Episode 1815 Scott Adams: The January 6 Hearings Have Cleared Trump. Will News Report It That Way?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Hiring Nazis to support your political opponent
J6 produced no evidence of insurrection
J6 Democrats doubling down
Recession definition modified
WSJ weird hit piece on Elon Musk
Dave the Black engineer colorized White today
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
The thing that's going to get your day off to a good start is the positive vibe that you can't find anywhere else.
Today's the day that you're going to feel a little bit better about, well, just about everything.
Because that's the way it goes.
On Coffee with Scott Adams.
And all you need to guarantee this good day is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or Chelsea Stein, a canteen jug or flask.
It's a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
That's the dopamine hit of the day.
Somebody's showing me a meme of a stamp tramp of the simultaneous sip in a text.
I don't think that's real.
But, you ready?
Go. Oh, yeah.
Yep. I don't know about you, but I felt it.
I would like to make a media recommendation.
Recommendation for some content.
You need to watch the Bill Burr stand-up special on Netflix.
He's got several of them.
It's the newest one from Red Rocks.
I'm about three-quarters through it, and oh my God, is it good.
It's so good.
There are points within it where he's just pissing off the audience, and you're not sure he could ever recover, and then he does, and then it looks like he couldn't possibly recover from the thing he's saying now, And that he does.
It's really watching him fly that close to the sun and not get burned up.
It's really amazing.
He goes after everything and everybody.
I think the real secret of it is that he is unrelenting.
I think if he went at these topics in a half-assed way, it wouldn't work.
But the fact that he's just so completely all in, you just say, all right, all right.
Just entertain us.
Did you see the alleged Nazis who were protesting in favor of DeSantis in Florida?
Yeah. Allegedly they were pro-DeSantis Nazis.
Yeah. Now, and of course the Democrats fell for it.
Do you know what the budget is to get some fake Nazis, or even some real ones, to demonstrate in favor of your political opponent to make your opponent look bad?
What do you suppose would be the budget for that sort of thing?
Real expensive? Pretty sure you could get it under $1,000.
Yeah, you could get several people for about $1,000 probably.
Yeah, somewhere in that neighborhood.
If you paid $5,000, you probably should have negotiated better.
But for a very low price, you can get people to dress up as Nazis, or actual Nazis, you know, neo-Nazis or whatever, and they'll stand there and hold a sign for your opponent.
Now, I have a suggestion.
Since you know this Nazi trick is going to be used over and over against the Republicans, The Republicans should form, or maybe, you know, not the politicians, but maybe some PAC or interest group, form a Nazi dancing troupe.
People who dress like Nazis, but they present themselves as entertainment.
So they're not trying to pretend to be Nazis.
They're only actors who are telling you they're actors, and it's a Nazi dancing troupe.
And then you send them to every event that the Democrats do.
Now, even though they would be clearly labeled as entertainment, they would not be trying to present themselves as actual neo-Nazis.
How many times do the Democrats have to see the dancing Nazis attend their events before they feel uncomfortable with the whole idea?
I think the Republicans could completely take this ridiculous political trick off the map by going really hard at it themselves.
Just have a Nazi dancing trip at every single Democrat.
They'd have signs, and they'd have really good costumes, like actual World War II Nazi costumes and shit.
Maybe they'd do the goose step.
Maybe some kind of a goose step dance.
Like Mel Brooks, yes. Very much like the Mel Brooks play.
Alright. I'd like to remind you of batshit crazy things I've said that ended up being actually the general understanding in the country after a certain point.
Now you can probably come up with several examples yourselves of things I've said or predicted that were just batshit crazy.
And then you wait a year or two, or maybe several, and it's the standard of thinking.
Here's another one. Nobody understands economics.
Do you remember the first time I said that?
And you probably heard it, and you're like, okay, that's a little hyperbole.
Like, what's that mean?
Or are you talking about something specific?
Now it's the headline.
The headline in CNN is that the economists don't understand the economy.
It's the fucking headline.
How many people thought it was ridiculous when I said that the experts don't understand the economy?
It sounded ridiculous, didn't it?
But now it's common understanding.
How many times have I done that?
Do you remember in 2015 I told you that Trump was persuasive?
And do you remember the response I got to that?
He's not persuasive!
Come on! He has what?
