Episode 1793 Scott Adams: I Help You Figure Out Who The Next President Will Be And Why
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
ZERO Romney votes in 59 Philadelphia precincts?
My take on Adam Kinzinger
Did Trump believe he lost the election?
Patriot Front march in Boston
Jordan Peterson's Elliot Page tweet
Jeff Bezos vs Joe Biden
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization and possibly some alien worlds that are yet to be discovered.
If you'd like to take it up a notch, and I know you do, what's it take?
Well, not much. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a jails or a 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.
It's the dopamine hit of the day, if you haven't heard.
A little bit of oxytocin on top.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Go! Ah, yeah.
That was good. Better than usual.
Well, I saw a video of a bunch of pilots on strike.
Here's the video. I don't know if you can see it on my tiny little phone.
But a bunch of pilots in Atlanta for Delta and American.
Is there anything about these pilots that you detect as a pattern?
Is there anything about them that, I don't know, it feels like they have something in common?
What is it?
What is it?
Oh yeah! It's all a bunch of white guys of a certain age.
So there's a, as you know, an airline pilot shortage.
Does anybody know why there is a pilot shortage?
Do you know what it costs to become a commercial pilot?
Do you know if somebody wanted to go into that business?
So you need a lot of flight time that you'd have to do on your own.
Take a guess. What do you think is a guess?
How much would it cost to start from zero and get enough air time to become a commercial pilot like those people in the video?
What do you think? I think it's between half a million and a million.
That's why there aren't pilots.
Now, did you notice there were also zero women there, at least in the marchers, and there were zero people of color.
Now, I have a little insight into this because my recent ex-wife just became a commercial pilot.
And so I can tell you a little bit, I'm no expert, but I can tell you a little bit about what it would take.
Let's say you're a woman and you want to become a commercial pilot.
What would it take? Step one, and you don't want to skip this step.
Step one is marry a millionaire.
And announce that your main ambition in life is to become a pilot.
If you skip that step, I don't know that there's another way to do it.
Honestly. Now, it's also necessary...
There's a second step that happens after that.
After you marry a millionaire and spend enough money to become a commercial pilot.
If you don't remember the video, let me show it again.
Marriages don't last.
It's very long if you're a woman who becomes a commercial pilot.
Let me just throw that in there.
So don't expect to stay married, but it's an excellent career, and I recommend it.
Here's a little psychology thing I read today.
I think it was in CNN. Do you know how grocery stores and other stores, too, always put flowers out front?
Have you noticed that? And apparently there's a reason for that.
According to Paco Underhill, the founder and CEO of Behavioral Research, he's got a consulting firm, he says that when the shoppers smell the flowers as they're walking into a store, it fires up their senses and it makes them irrational.
It makes them irrational.
So they're more willing to buy stuff just because the smell just sort of wakes up their brain and puts them in primitive mode, takes them out of logic mode.
And I don't know how much of that's true, but I'll bet a little bit of it is.
You've heard the trick if you're trying to sell your house, to have an apple pie baking when somebody comes in to look at the house, because the smell of the apple pie...
Or pumpkin, I guess, is good.
Sells the house pretty fast.
I would say that the most overlooked sense in our civilization is smell.
And, you know, I don't have a sense of smell at the moment.
It comes and goes at the moment.
I don't have it. But let me ask you this.
Men... Men only answer this question.
How many of you men wear a scent...
Some kind of cologne aftershave.
How many of you wear a scent?
I'm seeing a lot of no's but a lot of yes's.
Nope, nope, nope. All right, so the men are saying yes and no.
Now I'm going to ask you a question just for the women, but don't answer yes or no because it'll be confused with the prior question.
Just say you like it or don't like it.
If you're a woman, just for the women, Do you like or not like a man who has a scent, you know, an intentional scent?
Like or don't like?
Look at the women's answers now.
One don't like, two don't likes.
But mostly like, and then there's some people who would just be allergic, so that's a problem.
Needs to be light, like, like, like.
Depends on the scent, of course, it depends on the scent.
So, interesting. So here we have about...
Now, obviously I can't be too exact when it comes to something like, you know, this statistics, but what it looks like is maybe half the men do not wear a scent, but 90% of the women wish that the man did.
Is that about right? Did you see that?
It was just basically answers going by.
But it looked like about half of you don't wear an intentional scent, but most of the women wish you would.
Now, how important is the scent to closing the deal?
If I ask the men, they're going to say, not that important.
But what if I ask the women?
Yeah, it's right at the top.
It's right at the top.
And here's the way it works.
If the guy smells right, the brain will become a less careful shopper.
Just like the flowers in front of the store.
It's the same effect.
If you're a man and you don't put some flowers in front of your store, you're ignoring the science, right?
Now, the exception would be if somebody's allergic and you know it or something like that.
And there may be some environments where there's just a mixed crowd and you can't wear any scent, and you have to take that seriously because that's a medical problem for other people.
But if you were just going to take the scientific, statistical path, for the amount of time it takes you to do this, reach over, Put it back.
You would perhaps double your odds of sex.
Ladies, ladies, back me up.
Because there's no man who believes that.
No man believes what I just said.
I'm saying that for the five seconds it takes you to pick it up and go, put it down, you will double your odds of sex.
And look at the answers from the women.
The women are saying yes.
It's the same impact.
You get the smell right, and they will imagine the other things are right as well.
It's not true, but they will imagine the other things are more right if you get the smell right.
So three things.
Job, gym membership, and take care of your scent.
You get those three things right, you will rule.
You will rule the dating world.
Or your marriage, I guess.
Well, let's say that you want to go to a July 4th get-together this weekend, or this long holiday weekend, and you want to get people all worked up and having fights.
Get them in political arguments.
I like to do this every holiday.
Tell you how to start the biggest fight during your get-together with the family.
Here it is. It's just a little factoid.
And it's reported by CBS. So the source is a left-leaning source, CBS. And it was a major story, but it's not a recent story.
So I linked it.
You can see it in my Twitter feed in case you want it.
But the story says...
That Romney, when Romney ran in 2012, he was so unpopular, says the story.
Now this is how CBS is characterizing the story.
That Romney was so unpopular, that's the reason given, his unpopularity, that in 2012, a number of precincts in Philadelphia, Romney got zero votes.
Not one or two even by mistake, but zero.
Now, here's how the article started, in a number of precincts, in a number of them.
What do you think is the number?
Like, if you see a headline that says, in a number of precincts, Romney goes there, just take a guess before I tell you.
In a number of precincts, 3 to 5, 2 to 7, 0, 2, you would guess, oh, damn it, you know the answer.
One of you knew the answer.
All right, are you ready?
Hold. I'm going to give you the answer, but I want you to do this for me.
Put your hand under your chin before you hear the answer, all right?
Because if you hear the answer, your chin is going to go, and you might actually dislocate.
So for your own safety, before I tell you the number of precincts in which...
In which Romney got exactly zero votes in 2012.
Not one or two, but exactly zero.
The correct number, hold your chin, hold it, hold it, 57.
How's your chin? 57.
