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June 16, 2022 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:13:54
Episode 1776 Scott Adams: The Highlight Of Civilization Is About To Begin

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: J6, a 4-jump play Punishing Border Patrol for political gain Ted Cruz questions FBI Rep over J6, Ray Epps Correcting Cenk Uygur and Jim Cramer Gun deaths in poor America vs rich America Rep. Jamaal Bowman attacks Elon Musk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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

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Good morning, everybody.
Are you ready for the best show in the history of human civilization and possibly one or two alien civilizations who tried and failed before we evolved?
And who knows how many after that?
All I know is this is the highlight of the entire I know, big bang until now.
And if you'd like to take it up another notch, I know, I know, it seems impossible.
But it can't be done.
And we're going to do it today.
And you will start your day with a success.
And that will probably, you know, snowball into all kinds of good things happening to you today.
And by the way, again, I don't think I say this often enough.
I don't know, are you working out or something?
Because you look sexier than normal.
And if you'd like to take that up a notch too, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or style, 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.
It's the thing that makes you tingle.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
but it happens now.
Go.
Those on the locals' platform know that I was just modeling a technique that I had been describing to them.
They learn so much there.
So much more than you learn on YouTube.
But yet I love you all.
So in the news, the World Health Organization, who I just told you, the World Health Organization, who I just told you, says they want to rename Monkeypox.
Why? Why would they want to rename Monkeypox?
The first thing we have to acknowledge, and I think you'd all agree...
There has never been a better name for a serious disease than monkeypox.
I don't care who you are, you hear monkeypox and you think, ha ha, monkeypox.
Am I right? But you hear, you're going to get a bad case of COVID-19 that might have come out of some kind of weapons laboratory.
We don't know, but we worry that it might have.
Now that's scary stuff.
Although, as bad as saying you have COVID-19 sounds, ironically, saying you have long COVID sounds a little bit self-complimentary, if you know what I mean.
I don't like to brag, but I've got a pretty big case of long COVID. Long COVID. My COVID is so long.
So, monkeypox...
Tragically, it looks like they're going to change the name, so we won't have the fun of calling it Monkeypox anymore with all the jokes that we can make about that.
And, of course, the reason is obvious.
It's obvious. It's racist.
Now, here's a question I ask provocatively.
If you and I heard Monkeypox and thought of monkeys and thought it was funny and it was a good name, and that's all we thought, because we're good people, But if some other people, maybe the people in the World Health Organization and a bunch of people who wrote to ask for this, there was some kind of a sign-up where people signed the letter and said, you've got to change that name from monkeypox because it sounded racist to them.
To which I say to myself, huh, who is the racist in this story?
If I put the variables together...
The people who just think monkeys are cute?
Or is it the people who made some other association with cute little monkeys?
To which I say, I think we found the racists, or they found us, or something.
But if you'd like to contribute to the renaming of monkeypox, I think it's a fertile grounds for humor.
So can somebody maybe start a tweet thread?
I should have done it myself.
Cracker box.
On the locals' platform.
Somebody suggested renaming it to Cracker Pox.
I think we can close the competition.
I think Cracker Pox just won.
Oh, my God. That is funny.
You know, and it's funny because of the actual sound of the letters.
One of the reasons that monkey is funny is because of the K sound.
Right? When you put a K sound in anything, it just sounds funnier.
But cracker has that same thing going for it.
Cracker pox. And even pox.
Even pox is a funny word.
A pox of your house. All right.
Does it seem to you that maybe losing is winning these days or something?
There's something going on with the Democrats.
It's almost as if they're trying to play for a better draft pick next season.
And somebody needs to explain to them it doesn't work that way.
Because you know how if a sports team looks like they can't make the playoffs, well, maybe they don't try so hard after that point, because it would be better to end the season in a low rank, because then you go to the top of the heap for picking the new talent out of the draft next time.
So you could actually leapfrog and turn into a dynasty pretty quickly if you get the right players.
But it almost feels as if the Democrats are playing for a draft pick, and somebody needs to tell them, You know, it doesn't really work that way.
Listen to what the Democrats are up against in terms of a headwind for the coming elections.
Rasmussen says, Rasmussen poll, 89% of voters are at least somewhat concerned about the economy.
89%?
How does any incumbent Win re-election, when 89% are worried about the economy.
It doesn't even matter if it's the fault of the president.
Because remember, the rules are, the president gets credit even if they didn't do anything.
And the president gets criticized, even if there wasn't anything they could do, or even if they didn't do anything wrong.
So, if you've got 89% of the voters at least somewhat concerned about the economy, including 69% who are very concerned, that's not looking good for the incumbent.
And then, secondly, crime is the only issue that rivals economic concerns with voters.
This is also from Rasmussen.
88% are concerned about violent crime, including 64% who are very concerned.
Now, the economy and crime, what are the two things that are most associated with the Republicans?
That even Democrats would say, well, we hate these Republicans, but in a quiet moment, if nobody is overhearing me and I'm talking to my best friend who won't tell anybody, I might admit that they might do better on economics and crime.
At least some people would have that view.
So it's hard to imagine how Democrats could win.
And so this predicts that the only strategy that they could have, they Democrats, election strategy, would be coming up with bigger and bigger hoaxes.
And unfortunately, that's like real, isn't it?
Because it doesn't seem that the actual facts, even the facts that CNN is willing to report, because remember, even CNN has decided to become more even-handed, and apparently, to their credit, and I will say this publicly because I criticize them mercilessly, but to their credit, they had a fairly prominent primetime question about Biden's competency.
Don Lemon grilled him hard on that.
And I think the public would appreciate that.
That was a pretty meaningful way to approach an important question.
So give them credit for that.
But how in the world do the Democrats win unless they come up with the world's biggest hoax?
