Episode 1702 Scott Adams: No Real News Yesterday So Let's Talk About The Fake Stuff Instead
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Content:
Jack Dorsey tweet yesterday
Pandemic teen mental health issues
Russian Ruble seems to be saved
Reports of Ukraine War atrocities
Alex Epstein hit piece update
Jon Stewart vs Andrew Sullivan
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Yes, it is. Well, I saw a tweet yesterday by Jack Dorsey, founder, ex-CEO of Twitter.
And this is like the most interesting thing anybody tweeted lately.
He says, the days of Usenet, IRC, the web, even email with PGP. Now, if you don't know, those are earlier technologies, you know, when the internet was young.
And he said those things were amazing.
And then he says, centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet.
And then he says, I realize I'm partially to blame and regret it.
Jack Dorsey just apologized for creating Twitter because of the damage it's doing.
That just happened, right?
Now, I may have mentioned that I've met Jack and interacted enough to know he's not like other people.
Now, I'm not sure how much further I could go with that, but he's just not like other people.
That's all. And...
I'm sure he means it.
I don't think there's anything that isn't perfectly transparent.
He created a product, and he's concerned about its social impact.
I don't know. There's not much you can say about that, except that maybe it explains why he's not there anymore.
I don't know. I mean, at least part of it.
I think that's the smaller part.
The CDC is warning that there's this crisis of young people with depression.
Four in ten teens report that they feel persistently sad or hopeless, and one in five saying that they have contemplated suicide.
That's what the CDC says.
As Mike Cernovich noted in his tweet on this topic, wasn't that caused by the CDC? Isn't all this mental health crisis that the CDC is warning us about?
Didn't they create that?
Not all of it.
I think technology is...
Honestly, I think technology is 75% of it.
And the pandemic is 25%.
That would be my guess.
What do you think? Would you say similar?
Does that percentage sound about right to you?
But... This is a way bigger problem than any of us are willing to acknowledge.
And I would say it's true.
Let me ask you this.
How many of you have had a, let's say, a brush with somebody who tried suicide or succeeded during the pandemic?
So let's limit it just to the pandemic.
Through today. From the pandemic through to today, have any of you had a bad experience with either an attempted, threatened, or actual suicide?
Go. It could be your own.
Now watch the comments.
Yes, it's mostly yeses.
There are lots of noes, but there's a lot of yeses.
I'll say yes.
I would say yes. I would say that...
That this social risk has touched my life.
Nobody died, but only by luck.
Literally by luck.
So, yeah, look at that.
So this is like the big problem of our time.
And I'll say again, imagine this.
Imagine a candidate running for office Saying that you shouldn't be allowed to use social media until you're 16.
Imagine that. Could a candidate win with that?
Maybe. I feel like there are enough parents who would say, you know what?
I'll take that.
What are his other policies or her other policies?
Don't care. Don't care.
If you could make that one problem go away, take social media away from all teens and kids, I'd want that leader.
Because I don't think anybody has any idea how damaging this is.
We have no idea. So the Russian ruble seems to be saved.
Now, I'll try to explain this as best I can.
Because, you know, as I say too often, I've got a degree in economics.
I've got an MBA. And there are some topics that even if you have some credentials, if you're not pretty deep into that specific field, you get in trouble.
So I can't go too deeply into currency.
That's not some area that I have any expertise in.
But I'll tell you the most basic thing you need to know.
Any currency... Be it crypto or be it the dollar or be it the ruble, they all have the same characteristic, which is if there's a demand for it, if you know somebody will accept it, well, then it has value.
If nobody wants your ruble or your dollar or your crypto, well, then it has zero value.
So the only thing that gives anything value...
Is somebody willing to buy it?
Now, what is it that gives the US dollar value?
Well, one of the reasons is that oil is traded in dollars.
But the other reason is that the United States government will accept the dollar to pay taxes.
So you always have somebody who's going to take a dollar, even if it's just our own government.
Well, it turns out we're not the only ones to come up with that trick.
