Episode 1431 Scott Adams: How to Predict the Future and Also the Past. Bring Coffee.

Hey, everybody, it's time for coffee with Scott Adams. The best time of the day. Every single darn day. You know, you keep waiting for an exception. It never comes. It's always the best time of the day. And if you would like to enjoy this to its maximum potential, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of Tanker Chelsea and a canteen sugar flask. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go. Ah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's good. Does everybody feel better now? A little bit better than you did. Boy, I'll tell you what made me feel better. I just saw a paparazzi picture of Goldie Hawn and what's her husband's or semi husband's name? Man. They did not age well. So it made me feel good because I'm aging better than some other people. Kurt Russell. Thank you. Kurt Russell has not aged well, but made me feel good because maybe I'm doing better. Yes, thank you for that. So apparently, up in Sun Valley right now, there's a little thing happening called the Billionaire Summer Camp. Have you heard of it? The Billionaire Summer Camp? It's invitation only. I'm checking for my invitation, but I don't see it. And you have to be a billionaire. Ish. I guess. And you get to go there and hang out with other billionaires. Now, are you worried that there's an Illuminati? No, it's not the Bohemian Grove. That's a different billionaire club. This one's in Sun Valley. Do you worry that something like a trillion dollars worth of. Of value is all in one place? If that place ever blew up, the entrepreneurial life of the United States would be decreased quite a bit. But are you worried about it? Are you worried about all the billionaires talking? Apparently, this is the place where Jeff Bezos completed the deal to buy the Washington Post. So deals get done. It's just interesting that all the billionaires know each other. At what point could the billionaires decide to just run the world? They're kind of already there, aren't they? Hypothetically, just. Let's just do a mental thing here. Suppose all the most important billionaires in the United States got together as Sun Valley, let's say, and decided privately. Hey, this country is just not going the right direction. Why don't we billionaires decide what to do with the country and then we'll just tell the politicians to do it now. We'll tell it via our platforms and we'll tell them through our TV shows and our newspapers and stuff, but basically we'll just tell them what to do. Do they have the power to do that? What do you think? If the billionaires at Sun Valley, if they decided that they were the real power, but they would use it through influence and money and connections and, you know, brainwashing all the usual ways, could they literally and directly just take control of the country? I think yes. Now, I think it's unlikely that they would all agree because they're not all going to be on the same side on everything. They might not want to be in charge. Some of them might be more trouble than it's worth. You end up getting assassinated like the president of Haiti if you're in charge. So maybe, maybe they need to know. Maybe they would prefer just ruling from the background. I don't know. But my sense is that they could do it. They could do it. All right, over on, I see some people talking on YouTube about the locals livestream, and I'm seeing somebody saying it never works. Well, we're doing beta testing this week, so most of the time it hasn't worked. It's been a user error, such as forgetting to turn on my microphone, that sort of thing. But at the moment it's working better than YouTube. So if you have an option of seeing it on locals or YouTube, I've. I just temporarily, I've opened up the Locals channel so you don't have to be a subscriber for this live stream just in case people want to sample it. So you would see what it would look like without commercials. If you want to be a member of Locals later, they won't all be open, but this one's open because we're doing some testing. All right. Remember I told you I thought there was going to be some genetic element to the COVID outcomes? In other words, that some people who. Some people who have a certain genetic outcome or a certain genetic makeup probably have better and worse outcomes. And we keep seeing more confirmation of that. So now there's. There's a new manuscript published in Nature saying that they found a whole bunch of genetic clues to why some people have worse outcomes. Now, apparently, the genetic element could be as important to your outcome as. Could be as important to the outcome as your comorbidities. So if you're looking at the size of the genetic component, it could be as important as having being overweight, obese could be as important as being old. It could be as important as having diabetes, for example. But the importance is that we could identify who has the greatest risk. That might make a big difference. So if you're keeping score of, if you're keeping score of who did good predicting during the pandemic, I would say that add this one to my list because early on I was saying there's almost certainly a genetic component to this and there appears to be. So. Good guess, Scott. So let me. I promised in one of the titles, I think on YouTube, I promised that I would teach you how to predict the future. Now, this is going to be really complicated stuff. Things you've never heard before. No, it's stuff you've heard before, but watch how powerful it is. You've heard the statement follow the money. It is really creepy how often that works. You know, it's sort of, it's so obvious that you should see who's getting paid for anything to know what everybody's motivation is and what's likely to happen. So it's a completely obvious statement. What's not obvious is how often it works. Because in your mind you're thinking, well, that might work half the time. You know that 40% of the time that might tell you what's going to happen. No, no, it's not 40%. It's a lot closer to 100%. It's not 100%, but it's really close. Let me give you some examples. You know Ibram Kendi, he's the director of Anti Racist Research and Policy Center, Department of Anti Racism. I'm sorry, he's director of the Anti Racist Research and Policy center and he makes his money by telling the country that it's super racist and that people like Ibram Kendi are the partial solution. There are people who can explain it to you and