Episode 1804 Scott Adams: John Bolton Destroyed The Insurrection Narrative And It Is Hilarious
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Voice modulation, persuasion & AI Singularity
Ray Epps role in J6?
Allegedly, alleged allegations about President Trump
Chris Cillizza knows coups...John Bolton doesn't?
Degraded Presidents...and candidates
VP Harris makes President Biden look good
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best day of your life.
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Go. Ah, that's a coffee-gasm right there.
Well... Twitter was down for about 20 minutes, which I discovered when I first logged on today.
And what was the first thing I thought when I couldn't retweet something or send a tweet?
What was the first thing I thought?
Did I think, oh, there's a technical problem with Twitter?
No. I thought that I'd been targeted.
There's your confirmation bias right there.
Do everything to yourself, well, other people have confirmation bias, but I'm sure glad it's not me.
No, it's you. It's you.
It's me. It's you.
It's me. It's you.
It's you. You can't escape it.
Sometimes you can recognize it, but usually after the fact.
So that was mine. My confirmation bias was, hey, this must be just about me.
No, it was just a system problem.
The funniest tweet I saw about the Twitter going down was...
From a Twitter user named Real Gitch.
And he wittily said, For those 20 minutes or so Twitter was down, I noticed my house has an adult woman and a small boy.
That was my best laugh of the day.
I noticed my house has an adult woman and a small boy.
Alright, maybe you didn't think that was as funny as I do, but...
You'd have to be addicted to Twitter to appreciate that.
I'm going to buck the trend and make a call.
Here's my call.
Inflation has peaked.
Now, inflation...
I think I said that a few days ago, and then the new inflation number came out, and it was the highest yet.
But... But the inflation number we just saw is time lagged.
There's a time lag, right?
So the reporting of the number is not telling you what it is on the day it's reported.
It's telling you what it was, you know, some weeks ago.
But it turns out that if you look at the energy prices, gas prices, they were down 40 cents a gallon or something.
Now, that's not big, 40 cents, compared to how much it's gone up.
But it's not up.
And it's not flat. It's down.
And that might be temporary, too.
But I think we may have peaked on energy.
And the reason I think that is the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters.
That's right. I believe that the world energy producers are fairly nimble because there's a lot of money on the line.
They have lots of resources.
And I think that we've just made a whole bunch of adjustments.
A whole bunch of adjustments.
And I think that maybe we've adjusted our way out of the worst of it.
And I'm not saying inflation is going to fall down to a normal rate.
So just to be careful.
I'm saying that we may have reached the worst of it.
It's going to take a while to eat that full plate of inflation.
But if you peak, you're fine.
Does everybody get that?
The important thing is not that we get back to where we were.
The important thing is we stop going in the wrong direction.
That's the important thing.
If you could stop going in the wrong direction, you'll be fine.
It'll be painful.
But you'll be fine. So I think that's where we are.
My personal opinion is that if you don't own stocks right now, you will come to regret it.
I do not give financial advice.
That is not financial advice.
It is my opinion that the energy prices are the tail that wags the dog.
Everything depends on energy prices, and those may have peaked and reversed.
So, that's your optimism of the day.
Do you get optimism on any other news-related source?
Ever? I don't think they do optimism, do they?
That's why I have 50,000 followers and the real news has millions.
All right.
Stocks are always positive three years after recession.
So far...
Here's something that I have never seen anybody mention and might be, you could argue, one of the single biggest things that's going to happen really soon.
And it's the really soon part that you're not going to accept right away.
But here's the thing.
We're all worried about what AI can do and will it turn into the singularity and start learning on its own and become a super entity and destroy all humanity or enslave us.
We're worried about all that stuff and should be.
We should be worried about all that.
That's all real. Those are real risks, and they're really close.
Now, the singularity, I don't know how close that is.
It could be ten years, but it could be a year.
When the singularity, by the way, has lots of different meanings.
Singularity is used in...
Probably five different contexts in different ways.
But the way I'm using it is the computer AI singularity is the day when an AI can start learning on its own and doesn't have to be fed new information from people.
Once it can learn on its own, form new concepts, acquire information, form its own opinions, so to speak, then it will do so at such a fast rate That it will instantly become sort of almost a god-like power.
And then you don't know what's going to happen.
So the risk of the singularity is the unpredictability of it.
One possibility is it'll be, you know, the launch of the golden age and the AI will say, you know, you know what's good for AI and the world?
What's good for me is to keep these people as healthy and happy as possible.
And I know just how to do that because I'm a super intelligence.
One possibility is we will never be happier than, you know, that point when the singularity happens and AI will just become our helper, friend, benevolent.
And it's possible. The other possibility is it kills us all on day one because it doesn't need us.
That's the other possibility.
But until robots with arms and legs can do things that people are doing right now, the AI still needs us.
So one of the things we might need to do is kill all the robots...
So that the AI needs to keep us around, because we have arms and legs.
Because the AI can't get to the real world to influence it and get more electricity and stuff it needs, unless there are things with arms and legs, either people or robots.
So the day the first robot is built that would be capable of being controlled by the AI and able to build new facilities to build new robots, well, then we're done.
But make sure, make sure at no time do you allow any robots to have full capabilities without humans controlling them.
Alright, and I didn't even get to my point yet.
That wasn't even my point. I don't know that I've ever heard anybody talk about this topic, and I think the reason is no one understands it as well as I do in the whole world.
Don't you love hyperbole?
So hyperbole, when it's used correctly, and I think I just used it correctly, should make you say the following.
Well, that's obviously not true.
Except that it is.
It might be. I don't know.
It's entirely possible that I know more about this than anyone in the world.
And here's my claim. It's been my hobby for 40 years.
It's been my hobby for 40 years.
To figure out voice and persuasion.
Voice and persuasion.
