Episode 1642 Scott Adams: Our Data on Everything is Wrong But We Can Fix That By Lying. Welcome to 2022, Where Truth Died
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Why no mask rebellion from kids?
Tucker pulls in most Democrats
Young people incapable of holding a job
Havana Syndrome Coordinator
Feb1 Mask Free
ABC suspends Whoopi Goldberg
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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.
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I hope I didn't violate any copyrights with that perfect rendition of...
I think you all recognize it.
Sing along! Okay, I'll wait for the chorus.
There we go. Well, I think this is going to be the best thing you've ever seen in your life.
Lots of evidence for it.
Lots of it. And...
If you don't believe me yet, you'll believe me pretty soon.
Right after a little thing we call the simultaneous sip.
If you'd like to participate, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice of dine, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called The Simultaneous Sip.
And you, my lucky, lucky listeners, you're here for it.
My goodness, what a good day this is.
Go! I feel my DNA being rewired, but in a constructive way.
Well, um...
For those of you who are on YouTube, you may not be aware that I have a locals community on the locals site.
And people who pay a subscription get to see me make these micro-lessons, I call them.
They're usually two to four-minute videos that are designed to give you an actual useful life skill in a few minutes.
So there are over 200 of them now.
But the one I did yesterday, the locals people considered too valuable to be behind a subscription wall.
And I'm so glad they did.
And by the way, thank you.
Because after I had created it, it was a micro lesson on reframing stress and anxiety.
So it would be a bunch of little simple mental tricks and techniques and systems that you could very easily incorporate to reduce your stress and anxiety.
And the people and locals thought it was...
I'm going to over-interpret what they said.
But I thought it should be on YouTube because it would have a value outside the subscription base.
So, as a philanthropic And I guess it would be.
Sort of weirdly, indirectly philanthropic.
The people on Locals who actually pay money for my content have decided that you should see it too.
So in this case, it's on YouTube.
You can see the link to it in my Twitter today.
So if there's anybody in your life who could benefit by reducing their stress and anxiety, there would be a bunch of tips there that they can consume really easily.
And remember, the whole point of the short videos Is to just get right to it and give you something useful.
Here's the most depressing thought of the day.
Will you tell me if I'm just old man talking like an old man or if this is true?
And I know everybody my age is going to think it's true.
So this is the worst crowd I could ever ask this question for a sanity check.
All right, here's the sanity check, please.
What the hell is wrong with kids?
What the hell is wrong with them?
Can you imagine your generation, let's say you're my age-ish, can you imagine your generation not having a mask rebellion yet?
Seriously. Do you think my generation would have put up with months and months of wearing masks in school?
I don't think so. How long would it have taken us to simply all of us throw them away?
What would happen if the entire class threw their masks away at the same time?
What, they're going to close the school?
What the hell are they going to do?
What happens if everybody says, all right, well, if you're going to put your masks away, then you have to do Zoom school?
What happens if everybody says, well, I'm not going to turn it on?
I won't turn on my computer.
I'm going to school, and I'm going without a mask.
Am I crazy?
Am I crazy that my classmates in my school would have worked this out in two weeks?
I feel like I might be romanticizing my childhood a little bit, so that's where you have to stop me.
But... If I can be blunt, the fucking kids are a bunch of pussies.
You telling me that there's a bunch of 14 to 17-year-old kids who can't get their shit together enough to tell their teachers to go fuck themselves and get rid of the masks and just throw them away?
Do you think their parents are going to put up the fight that will change their minds?
All they have to do is do it at the same time.
It's not rocket fucking science.
Just do it at the same time.
Nobody can get in trouble.
Nobody. Zero risk.
Zero fucking risk.
If they just do it at the same time.
And they can't organize that?
Have you heard of social media?
There's this thing called Snapchat, TikTok.
I believe it's a way for young people to talk with each other.
And you can't work out a single day to throw your fucking masks away at the same time and just be done with it.
It's time, kids.
It's time. Did you lose all of your fight?
I mean, seriously.
Like... Well, what is going on here?
And I'm not even saying what is good or bad or when it should have happened.
I'm just astonished that there's no fight left in kids.
What happened? Is that the brainwashing or the change in diets or what?
I don't know. Here's some tragic news for a company called Spotify, who made a huge mistake of working with the most popular podcaster in the history of civilization.
And now they've lost, first they lost Neil Young.
If anybody's a certain age, you might have to Google him.
And Joni Mitchell, again, Google her, and now Nils Lofkin, apparently.
But that's not the end of it.
Mary Trump. She's removing her podcast from Spotify.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Mary Trump had a podcast?
But I don't know how Spotify is going to weather the storm.
You know, and I have to say that, unlike the children, they do have a little fight in them.
And Spotify seems to be...
I think they're going to... I think they're actually going to take this pressure.
I mean, Spotify.
That takes guts and standing up for freedom.
I don't know how you can take that hit, but I'm glad you are.
Weird news of the day, in a tweet by Bhatia Ungar Sargon, I saw, that of all things...
Tell me if you saw this coming.
This is what I did not see coming.
Would not have guessed this.
That Tucker Carlson is pulling in more young Democrat viewers than CNN or MSNBC individually.
So here are the numbers.
