Episode 1421 Scott Adams: The Most Delicious Coffee Sipping in the Solar System
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Intelligent design discussions
Chips for America Act
Brian Stelter drama and ratings
Squeezing CFO to reach Trump?
Tucker under NSA surveillance?
AOC, the face of defunding police
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Those of you who are ahead of the system, you're basically the high achievers.
The people who get in here early.
And that bodes well for your future.
It really does. Would you like to enjoy this livestream even more than you are already?
And I know it's probably the thrill of your life so far.
Well, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a chelsea stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen right now.
Do you want a little writing tip before we get going?
Listen to this sentence.
The dopamine hit of the day.
And the unparalleled pleasure.
Those sentences have percussion in them.
Meaning that you can almost feel them like they're a drum.
Like the dopamine hit of the day.
The unparalleled pleasure.
The unparalleled pleasure.
That makes your writing a little bit more interesting if you have the percussion element.
So apparently there was a 3.9 magnitude earthquake where I live yesterday at 6.40 p.m.
Did not feel it.
Now, my house is actually designed for maximum earthquake protection.
And I guess it did a good job, because my county was rocking and rolling yesterday, but I never felt it.
So, so much for that.
And I have to admit, I feel a little bit robbed.
Because when there's an earthquake where you live, and you don't feel it, and everybody's talking about it, and you don't get to say anything, well, I felt nothing.
It really ruins a good story.
Joshua Lysak, Ghostwriter extraordinaire on Twitter asked this question.
He says, tell me about the moment you realized we're all living in a simulation.
And I was reading some of the comments because I wondered, huh, I know I think I'm living in a simulation, but I wonder what it was that convinced other people that we're living in a simulation.
It turns out that for a number of you, the answer was me.
So apparently I have convinced a number of people that we live in a simulation.
Which is interesting because, in effect, I changed your religion.
In effect.
Because I remember it wasn't long ago when if you said that you believed in intelligent design, you were considered a nut.
Now, that was usually intelligent design in the traditional Christian god kind of a way.
Typically, that's the way people talked about it.
But if we're a simulation, there is an intelligent designer.
It just happens to be some alien or pre-human programmer.
Just somebody who can program.
So, is it my imagination, or has the debate about intelligent design disappeared?
Right? Because was it maybe 15 years ago?
It's all anybody could talk about?
Whether intelligent design should be taught in schools and if it's true and blah, blah, blah.
And now that there are plenty of legitimate smart people, Nick Bostrom being sort of the godfather of the simulation idea, a legitimate credentialed person, Elon Musk taking us to Mars...
And he likes it.
Oh, I'm just looking at some of your comments here.
So, it's sort of interesting.
It seems to me that intelligent design died.
Now, for those of you who have not heard this, this is one of the most interesting stories of my life, but I don't know if it'll mean anything at all to you.
And I've had a pretty interesting life.
But years ago, I did something really reckless.
Maybe not the first time.
I made a prediction that would guarantee I would be mocked for decades.
But if it was right, it would be a big win.
I would just have to wait 20 years, or something like that, and be mocked and have my reputation destroyed for about 20 years just to be right.
Now, if that doesn't tell you a little bit about my warped personality, I don't think anything will.
I literally signed up for 20 years of pain just to be right about something.
And I think I am.
And the thing I predicted was, 20 years ago or so, something like that, that in our lifetime, while I'm still alive, I predicted that the theory of evolution would be debunked Within scientific terms, not within religious terms.
So I never predicted that we would find out that there was a genesis, etc.
But I did predict that you could pick almost any popular theory in science and just look forward 20 years and it would be debunked.
You could almost pick anything.
And the reason for that is that you just go back 20 years and find out what did we think about pretty much anything.
And it's almost all wrong.
You could just go back 20 years at any time in history, rewind 20 years from there, and find out that gigantic things we thought were true were all debunked.
My problem with evolution was there was just something about it that wasn't working for me, even though I understand the millions of years and the gradual change.
I understand the mechanism behind it.
I understand the mountains of evidence for it.
And because there's so much evidence for it, evolution, the most reckless thing anybody could ever predict is that it would be overturned within your lifetime.
Now, How stupid was that prediction?
Pretty stupid.
Because I got mocked for 20 years, exactly as I imagined I would be, because people said, you idiot, you don't believe science.
Don't you know that science is smart and you are dumb?
So if science disagrees with you, guess who's right?
Is it you, or is it science, Scott?
Because science is always right.
And you, well, you're kind of a fucking moron, if we can be honest.
Science is up here.
You, oh, you're like a little chipmunk eating a peanut.
You're down here. Scott, don't you understand the gigantic difference between where you are, a fucking idiot, and science?
Science. It's almost a A god-like divine concept, the science.
And so, Scott, if you were to question the divine perfection of science, well, you little moron.
20 years of my life.
Fast forward, and the simulation is now widely accepted by smart people.
