arsenal.
And apparently it did. So Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons to be protected by this agreement, and then that didn't work.
Should we ever expect anybody else to ever give up their nuclear weapons?
That's a big fucking problem.
Right? Right?
If Ukraine gives up its nuclear weapons because we asked, and the UK asked, and then they get taken over by Russia, who was a signatory to the deal, nobody's ever going to give up nuclear weapons again.
Didn't work in Libya, and if it doesn't work in Ukraine, it's over.
I would say that our biggest strategic thing we have to protect is that if you give away your nuclear weapons, the whole world protects you.
Here's what's wrong with the Ukraine situation.
It is framed wrong. Instead of framing it as, hey, Russia is trying to take over, they should frame it, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for protection.
Russia was one of the signatories.
The entire fucking world needs to stop this from happening.
Otherwise, the problems down the road have nothing to do with Ukraine.
This is not a Ukraine problem.
This is a nuclear proliferation problem.
Don't care about Ukraine.
Don't fucking care about Russia.
Don't care about Putin.
Don't care about any of this shit.
But if Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons and doesn't get rewarded for that, big time.
Big reward. Don't try to get anybody's nuclear weapons away from them again.
North Korea. Do you think North Korea is looking at Ukraine?
Hell yes! Hell yes!
And what is North Korea doing right now?
Ramping up their nuclear program again...
Because Ukraine is on the verge of proving that dealing with people, even Russia, on giving up your nukes just doesn't work.
Just doesn't work.
The entire fucking world needs to protect Ukraine.
China needs to protect Ukraine.
India needs to protect Ukraine.
Israel needs to protect Ukraine.
There's no country that doesn't need to protect Ukraine because you're protecting yourself.
This has nothing to do with Russia.
Nothing. It has nothing to do with Ukraine.
It's about the fucking deal.
If you can't make that deal and make it a stick, you can't make any deal with anybody ever.
All right? That's the deal.
You've got to stop that deal from getting broken at all costs.
All costs.
Am I wrong? Now, I don't think that we framed this right at all.
All right, here's some more information.
So apparently Putin sees it as his sort of domain.
I guess in Russia, Ukraine has sometimes been called Little Russia because they have so much in common.
And so historically, Russia has regarded Ukraine as part of them.
So you have this historical thing where the Russians kind of feel like they should have some control, or at least influence, right?
A sphere of influence, at the very least.
But when Ukraine got its...
Let's see, there was a...
Oh, you should also know that in Western Ukraine, they're generally pro-Western, but on the border of Russia, they're actually a little bit more pro-Russian.
So there is a play where Putin could maybe absorb some of the pro-Russian people and get less complaints than if he absorbed the whole country.
So he's got a lot of different plays he could do here.
But just 15% of Ukrainians have a positive attitude toward Putin.
15, 1-5.
So Ukraine really, really doesn't want to be under Putin's thing.
And I would say that the correct frame for Ukraine is Switzerland.
Why is it that Switzerland doesn't get attacked when there's big wars all around it?
What is it that protects Switzerland?
You know, they've got mountains and they're not strategic.
I get that. But what else protects them?
It's not their militia, or whatever they call it.
The neutrality wouldn't be enough if they also had a strategic value.
They'd probably get taken over.
But I feel like that's where we should go with Ukraine.
Because I think Putin does have a genuine...
I have a genuine interest in not having NATO there, but I also have a genuine interest in not having NATO in Ukraine.
That'd be great. How about we don't defend Ukraine with NATO? How about we have some other solution where we just Switzerland them?
Now, if it's Switzerland, would Putin still have influence?
Probably, because he's got lots of ways to influence with money and bribes and cyber attacks and all kinds of stuff.
I feel like that's where it has to go.
We shouldn't be talking about Ukraine being pro-Western or pro-Russia.
The best thing for Ukraine is they can do business with both, right?
Don't you think Russia wants to do at least financial business with Russia while doing financial business with everybody else?
Just say Sweden.
Just use the words, hey, let's make Ukraine Sweden and let's protect the nuclear deal because we can't ever have a situation where somebody gives up nukes again.
You know, Libya was the first case.
We can't ever have that happen again.
That's just a zero, zero, no wiggle room there.
There's lots of wiggle room in other stuff, but you can't let a country go under if they give up their nukes willingly.
You just can't.
All right. What else do we need to know about that?
That's about it. There's a new Mississippi law that is either a prank or it's legislation.
Let's see if you can decide.
Is this new Mississippi law a prank, like actually a joke, or are they serious?
So the context is, you know, there's a critical race theory allegedly being taught in schools in some form, not directly.
And then there are people who don't want that, so there's the battle between the pro-critical race theory and the anti, and whether it's even being taught at all, and blah, blah.
So that's the context. Senate Bill 2113 would forbid public schools in the state from forcing students to agree, quote, that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior.