And I think that the January 6th thing is at least how they're going to frame things.
And I think the idea is that if they can...
So this is sort of Democrat math, but maybe it's just political math.
I won't blame Democrats. If you can say that there's one person in a group of ten who did something despicable, you can say that that group is bad.
Am I right? If one person in a larger group of ten does something terrible, it's our normal thing to say, well, that's a bad group.
Because at the very least, they allowed somebody in that group who would do that terrible thing.
So even if you say, well, there was only one person who did the terrible thing, it's a reasonable argument to say, but you know, the other nine maybe should have seen it coming or should have stayed away from them, whatever.
But now let's say you successfully make the argument and now you've demonized the ten.
But what if the ten are a small group of another larger group?
Does it work again? And the answer is yes, it does.
Once you've said that the group of 10 are all bad, by extension, then if they're part of yet another larger group, you can say, well, that larger group is letting these guys in.
So, logically, by association, at least they should have policed themselves better.
And so I look at the January 6th thing.
So the January 6th thing is a small number of people, probably in the Proud Boys and others, probably did some really bad things.
Not probably. There was actual violence and injury.
So people did some bad, violent things.
But probably not most of them.
But you still say, but wait, okay.
If the Proud Boys had this many people in them who were willing to fight and cause trouble, that does say something about the larger group, even if the larger group, 90% of them, had nothing to do with anything illegal.
Right? So you start with the small troublemakers, and you extend that to the Proud Boys.
But then you say, the Proud Boys were...
A few hundred, or at least people like them, you know, if you include like-minded people, and of a number of several thousand.
So now you can say, wait a minute.
If there are a few people in the Proud Boys who are bad, you know, unambiguously bad, now you've demonized the Proud Boys.
So you've got that whole group.
But now you say, but the Proud Boys were a significant chunk of the entire protest.
Whatever you want to call significant, kind of subjective.
And now you can demonize the entire protest.
So now you've done two leaps, right?
One is the few protesters to the Proud Boys.
And I'll just use the Proud Boys as a proxy for the people who came there with the worst intentions.
You know, they were thinking fighting when they went there.
And then you say, you extend that to the people who were...
Let's just say enthusiastic Trump supporters, but they were nothing like the Proud Boys.
Many of them might not even know they existed.
So now you've demonized all the people at the protest.
And you can extend that now to Trump.
Because you can say, well, you know, maybe it's hard to prove in any legal sense that Trump directly told anybody to do anything illegal.
Or even unwise.
But we can certainly show that he didn't do enough to stop it as soon as he could.
So now you've extended the larger crowd to Trump.
And now that you've gotten to Trump, you can extend it to MAGA, the ultra-MAGAs.
So now you've got it all the way to Trump and MAGA. And then MAGA, of course, makes up much of the Republicans and the right and conservatives.
So now you've done...
How many leaps was that?
Four? Four leaps?
So you started with a small group of violent people.
Then that demonized the Proud Boys and like-minded people.
And then that got all the protesters...
No matter what reasons they were there, or no matter what they did, or no matter what their intentions were.
And then that got Trump's orbit, and then that got all of MAGA, and then that gets all of Republicans, and then that's all of conservatives.
Right in front of our eyes.
It's not like it's a magic trick.
They're doing it right in front of us.
And yeah, we'll talk about the FBI in a minute.
So, now do BLM and Antifa.
Same political math.
Yeah, so earlier when I said...
When I was saying that it's not just a Democrat math, it's political math, that would be a good example.
So you could do the same thing with...
There were some number of people who were violent in the Black Lives Matter protests...
They're all Democrats, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it scales up the same way.
But the January 6th thing, I think, has more jumps.
We're used to two jumps, right?
But the January 6th thing is like a four-jump play.
All right. Speaking of hoaxes...
So now the Biden administration is going to look into some kind of administrative punishment for the Border Patrol, who allegedly were whipping Haitians crossing the border, the Mexican border.
And, of course, it turns out that the photographic evidence completely clears them.
It was just a misleading video, and they were just using their reins on their own horse.
But instead of just saying, well, we're sorry.
I guess we were fooled by those misleading videos.
Go back to work with our blessings.
They're actually going to pretend like they were right all along because demonizing the Border Patrol is good for their politics.
It's like one of the worst things I've ever seen.
And at what point do you stop ignoring it as a public?
Because every time I see a story like this, it makes my blood boil.
I'm like, oh, are they really going to punish these guys, the Border Patrol people, who apparently did nothing wrong?
Are they really going to punish them just for consistency and political gain?
And do it right in front of us.
Right in front of us.
Is that really happening?
And so here's the thought process I go through.
I think, well, I've got to do something about this.
But then the very next story I read, I think, well, I've got to do something about that, too.
There are too many things to do stuff about.
They've basically overwhelmed me with outrage.
So I have so many outrages.
I'm like, you know, I should, like, weigh in and make sure that these Border Patrol people, because they're employees of the United States, right?
So in a way, public employees are sort of my responsibility, aren't they?
You know, in an extended way.
I pay taxes.
The taxes go to their, you know, they're working for the public, I'm the public.
I mean, I feel like it's a two-way obligation, right?
They're keeping us safe.
Don't I have the same obligation to them?
To keep them safe?
So I read this story, I'm like, oh, it's their job to keep me safe.
They're now safe themselves.
I should run down there and, like, keep them safe.
It's just a reciprocal instinct kind of thing.
But then, who has the time?
And I think, well, other people got problems too.
Maybe I could solve a problem that's closer to home.
You talk yourself out of it.
And it could be that if you looked into it, you'd find out there's more to it than you know.
And then you spend all your time trying to fix this outrage, only to find out that a few of the Border Patrol that they're talking about actually did something wrong.
And then you've wasted all your outrage on something you just didn't have the full context to.