Not all of them. But lots of smart people would say that the evolutionary model is maybe just a programmed thing that we perceive.
All right. So enough of that gloating.
But I've always wondered if you could change somebody's religion, and then I found out that I did it, apparently.
Apparently I've changed a bunch of people's religion in some sense.
Senator John Cornyn.
I guess he was one of the people, or maybe the main guy, who promoted this U.S. semiconductor manufacturing bill called Chips for America.
Do you remember when you found out that the United States can't make microchips anymore and that they're pretty much all made in China or Taiwan?
Do you remember finding that out?
I think I found out this year.
When did chip manufacturing completely leave the United States?
Or mostly. I don't know if it's completely.
But didn't that scare the hell out of you?
The moment you found out that the United States isn't a main producer of microchips?
So I don't know the details of this bill, but it apparently got passed.
So it must have been at least good enough to get passed.
And... It says it's going to fix this critical issue.
I don't know what that means, but I assume it means some kind of government benefits if you start a chip manufacturing plant, I guess.
But we definitely need this.
This type of technology dominance is military.
I mean, you can't not have this industry if you want to remain a superpower.
So congratulations to John Cornyn for doing a solid thing for the country.
Looks like good work.
You know, most of the time I'm criticizing the government for one thing or another, right?
And if somebody does something that is clearly and unambiguously in the right direction, I think that needs to be called out.
So good job, Senator Cornyn.
So remember I've been telling you that over time, Joe Biden will have to morph into Trump in order to just do his job.
And the theory was that Trump did so many things right, yet because he was Trump, he was criticized for being wrong, that if you tried to do the opposite of Trump, you would come to regret it because Trump was doing the right thing in the first place.
And you'd have to become him over time just to keep your job as president.
Here we have another example.
Apparently Joe Biden said that Iran will, quote, never get a nuclear weapon on his watch.
Now, I don't know if he's ever said it so clearly before, but his plan of giving them everything they need to make a nuclear weapon seems a little bit off target.
With his goal of having them never get a nuclear weapon.
So I feel as though, and now we also see Biden is bombing some Iranian assets in Syria and Iraq.
So did Biden, has he already become Trump on this topic?
Because he kind of has to, right?
I mean, that seems like that's where it's got to go.
So, keep an eye on that.
I don't see any chance that Iran is going to...
I don't know.
They're not going to say, hey, we're done with all this nuclear stuff and prove it.
So, I feel like Biden just has to complete the circuit and just become Trump.
Are you watching the drama with poor Brian Stelter on CNN? No.
So you might know that Brian Stelter is like the attack dog of CNN. One of them, I guess.
They've got a lot of attack dogs.
And he's often more prominent in criticizing Fox News, etc.
But his own ratings have collapsed, according to, I think the Daily Wire said, that his ratings have collapsed over 72% since January.
72% reduction in his audience since January.
Now, here's the funny part.
He's still on the air.
Now, I don't have any bad feelings toward Brian Stelter, and I'm not the person who calls for people to be taken off the air because I don't like it to happen to me.
But... There's something funny about this story, which is if any normal show lost 72% of its audience in this news realm, wouldn't they be fairly quickly replaced?
But CNN is kind of in a trap here because the person who would be replaced in this scenario is the main attack dog for Fox News, the person who attacks Fox News the most.
And if the guy who attacks Fox News gets cancelled, Fox News won.
Because they want him cancelled.
If you listen to Fox News, you'll hear Greg Gottfeld often taking a run at Stelter and vice versa.
You'll see now Tucker Carlson's taking a run at him.
I guess Joe Rogan, not on Fox News of course, but Joe Rogan on his own show railed against Stelter.
So he's got all these people railing against him.
But CNN can't get rid of them, can they?
Because the moment they get rid of them, it would be like surrender.
It would basically be to say, okay, Fox News, you have better content, your shows are doing well, we had to cancel our show that makes fun of your show.
Imagine having to cancel the show that makes fun of the competition because that show doesn't get enough ratings.
I feel as if they want to cancel him for monetary reasons, but they can't do it because of their reputation.
It would just be too much of an admission of defeat.
Yeah, I'd like to see Jeffrey Toobin take that position.
He'd be good at it, actually.
No joke. Jeffrey Toobin is good at his job.
He's got a little reputational thing to clean up, so to speak.
But it's funny, anything you say about the Jeffrey Toobin story sounds naughty.
Like no matter what you're actually talking about, your brain immediately goes there.
And when I said he has to clean up his reputation, where did your brain go?
Tissues. Yes.
Tissues. All right.
That's because you're awful.
So I've decided that Brian Stelter is essentially the piñata of CNN. Everybody likes to.
Wow. Getting weird messages this morning.
All right, let's talk about Trump and his legal problems.
So the news is that Trump will not be prosecuted for now.
For now, Trump is not being prosecuted in the Manhattan DA's first indictment.
So we don't know how many more there might be, if any.
But in the first indictment...
They're likely to announce charges.
