Episode 1798 Scott Adams: Let Me Tell You All The Things The News Isn't Telling You Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Shinzo Abe murdered
Dr. Simone Gold avoids a "so what?" question
Energy crisis in Germany
2022 Midterms HOAX brewing?
The case for Tom Cotton in 2024
The Fed, Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Inflation
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
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Go to the local site and subscribe.
Go. Oh, that's the best ever.
Well, I'm going to start including headlines from the Babylon Bee because it used to be, I would say, oh, I'm not going to talk about joke headlines because those are just jokes.
Those are parodies. I'm going to talk about the real stuff.
Not much difference anymore.
So I feel like I can give you Babylon Bee headlines just along with the others.
I'm not even going to mention where they come from.
So, I don't know.
Does this come from the Babylon Bee or from CNN? You decide.
Here's the headline. A recently published study presented a worrying statistic regarding the masses of Californians migrating to other states.
The study finds 92% of those fleeing the Golden State don't survive the first winter.
So, it's pretty tragic.
Don't survive the first winter.
If you were on my livestream yesterday from locals, you'd have to be a subscriber to see it, you would have seen me discussing the fact that the word fleeing is a good word for comedy.
Fleeing. Notice it's like, study finds 92% of those fleeing the Golden State.
That's how you know it's the Babylon Bee and not CNN. That one word is the only tip-off.
Fleeing. It's a comedy word.
Well, Boris Johnson resigned and Shinto Abe was murdered.
So it's a bad day, bad week for conservative leaders around the world.
Let's talk about Boris first.
Boris got fired.
He resigned, but let's say he got fired.
Boris Johnson got fired for partying too much.
That's sort of what happened, right?
Is that what happened?
He partied too much?
I feel like there was like You know, scandals.
Yeah, COVID party restrictions he violated.
So basically, he was a hypocrite, a liar, and he looked too much like Donald Trump, his haircut.
I think that's unforgivable.
You know, I'm wondering if the way things work best is that you get a Boris Johnson or a Trump, and they fix stuff...
And then you let other people run it for a while until something breaks.
But when something breaks, you need somebody to come in and kick some ass again.
So I feel like maybe the people who can break things the best shouldn't be the people who are running things.
Because you need the demolition people to just come in and break everything.
And then you need the people who are just going to pick up the garbage.
So it might not be bad that your Boris Johnsons come and then they do their thing and then they go.
Maybe that's the very best way it works.
Same with Trump. But I wonder, I wonder, is the Boris Johnson situation the simulation sending us a signal about Trump?
Huh? Huh?
Now the way we usually talk about it is, is there some trend developing with this one point of data?
That's the way we usually talk.
And I don't know that it's a trend, but maybe the simulation is winking at us and saying, hey, hey, we're moving on to a new upgrade and it doesn't require people with non-standard haircuts.
Maybe. The more tragic news, and this is really shocking, you know, former...
Prime Minister Shinto Abe, am I saying it correctly?
Good friend of President Trump's, Shinzo.
Shinzo Abe.
Right? Shinzo Abe.
I'm terrible at the pronunciations.
CERN destroyed Earth's shields.
Okay, that sounds like a story I don't know about.
So we don't know who killed him, right?
Or why? But he was considered, I guess NPR, in their little story, they called him an arch-conservative.
And then they deleted it.
I guess people didn't like the way he was characterized.
It was a homemade gun, somebody says.
Is that confirmed? Because it's very, you know, the gun control is very...
You have the shooter, and a homemade gun confirmed, somebody says...
He printed it.
Oh, my God.
Is that true?
Two pipes and a plank.
No, he didn't.
Was not printed. Okay.
So apparently you should not get the news from me reading comments as they stream by.
Turns out that's a very inaccurate way to get the news.
So it wasn't printed, but maybe he made it himself or something.
It's just a pipe shotgun from the looks.
Okay. Home Depot gun.
Hardware store items.
Interesting. Wow.
Ex-military, you think?
Or do we know that?
It was homemade. Interesting.
Well, I don't know what we're supposed to take away from the story, because on one hand...
You know, it's notable that they have strict gun control and probably the most prominent politician in Japan just got murdered in public.
But I don't know that it's telling us anything, is it?
I mean, it's a horrible tragedy.
But did we learn anything from it?
I don't think so.
He's an ex-Navy, somebody says.
Yeah, I don't know. There's probably...
I don't think there's necessarily anything to add to the story.
It's just horrible. All right.
I'm watching in, let's say, great interest as the COVID skeptics, you know, the rogue doctors, etc., are still in the game, and there's still studies coming out that, you know, support them or don't.
But Dr.
Peter McCullough is back in the news.
He and two other doctors were on TV talking about a Swedish study that allegedly confirms that Pfizer does modify your DNA. It causes your cells to produce the toxic spike protein.
So that was a news clip that I saw forwarded around.
So let me give you the following context so that when you see this clip, if you do, you'll know how to evaluate.
Now, first of all, is it true That the Pfizer shot does something to modify your DNA. Well, I don't know.
I don't know if it's true. I'll tell you what we know.
We know that it's one study.
How reliable is one scientific study?
Just in general. How reliable is one scientific study?
Probably less than half.
Would you say that less than half the time they would be confirmed?
Is that true? Now, I know in the social sciences, they have a really bad reproduction problem.
25%? 25% of the time, it's reproducible.
Is that right? Or is that only for the social sciences, where things are a little sketchier?
All right, well...
So the fact that there's only one study that should tell you it's not...
The majority likelihood is that it's not true.
Is that too strong?
If you see one study, and it even looks like a high quality study, can you say, without even knowing what the topic is, can you say that it's most likely not true?
I feel like that's statistically true, right?
Most likely not true if there's a high-quality study that says it is true.
Historically, most likely it's not, right?
If there's just one study.
Now, suppose there's a second study.
You know, also high-quality gets the same result.
Well, then you're much better territory, right?
