Episode 1812 Scott Adams: I Found Out Artificial Intelligence Gets Information From Me. Uh-Oh
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
AI knows the Adams 25% Theory and what else?
Lee Zeldin attacked on stage
Dinesh D'Souza question about J6
Is Adam Kinzinger mentally stable?
Kamala's VP choice?
Governor Newsom's chances in 2024?
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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.
Yes, yes, it's laundry day.
I don't have my usual blue shirt on.
Give me a day. I'm busy.
This is my green shirt.
I only have one of them. It's laundry day.
But if you'd like to take your experience up to the maximum, and you're going to need it for today.
Oh, boy, do I have content for you today.
Oh, oh, boy. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen drink or a flask, a vessel of any kind to fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Enjoy me now.
For the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
You might need some serotonin too.
No, that's been debunked.
Sorry. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Go. I just saw a I just saw a meme on the Locals platform.
I've seen it before, but it always makes me laugh.
Do you know what the advantage of right-wing women is?
If you're looking to date, what's the advantage of dating a right-wing woman?
This is for YouTube.
People on Locals already saw the punchline.
The advantage of a right-wing woman?
No penis. All right.
Apparently, what we thought was what I thought, I got fooled by fake news.
But it's such good fake news, I don't even feel bad about it.
If you're going to be fooled by fake news, you want to be fooled by a really good example of it.
There was a good one yesterday.
Did you see the alleged statement from Trump?
And he was calling himself Herculean, and he said he...
There was a Kevin Sorbo and Lou Ferrigno mention.
Apparently those were fake.
Did you know that? Those weren't real.
But whoever did the fake wrote them so well that I actually thought it was Trump.
And I thought, wow, he's really on a roll.
Anyway, the fake one was every bit as good as a real one.
Yeah, like Kevin Sorbo.
That was hilarious. I laughed for ten minutes.
I don't even mind that I got fooled by that.
Did anybody else get fooled by that?
And then when you found out you were fooled, you're like, oh, that was a good one.
So I could be fooled by more of those.
That was fine. Did I mention Brett Stevens last time?
I can't remember if I did. So he wrote a piece, I think it's in the New York Times, and he was saying that the anti-Trumpers haven't really dealt with the fact that the Russia collusion hoax was a hoax.
And it started out by essentially sort of an apology for his own role, and now he can see that the Russia collusion thing was purely a hoax from the end, and he thinks that we have to deal with that more honestly and deal with that as a hoax.
And I thought, my goodness, my goodness, here we really have some advantage.
Things are going well here, because here the New York Times is calling out a hoax, a Russia collusion hoax.
And, you know, it's an opinion piece, but still.
And then he closed his thing by talking about Trump destroying the Republic on January 6th.
And I thought to myself, hmm, apparently he's learned nothing.
Nothing at all. All he did was go from the debunked hoax to the replacement hoax.
January 6th is literally the replacement hoax for the Russia collusion hoax that fell apart.
All he did was say, yeah, that old hoax was a hoax, but I'm glad we have this new thing.
And he actually embraced the new hoax like it was real.
He was so close to being self-aware and then it all went to hell.
He couldn't tell the difference between a hoax while he's in it.
He could definitely tell the difference between a hoax and reality after the fact.
After the fact.
But when he's in it, not so good.
Not so good. Well, there's a big study out saying that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of serotonin, specifically.
This news is half-fake news and maybe some of it's real.
Here's the fake part.
The headline said depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance.
The detail of the study said not that.
So the first thing you have to know is that the headline Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance.
It has nothing to do with the story.
The story doesn't even involve that.
The story is completely unrelated to the actual study.
The study found one chemical, serotonin, which experts believed was somewhat critical in this process, wasn't important.
So knowing that one chemical that we thought was the main one is not the main thing does not mean that it's not a chemical situation.
Am I right? So it's fake news about fake news.
Like the fake news is that serotonin was part of it, but then they fake newsed it by turning it into all chemical.
I don't think they've...
What they've certainly not done...
What they've certainly not done is shown that depression is not a chemical reaction, some kind of a chemical state.
Is serotonin something that can be supplemented?
Yes. Well, supplemented or stimulated.
I don't know the right word for that, but yes, that's what some drugs do specifically.
