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Politics, SOTU Review, President Biden, IVF Opposition, Democrat Policy Preferences, 25% Billionaire Tax, Cognitive Impairment, Paul Krugman, Katie Britt SOTU, Tucker Carlson SOTU, Voter ID, Loneliness Depression Crisis, TikTok Ban, Rand Paul, Body Language Lie Detection, FDA LSD Trials, Anxious Incompetent Kids, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the High Line of Civilization.
Coffee with Scott Adams.
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go ah nice all right Well, let's see how many people we have here.
We've got a thousand people.
That's about our normal for locals.
How many of you watched the State of the Union?
I saw somebody describe it this morning as old man yells at the teleprompter.
Old man yells at the teleprompter.
I wish I'd thought of that.
It was pretty good.
All right, well, here's some things we know.
Look, this is fake news.
Ask yourself if this sounds like fake news.
That Haley voters, 63% of them say they're going to back Biden.
So that's the story.
Haley voters, 63% say they're going to back Biden.
What's left out of the story?
What's left out of the story is that, you know, some percentage of them are Democrats.
If you leave out the fact that they're Democrats and they were just gaming the system for the most part, there's no story here at all.
Am I wrong?
There's no story.
All right.
Anyway, here's some fake news from the Hill.
So they say that Biden quoted Trump with alarm for boasting that he would encourage Russia and Vladimir Putin to quote Do whatever the hell they want to NATO allies if those countries do not spend enough on defense.
Is that true?
Did that actually happen?
How many of you watched it and can confirm?
No, it didn't happen.
No, this is false.
This is fake.
Here's what did happen.
What Biden did do is he said that Trump said he wouldn't defend NATO.
Biden left out that it was in the sort of negotiating for NATO to pay its fees.
If you leave out that, you can't add it in the story after the fact.
You can't add it into the story.
No, it's not part of the story.
He didn't say it.
And there's a reason he didn't say it.
So that's the Hill.
Fake news from the Hill.
Well, let's talk about The Hate of the Union.
Of course, it was two movies on one screen.
It's no surprise that the Democrats thought it was a masterful performance.
And it's no surprise that people like me saw it as angry dementia, yelling and disunity.
Which one of those is true?
Neither.
I mean, these are just impressions.
But let's go through what's going on.
So he starts with freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and abroad.
When you say democracy is under attack, you make it possible to assassinate anybody who's opposed to it.
So it sounds like they're calling for assassination or Biden is for Trump, but doing it indirectly in that Mafia boss way.
The secret assassination whistle.
That's fair, right?
If there could be a secret racist dog whistle, can't there be a secret assassination whistle?
That's what it looks like to me.
Anyway, he didn't say Trump's name once.
He referred to him as, quote, my predecessor, but he said it 13 times, which apparently 13 times There's a lot.
So it was some say, therefore, it was more of a political speech than the State of the Union speech.
I think that's half true.
It was definitely more political than usual.
Could have been a lot more political than it was.
So somewhere in between.
And of course, Biden was pushing hard on the January 6 hoax.
So it looks like they're going to focus on the January 6 hoax.
He did not mention the fine people hoax once.
Think about that.
Now that's more political than State of the Union, so maybe that's the only reason it wasn't in there.
He did mention shrink-flation.
I can't believe he put shrink-flation in the speech.
The State of the Union, we don't have enough chips.
So RFK Jr.
quite rightly and cleverly does his response in which he says the entire country is suffering from chronic disease because our food supply is bad and Biden wants to give more chips to the kids.
Our biggest problem is the food.
He wants to give more junk food to kids.
Am I wrong or do Democrats prefer every policy that's bad for children?
Let's see.
We're going to increase the amount of your unhealthy snacks.
We're going to abort you in nine months.
I don't know how true that is, but let's throw that in the mix.
We're going to not let you have school choice.
We're going to transition you with surgery while you're a child.
We're going to keep you home from school during the pandemic.
It's consistent, isn't it?
I feel as if that's a theme that needs to be explored.
Because in every single situation, they do what's bad for children.
Including the lack of, you know, family as an emphasis.
Yeah, this other pro everything that's bad for children, basically.
The exception would be IVF.
How many of you are opposed to IVF, in vitro fertilization?
How many of you are opposed to that?
Honestly, I didn't even know that was a thing.
You're opposed to it.
Under what logic are you opposed to it?
Because the baby doesn't have a soul?
Are you saying the baby doesn't have a soul?
Now, give me a reason.
Some of you... gave you a daughter.
Doesn't work very well?
Well, it works well enough.
But nobody has a reason, right?
So I think the anti-IVF thing is probably the dumbest fucking thing that the Republicans have ever done.
It might be the number one dumbest thing they've ever done.
Because the entire Republican thing is more babies, right?
Help you bring a child into the world.
Yeah.
Now, being opposed to IVF has no logical, religious, or moral backing.
It's just ridiculous.
And it's really bad for your own politics.
So you pick the least important thing, but it's the least important thing, because you don't care about somebody else's IVF, do you?
If it's not your own, why do you care that someone else is doing it?
Why is that even your business?
You got really quiet when I said, why are you opposed to it, right?
So that proves my point.
There isn't a reason for it.
I think it must be some reflex kind of thing.
But, yeah, I mean, money's not the problem.
The people who are doing it are not complaining.
They're still doing it.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Well, but yeah, buying a baby is a different situation than... Oh, is that why?
Is it an anti-gay thing?
Are they opposed to IVF because it's an anti-gay thing?
Is that why they're opposed?
I'm not even aware of any reason.
I've never heard a reason.
So basically that's just handing the Democrats a victory.
I think Democrats would literally vote a corpse into office if it looked like they could protect abortion rights.
And the IVF stuff looks like a slippery slope to them.
So basically it's just giving the election away.
I don't know why.
I have no idea why Republicans would do such a thing.
Anyway.
Um, did you see all the fact-checking?