Fifty-fucking-seven.
Now, just drop that big floating turd at your barbecue and watch the lefties try to tell you that the election was completely good in 2020.
Yeah, you know, I believe...
And here's the way to go.
Agree with them that it was good in 2020 and the election was absolutely fine.
But also, you know, interesting...
It's a weird little thing, probably not connected to the current situation in any discernible way, but it's sort of an interesting historical note that there were 57 fucking precincts that gave Romney zero votes.
57 fucking zeros.
57 fucking zeros reported in CBS right in front of your fucking face, and they tell you that it's because Romney wasn't popular in urban areas.
That's not fucking true.
That's not true. If you want to wonder if our elections are fucked up, you don't have to wonder anymore.
By the way, if this is true, and I guess you'd have to say maybe CBS has the wrong numbers, maybe.
But if it's true that 57 precincts had exactly zero Romney votes, we're done.
We're done. Our election system didn't work in 2012.
You can say that for sure.
Now, I don't know if it got the wrong answer.
It's possible that Obama would have been handily elected under every circumstance.
It's possible. But you don't have to wonder if the election is corrupt.
That's been answered. Now, what was it that changed the situation?
And how did the system get upgraded so such a thing wouldn't happen again?
Well, that's not in the story.
Because the story doesn't need to tell you how the system was fixed.
Because there was nothing to fix.
The headline tells you that Romney was unpopular.
So the way you fix that is run a better candidate, right?
Nothing wrong with the election system, according to CBS. It's just that you have this one candidate who's so darn unpopular that he gets zero votes.
Amazing. Google says 59.
Oh, yeah, you're right, it's 59.
Doesn't change the story, but...
59. I wish I'd sworn with the correct number.
It would have been much better.
Anyway, that's the country you live in.
The elections...
Oh, let me say it directly.
You want to see me get cancelled?
Based on the CBS report, a reasonable citizen should conclude that our elections were fixed in 2012 and that nothing has happened since then that would change that situation.
So if CBS is correctly reporting, the only reasonable conclusion is that the elections were completely rigged, or at least in Philadelphia.
You can't go beyond that.
That the election was rigged in Philadelphia, And that nothing has changed since then.
A reasonable citizen should be able to look you straight in the fucking eye and say there's no chance that our elections are not rigged.
Doesn't mean that Trump won the election.
I don't make that claim. I accept the election outcome the way it was called from the day it was called.
Because I still think we're better off trusting the system and fixing it than to throw out a system.
So we're still better off acting as though that was a credible result, but we certainly should not expect that it was.
So if I'm still here tomorrow, that'll be a surprise.
But if I get kicked off, that CBS report about 59 precincts having zero Romney votes is going to get a lot more attention, won't it?
And that's the kill shot.
That's the end of the fucking conversation.
If it's true... I mean, I could take a fact check on that.
Maybe the CBS report is wrong.
But if it's true, it's the end of the fucking conversation.
Does everybody agree with that? There's nothing to say after that.
You don't need any audits.
You don't need any. You don't need any smoking guns.
Nope. You don't need to find a hanging chad.
You don't need a thin ballot.
You don't need any trucks in the wrong area.
You don't need any mules.
You don't need a fucking thing.
Except 59.
59 precincts with zero Romney votes.
It's not possible.
All right. I've told you before about my favorite Chinese operative.
At least, allegedly, he denies it.
But Chen Waihu on Twitter, I call him my nemesis because we've had a number of interactions, but he's the best nemesis ever.
Number one, he's really good at his job, and I can't lose sight of that because it makes me laugh every time I see him operating.
So what he does is he waits for some political story, And then he weighs in in the comments to tell you that if you looked at the context, you know, America is really a bad place.
And he adds the context that changes the story a little bit to sort of a Chinese propaganda view of things.
Now, Twitter labels his account as affiliated with state media of China.
So Twitter is doing a good job telling you, you know, watch out for this one.
This is probably the Chinese government talking to you right now.
And I appreciate that.
So that's something good that Twitter's doing.
But the funny thing is that Chen still operates with the label, and he's even complained quite accurately about the label not being applied to other places, and he's right about that too.
So what I like about Chen is that when he criticizes the United States, usually, not every time, but usually it's actually a pretty good point.
And it might even be one that we would criticize ourselves from.
So it's wonderful to watch him work because he's so good at it.
But here's a tweet he did about Biden.
When Biden, I guess, asked the gas companies to lower their prices, basically just telling them they're making too much money and lower your prices.
And Chen tweets to that.
He says... So Biden said, bring down the price you were charging at the pump to reflect the cost you're paying for the product and do it now.
And Chen tweets at that and he says, now U.S. President finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation.
He didn't believe this before.
He didn't believe this before.
Isn't that funny? Because it's such a short tweet, which is what makes it funnier.
Like, he's not wasting any extra words, Chen.
Now the U.S. president finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation.
He didn't believe this before.
It's such a good troll.
It was even picked up by Fox News.
They did an article about it just because it was such a funny troll.
All right. You know the story where Trump allegedly tried to grab the steering wheel of the beast and maybe he tried to strangle the Secret Service officer who was driving to try to get him to drive toward the January 6th protests?
And I guess the Secret Service guy is named Tony Ornato.
And a CNN political commentator gave us a little context.
So Alyssa Farrah Griffin, who lists herself as a CNN political commentator, she said in a tweet that Tony Ornato lied about me too.
So the indication here is that the person defending Trump's behavior might have a history of lying.
Okay, let's see what that's about.
She said, during the protests at Lafayette Square in 2020, I told Mark Meadows and Ornato they needed to warn press stage there before clearing the square.
Meadows replied, quote, we aren't doing that.
Tony later lied and said the exchange never happened.
He knows it did. All right, so here's a he said, she said situation in which a CNN political commentator says that this specific Secret Service person was a liar.
Now, I don't know about you, but...
If I were to weigh the credibility of two people by their backgrounds and their professions, and one of them was a CNN political commentator, and one of them was a Secret Service agent that had been vetted extensively, which one of those is more likely to tell you a true story On a factual event.
A CNN political commentator.
Remember, not just the news, the political news, and just not a news reader, but a commentator.
A pundit, if you will.
A CNN commentator or a professional secret service agent who would guard a Republican or a Democrat equally because that's their job.
I don't know. So I thought I would be helpful because Alyssa Farrah Griffin added some context, which actually is useful.
That is useful context, if it's true.
If it's true. But it would be kind of two people's memory of an event, wouldn't it?
You wouldn't really know which one was true, he said.
Maybe he'll say something different than she said.
But I helpfully retweeted my list of 11 CNN hoaxes so that you could have further context.
So now you know there are 11 things that Alyssa Farrah Griffin probably thought were true and said so on TV. I don't know specifically which one she would have agreed with, you know, the fine people hoax or the drinking bleach one, but probably all of them.
So she's got 11 strikes against her, probably.
You'd have to fact-check that to see how many of the hoaxes she bought into.
And then, allegedly, Tony Ornato has one communication example in which there's some uncertainty about who said what and when.
So there's your setup.
