Episode 1374 Scott Adams: Trump's Funniest New Insults, Israel Dismantling Hamas, CNN Viewers Gaslighted on Climate
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Content:
Charismatic ex-Marine Winsome Sears
Israel, Hamas conflict
AZ election audit "bombshell"?
President Trump's underrated writing skill
Colonial pipeline hackers
Unapproachable arguments technique
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And you don't want to do that. You want to start off strong.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a style of canteen, a jug of glass, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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You know the thing. Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Go. Well, in my ongoing segment called Democrats Eat Their Own, Ellen DeGeneres has announced that she's quitting her show because she was accused a while ago of a toxic workplace.
And ratings tanked because people didn't want to watch a show with somebody who was pretending to be all nice, but running a toxic, toxic workplace.
And Ellen has responded.
And she says that the toxic work claims were a coordinated misogynistic attack on her because she's a woman.
And she couldn't have known that staff were unhappy.
Huh. What would be a way to know that your staff is unhappy?
It's too bad there's no way to know.
So I guess Ellen's off the hook.
Because if you manage a staff and you work with them closely all day long, five days a week for 19 years, I don't know how you could possibly detect any unhappiness.
I mean, what would you do?
Talk to people?
Maybe look at their reactions?
Get a little feedback?
Really, there was no way to go there.
So Ellen really had no choice.
She couldn't have known her staff was unhappy.
But apparently the women who are saying bad things about her, including a woman producer, are part of the coordinated misogynistic attack.
So not only is it a coordinated misogynistic attack, but it's being done by women.
It's the worst kind of misogynistic attack.
Woman-on-woman crime.
I'm sure there's some men in there too.
I saw a video by, it's on the Fox News site, Virginia Lieutenant Governor nominee Winsome Sears.
Now, I recommend you watch the video because you've never seen somebody with so much charisma and someone who the camera loves.
I mean, the camera loves her, meaning that her charisma on camera, just like, it's like this bright beam.
And interestingly, she's Republican, and she came in against critical race theory and branded it nonsense.
Now, if that's not good enough, she's an ex-Marine.
How would you like to be a black Republican woman who's prominent in at least state politics, be an ex-Marine, and be great on camera?
I would watch out for this one.
Keep an eye on her, because I don't think this is her last job in politics if she gets the first one.
We'll see if she wins. But boy, does she have the whole package.
It takes you approximately four seconds to say, what am I watching here?
Oh, crap.
This is the real deal.
Now, I could be wrong, because literally I'm judging her on just a little appearance on TV, but Good luck doing that well on TV, if you're anybody else.
I mean, it's not easy to come across that well on TV, especially if you're new to it, and she nailed it.
So the situation with Israel and Hamas is heating up.
Allegedly, the Palestinian militants have stockpiled enough missiles to continue bombing Israel for the next two months.
How do we know that? How do we know how many missiles Hamas has?
If we know how many they have, don't we know where they are?
Because how can you know how many they have unless you also know where they are?
I mean, I don't know exactly how we would have that intel, but let's say we do.
So a number of things happened on this story.
AOC criticized Biden For only saying that Israel has a right to defend itself, and as she described, without having any words at all about what the other side is complaining about, or what it is they want, or how they've been treated, AOC says that it's terribly unfair.
You have to look at the causes of the unrest.
To which I say, no you don't.
I can't think of a bigger waste of time than to look for the nuance.
Because everywhere else in the world, it seems, I mean, just perceptually, it seems that if you know who's right and you know who's wrong, that would allow you to do something differently, such as put somebody in jail or free somebody from some allegations or something like that.
But none of that applies in the Middle East.
It's just power. Any argument you make about why someone should have done something or who was really the cause, but if they were the cause, what about the cause before that?
But who caused that?
How far do you go?
None of this is useful.
I'm all for understanding situations, but once you understand it...
Richard Thomas...
Let's talk to Richard Thomas here.
So, Dick...
I know you're being a dick.
Scott's a right-wing shill.
First of all, I'm left to Bernie, so get informed.
So when you make public comments like this, you don't look like a fucking idiot.
Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't criticize me.
I'm fine with criticism.
But your criticism should at least be in the same general category as the topic.
For example, if you were to criticize the Pope for, let's say, sagging his pants, would that be fair?
Ah, the Pope should not wear sagged pants.
But you know he doesn't.