So it's easy to talk yourself out of working against any of these outrages, because maybe they're not even true.
So, what is the worst thing about having a job with co-workers?
It's the co-workers.
It's the meetings. Because then there are more co-workers there at the same time.
The only thing worse, the worst thing at work is interacting with other people, right?
All of the unpleasantness at work is interacting with your boss or interacting with your co-workers.
Generally, the customers are fine.
You can usually have a good day with customers.
You help them. They're happy about it.
It's all good. But all the unpleasant stuff has to do with meetings and just running into people.
So now we've found a way to make meetings even worse.
Apparently, the so-called hybrid meetings where some people are on video and some people are in the room, it turns into a whole second-class citizen thing if you're on video, and it's a terrible look, and you have to look at these little postage stamp people in the crowd.
But there are a few technologies, apparently, that are going to fix that.
One of them is automatic camera focusing on whoever's talking.
So that whoever's talking could be bigger on the screen.
That would be good. That already exists.
It's a little expensive.
And then apparently the meta model where you put on the goggles and you go talk, according to one article I read who I wish I could remember the author, said that the goggles were annoying so it's not quite ready for prime time.
But that the sensation of it was being in person.
Even though it was avatars at a table, the sensation was as personal as being in person.
Now, I think that's real.
I think that meetings among avatars are going to be important.
And what's really interesting is, if you're meeting as an avatar that doesn't look exactly like you, you get to change how influential you are.
Here's something that nobody has...
I haven't heard anybody talk about this.
Let me give you two scenarios in the real world.
In the real world, you go into a meeting and somebody, let's say, is applying for a job.
We'll use that example.
Applying for a job. You walk in and how long does it take you to know that you're going to hire that person?
From the moment you meet them, how long before you know if you're going to hire them?
Well, I hate to say it's like 10 seconds.
It is. Because you just look at them.
You think that you interview them, but you don't.
That's just an illusion.
You walk in, you look at them, and you decide if you could hire them.
I'm sorry, did you think it was because of all their qualifications and the things they said?
Nope. No, it's just you looked at them.
And now I'm exaggerating a little bit for hyperbole, right?
So here's an assumption I'm making.
That by the time they got in the room, you've already checked that they met the basic qualifications.
Am I right? Generally, they don't even get in the room unless you've seen something on paper that says, oh, they have at least the background.
So now, has anybody interviewed enough people or hired enough people to realize that we're not good at it?
Has anybody had that sensation yet?
You hired somebody and you thought, well, this is obviously a good hire, and it turned out to be a disaster.
And did you learn from experience that nobody's good at it?
Nobody's good at it. This is why the Naval-Ravikant theory is so important.
I think he's the first person I heard it from.
That hiring people is not the skill.
Firing people is the skill.
Because they all look alike when you hire them.
They all look like, well, you know, I talked to ten people and any one of those ten might have been the superstar.
I don't know. Can't tell.
But you can tell after they start.
You can tell if they're killing it after six months.
So if you don't execute the kill switch, then you don't have the skill to be a good manager.
So it's the firing that is the skill.
All right, so everybody's buying that?
The firing is the skill.
You haven't worked in engineering land before.
So what I'm saying is that if you see somebody looking differently because the only contact you have with them is in a virtual world in which they're an avatar and not a person, your decision-making system will be interrupted and you'll have to use a different one.
So the avatar that you choose to represent you will have a gigantic effect On your success in the real world.
You just don't realize it.
So if your avatar is a giant, let's say, weasel, and you think it just looks cute, but people who see it think weasel or skunk or something, that is going to affect you.
Your actual life will be much affected if you choose to look like a skunk Because it's cool and it's edgy or you just like the color.
The color is white and black, whatever.
So here's just putting it all together.
You don't realize that people pretty much make their decisions on looks because you're sure that you don't do it.
I'm sure that you do.
What you do is you make your decision on looks, and then you talk yourself into it by saying, you know, perfect qualifications.
I liked how he or she answered that question, but it's not really that.
It's just looks. It's basically how much you want to mate with them.
That's pretty much it.
All right. And sometimes it works the other way.
Sometimes there's a jealousy factor where good-looking people could be discriminated against.
I've actually seen that happen in hiring because the people who worked there were not good-looking and they didn't want anybody there who was.
That's actually a thing.
But the point is, in both cases, looks are the real reason you're doing something.
School choice won big in Iowa in the election, so I guess eight out of nine candidates...
Who are super pro-choice beat out their challengers, including incumbents.
So we now know that there's an issue, a single issue, which moves the dial, and it's school choice, at least at the state level.
So I feel as if it's time for a presidential candidate to make a stand on that.
You know, they always have opinions on it, but it's never been a central point of anything.
And somebody could make that work.
So watch for school choice to be the big thing.
There was an article that says that weed lowers your IQ over time.
So if you use it every day, your IQ will decline by 5.5 points on average from childhood.
Do you believe that?
If you use weed every day, your IQ will decrease 5.5 points.
Not 5.5%.
About 5.5 points.
So here's why this is a problem for some people more than others.
Suppose your IQ is 100.
Supposedly average.
Society is built for people with roughly an IQ of 100.
Because if they didn't build it that way, people wouldn't be able to open doors and use cars and Just operate society.
They wouldn't be able to buy a bus ticket.
So you have to make everything in society work for people who are around an IQ of 100.
What happens if you take 5.5 points off of somebody who's just barely smart enough to operate the machinery of civilization?
It's dangerous. I would say if you take somebody who is marginally smart enough to navigate life, and you take five points off their IQ, you've turned them into kind of a high-functioning moron, and maybe that's not such a good thing.
So if you have an IQ of 100, I do not recommend smoking pot every day.
I mean, I don't dis-recommend it.