So Russia said, hey, if our ruble is plunging in value compared to these other currencies, why don't we just say our ruble equals X amount of gold, we'll pin it to the price of gold, and basically we'll have some kind of universally agreed standard, and it will just stabilize it, and we'll say, well, we'll take that or we'll take gold.
Doesn't matter if we get a ruble.
Doesn't matter if we get a dollar.
Doesn't matter if you want to ship us gold.
Because now it's all the same.
And the way that the Russians made the ruble, pegged to gold, is that they used their own central bank to buy rubles.
And, no wait, they would use rubles to sell gold.
Right? So they would accept rubles, To allow people to purchase gold, which gives rubles value because there's something that you can buy with it.
So here's my question.
I keep hearing people say, oh, the dollar is going to be dead, and then we'll be in trouble.
But that doesn't mean the dollar becomes worthless, does it?
I don't think that happens, does it?
Because wouldn't we just do the same thing?
Say, oh, okay, looks like we're in trouble, so we'll just say the dollar, the dollar is now tied to gold, and you can pay your taxes in gold or dollars, either one.
I feel like we could just do the same thing.
And I'm not entirely sure how much power that we give away by just being like everybody else with our currency.
Somebody says tie it to Bitcoin.
That would be the ultimate.
All right. So I guess the thing that we can't tell about any of this Russian ruble stuff is, I don't know, is it good or bad?
Or is it heading in the right direction or the wrong direction?
I'm not sure anybody knows.
Alright, how many of you saw the videos of the alleged Russian atrocities in a Ukrainian city where there were bodies, apparently, their hands were bound behind their backs and they had been killed.
And there were a lot of them.
And they were just dumped right on the streets with their hands tied.
Now, if your hands are tied and you're dead, it does look like you're executed.
Especially if there are lots of them.
It looks pretty much like executed.
And somebody suggested that it looks like they were taking the men out from each of the homes, like knocking on each door and saying, is there a man home?
And if there was, they just took him out and killed him in the street in front of his house.
I mean, that's what it looks like.
We don't know what happened. Now, raise your hand.
How many of you believe that these reports are true?
We saw the video.
That doesn't mean it's true, because video can be faked.
How many believe the atrocity stories?
Interesting. On locals, it's 95% now.
How about on YouTube?
Mostly, you don't believe it.
Now, that's very interesting.
May I give you a standing ovation?
I'm too lazy. A sitting ovation.
This makes me very happy.
Well, here's the way I would phrase it.
We don't know if it's true.
We don't know if it's true.
But we do know it's not credible.
Meaning that you shouldn't believe it's true.
If you believe it's true because you saw it with your own eyes on the video, then you're not a clever consumer of the news.
Because we're still in the fog of war.
We are right now in the maximum propaganda stage.
In theory, there shouldn't be anything we hear about the war that's true.
Nothing. Because both sides have a strong incentive to lie And we don't have any independent press in the area.
Not really. So everything you hear is either going to come from one side or the other.
Why would anybody tell the truth?
Why would anybody tell the truth?
Seriously. And, you know, I did see...
I hate to say this, but I did see some pictures of what looked to be mass deaths, and the people looked alive to me.
Did anybody have that experience?
Because I feel like I've seen enough, at least, video and photographs of dead people, even ones that had died recently, and they didn't look like that.
They looked a little bit alive, if you know what I mean.
So not all of them.
I mean, some of them were clearly dead.
But, I don't know, to me...
To me, this...
It looks fake.
So I would say it looks fake, but I don't know if it is.
There's no way to know. So I would say don't make up your mind whether it's real or not, but be aware that in this situation it would be rare to see anything that's true.
Shanghai, apparently the lockdown in Shanghai because of the coronavirus.
I saw a tweet thread from somebody, it looks like a non, might be a European or American or something, who's staying in Shanghai and is part of the lockdown.
And here's the problem, they can't get food.
So they've been locked down for 16 days and they're running out of food, and they have literally no way to get new food.
So they have apps for delivering food, but they all go to nothing because they're all overextended.
So you can't even go on your app and order food.
So this one individual was cataloging his attempt.
He's using every kind of app in every way he can, but can't get any.
