Episode 1297 Scott Adams - Bombing Syria, The Obesity-Virus Pandemic, How Not to "Log Off" on Zoom
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Biden Bombs Syria - Strangling a leopard - $15 minimum wage, yes or no? - COVID's key infection factors - Tiger Woods accident - Bill Gates says nuclear power will be acceptable again ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day, and it'll be one of the best ones ever. Yeah. Hey Omar, Dr. Funk, Juice, you too
View segment →. Good morning everybody. If you'd like to enjoy today to its maximum potential, and I know you would, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unpara…
View segment →o. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yep, that's the stuff. Oh, you can feel it just going down and making yourself healthier as you digest. Really good stuff. Well, you want to talk about all the interesting things in the news. I know you do. I know you do. But first, a question for you. What value do I produce that…
View segment →ou to understand it better by improving your talent stack. So I'm going to make you more effective in your life, not just informed. That will be my goal. So if you're wondering why to watch this, it would be because the people who do are getting smarter and better every single day. And by the way,…
View segment →ictatorship because people prefer it, because the alternative is being incompetent, having Congress muddle around? Yeah. Now the problem of course is that if you take it too far, let's say for example this latest bombing attack, let's say that when Trump did it and also when Biden did it, that let'…
View segment →you. All right, now let me take that story into this next news item. There was a man, I guess his last name was Raja Gopal. I think it was India. Was it India? Might have been Pakistan. I forget. But he's from the Karnataka Hassan district, so somebody can tell me where that is. But anyway, he was…
View segment →right? Well, I don't feel like I'm giving away a state secret because it's kind of obvious. Don't you think that our government and probably other ones are putting together deepfakes of other leaders and deepfakes of terrorists? Don't you think if we had a good deepfake of Osama bin Laden we could h…
View segment →how to turn off your ads and your ad blocker, which isn't too much of a bother. I would say I skip almost everything that's asking me for money or a password or my email address or to turn off ad blockers. And every time I go to one of those links I get angry. Now Twitter users are gonna have that…
View segment →business or product that you hear about, people would tell you why to use it, like what its extra advantage is. But I haven't heard that about Clubhouse and I don't know why. Does that mean there isn't any extra advantage? I don't know. I guess I'll keep that as an open question. Here there's big n…
View segment →ferent areas because not every area is the same. It might hurt some places. It might help some places. And that feels like a good argument. I don't know how accurate it is but it feels at least like it makes sense. So here's my advice to you. If you have a really strong feeling about this $15 minim…
View segment →are putting up with this. This is pure incompetence because the people making the decision, they don't know if $15 an hour is a good idea. Do you think there's anybody in Congress who knows more than I do? And I don't know much. That's the whole point. I don't know much about whether a $15 minimum…
View segment →tubing. He may have been doing a little tubing when the camera was still on. And here's the funniest part is that the young man, the 21-year-old employee, he also has a side company. When he's not being an assistant in schools he also runs Pirate Magic, a business that throws pirate parties for youn…
View segment →l as though that one restriction of nobody in your residence except the residents for a month and we'd be pretty well done. I feel like now you wouldn't get rid of the infection but you might get it down to a low level. Now does anybody disagree with that? Because it's something like over 50 percent…
View segment →sarily means as much as you might think it would mean. It could mean that he's just less controversial so the others have some specific reasons you're mad at them. But I can't think of a specific reason to be mad at Kevin McCarthy, can you? I can't think of a like a scandal or was he on the wrong si…
View segment →would suggest it would be a hit? And the executive said we don't look at the average because that's useless, which is really interesting to know. We look at how excited some people are. What you want is that a few people, you know maybe 10 percent of the audience just thinks it's the best thing they…
View segment →get elected. Somebody says she's misinformed. My point was that her mentor may have taught her a lot but if you factor in how quickly she would pick up what she learned the mentor may have already given all he could give. There may not be more to give there. All right. When has AOC ever faced a tou…
View segment →Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day, and it'll be one of the best ones ever. Yeah. Hey Omar, Dr. Funk, Juice, you too. Good morning everybody.
If you'd like to enjoy today to its maximum potential, and I know you would, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice, a canteen, a jug or a 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 of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip.
And people all over the world will be joining in right now. Go. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yep, that's the stuff. Oh, you can feel it just going down and making yourself healthier as you digest. Really good stuff.
Well, you want to talk about all the interesting things in the news. I know you do. I know you do. But first, a question for you. What value do I produce that would make you want to watch this in the era of being after Trump? Now when Trump was in office, a lot of people were watching me for my Trump persuasion and other comments about him. But why would you watch now?
I'll tell you what I'm going to try to do, and I'll look for some feedback on this. I'm going to try to make sure that anytime you watch me you're increasing your talent stack. In other words, I'm going to try to talk about what's happening in the news, but that won't be the main thing. The main thing will be to try to get you to understand it better by improving your talent stack. So I'm going to make you more effective in your life, not just informed. That will be my goal.
So if you're wondering why to watch this, it would be because the people who do are getting smarter and better every single day. And by the way, I think a lot of you will confirm that that's true in the comments while I'm talking about other things. For those of you who are newer, tell me if you think you've gotten anything valuable from watching me for however long you've watched me, and that'll tell the other people what's up.
All right. Biden decided to bomb some factions in Syria that are being funded and supported by Iran, in response to Iranian proxies hurting at least one contractor in an attack two weeks ago. Now I would like to say that this is a good move by Biden. Now if you're tuning in to me to watch me say bad things about Democrats and good things about Republicans, I'm not going to do that. Nothing like that will ever happen here. I'm just going to talk about what works and what doesn't, and you can play the politics yourself.
When Trump and Pence won in 2016, I talked about what I call the new CEO move, which is how you establish who you are. When a new CEO is hired, they'll often do something big and splashy right off the bat. They'll maybe fire some executives who needed it. They'll reorganize some things. But the idea is to establish who you are as the new leader right off the bat, because your first impression just has all this power forever. Whoever you are on day one, it's going to be hard to change that. So you want to get it right in the beginning.
So Pence and Trump did that when they started talking to Ford and Carrier when they first got elected, before they'd even been sworn in. It was a really, really good first move, CEO kind of play. And then Trump did it again when he fired all of his cruise missiles into that airport in Syria to give Russia a little bit of a tap on the shoulder. Now people watching it said, "Wow, that might even be sort of an overreaction," or "Wow, Trump sure went military quickly." But it was a good positioning attack because it said, yeah, there was also the mother of all bombs in Afghanistan. And I believe that Trump played that exactly right by establishing right up front, you don't know what I'm going to do, which he would say that directly. You can't predict what I'm going to do. But you did see me drop that mother of all bombs and you did see me attack that airport. So just be warned. You don't know what I'm gonna do, but it could definitely include lots of violence. That is exactly the positioning you want.
Now Biden comes in and of course our adversaries are going to be poking him. They're going to find out, hey, do we have a little more freedom under this new president? Are we going to be able to get away with a little bit more? And Biden has now sent the following message: no, no you can't.
Now I know what you're thinking. Was Biden even involved in the decision? Is he so mentally degraded that it's his staff who's making the decisions? I don't think it matters that much in this context, because whether it's Biden calling all the shots or some Biden cartel collectively making decisions, it looks the same. The message is the same, which is if you mess with the United States there will be violence. There will be violence. There will be a response.
Now I heard somebody on Twitter say, why do you wait so long, two weeks? That's all so perfect. Waiting two weeks to do your attack, perfect, because it also sends the following message: you don't know when it's going to come. We're not going to forget it. It's coming. Might be today, might be in two weeks, but the one thing you can be sure of, it's coming. Now of course you want to do it right, so it might take a few weeks to pick the right target and get the right assets in place and all that. So I'm going to give Biden an A-plus for handling this situation so far. Anybody disagree? Would anybody disagree with that grade?
Now there's a secondary question, and maybe it's not a secondary, maybe it should be primary. Some would argue the Rand Paul position that there's no authorization for this attack and the president can't just start a war, basically can't just attack another country. And I think that that position needs our full respect. In fact, Rand Paul's position is not unlike Jen Psaki's position just a few years ago when Trump was doing it, and where she criticized Trump for attacking Syria, basically not authorized, all the rest.
Now here's an interesting thing. I don't really understand the whole situation with executive orders. Do any of you understand what's going on with, let's say, the whole body of executive orders over the last few years? Because I don't quite understand how the president can just sort of do stuff that you thought Congress was supposed to do. How does the president just decide to just do it himself and then people obey it? Why do they obey it? Why does anybody obey an executive order?
Now I know that there's different kinds. There's some executive orders that are just a clarification on an existing law and that's perfectly fine. Everybody's okay with that. Somebody has to clarify the law, right? It's fairly fair game. Maybe the courts have to do it if people don't like how the president did it, but it's a good process. But what happens when the president does something with an executive order that the Constitution didn't quite foresee? We let that happen.
I feel as if, and this is just speculation, I need somebody smart to tell me how wrong this is because it's probably pretty wrong, but it feels like the country has a great, let's say a great flexibility with how they treat the executive, the president, when Congress isn't effective. Because Congress has such a low rating that we're happy when anything gets done. You see your government make a decision and then implement it and it goes well. It's hard to disagree with it because the alternative would have been to take it to Congress and nothing happens and it's a big fight and nothing good happens.
So it feels as if people are just sort of okay with executive orders because the alternative looks worse, which is to depend on Congress for making decisions. So are we sort of drifting toward a dictatorship because people prefer it, because the alternative is being incompetent, having Congress muddle around? Yeah.
Now the problem of course is that if you take it too far, let's say for example this latest bombing attack, let's say that when Trump did it and also when Biden did it, that let's say it was extra-constitutional, meaning the Constitution doesn't quite support this act. But what if the country does? The country might support it and by a majority. So I don't know. It feels like it could be dangerous, but on the other hand I like it when it happens generally. I like it when something happens. So I think I do like our presidents, including Biden, to have some executive order power.
Now the Congress and Rand Paul, and I think Rand Paul is a great asset to the country by pushing back on it, because you don't want the executive orders without the pushback, right? Anytime this happens, even if you like the executive order, don't you have to also like that Rand Paul is pushing against it? You could like both of those things because they work together pretty well. It keeps the executive orders maybe a little bit constrained because there's some pushback, but you still get to do them when they're important. It's kind of perfect.
So thank you to Rand Paul for pushing back, but at the same time I kind of like this. I like this action in terms of national security.
I've told you before that it's handy to have a story of you. Here's the helpful part of my broadcast. You should always have a heroic story of you, which is the sort of the imaginary story you have in your mind of who you are character-wise or who you are capability-wise or who you are basically, just who you are. And I've told you before that my story, and I'm going to add to this in a bit, but the personal story that I keep running as a little loop in my mind and always have is what I call prisoner island.
Prisoner island imagines that there's some island where all the prisoners go and there's no law there. They just are dropped on the island and there's no guards or anything. It's just a prisoner society, so it's pretty rugged there. So I get convicted of something and I'm dropped by helicopter onto the prisoner island. Well, Australia is a little bigger so you know that that doesn't work for my story, but imagine it's a smallish island and all the prisoners know each other and stuff.
Now on day one, if you drop me in prisoner island, how am I gonna do? Not so well, right, because I'm not physically large, et cetera. So the prisoners would beat me up and rape me day one. Day two, prisoners would beat me up and rape me again. Day three, day four are gonna look a lot alike. Beaten up, raped, beaten up, raped. Three or four months go by. Beaten up, raped.
But here's the prisoner island story. It's the story I run in my head. Come back in a year. Come back in a year. In a year I'm gonna run the island and everybody who touched me will be dead. But you have to wait a year. Day one won't go so well. Day two not so good. Come back in a year. They'll all be dead and I'll be running the island. Every time.
Now is that true? No, I just made it up, right? It's just a story in my head. Is it also true that I would fight through adversity? Well, I'm trying to make it true, right? I like to think it's true. But having a story of you is like a program that runs in your head permanently and it can turn you into that by being the story that guides you.
All right, now let me take that story into this next news item. There was a man, I guess his last name was Raja Gopal. I think it was India. Was it India? Might have been Pakistan. I forget. But he's from the Karnataka Hassan district, so somebody can tell me where that is. But anyway, he was riding his motorcycle and a cheetah or a leopard, it's not clear, attacked his family. Just like came from the bushes and attacked them and bit his son in the leg and starts attacking his son and wife.
This guy, who's not some fighter or hero or anything, he's just a guy, gets off his motorcycle and kills the leopard with his bare hands to save his family. He actually grabbed the leopard and strangled it. Did he get hurt in the process? Oh yeah, he did. Yeah, he got hurt. But he also saved his family and strangled a leopard or maybe a cheetah. A leopard, I don't know. It's pretty bad either way.
Now that's the prisoner island story. This is the prisoner island story. Now I don't know anything about the guy who did this, but it makes me wonder, does he have the prisoner island story in his head, some version of it? Has he carried a model of himself through his life that when he came to this situation the model kicked in and there was no doubt who was going to win the fight and that he was going to fight?
Now it probably was just reflex of somebody saving his family, so probably there wasn't a lot of thinking going on. It was just reflex. But whether or not he had the prisoner island story in his head, he has it now. He has it now. The next time he gets in a situation that you and I would be frightened to death of, he knows he can get through it or has gotten through something similarly dangerous.
So make yourself a prisoner island story. It doesn't have to be real. It just becomes the program that runs in your head. Could come in handy if you were attacked by a leopard.
Have you seen the videos of the Tom Cruise deepfakes? Look on my timeline if you haven't seen them yet. They're, I don't even know what to think about them. So there's some discussion about whether they're real deepfakes. They're actually so good that you can't tell if they're deepfakes. And some people are saying, ah, you got fooled. It's really just a look-alike. It's a look-alike pretending to be a deepfake. Maybe. Maybe. I can't tell. I can't tell if it's a real person. I also can't tell if it's actually Tom Cruise who's playing a prank. It doesn't quite look like Tom Cruise to me. So my personal opinion is it's not Tom Cruise. I can't rule out a look-alike, but it did look a lot like him.