Someone who bought into some number of 11 major hoaxes, Versus somebody who had a brief communication during the fog of war, and one person who's remembering it may be different than the other.
So there's your credibility check.
Well, we're talking about whether Trump will announce.
He might announce in July just to get his platform back, because if he announces, he'll be interviewed on bigger platforms, etc., But if he waits, he can wait till the midterms are over and not interfere with that.
So nobody knows what he's going to do, but I guess he's chomping at the bits, people say.
That's what they say. Let me suggest a campaign strategy for Trump if he decides to run.
If Trump decides to win, allow me to give you the winning strategy.
And the funny thing about this is, it would actually work.
There's no way he'd ever do it, because it sounds funny, but it would work.
All he'd have to do is announce his presidency and then go hide in the basement for the rest of the election cycle.
That's it. And he would become president.
The only thing that could stop him from being president is talking.
Am I right? Only talking can prevent him from being president.
And what he wants to do is have a bigger opportunity to talk.
So the one thing that could prevent Trump from being president is the only thing he wants.
The one thing that will prevent him from being president.
I don't know. Yeah, well, that and the elections being fair, I suppose that matters.
So let me ask you about Adam Kinzinger.
And I'm going to take a 4th of July frame on this.
And, you know, Adam Kinzinger is a Republican who's acting like a Democrat when it comes to the January 6th hearings.
And I guess he's retiring from Congress.
He's not going to run again. Here's my take on him.
Forget about the politics for a minute.
He's also a veteran.
I'm no medical doctor.
But I think Adam Kinzinger needs some actual medical help.
Like, psychological, something like that.
And I'm serious. And this has nothing to do with politics.
This has only to do with the fact that he's a veteran.
So if I can just say, politics don't matter for a moment, and I just watch Adam Kinzinger operate in public, I say to myself, I feel like he needs some help.
Like, actually, legitimately.
Like, I actually have empathy.
I'm not making a political point.
It has nothing to do with his politics, nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with anything.
I mean, you can read it on his face.
There's something distressing going on.
And so, in the interest of, you know, July 4th, maybe the one day we can pretend to be together, I'm going to value his service to the country higher than his politics.
And I think that his service to the country sort of obligates us to take care of him.
And I don't think he's being taken care of.
I worry about that. Does anybody else see the same thing?
Am I the only one who sees it?
Because remember, he's not running for office anymore.
So if I say, you know, it looks like he needs some help, it's not because I want to prevent him from getting his message out.
I'm not trying to degrade him politically.
He's already out of the game.
I'm saying he looks like he needs help.
You could read it all over his face.
And I don't know if that has anything to do with what he's doing in public, but I'm willing to separate that for this discussion.
He looks like a veteran who looks like he's in distress.
I just hope he's getting the help he needs.
That's all. And just try to separate that from politics for a moment.
Well, what else is going on?
Here's the thing I'd love to see some Republicans say in public.
You know, I said it on a tweet, but it feels like this needs to be in public.
Everything about the January 6th event depends on one assumption.
And first of all, give me a check on this.
Do you agree that everything we understand about Trump's actions during that time depends on one key assumption, which is, did Trump really believe the election was stolen?
Genuinely. Or was he pretending to believe because it would give him some advantage to try to take over the country as a dictator?
Now, we could say with all clarity that we don't know what he was thinking, right?
We don't know. But why would you take the least likely assumption?
There are several assumptions you could make.
One is that he actually was trying to take over the country.
And he thought he could do it with some kind of legal machinations, and he hadn't quite worked out the details, but at the very least he wanted to get some fake electoral votes in there.
Maybe. That's entirely possible.
Based on what we've seen, that hypothesis seems to generally sort of kind of fix the facts a little bit.
I mean, it's not ruled out by the facts, is it?
We haven't seen anything that rules it out.
But you can't prove a negative either.
So, but here's the other take.
The other take is that he genuinely believed the election was rigged and that it was obvious.
Now, I'm not saying that.
That's not my opinion.
Not my opinion. I'm just saying that He could have easily had that opinion.
So if you were going to take those two hypotheses as your starting assumption, and the one you take determines all the rest.
Everything else is determined by that assumption.
Because if he believed it was really a rigged election, and he was trying hard to delay things and stay president long enough to figure it out, then he is George Washington.
He's a hero. He didn't succeed, but he would be a hero who tried to stop a horrible injustice of the country.
If he made that assumption.
We don't know, but if he made that assumption, he's a hero.
He just didn't succeed.
If you make the assumption that he knew the election was legitimate enough and that he really lost, well, then he's a traitor and belongs in jail.
Or if it's crime, I don't know.
Who knows what's a crime these days?
So don't you think that everything relies on that?
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
Everything springs from that.
Because you could imagine that he would...
Now, let me put this in context for you.
One of the big complaints is that he didn't stop the protesters.
Well, if you believe the election was actually illegitimate, would you stop the protesters?
No, you wouldn't. That wouldn't be the right play.
Because you'd want people on your side.
You'd want to make a big deal about it.
You'd want the press to cover it.
You'd want everybody to know. You'd want the most people there.
Would you, if you believed the election was legitimately stolen, and it was obvious, I'm not saying it was.
I'll say that every five seconds.
That's not my opinion. But if you believed that, would you put up with some extra risk to the vice president?
Under that weird, weird condition that you really believe the election had just been stolen.
Somebody says no.
Interesting. I thought I was leading you toward a yes.
The correct answer is yes.
The correct answer is yes, you would put up with greater risk in all areas.
Not just the risk to the vice president's safety.
You would increase your risk for everything appropriately.
That would be the right play.
You would increase all of your risks to take care of what you saw as even a bigger risk if you believed it, that the election was rigged, which is not my opinion.
So... Every single part of that.
Now, the hanging, obviously, I wouldn't believe any reporting about Trump thinking that Pence should be hung.
That doesn't sound believable to me.
But let me put it this way, and I'm going to use the really test.
You remember the really test?
It's where you state a fact that somebody's trying to tell you it's true, and then if you can make it look ridiculous with one word, it probably isn't true.
And that one word is, really?
Are you really trying to make me believe this?
Really? All right, let's do that test with this.
So the question is, did Trump believe that the election was rigged?
So put yourself in Trump's head.
It's impossible, but do the best you can.
You're President Trump.
Everything is about winning.
He says so, right?
It's win, win, win.
It's all about win. He's a winner.
He's got to be a winner. He can't lose.
He's got to be a winner. He's sure he's going to win.
He's sure he's going to win. It's midnight.
It looks like he's won.
Damn it, he's won. Then he wakes up to find out there was something that he can't yet explain.
Turns out it was the late ballots.
But he couldn't yet explain.
That looked really sketchy.
It looked like it was rigged.
If it wasn't, we don't know.
But it looked like it on day one.
So put yourself in his head.
And here's the question.
Do you really think he lost?
Really? Do you think, in his personal mind, he saw those irregularities that came at the end of the night, which I think have been explained, by the way, as late ballots that typically favor Democrats for reasons that we can discuss.
