Episode 1644 Scott Adams: False Flags, Fake News, Putin Trapped, and the Walls Closing in on Spotify
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Senator Hawley says NO NATO for Ukraine
Will President Putin invade Ukraine?
Fox mocks CNN, MSNBC for NOT reporting fake news?
Omicron Olympics begins today
NBC doubts Uighur atrocities happening?
Mike Cernovich on regime distrust
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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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Good morning, everybody. And welcome to, undoubtedly, the finest experience of your entire life.
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You can almost feel it, can't you?
Alright, number one.
I guess Josh Hawley in the Senate is urging the Biden administration to...
Forget about putting Ukraine in NATO, should they ever qualify.
They're not qualified at the moment, anyway.
But... What do you think about that?
What do you think about promising Putin that we won't do the thing that we probably didn't want to do anyway?
I have mixed feelings about it.
So let's talk it through.
Number one...
I, too, had once said, why don't we just give him what he wants, because what he wants is nothing that we care about anyway, which is, he doesn't want NATO in Ukraine.
Ukraine is too corrupt for us to allow it to be part of NATO anyway.
Doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon.
Why not just give him what he wants and then say, okay, you have what you want, and we could take it back at any time.
Should he keep his army there?
We could say, whoa, that wasn't the deal.
Now we're going to let Ukraine and NATO, you bastard.
So it seemed to me like we could give him literally nothing, because it wasn't anything we wanted anyway, and it would embarrass him into having to withdraw or at least respond in some way.
But then I watched the Biden administration surprisingly offer absolutely nothing to And it looked like it worked.
And I thought to myself, you know, if Biden actually gets away with this, it's too early to say, but I'm willing to imagine that it was the right play.
Just say, how about we give you nothing?
And how about we call your bluff?
And how about your 100,000 troops aren't going to take a step into this territory?
Because you know it would be worse for you than if you did.
Because I do think Putin knows it would be bad for him to do that.
What do you think? I mean, none of us can read Putin's mind, right?
So we're all guessing. But I don't think we can guess any worse than the intelligence agencies.
Do you? Well, let's do a little experiment here.
So you've probably seen experiments where a group of people are asked a question.
I'll give you an example.
I was once in some kind of a class.
I forget what they were teaching.
And people were asked to guess on average how many credit cards each person had on average.
And of course, since you don't know anything about the other person's belongings, they were strangers in the class, we all put in our guesses, and the guesses were like crazy.
It was everything from, you know, one to nine.
You know, people were guessing that the average person had nine credit cards.
But you take all these crazy guesses, and then you average them out.
And then we actually took our credit cards out and counted them and took the average.
It was, like, amazingly close.
So it was one of those wisdom of crowds things.
I guess you can repeat that experiment, and it works enough that it was part of the class.
And so I wonder...
If you were trying to anticipate what Putin would do, would you do better if you had all your sources and methods?
Because probably Putin hasn't made up his mind, right?
So even if he had sources and methods and you got information that was 10 minutes old, it would be useless if he's changing his mind all the time.
So let's try the wisdom of crowds.
The hypothesis is this.
That the average of us, just watching this right now, probably could guess what he would do.
Just a hypothesis.
There's no reason to believe it's true.
Just for fun. So here's my take, and then you can add yours.
I might bias you with mine, but that's okay.
This isn't exactly science.
I think he won't invade.
I think that we trapped him.
But... There's a persuasion play here that's really, really juicy.
I'll tell you about that in a minute.
So what do you think? Give me your invade or don't invade.
And for our purposes, I'm going to say there's no such thing as a minor incursion.
Just forget about minor or major.
Just invade, no invade.
Invade, no invade. So I'm looking at the locals' people.
Mostly no invade.
Okay, so I would say overwhelmingly no invasion.
Interesting. So that's what I think, too.
Now, and you know what's interesting about this is that it's nonpartisan.
I'll bet. I do see some yeses.
But it's overwhelmingly no on both platforms here.