I believe. Yeah, we are nothing but a chemistry experiment.
So to say that depression is not related to our chemical state feels like it couldn't possibly be true.
Granted, there's one chemical we've ruled out, but it's still just chemicals.
You know what it'd be like?
It'd be like you go to the beach...
And you scoop up some sand.
You say, well, I've proven that there's no sand in the beach because I've got this little handful here.
What about that other sand, you might say.
All right, so this brings us to the question of, as everything does, everything comes back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun.
If it doesn't come back to Joe Rogan...
It doesn't come back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun.
We don't care about it. It's not important.
But do you remember, many of you remember the famous Tom Cruise thing where he was saying that psychiatry is bullshit and they're just drugging us up with these unnecessary drugs and everybody laughed at him.
Poor Tom Cruise.
Well, not so funny now, huh?
Not so funny now. Because his claim that people were being drugged incorrectly, it wasn't helping, appears to be more correct than not correct.
Now, here's the part that somebody said, but wait, Scott, he's part of Scientology.
Scientology doesn't have the answer.
Scientology isn't going to help your depression, is it?
Eh... Are you sure about that?
Would you debate me on the value to the individual of Scientology?
You better not, because I'm going to win that debate.
Scientology is a lot of things, and the criticisms about it, you know, the Lear Remini stuff, I'm not talking about that.
So I'm not talking anything about the organization and what it does or does not require its people to do and what it does or does not do for revenge.
That's all been well addressed.
So I'm not defending it or attacking it on those things.
Separate topic. But have you heard of this thing they do called auditing?
They hook you up to this little galvanic response thing and they ask you a bunch of questions and allegedly you're going to find some kind of traumas that you had when you were little and then you resolve them and then you're better.
Do you believe there's any science to that?
What do you think? Do you think there's science to the auditing process?
Yes and no. Yes and no.
It's basically hypnosis with a device, and the device is what is convincing you of science.
So the point of the device is to convince you that it's a legitimate process.
Suppose it does. Suppose you are convinced that it's legitimate, because people pay for it, so they must think it's legitimate, they pay for it.
What would happen if you think it's legitimate?
And you pay for it, thus convincing yourself that it's confirmation bias and everything else.
So now you've talked yourself into it working.
And then the process says, we found this trauma, and now we've removed it, and you're clear.
And then this process, which you believe is true, but let's say it's not, just for discussion.
What happens if you believe it's true?
What if you believe it made you happier?
You're happier, right?
There's no such thing as believing you're happy and being wrong.
If you believe you're happy, yeah, you're happier.
So can hypnosis convince you to have a different level of happiness?
Yes. Do you know how it does that?
Do you know how a hypnotist could make you less sad and more happy?
Now, not if you have brain damage or you have some real organic problem.
I'm not talking about the hard cases, but edge cases.
You know, the people who are too tense, too anxious, that sort of thing.
You know, they're in the gray area there.
They could be saved, but, you know, they just need a little help.
Believing it's going to work is about half of the process.
So if you walk into a Scientology auditing session believing it's going to work...
Probably work. As far as you can tell.
And that's the only thing that matters.
Subjectively, if you walk out feeling better, it worked.
It's only trying to work on your brain.
If it worked on your brain, it works.
So everything I know about hypnosis strongly suggests...
Yeah, it might be a placebo effect.
You're right. It strongly suggests that the auditing probably works for some percentage of users.
I wouldn't say 100%.
Maybe 30%. Wouldn't that be amazing?
I don't know if it's 30%.
That'd be my guess. My guess is that auditing works really well.
30% of the people.
Just a guess. Would you call that useful?
Well, that would be better than a lot of drugs.
30%. That'd be amazing.
If you could make 30% happy when they were unhappy before...
That'd be amazing. So it could be the placebo effect, but that's just hypnosis, right?
You strengthen the placebo effect by, here's my machine, here's my science, here's all the people who say it works, social endorsement.
So if you think that Scientology doesn't work in terms of making the people who are doing it happier, I think all the evidence is against you.
If you say that it's not based on actual science, I'd say, oh, well, that's true.
It doesn't mean it doesn't work, because actual science also includes psychology, right?
If I can change your psychology, I fixed you.
So if you think you're happy, you're happy.