tell you how to fix it and, and you would give them money for that. Now, if somebody who gets paid for something has a good idea about how to fix the world and coincidentally that person is likely to get a big promotion out of this idea. Do you trust the idea? Well, Ibram Kendi is apparently proposing that there be some new. I think it's a cabinet level position he wants created called the Department of Anti Racism. And they would have powers to punish other entities for being too racist. Who do you think would be the obvious person to make the director of the Department of Anti Racism if the Department of Anti Racism were to be created? Because it's probably a pretty good paying job. And I Don't know how much Ibram Kendi makes in his current job, but I'll bet it would be a promotion. And should you trust anybody who suggests creating a job for themselves, I think you could have predicted that sooner or later anybody who's in charge of an anti racism thing will come up with a plan that coincidentally is good for them monetarily. If you look at Black Lives Matter and you say to yourself, hey, let me make a prediction about Black Lives Matter. We know that Black Lives Matter, representing largely the black population of America, should agree with the black population of America that we should fix, let's say, the school system. It's a very simple thing, right? There's probably, I doubt you could find even one black person in America who doesn't think the school system should be fixed specifically for black American children, but also for everybody. Right. A universally true statement. So if you were Black Lives Matter, it would be obvious that you would be in favor of, let's say, working with Republicans who have the same opinion that the school system needs to be fixed. The teachers unions are too powerful. They're preventing school competition. And if you could fix that competition part, then schools could rise to a much higher level for everybody. But what would happen to the leaders of Black Lives Matter if they fixed that problem or fixed any problems? Well, you lose your job because you don't want a job where if you succeed, you lose your job. And that's what leaders of sort of protest movements, if you will. That's the problem. It's the same problem with a dictator. You say to yourself, I'd sure like that dictator to retire. But how? Dictators can't retire. They would immediately be killed by the new dictator just to get them, get them off the field. So if you were to follow the money, you should assume that Black Lives Matter would oppose the legitimate interests of all of their members, not some of their members, literally all of them. 100% of black Americans would like school to be better. Am I wrong? Is it 99? If you did a poll, would you find anybody who said, you know, I'd like schools to be a little bit worse or maybe stay the same? None. Literally none. So here you have an organization that tries to represent a population, black Americans, while clearly being on the other side. How could you predict that? Well, you could predict it easily. Just follow the money. The leaders only, only prosper if the conflict remains the conflict and they don't prosper. If Republicans say, you know, that's a pretty good idea, fixing schools, let us help you We've got money and power. You've got a legitimate issue. Let's work together. Same page, Boom. All done. Follow the money. All right, let's go to the important story of Britney Spears and her conservatorship. I have to say that while I generally do not like much of anything about celebrity news. Well, it's fun. I mean, I like the fun part, but, you know, it's not important. But this conservatorship thing with Britney Spears, I gotta admit, it bothers me. Like, it legitimately bothers me. You know, it doesn't even feel like it's somebody else's problem. Like, it actually feels personal in a weird way. Does anybody else get that? Does anybody else feel that? This Britney conservatorship, it feels personal, doesn't it? I don't know why exactly. Some of it, I think is because Brittany herself is so transparent. Meaning that, you know, we see her all the time. We see her lows, her highs. You feel like you know her a little bit. Right. And she is a character who. I would say she invites our empathy. Because I don't think that. Have you ever heard of Britney Spears doing anything bad to anybody? Right. She's sort of a good soul who's got some problems, which she admits. But now we hear that Madonna has thrown in, saying, with the free Britney movement, and she went in hard. And how many celebrities does it take to change this situation? Because now here are the people who have spoken out. Justin Timberlake, Mariah Carey, Halsey Rose McGowan, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, I guess Elon Musk has spoken out on it. And I'm looking for my name on the list. And what. How did they leave my name off the list? I. I have spoken out about this situation. So I will throw my weight behind these other people and my tiny weight behind these other people and say, yeah, this needs to get fixed. This really needs to get fixed. And I feel like I could help. So, Brittany, if you need any help, let me know. All right? I'm following the story of the Haitian president who got assassinated. And what we know so far, although it's still fog of war, so this could change. There was some team of highly trained commandos who stormed the palace and killed the president and wounded his wife badly. And at least two of them look like they're American citizens, and they were apparently from a variety of countries, et cetera. And here's the thing that is sort of buried in the news. Why'd they do it? What was the point of assassinating the president? Because Generally, when you do an assassination, it's part of a coup, right? So you have the new president who's trying to be president, and he wants. That one wants to come in. But where was the replacement? What was the point of assassinating the president? How did we get this far into the story and not even know the motive? Seriously, how do you not know the motive of killing a president of Haiti? Well, then I saw one sentence, and I think it was a CNN report that said that the president who got killed had been ruling by decree for more than a year. Ruling by decree. In other words, it was a dictator. So a team of mercenaries killed a dictator and did not suggest a replacement. What's going on here? Because I see people speculating that