Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1290 Scott Adams： Ted Cruz Warms Texas With His American-Based Tweeting, Helicopters on Mars, Lots More

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, you're right on time. I like that about you. Punctuality will always pay off.

00:00:12.060 In fact, if you're there on time, you're five minutes late. Yeah, that's right. So I'm glad

00:00:18.880 you're all here, but if you would like to enjoy this even more, I know it's hard to believe,

00:00:25.600 right, that you could enjoy this more. It's a big claim, but let me back it up by saying that if

00:00:32.940 you were prepared with your cup or mug or glass or tank or chalice or stein, the canteen jug or

00:00:38.080 flask or vessel of any kind, if you filled it with your favorite liquid, have I ever mentioned I like

00:00:44.200 coffee, and join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.

00:00:51.540 It's called the simultaneous sip. I'll bet you know how to do it. It's coming up now. Go.

00:01:04.080 So let's start with the biggest problem in the country that has been solved. I'm here to report

00:01:10.140 a lot of other live streams and news sources will be giving you bad news. All the bad news makes you

00:01:18.260 feel bad, stresses you out. Why? Why? When there's so much good news to report. For example,

00:01:26.980 I know that you had been suffering from the lack of something called a, let's see, what's it called?

00:01:37.380 A blackfoot ferret, I believe. Yeah. It's called a blackfoot ferret. And they were extinct until this

00:01:46.440 week. And it looks like the, this, uh, blackfooted ferret has been cloned to life. Uh, they named it

00:01:55.740 Elizabeth. I call it Betty. Um, or Liz just sometimes, but it's a blackfooted ferret. And a lot of you were

00:02:04.920 saying really just last month, people were just talking about this and talking about, it's like,

00:02:10.720 there are no blackfooted ferrets. Where are all the blackfooted ferrets? We have whitefooted ferrets.

00:02:17.180 That's not fair. And so not only have we made things more just racially, but we now have a whole new

00:02:26.020 animal, brand new animal. I mean, it was an old animal. That's of course, sort of a classic brought

00:02:32.160 back, but how long before dinosaurs? I know we haven't found any intact DNA, but will that stop us?

00:02:39.640 No. I think we're going to be building some animals. Maybe build us up, build ourselves a

00:02:46.780 dinosaur that never existed before. Maybe you can't find all the DNA for a proper dinosaur of the past.

00:02:53.700 Maybe you find like a couple of dinosaurs and stick them together. See what you get.

00:02:59.320 Franken, Frankenstein dinosaurs. What could go wrong? Really? Um, is it just me or is it obvious?

00:03:08.300 It's like really obvious that there's a gigantic available space for some new political person.

00:03:19.480 With Trump off the stage, nobody has replaced the size of his voice. You know, Biden doesn't really

00:03:27.100 leave much of a footprint, and we think he's short-termer on the Democrat side. But as we're

00:03:33.260 watching the Republicans sort of figure out what life after Trump or with Trump on the outside looks

00:03:39.940 like, it's just not obvious anybody is emerging. Now, I know all the names that you're going to

00:03:48.660 mention, DeSantis and Ted Cruz, etc. But when you watch how badly Ted Cruz is being whipped by the media,

00:03:56.600 we'll talk about him in a minute, it's as if they're trying to suppress Ted Cruz because the

00:04:03.040 other side feels like he might be the biggest threat. They might be right. They might be right.

00:04:09.280 He might be at least in the top, certainly in the top four of the biggest threats. I mean, he

00:04:15.460 came in pretty close compared to Trump. So it feels like the news about Ted Cruz, you have to see it

00:04:24.200 through the filter of they're trying to stop him four years from now. That's what it feels like.

00:04:31.180 We'll talk about him a little bit more. Now, if you've been looking at the story, you know that

00:04:36.200 Ted Cruz and his family went to Cancun while he had no electricity. He was one of the people

00:04:42.500 affected in Texas. And people said, hey, Ted Cruz, how can you leave the country to a warmth when

00:04:49.740 your constituents have to stay here freezing? Get back here and be a leader. And so he rather

00:04:56.660 quickly got back in a plane and got back to Texas or got back to the United States somewhere. I don't

00:05:02.580 know where he is. But a lot of you don't understand the importance of this. People are talking about

00:05:09.400 it as if it's just some kind of a psychological morale building leadership thing. But it's a lot

00:05:16.120 more than that. And let me bring you the whiteboard. This is an important point. There's no way you're

00:05:24.120 going to get to the other end of this crisis in Texas unless Ted Cruz has enough pain. So when he

00:05:32.760 went to Cancun and he got all warm, things just went to hell. But now as soon as he's back in the

00:05:39.920 country suffering a little bit, we hope he doesn't have heat. And I hope they didn't give him a jacket.

00:05:45.460 Because if he has a jacket, that's just going to postpone the solution. Because he'll feel okay

00:05:51.320 with at least the jacket on. So you've got to get rid of his jacket. You've got to get rid of his

00:05:55.280 warmth. And the more pain that we can inflict on Ted Cruz, the warmer it will get in Texas.

00:06:03.620 Now, that's not obvious to you. You're thinking it's about psychology and morale. But no,

00:06:08.420 the forecast actually is that by tomorrow, temperatures are going to start changing. It might be,

00:06:14.160 you know, at least in Houston, the cold snap is looking like it's going to drop. And I think

00:06:19.380 that has everything to do with bringing Ted Cruz back. Not just the fact that he's back. I'm talking

00:06:26.080 about the fact that he's back and tweeting American-based tweets. Did you see any of his

00:06:32.620 Cancun-based tweets? It was like they were just, they fell apart. He would send them and they would

00:06:39.320 just, like they would evaporate in the air. They're useless. Tweeting outside of the United States,

00:06:47.120 I don't even know why anybody does it. But as soon as he got back on American soil, did you see the

00:06:53.080 power in those tweets? I'm miles away and I felt warmer just reading them. Now, one of the things

00:07:02.140 that you noticed is that as soon as people heard that Ted Cruz had left to safety in Cancun, a lot of

00:07:10.240 the residents of Texas really got kind of hot under the collar about that, didn't they? And does Ted Cruz

00:07:18.500 get any credit for that? No. He made every forehead in Texas a little bit warmer because they were so angry

00:07:27.060 about him going to Cancun. I feel that that helped. And does he get any credit for that? No. No. We act

00:07:34.380 like that didn't even happen. We're all just talking about the bad side. What about the good side? People

00:07:40.280 felt a lot warmer. They were pretty worked up about that. That's not nothing. Now, Ted Cruz did

00:07:49.100 satisfy the 48-hour rule which I invented. And the 48-hour rule says that if you do a proper and proper

00:07:59.720 matters apology within 48 hours of whatever the hell you did wrong, that we should accept it and move

00:08:07.260 on. Because I want to live in a world where people can mess up and say, oh, I'm stupid. I'm sorry. I did

00:08:15.640 something wrong. I know it was wrong. I won't do it again. You're right. I apologize. When people do

00:08:22.360 that, they're just being human. And I get it. Now, the human part of this story, I actually like Ted

00:08:29.000 Cruz more because of this story. And I'm not kidding. I like him more because of this story.