So here's a leak, right?
I assume that we know more than we're supposed to know.
Must be a leak. So they're likely to announce charges against Alan Weisselberg, CFO, sometime soon.
And he is under scrutiny, we're told, for benefits he received, including a company-funded apartment and car.
Now, how big a deal is it How big a deal is it that maybe taxes weren't paid properly on benefits to employees?
Well, it's sort of a standard corporate problem, and people don't really go to jail for that.
I feel like this is one of those things where the corporation might pay a fine or something like that.
But Trump isn't even named.
Now, of course, the danger here is that the CFO being named might be simply a ploy to put pressure on the CFO so he can flip and give the prosecutors some dirt on Trump.
But, first of all, is this lifetime employee likely to flip on Trump?
I don't know he will, right?
You know, you can expect a lot of people to do flipping, But I don't know that he will.
And I don't even know if he really would have any jail time because it's sort of a corporate crime.
And it probably wouldn't be a ton if he did, but nobody wants to go to jail.
So... Here's the question.
Do we think that the real play is to squeeze the CFO until he gives something up on Trump?
And here's my question.
And for the lawyers who are watching, I always have lawyers watching.
For some reason, this live stream gets a lot of lawyers.
For the lawyers, can you answer me this question?
I'm aware that if you were trying to take down a mafia boss, You could try to squeeze people and get them to give up some stuff about the mafia boss.
But if you're not talking about a mafia boss, can you just fish for a crime for somebody who's just the CEO or owner of a company?
Can you just grab some lower employee and say, we don't have any specific crime we're investigating for the CEO, but if you give us something...
We'll reduce your sentence or drop your charges.
Is that even a thing?
I mean, if you're not actually, like, a mafia boss, you can...
I'm seeing some yeses.
I don't know if you're attorneys.
But tell me if you're an attorney, if you're going to give an answer to this in the comments.
But I don't know that you can just fish for a crime, can you?
Wouldn't you have to have a specific crime that you at least have some indication of before you can dig into it?
I'm seeing most of you saying that this can be done and it's completely legal.
Well, if it's legal, it's pretty crappy.
Thomas is an attorney and says yes.
So there's one attorney, and probably some of you are also attorneys, saying yes.
So let's take that as a yes, that they can do that, which is pretty shitty.
I mean, I feel like you could almost take anybody down with those rules.
Yeah, it seems deeply unethical.
But let's say that's happening.
Here's another take on it.
So Ross Garber on Twitter, who's got legal background and expertise, was pointing out the fact that maybe this is a squeeze on the CFO, but also points out that approving financial crimes, I'm just reading Ross's tweet, beyond a reasonable doubt and unanimously, under New York state law, can be a challenge.
And he goes on, Ross does, there are issues, these issues are normally investigated, prosecuted by the feds who have expansive mail and wire fraud statutes.
So basically, if you thought there was some financial crimes going on, you would expect the feds to be involved because they would be more effective at prosecuting.
But we have no indication that the feds are involved.
Which means... Which could mean...
And I don't want to, like, over-interpret this because this is well outside my expertise.
I'm just trying to draft off of what Ross Garber is saying.
But it could mean, because we haven't heard any leaks, that the feds are involved, that they don't have anything.
That there may not be enough for the feds to say, yeah, let us in on this.
Maybe the feds say, well, we would get involved, but you need a crime...
We don't have any. I feel as if the fact that the Feds are not, at least, there's no leak to say that the Feds are involved, that probably means something.
And the fact that Trump is not named probably means something.
And I would think that all the Stormy Daniel stuff will probably turn into nothing, at least in terms of Trump going to jail or something like that.
That's just not going to happen. At worst, some of this stuff will be fines, I think.
So my prediction all along is that Trump will not have a You know, any kind of a jail sentence or even be prosecuted or even, yeah, I don't think he'll even go to court for anything that would be a jailable offense.
So that's still my prediction.
Some of you, as someone pointed out on Twitter recently, are still waiting for Hillary Clinton to go to jail.
And I think at some level, just people don't go to jail.
I think it just doesn't happen.
Now, one of the things that Trump has done correctly for his entire career is not use email.
So it's really hard to prosecute someone who doesn't write things down, doesn't text.
At least he didn't use the text.
I don't know if he does now. But he didn't use email and he didn't text.
So even if somebody said, I did this because Trump told me to, how do you prove it?
You can't prove it. Trump can just say, I didn't tell you to do that.
And that's it. That's the end of the case.
No paper trail.
You're done. So the odds of Trump going to jail, I think, are really small.
And I've been predicting this from the start.
And so far, it's looking good.
But with that caveat that maybe there's a squeeze on the CFO. And maybe that produces something.
But... I think we'd know by now if there was any smoking gun.
So... This is something Mike Cernovich tweeted about the Trump legal stuff.
He said, prosecutors who leaked to New York Times make it seem like this is a fringe benefits not taxed properly case.