So if you were to criticize the Pope in public for wearing his pants sagged, you would be a fucking idiot.
Because you're not even on the right topic.
All right. I think we were talking about Israel and Hamas.
But I just had to respond to Dick.
So if they've got this many weapons and Israel's got to do something, it looks like Netanyahu has taken out, and Israel's military, has taken out nine Hamas leaders.
How many do they have?
How many leaders are there in Hamas?
And if you were a Hamas leader, let's say you were in the top ten, and your team starts firing some missiles, don't you know you're dead that night?
Israel is pretty consistent about this.
Well, let's see. Are you firing missiles into Israel tonight?
Yes or no? Yes.
Will you be alive by morning if you're one of the top commanders in Hamas?
No. Okay.
Do I care that they got killed?
Nope. Don't care about them whatsoever.
Do I think that we should have a balanced approach over there?
We could, but what's the point?
What would be the point?
Nothing's going to change because we think it's somebody's fault or somebody else's fault.
None of this has anything to do with anything.
It's just going to be what it is.
It's just power. If Israel has the power, they'll squash this problem, and if they don't, they won't.
But there's nothing else to be said about it.
Israel will, of course, look to find any advantage in it, as they're good at doing, historically.
And they'll probably come out ahead.
So at the moment, Netanyahu is...
Here's the funniest part.
I don't even know how to understand this next part.
Apparently Hamas has asked for a ceasefire.
What? What? Hamas asked for a ceasefire?
Are you freaking kidding me?
This is not a ceasefire situation.
This is like somebody rapes and kills your wife right in front of you, and then you start to kill them in revenge, and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Let's have a little ceasefire here.
Let's not get out of control.
Just because I raped and killed your wife...
Let's not make this disproportional.
I said ceasefire.
So let's ceasefire.
Unless you're like a bloodthirsty, crazy people, take the ceasefire.
No, this is not ceasefire situation.
Maybe if you had a war that had been going on for a while, you'd reach some kind of a conclusion, somebody won, somebody lost, I can see you might want a ceasefire.
But not for a terrorist act.
I don't think there's any doubt that Israel's going to send in ground forces.
Does anybody have any doubt about that?
I don't see any possibility there won't be ground forces.
So that's my prediction.
Because Israel has a big opening now.
The attack was so much that Israel can go do terrible things that it couldn't have done before.
And sometimes you have to do terrible things to get something done for national security.
So I think that Hamas just gave Israel a free pass to do whatever the hell they want.
And whatever the hell they want is going to be pretty, pretty bad for Hamas.
So I don't even know if Israel is coming out behind.
I think Israel is going to come out ahead, actually, by knocking down Hamas a little bit.
So apparently Hamas is using GPS-guided suicide drones, so cheap drones, that instead of controlling them the whole way, they just give it a GPS coordinate, apparently, and just have it go off and do something.
Now, I think that they do it by GPS. The reporting's a little bit sketch on that, so maybe it's being guided all the way to its target.
But it did talk about, you know, miles and miles of travel, so I don't know if the signal would reach these cheap drones too well, because it's not like they're using satellites or anything.
So I predicted the drone, the direction-guided sort of self-guiding drones back in 2004 in my book, The Religion War, which was a sequel to God's Debris.
The religion war had the following primary plot.
It was set approximately 20 years in the future.
It was set now.
So in 2004, the time period for that book was basically now.
And the idea was that terrorists in the Middle East would start using drones and that they would eventually come to the homeland, in this case America.
And that the bad people, in order to keep their own power and to keep their population happy, would have to keep attacking the West to have some credibility.
So they don't want to win, because they can't really just defeat all the Western powers or whatever.
They can't really defeat Israel.
But they can pester forever.
And if they pester enough, it just keeps them in power.
But if they pester too much, Then there's going to be a giant war.
And so the book is about solving that problem, which is that the terrorists have a reason to continue being terrorists, and they start using drones and they put chemicals on them.
Now it seems to me that because these cheap drones don't weigh much and they can't carry much in terms of bombs, that the obvious way this is going to go is chemical warfare.
Wouldn't you agree? And I don't feel like I'm giving them the idea or anything because it's just too obvious.
The lowest weight you could carry would be a chemical.
So as soon as the people who have the drones have access to bad chemicals, whatever they might be, I think you're going to see that.
Now when that happens, that should provoke a response that would be bigger than just about any response you've ever seen.
So it would be a response similar to, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki kind of thing.