And then finally got some potatoes and bread, but he wasn't sure that they would be delivered.
But at least on the app, he ordered them.
And I wonder how bad this is going to get.
Because I really can't imagine that China can't feed people if they really want to.
Like, I don't think they're running out of food.
It's just a distribution problem, right?
So I feel like they could solve that before there are mass deaths.
But it looks like it's going to be close.
It looks like starvation on a mass scale is at least a possibility.
At least a possibility.
So that's looking pretty grim. And especially what it does to supply chains around the world.
Well, you know, the military was looking to find all those right-wing extremists.
You know, all the racists and white supremacists and stuff.
And after they looked into it for, I don't know, a few years now...
They found fewer than 100 instances of confirmed extremist activity in 2021.
And so Fox News is presenting this as they looked and they didn't really find anything of substance.
100 is substance, but we don't know what exactly the nature of these were.
And so Fox News is minimizing it a little bit.
That's the way they're treating it as, well, we looked and there wasn't much of anything to worry about.
And then other people say, wait a minute, are you telling me there are 100 Timothy McVeys?
What? Because that would seem like a lot of Timothy McVeys, wouldn't it?
But there's no indication that the 100 or so extremists are Timothy McVeys.
They might just, you know, like talking.
It doesn't mean they're going to blow something up.
So we don't know.
But I guess I would be worried about 100...
Extremists out of any size group.
I don't really care if it's out of 10 million or out of 100 million.
If there are 100 of them, that's 100 things I'm worried about.
But it does look like it wasn't...
At the very least, it was not a massive military problem.
So that's new. So the one thing I think we can say for sure...
Is that however big this problem is, it's not a massive problem.
So it certainly didn't affect readiness or anything like that.
Let's see. So Zelensky of Ukraine is saying that he won't trade any territory, so Ukraine won't allow Russia to take anything, and that the only acceptable outcome is victory by Ukraine.
Now, does he mean that?
It sounds like a negotiating position, or is it?
Or is it?
It's actually a smart negotiating position.
Do you know why? Because if he goes in public and says, absolutely, this is the one thing we will not do, what does that do to the value of that offer?
It increases it.
If Russia thought they could get land cheaply, meaning that he would roll over and give it to them, well, then they'd negotiate hard and get everything they can.
But he's now made that expensive by saying, we will not accept it under any circumstance.
It's not even on the table.
Which means, should he have to give it up in the end, it will appear that he's giving up something bigger than Because the way we talk about the land that Russia has occupied is it was practically Russian already.
Am I right? Because we say, well, it was sort of a separatist-ish region with a lot of Russian speaking, and maybe they didn't mostly want to be Russian, but a lot of them did.
At least in America, we...
We're sort of turning that into a grey area.
Well, I don't know.
Should Russia own it? Should Ukraine?
I don't know. Historical this or that?
I don't know. But by Zelensky saying, no, zero land goes to Russia.
He just improved his negotiating position.
Or, or he means it.
Now remember, I did tell you that I have not ruled out the possibility, and I think everybody else in the world has, so I'm the only one who hasn't, that Zelensky is going for the kill shot.
That he's not trying to survive, he's trying to take Putin out.
Scott, are you softening your change of belief that Putin wins?
You know, at this point, I don't know what winning looks like.
Do you? Because if Putin wanted to put enough weight onto Ukraine, he could certainly win.
But if he puts that much weight on it, then he will certainly be removed from office also.
Or the odds would be greater.
So I don't know what winning looks like.
Because I'm not entirely sure he could win the war and keep his job.
But it is possible. Let's see, if I were going to put a bet on it right now, let's see, the most likely bet would be Land for peace, and Putin survives.
And that in five years we drop the sanctions because somebody has an economic interest in doing it.
That's what I think. What do you think?
But I have not ruled out.
I would say there's a 90% chance Russia gets at least a bunch of land and Putin survives.
That's the 90%.
10%, and I think I'm the only one saying it, 10% Zelensky takes Putin out.
10%. And I think when you see both sides have gone after fuel depots now, things are getting pretty serious now.
And I wondered, why did Russia wait so long to take out a fuel depot?