And the bill doesn't mention critical race theory in any way.
It doesn't mention it directly, and it doesn't even mention it indirectly.
And indeed, the bill would just reinforce what everybody agrees with, And the Constitution would require that you don't discriminate against any race or ethnicity, blah, blah, blah.
Now, what happened when Mississippi decided to have a law that you would not call any race inferior?
What happened? Their two black state senators walked out.
What? Wait, what?
What? Wait, the two black senators in Mississippi are protesting a law that says no one can be considered superior or inferior based on race.
And nothing else.
There's nothing else in the law.
There's no other little details or anything.
That's literally it.
So is it a prank or legislation?
Because it looks to me like some Mississippi lawmaker figured out a way to get black people to protest equality, against equality, because that's what they did.
He actually got two black state senators to protest against the idea of treating them equally.
What did I tell you about the news today?
You don't have to add any punchlines.
The news is just doing all the work.
All the heavy lifting is the story itself.
I wanted to add something clever to it, but I didn't have anything.
I've got nothing clever, because I think the story is the clever part.
I think it's a prank.
I'm going to go on record as saying I think this is a prank.
I don't think this was ever serious because it didn't say anything.
It was literally a proposed bill that would change nothing because it doesn't change anything.
It's the existing law, which was really clever, by the way.
Really clever, if that's what they were thinking.
Let's talk about February 1st being done with COVID mandates.
We've got a little action here. So the NFL and the Players Association is going to halt daily COVID testing for the unvaccinated players.
That seems like a big deal.
So if you don't have a vaccination, you don't need to test unless you have symptoms.
That seems...
Reasonable, doesn't it?
Under the current data and the current situation, it seems reasonable.
And every time you see somebody acting reasonable, don't you pause and say, hmm, there must be more to this story.
I think I'm missing something.
Because it seems to indicate a large organization is doing something perfectly reasonable and practical.
There must be some more to this, right?
No, I guess maybe that's actually happening.
You might actually see people starting to do reasonable things.
Could happen. I tweeted a couple of graphs today showing that the projections, now remember these are projections, for hospitalization capacity and deaths is supposed to just fall off a table around February 1st.
So the timing's kind of perfect.
But we're going to need probably a good solid week of death declining sharply before we can get rid of the masks, at least in schools.
We should do schools first.
And so you've got that.
And then also CNN is giving sort of endemic opinion coverage.
In other words, it's not just Fox News saying get rid of those masks and mandates, but CNN is softening its side by showing people say, you know, I think we're moving more to an endemic situation here, which doesn't address directly the mandates, but it does, right?
If you're an endemic, you're probably going to drop your mandates.
So now you have the entire left and the entire right...
We're persuading in the same direction.
Let's get rid of these mandates sooner than later.
But I still don't know if it's enough.
And I've got a, oh, let's say a question, not a suggestion.
I'll see how you respond to it.
If, let's say you're in a state where the kids have to be masked, and February 1st comes, and you've seen other states maybe drop mandates in other countries, and you haven't done it in your state, how tempted would you be, as a parent of a mask-wearing school-age kid, to call that kid in sick with a bad case of mask rash?
Which, I don't know if that's a real thing or not, but it doesn't really matter to the story.
Because I feel like you might want to keep your kid home at least one day.
You know, the schools take a big hit if kids don't come to school.
I think there's a funding issue.
I don't know the details of that.
But you have to get their attention, right?
Now, I don't know if you need two days.
I don't know if you need to keep them out two days.
Maybe. I don't know.
But if, I don't know, 30% of parents called in and said their kids had a bad case of mask rash, and nothing else.
Because when you call in a kid sick, it's usually just a phone call where you leave a recorded message.
And I think you could crash the schools just by calling in your kid sick with mask rash.
Now, I wouldn't do it any other way.
Because I think you should be overt about what you're doing.
If you say, oh, my kid has a stomach ache or something.
I'd rather you say directly what you're doing.
Yeah, it's a bad case of mask rash.
So we've got to keep them home.
Now, I don't know if that's a good idea or a bad idea.
I'm just going to put it out there.
That the public needs to at least be considering all of its options.
We should be more Putin-like.
Let us take a page from Putin as he's dealing with Ukraine.
And you can see that he uses persuasion in every forum.
You know, physical persuasion, verbal, money, everything.
So we should use all of our tools to get rid of these mandates.
And I guess D.C. is going to have the big rally on Sunday.
That's tomorrow, right?
Big D.C. rally.
I don't think the D.C. rally is going to have an impact because a lot of the people in it are controversial.
Controversial doctors, etc.
And another story that is too good not to report.
In Pennsylvania, a truck full of monkeys overturned.
The monkeys were on the way to a lab...
And four of the monkeys escaped and are on the loose.