Much better territory. I don't know what the percentages would be, but two studies completely done separately.
Now you have my attention.
One study? It's a flag, but it's not quite news, is it?
It's just a flag.
But here are the other things you should say about this news to be an educated consumer of news.
And see how many of these you sort of automatically got on your own.
Number one, you should have said it's most likely not true because there's one study that says it's true.
How many got that right from the jump?
As soon as you heard there was one study, how many of you said automatically, probably not true?
If you did, then you're a good consumer of news.
All right, here's some other things you should have thought about if you saw it.
Now, I haven't mentioned this, but one of the doctors, Dr.
Simone Gold, who also has been very controversial as one of the rogue doctors, maybe kicked off of social media?
Kicked off of Twitter, yes or no?
Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
Was she kicked off of Twitter?
Dr. Simone Gold?
Somebody says, very kicked off.
Somebody says she's still on.
All right, we can't confirm anything.
Today's the day we can't confirm anything.
But she's controversial.
Now, one of the things that she said was that if it's true that the DNA is altered, she says that this might create new avenues for lawsuits to Against the pharma companies, or against somebody,
because it modifies your DNA. And there's some law that says you can't discriminate against people with different DNA. And so the idea was that because DNA is involved,
And you can't discriminate against people who have different DNA that gives you some kind of avenue for, I guess, objecting to be banned if you're not vaccinated, I guess.
Now, that's stupid, right?
Am I right? Are there any lawyers on here?
There always are. There's always a few lawyers.
She's not a lawyer, but correct me if I'm wrong, her Her legal theory, she's a lawyer, somebody says.
She's not a lawyer, is she?
I think she's a doctor.
She is a lawyer.
No way! Are you serious?
Is she a doctor and a lawyer?
She's both. All right.
So this is even more interesting.
This is even better than I thought.
In my opinion, as a non-lawyer, Her legal take is stupid.
Like, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm evaluating somebody who you say is a lawyer, and I'm not changing my opinion.
Do you think there's any existing law about, you know, discrimination based on DNA? Do you think there's any law that this would apply to?
I don't see it.
I don't see it.
All right, here's the thing. - Okay.
I see people complaining, and I'm not going to let this go.
Usually I don't dump on people who are on the local platform because they're subscribers, but I'm not going to let this go.
I'm seeing a complaint that I'm talking about a topic that I don't understand again.
That's the fucking show.
If you can't deal with that, don't watch.
This is the fucking show.
I deal with you, it's interactive, you correct me, I correct you, you correct me, I correct you.
That's how it works. And a lot of this is breaking news, we haven't looked into it, we're just trying to figure it out, just like everybody else.
So if your complaint is that I don't understand thoroughly the topic, you are so fucking in the wrong universe.
Because nobody understands any of these goddamn topics.
If there's anything I could teach you is that nobody understands them.
In fact, that's going to be the biggest theme today.
Even the experts don't know what the fuck they're doing.
So if you think the problem is I don't understand the topic, you're right.
But it's a dumb fucking comment because nobody understands the topics.
Nobody. That's the context of all of this.
Nobody understands the topics.
All right? So I invite you to unsubscribe, please.
So here are the other reasons you should maybe be skeptical of this new information about the Pfizer shots.
First, the legal part sounded so dumb to me that it degraded my opinion of their medical opinions.
So maybe that sounded the same way to you, or maybe you know more about the law than I did and it doesn't.
Here's the part that was glossed over in the video that we saw.
One of the hosts asked directly, and this is the most important question, they asked, so what?
That's the big question, right?
So Dr.
McCullough said that the study shows that the DNA is modified in this particular way.
The host correctly says, and...
And what? How would that make any difference, right?
That's the right question.
You're saying something got modified.
Okay, doctor. So what?
Is that a modification that will matter?
Am I going to grow another leg?
Isn't that the big question?
What happened when she asked the so what question?
The most important question.
What happened? Dr.
Simone Gold cut her off To talk about something else.
They didn't want to answer the so what question because it might be a so what nothing.
It might be. It could be that there's like a technical change to something that's technically your DNA. But if you heard the other side, which you didn't, what would they have said?
What would Pfizer say?
They might say, oh, God, you're being so technical.
Yeah, in a technical way, you could say some DNA got modified.
But if you look at the details, you can see that the way it's modified is so trivial, it would be more correct to say that nothing important happened.
Now, I don't know if they'd say that or anything close to it.
But did you hear the other side?
So what credibility would you put in a study where you haven't heard the, let's say, the offended party would be Pfizer, right?
They would be the offended party in this because the data goes against their best interests.
If you haven't heard from them, you really haven't heard the situation, have you?
Just remember that. You haven't heard the other side.
So they glossed over the so what.
They made a legal pronouncement that, to my non-legal mind, just looks stupid.
It just doesn't look like it applies at all to me, but I could be wrong.
And then scientific studies are not credible.
Here's another thing. Who paid for the study?
Who paid for the study?
I don't know. It wasn't presented.
What trust or credibility would you put in a scientific study...
That says one company in a competitive field that one company is a company you shouldn't use.
Well, who is the most likely entity that would fund a study like that?
Who would have a lot of interest in putting some money into that kind of a study?
They're competitors.
Now, if Right, the competitor.
So, if the competitor funded the study, would you trust it?
You shouldn't. Right?
Now, if they don't tell you who funded it, should you trust it?
You shouldn't. Right?
Not telling you who funded it is the same as saying, well, don't trust it.
You don't even know who's behind it.
Right? If you found out that China funded it, would it change your opinion?
How about Johnson& Johnson?
Suppose Johnson& Johnson funded it because they used different technology.
You don't know, do you?
Suppose it was somebody who funded it who has a large investment in J&J. It's not even J&J, just somebody who has a large investment in it.
How would you know? And then why is no other major media covering it?
Now you can explain that by saying they're all captured media.
By the way, that's the phrase I'm preferring lately.
The captured news.
Does that sound better?