00:08:36.620 Because the reality of it is that the reason he went

00:08:39.400 is that his wife and kids talked him into it. And he basically says that. He was trying to be a

00:08:47.780 good father, he said. But, you know, he also had a wife. You know, he's trying to play it toward it

00:08:53.400 has more to do with the kids. But he had a wife, too. And I'll bet she she had an opinion about how

00:08:59.420 that family went. So let me tell you this. If your family is around the fireplace freezing with no

00:09:06.240 electricity, and you decide to take them to warmth, I am not mad at you, Ted Cruz, for taking your

00:09:15.340 family to warmth. That was one less family that the resources of the United States had to worry about.

00:09:22.940 He had the money to take them away from the problem. That was the right thing to do. Indeed,

00:09:31.060 every single politician in Texas who has the means to send their own family out of state or to

00:09:40.800 someplace warm, please do it. Please do it. Because the fewer people who are in danger, the fewer people

00:09:48.140 the system has to support. There's a food problem. They're literally running out of food. Wouldn't you

00:09:54.880 like fewer people eating food if they can afford to go someplace else? And if it causes maybe some

00:10:01.940 extra economic activity wherever they go? Well, that's good, too. Now, but Ted Cruz himself,

00:10:10.120 you have to say to yourself, okay, there's there's also the leadership thing, you have to be in the

00:10:14.100 front line, etc. But where's the compassion? Do you think Ted Cruz had less compassion?

00:10:22.320 Because he made his wife and children warm? It doesn't work that way. You can have plenty of

00:10:30.460 passion and still take care of your family. Those are unrelated concepts. So I would say that the Ted

00:10:37.680 Cruz thing says more about us than it does about him. It says something about Ted Cruz, and he apologized

00:10:45.600 for it directly. In fact, the quality of Ted Cruz's apology, if you will, was perfect, was perfect. He

00:10:54.560 told you why it happened, but not as an excuse, just by background, which we appreciate. He said it was

00:11:01.520 a mistake, obviously. Now, that's as clear as you can be. He didn't say, well, you know, you know,

00:11:09.780 if you look at it differently, it wasn't a mistake, or, you know, you're being political, or you're

00:11:15.180 spinning it. Didn't do that. He said, it's obviously a mistake. I felt it as it was happening. I came

00:11:23.740 right back. That's as good as you can do for an apology. Now, you, of course, wish the situation

00:11:31.180 hadn't happened. But as an apology goes, that was the gold standard. And when people do a proper

00:11:38.960 apology, where they acknowledge exactly what the problem was, no weasel, no spinning, I like them

00:11:47.080 better. Because you don't get that from a lot of people. It's a sign of, it's a sign of character,

00:11:53.160 I think. So Ted Cruz, with his apology, right? I'm isolating just the apology part. That's high

00:12:02.120 character. How much do I criticize him for, let's say, satisfying the needs of his family?

00:12:12.860 Not a bit. Zero criticism. And to be consistent, had this been any Democrat, just in case you're

00:12:20.400 wondering, had it been any Democrat, I would say exactly the same thing. If there are any

00:12:25.220 Democrats in Texas who can get their families out, go ahead and do it. Do it. So, but there is this

00:12:35.260 need among the public. You know, you and I, we need Ted Cruz to act differently. But let's not kid

00:12:42.780 ourselves. This is about us, right? It's about some need we have that's a little bit irrational.

00:12:48.360 Because is Ted Cruz really less effective, tweeting from Cancun? Would he care less about

00:12:56.920 his state? I don't think so. There's no evidence that that would be the case. And what has he done

00:13:03.740 since he got back? What did Ted Cruz do to make Texas warmer? Tweet? Appear on TV and apologize for

00:13:14.180 going to Cancun. What exactly could he do? So he comes back and he gives the public what they asked

00:13:20.340 for, which is he pretends he's on the ground and being on the ground and being locally makes a

00:13:26.440 difference. Does it? I mean, does it? You know, the entire country just learned that driving to work

00:13:35.900 didn't really matter. Didn't we? Didn't we all just learn that there was never a compelling reason

00:13:43.200 to drive to work in the first place? We felt there was. But as soon as we couldn't, well, maybe we

00:13:49.940 prefer it this way, don't we? Suddenly driving to work isn't even that important. But Ted Cruz driving

00:13:56.420 to work and being, you know, physically there, that's still important. It's not. It's just something we need.

00:14:01.960 Now, it's not nothing. Because if the public needs it, they need it. But it is based on some kind of a

00:14:09.880 flaw in us that we need it. I think Ted Cruz does need to, as a leader, he needs to acknowledge,

00:14:19.040 and he has, that coming back matters to us, the public. And if it matters to the public,

00:14:25.660 he has some responsibility to address that. It's just an irrational need.

00:14:30.680 All right. Jake Novak tweeted, and I didn't see this anywhere else. There's an article on,

00:14:39.500 I guess our first special forces command is building an information warfare center

00:14:44.940 that will specialize in, quote, influence artillery rounds. In other words, persuasion. So our special

00:14:53.680 forces have a persuasion wing now to attack with new persuasion wherever somebody else's persuasion

00:15:02.120 had caused a bad outcome. Now, militarizing persuasion, it had to happen. I mean, it's the obvious

00:15:11.120 thing that had to happen. But just think about how powerful the, let's say, the system of persuasion

00:15:18.640 has become. Because persuasion as a skill has existed for decades. We haven't really learned

00:15:24.720 that much in the last, you know, 10 or 20 years about how to persuade. We pretty much had that down

00:15:31.500 20 years ago, maybe longer. But what's different is our ability to instantly communicate anything to

00:15:37.700 anywhere, anyone anywhere. So once you can instantly communicate that influence, it becomes weaponized

00:15:43.940 pretty quickly. So the government is creating a, basically a brainwashing

00:15:51.520 group. Now, of course, it's under our national defense umbrella. So we assume it's defensive and

00:15:59.220 used for our benefit. But what happens to the skills these people develop? What happens to all the people

00:16:05.600 that we're using in our military to protect us when they learn all these skills about how to overthrow

00:16:11.500 governments and change the news and, and brainwash people? What do they do after they leave these

00:16:18.460 jobs? What is their civilian job after they leave with these skills? It's a problem. It's a problem.

00:16:29.780 So this is not free, meaning there's a risk to doing this, but we probably do need to do this.

00:16:35.540 I would imagine this is actually a smart thing to do, to have a weaponized military group to deal

00:16:41.960 with this kind of stuff, persuasion. Let's talk about white supremacy, because it seems to be the

00:16:51.120 monster under everybody's bed, if they're a Democrat anyway. Now, I've said this before, but I feel like

00:16:58.840 it needs to be said again, which is that what white supremacy used to be, say when I was a kid,

00:17:07.120 was the belief that white people were better than other people. But I believe that is extinct as a

00:17:15.760 belief. Now, that's not to say there aren't, you know, a pocket of people who believe anything.

00:17:20.760 So it's extinct in the same way that the flat earth idea is extinct. Yes, there are flat earthers.

00:17:29.280 So I'm not going to say, you know, 100% of anything is ever true. It's just hardly ever true that 100% of

00:17:34.860 something is true. But I've never met one. I mean, I've never even seen one talking about it on TV

00:17:44.380 in the old way. The old way was that there was actually some kind of genetic superiority.

00:17:51.200 I don't even see white supremacists saying that. The people would even call themselves

00:17:56.140 racists. I don't even see them saying that. And why not? Because they used to.