But I think they're explained, but they had not yet been adequately explained at that time.
So remember, you have to go back to the time and know that there had not been all the allegations that had been debunked by then.
There were still plenty of allegations, but not a lot of debunking going on yet.
You put yourself in his head, his mindset that he thought he won, he's got to win, winning is everything, and then, surprisingly, with great sketchiness in some of the observed facts, he amazingly loses.
You tell me, you look me in the face...
If you're a Democrat, look me in the face and you tell me seriously, you fucking think that he didn't believe he won.
Really? Really?
I mean, seriously.
This is not you and it's not me.
This is Trump. You really fucking think he didn't think he won, or at least suspect it was very likely that there was something going on?
Of course he thought it was something sketchy.
He just got through the entire Russia collusion hoax.
If you had been the subject of the Russia collusion hoax, would you believe that the next election was going to be fair?
The Russia collusion hoax proved to us that the Democrats would break any law, tell any lie, to keep him out of office.
And now you've got a situation where it looks exactly like that's what happened.
That's not my opinion.
But it looked exactly like that's what happened.
It's been explained, in my opinion, but it looked like it.
Now you tell me that you honestly think, honestly, I mean seriously, it's just the two of us here.
This is a conversation between me and some anti-Trumper, hypothetically.
It's just the two of us in the room.
I want you to look me in the eye and tell me seriously that you believe Trump actually thought he lost.
Seriously. Really?
Have that conversation with somebody and you know how it'll go.
They'll change the subject.
Do something else bad.
Do something else bad that Trump did another time.
There's nobody who could deal with that direct assumption challenge.
So the direct assumption you need to challenge is you tell me that Trump thinks he's a loser.
Go ahead. Go ahead.
Tell me that you think that Trump, everything you know about his personality, that when he lost the election and said, yeah, well, it turns out I'm a loser.
And I lost to a brain-dead guy.
Do you think he accepted that?
Well, that's what we asked to believe, that he actually thought he lost and he acted as if he didn't.
Ridiculous. Now, I don't know what he was thinking, so I'm not going to take the trap of saying I know what he was thinking.
I'm saying that if you don't know what he was thinking, assuming the least likely one is not a smart play.
Well, Newsom is getting active, looking like he wants to be a candidate for president.
I think everybody assumes that.
And so he's saying some stuff in public against DeSantis to try to blunt DeSantis in case DeSantis becomes a candidate and in case Newsom does.
But here's what caught my eye.
On CNN, I'm not sure if it's an opinion piece or not.
This one's hard to tell.
It's a newsy opinion piece, I guess.
But it was written by Edward Isaac Dovere and Steve Contorno for CNN. And here's what they said.
This is the first sentence of their article.
And listen to the language they use.
So we're looking for CNN to be shifting toward the middle.
So I'm looking for it in their language.
All right, here's the story.
It says, Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis aren't just avatars for the different futures of their parties, but also for the separate realities blue and red America are living in two people of opposing viewpoints looking at exact same set of facts and coming to vastly different conclusions.
Was that me? Was that me?
What do you think? Because CNN just...
I mean, this is not an exact quote of mine or anything, but I'm the person who told you that we were living in two realities.
We were not living in a reality in which some people were smart and some were dumb, or that some had different preferences.
That's the old way. The new reality is we're looking at the same facts, and we don't even perceive it as the same reality.
That was me. Has my influence reached CNN? What do you think?
Because I don't know the answer to that.
You know, it could be coincidence.
It could be it's just in the zeitgeist and other people are coming around to it, something.
But it looks to me...
And this would get to your question.
Sometimes you ask, you know, what can one person do?
How much influence can one person have on the world?
You see it all the time.
You see one person changing the world all the time.
In fact... Smart people have noted before I said it that one person is the only thing that's ever changed anything.
It's not a case of one person can't change the world.
It's literally the opposite.
It's always one person who gets other people involved.
But it's always one person. One person changes the world every time.
But you have an option to make it you, I guess.
That's one of your options.
All right. It used to be, just wrapping this up, correct me if I'm wrong, but it always used to be that we said one group is anti-science, or one group is not paying attention, one group is dumb, one group is selfish.
We had all these different explanations.
But CNN, right up front, looking at the exact same set of facts and coming to vastly different conclusions, I have trouble imagining that didn't come directly from me.
Directly as in through other people until CNN didn't know it came from me.
Right? I mean, I doubt that they would identify it as coming from me, but it came from me.
I'm pretty sure of it. 80% sure.
I'll leave some doubt. I'll say 80% sure that it came from me.
Have you seen the video of the Patriot Front marching in Boston?
These are the people who look exactly like feds pretending to be protesters.
So they wear their khakis and nice shirts and stuff.
And they've got the masks on and the matching outfits.
And they don't seem to be asking for anything in particular.
They just march around looking provocative and right-wing.
So I've decided that the Patriot Front is what I call the office depot of protesters.
And I have to tell you a story to make that make sense.
So years ago, Office Depot agreed to use Dilber, my character, as part of their advertising campaign for television.
And for me, it was a really big deal.
Because imagine, you know, Snoopy for MetLife.
It's like a gigantic licensing opportunity.
And if it worked...
Dilbert would have been maybe, possibly, forever the brand of Office Depot, and that would be a profitable thing for me.
So I worked with the ad campaign to make the commercials, and they wrote the commercials, and I had basically no input except making sure that Dilbert looked like Dilbert, basically.
And the commercial ran, and it became a big thing.
A lot of people saw my character on television, and people would stop me all the time in the street, and they'd say, hey, hey, I saw your Dilbert commercial for Office Max.
I'd say, no, it wasn't Office Max.
That's the competition. The commercial Dilber was for Office Depot, the biggest competition to Office Max.
And then somebody else would come up to me and say, hey, that's great.
You're finally doing some TV commercials.
I saw you advertising for Office Max.
And I said, no. No, somebody else said that, too.
That's funny. But it wasn't Office Max.
It was Office Depot, the competition.
Twenty-five people later, all twenty-five, Said, I saw your commercial for Office Max.
All 25. Not a single person knew that I was advertising for Office Depot.
None. Not one.
And do you know why? Because Office Max was a little more famous.
And the commercial started out talking about office supplies, and it wasn't until the very last part of the commercial it showed the name Office Depot.
Nowhere in the beginning of the commercial did it show who you were advertising for.
And so people's natural psychology is you look at the first part of the commercial, And you're not really paying attention because it's a commercial.
And then you stop thinking about it for a while and then it ends.
So I called the advertising people and I said, you've got a huge problem here.
You are literally running commercials for the other side.
Do you know what they said to me?
And I told them why. And I said, everybody who sees this thinks it's Office Max because they see Dilbert, they see Office Supplies, they think of the major brand in that space and then they're done.
And do you know what the advertising people said?
They laughed. Basically, they said, we do this for a living.
Go draw your cartoons, Cartoon Boy.
This is sort of our domain.
Totally blew off my thing.
And the sales for Office Depot when they ran their major TV campaign, absolutely flat.
No difference. They could see that their advertising campaign completely failed, didn't make any difference in sales.