So fake news just turns into, you know, no it's not, it's not fake news.
So you just argue about what's true and what's not.
If you say it's the corporate media, it's true, but it feels sort of cold and analytical and it doesn't really have a persuasive punch.
But if you say the captured news, the captured news, not big media, not mainstream media, they don't tell you enough.
Captured news. Yeah, so this is borrowed from regulatory capture, if you know that topic.
Regulatory capture goes like this.
You have a regulated industry, let's say a phone company or the power company.
The regulators eventually get owned by the company they're regulating, one way or another.
Over time, the company with the money finds a way to get people regulating them who are more on their side than not, right?
So that's called captured.
Captured industry. So to me, it seems that between the pharma advertising and the Democrat influence and the probably CIA, it looks like it, that the news, most of the news, is captured.
Meaning that there's somebody controlling it who is not interested in you hearing the total truth all the time.
About the fleeing media?
Well, that's funnier.
Yeah. So what do you think of that?
The captured industry?
The captured news or the captured media.
Because captured gets right down to what's happening, right?
When you say corporate, it doesn't really describe the problem.
It just gives you a vague unhappiness about corporations.
If you say captive, well, captive's not bad.
The captive media, as opposed to captured...
I'm liking that upgrade.
Who else wants to go with the upgrade?
Captive instead of captured.
Which is stronger? Captive?
I think captive, right?
Yeah, I like captive.
All right, so change is made.
My new term is captive media.
The President Biden gave out 17 Presidential Medals of Freedom.
I guess that's the highest honor a civilian can get.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom, including one for Denzel Washington.
And the bigger news, this might be just me, but the bigger news in all this is that I've been passed over again, but not Denzel Washington.
Now, I ask you this.
I love Denzel Washington.
I like every movie he's in.
I think he makes like $60 million a year.
I just checked to find out.
And I think he's actually a solid citizen as well.
I mean, I don't know. Something could come out later.
But he does seem like a solid citizen, like the kind of person you want to listen to, the kind of person who would give you dad advice you should actually pay attention to.
I'm not going to read that.
But for all of his many qualities, of which I think Denzel Washington should be complimented, he has quite a set of qualities that I like.
Character, etc.
Empathy. But I ask you this.
Did he do more for the country this year than I did?
Seriously. I mean, seriously.
Did he do more for the country than I did?
No. Not even close.
And it's not even just me.
I could give you six names of people who seem to have moved the needle, but none of them would be Denzel Washington.
Now, maybe he did some awesome things.
I don't want to degrade his worthiness, because he probably was totally worthy.
But there might be some other people who got passed over.
That's all I'm saying. The Libs of TikTok account, if you're not following that on Twitter.
So there's a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok where they take TikTok videos and put them on Twitter.
And they're the ones that make the people on the left look the worst.
So you should look at them as humor more than news.
They're hilariously too far.
You know, I say this a lot.
When you argue against wokeness, and like, hey, everything's too woke, and I don't want to use your pronouns, and all that stuff, I'm not with you on that.
The reason I'm not with you on the anti-wokeness stuff is because, to me, it's just an extension of politeness.
Like, I'm fine with people telling me what they would feel comfortable being called, what pronouns they want.
It's just hard to do.
Now, the fact that people are making somewhat reasonable requests, in many cases, I'm all on board for that.
Yeah. And, you know, times change, if you want to use this word or that, I'm willing to update.
I'm happy to boss me and you lost me.
Yeah, the question of demanding it is different, right?
But the question of, do I want to call people by the names that they would feel most comfortable with?
Yes, I do. But there's no good idea that isn't taken too far.
And when people look at my work with Dilbert, they often misinterpret what it is I'm making fun of.
And they'll say, you're making fun of all the bad things that corporations do.
Almost. That's almost true.
It's actually a little more subtle than that.
What I make fun of is good ideas that went too far.
You'll see that throughout my work.
For example, I used to make fun of something called re-engineering.
It was a big buzzword in the 90s.
And the idea was, instead of tweaking things to improve them in your corporation, you would just tear them down and build them up from scratch.
In other words, re-engineer them.
Re-imagine the whole thing instead of just fixing them on the edges.
Now, weirdly, that was like a new idea in the 90s.
Isn't that weird? That somebody had to introduce the idea.
Consultants and books. I think it was Michael Hammer who did it.
So they had to introduce the idea that maybe sometimes you should start and completely re-engineer.
So was that a good idea?
Or a bad idea?
Because I made fun of it.
It was a good idea.
Completely good idea.
But... The corporations, like they always do, took it too far.
So they took a perfectly good thing, and then they took it too far, and it turned crazy, and then it became bad.
So the woke stuff is exactly like that to me.
It starts out as a perfectly good idea.
Let's treat everybody with respect.
How about we talk to people the way they'd feel comfortable being talked to?
You know, within reason. And then it goes all the way to, if you don't use my right pronoun, you're going to lose your job.
I'm like, hold on.
Hold on. I think that's a little too far.
A little too far.
Now, somebody's saying you're wrong, because you're saying that wokeness is a larger category than just pronouns, and that's my point as well.
My point is that this stuff always starts as something you could defend.
And then it grows and becomes this horrible, stupid thing.
So anyway, there's this therapist on TikTok, a young...
Well, I don't want to label him.
I would say that it's a they.
So the they says that...
You're going to think I'm saying this wrong.
It's so outrageous that you're going to think you heard it wrong.
The therapist is saying that the mass shooters don't have mental illness, but a lot of the people they shoot do.
That there's more chance that there are mentally ill people in the victim groups than in the shooter groups.
And not only that, but this therapist...
This is somebody who does this for a living.
This therapist is quite exasperated because we all know this.
We all know that thinking that the mass shooters have mental illness is just a distraction from the gun issue, he says.
And that the real problem here is the patriarchy.
The problem is the patriarchy.
It's not mental illness.
It's obviously guns and the patriarchy, says this therapist on TikTok.
And there you go.