Biden did it. Oh, so he's saying it's like Biden. Okay, that's a different point. So how can we get this far into the story without knowing, oh, there we go. I'm seeing somebody suggest child trafficking. Because doesn't this look like an anger crime? It doesn't look like a political crime. Does looks like somebody was really pissed off and had the money to do this, doesn't it? It looks like somebody just wanted him dead, like they would want anybody else dead. And they just had the money to do it and they hired a bunch of people and killed them. Oh, somebody says it's a McAfee dead man switch. Oh, my God, that would be interesting. I doubt that's true, but my goodness, that would be interesting. Now, other people are suggesting that there's some kind of Clinton connection, blah, blah, blah. I don't. I doubt it, but we'll see. All right, so until we know who paid these mercenaries, this story could get a lot more interesting. Letter to the Woke Heart by Alexander. Okay, I'm just reading a comment there. Apparently the Spotify staff is still mad about Joe Rogan having his big deal over there on Spotify. And I was trying to figure out what exactly is their problem with Joe Rogan. And the only thing I've seen is, quote, reference to his, quote, transphobic comments. Transphobic? What does transphobic mean now? I assume it means somebody who has a phobia or a fear, I suppose, of trans people. But would you say that Joe Rogan has a fear or some kind of, like, just some kind of emotional reaction to trans people? Well, I haven't seen any evidence of that. I have heard him talk about how in sports it could create unfairness and it doesn't make sense. Is that transphobic? It's sort of what Everybody's talking about. I don't really see it. So. And he may have made some comments about the. The mental state of people who go through the transition. But I think it's fair to ask those questions, because no matter what you think about the transgender situation, is there anybody who would disagree with the following statement? Let's see. Let's take the temperature of the room. I'm not going to talk about a bunch of transgender stuff. I know you hate that topic, but. Because we've done it too much, not because it isn't interesting. But let me ask you here. How many of you would agree with the following statement that there are undoubtedly people who are better off making the change, and there are almost certainly people who are not. Is that a fair statement? Without giving any percentages, would you say that it's just a flat statement of truth? Yeah, I'm seeing you say that. So as long as it's a universal agreement, I don't think I've ever seen anybody agree so hard at anything I've ever said in my life. All right. I'm saying only yes. Oh, so one no. Okay. A couple of no's. A couple of no's are sneaking in now, but almost entirely Yeses looks like 95% yes. Yeah. I think the overriding truth of the whole transgender thing is that people are different. How about just that? How about people are different, and you either think that people can make their own decisions, even if you don't think that they're good decisions. So can Brittany make her own decisions, even if you think that they're not going to be as good a decision as somebody might make for her? Well, freedom kind of requires that Brittany does make her own decisions, even if they're not good ones, according to you. You know, they might be good ones for her, but the transgender is the same thing. It's. You have a bunch of people who want to make the choice for themselves. Now, when children are involved, that's a whole different situation. But for adults, I would say the evidence clearly shows there's some people who regret the change, and some people are really happy they did it. And what can. What can you and I do about that? Well, nothing, unfortunately. We live in a world where people get to make these choices themselves, and some of them are bad. So to me, that's the whole story. The sports stuff is interesting, but otherwise, it's just a personal choice story. There's a actress, Christina Haack, H A A C K. She just revealed that she smoked toad venom and got rid of 15 years of anxiety. She said that smoking the toad venom reset my brain. All right, let me ask you this question. This will be a good test of your situational awareness. If you see, if you hear a story about an actress who smoked toad venom and cured her of a 15 year mental problem, do you say that's true? We don't know for sure. But do you say it's probably true or probably not? Okay, fake news. Check. Fake news, check in the comments. Probably true or probably fake? I'll read your comments. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Probably not. Fake, fake, fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Fake. Not. Not. Not. Not. Not. Not. Well, look at you. You're all pretty sure that this is fake news. Guess what? You're all wrong. This toad venom is a hallucinogen, and I believe this is the basis of dmt. I'm not the expert on hallucinogens, but I think that's true. And do you believe it is likely or even possible that somebody could have a few minutes of smoking toad venom and cure a mental disease? This is really going to fuck you up. The answer is yes. The answer is unambiguously yes. Now, I don't know if it worked in this specific case. Right. So I'm not making a claim that it always works in all people and you get only good results or anything like that. It's an illegal drug, so of course I don't recommend it. I'm not a doctor. But if you think that this is unlikely to be true, you're missing one of the biggest stories in the world. Because the people who have studied this field, and I've had enough conversations with people who know this field to know this is real. There are people who fix a lifetime of mental problems. Depends on the mental problem. Right? Not every problem, but one like this. Fifteen years of anxiety. Yep. Yeah. There is plenty of evidence that people are fixing lifetimes of mental problems in 15 minutes. That's real. Now, this isn't the only hallucinogen that can have that kind of benefit. Yeah. PTSD would be another thing that people have fixed fairly quickly with this. So when I asked you this was a fun test because when I sort of disguised the story by saying it was toad venom, I got you off the. Off the idea that it was a hallucinogen. If I had said a hallucinogen from the start, most of you would have said, well, maybe, maybe. But I fooled you by calling it toad