00:18:04.300 And the obvious reason is that observation doesn't agree with that opinion. You just have to wake up and

00:18:12.140 turn on the TV. Oh, wait a minute. Obama was the president of the United States.

00:18:19.280 Wait a minute. Michael Jordan was the best basketball player. Wait a minute. Kanye West can do just about

00:18:26.480 anything. Wait a minute. Oprah is the best, probably, who's ever done what Oprah does. So you can't really,

00:18:36.140 you can't really live and interact in the world and hold that belief that somehow white

00:18:42.060 people have this superiority like in the old days people used to think. It's just so obviously not

00:18:47.280 true. Now here's the dumbest part about white supremacy, which is, well, there's a flip side to

00:18:56.520 it too. The dumbest part about white supremacy as a belief, let's say you are the white supremacist.

00:19:02.220 Now I'm not talking about people talking about it. I'm talking about this alleged person who's the

00:19:07.140 white supremacist. Why would you take credit for the work of other people? So suppose you're saying,

00:19:15.800 hey, white people invented, you know, all the good stuff. Or you're saying, hey, white people

00:19:21.840 accomplished this or built this or build economies or constitutions or whatever. And let's say that's

00:19:29.820 true. If you were to just look at the, you know, do a checklist and say, all right, who built the

00:19:36.300 computers? Okay, more white people than other people. Who, you know, made the smartphones? Well,

00:19:42.120 by the time you got to smartphones, companies like Apple had lots of people of all kinds of types

00:19:48.860 working on it. But let's say you could make the argument that more historically, less in current

00:19:54.280 times. But more historically, that a lot of white people accomplished a bunch of stuff. What's that

00:20:00.060 got to do with you? They're not you. Odds are, you're not even related. How in the world do you

00:20:10.160 specifically take credit for what, Edison? Or Tesla? You know, Tesla, the inventor? How do you take

00:20:19.260 credit for that? They're not you. It doesn't make any sense. And likewise, how does black history

00:20:27.460 make sense? How does that make sense? Because if you're black, and you learn that somebody black

00:20:35.400 invented something, did something, it's good to remind us, you know, that everybody can accomplish

00:20:40.780 stuff. But those people who are black and accomplish things, they're not you. Why do you get credit for

00:20:48.900 that? The same way that I don't get credit for Edison? Why do you? Why does somebody else get

00:20:54.060 credit for George Washington Carver? It's just other people doing stuff. It makes no sense that

00:21:01.480 somehow that has something to do with me. It just doesn't. So, you know, we've drifted more into a

00:21:09.120 situation where I think the way white supremacy is used in 2021 is that it's, let's say, a system has

00:21:17.940 developed primarily through the influence of white people over time, which is optimized for white

00:21:25.600 people. Now, that argument isn't bad. That's not a bad argument, right? Wouldn't you say that the

00:21:32.140 United States, I know, you know, you have your issues with wokeness and blada blada and cancellation,

00:21:38.720 and those are real things. But wouldn't you say that's a reasonably true statement, that the United

00:21:44.260 States, not necessarily by intentional design, but it sort of evolved into a place that was optimized

00:21:51.860 for white people. I don't think it was necessarily intentional, but it just sort of worked out that

00:21:57.560 way. Now, not optimized for every white person, right? If you were a poor white person, and you came into a

00:22:05.360 situation where you're trying to get a job, and there was some preferential hiring that went to trying to

00:22:12.540 increase diversity, well, that didn't work for you, did it? Because I was in that situation. I had two

00:22:19.220 careers that I lost for being white, explicitly, white and male, explicitly. In other words, my bosses told

00:22:26.500 me that directly. They said, we can't promote you because you're white and male. Now, was I getting the

00:22:33.920 benefit? It seems like I was being discriminated against. But the truth is that at the time, I could easily

00:22:41.640 get a college education. And it kind of didn't matter how many companies were bad to me. I just

00:22:46.900 had other options. So I just went to my other options. So it wasn't good for me, but I just went

00:22:52.880 to my other options because I had them. Was the United States optimized for a person like me in, let's

00:23:00.400 say, the late 70s when I was getting started? The answer is yes. It was very optimized for people like me.

00:23:07.200 And I took advantage of it. So I think that argument has some weight. But here's a question

00:23:13.000 I have for you. If you were to actually calculate reparations, we'll just talk about it hypothetically.

00:23:20.440 I know you're opposed to it, this audience, for the most part. But let's talk about there's something

00:23:25.260 to learn by thinking about it. How would you calculate it? Now, the way that we automatically

00:23:33.660 think is that the way you'd calculate it is you'd say, well, how are all the white people doing?

00:23:38.880 And then how are all the black people doing? You know, whether or not they descended from

00:23:43.060 slavery or not, they sort of, you know, get painted by the same brush and have the same experiences to

00:23:50.520 a large extent, not completely, of course. So, you know, you could argue there's maybe an economic

00:23:56.740 difference on average. And so what you're trying to do is, you know what the gap is. So you base your

00:24:03.420 reparations on maybe closing some of that gap, right? That would be the common way to do it.

00:24:08.860 But does that make sense? Is that the way an economist would do it? Let's say the economist had no

00:24:15.220 racial bias. That's not a possibility, right? There's no such person. But imagine there were.

00:24:20.680 And the economist was doing nothing except a calculation. What would be the calculation?

00:24:27.860 Well, I think they'd go like this. They'd say, you're a black person living in America.

00:24:33.680 And if slavery had never happened, you would be a black person living in Africa.

00:24:39.660 What is the average income in Africa? You know, normalized by, you know, different dollar stuff,

00:24:47.020 et cetera. I get spam, like, all times a day. So if you were an economist, you'd say,

00:25:04.240 how are the people doing in Africa? And how are the people doing who were victims,

00:25:09.960 at least their families were victims of racism? How is their economic situation?

00:25:14.600 Probably better. So what do you do with the fact that the victims, the people who are descended from

00:25:23.380 slavery, and I think victim is the right word. That's not too strong. What do you do when the

00:25:28.720 victims are doing better than the ones who are not victims? Now, of course, if you were actually a

00:25:33.460 slave, and you were still alive, that's a whole different conversation. Because you specifically had

00:25:39.960 a really bad thing. Your life was stolen from you. It doesn't get any worse than that, right?

00:25:44.600 But if you're descended a few generations down, and you compared where you are today, as a person

00:25:52.580 working in the United States, compared to what you would have been if your family had stayed in

00:25:58.520 Africa, which one's the better deal? I actually don't know. I mean, maybe you'd have to adjust it for

00:26:04.780 various cultural expectations or whatever, but how would you calculate that?

00:26:10.620 Now, here's the other thing that makes it even more iffy. What is more important, money or happiness?

00:26:19.540 Go. What is more important? What do we put in the Constitution? Does the Constitution of the United

00:26:27.980 States say you have a right to make money? Well, it doesn't restrict that right, so you do, of course,

00:26:34.040 have that right. But the Constitution is sort of silent on money, isn't it? It's happiness. The

00:26:41.880 Constitution directly calls out happiness and freedom, but happiness, right? So if you're going to

00:26:51.120 pay reparations, should you pay reparations until the monetary situation is, you know, closer to being

00:26:59.100 equal? Or, since money is not your top priority in life, not anybody's, happiness is. Should you not

00:27:07.840 create a situation where your happiness gets to the same level? What do you think is the general

00:27:15.740 happiness level of black people in America compared to white people in America? Go. In the comments,

00:27:23.220 without looking it up, don't cheat. I know you can Google this instantly, but without any cheating,

00:27:29.820 what do you think? Is the average black person and the average white person in America about the

00:27:36.300 same level of happiness? Or is there a difference? Go. What do you think, without looking it up?