OfficeMax did pretty well.
OfficeMax did well during that period.
So they dropped Dilber as their advertising avatar because it didn't work.
And I said to them, I'm not sure it was the Dilber part that didn't work.
I think the didn't work part is that you made an advertisement for your competitor.
So, here's what's wrong with the Patriot Front.
They may in fact be some kind of shadowy right-wing organization.
Maybe. They might be what they want you to believe they are.
But I don't know a single conservative who isn't laughing at them for obviously being feds.
In other words, it's the Office Depot problem.
They're running a commercial To make you think there's this scary, shadowy group of conservatives that are forming and you better worry about them, and the conservatives are saying, oh, there's the feds doing a commercial again.
We actually think it's a commercial for the FBI. Am I wrong?
It looks like a commercial for the FBI. It's a complete failure for whatever it was supposed to do.
But I will allow that the people who are tweeting about it on the left seem to think it's real.
So it does sort of work.
Yeah, and it's my opinion that the Charlottesville thing was at least backed by some entity that was, you know, not organic.
So I don't know the full story there, but I don't think that was an organic event.
It was organized, but by whom and paid by whom?
I don't know. That would be a good question.
All right. And then I saw that some on the left are calling this Patriot Front cowards because they're not wearing matches.
Or, I'm sorry, because they're wearing masks.
And then I tweeted this.
I said, the least useful people in every conversation, which tends to be about 25% of the public, coincidentally, are the bad mind readers calling other cowards.
Any time you see a big news story, And somebody weighs in to say that the people in the story are cowards, you can ignore everything that those people say for the rest of your life.
Because that is the lowest level of analysis and almost always wrong.
Do you remember when the 9-11 attack happened and a lot of the politicians were calling the terrorists who gave their lives for their cause?
We called them cowards.
And I remember thinking that, like, we are so far off on what's going on here.
I don't know what's going on.
I mean, it was still fog of war.
But there's one thing I do know.
People who do suicide attacks are not operating from cowardice.
That I know. And if you even start with that as your explanation about why anybody's doing anything, nobody does anything out of cowardice except run away, right?
If you see something doing something aggressive...
People are not aggressively cowards.
It's the opposite. If they run away or they don't get involved, you can say, well, you're cowards, and you might be right.
But if you see somebody dressing up and organizing and marching in the streets, whatever they are, and I don't know, it's a sketchy-looking organization, but whatever they are, they're not cowards.
That's the only thing you can know for sure, because they're literally taking a risk right in front of you.
So, what do you call it when people take a risk for whatever the cause is right in front of you?
Not cowards. As soon as you say cowards...
I see your comment, and I'm not going to say that out loud.
Somebody clever suggested another C-word to call them, but we're not going to use that one here, because their name is not Shelley.
Not Shelley, my ex, but Shelley, somebody else.
All right, so you've heard about this liberal world order that the Biden administration has referred to.
They haven't defined it, what it is, the liberal world order.
But apparently we're supposed to sacrifice as citizens by paying higher gas prices And if you pay higher gas prices long enough, then we'll solve climate change and get to a liberal world order.
That's the proposition.
But I wondered if there's anything else we need to know.
Is high gas prices the only thing we have to sacrifice?
Because I didn't see it coming.
Did you? A year ago, would you have said to yourself, you know, the only way we're going to get to a liberal world order is if I pay higher gas prices.
Well, I didn't anticipate that.
Maybe you didn't either. But it makes me wonder, are there other things we have to sacrifice to get to the liberal world order that we don't even understand and probably don't want?
So, I don't know, should we pay more for other stuff, too, to get to this world order?
Should I shave my head or chant?
Is there anything else I need to do to get to this liberal world order, which apparently is an awesome thing and we should be running toward it?
Doesn't sound scary at all.
Not at all. One more comment about the Patriot Front.
And I'm not going to say this too loud, but here's a little hint for analyzing the Patriot Front.
It has the word front right in the name.
The name of the organization is that they're a front for patriots.
Literally, they're calling themselves an artificial fake organization that is covering up the fact that they're hiding something behind them.
They're a front. A front for patriots.
It's actually in the name.
Do you remember Maya Angelou's quote?
When somebody tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
Or when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Is that how it goes? If they show you who they are, believe them the front time.
They just told you they're a front.
It's right in the name.
It's right in the name.
All right. There's a funny viral video of, I think it's Portland, some white woman, let's call her Karen, gets into a verbal altercation over some traffic incident with a gentleman who is a person of color,
I don't know what, he might be Hispanic, he might be Native American, not sure what he is, but he gets in this heated conversation in which he calls her a white colonizer with a white colonizer mindset.
And then she gets all mad because he's making it all racial and really it was just a traffic thing.
And then she goes extra Karen.
So she goes extra Karen and he goes extra woke.
And it's like Karen versus woke and they're shouting it out.
And I've never enjoyed a fight more than that.
I've never paid for like an MMA fight.
But... If you want to see a Karen versus a woke guy complaining about white colonizer mindset, you would pay for that fight.
You put those two in a cage and I'm going to start shelling out some money for that stuff.
But it's worth seeing.
You have to see it. But when she was saying she makes it all about race, I saw a quote from somebody else who I wish I had written down to give them credit.
But... Somebody tweeted, it's all about race to the bottom.
And I thought about that as maybe a slogan.
Let's say you're a Republican and everything gets turned into race.
Suppose you said, if you make it all about race, just understand it's a race to the bottom.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
Somebody says, oh, this is about race.
You're doing this because of race.
You're a racist. And instead of dealing with, like, the specific complaint, you just do a global one.
It just takes care of all of it.
You just say, you know, if we make it all about race, we can.
We do have that option.
We can make everything about race.
But just understand it's a race to the bottom.
There's only one direction that goes.
If that's where you want to put your attention...
It's a free world. You can do that.
But just understand where it takes you.
It takes you to the bottom. If you're thinking in terms of, you know, we're all Americans, that's a way to help us all rise.
But as soon as you make it about race, it's a race to the bottom.
And it's a clever use of the word race in two contexts.
And the reason it works...
So well, in my opinion, is because the brain is not clever enough to quickly make the change that the race is being used in two ways.
I mean, you do see it, but it just takes a moment.
And in that moment, that's when the thought slips by.
So, right, it's basically a distraction at the front door and then somebody slips by.
That's your persuasion tip for the day.
All right. I would like to issue a public apology, if I may, to Travis Barker, drummer for Blink-182.
And when he was hospitalized for allegedly some pancreatic damage that happened during an endoscopy, I said to this story, hmm...
Did he really get an extremely, extremely, extremely rare problem, complication, or is it exactly what it looks like?
Because pancreas, you know, maybe there's some drinking in his history or something like that.
Now, I made a, what would you call it, a...
What did I do?
I stereotyped him.
Yeah, I made an assumption. I stereotyped him.
And I said that based on the reporting, very unlikely...
that this is some kind of medical complication and more likely it's a cover story.
I publicly apologize to Travis Barker for even suggesting that there was another possibility because we have some more information.