And Mike says, if this is it, Trump ran the most honest real estate company in New York's history.
Exactly. Do you think that you could do a deep investigation of any major real estate company in New York City and they would come out clean?
Any of them? And I'm talking about people who don't even know they're committing any crimes.
Right? Probably any big real estate company is going to have a lot of subjectivity in their, let's say, valuations.
A lot of subjectivity in whether they handled the taxes correctly.
Right? There's a lot of gray area when it comes to real estate.
All right. Apparently Bill Barr is quoted as saying that he didn't believe any of the election fraud claims by Trump, at least he didn't believe that any of it would be big enough to overturn the election, and has referred to it as it was all bullshit.
So Bill Barr is not a believer that the election will turn up anything.
There are two parallel stories here.
That I think are weirdly paired, which also makes you think there's a simulation going on.
Because remember I predicted that 95% of anything you heard about election fraud would be bullshit.
Can anybody confirm in the comments, anybody who heard me say it a bunch of times, that before we even looked into the election through audits and anything else, I told you that on the surface, 95% chance any specific thing...
Now here I'm talking about a specific claim.
I said there was a 95% chance that any specific claim was bullshit.
So now Bill Barr and I are, you know, within 5%, right?
So I was still allowing, okay, well, maybe.
Now my take from the beginning, and I think you can confirm this as well, is that we don't have overwhelming evidence of election fraud.
We probably are not going to be looking in the right places to find it if it exists, because I don't know that they're going to do an audit of the software, the databases, etc.
But my take was that if there was not fraud already, you can guarantee there will be in the future.
Because it's the type of system that is guaranteed to be corrupted by state intelligence agencies, either domestic or foreign, eventually.
So it's only a matter of time.
It's either already happened and we haven't detected it, Or it'll happen in the future, for sure.
Because it's a system that's vulnerable, and people will just keep hacking on it until something gets it.
It's kind of like saying, we're going to start a virology lab, and we're going to be looking at deadly pathogens, and we're going to do a really, really good job of containing them.
Isn't it really just a matter of time?
If you wait long enough, do you have to wonder if anything is going to get out of the lab?
No, not in the long run.
In the long run, it's guaranteed, right?
It's just in the short run, you're not sure.
Did it happen this year? Did it already happen?
Or is it something that's going to happen?
Take nuclear energy.
You've got lots of older nuclear plants around the world.
The newer ones, the generation 3, have had no problems, at least no notable problems.
But the earlier generation, could you predict that there'll be, say, another problem with one of the older ones?
Yeah. Probably.
Probably. Right?
So there's some things that you know are a problem.
It's just guaranteed. You just don't know when it happens.
That's the only thing you don't know.
So the things that are kind of paired are Trump's legal problems, Which a lot of people who are anti-Trump said, there is so much smoke there, there is definitely a fire there.
We just have to clear out the smoke, and we're going to find all these financial crimes.
We're going to find stuff with Russia, bribes, tax cheating.
Oh, it's going to be glorious.
There will be so many crimes.
And I said, probably nothing that's going to be a problem.
Probably a whole bunch of smoke that gets cleared away and it's just steam.
Right? That was my prediction.
So far, so good. And on the election, oh, there's so many specific proven cases of fraud to which I said, no, there aren't.
No, there aren't. There's lots of suspicion.
There's lots of smoke.
But clear that smoke out.
There's maybe nothing you're going to find there because you're not looking in the right place for one reason.
So anybody who expected that Trump would go down for his legal problems will probably be disappointed.
And anybody who's expecting that the Maricopa County audit has got the goods, I think you're going to be disappointed.
Do you think there's any chance we wouldn't know by now from a leak, or at least somebody announcing it, that the Maricopa audit had the goods?
You wouldn't know by now, right?
Do you think there's any chance that all of those people involved in the Maricopa audit Do you think that all of them shut up, and they've really got it, and it's going to be a kill shot when that gets released, and we haven't heard a hint about it?
If that's true, it would be the most amazing story of the year, simply that the secret was kept.
So even forget about the question of what's actually in there.
The fact that they kept it a secret would be amazing and inexplicable, really.
So, yes, Matt Brainerd has lots of statistical evidence of things that look amiss.
But that's not what the audit's going to prove, right?
I think that you could have lots and lots of statistical oddities that might actually even indicate there's a real problem, but it doesn't get you to the finish line.
If you can't translate the statistical oddities into a physical ballot and a whole bunch of them that caused a problem, you're going to need the physical part.
The statistical stuff is a real red flag.
And genuinely it's a red flag.
I mean, there's enough of it that you got all kinds of questions.
That's true. But you gotta have the physical proof or else it's nothing.
And I don't think that connection's been made yet.
Which does not mean that Matt Brainerd is wrong.
It just means they might not be looking in the right place to find the kinds of things that the statistics are suggesting is there.
Here is the most disturbing...
No, well, two very disturbing stories.