It seems like that should have been early on.
But I've got a feeling they're all going to run out of fuel.
So both sides will run into fuel.
They're going to be fighting hand-to-hand in about a month.
So... So here's some more propaganda.
So Fox News is writing about whether or not Putin has disagreement within his inner circle and his generals, and are the generals telling him good information, or are they lying to him, etc.
And here's how Fox News reports that.
Watch this first sentence.
It's been said more than once in recent days that Russian President Putin has likely been misinformed by his security and military services about the war in Ukraine.
Now, let's go back to the first part of that sentence.
This is on a news site.
It's on Fox News site.
So this is a news site.
And they say, it's been said more than once in recent days.
By whom? Who said it?
And did they have any reasons?
What the hell is this way to frame something?
You frame it as, it's been said more than once?
And how many times more than once?
Twice? Is more than once twice?
And who said it?
Besides me. Right?
The people saying it are people like me.
We're assholes. Like, you don't listen to some asshole like me saying that Putin's inner circle might be having some problems.
What the hell do I know?
And does it matter how many people like me said it?
What if six people like me said it?
That doesn't mean anything.
It means nothing.
Yeah, okay, it's a topic of conversation, but to imagine that because people are saying it more than once, it has some weight, that's a little bit of a stretch.
But is there any situation in which the inner circle always agrees?
No. So is it reasonable to assume, lacking any direct information, that there's some dissension within the inner circle?
That's the most obvious thing you could ever predict.
There probably is no inner circle anywhere without disagreement.
Otherwise you don't need an inner circle.
You just need one person. The whole point of an inner circle is they don't have the same opinion.
That's really the beauty of the inner circle.
They don't have the same opinions.
So, I mean, you don't really need insiders to tell you that that's going to be going on.
So, an update on the author Alex Epstein's situation, which I reported a few days ago.
So, earlier in the week, Alex had been informed by his publisher that the Washington Post was going to do a hit piece on him based on something he wrote when he was 18, which, if taken out of context, and only if taken out of context, would make him seem like he might be a racist.
Now, did I mention he was 18?
First of all, can we just leave the 18-year-olds alone?
I mean, seriously.
If somebody's an adult running their career, and that career has taken a certain form, and it looks pretty good, just leave his 18-year-old self alone.
We have no respect for that.
None. None.
We have no respect for digging through somebody's almost childhood stuff.
His brain wasn't even developed at 18.
Come on! I mean, let's be a little bit scientific about it, right?
If the science says your brain isn't developed until you're 18, Washington Post doing a story about what he said when his brain wasn't fully developed, Then you're going to take him out for something he said out of context.
Because keep in mind, it's not about what he said.
It's about what they say he said.
It's not even about what he said.
I mean, it's the worst possible thing.
First of all, don't bug, you know, don't dig through somebody's 18-year-old turds.
Second of all, don't lie about it.
I mean, you just compounded the worst thing you could do, and then you lied about it.
That's like two of the worst things.
And then you're going to put a hit piece in a newspaper?
I mean, this is disgusting behavior.
Well, an interesting thing happened.
So Alex Epstein, it turns out, as I mentioned before, has lots of friends.
Authors often know each other, and he knew a number of people, and I was on his list, of people who said, hey, maybe you want to say something about this before this hit piece lands.
So I did. I talked about it, and I know he tweeted some clips of me talking about it.
And other people did too, with bigger accounts, and people have different reach.
And I don't know if this is true yet, but it looks like the Washington Post pulled back the story.
Now, if the story had been true and they could support it, do you think they would have pulled it back?
Now, maybe it just wasn't done.
Maybe they needed to talk to a few more people.
That's possible. We don't really know.
But the managing editor at the Washington Post wrote this tweet without mentioning what the topic was.
So there's no mention of what topic she's talking about.
But she tweets this. In the course of reporting the story, the Washington Post's Maxine Josselow has been subjected to vitriol and baseless attacks on social media.
She conducts her work with fairness and to the highest standard.
And we are proud to count Maxine among our talented staff of journalists.
And I'm waiting for something like she was working on a story about...