Now, I'm not saying that this is right, but I completely withdraw my prior insensitive speculation because apparently he was having a polyp removed.
Now, having an endoscopy to me is just looking around, right?
Am I wrong about that? The endoscopy is just looking around.
But removing a polyp, that's not an endoscopy, is it?
Or does that correlate with it somehow?
I mean, you look for it and then you remove it separately.
So he had something removed, a polyp, and he said it was a very small polyp removed right in a very sensitive area, usually handled by specialists, which unfortunately damaged a critical pancreatic drainage tube.
Now, having now heard a more full explanation...
They say it's removed endioscopically.
Okay, so I'm thinking that the correct answer is you use the endioscopy to both look and also to remove a polyp.
You would use that word endioscopy in both of those?
All right, some people are saying yes.
So let's assume that what it is.
So when the story was just, it sounded like they were just looking around, I said, no, I don't think you're damaging his pancreas just looking around.
And then when I say they're removing a polyp in a sensitive area, I go, oh, okay.
If you had told me that...
Oh, polyps are removed during the endoscopy.
Okay, so somebody's giving me some more information.
So had I understood that it was an operation, as opposed to it looking around, I would not have jumped to that conclusion.
And I'm not sure if the polyp removal was part of the first story.
I don't know if it was. So, in the spirit of which I like to be generous to other people who make big boneheaded mistakes like this one, I would like to ask for the 48-hour clarification.
I don't know if I was in under the...
I may have missed the deadline of 48 hours.
But I would like the same...
Same understanding that I offer publicly to anybody who clarifies or corrects within 48 hours.
Because we all make mistakes.
I would call this just a mistake on my part.
I'm explaining it away by saying the news was confusing, but that's on me too.
So it's all on me.
All right. Cernovich bagged on Jordan.
It's a bad look. Thoughts?
Well, I heard Mike Cernovich reached a million Twitter users today.
And here's the question that I have.
Could Trump get elected without Mike Cernovich being on board?
Because I don't know what would happen if it came down to, you know, two-person race.
Like, if it's a two-person race, would Cernovich sit it out?
Or would he back the Democrat or an Independent?
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know. So it's actually a very interesting opinion.
I don't know that Trump could get elected without somebody as powerful as Cernovich being on board.
And I suppose it would depend on how he decided to treat it.
If he sat it out, maybe that's okay.
But if he decided to make Trump not president, I feel like he could do it.
What do you think? It's just a hypothetical.
But if Cernovich actually wanted to prevent Trump from winning the election, I think his reach is big enough at this point.
I think he could do it.
I don't know. I'm not saying he would or would want to or anything like that.
He is unpredictable, which is exactly why you should follow him.
If you want to follow somebody that you don't know what he's going to say, follow Cernovich.
I never know what he's going to say.
But it's always something high value, even if it's all over the place.
He does a lot of topics, from lifestyle to politics and health and all that stuff.
But it's always surprising.
Every time I read one of his tweets, I'm like, well, okay.
I wasn't thinking of anything that way.
All right. Let's talk about who's going to be president.
The main topic. Somebody asked me about Jordan Peterson and Sertovich.
Now, I don't know what that was about, so I can't speak to that right now.
But I did see that Jordan Peterson got suspended by Twitter.
I don't know if he's back.
He would need to remove a tweet about Elliot Page...
Who has transitioned to Eliot.
Had been a famous actress, and I don't want to deadname anybody, so if I'm using the wrong words, just understand that I'm not doing it intentionally.
So what Jordan Peterson's tweet was about was he used her...
There, I did it again.
Jordan Peterson used him...
Elliot Page, as an example to rail against his opinions about transitions, etc.
Now, I think that he was suspended for targeting somebody for harassment.
That's my guess, because he wrote an article in which he said it's not clear why he was suspended, because they don't give you specifics.
But in my opinion, They probably thought he was targeting somebody for harassment.
Now, have you ever seen anybody target anybody for harassment on Twitter?
It's all anybody does.
That's like the full-time job of Twitter, targeting people for harassment.
Am I right? But I guess it depends how you target them.
How do you target them? If you target them for their sexual choices, you know, their gender and stuff, or their race, then I guess that would be over the line.
If you're targeting them for their bad opinions or being dumb or you just don't like their work or whatever, I suppose that's still legal.
But do you have a problem with the fact that Jordan Peterson made his point by singling out a specific individual?
Because I do have a problem with that.
I do have a problem with that.
And actually, if I were him, I would have removed the tweet.
I would not have removed my opinion, because his opinion is his opinion.
But I would have removed the tweet, because when Twitter said, you're sort of targeting this person for harassment, I kind of agree with that.
I mean, I agree with the...
if that's what Twitter did it for.
I agree with the statement that it does target one person, because the question is not about that one person.
The question is about the larger question.
And I think we would all agree that for any one person, their choices are, you know, they might be right.
Now, I believe the context was pride, right?
So I'm trying to remember the context.
And I think Jordan Peterson said that pride used to be considered a sin.
But that we have an entire pride month now where we're treating pride of your gender or your sexuality We're treating that as if it's something to be proud of, and I think his point was pride in general isn't a good idea, or at least we always thought it wasn't a good idea in the past, and why would this be the exception?
That's a reasonable good question.
Because I make the same point about white supremacists as I will now make about the LGBTQ community.
When white supremacists say they're proud to be white or they show some connection to great things that white people invented in the past, I always say the same thing.
It's like, that wasn't you. Why are you proud about other people?
How did you get that?
How did you get to be proud of other people?
They're strangers. You never even met Edison.
Don't be taking any pride because he was white and you're white.
How in the world? Yeah, proud boys, that's a special case.
But I say the same thing about gender.
I'm the most open-minded person I've ever met.
I mean, some people could tie me, but nobody could beat me in terms of open-minded about how people get to live their life and their lifestyle and their choices.
You can't get left to me on that.
You could try, but you'll never get left to me on letting people live their life the way they want to live it if they don't bother other people.
And so I could not be more pro-LGBT. TQ+. I'm as on board as you could possibly be.
But why does it make sense to be proud about it?
So the very reason that I'm completely accepting is because everybody's the same.
As soon as you add pride in there, it's like, huh, I'm not really proud of being heterosexual.
I'm just heterosexual.
Right? Could I be proud of it?
Would that even make sense?
Because the moment I become proud of being heterosexual, am I not a bigot?
Like at the same time?
The moment I say I'm proud of being hetero, I'm a bigot that very moment, right?
Am I wrong? If I said I'm proud of being white, then I'm a racist.
Am I not? If I say I'm proud of hetero, then I'm a bigot against LGBTQP. But why does it work the other way?
Why do you get to be proud to be gay?
I totally get that you don't need to explain it to me.
I totally get it's none of my business.
I totally get everybody's equal in that way.
I totally get all that.
I'm on board as you can be.
But proud? Proud.
Really. The moment you say you're proud, I've got questions.
I could not be more of your ally if you just want to live your life and keep me out of it.
I could not be more supportive of that.
But proud? That's asking me to take a step that feels a little distasteful to me.