13% support even among Republicans.
Right? 13%.
Come on! He's anything but persuasive.
He's a big crazy clown.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
And now what's the headline today?
The headline is that Trump is so persuasive that he may have accidentally triggered something like an insurrection.
Because he's so persuasive.
And that more than half of the country believes the election was sketchy.
More than half of the country.
That number has never been achieved or even close.
That's all Trump.
That's all Trump.
He has literally proven to be the most persuasive human in modern civilization, I think.
And people laughed at me when I said, you have no idea what's coming here in 2015.
You don't see this coming.
Trust me. I have just the right skill set that I can look through this little window.
There it is. Alright, so nobody understands economics.
Specifically, this is one of those things you can do when you have no shame.
Just try to imagine yourself doing this.
This is something that I did in public, in the most public way I did.
I have a degree in economics, and I have an MBA. And I'm an adult who has lived in the world and watched the news closely for decades.
And the other day I tweeted that I don't understand the unemployment number.
I don't even understand that.
What the hell is going on?
How in the world could the economy be having so many problems and the employment looks great?
Now, many of you said, Scott, Scott, Scott, everybody knows it's because people left the employment pool.
I know that.
That's not the part I don't understand.
I get that the employment is only of the people who are looking for a job.
So fewer people say they're looking for one.
Well, you've got full employment.
Yeah, I get that. That doesn't come close to explaining what we're seeing.
If that explained it, like fully, it's part of the story, of course.
Of course it's part. But there's something else going on here.
And I don't know what it is, and I have a hypothesis.
And I would expect to win the Nobel for economics for the following hypothesis.
And by the way, I'm not even kidding.
I'm not joking. I'm going to add a hypothesis to the body of economics that I don't think you've seen, That will explain all the things that don't make sense right now.
It goes like this.
Economics assumes a, let's say, a small range of change.
Economics assumes that the world changes at a somewhat predictable, regular pace, or at least it's the same as it was the last ten years.
Maybe modern days change faster than old days, but the last ten years would be a pretty good proxy for change.
So everything that you know about economics, every common assumption, is assumed that the base of all of our assumptions about everything stay about the same, And that economics is just running on top of those assumptions.
But the pandemic...
And I'm going to give Naval Ravikant the credit for...
I think the first person who observed this.
His prediction was that the pandemic would make everything that was going to happen anyway happen faster.
And we're seeing it, right?
So right now we have legacy systems...
That are operating at the same time as the replacement system for a short period of time.
What happens to employment numbers when you still have the old system, but you're bringing up the new system?
You need twice as many people because you still have the old system, but you've now added the new system.
For example, before the pandemic, mostly you got your food from the grocery store.
Is the grocery store still there?
Yes, it is. The grocery store is still there.
Still employees, about the same number of people.
But on top of that, because it was so hard to go anywhere during the pandemic, the food delivery business exploded.
So now you have the entire grocery industry just the way it was, but on top of it you have what I think will be the long-term replacement industry, which is the food comes to you.
Do you buy it? So that would be an explanation of why things could be falling apart.
We could have recession, inflation.
We could have supply chain problems.
We could have every problem that you're seeing.
But at the same time, we're in this weird situation where the pandemic said, wait, everything you're doing is fucked up.
You better start putting the new plan in place right away.
And then we did. We did.
So at least part of it, I think, is the rapid acceleration of the baseline world.
What do you think? Will anybody accept that?
And will you nominate me for the Nobel for economics?
Do I have to do some math to get that Nobel?
I want the Nobel. I already invented...
By the way, how many of you know I invented the concept of the Confusopoly?
Which is now standard part of economic thought.
How many of you knew that?
That I'm actually part of the economic literature?
Now, a confusopoly is a word I invented years ago, and it refers to the fact that businesses such as, let's say, cell phone companies and insurance companies, banks to some extent, lots of businesses, the reason that they don't need to compete with each other Is that they've made their products too complicated for you to know who's doing a better job.
Imagine going to get your cell phone if you knew for sure which was the better deal.
You would just walk in and get the better deal.
Because cell phone coverage is kind of like every other cell phone coverage.
But you don't. When you go to buy a cell phone, it's like, well, this one's a plan, but this one has rollover minutes, but this one I can add a family member.
You have no way to compare it.
That's a confusopoly.