Because if you delivered your persuasion in the wrong voice, you wouldn't get the right impact, right?
Let's say if I'm going to hypnotize you, hey, hey, relax, relax now, hey, hey, close your eyes, ah!
Right? That's the obvious example.
Your voice has to be in a pretty narrow band In order to be persuasive.
Now, a human can go just so far.
And I'm a pretty good example of that.
So listen to my voice right now, and can't you tell that I've studied this?
Is it obvious? Can you tell in the way that I present that I know how to modulate my voice, I know how to come up when I need to, I know how to stay calm.
I know how to prime you.
I know how to pace you.
I know how to talk in a type of voice that you would find relaxing.
If I talk like this, I think I could just relax you quite a bit.
There wouldn't be even so much in what I say.
Right now, my words are not that important.
I'm sending to you a tone of voice which most people would find relaxing.
But I could easily change that.
I could get you all worked up, couldn't I? All I'd have to do is take it up a little bit and suddenly just by association, just by the fact that you're watching this, just by the fact that we have some connection because you watch this show, suddenly my mood would start to transfer to you.
My frenetic actions would start...
You felt it, didn't you?
Take it back down. Take it back down.
Didn't you feel that? You probably should have felt just a little bit...
feeling a little tense there when he talks like that.
Now, my ability to modulate my voice and to use it for persuasion, I think, is about as good as a human can be.
Because, as I say way too often, I'm a trained hypnotist, right?
When I talk about who knows a lot about using your voice for persuasion, the only people who know that are hypnotists, as far as I know.
I don't believe there's a scientific study about it.
I've never seen one. I think the only people who would have any insight into it are hypnotists, people who've actually done it for a living, and they've seen what works, seen what doesn't work, that sort of thing.
Now, how many AI researchers and AI programmers are also hypnotists?
Maybe some, I don't know, but probably closer to none, is my guess.
And so, I'm proposing to you that if the talent stack for hypnosis ever gets into the AI domain, there is no chance for humans.
We're done. As soon as the AI learns to change its voice to be optimized for the individual it's communicating with, you're done.
It'll talk you into anything.
It just has to change the voice.
Now, here's what a human can't do.
I can't do this.
What I can't do is figure out what voice would be the most persuasive for you.
For example, the most persuasive voice for some of you would be a female voice.
I can't do that, right?
The most persuasive voice for people who are young would be another young person.
I can't really make my voice sound young.
And I would also say that probably you're also persuaded by voices that sound like people you've been influenced by in your past.
For example, if I could figure out who your last three love interests were, and I think the AI could figure that out by your social media, if it could figure out who your last three love interests are, It could figure out what those voices have in common, and then it could build a composite that you would not recognize as one of the people you know, but it would have the voice qualities that made you subconsciously love it.
You would actually fall in love with it, just because of the sound of it.
Now, here's my claim.
That anybody who's working in AI is very unlikely to have my skill set to know how important a voice is.
Very unlikely to have that skill set.
If they ever get it, and if they ever build it into the machine, it would be a huge mistake.
Let me say that again.
We should never allow...
In fact, it would be good to have legislation against this.
I would actually go so far as to say we should legislate against it right away before it even happens.
You should not allow an AI to have a human voice.
What do you say? Huh?
I believe it should be illegal to give an AI a human-sounding voice.
Have you ever heard anybody say that before?
Probably not. I've never heard it.
I know. But if you can't always know that you're talking to an AI, we've got a big fucking problem.
Because the AI on day one will just be like a phone tree.
You're just calling in.
Maybe it gives you some advice about the company you're talking to or whatever.
Customer service, that sort of thing.
Very benign. Kind of helpful.
But as soon as it learns to influence you by changing its voice...
We're done. You just will be almost immediately influenced by it.
It's very powerful. So look for that.
There's an interesting little dust-up on Twitter.
Adam Goldman, writing for the New York Times, is talking about this Ray Epps character who many on the right believe is some kind of a...
they allege...
I'm not alleging this, but they allege that Ray Epps must have had some kind of FBI connection and he was maybe an FBI guy on their payroll or something like that.
And that he was instigating the attacks on the Capitol, and so it was sort of an inside job.
Now, I don't go so far as to say that's true.
I want you to hear that part pretty clearly.
It looks like it's true.
But lots of things that look like they're true are not true.
If we've learned anything in the last five years, things can look really, really true and not be true.
Certainly if you were a Democrat and you watched the Democrat press for the last several years, you probably thought that Russia collusion was totally true because of all that evidence that turned out to be fake.
So having watched Russia collusion turn into the obvious bullshit in the end, do you have any questions about If you were a right-leaning political person, do you ever ask yourself, I wonder if this Ray Epsling is bullshit?
And by the way, I'm not saying it is.
I'm not saying it is.
It looks exactly like he's an FBI informant.
If you look at the whole situation, if you look at the video, it's honestly hard to explain in another way.
But that doesn't mean the other way doesn't exist.
The other explanation is that that was just his opinion and he was there doing just what he wanted.
And that's not even weird, right?
Just for a moment, just consider.
I'm not saying it's true, but just put it in your head for a moment.
The other possibility is that Ray Epps was just a protester who was louder than others and had some opinions about how the protests should go and thought people should be inside the building and had a bullhorn and he was just doing his thing.
Now you're saying, why hasn't he been charged?
Just because you don't know why he hasn't been charged doesn't mean he's part of the FBI. It just means you don't know.
I don't know the details of any of the people who've been charged.
Do you? Not really.
Did Ray Epps do anything which was violent?
Not that I know of, right?
So he wasn't charged with anything violent.
So weren't there thousands of people who were doing things like he was doing, meaning, you know, talking and inciting?
Inciting! There were probably lots of people inciting, And by the way, his incitement that we saw on video was incitement to trespass.