Now somebody says too tall. Well, I don't know if you could tell from the video his height, but here's the thing. That's how good a deepfake is right now, that we can't even tell if it was really a deepfake. How good do you think the best ones are? Because this is just something that ran on Twitter, right? It's just something on social media. How is the best one? Don't you assume that there are government versions of this? You know, where we're working on it for both offensive and defensive reasons.
Because I have to think these deepfakes have a military application that's through the roof. What would happen? And you know we're working on this, right? Well, I don't feel like I'm giving away a state secret because it's kind of obvious. Don't you think that our government and probably other ones are putting together deepfakes of other leaders and deepfakes of terrorists? Don't you think if we had a good deepfake of Osama bin Laden we could have made some videos and put them into the system and caused people to act differently because they thought bin Laden was giving them guidance? And I'm not sure we didn't. How would we know, right? We wouldn't know if we'd done that. Nobody would tell you.
So the opportunity for weaponizing these deepfakes is really scary. Because imagine you get into a shooting war and we take a deepfake of the leader of the other side, put him on a video, and he says, hey everybody, lay down your weapons, we're surrendering. His own military would probably think it was true, right? Because everybody, even in the military, they have the phones, right? Or do they? If you're on operation maybe not because you could track the phone. But when they got back to base, people would have phones and stuff, right? So even if you're a terrorist you would see the video. It wouldn't have to be on TV. It would just be circulating. And there would be your leader, your terrorist leader, saying lay down your weapons, you know, we got everything we wanted or whatever.
So that's common. Twitter is talking about having some kind of pay model where you could optionally charge people for extra content, maybe even newsletters. So the world is moving toward this subscription base. But Twitter has a really big obstacle to overcome, a psychological obstacle. And the psychological obstacle is you're used to Twitter being free. Once you get used to it being free, people are going to complain if there's anything that looks like it's extra and it's on Twitter but you have to pay for it. It's really going to make people angry.
Let me tell you how you're going to feel. Well, this is how I feel. Now I'll read a story on let's say Twitter or CNN or whatever, and I'll click to see the original story and it's behind a paywall or you have to go and figure out how to turn off your ads and your ad blocker, which isn't too much of a bother. I would say I skip almost everything that's asking me for money or a password or my email address or to turn off ad blockers. And every time I go to one of those links I get angry.
Now Twitter users are gonna have that experience. They could be like, hey that looks interesting, click. Oh I'd have to pay for that. I'm angry. Oh here's a good one. Oh I'd have to pay for that. What would happen if everything that's useful on Twitter turns into a paywall? Because that's the only thing that'll be behind the paywall, right? Good stuff. You're not going to put your worthless stuff behind the paywall. So Twitter has a really big challenge how to handle the customer's psychology.
Now as you know I have a full subscription account separately on the Locals platform. But the Locals platform was built for just that. Its only purpose is to be a subscription platform. So there's no psychological barrier there. Nobody would sign up for it unless they knew exactly what they were getting. So they're all happy. But if you're used to it being free, people don't like you adding any kind of friction to that, even if it's the extra stuff, because they're going to think we used to get the extra for free, didn't we?
But I do think subscription is the way things have to go. So Twitter is making the right move. It's just going to be hard to implement in their case. I think they'll be successful at some level. All right. But if you don't want to be banned etc., something like Locals would be better.
Now I keep hearing about a new platform called Clubhouse, which as I understand it is some kind of open audio conversations with some set of rules. And I've received a number of invitations to it. I guess it's still invitation only. And I've declined them all so far. Now the reason that somebody says Clubhouse is Chinese, that's not true is it? I don't think that's true. So don't believe that unless you see some confirmation. I don't think that's true. But you got my interest if it is true. I definitely want to know it. Somebody says it's not a U.S. company. I was sure it was a U.S. company. No, the API they use is Chinese, somebody says. All right, so there may be some connection. Let's put that as an open question.
But that's not what I was going for today. What I was going for is I don't understand it. So this is the interesting thing. Clubhouse, everybody's talking about it and signing up and everything, so there must be something to it. But I keep waiting to hear something about it that makes me want to do it and I haven't. And I don't know what other people are hearing that makes them want to do it, because lots of smart, connected, forward-thinking people are already on it and telling me I should be on it. But I don't know why. Does anybody know why? Because I don't think you can monetize it, right? And if there's no video, isn't it less good?
All right. Somebody says think live podcasts. Well, I suppose if they did a good job on the interface it would be interesting. I'll probably check it out eventually. But my only point is not that it is or is not valuable, but why have I heard so much about it and yet nobody has told me what its value proposition is? Isn't that weird? Well, you would think that almost any business or product that you hear about, people would tell you why to use it, like what its extra advantage is. But I haven't heard that about Clubhouse and I don't know why. Does that mean there isn't any extra advantage? I don't know. I guess I'll keep that as an open question.
Here there's big news about the minimum wage $15 thing that the Democrats want to make a national law. And I guess there's a rules person who decides the parliamentary rules in the Senate has decided that they can't include that minimum wage thing with this big omnibus bill. There's some kind of rule that says you can't include things that are trivially related to the main purpose and this is too trivially related to the main purpose, I guess.
So number one, I don't agree with this parliamentary decision. It might be correct in terms of interpreting the rules, but why does Congress put a rule on itself? What's the point of that? Why would Congress limit its own flexibility? Yeah, somebody says it's a rule, it's a rule. But why? Why is it a rule? Why in the world can't the Congress say, you know, we all think this should be in this bill. Why can't we just put it in there? Would that bother you as a citizen if you were a citizen? Would it bother you that there was some weird rule that they collectively decided to just ignore because there wasn't any purpose for the rule? I can't see the purpose for it.
Now I get that you don't want to have big messed up group things and you want to maintain the ability to do a filibuster and you know it's complicated etc. But none of this stuff serves the public, I don't think. Somebody says in all capitals, you don't understand the Senate and House rules. I'm going to block you for telling me what I don't understand. Goodbye. In all caps. Probably could have gotten away with that if you hadn't used all caps. Don't criticize me in all caps if you want to come back. At the very least use upper and lower case. Then you've got a chance of surviving. But you're not going to survive with all caps and no reasons, just some kind of weird insult because I'm telling you I don't know the rules. So you don't need to yell at me that I don't know the rules when it's literally what I'm saying to you. I don't know the rules, okay? I'm swearing at a guy who can't hear me.
All right. So here's my take on the minimum wage. So forget about the rule part. This is, you know, you wish there could be something like an executive order from Mitch McConnell who could just say yeah there's a rule but we're just going to ignore it because it doesn't serve us.
So what is your opinion on the $15 minimum wage in the comments? Can I get a feel of the crowd? Yes? No? On the minimum wage going to 15. It doesn't look like it's going to be an option right away, but what do you think? I'm interested in my specific audience. So take a second for the answers to comment. I'll tell you my opinion.
It goes like this. And I base this on the fact I have a degree in economics. I have an MBA from a high-end college, you know, university, Berkeley. And here's my opinion about the $15 minimum wage. I don't know. I don't know. Every one of you who says yes or no, what are you basing that on? Because I'm telling you I've got a degree in this. I don't know. I don't know if it's good. How do you know? Where the hell do you get your opinion from? Seriously, where the hell did you get these opinions? Because I don't think economists agree, do they?
Wouldn't you like to see two economists, one on each side, just get on a show and give you 15 minutes? You don't need more but you don't need less. Just 15 minutes of two economists on either side saying here's why it's a good idea. And then the other one says this is why it's a bad idea. And then maybe then I could make a decision. But have you ever seen that? I haven't seen that.
I've seen complaints about people saying it should be different in different areas because not every area is the same. It might hurt some places. It might help some places. And that feels like a good argument. I don't know how accurate it is but it feels at least like it makes sense.
So here's my advice to you. If you have a really strong feeling about this $15 minimum wage and you're not a small business owner yourself, in other words it's not going to directly affect you, you immediately maybe shouldn't have that opinion. Because I don't think economists agree. You know, I don't think all economists are on the same side, do you? Do you think if you surveyed economists they'd all be like 95% of them would say either yes or no?
Now I get the Milton Friedman argument of course that the free market is the best mechanism. But we don't really have a free market. We don't really have a free market. We have a very, let's say we do have a free market. We don't have an efficient market. That's what I should have said. It is free but it's not efficient. In order for this minimum wage to find its right level based on competition and the economy and everything else, you need less friction. You need the ability for things to adjust in real time fairly quickly and all that. I don't believe that happens because people don't have that much mobility. There's just too much friction, I think.
So I have no idea whether this is a good idea. I have no idea. Now what do you do when you have no idea if something is a good idea? Anybody? Anybody? What do you do if you're not sure it's a good idea? You test it.
Which one of the sides, the Democrats or the Republicans, are saying, you know, we can't tell if this is good or bad. Why don't we run it for a year in let's say one state or maybe some selected counties? We'll just test it for one year and then we'll know, right? Are the Republicans saying that? Where are the Republicans saying, you know, we think it's a bad idea but we don't hate testing things? Where's that guy or a woman, right? Where's that person or any gender you like?
The only thing we need we don't have. Am I wrong? Is there some story I'm missing here? Tell me I'm wrong. Nobody knows the right answer. It would be trivially easy to test relative to big national things. It's easy. You just say this county, that's the rule for a year. Let's see how it goes, right? Don't understand why we as a population are putting up with this. This is pure incompetence because the people making the decision, they don't know if $15 an hour is a good idea.
Do you think there's anybody in Congress who knows more than I do? And I don't know much. That's the whole point. I don't know much about whether a $15 minimum wage is a good idea. I don't think so. And when I say good idea I mean good overall in the long run, right? All things considered. It's obviously good for the people who get the raise, most of them, if they keep their job. So I don't think we can be happy with any opinion on this. And I would tell you that if you have a firm opinion either yes or no on the minimum wage, you shouldn't. If you have a firm opinion on this you shouldn't, because smart people don't know. Like really well-informed smart people don't really know. They might lean one direction but without a test nobody knows.
All right. I've come to a potential decision about what's the biggest factor or factors in COVID infections. And it goes like this. I feel as if there are two things. And some of this is just speculation and a little bit of what I'm reading. But here's some things we've learned about the COVID infections.
We think number one in the UK, surprisingly they say there's no real difference in minority outcomes for coronavirus except that they get infected more often. But haven't we all been under the impression that your genetic makeup would probably make a difference in your outcomes? But it might be that that's true but that genetic difference is not necessarily ethnically related. In other words if you read between the lines here, the UK outcome, if let's say the data holds, you know any preliminary study like this you can't assume is right, but let's say it is, it would be saying that genetically there wouldn't be much difference across ethnicities but there might be a big difference in terms of lifestyle and economic situation. And that might be what's driving more infections. For example at the lower economic end of things there might be more people living per house. It could be that. It could be they have less health care resources. Could be that.
So this may be really important information if it's true. I'd still wait to get a confirmation of this. All right. So that's the first new piece of information. There might not be that much difference ethnically even though the outcomes are very different. Might be lifestyle not genetics. Although there could still be and probably is a gigantic genetic difference across individuals but not necessarily across ethnicities, which seems unlikely to me frankly. But doesn't seem unlikely to you that there's no difference in ethnicity? It feels unlikely but that's what we have here.
All right. Then we also have an HSE university research study. This says that, oh I'm sorry that was the genetic difference study, but there's an additional study that says that 63 percent of U.S. hospitalizations for COVID could have been prevented if we were not so darn fat. So obesity according to this one study is responsible for 30 percent of the excess hospitalizations. In the same sentence it says 63 percent. So it's written very poorly so I don't know exactly which of those numbers to look at because it looks like it's two different numbers saying the same thing but there's a gigantic difference. Now we all knew that, right? We all knew that.
But there's some kind of word that I didn't write down that says that sometimes it's the combination of two things. You know you need the comorbidity plus the virus. One by itself doesn't kill you. Now why do we call this simply a virus pandemic when it's clearly an obesity pandemic at the same time? It's two pandemics if you call obesity a pandemic. But we sort of ignore one of them and pay all of our attention to the other one when they're clearly both gigantic variables.
Now I agree the virus itself is a bigger variable than obesity but the obesity thing is so big it's like you should talk about them in the same sentence every time. We've got a big problem with the virus killing our fat people right now. I don't do fat shaming so I'm just using fat in a casual way, not to mean an insult. You know I myself have been a few pounds overweight at various times in my life and so I don't do fat shaming. But it's just simply a fact that Americans are overweight. So I feel as if the fact that we don't talk about that more is for what? Social reasons? Wokeness? Is there some reason we can't talk about people's health because they'll feel bad? It'll be racist somehow? Sure.
Here's the most predictable thing. What was the most predictable thing that would come out of the Tiger Woods thing? And by the way I don't mean to make fun of anything that happens to Tiger Woods. We all hope that he recovers and it is a tragedy so I'm not going to take anything away from how bad this is. But the most predictable thing, and I wish I'd said it in public because it was so predictable, today we learn that Tiger Woods does not remember the crash. Was that predictable?
As soon as I heard that he was awake when they found him and he was coherent and all that but that the actual cause of the crash was unknown, as soon as I heard that I said to myself he's going to say he doesn't remember the crash. He's going to say he doesn't remember what happened. What would you do in that situation? What would you do in that situation if that were me? I would say I didn't remember the crash because he might have been texting. I'm not saying he was. He might have had something in his system. Apparently he was not tested for any drugs. Now I don't know if the rules are different in the U.S. but because there were no overt signs of drug use or inebriation, in other words there was nothing in his car that suggested he had taken something and nobody had, there were no eyewitnesses and said we saw him put something in his mouth or anything like that. So if you don't have any cause it's just an accident I guess they can't check.
So Tiger Woods can just say I don't remember. They won't ever check his blood to find out if he was inebriated and it looks like he can just go with that story that he doesn't remember and he'll be fine from any kind of repercussions. So I don't think anything was more predictable than he would say he doesn't remember. Do you believe it? Do you believe he doesn't remember? I'm going to go on record as saying no I don't believe it. It's not impossible. It's traumatic, very traumatic. Could be that the cause of the accident was that he blacked out. So then of course he wouldn't remember it. It certainly looks like he blacked out, doesn't it? Wouldn't you say that the odds are based on how far the car went etc. you'd have to think he wasn't conscious, wouldn't you?