And it's funny how much of...
Well, it's hilarious that somebody's opinion on the left can be used as entertainment for the right.
Think about that. When you look at this, you don't say to yourself, well, here's a political opinion I need to argue against, do you?
You just laugh at it.
Am I right? It's literally entertainment.
You just laugh at it.
So when you get to the point where somebody's, I think it's a serious political opinion, you can't even debunk it.
It's beyond the point where debunking even makes any sense.
You just go, all right.
Okay. All right.
Fine. Okay, Keith.
All right. Here's a take on the Russia-Ukraine thing that I thought was worthy of passing along from Armchair Warlord on Twitter.
So I don't know anything about Armchair Warlord, but I'm going to tell you his, or they, opinion.
And he talks about his idea now is that Russia has basically a total lock on winning, and all they have to do is grind it out.
Now, you've heard that before, but here's the specific to it.
Apparently the Ukrainian military would be quite capable if the Russian military met it, you know, military to military in a big old confrontation.
But modern militaries don't do that so much anymore.
So they're standing at a great distance and shooting artillery at each other.
The problem is the Russian artillery reaches the Ukrainians and the Ukrainian artillery does not reach the Russians.
And it doesn't look like that's going to change.
So apparently the Russians can just, you know, let's shoot off another thousand artillery shells.
They'll shoot off a thousand artillery shells and like, all right, time for bed.
Get up tomorrow, shoot off another thousand artillery shells.
Now when they're done, and it looks like they're not going to run out of artillery, There won't be anything left of the Ukrainian army, and there won't be any battle.
Right? That's it.
So, I said this about Russian artillery over a month ago.
Yeah, the thing that's, I guess that we would add to it, is that it doesn't seem to be a counter-strategy to it.
The Vietnamese strategy, which I also read about on this thread from Armchair Warlord, the Vietnamese used to call it getting between the belt buckle and the person.
So in other words, if you're at a place where their artillery can get to you but you can't get to them, you've got to get closer, getting further away isn't going to help you because then they just move toward you.
So basically, the only strategy that the Ukrainians have is basically to attack a stronger military, get closer to them, so that their weapon's worth both ways.
Do you see that happening?
I don't see that happening.
So, you know, war is completely unpredictable, most of the time.
And so, I don't know.
I don't know if this is the steady state and now we can predict how it goes.
It looks like it. But I would also expect the Ukrainians to counter with different kind of weaponry and tactics and something.
So we'll see. But I think this is a worthy point of view that we might already see the end point, which is Ukraine just gets ground up and they can take as long as they want because Russia's got time.
So... Is there any theories yet about why Shinzo Abe was killed?
Does the news have an update on that?
Because it was such breaking news, I didn't see anything before I got on.
Any breaking news on that?
Just speculation, right?
He was based, this crazy guy, who knows?
Yeah, maybe because of China.
I don't know. I don't feel like China assassinates people in foreign lands.
Do you? That feels as non-China-ish as anything could feel.
And believe me, I'm as anti-China as anybody.
But I don't think they do things that are that on the nose.
That's more of a Putin play.
Putin might just kill his adversary on foreign ground.
The CIA does?
Somebody says. Maybe.
All right. So apparently Germany is already rationing hot water, dimming its street lights, and shutting down swimming pools because the energy crisis is sweeping the country.
And how many different ways do we have to say that Trump was right about that?
If you were on the left...
And you saw how many times Trump said something that was just outrageous and then it turned out to be true.
Wouldn't you be a little bit worried about your stance on climate change?
Right? Every time Trump gets one right, that even...
I have to admit, even at the time when he said it, I didn't make too much note of it.
I wasn't quite sure it would make a big difference.
I thought things were stable with Russia and Germany.
I wasn't really sure it would make any difference.
But he did. Trump did.
And now I would say, well, he was definitely right.
Definitely right. And the rest of the world seems to have been wrong on that.
But when you see him do that time after time, including running for president, how many people thought Trump could win the presidency?
I'm not even sure Trump knew it, actually.
But when you see him get one like that right, that the smartest people were getting wrong, what else has he gotten right Trump says the election was rigged.
He doesn't have solid evidence of that.
But what do you think of his instincts?
See, here's the trouble.
His instincts are crazy.
Crazy good.
His fact-checking, not so good.
His command of the details of topics, I don't know.
Maybe good enough, maybe not.
Who knows? Depends on the topic.
But his instincts are crazy good.
And his instinct is that the election was rigged.
So what would you judge as more credible?
Trump's instinct, which weirdly has been correct in times when he thought it wouldn't be, or the fact that there's no evidence that stands up.
I don't know. I would be uneasy if I were on the left because the more times Trump is proven right about something that's, you know, a complicated topic, the more you have to wonder if he's right on the other one that you don't, you can't prove it one way or the other.
All right, how many of you think this so-called red wave of Republican electoral victories is really going to happen?
Because I think Rasmussen is still confirming there's a big gap, eight-point gap at the moment.
And So the trouble is, nothing seems predictable anymore.
Does it? Thank you for the $10.
Should make a list of things Trump got right.
Yeah. That would be interesting.
I'm a little bit concerned that I'm not worried about complacency.
You know, that's... Everybody mentions that.
But I'm a little bit concerned that there will be another surprise.
And that the insurrection, the January 6th hoax, may not be working as well as the Democrats wanted.
They have to kind of roll out another hoax, don't they?
So I feel like there's a master hoax brewing.
Now, it could be they thought they had all they needed in the January 6th stuff.
It could be that there's some sub-hoaxes within the January 6th thing.
But we know some hoaxes are coming.
Because that's their only play.
That's all they have. Well, here's the funniest part of all of this.
Now, let's say things go the way most of the pundits expect and that the Republicans sweep Congress and even win the White House in 2024.
Do you know what the best part about that would be?
Not the part where Republicans are in charge.
I know some of you like that.
That's not the best part.
Do you know what the best part will be?