I didn't make that up.
There was a truck full of monkeys that were on the way to a lab, and four of them got loose.
Now, I said that this could be a problem if the monkeys start wearing masks.
We're never going to find them.
We're never going to find those monkeys.
They'll just fit right in. A couple of people said to me that I was being very racist...
In saying that if monkeys wear masks, they would not be identified.
To which I said, well, that's funny, because until you mentioned it, I never even thought of it in a racial context.
So was the person who never even considered the racial context the racist, or was it the person who imagined a monkey in a mask and thought of a fucking black person, you goddamn piece of shit?
Racist? That one's pretty clear.
Am I wrong? I mean, that one's crystal clear, who the racist is in that story.
All right. How many of you saw a real-time with Bill Maher, maybe you saw the clips of Barry Weiss being sort of anti-mask, anti-mandate...
Part of the story is she got a big cheer from the audience, which was left-leaning, of course.
Now, I have mixed feelings about this.
First of all, Barry Weiss is not a classic liberal.
She still identifies as liberal, but if you know her work, she's got one foot in two worlds.
So for her to go anti-mandate is not as big a story as if it were Bernie Sanders or something.
But still, it's movement, and still the audience clapped and cheered.
So regardless of her specific situation, the audience is very left and they agree.
So that feels like a big deal.
But here's...
I just got two problems.
I don't know how much this bothers you, because I know it bothers a lot of you, but I can't stand it when people who agree with me use bad arguments.
And so I'm often accused of attacking people on the right for their arguments about mandates or whatever.
And people, I think, completely misunderstand that.
I'm trying to fix your argument.
I'm not trying to break it.
I don't want you to be wrong.
I want you to be right.
I want us all to be right and get out of the masks and get out of the mandates and go on with our lives.
We're on the same side.
I'm telling you that you can make a better argument than you have been making in some cases.
And Barry Weiss used two of the worst arguments to back her decision to sort of be anti-mandate.
And I don't want to talk about them too much except to say these are two of the worst arguments.
One was that they promised us that the vaccine would help us get back to normal, and then it didn't.
What's wrong? What is the logical problem with that argument?
They promised us that the vaccines would help us get back to normal, and then clearly they didn't.
What's wrong with that? Number one, the data changed, right?
The data changed.
Number two...
I'll bet nobody's going to get this one.
Fog of war, that's part of the story.
There's something even more basic than the fog of war.
I'll just tell you because I think none of you are going to get it.
She's valuing a sunk cost, effectively.
It's not a cost cost.
It's a sunk cost.
Whatever happened in the past...
It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter.
What matters is what's your situation today.
So does it matter that somebody promised you something in the past?
It shouldn't matter to your decision today.
So she's acting as though something that happened in the past, a sunk cost, can't change it, there's nothing you can do about it, somehow should inform her current decision, and it really shouldn't.
That's a logical problem.
It would be better to say...
It's just true that the vaccines are not stopping the spread, because that would be talking about today.
As soon as you add what they promised us, that's a sunk cost.
That's gone.
That's yesterday. It doesn't exist.
It's history. Just what are you working with today?
Because your argument is plenty good.
Now, the one who says, oh, my God, no, you're saying that they lied to us.
The real issue is they lied to us.
Say that. Say that.
If you said that we don't trust them and the data has changed, we need to take control of it, that'd be good.
But don't say that you value something that happened in the past that's just sunk, it's gone, it's forever.
Just make the argument based on today.
That's all. That's better.
Secondly, she said that we know now that cloth masks don't work.
And I think she means the cheap ones that I wear all the time.
Now, that's just not true.
It's not been proven that they don't work.
Many of you saw a headline that you said that, right?
But if you read the headline, it said the headline was misleading.
The story said that they don't work as well as M95s.
Now, I think all masks are useless during Omicron when people are vaccinated anyway, right?
And we know how to protect the vulnerable, etc.
So I'm anti-mask, period.
No discussion. No discussion.
But it's simply a lie that cloth masks have been proven not to work.
There's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence that they work, right?
It's not been proven that they work.
But it's equally true that it hasn't been proven they don't work.
There's no evidence of that.
At all. It's just that they don't work as well as N95, and they're definitely less useful in Omicron.
So here's my problem. She made two points that I consider just wrong to back the argument I agree with.
And you didn't need to do that.
Because there's plenty of argument to get there without these two, what I consider both mistakes.
Jeff Pilkington had an interesting tweet from a liberal friend.
Now, one of the reasons that Jeff is a really good follow, and he spells his first name G-E-O-F-F, Pilkington, you can find him in my Twitter feed almost every day, is that he's a weird duck, meaning that he has equal vision on the left and the right, which I've almost never seen.
And, you know, I'm not sure I have it.
But when he talks about the left or he talks about the right, he's almost always free of cognitive dissonance.