venom, which I think is basically what it is. All right. Stephen Miller, the controversial former aide of President Trump was on TV saying that about Biden, that no president in history has been dealt a better hand on day one than President Biden. How could you argue with that? I mean, you can dislike Stephen Miller all you like, but really, could you argue with that point? And then the people arguing with us say, are you kidding me? Biden inherited a debt economy with a pandemic. Well, yeah, but he also inherited the known solution. So whoever was president was going to be president over the near solution of the pandemic, the huge improvement of the economy, all that was going to happen. The only thing that Biden added was he made some things worse, like immigration made it worse. I also wonder if Trump had been president, and it looks like most of the vaccination resistors are Republican. Do you think that having Biden as president is creating more resistance to the vaccination because he's a Democrat and because the Republicans just have a sort of a natural resistance to anything that comes from a Democrat? What do you think? I'm actually interested in that. Anyway, so tell me in your comments. So my take is that maybe, maybe Trump could have influenced people to take more vaccinations. Now, I'm not saying, you know, if you want to argue that wouldn't be a good idea, that's a separate conversation. But just would he have been able to successfully do that? Because, remember, he took the vaccination himself. Right. So when you see that Trump has convinced half the country that the election was a lie and he's still controlling the party, it seems like, from the outside. Does anybody still think Trump is not persuasive? Do you remember when people were laughing at me early on when they'd say he's persuasive? Ha ha, ha ha ha. How can he be so persuasive when he's only got 25% of the support in the primary, the Republican primary, that's not very persuasive. It's only 25%. And here he is. So, yeah, he's persuasive. I imagine that Trump, if he had tried, if Trump had put his level, best effort into more vaccinations, and again, we don't know if he would have. Maybe he would have just been. Yeah, wear a mask. I think it's a good idea. He might have been Luke Orb on it, who knows? But there's no way to know how he would have handled it. But at least there's a chance he could have gotten more Republicans to take it compared to Biden. I think that's fair to Say, all right. Rasmussen asked people if they agree with the following statement that media are truly the enemy of the people. Truly the enemy of the people. What percentage of Americans, likely voters this is agreed with the statement that the media is the enemy of the people. 58%, either strongly or somewhat agreed that the media are the enemy of the people. Do you remember when I said that Trump was persuasive? This is Trump. Trump is the reason that 58% of the public think the media is the enemy of the people. Now, it would have been at least 40% without him, probably. But this specific phrasing, don't you think that it was always true that people would have said, oh, I think the media is biased in one direction. People would have always said that. But would they have gone the extra level and say, no, no, it's not just bias. You're the enemy of the people? I don't think that happened before Trump. I think this poll shows you how persuasive he is, that he just turned this into a thing, that the media is the enemy of the people. And now 58% of the public agrees. Now, they may disagree which side of the media is the enemy, but it's a lot of agreement on something. And here's another one. Do you trust the political news you're getting? Also from Rasmussen, 43% said no. What? 43% of the public, the voting public, the people who need the media to tell them what's true so that their vote will be non absurd. 43% say no, we don't trust the political news we're getting. Wow. But you want to know the shocking part? 37% said they do. 37% of the public thinks that the political news they see is accurate. Really? Do you know anybody who thinks that? I don't even know anybody who thinks political news is accurate. Like literally nobody. But it's a big country, so maybe I just talked to the wrong people. But here's even the funnier part of the same poll. You know, there's always a category for not sure or uncertain or no opinion. Well, 20% of the people said they were not sure that they can trust the political news. Huh. What would be very similar to not sure you could trust something? What would be another way to phrase that I'm not sure I could trust something that's very similar to don't trust it or exactly the same. It's one thing to say that the news is working against you, but if you're not sure you can trust it, you don't trust it. Right. Am I over interpreting this? If you're not sure you can trust it, then you don't trust it. You're not there. You're not sure. So let's add the 20% that are not sure to the ones who said no, we definitely can't trust it. You've got 63% of the voting public saying they don't trust political news. Nearly two thirds. Oh, my God. But what about the good news, Adam? Dopamine. Dopamine. Adam, Dopamine on Twitter is tweeting some good news, some scientific good news. So there's a professor in the department, department of some tech department at the University of St. Louis. They figured out how to turn wastewater into clean water and electricity so they can take waste water and run it through some filters and chips and whatever the hell they do. And, oh, we got a cat sighting and they can turn it into electricity and clean water. Now, this is the sort of thing where who knows if this specific technology will take off or not. But it's the sort of thing where I look at it and I say to myself, these are all the little things that are not in the news that could be big things. So they're not in the news, but could be completely transforming society. But on the bad news, although it's weird news, there's news that China is developing exotic nuclear weapons such as underwater drones. How dangerous will the world be when the ocean is filled with underwater nuclear drones? I think I want to go to Mars. You know, I've been thinking that Mars would be the least safe place to be because what happens if your enclosure unit gets a crack or something? But I'm starting to feel that if the ocean gets filled with nuclear drones pointed at each other, that's not a