So I think that's where things are going, maybe in the next five years.
Alright, here's a plan for how to control a country.
You ready? Let's say you had a country that was a democracy-ish, and you wanted to take control.
Here's a way to do it.
Number one, persuade this public to follow the science.
That would be step one in creating a dictatorship.
Convince the public that they're all idiots unless they follow the science.
And other people can mock you.
Your fellow citizens can mock you if you don't follow the science.
You've got to follow the science.
That's step one. And you say to yourself, what's wrong with that, Scott?
Of course we want to follow the science.
Yeah, you do. You do want to follow the science.
But who interprets the science?
Who tells you what the science was?
Well, it's not you, because you didn't see any science personally.
You're waiting for somebody to tell you what the science is.
So step two is to control the narrative around what science says.
So does science say that electric cars are the future?
Does science say that climate change will kill us all?
What does science say?
Well, unfortunately, science doesn't have a voice, per se.
It has to be interpreted.
By the news business, by your government in some cases.
So the second point is to control the narrative.
So let's say that the party in power had a good working relationship with the dominant news organizations.
The news organizations could tell the public that they have to follow the science, and then they could tell them what the science says.
Now we're into the dangerous part.
Because if they tell you the science is X, you act one way.
If they tell you it's Y, you act the other way.
But are you following the science?
Or are you just doing what the people who interpreted the science and put a narrative on it told you as a science?
So you could very easily think you're following science, and the next thing you know, you're in effectively a dictatorship.
Because you don't know what the science is.
You don't have access to it.
You only know what the government told you the science was.
And if you don't follow it, well, you're going to be ostracized, and your reputation will be destroyed, and you're just a science denier, and who's going to hire a person like that?
So that's the thing to worry about, is who controls the narrative around what the science officially says.
Have you noticed that on Twitter, there's a pinned...
It's in that trending area, on the browser at least, and it's about the Arizona audit, and it notes that a lot of experts or Republicans are having doubts, I think they're saying a lot of people, are having doubts about the audit.
Now why is that on the trending side just pinned there?
Every day I wake up lately, and there it is, that the Arizona audit is sketchy, basically.
Now, is that the top news every day?
Because it feels to me like it's actually a smallish part of the news, unless they find something.
It's a smallish part of the news, but it's prominent on Twitter because it's propaganda.
Putting that there and leaving it there to say that people are worried about how sketchy it is, whatever language they use, that's just propaganda.
It's very transparent.
So that's somebody controlling the narrative there.
But there is a story coming out of it, and the story goes like this.
And before I tell you the story about the audit, I'm going to give you some general advice.
Anything you hear about the Arizona audit, It's probably false.
Probably. Now, that doesn't mean it's all false.
But anything you hear early, the earliest you hear it, the more likely it's bullshit.
Now, eventually, we might have something approaching knowledge.
Because let's say they find some things.
If they find something, obviously that would open it up to other people reviewing it, more experts.
Democrats looking at it, giving their opinion, etc.
If we go through all of those experts, and there's still some substance there, then I'm going to say, whoa, pay attention to that.
Looks like the experts couldn't even debunk it.
But in the beginning, the odds of any of these stories being real is just really low.
I mean, pretty close to zero.
So today's pretty close to zero story...
Is that the Maricopa County deleted a directory full of election databases from the very election that they're auditing days before they have to give the equipment to the audit.
Now, if that's true, it's pretty bad, right?
That they deleted the database before handing it over to audit.
So, what's that sound like to you?
Put on your BS detector, all of you.
And tell me in the comments what flags you see in this.
Do you see any flags on this story?
All right, let's see if you can get this.
Here's the red flag.
It's a little bit too on the nose.
What if I told you about that?
If you see a story that's too neat, Yeah.
If you see a story that's just too exactly what you would want this story to be, wouldn't you, let's say you're a Republican or a Trump supporter, wouldn't you just love to hear that somebody got caught red-handed deleting a database and then you look at it and there's a reason it was deleted because that's where all the bad stuff was hidden.
Okay, the odds of that perfect story being true, I'm going to say pretty low.
Pretty low. But it could be, right?
And I saw online, you know, the question was asked, if it's true, how could you explain it with anything else?
How could you explain it other than bad intentions?
To which I say, that's never the first assumption.
The first assumption if data is erased is incompetence.
And I'm imagining a typical bureaucracy, and it goes like this.