You know, you turn on the network, CNN, MSNBC, and they've got the fact-checker there, and the fact-checker is just like, oh, that's right, there weren't any fact-checkers.
Did anybody see one?
Did anybody see a fact-checker?
I didn't see one.
I didn't look at everything all the time, but They were usually pretty prominent.
How many things did Biden say that were literally not true in a pretty easily demonstrated way?
A lot.
There was a lot that wasn't true, or at least was out of context.
I think he said a lot of things that are true-ish, but, you know, the context is all whacked.
All right, so let's see what else.
Biden had a good little line there.
He said, you can't love the country Only when you win.
Now, of course, yeah, that's propaganda and narrative, and it's horrible.
But in terms of politics, it's a pretty good line.
I would say the speech was pretty well written.
What would you say?
Well, separately, we'll talk about how he performed.
But I thought the speech was pretty well written for his base in a political year.
And he had some actually good Good sounding little economic things.
You know, where he could say that he negotiated lower drug prices.
I didn't know anything about that.
But, and there was something about insulin, capping insulin.
And I saw on social media, somebody said that Trump tried capping it and Biden reversed it.
Is there something to that story?
So basically everything has a, but what would Trump have done?
That's always left out.
Is there any reason that Trump would not have negotiated better drug prices?
Who stood in his way?
Was it the Republicans that were stopping Trump from negotiating better drug prices?
I don't think so.
I don't think any Republicans were stopping Trump from doing it.
So it must have been the Democrats, right?
I mean, I sort of missed that story.
Yeah.
So all these things are out of context.
If the only thing you heard was he reduced your insulin costs, but at the same time he's recommending more snacks so you're going to need more insulin.
Kind of a break-even situation.
The good news is I'm going to lower your insulin costs.
The bad news is I'm going to make sure there's a lot more snacks in your bag so you get more diabetes.
Anyway.
So Biden started with that really scary Hitler-like reference.
At first I thought he was entirely talking about Trump.
But then he made it something about Putin.
But then he said foreign and domestic.
So it was like he tried to have it both ways.
Well, I'm really just talking about Putin.
But it's for an end domestic problem, so Hitler.
Yeah, it did sound like he went full Hitler right away.
As others have pointed out, he seemed to be quite hard on Russia, but soft on China.
Hmm.
Hmm.
I wonder if he's got any lost diamonds that would explain that.
All right.
He proposed a minimum tax for billionaires of 25%.
Do you think there's something missing in that?
A minimum tax for billionaires of 25%.
25% of what?
Of what?
Do you know why the billionaires are not paying as high a tax rate?
It's because it's not income.
What are they going to be taxing?
In other words, they get their gains and capital gains and take out loans and do clever things, but it still has to be income.
You can't tax somebody's assets.
What is he even talking about?
I think we need a little, uh, yeah, I think we, well, unearned income.
Well, Can't tax their worth.
Well, you know, that was not Elizabeth Warren's plan.
She was actually going to tax their worth.
Like 2% of their net worth.
That's crazy.
Oh, my God, that's crazy.
So it looks like he wants to raise taxes on everybody who makes over 400,000 a year as well.
So he's running for president on raising taxes.
He's not good at explaining how economies work, because if you raise taxes on the billionaires, well, they're going to find some other country.
Probably they should.
All right, he says no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, or a nurse.
What if I taught you when people use the percentage but not the total dollar amount?
Or they use the dollar amount but not the percentage.
In every case, if they do one without the other, It is a lying bullshit propaganda persuasion technique, right?
It doesn't matter which one you see.
If you see one without the other, it's obvious it's just propaganda.
Let's see, you want to put a cap on credit card fees and make the credit card companies only recover, you know, the amount it costs them to recover.
You know, I'll tell you, I used to work for the phone company, as you know.
So I got to hear things behind the curtain, what people really thought about things.
And we used to laugh that our most profitable line of business in the phone company was unpaid bills.
Unpaid bills were our most profitable line of business because we would charge somebody, you know, I don't know, $25 or something, a reconnection fee.
So in addition to whatever late fees they would still have to pay, you know, we'd get an extra $25 we weren't going to pay.
But the reason it was like free money is that everybody has to pay their phone bill.
If you don't pay your phone bill, or at least in those days it was one local phone company, if you didn't pay your phone bill, You didn't have an option of another phone company in those days.
So they could guarantee that you would pay.
You had to.
So they could just give you any penalty they wanted.
You'd pay it.
So yeah, we were evil bastards and we knew it.
What about the banks?
Do you think the banks know that the credit card late fees are really abusive?
Of course they do.
Yeah, of course they know it's abusive.
But they were getting away with it.
So I have to back Biden on capping credit card fees and maybe doing something with drug prices.
I don't know that Trump wouldn't have done something with drug prices.
I don't think he would have capped credit cards.
That feels like anti-competitive.
Doesn't seem like something he would have done.
And I'm not sure it's necessary in a competitive environment.
You'd think that at least one credit card company would come up with the idea of not having that penalty.
You think the free market would take care of that really easily?
Credit cards are pretty competitive business, right?
Nobody wanted that business?
Yeah.
So, these are things that sound great.
In context, they might be very different.
They're in bed with the banks, you say.
All right.
So Trump tried to be doing live posting on Truth.
Now, I couldn't get into Truth last night because it was unavailable.
Did anybody try to get in?
It kept crashing.
Was it crashing because it was getting attacked?
I'll bet it was hacked.
I'll bet it wasn't a regular capacity problem.
Yeah, to me that sounds like a dirty trick.
Oh, so is X?
X had a problem?
Well, maybe it's the same thing to knock down my internet.
I guess we'll find out.
Are there any Californians here?
Any Californians with no, especially Northern California?
Anybody with no internet in Northern California besides me?
Is that a yes?
Anybody, Northern California with no internet?
No, you've got internet.
I guess it's just me.
All right.
So Biden was well prepared, and he was well prepared for his critics as well.
So when the critics started yelling, say the name of Lakin Riley, because she was a victim of an undocumented person.
He was ready.