She just published a story about, and the people are complaining about, and the trolls are after her because, and it's not there.
Why would they leave that out?
It isn't the most important part of the story.
Why? What about why?
Turns out this is the reporter that was allegedly writing a hit piece on Alex Epstein.
And so Alex's preemptive suppressive attack was so effective that the Washington Post is defending itself in public against the guy that they were trying to destroy.
He managed to capture so much energy on his team That they're actually playing defense and they haven't even published the story.
They're playing defense on a story they haven't even published.
That's how weak their position was.
And that's pretty weak.
Well, did you see Saturday Night Live?
They had a comedian whose name I can't remember, Carmichael maybe or something?
But... There's a story in the news about how Saturday Night Live treated the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock.
So if you want to know what a slow news day looks like, a slow news day looks like news about an entertainer who's talking about two other entertainers in a different place at a different time.
Is there anything less newsy Then the news talking about an entertainer talking about another entertainer who did something with another entertainer.
I don't think you could become less relevant than that.
Of course they had to handle it because it's a big story.
But that's where we're at.
The news is about people talking about the news talking about the people talking about the news or something like that.
There's a little dust-up between Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan.
Now, Jon Stewart, famously of the...
used to be the Daily News guy.
Daily News? Daily Show.
Daily Show guy. And he's come back with his new show, streaming, I think.
And he had Andrew Sullivan as a guest.
And when Andrew Sullivan arrived, it turns out there was another guest that he didn't know about.
And the other guest was basically there to make Andrew Sullivan look bad.
And then there was a little disagreement about that.
And Andrew Sullivan's version is that the booker told him he would be the only guest.
Now, Jon Stewart, who I would consider highly credible, He says that didn't happen and that the Booker told him exactly the story and that Andrew Sullivan's complaints are baseless.
Now here's what's interesting. Jon Stewart is very credible.
Don't you think? Even if you disagree with him.
He's got a pretty long public record of not lying to you.
Am I right? I mean, he's not a liar.
Does anybody think he's a liar?
I mean, you could disagree with everything he believes or said, but you probably wouldn't call him a liar.
How about Andrew Sullivan?
Same story, interestingly.
You rarely have a story with two people of this level of credibility.
That's what's weird about the story.
Usually there's like a known liar who's saying something about another known liar, or at least one of them is a known liar and the other one isn't.
But when do you ever get a situation where there's a really specific fact in question and both people are actually very credible?
So let me add my filter to this.
So the claim by Andrew Sullivan is that he'd been told that he would be alone, but then there was another guest to make him look foolish.
This exact thing has happened to me.
Now, I'm not going to name the show that this happened.
Because I think the host of the show probably didn't know it.
Because the bookers work with the host very closely, of course.
But I don't know that the host necessarily hears everything that the bookers said to the guest, right?
So I'm not going to mention the name of the host.
But it was a well-known national brand show.
I will tell you it wasn't on Fox News, because I often say this about Fox News, especially if I'm going to criticize them about how they handle a story or something.
I'd love to add this.
Fox News is really well produced.
Really well produced.
It just impresses me every time I work with them.
So say what you will about their opinions and the hosts, etc.
Well, the hosts are all highly talented, which is because they have good management, basically.
So it's not Fox News.
Fox News has great bookers.
Great bookers. I mean, just the best in the business.
And so it wasn't them.
But it was another national brand, and they did the same thing to me.
Invited me with the clear indication that I would be the only guest.
Now, they didn't say it specifically, but that is the default assumption.
If somebody says, would you like to come on my show...
You assume that you're...
No, it wasn't Bill Maher.
You assume that you're going to be there alone.
Now, the Bill Maher show is very clear that you're on a panel or you're going to be interviewed separately.
The Bill Maher show did a really good job of booking, so they also are very professional.
Okay, it was some recognition. If you're just going to sit there and guess all day.
Yeah. Now, I like Spur Connish because I think he's a pretty straight shooter.
But the booker did not mention that there would be somebody on the show to basically make me look like an idiot and then use up my time so I wouldn't have time to defend myself.