According to this tweet, anyway.
Fox News got 42% of Democrats aged 25 to 54.
The ones you want, right?
That's exactly the age you want.
So in the age that mattered, most advertisers...
You've got 42% of Democrats.
CNN only got 33% of Democrats.
Now, remember, Fox News also has huge numbers in general, so they have more of every category.
But I didn't think they would have more Democrats.
How many of you knew that?
I mean, specifically for Tucker Carlson.
Let me be...
Yeah, Carlson was top among Democrats in the demo across all cable news.
Tucker Carlson is the top thing watched by Democrats.
What? Am I reading this wrong?
Carlson was top among Democrats in the demographic across all cable news and ranked third among Democrats in total viewership.
So I guess you throw in the old people and the younger people and it changes it.
Oh, wow. So, how do you explain that?
Somebody says hate-watching.
I don't think it's hate-watching.
You know what I think it is?
I think it is distrusting the government is just popular everywhere.
Don't you think? I mean, if you had to say, what is Tucker Carlson's Political view.
If you were on the left, you'd probably say he's a Republican.
If you're a Republican, you might say, I don't know.
I mean, he seems sometimes surprising.
But, you know, more on the conservative side, for sure.
Libertarian, I think. A little closer to libertarian, right?
But if your message is the government is screwing you and you can't trust anybody, there's an audience for that.
Apparently there's a big audience for that.
But you also have to be...
I don't think you can ignore the fact, I've said this a million times, Fox just has better production values.
It's just a better produced show.
And I would say that Tucker stands out among the crowd of people who do what he does.
I think at the moment he does it better than anybody else.
Would you agree with that?
Let's say on cable news, just cable news alone.
I feel like even if you disagree with him, Just the performance, the thinking, the provocation, the, I don't know, just the talent that goes into it, the writing.
It feels like almost every part of it is just a little bit above who he's competing with.
So it doesn't surprise me that people were drawn to not only quality of the program, in a technical sense, but also the message of not trusting the government.
So that's my view. That's my best hypothesis for what's going on.
Payroll is down.
Surprisingly, we're expecting the number of people who are on a payroll to go up, but it went down quite a bit.
And why is that?
Well, here's some speculation, with no numbers beyond it, just speculation.
So this is my own speculation, and Mark Schneider had an idea here I'm going to throw in.
Somebody on Twitter mentioned vaccine mandates.
Do you think the vaccine mandates would be a reason the payroll is down?
How about, as this is what Mark Schneider added, how about the return to single-family incomes?
I was sort of expecting this.
I feel that a number of people said, you know, maybe only one of us needs to go back to work.
But, you know, it's 2022, so, you know, whichever one, doesn't matter.
So I think it'll be more single-family, less traditional, you know, the dad's working mom at home, but probably still a lot of that, right?
Still a majority, probably.
So that's it.
But I'll bet it's also hard to hire.
So here's another old man yelling at the clouds thing.
And you really have to fact check me on this stuff.
Because I'm somewhat hyper aware that there's some point in my future where I can only see things through an old man lens.
And I'm just going to lose the ability to see life in a normal way.
Because it feels like it happens to everybody.
So why would I be the exception?
But here's what I'm thinking. I've never seen so many people in the young, working age category who are incapable of holding a job.
Is that new? Do you see this just in your personal life?
Do you see the number of people who, for different reasons, and anxiety is often one of them, for whatever reason, didn't get whatever that base...
That base capability is.
And I'm not sure that they're, you know, different genetically than anybody ever was.
So I wonder if it's partly that the environment got more complicated or are people different?
So here's the question.
Did the environment get too complicated And there's some people who just, you know, they're not built for that level of, let's say, stimulation.
And they're just overstimulated, and it's like paralyzing.
Or is there something in the water?
Is there something in the diet?
But if...
Is it just the schools are bad at teaching?
You know, I would say, somebody's saying the soy, but it's not like it's only boys are being affected, right?
No competition, somebody says.
I don't know. I don't really have a speculation, and I'm also not sure it's true.
Oh, drugs. Drugs, maybe.
Although I haven't seen drugs being directly implicated.
Although, yeah, I guess so.
Yeah, I guess it would be a combination of a whole bunch of stuff.
All right. Here's some CNN fake news.
So they're reporting that the Tennessee school board banned a comic about the Holocaust.
So rats are portrayed as people, and it's sort of a Holocaust-y theme.
And so they banned these books in, I guess, the libraries, in the school libraries, because of the book's, quote, unnecessary use of profanity and nudity, and its depiction of violence and suicide.
And then the CNN commentary here, opinion, is as though it would be possible to depict one of the most violent events of the last century without violence.
Now, what is wrong with banning a book for having too much violence and sex in it if it's a school?
Is that new?
Like, are...
Could you put copies of Penthouse?
Back when there were copies of Penthouse.
Could you just put porn in the school library?
I'm pretty sure we've always had restrictions about levels of violence and nudity and sexual stuff, right?
Right? Am I wrong?
Now, even though it's a classic, yeah, I know, in its genre, it's a classic.
But why is this even news?
Is it news? I mean, that's a serious question.
Isn't this just the most ordinary thing?
And I think that the political part of this is that because it's about the Holocaust, maybe it would be denying kids, you know, some history about the Holocaust.