good thing. I also asked this question. How good do nuclear weapons have to be before they're good enough? Is there not something that's completely good enough? Well, before you have underwater drones? Because it's not as if any country could wipe out the nuclear arsenal of another on day one. Anybody who starts a nuclear war is going to get attacked with nuclear weapons if it's a superpower. So I just wonder if it makes any sense whatsoever to keep improving our nuclear weapons because we're not going to use them, right? I mean, and if you did use them, it would be the end of the world, effectively. So that's a big question. But remember I said you could predict the future by following the money. Let me ask you this, is there anybody in China who's in charge of a big, let's say drone building operation who would not make money. No, there are people in China who run their military industrial complex who would make amazing amounts of money if the government improves their nuclear arsenal. So who do you think runs China? It's the people with a lot of money, coincidentally, you know, the, the head party members who were connected to the billionaire class, etc. So is China building all these nukes because they're preparing for a war? I suppose it's possible. But you could predict that this was going to happen, even though it probably doesn't make any sense for China. I just don't see how China's better off doing this. But you could predict it because if you follow the money, likely the billionaires who run China, like every country is run by the billionaires, effectively, they would make a lot more money if they build more devices. So you can predict it'll happen. Same with the United States. Well, let's give Joe Biden some props if we could, or whoever is the puppet master behind him, because Joe Biden has announced that August 31st will be the end of the 20 year mission in Afghanistan. And I don't have anything to say about this except positive. I have only positive things to say about this. This is one of those cases where if you can't full throatedly say, Joe Biden, you Democrat, good job, then you have to really check your bias a little bit, don't you? Because this is something that Trump started and I, yeah, right in the comments. You beat me to it. Trump started it. So, you know, you could certainly make the argument it's a, it's a Trump accomplishment that, you know, Biden is just finishing off, but he didn't need to, you know, Biden didn't need to finish it off. He could have found a way to stay. So I think the current president always has to get credit for doing something, even if, even if it was easy, even if somebody else started it. You have to discount that a little bit. So let me say it again. Joe Biden doing exactly the right thing. Congratulations, good job, and I have nothing. You feel like I want to put a disclaimer on that, but no, no, I just want to say this was a good job and that's it. Moving on. All right. Remember I told you that money could predict things. Let's say you had a situation in which there was somebody looking to sell something that they would make a lot of money selling and there was somebody who might be a buyer for that thing, but it would Cost them a lot of money. And then there's a decision to be made about whether more of it should be created and purchased. Who would be in favor of creating and purchasing more of this product? Well, the people who sell it. Who would be not in favor of it? Well, the people who had to pay money for it, they would take some more convincing. Well, here we are. Pfizer, maker of one of the major vaccines, says that you might need a third dose. In fact, they say you do. You're going to need that third dose for that extra booster if you have the Pfizer shot. No word yet on the Moderna, which is the one I have. I think the most recent information is that the Moderna shot lasts longer. Maybe, we'll see. But do you trust Pfizer when they say, oh, yeah, you're gonna need another shot? You're gonna have to pay for it, it's gonna be expensive. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, you need another shot. Who says they don't? Well, it turns out that the. The FDA and European Medicines agencies and other regulators, I think the CDC said, nope, nope, you don't need it yet. The data does not yet indicate it was this predictable. What about the Moderna people? I'm sure the Moderna people would love to tell you that theirs works better than Pfizer, because that could be cool. But don't you think the Moderna people are looking at the Pfizer people and saying, wait a minute, if we could make the case that you would get 10% extra coverage for a booster shot of the Moderna, should we recommend it? Because if we recommend it, it will make $20 billion for us that we weren't going to get otherwise. And it would make people 10% safer, which might not make any difference in terms of deaths, should we recommend it? You should assume they will. Right. If you want to predict what Moderna is going to do, they'll probably try to tell you their shot is better in the first place. But just to be safe, you better look at that booster shot. I mean, we're not saying you definitely need it, but 10% pandemic, watch out for those variants. So follow the money tells you that Moderna, no matter how well their shot works, are going to be influenced by this Pfizer thing and probably try to get away with the same thing. Here's a dumb story. So you're watching Hunter Biden's art career. So if Hunter Biden is going to sell this expensive art and that he made himself for $75,000 to half a Million per painting. And the worry was that people would buy these paintings as a way of bribing him, which would be an indirect way of bribing the senior Biden. And the solution apparently is that the White House worked on a deal with the art house that's going to be selling this stuff. That the buyers names will be secret. That's right, the buyers names will be secret. So even the Bidens, the public, nobody will know who bought it. So that's a pretty good idea, right? How would anybody ever know who bought this painting? Well, maybe everybody who visits the house of the person who bought it. Because do you buy a painting and then not put it on the wall? Seems to me that whoever spends half a million dollars for a painting is going to want to display that painting. They're going to want their friends to see it. How do you hide who buys this frickin painting? Now let me ask you this. If you wanted