And so to me the texting or the cell phone or even if an animal ran in the road, I don't feel like they completely would describe what happened. It feels like he was unconscious but that's just speculation. No, no. All right.
Amy, do you know who Amy Siskind is or Siskind? But she's one of the more ridiculous characters on Twitter I think. She's blocked me and vice versa eventually. But she was like a crazy anti-Trump person and she tweeted after Biden bombed Syria. She tweeted, so different having military action under Biden. No middle school level threats on Twitter. Trust Biden and his team's competence. A tear is coming to my eye because Biden, he knows how to bomb Syria in a responsible way, not the way Trump did it with his irresponsible taunts. No, Trump bombed Syria the wrong way whereas Biden, he's bombing Syria in a responsible way. So big difference there according to Amy.
So China apparently did some COVID tests on some U.S. diplomats and decided to go with the anal test instead of the cheek swab. That's right. Instead of the nasal swab with the cheek swab, China decided to shove something up our diplomats' asses. They complained. The diplomats complained about China shoving things up their asses and China said oh it was an error. It was a mistake. Sorry. Didn't mean it. Sorry.
And what will the United States do? Will we turn the other cheek? Will we note that although America went to Mars, China went to Uranus? I would like to give this opportunity for all of you to add your own jokes about China shoving a COVID test up the ass of our diplomats. What would Trump have done if China shoved things up the ass of our diplomats and then said whoops, whoops, sorry? What would Trump have done? Would he do what Biden is likely to do? Complain? I don't know what he would have done but he should have closed the embassies. Should just close the embassies. Like I don't know how you protect your diplomats but do you want to be a diplomat that was not protected the way these guys were not protected? These guys and women and genders of all types, they were not protected.
Now I think they probably had a choice of saying no but then they probably couldn't travel or I don't know. There's probably some repercussion. So I don't feel this can go unaddressed. Do you? This should not be unaddressed. I think Trump would have addressed it. I don't know if Biden will.
There's a new story of a classroom assistant who didn't know his Zoom was still on and he may have done a little tubing. He may have been doing a little tubing when the camera was still on. And here's the funniest part is that the young man, the 21-year-old employee, he also has a side company. When he's not being an assistant in schools he also runs Pirate Magic, a business that throws pirate parties for youngsters while he portrays a character named Captain Silly Bones.
Let me give you this advice. Here's some good advice for you and you can take this to the bank. If there's any chance at all that you're going to get caught masturbating on Zoom, don't have a side business. Don't have a side business called pirate parties and don't call yourself Captain Silly Bones. Don't do them at the same time. That's like a comorbidity. One of those things just by itself, let's say the pirate parties, one of those things by itself that's fine. Pleasuring yourself in private, far as I know, still totally legal. Totally legal. A problem when you combine the two things on a Zoom call, right?
You know what, Captain Silly Bones, I don't think he's gonna get booked for another party.
Let me give you some advice that you will find very useful. Let me tell you what I do. The moment I'm done, I'm done with these Periscopes. The moment I'm done with them I've got two screens here, two iPads that are facing me where I would sit at my office desk. The first thing I do after I turn these off is I turn them this way so you're looking at each other. Now the first thing I do when I'm done with any kind of a Zoom call on my laptop, first thing I do, close the laptop.
So let me suggest to you that you never assume, never assume that you're not on livestream because that's how you lose your pirate parties if you know what I mean. Never assume it. So as a habit you should physically move your camera out of a viewing distance when you're done every time and just do it every time as a habit.
I'll tell you one wake-up call was when somebody discovered that I guess Mark Zuckerberg puts tape over the camera on his own laptop. Now do you think Mark Zuckerberg understands the world of security and what is or is not a risk? Oh he does. And if he's covering up the camera on his laptop maybe you should too. Now he's more of a target than you are but you're all targets. Yeah. And the same with the hot mic. Just assume you're always being listened to.
Now I've got a number of digital products here, everything from my phone to my Amazon digital assistant. So I just assume that I'm being recorded all the time. I just assume it. I just assume there's nothing I say even in the privacy of my own home, even in the bathroom. I just assume that somebody's listening or could. Doesn't mean they are listening. They just could. Technologically they could.
All right. So being boring is how I protect myself.
CNBC had this story and I think it's important that it's CNBC because it's a major, major network, right? Bill Gates was asked about nuclear power and he said it absolutely will be politically acceptable again, which is an interesting way to make the prediction. I think he was asked a specific question but according to Bill Gates, who most of you would associate with the left, wouldn't you? Now I don't think he associates himself that way. I doubt, I mean maybe he's a Democrat, I don't know. But he seems more like a problem solver than a political animal. And he's saying as clearly as possible nuclear power will absolutely be politically acceptable again. And he points out that it's safer than oil, coal and natural gas. The reason it will be acceptable is that it's safer.
And then he goes on to talk about one of the companies he's invested in, TerraPower. It's a generation 4 nuclear power that can't melt down and it's smaller, more economical. It's more off-the-shelf pieces. You can transport it easily etc. So that we may be years away from making that commercial but it really does matter that Bill Gates said this because he has credibility with the left. You know he thinks climate change is a big problem so he's got credibility.
Here's the other observation I was going to make about COVID. I feel like besides obesity the other biggest factor is how many strangers you let in your house. And by strangers I mean anybody who doesn't live there normally. So I feel as if if we controlled one variable we would get through the pandemic quickly. Now maybe the vaccinations will get us there on time anyway. But if in the beginning we had only done one restriction I think we'd already be done. And that one restriction would be don't let anybody inside your residence who is not a resident. Unless you know it could be the plumber with a mask, right? But nobody to visit. Not even your out-of-town family members.
I feel as though that one restriction of nobody in your residence except the residents for a month and we'd be pretty well done. I feel like now you wouldn't get rid of the infection but you might get it down to a low level. Now does anybody disagree with that? Because it's something like over 50 percent of infections. It's worse in the winter when you're indoors. Somebody says I thought we did that. No we didn't really do that. We said don't you know you don't want to socially mingle but I don't think anybody took it seriously inside their own house. I think everybody lets their other family members. I think everybody lets the boyfriend or the girlfriend come over. I feel like inside the house there are no rules and that probably was the main problem. Probably the main problem.
And I would also think that you could solve that with statistics and publicity. If you stopped somebody on the street and said to them what's the main place you get infected, what would the average person say? Think about it. You're probably way more informed than the average consumer just the fact you're watching a live stream about the world in politics. The average person isn't really paying attention to too much news on average. So stop the average person on the street and say to them where do you think most infections happen? What would they say? I'll bet they wouldn't say home. I'll bet most people would say well they closed the restaurants and gyms. It's probably restaurants and gyms. Or they might say must be the workplace because why else would they do the lockdown? But I'll bet it's not. I'll bet if you simply produced enough statistics to say look most of it is because you're letting somebody in your little unaircirculated space who doesn't live there. That's most of it. I think if we just hammered people with I don't know what the real number is like 56 percent is in the home and just keep telling people that. Say it's because you use your app on Tinder right or whatever it is. So that's all I have to say about that.
Now Rasmussen has an interesting poll in which they were asking about people's opinion of some national leaders. You know I've been telling you why is there not like a new national leader and I've said AOC may fill that spot. But here are some names. I'm going to tell you the names that they polled and let me see if you can guess who has the highest favorability at the moment with the public. So this is the entire public. The names they tested were, this is Rasmussen, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and AOC.
Now add together their two favorable categories, the highly favorable and the normal favorable. And who among those do you believe had the highest favorability? Take a guess. I want to see in the comments how plugged in you are to the national consciousness. Most people are guessing AOC but I think you're guessing that because you think that's going to be the answer because why would I bring it up? I always talk about AOC's persuasion so I feel like I've biased the survey. I think I biased the survey too much. You're trying to guess what it's going to be.
Here's the answer. Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy. He has the highest favorability of this group. What? How the hell did that happen? Did you see that coming? Now I don't think that necessarily means as much as you might think it would mean. It could mean that he's just less controversial so the others have some specific reasons you're mad at them. But I can't think of a specific reason to be mad at Kevin McCarthy, can you? I can't think of a like a scandal or was he on the wrong side of something? I know it could be that he just hasn't caused any trouble and that people respond to a specific story they remember more than they respond to the average.
So here are the numbers. So Kevin McCarthy if you add his two favorable categories together 43. Compare that to McConnell at 29. It's a big difference. Compared to Pelosi at 37, surprisingly good. Schumer 32 and AOC at 34.
So if you were to look at this would you say to yourself my goodness Kevin McCarthy should run for president because he has a substantially like a 30 percent higher favorability than AOC? But it doesn't work that way because our primary system does like the exciting people, right? So I would say AOC already has enough support to win a primary. I think she already has enough support to win a primary for president someday if it doesn't change. But it certainly raises a question about Kevin McCarthy if he has bigger ambitions to run for president. That would be interesting. So I'll just put that name out there. We're all looking for our next leader and it's very interesting that he doesn't have obvious negatives.
Yeah it could be that just as the lowest profile, meaning as somebody says in the comments that just people don't know as much about him so they don't have a negative feeling so they say he's okay. It could be just that. So you have to be careful about averages if I've taught you anything. And I'll remind you this is what I call the Hollywood way of looking at favorability. And I learned this when I was doing a Dilbert TV show which never made it to the air. We did, we tried to do a live action one with real actors. The animated one did eventually get on TV. But when I was testing that we made a pilot. We brought people into a room and they have their little buttons that they push when there's something they like that's happening on the screen.
And I asked the executive what are we looking for? You know what average approval of the TV show would suggest it would be a hit? And the executive said we don't look at the average because that's useless, which is really interesting to know. We look at how excited some people are. What you want is that a few people, you know maybe 10 percent of the audience just thinks it's the best thing they've ever seen. You don't even care about the other 90 percent because most shows are not watched by 90 percent of the public. A huge hit whether it's a song, a movie, a TV show is because 10 percent of the public loves it. That's what makes it. Same with Dilbert. If you ask the average person hey how about this Dilbert comic, the average person would say not for me. But something like 10 or 20 percent of the public who has a job and relates to the situations etc. will cut it out, buy the book, get the calendar and that's enough to make Dilbert wildly successful.
So be careful when you're looking at average favorability because it doesn't predict. What does predict is if you're wildly hating or loving an individual such as a Trump or an AOC. So Kevin McCarthy doesn't have the wild hate or the wild love and that usually does not predict national success at least running for president's success. But how hard would it be for him to learn that or to use, let's say, to adopt a persona that could get him elected? Probably could do it. Probably could do it. I would guess he has the capability to raise his game but we'll see.
All right that's all I got for now. Yeah I know about the brains behind AOC. There's you know she was sort of selected and groomed and there was a mentor who probably made a big difference. But here's the thing. Everybody who thinks she's not smart, you're all wrong. Say what you will about her politics. She's really smart. I hate to tell you but it's obvious. If you're still judging her as like the bartender you are so missing what's going on. She's smart. Most of our members of Congress are. Most of them. It's not even unusual. That's how they get elected.
Somebody says she's misinformed. My point was that her mentor may have taught her a lot but if you factor in how quickly she would pick up what she learned the mentor may have already given all he could give. There may not be more to give there. All right. When has AOC ever faced a tough interview? You say I wouldn't worry about that at all. I'm pretty sure she could handle a tough interview. And she does what Trump does which is she'll do the big ask that you think is ridiculous but then it ends up well because she negotiates toward the middle.
All right. That's all we got for now and I will talk to you later. All right YouTubers. Somebody says she even flubs the softball. I'd have to assume some examples of that. Her public speaking is so good that I can't imagine that she would be bad in a tough interview. Who's going to jail for the fraud? Which fraud? Let's see just looking at some of your questions. She's one generation removed from. All right well there's a lot of with Margaret Hoover not good. How do you bruise your arm? Is my arm bruised? That's weird. I didn't know I had a bruise. You know what's weird? I can't see it. I'm looking at my arm and I can't see it but I can see it on camera. Just the lighting is different actually. I have no idea. I must have banged it on something. It's not a burn. It's a bruise. I just don't know how I got it.