00:27:43.440 People are saying the same. Same, same, same, same. I'm looking at, now why would you think that? How

00:27:52.340 could it possibly be the same? I only got one no. Somebody says black happiness would be lower.

00:28:04.260 Somebody says black people are more upset on average. I don't think you can make that claim.

00:28:08.840 That feels a little bit racist. A little bit racist. You know, even if it's right. I don't know

00:28:16.220 if it's accurate, but even if it's accurate, it's a little bit racist. All right. And by the way,

00:28:26.020 it's my belief that 100% of humans are biased by design. You know, your brain is a pattern

00:28:33.080 recognition machine. It doesn't turn off. And you're not good at recognizing patterns.

00:28:37.520 We see false patterns all the time and we think they're real. I mean, it's, it's a continuous

00:28:41.900 thing. So you can't really turn off the fact that every now and then you think or say something that

00:28:47.840 somebody else thinks is a little racist. That's not a thing. And we should stop pretending like we

00:28:53.720 could do it. It's just not a thing. People can't turn that off. You can deal with it with your better,

00:29:00.540 you know, your better moral and ethical fiber. You can, you know, you can overcome it. You can become a

00:29:06.760 better person, but you can't turn it off. That's not a thing. Um, so the answer is that, uh, at least

00:29:15.780 in the last, you know, internet search of some survey I saw that the black and white happiness

00:29:21.560 is similar, but here's the weird part. Black happiness used to be higher, used to be higher

00:29:28.160 than white happiness, not too many, you know, decades ago. Um, what's up with that? What's up

00:29:36.940 with that? And what if, what if that had persisted? What if you did a survey today? This is not the

00:29:43.740 case, I understand. But what if you found out that black people were a little bit happier than white

00:29:48.000 people on average? What the hell do you do with that? Given that happiness is literally our highest

00:29:55.180 goal? I don't know. But at the moment it's equal, but black happiness has fallen. Is there a reason

00:30:03.100 to believe it will continue falling? I think so. Because whatever caused it to fall in the first

00:30:09.500 place, I doubt it changed. Did it? I mean, what made it fall in the first place? I don't know.

00:30:15.900 I would imagine that social media isn't helping, is it? Do you think social media is making black

00:30:21.880 people happier? I doubt it. I doubt it. I don't know if it's making anybody happier.

00:30:28.680 Why would it make them happier and not everybody else? It doesn't make sense. So I would definitely

00:30:34.860 like to know what it is that's lowering the average happiness of African Americans, but it does coincide

00:30:41.740 with smartphones. It does coincide with, you know, social media's rise. Coincidence? Maybe the best

00:30:51.700 form of reparations is to get rid of social media. Because if social media is what caused the higher

00:30:58.940 black happiness to reduce to the level of white happiness, maybe the social media platforms are part

00:31:06.720 of that. I mean, not intentionally, obviously. So did it fall or did white happiness rise? According

00:31:17.500 to what I saw with low credibility, white happiness has stayed about the same for a long time, and black

00:31:23.520 happiness had been higher but was reduced. Now, you can't really trust necessarily that any of that was

00:31:29.640 polled correctly. You can't trust that the question was asked correctly, so it didn't have a cultural bias.

00:31:36.400 You can't really be sure that's true. But what I can be sure of is that there's no evidence that

00:31:43.260 white people are happier than black people, on average. We can be sure we don't know there's

00:31:49.120 a difference. We can't be sure we know it's the same. All right. So I just throw that in the mix to

00:31:56.600 say that if we try to calculate this on economic basis, it would be an irrational act. But it could be

00:32:03.040 an irrational act in the same way that Ted Cruz returning to the United States was, in my opinion,

00:32:09.640 irrational. But he's dealing with an irrational problem, which is how people felt about it.

00:32:15.440 So sometimes you have to deal with irrational problems with irrational solutions. That's not

00:32:20.280 even unusual. It's sometimes just the only way you can do it. All right. One of my favorite follows

00:32:27.840 on Twitter, and this guy drives me freaking crazy in a positive way, is Anatoly Lubarsky. I think he's

00:32:38.660 a game designer. But he follows a lot of my tweets and then comes into the comments and debunks a lot

00:32:47.060 of what I say and a whole lot of what other people say. I've never seen a more productive

00:32:53.560 debunker or anybody who could do it as quickly and make a solid case of it. So if you're not following

00:32:59.720 him, look him up. So his last name is Lubarsky, L-U-B-A-R-S-K-Y, first name Anatoly. Now, I don't know

00:33:11.960 anything about him except his tweet activity. But his tweet activity is so rational and well-informed

00:33:19.660 that you're really missing a lot if you don't see his take on the same things that you see me

00:33:26.240 give an opinion on, especially to see him take an opposite opinion from me quite often. Now, he's

00:33:32.940 probably one of the few people who disagree with me that I will happily tweet because his disagreement

00:33:41.080 is so well done that I'm happy to be called out on it. He just does a good job on it. So here's

00:33:48.840 something he said that is so funny because I think it's just so right. Everybody's talking about why

00:33:57.200 it is that the infections and coronavirus are plunging. Because shouldn't February be a bad

00:34:04.880 month? Seasonality, blah, blah, blah, right? February should be a bad month. If the cold has

00:34:10.880 anything to do with anything, or seasonality has anything to do with anything, this should be our

00:34:15.480 worst month. But in fact, the infection is plunging everywhere. How do you explain that? And so

00:34:23.280 everybody's been arguing about, oh, it's, you know, the vaccinations are kicking in, other people saying

00:34:28.340 there's natural immunity, which I think there's something to that argument, by the way. But there are

00:34:33.640 different explanations. And then Anatoly Lubarsky comes in, and he says, all we're doing is reverting

00:34:43.200 to the mean after the holidays. And I thought, well, it can't be that simple. And then you look at the

00:34:51.400 chart, and all we're doing is reverting to the mean after the holidays. That's it. That's the whole

00:34:59.900 freaking thing. Now, of course, it matters that we're, you know, we're trying hard to socially

00:35:05.480 distance and wear masks and stuff. I'm a believer that those things matter, that they make a

00:35:10.700 difference. But we were doing that before the holidays, and it was keeping us at a certain

00:35:15.060 level of infection. Then the holidays came in, and it was this huge thing, which we said was seasonal.

00:35:21.120 Well, but was it seasonal? Maybe it was only seasonal because the holidays are clumped in

00:35:27.660 one season. You know, the big ones, where you travel to your family. So just think about this,

00:35:37.560 that all of these explanations you heard, it's like, wait, maybe they're secretly using

00:35:42.260 hydroxychloroquine, and it really works. Think about all the explanations you've heard

00:35:48.140 for the unexplained drop in infections. Completely unexplained. And then Anatoly says,

00:35:56.840 no, it's just reverting to the mean because the thing that caused the spike went away.

00:36:01.740 And I read that, and I thought, uh, I think that's the right answer. I don't know that this is a

00:36:11.200 mystery at all, is it? Is there any mystery here? It literally just returned to the mean.

00:36:19.800 That's it.