The best part will be watching the Democrats complain that the elections were rigged Because there's no way that they could have lost that badly in fair elections.
That's actually going to happen, and they're going to do it shamelessly as if they had not spent the prior four years complaining that you shouldn't say elections are rigged.
They're going to do it right in front of you, and it won't matter that they spent the prior year telling you it's not a thing.
It will not matter.
Mark my words, it will not matter That they argue the opposite for four years.
Won't matter. They'll just act like they had never existed four years ago.
So that's my prediction.
All right. How many of you think that...
I'm going to do a little straw poll here.
How many think the next president will be Trump?
So just say Trump if you think it's Trump.
Trump. A lot of no's.
A lot of no's. Interesting.
How many say...
I'll wait for those to go by.
How many say DeSantis?
And just use his name. Just use DeSantis or Trump.
DeSantis. Now, this is not necessarily who you're backing.
This is who you're predicting.
Predicting, not backing.
Predicting, not preferred.
A lot of DeSantis.
What happens if DeSantis...
Let's play it through.
Do you think that that's a thing?
That if Trump is in the primary...
Yeah, if Trump announces, do you think it's a thing that DeSantis will stay out?
Most say yes. All right, I would agree with that.
I would say he'd stay out.
Now, because he's young enough, right?
He's young enough, he can wait another four years.
Or eight. Now, here's the fun part.
If Trump runs but DeSantis does not, is anybody else going to primary Trump?
Do you think Trump will get primaried?
Some are saying yes, some are saying no.
Who would be the strongest primary challenger?
Strongest challenger for the primaries?
Somebody says, Tulsi?
Liz Cheney?
I can't tell if you're joking.
Josh Hawley? Somebody says.
The answer is Tom Cotton.
Now, I don't think Kristi Noem is probably going to run, so if she did, that'd be interesting.
But of the people who are likely to have an interest, who is better than Tom Cotton?
Because I don't think he has any baggage, does he?
Somebody says, you know, he doesn't have the charisma.
Is that going to matter for the coming election?
Does the next Republican candidate need charisma?
I don't think so.
I don't think the next Republican needs charisma.
You know what? A lot of people might say a little less charisma would be good this time.
Am I right? A little less charisma might be exactly what we need this time.
So here's my little semi-prediction.
It's sort of a conditional.
So conditional upon the following.
DeSantis not getting in.
Don't know if that's true.
Trump getting in.
And then Tom Cotton primarying him.
Do you think Tom Cotton could beat Trump in a primary?
I see almost all no's.
How about on local, almost all knows.
On YouTube, almost all knows.
Somebody says he supported the war in Ukraine.
Well, we'd have to look at what that means.
I'm going to give you an ulterior, let's see, a competing prediction.
He might be able to win a primary against Trump.
He might. And here's why.
I believe his policies are Republican enough.
Am I right? There's no Republican who's going to say Tom Cotton's not Republican enough.
Confirm this for me, please.
Correct. He is as Republican as you need to be.
Does he have the experience?
Senators generally do.
So he has the experience.
He's Republican enough.
Does he make mistakes?
Is he a big mistake guy?
You know, blunders and gaffes?
Not so much.
Not really. I don't think I've ever seen one.
In fact, I can't think of any video I've ever seen in which he's talking and the idea is, you know, he said something silly, so we're all joking about it.
I don't think so.
So if you put somebody in there who's error-free, totally Republican, very smart, totally qualified, and he's running against Trump, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do? Because you do think to yourself, well, I think Trump has more wattage.
And he does. He has more wattage.
But do you want it? Do you want it?
Because the wattage works two ways, right?
It does break down some doors, but it also breaks down some houses.
Like, sometimes it's a little too much.
So... I think Tom Cotton could take Trump out.
Because a lot of Republicans are going to say to themselves, I want to win, but I don't want a repeat of having somebody in office who's just going to be the subject of all this controversy.
Somebody's saying Pompeo.
And if Pompeo is in there, that would be interesting, because he'd be primarily Trump.
But... It would also divide the vote, right?
So presumably that would help Trump.
If the not-Trump vote gets divided, Trump still sails through as the one who has the most votes, right?
And yes, I will not ignore the fact that Tom Cotton has a very unfortunate last name.
Pompeo would hold his own in a debate.
Yeah, Pompeo would be good in a debate.
He's a smart guy.
But so is Cotton.
Alright, I believe that if Tom Cahn had the right campaign help, he could take Trump out.
That's what I think. There is a situation where that could happen.
And I feel like calling it a long shot would be too far.
I don't think it's a long shot.
I think it's unlikely.
So let me be clear about my prediction.
It's unlikely. The main thing that would happen would be Trump gets in and Trump gets the nomination.
That's the most likely scenario.
But here's what you can't rule out.
That when you hear Tom Cotton talk, you think to yourself, wait a minute, is he selling me the Trump benefits without the Trump costs?
How many Republicans would take that proposition?
I'll give you Trump-like policies, but without the Trump-like problems.
You don't think Republicans would find that attractive?
Because he could say it directly.
You know, Tom Cotton could say directly, look, my policies are not that different from Trump's, but with me you don't get all that problem.
What Republican is going to say no to that?
I mean, if the proposition is given to you that cleanly, same policies or very similar policies, a little bit more research, don't worry about the drama.
I'm not going to bring any drama.
Republican policies without the drama.
I don't know. You give me a...
You tell me...
Imagine this, all right?
Mental experiment. I'm walking down the street, and I randomly stop a Republican voter.
Just randomly. They say, who are you going to vote for?
And the voter says, give me Donald Trump.
And I say, all right, great.
Would you be even happier if you could get Trump's policies in a candidate who wouldn't be as much trouble and maybe make you look bad as a voter?
Would you prefer that?
How many Republicans could I not convince To change the vote to one that's better for them as a voter, because they get all the right policies, but they're not smeared by the reputation that comes with being a Trump supporter.
Who would not take that deal?
See, I think it's entirely how it's presented.