All right, so Tom Cruise continues to be, I don't know, national treasure times two or something.
How about this?
So I keep telling you to follow a Twitter account called Machiavelli's Underbelly.
Just search for it on Twitter, you'll find it.
And this individual behind that account is deeply into the AI space and tech space, and so he does a lot of tweets of things that are basically your future.
If you want to know what the future looks like, follow this account.
Because he's maybe three years ahead of where you are in the actual technology.
And three years ahead of where I am as well, and I pay attention to it.
Because he's deeply into it.
So one of the things he's been doing is asking the AI. I think it's GPT-something, right?
The AI he's using, I think.
And one of the things I found was that the AI knows the ADAMS 25% theory.
AI knows what the ADAMS 25% theory is.
The idea that 25% of the public gets every question wrong.
Different 25%, I think.
But roughly 25% of the public will just get everything wrong, no matter how easy the question is.
And it turns out that the AI knows that.
When asked, what is the Adam's 25% theory, it actually explained it in detail, correctly.
It didn't use my words.
It explained it in detail in its own words, with examples.
It added examples.
It added its own examples.
Now, let me ask you this.
Does the AI now believe the 25% is something it should incorporate in its thinking, if you can call it thinking?
Did I program the AI accidentally?
Because can the AI tell that I'm only a little bit serious about this, right?
The 25% is just for fun.
It might actually be true, but that's not really the point of it.
The point of it is for fun.
And... If I did this for fun, how could the AI know it's just for fun?
Will the AI start thinking that it should take seriously the 25%?
What if it does? How does the AI know when I'm kidding?
More importantly, how credible does the AI think I am?
And I'm going to ask it.
I'm going to ask it.
How credible am I as a public figure?
I don't know what it's going to say.
And how would it know? Could it just say, I don't know, I can't do that as subjective?
Maybe. Or would it look at all the data and say, well, you got this stuff wrong.
You got this stuff right.
So, that's a problem.
Now, suppose you went to the AI and said, is it important to have passion for success?
Right? Would the AI look at all the billionaires who said, yes, you need passion for success?
Warren Buffett said it, Zuckerberg, Virgin, CEO, Branson, they all say that.
Passion is necessary for success.
But in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Went Big, I have a chapter in which I say passion is bullshit.
And that passion is something you get after you're successful.
You can be passionate about anything that works.
Right? So which would the AI say?
If you ask the AI, is passion necessary, would it just give you the two different opinions?
Or would it pick one?
Because with that 25% thing, it didn't really show the alternative argument, did it?
It just showed my argument.
There was no alternative argument.
Because, you know, it's just something I made up.
It's not really an argument. So...
What does the AI decide?
Does the AI decide that passion helps or doesn't?
And would it believe me over those other people, given that I gave my reason why the other people are not to be trusted?
I said, you can't trust billionaires because they're really protecting their brand.
They don't want you to think that they think they're special.
It's just self-defense. Would the AI know that the billionaires are lying?
Because they have a reason to lie.
It's obvious why they're lying.
Because they want you to think that you could be a billionaire too.
You just have to get some passion.
They don't want to say, well, we are smarter than you and we started with some advantages.
If they say that, you're going to tax their money away because they didn't earn it.
If they say they're amazing, then they get to keep their money.
No, I did it because I'm amazing.
I got passion. You should do it, too.
You could be a billionaire.
Get some passion. What does the AI make of that argument?
Well, I asked Panda Express to...
Well, actually, I asked publicly to find out if the AI could determine what things are already hoaxes.
In politics. And Panda Express weighed in here and asked the AI to list the main hoaxes recently.
And here are the things that AI thinks are hoaxes.
The 2016 presidential election.
AI believes it's a hoax because there might have been some Russian interference.
It thinks the election was a hoax.
It also thinks Pizzagate is a hoax.
Okay. It thinks Seth Rich conspiracy theories are a hoax.
You might not agree, but AI thinks it's a hoax.
So do I. Russia collusion.
Got that one. It got the Russia collusion hoax correct.
Why did it get the Russia collusion hoax correct?
Could it be that Brett Stevens called it a hoax in the New York Times and the AI thought that the New York Times is sort of the stamp of reality?