The way economics was supposed to work is that the free market would drive all the weak competitors out of business, and eventually you'd have one strong competitor.
But that's not happening.
You have lots of competition, insurance and everything, and the way they compete is they confuse the consumer so the consumer can't tell which product is better.
And I believe that they do it intentionally.
Meaning that they're all quite intentionally making sure that nobody can compare their products.
I mean, I know that's the case.
I'm not guessing.
That's definitely the case. So, before I explain that, that concept didn't exist in economics.
But if you Google it now, Confuseopoly, you'll see it's a standard concept.
So how many of you thought that I would be famous for adding a concept to economics?
See, you didn't see that coming, did you?
But it happened. All right.
Rasmussen did some polling on American voters and energy independence and found out that only 19% of those polled oppose a policy of encouraging U.S. energy independence.
In other words, 81% would like more of a Trump approach, you know, going for energy independence, and only 19%, and remember, This includes Democrats.
Only 19% of the public wants something like what we have now, where we're not encouraging domestic energy.
And let's see.
53% of voters, and remember, this includes Democrats and independents and everybody else, Trust Republicans more to encourage U.S. oil and gas production.
Well, that makes sense, right? But why is it only 53%?
If you took the assumption, even if you don't assume that you want that, even if you said to yourself, I don't want more domestic energy production, I don't know why you'd say that, but suppose you did, wouldn't you still at least recognize that Republicans would do more of it?
How could you be so dumb that you think the Republicans and the Democrats would be roughly the same when it comes to encouraging domestic energy production?
That's a pretty weird opinion.
I mean, it would fly against literally 100% of all reporting from both sides.
18% of the public thinks there's not much difference between the two parties on the issue of energy.
18%. Feels a little low.
That's a number I would have expected closer to, I don't know, maybe north of 20%.
Closer to a quarter.
I would have expected that closer to a quarter.
Just saying. All right.
And 71% of likely U.S. voters think the U.S. government should encourage increased oil and gas production in the U.S., 71%.
How in the world does a Democrat get elected president in this atmosphere?
There's a really dangerous situation shaping up here, and I think you all see it, right?
Everything in the news and the polling suggests that there's no way a Democrat could win the presidency against anybody, basically.
What if they do?
What if they do?
I don't know. I mean, if it happened in this atmosphere where every indicator is pointing toward, you know, a strong Republican win, if it doesn't happen and all these indicators stay so strongly in the other direction, that could be a problem.
That could be a problem.
So we'll see if that happens.
So, as you know, the January 6th hearings have completely cleared Trump of any criminal behavior by showing that there's no evidence of it.
They have completely eviscerated the encouraged and insurrection narrative, completely gone, because I don't think anybody believes that there was a planned insurrection in which Don Jr.
wasn't let in on it, or Ivanka.
To me, that's just funny.
Not only did they disprove their own contention, that there was some planned insurrection, but they disproved it in a way that's actually funny.
It's like, hmm, really?
Somebody should have checked to see if Don Jr.
was at least informed about this alleged insurrection.
Because if he had not been, and the evidence clearly shows that he didn't know anything about any planned insurrection...
There's nothing else to talk about.
None of the other evidence is even worth looking at.
Once you see that his own family didn't know anything about it.
That's sort of it. And then you say, but, but, but, but, but, Scott, but, but, but, what about all those people in the administration who are helping him try to game the rules to take over?
What about them? To which I say, what about them?
Do you notice anything in common with those people who have been named, who are like trying to find some scheme for you to keep power?
You know, playing with the electoral, the electors and stuff like that.
They're all fucking lawyers.
They're all lawyers. Don't you think the Democrats owe it to the United States to say, well, there's one thing we should point out.
That the people who did seem to be supporting the idea that there might be some legal challenge here were all lawyers, and that's what they do.
It's not their job to tell you what Trump should do ethically or morally or what's right for the country.
They are there to say, is there a legal argument, yes or no?
And they did their job.
You could argue they did it well.
Because if the boss who's paying them says, is there a legal way that I can find this?
Their job is to go find the best argument to support your preferences.
They came up with the best argument they could, but it was weak.
Would you all agree with that?
The best argument they came up with about changing electors or whatever was a little weak.
I mean, it didn't even convince Pence.
If he can't convince Pence, that's a weak argument.