Writer Andy Ngo, spelled N-G-O, you've probably seen him on Twitter, etc., He says that SoundCloud, which is the platform his podcast was on, they dropped him permanently.
He's permanently banned.
Now here's somebody who's an editor-at-large for the Post Millennial, a legitimate, serious publication, and he's a high-profile journalist, I guess would be the best description, has made a huge impact on Right?
Very important, substantial person.
Doing good work that the public appreciates.
And he gets kicked off the platform.
Do you know what the reason was?
Can anybody guess the reason that Andy Ngo got kicked off the SoundCloud platform?
Well, if you could guess the reason, you'd be the first one to know.
Because they didn't tell him.
Somebody says cussing.
Yes, cursing is called for in this situation.
I'm trying to hold back, but I don't know if I'll succeed.
So he didn't get taken down for cursing.
I think you were talking about me cursing.
So here's the scary part.
The scary part is not that somebody was taken off a platform.
The scary part is they didn't tell him why.
I think they just sent their terms of service and said you were bad, you were taken off.
That's not cool.
These platforms are big enough that they become quasi-governmental Accidentally, right?
You kind of can't exist in the real world and make an impact unless you can use social media.
And if you're getting kicked off of these platforms without pretty specific reasons, and apparently there's no process for appeal.
So basically his platform is just removed.
No reason given.
Now, do you think this was done for political reasons or for business reasons?
I'm pretty sure it was for political reasons, maybe dressed up as business reasons, but it looks political to me.
And if it looks political and they don't give you a reason for doing it, you have a right to assume it was political.
The SoundCloud has a responsibility.
To tell us specifically why he was banned, or at least to tell him.
And if they don't do it, you have every right to assume it's illegitimate.
That should be your default assumption that this is illegitimate.
It might not be, but it should be your default assumption under these conditions.
So this is deeply disturbing.
Deeply disturbing. And it looks like it's part of a larger effort to just de-platform people who have a certain point of view.
How many people who were prominent Trump supporters no longer have a platform in 2021?
If you start counting up the number of people who have been de-platformed, it gets kind of scary, doesn't it?
Now, you can start and say, well, you know, this one had a good reason, and this one went too far, and, well, this one maybe broke a rule, but, I don't know, is this happening to the left, or is it only happening to the right?
Yeah, it's a pretty long list of people who've been banned.
But it gets worse.
Tucker Carlson reports that a whistleblower has told him that the NSA is spying on Tucker Carlson's private communications, private meaning business, I think, emails and text messages, apparently, and proved it by telling him something that was in his private communications.
How would you like that to happen?
How would you like a whistleblower from the NSA, a government entity, how would you like a whistleblower to come tell you what your fucking email says?
Think about that. Just put yourself in that position for a moment.
Just imagine you're Tucker Carlson.
And somebody says, hey, I'm a whistleblower, and they've been looking at your communication, and I'm going to prove it by telling you something that's in your email that nobody else would know.
Holy fuck.
Holy fuck.
This isn't cool.
And according to the whistleblower, the purpose of it was to deplatform him.
The purpose of it was to deplatform them, according to the whistleblower.
This might be one of the worst stories in American history, I would say.
One of the most horrible examples of government abuse...
I've ever seen. I mean, you'd have to go to something like the, you know, Tuskegee experiments or something where you're doing like human experiments on people to get down to this level of fuck you.
This is pretty deep.
Now, I'm still open-minded that there's something we don't know about the story.
Maybe, you know, maybe the whistleblower is not exactly what we think it is.
But, and it's also possible that, you know, an email could be hacked from some other entity, you know, so there are other possibilities.
But, man, you don't want this to be true, do you?
But you kind of feel it is, don't you?
Don't you kind of feel it's true?
Imagine, if you will, the chessboard for, you know, Republicans versus Democrats.
Imagine which pieces on the chessboard are the powerful pieces.
You know, which ones are the real chess pieces that can make a difference?
Where is Tucker Carlson on that chessboard?
Right? He's basically the queen.
He's the fucking queen.
Now, I mean in terms of the Queen being the most powerful part of the chessboard.
Because his show is so impactful, so highly watched, and he does such a good job of the communication and the packaging of the points, etc., Tucker's not like the rest of us.
You could take me off the field, and I don't know if you'd notice.
You could name three other people on Fox News, right?
You could name three other people, take them off the network.
You'd notice.
You might miss their show.
But I don't know that politics would be different.
But Tucker's not like the rest.
Tucker changes the news.
Tucker decides, in effect, what a lot of people are going to think.
Tucker decides what's important.
If it's on his show, that's important.
If he decides to ignore it, then he knows it's not.
So the horribleness of this story is hard to understate.
This is not a free country, if this is true.
If chess pieces are being taken off the board, where am I in this process?
You want to get a little bit more scared?
It's my understanding...
That if you're looking at a target for whatever you're investigating, and you're checking out a specific target, let's say it's the NSA that's snooping on their communication, do they have a right then to look at the communication of the other people who are communicating with the target?