All right, good. So actually, I think I'm kind of happy about this result.
I wasn't sure that people would be on the same team on this.
All right, you want to hear the persuasion play?
This is one of the best opportunities the United States has ever had.
And here's the weird part.
Maybe Russia, too.
I've said this before, that the difference between good news and bad news, we just can't tell.
Something that looks like it's on the edge of a disaster could just as likely be on the edge of some great breakthrough that's really good for everybody.
Here would be the persuasion play.
Imagine, if you will, that Putin feels trapped, because he should.
If he removes his forces, he looks like a big old pussy, and he loses everything he might have gained.
He has to play the long game then to try to control Ukraine, but he was going to do that anyway.
So he can't really withdraw, but he can't really attack.
He's absolutely completely trapped.
Now, of course, the wild card is that it's Putin, and he's a pretty good chess player, so to speak.
So he might have some play that...
We would never imagine.
Just some completely surprising thing.
Maybe. Never know.
But here's the persuasion play.
Because he's trapped, you can make a wild offer that would ordinarily not be considered.
You see that?
Because he's in a no-win situation.
So anything we offer him that looks like a win, even in an unrelated conversation, He's going to jump at.
Because the only person, the only way that Putin can win now, at least in terms of international prestige, the only way he can win is if we let him.
Right? He doesn't have a winning play at all.
And we have all the cards, I think.
And that's what it feels like.
So why don't we offer him the following deal?
If you could get closer to us, let's say militarily and strategically, and a little bit further from China, whatever that looks like in a secret deal, we'll figure a way to engineer a step-down in Ukraine that makes it look like you got something.
Scott is a puppet of the Biden machine.
You think I'm a puppet of the Biden machine?
Somebody's new. I think you're new here.
Anyway, so the only point is this.
The only point is this.
This is an historically rare situation where Putin needs a deal, and he probably would be happy to be more aligned with the U.S., just militarily, because it's going to keep him in office.
So, as I've mentioned before...
Every oligarch who reaches a certain age, let's say when a dictator reaches a certain age, they're going to be more interested in, let's say, what happens to their kids and their legacy, and even themselves when they're elderly, than they are about conquest.
It seems like conquest is a young dictator's game.
You know what I mean? 40s, 50s.
Once you're in the 60s and 70s, conquest isn't such a fun deal.
You're more about defense.
So I would think that Putin is sort of poised for how can we keep your children and your children's children alive as long as possible?
And the United States could just say, well...
We don't care who runs Russia.
We really don't care if you're a democracy or a republic or anything else.
Now, whoever's saying mind-reading, that's exactly what we're doing.
So we're anticipating...
But knowing that we can't really read minds, so we're just going through a mental exercise here.
So the only thing I'm trying to communicate is that you should learn to recognize this situation.
And what this situation is, is the very best time you could offer, let's say, a bold, out-of-the-box, bigger-than-you-expected deal, which could be a secret deal.
It could be something that Maybe we just say to Russia, look, if you never hack us again, we'll never hack you, and we'll let you wind down, because we're more worried about cyber war than other stuff.
Right? Now, I don't know if we could ever make a deal like that hold, so that would require some other experts to tell me.
But the point is...
Yeah, the point is you don't get this kind of a situation often.
And if you don't take advantage of it, when's the next time you would be able to make a really big progress with Russia?
All right, so one interesting thing here is that, I guess, the Pentagon press secretary, John Kirby, was saying that they think Russia is going to produce some kind of a video based on some false flag, fake event, as a pretext for invasion.
Now, do you think that's going to happen?
Do you think that the Russians are in fact planning to create a video that makes a fake reason for invasion?
I actually don't believe it.
I actually don't believe it.
Now, we'll never know.
Because the whole point of announcing that Russia might do it is to discourage them from actually doing it.
Because if we're primed to see it as fake, then it won't work.
So in terms of what the Pentagon did strategically, strategically this was brilliant.
Would anybody disagree with me?