He had a pin with her face on it and he said her name.
It looked a little too prepared.
Well, some say he said her name wrong.
It was Lincoln.
But that's probably just because he slurred a lot.
So he did a good job of knowing what the criticism would be in the room and having his little prepared thing.
Oh, Marjorie Taylor Greene gave him the pin.
Well, he was ready.
He was ready because he immediately said her name and then went into a thing about how bad it was she got.
So he was very ready for it.
I would say that I would give his... See the trouble is you have to either decide whether you're ranking him for how well he did considering his age or you're ranking him compared to everybody.
If I rank them compared to good speakers, let's say Obama, or Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or Trump, I would say all of those four I just mentioned would be an A, and I would give maybe C, C-, for actual presentation.
He really only had to survive.
And he did.
He survived.
So he did everything he needed to do for his bass.
And the people who don't like him still don't like him, so it didn't make any difference at all.
I don't think.
I did see, maybe it was Charlie Kirk saying that it looked like there was a change in strategy and that maybe they found out that the dictator thing wasn't working.
So he didn't say extreme or MAGA or dictator, did he?
Which seemed a little obviously missing.
So it looks like maybe he got the idea that we were going to mock him mercilessly for doing the, you know, the real obvious stuff.
It ruined our bingo too.
All right, so he did do something about chaos though, right?
So he used chaos.
He used Hitler.
I don't know if he used extreme.
He used predecessor a lot.
Yeah.
So we don't know if this signals anything about the campaign, because the State of the Union's its own animal.
All right.
Speaking of freedom.
I guess Nancy Pelosi slammed Joe, not slammed him, but said Joe Biden should have talked about Lauren or Lincoln Riley's killer as an undocumented, whereas he referred to the killer as illegal.
Man.
All right.
Are you amazed that they're actually telling Democrats that there's no immigration problem?
Basically, they're saying there's not really a problem.
It's kind of unbelievable that that's happening.
All right.
According to Rasmussen, 65 percent of Democrats think Trump should be banned from the X platform.
Two-thirds of Democrats think the guy who's going to be probably the next president, or at least if the election is not rigged, and that he should be banned from the major political platform.
It's almost amazing.
Now, Biden is running to restore freedom and democracy.
What freedom is he restoring?
He's putting people in jail for free speech.
They want to ban free speech on the platform.
The only freedom that Republicans are trying to take away is reproductive.
Reproductive options for ending ending determinacy.
Well actually reproductive options including IVF.
So, the only thing that Republicans want to do is limit what women can do with their own bodies.
So, Republicans have no argument about freedom, unfortunately.
Now, that's not my opinion.
I'm saying, politically speaking, politically speaking, that Republicans have given up freedom as an... You really can't claim freedom.
You really can't.
You could try, but it would just sound crazy.
So I would say that both sides are trying to take your freedom away, they're just doing it in different ways.
So the Republicans are definitely limiting what women would call their freedom, and it doesn't matter what you call it.
I know you would call it saving a baby, or not having something that God doesn't want.
So you'd have a different framing on it, but it doesn't matter what your framing is.
Yeah, I know that you think it's banning murder.
I get it.
I'm not making any arguments about abortion.
I'm saying that to the Democrats, he has a completely credible argument that Republicans are the ones who want to ban your freedom.
It's a good argument.
No matter how much you hate it, it doesn't matter.
No matter how much you say, he's using the wrong words, he should call it.
We want to murder babies.
It doesn't matter what you think.
It's unrelated to whether it works.
It works.
So his people think you're trying to take their freedom.
And they even say, you know, what's next?
If you can't do IVF, what's next?
So they're telling their people that birth control will be banned next.
How many of you would like to ban birth control?
Ban birth control.
How many of you?
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
I've seen not a single yes.
But it's credible to their audience.
Do you think Democrats think it's credible?
Of course they do.
Because the IVF thing is just too far.
Let me say this in a clearer way.
If Republicans are going to die on the IVF hill, they deserve to lose.
They really deserve to lose.
I mean, if you're going to do something, you just got to hand it to them.
You deserve to lose.
But the other team deserves to lose, too, because they're running Biden.
Who runs Biden if they think they should try to earn the election?
It's like both sides are trying to lose.
What is Trump's take on IVF?
Trump is pro-IVF, right?
So that probably protects him.
Yeah.
Yeah, Trump is pro-IVF.
And I think the Republicans should take a note from that.
All right.
So here's how the Democrats are taking your freedom.
They're stealing elections, allegedly.
Now remember, this is just the framing that the opposing party would put on.
So they'd say he's stealing the election, he's jailing people for their free speech, he's limiting it on the, or at least the government is limiting it on the platforms.
Free speech, we know that from the Twitter files.
And the open borders are sort of taking away your freedom to be safe in your own country.
Now that's not an explicit freedom, but we had it before.
Yeah, we had it before.
So I think the Republicans could probably say more about the Democrats taking your freedom.
They're taking your money.
Yeah.
All right.
So Jerry Nadler came up to Biden afterwards and said, nobody's going to talk about cognitive impairment now.
Jerry, you were just talking about cognitive impairment.
As you were saying, nobody's going to talk about cognitive impairment.
You can't say nobody's gonna talk about cognitive impairment when you're talking about it.
In other words, it was at the top of his mind.
And Adler's basically saying, well, it's the first thing I was thinking about.
But you limp through.
Here's what Paul Krugman said.
Paul Krugman's sort of the economic wing of the turd caucus.
The turd caucus are the Democrats who are willing to say the most absurd lies that even other people who agree with them on most of the stuff would never say in public.
So here's what Paul Krugman says.
A thought.
The whole Biden is too old thing was kind of a bubble in the sense that people were buying it mainly because other people were buying it.
Did Biden just burst that bubble?
Well, I don't think we saw something that tells us the big picture just because they drugged him up for one hour.
You tell me what drugs were in his system and I'll tell you if I'm concerned about his dementia at his age.