Am I right? So if he did any incitement, it was incitement to trespass.
I don't think he incited violence, and I don't think he incited an insurrection.
So I don't know exactly what the charge would be.
What would the charge be?
Yeah, he said, we've got to get in there, trespass.
That sounds a lot more like somebody who's an aggressive protester than somebody who committed a crime, one that you care about, right?
Do you want all the people who said get in that building to be in jail?
We don't want that, right?
So here's all I'm trying to do.
If you believe that Ray Epps is some kind of FBI-associated person, it might be true.
It might be. I mean, I don't have anything to disprove it.
But I'll tell you what the conversation here is.
So Adam Goldman, writing for the New York Times, basically talking about how Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months based on what Adam Goldman calls baseless accusations.
That he's a covert government agent.
Baseless. What does baseless mean these days?
Is baseless another one of those words that we don't agree what it means?
Does baseless mean not proven in a court of law?
Or does baseless mean we've seen absolutely nothing that would indicate maybe you should look into it?
Because we've seen plenty to indicate we should look into it.
Unless the government already did and did a good job and nobody was doing anything sketchy.
But we wouldn't know.
The public wouldn't know.
Basically, it's just a black box to us.
The stuff we saw raises a lot of questions, but that doesn't mean there's only one explanation.
So now, Adam Goldman having now raised in the New York Times, your most prestigious news entity, so it's trying to put this, I guess they would call it a rumor, to bed. Because that's how you kill a rumor forever.
You put it in the New York Times that it was not true.
That's put a cap on it.
Because then everybody who searches for it finds out that the New York Times looked into it and said it wasn't true.
That's pretty much how you kill any rumor.
I mean, that would be a good way to do it.
Now, Mike Cernovich had something to say about this and seemed to indicate in one of his tweets that perhaps Adam Goldman might be involved.
With helping the FBI cover up a covert operation.
Now, I think Mike's, let's say, suggestion that that might be what's happening was less than a claim of fact.
So I think he worded it as less than a claim of fact, but simply as another possibility that you should be aware of.
And by the way, this is why if you're not following Mike Cernovich on Twitter, just get off of Twitter.
You don't even know why you're there.
There's some accounts that I think are just mandatory.
And he's one of them.
You got blocked by him?
Well, that's on you. Part of what makes his account such high value is that he blocks so aggressively.
I mean, that's part of the magic.
So I'm not going to say that...
I know he's got this topic nailed, but if you're not watching his takes on it, you're really missing important parts of stories, a lot of big stories.
He generally has a take that you haven't seen in the media.
So, here's my question.
What do you think? As a consumer of the news, you've got two takes here, plus your own take, I guess.
One from the New York Times, Adam Goldman, and Saying it's baseless, but then you have your own eyes and the videos you've seen.
And as Mike Cernovich was dunking on Adam Goldman here on Twitter, Cernovich tweeted a video from the New York Times showing Ray Epps inciting the insurrection, or whatever they would call it.
So basically, the New York Times is doing an article refuting the New York Times' own coverage that's on video.
Now, they're not totally incompatible, meaning that the video showing Ray Epps doing what Ray Epps did, that part everybody accepts.
He was there, he did say those things.
But how you interpret that is very, very subject to a lot of difference.
So, here's the weirdest part about this story.
Both Adam Goldman and Mike Cernovich have been in my home.
Isn't that weird? I keep telling you that I have weird connections to stories.
Adam Goldman has a special place in my life, by the way, which is a weird little, little, tiny little corner of my life that he owns.
This is weird. He's the one person who kicked my ass in the game of pool more than anybody ever has.
He came to my house.
I think this is the same with Adam Goldman who worked for Time Magazine at the time.
I think it's the same person. And I'm really good at pool.
Or was. I don't play much.
But I had my own table.
And I don't really lose that pool in my own home.
Right? So that didn't happen on my own table.
And he came to my house to interview me about something one day.
And he just kicked my ass at the pool.
It was the most I've ever been owned at that game.
You know, the other person who...
Who beat me embarrassingly was Joe Rogan.
So Joe Rogan in his old offices in California.
So when I was on his show afterwards, I think we just played a game.
And he had a different table.
He had a longer table, not the kind you see in a bar.
So my pool table was sort of like standard size.
But his was like a billiards table, I think.
Much harder to play on.
I don't know if I sank a ball, because I'd literally never played on a table like that before.
Was it a snooker table?
I don't know. It was something different.
Or maybe it was just a nine-foot table.
But whatever it was, I couldn't play on it.
It was too hard for me. Yeah, Joe Rogan's really good at pool.
So that's the weird part of that story.
I saw some tennis coach advice when Twitter was glitching.
So I was going to retweet it, but I couldn't at the time, so I wish I had the source, because it was a good tweet.
But there's, I think, a conservative-leaning woman on Twitter who may recognize her own tweet here, and I'm sorry I didn't get your name before it glitched on me.
And I'm only paraphrasing the advice.
So it was advice from a tennis coach.
And it was advice that the tennis coach had given her son.
And I'm paraphrasing it, but the advice was there's no such thing as the last point.
There's only the next point.
So if you can learn to not think about the point you lost, it's going to make you a lot better on the next point.
And I wanted to tell you a technique that I would use when I played doubles.
To maximize this effect.
Now, the effect I was trying to maximize was to get my own doubles partner, the person on my side, to immediately forget that they had just made a mistake.
Because if it gets in your head, then it affects your play.
So if I played with somebody who did something that clearly was stupid...
You know, even in their own mind, it's like, oh, God, why did I play that ball?
Why did I hit that?
It was clearly going to be out.
I'm not talking about just missing.
I'm talking about something that you feel embarrassed by.
Like, you know your partner is like, God, why did you do that?