But... I don't feel like that's really going to be skipped.
Are they skipping the Holocaust in history now?
You need a comic to do it?
I don't know. It just feels like a non-story that turned into a story.
So, can you believe that the Biden administration is going to appoint a Havana Syndrome coordinator?
So Havana Syndrome, the thing that, as far as we can tell, never happened and doesn't exist, is probably a psychological disorder, although there could be actual physical disorders caused by something, but unlikely to have been caused by a directed energy attack.
But we have a sitting senator, a Democrat, not that it matters in this case, Senator Gene Shaheen, who tweeted, For too long, Americans affected by directed energy attacks...
What? What?
I guess this is a big problem in our world.
Americans affected by directed energy attacks have struggled and fought to access the care they need and deserve to get well.
Their experiences drove my effort to establish this coordinator and reform our government response to provide equitable...
So there's a senator who believes that It's proven enough that she can just tweet it out like fact that there was a directed energy attack.
At the very least, it's not proven.
Can we all agree on that?
At the very least, it's not proven.
It's not in evidence.
There is some suspicion.
Now, the latest I've seen is that it's been debunked.
But, you know, debunked doesn't mean the debunk is right either.
So I don't doubt that people have actual medical problems.
I just don't know that this is a source.
And I think it's weird that we're going to have a coordinator for a mass hysteria as if it had been real.
And, you know, it would be hilarious.
Hypothetically. Hypothetically. What if Trump gets re-elected?
Work with me on this.
Hold. What if Trump gets elected and then appoints a Trump derangement syndrome coordinator to try to figure out how to collectively deal with the damage that's been done to people who are suffering from Trump derangement syndrome?
The source, I think the source of the Trump derangement syndrome It's a directed energy weapon.
Now, that directed energy weapon is the press and the fake news, but you'd have to admit that the press is directing its energy, directed energy, at the people's skulls who are consuming the fake news, the directed energy, and that it's causing them, in many cases, correct me if I'm wrong, Give me a fact check on this.
Actual, verifiable mental illness, bam.
Right? Trump could literally do this.
Now, we wouldn't want to see a budget for that person, right?
I wouldn't want to spend money on it.
But it would be hilarious, and it would be completely defensible.
Because if the news reported on it, and they tried to say how ridiculous it was, they would still have to talk to the experts, wouldn't they?
What would the experts say?
What would the experts say?
Would they say there's no such thing as people having mental illness from the time of Trump?
No, they wouldn't say that.
I'm pretty sure the experts would confirm that something like Trump derangement syndrome absolutely exists.
And then we'd have to talk about where it came from, wouldn't we?
And, of course, we'll never agree where I came from, but wouldn't it be hilarious if Trump made the conversation about where you got the Trump derangement syndrome instead of whether or not it exists?
I mean, it would just be too perfect.
And even better than doing it for real...
Better than doing it for real would be to do it on the campaign trail and say he's going to do it, but you don't know if he's kidding or not.
Because you think, he might actually do that.
And then the press wouldn't know if he's kidding, so they'd report it like he wasn't kidding, but they wouldn't be sure.
And then that would be the story itself, whether he was kidding or not kidding.
It would be just the ultimate campaign thing to say, a Trump derangement syndrome coordinator to bring help to those who were damaged by the fake news.
And then back it up with examples.
When somebody says, that's crazy, they say, well, did you or did you not report X, Y, and Z? And if somebody thought those things were true, shouldn't they feel distressed about them?
I'd feel distressed if I thought those things were true.
So it's a wonderful, just persuasive message, just for fun.
Here's a thought. If climate change causes a whole bunch of problems, They have to be remediated.
It's going to cost a lot of money, right?
So, you know, there have been economic projections.
Now, if you can release on the question of whether climate change is real, I know you're all going to be, hey, it's not real.
Forget about that for a moment, because that's not important to the point.
If it were true, if it were true that there will be massive economic displacement, Because of climate change, how do you fix that?
Let's say it's going to happen and it's too late to stop it, which the experts are telling us, right?
They're already saying it's too late to stop pretty big economic problems.
It's not too late maybe to stop even bigger ones, but pretty much the consensus, and I know you don't agree, but hold that thought, because that's not the conversation.
It's not about whether you agree with that.
I'm just saying hypothetically, if there were big economic displacement, what would you have to do necessarily to fix it?
Well, you'd have to spend a lot of money.
Am I right? But more ironically, it would take a great deal of energy.
Literally, oil and coal...
And green energy and nuclear and every other kind of energy.
And since we don't have as much green energy or nuclear as we need, nuclear being green too, where would you get it?
So I feel as though you've got...
It's just a question I haven't seen addressed, that if you have to fix all the economic displacement, it would necessarily mean a whole bunch of energy increase, which would also make the climate worse, right?
I guess the only question is, if you have a long-range 80-year economic model, Is anybody doing it right?
Or could it even be done right?
Is it just safe to say, this is sort of a Jordan Peterson take as well, that if you're looking at a 100-year model, it doesn't matter how good you are at modeling, you're not going to get it right.
It's just not a thing.
But I wonder about the feedback thing.
And let me now simplify that whole point that I should have started with.