Hey, we're the audit people, and we have court approval to have access to your machines, so deliver us our machines by next week.
And they talk to somebody who's in management who controls the machines.
The person in control of the machines says to an underling, hey, we have to turn over these machines by Tuesday.
The underling assigns it to yet another underling, who now is three layers away from what was requested, and says we've been requested to deliver these machines to this entity by Tuesday.
The final person who gets the final instructions might not even know why.
Might only know that they have to deliver some machines.
And so, you could imagine, and I'm not saying this happened, I'm just saying imagine a bureaucracy at work.
You can imagine the person doing the actual work saying to themselves, well, what's our process?
Oh, our internal process is that you never take a machine out of storage and move it anywhere until you've deleted its data.
And so the guy doing the work says, what's my process?
Oh, I've been asked to deliver this machine to another place, and our process is always delete the data before you move the machine.
Now, I'm not saying that's the process.
I'm not saying anything like that happened.
I'm just saying if your first assumption is bad intentions...
I think your first assumption has to be bureaucracy and stupidity and incompetence.
Or even that the story isn't true, that nothing was deleted.
That's your first assumption.
Now, if you've worked through all the possibilities that stupidity was or was not there, maybe you're left with bad intentions.
But you've got to start with just stupidity.
Now, the other question is whether anything that was erased from these machines is erased in a bleach-bit way where you can never recover it, or is it simply deleted in a way that forensic people can just recover it?
Because they still have the hard drives, I understand.
So, we don't know anything about this story yet.
I wouldn't assume any of it's true.
I would assume it's not true, actually, at this stage.
Alright, so Liz Cheney, of course, lost her committee assignments or whatever, and she's going to make it her life's mission to take down Trump.
But let me tell you, the last thing you want to do if you want to take down Trump, what would be the worst way to do that?
If you were thinking to yourself, let's see, we're going to take down Trump so he can't run for president again, what will we do?
What will we do? What will be our strongest play?
Why don't we take somebody who is wildly unpopular and have her become the face of the resistance against Trump?
Yes, that's a good plan.
Let me give you some advice about trying to take out Trump.
Never give him an attractive target.
Because that's what happened.
Suddenly, Liz Cheney just became the Jim Acosta of Congress.
You know, she became the fake news of Congress.
There's nothing Trump likes more than an unpleasant enemy.
I mean, I don't know if he could like that anymore.
So, if you want to power Trump up, give him an unattractive enemy.
Here I'm not talking about physically unattractive, but as a candidate or as a politician.
I'm going to read to you later some of...
Well, I'll do it now.
I'll skip ahead. So Trump now has just a website, and he puts out these press releases, and they turn out to be basically just super tweets.
So I'm going to read you Trump's funniest insults from his new process of putting out his statements all the time.
So I'm just going to pick a few.
So here's the Liz Cheney one.
Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being.
I watched her yesterday and realized how bad she is for the Republican Party.
She has no personality or anything good having to do with politics or our country.
She is a talking point for Democrats, whether that means the border, the gas lines, inflation, or destroying our economy.
She is a warmonger whose family stupidly pushed us into the never-ending Middle East disaster, draining our wealth and depleting our great military, the worst decision in our country's history.
I look forward to soon watching her as a paid contributor on CNN or, as he calls it, MSDNC. Now, here's the first thing I have to say about this.
Trump is really underrated as a writer.
Just as a writer.
This first sentence, Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being, That's like a perfect first sentence.
Short to the point you know exactly where he's going and then he fills it out.
You could work as a writer for a hundred years and never write a sentence as good as this first sentence.
Liz Cheney is a bitter, horrible human being.
Could you imagine yourself not reading the second sentence?
Seriously. Who in the world could read that first sentence and then say, oh, I get it, and then walk away?
You can't. You can't read that sentence and not continue reading.
That's what a first sentence is supposed to be.
Let's do another one.
I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter.
Okay, aren't you in?
That's his first sentence.
Could you walk away from that?
You can't.
You can't walk away from that first sentence.
I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter.
You know this is gonna be good.
Whatever comes after that sentence, if it's coming from Trump, you know you're gonna be entertained, don't you?
Well, here's the entertainment. He says, it would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter.
Okay, it begins.
Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has created crisis after crisis.
Oh, money shot.
Money shot. First, there was the Biden border crisis that he refuses to call a crisis.
Then the Biden economic crisis.