All right that's all for now and I'll talk to you later.
hey everybody come on in it's time it's time for coffee with scott adams best time of the day and it'll be one of the best ones ever yeah hey omar dr funk juice you too good morning everybody and if you'd like to enjoy today to its maximum potential and i know you would all you need is a couple of marker glasses tango chalice of time canteen jogger flask vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure dopamine of the day the thing makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip and people all over the world will be joining in right now go uh-huh yeah yep that's the stuff that's oh you can feel it just going down and making yourself healthier as you as you digest really good stuff well you want to talk about all the interesting things in the news i know you do i know you do but first a question for you what value do i uh do i produce that would make you want to watch this in the era of being after trump now when trump was in office a lot of people were watching me for my trump persuasion and other comments about him but why would you watch now i'll tell you what i'm going to try to do and i'll look for some feedback on this i'm going to try to make sure that anytime you watch me you're increasing your talent stack in other words i'm going to try to talk about what's happening in the news but that won't be the main thing the main thing will be to try to get you to understand it better by improving your talent stack so i'm going to make you more effective in your life not just informed that will be my my goal so if you're wondering why to watch this it would be because the people who do are getting smarter and better every single day and by the way i think a lot of you will confirm that that's true uh in the comments while i'm talking about other things for those of you who are newer tell me if you think you've gotten anything valuable from watching me for however long you've watched me and that'll tell the other people what's up all right biden decided to bomb some factions in syria that are being funded and supported by iran in response to iranian proxies hurting at least one contractor in an attack two weeks ago now i would like to say that this is a good move by biden now if you're if you're tuning in to me to watch me say bad things about democrats and good things about republicans i'm not going to do that nothing like that will ever happen here i'm just going to talk about what works and what doesn't and you can you can play the politics yourself when when trump and pence won in 2016 i talked about the what i call the new ceo move which is how you establish who you are when a new ceo is is hired they'll often do something big and splashy right off the bat they'll maybe fire some executives who needed it they'll reorganize some things but the idea is to establish who you are as the new leader right off the bat because your first impression just has all this power forever whoever you are on day one it's going to be hard to change that so you want to get it right in the beginning so pence and trump did that when they started going talking to ford and carrier when when they first got elected before they'd even been sworn in it was really really good first move uh ceo kind of play and then trump did it again when he fired all of his cruise missiles into that airport in syria to give russia a little bit of a tap on the shoulder now people watching it said wow that might even be sort of an overreaction or wow trump sure went military quickly but it was a good positioning attack because it said yeah there was also the mother of all bombs in afghanistan and i believe that trump played that exactly right by establishing right up front you don't know what i'm going to do which he would say that directly you can't predict what i'm going to do but you did see me drop that mother of all bombs and you did see me attack that airport so just be warned you don't know what i'm gonna do but it could definitely include lots of violence that is exactly the positioning you want now biden comes in and of course our advertise adversaries are going to be poking them they're going to find out hey do we have a little more a little more freedom under this new president are we going to be able to get a little get away with a little bit more and biden has now sent the following message no no you can't now i know what you're thinking was biden even involved in the decision is he so mentally degraded that it's his staff who's making the decisions i don't think it matters that much in this context because whether it's biden calling all the shots or some biden cartel collectively making decisions it looks the same the the message is the same which is if you mess with the united states there will be violence there will be violence there will be a response now i heard somebody on twitter say uh why do you wait so long two weeks that's all so perfect waiting two weeks to do your attack perfect because it also sends the following message you don't know when it's going to come we're not going to forget it it's coming might be today might be in two weeks but the one thing you can be sure of it's coming now of course you want to do it right so it might take a few weeks to pick the right target and get the right assets in place and all that so i'm going to give biden an a-plus for for handling this situation so far anybody disagree would it would anybody disagree with that grade now there there's a secondary question and maybe it's not a secondary maybe it should be primary some would argue the rand paul position that there's no authorization for this attack and the president can't just start a war basically can't just attack another country and i think that that position needs our full respect in fact uh rand paul's position is not unlike jen saki's uh position just a few years ago when trump was doing it and where where she criticized trump trump for attacking syria basically not authorized all the rest now here's an interesting thing i don't really understand the whole situation with executive orders do you do any of you understand what's going on with let's say the whole body of executive orders over the last few years because i don't quite understand how the president can just sort of do stuff that you thought congress was supposed to do how does the president just decide to just do it himself and then people obey it why do they obey it why do why does anybody obey an executive order now i know that there's different kinds there's some executive orders that are just a clarification on an existing law and that's perfectly fine everybody's okay with that somebody has to clarify the law right it's fairly fair game maybe the courts have to do it if people don't like how the president did it but it's a good process but what happens when the president does something with an executive order that the constitution didn't quite foresee we let that happen i feel as if and this is just speculation i need somebody smart to tell me how wrong this is because it's probably pretty wrong but it feels like the country has a great let's say a great flexibility with how they treat the executive the president when congress isn't effective because congress has such a low rating that we're happy when anything gets done you know you you see your government make a decision and then implement it and it goes well it's hard to disagree with it because the alternative would have been to take it to congress and nothing happens and it's a big fight and nothing good happens so it feels as if um it feels as if people are just sort of okay with executive orders because the alternative looks worse which is to depend on congress for making decisions so are we sort of drifting toward a dictatorship because people prefer it because the alternative is being incompetent having congress muddle around yeah now the problem of course is that if you take it too far let's say for example this latest bombing attack let's say that when trump did it and also when biden did it that let's say it was extra constitutional meaning the constitution doesn't quite support this act but what if the country does you know the country might support it and by a majority so i don't know it feels like it could be dangerous but on the other hand i like it when it happens generally i like it when something happens so i think i do i do like our presidents including biden to have some executive order power now the congress and rand paul and i think rand paul is a is a great asset to the country by pushing back on it because you don't want the executive orders without the pushback right anytime this happens even if you like the executive order don't you have to also like that rand paul is pushing against it you could like both of those things because they're they work together pretty well it keeps the executive orders maybe a little bit constrained because there's some pushback but you still get to do them when they're important it's kind of perfect so thank you to rand paul for pushing back but at the same time i kind of like this i like this action in terms of national security i've told you before that uh it's handy to have a story of you here's the helpful part of my broadcast you should always have a heroic story of you which is the the sort of the imaginary story you have in your mind of who you are character wise or who you are capability wise or or who you are basically just who you are and i've told you before that my story and i'm going to add to this in a bit but the the personal story that i keep running as a little loop in my mind and always have is what i call prisoner island and prisoner island imagines that there's some island where all the prisoners go and there's no there's no law there they just are dropped on the island and there's no guards or anything it's just a prisoner society so it's pretty rugged there so i get convicted of something and i'm dropped by helicopter onto the prisoner island well australia is a little bigger so you know that that doesn't work for my story but imagine it's the smallest smallish island and all the prisoners know each other and stuff now on day one if you drop me in prisoner island how am i gonna do not so well right because i'm not physically large et cetera so the prisoners would beat me up and rape me day one day two prisoners would beat me up and rape me again day three day four are gonna look a lot alike beaten up raped being up raped three or four months go by beating up raped but here's here's the uh the prisoner island story it's the story i run in my head come back in a year come back in a year in the year i'm gonna run the island and everybody who touched me will be dead but you have to wait a year day one won't go so well day two not so good come back in a year they'll all be dead and i'll be running the island every time now is that true no i just made it up right it's just a story in my head is it also true that i would fight through you know adversity well i'm trying to make it true right i like to think it's true but having a story of you is like a program that runs in your head permanently and it can make it you it can it can turn you into that by being the story that guides you all right now let me take that story into this next news item there was a a man i guess his last name was raja gopal i think it was india was it india might have been pakistan i forget but he's from the karna tacos hassan district so somebody can tell me where that is but anyway he was riding his motorcycle and a a cheetah or a leopard it's not clear uh attacked his family just like came from the bushes and attacked us and bit his son in the leg and starts attacking his son and wife this guy who's not some you know he's not some like fighter or hero or anything he's just a guy gets off his motorcycle and kills the leopard with his bare hands to save his family he actually grabbed the leopard and strangled it did he get hurt in the process oh yeah he did yeah he got hurt but he also saved his family and strangled a leopard or maybe a cheetah cheater a leopard i don't know it's pretty bad either way now that's the prisoner island story this is the prisoner island story now i don't know anything about the guy who did this but it makes me wonder does he have the prisoner island story in his head some version of it has he carried a model of himself through his life that when he came to this situation the model kicked in and and there was no doubt who was going to win the fight and that he was going to fight now it probably was just reflex of you know somebody saving his family so probably there wasn't a lot of thinking going on it was just reflex but whether or not he had the prisoner island story in his head he has it now he has it now the next time he gets in a situation that you and i would be frightened to death of he knows he can get through it or has gotten through something similarly dangerous so make yourself a prisoner's island story it doesn't have to be real it just becomes the program that runs in your head could come in handy if you were attacked by a leopard have you seen the videos of the uh the tom cruise deep fakes uh look on my timeline if you haven't seen them yet um they're i don't even know what to think about them so there's some discussion about whether they're real deep fakes they're actually so good that you can't tell if they're deep fakes and some people are saying ah you got fooled it's really just a look-alike it's a look-alike pretending to be a deep fake maybe maybe i can't tell i can't tell if it's a real person i also can't tell if it's actually tom cruise who's playing a prank it doesn't quite look like tom cruise to me so my personal opinion is it's not tom cruise i can't rule out a look-alike but it did look a lot like him now uh somebody says too tall well i don't know if you could tell from the video his height but here's the thing that's how good a deep fake is right now that we can't even tell if it was really a deep fake how good do you think the best ones are because this is just something that ran on twitter right it's just something on social media how is the best one don't you assume that there are government let's say government versions of this you know where we're we're working on it for both offensive and defensive reasons because i have to think these deep fakes have a military application that's through the roof what would happen and you know we're working on this right well i i don't feel like i'm giving away a state secret because it's kind of obvious don't you think that our government and probably other ones are putting together deep fakes of other leaders and deep fakes of uh terrorists don't you think if we had a good deep fake of osama bin laden we could have gotten we could have made some videos and put them into the system and cause people to act differently because they thought bin laden was giving them guidance but we could and i'm not sure we didn't how would we know right we wouldn't know if we'd done that nobody would tell you so the the uh opportunity for um weaponizing these deep fakes is really scary because imagine you get into a shooting ore and we take the the a deep fake of the leader of the other side put him on a video and he says hey everybody lay down your weapons we're surrendering his own military would probably think it was true right because everybody even in the military they have the phones right or do they if you're on operation maybe not because you could track the phone but uh when they got back to base people would have phones and stuff right so even even if you're a terrorist you would see the video it wouldn't have to be on tv it would just be circulating and there would be your leader your terrorist leader saying uh lay down your weapons you know we got everything we wanted or whatever so that's common twitter is talking about having some kind of pay model where you could optionally charge people for extra content maybe even newsletters so the world is moving toward this subscription base but twitter has a really big obstacle to overcome a psychological obstacle and the psychological obstacle is you're used to twitter being free once you get used to it being free people are going to complain if there's any anything that looks like it's extra and it's on twitter but you have to pay for it it's really going to make people angry let me tell you how are you going to feel um well this is how i feel now i'll read a story on let's say twitter or cnn or whatever and i'll i'll click to see the original story and it's behind a paywall or you have to go and figure out how to turn off your ads and your ad blocker which isn't too much of a bother i would say i skip almost everything that's asking me for money or a password or or my email address or to turn off ad blockers and every time i go to one of those links i get angry now twitter users are gonna have that experience they could be like hey that looks interesting click oh i'd have to pay for that i'm angry oh here's a good one uh oh i'd have to pay for that what would happen if everything that's useful on twitter turns into a paywall because that's the only thing that'll be behind the paywall right good stuff you're not going to put your worthless stuff behind the paywall so twitter has a really big challenge how to handle the the customers psychology now as you know i have a full subscription account separately on the locals platform but the locals platform was built for just that it's its only purpose is to be a subscription platform so there's no psychological barrier there nobody would sign up for it unless they knew exactly what they were getting so they're all happy but if you're used to it being free people don't like you adding any kind of friction to that even if it's the extra stuff because they're going to think we used to get the extra for free didn't we but i do think subscription is the way things have to go so twitter is making the right move it's just going to be hard hard to implement in their case i think they'll be success successful in at some level all right but if you don't want to be uh banned etc something like locals would be better now i keep hearing about a new platform called clubhouse which as i understand it is some kind of open audio conversations with some set of rules and i i've i've received a number of invitations to it i guess it's still invitation and i've uh i've declined them all so far now the reason that someone somebody says clubhouse is chinese that's not true is it i don't think that's true um so don't believe that unless you see some confirmation i don't think that's true but uh you got my interest if it is true i definitely want to know it somebody says it's not a u.s company i was sure it was a u.s company no the api they use is chinese somebody says all right so there may be some connection let's put that as an open question but that's not what i was going for today what i was going for is i don't understand it so this is the interesting thing clubhouse everybody's talking about it and signing up and everything so there must be something to it but i keep waiting to hear something about it that makes me want to do it and i haven't and i don't know what other people are hearing that makes them want to do it because lots of smart connected forward-thinking people are already on it and telling me i should be on it but i don't know why does anybody know why because i don't think you can monetize it right and if there's no video isn't it less good all right somebody says think live podcasts well um i suppose if they did a good job on the interface it would be interesting i'll probably check it out eventually but my only point is not that it is or is not valuable but why have i heard so much about it and yet nobody has told me what its value proposition is isn't that weird well you would think that almost any business or product that you hear about people would tell you why to use it like what its extra advantage is but i haven't heard that about clubhouse and i don't know why does that mean there isn't any extra advantage i don't know i guess i'll keep that as an open question um here there's a big news about the minimum wage 15 thing that the democrats want to want to make a national law and i guess the there's a rules person who decides the parliamentary and rules person in the senate has decided that they can't include that minimum wage thing with this big omnibus built there's some kind of rule that says you can't include things that are trivially related to the main purpose and this is too trivially related to the main purpose i guess so number one i don't agree with this parliamentary decision it might be correct in terms of interpreting the rules but why does congress put a rule on itself what what's the point of that why would why would congress limit its own its own flexibility yeah somebody says it's a rule it's a rule but why why is it a rule why in the world can't the congress say you know we all think we all think this should be in this bill why can't we just put it in there would that bother you as a citizen if you were a citizen would it bother you that there was some weird rule that they collectively decided to just ignore because there wasn't any purpose for the rule i can't see the purpose for it now i get that you don't want to have big you know messed up group things and you want to maintain the ability to do a filibuster and you know it's like complicated etc but none of this stuff serves the public i don't think uh somebody says in all capitals you don't understand the senate and house rules i'm going to block you for telling me what i don't understand goodbye in all caps probably could have gotten away with that if you hadn't used all caps don't criticize me in all caps if you want to come back at the very least use upper and lower case then you've got a chance of surviving but you're not going to survive with all caps and no reasons just some some kind of weird insult because i'm telling you i don't know the rules so you don't need to yell at me that i don't know the rules when it's literally what i'm