There are some who say that your well-being is directly related to how much energy you could use or that's available to you cheaply.
Maybe that's all you need to know.
What if the only thing we did is we just ignored the climate and everything else?
I'm not saying it. This is just a mental exercise.
What if you just ignored everything and focused on one rule?
And the one rule was this.
The more energy you can provide for everybody at the cheapest cost, the better everybody will be in the long run.
I have a feeling it is that simple, that you could ignore all the models and all the everything and just try as hard as you could to drive down the cost of energy and also to produce more of it in every way that you could.
Like, you know, get as much oil as you can, Because if you boost the economy of any place, it's going to do better against any climate change risks.
So I feel as if we have all this complication because there are people whose jobs it is to do complicated stuff.
Right? The scientists have to do complicated stuff or else what's the point of being a scientist?
That's what they do.
They do the complicated stuff.
So we probably get drawn into thinking things are way more complicated than they should be because there are people whose job it is to say, hey, you better pay me because I can do this complicated stuff and you can't.
But it might be a simple economic truth that more energy equals more better all the time, every time.
And I would love to see some economist, especially an economist who's involved in any kind of climate change.
I guess I should have asked that question to Bjorn Lomborg, right?
He would be the right kind of person to ask that question.
Is it true, just generally speaking, that more energy More cheaply.
It just always is the right answer.
No exception. It might be.
I'll just put it out there.
If I were running for president, I think I'd be saying that.
I did my maskless experiment on February 1st.
Here was my result. In mask-required California, I was the only maskless shopper in my supermarket.
And it was pretty crowded. There were a lot of people there.
Um... Not a single problem.
I just didn't wear a wand and nobody said anything.
Now, I did use the self-checkout because I was going for a soft target here.
It was more important for me to get in and get out without being challenged than it was to make any specific thing happen.
So I wanted to use the self-checkout, but of course the self-checkout never works.
LAUGHTER Or there's always some problem.
So I end up interacting with a masked employee at the supermarket who stood next to me with her mask on and said nothing about the fact I didn't have one.
Now, do you think half of the people looked at me and said, you magnificent bastard, I wish I could do that, and half of them said, you're going to kill my grandmother?
Maybe. I don't know.
I couldn't tell. I will just tell you that I couldn't detect...
Anything except me walking around.
And if I have to be honest, I'm not exactly the kind of person that gets challenged in my town.
So it's not really a fair test.
If I may throw some systemic racism at you, it is a true thing that people who look like me don't get challenged in a town like mine.
Let me give you an example.
If I saw a construction site, I could walk into the middle of the construction site and the people wouldn't stop me.
They would assume I was in charge.
It's true. I could talk myself past any security.
It's true. Do you think I've ever been stopped by security?
No. And couldn't get through?
Like, ultimately couldn't get through?
No. No.
It is literally true that I'm in that exact demographic that looks like it should be ruling the world because of systemic racism, right?
And so people just sort of assume that I'm trouble.
Not trouble, like, physically.
But I just look like, ah, I'm not going to challenge that guy.
He's probably got an ace up his sleeve.
So I have a feeling that when I walk through Safeway, I don't get the same challenge I might be if I were 20 years old.
Am I right? If I were 20 years old, do you think somebody would have told me to put a mask on?
I bet they would have. Maybe.
More likely. Anyway, so I tried it in a few different corporate chains, and the private companies are all maskless at this point, for all practical purposes.
Nobody wears a mask at their home.
Nobody wears a mask to socialize.
Nobody's telling their kids to stay home because of COVID. I mean, basically, masking's over if you want it to be.
So here's my point.
Masking's optional in California.
It's over. Now, if you'd like to push it harder, if you're in a state that wants to push it, I think it is now fair to give a bad Yelp review to any business that challenges you on being maskless.
Not a bad Yelp review for requiring it, because that's usually just putting a sign up.
I don't care what sign somebody puts up.
But at this point, and I wouldn't have said this earlier, in fact, I didn't want to recommend this earlier because I think Yelp is a nuclear weapon.
You don't want to use that one.
Yelp will take a business out.
It's really bad if you get Yelped.
This is one of the reasons that I couldn't own a restaurant.
If somebody was mad at me for something I did in my public life, They would go to Yelp and give my restaurant, that had nothing to do with anything, a bad review.
And if you have a bad review on Yelp, you're dead if you're a local restaurant.
You're just dead. So people had the ability to put me on a business, and that's kind of what happened.
I mean, there are other stories for why being in restaurants is a bad business.
But I couldn't get past the bad Yelp reviews from the people who were mad at me for other reasons, basically.
So Yelp is that powerful.
It was powerful enough to completely change my business life.
That's how powerful it was.
And I figure I have, you know, my own power, so it's not like I'm a powerless individual in society, as I just said.
And Yelp took me out, no problem.
So if there's a business now, don't give them a bad review about, you know, some of their service or something.
Just be specific, and it'll show up, and it will get their attention.
Anyway... Schools across America are implementing some kind of BLM week of action.
And one of the, I guess, controversial parts is that the BLM is calling for a, quote, disruption of Western nuclear family.
Well, that doesn't sound good.
Let's dig into this a little bit.
And return to the, quote, collective village that takes care of each other.