Because I'm not going to be proud of the things I had nothing to do with.
What, did I work hard to become hetero?
Well, I was born gay, but I put in the hard work to turn hetero, and man, am I proud.
No. No.
Don't be proud of your sexuality.
Why would you be proud of that?
It's just what you are.
Norm Macdonald was hilarious.
I'm being proud of your gay son.
I don't even know what that comedy routine is, but it's already hilarious.
Scott, how do you develop a critical thinking?
You watch this livestream.
Or you buy my book, Loser Think, which teaches you how not to make mistakes.
All right. Here's a question for you.
So Bezos, Jeff Bezos, basically is saying stuff about Biden now.
So Biden made some inflation claims, told the gas companies to, told the oil companies to just lower their prices.
And Bezos tweeted, ouch, inflation is far too important a problem for the White House to keep making statements like this.
Basically, Bezos has been criticizing Biden The Biden administration, Biden in particular, for acting like he doesn't understand anything about inflation or economics.
And Jeff Bezos is saying this directly.
They're acting like they don't even know what any of this is or how anything works.
And here's my question.
Could Biden ever win re-election without Jeff Bezos on his side?
Do you think he could?
I don't think so. Because Bezos owns the Washington Post.
The Washington Post pretty much has to back the Democrat candidate.
And if they don't, you're going to get another candidate.
I feel like Bezos not only could take Biden out, and just did, in my opinion, he just took Biden out.
Imagine you're all the Democrat important people, and you just saw that Bezos just threw Biden under the bus.
Are you going to say, let's run him anyway?
Oh, we lost Bezos, but I think we could get elected anyway?
I don't know. I'm not entirely sure anybody would make that decision.
But here's something to toss in the ring.
I said by tweet that all Bezos would have to do to become president himself is to apply for the job and tell us that his policy will be to do stuff that works for a change.
That would be it. Just apply for the job.
You know, fill out the forms.
Don't do any campaigning.
And have your slogan be...
Your slogan is your entire campaign.
Let's do stuff that works for a change.
Right? Now, you imagine, as I imagine, that Bezos is left-leaning, right?
Would you all agree? Bezos is left-leaning.
But do you know what else he is?
I mean, he probably is, I'm guessing.
But do you know what else he is?
He's a guy who understands systems better than maybe anybody ever, ever, and proved it.
Because Amazon is a system.
And you have to be a systems thinker and think about all the parts and keep them in your mind and how they fit to build an Amazon.
Amazon is a system of systems.
It's just systems on systems.
And if you have somebody who thinks in terms of systems but leans left, which I equate with empathy, really, in his case, more like an empathy to individuals as opposed to a set of policies, that would be your perfect president.
That's your perfect president.
Leans left philosophically, leans right systems-wise.
Leans left philosophically, leans right in terms of making stuff work.
Test it, see if it works.
If it doesn't work, don't do it.
Don't have some kind of philosophical hold on a particular way of doing things.
Just release on the philosophy and say, well, if we can test it...
See if it works. What does Amazon do better than anybody except Apple Computer and Google?
It tests stuff. They're always testing, continually testing, right?
So if you've got a president who was born and raised in systems and testing, that's your best president.
That's your best president.
Leans left, For empathy leads right for systems.
You could not beat that.
And I would support him on day one.
I doubt I'd ever change my mind.
So if he ever decided to be president, let me say it publicly.
Jeff Bezos. If he ever decided to run for president, I would totally back you.
Without even hearing your policies.
Because I know that he would not present a policy that didn't make sense.
And if he had a policy that I didn't agree with, I would stop believing I was right immediately, and I would listen to what he said.
He's that smart. Now, that's not true of everybody.
If DeSantis said something I didn't agree with, I wouldn't automatically suspend my opinion to listen to what he had to say.
I'd listen to it. It might change my opinion.
But if Jeff Bezos said something that was just directly opposite of what I believed would be a good thing to do, I would immediately delete my opinion.
I wouldn't immediately take his opinion, but I would delete mine immediately and say, okay, wipe the board clean.
Let's hear what he has to say.
He's that smart. Now, have we ever had a president who was that much smarter than us?
Bill Clinton, probably.
Actually, we have. Jefferson.
I guess we have.
But it would be a refreshing change.
A refreshing change.
We know that he thinks ahead.
We know that he thinks of consequences.
We know he knows economics.
We know he knows systems.
We know he has an empathy bias.
You don't get better than that, really.
He's the right age. He's the right age, too.
Now, if he ran for president, and there's no indication he has any interest, it'd be crazy.
It'd be a suicide mission, really.
Actually, if he ran for president, I'd call him a coward.
Just because that's what stupid people do.
It's funny. Alright.
You think you'd be another CIA president?
You think Bezos is influenced by the CIA? I bet it's the opposite.
I'll bet Bezos could influence the CIA more than they could influence him.
But that's just speculation.
Alright. I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that that...
It's exactly what I wanted to accomplish for today.
I don't think there's any doubt that this was the finest piece of entertainment you'll experience.
If not today, possibly in your lifetime.
China... What's China doing?
It's the best show ever.
Yeah, best show ever. I think that's true.
We did learn that there's...
I'm not going to say it.
Now, of course, anybody who runs for president is, first of all, insane.
You have the Groucho Marx problem with presidential candidates.
Groucho Marx famously said that you would never join a club that would have somebody like him as a member.
And there's a little bit of that problem with running for president, is there?
If you're dumb enough to run for president, should I vote for you?
Because it is a suicide mission.
Actually, Obama came out of it pretty good.
But you do get pretty beaten up by that process.
And if you have a perfect life, and Bezos looks like he's enjoying himself at the moment, somebody says Cuban will run.
Mark Cuban? I'm not seeing it.
I'm not seeing it.
I feel like I would know if Mark Cuban...
We're preparing a run.
Like, you see some signs of it.
He'd be saying and doing some things that would be suggestive of it by now.
I don't think so. Although, he would be a strong candidate.
I could back Mark Cuban for president.
Do you want to throw up on that a little bit?
I'll give you a little time to barf on me.
Because he would be a Democrat.
He would run as a Democrat. Do you know why?
Why? Let me tell you why I could back Mark Cuban as a president, even though he's a Democrat.
Same argument as Bezos.
Exact same argument. Mark Cuban would not be able to do right in front of you, put together a policy or a system that obviously didn't make sense.
Even if it was like what all the lefties want, he wouldn't be able to do it.
I mean, I don't think his constitution would allow him...
To put together a proposal that you just look at and you go, this looks like just crap.
But regular politicians do that all the time.
Regular politicians don't explain their reasoning.
They take one side and they say, here, shove this down your throat.
I've got enough votes to make it happen.
Mark Cuban, being a rationalist and engineer, engineer by training, right?
Am I right about that? But...
He would have the empathy part, again, just like Bezos, but he's also a system thinker and knows how to make things work.
So the problem that you don't like with the left is that their systems don't work and they don't know it.
Am I right? Be honest.
Your problem with the left is primarily...
That their systems they put together don't have the right incentives and stuff, so they all fall apart.