In other words, he can actually see their arguments without any distortion.
And part of it, I think, is just his experience is that he has about equal contact with both sides and listens to both sides.
So it's just a weird case.
But his tweets are interesting because of that, because he can see the whole field and there aren't many people who can.
And he has a liberal friend whose name he withholds.
But somebody... Well, I won't say any more, but just a liberal friend who had this suggestion, and I want to run this by you.
His liberal friend, remember...
The key to this is it's a liberal friend.
If I told you this story and said a conservative said it, it would mean one thing.
But this came from a liberal.
A liberal said, Trump should run with the motto, quote, build back exactly the way it was.
I'm leaving a strategic silence here.
Thank you.
Build back exactly the way it was.
Slow clap.
Slow clap.
So I don't know, that's just perfect.
That's just perfect.
Now, of course, you know, you don't want it exactly the way it was, so it's not one of those things that's literally true.
But as a thing that makes you go, hmm, it's really good.
I don't think Trump would use that slogan, but if anybody would, it would be him.
If anybody could do this, it would be Trump.
I don't think he will, but he'd be capable.
How many of you have seen the video of the so-called Patriot Front doing a little video, and then after the camera is off, they think they say some Hitler-related stuff?
How many of you saw it?
Alright, well, this video is being dunked on all over the place because it's so obviously fake, meaning that the people are so obviously actors and not really what they present to be, that it's just hilarious.
You have to see it.
I can't really describe how obviously fake it is.
You just have to see it yourself.
And the funny thing is that we're all trained now.
If you see the comments, it's hilarious.
I think five years ago, I don't know how many people would have thought that was fake.
What do you think? Five years ago, would you have just naturally and instantly known that was fake?
Or would you have said, maybe?
All kinds of people.
Maybe these are people.
Some of you would have thought it was fake even five years ago.
I think a lot of us got a lot smarter in five years, but it looks super fake.
Anyway, that is my show for the day.
Did I leave anything else? It looked phony as hell, yeah.
Somebody says, I thought the tiki marchers in Charlottesville were fake.
My opinion is that that was not real.
I don't believe the Charlottesville march was completely organic or organized the way we're told.
Nothing about that looks real to me.
Once you see all these fakes...
You know, rerun your movie.
Just reverse it a little bit and see what 2018 looks like through the eyes of 2022.
If you had any doubt about what was going on in Charlottesville, just use your 2022 brain and rewind the film and look at 2018 again.
It's really obvious once you see it from today's perspective.
It wasn't as obvious then.
Market crash.
Oh, let's talk about the stock market.
So there's a famous bubble caller who's calling it bubble.
If you had sold your stock the last time somebody warned of a bubble crash and then it happened, would that have been a good move?
What do you think? If you had sold all your stock Just before the bubble, would that have been a good move?
Well, if you got lucky, because you might buy it back at the bottom, and you might have luckily timed the top and luckily timed the bottom, but it's not a good play.
So generally speaking, you want to buy and hold, and you want to be able to buy and hold long enough that you can survive an entire bubble crash.
So a bubble crash, would you say that's a three to five year thing?
Let's say five, let's say.
Maybe five minimum. But if you can't survive a five to seven year crash, maybe you shouldn't have stocks in the first place.
Because that would be the common thing to do.
Now, I think I held all of my stocks through all of the crashes.
The big and the small.
I think I have. And I'm doing fine.
So the people calling the crash may be right.
They might be right. But I'm not sure it matters in the long run.
So here's a tip from me on managing your stocks.
If you know the whole market went down, don't check your portfolio.
If you know the market went up and they're saying, hey, it's a new high, check your portfolio.
It might make you happy.
But the last thing you want to do is keep checking your portfolio when it's going down.
Assuming you have a good mix of stocks.
Now, it's different if you thought you bought the wrong stocks and you were buying individual stocks.
I can't help you with that because you shouldn't have done that in the first place.
But if you have an index fund, say the Fortune 500 index...
Let me see if I have to do something.
Oh, no, I don't.
Yay. So that...
That's all I got for today.
Stupid advice.
That's only if you're a hundred millionaire.
What is bad advice?
To hold on to your stocks?
No, that's not a millionaire advice.
That's general advice. Scott, Scott, Scott.
Illegal aliens cost California $20 billion last year.
You asked for a figure.
Well, thank you.
So that's an estimate of what they cost.
How much did they add?
And what did their second and third generation add?
So that would be the complete economics.
If you're telling me that they cost in the first generation but make money by the second or the third, is that bad economics or good?
I don't know. I don't know.
It would depend on how big one is compared to the other.
Why wasn't Newsom recalled?
Because it's a Democrat state.
That's the whole answer.
Illegal is about to cost trillions in California when single...
Yeah, I mean, we do have a problem if we start giving free health care away.
