Episode 1632 Scott Adams: Nothing But Hoaxes and Fake News Today. There's Plenty of it
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
NO Uighur genicide per people paid to say that?
China fires top German Navy Chief
Inaccurate COVID death count
"Ghost Army" of Wisconsin voters?
Destroying civilization by destroying supply chain?
Ukraine / Russia solution
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams.
Probably the best thing you'll ever experience in your entire life.
You may feel some tingling early on.
Don't worry. The tingling is nothing to worry about.
It's not a comorbidity.
It's actually a sign that your day is starting up right.
And man, has it started up right.
We got fake news.
We got hoaxes. We got all kinds of stuff coming at you.
Is China listening, you ask?
Probably. If they're not, I'm going to make sure that they do.
But first, before we get going, how would you like to take it up a notch?
I know you would. All you need is a cup, a mug, or a glass, a tanker, Chelsea, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee. And join me now.
For the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's called the simultaneous slurp.
No, sip, sip.
It's not a slurp. And it happens now.
Go. Oh, your meme timing over on Locals is excellent.
Excellent. Well, I knew there would be a day eventually...
When 100% of the news was hoaxes?
Now, I don't know if we're quite there, but at the end of this, I want you to tell me if there was any news that was real today.
Because it looks like it's all fake to me, or at least partially.
Let me start with the fake news that fooled me for about half a minute until somebody told me it was fake news.
There's a fake, old-looking cartoon.
It looks like it was made in the 30s, you know, really black and white, and it looked like It presented itself as a story of how to take over the world by introducing a fake weaponized virus and making everybody get vaccinations.
Now, when I looked at it, I thought, huh, that seems like a weird coincidence that somebody had a fictional plot in the 30s that was similar to something that happened.
So I tweeted it thinking, whoa, that's a weird coincidence.
But it's not a coincidence.
It's just a fraud.
So it wasn't such a coincidence.
Now, of course, what happened when I tweeted what I thought people would see as a coincidence?
Well, people thought that it was proof that everything they said was true, that there was a global conspiracy to introduce this virus, and they'd been planning it since the 30s.
That wasn't what I had in mind.
And people thought, Scott, you've finally woken up.
Finally you woke up and found out this plot has been brewing since the 30s.
And there's proof in that comic right there.
Well, that's not exactly what happened.
It was more like I thought, huh, somebody had a fictional plot that just looked like the real world.
That's what I thought it was. But anyway, I deleted it.
It is debunked.
Here's a... I am seeing things that are just rocking my whole world.
I saw some people who looked credible, but on Twitter you can't really tell, who were saying that it is a hoax to imagine that 75% of the people who are dying from COVID have comorbidities.
And that hoax started with an ABC News thing that they got wrong.
And that from there it's spread and that there's nothing like that going on.
What? Is that possible?
Is it possible that comorbidities didn't make a difference?
Because I googled it immediately, of course.
And there were plenty of stories that suggested comorbidities were triple the risk, etc.
But have you heard this?
Or is there something about the definition of things?
But let me just ask you, have you heard anybody push back on that, like the entire thing was a hoax, and that comorbidities didn't really predict as much as you thought?
Has anybody said that?
Because I'm seeing people actually debunk it, like, oh, it's well known, it's been debunked.
That comorbidity thing has been totally debunked.
Because I would be really interested if that were true, because I can't imagine that's true.
Yeah. Yeah. Nobody else saw that, right?
So this might be one of those news bubble things, where there might be a bubble where people think that's been debunked.
And I think that the idea of it was...
Market trader. I'm just going to get rid of stupid people.
You really need to take your criticism up to a level of not fucking idiot.
Really? So, market trader, you're going to go in the biz bag here.
Just raise your game a little bit.
Just a little bit. A little bit.
All right. But it made me think that maybe the purpose of that was to make people think that they were not safe and they better get their vaccinations.
I don't know. Well, I don't know what the purpose of it would be.
There's another hoax and or hoax about the hoax.
You decide. And the hoax or the hoax about the hoax...
Apparently, China is doing a big push...
It looks like they bought off some influencers.
And the influencers that are apparently bought off by China are saying that there's no Uyghur genocide.
So you're seeing a bunch of social media things on that.
Uyghur genocide?
There's nothing like that going on.
Now, here's the clever part.
They're defining genocide very narrowly.
To be mass killing or mass stopping birth rate.
One of those things. And the people who China has apparently bought off to influence is saying, no, no, there is no genocide.
And stop saying genocide because that would say we're killing people and that's not what's happening.
And we're not doing anything about the birth rate because the birth rate in the Uyghur territory is actually higher than the birth rate in the rest of the country.
And the Uyghurs would have more children than the ethnic Chinese elsewhere.
Had you ever heard that?
That the Uyghurs were having more children...
Even during the time that China was clamping down and having children, they gave a little bit of extra leeway, I guess for cultural reasons, of the Uyghurs.
They claim. They claim.
Who knows what's true?
That's just the claim, right?
I'm not saying it's true.
Just the claim. If what China wanted us to believe is that there's nothing especially bad going on whatsoever, except that they're dealing with what was a pretty big terrorism problem in that community, and they've figured out a way to, would say, and all they're doing is sort of re-educating people to not be terrorists, how could that be bad?