No, I think everybody who thought he was too old saw an old man yelling at a teleprompter and it didn't look good.
And everybody who was trying to pretend he's not too old saw him in command and full of energy and seizing the moment and winning the day.
So let's not pretend any of this is objective.
Well, as Adam Townsend said, State Senator Katie Britt is some kind of a rising GOP star.
So she did the rebuttal.
I would like to give you my impression of listening to Katie Britt give the rebuttal.
Click.
Let's see what the rebuttal looks like.
Oh, God.
Oh God!
Oh God!
Turn it off!
Did any of you make it through that?
Her voice and her charisma are like anti-charismatic.
Who in the world thought she's the next Obama?
That's the worst thing I've ever seen.
It was a total car wreck.
Now, if I'm saying that, now remember, I'd like to see the Republicans do well in this election.
Why in the world did they pick her?
What is going on?
And then one of the other, I forget who, one of the women in Congress, I think, said, why did you put her in the kitchen?
They put her in the kitchen.
So the Republicans finally, you know, which I suppose is not, I'm sure they've had women do the response before, but it's, you know, if they're trying to show that they're open minded, that they put their rising star in a kitchen?
Seriously?
And then have redressed, you know, semi, you know, maybe like business casual, but something you might have been wearing in the kitchen as well.
Terrible.
Oh my God.
Haley did the 2016 response.
Now, Haley is a very credible speaker.
I mean, there's a reason she did relatively well.
I would consider Haley a very good public speaker, above average.
But poor Katie Britt.
Yeah, she's not ready and she doesn't sound like a serious person, actually.
Alright, so that didn't work out for the Republicans.
Tucker Carlson is doubling down on saying that Biden can't win and that's obviously going to be rigged.
And he says that they're basically saying it out loud and they meaning Democrats.
And he talks about the Attorney General.
What's his name?
What's our Attorney General's name?
Merrick Garland.
And how he is out there in public talking about Getting rid of IDs for voting and doing more mail-in ballots and basically everything that makes your vote less credible.
So he's literally out there just strongly promoting things that really don't have a purpose other than cheating.
They really don't.
There's no other purpose.
And to even pretend there's some other purpose other than cheating is a little too far.
I can't go there.
I can't wrap my brain around the fact that there's any legitimate reason to not require ID.
You know, the whole black people don't have ID thing is beyond absurd.
Because you know what I don't want to fix?
Here's a problem I don't want to fix.
I don't want to get more votes from people who can't figure out how to get an ID.
Does anybody want that?
If you were to talk to black American voters, you say, you know, hey sir, do you vote?
Well, yes, I do.
All right.
Well, as a voter, do you think that black voters, black people who can't get an I.D., do you think that they should vote?
What would a black voter say?
I don't know, actually, but what would a black voter say to the idea that black people who can't get an I.D.
should be adding to the political process?
What exactly are they adding?
Their brilliance?
Their preferences?
Well, why are we trying to solve this problem?
What problem is being solved?
None!
Yeah, they're doing the disenfranchised stuff.
Do you think somebody who doesn't have a government ID is worried about being disenfranchised?
That might be the last thing they're worrying about.
Oh, I'd hate to be disenfranchised.
I don't have a bank, I don't have a job, I don't have a credit card, I don't have a way to buy things without cash, and cash is gonna go away.
No, you have much bigger problems than being disenfranchised from voting for somebody you haven't paid attention to.
Anyway.
So, Tucker's right, but the funniest thing he said was, He referred to Chris Hayes on MSNBC, and I quote, as, the most famous lesbian in television.
So, that's something Tucker said.
The most famous lesbian in television.
I laugh because it's so wrong.
The thing is, that's not an insult to lesbians, is it?
I don't believe anybody's trying to insult lesbians with that.
It's more like Chris Hayes is just morphing to whatever he needs to be.
So to me it just sounds like a Chris Hayes insult that's kind of funny.
But I wouldn't say it if I thought it was intended to be insulting to lesbians.
I love my lesbians.
I'm pro-LGBTQ.
Yeah, I always say the same thing.
I'll be anti-LGBTQ the same day that you say, we don't want to go into that neighborhood, because it's kind of a crappy neighborhood, it's full of LGBTQ people.
Never happens.
It will never happen.
There's no such thing as that dangerous gay neighborhood, or the lesbian neighborhood where they didn't clean up their yard or something.
It just doesn't happen.
Probably if you were going to just be a jerk and rank people, They would rank near the top.
If you just said, what do you want a citizen to contribute to the world?
And just ranked everybody?
They'd be toward the top.
Toward the top.
So no, I'm as pro-LGBTQ as you can get.
But you know, everybody, every interest group can go too far.
But I'm very pro.
All right.
RFK Jr.
He said, neither my uncle nor my father would recognize the version of America that we have today.
And he talks about we're becoming a nation of chronic illness, so I mentioned this, and violence and loneliness.
He also mentioned the loneliness and depression.
You know, I think this whole loneliness and depression thing is maybe a lot more complicated than we think.
Yeah, your first thought is, well, go make a friend.
If you're all lonely, go make a friend.
That doesn't really work for men.
Do you know most men have zero friends?
I saw somebody say that.
Like, you're lucky if you have one.
And by friend, I mean somebody who comes over to your house and you go over to their house, that sort of thing.
Yeah, and a lot of people have zero.
A lot of you were saying it in the comments, you have zero friends.
That's a lot of people with zero friends.
So why is that?
Well, I would like to offer some possibilities.
One is, you know, we spend a lot of time on our devices, of course, the obvious.
But I think people don't have anything in common anymore.
We're so divided and so different in our interests, it's hard to find somebody that you want to spend time with on a regular basis, because your interests are so different.
And then, of course, I remember a day when... It's funny that this used to be true and it's not anymore.
Do you all remember a day when, if you got invited to a party, it didn't matter what the politics of the host were?
Do you remember that?
Didn't make any difference.
Like, literally zero difference.
Not five years ago, but before Trump.