That's primarily the problem.
And nobody's really offered you the alternative, have they?
Because, unfortunately, the alternative doesn't look like a Democrat plan, because it would have too much market competition in it.
But I don't see a Mark Cuban promoting any plans that don't have market competition built into them.
Do you? Can you imagine the shark tank entrepreneur guy, the guy who owns a competitive sports team?
Do you think he's going to be against competition?
I don't think so.
But you're expected of Democrats, don't you?
So I think that I'm naming two people, Bezos and Cuban, who I would easily, easily support as a Democratic candidate over...
I don't know if I like him over DeSantis.
DeSantis is pretty strong.
But totally credible candidates.
So you know how it's always darkest before the dawn?
Like it looks like everything's going to be a nightmare and then suddenly the lights come on and you go, oh, okay, that problem's over.
It's sort of like in California.
We'll have a year of massive drought and it's going to be this way for years.
And then winter comes and it rains.
And everybody goes, oh, okay, I guess we're okay for a while.
Here's what could happen in 2024.
Maybe. Would you agree that we have a candidate problem on both sides?
The Democrats basically don't have anybody.
And the Republicans have a DeSantis who probably won't run if Trump does.
So he's sort of taken out of the game.
And then Trump controls, really, the fate of all the other candidates.
So if he runs, they won't.
So basically, if Trump wants to run, it's probably going to be him, right?
So then you have basically the only Republican candidate who has a chance of losing.
It's the only one, because he could talk himself out of the job, basically.
But the other possibility is this.
It's not impossible that you could get the best presidential candidates we've ever had.
Just imagine that somebody like a Cuban or a Bezos announces on the left.
They would suck all the energy away and they would become the candidate.
So you could end up with a Democratic candidate who's the best one you've ever had because they realize that their bench is empty.
So they have to go recruit somebody outside the team.
If they recruit and they get a, you know, Bezos-Cuban kind of a character, they win.
Not me. No, I would be a terrible president.
And then on, let's say Trump decides not to run.
That could happen. Then you might have DeSantis running against a Bezos or a Mark Cuban.
Just hold that in your head.
I almost wouldn't care who won in that situation.
I almost wouldn't care. That would be such a strong slate that I'd actually say, you know, I could go either way on this one.
I thought I would see more pushback on that.
That's interesting. But don't rule out that this will be an election between the two strongest candidates we've ever seen.
That could happen. It's just unlikely.
The most likely thing is, you know, Trump runs against some weak Democrat bencher and destroys him.
That's the most likely thing.
But you never know.
could go exactly the other way.
You put a lot of faith in those people.
Well, do I? Do I? Am I putting a lot of faith in Mark Cuban or Jeff Bezos?
Because I think that they've both proven what they can do in so many ways and so publicly that most of the questions have been removed.
I feel. I mean, anybody who runs for office, especially if you're a billionaire, there's going to be all these stories that come out.
Some will be true, some won't.
And they'll be shocking. So the only way to run for office as a billionaire is to do what Trump did, but do more of it.
When Trump ran, he said, I'm no angel, but, you know, I can give you these things for the country.
Now, that didn't get widely quoted, and I wish he'd said it a whole bunch more times.
But I'd love to see, you know, let's say some billionaire, I won't name names, some billionaire runs for president.
I would love to see that some billionaire say, look, I'm going to be honest.
When you start looking into my background, you're probably going to be shocked.
And I'm not running to sell my personal life.
I want you to hear this clearly.
Don't vote for me if you think I'm going to be a role model to how to live your life.
I don't have anything to tell you about that.
I've got nothing for that.
If you like some good policies and some systems that will work, some good persuasion, if you'd like the country to be stronger, think of me like your plumber.
I can fix your pipes, but don't try to emulate my personal life.
That would just be a terrible strategy for you.
And then any time I got accused of something, I would just say, well, if you're more amused to think that's true, I welcome it.
Because whatever abuses you, I mean, life is short and brutal.
If you think it's funny to think that I put a gerbil in my butt, go for it.
Like, if that gives you a laugh over a beer, I'm all for it.
It's just that I also have some good policies.
Can we talk about those once in a while?
But I'm not even going to defend anything.
Yeah, you killed a hooker and buried her in your basement?
Whatever. If you like thinking that...
If you like it, I'm all for it.
You should enjoy yourself.
One of the greatest hidden resources in the world is honesty.
Some of you just had a moment when I said that.
It's the most valuable hidden resource.
Have you ever met anybody who was honest?
Sometimes you do. Every now and then you'll meet somebody who's honest.
And do you know what effect they have on you?
It rocks your world, doesn't it?
It totally rocks your world.
Now, I'm not talking about assholes.
There are some people who say they're honest, but it's just an excuse to be insulting.
Well, hey, you look terrible in that dress.
I'm just being honest. I'm just being honest.
No, you're not. No, you're not.
You're being an asshole. That's different.
But how about somebody who's just honest?
It's shocking when you eat them.
And they have a superpower, don't they?
If you actually believe somebody's honest, all their flaws are right there so you can see them.
And once you can see somebody's flaws, what happens?
You trust them. You trust them.
So the more flawed somebody looks, the more you trust them.
Do you ever wonder how Pete Davidson can pull so much, I won't use the word, Ever wonder how Pete Davidson can get so much female attention?
I think, you know, he's got a look that they like.
He's a certain height. He's famous.
He's funny. Got a lot going for him in that way.
But I think the big thing is his honesty.
I think when you look at him, you go, I'm pretty sure I see every one of his problems.
I think I see them all.
I feel like I see every one of your problems are just right out there.
And then when you see him, you go, oh, okay, I can deal with that.
Like, that set of problems, I'm willing to deal with.
So it's really a superpower, and I think he shows it to you.
Now, if your counter-theory is that he's rich and funny and that's good enough...
I don't know.
I'm rich and funny, and it's usually not good enough, so...
Maybe if I were taller and younger, it would be different.
Um... Alright, guys in skinny jeans, I just can't.
Women are suckers for the fixer-uppers.
I think that's true.
I think that's true.
If you were Kim Kardashian, what would make you feel more comfortable than to have a boyfriend or a mate who's really famous and known for his flaws?
It's sort of comforting, isn't it?
Because, you know, Kim Kardashian's entire business model is covering up flaws.
So, you know, she's continually, you know, managing her brand, etc., and doing it really well.
Kim Kardashian's one of the greatest entrepreneurs this country's ever had.
She doesn't get nearly enough credit.
Not nearly enough. I would put Kim Kardashian in the same highest category of entrepreneurs and system thinkers and smart people this country's ever produced.
All right. That, ladies and gentlemen, somebody says it's her mom.
Yeah, her mom gets a lot of credit.
She's clearly very clever.
Yeah, I guess she's in law school now, or there's some kind of special law school that's not like real law school.
There's some path that you can take that's not the typical path.
Hard disagree, somebody says.
Yeah, you know, people say that Kardashians just look pretty and hang around and they're not working, but they're working harder than most of you.
Um... Alright, if you fix your partner, you lose your biggest project.