Then the Biden Israel crisis.
And now the Biden gas crisis.
Joe Biden has had the worst start of any president in the United States history.
And again, he makes a statement like that, so you have to fact check it.
It's like, okay, was he the worst?
Or was he the second worst?
We better look into whether he was the worst or was he just the top three worst?
Classic Trump. And someday, they will compare future disasters to the Biden administration.
But no, Jimmy was better.
Now, don't you miss him?
I mean, seriously.
He's the only person who knows how to really bring, like, humor and interest to politics.
Here's another one.
He goes...
A guy named Miles Taylor...
Who I have no idea who he is, don't remember ever meeting him or having a conversation with, gets more publicity pretending he was in the inner circle of our administration when he was definitely not.
Some people refer to him as, quote, absolutely nothing.
And he goes on.
So he refers to this guy as, quote, absolutely nothing.
Oh, God, I've got allergies problems this morning.
Sorry. All right.
I heard that Nigel Farage confirmed on his podcast that Trump lost weight.
I feel like this is actually an important story.
That Trump lost weight.
Because he looks great.
And especially if he's thinking about running again, how vital and healthy he looks.
I think it matters.
It matters a lot.
And so it looks like he's controlling something he can control.
Alright, let's talk about the CDC guidance on masks.
So the CDC is getting some pushback because their mask guidance is too complicated and even Trevor Noah is mocking them.
So even the left and the right are mocking them.
So basically they're saying go ahead and do outdoor things if you're vaccinated.
So let me see if I can help them.
Let me see if I can simplify their own advice.
If you're outdoors, you don't need a mask if you're vaccinated.
So far, simple, right?
The exception would be if you're going to be close to somebody for a while.
That's it. That's the whole outdoor part.
So do you think they should hire me to do their messaging?
Because they've got this little, like, you know, if this, if that, under these conditions, when to wear a mask, when it's dangerous.
I just told you the whole thing.
Don't wear a mask outdoors if you're vaccinated, unless you're gonna spend some time really close to somebody.
That's it. That's outdoors.
Now let's do indoors.
Now their guidance is you should still wear a mask indoors if you're around, you know, anybody you're not hanging around with all the time, such as your family.
And that's also kind of simple, right?
Wear a mask indoors if you're not with your familiar people.
But I'm going to suggest that the public, as I said this before, I think the public just needs to make their own guidelines and then tell the government what they are.
Because if enough of us do it, it just becomes the de facto standard.
And I would say that by July 4th, and of course I would update this as data suggests, if anything changes, but I think by July 4th, vaccinated people should just go maskless.
And the only exception would be if they're going to be in close contact or in a room for a long time with somebody who's Got an obvious comorbidity.
You know, they're a certain age or they're not too healthy or something.
And I feel like we should just do that July 4th, Independence Day.
Yeah, and no masks for kids, as you say.
Now, if your kid has a weight problem or something or some other health problem, maybe that's different.
All right. And they're also, the CDC is also trying to figure out How dangerous it is if you're fully vaccinated, if you can still transmit the virus asymptomatically.
Now, on one hand, I fully approve that they're looking for that data, because I'd like to know that data.
On the other hand, Don't we already know?
I mean, we don't know in a 100% certainty way.
We don't know that fully vaccinated people are at very low risk for transmitting.
But we know it. And if you look at our overall death rate, it's plunging and it doesn't look like it's going to stop plunging.
As long as the overall death rate gets down to about our baseline death rate, it doesn't matter.
What if they find out that you can?
It wouldn't change anything.
Because if the overall death rate has gotten so low that it's sort of comparable to just the baseline death rate, what's the difference?
I mean, it would be far more valuable to just get back to life, as long as our death rate is back down to normal, than it would to worry about this little special, unique little risk.
So I would say the CDC is studying something we definitely want to know, but I don't think the decision should be based on that.
It's just a little extra.
So I think that's a mistake, and probably politically motivated, meaning that Politicians don't like to guess something wrong, so they err on the side of caution.
Rasmussen has done a poll that says that apparently if you watch MSNBC or CNN, you get gaslighted pretty hard on climate.
So 54% of likely U.S. voters who watch MSNBC, who say it's their favorite cable channel, believe that That basically we're doomed within 100 years from climate change.
Just like doomed. Not as in it will be a challenge to overcome it.
Not as in our GDP won't be as good as we hoped.