Well, here's my question to you, China.
If any of that is true, why don't you let us take a look?
You don't have to tell us what's true.
You don't have to correct the hoax.
You don't have to do anything.
Just open the door.
Here, let me tell you how to...
I'd like to demonstrate this for China in case they don't know how to solve their gigantic, gigantic PR problem.
See, I don't have a good prop, but imagine I was holding a key in my hand, and I would like to teach them how to solve this gigantic problem.
You invite some reporters in from other countries, and then you walk over to the door behind which is all the Uyghurs, being either re-educated or retrained, or possibly massively abused in a human rights sense.
Now, if you'd like to clear it up, we'll take a little item, it's probably about this big, it's called a key item.
And you would put that in the lock of the front door of your Uyghur retraining facilities, and you'd turn it clockwise, about this far, and then there might be some kind of a handle situation, and then you would pull or maybe turn that, and then you would swing forward the thing called a door,
And then the people would walk through that door, possibly look around and talk to the Uyghurs, and they might come up with an opinion that totally agreed with China.
Maybe. You know, if you have a problem that can be solved that easily, wouldn't you do it?
If the worst problem that you had could be solved by doing this, hmm, hmm, And then you're done.
You're completely done.
You've just solved your biggest problem.
But apparently, they would rather buy influence and have them talk about it than to completely solve the problem by...
I guess China hadn't figured out how to use the fucking key...
Now, it's bad enough you haven't used the fucking spoon, because you got your chopsticks.
That's a Jerry Seinfeld joke, by the way.
I'm stealing that. You know, it's bad enough that you couldn't figure out how to use a spoon.
You had to use chopsticks.
I'm just joking about that part.
But you don't know how to use a key?
You don't know how to open a door?
So you take a look? All right.
So remember, you should assume anything that comes from a government is a lie unless they can prove it's true.
The burden of proof is on the government, not just the United States, but every government.
The burden of proof is on them to prove they're not doing something bad.
It's not like an individual where the burden of proof is on the state, blah, blah.
All right. So I'm going to say that's probably not a hoax.
It's probably a hoax that it's a hoax.
Meanwhile, China fired Germany's Navy chief, which is weird.
So there was a guy who was the top guy in Germany's Navy, and China fired him for saying that Germany should get closer to Russia to basically team up against China.
China didn't like that, so they fired him.
Now, that's not the way it's reported.
If you've seen it reported, they probably don't word it the way I did.
They don't say China fired him.
But what else happened?
How do you explain it any other way?
Is there any other explanation?
Do you think that Russia put pressure on Germany to say, no, no, no, fire this guy because he keeps saying we should be friends with Russia?
No, it probably wasn't Russia.
Do you think that Germany itself, the people in Germany, are so offended by the idea that we should ally with Russia against China?
Is that idea so unacceptable that Germany fired them for their own reasons?
I think China fired him, meaning that Germany's relationship with China depended on him being fired.
I literally, I think China fired him.
If that doesn't scare you, I don't know I will.
If China can fire people in your government, and I think that just happened in Germany, you better wouldn't be worried.
All right, here's another CNN fake news.
Now, it's fake in the sense that they're acting like it's news.
Why is this news? Apparently during the aftermath of January 6, Sean Hannity of Fox News was messaging McElhaney, I can never pronounce her last name, and was suggesting that Trump tone it down or stop talking about the stolen election.
Now, this is being reported as CNN's characterization as Hannity and McElhinney conspiring to control Trump.
Is that what happened?
McElhinney? Sorry, I can't pronounce her last name.
But would you say that's a characterization, that Hannity was conspiring to control Trump?
Isn't that the weirdest characterization?
Don't you think that every single person in Trump's universe gave him advice?
Do you think there was anybody who didn't give him advice?
Where every single person in his universe was just conspiring to control him?
It's not cons...
Okay, McEnany said...
Thank you, McEnany.
Um... I think I was conflating their first and last names here.
Anyway, why is it news that Hannity would give some advice to Trump?
Or give advice through somebody else to give to Trump?
There's no story there at all.
Is there? It's like there's literally nothing there.
It's stuff you already knew.
Hannity knew Trump.
Trump would talk to Hannity and get advice.
I've said this before, but...
I don't think CNN is quite appreciating how valuable advice from Hannity would be in this exact situation.
Think of anybody in the entire planet that would be a better source for advice on just this specific topic, how to handle the public and the politics of it, than Hannity.
Seriously. Who's more qualified than he is to give that exact advice how to handle this situation?
And also, Laura Ingraham, right?
Who's more qualified than that?
Tucker, yeah, same thing.
I mean, you could say you agree or disagree with their advice, but nobody's more qualified.
They're about the most qualified people on the planet for that exact question, how to handle the public.
Because they're the ones who handle the public every day.
They're sort of the gatekeepers of opinion on the right.
So that was a nothing story they tried to make into something.
All right, here's another hoax or not hoax.
You decide. We, of course, may never know if the COVID deaths were accurately counted.
I'm just joking.
We will know they were inaccurately counted.
Am I right? We will know someday...
That they were definitely inaccurately counted.
Are you with me so far?
But the degree and the direction of that might still be a surprise.
And the reason I can say it's poorly counted is because everything is early on, right?
Pretty much everything's poorly counted in the beginning.