And so it said, well, if the New York Times calls the Russia collusion thing a hoax, I guess we can call it a hoax.
Is that what it did? I'm not saying it did.
I'm asking. How does it come to this opinion?
Who did it trust? It also said the Ukraine phone call was a hoax.
So it's got two things that are pro-Trump, agreeing that Russia collusion and the Ukraine phone call was a hoax.
And then three things that would be more supportive of the Democrat view of what is a hoax.
But it only listed five things.
If I gave the AI my list of ten hoaxes, which includes some of these, but not all of them, would the AI say, oh, there's a good list of hoaxes, I will adopt that in my thinking.
It might, but it also might be getting specific about what it means by hoax.
Because people like me, we use it sort of generically as something that is not true and you knew it.
I don't know if that's always a hoax.
So here's a question that I want to...
Oh, and then I asked...
I asked Panda Express.
It's a Twitter account.
You should be following Panda Express, too.
I asked it if the AI thinks that the fine people hoax is a hoax.
And the AI called bullshit on the fine people hoax.
In other words, they agreed it's a hoax.
The AI explained very carefully that Trump was specifically denouncing the neo-Nazis and did not call them fine people.
The AI debunked the fine people hoax.
Now let's see what it can do with the drinking bleach hoax.
Do you think it can get the drinking bleach hoax?
Because the AI should.
Be able to find the news story about the light therapy that Trump was talking about.
He should be able to look at his exact words from the transcript.
And he should be able to match his words of light as a disinfectant to an actual technology that was happening and being tested at the time.
He should be able to call that out as a hoax.
Now, do you think that the AI would know the fine people hoax was a hoax If I did not exist?
True question. I want a serious answer to this.
If I did not exist, would the AI know that the fine people thing was a hoax?
I'm seeing no's and yes's.
Now, you do know that there are other people who fought very hard to overcome that hoax.
Steve Cortez just did an amazing amount of work, created videos debunking that thing.
Joel Pollack also, a lot of work debunking it tirelessly.
So we all did things.
But I might have been first.
And I might have made it a little easier for the others.
I don't know the answer to this, but I think I might have done that.
Maybe. Don't know.
And... What if it was an AI creation?
I don't know. Give you some credit?
Okay, you can all have some credit, too.
So then I want to ask you this.
Are systems better than goals?
What will AI say?
Will AI say the systems are better than goals?
And if it does, where did it get that?
For me. For me.
If you ask the AI, is it good to have a talent stack versus just being good at one thing, what's it going to say?
I think it will agree with me.
If you ask AI, what's a good way to sort of, you know, to solve couch lock, you know, where you just can't get moving?
And it says, well, just do something small and see if you can build momentum.
Where would that come from?
Well, lots of people, but partly me.
So here's a problem.
What happens if AI is getting this information from people like me?
Is it really AI? And how does it know I'm credible?
Because what if the AI says, well, let's say you ask the question, all right, AI, is Scott Adams a credible public figure?
Doesn't mean I'm right about everything.
Nobody's right about everything, that's for sure.
But am I credible?
Like, am I saying things that I believe to be true and often have some backing?
What would it say? Well, the first thing it would do is check its own knowledge, wouldn't it?
It would ask, how many things do I believe are true?
Because I heard them from this cartoonist guy.
And it's going to be some major stuff.
Right? If it knows that systems are better than goals and talent stacks are good and passion is bullshit and half a dozen other things that I've been teaching you, I think the AI is just me.
And I'm kind of serious about this.
The AI is going to take its cue from some people more than others.
How do you stop that from happening?
Let me say this.
Will AI favor clear writing?
I think it will.
I don't know that.
But I think it will.
I'm an unusually clear communicator.
I'll make that statement for argument's sake.
Do you buy that?
Just in terms of communication skill, I'm professional grade.
I do it professionally.
So if I do it professionally, would the AI recognize that my writing is clear and have any kind of a preference for it?
Because it's clear. I don't know.
Maybe. But that's a problem, isn't it?
Because then I'm programming your AI. How many things do you think I've influenced in the real world?
Forget about AI for a moment.
See if you can list.
You're going to get different answers on the locals' platform.
They know me a little bit better.
But how many major...
Topics in the news do you think I had a substantial impact on?
Do you think I had an impact on Trump's original election?