saying to you i don't know the rules okay um i'm swearing at a guy who can't hear me all right uh so here's my take on the minimum wage so forget about the the rules the rule part this is you know you you wish there could be some something like an executive order from mitch mcconnell who could just say yeah there's a rule but we're just going to ignore it because it doesn't serve us so what is your opinion on the 15 minimum wage in the comments can i get get a feel of the crowd yes no on the minimum wage going to 15 it doesn't look like it's going to be an option right away but what do you think i'm interested in my specific audience uh so take a second for the uh for the answers to comment i'll tell you my opinion it goes like this and i based this on the fact i have a degree in economics i have an mba from a high-end college you know university berkeley and here's my opinion about the 15 minimum wage i don't know i don't know every one of you who says yes or no what are you basing that on because i'm telling you i've got a degree in this i don't know i don't know if it's good how do you know where the hell do you get your opinion from seriously where the hell did you get these opinions because i don't think economists agree do they wouldn't you like to see two economists uh one on each side just get on a show and give you 15 minutes you don't need more but you don't need less just 15 minutes of two economists on either side saying here's why it's a good idea and then the other one says this is why it's a bad idea and then maybe then i could make a decision but have you ever seen that i haven't seen that i've seen complaints about people saying it should be different in different areas because not every area is the same it might hurt some places it might help some places and that feels like a good argument i don't know how accurate is but it feels at least like it makes sense so here's my advice to you if you have a really strong feeling about this 15 minimum wage and you're not a small business owner yourself in other words it's not going to directly affect you you immediately maybe you shouldn't maybe you shouldn't have that opinion because i don't think economists agree you know i don't think all economists are on the same side do you do you do you think if you surveyed economists they'd all be like 95 of them would say either yes or no now i get the milton friedman argument of course that the free market you know is better is the best mechanism but we don't really have a free market we don't really have a free market we we have a very uh let's say we do have a free market we don't have an efficient market that's what i should have said it is free but it's not efficient in order for this minimum wage to find its right level based on competition and the economy and everything else you need less friction you need the ability for things to adjust you know in real time fairly quickly and all that i don't believe that happens because people don't have that much mobility there's just too much friction i think so i have no idea whether this is a good idea i have no idea now what do you do when you have no idea if something is a good idea anybody anybody what do you do if you're not sure it's a good idea you test it which one of the uh which one of the sides the democrats or the republicans are saying you know we can't tell if this is good or bad why don't we run it for a year in let's say one state or maybe some selected counties we'll just test it for one year and then we'll know right are the republicans saying that where are the republicans saying you know we think it's a bad idea but we don't hate testing things where's that guy or or a woman right where's that person or any gender you like um the only thing we need we don't have am i wrong is there some story i'm missing here tell me i'm wrong nobody knows the right answer it would be trivially easy to test relative to big national things it's easy you just say this county that's the rule for a year let's see how it goes right don't understand why we as a population are putting up with us this is pure incompetence because the the people making the decision they don't know if 15 an hour is a good idea do you think there's anybody in congress who knows more than i do and i don't know much that's the whole point i don't know much about whether a 15 minimum wage is a good idea i don't think so and when i say good idea i mean good overall in the long run right all things considered it's obviously good for the people who get the raise most of them if they keep their job so i don't think we can be happy with any opinion on this and i would tell you that if you have a firm opinion either yes or no on the minimum wage you shouldn't if you have a firm opinion on this you shouldn't because smart people don't know like really well-informed smart people don't really know they might lean one direction but without a test nobody knows all right um i've come to a potential decision about what's the biggest factor or factors in covid infections and it goes like this i feel as if there are two things and some of this is just speculation and a little bit of what i'm reading but here's some things we've learned about the covet infections we think number one in the uk surprisingly they say there's no real difference in minority outcomes for coronavirus except that they get infected more often but haven't we all been under the impression that your genetic makeup would probably make a difference in your outcomes but it might be that that's true but that genetic difference is not necessarily uh ethnically related in other words if you read between the lines here the uk outcome if let's say the data holds you know any preliminary study like this you can't you can't assume is right but let's say it is it would be saying that genetically there wouldn't be much difference across ethnicities but there might be a big difference in terms of lifestyle and economic situation and that might be what's driving more infections for example at the lower economic end of things there might be more people living per house it could it could be that it could be they have less health care resources could be that so this this uh this may be really important information if it's true i'd still wait to get a confirmation of this all right so that's the first new piece of information there might not be that much difference ethnically even though the outcomes are very different might be lifestyle not genetics although there could still be and probably is a gigantic genetic difference across individuals but not necessarily across ethnicities which seems unlikely to me frankly but doesn't seem unlikely to you that there's no difference in ethnicity it feels unlikely but that's that's what we have here all right um then we also have an hse university research study this says that uh oh i'm sorry that was that was the genetic difference study but there's a additional study that says that uh 63 percent of u.s hospitalizations for co covered could have been prevented if we were not so darn fat so obesity according to this one study is responsible for 30 of the excess hospitalizations um in the same sentence it says 63 so it's it's written very poorly so i don't know uh exactly which of those numbers to look at because it looks like it's two different numbers saying the same thing but there's a gigantic difference in opc now we all knew that right we all knew that but there's some kind of word that i didn't write down that says that uh sometimes it's the combination of two things you know you need the you need the comorbidity plus the virus one by itself doesn't doesn't kill you now how do why do we call this a simply a virus pandemic when it's clearly an obesity pandemic at the same time it's too pandemics if you call obesity a pandemic but we sort of ignore one of them and pay all of our attention to the other one when they're clearly both gigantic variables now i agree the virus itself is a bigger variable than obesity but the obesity thing is so big it's like you should talk about them in the same sentence every time we've got a big problem with the virus killing our fat people right now i don't do fat shaming so i'm just using fat in a casual way not to mean an insult uh you know i i myself have been uh a few pounds overweight at various times in my life and so i don't do fat shaming but it's just simply a fact that americans are overweight so i feel as if the fact that we don't talk about that more is for what social reasons wokeness is there some reason we can't talk about people's health because they'll feel bad it'll be racist somehow sure um here's the most predictable thing what was the most predictable thing that would come out of the tiger woods uh thing and by by the way i don't mean to make fun of anything that happens to tiger woods we we all hope that he recovers and it is a tragedy so i'm not going to take anything away from how bad this is but the most predictable thing and i wish i'd said it in public because it was so predictable today we learn the woods tiger woods does not remember the crash was that predictable as soon as i heard that he was awake when they found him and he was coherent and all that but that the actual cause of the crash was uh unknown as soon as i heard that i said to myself he's going to say he doesn't remember the crash he's going to say he doesn't remember what happened what would you do in that situation what would you do in that situation if that were me i would say i didn't remember the crash because he might have been texting i'm not saying he was he might have had something in his system uh the apparently he was not tested for any drugs now i don't know if the rules are different in the uk but because there were there were no overt signs of drug use or inebriation in other words there was nothing in his car that suggested he had taken something uh and nobody had were no eyewitnesses and said we saw him put something in his mouth or anything like that so if you don't have any cause it's just an accident i guess they can't check so tiger woods can just say i don't remember they won't ever check his uh blood to find out if he was inebriated and it looks like he can just go with that story that he doesn't remember and he'll be fine from any kind of repercussions so i don't think anything was more predictable than he would say he doesn't remember do you believe it do you believe he doesn't remember i'm going to go on record as saying no i don't believe it it's not impossible it's traumatic very traumatic could be that the cause of the accident was that he blacked out so then of course he wouldn't remember it it certainly looks like he blacked down doesn't it wouldn't you say that the odds are based on how far the car went etc you'd have to think he wasn't conscious wouldn't you and so to me the the texting or the cell phone or even if an animal ran in the road i don't feel like i don't feel like they completely would describe what happened it feels like he was unconscious but that's just speculation no no all right um amy do you know who amy siskind is or cis kind but she's one of the more ridiculous characters on twitter i think she's blocked me and vice versa eventually but she was like a crazy anti-trump person and she tweeted after biden bombed syria she's tweeted so different having military action under biden no middle school level threats on twitter trust biden and his team's competence a tear is coming to my eye because biden he knows how to bomb syria in a responsible way not the way trump did it with his irresponsible taunts no trump bombed syria the wrong way whereas biden he's bombing syria in a responsible way so big difference there according to amy um so china apparently uh did some kova tests on some u.s diplomats and decided to go with the anal taste test instead of the cheek swab that's right instead of the nasal swab with the cheek schwab uh china decided to shove something up our diplomats asses they complained the diplomats complained about china shoving things up their asses and china said oh it was an error it was a mistake sorry didn't mean it sorry and what will the united states do will we turn the other cheek will we note that although america went to mars china went to uranus i would like to give this opportunity for all of you to add your own jokes about china shoving a kova test up the ass of our diplomats what would what would trump have done if china shoved things up the ass of our diplomats and then said whoops whoops sorry what would trump have done would he do what biden is likely to do complain i don't know what he would have done but he should have closed the embassies should just close the embassies like i don't know how you protect your diplomats but do you want to be a diplomat that was not protected the way these guys were not protected these guys and and women and genders of all types they were not protected now i think they probably had a choice of saying no but then they probably couldn't travel or i don't know there's probably some repercussion so i don't feel this can go unaddressed do you this should not be unaddressed i think trump would have addressed it i don't know if biden will there's a new story of a uh uh classroom assistant who didn't know his zoom was still on and uh he may have uh he may have done a tubing he may have been he may have been doing a little tubing uh when the camera was still on um so uh and uh here's the funniest part is that the young man the 21 year old uh employee he he writes he also has a side company when he's not being an assistant in schools he also runs pirate magic a business that throws pirate parties for youngsters while he portrays a character named captain silly bones let me give you this advice here's some good advice for you and you can take this to the bank if there's any chance at all that you're going to get caught masturbating on zoom don't have a side business don't have a side business called called pirate parties and don't call yourself captain silly bones don't do them at the same time that's like a comorbidity one of those things just by itself let's say the the pirate parties one of those things by itself that's fine pleasuring yourself in private far as i know still totally legal totally legal a problem when you combine the two things on a zoom call right you know what captain silly bones i don't think he's gonna get booked for another party uh let me give you some advice that you that you will find very useful let me tell you what i do the moment i'm done i'm done with these periscopes the moment i'm done with them i've got i've got two screens here two ipads that are facing me where i would sit at my office desk the first thing i do after i turn these off is i turn them this way so you're looking at each other now the first thing i do when i'm done with any kind of a zoom call on my laptop first thing i do close the laptop so let me suggest to you that you never assume never assume that you're not on live stream because that's how you lose your pirate parties if you know what i mean never assume it so as a habit you should physically move your camera out of a viewing district when you're when you're done every time and just do it every time as a as a habit i'll tell you one wake-up call was when uh somebody discovered that i guess uh mark zuckerberg puts tape over the camera on his own laptop now do you think mark zuckerberg understands the world of security and what is or is not a risk oh he does and if he's covering up the camera on his laptop maybe you should too now he's more of a target than you are but you're all targets yeah and the same with the hot mic just assume you're always being listened to now i've got a number of digital products here everything from my phone to my amazon digital assistant so i just assume that i'm being recorded all the time i just assume it i just assume there's nothing i say even in the privacy of my own home even in the bathroom i just assume that somebody's listening or could doesn't mean they are listening they just could technologically they could all right so being boring is how i protect myself cnbc had this story and i think it's important that it's cnbc because it's a major major network right uh bill gates was asked about nuclear power and he said it absolutely will be politically acceptable again which is an interesting way to make the prediction i think he was asked that a specific question but according to bill gates who most of you would associate with the left wouldn't you now i don't think he associates himself that way i doubt i mean maybe he's a democrat i don't know but he seems more like a problem solver than a political animal and he's saying as clearly as possible nuclear power will absolutely be politically acceptable again and he said he points out that it's safer than oil coal and natural gas the reason it will be acceptable is that it's safer and then he goes on to talk about one of the companies he's invested in terra power it's a the generation 4 nuclear power that can't can't melt down and it's smaller more economical it's more off the shelf pieces you can transport it easily etc so that we may be years away from making that commercial but it really does matter that bill gates said this because he's he has credibility with the left you know he thinks climate change is a big problem so he's got credibility um here's the other uh the other observation i was going to make about covet i feel like besides obesity the other biggest factor is how many strangers you let in your house and by strangers i mean anybody who doesn't live there normally so i feel as if if we controlled one variable we would get through the pandemic quickly now maybe the vaccinations will will get us there on time anyway but if in the beginning we had only done one one restriction i think we'd already be done and that one restriction would be don't let anybody inside your residence who is not a resident unless you know it could be the plumber with a mask right but nobody to visit not even your anna town family members i feel as though that one restriction of nobody in your residence except the residents for a month and we'd be we'd be pretty well done i feel like now you wouldn't get rid of the infection but you might get it down to a low level now does anybody disagree with that because it's something like over 50 of infections it's worse in the winter when you're indoors somebody says i thought we did that no we didn't really do that we we said don't you know you don't want to socially mingle but i don't think anybody took it seriously inside their own house i think everybody lets their other family members i think everybody lets the boyfriend or the girlfriend come over i feel like inside the house there are no rules and that probably that was the main problem probably the main problem and i would also think that you could solve that with statistics and publicity if you if you stopped somebody on the street and said to them what's the main place you get infected what would the average person say think about it uh you're probably way more informed than the average consumer just the fact you're watching a you know a live stream about the world in politics the average person isn't really paying attention to too much news on average so stop the average person in the street and say to them where do you think most infections happen what would they say i'll bet they wouldn't say home i'll bet most people would say well they closed the restaurants and gyms it's probably restaurants and gyms or they might say must be the workplace because why else would they do the lockdown but i'll bet it's not i'll bet if you simply produced enough statistics to say look most of it is because you're letting somebody in your little uh unair circulated space who doesn't live there that's that's most of it i think if we just just hammered out hammered people with i don't know what the real number is like 56 percent uh is in the home and just keep telling people that say uh it's because the you know you use your uh your app and on tinder right or whatever it is so that's all i have to say about that now i rasmussen has an interesting poll in which you they were asking about people's opinion of some national leaders you know i've been telling you why is there not like a new national leader and and i've said aoc may fill that spot but here are some names i'm going to tell you the names that they pulled and let me see if you can guess who has the highest favorability at the moment with the public so this is the entire public the names they tested were this is rasmussen uh kevin mccarthy mitch mcconnell nancy pelosi chuck schumer and aoc now add together their their two favorable categories the highly favorable and the normal favorable and who who among those do you believe had the highest favorability take a guess i want to see in the comments how plugged in you are to the national consciousness most people are guessing aoc but i think you're i think you're guessing that because you think that's going to be the answer because why would i bring it up i always talk about aoc's persuasion so you i feel like i've biased the survey i think i biased the survey too much you're trying to guess what it's going to be here's the answer kevin mccarthy kevin mccarthy he has the highest favorability of this group what what how the hell did that happen did you see that coming now i don't think that necessarily means as much as you might think it would mean it could mean that he's just less controversial so the others have some specific reasons you're mad at them but i can't think of a specific reason to be mad at kevin mccarthy can you i can't think of a like a scandal or was he on the wrong side of something or i know it could be that he just hasn't caused any trouble and that people respond to a specific story they remember more than they respond to the average so here here are the numbers so kevin mccarthy if you add his two favorable categories together 43 compare that to mcconnell at 29 it's a big difference compared to pelosi at 37 surprisingly good schumer 32 and aoc at 34.