You're lucky if you can ever fix it.
So I'm sure it's poorly counted, but I had estimated, and this is based on...
Well, let me give you some context.
For much of my corporate career, I was a finance guy.
So I'd be crunching numbers and making predictions and putting budgets together and stuff like that.
And one of the things that happens that's really mysterious is that when you work with numbers and estimates and predictions all day long, and you're sort of immersed in it, you develop this weird ability to estimate things for which there's no information.
I don't know. I don't understand it.
It's something that my old boss could do because she did the job before I did it.
And she amazed me when I first took the job where she would just make an estimate of something and she'd say, I don't know, I think that's going to cost you about $1.2 million with no work whatsoever.
And then I would do all this work.
Two weeks later, I'd have everything collected and I'd show it to her and it'd be like $1.2 million.
I'd be like, how the hell did you do that?
And she would say, I don't know.
It's just, you know, you just live and breathe this world, and then you can just sort of guess what things are going to cost.
Now, later I figured out it's probably related to understanding what the market could handle.
So she knew what things would cost, Not so much based on what it costs to make that stuff.
That would be unknowable. But sort of knowing if you're the consumer, which we were.
We were the ones who decided what technology to buy.
If we were the consumers, we'd kind of say, you know, that sounds too expensive.
Just, you know, if I'm a buyer, relative to other things, that just sounds expensive.
And that's probably how prices are set.
Prices are probably set based on how they feel.
You're going to charge as much as you can get until you cross the line where people say that's too much.
So she just had this intuition after a while of what would be too much to charge for anything.
So she could make an estimate of what something would cost without any information, any information, about the thing we were looking at.
And I was always amazed by it until I developed the same skill.
And I always show this off to Christina.
She's seen it a million times, so she's completely convinced.
We'll talk about something that I don't know anything about, and I'll say, you know, I think that costs about...
That's going to be about $3,500.
And weirdly, I'll be right way more often than common sense would suggest.
And I think it's the same skill.
It's not about how much it costs to make it.
It's about how much a consumer would pay for it, because that's going to be the price.
And you just sort of feel that after a while.
So anyway, I took that skill or lack of skill that has all the scientific backing of a horoscope, and I applied it to the question of, have we over-counted or under-counted COVID deaths?
And my best guess, with no information whatsoever...
Is that we over-counted deaths by 25%.
Would you like me to back that with sources?
I don't have any. All I have is a life experience which suggests that that's about how much you get wrong before you close down the system.
So that's sort of the intuition behind it.
How bad could the numbers be Before it would just close the system.
In other words, it would be so bad that the whistleblowers couldn't resist, right?
If you're 10% off, will that produce a whistleblower?
Probably not, right?
I don't think a 10% error in counting would necessarily produce a whistleblower.
Because it wouldn't really change what we do, right?
All the techniques and mandates and everything would be exactly the same.
So if it were only a 10%, you wouldn't produce any whistleblowers.
At what level are you guaranteed to get whistleblowers, the kind that just break the whole system?
It's around 25% in a pandemic.
Now, how do I base that?
Absolutely nothing but a lifetime of experience.
Let me see if I can explain it in a way that maybe your intuition will get some traction on this or not.
Let me give you some extremes.
If the numbers were off by 500% from day one, could we have gotten to this point without knowing that for sure?
I'd say no. All of my intuition says if it were that bad, 500% off, it's just too noticeable.
Likewise, if it's only off by 10%, I mean, it doesn't even matter, really, because our decisions would be exactly the same.
Somewhere between 500% and 10%, things get murky.
In my sense of how things work, where people start to notice things, put it in the context of a pandemic where you're going to need a bigger signal to notice, right?
Because when you're in a fog of war, 10% of anything doesn't stand out.
You're going to need something greater than 25% before anybody even notices because there's just so much noise and variables and stuff going on.
So... My life experience says that the COVID deaths in hospitals are maybe 25% over-counted.
Also because it would be too much of a financial scandal to be too much more than that.
If a hospital got caught with a 25% over-count and they had gotten funding because of that, could they defend themselves?
25%? Probably.
I'll bet they could defend a 25% error.
Could they defend a 50% error?
Yes, this is all guessing, speculation, intuition.
Nothing more than that. I don't think they could defend a 50% error.
So you would expect that the hospitals, if they had a financial motive, would take the financial motive as far as they could, but just short of where they knew they could defend it when they got caught.
Because you can defend an error...
You can't defend it if it's intentional, right?
25% is about the point where anybody can explain anything away as a mistake.
At 50%, good luck.
Good luck explaining a 50% difference.
25%, that's pushing it.
But because, as all of you have often said, follow the money, you would expect that the amount that they thought they could get away with would be redlining, right?
They would push that right to the max...
Under these situations.
Right? So I'm going to say 25% overcounted, and then I'm going to really make you mad by saying that's probably exactly balanced by 25% undercounted.
I think we're also undercounted by about 25%.
And that was based on a recent study in which they actually looked...
To do a deep dive and find out how many people probably died of COVID that were not identified as such.
Because if somebody dies at home, you don't always know.
If they die and they've got a comorbidity, maybe you didn't notice, etc.
Now, I wouldn't trust the study that says it was undercounted by 25%.
Do you know why I wouldn't trust the study?
Because it's data.