00:36:20.480 Now, I'm seeing somebody say, wow, in the comments. Are you having the same feeling that I had when I

00:36:28.820 first read this? Which is, not only is it right, but it's obvious? But it wasn't obvious until I read

00:36:37.660 his tweet? What the hell is wrong with me? How hypnotized have I been that something this obvious

00:36:44.480 wasn't obvious to me? I mean, I've looked at those graphs over and over again, and you can very

00:36:52.140 clearly see, here's the baseline, here's the spike, and then it's going back to the baseline.

00:36:59.520 Now, of course, there are lots of other things happening. We're getting better with therapeutics,

00:37:03.920 and some people say there's something about the testing that's changed, and maybe it's

00:37:07.760 Biden is in office, so they're looking at it differently. I don't know. I don't know.

00:37:13.720 It just looks like nothing happened, except that we stopped going on holidays where we

00:37:18.680 mingled with each other. Let me ask you this. Suppose you said, hey, United States, here's

00:37:26.480 the deal. For three weeks, you can only physically interact with people that you have interacted with

00:37:34.440 already in the past one week. And just say, that's the rule. You can interact with everybody

00:37:43.500 you've interacted with in the past week, but for the next three weeks, nobody else. Nobody else goes

00:37:50.760 inside your house. You never go into a room in which there's even one person in that room that

00:37:57.040 you have not already been with in the past week. How hard would that be? Well, I don't really meet

00:38:04.540 many new people during a pandemic, do you? That would be really easy for me. I would just make a list of

00:38:11.480 the people I've seen in the last week. I'd be like, that's pretty easy. Now, I would still let a plumber

00:38:16.880 in my house. I'd just make sure I'm not standing in the same place, right? You know, I would still

00:38:21.720 maybe, you know, have somebody deliver DoorDash or something. But somebody says, stop it. Stop what?

00:38:32.500 Stop what? Could you be a little more specific? Now, I'm not suggesting that we do that, because

00:38:40.160 there's no practical way that's going to happen. But aren't we sort of at the point where we kind of

00:38:45.960 know what caused the problem? And the problem is people interacting who don't normally interact.

00:38:51.780 That's what the holidays did. As soon as you take away people interacting that don't interact on a

00:38:56.960 normal weekly basis, infections just fell off a cliff. Couldn't we just do that for three weeks?

00:39:04.060 Is that the Chinese secret? Nah? Nah? Is China's secret that they just socially distance?

00:39:14.600 They didn't socially distance that much, but they did it with only the same people that they

00:39:20.260 they hang out with. I mean, could it be that simple? Maybe. I'd like to know. All right.

00:39:28.780 Then there is the question of whether half the country is already immune from either other T-cell

00:39:34.120 stuff or whatever. I think that hypothesis is still very much alive. But I think the big drop is

00:39:42.360 probably just we stopped mixing with strange people over the holidays. Here's a question for you.

00:39:47.600 How does Facebook still make money? There's something going on here, isn't there? I've told

00:39:56.920 you before that a background in economic is like a superpower. For anybody who doesn't know,

00:40:04.400 I've got a background degree in economics and an MBA. So when you have that talent in your talent stack,

00:40:12.380 it lets you just see things that other people can't see. For example, I use this example a lot.

00:40:19.560 I avoid speeding tickets because I understand economics. So I say to myself, would a police force

00:40:27.640 use a valuable resource, because everybody's got a budget problem these days, and put it somewhere

00:40:33.580 where there would be no real danger from speeding? Let's say Sunday morning at 9 a.m.

00:40:42.500 Nobody's on the roads. It's 9 a.m. Would a police force have a speed trap at 9 a.m. on a Sunday

00:40:49.380 morning when absolutely nobody's getting in an accident? And the answer is no, because economically

00:40:54.860 it wouldn't make sense. So there are all these situations in which you can use economics to actually

00:40:59.660 see through walls. I can actually see around a corner and know that there's not a speed trap

00:41:07.680 if it's Sunday at 9 a.m. So my economics ability literally, figuratively, but almost literally,

00:41:17.080 allows me to see around the corner on the road and know that there's no speed trap there.

00:41:22.020 Think about that. It's like a superpower. Now every now and then, this superpower lets me see things

00:41:29.460 in other realms as well. And here's what I'm seeing with Facebook. I log on to Facebook and I look for

00:41:35.620 posts by the few friends that I have remaining, and there are none. There are maybe two people in my

00:41:44.220 feed who still post because they're Republicans, or two families, I guess. And they still post because

00:41:52.460 at least one of them is still traveling, you know, literally every day. And so it's travel pictures,

00:41:58.360 but only one. And, and then another Republican who's, you know, does his hobbies and stuff like

00:42:04.660 that. But almost everybody else is not posting. Yeah, I'm looking at other comments as other people

00:42:13.520 are saying the same stuff. Now, how do they make money if people stopped posting? Because there's no way.

00:42:21.700 Somebody says, somebody says, I see my friends post on Facebook all the time. Are they posting about

00:42:29.600 their travel? Or their, their, their parties that they're at? Because probably half of Facebook was

00:42:37.040 where you went, and the group of people you were with, or even, you know, pictures of your food at

00:42:43.300 that nice restaurant you went to. And then there's also pictures of people just, you know, looking good.

00:42:49.160 But if you're wearing your mask, nobody really wants those pictures to be part of their permanent

00:42:55.620 record, except as the novelty of it. Right? Somebody says, my friends just post memes and jokes,

00:43:02.020 but I'll bet not more of them. Right? Probably not that much more. So you've got Facebook who has the

00:43:09.640 pandemic. In my observation, their number of posts are probably down 60%. At least 30%. Am I completely

00:43:22.520 wrong? I'm talking about individuals just posting pictures of their life. Is that not down 60%?

00:43:30.140 Could somebody tell me? I'm looking at the comments to see if people are agreeing. Is this just my

00:43:34.620 observation? Now, I'll get that there's more activity in the lists, and the groups. I'm hearing

00:43:41.720 the people who are advertising, just anecdotally. Anecdotally, I'm hearing the advertisers are,

00:43:47.920 not advertisers, people who are advertising their services are still doing great.

00:43:52.920 So they seem to be getting just as much response. So you're seeing a lot of people sharing articles.

00:44:02.260 Somebody says wrong completely, but you don't give any details. Somebody says the gamers are keeping

00:44:09.380 it afloat. Somebody says I stopped posting. Some no longer use it. So most people are agreeing with

00:44:18.560 my observation that there's less activity, at least on the posting part. So do you believe that other

00:44:25.020 activities magically increased to fill the gap? Do you think so? Do you think that people are spending

00:44:33.520 as much time on Facebook, but they're just doing other things? And that just magically their interests

00:44:40.360 went from the thing they were doing, which is showing their vacations and whatnot. Suddenly,

00:44:45.360 they like memes and groups and lists. Maybe. I mean, it could have happened. People spending more time at

00:44:54.880 home. Maybe they've got a little more time. But it doesn't smell right to me. All right, here's the

00:45:00.620 other thing to add to this. They don't have election campaign ads, because the election's over. That had to

00:45:09.160 be a huge source of revenue, right? And it just stopped, at least until the next election. At the same

00:45:15.120 time, I've seen some allegations that Facebook... Now, I don't know if this is true. It's just

00:45:21.100 allegations. That Facebook had been aware that its statistics it was giving to advertisers were

00:45:28.500 inflated. I don't know if that's true. It's just an allegation that's in the news this week. Now,

00:45:36.240 let me ask you this. Let's say you work for Facebook and you sell ads. It's your job to sell ads.