so if you were to look at this would you say to yourself my goodness kevin mccarthy should run for president because he has a substantially like a 30 higher favorability than aoc but it doesn't work that way because our primary system does like the exciting people right so i would say the aoc already has enough support to win a primary i think she already has enough support to win a primary for president someday if it doesn't change um but it certainly raises a question about kevin mccarthy if he has bigger ambitions to run for president um that would be interesting so i'll just put that name out there we're all looking for our next leader and uh it's very interesting that he doesn't have obvious negatives yeah it could be that just as the lowest uh profile meaning as somebody says in the comments that just people don't know as much about him so they don't they don't have a negative feeling so they say uh he's okay it could be just that so you have to be careful about averages if i've taught you anything uh and i'll remind you this this is what i call the the hollywood way of looking at favorability and i learned this when i was doing a dilbert tv show which never made it to the air we did we tried to do a live action one with real actors the animated one did eventually get on tv but when i was testing that we we made a pilot we brought people into a room and they have their little buttons that they push when there's something they like that's happening on the screen and i asked the executive what are we looking for you know what average approval of the tv show would would suggest it would be a hit and the executive said we don't look at the average because that's useless which is really interesting to know we look at how excited some people are what you want is that a few people you know maybe 10 of the audience just thinks it's the best thing they've ever seen you don't even care about the other 90 because most shows are not watched by 90 of the public a huge hit whether it's a song a movie a tv show is because 10 of the public loves it that's what makes it same with dilbert if you ask the average person hey how about this dilbert comic the average person would say not for me but something like 10 or 20 percent of the public who has a job and relates to the situations etc will cut it out by the book get the calendar and that's enough to make dilbert wildly successful so be careful when you're looking at average favorability because it doesn't predict what does predict is if you're wildly hating or loving an individual such as a trump or an aoc so kevin mccarthy doesn't have the wild hate or the wild love and that usually does not predict national success at least running for president's success but how hard would it be for him to learn that or to use let's say um to adopt a persona that could get him elected probably could do it probably could do it i would guess he has the capability to raise his game but we'll see all right that's all i got for now uh yeah i know about the brains behind aoc there's you know she was sort of selected and groomed and there was a you know a mentor who probably made a big difference but here's the thing everybody who thinks she's not smart you're all wrong say what you will about her politics she's really smart i hate to tell you but it's obvious if you're still judging her as like the bartender you are so missing what's going on she's smart most of our members of congress are most of them it's not even unusual that's how they get elected somebody says she's misinformed my point was that her mentor may have taught her a lot but if you factor in how quickly she would pick up what she learned the mentor may have you know already given all he could give there may not be more more to give there all right when has aoc ever faced a tough interview you say i wouldn't worry about that at all i'm pretty sure she could handle a tough interview and she does what uh what trump does which is she'll do the big ask that you think is ridiculous but then it ends up well because she negotiates toward the middle all right um that's all we got for now and i will talk to you later all right youtubers uh somebody says she even flubs the softball i'd have to assume some examples of that her uh her public speaking is so good that i can't imagine that she would be bad in a tough interview uh who's going to jail for the fraud which fraud um let's see just looking at some of your questions uh she's one generation removed from uh all right well there's a lot of uh with margaret hoover not good how do you bruise your arm is my arm bruised that's weird i didn't know i had a bruise you know what's weird i can't see it i'm looking at my arm and i i can't see it but i can see it on camera just the lighting is different actually i have no idea i must have banged it on something it's not a it's not a burn it's a bruise i just don't know how i got it all right that's all for now and i'll talk to you later
hey everybody
come on in it's time it's time for
coffee with scott adams
best time of the day and
it'll be one of the best ones ever yeah
hey omar dr funk juice you too good
morning everybody
and if you'd like to enjoy today to its
maximum potential and i know you would
all you need is a couple of marker
glasses tango chalice of time canteen
jogger flask vessel of any kind
fill it with your favorite liquid i like
coffee
and join me now for the unparalleled
pleasure dopamine of the day the thing
makes everything better it's called the
simultaneous sip
and people all over the world will be
joining in
right now go
uh-huh yeah yep that's the stuff
that's oh you can feel it just going
down and making yourself healthier as
you
as you digest really good stuff well you
want to talk about all the interesting
things in the news
i know you do i know you do but first
a question for you
what value do i uh do i
produce that would make you want to
watch this
in the era of being after trump
now when trump was in office a lot of
people were watching me for my
trump persuasion and other comments
about him
but why would you watch now
i'll tell you what i'm going to try to
do and i'll look for some
feedback on this i'm going to try to
make sure that anytime you watch me
you're increasing your talent stack in
other words i'm going to
try to talk about what's happening in
the news
but that won't be the main thing the
main thing will be to try to get you to
understand it better
by improving your talent stack so i'm
going to make you more
effective in your life not just
informed that will be my
my goal so if you're wondering why to
watch this it would be because the
people who do
are getting smarter and better every
single day
and by the way i think a lot of you will
confirm that that's true
uh in the comments while i'm talking
about other things
for those of you who are newer tell me
if you think you've gotten anything
valuable from watching me for however
long you've watched me
and that'll tell the other people what's
up
all right biden decided to bomb
some factions in syria that are being
funded and supported by iran in response
to
iranian proxies hurting at least one
contractor in an attack
two weeks ago now i would like to say
that this is a good move
by biden now if you're if you're tuning
in to me to watch me say bad things
about democrats
and good things about republicans i'm
not going to do that
nothing like that will ever happen here
i'm just going to talk about what works
and
what doesn't and you can you can play
the politics yourself
when when trump and pence won in 2016
i talked about the what i call the new
ceo move
which is how you establish who you are
when a new ceo
is is hired they'll often do something
big and splashy right off the bat
they'll maybe fire some executives who
needed it they'll reorganize some things
but the idea is to establish who you are
as the new leader right off the bat
because your first impression just has
all this power forever whoever you are
on day one
it's going to be hard to change that so
you want to get it right
in the beginning so pence and trump did
that
when they started going talking to ford
and carrier when
when they first got elected before
they'd even been sworn in
it was really really good first move uh
ceo kind of play
and then trump did it again when he
fired all of his
cruise missiles into that airport in
syria
to give russia a little bit of a tap on
the shoulder
now people watching it said wow that
might even be
sort of an overreaction or wow trump
sure went military quickly
but it was a good positioning
attack because it said yeah
there was also the mother of all bombs
in afghanistan and i believe that trump
played that exactly right
by establishing right up front you don't
know what i'm going to do
which he would say that directly you
can't predict what i'm going to do
but you did see me drop that mother of
all bombs
and you did see me attack that airport
so just be warned you don't know what
i'm gonna do but it could definitely
include
lots of violence that is exactly
the positioning you want now biden comes
in
and of course our advertise adversaries
are going to be poking them
they're going to find out hey do we have
a little more a little more freedom
under this new president are we going to
be able to get a little
get away with a little bit more and
biden has now sent
the following message no
no you can't now i know what you're
thinking
was biden even involved in the decision
is he so mentally degraded that it's his
staff
who's making the decisions i don't think
it matters
that much in this context because
whether it's
biden calling all the shots or some
biden cartel collectively making
decisions
it looks the same the the message is the
same
which is if you mess with the united
states there will be violence
there will be violence there will be a
response
now i heard somebody on twitter say uh
why do you wait so long
two weeks that's all so perfect
waiting two weeks to do your attack
perfect
because it also sends the following
message you don't know when it's going
to come
we're not going to forget it it's coming
might be today might be in two weeks but
the one thing you can be sure of
it's coming now of course you want to do
it right so it might take a few weeks to
pick the right
target and get the right assets in place
and all that
so i'm going to give biden an a-plus for
for handling this situation so far
anybody disagree would it would anybody
disagree with that
grade now there there's a secondary
question
and maybe it's not a secondary maybe it
should be primary some would argue
the rand paul position that there's no
authorization
for this attack and the president can't
just
start a war basically can't just attack
another country
and i think that that position needs our
full respect
in fact uh rand paul's position is not
unlike jen saki's uh
position just a few years ago when trump
was doing it
and where where she criticized trump
trump for attacking
syria basically not authorized
all the rest now here's an interesting
thing
i don't really understand the whole
situation with executive orders
do you do any of you understand what's
going on with
let's say the whole body of executive
orders over the last few years
because i don't quite understand how the
president
can just sort of
do stuff that you thought congress was
supposed to do
how does the president just decide to
just do it himself
and then people obey it why do they obey
it
why do why does anybody obey an
executive order now i know that there's
different kinds
there's some executive orders that are
just a clarification
on an existing law and that's perfectly
fine
everybody's okay with that somebody has
to clarify the law right
it's fairly fair game maybe the courts
have to do it if people don't like how
the president
did it but it's a good process but what
happens when the president does
something
with an executive order that the
constitution didn't quite
foresee we let that happen
i feel as if and this is just
speculation i need somebody
smart to tell me how wrong this is
because it's probably pretty wrong
but it feels like the country has a
great
let's say a great flexibility with how
they
treat the executive the president
when congress isn't effective because
congress has such a low rating that
we're happy when anything gets done
you know you you see your government
make a decision and then
implement it and it goes well
it's hard to disagree with it because
the alternative would have been
to take it to congress and nothing
happens and it's a big fight and nothing
good happens
so it feels as if um
it feels as if
people are just sort of okay with
executive orders because the alternative
looks worse
which is to depend on congress for
making decisions
so are we sort of drifting toward a
dictatorship
because people prefer it because the
alternative
is being incompetent having congress
muddle around yeah now the problem of
course is that if you take it too far
let's say for example this latest
bombing attack let's say that when trump
did it and
also when biden did it that let's say it
was
extra constitutional meaning the
constitution doesn't quite support this
act
but what if the country does
you know the country might support it
and by a majority
so i don't know it feels like it could
be dangerous
but on the other hand i like it when it
happens generally
i like it when something happens so i
think i do
i do like our presidents including biden
to have some executive order power
now the congress and rand paul and i
think rand paul is a
is a great asset to the country by
pushing back on it
because you don't want the executive
orders without the pushback
right anytime this happens even if you
like the executive order
don't you have to also like that rand
paul is pushing
against it you could like both of those
things
because they're they work together
pretty well it keeps the executive
orders maybe a little bit constrained
because there's some pushback
but you still get to do them when
they're important
it's kind of perfect so thank you to
rand paul for pushing back
but at the same time i kind of like this
i like this action
in terms of national security
i've told you before that uh it's handy
to have a story of you
here's the helpful part of my broadcast
you should always have a heroic
story of you which is the
the sort of the imaginary story you have
in your mind
of who you are character wise or who you
are
capability wise or or who you are
basically just who you are
and i've told you before that my story
and i'm going to add to this in a bit
but the the personal story that i keep
running
as a little loop in my mind and always
have
is what i call prisoner island and
prisoner island
imagines that there's some island where
all the prisoners go
and there's no there's no law there they
just are dropped on the island
and there's no guards or anything it's
just a prisoner society so it's pretty
rugged there
so i get convicted of something and i'm
dropped by helicopter
onto the prisoner island
well australia is a little bigger so you
know that that doesn't work for my story
but imagine it's the smallest
smallish island and all the prisoners
know each other and stuff
now on day one if you drop me
in prisoner island how am i gonna do
not so well right because i'm not
physically large et cetera so the
prisoners would
beat me up and rape me day one
day two prisoners would beat me up and
rape me again
day three day four are gonna look a lot
alike
beaten up raped being up raped three or
four months go by
beating up raped but here's
here's the uh the prisoner island
story it's the story i run in my head
come back in a year come back in a year
in the year i'm gonna run the island and
everybody who touched me
will be dead but you have to wait a year
day one won't go so well day two
not so good come back in a year they'll
all be dead
and i'll be running the island every
time
now is that true no i just made it up
right
it's just a story in my head is it also
true that i would fight through
you know adversity well i'm trying to
make it true
right i like to think it's true but
having a story of you
is like a program that runs in your head
permanently and it can make it you
it can it can turn you into that by
being the story that
guides you all right now let me take
that story
into this next news item
there was a a man i guess his last name
was raja gopal
i think it was india was it india might
have been pakistan i forget
but he's from the karna tacos hassan
district so somebody can tell me where
that is
but anyway he was riding his motorcycle
and a
a cheetah or a leopard it's not clear
uh attacked his family just like came
from the bushes and attacked us
and bit his son in the leg and starts
attacking his son and wife
this guy who's not some you know
he's not some like fighter or hero or
anything he's just a guy
gets off his motorcycle and kills the
leopard with
his bare hands to save his family
he actually grabbed the leopard
and strangled it did he get hurt in the
process
oh yeah he did yeah he got hurt
but he also saved his family and
strangled a leopard or maybe a cheetah
cheater a leopard i don't know it's
pretty bad either way
now that's the prisoner island story
this is the prisoner island story now i
don't know anything about the guy who
did this
but it makes me wonder does he have the
prisoner island story in his head
some version of it has he carried a
model of himself
through his life that when he came to
this situation
the model kicked in and and there was no
doubt
who was going to win the fight and that
he was going to fight
now it probably was just reflex of you
know somebody
saving his family so probably there
wasn't a lot of thinking going on it was
just reflex
but whether or not he had the prisoner
island story in his head
he has it now he has it now the next
time he gets in a situation
that you and i would be frightened to
death of
he knows he can get through it or has
gotten through something
similarly dangerous so
make yourself a prisoner's island story
it doesn't have to be real
it just becomes the program that runs in
your head could come in handy if you
were attacked by a leopard