It's a study.
And it's 2022.
Who trusts any study in 2022?
If you trust anything in 2022, you've missed the entire lesson of the pandemic.
Or the last five years, really.
So, no, I don't trust that study.
But it does suggest that there might be something there in terms of...
I do think the study probably proved there can be such a thing as undercounting.
I don't think I would go beyond that.
I don't think it can prove how much.
But I think they can prove it exists.
I do exactly this at work.
Here's a comment. Over precision or SaaS apps such as...
Anything you ever bought at Venerable Star asking you to pay more.
Yeah. 25% is sort of a psychological...
Barrier, right? Things like 10%, 25%, 50%.
They have importance, like a round number like 100.
You know, whenever the stock market reaches a round number like, you know, 16,000 or whatever it is, then everybody starts talking about it.
So our brains are really focused on sort of metrics that we snap to grid.
I like using that term.
We snap to grid on 10%, 25%, 50%.
That's why I think 25 is a reasonable estimate.
So bottom line is we don't know how to count the dead.
My personal estimate is that we're roughly right because our overcount and our undercount probably came close to canceling each other out.
But I wouldn't die on that hill.
I wouldn't bet on it.
If you asked me to put my actual money on that prediction, that we're going to be pretty close on the count, because the overs and unders cancel out, I wouldn't bet money on it.
That's just sort of where my intuition takes me at the moment.
All right. Rasmussen has some thoughts about the 2020 election.
So here's a tweet.
I'm just going to read you the tweet, and so I don't get banned by social media.
I will tell you this is me talking about somebody else's tweet as opposed to saying any of these things are factually true.
Are we good? Because you can talk about something without asserting it's true, and then you still stay on social media.
I'm pretty sure. We'll find out.
I'm pretty sure that that keeps me safe.
All right. So Rasmussen Report has a Twitter account, and here's what they tweeted.
Blockbuster 2020 election integrity.
First item is Wisconsin, quote, ghost voter army silently emerges from state election records.
I don't know the details of that, but apparently there's some kind of phantom votes there.
But I don't know from the tweet whether that's a significant number or confirmed or anything else.
Number two, we see evidence that third parties do have access to the voter rolls and can alter the outcomes.
Alter an item. Now, the fact that somebody has access to it, does that mean it happened?
It does not. It doesn't mean that they used that access to alter the vote.
It just means they had the They had the option.
And here's the more interesting one.
Over 115,000 voters over 100 years old voted in the 2020 election.
That would be more than all of the people over 100 years old in the entire country.
There are 97,000 people that age, last we checked, but 115,000 of them voted in the election, which is a pretty good turnout.
Pretty good. Usually you're trying for 100% turnout, but if you can get 110, 120% turnout within a demographic, then I would say your get-out-the-vote campaign has been very effective.
So this is really a story about how the get-out-the-vote campaign for the Democrats was excellent, because not only did they get more than 100% of this group to vote, but I'm pretty sure they all voted Democrat.
And you can't do better than that.
You can't do better than that. All right, this is probably fake news.
Sorry. Do you really think that there were more 100-year-olds voting than exist?
Do you think that's real?
Really? Here's the other explanation.
Here's the other explanation.
That there were a number of databases in smaller towns...
Where the data was incomplete, and when the data is incomplete, it defaults to say you're over 100 years old, because it doesn't know how old you are.
It's just a software thing.
So which do you think is more likely?
That a known problem, it's a confirmed problem, that if you don't have the right data, and some of the smaller towns, I guess, didn't have the data, it's a known problem that the software will make it look like you have too many 100-year-olds.
What sounds more reasonable?
We know the software does that, or there were more 100-year-olds that voted than there are in the entire country, meaning that there was something illegal going on.
Which is more likely?
I'm looking at your answers.
Well... There's a scale problem.
So here's the pushback to the pushback.
So the claim is that too many people of this over 100 years old voted, and it couldn't possibly be true.
So let's accept that it's not true.
Let's see if we're all on the same page.
Nobody thinks it's true that there were more people who voted than existed.
So we would all agree that no matter what the answer of how this happened is, what definitely didn't happen...
Is that there were more 100-year-olds voting than exist.
All right, we know that didn't happen.
So only two possibilities.
Either fraud or just a software thing that doesn't mean anything.
The pushback on the software is that there weren't that many towns and they weren't that big to make this much of a difference.
I don't know, I can't fact-check that with my own deep dive and doing my own research.
So I'm going to leave that to you as your assignment, if anybody wants to do their own research.
Find out if the small towns that were involved in this bad data, if there were enough of those small towns that it could possibly explain the discrepancy.
Because you would imagine...
You would imagine that this is exactly the group where the fraud would happen, but it's also exactly the group where the bad recordkeeping happens.
Let me think. If I were about to intentionally do some fraud, would I do it where the recordkeeping is really good, or would I look for a place where the recordkeeping is so bad...
That even when my fraud was detected, you couldn't really suss it out.
Which would I pick?
The place where I would definitely get caught, because the data was so good, they'd notice an anomaly, or the place where the data is so bad, I'd have a built-in reason when somebody asks, well, it's that small-town effect.
Where would you hide your crime?
Would you hide it where you can't find it, or where it's obvious?
So, there is no way to know, with current data, what was going on with this number.