Don't you? If Tom Cotton just runs sort of an independent race where he says, I have good ideas, I don't think that's enough.
But if Tom Cotton says directly, look, I'm going to give you Trump policies or Trump-like policies, but without all the drama, how do you not vote for that?
Remember, he doesn't have a weakness.
You know, if you're saying his weakness is charisma, I say, well, that might make him less fun.
But is that what you care about now?
Is that your top priority when the world's at war, kind of, in Ukraine, and you've got big issues?
Is your biggest criteria that he's not entertaining?
Could be. It could be.
I don't think anybody understands the strategic petroleum reserves.
There's a story out that some of the oil got sold to a Chinese company that Hunter Biden had some financial investment in.
Now, would you be worried about that?
If our strategic petroleum reserves, that's the oil that we keep stored for an emergency, it was released for the purpose of increasing the supply of oil, which should have decreased the price.
So that was the purpose of it.
But some of it got sold to a Chinese company.
Now, what I learned as I was dealing with this on Twitter...
Nobody understands the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
I don't. I wanted to come out here and explain it to you and say, well, let me explain to you.
This is the way that works.
But do you know what you're hearing in the news?
You're hearing that the oil was released.
What? How did you release oil?
Was it in jail? It's not really an economic term, is it?
So I don't know how to evaluate it.
It got released. Does released mean that they gave it away?
Does released mean they sold it as a discount?
Does released mean they sold it at spot market prices?
Or does released mean they sold it only to domestic companies, or should have?
Or does released mean it goes into the world?
I saw before I came on a statistic.
Give me a check on this. Does America use 20 million barrels a day, but the Strategic Reserve was going to release 1 million barrels a day?
Are those numbers correct?
Give me a fact check. Does the U.S. use 20 million barrels?
20 million, yeah. 20 million a day, but we released an extra one, which would be 5%, right?
Now, if all of that happened within a world which was just the United States, shouldn't a 5% increase in supply have something like, it's not an exact correlation, but something like a 5% decrease in the price at the gas station, right?
Right? But what if it's released into the global economy?
Because I don't know how it's released or if it's bought or sold or given away.
I don't know anything about it. And the people I talk to on Twitter seem to have pretty strong opinions but also didn't know anything about it.
So I suggested on Twitter that maybe the Fed should buy everything in the strategic petroleum reserves to bring down inflation.
Anybody on board with that?
The Fed, let's just have the Fed buy the entire Strategic Petroleum Reserve to bring down inflation.
Anybody good with that?
I don't even know what that means.
It doesn't mean anything.
I don't even know what the Fed does.
I hope you heard that.
I have a degree in economics.
I've got an MBA from a top school.
I don't know what the Fed does.
Somehow I made it through economics without anybody being able to explain it to me.
I mean, I could repeat the surface-level stuff, right?
But there's something about it I just don't understand.
I understand some of its functions, but that's very different from understanding it.
And I've tried to read up on it a number of times.
And when I read up on it, I'm like, why does this not make sense?
Does anybody have that same experience where you try to educate yourself and say, I keep hearing about the Fed, but I don't hear it.
What does it do? And then you look into it, and you don't quite understand what it does.
The other thing like that is the strategic petroleum reserves.
I don't know. Do we sell it, give it away, do something domestically?
Is it only for the refineries in the United States?
What happens if there's more oil than the United States could use because of refinery capacity?
Do we sell it? Is it spot prices or restriction on who buys it?
I don't know. I don't know any of that.
So when I said, why don't you take the thing you don't know about, the Fed, and use it to buy the other thing you don't know about, Or you don't understand the strategic petroleum reserves and reduce inflation, which is the third thing you don't know anything about.
Those are three things that economists don't understand.
The Fed, strategic petroleum reserves, and inflation in general.
Because the experts were all confused.
Remember when we had stagflation in the 70s or whatever it was?
And... Then later, all the experts said, well, we're going to get a stagflation again.
No, we didn't. We got inflation without the stag part.
So, the thing you need to know when you see any story about strategic petroleum reserves or the Fed or inflation, literally nobody understands them.
That's my opinion.
Now, it's not a fact.
It's just an opinion. But I haven't seen anybody who can explain it.
I did a micro lesson that I wasn't sure I was going to release, but I'm going to talk about it right now.
I tried to learn music, specifically playing the drums, and I got experts and looked at, you know, talked to people who got to music, and here was the thing I couldn't understand.
If I look at drum music written on a music sheet, and then I go to play it, it doesn't sound good.
If I play it exactly like the music is written, it doesn't really sound like anything you'd want to listen to.
And likewise, if you took a drum machine, And you just programmed it to play the notes exactly as written, you wouldn't want to hear it.
Because it wouldn't have any soul.
It wouldn't have any... Right?
So when somebody teaches me to play the drums, and I play it exactly as it's written and exactly as taught, but it doesn't sound good, I say, why doesn't it sound good?
Why is this famous drummer sounding good?
I'm playing the same notes off the same sheet.
Why does mine not sound good? And the answer is that the artist is actually adding something.
So the artist is modifying the notes in small ways, a little emphasis, maybe a little space that they make up for by compressing the next one, something like that, whatever it is.
So here's the question I asked.
Well, if the good drummers are doing that, can't you just listen to them and then rewrite the music so that a new drummer could look at how the other person played it in a pleasing way and then just imitate it?
So why couldn't my computer simply listen to Keith Moon or some other famous drummer and just say, oh, this drummer is not playing it the way it shows on the sheet?
They're either consistently making this kind of change, which would be easy to program, or they're somewhat randomly adding things to it that your ear is picking up subtly.
But a computer can randomly add things to it.
So there's no reason that your computer can't make this music better than an artist, except one reason.
Do you know what that is?
That the people who do it for a living, the artists, don't know what they're doing.
That's the only way any of this makes sense.
And the way you can confirm that is by talking to them.
Let me give you my impression of a very good artist who really knows music explaining to Scott why his drumming doesn't sound good.