Not as in, you know, some places will be less habitable, but while other places might be more habitable because of the change.
No, nothing like that.
Over half of MSNBC viewers think the humanity is doomed in 100 years.
Now, could you have children?
If you thought the world was doomed in 100 years, let's say you're a young person, would you bring a child into that world?
Because long before it's doomed, it's doomed-ish.
Any kid you bring into the world today will be in that doom world.
So let's compare that and also 53% of CNN viewers say the same.
All right, so more than half of CNN and MSNBC viewers say that we're doomed.
What about Fox News viewers?
What do you think? Only 25%.
So 25% of Fox News viewers also think that we're kind of doomed in 100 years.
What did I tell you about 25%?
It's sort of my go-to thing every time I talk about a poll.
25% of people will say any damn thing on any poll.
It doesn't matter what the question is, 25% of the people will just always be on the other side.
It could be the most obvious question in the world.
Do you like to eat good food?
25% of the people will say, no, I don't like to eat good food.
Not me. It's just weird.
It's really hard to penetrate 75%.
But now we know that the poor people who watch MSNBC and CNN, poor meaning unfortunate, they are being gaslighted and they fear for their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
Yeah, so he says, oh wow, 25%.
Yeah, Hannah, I agree.
How in the world did 25% of Republicans, I assume, come to that conclusion?
But 25% will say anything.
So let's talk about that hacker group DarkSide.
So Biden says, quote, so far there's no evidence, based on our intelligence people, that Russia is involved.
Although there is evidence...
That the hackers are in Russia.
Now, further evidence is this.
Now, this is part of the reason that they think that they're Russian, is that they'll actually look at machines they're infecting, and if those machines have any Russian language settings or something similar to that, they won't attack.
So, in other words, we do know that they avoid attacking Russian assets.
But we don't have confirmation that Russia is involved.
Is that a difference that you respect?
Let's say, for example, we found out that Putin had not ordered them to do it, and they're actually a criminal organization just doing what they do.
Why would they not target Russia?
I can think of two reasons.
See if you can think of any other reasons.
Number one, they're working for Russia.
But again, the intelligence agencies have not determined that to be the case.
But it's possible. Number two, they're not working for Russia, but they are afraid of Putin.
See where I'm going?
Either Putin is paying them, in which case he knows where they are, or they're afraid of Putin.
In which case he knows where they are.
Or they're worried that he can find them even if we can't.
So let me pull this together.
And this is how you should run your personal life as well as politics.
If Putin knows where they are, and we don't know that, but we know that they're afraid.
They're obviously afraid.
He knows where they are.
That's the same as if Putin is sanctioning them.
I mean, it's the same as if Putin is ordering them to do what they're doing.
If he knows where they are, if they're afraid of him, he can stop them.
Same level of responsibility.
If you're trying to say, well, that's different.
He didn't order it.
No, that's not different.
We should treat it exactly the same as if he ordered it.
Because if they're afraid of him, and they're in his country...
It's because he can find them.
And if he can find them, and he's not, it's the same as if he ordered it, in terms of how we should treat them.
So I think that, I don't know if Biden has the guts to do it, but I think the pressure on Russia, and of course you have to go through the whole intel thing, you don't want to act harshly, but I have a feeling that within our government we're talking about Something pretty heavy in terms of a response to Russia.
At least talking about it.
I don't know if it'll happen. But I think this is just pure bullshit to say that this is happening in Russia, they're not attacking Russian resources, and to say that Putin can't get at them.
I get that we can't get at them.
Maybe. I mean, I think we probably can, but maybe we can't.
But they're afraid of Putin, and that means something.
All right. So one of the tricks I've told you for persuasion, and sometimes it's just for fun, is to embrace your opponent's arguments.
Because when you embrace your opponent's arguments, and they have a reflex to argue with you no matter what, you can actually trick them into debating against their own point.
And I'll show you a couple of examples of that.
So these are some tweets I made just to practice this technique.
I said the pipeline companies should hire the election software makers to make some unhackable software for them.
I hear they are the only ones who can do it.
So I've embraced the argument that election software is the only software that can't be hacked.
Which is fucking stupid, right?
But I put it out there like I mean it.
Now, nobody who read this probably thought I was completely serious, but wouldn't you expect a lot of critics to push back on this?
I haven't looked at the comments in the last hour or so, but I think the critics just got really quiet.