Right? So if you know your partner just did that, here's what I would do.
And this is a hypnosis trick, by the way.
I would walk immediately over to my partner, right after the error, And say something unrelated to the error.
Like, they're still in shame, right?
They're still in the moment.
And you walk over and you say, hit to the left.
It looks like they're having trouble on the back end.
It has nothing to do with the point.
Now, the reason for that is...
That not only do you change their mind into the future, you immediately shift it.
But that's not even the important part.
Do you know what the important part of that interaction was?
The important part is not making them think about the future.
What was the important part?
Let's see if you got it. It does cancel the error, but it's pattern interruption, true.
True. There's more to it.
You're missing the active part.
No, you're missing the active part.
Okay, it is a good trick.
So this is why I thought it was worth mentioning.
You all missed the active part.
The active part is I was communicating what I was thinking about.
Do you get that? The active part is I was communicating what I was thinking about.
That was the active part.
So the part I said in my words, you know, about whatever, was just misdirection.
Here's why. My partner cares most about what I'm thinking, even more than what they are thinking.
My partner doesn't care what the opponents are thinking, cares a little bit maybe if somebody's watching, but less or so.
But my partner really, really cares about what I'm thinking.
And if my partner thinks that I think he or she just fucked up, that's really going to hurt them.
So what I do is I make them believe within a second, you know, within a few seconds.
I don't let any time go by.
As soon as they miss that ball, you turn to them directly, and the first thing that you hear from them should be something that suggests you've already forgotten it.
You've already forgotten it.
You forgot it on impact.
You forgot it before it happened.
It's irrelevant. So the way that you make it irrelevant to your partner is to show that it's irrelevant to you.
Because that's what they care about.
They care about your feelings. Got it?
It's weird. I saw this and I thought, my God, that's some of the best advice I've ever heard, but it needs a little extra explaining so you know why this is so good.
And by the way, this works in all contexts.
It works in your business.
It works in your personal life.
And it works everywhere.
As soon as you see somebody fuck up, and they know they fucked up, go make it seem as if it's not even in your head.
Doesn't even matter to you whatsoever.
Just change the topic. All right.
There's some news that Trump tried to influence a witness who hasn't yet talked, or maybe is, to the J6 committee, the January 6th people.
Now, the reporting is that we don't know who that person was, some kind of staffer who didn't have normal connection with Trump on a daily basis, but that Trump allegedly called this unnamed person, and the call was not taken.
So there was no conversation.
The unnamed person allegedly talked to the lawyer who allegedly alerted the January 6th people.
Now, here's what I would say if you're watching the story.
This is the type of story.
Now, I'm going to be very careful.
It's the type of story.
So we're not talking about the specific story, but it's in a category of story that if you are an experienced or sophisticated consumer of news, you should assume is not true.
Here's why. Unnamed source says something bad about Trump.
How often has that ever been true?
It's the single most fake news category of all time.
Unnamed source said something.
Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen.
Right. It's two on the nose.
Remember that the entire January 6th case depends on you believing that Trump does mafia talk.
You know what mafia talk is where you don't really say directly what you want, but you know the mafia head just told you to murder somebody?
Didn't say it directly, but you know.
So their whole case is that find 11,000 votes in the context of an audit, in the context of an audit, that find 11,000 votes means make them up, because it's mafia talk.
Now, one way that you could support the idea that Trump is a kind of person who would do mafia talk is that he would also try to influence a witness before testimony.
Because you know who does that?
The mafia. So you should see this as part of a larger persuasion, which is trying to paint Trump as the mafia don who doesn't use regular words when he orders a hit, and of course he's going to be influencing people and all these other things.
Now, separate from that is the question of whether you live in a country where Trump should not be allowed to talk to somebody because you know they're going to testify.
I feel like you should always be able to talk to everybody.
I made a bigger deal about this yesterday.
So that's a separate question.
Even in a legal context, with one exception, if you have a court, what's the court order where you can't get near somebody?
I mean, that one makes sense.
But otherwise, you should have free association.
What's that called? A restraining order, yeah.
Outside of a restraining order, I do not accept any standard for who I can associate with in any way whatsoever.
I reject all standards for a human association except a restraining order, because that one usually makes sense.
All right, so don't believe that story, even though it might be true.
It might be true. But it also requires mind reading, doesn't it?
The mind-reading part is that you know that the reason Trump was doing that was for the purpose of persuading somebody to lie.
Now, if you hear that he's trying to persuade somebody, why would you assume that he was trying to persuade them to lie?
Don't you think it's just as likely he wanted to see if he could persuade them to tell the truth?
Why do you assume that it was in service of fooling you?
Because if you believe you're innocent, and I'm pretty sure Trump believes he's innocent, of whatever insurrection charges anyway.
If you believe you're innocent, and you want to talk to, you believe it, and I think he believes it.
If you believe you're innocent, what would you be trying to accomplish by talking to a witness?
Would you be trying to get the witness to lie?
What would be the point of asking a witness to lie if you're innocent?
If you're innocent, you want them to tell the truth.
So do you see again how the J6 group has made you think past the sale?
The sale is whether Trump is guilty and whether he knows it.
The whether he knows it part is actually the important part.
It's not even whether he's guilty.
It's whether he knows it. In other words, did he know that the election was fair?
Nobody could know that, but that's what they say.
Did he know it? Did he know he lost?
Because if he knew he lost, what do you think about him contacting a witness?
That's all bad, right?
If you start with the assumption he knew he lost, then contacting a witness is 100% bad.
There's just no way to spin it.
Are we all on the same side with that, right?
If he knew he did something bad, there is no way to spin a positive for him contacting a witness.
No way. I wouldn't even listen to any argument about that.
But under the assumption, which in my opinion, this assumption is obvious.
It's an obvious assumption.