Now, the only thing I'm telling you is that I'm pretty sure it's fairly routine...
For the booker to maybe not mention somebody else would be there.
Am I right? So if I had to bet who's right, I think John Stewart talked to his booker, and then the booker said, oh yeah, I told him.
I told him the truth.
Now what's John Stewart going to do?
He hired this guy. This is his own employee.
Do you think Jon Stewart is going to say in public, you know, I asked my booker, he said he didn't do it, but I don't trust him.
I don't trust my own employee, so I'm going to go with what Andrew said.
You can't really do that, can you?
You can't really do that.
So I think you have a case of Jon Stewart backing his employee, which is, I don't think that's the wrong instinct.
I don't think it's the wrong instinct.
But it might be the wrong way to go.
And I'm going to back Andrew Sullivan.
If I had to bet on it, I think Andrew Sullivan's telling you the straight scoop and that he was told by the booker as one person.
Now, there were other emails that I think may have told him there were other people there, but it's not reasonable to ask a busy public person to look at all the details in an email.
It just isn't, because we don't.
Ask how many people have sent me an email with some details in it that I didn't read.
A lot. A lot.
One of the jerkiest things that famous people do, and I'm going to confess this, is that when people make our life hard, we push back really hard.
Because you can't have too many people doing that.
So my big pet peeve is somebody asking me to do something to which I say yes, and then there's an add-on.
This is a typical one with me.
Scott, would you mind doing a four-minute interview for an article about you?
And I'll be like, four minutes for some publicity?
Sure. So I'll do the four-minute interview, and then at the end they'll say, and would it be too much trouble...
If you drew us a cartoon that we could run just with the article.
And this happens to be continuously.
So when I say yes, I agree to the thing that I can handle, and then immediately they bait and switch and offer the thing that sounds reasonable, right?
Don't you think it sounds pretty reasonable to ask a cartoonist to just, you know, whip up a little cartoon for your article?
It's pretty reasonable. I say no.
Nope. And when they say, well, the article would be no good without it, I say, well, not my problem.
I gave you my four minutes.
So when somebody does the bait-and-switch, it almost doesn't matter to me what the switch is.
Just automatic. I say, okay, I'm dealing with somebody who can't be trusted.
If you had told me in the first place, I would have said yes or no.
But if you could add it on, it's just no, automatically.
It doesn't even matter if it's reasonable.
If it hasn't been disclosed from moment one, nope, as a matter of principle.
Now, do you know how much trouble you get in when you're that much of an asshole?
They don't like it.
They don't like it.
But so far, I always get away with it.
Lemon Minty is saying, the thing famous people think is that we care.
Well, unfortunately, you do.
Maybe not you specifically, but...
The truth is that people care about famous people, even if they shouldn't.
All right. So, this is the emptiest news day I've seen in a while.
Everything about Ukraine looks like bullshit, or the same story we've already heard.
Are there some major stories that aren't being told?
I feel like it. Alright, how many of you know if the supply chain problem of the ships that were stranded off the docks in America, is that worse or better than the last time you heard about it?
Isn't that a pretty big deal?
That's a pretty big deal, right?
Is the supply chain problem getting worse or better?
Come on, that's like the biggest thing in the world.
You don't even know the answer to it.
There's nothing that will affect you more than what is the situation with the supply chain.
If the supply chain is 10% worse than the last time we heard about it, we're fucked.
We're fucked if it's 10% worse than the last time I heard about it.
Because that means there's nothing that's going to save it.
But what if it's 10% better?
Or 50% better?
Well, that means it wasn't much of a problem and it's on its way to being solved.
You know, unless China has more coronavirus problems.
So, I don't read supply chain magazine yet.
But it should be a front page story.
Remember, we saw the coronavirus stats on every show for months and months and months and months.
And nobody's going to show us how many ships are out to sea in the supply chain.
Yeah, how about the border?
Every now and then Fox News will talk about the border, but are more people coming across the border or fewer?
I don't know. I did hear just before I went live there was some mass shooting in California.
I haven't seen the news on there.
Alright, something in Sacramento...
Automatic weapons used.
Automatic weapons.