In terms of what the Pentagon decided to do, in terms of announcing that Russia might produce this propaganda video, isn't it brilliant to tell us in advance?
Because if we see one now, it won't have the effect, the intended effect.
I think this is actually one of the smartest things I've seen.
This is damn lunary talk, says James.
Lunary talk.
Maybe it is.
All right. Well...
Personally, I don't think Russia was going to do that, but I think that by, you know, front-running it like this and priming us, it makes it not really an option anymore.
So my guess is that Russia might have been talking about it, but I doubt they would have done it, and now I think probably they can't.
So... Pretty good.
But the interesting thing that came out of it was the tough questioning that came from a reporter from The Hill who was accusing our government, let's say, the spokesperson in this case, of just making up stuff like crisis actors and Alex Jones was the analogy that he used.
And the government guy, was it John Kirby?
It was John Kirby, right? Did a really terrible job in explaining why he can't explain where our secret sources are coming from.
Oh, it wasn't Kirby?
So I think Kirby may have been in another event.
Yeah, he said, I just told you the evidence.
It was really poorly done in terms of a spokesperson.
So let me not...
I won't blame John Kirby if it was...
Who was it? Somebody said Ned Ryan.
Anyway, we'll look in the comments.
You'll find out who it was. Somebody will have the right name.
But the point is that if somebody says, what is your evidence for this secret intel?
The correct answer is, it's secret intel.
If I could tell you how we got it, it wouldn't be secret intel.
And then when the reporter says, why should we believe you just because you're saying it, what is the right answer?
The right answer is not, I just told you.
Which is something like what he did.
The right answer is, I think you should remain skeptical of anything you hear from anybody.
That's just a good practice.
So you should be skeptical of anything I say, anything anybody says.
Anything Republicans say, anything Democrats say.
Just be skeptical of everything.
But I am telling you that our sources are getting this information.
Use it. Use it however you want.
But if you do see a propaganda video being created, just know that we warned you, and so you can put it in that context.
I mean, it was such an easy thing to answer because the criticism is that the public shouldn't necessarily believe it on faith, and he should have just agreed on that.
He should have absolutely agreed the public should not just accept things on faith.
But isn't it helpful to be warned of things?
Because if it doesn't happen, what's the difference, right?
If there's no false flag, what's the difference?
But if there is, then the government becomes more credible because they warned you, and you're also primed, so it doesn't have the same effect.
So the communication of it was horrible, but the idea of warning us was pretty good, I think.
So Biden, of course, is talking about reducing access to guns in a variety of ways.
And I came up with my own idea for reducing gun-related crime by 75%.
This is my estimate.
75%. And it would be something that both Republicans and Democrats, by a pretty strong majority, would agree with.
All right, here's my idea.
That you would ban guns, gun ownership, from just Democrats.
Because if you ban guns from just Democrats, you would reduce crime by about 75%, I estimate.
You know, murder.
Murder by guns. And since Democrats, by a majority, are in favor of gun control, they should certainly be in favor of gun control on Democrats.
And since Republicans also think that Democrats should have fewer guns, but Republicans not necessarily, it seems to me all you'd have to do is have a database that says if you voted Democrat in the last election or two, you can't have a gun until you've at least registered Republican.
What, you would be against that?
How many of you would oppose this excellent idea that I'm suggesting?
I see a lot of support.
I think it's one of the best ideas ever, ever mentioned.
Now, here's what's funny about it.
Of course, it's not a practical idea, but what would be the practical version of it?
All right, so here's the practical...
Well, maybe. I don't know. Maybe it's not practical.
But let me run it by you anyway.
Suppose you said you can't buy a gun or own a gun unless you've had NRA or similarly accredited gun training.
I mean, you would end up with something that almost...
Look like what I was joking about.
You'd end up with the responsible gun owners would get training because they would say, well, that's a good idea anyway.
Right? Your basic responsible gun owner is going to say, you know, I have to get training?
Oh, well, I was going to do that anyway.
Now, you might make some exceptions, for example.