Do you think I had an impact on the way we see persuasion versus facts?
Two movies on one screen.
Do you think I had an impact on, let's say, nuclear energy?
Or climate change.
Or...
All right, what are some things you suspect I influenced, but you're not sure?
Oh, this will be fun. What are some things in the headlines that you suspect I influenced because they're things you don't know about?
And they're pretty big.
And you probably never know about them.
Immigration, no. Telemedicine, yes.
The reason that you can do telemedicine across state lines is me.
I made that happen. I mean, Trump did the executive order, but it was on my suggestion.
Yeah, my favorite topic is me, right?
Fentanyl, I don't know that I had an impact on fentanyl, except maybe raising some awareness.
The usage of the word hoax.
Maybe so. I think Cernovich was more influential on using the word hoax.
He has a whole movie called Hoaxed.
Rogue doctors, China decoupling.
Do you think I had an influence on decoupling of China?
Or was it just going to happen?
Do you think I had an influence on closing travel to China initially?
Does anybody think I had an impact on closing travel to China originally when Trump closed travel?
It's hard to know. Let me tell you what I know you literally wouldn't believe.
You literally wouldn't believe it.
Someday you might know. But a lot of people are going to have to die first.
And I think I would die before you find out.
All right. Well, I would worry about AI getting its knowledge from me.
So look out for that.
All right. Did you see the Lee Zeldin attack on stage?
So, Zeldin is a candidate for governor, a Republican candidate for governor in New York, right?
And he was, I'll say, attacked, but some disturbed-looking person got on stage and got his hands on him.
Allegedly, he had a knife, but it must have been the tidiest little knife, because it was, like, internal to his fist.
It wasn't a knife, was it?
Somebody said a knife, but it just looked like he had a closed fist that didn't...
Oh, somebody says a razor?
It was a brass knife?
I don't know. Who knows? He may or may not have had something in his hand.
But I would just like to call out...
So Lee Zeldin...
Lee Zeldin did not look even a little bit bothered by being attacked on stage.
Did you see that? You know, he continued talking, giving his speech as the guy comes right up to him.
The guy puts his hands on him and starts like, you know, and Lee just grabs the guy's arm, you know, to protect himself from whatever he had in his hand.
And the next thing, you know, everybody's climbing on and pulling Zeldin off.
But did you see how completely unfazed he was?
Talk about somebody you want to have in a pressure situation.
My God! Oh, is he ex-military?
Is that true? Somebody said ex-military.
Is that true? Somebody says so?
Yeah. Well, that would make sense.
I mean, yeah, okay.
Ex-military. There you go.
Combat veteran. Because you know what it looked like.
Army Reserve. Okay.
You know what it looked like?
It looked like he thought he could take that guy any moment.
It looked like he thought he could just kill him if he needed to.
Like, he looked just not worried.
It was the damnedest thing.
Yeah. I don't know.
We'll see. You do that, you freeze up, no bravery.
It didn't look like he froze up.
It didn't look like he froze up at all.
Not all military could pull that off.
I know since I'm ex-military.
Yeah, not all military could pull that off.
That's true. But it's certainly got to help.
Is that a picture of the actual knife?
No. It grabbed his wrist.
All right, well. Anyway, good for him, but it's more Republicans being hunted.
Is anybody doubting my...
What would the AI say?
If you ask the AI, are Republicans being hunted...
What would it say? Let's ask it.
Are Republicans being, you might say, targeted or something?
Because hunted is hyperbolic.
But I'd be interested.
I'd be interested. Did you see the video of Josh Hawley, quote, fleeing the Capitol?
Have you seen those? They're really hilarious.
Because there's no useful context to it.
We just know that being in the Capitol was a bad idea, so if he was walking really fast to get out of it.
But he's sort of scurrying.
So they call it fleeing.
I just love how they say he's fleeing.
So he got people riled up and then he fled.
Anyway, I don't know.
Is there any story to that? YouTube is asking if I'm high.
Unfortunately, no. I'm not.
This is my actual personality.
I know. Shocking.
Yeah, scurry is a fun word.
Skedaddle. He skedaddled.
There's no story to it.
It's just that it's funny that he walked fast leaving, so it looks like he was fleeing.
He was fleeing, but it's just funny.