But after Trump, I lost 100% of, you know, my Democrat-only friends.
Which was most.
You know, where I live, it was most of them.
So that just, you know, wiped out most of my social life.
Yeah, and then you've got the dating problem as well.
So there are pretty good reasons why we're lonely.
And a lot of it has to do with being out of shape and having chronic illness and all that stuff.
So I think our food supply is part of it.
I think our food supply is everything from our health care costs, to our quality of living, to depression, to anxiety.
Alright, so there's another story in the There's a US Army intelligence analyst who sold a whole bunch of top-secret military things to China for $42,000.
It makes me wonder, does China have any problem at all buying our secrets?
This guy sold like really important secrets about our air defenses and stuff like that, our technology, for $42,000.
I mean, don't you think that China just has everything?
They must have everything.
If you could get it for $42,000.
So I don't know if this is, you know, he's innocent until proven guilty, but it doesn't sound good.
The leftover fetuses from IVF bother you.
All right, let's talk about TikTok.
The House panel unanimously approved a bill.
Now, that doesn't mean the bill has been voted on.
It's just the panel that's coming up with a bill that could ban TikTok from all U.S.
phones and tablets if enacted.
U.S.
phones and tablets, okay.
Now, here's the thing.
Do you think that's going to get voted on and it's going to get banned?
Because I think the ban is really a ban only if ByteDance doesn't sell it to an American interest.
Now, my information as of this morning is that there's no buyer.
Now that doesn't mean there won't be, but at the moment there's no buyer.
So that would mean that if the bill passed, TikTok would just be shut down.
Now, I just don't think there's any chance of it happening.
What do you think?
Is there any chance that the larger Congress and Senate will vote to kill TikTok?
Because TikTok is very popular with the young and the Democrats need the young.
And there might be people who are working for China.
And then you've got your Rand Pauls who don't want to ban it because of free speech.
Let me deal with the Rand Paul complaint.
So, you know that typically I love my Rand Paul, but he's, in my opinion, analytically just totally wrong on this one.
Now, he says it's a free speech thing, and you don't want to be against free speech, so don't ban it.
Now, I like the simplicity of the argument.
However, it's not really a free speech question.
Let me give you another example as a say a mental experiment.
Let's say you had a terrorist who captured a U.S.
citizen in a foreign country and the terrorist was probably going to kill them and they were under duress and then the captured person
Produces a one of those captive videos where they say Isis is great You know and all the things you know are lies now Should let's say that the military gets a hold of it should the military Provide it to the world Because you know free speech or should they say this is more of a military thing and we should prevent it because we don't want more of these videos and
Would it be a violation of free speech to prevent a terrorist video that featured an American saying something with their own voice?
Would it be a violation of free speech to suppress that for military purposes?
Now remember, it would be coming from another country.
And the video is not being made by the person speaking, but it's an American speaking.
Now, I would say that's not free speech.
That there's, you know, a minor element of somebody who's American who's saying something, but he's not saying something he believes, and it's being done for military purposes, you know, terrorist purposes.
I would say that's not free speech.
That's an enemy using a weapon.
I believe we can stop a weapon, but not free speech.
So the fact that a weapon has some free speech embedded in it shouldn't stop you from being able to stop a weapon.
Do you agree?
And I say that TikTok is a weapon, the way it's used now.
Because although the people using it probably are mostly looking at American content, they're producing it and consuming American content, mostly.
But, who gets to decide who sees what?
Whose free speech are we protecting?
See, the free speech of an American to say something is still available because they can go to any platform and say it, except TikTok, if the ban happens.
But if they say it on TikTok, The presumption is that how many people see it and hear it is going to be determined by a Chinese company.
So what's only being banned is the ability for a Chinese company to determine how much free speech Americans have.
We're not banning the Americans' free speech.
We're banning China's ability to regulate our free speech.
Because that same person can just walk over to Facebook or Meta or anyplace else and just do the speech.
So really, it's about the danger of the tool.
And the fact that there's a free speech element in it is true.
And it's not nothing.
But it's so much less important than the fact that we're brainwashing our youth to rip off their own genitals.
I mean, I think that matters.
All right.
I have a suspicion that something else is going on here, which is if it turns out that this gets voted, let's say, my guess is it'll get defeated.
Because I think there are too many people in Congress who are either rely on TikTok for their election or, you know, don't want to make their young voters mad or some other reason.
But I think it will be turned down.
Now, I haven't heard anybody say that the vote counter say that it has the votes.
You Usually you hear that pretty early, don't you?
Am I wrong?
Usually with something like this, a high-profile thing, you hear right away whether it's likely to pass.
That's completely missing in the story.
That's like a giant dog not barking, isn't it?
I mean, think about that.
That we don't hear whether it's likely to pass.
We always know that in advance and for some reason this one that story is missing So I think it's gonna fail Because I think Democrats are unable or unwilling to ban it but I'm gonna give you a conditional prediction conditional prediction if it flies through and gets passed Then there's something else going on
Because nothing really changed from the last time they tried to do it and it didn't work.
The only thing that could have changed is maybe our intelligence people said, you know what?
It would be great if we're the ones who controlled this.
So if you see suddenly there's an American company that just pops up out of nowhere and says, hey, I'll buy it.
Maybe a Microsoft or somebody else.
Then you would have to assume that they're in cahoots with the intelligence people who just want to control it like the rest of the platforms.
So if Microsoft bought it, for example, I would assume that they had already worked out an agreement in which the CIA or FBI or whoever has a backdoor.
So I think the problem with TikTok is our intelligence people don't have a backdoor.
So that's my summary.
That the real problem with TikTok, from the perspective of the people who are really in charge of our government, the intelligence people, is that they don't have access to it.
The back door.
And China does.
So, certainly, America wants to be the only one who has access to the social media platforms.
So that they can tweak it as they did with the Twitter files, or at least know what people are doing.
Alright, so we'll...
So if it turns out a company wants to buy it and then actually gets away with buying it, that's going to tell you a lot about that company.