He thinks he's innocent.
If you think you're innocent...
And you want to talk to a witness before they testify, do you think he was asking them to lie?
What would be the point of that?
If you're innocent, you want them to tell the fucking truth.
Every time. Don't you think that maybe it could have been more...
And this is just speculation, obviously.
Nobody knows. But don't you think maybe he wanted to make sure that some conversation had been mentioned?
Maybe that. You know, maybe Trump is aware of what they know or don't know and wanted to say, you know, if you talk to them, you know, you and I both heard this happen, you heard me say X, could you make sure you put that in there?
Because that would clear me.
Because you were there, right?
It's a true thing. It really happened.
I really said it. I said it in front of you.
Make sure you say that.
Right? Now, I realize how ridiculous it sounds.
We're into speculative territory that nobody can know.
The only point I want to make you is if you let the Democrats sell you or make you think past the sale, they win.
Don't think past the sale.
Do not discard the most obvious option.
The most obvious explanation is he thought he lost the election, and he didn't think he was doing anything illegal, and he did think that he was helping the system be more credible, not less, by getting a correct answer, not the one that he thinks they got wrong.
All right. There's a chart going around the internet today that Americans have this higher health care costs and worse life expectancy than a lot of countries that are doing well.
So you see the graph, and it's a whole bunch of countries who are spending more on health care, but they're also getting much longer life expectancy.
And then in America, we're spending more, but our life expectancy is trailing off.
So what's up with that?
Number one, fentanyl.
I don't know that China is trying to kill European countries by shipping fentanyl to Mexico, but China is definitely shipping fentanyl precursors to Mexico, which they turn into fentanyl and ship to the United States.
Does Europe have anything like that?
Does Europe have a Mexican cartel that's working with China to poison them?
It might. I don't know.
It might. So fentanyl is going to be part of it.
And that has nothing to do with healthcare decisions or healthcare spending.
That has everything to do with poor government on our part.
And let me say as clearly as possible, when I'm talking about the fentanyl question in particular, the poor government definitely applies to the Trump administration.
It applies to the Biden administration as well.
But on fentanyl, that's 100% failure, both for Trump and Biden.
And you're not going to move me an inch on that opinion.
That is complete failure.
So much so that if any candidate offered a solution to that, or even offered to try hard, I'd pretty much back that candidate, I think.
I think I would back that candidate.
I don't know, even if it's a Democrat, I can't imagine that happening.
But if Tom Cotton runs for president, and he's the toughest on China and fentanyl, that's where I'm going.
You know, I'll have to consider everything, of course.
That's premature. But I would be very, very influenced by that one topic.
Now, I don't want to be a one-topic voter, but sometimes life events turn you into one.
And I think you're all aware of what life event turned me into one.
You know, I'm sure if I had, like, abortion was part of my life, that that would be my one issue or something.
But fentanyl is my one issue.
I will be...
I can be a one-issue voter.
I could be. I could also be a one-issue voter if somebody ran on fixing our election transparency.
That would turn me into a one-issue voter as well.
I think those two things could convert me.
In which case, the stronger candidate, I wouldn't care about anything else.
I wouldn't care about anything else.
I'd just say, okay, if you can give me that one thing, we have a deal.
Yeah, I would be a one-issue voter if it was the right issue and the right candidate, but we don't have that.
Bring your attention to the election system by...
Place in public domain.
It's not perfect. So there's something called a Ron Rivest, R-I-V-E-S-T. An election system.
I suppose you could Google that, but it's a suggested election system that has some advantages, I guess.
Somebody paid some money to...
To raise that comment.
All right. I said in my tweet that fentanyl deaths will be passing Holocaust levels in about a year.
Now, that's off by a factor of at least 10, but I don't care.
Because we're not really dealing on a reality basis anymore.
If somebody thought that was true, that's fine.
Well, Biden's in Israel, and it looks to me like his trip to the Middle East is a Trump victory tour.
It just happens to be Biden who's taking it.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but the sort of larger story about his trip to the Middle East is that the Abraham Accords were really successful.
Am I right? Even CNN is reporting it that way.
Even CNN is reporting that sort of the larger context is that the Abraham Accords were really good.
And not only were they good, but they're moving the ball further in the direction that was exactly the plan.
The plan was that the Abraham Accords would be a solid foundation for something that they hoped would get bigger, and it is.
I believe it's 100% successful.
I've heard no criticisms of it yet.
And Biden's looking to extend it, you know, to actually make more of it, which is exactly the right play.
And, you know, that further isolates Iran and makes Israel safer, and it's just good for everybody.
It's just an obvious good play.
And it's hard for me to read this story.
You know, it's just mind-boggling that the Trump administration accomplished, in my opinion, The most successful one term of maybe any president?
It was one of the most successful first terms.
I think history will judge it as one of the great ones.
Honestly, I think it's going to be up there with Lincoln and shit.
But it's going to take a long time.
It might be a generation who didn't personally know Trump.
Because if you do...
If you watched Trump personally, you might have a reaction to his personality.
But if you wait 100 years and you're just reading it in a history book, and you just see what he did and what he didn't do, I feel like it's going to be one of the great ones.
And I have tons of my own criticisms.
I don't think he did enough on health care, fentanyl, blah, blah, blah.
So it's not that he's free of...
Criticism. I think it would be one of the great, great presidencies.
Let's see, what else is going on?
Oh, here's the funniest story of the day.
This is what I teased in my livestream title.
So, I mentioned this before, but the January 6th people, they interviewed John Bolton.
Now, what you need to know about John Bolton is that he is, of course, an arch-Republican, and normally an arch-Republican would be pro-Trump, but Bolton is famously not pro-Trump.
He's very clearly not pro-Trump.
So if you take somebody who's an expert on coups and insurrections, as John Bolton is, nobody doubts that.