You could say, you know, if it's a hunting rifle or something, you don't necessarily have to go through a gun training course, but it'd be nice.
Right? So, you know, you could still have some exceptions.
But I think you would get at a lot of this, even if it only reduced the accidental access and stuff like that.
You know, even if it only kept guns away from the person who was going to grab your gun and go do something bad.
If I were running for president, I would suggest...
And I would keep a straight face when I said we should ban the guns only from Democrats because making people talk about that point would be hilarious.
Bad means often triumph over good intentions.
That's true, Eric. It's an incursion leading down the slippery slope.
Yeah, anything with guns leads to more stuff with guns.
I think that's true.
Here's an idea that would scare you.
In my opinion, artificial intelligence is already smart enough, should we turn it loose to do this, to identify mass shooters in advance.
In my opinion, AI is already smart enough.
It would just need access to enough databases.
So if AI had, let's say it was a government AI, I'm not suggesting this, I'm just running you through the scary logic of it.
So here's the scary logic.
I'm positive that if the government could somehow legally give the right program access to just every database in the world, you know, your financial, your credit card, your social media, your everything, your phone, and I'm hoping that doesn't happen, of course.
I'm just scaring you here.
I think AI could identify a mass shooter in advance.
What do you think? Please stop.
You don't have to worry that I'm giving anybody the idea.
You don't think that people who know AI... I mean, it's sort of an obvious idea, so you don't have to worry about somebody getting the idea for the first time.
And I'm not suggesting it because it would be an outrageous violation of privacy.
But how about this?
Again, I'm not suggesting this.
I'm just tossing this around.
Suppose the AI... It had access to every database, but it was blinded, meaning that the AI could know everything, but no human could ask the AI what it learned.
Now, you could ask yourself, is that possible?
It might not be technically possible to keep humans away from it, but imagine it was.
Imagine the AI was in some guarded black box, And all of its knowledge, once it went out and got it, it would bring you back and it would be in a guarded black box in the middle of Fort Knox.
So nobody could get to it.
So only the AI would know your personal information.
Then what would the AI do with it?
It would be programmed to do one and only one thing.
Warn the people close to you that there's a potential crisis.
Not law enforcement.
Not law enforcement.
But it would warn your family that a trigger had been hit, no pun intended, that suggests that somebody is acquiring the weapons and has the mindset that is highly predictive of this crime.
And you just get a text message that says, AI has determined that there's somebody in your family named Bob Who is exhibiting behavior that we think you should look into.
No other human in the world would get the message, except the ones closest to the person.
Now again, I'm not suggesting it, but is there anybody here who is at least close enough to AI To say that that wouldn't work.
I mean, technically. It wouldn't work socially.
Socially, it's a non-starter.
But technically, I think it would work, wouldn't it?
Some families wouldn't care.
That's another issue, yeah. What about the isolated loners?
Well, you know, then maybe everybody has a connection to something, even if it's just social media.
You can get to anybody.
Here's interesting news.
How long ago was it that probably, if you read the same stuff I read, you heard that, oh yeah, we can have electric cars all right.
Sure, you can make an electric car, but one thing you're never going to make is an electric airplane.
Am I right? Am I right?
If there's one thing we know for sure, nobody's ever going to make an electric airplane because, you know, blah, blah, blah, energy to wait.
Well, there's an electric airplane Getting ready to launch.
So experts, anybody who thought that wasn't going to happen was wrong.
But it's a smallish one, a nine-person commuter thing.
They think they can lower maintenance costs by something like 70%.
I think it's an Israeli startup, and it's called Eviation.
Now, I believe there are a number of these, aren't there?
I believe there are a number of startups in the same space trying to make electric flight.
And am I wrong that the experts said that was never going to happen?
Somebody says they already exist in prototype, right?
They exist in prototype.
And there's the little helicopter-y one, like the drone.
I talked about QuantumScape 16 months ago.
Is that another one of the electric planes?