You might not want to know that stuff.
All right.
I saw a article that people think they can do lie detecting by just looking at people and that it's not true, that there are no reliable nonverbal cues from liars.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that you can't tell who's lying?
By looking at the body language.
Well, they did some tests and they said that people look for when you can't look somebody in the eye.
But they found there's no difference between liars and non-liars in terms of eye contact.
Probably that's more about being shy, right?
And then they also said there's no correlation with fidgeting.
So if you look nervous, it didn't make much difference to, you know, predicting whether you were lying.
Do you believe that?
I believe it.
Because by the time somebody's trying to determine if you're lying, it's already a tense situation.
So I can imagine everybody's fidgety if they're being accused of lying.
And it matters.
So their take is that the way you can detect lying the best is by looking at what they say or don't say.
Their choice of words.
Now I've told you the same thing.
That choice of words always tells you what's going on.
The day before Nikki Haley dropped out of the race, do you know what she said?
I'm not dropping out of the race... yet.
She actually said yet.
And I said, oh, you're gonna do it tomorrow.
And then she did it tomorrow.
If somebody puts yet at the end of a sentence, They mean yet.
They mean that she very clearly was telling you she was lying, because the yet told you she was going to do it tomorrow, and she did.
Now, I do agree that words are a better detector.
However, here's what they have wrong.
The eyes definitely tell you if somebody's lying.
Now, there are a few exceptions.
A psychopath's eyes will not tell you anything.
Because they'll tell you a lie, even with details, the same as if they told the truth.
You can't tell the difference if they're psychopaths or sociopaths.
If somebody's a professional, let's say a trial lawyer, they would also be practiced at keeping their face normal while they tell something that isn't true.
But if you catch somebody in a casual, spontaneous situation, and they're not a professional, their eyes will tell you everything you need to know.
You just have to look for it.
Rachel Maddow does the rapid blinking.
Watch it when she's listening.
When she's listening, she blinks normally.
When she says something that everybody agrees with and is obvious, normal.
But then when she does her closer, it'll be something like, and that's why Trump is gonna give her a reach around to Putin.
And then she goes into the rapid blinking.
So, it's not a coincidence.
And then you look at the people, the Democrats, who do the wide-eyed thing.
The wide-eye thing is just the easiest tell.
You can see that right away.
Yeah.
It's like three fake things and then one wide-eye thing.
It's like, uh, yes, the, uh, the, the rate of, uh, let's see, the unemployment rate is looking pretty good.
And, uh, you know, the job claims are good.
Um, but Trump is the one that let people in the border.
And then her eyes go big and you can see the wrinkles in the forehead because the eyebrows go up when they lie.
It's very obvious.
All right.
Fox News is reporting that almost all the hospitals are trying to increase the racial diversity.
Among the leadership.
So you might have some risk of flying or going to the hospital that's a little extra.
Now I hasten to say not because of diversity.
That's not the point.
There's no risk that comes from just diversity.
The risk is trying too hard to get diversity.
Do we all agree on that?
The problem is not the diversity.
It's the trying too hard in a situation where the pipeline doesn't have enough to select.
You know, the one thing that the Republicans absolutely get wrong, like just terribly, terribly wrong, is they should say that systemic racism is real and the only place you can stop it is in early school.
That's what they should say.
Systemic racism, totally real.
And the only place you can stop it, you know, practically, is making sure everybody has a good education.
If you have a good education, it won't bother you as much.
You'll be able to slice through it as an adult.
But if you don't, and you don't have any skills, yeah.
Probably it does matter what your ethnicity is, but you want to make it not matter by just being capable.
That's usually all you need.
So yes, the Republicans should be saying, we love diversity, we hate forced diversity because it forces you to try too hard and then bad things happen.
That's what I say.
All right, so there's a study that says a single dose of LSD can give people lasting anxiety relief.
And the FDA has granted breakthrough therapy status to LSD.
Amazing.
To treat generalized anxiety disorder.
Now that just means breakthrough therapy.
Does that mean you can do it?
Or does that mean you can test it?
Let's see.
It still has to go through trials.
So I guess that's just approval to get to go into a trial, right?
It's just approval for a trial.
Yeah.
Which is good.
Still want to do the trial.
This is the funniest statement from it.
The most common adverse effects of the LSD are usually only on the day of the dose.
And some of the problems are hallucinations, euphoric mood, abnormal thinking, Headache, dizziness, and nausea.
You know what?
I've known a billion people who've done LSD and never heard a single person said they have a headache, dizziness, or nausea.
Has anybody had that side effect?
Dizziness or nausea?
Cause I'm sure we got some day trippers in here.
I've never heard of it, but you know, like every other drug, there's some people who have bad effects.
I do not recommend LSD or any other drug.
Only your doctor can recommend that.
So, there's a book, I think Elon Musk was recommending it, and people were talking about it.
I forget the name of it.
But one of the takeaways is that the reason all of our children are anxious and incompetent, it seems, is that the only way you become capable and confident is by doing tasks and succeeding.
Now, that does match observation.
Now let me ask you, how many of you have had kids, let's say, you know, recently, and have you ever tried to ask them to do something?
Now it's very kid dependent.
You know, every kid's different.
Here's what happens in the modern world.
All right, kid, when you come home from school, I want you to do some work around the house to earn, let's say, to earn an allowance.
What happens?
What happens in the real world if you say, all right, we'll give you some discipline.
You're going to do some stuff around the house when you get home.
What happens?
In the real world?
In the real world, the kid says, oh, I have so much homework.
Let me do the homework first.
And when I'm done, because you would agree, Dad, I mean, I think you'd agree, homework's more important.
So I'm going to do the homework first, and then if time is left, you know, we'll do those chores.
And then Dad says, um, OK, well, I don't want you to have a bad grade at school.
How much homework do you have?
Uh, hours.
Oh, man.
All right, well, OK, we'll do it your way.
Yeah, do your homework.
And then catch up with me and we'll do those.
Then what happens?