The only thing I wanted you to know is that there are two stories, and with the data that we have right now, I don't know that we can tell which one's real.
But if you think that you're getting the straight story for sure, well, I would question that.
I think your skepticism has to be set to 10 on this.
Doesn't mean there was anything fraudulent.
But your skepticism should be just pinned to the right.
Until your government can make this go away, and I don't know if they can, but until they can make this kind of question go away, just assume there's something wrong.
All right. This next category I'll call news of the obvious.
News of the obvious.
This is where something that everybody knows...
It's turned into breaking news.
Early Saturday, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in the UK, they said that they had information, it must be secret information they got somehow, suggesting that the Russian plan was in the works and that, quote, we have information that indicates the Russian government is looking to install a pro-Russian leader in Kiev.
Ukraine, as it considers whether to invade and occupy Ukraine.
A spokesman for the British agency said, wow, this is so shocking.
Did anybody suspect that Putin might want to set up a puppet government in the Ukraine if he couldn't own it outright?
Who would have ever seen that coming?
How about every single person who watches the news?
Is there anybody who didn't know that Putin wants to set up a puppet government if he can't just, you know, outright take the country?
What is the news here?
I think the news is, it's like acting as if this is news is just weird.
Of course. Don't you think that the United States would want to set up a puppet government in Mexico, let's say, if it could?
Of course we would. Of course we'd want a puppet government on our border.
Who doesn't want a puppet government on their border?
Seriously. Is there anything that you would want more than a puppet government on your border?
I can't think of anything I'd want more than that.
So to say that that's news is weird.
So the grocery store supply chain's getting worse because of COVID and all the usual reasons.
And then the supply chain itself being crap.
But on top of that, apparently the Biden administration is now requiring that anybody coming in the country...
Has to show vaccination status and be vaccinated.
Which, as Adam Townsend pointed out on Twitter, assuming this applies to truckers coming across our northern and southern borders, what happens to our supply chain when the truckers can't come across the border, or a lot of them, because they're not vaccinated?
Did Biden just destroy civilization?
Because there aren't that many decisions you can make as a president that would destroy civilization.
Nuclear war might do it.
Bad economics might do it.
But it seems to me, if Biden is taking our weakest point of civilization right now, which is our supply chain, it's the weakest link in civilization...
I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating, but it seems to me that the supply chain is the weakest link in all of civilization right now, at the moment.
And he's taken the weakest link, and he just kneecapped it.
He just knocked it out.
Because the weakest link is the truckers, and he just basically handicapped them.
Now they can't even come across the border.
What the hell is that going to do to our store shelves?
Now, by the way, I would like to take some credit for In the beginning of the pandemic, many of you remember I was doing my swaddling, simultaneous swaddling, and doing two shows a day to tell you that civilization was not going to end with supply shortages, etc., and to tell you that economically we would be fine because we're really good at adjusting.
And what happened? It turns out we're really, really good at adjusting.
So even where we have lots of shortages of products that may be the ones you wanted, but they do have substitutes, and I just bought other food and did other things.
Jeff says he walked across the southern border the other day and didn't get asked for anything.
I think it's brand new. The passport thing is new, so that hasn't happened yet.
Anyway, I don't know.
It looks like Biden is doing something that could destroy civilization.
And what is the upside?
Now, of course, the rule is not about just truckers.
It's about anybody coming across.
But if you don't exempt the truckers, what are you going to gain by having truckers coming across the border vaccinated or not?
It's just like one person.
And they probably got Omicron if they have anything.
So, I can't imagine Trump doing this, can you?
I believe that Trump has maybe a stronger sense of risk management or something, but I can't see Trump doing this.
And I think Biden did something that has at least some chance of creating some kind of a cascade effect that just ends civilization as we know it.
Who risks civilization itself for just getting some truckers vaccinated?
Like, that is the worst risk management I've ever seen.
Honestly, come up with anything that's worse risk management than crippling the supply chain when it's already crippled.
Trying to unilaterally federalize the truckers?
I don't think so. I don't really see a hint of that.
I mean, anything's possible, I suppose.
I don't see any hints of that.
I've decided how to settle this whole Ukraine-Russia thing.
And what's funny is that I actually do have the solution.
This is the non-hyperbole solution.
This is an actual solution.
And it goes like this.
So Putin has asked for two things that we don't want to give him.
One is a promise that Ukraine won't enter NATO, which we don't want to do.
And they promised not to put offensive weapons in Ukraine, offensive pointed toward Russia, which we don't want to agree to.
Now, the offer, of course, would require probably us telling them to move their troops back from the border.
And if it didn't specifically include that, we could obviously add that.
So here's how you solve the problem.
Accept his offer.
Accept the offer. Now, how many of you just said, peace in our time?
How many of you just said, oh, Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain, you're appeasing a dictator.
Is that appeasing a dictator?
Let me tell you what I think is appeasing a dictator.
A dictator threatens you and asks for something, and then you give it to him.
Wouldn't you agree that that would be appeasing a dictator and getting nothing in return?
So if we were to give Putin what he asked for and get nothing in return, would that be appeasing a dictator?
On paper it would, wouldn't it?
Somebody says, glad Scott is not our negotiator.
Well, you're going to change your mind in a moment.
All right, you want me to tell you why this works and why you think it won't?