All right, well, apparently a lot of electric planes are coming.
All right, here's the funniest news of the day.
Chuck Schumer was trying to support Biden's idea of selecting a black woman to be nominated for the Supreme Court.
And part of Schumer's argument is that out of the entire judiciary, only 6% of the judiciary are black women.
Well, that's a pretty good argument, isn't it?
It's only 6%.
Or black women. That's clearly a sign of injustice.
Let me do some math here.
Percentage of black people in the country, a little under 13%.
But that would be all black citizens of the United States.
So women would be roughly, what, half-ish of something a little under 13%.
That would be in the range of, what, 6?
Oh, 6? 6% is exactly the percentage of black women in the population.
Chuck Schumer actually said this in public.
And credit where due, Twitter account Daily Sunshine alerted me to this.
It's pretty funny.
Now, you may or may not know that there's a Dilbert comic...
Which is based on a real-life thing.
There was a real boss who said the following.
That he was concerned about people calling in sick because he noticed that 40% of all the sick days were on either a Monday or a Friday.
So, I mean, what are the odds?
Like, what are the odds that 40% of all the sick days are either going to be, like, right next to a weekend, like on a Friday or a Monday?
What are the odds of that?
Okay, that is 40% of the work day.
40% of the work week is a Monday or Friday.
So it's exactly what you'd expect.
Anyway. Do you remember I talked about the meta-analysis that showed that the lockdowns had no effect whatsoever?
But then I said it was a meta-analysis and it was so poorly done, it was just obviously garbage.
And then I told you that Andres Backhouse sort of backed me up on that by picking it apart and showing it was garbage.
Fox News has a big thing today on that garbage report saying how the other major media are ignoring it.
So here's the Fox News headline.
CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post completely avoid the Johns Hopkins study finding COVID lockdowns were ineffective.
There's one reason they might have completely ignored it.
Because it was garbage. This is sort of embarrassing for Fox News.
You know, I appear on Fox News, so it's like a little bit embarrassing for me, honestly.
Honestly, it's embarrassing.
Like, I don't mean that...
I don't feel actual shame or embarrassment the way ordinary people do.
But in terms of...
I have a professional association with this entity, you know, because I've been on it enough times.
And I'm thinking to myself, Well, I don't like this at all.
I don't like this.
I think that they would at least have to wave their arms at the fact that the credibility of the thing was questioned.
Now, and I hate to criticize it because I want it to be right.
I mean, I want it to be true that none of the lockdowns worked, right?
So that... That fits into my worldview.
But I think they should at least...
And as somebody's saying here, just because Andres Bacchus picked it apart, it doesn't mean the conclusion's wrong, right?
Am I right? I'm not saying the conclusion was wrong.
I'm just saying that the quality of it was low.
So, you know, use your own judgment there.
But if you don't mention that the quality of it was low, I think that's the biggest...
Answer to the mystery of why nobody else was covering it.
Because I don't think at this point...
I don't think at this point any of the major entities would shy away from that story.
Do you? Do you think that, as of literally right today, that one of these entities, like New York Times or Washington Post, do you think that they wouldn't do a story if it were credible and the science is good?
I think they would do a story now.
Maybe before they wouldn't have, but I think now.
I mean, look what's happening.
In Iowa, the disaster protocols will be dropped on February 15th.
The governor is announced. So Iowa is basically moving out of pandemic into endemic.
So yeah, I think it's time.
I think everybody's going to do a story like that eventually.
All right. You might be aware that China's gigantic public relations disaster kicked off today.
Some people call it the Olympics.
Some people call it the Omicron Olympics.
Some call it the Genocide Olympics, but I call it a public relations debacle.
And it's a little bit embarrassing also for NBC News, who apparently has the rights to cover this thing, And Twitter user Election Wizard tweeted this.
He said, NBC News, both sides approach to the CCP's genocide.
And then it quotes them saying, NBC News, it quotes them saying, Western governments allege a systematic repression of Muslim Uyghurs.