They run out of time, which they always knew, right?
They always knew they'd run out of time.
So what happens if your kids have shared custody?
Have you ever been in that situation where the kids are with you half the time and half the time with another parent?
And then you want to tell the kids, all right, kids, You're gonna have chores to do at my house, even if the other parent doesn't do it.
At my house, you're gonna do chores.
What happens then?
Then the kid says, there's no way I'm doing chores at your house.
I'll go live with the other parent.
And that's it.
Game over.
Because no parent wants to say, OK, go live with the other parent, because they will.
They actually will.
You lose your kids.
So let's say you say, all right, kid, you keep messing around, so I'm going to punish you.
Nobody punishes kids for doing their homework instead of their chores.
There's just nothing you can do.
There's just nothing you can do.
So modern children are basically Free-range chickens that can kind of do what they want.
Now I know every situation is different and there are there are kids who are born able to do their homework and their chores and they want to do both.
That's a thing.
But there's a whole bunch of you average kids who are just They'll never do the things that make them confident.
When I look at the number of things I did as a kid, just things.
Like how many different things I did.
My normal weekend would be your uncle the farmer needs somebody to help stack up the hay bales.
So one day I'm stacking hay bales.
Your uncle the farmer, it's the sapping season so you could be walking through the snow and carrying big buckets of sap that came from trees.
All right.
And, you know, one day I'd be shoveling snow, moving furniture, mowing lawns.
You know, I'd play three different sports.
It was just one thing after another that I had to navigate.
I had to figure out how to do it, and then I had to do it.
And, you know, no screens.
So, I developed insane confidence, almost to the point of having too much.
Because every time I did something, it worked.
Mow the lawn?
Oh, it might be a problem.
But it worked.
So by the time I got to college, I've never, I don't know, I think I told this story in the man cave.
By the time I got to college, I practically took over the college.
Because everything I tried up to that point worked.
So working with some of my classmates who lived in the dorm, We said, hey, why don't we run the dorm and get rid of the resident assistant and we'll take the money and get single rooms for ourselves.
Do you know how crazy that sounds?
We literally sat in our dorm room and said, huh, why is there like this adult in our dorm?
We're adults.
Why do we need an adult to watch adults?
How about we vote and we'll pick, you know, we'll pick somebody in the building.
And we'll get paid.
The students will get paid from the college.
And we'll just do that work.
So we actually pitched it to the college.
And they said, well, if you can get people to agree to it for next year, we'll try it.
And so we did.
So we went out and got people to agree to it.
We're going to live there next year.
And then we had an election, and the three of us who came up with this idea, we ran against other people.
So other people could have won the election and gotten those jobs that we created.
But we won, because we'd created the whole situation.
So I ended up managing the dormitory, but there was also one business on campus.
It was a coffee house, so it was the only entertainment, live entertainment, get a beer kind of place on campus.
And the people who ran it were volunteers.
So I volunteered to take over the finance part because I was an economics major.
And I redid the entire accounting and finance for class credit.
I just created a classroom myself.
I said, hey, there's no accounting process here.
How about I work with my accounting professor, and if I created an accounting process for a business, he should give me credit.
And he thought so too.
So I got accounting credit for creating an accounting system for a real business, and then maintaining it.
Which allowed me to learn accounting, you know, inside out, by the time you're done.
The way the classroom couldn't do it.
It was really good.
So, that was my college experience.
So, I ran the biggest entertainment industry in the college.
I was one of three managers in my dormitory.
And then we started building interlocking directorates.
We formed an oligarchy.
This is a real thing.
So we, one of our friends ran for the head of the student council.
So we had a student council head in our dorm.
The head of the local radio station was our best friend.
So we owned like all the entities, you know, the leaders of all the entities.
So anything we wanted to do, we had all the free publicity, you know, just everything.
So basically, Because I grew up in a, um, do this, I don't know how to do this, well you will in a minute.
That was my life.
Do this, I don't know how to do that, you will.
You're gonna know how to do this by the time you're done.
And then you do it.
Over and over and over and repeat and repeat.
By the time I was 18, I didn't think anything could stop me.
Now, there were certainly things that could stop me.
So it's, you know, more of a mindset.
But my mindset was, I don't see why anything would stop me.
Here's another example.
We wanted to play indoor soccer, but the gym had, you know, limited capacity and it was always cold in the winter.
You couldn't play indoors.
So I said, how come we can't just rent space like everybody else did?
And they said, well, the only people who can, you know, reserve time in the gym Or people who have like organizations.
So if you were like a league or an organization or something, you know, you could do it.
So I said, what's it take to form an organization?
And he said, well, you know, you fill out this paperwork and the dean approves it or whatever.
And I said, where do I get the paperwork?
And I said, well, you know, go to the dean's office, or whatever it asks for it, the business office.
So I go to the business office, I get the paperwork, I filled it out, I hand it to the dean, and I was a soccer club.
So I was the only one in my dorm that could, I could schedule time in the gym.
All I did was identify a problem, and then I said, okay, what's the solution?
And then I just slogged through it, like everything else I'd done to that point in my life.
So, how do you get rid of anxiety?
How do you get rid of depression?
That's how.
An unending series of challenges, which you eventually succeed at almost every time.
You know, because they're not such big challenges that you can't do it.
So by the time I got my big break to become a cartoonist, I thought it would work.
By the time I wrote my first book, my first book that wasn't just comics, I said, this will be a best-selling book, number one best-seller book.
I hadn't even taken a writing class, except one two-day class in business writing, and it became a number one book.
Now, I have a level of, I'm sure you've witnessed it, I have a level of confidence that's unnatural.
Because it is unnatural.
It's a learned, preferred mindset that I've developed over time.
But it's not based on reality.
You know, if I take a moment to say, well, in reality, You could definitely be stopped.
But I just don't live my life like I can be stopped.
I just assume.
If I see something that's wrong with the entire country, like fentanyl or anything else, I say to myself, I could probably put a dent in that.