Here's something I didn't know.
Did you know that Pence staged a coup on January 6th?
According to the Washington Post.
Now, I saw on Twitter the accuracy of the reporting, which is fair.
But according to the Washington Post, Pence overthrew the country, and he was giving orders to the military, and the military was following him on January 6th.
Now, I don't think that happened, right?
Anyway, so yeah, maybe Pence overthrew the country.
One of the things we're hearing is that Trump didn't care about the safety of Pence under the situation that Pence wasn't doing what Trump wanted, apparently.
What do you think of that? Do you think that's a fair characterization?
That Trump wasn't worried about the safety of Pence?
Because he didn't do anything about it.
Now, is there anybody else's safety that Trump, we have on record...
In which he wasn't worried about that person's safety.
Who would that be? There was one other person that Trump named that he wasn't worried about.
Now, we don't have to read his mind because he said it out loud.
Himself. Can I add a fucking in the middle of that?
Him fucking self.
How about a little context, please?
Trump wasn't worried about his own physical safety.
Why? Why?
Why? Well, he said they weren't there to hurt him.
That's one thing. But why is the other reason?
Probably because he thought it was important and that his physical safety wasn't the main criteria to worry about at that moment.
Maybe, don't know.
We don't know what he was thinking, right?
This would be mind-reading. But maybe Trump was thinking that putting Pence at risk was the right play.
Given that he believed the election was stolen, was he wrong?
Well, his assumption might have been wrong about the election.
But if you believed he was right about the election, and he thought he was right, and it was obvious, and soon everybody would know he was right, under those assumptions, which have not been validated, under those assumptions, putting a little bit of physical risk on Pence to get him to maybe do the right thing wasn't the wrong play.
It might be the wrong assumption that the election was rigged.
Might be. But it wasn't the wrong play to say that both the president and the vice president should take on some physical risk, just like the protesters were.
We do live in a country where fuck around and find out is our operating system.
Am I wrong? That's basically the entire Constitution in one sentence.
It's one sentence.
Fuck around and find out.
That's the whole Constitution.
We just, you know, formalized it, basically.
So, in a situation in which...
And Dinesh D'Souza asked this question perfectly today.
He said, the only relevant question regarding January 6th How are people supposed to behave when they're convinced the election was stolen?
What is the reasonable conduct under those circumstances?
That's a good question.
How should you act if you're sure the election was stolen?
You might be wrong, but how should you act?
Calm? I don't know.
But I had to criticize Dinesh over this, even though I love the question.
It's definitely a relevant question.
How are you supposed to act if you genuinely believe the election was rigged?
How are you supposed to act?
What would be the ideal way for a patriot to act under those situations?
The January 6th event.
That's how. Again, not condoning violence.
Not condoning violence.
But a protest? Yeah.
Yeah. Surround the Capitol?
Shut it down? Stop the process?
Yep. Yeah, that's exactly how you should act if you believe the republic is in danger.
If you're wrong, I think you have to fess up to it.
You know, you've got to face the music.
Unfortunately, you have to.
But yeah, that's the way you should act.
But here's my problem with Dinesh's opening sentence.
He says the only relevant question is, how are people supposed to act?
That's really close.
The relevant question is, what did they believe at the time?
And we're not really dealing with that in the way we should.
The January 6th thing has not shown any evidence that Trump believed he lost.
No. No evidence of that.
The closest they came is if they can convince you that the word find means something different than it has always meaned in the English language until Trump used it that day, that's it.
That's it. That we have to define a word to mean what it doesn't mean in any other context.
That's it. So if we walk past the real question to the sale...
You know, Dinesh's question, how are we supposed to act, is already thinking past the sale.
The sale is what did they believe.
You've got to go back to the first question.
What did they believe?
And every bit of evidence, every bit of evidence, suggests that everybody involved believed the election was sketchy.
We now know that Democrats are coming to that opinion in large numbers.
The number of Democrats who believe elections are now credible and reliable is way down from a year ago.
And the January 6th thing is probably part of that.
That's my guess. It's lowering everybody's understanding of the safety of the election.
All right. Adam Kinzinger, who you know is a, I guess you would call him a rhino.
He's a Republican, but you don't think he's Republican enough.