I'm not a doctor. So don't take my advice either way.
That would be my overall advice.
But suppose you had an IQ of 145.
And you smoked weed and took five points off it.
You'd still be the smartest person in the room.
Would it make any difference?
So let's say the side effect is the same.
It's five points off your IQ no matter who you are.
I'm going to make an argument that for some people, it might not make a difference.
I suppose if they're physicists, maybe lay off the weed.
That would be a good idea.
But suppose they were just overqualified for their job.
Well, in that case, maybe they got a little to spare.
Now, here's the first question I ask about this study.
Did they study sativa users or indica?
Because it's really different.
Sativa makes you more creative and smarter.
I'm going to just assert that.
Now, that's not based on science.
It's based on a lot of experience.
For the first 15 minutes that you experience sativa, you're smarter.
I'm not going to tell you which of my ideas that people like and have spread around were concocted in the first 15 minutes after smoking pot.
But it's a lot.
It's a lot.
And if you were to smoke sativa, you get that effect.
More creative, you're actually more energetic for a little while.
But if you smoke indica, and these both have a dominant hybrid, so they're not pure in either case, usually.
They're usually not pure. So they're mixes, but they're dominant one way or the other.
If you do an indica dominant, it just makes you sleepy and stupid.
That's why people do it, to relax and go to sleep.
So, do you think that the long-term IQ effect...
Of taking a drug that makes you sleepy and stupid would be the same as the long-term effect of somebody who took only the sativa version, which makes you literally smarter, but for a little while, and then you plunge after that.
What if the IQ effect is due to a lack of motivation?
Exactly. Because sativa can make you feel more motivated To do things you weren't even motivated to do before.
Whereas Indica makes you less motivated because that's why you take it, to slow yourself down.
So here's the first question I'd ask is, if they didn't break that out, I think I tweeted it.
So if you want to see the sources for any of these things, look at my Twitter feed for the same day as I talk about it.
It's usually there. All right.
So I saw a video that apparently has been out a while.
I don't know how many weeks, but it's a video in which Ted Cruz was talking to the FBI representative and asked whether the FBI had been involved in instigating any part of the January 6th event.
And here's what I found interesting.
Now, somebody said this is a real old video, like from January.
Does anybody have a confirmation when this was?
Because I think some of you saw it in my Twitter feed.
But it's not brand new.
But it's relevant more now than when it was new.
Because now we're in the middle of these January 6 hearings, so we have a lot more context.
So now when you look at it, it really reads different.
Because we have more context.
And here's what happened.
So Ted Cruz, in his prosecutorial brilliance, because he's really good at this stuff, was grilling the FBI representative if the FBI... He asked the question in a number of ways to say yes or no.
Was the FBI involved in any part of instigating January 6th?
And specifically Ray Epps.
And the FBI representative refused to answer any of the questions and at one point mentioned sources and methods as something that they don't want to give away accidentally so they can't answer questions because it's questions about the secret stuff.
Now, I interpret that as a confirmation that the FBI instigated January 6th or was involved in some way that was important.
How do you interpret it?
Because the ways and means explanation isn't real.
It isn't real.
Because it would be very easy to carve out an answer that didn't give anything away.
And it goes like this.
Mr. Cruz? We don't give away all the details of our undercover work or operational stuff, but I can tell you with complete certainty that the FBI did not instigate anything or talk anybody into anything or try to get anybody to...
Break the law. We don't do that.
And that definitely did not happen in this case.
Beyond that, I think you'll understand, I don't want to answer any detailed questions, because that would get to sources and methods.
But for the benefit of the public, let me just say, certainly, the FBI is not out there breaking laws.
They did not break any laws or try to incentivize anybody to break any laws for any purpose at all.
We don't do that.
That's not the business we're in.
Now, Did I just give away any sources and methods?
I don't think I did.
Did I? I don't believe there were any sources and methods that I just gave away.
But I told you a very direct answer, didn't I? No.
The thing you're worrying about, no.
We didn't do that. But beyond that, don't ask any detailed questions, because I would be giving away sources and methods.
Now, here's why I consider this a confirmation from the FBI that they were involved.
Because it's too easy to say you weren't.
It's too easy. I just did it.
I'm not like the spokesperson for the government.
I would think that they would be trained well enough to answer a question like that.
It's not even hard.
I mean, what was the degree of difficulty in saying, we can't give away secret stuff, but I'll tell you we didn't have anything to do with what you're alleging?
I mean, if you're not willing to say that directly, it's because you're confirming it's real.
I don't have another way to interpret it, do you?
Because if your interpretation is that they genuinely were trying to protect sources and methods, I just gave you the answer that proves that wasn't real.
It was too easy.
So... This is another one of those outrage things where I have outrage exhaustion.
Do I go work on this Border Patrol, you know, unfairly accused whipper-gate problem?
Or do I do something about the fact that the FBI just effectively...
For all practical purposes, confirmed that they were behind instigating a series of violent actions that are now being blamed on Republicans.
People went to jail, and the entire politics of the country will change probably because of this.
And the FBI is clearly hiding something that they shouldn't be hiding from the public.
Now, are you not outraged?
Because to me...
They just admitted one of the biggest crimes of the century.
I mean, this is a really big crime, if I'm interpreting it correctly.
And if I'm not interpreting it correctly, the FBI could always clarify and say, oh, let's follow up with a clarification.
We can't give you sources and methods stuff, but we can say for sure that we were not instigators of that event.
Too easy. It's just too easy.
And they can't do that. They can't do that.
So, I'm just out of outrage.
I just don't have enough. The individual whose name I can never successfully pronounce, Cenk?
Cenk Iger?
Is that close? C-E-N-K, Cenk?
I think that's Cenk, right?