Yes. Because at the very least, they can see the communication from the other person.
I'm going to go a little further now.
I have personally communicated with Tucker Carlson in electronic form.
So, in a trivial way, it wasn't any special.
I complimented him on the show or something, got a text from Tucker thanking me, blah, blah, blah.
But I've actually had digital communications with somebody who is being snooped on by the NSA. If my communication with him Had been of substance, they would be fucking spying on me.
Now, as I tell you the story, you're probably plenty mad just being an observer.
I'm in this fucking story.
I'm in the fucking story.
I'm a subject who could potentially...
Now, in my case, there's nothing of importance.
It was a few years ago.
I haven't had a contact since then.
So there's nothing of mine that actually matters in this.
But this is a little too fucking close to home.
The NSA is fucking spying on people like me now.
In the sense that anybody who had communicated in a digital form with Tucker got spied on.
Do you know how much I hate that?
A lot. A lot.
And I don't know if this puts me on any enemies list, but I have long imagined that my communications are being monitored one way or another.
What do you think?
Do you think my communications are being monitored by anybody, foreign or domestic?
What do you think? Yeah.
Almost certainly. And I'm a private citizen.
I didn't run for any office, right?
I just go on here and I talk about politics.
But if I had to guess, I mean, I live my life as if my communications are all being monitored.
Which, by the way, I recommend.
I do recommend that.
If you're using a private app like Signal or WhatsApp or something, and you say to yourself, I've got an encrypted app.
Nope. No, you don't.
If anybody's logging your keystrokes on your device, they catch it before it gets into the encryption.
Or they catch it on the other side.
But no, you don't have private communications.
That's not a thing. So that's your scary thought for the day.
Rasmussen reports...
That 52% of likely U.S. voters believe America needs to spend more on police.
But 23% say the current amount of funding for police is about right.
What do I tell you about the 25% rule?
That 25% of the public will have a wacky opinion on any poll.
It doesn't matter what the topic is, 25% of American voters will have whatever is the dumbest opinion.
And in this case, that the current amount of funding is about right.
Now, I'm not saying it's not about right, but how would you know that?
How would anybody know if it's about right?
It's just like sort of a dumb opinion.
You could certainly say you need more, and people do say you need less.
I don't understand that opinion, but people do.
But who are the people who say it's about the right amount?
They don't have any information.
Is this somebody who's looked at the budget?
Anyway. 66% of voters, according to Rasmussen, agree with the following statement.
The radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces have had a real and devastating effect on American communities.
So two-thirds of the public say that the pressure on the police is devastating American communities.
Has there ever been an issue...
Where we were so unified.
I mean, if you think about it, this is probably the most unifying topic there is, right?
Can you think of another one?
Maybe immigration, where 66% of the people are on the same side?
It's kind of rare. But here's what I was going to say about that.
AOC got in a little bit of trouble for saying something like this.
She said, this is actually a quote from AOC. Now, I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable.
So she's talking about police and funding.
Any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much.
Now, of course, when she's quoted, they take that out of the context.
So she's being taken out of context But I want you to hear the whole context.
But I also want to make sure that this hysteria, you know, that this doesn't drive a hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context.
Now, it's a bunch of word salad here, but what she's trying to say is that we shouldn't look at the percentages because that would be misleading.
Is she right? Here are some of the percentages that she thinks we should not take too seriously, but to rather keep them in context in terms of their size.
Shootings have increased more than 60% in New York City compared to last year.
So that's a percentage.
Should you ignore a 60% change in one year in shootings?
AUC says, keep that in context.
Well, let's say the number of shootings went from 100 to 200.
Would you notice?
If you weren't the police, would you even notice?
If shootings doubled in a major metropolitan area, how would you even know?
Because very few people are actually the subject of a shooting.
So, Her point, that you barely would even notice it if you look at the raw numbers.
But if you look at the percentages, of course your hair is on fire.
So that's where the hysteria comes from.
Oh no! The hysteria, the percentages are high.
So I would say she is right on the math.
But I feel as if a 60% increase in one year is something you ought to be pretty hysterical about.
I feel as if a little bit of hysteria about a 60% increase in shootings, yeah, even though that number is still smallish compared to the total number alive, 60%?
What happens next year?
Is next year it's going to level off?
Or does next year it goes up 100%?
You have to worry about the direction of things.
So this is what AOC is getting wrong.
That 60% doesn't suggest that we're done.
That might be the start.
If it's the start, it's the worst problem in the world.
If we're done, why would that be?
Like, why would it top off?
There's nothing that would stop it.
Here's some more statistics that we're not supposed to worry about.
The number of shootings has spiked 126% in Portland in the last year, and 51% in Los Angeles.
Those seem like pretty big numbers, percentage-wise.
Homicides in New York surged 12% compared to last year, and other cities have huge percentage increases.
So AOC is in a tough spot right now.