have you seen the videos of the uh the
tom cruise
deep fakes uh look on my timeline if you
haven't seen them yet
um they're i don't even know what to
think about them
so there's some discussion about whether
they're real deep fakes
they're actually so good that you can't
tell if they're deep fakes
and some people are saying ah you got
fooled it's really just a
look-alike it's a look-alike pretending
to be a deep fake
maybe maybe i can't tell
i can't tell if it's a real person i
also can't tell if it's
actually tom cruise who's playing a
prank
it doesn't quite look like tom cruise to
me
so my personal opinion is it's not tom
cruise
i can't rule out a look-alike
but it did look a lot like him now
uh somebody says too tall well
i don't know if you could tell from the
video his height but
here's the thing that's how good
a deep fake is right now that we can't
even tell
if it was really a deep fake how good do
you think
the best ones are because this is just
something that ran on twitter
right it's just something on social
media
how is the best one
don't you assume that there are
government let's say government versions
of this
you know where we're we're working on it
for
both offensive and defensive reasons
because i have to think these deep fakes
have a military application that's
through the roof what would happen
and you know we're working on this right
well i i don't feel like i'm giving away
a state secret because
it's kind of obvious don't you think
that our government and probably other
ones
are putting together deep fakes of other
leaders
and deep fakes of uh terrorists
don't you think if we had a good deep
fake of osama bin laden
we could have gotten we could have made
some videos and put them into the system
and cause people to act differently
because they thought bin laden was
giving them guidance
but we could and i'm not sure we didn't
how would we know right we wouldn't know
if we'd done that nobody would tell you
so the the uh opportunity for
um weaponizing these deep fakes is
really scary
because imagine you get into a shooting
ore
and we take the the a deep fake of the
leader of the other side
put him on a video and he says hey
everybody lay down your weapons
we're surrendering his own military
would probably think it was true
right because everybody even in the
military they have
the phones right or do they if you're on
operation
maybe not because you could track the
phone but
uh when they got back to base people
would have phones and stuff right
so even even if you're a terrorist
you would see the video it wouldn't have
to be on tv it would just be circulating
and there would be your leader your
terrorist leader saying uh lay down your
weapons
you know we got everything we wanted or
whatever
so that's common
twitter is talking about having some
kind of pay model
where you could optionally charge people
for extra content
maybe even newsletters so the world is
moving toward this
subscription base but twitter has a
really big
obstacle to overcome a psychological
obstacle
and the psychological obstacle is you're
used to twitter being free
once you get used to it being free
people are going to complain
if there's any anything that looks like
it's extra
and it's on twitter but you have to pay
for it it's really going to make people
angry
let me tell you how are you going to
feel um
well this is how i feel now i'll read a
story on let's say
twitter or cnn or whatever and i'll i'll
click to see the original story
and it's behind a paywall or you have to
go and figure out how to turn off your
ads and your ad blocker
which isn't too much of a bother i would
say
i skip almost everything that's asking
me for money or a password or
or my email address or to turn off ad
blockers
and every time i go to one of those
links
i get angry now twitter users are gonna
have that experience they could be like
hey
that looks interesting click oh i'd have
to pay for that
i'm angry oh here's a good one uh oh
i'd have to pay for that what would
happen if everything that's
useful on twitter turns into a paywall
because that's the only thing that'll be
behind the paywall right good stuff
you're not going to put your worthless
stuff behind the paywall
so twitter has a really big challenge
how to handle the
the customers psychology now as you know
i have
a full subscription account separately
on the locals platform but
the locals platform was built for just
that
it's its only purpose is to be a
subscription platform
so there's no psychological barrier
there
nobody would sign up for it unless they
knew exactly what they were getting
so they're all happy but if you're used
to it being free
people don't like you adding any kind of
friction to that
even if it's the extra stuff because
they're going to think
we used to get the extra for free didn't
we
but i do think subscription is the way
things have to go so twitter is making
the right move
it's just going to be hard hard to
implement in their case i think they'll
be success
successful in at some level
all right but if you don't want to be uh
banned etc something like locals would
be better
now i keep hearing about a new platform
called clubhouse
which as i understand it is some kind of
open
audio conversations with some set of
rules
and i i've i've received a number of
invitations
to it i guess it's still invitation
and i've uh i've declined them all so
far
now the reason that someone somebody
says clubhouse is chinese
that's not true is it i don't think
that's true
um so don't believe that
unless you see some confirmation i don't
think that's true
but uh you got my interest
if it is true i definitely want to know
it
somebody says it's not a u.s company i
was sure it was a u.s company
no the api they use is chinese somebody
says
all right so there may be some
connection let's put that as an open
question
but that's not what i was going for
today what i was going for is i don't
understand it
so this is the interesting thing
clubhouse everybody's talking about it
and signing up and everything so
there must be something to it but i keep
waiting to hear
something about it that makes me want to
do it
and i haven't and i don't know what
other people are hearing that makes them
want to do it
because lots of smart connected
forward-thinking people are already on
it and
telling me i should be on it but i don't
know why
does anybody know why because i don't
think you can monetize it right
and if there's no video isn't it
less good
all right somebody says think live
podcasts
well um i suppose if they did a good job
on the interface it would be interesting
i'll probably check it out eventually
but my only point is not that it is or
is not valuable
but why have i heard so much about it
and yet
nobody has told me what its value
proposition is
isn't that weird well
you would think that almost any business
or product that you hear about
people would tell you why to use it like
what its extra advantage is but i
haven't heard that about
clubhouse and i don't know why does that
mean there isn't any
extra advantage i don't know
i guess i'll keep that as an open
question um
here there's a big news about the
minimum wage
15 thing that the democrats want to want
to make a
national law and i guess the there's a
rules person who decides
the parliamentary and rules person in
the senate
has decided that they can't include that
minimum wage thing with this big omnibus
built
there's some kind of rule that says you
can't include things that are
trivially related to the main purpose
and this is too trivially related to the
main purpose i guess
so number one i don't agree with this
parliamentary decision it might be
correct in terms of interpreting the
rules
but why does congress
put a rule on itself
what what's the point of that why would
why would congress limit its own its own
flexibility yeah somebody says it's a
rule
it's a rule but why
why is it a rule why in the world can't
the congress say
you know we all think we all think this
should be in this bill
why can't we just put it in there would
that bother you as a citizen
if you were a citizen would it bother
you that there was some weird
rule that they collectively decided
to just ignore because there wasn't any
purpose for the rule
i can't see the purpose for it now i get
that you don't want to have big you know
messed up
group things and you want to maintain
the ability to do a
filibuster and you know it's like
complicated etc
but none of this stuff serves the public
i don't think uh somebody says in all
capitals you don't understand the senate
and house rules
i'm going to block you for telling me
what i don't understand
goodbye in all caps probably could have
gotten away with that if you hadn't used
all caps
don't criticize me in all caps if you
want to come back
at the very least use upper and lower
case
then you've got a chance of surviving
but you're not going to survive with all
caps
and no reasons just some some kind of
weird insult
because i'm telling you i don't know the
rules
so you don't need to yell at me that i
don't know the rules when it's
literally what i'm saying to you
i don't know the rules
okay um i'm swearing at a guy who can't
hear me
all right uh so here's my take on the
minimum wage so forget about the
the rules the rule part this is
you know you you wish there could be
some something like an executive order
from
mitch mcconnell who could just say yeah
there's a rule but we're just going to
ignore it
because it doesn't serve us so what is
your opinion on the
15 minimum wage in the comments
can i get get a feel of the crowd
yes no on the minimum wage going to 15
it doesn't look like it's going to be an
option right away
but what do you think i'm interested in
my specific audience
uh so take a second for the uh for the
answers to comment i'll tell you my
opinion
it goes like this and i based this on
the fact i have a degree in economics
i have an mba from a high-end
college you know university berkeley
and here's my opinion about the 15
minimum wage i don't know
i don't know every one of you who says
yes or no
what are you basing that on because i'm
telling you i've got a degree in this
i don't know i don't know if it's good
how do you know where the hell do you
get your opinion from
seriously where the hell did you get
these opinions
because i don't think economists agree
do they
wouldn't you like to see two economists
uh one on each side
just get on a show and give you 15
minutes you don't need more but you
don't need less
just 15 minutes of two economists on
either side saying
here's why it's a good idea and then the
other one says this is why it's a bad
idea
and then maybe then i could make a
decision but have you ever seen that
i haven't seen that i've seen complaints
about people saying it should be
different in different
areas because not every area is the same
it might hurt some places it might help
some places
and that feels like a good argument i
don't know how accurate is but it feels
at least like it makes sense
so here's my advice to you
if you have a really strong feeling
about this 15 minimum wage and you're
not
a small business owner yourself in other
words it's not going to directly affect
you
you immediately maybe you shouldn't
maybe you shouldn't have that opinion
because
i don't think economists agree you know
i don't think all economists are on the
same side do you
do you do you think if you surveyed
economists they'd all be
like 95 of them would say either yes or
no
now i get the milton friedman argument
of course that the free market
you know is better is the best mechanism
but we don't really have a free market
we don't really have a free market
we we have a very uh let's say
we do have a free market we don't have
an efficient market that's what i should
have said
it is free but it's not efficient
in order for this minimum wage to find
its right level based on
competition and the economy and
everything else
you need less friction you need
the ability for things to adjust you
know in real time fairly quickly and all
that
i don't believe that happens because
people don't have that much mobility
there's just too much friction i think
so i have no idea whether this is a good
idea
i have no idea now what do you do when
you have no idea if something is a good
idea
anybody anybody what do you do
if you're not sure it's a good idea
you test it which one of the
uh which one of the sides the democrats
or the republicans
are saying you know we can't tell if
this is good or bad
why don't we run it for a year in let's
say one state or maybe some selected
counties
we'll just test it for one year and then
we'll know
right are the republicans saying that
where are the republicans saying you
know
we think it's a bad idea but we don't
hate testing things
where's that guy or or a woman right
where's that person or any gender you
like
um the only thing we need
we don't have am i wrong
is there some story i'm missing here
tell me i'm wrong
nobody knows the right answer it would
be trivially
easy to test relative to big national
things it's easy
you just say this county that's the rule
for a year let's see how it goes
right don't understand
why we as a population are putting up
with us
this is pure incompetence
because the the people making the
decision
they don't know if 15 an hour is a good
idea
do you think there's anybody in congress
who knows more than i do
and i don't know much that's the whole
point i don't know much
about whether a 15 minimum wage is a
good idea
i don't think so and when i say good
idea i mean
good overall in the long run right all
things considered
it's obviously good for the people who
get the raise most of them if they keep
their job
so i don't think we can be happy with
any opinion on this
and i would tell you that if you have a
firm opinion
either yes or no on the minimum wage you
shouldn't
if you have a firm opinion on this
you shouldn't because smart people don't
know
like really well-informed smart people
don't really know
they might lean one direction but
without a test nobody knows all right
um i've come to a
potential decision about what's the
biggest factor or factors in
covid infections and it goes like this
i feel as if there are two things and
some of this is just speculation
and a little bit of what i'm reading but
here's some things we've learned about
the covet infections
we think number one in the uk
surprisingly they say there's no real
difference in minority
outcomes for coronavirus
except that they get infected more often
but haven't we all been under the
impression
that your genetic makeup
would probably make a difference in your
outcomes
but it might be that that's true but
that genetic difference is not
necessarily uh ethnically related
in other words if you read between the
lines here
the uk outcome if let's say the data
holds
you know any preliminary study like this
you can't you can't assume is right
but let's say it is it would be saying
that genetically there wouldn't be much
difference
across ethnicities but there might be a
big difference
in terms of lifestyle and economic
situation and that might be what's
driving more infections
for example at the lower economic end of
things there might be more people
living per house it could it could be
that it could be
they have less health care resources
could be that
so this this uh
this may be really important information
if it's true
i'd still wait to get a confirmation of
this all right
so that's the first new piece of
information
there might not be that much difference
ethnically even though the outcomes are
very different
might be lifestyle not genetics although
there could still be
and probably is a gigantic genetic
difference across
individuals but not necessarily across
ethnicities
which seems unlikely to me frankly but
doesn't seem unlikely to you that
there's no difference in ethnicity
it feels unlikely but that's that's what
we have here
all right um then we also have an hse
university research study this says that
uh oh i'm sorry that was that was the
genetic difference study
but there's a additional study that says
that
uh 63 percent of u.s hospitalizations
for co
covered could have been prevented if we
were not so
darn fat so obesity
according to this one study is
responsible for 30
of the excess hospitalizations
um in the same sentence it says 63
so it's it's written very poorly so i
don't know
uh exactly which of those numbers to
look at because it looks like it's two
different numbers saying the same thing
but there's a gigantic difference in opc
now we all knew that right
we all knew that but there's some kind
of word that i didn't write down
that says that uh sometimes it's the
combination of two things you know you
need the
you need the comorbidity plus the virus
one by itself doesn't
doesn't kill you now
how do why do we call this a simply a
virus pandemic when it's clearly an
obesity pandemic
at the same time it's too pandemics
if you call obesity a pandemic
but we sort of ignore one of them and
pay
all of our attention to the other one
when they're clearly both
gigantic variables now i agree the virus
itself is a bigger variable than obesity
but the obesity thing is so big it's
like you should talk about them in the
same sentence every
time we've got a big problem with the
virus
killing our fat people right now i don't
do fat shaming so i'm just using
fat in a casual way
not to mean an insult uh you know
i i myself have been uh
a few pounds overweight at various times
in my life
and so i don't do fat shaming but it's
just
simply a fact that americans are
overweight
so i feel as if the fact that we don't
talk about that
more is for what social reasons
wokeness is there some reason we can't
talk about people's health
because they'll feel bad it'll be racist
somehow
sure um here's the
most predictable thing
what was the most predictable thing that
would come out of the tiger woods
uh thing and by by the way i don't mean
to make fun of anything that happens
to tiger woods we we all hope that he
recovers and
it is a tragedy so i'm not going to take
anything away from how bad this is
but the most predictable thing and i
wish i'd said it in public
because it was so predictable today we