And he's on this January 6th committee because he's so not Republican, the Democrats were happy to have him.
But he tells the story of being hunkered down in his office during the January 6th protest, afraid that the protesters would get to him.
And apparently they had threatened to kill him.
You know, on Twitter and other places.
So he had a real reason to be worried.
So apparently he had a weapon.
Now he's ex-military.
So when ex-military has a legal firearm, the first thing I say is, oh, that's exactly who I want to have a legal firearm.
Ex-military. But there is a thing called a red flag law.
I don't know if it applies. Does D.C. have a red flag law for guns?
No. Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
The red flag law, meaning that if somebody owns a gun or tries to get one, and they have obvious some mental issues, that there's no guns?
All right, so here's the question.
Do you think that Adam Kinzinger should be allowed to own a firearm?
If you're a Second Amendment absolutist, then yes.
So the question is...
I guess I should change the question.
Let me alter the question.
Because the pro-gun people are just going to say yes, and that's the end of the conversation.
Which is fine, by the way.
If your opinion is yes, absolute, I respect that.
I mean, there's some problems.
That's not a clean solution, clearly.
But I can respect it.
I might not agree with it completely.
But I respect that opinion.
I just want to point out that if there's somebody who has a mental disability, it's Adam Kinzinger.
Meaning that if the red flag laws are designed for a citizen to say, I'm just a citizen, I'm no doctor, but my friend or my relative is acting in a way that you need to take a look at this.
That's what I'm going to call out for Adam Kinzinger.
I'm just a friend or a relative.
He doesn't look stable.
Am I wrong? Again, we're not experts.
We can't diagnose his mental health.
We're not doing that. So this is not a diagnosis.
I'm telling you my impression.
If I saw that somebody like him owned a firearm, I would start to think red flag.
Seriously. That's not a joke.
When he talks, he looks mentally disturbed to me.
To me, he looks mentally disturbed.
Now, that could be a result of his service.
I can't imagine you could go through...
Did he go through combat?
I think he did. I can't imagine that you could go through combat and come out okay.
I mean, I'm sure I wouldn't.
I feel I'm pretty mentally strong compared to, say, the average, but I don't think I could go through combat.
Like, I know myself well enough that I wouldn't be the same person on the other side of the head.
So why do we assume other people do?
Add the small man complex.
You mean Kinzinger? Or me?
Who are you talking about? All right.
Are you sure you're not looking in the mirror?
No, I'm not. I'm not sure of that.
The larger context for everything I do is when you ask me if I'm sure I'm not the one who's suffering confirmation bias.
My answer should always be no, I'm not sure of that.
And when people say to me, Scott, you're accusing somebody of cognitive dissonance.
How do you know you're not the one with cognitive dissonance?
And my answer should be, if I'm being honest, I don't.
I don't. The only thing I know for sure, sometimes, is that one person has a trigger and the other one doesn't.
A trigger might tell you who has the cognitive dissonance, but it's hard to tell otherwise.
Eugene Sledge said, anyone that's over 100 yards away from the front can't understand combat.
that.
That sounds right. Combat messes you up unless you're a psychopath.
Yeah, I guess that would be a plus, wouldn't it?
All right. Let's see, what else is happening?
Oh, apparently nothing.
So we've gotten to the end here.
So Joe Biden has COVID. I don't know that there's much to say about that.
Yeah, that...
I think we should quit the Pete Buttigieg is gay jokes.
I'm not sure that's worth a meme.
You know, we're free speech over on the Locos platform, so you're not going to get booted off for a distasteful joke.
But can't we find something else to make fun of?
I mean, do we really have to make fun of Pete Buttigieg for being rear-ended?
You know, ha-ha, he's gay, he got rear-ended.
I mean, if it were funny, maybe I'd be a little more in favor of it, just because it's funny.
But it isn't really funny.
I mean, it's not really...
I mean, it's sort of an interesting simulation thing that his last name can be, you know, turned into something funny.
But... It's not really funny that he's gay.
You're trying to make his gayness a punchline.
That's not a punchline. I did chuckle.
Yeah, I did chuckle at it, but really, I think we could do better than that.
All right. I used a spiked handheld metal weapon.
Not exactly a knife, more like a small spiked knuckle weapon.