Why can't I just put this in a computer and it would sound great?
And the artist says, no, no, it's not going to have the soul, you know?
It's not going to have the oomph, the oomph, you know what I'm talking about?
Because, you know, if the computer does it, it's just going to be...
Nobody wants to hear that.
But if a human does it, it's going to be...
Do you see?
And then I say... No.
No, I don't see. Because what you're describing, if you understand it, would be something you could write on this piece of paper.
And you say, look, don't play it the way it's written normally.
Make sure this is modified a little, this is modified.
Now do that, and watch how good it sounds.
And I'd say, oh, okay, so that's a little modification.
I'll do that modification.
I'll do it. Now, that would work, but that will never happen.
Instead, instead of saying, okay, modify your sheet music so it's more like what they actually play that sounds good, do you know what the artist will say?
No, you've just got to put a little into it.
You've got a little stank into it.
The experts don't know why the thing they're doing works.
They really don't. Economists don't know why shit happens.
It's their job to act like it.
So you get a lot of experts explaining to you things, and you think it's your problem, don't you?
Do you know what I don't think?
This will be the cockiest thing I've ever said, and I've said some cocky things.
This will be the cockiest thing you've ever heard, but it's also my advice to you.
So I'm going to say something about myself, but put yourself in that position, because it's about you too.
The reason I can't understand the Fed is not my fault.
It's not. It's because the people whose job it is to understand it don't understand it.
If they did, they could explain it to you.
If they did, they could explain it to you.
When the experts can't explain something to you, It's not always because you're dumb.
20% of the time it is.
80% of the time it's because they don't understand it.
And when they do, they can understand it well.
Let me give you another example.
When I started writing humor, I naturally wondered if there's some way to do it better.
Is there a formula to add? You know, something's funny.
And it didn't exist.
And if you asked anybody who wrote humor for a living, and you said, all right, what makes it funny?
And they say, well, surprise, or it's, you know, tragedy happening to somebody else.
And those would be in there.
But if that's all you knew, could you reproduce it?
Could you take that and then go write some humor?
Nope. And the reason is that the people who made humor didn't know how they did it.
They didn't understand their own area of expertise.
But, because I don't come from sort of an artistic background, I come from more of an engineering mindset.
I'm not an engineer, but, you know, I spend so much time with them, you pick up the mindset.
When I started doing humor, I started saying, well, there's got to be some formula underlying all this.
And then I discovered it.
It's the two of six formula.
That if you write what you want to be a joke, and you use two of these six dimensions...
It's funny. So that's an example of me as an expert actually understanding my field.
Because I can explain it to you in a formula that you can completely understand.
I'll do it right now. You have to use two of these six things.
And help me out if I forget two of my own things.
It's got to be acute, clever, absurd, recognizable, mean, or naughty.
Now, you understand what all of those words mean.
You would know what a cruel situation looked like.
You would know what an absurd situation looked like.
So there's no definition that really needs to be given there.
And all you do is follow that rule.
If you use two of those dimensions in your joke, people will laugh at it.
It actually is a formula.
Now, musicians can't do what I just did.
Tell you how to do it with some detail that you could just put into an objective form.
And when people can't put it that simply, they don't understand their field.
Okay.
Somebody says the good ones can...
Yeah, everything has an exception.
And by the way... There's nothing more annoying than dealing with what I call the absolute people on Twitter.
So if I say, inflation's gone up, somebody's going to say, hmm, that's not true.
The price of my whatever went down yesterday.
All right, and then I want to say, but mostly it went up.
I'm not really talking about every single situation.
I'm generally talking. So the other day when I was saying that I thought genetics were far more important than parenting, a lot of people said to me, why do you say parenting is completely useless?
And I said, no.
I'd say parenting is maybe 10 to 20% of the outcome, and genetics is probably 80 to 90%.
And then people say to me, but why are you saying that genetics is everything?
And I say, I don't know, did you just listen to the last 10 seconds?
I just said it's 90%.
And then people say, well then, you're saying it's worthless to try to have good parents.
And I say, are you listening to any of this?
If you could improve a 10% likelihood of outcomes for your children, you'd be all over that.
10% is a lot when you're talking about the life of your children.
So of course you want the best parents.
Of course you want the best advice, the best techniques, because it is going to affect 10% to 20%.
But for some reason, I couldn't get that across.
Isn't that interesting? That that concept I could not explain.
And I don't know why. You consistently see it across all topics.
People will interpret what you said as an absolute.
Do you know why they will do that?
Why will people interpret what you clearly don't mean to be an absolute?
They'll interpret it as an absolute to debunk it.
Why do they do that? It's cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance says, I know I was right, but I don't have a reason...
So my brain is going to create one that doesn't make any sense, and then I'm going to act like it made sense.
That's what cognitive dissonance is.
So if I say to you, it's 90% genetic, but you've spent your whole life believing, oh, it's 90% parenting, even if I make my case, and even if it's well made, which I think it is, what you should say is you should hear me saying, it's 100% genetic, which I've never said.
And then you'll debunk the 100% part.
Not what I said.
So when you hear the absolutists weigh in, are you saying so?
And I got this exactly.
So, you're saying every single...
No. No.
Of course not. Anything else happening?
Um... So people couldn't tell it was a joke when I said the Fed should buy the Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
Literally, it doesn't make any sense.
It's just random economic terms slapped together.
But we'll have to figure out what release means when we release the Strategic Reserves.
Do we buy it or what?
Germany is making it illegal to change thermostats.
The Fed has been captured.
Release means sell, Gary says.
Sell it to whom and at what price?
Now, here's what I do know about things.
Does somebody have a number of how many barrels of oil are used per day by the entire world?
Did somebody give that number?
How many barrels of oil are used, not produced, are used?
Actually, it's probably going to be exactly the same as produced, right?
Is that right? Roughly speaking, the world would end up using about the same as they produce every day.