That's how you know you penetrated.
You know how much the critics love to pile on anything I say, right?
Anybody with a blue check, if they say anything about politics, the critics just flow in and eat them alive?
Well, the critics got really, really quiet.
Because in order for them to criticize me, they would have to argue that election software cannot be made unhackable.
Which would open up the possibility that maybe we should audit them to see if they had been.
So it's an unapproachable argument.
Here's another one. Breaking, I said in a tweet, no court has found any evidence that the colonial pipeline was hacked.
Therefore, it wasn't.
See what I'm doing here?
So did the critics come in and say, hey, you can't say that just because the court, which is really the wrong entity anyway, just because they didn't find any evidence of it, That just means they're the wrong people and they didn't even look for it.
That doesn't mean there's no evidence.
Well, that, of course, is the whole argument about saying that the few courts who looked into some few specific things didn't find anything, but they're also not the ones looking for it.
So if people who are not looking for something don't find it...
So how much pushback did I get on that?
Surprisingly, not little.
Or surprisingly little, which actually is not a surprise.
So there's your technique.
Embrace the most idiotic arguments on the other side, and then challenge the critics to debate their own point.
And then just watch.
Elon Musk interestingly suspended the acceptance of Bitcoin for Teslas.
Because creating Bitcoin uses so much electricity that apparently it's a climate disaster.
Just what Bitcoin itself is creating in electrical needs.
So, I saw the cryptos were down this morning.
I don't know if they'll stay down. I'm not going to suggest that this is a buying opportunity for Bitcoin.
But I would certainly be worried if the people who care about the climate decide that they don't like it.
So that's going to be interesting to watch.
Who saw that coming?
Yeah, a lot of people saw that coming.
Yeah, Elon Musk has the power to crash a crypto.
It looks like he's done it at least twice.
Scott, please wear your blue t-shirt.
It looks best. You mean this one?
Every once in a while, I feel I need to tell my audience that when I buy t-shirts, if I find one I like, I get a bunch of them, the same kind.
So if you see me wearing this shirt a whole bunch of times, it's actually multiple shirts.
I just thought you should know that.
It says 75% of Bitcoin uses renewable energy.
Well, that doesn't matter, because that renewable energy could be used somewhere else.
Yeah, the dark shirts look better on TV, that's true.
On my face, anyway.
Can you do a show in drag?
Would you believe that's the first time I've ever been asked?
I'm going to tell you something that I don't know if I've said this publicly.
I might have. So tell me if you've ever seen this.
But some 20 years ago or so, when I was already beginning to contemplate how I would retire someday in the far future, I had a plan for retirement which would change Dilbert forever.
And the plan was that the way you'll know I'm going to retire, because I might not announce it before it happens, the way you would know is if Dilbert becomes transgender.
So 20 years ago that was my plan, is I was just going to make Dilbert transgender and then just stop and just leave it there.
Because in the cartoon world, when you make any kind of a change, people expect it to go back to where it was, because everything always has to go back to where it was.
And I thought, the most provocative thing I could do is just make him transgender, like legitimately, and then just walk away.
But in the 20 years that has passed, the politics of transgender everything has changed to the point that Where I believe it would be considered just disrespectful or something.
So I'm probably not going to go that way.
Because it doesn't have the same...
It's lost all of its uniqueness, which is what would have made it fun.
And now transgender is just sort of our daily topic, so it just doesn't have that uniqueness to it that I was looking for.
It might be considered very brave...
Well, I don't know. I don't know how brave it would be.
How do we know he isn't?
Good point. Nobody would sell Bitcoin to buy a Tesla.
Don't wear a white shirt.
Yeah, you're right. Somebody says Colonial paid the five million ransom.
Did they? I don't know if that's confirmed, and I don't know if it would make any difference.
I don't know if it would work.
But as I've said before, the U.S. government should have been telling the public that they have intel and they're closing in on the hackers.
The hackers should have been feeling that they were going to die within 24 hours.
And if they didn't feel that, even if it wasn't true, they should have been convinced that Some military agency is going to put a drone on them any minute.
Because that's how you negotiate.
You don't negotiate saying, we don't know where you are.
There's no way we could ever find you.
So I guess we'll just pay this amount.
That's not very good negotiating.
They should have been under the immediate threat of death within minutes.
You want them thinking about their death within minutes.
Then you negotiate. Alright.
That is just about all I have to talk about today.