Allege. That's NBC News.
We allege it. And then, quote, it has to be said that the Chinese government emphatically denies all of this.
They say the accusations of genocide are the lie of the century.
Well, I do think that the genocide part, if you mean actual murder, that would be the lie of the century.
But I don't think that's exactly what the first sentence said.
The first thing that NBC said was systematic repression.
But then they do the both sides thing, and instead of saying, is there or is there not a systematic repression of Uyghurs, which is the claim, they give a defense of genocide, which was not the claim.
So if you're not paying attention, it looks like there was a claim and then they addressed it and said it was false, but actually there was a claim and then somebody addressed something completely different.
The claim actually stands.
They didn't even deny, or at least not in a direct denial to this claim anyway, systematic repression.
So maybe it would be smarter to say that China is involved in systematic repression and let them respond to that.
Because every time you say genocide, you're giving them an easy out.
Well, where are the bodies?
Now, I'm only saying that as far as I know.
It's not systematic murder.
I don't believe that's been reported.
I believe it's systematic repression, which would include reproduction.
You could argue that reproduction repression would be genocide-ish.
But it's not...
Oh, cultural genocide, yeah.
You could say cultural genocide, that you're just using it that way.
Well, have you ever imagined what it would feel like...
If you were pelted with pocket lint, and let's say it was the pocket lint that came out of your grandfather's suit that had been in the attic in storage for over 40 years, and you went up there and you rifled through the pockets, and you, oh, here's a little bit, a little pocket lint, and somebody, like, threw it at you.
What would it feel like if that happened not just once, but it seemed like every single time you checked the news, there was another piece of pocket lint from your grandfather's old suit hitting you?
It would be like waterboarding, wouldn't it?
I mean, it would be terrible. And that is what I feel is how Spotify and Joe Rogan must feel, because today even Barbara Streisand has threatened to remove her music from Spotify.
If they don't de-platform Joe Rogan, immediately.
And I'm thinking to myself, my God, this slow trickle of being bombarded by pocket lint from your grandfather's suit that was in the attic for 40 years.
The walls are closing in.
At this point, we don't know the exact dollar amounts, but experts are estimating.
The Spotify, because of all these boycotts of Joe Rogan, they may have already lost up to $1,000.
At least multiple hundreds of dollars of loss.
And despite that, Spotify is standing strong behind their talent, Joe Rogan.
So you have to give Spotify some credit.
That's a hit.
Hundreds, possibly even as much as $1,000 they've lost.
And they're just going to push right ahead.
I say they deserve our respect.
Mike Cernovich had an interesting observation in his tweet.
He said, for the first time in his life, he goes, for the first time in my life, no one believes the regime when they claim to have taken down a terrorist.
He says, friends, I can't overstate how this is truly unprecedented.
So the whole story about the ISIS leader being killed...
How many people just thought to themselves, oh, did we?
Somebody got killed in a remote place that we can't easily verify, and it just happened to be when Biden's popularity numbers were...
Kind of low. Kind of low.
And if there's one thing that you can guarantee will get people on your side, from both Republicans and Democrats, it's to take on a terrorist leader.
It's like the best thing you could possibly do.
And he did it at the best possible time.
I was joking yesterday that he must have a checklist, and they just look at his approvals.
It's like approval level down to, oh God, 43%.
Oh God, oh God.
Get the terrorist checklist.
We did Al-Qaeda.
What's left? We got Soleimani.
ISIS. Have we hit ISIS? We'll do ISIS. I think we can get those numbers up 5%.
Now, I'm not saying anything like that happened.
I am saying that I agree with Mike Cernovich's comment that our level of skepticism...
It's approaching practical levels.
That's right. The level of skepticism that the public is now willing to somewhat automatically apply to everything, it's approaching useful.
Almost. It's almost good enough to keep us out of the wood chipper.
Not quite there.
We're still a little bit too believing.
We're still a little bit too gullible, especially if something comes from our own team.
We'll believe anything from our own team.