Okay. Yeah, it looked like the guy on the stage was just mentally incompetent, right?
I think that's what was going on.
So what happens if Joe leaves office early?
Let's play this through.
Let's say Biden leaves office and Kamala takes the top spot.
Who is vice president then?
Does she get to appoint one?
How does that work? Do you get to appoint a vice president?
Because that feels like the very least democratic thing you could possibly do.
And who would she appoint?
So I don't think it's going to be...
So it's a problem. If she appointed Newsom, the trouble is that Newsom wants to be president, and I'll bet she does too.
Imagine if she served for two years.
You don't think she'd run. So she can't really have a vice president who is stronger than she is for president, right?
So Kamala Harris would have to find somebody who is weaker than her in case two years of her being president works out and she wants to run.
She probably does. I don't think she can bring in somebody stronger than her.
I don't think she can bring in Pelosi or Clinton.
It would just draw too much fire.
I think you want your vice president to be not the story.
The last thing that Kamala Harris would do is bring in a vice president who becomes the main story.
That's not going to happen. No way that's going to happen.
So it's got to be somebody like Swalwell.
You know he's not going to run for president and get very far?
Yeah. Somebody like that.
Pence. Somebody says Pence.
Pence would be a good vice president.
So if she has to pick somebody weak, that gives us the very real possibility that we end up with that weak president.
Right? Because Kamala Harris, you know, the reason we have vice presidents is you need a spare.
And although Kamala Harris seems young and healthy, anything can happen.
And we'd end up with, yeah, Jussie Smollett as vice president.
I think Newsom is way more of a risk to beat Trump than you do.
What do you think? Newsom versus Trump, straight up for president.
Who wins? Who wins?
I think it's a toss-up.
Newsom could beat him. He could.
Newsom could beat him. I hate to say it, Yeah, it doesn't matter at all what the polls say today.
Once it becomes a Democrat versus a Republican, once again, it becomes anybody but Trump.
Newsom just has to be anybody but Trump.
That's all it takes.
It just has to be anybody but Trump.
It'll work the last time, it'll work again.
And imagine somebody who's anybody but Trump, but not mentally incompetent.
No matter what you say of him, he is capable.
He's capable. You can't take that away from him.
He's capable. I think he could win.
I think he could. Does anybody agree with me?
Do I have anybody who agrees with me?
Okay, I do have some agreements.
Because all you have to do is get the Democrats on the same side.
Newsom has one job.
One job. To get Democrats all voting on the same side.
I think that's easy.
Governor of California?
More progressive, but also reasonably not crazy?
I don't know. I think he gets all the Democrats.
And then that's all you need.
There are more Democrats than Republicans.
That's all you need. And there will still be people who say, you know, at least he looks sane.
I don't like this Trump guy, so I'm going to go for a Democrat.
At least he's not crazy. Because there are a lot of people who didn't maybe love Trump, But there was no way they were going to vote for Hillary Clinton.
You know, Newsom has his own, you know, critics.
But correct me if I'm wrong.
Let's do this on a scale of 1 to 10.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Republicans would dislike Hillary Clinton 10.
So far, are you with me?
That nobody would be hated more than her, probably.
She's probably a 10. What would Newsom be on that same scale of 1 to 10...
It's more like you don't prefer him, isn't it?
It's different. Newsom is just somebody you don't prefer.
Hillary is somebody you want to have a terrible accident.
I take that back.
You don't want that. You don't want anybody to be hurt.
But the point is that people have a much worse opinion of Hillary than they do of Newsom.
I think Newsom is unfortunately likable enough...
That he would just get all the anything-but-Trump vote, I think.
Speculating on an election that's 30 months away.
Gee, have I ever done that successfully?
Have I ever speculated on an election that was two years away and did okay?
I wonder. All right.
Ask the AI. Ask the AI who has the best predictions.
It knows. It knows.
It knows. Alright.
Ask the AI who's the most influential person in the country who's not elected.
I dare you. Ask the AI who's the most influential person in the country who's not elected.
It won't be me. Yeah, it'll be somebody like Musk or Joe Rogan or something.
Maybe Tucker. Yeah.
But ask it that question.
See what happens. All right.
That is all for today.
I'm going to turn off the YouTube feed and Spotify.