Yeah, I heard, I think it was Jack Posavik say that it sounded like automatic weapons.
Six dead in downtown.
Title 42 going away?
What's that mean?
All right. Didn't see backup ships at Long Beach.
Oh, I was just in L.A. and didn't see backed-up ships at Long Beach.
Would you see them?
You would, wouldn't you? All right.
Well, if anybody knows the answer to that, I'd love to hear about it.
Is there any topic that we haven't talked about?
I generally don't talk about the mass shootings too much because I just don't like to give them attention.
A tennis player dropped down to we don't know why.
Okay. That's probably a drug test.
I don't know why that youth feel that this is a comment you need to make.
The ships are parked outside the view.
Yeah, I think that should be.
Oh, God. What is wrong with this guy?
All right, you were hidden.
The detention of Brittany Griner, I don't know about that.
So somebody says port delays in Shanghai are getting worse.
Well, that makes sense. Oh, the Title 42 was what allowed us to turn back immigrants because of COVID. And...
Oh, the Daily Wire making kid shows and selling razors.
Yeah, the Daily Wire is funny.
One of their sponsors dropped, I guess it was Harry's Razors, and so the Daily Wire CEO started his own razor business.
That's one way to go.
Yeah, and the commercial was Jeremy Boring.
The commercial was actually really good.
There are very few commercials you watch from beginning to end, Because just the content is good, but that was one of them.
It's called Jerry's Razors, is it?
Oh, Brittany is the U.S. basketball player being held in Russia.
Yeah, you know, I don't know the details of that.
I mean, I know what the accusation is, but we don't know what's really happening there.
I'm not sure that's political.
Exactly. So the Babylon Bee is still banned from Twitter.
You know, here's the thing with...
Being banned from Twitter.
If Twitter gives you an option to remove your tweet, and it's not like the world's most important tweet and you don't do it, you know, you should.
Was Tucker banned?
You got banned?
Somebody got banned? Constantine says, Scott, you are being dragged as a modern Holocaust denier for your denial of Russian atrocities last week in Ukraine.
Do you really think you were right on this?
Well, Constantine, let me talk to all the fucking idiots.
If you think that me not believing stories out of a war zone is the same as denying them...
Then you don't understand much about how words work or thinking or the fog of war or anything.
So a question about my opinion about this is that you know how this works, right?
People drag famous people to make their own point.
So if their own point is that these are real, they'll take somebody who said, oh, I don't believe information coming out of a war zone, and then they'll...
Turn it into something else.
So me being dragged only means that somebody decided to take advantage of somebody else's fame to get some attention for their opinion.
It usually doesn't mean anything about me.
The person getting dragged is just a vehicle to boost somebody else's opinion.
It almost never is about the famous person.
Uh... You're a postman for...
Remember what? Yeah.
Oh, here's a photo of all the tankers off the LA. So there's still a lot of them, but I don't know if that's more...
Is that more tankers or fewer tankers than the last time we checked?
Which way is it moving?
Better or worse? Do you see the Ukrainian war zone marriage proposal?
Trump bashed Justin Trudeau.
Now, have you heard the story that the Hunter laptop thing might be nearing some kind of a legal process?
And that's the reason the mainstream media is suddenly acting like it exists?
Because they have to get ahead of it?
Um...
Gretchen half Whitmer.
That's pretty funny. All right.
Biden would have negotiated Greenwich's lease if she was white and straight.
I don't know about that. You're off the air.
What's that mean? Scott hasn't talked about the House legalization of pot.
Yeah, I talked about it yesterday.
Just quickly, my take on that is that the Republicans are just...
They've been trapped again.
They allow themselves to be trapped because they have such an irrational view on marijuana.
So the Democrats can just make them look like idiots by making them vote against it, and it looks like that's what they're doing.
How do you feel about a pardon of Hunter Biden?
um Well, the whole point of pardons is that these are people who generally deserved what they got.
So the pardons are not based on how deserving somebody is of punishment.
The pardons have to be no questions asked or else they don't work.
You couldn't have pardons if you could also question the person who gave the pardon to the point of changing the decision.