So this is part of a starter kit for schools that want to be teaching the BLM Week of Action stuff.
Now, here is my persuasion advice.
I know you're going to hate this, but I almost sort of kind of agree with BLM But the way they're saying it makes it sound like nothing you could possibly agree with.
Here's what they should have said, and maybe I'm interpreting it wrong, but I think this is what they would want.
If a nuclear family works well for you, go ahead and do it.
But there are lots of people for whom it doesn't work and won't work, and a lot of them are called children.
For children, you might have one parent who is an addict.
So there are probably lots of people who just, through no fault of their own, just the nuclear family isn't working, so they need some kind of extra village help, right?
So don't get mad at me for thinking that the nuclear family is the best institution.
You all agree with that, right?
That the nuclear family, when it works right, I think everybody would agree it's the best.
Does anybody disagree with that?
In the ideal situation, you know, your parents are functional and you've got enough money, you live in a nice place.
I don't think you could beat that.
But would you also agree that not everybody could achieve it?
Realistically. You know, the number of people could hit that would be...
25%, I'm thinking.
You know, I say 25% because there's another 25% that pretends they're happy, but they're not.
So if you actually could know secretly in people's heads whether things are working or not, I think that nuclear family thing, I mean, the odds of getting one good parent, what are the odds of that?
Not that high, right?
50-50? The odds of getting one good parent about 50-50?
Now, what are the odds that you get two good parents when the odds of getting one is 50-50?
25%, right?
So there's a 25% just based on the awfulness of people.
You're going to get at least a below-average experience.
And then one of them's an addict and blah, blah, blah.
So I'm only making a persuasion suggestion here.
So don't get mad at me for doing something that sounds like I support BLM. If you haven't heard the full breadth of my opinions, I think Black Lives Matter has been a scam organization, even though they had good intentions by the people.
But I think the leaders at this point are obviously just scammers.
So... Don't use the word disruption.
Just say you're augmenting, you're improving.
That would be better. Here's another persuasion thing about school choice.
I guess a representative was talking to a senator.
I didn't see what the setting was.
It doesn't matter to the point, but it looked like some congressional kind of debate thing.
And Representative Noyan, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Asked another representative.
I'll get to that. He says, why don't private schools have the same level of accountability and scrutiny as our public schools?
And the answer from Representative Cantrell was, quote, and here's the kill shot.
This has done so well. He goes, you're right.
They don't have the same level of accountability.
They have a much higher level of accountability.
Families have the freedom to leave.
And I thought, well, yeah, we're done here.
We're done here. That's the high ground.
The high ground maneuver is accountability is the only way you get anything done.
Am I right? Who's going to argue with that statement?
Having accountability is the only way anything's ever worked.
There's no exception.
So what is more accountable than people can say, well, screw this, I'll take my money somewhere else?
You couldn't get more accountable.
So if somebody's arguing for a school choice, Representative Cantrell is either a natural...
He might be just a great communicator.
I don't know anything else about him.
But the way he so succinctly put this, it's the succinct part that's the impressive part.
Having the idea is something you've all thought of.
Am I right? Just knowing that that's true is something you've all thought of.
So it's not that novel.
But how he boiled it down was, you know, it's the highest level of accountability.
Families have the freedom to leave.
You're done. That's perfect writing and perfect speaking.
So I just point that out as good persuasion.
And I would also say that you can always tell the Republican in a conversation, even without them being labeled.
Do you know how? The Republican's the one who's making an appeal to how human incentives and motivation works.
And the Democrat is the one who's acting like they forgot that variable.
If you didn't... You know, I saw the video before I knew the political parties, but, you know, it's just instant.
As soon as you see one talk about motivation and incentive, you know, market forces, and the other one acting like they don't even understand that, you know the parties.
So Biden's doing this cancer moonshot.
He's resurrecting it. They had this during Obama-Biden administration.
And I guess it's mostly funding to get...
And he's got an aggressive goal of reducing cancer death rates by 50%.
Pretty good.
I mean, I like the fact that he's taking a shot at it.
But... So let me say this.
From a... I don't know, I'm assuming that funding it is going to help.
Apparently, cancer rates, death rates have fallen quite a bit, 25% in the last...
What? What? Yeah.
We've already brought cancer death rates down quite a bit.
So I'm saying this is probably a reasonably good thing.
It's a high priority. All right?
It's a high priority.
So giving it more money sounds good on paper.
But here's the political persuasion problem.
And you have to respect him for doing it anyway.
You don't want to be associated with cancer.
I don't even like to talk about it on the live stream.
In fact, that's the last time I'll say it.
So I'm not going to use the word again.
And that will beg my point.
Our brains...
We can process some things semiologically, but it's not how the brain is wired.
The brain is wired by association.
So the brain just associates things.
Oh, this is like this.
It's like that. It's different from this.
It's like that. And...
For Biden having this moonshot of this word, I'm not going to say out loud because I don't want to associate with it.
Even though it's important, even though it's a top priority, even though I would compliment him for having a good sense of priorities, I guess.
It's politically really bad.
Politically, it's just a loser.
I don't think Trump would ever do this.
Even if you think it's a good idea, I think his political instinct would steer away from it.
Rasmussen had a poll asking, is Biden the best or worst president?