Because it's not like the world is piling it up.
It's selling it as it makes it, right?
Somebody says 100 million barrels a day.
88 million? So if the United States was 20, that sounds about right.
The US is about 20% of the oil use?
Let's say that's right.
So if Biden released 1 million to the global world, 1 million barrels per day, but he uses 100, there should be a 1% difference.
It's not one for one.
But somewhere in that neighborhood would be the most it could have affected the price at the pump, right?
Like, it couldn't be a 10% improvement if there's only a 1% change in supply.
Yeah. When they release U.S. crude, it may make you attractive.
All right, so release means sell, but we still don't know sell to whom and at what price.
And that was big.
Now, here's another complaint I have.
People said that we shouldn't use the strategic petroleum reserves unless it's an emergency.
To which I say, isn't this an emergency?
Now, there's two things happening.
One is that it doesn't work.
Can we all agree on that?
Increasing the supply of oil by 1% globally?
It shouldn't make any difference, right?
1%. So if we agree it doesn't work, I want to back up to more of a philosophical question.
On a practical level, it just doesn't work.
But on a philosophical level...
Isn't an economic crisis a defensive problem?
See, I think a lot of people think that military and economy are two different categories, but it's only because we choose to talk about them that way.
In reality, they're so merged.
If you look at Ukraine and Russia, we're talking as much about their economic ability to wage war as their physical ability.
Do they have the money to keep resupplying and staying in business?
So if you had a situation where using the strategic oil reserves was going to benefit only your economy, but it actually made a difference, I would say that's an emergency.
And I would say that would be an appropriate use of an emergency fund.
To put off a recession.
Because a recession can really damage your ability to fund your military and rebuild it and keep it modern and all that.
However, the reality of this situation is it doesn't look like it would make any real difference in the real world.
In which case, it's just a political signal.
And if we believe...
Here's the best economic analysis I've seen today from Jerseycy, a Twitter user.
Now, he's weighing in on the question of releasing the strategic petroleum reserves.
If that lowers gas prices, and it works, if that works, this question makes sense.
And Jerseycy asks, would, quote, release the hounds, make the price of dogs go down?
And I think it would. I think it would.
Because if you release the hounds, there would be more hounds on the market, and then the average price per hound should go down.
So, yes. Release the hounds to lower the cost of hounds.
Thank you for that joke. That's pretty good.
All right. Dutch farmers.
Yes, the Dutch farmers are rebelling quite effectively, it looks like.
Now, let me ask you this.
Where's that food shortage?
Now, you say to yourself, oh, that's working its way through the system.
We're not seeing it yet, but we sure will.
Really? Now, I get that there's a lag.
I get that. And that we should not have seen it yet.
Do you all agree? But here's what we should have seen.
A lot more reporting.
And I feel as if The food shortage might be a mirage.
What do you think? I think I'm going to bet against it.
Yeah, I guess the cost of groceries is already going up, but that's with everything else going up.
We do know that, you know, transportation, every part of farming is going to be more expensive because of energy.
Okay. You think Africa's going to run out of food?
I feel like they just might run out of grain, and that they'll just be other replacements.
The tulips are up 300%.
All right.
The fertilizer shortage is probably the biggest deal that we have, and we don't talk about it too much.
All right. Well, keep an eye on that.
Here's the thing, is that I feel like the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters is going to take care of the food shortage Because the market saw way in advance that it needed other alternatives.
So I think anybody who could have grown an alternative or planted an extra field where they can probably did.
Remember when...
Do we still do this?
Do we still pay farmers to not plant?
Can somebody give me a fact check?
And is that a big deal?
Could the government just say, change their minds, you're going to have to plant those fields?
And wouldn't that be a one-season problem, and couldn't we probably get by for one season?
Don over on YouTube has a comment.
I'd like to weigh in on this.
Talk about the Dutch farmers, and Don wants you to know that the Dutch blondes are so hot, though.
They're so hot. It's true.
The Dutch blondes, so hot.
And I think that's a valuable contribution to the conversation.
And... AI is making its own patents.
Uh-oh. Yeah, what happens when AI applies for a patent?
Yeah, I saw the AR-15 commercial.
I don't know, I wasn't too interested in it.
I get it. You had a KKK hat on.
So the CERN AI... Is that why you keep saying CERN to me?
Or are you talking about it destroying the planet?
Oh. The CERN questions are all about AI. All right.
The AI will immediately patent itself.
Oh, CERN is a conspiracy theory involving timeline shifts.
Is that the story?
Is the story that CERN did something that changed the timeline?
Well, if you told me this earlier, I would have looked into it.
What if the UFOs are actually us from the future?
Thank you.
You ever think about that?
One explanation for UFOs is that it's just us.
It's just us from the future.
And the reason that you don't get a good picture of it and, you know, they don't land and introduce themselves is that they can't change the timeline.
Because we know we don't want to change our own past, so we make sure that when we go back to it, we stay in the ship, and the ship can observe things, and maybe sometimes it gets caught, but nobody knows what it is, so it doesn't change our timeline.
Here's another possibility.
If you live in a simulation...
It could be that these UFOs are just really the hosts of the simulation.
You know, whoever built it, it may be just their mechanism for getting inside and looking at things.
That's all you're seeing. It's the warden.
All right. Yeah, maybe. What are the chances we have a future we don't want to change?
Well, that's true. We want it.
Yeah, it's sort of a Rick and Morty program.
All right. CERN is a programmer in the simulation.
I don't think they're military drones because the turning so quickly thing.
That's why I think it's either software or an illusion or it's us from the future or some damn thing.
Thank you for this wonderful message today.
I can't tell if you're kidding.
Are you kidding? So I'm looking at a comment that says, Scott, thank you for this wonderful message today.
You know, we needed it. And I'm thinking, what message?
I can't even tell if you're serious.
All right.
I'm on top of my game.
Thank you. Great show, do you think?
Yeah, I think so. Probably one of the best shows ever.