It works because Putin can't keep his side of the deal.
So here's our side of the deal.
Yes, we completely accept we will not bring NATO in.
We will not put offensive weapons in Ukraine.
In return, you, Putin, will cease all hostilities.
So you will move your troops away from the border, and you will cease cyberattacks.
You'll cease cyberattacks.
And you'll cease bribing officials and whatever else bad they're doing, right?
What are the chances that Putin can keep his side of the deal?
Is there any? Is there even the slightest chance that Putin would keep his side of the deal and stop hacking and influencing?
No. This is the genius of my idea.
We would never be committed to what we promised.
But we could call his bluff.
And say, absolutely, we'll take your deal.
And in return, you'll move your troops away from the border, and you'll stop cyber-hacking.
Now, what happens the next day when they cyber-hack us?
Deal's off. But we don't have to tell them that.
We could just introduce NATO anytime we wanted.
Right? Because they're going to be breaking the deal on day one.
So we would have promised something.
Wait for it. We would have promised to give them everything they wanted under the condition that they comply, but our promise would be worth nothing.
Our promise to give him everything he wanted would have no value and no binding power because he would never do his part.
But he would have to pull his troops back, so it would lock him in a no-win deal.
Either he pulls his troops back and gets nothing, or he's revealed to be not negotiating in good faith.
And he can't handle either one of those situations.
Just accept the deal.
We give him nothing.
Now the problem is, it would look like we gave him something, right?
Because people are not as sophisticated.
They look at a deal like that and they say, it looks like you gave him everything.
My God, you've just appeased a dictator.
But I think Biden could sell it directly the way I just sold it.
I think he could say in public, here's the deal.
We're going to say yes to Russia because we don't think there's the slightest chance they can keep their side of the deal.
And if they don't keep their side of the deal, what we've given them doesn't have any value because we can just change our minds and put offensive weapons there tomorrow.
We could put in NATO tomorrow if we wanted to.
So literally, what he's asking for...
Is nothing. And we're not giving it to him, and we're going to be on the brink of a nuclear war, wait for it, because a guy who asked for nothing didn't get it.
We're on the brink of a nuclear war because a guy who asked for literally nothing, we refused to give him the nothing.
Am I wrong? I'm not wrong.
He asked for fucking nothing.
And we're going to maybe have a nuclear war because we don't want to give him nothing.
I'm looking at your comments because I think I really fucked up all of your brains right now.
uh How many of you are having a thought, that could work?
Seriously. How many of you are thinking, wait a minute, that could actually work?
I'm seeing a lot of yeses.
I don't see any no's.
I see one no. Yeah.
Now, am I also wrong that this is the most obvious play in the world?
It doesn't cost anything.
It really doesn't. Now, I've told you before that, and especially with this German head of their navy getting fired over saying we should be closer to Russia, the There are two nuclear considerations that we keep not talking about, and it's the only thing we should be talking about.
Number one, Ukraine has to be protected because they gave up their nukes.
We cannot allow a country to give up their nukes, willingly, and then get attacked.
We cannot allow that.
And I'll go further.
We should make Russia sign an agreement to that effect.
China, too. They wouldn't sign.
But I'll bet we could offer to Russia, let's make an offer, or let's make an offer to, here's what we should do.
Even if it's rejected, in order to create a counter-narrative, the Biden administration should say, we'd like a deal among the nuclear powers that will defend any country that gives up its nukes voluntarily.
Now, nobody's going to sign that deal, right?
That would be too hard to get that deal.
But you want that narrative in the air.
You want it in the air that a big question is how to deal with a country that gave up its nukes.
We cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot let that country be invaded.
And it wouldn't matter what country it is.
It doesn't matter if it's Ukraine.
It doesn't matter if it's on the border of this or that.
It doesn't matter how strategic it is.
None of it matters. All that matters is that deal, that if you gave up your nukes, you were protected.
That's got to stand. And by the way, that's got to apply to Iran, too.
It's got to apply to Iran.
If Iran were to...
I can't imagine they'd do it.
But if Iran gives up their nukes, we have to guarantee them...
Permanent autonomy.
You know, unless they're attacking us or something.
But we've got to get really serious about that.
Number two, that's just the first nuclear...
That's who owns Earth. Earth will be owned by whoever controls space.
It's going to be China if it's not the United States plus Russia plus some other allies.
So we should be talking today about a space alliance with Russia...
A military space alliance.
And even though that seems like it's speculative and it's way out in the future, that creates a narrative that we're on that direction.
So one of the things you want to do is say, here's where we're going to end up.
So that will define what we do today.
Because I keep telling people, we will be allies with Russia.
We will be. Every part of history, biology, common sense, interest, economics, basically on every single level, the arc of required history is that we're going to be allies.
We're going to be allies.
So as long as you know it's going to happen, why would you mess around with all the stuff in between that's just nonsense if you know where you're going to end up?
Get rid of all the nonsense and just go there.
So, the nuclear argument has not been made by the Biden administration a gigantic error.
Gigantic, gigantic persuasion error.
It's really a bad one, in my opinion.
So, okay, now I've solved the Ukraine standoff.
What else we got going on here?
Do you know why Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will never run for president as a president, vice president ticket?
In the comments, why will Manchin and Sinema never run as a president and vice president ticket?