I might be able to change the narrative on that.
I just don't think anything can stop me.
And that's how you get rid of your anxiety.
I just figure, always a way out.
And so far so good.
All right.
So, if you can figure out how to get your kids to do something useful in today's world, it would be really good for them.
Just so they can succeed over and over again.
Oh, yeah.
You always say the rules don't apply to you.
I say that all the time.
That's one of my favorite sayings.
Well, I say the odds don't apply to me.
Yes, you're saying the rules don't apply, but I think you're saying the odds.
Maybe that's a little more expensive than what I'm saying.
So if I embark on something where it's unlikely people would ever succeed at it, I just don't think it applies.
I just think it's up to me.
And I just live my life that way.
All right.
Yeah.
I also worked in a lab, you know, an engineering sort of lab in the phone company.
And we had unlimited daily problems that we had to solve.
You know, why something wasn't working.
Pretty much we always did.
I don't think there was ever a case where we just said, ah, just give up.
We always figured it out somehow.
Alright.
Is there any story that I missed before I sign off?
Yeah, Kerry said some things about the Ukraine war.
Jobs build confidence too.
Yeah, it's always good to change jobs.
So I've changed jobs.
Let's see in the comments how many times you tell me how many times you've changed jobs so far.
And that just as an adult.
I probably had 20 different jobs as a teenager.
But as an adult I've changed jobs.
Now I also changed jobs within companies.
So I'm going to count all of that.
Jeez, jobs may be...
Um...
Maybe 15 times, if you count adding jobs.
Maybe 12 to 15 times.
And every time you change jobs and, you know, you get up to speed in the new job, there's your confidence.
Yeah, if you include within the company, yeah.
And a lot of you are having numbers from... 6 is a very common number.
A whole bunch of you have 6.
That's very common for some reason.
You've been a cook and an IT director.
Huh.
Oh, yeah.
So there's a COVID vaccine liability bill that's being floated.
I don't think it'll pass.
But the idea would be that the company that gives you the meds would be responsible if something happens.
So here's the problem.
The problem is, the vaccine companies are going to say, we won't make any vaccines because the liability is too big.
So it seems like an obvious and good idea.
And RFK Jr.
says the same thing.
But look what you wouldn't have.
Would you agree that there are some vaccinations that work?
Do you believe that?
I'm not talking about COVID.
But do you believe there's any vaccination that works?
You don't think it prevents the mumps?
Yeah.
So here's the thing.
None of those would exist if the companies had to take full liability.
Because if you've got something that could make 10 million people die, You don't go into that business at all if you're already making money.
So the argument for not having that liability is actually pretty good.
Maybe they should have some kind of cap or something?
There should be a cap on the liability, because unlimited liability means you're out of business, and nobody would do that drug.
If you already had, let's say you're a big drug company, you're Pfizer, and you have a dozen blowout money-making drugs.
So you're making money on the drugs you have, and then the government says, oh, we really need this new drug, but you're going to be liable.
And then they say, how many people are going to take it?
Well, everybody.
So 100 million people will take it, at least.
You go, all right, 100 million people.
If 5 million of them have a bad reaction, I'm out of business.
I'm completely out of business.
So it would be irrational for Pfizer ever to make another vaccine for anything, even if it was a good idea.
Any arguments for not putting a cap on liability on any product?
Yeah.
If there's a company that makes one product and it kills people, you don't need a cap.
You can take 100% of their money and close them down.
It's just that if you're already profitable with other lines of business, they're all at risk with the new venture, and that's not normally the case.
So it would be a bad business decision to do a new vaccine if you had all liability.
True with all products?
Not really.
No.
Now, do you think that the iPhone has the same risk as a vaccine or an iPad?
Does my microphone have the same liability risk?
Ow!
It hit me in the eye!
No.
Most things you can reasonably know that your liability is sort of just naturally capped.
But vaccines have unlimited... I mean, it could be a $100 billion fine.
Or not fine, but let's say lawsuits.
Get rid of school vaccine mandates.
Yeah, that's another topic.
Yeah, none of us like the mandate.
and connect.
I wonder if we'd be talking about the mandate if the vaccination worked, and it was safe.
Do you think you'd care?
Or would you just say, eh?
You'd care on an intellectual level, but you wouldn't care.
You'd put it in your, next time I have an intellectual argument I'll pull this out, but you wouldn't care.
As long as everybody did well, and you did well, and nobody died, You wouldn't care.
You really wouldn't.
Mandatory only matters if... When they are mandated, there should be compensation.
But would the compensation come from your government or from the vaccine?
I think the compensation would have to be from whoever mandated it.
Not from the vaccine company.
Because otherwise it never happens.
There would be no vaccine if the vaccine company, if the government mandates it, they're going to have to, they're going to have to ensure it.
Although you could argue that in a way they do because they end up being on the hook for a lot of the healthcare.
Um, yeah.
There's another ivermectin study I don't believe in the news today, and it doesn't matter which way it goes or anything else.
I just don't believe any ivermectin study.
By the way, it may very well have been a miracle drug, but I don't believe any data about the pandemic.
There are always-- we have so many mandates.
I don't think, you know, the medical mandates are worse, I'll give you that.
But we have a lot of mandates.
Go look at the old data about... It's like there's some things that can't be communicated.
Watch this.
Here's something that I can say it, it can be very clear, but I can't make you hear it.
I will not, under any circumstances, And there's nothing you can do that will change my mind.
Believe any data from the pandemic.
And then somebody will say, but what about this study?
No.
Listen to me.
None of it.
Don't believe any of it.
Doesn't mean ivermectin doesn't work.
I'm just going to say I'm not going to believe it because the study said it did.
Do not believe it.
Yeah.
If there's any money linked to it, that's all you need to know.
Yeah, you can still post them.
I might not be reporting them.
You're in a weird segment space with only a few dozen people.
What's that mean?
All right.
That's all I got for now.
And maybe No, my internet's still out.
So I guess that's what I'm going to be doing all day today.