00:45:42.260 Do you go to the advertisers and you say, here are our statistics from the last week? And you can see

00:45:50.900 the traffic is way down. So the amount we'll charge you for your ad will be based on this traffic being

00:45:58.820 way down. So we're going to have to give you a big discount. Do you think that it goes that way?

00:46:03.940 Is that how salespeople work? Let me explain how a salesperson works. They work for commissions,

00:46:11.780 usually. I don't know if that's the case in Facebook. But in any case, everybody wants to

00:46:15.540 do a good job. And the salesperson says this. They say, look at my traffic for 2020, which might have

00:46:27.740 been high. And we'll base your advertising fee based on the traffic from that last year, because

00:46:35.860 that's the full year we have. We're not going to base it on the last month, because, you know,

00:46:41.600 it was an unusual month and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Don't you think that advertisers are overpaying?

00:46:49.300 I feel like they might be. Do you think that the advertisers are aware that people aren't posting

00:46:55.040 as much on Facebook? Does Facebook tell the advertisers that? It's like, hey, hey, guys,

00:47:00.020 it's okay. People are posting way less because of the pandemic. They can't show a picture of their,

00:47:05.560 you know, Ted Cruz is not going to show the pictures from Cancun on Facebook, right? And then you can

00:47:10.260 extend that to other people who also don't want to do that. Now, when I had my delayed honeymoon

00:47:17.920 recently, went to Bora Bora, we did post some pictures, but I didn't feel comfortable about it.

00:47:24.880 Let me tell you, I didn't feel comfortable about it. We were trying to preserve some sense of

00:47:30.380 normalness, but maybe it was inappropriate. I felt a little bit like Ted Cruz did, which is that if I

00:47:38.040 were not suffering enough, I wasn't enough of a team player. You know what I mean? But I powered

00:47:46.240 through it. I managed to enjoy it anyway. So I've got a big question about Facebook. I'm not so sure

00:47:53.700 their business is as solid as maybe their stock price would indicate. All right.

00:48:02.600 Ed Martin tweeted this, and I love this thought. He tweeted that the Russia hoax, which is sort of an

00:48:11.220 election-based hoax, right? Something about the election and Russia. So the Russia hoax and the

00:48:19.120 fine people hoax, which was about white supremacy, got together and basically had sex and created the

00:48:26.880 Pelosi insurrection hoax. So if you look at the capital insurrection hoax, the idea that they were

00:48:34.800 actually literally trying to conquer the United States with their Viking horn hat and their zip ties.

00:48:41.260 If you look at that hoax, it is literally the combination of an election-based hoax, the Russia

00:48:48.860 hoax, and the fine people hoax, a white supremacist hoax. They actually married two hoaxes and made a new

00:48:55.800 hoax. And I love this observation because it feels like exactly what happened, doesn't it?

00:49:03.860 Anyway, so good tweet, Ed Martin. Looks like Nancy Pelosi hired a racist to hunt down MAGA people.

00:49:16.440 That's what Matt Gaetz tweeted this morning. So this was a general honorary or whatever. I'm just

00:49:25.320 going to say this, that he looks like a nut job and probably a racist, just based on what we can see

00:49:32.920 of him and some clips about things he said. And remember I told you, was it maybe in the spring

00:49:40.920 of last year? And I tweeted that if Biden got elected, Republicans would be hunted.

00:49:49.520 Do you remember how much shit I got for that? All the Democrats just grabbed that tweet and

00:49:56.380 they got republished in various left-leaning publications. Look at this idiot.

00:50:01.920 Can you believe it? The cartoonist says if Biden gets elected, the Republicans are going to be

00:50:07.460 hunted. Ha ha ha ha. They're going to be hunted. It's happening. It's happening. Now, didn't you think

00:50:15.840 that was the weirdest prediction? Probably not. Some of you probably were already there. But if you look

00:50:22.900 at how weird some of my predictions have been that have come in, this one was pretty weird. But I would

00:50:31.220 say that it is now proven right. All right. New news. Secretary of State Blinken, under the Biden

00:50:39.760 administration, says they're willing to meet face-to-face with Iran and talk about it. And they

00:50:45.160 want to get back with the other United Nations countries that are part of the conversation with

00:50:50.920 Iran. Now, is that good? Now, if you were to just read this story on the surface, it sounds pretty

00:51:00.660 good. You got a nuclear issue, but Iran is willing to talk about it and negotiate. Now Biden's team is

00:51:09.300 willing to talk about it. Pretty good. On paper, right? If you didn't know any context, pretty good.

00:51:18.020 Because you certainly would rather be talking about nuclear war than, you know, building toward it. So

00:51:24.300 it's all good, isn't it? Well, here's some context that was left out. And Joel Pollack pointed this out

00:51:32.780 in a tweet. That if the Biden administration starts negotiating with Iran and gets back to

00:51:40.860 something like Obama's old nuclear deal with Iran, it's basically a green light to Israel to attack

00:51:47.420 Iran and change the regime and get rid of their nuclear weapons program. Now, would you say that?

00:51:55.840 Would that be your opinion, that Israel would now have a green light to take out the regime of Iran

00:52:02.740 Iran if Biden's team looks like they're going to sign on to a deal that would doom Israel in the long

00:52:10.540 run according to Israel? I think so. I think this is a green light to attack. So was the Trump approach

00:52:22.000 more likely to create war or less likely? Remember I told you, I'm going to remind you of this so many

00:52:31.080 times. You're going to be so sick of me. You're already sick of hearing it. The longer Trump is

00:52:36.560 out of office, the smarter he will look. As long as he sort of stays out of things, right? As soon as

00:52:44.000 he gets back into things and becomes part of the headlines, then we're back to where we were. But

00:52:49.620 it does look to me like Biden has set up a path that guarantees war with at least one nuclear power,

00:52:59.940 Israel, and one fledgling nuclear power. Am I wrong? Is this not a fair analysis that it seems pretty

00:53:13.880 clear that whatever Trump was doing was likely to cause flare-ups of maybe some terrorism? But

00:53:20.800 it looked like he'd even scared Iran out of some of their terrorist ambitions. Not all of them,

00:53:28.360 of course. But it looked like they had tamped it down a little bit, right? Now, as soon as Biden's

00:53:33.280 in, one of their proxies hurts Americans in Iraq. It's not a coincidence. It looks like Biden has

00:53:42.240 just created a clear path to a major war. Are you surprised? Well, a lot of people said that Biden was

00:53:51.640 part of the war party, you know, associated with the industrial military complex and various people

00:53:58.180 who like war because it's profitable. So Trump looks like the smart one. Trump looks like the smart

00:54:08.500 one on this topic, period. He looks like the smart one. And I don't know that that's going to change.

00:54:13.420 There's a new book alleging that Jislaine, or is it Jislaine? I never know. Maxwell, appeared to admit

00:54:24.980 that Jeffrey Epstein was taping Donald Trump and the Clintons visiting, I guess, Epstein's island and

00:54:37.340 whatever. During a 26th meeting with, so this alleged admission happened with a 2016 meeting with former

00:54:47.660 CBS producer Ira Rosen, who writes this in his new book. All right, so here's what we know.