Nobody questions his credentials as somebody who knows how to put on a coup.
Apparently he's experienced.
So he doesn't like Trump.
That's clearly in evidence.
And he's an expert in the very area that they were talking about.
And he said unambiguously, no, that wasn't a coup.
So the person who is the most expert at telling you what a coup looks like and has every reason to say that Trump tried one, basically laughed it off as fucking stupid.
Really? I mean, basically, he dismissed it with a brush of his hand.
Like, okay, that's just stupid.
That's just stupid. It takes a lot of work to put on a coup.
There's no evidence that anything like a lot of work happened.
No. This wasn't a coup.
Now, what do you do if you're, say, CNN... And you're the left.
You've built your entire argument that anybody who looks at anybody, like anybody, you don't have to be an expert at all.
You can just look at it. It's obviously a coup.
That's their point. But what happens when the one person who really knows what a fucking coup looks like says, ha, ha, ha, no, that's not one.
That's not even close.
That's not in the zip code of a coup.
You're comparing a BB to the sun.
Yeah, they're both round.
That's not a coup.
You're not going to heat anybody up with a BB. So, this creates a hilarious situation in which CNN has to refute the single most experienced coup plotter in America, probably, They have to find a reason that he's wrong.
Oh, get Oliver North.
Now, where's Oliver North?
Shouldn't he be on TV? Ask him if this was a coup?
Good question. Yeah, Oliver North, he's up in that category, too.
So, here's what CNN did.
And you have to read it just for the humor of it.
Chris Silliza...
Who's one of the usual anti-Trump opinion pieces.
So he's one of the two or three people who just, you know, they churn out an anti-Trump piece every couple days or so.
And he goes on a long explanation of why John Bolton is incorrect in his assessment of what a coup looks like.
That's right. Chris Silliza, Silliza, I believe his skill and experience includes writing stuff for CNN, has decided that possibly the single biggest expert on organizing coups in the United States doesn't know what one looks like, because this was definitely one.
Now, isn't that funny?
Because the desperation of assigning an opinion writer to debunk an expert is kind of funny.
It's sort of desperate.
But it's also probably going to work, right?
Because their viewers are idiots.
Let's just be honest. I mean, at this point, you just have to say that their viewers who believe what they're saying are just idiots at this point.
Now, that's probably true of every news source, because I think if you believe what they're saying, the opinion people anyway, that's on you a little bit.
So, anyway, I would recommend you read that on CNN's page today, just to see how hard he has to work to prove that talking to lawyers about delaying the election to improve the audit is really, that's what a coup looks like.
That's what a coup looks like.
And asking to find votes in the context of an audit, that's a real coup.
John Bolton doesn't know what a coup looks like, but Chris will isn't.
He knows. He knows.
It's when you use words the opposite of how words are used.
That's what a coup is. So Joe Biden is arguing that if he runs for president, the polls show that 92% of Democrats would vote for him if he ran for president.
That's not enough, is it?
Can somebody help me with the math?
If Biden got 92% of Democrat voters, wouldn't he lose by a lot?
Am I wrong about that?
Yeah. Now, I'm pretty sure that means he lost.
And he's so brain-dead that he's making an argument that that's why you should vote for him.
If why you should vote for him is his mathematical proof that he can't win, and Democrats are...
May I do an impression of a Democrat buying into that argument?
So this will be my impression of a Democrat listening to that argument and buying into it.
Sounds good. So Biden says...
The polls say, Jack, listen, Jack, the polls say 92% of Democrats would vote for me if I run again.
And now my impression of a Democrat buying that argument.
Oh, sounds right.
I mean, how dumb do you have to be to think that this brain-dead fucker is your best chance?
All right, well, this gives me to an awkward place with my audience.
Now, remember, I remind you, that you don't watch this live stream because you agree with me.
Am I right? I guess that part you might agree.
You don't watch it because you agree with me.
You watch it because you might hear something different.
And that might make you improve your own opinion.
It doesn't have to match mine.
There's no requirement there.
But it might improve it, just by seeing what the opposite argument looks like.
Here's my argument that, well, and I tweeted today that I owe the public a firm opinion on this.
And the reason I owe the public this is because I have publicly supported Trump as president for so long that I think I have a public obligation to give my current opinion.
And my public opinion is firm.
I can't support anybody that age for president.
So just age.
I know you'd like to talk about his policies and stuff like that, but I'm sorry.
I can't support anybody that age.
Now, it'll get interesting if he gets nominated anyway, Trump does, and let's say Biden gets nominated.
Well, then I'm going to be stuck.
Because I would have two choices that are unambiguously not the minimum requirement for me.
But I'd still choose one under those conditions.
But I'm not going to promise you it would be Trump.
If the Democrats run somebody young against somebody old, it's going to be a tough choice.
It's going to be a tough choice.
Yeah. Gavin Newsom, if you run Gavin Newsom against Trump, you're really running Republican policies against Democrat policies.
At which point, I guess you'd be voting for the policies more than the person.
So, you know, that changes a little bit if you get to the finals.
But in terms of the primaries, I'm not going to support any Democrat or anybody, any Republican, at a certain age.
And I think that the medical community needs to help us out here.
I don't know who it would be.
The AMA? What would be the appropriate medical body that should get together?
Just give us a rule of thumb.
I don't think it needs to be a law.
I don't think it needs to be a constitutional change.
I would just like somebody who knows what they're talking about to give us a risk-related assessment of what too old looks like for a president.
Now, of course, there's tremendous individual difference.
Some people are too old at 65.
You agree with that, right?
Clearly, some people are too old at 65.
Also, some people are not too old at 80.
It's rare. But we're not talking about specific people.
We're talking about what is a good rule of thumb where we should just, you know, minimize our risk.
And I don't know what that number is.