And whenever I mispronounce anybody's name, I always like to tell you, like, I feel bad about it, and I'm not doing it disrespectfully.
I just sometimes don't know the name.
Yuger? So it's a...
Cenk Yuger.
Okay, let's go with that. He says, what do we do when...
This is in a tweet. What do we do when 40% of our fellow Americans just don't believe in facts anymore?
What do you think of that? What do we do when 40% of Americans just don't believe in facts anymore?
To which I say, that's not what's happening.
That's not what's happening at all.
Everybody believes in facts.
What we don't believe in is who's telling us the facts.
We don't believe you.
It's not the facts that are lying to us.
It's you. It's you.
You're the liar. No you.
You. Facts.
Facts are excellent. I haven't met a fact I didn't like.
In fact, I've never even had a fight with a fact.
No fact has ever tried to malign me.
No fact has ever insulted me.
In fact, I have a good relationship with facts when I know what they are.
What I don't have a good relationship with is big old liars who are telling me that they know the facts and I don't.
I've got a big old problem with them.
And I saw on the same theme, Jim Cramer, investment guru Jim Cramer, he tweeted, Why can't we accept that most Fed chiefs have not faced a heinous war against a democracy?
Interesting way to put it.
A heinous war against a democracy in a large country that doesn't believe in the science.
Really? Do we have a country that doesn't believe in the science?
Is that the problem?
Do you wake up ever and say, you know, I don't believe in science.
Nope. So I sent a correction on his tweet.
I retweeted it with a correction.
I said, the public doesn't believe scientists for good reasons.
But we still believe science is our best system for figuring out the truth.
So let me be clear.
Science, we all like.
Am I right? We all like science as the best system to get as close as you can to the truth over time.
Every one of us, 100%.
We don't necessarily like the scientists.
How about the facts?
Is there anybody here who hates the facts?
Any fact-haters here?
Or disbelievers?
Do you believe facts don't exist?
No, no.
But I'll bet there are people who think that there are liars.
Do liars exist?
Yes, they do. Yes, they do.
So, let's get it straight.
We love facts.
We love science. We don't trust scientists.
And we don't trust people who tell us we got our facts wrong.
Even if we did. I'm just saying that we don't trust them.
Maybe you shouldn't trust yourself.
Because I'm pretty sure you get the facts wrong sometimes.
I'm pretty sure you've seen me get facts wrong fairly frequently.
Am I right? I mean, I do this in front of people every day.
I mean, I'm doing this in front of witnesses.
So you know I'm trying to get it right.
It's like I'm immersed in trying to get the story right.
But you've seen me get basic facts wrong Bunch of times, right?
If you've been watching for a while.
And I get called out in the comments all the time.
You've seen it on Twitter. People will call me out on a fax.
I'll talk about one in a moment.
So, I don't know.
We like fax. We don't like liars.
All right. Have you noticed that everything is broken?
I feel like I woke up in a third world country.
I'm going to give you the smallest example, just from my life, if I could just be self-indulgent for a moment.
But I keep hearing stories from other people that they can't get the most basic damn things done that seemed to work fine just a while ago.
And part of it is because there aren't enough employees.
Some of it is shortages of goods.
Some of it is incompetence.
Some of it is red tape. But some of it is complexity, too.
And some combination of all those things.
So there are all these weird forces that have sort of come together.
But here was a little experience I had.
So, was it yesterday?
I was trying to get some health care.
For somebody in my circle, not me.
So there's a minor injury.
Everything's fine. Don't worry about the injury.
So the injury is not the story.
Minor injury, it doesn't matter the details.
And I was trying to figure out, should I go to my Kaiser Permanente, Northern California, minor care, so that's one thing they have, urgent care, that's a different thing they have, or emergency care, All of them are in different towns.
So it's not like you could go to one place and then they tell you which one.
They're different towns.
So you'd have to drive pretty far and find out you went to the wrong one.
Now here's the thing.
So I tried to find out, like, there should be a website where I can quickly see if you have this kind of problem, go here.
I couldn't find it.
But, of course, it's also when you don't have all of your senses about you because you're working fast.
You're trying to get something done quickly for somebody who needs it right away.
And so you're driving and you're Googling on your phone and trying to read their website to figure out where to go.
Is it minor, urgent, or emergency?
And call the hospital, somebody says.
Do you know how much that doesn't work?
So yes, I tried calling.
And I said, and when you call the healthcare, they start asking you questions.
What's your number of your card, your membership number, phone numbers, and stuff.
And so as soon as they answered and started asking questions, I said, let me shortcut this.
I only need to know where to go.
Here's the situation.
Tell me which facility to go to.
That's all I need. What do you think happened?
Do you think that the employee said, oh, okay, hearing what your problem is, here's the address you want to go to.
Nope. Couldn't do that.
Do you know why? Because I didn't have the health care number for the person.
So couldn't tell me which facility to go to.
Because one requires an appointment and one doesn't.
And so can't make an appointment without a membership number.
And couldn't even tell me where to go to, like, work it out in person.
I had to tell them where the facility was that was closest to me because they couldn't figure it out.
Because the first thing they told me was the wrong city.
And I said, I kind of vaguely remember that the city right next to me has one of these.
Oh, let me check that.
Oh, well, you're right.
They do have one right next to you.
This isn't an emergency.
In an emergency, I, the customer, had to figure out, based on my vast medical experience, what does minor care, urgent care, or emergency room mean, and which is the right one, what requires what waiting time.
And let me tell you that if you've got a minor injury that you're not a medical expert, you think, well, it looks minor to me.
But what if it only looks minor to me and I go to the wrong place?
I couldn't get any help.
I ended up basically guessing and I think by the time we got actual help, I think it was eight hours later.
So this is somebody bleeding and got help eight hours later.
I pay for that healthcare.