00:54:54.620 And then apparently Jislaine said that she didn't want to admit where the Trump tapes were,

00:55:02.460 because then people would ask for the Clinton tapes, and she wanted Clinton to win.

00:55:09.760 All right, so that's what's reported. And the source of this is a book

00:55:14.160 with no tapes or no text messages, just somebody who said he heard it. Now, what level of credibility

00:55:23.980 do you put on a story that's in a book? And the most interesting thing in the book

00:55:30.960 is this story, which is what sells the book. What credibility would you put on that?

00:55:38.700 Zero. Yeah, exactly zero. Now, that doesn't mean it's not true. And I'll say this every time I use

00:55:46.500 the word credibility. Credibility just says how you should treat it. It doesn't say whether it's true

00:55:53.080 or false. But the credibility is zero. There's no credibility. If you give this any attention,

00:56:00.100 you're a sucker. Because this is a pure sucker play right here. Now, aside from the fact that

00:56:09.320 there's no credibility because of the source it's coming from, an author selling a book with no

00:56:14.900 documentation to support it, right? But could it be true? Well, anything could be true, but I feel like

00:56:24.480 we would know it by now. So I imagine that whatever happened was probably he heard it wrong or remembered

00:56:29.960 it wrong or she answered unclearly. It's probably something like that. But all right. Here's a

00:56:39.220 question. Why is California doing about the same as Florida when the way that they're handling the

00:56:47.120 coronavirus is completely different? So California had strict lockdowns. Florida was more permissive

00:56:56.380 with opening schools and business. But the curve looks about the same. How do you explain it?

00:57:04.000 Well, let's go back to my previous note. Anatoly will explain it by the only thing that mattered

00:57:11.320 was that it's not Christmas anymore. Maybe that's it. Maybe none of the other stuff makes much of a

00:57:20.760 difference. Maybe. Now, the other thing you have to factor in is that California might have had far

00:57:27.300 worse infections. So it could be that if California had not locked down and done, you know, stricter

00:57:35.160 things, that they wouldn't have been similar to Florida. It would have been much worse. Now, why am I

00:57:40.820 saying that Florida, that California might, and this is speculation, this is pure speculation. Why am I

00:57:48.140 saying that California might have more infections? Because they're locking down harder, right? Oh, it's

00:57:57.060 a thing I'm not allowed to say, isn't it? What's the thing I'm not allowed to say? You can say it in

00:58:05.000 your head now. What does California have as far as the situation that Florida doesn't have? Forget

00:58:13.560 about the politics and forget about the rules for the pandemic. What else is there about California

00:58:21.740 that's a little bit different? Oh, I'm seeing a bunch of racists saying stuff in the comments.

00:58:28.820 Somebody's saying it's because we have an open border with Mexico. So a lot of infected people,

00:58:35.280 presumably, might be coming over the border and making it impossible for California to control

00:58:41.920 the infection, whereas Florida has at least a little bit of a water boundary there. So fewer people

00:58:48.720 streaming infected. But that is very racist of you, and I would never say that. So racist.

00:58:55.480 But back to Anatoly Lubarsky's comment, it might be that the only thing that really matters is that

00:59:07.600 we're not having holidays at the moment. Could be that that's 80% of everything, but there's a solid

00:59:13.620 20% we don't understand, at least, right? And that 20% could have to do with immigration being more

00:59:20.360 permissive in California. Can I say that out loud without being canceled? What do you think?

00:59:28.420 Is that just a statement of statistics, or is it just automatically racist because it has something

00:59:35.640 to do with immigration? We live in dangerous times. I don't know if you can make an obvious statement

00:59:44.000 that if your border is open and people who could be infected are coming across it, that you're in

00:59:50.660 worse shape than if you didn't do that. Isn't that fair to say? But we don't say that much out loud.

00:59:56.700 All right. So what else we got going on? How about, I guess Johnson & Johnson announced

01:00:08.900 that they filed with the World Health Organization for emergency use of its single-dose COVID

01:00:17.700 vaccination. So now there will be a one-dose vaccination. I'm guessing that it will not be

01:00:22.900 as effective, but I think it's both in the 90% range, like one's in the low 90%, one's in the

01:00:29.380 mid-90%, something like that, right? So it might be a little less effective, but not so much less

01:00:35.600 that it would matter that much, right? So I told you that everybody asked me,

01:00:42.580 are you going to get the vaccination when it's available to you? And I always said,

01:00:47.660 I'm going to wait until the last possible moment when I have the most possible information.

01:00:54.280 Because we might find out that one of the vaccinations is better than the other,

01:00:58.840 right? I mean, that seemed obvious that we would at least hear a story about that,

01:01:02.700 even if it's not true. We might find out that one has some side effects that we didn't know about.

01:01:08.140 So I'm waiting until the last minute to make my decision. I'm leaning toward getting it.

01:01:15.000 So I'd be really surprised if I don't get the vaccination. But this is the kind of thing I'm

01:01:20.160 waiting for, right? Now, did you know that within the time that we're waiting for the vaccination,

01:01:26.960 we might get approval for a single vaccination? That was worth waiting for, right? So I didn't

01:01:36.220 have an option of getting it, but that's why I wait on the decision. All right, so I would be far

01:01:42.900 more likely to favor the single shot than the double shot. Here's the good news. NASA just put a

01:01:50.800 helicopter on Mars. You know, I tweeted and live streamed on this, but I just can't stop being

01:01:57.460 happy about this. NASA put a helicopter on Mars. And so I guess it's a little helicopter that's built

01:02:05.340 for their atmosphere. How do you build a flying device for another world? I mean, how incredibly

01:02:18.120 awesome is this. And if you understand the number of technical challenges that all had to be solved

01:02:24.420 just right, and nothing could go wrong. I mean, everything had to work just right to get this

01:02:31.960 thing to land safely in one of the most hardest places to land. This is a big deal. And I've said

01:02:40.580 this before, but again, I can't say this enough. Whoever controls space will control

01:02:47.840 everything. Because if you control space, you've got a good chance of controlling the planet,

01:02:53.040 because whoever has the high ground controls the planet. There's probably more wealth ultimately

01:02:59.100 in space, ultimately, not right away. Whoever gets up there is going to own the United States. Now,

01:03:08.620 how big is it that I think we're the first, the United States, to put a flying object

01:03:16.960 on Mars? Because you don't control Mars unless you control the sky on Mars. And we put the first

01:03:28.100 flying device on Mars. We are the closest so far to controlling the sky militarily on Mars.

01:03:39.220 You don't think that matters, do you? It's going to matter a lot. Now, it might not matter to you,

01:03:46.040 but it's going to matter to your grandkids. Because whoever controls the sky and the air and Mars

01:03:53.100 controls Mars. And whoever controls Mars has a base in space that would be unparalleled. The moon

01:04:01.240 might even be better. But Mars is pretty important for controlling space. So militarily, it's gigantic.

01:04:10.680 How it makes us feel as a country is gigantic. Is this a Trump accomplishment or a Biden

01:04:18.880 accomplishment? Well, I think it probably has been started even before Trump, I would imagine. So

01:04:25.560 I'm not sure you can give people credit. But at least Trump must have funded it. At the very least,

01:04:31.420 he funded it, right? So this is the sort of thing that I think Trump has the smart strategic advantage.