And she reminds me of, I may have told this story before, this is a very dark story, but it's kind of funny, but very dark.
Years ago, when I worked in a bank, there was a human resources person who told me the following story.
We were at lunch and he said, you know, I was counseling one of your co-workers who had lots of personal problems and was very distressed, but I thought I did a good job.
You know, they were really in a bad place in their life, but I feel like I counseled them up and really made some progress.
He finishes the counseling with this employee, feels pretty good about it, things went about the way he expected, goes back down to his office, and as he's in his office feeling pretty good about how he helped this employee through a tough time, he watched the employee's body fall past his window in the high-rise.
Immediately after he was done counseling this person, he thought successfully, that person climbed up on the roof and jumped off.
Right past his window as he was standing in front of it.
True story. I think of that story when AOC defends defunding the police.
Whoa, what the hell is that?
Um... Loco Valdez.
Richard says, if I have been unfair or misunderstood you, sorry, thanks for everything.
Well, I don't know what you're talking about or why you just gave me $100, but thank you.
Did I block you or something?
I'm not sure what that's about.
But let me know if I blocked you, let me know.
I shouldn't allow people to buy their way back from being blocked.
But if you really paid $100, I would do it.
I don't want to make that a business to unblock people.
But if it meant that much to you, then I would do it.
So let me know if you were blocked.
So about AOC. So she became the, I would say, the face for defunding the police.
She was not the only one who said it, right?
Lots of people were on that side.
But wouldn't you say that AOC, just because of her prominence, etc., became the face of defunding the police?
So how would you like to be the person who became the face of defunding the police when shootings are up 60% in your city?
And that's kind of on you, isn't it?
Doesn't it feel like AOC killed a bunch of people this year?
Like, actually? If you took AOC's influence out of this topic, would there be as much juice toward defunding the police?
I feel like she killed a lot of people.
Like, actually, literally, her approach to this topic, literally, no exaggeration, It appears, killed a lot of citizens.
Right? And a lot of innocent citizens.
People who weren't necessarily committing any crimes, although I suspect a lot of criminals were shot by other criminals.
So that's as bad as the HR person watching the person they counsel just go past the window.
Every time AOC picks up a paper or looks at the news, I doubt she looks at a physical newspaper, but looks at the news, she has to see how many extra people were killed because of her preferred policy.
How do you go on?
Wouldn't you quit politics if you did that?
If you had been the face of a cause...
That just killed a bunch of people and destroyed a bunch of cities?
Wouldn't you quit?
And say, well, I guess politics isn't for me.
I just killed hundreds of people.
Personally. Like, my own actions killed hundreds of people.
Legally. Apparently.
So, let's talk about Gwen Berry.
The flag-snubbing hammer-thrower.
Number one...
Don't you love that there's somebody who is a woman in a sport that involves throwing a hammer a long distance?
Why is that even a sport?
That's the most useless random sport.
Who can throw a heavy object the longest distance?
Oh, for a woman.
Now, if you were saying who could throw at the farthest distance just in general, which I imagine would be mostly men, then I would say, well, that's cool, because I would like to see what's the furthest distance any human being can throw a hammer.
It would be kind of interesting, actually.
It would probably be impressive. But the longest thrown hammer by a woman, presumably not that far compared to The top male hammer thrower.
I don't know that that's worth anything.
I don't know that that has any entertainment value.
Now, I get the whole, you know, women and men should have equal access.
No argument. But really?
You're going to make up a sport that only depends on how big you are, basically, and how strong you are?
And then you're going to say, you know, we're going to watch the group of humans we know don't do this well, because they're biologically not capable of lifting as heavy objects?
You know, it's not an insult, it's just a fact.
It's just the most random thing to care about.
And then I guess Biden said, quote, according to Jen Psaki, Biden said, pride in our country means recognizing that we haven't lived up to our highest ideals.
Okay. Okay, I get that.
And freedom of speech is important.
And There's somebody named Ronnie Hunt who needs to get blocked here, Patrick says.
I'll look for that.
I haven't seen him.
So, anyway, I don't have really...
I don't really care about hammer throwers, and I don't care about the Olympics, and I also don't care if somebody disrespects the flag.
My personal opinion on disrespecting the flag is that's what makes it stronger.
Right? Now...
I seem to be completely alone in that opinion.
Not many people agree with me.
But if you can't burn your flag, and actually you don't observe people doing it, it's no good.
The power of the flag, all of its power, 100% of its value, is that you can fucking burn it.
You can piss on it.
That's very offensive, isn't it?
Right? That's like one of the most offensive things you could think if you're a patriot.
But that's why it has value.
The moment you take that away from the flag, I don't give a shit.
Then it's just a piece of fabric.
But the flag is imbued with this power, right?
That you can burn it and it gets more powerful.
It gets stronger. The more you hurt it, the more you disrespect it, the stronger it gets.
That's what makes it cool.
I don't want to lose that.
So I don't care that somebody disrespected it.
That's sort of on them.