So I guess the question is, do you want to have a system where pardons are allowed or not?
If you decide pardons are allowed, you just kind of have to shut up about how they're used.
I mean, you could talk about it.
But once you've bought into the concept that one person can give a pardon, that's the system you bought.
And you know that a whole bunch of those pardons will not be legitimate, but you know they're going to happen.
And we have a system that prefers to help the innocent over the guilty.
So if we have a system that gives more pardons than you think makes sense, that's better than a system that doesn't allow pardons.
If he had to choose, I'd take the one that's more lenient, not less.
All right.
Yeah, the Trump rally wasn't really big news because I don't think he said anything that was news necessarily.
Scott is delusional.
Okay, that's a good logical sentence there.
So there's at least one thought that I saw on the internet that the Democrats might want to speed up the Biden prosecution so that Dad Biden is still in office to give the kid a pardon.
I don't know. That's actually not crazy.
If Biden, the President Biden, if he knew that his son were going to be indicted...
I think he'd want to stay in office.
So how about this?
What if the only reason that Biden has not stepped down is that he can't trust his successor to pardon Hunter?
And he's an accomplice, right?
Maybe. But doesn't it look like the reason we have a brain-dead president is that he has to stay in office to protect his criminal son?
Allegedly. Allegedly.
Right? I mean, it feels to me that Biden would have already stepped down.
I would say that there's no way that Joe Biden is not aware that he's now embarrassing himself.
Don't you think he's aware of it?
He sees his ratings.
I mean, there must be some people who tell him the truth.
He must be able to see it himself.
He's been around long enough. Because the specific kind of cognitive problem that Biden has would not prevent him from understanding the situation.
He wouldn't like it, but he still has enough cognitive ability to understand his own situation.
I'm sure of that.
So I feel as if he's dragging it out at the cost of the country...
To protect his family.
Worst possible thing.
And so I offer you the following really, really annoying opinion.
I think Biden should pardon him right now.
You can do that, right?
You can pre-pardon? Somebody give me a legal opinion.
You can pre-pardon.
As much as you hate to hear this, I think he should pre-pardon him.
Because as much as you say, oh, it'd feel really good to take him down and we'd really find out what's in the laptop and all that, and that's all true, and I agree with you.
I would like to know what he did, and I would like him to pay if there's something to pay for.
But what's good for you?
Like, what's my personal self-interest?
My personal self-interest is that we have a president who's not brain-dead.
And if part of the deal is he gets to pardon Hunter, maybe himself somehow, I don't know, but he leaves the office so we have at least a competent Democrat.
I would take a competent Democrat over Biden right now.
I mean, it's not really Kamala, so I don't know what they would do.
But... I would take that deal.
I would let Hunter get a pardon, a pre-pardon, without even knowing if he had a crime, and Biden too, just to move on.
Because I think the stakes are so high that the individual crimes they may or may not have committed They're just below my level of caring.
As bad as they are.
I'm not minimizing them.
I'm saying they're pretty darn bad.
If anything like the allegations are true, that's pretty bad.
But not nearly as bad as having an incapable president.
So, it's a tough choice.
I would accept the pardon under those...
If it meant that Biden left office sooner, even for a Democrat...
Even to be replaced with someone who has similar thoughts, but just more capability, I'd be okay with that.
I would take that trade.
And I know most of you wouldn't, but I would.
And there's no perfect answer, because you're going to be unhappy in both ways.
Yeah, he can only pardon the federal crimes, but I imagine these are mostly potentially federal crimes, if there's any crime at all.
Let's be clear that I'm not aware of any crime the hunter committed, are you?
We have speculation, but the process has not done what the process needs to do, if indeed the process will do anything.
Tax evasion? Well, even the tax evasion, apparently he paid his tax bill.
And my understanding is that if you pay your tax bill in full...
Even if you evaded it, if they haven't yet prosecuted you, they look at that and say, all we really wanted was the money.
That's good enough. I don't know.
So I think that's a slap on the wrist.
All right, gun crimes...
Yeah. For some reason, there will be no charges about the gun crimes, I'm sure.