Or is he one of the best or one of the worst presidents?
And 54% in the Rasmussen poll said that Biden is one of the worst.
Trump was only 43%.
So way more people think that Biden is the worst, which means that he's picking up a lot of Democrats, right?
So at this point, there are a lot of Democrats who are not liking Joe Biden.
And Obama did better than both of them.
Only 33% thought he was one of the worst.
So here's a progression of people who thought they were one of the worst.
33%, 43%, 54%.
Do you think it's actually the president, or is there something else going on?
What else was happening during this period?
What was the other large force?
The other large force was the social media and fake news.
As social media and fake news got more polarizing, we started to hate our presidents more.
Now, it could be a coincidence...
The last three of our presidents started out relatively awesome and just got progressively worse.
It could be. And then the people noticed and they answered the poll.
It could be. We'll rule it out.
I mean, it doesn't look that way to me, but we'll rule it out.
But I think a better interpretation of this is that everything looks worse.
Because of the nature of social media and the nature of the fake news business.
Just everything looks worse.
So my guess would be that our next president, no matter who it is, will set a new record as the worst of the worst.
Democrat or Republican, it won't make any difference.
I think our next president is going to be both a racist and mentally incompetent.
So it's the only way you can get even worse.
Could you tell me, did I say yesterday that there was yet another big study that says moderate drinking is not good for you?
Did I mention that yesterday?
I didn't mention it yesterday.
Well, there's another big study that says moderate drinking is not good for you.
And if you ever thought it was, it's because the numbers were done wrong.
Now, and so I did a Google search.
Oh, somebody says yes, though.
Oh, two days ago I did.
One of my best predictions.
But one of my other best predictions is that when the pandemic was over, that leadership wouldn't matter.
In other words, we wouldn't see a difference in leadership as changing your numbers.
And I'm going to lay a claim down that the one and only place you can see a clear signal for leadership...
Was Trump's warp speed.
And arguably closing traffic to China, but I don't know if we can measure that exactly.
Now, here's the thing.
You also have the benefit of being able to measure some things better than others.
Okay? Okay.
So whatever you can measure is always going to seem like a more important thing because you have more certainty about it.
So because we know who gets us vaccinated, we know if they die, even though the data is bad, it does look, according to the official data, and I know, I know, this is before all your alleged vaccine blood clots wipe out America or whatever is going to happen.
So we don't know the long run yet.
But in the short run, the latest I saw today was there are 16 times more vaccinated people in hospitals in America in December than vaccinated.
16 times more unvaccinated than vaccinated in the hospital in December.
Now, if that's true...
Or even true-ish.
Let's say it's just 8 to 1, right?
Let's say the numbers are terrible, but it's still 8 to 1.
That is a big effect that can be measured, at least in the short run.
Now, remember, I said the leadership that would matter the most.
If you think it was a huge mistake and it's going to kill us all, it still mattered the most, right?
So my point is matter to the most.
I don't want to argue with you about what was a good or bad idea.
Can we get away from that?
I'm not saying the vaccinations are a good or bad idea.
Let's forget about that. Just what had an impact.
And I'm saying that nobody else really impacted anything.
That all the lockdowns, apparently the numbers are all over the place.
Oh, by the way, there was a new study, you know, a meta-study about the lockdowns that showed that they didn't work, but really they did work, except they didn't work, except it was a meta-study, except the data's bad, but it worked, except in the cases where it didn't work, and then the bad study that was ridiculous.
So we don't know anything about lockdowns, but we do know that the signal was not clear, You could still argue, ah, maybe in some cases the lockdowns made some...
And there's some indication that maybe closing the bars might have made a difference.
But the one thing we'd all agree on is there's no clear data, right?
There's no clear data that says the lockdowns work.
Am I right? Can we get a fact check on that?
Because I'm not positive I'm right, but I think I'm right.
And if there's a small effect, you know, that wouldn't necessarily be worth the cost.
So of the things we can measure, just fact-check me on this, of the things we can measure, the vaccinations have the biggest impact.
Again, I'm not saying good or bad, but the biggest thing you can measure, and that was Trump.
Now, some of you could say, oh, wait, you know, DeSantis is a clear example of good leadership.
But here's the catch.
DeSantis' leadership, at least in terms of staying open, was more about not doing something.
And I'm not sure his numbers were really that different from anybody else's.
We do like the fact he protected the elderly.
We liked his Regeneron thing while that was working with Delta.
So he did a lot of stuff right.
But you don't see it in the numbers.
That's my point. Even if I grant you, and I think it is true, that DeSantis may have hit every note right.
He may have hit every note.
I don't think it made much difference.
But the vaccinations did.
Even if they end up killing you, they made a difference.
So, I think that was my...
Two of my least likely predictions.
That moderate drinking...
I think I made this 15 years ago, the first time I said it.
Or 25 years ago, probably.
That there was no way that moderate drinking was going to be good for you.
And that leadership wouldn't matter in the pandemic.
Except the one example of...
And there's also indication that maybe even warp speed would have happened anyway.
Maybe. Like anybody would have done it if they had been president.
We don't know that to be true, but we do give credit to the person who did it.
That's the way it works.
So that was Trump. All right, we have to talk about Whoopi Goldberg.