That's for their reputation, their career.
It cost her a lot of money, but she got what she wanted.
She got her free speech.
She got her free speech.
She made her point. It cost her some sponsors, I guess.
So she paid a price.
But that was her decision.
So I don't really have a problem with any of this story or anybody's opinion on it.
That's the country we live in.
That's the one we prefer.
Now, have I told you that one of the ways I know I live in a simulation is that the news is always about me?
One way or another. I feel like every day there's at least one news story that has some connection to me personally, and it's the weirdest thing.
Now, some of it is because, you know, I'm famous and I operate in this realm of the news, so I just meet more people and, you know, connect more topics and stuff.
So some of it's just that, right?
Just chance. But here's another one.
I like to point them out because they're fun.
So are you following the Britney Spears situation?
And if you are, and you're watching the gossipy stuff in the news, Britney Spears and her boyfriend are vacationing in Maui, and she's doing a bunch of videos of them having fun on their vacation, because she's in the news about the conservatorship stuff.
And I'm looking at the videos, and...
I think she's in the room that Christina and I recently stayed in.
So she's definitely in the hotel we stayed in, and she's definitely within one room of where we stayed, because the view from our room was identical, and we could tell it's the same hotel.
So I was just talking to Christina...
That it's our favorite place.
We've been there a number of times.
And so I was just saying we should make plans to go back to that place.
Literally to that room.
Or it might be one right next to it.
I don't know. But it's the same view.
And then I look at a video and there's Britney Spears dancing around in her bathing suit in that room.
Or the one next to it.
The number of times that the news reaches out and taps me on the shoulder is just freaking weird.
It's just weird. But anyway, that's what makes me think we're living in a simulation.
Let's see if I talked about everything I needed to.
Because I think you did. Yes, all of the interesting news has been discussed.
There's nothing else to say.
So not only do we have summer, which is always slow news...
We don't have Trump in the news much.
That makes everything boring.
We've got Joe Biden, who is barely sentient.
That's boring. We've got, it looks like the end of the pandemic.
I don't want to say it too soon, but it's looking good.
I feel like we're hitting a boredom patch that's unprecedented.
Now, question for you.
Will we see lots of summer riots for, let's say, defunding the police and violence by the police against citizens?
Or were those protests...
Well, let me ask you this.
Were the protests from last year, especially the ones about the police, did they accomplish what they wanted and now the problem is fixed?
Or... Are we going to see exactly the same amount of problem in the world, but no protesting?
How do we fight the non-stop Kafka traps the left uses?
You're going to have to be a little less obtuse, because I don't quite understand that question.
For $4.99, you did not get your questions value worth on that one.
But at least I read it.
So, anyway, I don't need to go any further on that point.
Here's a thing to expect.
In a context of super slow news, how long will that last?
If we live in a simulation, there's something coming.
There's something coming.
Might not be something you like, but you don't have slow news for this long.
Something's coming. We just don't know what it is.
And I want to ask you this question.
Have any of you decided to not fly long distance because of masks?
Because this week alone I decided to not do a long distance trip because of masks.
And it's the only reason. Or it's the tipping point reason.
I had other reasons. But the tipping point reason was that I'm not going to get on an 11 hour flight and wear a mask.
I did that And I've done that twice during the pandemic, and it is awful.
Now, I've got a little asthma, so I get like a whole different feeling with a mask on if I wear it too long.
So the feeling that I get is like being waterboarded, like I feel like I can't breathe, etc.
If I fall asleep, I wake right up feeling like I'm gasping for air.
And I think it's mostly psychological, maybe a little bit real, I don't know.
But I'm not going to fly anymore.
That's it. I'm done flying until the masks are gone.
I might fly an hour, but I'm not going to fly six hours.
So as I've told you before, economics is all that's going to matter, right?
Economics is the only thing that's going to matter to getting rid of masks.
It won't be the government. And the airline business is hopping right now.
So as long as they've got plenty of business, they can keep the masks.
But if they feel enough of us are waiting until masks are taken off...
Imagine, if you will, they said...
I think they do say that we're going to wear masks until September.
Would you book a flight one month before, and actually fly, one month before masks go away?
If you could just wait one more month and know you could have the same, let's say, a vacation trip, or even a business trip, but you didn't have to wear a mask, would anybody book a flight in that one month period before the masks are scheduled to go away?
Right? You wouldn't.
A basic understanding of economics is that the long-haul flights should just be destroyed a month before the mask mandate goes.
So, how do you fix that?
People probably are going to do the same number of flights if it's three months before the mask mandate ends.
But when you get to that last month, people are really going to postpone because it makes such a difference.
I think they're going to drop it early.
Because that month will destroy the airline industry for the long haul stuff.
Unless they say, okay, we're going to say get rid of masks a month early.
So here's your prediction.
Prediction is that the mask requirement will be dropped early and not in September.
And it will be because they have to.
The business will just fall off a ledge if they don't do it.