But that doesn't mean they shouldn't have done that.
And it doesn't mean that Trump shouldn't have asked.
Because in the process of leadership, you ask all the questions.
In fact, one of the biggest, I guess, criticisms of Trump is we keep hearing stories where he asks crazy shit, like, can you stop a hurricane with a nuclear weapon?
I doubt he ever said that, by the way.
I don't think he ever actually said that.
But what was the other one?
Can you nuke, or no, can we send a missile into the cartels, basically?
Can we attack the cartels?
Now, the answer he got back was, no, don't do that.
I think that's the wrong answer.
I think he could attack them.
You see that he always asks the edge question.
If you're a leader and you're not asking the edge question, you're not doing your job.
You need a president who says, all right, here are all the standard things we've talked about.
Now, you better tell me why I can't do a non-standard thing.
Why can't I do something outside this box of options?
Tell me, if I go outside this box, tell me what's going to happen.
That's what Trump does all the time.
His most basic way of managing is, okay, now I'm thinking of something that's outside that box.
How much trouble would I get in if I do that?
It is the question you're supposed to ask.
If the answer comes back, if you get outside this box, you're going to get creamed.
And then he says, okay, thank you.
And then he stays in his box.
Wasn't that exactly what you want?
Somehow the Democrats have made...
Good, basic leadership, which is asking all the questions, the questions inside the box, but importantly, the ones outside the box.
Those might be the important ones.
And every time they describe Trump doing exactly what I want my leader to do, as if it's a mistake, I always say the same thing.
Do Democrats know anything about leadership?
It's as if they don't even know what it is.
Like it's some weird concept, right?
Yeah. They don't understand human motivation.
If you don't understand human motivation, and you can see that in a number of examples of the systems they prefer.
If you don't understand human motivation, how could you possibly understand leadership?
Right? Those two are linked.
There's no such thing as leadership without a big variable about human motivation.
Because that's what the leader tweaks.
That's what they work on.
They work on your motivation to motivate you to do what they want.
All right. So now that the January 6th hearings have shown that Trump clearly was not trying to do an illegal insurrection, clearly it was not planned, at least there's no evidence of it, and So what are the people who have bet everything on this and now lost the bet because there was nothing there?
How did they act? Did they say, wow, well, we looked, and I'm glad we looked.
There were some flags there.
There were some red flags.
And by the way, I agree there were some red flags.
Would anybody disagree with that?
I do think this was worth looking into.
You know, I had...
I wish it had been done better, you know, in a different way.
But I think the Republicans ended up...
They pursued what I would say is a risky strategy by not supporting the members of the thing.
So, you know, McConnell withdrew their support because they didn't get the people on the committee that they wanted, but those people were also implicated in the actual allegations.
So that was a little gamesmanship, right?
So it was mostly gamesmanship and politics that Mitch McConnell decided not to participate.
So it was a show trial, and then the show showed that Trump basically was not guilty of the primary allegations.
So now they're backing up from, well, we didn't mean he planned an insurrection.
Did it sound like that?
Oh, McCarthy, I'm sorry, let me correct that.
I'm being corrected. It was McCarthy, not McConnell, who pulled out of participating in the hearings.
So, did you all get that correction?
It wasn't McConnell.
But whenever I see a clever political thing, I think I'm biased toward thinking it was McConnell.
I mean, you can hate that fucker as much as you want.
But he knows how to do this stuff.
Same with Pelosi, right?
No matter what you think of Pelosi, don't you ever have this feeling that, God damn it, she does get some stuff done for her side, right?
As old as they are, they do get stuff done, for their team anyway, even if you wish they wouldn't.
So now, since the main insurrection, planning an insurrection thing has been completely debunked, Does the news go back and say, well, we checked it out.
They were serious allegations, and there were some red flags there.
We checked it out. We found nothing.
So let's go on with our lives.
Glad we checked. Is that what they'll say?
No. No, they won't.
They will show you no evidence until you saw it.
Same with Russia collusion.
They will prove by looking for it and not finding it, if you can call that proof.
They will show that there's no evidence whatsoever of their allegations.
And then at the same time, they'll tell you that they found them, and there were plenty of them.
Oh my God, there's so many, I can't even get into them.
And their base will actually believe that.