to bribe Hunter Biden by buying his painting, do you think it would be hard? Do you think that would be hard? You just get the message to somebody who knows Hunter Biden personally. You say, hey, tell Hunter that when tomorrow comes, I'm going to buy his half million dollar painting. And I, you know, I'm a Ukrainian oil company or whatever I am, you know, somebody who wants a favor from him and just let him know, just let him know I'm the, I'm the secret buyer. How hard would that be? How hard would it be for the Bidens to be the only ones to know who bought the painting? So here's what happened. The Bidens had a situation where somebody was going to buy this art and everybody would know that the Bidens were beholden to whoever bought the art. The Bidens actually figured out a way that the only people who don't know who bought the art is us. Right? Because you don't think the Bidens are going to find out one way or the other either before the purchase or after. You don't think the Bidens are going to find out who bought it? Seriously, you and I might not ever find out. But do you think there's any chance the Bidens won't find out? Of course they will. Of course they will. So they took a bad situation and they found a way to make it look better by making it way worse. It's way worse in the sense that at least if we knew who bought them, right? Tell me if I'm wrong here. At least if the public knew who bought the painting, we could keep an eye on them and see if Joe Biden makes any decisions that seem coincidentally favorable to the buyer of the art. But now that only the Bidens will know, they can do any favor they want. And you might even have somebody buy the art and put it in the, you know, just destroy it so nobody knows they even bought it. If you were going to bribe the Bidens, you would buy the art and you would immediately destroy it or hide it. But you wouldn't, you wouldn't put it on your wall, right? Somebody says Trump bought it. Now that would be funny. All right. So there again, money predicts. There's a Julian Zelizer, CNN political analyst who's also a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, is talking about it might be time to impose vaccine mandates and passports. I don't think it's time for that, do you? Because the public has to be willing, right? I mean, there's a line, you can push the public pretty far, but do you think you could push the public this far all the way to mandatory vaccines and passports? I don't think so. I think you have to read the room on this one, right? You can make, you know, let's say charitably, let's say you could make the argument for it and let's say it was a reasonable argument and you looked at it and it made sense. I don't think it matters because the mood of the public is just not there. I think that would just be an overreach. So. And I think the public has very clearly stated that it will accept the predicted level of death return for freedom. Right. Don't you think that the public has spoken? Go outside. See how many people are outside walking around living their life. The public has spoken. We have decided that the risk is now small enough that it's like driving to the store to get a loaf of bread. Meaning that you don't even consider the risk when you plan your life. Once you get to the point where you don't even consider the risk when you plan your life. I'm going to go to the grocery store today. Am I worried that if I don't have it delivered, I'll get Covid. Nope, nope. It's not even part of the decision. Do I have time? Do I have money? Do I need groceries? That's it. Once you reach that point where you're not even factoring it into your daily decisions and I'm vaccinated, so I have a little advantage there, I think the government has to just get the fuck out of it, right? They just got to get out of it. All right. Now, the other thing that's interesting is the number of people getting the COVID while they're also vaccinated. And I'm still uncertain whether I want that or don't want it, because, correct me if I'm wrong, but if the shots can wear off in effectiveness. But I don't think that actually being infected wears off as quickly or ever, really. So don't I want to get it? I wouldn't go out of my way to be infected. But given that I'm vaccinated, if I also got it, I would have sniffles for three days. Right. Or whatever, minor symptoms, and then I would have natural immunity on top of my artificial immunity. I'd be like a God, you know, I'd be. You may have had it already and not known. No, I've been tested so often because I did some traveling. So I've been tested every few weeks. And then I did some surgery last year. I've been tested quite a few times, maybe. How many of you have been tested? How many times? I'd be interested in this, in the comments. Tell me how many times you've done a COVID test. I'm going to try to remember how many times I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I think I've done 5, 6. I've done at least 6. And I'm looking at your numbers. Oh, the biggest number I see yet is 4. I'm up to 6 because of travel. 3. 10. Somebody had 10. 6. Yeah, we're pretty well tested. 2 times 0. 10. Another 10. Yeah, people having 10 of them. Probably you have some kind of a job where they have to test a lot. Somebody says it's so dangerous that you have to be tested to know you have it. Well, be reasonable. You know, we know that you don't have symptoms right away. All right. All right. Let's see if I got anything else. So Michael Avenatti. So Michael Avenatti got his two and a half years of prison for trying to extort Nike. Just do it. Bad advice in his case. He was probably thinking, I wonder if I should try to extort this major company. And then he thought to himself, ah, just do it. Worst advice ever. Just do it. Anyway, he was crying in court. A lot of people making fun of him for all that. Here's. You know, I believe. I know it's hard to believe, but I do have empathy for him because he did throw his life away and the life of his family and stuff, and I actually feel bad for him. But I would like to add this comment. Have you ever noticed, and this is just a pretty well established fact, that males tend to occupy the extremes of every category, right? So there are more men who are literally geniuses than there are women. Which is not to say men are smarter than women. Just, you know, I'm not one of them, so I'm not Einstein, so I don't get any credit for him because I also, you know, have a penis. So I'm not