01:04:40.940 If Biden is not working on nuclear power really hard, and working on conquering space really hard,

01:04:50.100 and making sure that we have flying technology in space, flying technology, both for the outer space

01:04:57.640 part, but also on planet, if those aren't highest priorities for the future, Biden isn't getting it

01:05:04.880 right. I think Trump understood that. Don't you? Yeah. And I think Elon Musk, of course, understands it.

01:05:13.020 So yeah, and Trump did Space Force, right? Space Force was not just because it's going to look good on

01:05:18.720 his resume. Space Force is because he understood power. If there's one thing that Trump understands

01:05:27.580 that nobody should be arguing about, he gets power, right? He knows how power works, all of the ins and

01:05:36.960 outs of power. And he looked at space and said, uh-oh, if somebody else has that power someday,

01:05:44.040 space, we're doomed. We have to have that power. And so he went out and created the seeds. And we're

01:05:53.420 seeing it start to come to fruition of that power. I think Trump is beyond smart president. He's

01:06:02.820 visionary, if you look at Space Force as an example. So I don't know if he'll ever get enough credit for

01:06:10.300 that, but he should. And the other good thing I was saying on a live stream yesterday, I did a

01:06:17.280 little impromptu walk in my neighborhood, if you saw that. And I noticed yesterday for the first time

01:06:22.540 that one of the facilities near me, there's a big fairgrounds facility not too far, and they put up

01:06:28.520 giant tents and they built a vaccination center. Now, of course, there have been vaccination centers for

01:06:37.960 some time in other places. And we know that the vaccination has been rolling out, of course.

01:06:43.620 But I have to tell you that when you see a giant human-made vaccination center pop up in your town,

01:06:54.560 it'll change you. It doesn't feel the same as just knowing it's happening.

01:07:01.500 I actually cried when I saw it. Because this was the point where the humans go on offense, right?

01:07:12.680 Defense is putting on your mask and socially distancing and closing your schools. That's just defense.

01:07:20.000 I don't really want to be in the military that only plays defense. I want to fucking win.

01:07:27.400 And winning requires offense. Now, of course, I'm speaking just figuratively, but vaccinations look

01:07:35.620 like offense to me. That doesn't look like defense. And the psychological morale thing that that did to

01:07:46.400 me, watching my town go on offense for the first time. So maybe your town's been on offense for a while,

01:07:55.020 if you've got it first. But my town just went on offense. I'm very, very happy about that.

01:08:02.440 It happened about the same time that my country put a helicopter on Mars.

01:08:11.920 Who put the helicopter on Mars? Was it the politicians? Well, they helped. But it was the engineers.

01:08:19.660 American engineers. And they didn't work with people born in other countries, etc. So, you know,

01:08:28.020 different national origins were involved in the landing. But let's say mostly American engineers

01:08:35.640 just saved our bacon in the future. Or they're on a path to doing it, meaning giving us some

01:08:44.800 military assets in space. At the same time, our scientists built these vaccinations in record

01:08:53.980 time. Politicians helped, right? Politicians did their job on both cases. But we're watching

01:09:01.880 our best scientists and our best engineers re-engineer our whole frickin' civilization right in front

01:09:11.300 of you. We watched our engineers say, wait a minute, you can't commute? Well, we got this

01:09:17.740 other technology. Now, a lot of those engineers were in China, I suppose, the Zoom people. But the point

01:09:23.280 is, the engineers and scientists are really pretty big heroes. I mean, not to take away from the front

01:09:32.980 line responders who are in a category of their own, hero wise. But I don't think we give enough credit

01:09:41.260 to the engineers and the scientists. You know, we complain about the science all day long. But usually

01:09:47.160 we're complaining about what journalists told us about science, or what politicians told us about

01:09:52.360 science. We're not really complaining about science, because we don't have access to it directly.

01:09:57.580 But they're doing some stuff. I'll tell you, that's stuff we can't see directly. The science,

01:10:04.340 they're doing some stuff. Just put a helicopter on Mars if I haven't mentioned that before.

01:10:11.600 So, is the golden age here? Might be. What do we have in front of us? Probably peace in the Middle East.

01:10:22.640 There might be a war with Iran before we get there, but it will be short if it happens.

01:10:29.320 Probably space colonization is entering its golden age. Probably the way we manage future pandemics

01:10:39.260 is forever changed. Taking that risk, which was a gigantic risk, and probably figuring out how to

01:10:47.120 put that back into a smaller box.

01:10:53.300 So, it's easy to get caught up on, you know, who got canceled, and what's in the headlines,

01:10:58.260 and who's arguing with who, and our country is divided and stuff. But we're working on nuclear fusion,

01:11:05.060 space exploration, you know, vaccines like we've never seen. I think education will be,

01:11:11.940 I think there are now, Corey DeAngelis does the best reporting on this about school choice.

01:11:20.360 And I think there are 23, if I have it right, 23 state legislatures who have put forth legislation

01:11:27.600 for funding to follow the child instead of the school. The effect of that is if your child decides

01:11:33.920 to go to a non-public school, that the funding would follow the child and help fund the other entity.

01:11:40.760 So, almost half of the country. Now, is that a big deal? Yeah. Yeah, that's really big. Because the

01:11:51.860 teachers' unions are the primary source of systemic racism. And systemic racism is probably the biggest

01:12:00.720 problem in the country, at least domestically, right? And we have, it looks like, we are marching

01:12:07.920 pretty quickly towards solving it by taking money away from their control and allowing the student

01:12:15.200 to go where they want with the, you know, parents, of course, and take the money with them.

01:12:20.880 So, this is so big. It's almost incalculably, is that a word? Incalculably large.

01:12:32.240 If it keeps going the way it's going. So, you still need to get there. But it's going the right way.

01:12:38.080 Right? So, who promoted that? Yes, I think Trump was one of the louder voices,

01:12:45.340 and the Republicans in general were the louder voices on that topic. Somebody says, no, systemic

01:12:53.140 racism is not the biggest problem. It's the biggest problem in terms of disunity in the country.

01:13:02.580 Now, if you're saying that it's not real, here's my definition of systemic racism, which is that if

01:13:09.940 you can't get a good education, because you're, let's say, in a depressed part of the country,

01:13:15.180 if you can't get a good education, and you don't have a choice, that does suggest that there's a

01:13:23.300 ripple effect all the way from slavery to the current world. And even though it's true that,

01:13:28.820 you know, black people can succeed, of course, there is an average difference. That's real.

01:13:35.620 There's an average difference. And of course, there's a ripple effect from slavery. How could

01:13:41.000 there not be? So, that doesn't mean it's your fault. And it doesn't mean you have to lose your

01:13:47.080 job to fix it. That's a whole different conversation. I'm saying that if you could fix the schools,

01:13:53.380 you would eventually, and it wouldn't take that long, maybe one generation, probably stop talking

01:13:58.780 about systemic racism, because everybody would have an education that wanted one. And, you know,

01:14:05.620 the economic disparity would close on its own, etc. So, it's a big deal. It's a big deal.

01:14:13.360 All right. That's all for now. And I will talk to you tomorrow.

01:14:19.780 I've gone on too long. I've gone on too long. And I'll talk to you tomorrow.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - February 19, 2021

Episode 1290 Scott Adams： Ted Cruz Warms Texas With His American-Based Tweeting, Helicopters on Mars, Lots More

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