Now, I don't think that things were this bad a year ago, or two years ago.
I feel like everything broke.
Show me in the comments, are you having the same experience?
Because that was just one anecdote, you know, you don't need to care about my little problem.
But I feel like nothing's working.
Like, all the things are too hard.
All the things. Yeah.
I don't know if it's a bunch of different reasons or there's some larger effect going on here, but I just woke up in not even the same country anymore.
I mean, the headlines that I'm looking at are that my electricity is no longer reliable in California and that there's a very high likelihood that I'll have neither water nor electricity sometime this summer.
Think about that.
I could have no water and no electricity this summer.
And I don't think anybody's doing anything about it.
Seriously. I don't think anybody's doing anything about it that I know of.
So, that's weird.
Let's talk about Republicans getting hunted.
How many situations have we seen where that's happening?
So we've seen the Russia collusion hoax could have put people in jail.
Actually did, because of some unrelated reasons.
So that's a Democrat hoax that would have put Republicans in jail for a hoax.
This January 6th thing, now that the FBI has indirectly confirmed it, now that's my subjective opinion, That in listening to their answer, the right way to process it is as a confirmation that they were behind it, in a substantial way.
We don't know how substantial, but it's there.
And that looks like, well, that's already put people in jail.
Now, they're in jail for doing things they shouldn't have done, in most cases, but it still was, it looks like, the larger context is it's being treated in a hoax way, basically, because...
They're treating the small number of bad people as representative of the whole event.
Then there's this Border Patrol whipping thing, and then these Border Patrol people will probably be punished in some way.
And then there's also a story about there's some terrorist group that's attacking the pro-life centers.
So that's, again, Republicans being hunted.
Now, as has been pointed out, in the past this went the other way.
That it was the abortion provider centers that were being targeted.
But I think that hasn't happened lately.
So in terms of a trend, it looks like Republicans are being hunted.
I have a fascinating update on gun safety and murder.
Want me to blow your mind?
All right. So Panda Tribune, a Twitter account you should be following, Made a claim yesterday that I questioned on Twitter.
And the claim was that from 1993 to 2013, the CDC found that gun murders per capita declined by 40%, yet gun ownership per capita increased by 56%.
And I said, that doesn't sound right.
So, Panda Tribune provided a long thread with full sources.
And sure enough, Pew Research, I think, was the one, that during that time, gun murders dropped a lot, 40%, but gun ownership zoomed up 56%.
So would that suggest to you that either guns are unrelated to murder rates, or does it suggest to you that owning more guns reduced the number of people getting murdered?
What would you say?
The correct answer is you can't tell anything from this.
That's the correct answer.
The correct answer is that there was something that had nothing to do with guns that was changing crime of all kinds.
So I'm pretty sure from 1993 to 2013 that all kinds of crimes, violent crimes, were all way less.
And I think there's some argument about what that was.
I mean, Freakonomics thought it was something about abortion.
I don't know if that's checked out or not.
But there were some number of factors that substantially made everything safer at the same time the number of guns was going up.
So, what could you say about gun ownership either making more or less gun murder based on this data?
Well, I would say you can't tell, because there's something bigger than gun ownership, much bigger, that's changing how people are acting, and that whatever the guns are doing is being masked by some larger social change.
So you could not tell, you cannot answer this question from this data.
If I added guns or subtracted guns from this society, would there be more or fewer murders?
This data doesn't tell you anything on that.
So you can't answer the question, do more guns cause more murder?
Even if more guns happened during a time when there was less murder.
Because remember, the larger homicide thing, whatever's making less violent crime in general, is overwhelming whatever the guns are doing or not doing.
So you just can't tell.
It's hidden. You can at least say guns aren't a huge factor.
Can you? Can you?
It depends how you define huge.
You could certainly say it's more of a gray area, where some people would say it's huge and some wouldn't, maybe.
I think it's a little more of a gray area.
All right. So we don't know what the trend would have been if the larger downside trends had not been what they were.
But here's another thing.
Did you know that gun deaths correlate with income?
You probably knew that, right?
The higher your income, the less likely you're going to get murdered with a gun.
Right? And so when I look at the United States having sort of extremes of poverty and rich people, so we've got income inequality extremes, And then we blend it all together to see how the United States does compared to other countries.
But the United States is sort of like two countries.
You know, one is poor America, where things are terrible, and one is rich America, where things are better.
And they don't have the same gun violence rates.
Not at all. So, again, there's something much larger than having a gun or not having a gun that's causing people to die or not die.
Also interesting that gun deaths were correlated with more suicides, which is largely a white person problem, versus murder, which is largely, in a per capita basis, is more of a black person problem.
But then I always think it's weird to lump together...
How many of you have the same feeling?
I think this is common.
That when we statistically lump together suicide and murder...
That's just an apple and an orange, isn't it?
Because here's the problem philosophically.
If you get murdered, you've got something you didn't want.
If you commit suicide successfully, you've got something you want.
And we add together the thing you want.
Now, I get it.
I'm not promoting any suicide, so see a professional if you have those thoughts.
Trying to be responsible here.
But it is nonetheless, by definition, something you want versus something you don't want.
Now, maybe you shouldn't want it.
That's a good conversation to have.
Maybe you could be talked out of it.
Maybe it's never a good idea until you've seen every health professional you could possibly consult.
But the fact is, if we just lump them together, we're just blinding ourselves to whatever the hell is going on.
We're using data to shield ourselves from knowledge, if you add those two things together.
So we should forever separate them, and we should probably separate rich and poor.
Because suppose we find out that it's terrible for poor people to own guns, but it's actually a pretty good idea for rich people to own guns.
What if we find out that's true?
What if the data says that?
Well, then we have something to work with.
You could say if you're in a poor zip code, maybe, you know, maybe you don't get a gun, but if you do well, or maybe it's by income.