That's the problem. But I feel like our distrust of the government is finally, finally reaching healthy levels.
Maybe we could do something about getting an election system that is fully credible because it's fully transparent, instead of a little bit transparent, and then we act like that was the whole thing.
Maybe. Maybe we can start having wars that make sense, if any war makes sense, and just avoiding all the ones that were bullshit.
Maybe. Maybe.
Maybe we can stop believing all the experts who have been wrong about everything every time, which, of course, is an exaggeration.
To be fair, the experts obviously help a lot.
Civilization requires them.
But the trouble is we can't tell which ones are right.
This is the same problem with investing.
If I said, hey, go buy some stocks...
And you would say, well, I don't know anything about stocks or investing.
How am I going to buy the right ones?
And I'd say, well, just do your best.
Use your judgment. You'd just go off and buy some stocks.
How would that do? Well, if you bought one stock, your odds would not be good.
So instead, what do you do?
Well, you get an expert to help you.
How many experts are there?
So there are 10,000 stocks, roughly.
That's how many you could buy in the United States.
How many experts are there?
Way more than 10,000, right?
So instead of guessing one in 10,000 and hoping that you get, like, a good stock, in order to improve your odds, you've decided to pick one out of 100,000 experts who would then be guessing on what stocks to buy.
Right? If they bought stocks for you.
Now, some of them might put you in a managed fund, so they charge you a fee to put you in a fund that charges you a fee.
Not so good. So my point is, it doesn't matter how much the experts know.
If you don't know, how to know which experts are right.
Right? The problem is not what the experts know.
The problem is what you know.
And it doesn't help me if experts know everything because I don't know which one is right.
So once you realize that, then I think you've reached a new level there.
All right. Somebody said, I've made a small fortune from investing in Apple.
Apple is a weird exception.
Because they're effectively a monopoly.
Once you get in the Apple ecosystem, you just can't get out, if you found that out.
I mean, you can. It's just a huge pain in the ass.
So there aren't too many things like Apple.
That's sort of a once-in-a-generation sort of thing.
Microsoft was that for a long time, and arguably still is.
I think Amazon probably is that.
But there are very few things in that category.
Now, keep in mind that if Apple had not succeeded, I would be here telling you, well, it was obvious I didn't succeed.
So I guess I have to review my own skepticism here.
Because you really...
I also made a killing on Apple.
I've held it for a long time now.
But I don't think I was a genius.
I think I got lucky.
That's the way I process it.
Oh, I already talked about what Scott said.
These things you see, those are just a dermatologist with a spray, that freezing stuff.
These are just little cosmetic changes.
So literally, there was just a little cosmetic thing here that I had frozen.
So for a while, it'll look worse, and then a month from now, it'll be gone.
Did I sell any Ethereum?
I only transferred some Ethereum into Bitcoin at just about the worst time.
But not much of it.
So I haven't sold any beyond just transferring it to another crypto.
You bought Bitcoin, oh, GBTC, based on you owning it.
Okay.
Well... You shouldn't take financial advice from me.
However, I would say that whatever your reasons for holding Bitcoin originally, I don't think it's changed.
I don't think it's changed.
Because I don't think the reason was that you could see what was coming.
I think the reason was that you couldn't see what was coming.
so that it was part of a diverse portfolio that sometimes other things will go down and that'll go up and vice versa.
Government interference.
The risk of government interference has always been there, hasn't it?
But also the risk that somebody would find a, let's say, a security hole in it.
Always there. As again, more or less?
I don't know. Bitcoin is a passing off fraud going through the courts, my friend.
Going through the courts. I don't know what that means.
Any Canadian truckers' predictions?
Well, everything that draws the public's attention toward putting pressure on governments to end the mandates is good.
So anything that can stay in the news is what the politicians will care about.
And if the politicians see, hey, these truckers have a lot of support, then they're more likely to end the mandates sooner.
So the more support you show for the truckers, The more you're helping yourself if you want to end mandates.