Somebody got the answer right away.
You locals people are too darn smart because it would be a demotion.
At the moment, Manchin and Sinema run the country.
If they became president and vice president, they wouldn't have any power.
They would have to give up power to become president.
You want to... Here's how I could run the country.
I moved to a small state.
Let's say it's Rhode Island or Arkansas or some small state.
And I lived there for enough years that I'd become a citizen.
Let's say five years.
Five years after I lived there, and I wait for some...
Let's say I go somewhere where there's a weak senator.
So there's a senator there that's going to retire, or maybe he's not so weak.
So it's a small state, and I run for the Senate, and of course I would win.
Because I would be in a small state against a weak senator, and I have name recognition.
I mean, it wouldn't take that much, right?
So I become a senator in a small state, And I would run as a Democrat.
No, hold on, hold on.
The whole point is how I'm going to take over the world, so don't worry if I register as Democrat.
It's all part of my plot to take over the world.
So I went as a Democrat.
And by the way, I wouldn't be lying to say that, you know, if I were to characterize myself as either a Republican or a Democrat, I think I could back either one of those.
Because I wouldn't have exactly the same policies of either one.
So I could kind of pick.
I would either be a Republican who didn't agree with all the Republican stuff, or I'd be a Democrat who didn't agree with all the Democrat stuff.
So either way I go, I'm going to be an odd duck.
So I could just go as a Democrat.
Become a Democrat, and then there would be three swing votes.
And here I'm imagining that things stayed the same, which won't happen.
So it's just speculative. Now imagine if there were three people...
Manchin, Sinema, and me.
Who would run the country then if there were three people?
Me, Manchin, and Sinema.
I'm pretty sure I would.
Because I'm more persuasive than they are.
And again, it's not because I'm awesome, if that's what you're hearing, nothing like that's being said.
I'm saying that I have a specific skill set.
I'm literally a trained hypnotist.
If you put a trained hypnotist with two other people, and you have me work with them for a long time, they're just going to agree with me in the end.
They'll think they made up their own mind, but that won't be what's happening.
I mean, I've been on a jury trial, and I can tell you they didn't make up their own mind.
I made up their mind for them and told them what they were going to do, and then they voted that way.
So it's so weird to think that the pathway to me running the entire country is actually right there.
All I'd have to do is get that position through a weak state and then just do what I do.
I have no base, but I would.
You know, Trump didn't have a base when he started.
He had under, what, he had like 13% support on day one or something.
You build a base, you don't find a base.
Now, let me give you my view of why a non-traditional candidate has a wide open path.
Here's my view of the Democrats and the Republicans.
Democrats... Are better at expressing goals.
Expressing goals. In other words, saying we'd like everybody to have a fair shake and we'd like everything to be fair and everybody eat and not go to jail.
So if you're just expressing the goal, I think Democrats do it way better.
If you're looking at how to make anything work, to build a system that works, that's all Republican.
I would associate the Republicans, and this is unfairly.
I'll tell you why it's unfairly.
I would associate Republicans with capitalism, which is messy, but it works.
Democracy and the Republic.
It's messy, but it works.
The Constitution. It's imperfect, but it works.
And basically, the Republicans consistently get the human motivation part of their systems correct.
They have to be a little bit tough.
You've got to build in some tough love into your systems or they just don't work.
The Democrats don't like the tough love part.
As Sean Ono Lennon tweeted, in order to be fully woke, you have to believe that two wrongs make a right.
I just thought about that all night.
My God, that's true.
In order to be woke, you have to believe that two wrongs make a right.
And I thought, that fits just about everything, doesn't it?
And that gets to my point that the Democrats consistently get the motivation part.
All right, so here's the opening for...
A non-traditional candidate.
The non-traditional candidate would take what the Democrats do well, which is expressing where you'd like to end up with a good world, and combine it with what the Republicans do well, which is create a little bit tough love in their systems, but they're systems that work, and say, all right, I like the best of both.
I want the practicality of the Republicans, but it needs to be married with the directional goodness of the Democrats.
That doesn't mean the Democrats get everything they want.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying you want to get to the best world for everybody, however you want to describe it.
It's just that you need good systems to get there.
I think there's just this gigantic lane for somebody to agree with the Democrats on where they'd like to get, a world with no discrimination, etc., but describe it as something that only a good system will get you.
Completely wide-open path.
There's nobody who could even handle that.
You could walk into the presidency with that message.
All right, if you follow the account on Twitter by EthicalSkeptic, and by the way, you should.
This is one of the stronger accounts on Twitter if you want to get context and good data and stuff on stuff.
So follow EthicalSkeptic, and here's what he updates us with.
He says, as Omicron crests at 99.5% of cases, this is in the U.S., deaths continue to persist.
So deaths are still higher.
Than you would expect under Omicron.
But it's because the Delta deaths are still, you know, they're still lagging.
But also the sheer number of Omicron, even though the death rate is small, there's just so many of them that that's still going to be a biggish number.
But we should be very close, say within nine, seven days or so, maybe within a week, We might be within a week of the Delta death cases being cleared from the data.
Just in time for February 1st.
Just in time.
So, is February 1st going to hold?
I don't know.
I don't know. My blinking is once again crazy.
Yeah, I always blink too much.