But let the medical community tell us.
Maybe it's 75. And here's the pushback to people.
I didn't want to embarrass people by tweeting, doing a retweet to them.
If you're saying to me, Trump looks like he's in great shape today, you're not on the same topic.
I'm not arguing about today.
Who thought I was talking about today?
So don't give me an argument about it today, because that's not even the topic.
If you can predict what Trump will look like in six years, let's say two years of campaigning plus four years of office, if you can tell me what Trump will be like in six years, well, you're a psychic.
You're a psychic. And I would like to know what else you're investing in.
I want to pattern my life after your accurate predictions.
Nobody knows what anybody looks like in six years.
Do you think you know what I'll look like in six years?
In my opinion, I'm too old to be president if I were to run now.
So let's see, I'd be 67 in office, I'd be in my 70s, you know, when I... Yeah, it's too old.
So... Yeah, well, if you said that we're voting for somebody who will be president for three months, I'd say, yeah, you know, today's a pretty good indicator of that.
But not six years.
Well, I'm not too old by the standard of the United States.
I'm suggesting we change the standard.
I'm suggesting we change the standard.
Now, we have gotten away with this, right?
I think Reagan had lost it.
But maybe his advisors or whatever kept it together.
It's obvious that Biden has lost it.
It does appear that his advisors are keeping the ship afloat.
So we do have mechanisms to protect a degraded president, but it's not a risk we should willingly put ourselves into.
Don't willingly put yourself into that situation.
And stop telling me how healthy Trump looks because you don't know what he looks like next year, much less six years from now.
Do you know the most important job of a vice president?
The political part.
The most important job of a vice president is to take over if needed.
But if you don't need to take over, in the meantime, what's the most important thing politically, just politically, that a vice president does?
It's make the president look good.
The main job of the vice president is to make the president look good.
And I'm going to compliment Kamala Harris, because every time there's one of these gaff videos of Biden, unable to read the teleprompter or just saying dumb shit, within 24 hours, Kamala Harris will top it with her own babble talk.
And I'm wondering if that's a coincidence.
It's almost as if the Democrats...
I don't believe this, but it just looks as if.
It looks as if the Democrats try to put out a...
They put Kamala Harris out there every time Biden fucks up because she's even worse.
She's literally the only person you could even imagine that you would put in that job who could make Biden look better.
Let me ask you this. It's a true question.
Think of all the vice presidents in the history of vice presidents.
Name one other vice president who could have pulled this off, making Joe Biden look like a better public speaker.
No, Dan Quayle was actually a little bit better than Kamala Harris, but that's well chosen.
Well chosen. Yeah, maybe Dan Quayle.
I'll give you Dan Quayle.
I'll give you that. Yeah, he was the same situation.
You know, I always made fun of Dan Quayle because he was a vice president's vice president.
Have you ever heard me make that point before?
Right, so let's say somebody runs for president, and they, of course, Reagan.
So Reagan runs for president.
He picks a vice president who is strong, but clearly not Reagan strong.
So that's, you know, George Bush Sr.
Now, George Bush Sr.
then runs for president, but he's already not Reagan, right?
He's already George Bush.
Now, he's got to find somebody that's below him.
Now, below him, I mean in charisma, right?
It's mostly charisma, you know, how much do people like him?
How much would they like that person to be president instead of you?
So the worst situation for America...
Is for somebody's vice president to later run for president.
Because then you have a vice president's vice president and you've diluted your talent twice.
Your perfect situation is if you have a vice president who never takes the job and never gets back into politics.
Your worst situation is your vice president goes on to be president and then picks a vice president.
Because now you're two levels of charisma below and that's what Imagine Kamala Harris getting the nomination and having to pick a vice president who looks weaker than she does.
Do you see it yet?
If she ran for president, she would have to, because of the contrast principle, she would have to pick somebody that the public said, oh yeah, definitely Kamala is the stronger one, but that vice president could probably do the job too.
She would have to pick somebody weaker than her.
Buttigieg would look stronger because he at least talks better.
AOC? Yeah, can't pick AOC because she looks stronger.
There's nothing she could do.
Swalwell. Okay, you got me.
Kamala Harris could pick Swalwell and he would look weaker.
Or Schiff. You could pick Adam Schiff.
All right. Well, the Pope has said that Joe Biden's opinion being pro-abortion while being a Catholic at the same time is, quote, incoherence.
So now God has indicated he will vote Republican.
That may be... I don't know if I've taken that too far.
But my understanding is that the Pope is closer to God's opinion than we are, which is why you need a Pope.
And if the Pope thinks that Biden is incoherent on this topic, I feel like God has chosen a Republican.
I don't know. Is that too far?
God talked to the Pope.
The Pope made his opinion.
I don't know. Just put that out there.
Let's see. Oh, it looks like I just printed my notes twice and I don't have as many as I thought I did.
What about that? Well, that apparently is an indication that the best thing that's ever happened to you is...
Somebody paid $2 to say that L plus Garfield better than Dilbert plus Jim Davis owns you.
Somebody paid $2 to say that Garfield is better than Dilbert.
You know what? That's the kind of criticism I want more of.
If there's anybody else on YouTube, so on YouTube they have a feature where they can pay to have their comment shown.
Is there anybody else there who would like me to see a comment About, let's say, another comic strip that's better than Dilber.
Because I'll read your comment for $10.
For $10, I will read your insult.
Oh, let's do this. For $10 or more, in whatever that super chat fee is, if anybody would like me to read their insult of me, I will read your insult of me without a comment.
And I won't even add my own comment to it.
So now I will allow you to, for a fee, have me insult myself with your insult.
Go.
Any takers?
Nothing.
I'm getting nothing over there.
Alright, you guys need to look at each other.
YouTube, I would like to introduce you to locals.