Now, we don't have to guess if that can happen, because we watched it.
And it's happening right in front of us in real time.
It happened with the Russia collusion.
When it was shown that there was no evidence for Russia collusion, instead of just saying, whoops, you know, there were some signals there, but I'm glad there's none there, glad we checked.
Instead, they made it sound like Russia interference in the election was really sort of the same story, and really it's been proven to be true, so it's really the same as collusion.
And they sold that.
Ask a Democrat if Trump was colluding with Russia, and they'll say yes, and it was shown.
It was proven. And then you ask them, like, what?
And then they'll describe that the Russians had some memes, and that's it.
$100,000 worth of memes that nobody saw.
That's it. And then they'll say that Russia collusion was...
Now, as batshit crazy as that sounds, that's standard cognitive dissonance.
If you didn't know what cognitive dissonance is, that would make no sense to you.
You would think they were lying, right?
Some of them are. But mostly, they actually believe their own story.
Because the brain can't hold the fact that they were that wrong about something that important.
So the brain allows them to be right by just redefining stuff.
Now... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've decided that if America ever split up, you know, we're talking about red state, blue state kind of thing, I don't think it's going to happen, but if it ever did happen, you would have the Republican part of the country would continue to follow the Constitution.
Right? I think that's a fair prediction.
The red part would just say, well, we'll keep the Constitution, this will be the country.
The blue part, I believe, would start a new system They would focus less on the Constitution and more on their primary way of operating, which is to change the definition of normal words until they can put you in jail.
And that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
That they would have a system of governing Of which the operating system, the basic prevailing, you know, the biggest theme that goes across all of it is that they can change the definition of a standard word that's been used forever, and that by changing the definition of that word, they can make you a criminal.
Right? So they can look at Trump and say, all right, we saw you do a bunch of things, and we're going to change the definition of insurrection to be what you're doing there.
That's it. All they did is change the definition of an insurrection to make it look like it fit.
Now, you say to yourself, well, that's a one-off.
That's a one-off, right?
But it isn't.
Because, right, as I'm being prompted in the comments, remember when he talked to Rafsenberger and he said, in the context of an audit, he said you only need to find 11,000 votes to change the outcome.
And the Democrats changed the word find into lie and cheat, which was the opposite of what was in evidence.
What was in evidence is they were talking about an audit.
The person talking believed that the votes had been miscounted and miscounted against him, and that all that Rafsenberger needed to do was find the votes that Trump believed existed and had not been counted.
That's it. Or vice versa, fines that votes were counted that shouldn't have been.
And the Democrats turned that into lying and cheating.
A common word, fined.
And how about protests got turned into insurrection?
And now, believe it or fucking not, they are literally trying to convince you that the standard definition that has served us forever...
The definition of a recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, is no longer the definition of a recession, and that it must be looked at in a holistic way for the first time.
We never did before.
But now they need to change the definition of recession so that the thing we're going to experience and observe with our own eyes and our own bodies isn't what it used to be.
Now it's something else.
And a CNN headline, and I'm not making this up.
This is going to sound like a joke.
This will sound like it came from the Babylon Bee parody website.
Swear to God, I'm not making this up.
An actual fucking headline from CNN today.
This is a CNN headline.
Who decides if the U.S. is in a recession?
eight white economists you've never heard of.
Can you all join me in just a heavy sigh?
I don't even feel like I need to talk about it, do I? Because anything I say, your head is already there.
So join me. I will read it again, and I'd like to get a simultaneous sigh.
This will be our first simultaneous heavy sigh.
And wait for the prompt.
CNN headline. Who decides if the U.S. is in a recession?
eight white economists you've never heard of.
Moving on.
I think I saw this in the Hill, There was some publication.
There was some study that says a new poll.
The majority of Americans say the U.S. government is corrupt.
And almost a third of Americans say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against it.
So one-third of the...
Now remember, that includes Democrats.
So one-third means something like 80% of...
Actually, they had the number.
Some gigantic percent of Republicans, obviously, are saying that.
Now, again, here's the context that the news always leaves out.
When was the last time you were in a group of Republicans who did not say they might have to take up arms against the government?
I think the proper context for a study like this is, and we should note, that 100% of Republicans, 100% of the time, say, we might be getting close to needing to take up arms against our own government.
Again, it's the operating system of Republicans.