Maybe it's literally by income.
If you're above a certain income, you could have a gun.
Now, that would be the least constitutional thing anybody could ever do.
But the data would lead you there.
However, the Democrats could not be led there by the data, because they can't say rich people can have guns and poor people can't.
But the data might say so.
Do you think I'd be wrong?
Do you think if you studied rich people gun ownership versus poor people gun ownership, do you think they would look similar?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
So if you're following the data, just make gun ownership based on your income.
Again, it's the most unconstitutional idea, so you can't really do that.
But the data takes you in strange places.
So there's a new Hunter Biden audio where he's bragging to somebody that he can get his dad to agree to anything as long as it's sort of compatible with what Joe Biden might want to do.
So it's more about changing his priorities than changing his mind to do something he wouldn't want to do.
Important distinction.
But I don't know that this is new news, is it?
Because Joe Biden has said publicly a number of times that Hunter is the smartest person he knows in person.
So it does kind of follow that he would listen to his advice.
So it's sort of a story-non-story because it does, of course, suggest that he's selling his influence and everything else.
But the way he's selling it and the way he describes it in the audio...
It does say that he can influence the priority.
Not necessarily something that Biden wouldn't want to do, but the priority is how he spends his time.
And that's pretty frightening. But we also kind of knew that, didn't we?
Did you not think that Hunter could influence his father's priorities?
I feel like I knew that.
But hearing it directly is something.
So... So there's a congressman, Jamal Bauman from New York.
He's a Democrat, and he tweeted that Elon Musk is a supporter of white supremacy due to his announcement that he last night voted for Myra Flores.
Now, if you know this story, it's immediately funny.
Because they're calling Elon Musk a white supremacist, For voting for a Mexican-born congressional candidate.
And Glenn Greenwald called him out on that, as he should.
And I've told you that the world is really small.
Every time I'm listening to a story or watching a story, it's shocking how often I have some connection to it.
That I didn't know. And so I went to look at the Twitter account for Mayra Flores.
And she was already following me.
So I followed her back and congratulated her for a good victory.
And she thanked me.
So the world is so tiny.
You can't...
You can't appreciate how completely mind-bending it is to read stories and then say, oh, she follows me on Twitter, congratulate her, and she actually had the time to thank me.
It made this whole world just shrink down to two people sending a message to each other.
It's just the damnedest thing.
All right, if I were a Republican running and I saw stuff like this, like that tweet, everything turning racial, here is how I would high ground the hell out of it and destroy whoever came after me with this attack.
I would say, you know, I'm running against somebody who has a one variable filter.
For them, everything runs through the race filter.
And I, too, think that the race filter is an important one.
You don't want to lose sight of that.
It's been a big factor in the United States forever.
But I would suggest that you want somebody who works for you, who can handle more than one filter on the world.
That's what I'm going to bring.
I'm not going to lose the filter that race is a big factor, and we need to keep an eye on that.
We need to make things as fair as we can for everybody.
But if you're voting for somebody whose only filter is that, if everything looks like a nail to them, they're only going to bring you a hammer.
And I'm going to bring you the whole toolbox.
So if you want to fix more than one thing, I'm your person.
If you feel there's only one thing that needs to be fixed, and a lot of people do, to be honest, then a one-hammer candidate might be your candidate.
But I'm going to offer you more than that for the same price.
Who doesn't like a bargain?
I'll handle the fairness issue as best I can, and as transparently as I can, and I'll listen to everybody's complaints, and I'll be serious about it.
But I'll also try to solve other problems, and I won't see everything through the lens of race, because I don't think it's good for you.
So that's my proposition.
For the same price, because I would get the same salary as a congressperson as anybody else, for the same price, I'll bring you more tools.
And I'll work on more problems, and I won't see you through that one frame, and you'll get a complete candidate.
Am I done? Imagine listening to me, you know, as a hypothetical candidate, just giving you that proposition.
It would be over.
It would be over.
Like, that's it.
You wouldn't even need to run campaign ads.
Just explain what your proposition is.
I'm giving you more tools for the same price.
Why would you take a single-minded approach when you can have more?
Accept more. Don't settle for less.
You should have everything you want and a few things you didn't know you wanted.
That's what I'm going to give you.
I'm going to try to give you everything you want and a few things you didn't even know you could ask for.
For the same price.
Why would you vote for the other one?
You know, I feel like running for office is easy.
And we just have people who are not good at doing it.
That's why it looks like it's not easy.
All right. So President Biden tweeted, This morning I spoke with President Zelensky to discuss Russia's brutal and ongoing war with Ukraine.
I reaffirmed our commitment to stand by Ukraine and shared that the United States is providing over $1.2 billion in additional security and humanitarian assistance.
And I ask you the following question.
Are we going to see that same tweet every two weeks for 20 years?
It'll be a different president.
But is it just going to be Groundhog Day over and over?
We gave Ukraine another 1.4 billion because it's a brutal war.
Putin sucks. They need it for all these reasons.
I don't feel like this could ever end.
When is Ukraine going to be self-sufficient?
No time soon.
Now, I'm not saying I have a better idea, but I think you can see the future here, can't we?
We're just going to be bleeding money into Ukraine forever.
Again, I don't know what the alternative is.
I don't have a better idea.
But, ugh.
And the Ukraine defense minister says that the new U.S. weapons will help them get back to Crimea.
So, in other words, there's no end in sight.
Because as long as our military-industrial complex wants us to be at permanent war with somebody, we will be.
And I guess this is a pretty profitable war because you've got to sell them the new stuff, you know, the modern equipment to have a chance.
So... I don't know.
I'd say follow the money.
It looks like we're in another permanent war because it's good for the military-industrial complex.