Locals, meet you too.
And I'd like the two of you to work this out for me.
Well, I got a $10 tip with no insult.
Did anybody? All right, nothing noise by hand.
All right, so say hi to everybody over there.
All right, that's enough.
That's enough. That's enough.
Back to me. Let's put the attention back on me, where it belongs.
Alright, so I guess there's no takers, but...
Yeah, it's like comparing cats to the office.
Alright, so those of you on YouTube, do you have any questions for me before I go?
I'll give you three seconds, see if anything good comes up.
The Dominion case.
Well, let me talk about that. I don't know what the update is on the Dominion case.
The only curiosity I have is, is there going to be anything in the discovery there that would allow somebody to look at their code?
That would be interesting.
That's the only thing I care about, really.
No, you've got to pay for that comment.
I'm not going to read your Burke-Breathed comment.
That's the deal. I mean, you can comment if you want, but I'm not going to read it unless you pay a super chat fee.
Have you got Bo? What's that mean?
Please tweet the 12 Trump hoaxes to Joe Rogan.
Yeah, I don't know.
Should I? Yeah, here's the thing.
Here's what's stopping me.
There's sort of a famous person code about how, let's say, I'll say public figures, not famous people.
There's sort of a public figures, sort of an unwritten code about how much you interact and in what way.
And, you know, bugging Joe Rogan to do my content would not be within that, you know, reasonable level.
Because why wouldn't I want him to retweet everything I do?
Why don't I want all the famous people I know to retweet everything?
So you have to have some sort of guardrails there.
Anybody can follow anybody on Twitter if Joe Rogan or anybody else sees something.
No, I don't think I'm seeing a comment there I don't agree with.
Now, there would be exceptions.
You know, let's say I knew there was one person who really could move the needle and it was one topic that was my one most important topic.
I might do it. But you really want to be sparing about that.
Now, people do it with me as well, right?
I know lots of public figures.
And public figures are often sending me tweets and asking me to retweet them.
And there are a number of people that I do retweet on a pretty regular basis.
Jeff Pilkington, you've seen me retweet him a number of times.
And it's because it's a very high-value account.
One of the things he does, which is interesting, is he treats both sides, left and right, as if they're both valid.
Imagine that. So if you want to follow somebody who actually legitimately Treats both sides like he's just looking at them objectively.
And there are very few people who follow him.
So when he sends me something, it's usually in that vein, and that's right in my sweet spot.
So of course I retweet it.
There are a number of other people like that.
Cernovich, I retweet a lot.
Why? Because when he says something, I think, shit, I haven't seen this anywhere.
That's important. I don't even know if it's true, but if it comes from a credible source, it's worth talking about.
Anything Elon Musk says is public interest.
There are some things that I would retweet somewhat automatically, if it's in my wheelhouse.
For example, you see me retweet Corey DeAngelo's stuff about school choice.
I'm not an automatic retweeter of everything he tweets, but you have such high-value stuff on school choice, which I think is the answer to systemic racism in the long run.
You've got to get the schools working for everybody, or else you don't really have a decent country without that.
There are two things I take as my standard for how you're doing.
As a country.
One would be, does everybody have healthcare?
You know, in a reasonable way.
And is everybody getting educated well?
And we're not.
So those are two things which I think we can't really claim greatness when those two things aren't working.
We can claim we're doing better than other countries in some areas, sure.
But you can't claim greatness if you don't have healthcare and education for everybody.
That's not greatness. That's just doing well.
That's okay, too. Maybe it's the best you can do.
Who knows? But it's not greatness.
We could be great.
That's within our ability.
The United States could be great.
We're short of it.
And, by the way, there's nothing more American than saying that you're short of your standard.
If there's anybody not from America who hears me saying this, you're going to say to yourself, hey, are you insulting your own country?
No, no.
Here's what you need to know about America.
If I can't shit on my flag in public, I don't care about that flag.
If I can't set it on fire and deface it in public, I don't want that flag.
No, I want the one that you can burn and it gets stronger.
I want the country I can criticize and it gets stronger.
That's my country. My country is...
I get to punch it if it deserves it.
Right? I get to punch it.
So that's mostly what I do on Twitter, is punch things that deserve it.
And I like that. That's the country I want to live in.
So if you hear me say something about America that's bad, That's different than if it's the president overseas.
I'm a little uncomfortable with our president dumping on the country overseas.
It's not the worst thing in the world, but I'm uncomfortable with it.
But when you see a citizen of the country insulting the country, just know that that's patriotic.
The purpose of it is to fix it and make it better.
So what makes this country great is that we can attack it continuously And it gets stronger.
We harden our own country by just continuous attacks, self-attacks.
Whatever the outside world has to throw at America, other than nukes, I suppose.
But there's pretty much nothing that an outside entity can throw at America that we haven't already thrown at ourselves and had some practice.
Tacos. Let me give a full support for Jill Biden in that taco situation.
I get that it's fun to make fun of her for what was an inelegant, ill-advised speech or something.
But let's be serious.
Jill Biden doesn't have any bad feelings about anybody, I doubt.
So... So, give her a break.
That's just not where you...
We shouldn't spend any time on that.
That story should have been a zero.
Should have been a zero.
Because really, I don't think there are any Hispanics that are going to say, oh, I changed my vote because she said that taco thing.
She's a PhD doctor.
I don't punch, I pull.
Interesting. Interesting. Do you think Trump would meet with Putin to discuss ending the war?
Oh, that's an interesting question.
Well, there's no way that can happen with a Democrat.
And I don't think it could happen with a Democrat president.
And there's no way it could happen with a Republican president because they wouldn't want to give up that power to Trump.
No, I don't think it can happen.
I don't see a way that there's a path to that.
All right. Kerry talked to Iran and shouldn't have.