But you know, one of the things that it's easy to forget is how many people don't want to end mandates.
Like the citizens. And I hardly ever see them unless I see them in the comments on Twitter.
Because I don't know anybody in person.
Do you? I literally don't know anybody in person who doesn't want all the mandates to end.
Not in person. But there's plenty of them.
Obviously there are plenty of them.
Some of you know them, and they're in the comments.
And here's another thing that I thought of yesterday.
You know how I was talking about how the teenagers seem to be not rebellious enough about masks?
I have a really weird hypothesis that teenagers like covering their faces at school.
That the mask is uncomfortable, but I believe that teenagers like covering their faces.
Because one of the biggest problems in high school is people making fun of people for their looks.
And I think anybody who's got, like, some acne, for example...
How many teenagers have at least some acne where the mask would cover it up?
I actually think that anybody who even has one pimple is glad to have a mask if they're 16 or 15 or 14.
So the really conspicuous lack of pushback by teenagers is telling me that this might be like hoodies.
Have you ever seen how often the teens will wear the hoodies?
They'll wear it so it's almost completely covering the face.
And if you look at women who have their hair down, how often do you see women just using their hair as like a shield for their face?
Men grow beards.
Beards are in right now.
It's basically a face covering.
So you have to throw this in the mix.
I think that teenagers actually got used to masks and are finding a benefit in them that was completely non-obvious, which is they like to cover their faces.
I think that's actually happening.
Because otherwise, can you think of anything else you could make teenagers do that they wouldn't push back harder?
Think about it. Name anything else you could do that would be this intrusive that they wouldn't push back harder on.
It feels like they not only got used to it, but maybe found some benefits we did not anticipate.
Because the younger ones might be...
Carl says, damn you, I think you're right.
I think I'm right, too. I think I'm right, too.
I don't think they would necessarily say it.
If you ask them, you might not be aware of it.
And here's what keyed me to it.
There have been a number of situations in which I was glad to have a mask on.
Has anybody had that experience yet?
Have you had even one situation, let's say an odd, unusual situation...
Whatever it was. Yeah, see, in the comments, a lot of people say yes.
At least for some, like, limited...
Now, I'm not saying that you enjoy the masks.
I'm saying that there might have been at least one time when you were happy to have it on.
I'll give you an example.
Do you ever have a...
You're going to talk to somebody and maybe you ate something, you're not sure about your breath...
Has anybody thought to themselves, oh, I'm glad I can just put this mask on because I'm worried about my breath?
I'll bet. I'll bet you have.
Has anybody had anything going on with their face, like their lips are chapped, or there's a pimple, or they forgot to shave, or they don't have makeup on, or forgot their lipstick?
I feel like there are 50 reasons.
Now, I have one that's unique to me.
Which is, now that I'm more recognized in public, I actually...
I hate to say it.
I'm obviously very anti-mask.
Mask mandate. But there have been times when I felt more comfortable with a mask on in public.
Now, that's unique to me because of recognizability.
There have also been times when I was so cold...
That it was conspicuously warmer with a mask on when I was just, say, walking to my car, that I would leave the mask on to walk to the car because it was warmer.
You know, it's amazing what you can get used to.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't worn a mask in a few days more than, you know...
Actually, I wore a mask in the doctor's office because it's the doctor's office.
You know, part of my rebellion...
Is that I try to be sensitive to who is the person on the other side of the rebellion.
And I'm not going to rebel in a doctor's office.
You get that, right?
It has nothing to do with my belief about my risk.
It's simply a respect for the office.
Does that make sense? If the doctor's wearing a mask...
And I know the doctor would prefer it.
That's one setting in which it has nothing to do with the mask.
It's more about just respect for the professional.
That's all. And if you wanted to be a rebel about that, that's your business.
I'm just saying it's a personal respect thing.
And it only lasts, you know, ten minutes.
So it's not going to make or break whether masks are mandated.
But the place that doesn't make sense is Target, you know, your gym, that sort of thing.