saying that, hey, men are awesome because there are a lot of male geniuses because I'm not one of them. Most of you are not one of them either. It just happens to be that the category I'm from also creates different kinds of people who are geniuses. But also we men are mostly the mentally disturbed idiots. There are way more criminals than idiots who are men as well. So men occupy the extremes and we have a different relationship with risk. So even the men who are not on the extremes, we are prone to risk. We're just designed for it. For some reason. We evolved for it, whatever. And here's my take. The reason that somebody like Michael Avenatti can even exist is because men take big dumb risks. It's just built into us. And it doesn't seem to be related to how smart you are. You could be really smart. I think Avenatti's probably plenty smart. But somehow you still take these risks. It's just built into us. And if you didn't have people like Michael Avenatti, then you wouldn't have a Trump, because it's the same thing that drives a Trump, that drives somebody who ends up tanking their whole life. Because you could easily imagine that Trump's future could go either direction right now. I mean, if you take this point in time, Trump will either be a triumphant returning president, very possible. Or a forever mocked one term president. Either thing could happen, right? So it's the risk takers who tend to move things forward. Jeff Bezos is, I think he's 10 days away or something from being on his own rocket, Blue origin, going into space, pretty risky stuff. But Bezos is like, yeah, sign me up now. Whatever it is that makes Bezos willing to get on a rocket ship that you couldn't pay me all of his money to get on, if you said to me, hey, we'll take all of Jeff Bezos money and give it to you, but we'd like you to be the first passenger on this untested jet. I would say, thank you, but I'll stay right where I Am. But aren't you glad that there is a Jeff Bezos? You can hate his politics. You can hate what the Washington Post does. You can hate what he's done to small business. But if our country didn't have the Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk kind of personalities, the people who will take gigantic risks that sometimes work. Yeah. Branson, etc. Risk takers. If we didn't have these crazy risk takers, society wouldn't go forward. But the price for the crazy risk takers who do things that work is you get your. Michael Avenatti's the crazy risk taker who he ran for president. Right. If he hadn't been brought down by his legal problems, I don't know, could he have been running the country? It's just so close between jail and running the whole world. Jail running the world. As the president of Haiti recently realized the difference between being the president of Haiti and being dead. Really close, because again, the president of Haiti had become a dictator, took a very high risk path, didn't work out. So as much as I cannot approve of anything that Michael Avenatti did. Yeah. Epstein was another risk taker in the worst possible way. Right. So you really can't have a world where you have the good risk takers that are absolutely essential, but you don't have any bad risk takers. It'd be great if you could, but it doesn't seem to be a possibility. All right. Some saying that Avenatti is evil, but Trump is not. Yeah. I mean, the crimes that Avenatti is accused of, I can't see Trump doing. Really? I can't see Trump doing that particular crime. All right. Four African leaders are all dead in last 12 months and five have refused vaccination. Are you saying that people are being killed because they're refusing to get their people vaccinated? That would be an interesting conspiracy theory, but I don't think we can. So Mark says Tony Heller seems credible to you. Here's the problem. So Tony Heller is a well known critic of climate change and a lot of people follow his work. Here's the problem. A lot of what he says looks true or true. Ish. Meaning that when he finds problems with the theory and, or the data or the way it's looked at, they might be good points. But when you see his presentation without the counterpoints, it looks persuasive. But the problem is everybody's argument without a counter argument looks persuasive. Imagine a court case where only the prosecution got to talk. Everybody would get prosecuted Almost. You would have almost nobody who didn't get prosecuted if you didn't also have a defense attorney. That's why you do it. Right? It's just completely obvious that you could convince a jury of anything if you're a good enough lawyer, as long as the other side doesn't get to talk. So when you say Tony Heller is convincing, what you're really telling me is you don't know what credible things look like. Because a credible thing would look like two people with the point in the counterpoint arguing right in front of you at the same time being able to address each other's points. And then when it's done, you say, oh, I think that one did a better job than the other one. Or maybe they're both credible, but you like one argument better. That would be a case of having an ability to know what looks credible. But if you simply say to me, I read Tony Heller's stuff and he looks credible to me, you're not really judging Tony Heller. You're judging your own inability to know what a credible thing even looks like, because there's no such thing as a credible one. Person by themselves just talking. That's not a thing. Just. If I could teach you just one useful thing in life, don't ever take credibility from one person talking. Ever. No one will debate Heller. Plenty of people have debated his specific points in writing extensively. So just look to debunking Tony Heller and read what the critics say, and you'll come away with a different opinion. Rudy Giuliani's law license suspended without due process or presenting his side. I don't know enough about that story, but is that how it works? Is there no appeal to losing your law license? It seems to me that it would just automatically be something that you could have some legal recourse to. So I'm not going to say right away that he has no recourse. Why don't we discuss the possibility that global warming could be a net positive? Well, because I don't think that's likely. And here's why. Change is bad when it comes to the base of stuff. So in economics, it's better to be inefficient and predictable than to try to fix that and create an unpredictable situation. Because people don't