And when Ukraine says they're going to get so many great weapons that they might take Crimea back, which to the rest of us seems like, uh-oh, no.
Don't try to get Crimea back.
Let it go. Because, you know, it's not my Crimea.
It's easy for me to say, Crimea River...
I can't be the first person who thought of that.
Right? Crimea River?
Okay. So let me back up and be less dismissive of Crimea.
So I have great empathy for the people who live there because they're just being used as a political football.
I mean, it must be just a hell on earth to be in Crimea and just be everybody's pull toy.
So... So, for all empathy to the people of Crimea, do you really want Ukraine to try to take it back?
Is that good for you?
Is it good for anybody?
Is it good for the Crimeans?
I don't know. Who knows?
So, anyway, looks like that'll be permanent.
I call it the Donbass region.
Not the Donbass, but the dumbass, because I don't think they're ever going to stop fighting there.
Crimea's a beautiful little piece of land.
I'll bet it is. It looks like its location is kind of awesome.
Somebody says Hunter Biden's making a profit off the war.
How many of you think the Ukraine war has something to do with the Bidens hiding their crimes?
Is it a coincidence that Zelensky got the President of the United States, who was at least alleged to be somehow in the blackmail pockets of Ukraine, and that he's acting exactly like somebody who is being blackmailed?
Now, I'm not alleging that that's the case, because usually these conspiracy theories don't turn out to be true.
But you could say, I think it would be fair to say, that the way President Biden is acting, if you were just looking at all of his list of actions for Ukraine, he acts as though he is being blackmailed.
Meaning that if he doesn't give Zelensky everything Zelensky wants, Zelensky might know too much.
Now, it's also possible...
That Joe Biden is very pro-NATO, anti-Russian, and every single thing he's doing is exactly what he would have done under any situation because it's just what he believes and it's compatible with, you know, everything.
But those two hypotheses both are supported by observation.
He looks and acts exactly like somebody who's just a Democrat and a president, and he looks and acts exactly like somebody who's being blackmailed.
When we have a strong suspicion that there's a good reason he might be.
I mean, I don't know how to put the odds on it.
Let's look at it this way. If you were to put the odds on it with only what we know, which is almost nothing, what are the odds that President Biden feels a little blackmail pressure from Ukraine?
What are the odds?
25%? I don't know.
There's no way to put a percentage on that.
So I think if you're certain one way or the other, you're wrong.
I mean, you're thinking wrong, because certainty is the wrong thing to have in this case.
But I would give it 25%.
And so we're involved in a war that could turn into a nuclear war.
And I consider myself a fairly unbiased observer on this question.
I think. I mean, I don't know.
But I think I am. And I would put it at 25% chance that our president is not even acting in the best interest of the United States.
That's pretty terrible.
Now, remember that the Democrats do a lot of projection.
So that's exactly what they wanted Republicans to think about Trump.
That you don't know if he's in Russia's pocket, but look at all this.
You know, there was that time he said something good about Putin.
And there was that thing with a German bank that might have had something to do with a Russian thing, but no evidence.
And there was the allegation in the Steele dossier, which wasn't real.
And then it gives you this sense that even though, like, your logic says, you know, I don't think there's any Trump problem with Russia, but they can create enough doubt that you can walk around saying...
But maybe. But maybe.
They did produce a lot of smoke.
As we know, it was hoax-based smoke.
Now we know that.
But at the time, if you said, you know, there is a solid 10 to 20% chance that there's something wrong there, you wouldn't have been crazy.
You just probably would have been wrong.
You just wouldn't have been crazy.
Yeah, it's hoaxy smoke.
You just did the same thing.
I think you're right, but what did I just do?
Oh, I just did the same thing in terms of saying there's a 25% chance that Biden, blah, blah, blah.
Yes, I was trying to do the same thing.
So you are correct.
Just keep avoiding the huge elephant in the room.
What's the huge elephant in the room?
The huge elephant in the room is...
An elephant.
All right. Natural gas shortage in Europe this winter.
Yeah. So on social media, there are all these stories about refineries blowing up mysteriously, and there was another recently.
But I don't see any of that in the real news.
None of that's real, is it?
Do you think...
So the food processing plants and also energy facilities are having some kinds of weird number of accidents that don't look like accidents...
But does that look real?
There's nobody in any professional news organization who's saying it's real, are they?
I haven't seen it.
I think these are just industries that are prone to accidents, aren't they?
Because I feel like all my life I've heard of refinery accidents.
So I live fairly near a refinery.
Fairly near, meaning short drive.
So there are refineries in the Bay Area, and they have periodic alerts and accidents.
So they have a sophisticated system for warning the nearby town of any, you know, leaks or fires or anything.
And it's been used, I think, twice, maybe twice in my...
In my time here, there have been accidents which I think fire was involved at the refinery.
And we know that those were not any kind of terrorist acts.
So if I know one refinery that's had more than one accident since I've lived next to it, it seems like maybe that's just an industry that has lots of accidents because of the nature of the business.
And maybe food processing plants have lots of accidents.
Is there any reason they would?
I don't know. And maybe they don't.
Maybe there are just lots of them, and if you hear that one has an accident, that's what sticks in your mind.
So I guess I'm a skeptic on the refineries and the food processing plants, but I'm definitely interested, right?
Like, my interest has peaked, but I think we're well short of anything that looks like proof that something's happening.
All right, that is all I have for now.
And I believe I've delivered one of the best entertainment values of your entire life.
For the price of basically nothing, well, depending on what platform, you have been entertained for over an hour, I believe.
What time is it? Over an hour.
And I think it's the best thing that's ever happened to you, or at least today.
Let's agree on that. And we'll be back tomorrow, and it will be amazing!
Somebody says, this is my closing troll.
Scott's career and credibility has really gone downhill.
And let's end on that.
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