So if you're not up-to-date on this, Whoopi was talking about the Holocaust and said something like it wasn't about race.
It was, she said, quote, it's about man's inhumanity to man.
That's what it's about. And she argued, I think, that...
When Anna Navarro said, but it's about white supremacists going after Jews and gypsies, then Goldberg attempted to speak over and said, but these are two white groups of people, according to Whoopi Goldberg.
Well, she apologized for that because people explained to her that during the Holocaust, certainly the Nazis believed that the Jews were a different race.
So we could argue about what race means, but I don't think we could argue that that's the way Germany was interpreting it at the time, or at least the Nazis.
And so once Whoopi got this clarification, she issued an apology, which showed that she understood the impact it had.
She explained, you know, that she had become better informed.
Sounds good. And she apologized in a way that I took as sincere.
Would you say that her apology hit the form and was timely?
You know, I have the 48-hour rule that says if you apologize in 48 hours, you should be forgiven no exceptions.
If it's just words, right?
Not if you kill somebody.
But if it's just words, and you correct and clarify in 48 hours, forgiven.
So according to the 48-hour rule, Whoopi is forgiven.
But according to her employer, the biggest bunch of cowardly assholes I've heard of lately, she got suspended.
Now, you can't be a little bit wrong in America.
You can't be wrong and then correct it and apologize on a fucking opinion show.
Are you kidding me?
She's an opinion person who gives opinion on an opinion show.
She gives an opinion on an opinion show that disagrees with some other opinions, changes her opinion on the opinion show, Clarifies and apologizes sincerely and correctly.
I mean, hit forum. Nice forum.
And she gets fucking suspended.
You cowardly pieces of shit.
Talk about blowing a public relations opportunity.
Do you know how this could have worked?
This is how this should have worked.
We all learned something about the Holocaust.
This was the opposite of a negative anything.
Everything about this was positive until they suspended the person who caused the positive thing to happen.
Do you know why people have different opinions and then talk about it on TV? It's so you can get smarter.
That's the whole fucking point.
And what happened? She had an opinion, other people had an opinion, she revised her opinion, and you got smarter.
I mean, I'm not sure that I'd ever thought about that specific question, but that filled in a little context for me.
Oh, yeah. Of course, they would have called it race back then, but, you know, maybe our definitions of race have changed or whatever.
This is the most horrifyingly incompetent response I've ever seen from a corporation.
I mean, just who...
Compare this to Joe Rogan's response to his controversy.
I gave Joe Rogan an A +, literally a Steve Jobs-level comparison.
You don't get any better than that.
That's the standard of how to do it.
And then ABC News' PR department tweets out this horseshit about somebody who clearly is not a racist.
I mean, come on.
You know, Whoopi Goldberg?
She's suspended for being a racist?
Or saying something that I guess was insensitably, accidentally racist or something?
ABC News, you are so incompetent.
Really, the entire...
Whoever came up with this idea of how to deal with it, they should all be fired.
I can't believe that there's a CEO who looked at this.
I wonder if the CEO was even involved.
Let me give you a hypothesis.
I'm going to give you a very weird hypothesis.
I don't think the CEO was involved.
And I think he might reverse it.
Who's the CEO now?
Who's the CEO of Disney?
That just changed recently, right?
Who's the CEO of Disney?
Come on, somebody's going to tell me.
Chapik? Bob, is it Shapik or Chapik?
Well, here's the thing.
This is what, in my opinion, on my opinion livestream, the CEO probably didn't see this.
I think he didn't see it.
And here's why I think he didn't see it.
You don't become the CEO of Disney by being a fucking idiot.
And this decision is fucking idiot territory.
This is what somebody who learned public relations does.
This is not CEO-level thinking.
How many people would agree with me?
This looks like, yeah, this looks like human resources, doesn't it?
Am I right? I mean, maybe the CEO got pushed into it somehow, but no.
There's no way that...
This is my prediction, my new prediction.
The CEO did not have a, let's say, a strong input on the decision.
Something else is going on.
All right. Let's talk about long COVID risk.
So there's a story in the Wall Street Journal, and it starts out by saying that...
Asthma, unhealthy gut bacteria, the presence of autoantibodies, blah, blah, and some other things can predict whether you'll have this thing called long COVID. And then in the body of the story, there's a completely different story.
So if anybody works for the Wall Street Journal, I don't know if I missed it, but the headline said that asthma was one of the four things and then the story doesn't.
So... I think you've got a headline story mismatch or I'm a bad reader.
I wasn't in a hurry. Yeah.
But given that I have asthma, I would like to know if I have a risk of a long COVID. But according to the body of it, it's all these other things.
One of them is that you might reactivate your Epstein-Barr so that your long COVID is actually the Epstein-Barr kicking the shit out of you.
Maybe some people have Addison's disease.
Some people have some kind of autoimmune condition that isn't so bad normally, but it gets pushed over the edge.
Somebody said yes.
Anyway. That, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say today.
And... The question is, Scott, can we reframe critical race theory as a religion?
No. That never works.
People have been trying to do that reframe forever.
Science, it's just a religion.
You know, it makes a good bumper sticker and stuff, but nobody's ever been persuaded by it.