like to invest when things are unpredictable. So predictability is pretty high. So if you talk about climate change, the mere fact that it would change over 80 years, which would be, say, a short period of time in human history, all of that change is expensive. So we know it's going to be expensive. So when you say it's going to be a net benefit, you could almost guarantee that somebody's going to get rich. Some countries will be better off, some places will grow more food, some places will have longer, you know, longer times to grow things, especially if the winters get milder, et cetera. But you also know there might be rising seawater and people dying of the heat, et cetera. But at the same time, we'll be developing new air conditioning systems. But how are you going to power all those air conditioning systems? Because you need energy and we don't have enough clean energy. So is the warming going to cause the warming to get more? Because you need the air conditioning, which means the power, which has to be coal, because we don't have enough of the other stuff yet, can't build nuclear as quickly as we need to, even though that would be the big solution. So, as a general rule, anything that is a large change to a system that's largely working is going to be very bad news, because you have to adjust to all that change. However, your comment that it could be a net positive, totally appropriate. But would you make that choice if you could? Let me put it in different terms. Let's say I said to you, you have a magic power, and it's your magic power to make climate change either stop, so it's no problem at all, or to continue on the way it's going. And you're the magic person in the world and you get to decide. And the only thing you're going to decide is whether you think that climate warming or climate change is going to be net good or net bad. What do you do? Your magic. All right, I'll tell you what I'd do. I wouldn't introduce a big change into the world without a certainty that it was going to be good. You get that? Don't introduce a big change without a pretty big certainty that that big change is going to be good. And do we have something like a pretty good certainty that changing the climate of Earth in any direction would be a net positive? I don't think so. You could certainly make an argument that says, well, we'll grow more stuff, winters will be more mild, but you also have the other stuff. Rising seawater, too hot to live in places places can't grow, droughts, forest fires, et cetera. How do you net it out? Now, I'm an optimist, and I believe that whether the climate changes or not, humans are getting really, really good at compensating. I don't think you can predict how quickly we'll develop more efficient air conditioning. I don't think you can predict how efficiently we could move populations away from rising water. I think we would just be good at that stuff. So we could have every problem that the climate change people say, all of them. Like, every one of those things could happen and we could lose no people. You know, we could get to the point where zero extra people died because of climate change at the same time that the climate is just wreaking havoc all over the natural world. But we just become really good at predicting it and getting out of the way, which is a trend that has been, you know, as Michael Shellenberg says, often it's a trend that has continued for, I don't know, decades, if not hundreds of years. For example, we believe that climate change, or the scientists do believe, believe that climate change is making the forest fires worse in California. But every year fewer people die from forest fires. So how do you net that out? Yes, we have more forest fires, but fewer people die every year from a forest fire because we're just better at handling stuff. So, no, I don't think you would make. If you were magic, you would not make the choice to increase the temperature of the planet because it would be too much risk. But it's possible. So your question of might it be a positive is perfectly good question. But because you don't know, you don't want to change things that much. If things are going fine. The time you would change things a lot, even if you didn't know it would work, is if you were in an emergency. So if you had no choice, it's desperate. You're going to die if you do this, but you might not die if you do the other thing. Well, do the other thing, even if it's risky, because it's your best choice. All right? Climate always changes. Arrogant humans think they can change that. Well, Nimrod, that's his actual name. I'm not calling him a nimrod. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with humans saying that they can change the climate? You do realize that there's 100% chance that humans can change climate, right? Like, whether it's happening already is your question. But there's no doubt that we'll be able to do it. We know how to do it now. We can seed clouds now. We could probably spark a volcano if we wanted to. I don't know if we could do that, but I suppose if you nuked a volcano that was active, maybe something would come out of it. But I'm pretty sure that humans will be able to control weather and climate. Those things are completely doable within. Maybe not within my lifetime, but certainly within the lifetime of a lot of people who are watching this. Humans absolutely will be able to control the weather. Do you know what air conditioning is? Have you heard of it? Air conditioning, that's how you control the weather, at least where you are. So, yeah, we'll be able to control the weather. That's not arrogant, that's just science. All right, I believe I've said more than I need to say today, and the news continues to be gigantically boring. But we'll try to make it interesting with a simultaneous sip each and every day. By the way, the technology on locals for the live streaming, which I'm doing simultaneously with YouTube, is working really well for a beta product. I haven't had a problem with it at all the last number of times I've used it, so I think the people who decide to watch it there are going to be pretty happy. And the sound is a little bit better over on locals. I've got different hardware there. The simulation isn't working because there's no news. Well, you know, maybe that's a benefit that Biden is giving us. I'm definitely not worked up over the news. Maybe I should be. All right, that's all I got for now, and I'll talk to you youtubers tomorrow.