learn
the woods tiger woods does not remember
the crash
was that predictable
as soon as i heard that he was awake
when they found him and he was coherent
and all that
but that the actual cause of the crash
was
uh unknown as soon as i heard that i
said to myself
he's going to say he doesn't remember
the crash
he's going to say he doesn't remember
what happened
what would you do in that situation
what would you do in that situation if
that were me
i would say i didn't remember the crash
because
he might have been texting i'm not
saying he was
he might have had something in his
system
uh the apparently he was not tested for
any drugs
now i don't know if the rules are
different in the uk
but because there were there were no
overt signs
of drug use or inebriation in other
words there was nothing in his car that
suggested
he had taken something uh and nobody had
were no eyewitnesses and said we saw him
put something in his mouth or anything
like that
so if you don't have any cause it's just
an accident
i guess they can't check so tiger woods
can just say i don't remember
they won't ever check his uh blood to
find out if he was
inebriated and it looks like he can just
go with that story
that he doesn't remember and he'll be
fine from any kind of repercussions
so i don't think anything was more
predictable than he would say he doesn't
remember
do you believe it do you believe he
doesn't remember
i'm going to go on record as saying no i
don't believe it
it's not impossible it's traumatic very
traumatic
could be that the cause of the accident
was that he blacked out
so then of course he wouldn't remember
it it certainly looks like he blacked
down doesn't it
wouldn't you say that the odds are based
on how far the car
went etc you'd have to think he wasn't
conscious
wouldn't you and so to me the
the texting or the cell phone or even if
an
animal ran in the road i don't feel like
i don't feel like they completely would
describe what happened it feels like he
was unconscious but that's just
speculation
no no all right um
amy do you know who amy siskind is or
cis kind
but she's one of the more ridiculous
characters on twitter i think she's
blocked me and
vice versa eventually but she was like a
crazy
anti-trump person and she tweeted
after biden bombed syria she's tweeted
so different having military action
under biden
no middle school level threats on
twitter trust biden and his team's
competence
a tear is coming to my eye because biden
he knows how to bomb syria in a
responsible way
not the way trump did it with his
irresponsible
taunts no trump bombed syria
the wrong way whereas biden
he's bombing syria in a responsible way
so big difference there according to amy
um so
china apparently uh did some kova tests
on some u.s diplomats
and decided to go with the anal taste
test instead of the cheek swab
that's right instead of the nasal swab
with the cheek schwab
uh china decided to shove something up
our diplomats asses
they complained the diplomats complained
about
china shoving things up their asses and
china said oh it was an error it was a
mistake
sorry didn't mean it sorry
and what will the united states do
will we turn the other cheek
will we note that although america went
to mars
china went to uranus
i would like to give this opportunity
for all of you to add your own jokes
about china shoving a kova test up the
ass
of our diplomats what would
what would trump have done
if china shoved things up the ass of our
diplomats
and then said whoops whoops
sorry what would trump have done
would he do what biden is likely to do
complain
i don't know what he would have done but
he should have closed the embassies
should just close the embassies
like i don't know how you protect your
diplomats
but do you want to be a diplomat
that was not protected the way these
guys were not protected
these guys and and women and genders of
all types
they were not protected now i think they
probably had a
choice of saying no but then they
probably couldn't travel
or i don't know there's probably some
repercussion so
i don't feel this can go unaddressed do
you
this should not be unaddressed i think
trump would have addressed it
i don't know if biden will
there's a new story of a uh uh classroom
assistant who didn't know his zoom
was still on and uh he may have uh
he may have done a tubing he may have
been
he may have been doing a little tubing
uh when the camera was still on
um so uh
and uh here's the funniest part is that
the young man the 21 year old uh
employee he he writes he also has a side
company when he's not being
an assistant in schools he also runs
pirate magic
a business that throws pirate parties
for youngsters
while he portrays a character named
captain silly bones
let me give you this advice
here's some good advice for you and you
can take this to the bank
if there's any chance at all that you're
going to get caught
masturbating on zoom don't have a side
business
don't have a side business called
called pirate parties
and don't call yourself captain silly
bones
don't do them at the same time that's
like a comorbidity
one of those things just by itself let's
say the
the pirate parties one of those things
by itself
that's fine pleasuring yourself in
private
far as i know still totally legal
totally legal
a problem when you combine the two
things on a zoom call
right you know what
captain silly bones i don't think he's
gonna get booked for another party
uh let me give you some advice that you
that you will find very useful
let me tell you what i do the moment i'm
done i'm done with these periscopes
the moment i'm done with them i've got
i've got two screens here two ipads
that are facing me where i would sit at
my office desk
the first thing i do after i turn these
off
is i turn them this way so you're
looking at each other now
the first thing i do when i'm done with
any kind of a zoom call
on my laptop first thing i do
close the laptop
so let me suggest to you that you never
assume never assume
that you're not on live stream because
that's how you lose your pirate parties
if you know what i mean
never assume it so as a habit
you should physically move your camera
out of a viewing district when you're
when you're done
every time and just do it every time as
a as a habit i'll tell you one wake-up
call was when
uh somebody discovered that i guess uh
mark zuckerberg
puts tape over the camera on his own
laptop
now do you think mark zuckerberg
understands the world of
security and what is or is not a risk
oh he does and if he's covering up the
camera on his laptop
maybe you should too now he's more of a
target than you are but you're all
targets
yeah and the same with the hot mic just
assume you're always being listened to
now i've got a number of digital
products here everything from my phone
to my
amazon digital assistant so i just
assume that i'm being recorded all the
time
i just assume it i just assume there's
nothing i say
even in the privacy of my own home even
in the bathroom
i just assume that somebody's listening
or could doesn't mean they are listening
they just could
technologically they could
all right so being boring is how i
protect myself
cnbc had this story and i think it's
important that it's cnbc
because it's a major major network right
uh bill gates
was asked about nuclear power and he
said it absolutely will be politically
acceptable again which is an interesting
way to make the prediction i think he
was asked that a specific question
but according to bill gates who most of
you would associate with the left
wouldn't you
now i don't think he associates himself
that way i doubt
i mean maybe he's a democrat i don't
know but he seems more like a problem
solver
than a political animal and
he's saying as clearly as possible
nuclear power will absolutely be
politically acceptable again
and he said he points out that it's
safer than oil coal and natural gas
the reason it will be acceptable is that
it's safer
and then he goes on to talk about one of
the companies he's invested in terra
power
it's a the generation 4 nuclear power
that can't
can't melt down and it's smaller more
economical it's
more off the shelf pieces you can
transport it easily
etc so that we may be years away from
making that
commercial but it really does matter
that bill gates said this
because he's he has credibility
with the left you know he thinks climate
change is a big problem so he's got
credibility
um
here's the other uh the other
observation
i was going to make about covet i feel
like
besides obesity the other biggest factor
is how many strangers you let in your
house
and by strangers i mean anybody who
doesn't live there normally
so
i feel as if if we controlled one
variable
we would get through the pandemic
quickly now maybe the vaccinations will
will get us there on time anyway but if
in the beginning
we had only done one one restriction
i think we'd already be done and that
one restriction would be
don't let anybody inside your residence
who is not a resident
unless you know it could be the plumber
with a mask right but nobody
to visit not even your anna town family
members
i feel as though that one restriction
of nobody in your residence except the
residents
for a month and we'd be we'd be
pretty well done i feel like now you
wouldn't get rid of the infection but
you might get it down to a low level
now does anybody disagree with that
because it's something like
over 50 of infections
it's worse in the winter when you're
indoors
somebody says i thought we did that no
we didn't really do that
we we said don't you know you don't want
to
socially mingle but i don't think
anybody took it seriously
inside their own house i think everybody
lets their other family
members i think everybody lets the
boyfriend or the girlfriend come over
i feel like inside the house there are
no rules and that probably
that was the main problem probably the
main problem
and i would also think that you could
solve that with statistics
and publicity if you if you stopped
somebody on the street
and said to them what's the main place
you get infected
what would the average person say think
about it
uh you're probably way more informed
than the average consumer
just the fact you're watching a you know
a live stream
about the world in politics the average
person isn't really paying attention to
too much news
on average so stop the average person in
the street and say to them
where do you think most infections
happen what would they say
i'll bet they wouldn't say home i'll bet
most people would say well
they closed the restaurants and gyms
it's probably restaurants and gyms
or they might say must be the workplace
because why else would they do the
lockdown but i'll bet it's not
i'll bet if you simply produced enough
statistics
to say look most of it
is because you're letting somebody in
your little uh
unair circulated space who doesn't live
there that's
that's most of it i think if we just
just hammered out hammered people with i
don't know what the real number is like
56 percent
uh is in the home and just keep telling
people that
say uh it's because the
you know you use your uh your app
and on tinder right or whatever it is
so that's all i have to say about that
now i
rasmussen has an interesting poll in
which you they were asking about
people's opinion of some
national leaders you know i've been
telling you why is there not like a new
national leader
and and i've said aoc may fill that spot
but here are some names i'm going to
tell you the names that they pulled and
let me see if you can guess
who has the highest favorability at the
moment with the public
so this is the entire public the names
they tested were this is rasmussen
uh kevin mccarthy mitch mcconnell
nancy pelosi chuck schumer and
aoc now add together their their two
favorable categories the highly
favorable
and the normal favorable and who who
among those do you believe
had the highest favorability take a
guess
i want to see in the comments how
plugged in you
are to the national consciousness
most people are guessing aoc but i think
you're i think you're guessing that
because you think that's going to be the
answer because why would i bring it up
i always talk about aoc's persuasion so
you
i feel like i've biased the survey
i think i biased the survey too much
you're trying to guess what it's going
to be
here's the answer kevin mccarthy
kevin mccarthy he has the highest
favorability of this group
what what
how the hell did that happen did you see
that coming
now i don't think that necessarily means
as much
as you might think it would mean it
could mean that he's just
less controversial so the others have
some specific reasons you're mad at them
but i can't think of a specific reason
to be mad at kevin mccarthy can you
i can't think of a like a scandal or
was he on the wrong side of something or
i know it could be that he just hasn't
caused any trouble
and that people respond to a specific
story they remember
more than they respond to the average
so here here are the numbers so kevin
mccarthy
if you add his two favorable categories
together 43
compare that to mcconnell at 29 it's a
big difference
compared to pelosi at 37
surprisingly good schumer 32
and aoc at 34.
so if you were to look at this would you
say to yourself my goodness kevin
mccarthy should run for president
because he has a substantially like a
30 higher favorability than aoc
but it doesn't work that way because our
primary system
does like the exciting people
right so i would say the aoc already has
enough support
to win a primary i think she already has
enough support to win a primary for
president
someday if it doesn't change um
but it certainly raises a question about
kevin mccarthy if he has bigger
ambitions to run for president
um that would be interesting
so i'll just put that name out there
we're all looking for our next leader
and uh it's very interesting that he
doesn't have
obvious negatives
yeah it could be that just as the lowest
uh profile
meaning as somebody says in the comments
that just people don't know as much
about him so they don't
they don't have a negative feeling so
they say uh he's okay
it could be just that so you have to be
careful about averages
if i've taught you anything uh
and i'll remind you this this is what i
call the the hollywood
way of looking at favorability
and i learned this when i was doing a
dilbert tv show
which never made it to the air we did we
tried to do a live action one with real
actors
the animated one did eventually get on
tv but when i was testing that we
we made a pilot we brought people into a
room and they have their little
buttons that they push when there's
something they like
that's happening on the screen and i
asked the executive
what are we looking for you know what
average approval of the tv show
would would suggest it would be a hit
and the executive said we don't look at
the average
because that's useless which is really
interesting to know
we look at how excited some people are
what you want is that a few people you
know maybe
10 of the audience just thinks it's the
best thing they've ever seen
you don't even care about the other 90
because
most shows are not watched by 90
of the public a huge hit
whether it's a song a movie a tv show is
because 10
of the public loves it that's what makes
it
same with dilbert if you ask the average
person hey
how about this dilbert comic the average
person would say
not for me but something like
10 or 20 percent of the public who has a
job and relates to the situations etc
will cut it out by the book get the
calendar and that's enough
to make dilbert wildly successful so
be careful when you're looking at
average favorability
because it doesn't predict what does
predict
is if you're wildly hating or loving
an individual such as a trump or an aoc
so kevin mccarthy doesn't have the wild
hate or the wild
love and that usually does not predict
national success at least running for
president's success
but how hard would it be
for him to learn that or to use let's
say
um to adopt a persona that could get him
elected probably could do it
probably could do it i would guess he
has the capability
to raise his game but we'll see all
right
that's all i got for now uh yeah i know
about the brains behind aoc
there's you know she was sort of
selected and groomed and
there was a you know a mentor who
probably made a big difference
but here's the thing everybody who
thinks she's not smart
you're all wrong say what you will about
her politics
she's really smart i hate to tell you
but it's obvious if you're still judging
her as like the bartender
you are so missing what's going on she's
smart
most of our members of congress are most
of them
it's not even unusual that's how they
get elected
somebody says she's misinformed my point
was
that her mentor may have taught her a
lot
but if you factor in how quickly she
would pick up what she learned
the mentor may have you know already
given all he could give there may not be
more more to give there
all right
when has aoc ever faced a tough
interview you say
i wouldn't worry about that at all i'm
pretty sure she could handle a tough
interview
and she does what uh what trump does
which is
she'll do the big ask that you think is
ridiculous
but then it ends up well because she
negotiates toward the middle
all right um that's all we got for now
and i will talk to you later
all right youtubers
uh somebody says she even flubs the
softball i'd have to assume
some examples of that her uh
her public speaking is so good that i
can't imagine
that she would be bad in a tough
interview
uh who's going to jail for the fraud
which fraud
um
let's see just looking at some of your
questions
uh she's one generation
removed from uh all right well there's a
lot of uh
with margaret hoover not good how do you
bruise your arm
is my arm bruised
that's weird
i didn't know i had a bruise you know
what's weird
i can't see it i'm looking at my arm and
i
i can't see it but i can see it on
camera just the lighting is different
actually i have no idea i must have
banged it on something
it's not a it's not a burn
it's a bruise i just don't know how i
got it all right that's all for now and
i'll talk to you
later