I'm not sure if that's a neurological problem.
Somebody's asked me about that before, when I blink a lot.
I'm not sure if that means anything.
I think it's neurological, actually.
All right. If I leave my home, as I did last night, and turn right, if I go to a restaurant to the right, I need a vaccine passport.
If I leave my house and turn left and go the same distance, I don't need one.
It's a different county. So I'd forgotten about that and went to a restaurant last night with Christine.
And it was in Danville, and they required a vaccine passport.
And luckily I had it on my phone, so we both had it.
But it was a Friday night, and it was a high-end restaurant in the middle of Danville, which is sort of a happening local place.
What do you think was the capacity of the restaurant that requires vaccine passports?
And by the way, the food was very good.
The restaurant was excellent. Service was excellent.
Ambiance, quite good.
Food, quite good.
Good selection. So the restaurant itself was great.
It was about, I estimated, 20% capacity on a Friday night.
Now, if I had turned left and gone to the restaurants that do not require a vaccine passport, what do you think the capacity was at the same time on a Friday night?
I don't know, but it's almost always 80%.
And by 7 o'clock, it would be 100%.
If I turn left, where there's no vaccine passports, on a Friday night, you can't get a table.
On a Friday night when I turned right, where they required them, it was all tables.
In fact, we were the only ones sitting inside.
There were some outdoor tables because it was cold.
Now, some people have said to me, Scott, it might actually be a feature that they require that because the people who actually want to go out to eat and don't want to get infected might be a lot happier if everybody there has a vaccine passport.
To which I say, have you ever met a frightened person?
That's not how fear works.
There's nobody who's gonna say, I'm afraid of the virus, but I'll still go to a packed restaurant as long as they show their vaccine cards, even though the virus is breaking through the vaccinations like a hot knife through butter.
There's literally nobody who would make that choice.
I mean, nobody's smart. If you're afraid of it, you're going to stay home.
You're not going to go where there's a bunch of vaccinated people breathing on you because you know that that's not going to stop you from getting it.
Even your vaccination isn't going to stop you.
We know that now. So I don't think there was any feature to this.
I think that there are restaurants sitting on one border who are not getting business because of the vaccine passport, or at the very least, they're losing 20% of their business, right?
Because we have a pretty high vaccination rate here.
But I'll bet they lose 20% of their business.
Maybe I saw a weird night, but it looked pretty big.
And that is about all I had to talk about today.
February 1st, what are we going to do?
How are we going to handle that?
Now, most of you are past it, and you don't have these restrictions.
But for those of us who do, I would hope that we could get some support from the rest of you to get some freedom in our state.
You know, I do actually think that we need to wait a week in California.
Yeah, that's not crazy to me.
I mean, we all want it to be done right away.
But given that what we should see is that the deaths should fall off a table in the next few days, let's wait for the deaths to fall off the table, you know, to plunge.
And then at least the government has their fake because.
Which actually would be a real because.
So I think the government just needs...
They did what?
Okay. So something I've predicted too soon.
You know what I would accept?
I would accept on February 1st a date certain for dropping the requirements.
So in California, I think we'll be the last to go.
That's my guess.
I think we'll be last.
But even on February 1st, I think the governor could say, you know, we're going to shoot for February 8th or whatever the date is.
And I think the government needs to set a date and hit it.
I think he does. All right.
Now, I'm thinking that on February 1st, I'm going to avoid anywhere that requires a mask or a vaccination passport.
I'll see how long I can hold that.
You know, it's not going to hurt the grocery store, because I'm still just ordered online.
I do think we could put some pain on anybody who's requiring mandates, and that it might be helpful.
Moving the goalposts.
I'll tell you, the least respect I have for everybody who had an opinion on the pandemic is the moving the goalpost comment.
There are lots of cases where people just move the goalpost, and it's fair to call that out.
But in a pandemic where all the information is changing and we're guessing and we're learning and stuff, if you're stuck on whether the goalposts got moved, I just don't think that's good thinking.
Because everything got moved.
The data got moved.
Just everything got moved.
So, of course the goalposts move.
Because everything's moving.
Why wouldn't they move?
Yeah, it's just called adjusting for new data.
All right. The vax damaged my blinking.
No, I always had this blinking thing.
That's a lifelong thing.
We should see numbers drop this week.
Oh, is today the march?
Today's the anti-mandate march in D.C.? How do you think this time will be seen by posterity?
Really, it's really going to be a mixed bag.
I think historians are going to have just complete opposite takes on this in every way.
All right. Let's see.
I just saw some data coming through.
Provisional death counts for coronary disease in 2019.
Okay. All right.
That's all I got for now. I would say that solving a nuclear confrontation in Ukraine is, I don't want to brag, but I think that's pretty good work for one live stream.
Anybody? Anybody? I think that's pretty good work for one live stream.
And by the way, you know, I've said this before that you act like my virtual brain.
You know, there's like a high of mine thing that happens here.
And there's no such thing as me having any kind of an idea that I'm not going to run through you guys.
So the idea of solving the Russia thing by just accepting their deal and understanding we didn't really give them anything for it.
That's only useful if all of you heard it and said, oh, that could work.
Which actually happened. That actually happened.
So I actually had a...
A thought, but it doesn't really become activated until it gets past all your filters.