Because I think people just know what a religion is and what it's not, and they're not going to change their minds on that.
And plus people have a positive view of religion.
So when I say alcohol is poison, that's a good reframe because nobody likes poison.
But people do like religion.
So if you say, oh, critical race theory, that's like a religion, people are like, oh, I didn't realize it was that good.
But Can I get a micro lesson on getting past security?
Well, look like me, I guess.
Be an old bald guy with glasses, that helps.
Is it a good strategy to back what the left hates the most, like Trump?
Probably not. Based on our comments...
Oh, here's an interesting comment.
So Michael says, based on our comments, I think Whoopi Goldberg isn't particularly fond of Jews.
I feel as though that's a little mind-reader-ish.
I mean, you know, if you accuse a public figure of not being fond of Jews, you better bring a link.
You better bring a link.
I take that a little bit personally, honestly.
Because, you know, that's some shit that happens to me.
Just people throw out some wild accusation, and then somebody sees it in the comments, and that's all they've ever seen on the topic.
You better bring a link if you have an accusation like that.
Because we don't live in a world where that's safe to do.
You're actually creating an unsafe environment for a public figure when you do that kind of stuff.
I'm in favor of free speech, so I'm not saying you need to get banned for saying what you're saying.
That's a different kind of conversation.
I'm saying as a point of personal responsibility, don't put that shit out there, unless you can back it up.
If you can back it up, then please do, because that would be worth seeing.
Would mushrooms help someone with addiction?
I'm going to tell you to Google that, because I don't like to delve into anything that would look like a medical recommendation.
So I never recommend marijuana or mushrooms.
I might tell you if I've had an experience with them, but I wouldn't recommend them.
That's a medical thing, and why would I do that?
All right. Looking at some of your comments now.
Steven Spielberg launched Whoopi's career.
Oh, why is Whoopi clearly not a racist?
Well, I'm just saying that she wouldn't be on The View if she were.
Would you agree with that?
When I say it's clear that Whoopi is not a racist, I mean in the classic sense.
Not in the, let's say, expanded sense that...
You could be racist against white people.
Not in that sense.
I don't have an opinion on that because I don't know what she said about that.
But in the sense that the mainstream would consider her classically non-racist, I think she fits that category perfectly.
Yeah, and what are the chances her last name would be Goldberg?
It's like the simulation is just serving up this perfect thing.
You know, and this is another case of people being offended on behalf of other people.
So we've gone through this entire Whoopi Goldberg story, but was there anybody who was actually offended, or were we all worried that somebody else would be offended?
Was that the worry?
Yeah. Somebody else would be offended.
Because usually, most offense is third-party offense, right?
I am pretty sure that somebody I don't know, who doesn't have quite the sense of humor that I do, somebody with a thin skin, not like me, I've got a thick skin, Criticism rolls off my back.
But let me protect those weak people back there.
There's nobody behind me?
Well, I'm sure there was somebody back there the moment before.
And that person was deeply offended by that horrible thing you did.
Now it's somebody like me who has a sense of humor and a thick skin.
All right, I'm going to see a counter to that.
uh So Cole says, no, plenty of Jewish people were offended.
Deborah Messing was pretty explicit.
I'll bet if you read...
So there was a specific counterexample.
Deborah Messing.
I'll bet if I read her comment, it wouldn't strike me that way.
But send it to me.
Ha, ha, ha.
Ha, ha. Yeah, and this is also a special case, right?
Because where the Holocaust is involved, there's not only were you personally offended, but does it make you feel, let's say, more vulnerable if the Holocaust narrative is attacked?
So I feel like there's a complication there that That would be different from saying somebody was actually offended.
Somebody might have, let's say, their safety offended.
I guess that would be another way to say it.
She might feel that her sense of security as a Jewish person in the world might be offended by it.
Any little attack on it.
Ben Shapiro appeared pretty offended.
But again...
But again, I will bet if you asked him privately, I can't read his mind, right?
So let me have some humility about being able to read the mind of somebody who's smarter than I am.
That's always the worst thing.
At least with Ben Shapiro, I can somewhat confidently say he's smarter than I am.
So trying to read the mind of somebody, or understand exactly what they're thinking in their private thoughts...
If I could think what he was thinking in my private, if I knew what Ben Shapiro was thinking, I would be as smart as Ben Shapiro.
But I'm pretty sure I'm not.
But I'll bet. Here's my bet.
It's not so much that he was personally offended in some way that his body was having some stress.
I feel like it was more of a philosophical point that maybe he had some energy about.
But that's just a guess.
I probably shouldn't even try to...
You should erase that.
I shouldn't try to characterize anybody's probable opinion.
That's somewhat unfair territory.
But I guess that what I think of Ben Shapiro is that his personal ability to be offended must be pretty high.
Because you can't do this kind of work if you're easily offended.
So it's hard to imagine anybody doing this who's really ever offended.
I don't know if I've ever been offended.
I can't think of an example.
Have I ever said I've ever been offended by anything?
Have I ever used that word in talking about myself?
I may have just like an of hyperbole, but not really.
I'm sure I did. Oh, on this podcast?
Did I say it on this podcast?
That would be funny if I did.
That would be funny.
All right. Yeah, maybe somebody is using hyperbole sometimes.