It's not a fucking poll.
It's a definition of a Republican.
If I were going to define Republican, You know, like a funny summary?
It would be someone who thinks that at any minute they're going to have to shoot their own government to keep them in line.
Am I wrong? A Republican, by definition, is somebody who thinks at any moment I might need to shoot a government official to keep them in line.
I'm not talking about an insurrection.
I'm talking about keeping the government from abusing you.
There's nothing more basic to the Republican personality than, yeah, I gave my government some power, I'm not comfortable with it, but I did keep one right.
What does a Republican hate worse than giving rights to the government, powers to the government?
Nothing. There's nothing they hate worse than that.
But they did keep one right for themselves, the right to shoot those fucking assholes if they go too far.
I mean, it's really the right to own a gun, but it ends up being the same thing.
So I'm not sure that we should do polls when all you're really doing is finding out the definition of a Republican and reporting it like something changed.
I don't think anything changed.
All right. I would like to thank the January 6th Committee for my victory.
You know, I've been saying since the beginning there's no evidence of Trump forming any kind of an insurrection, but I don't think I could have operated in society successfully unless the hearings had shown me correct.
And now, as Mark Levin has pointed out on his show, I think last night, Mark Levin was saying the same thing I said, which is, um, nothing happened.
There's no evidence whatsoever.
And all the evidence we did get, the stuff that's new, such as the knowledge certain that Don Jr.
didn't know about any insurrection plan, that's for sure.
We now know that there was no evidence and that I've been exonerated by the January 6th committee.
So I would like to thank them all for their service.
I think they have some more. Special thanks to our representatives Kinzinger and Cheney, who, I have to admit, I had a negative initial thought about their participation.
But now that they've exonerated me and President Trump, I would like to thank them for their service, because there were some red flags there.
I think we need to be smarter about agreeing when there's a red flag, but understanding that doesn't mean there's really a crime.
It just means there's something to look into.
I'm kind of glad we looked into the Russia collusion thing, you know, given that, unfortunately, it was an allegation that was out there.
We kind of had to look into it, as much as I hated it.
I respect their service, and thank you for clearing me and exonerating the president, opening up his path to the presidency.
Trump, that is. So I think they've pretty much guaranteed his win.
I don't think Trump could have won without the January 6 hearings.
I think this is the key to his comeback.
And I think that McCarthy not participating...
In the long run, it's going to look like one of the smartest political plays of all times.
Because imagine if the Republicans had participated.
I mean, in a meaningful way, not Kinzinger and Cheney.
If they had participated, it would look like they had to defend themselves.
What does it look like when you don't even bother to defend yourself?
It looks like you didn't need to...
One of the baller plays that your defense attorney can do is to not present a case in rebuttal.
That's like a pretty baller move, if you get away with it.
Basically, the move is, well, you just watched the entire prosecution and they didn't have anything.
I'm not going to waste your time, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, given that right in front of you, you saw that there was no case.
I don't need to present a case that there's no case because the prosecution just did it.
They just did my work for me.
All of their discovery, all of their testimony goes to the innocence of my victim, not my victim, of my client.
And so with respect and with your permission, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'd like to leave this to your decision-making.
I think you've seen enough.
There's nothing I can add to this.
The case is over.
And in effect, that's what McCarthy did.
Now, I don't know if that was his intention or what forces were operating on him, but I'll tell you this...
Probably it had to do with Trump more than McCarthy.
Am I right? Do you think McCarthy made that decision himself?
Or do you think it was Trump?
And if Trump made the decision to not have a defense, and he pulled this off, it's the play of the year.
I don't know. It's premature.
I don't know that Trump was behind it, and I don't know that that's the outcome exactly yet.
But it looks like it. At this point, it looks like he took a very high-risk play, not defending himself, and it worked perfectly.
Because there was no evidence of his crime.
Now, Trump is the only person who could have known that play would work.
Because he's the only person who knows exactly what he did and did not do.
Nobody else knew. Even the people closest to Trump don't know every conversation he's ever had.
Even though I joke that obviously Don Jr.
would have to be in on a coup, even Don Jr.
doesn't know what Trump is doing all day long, who he talked to, what calls him, nobody knows that.
There's literally one person in the world who could have known that not putting on a defense would work.
Only the person who knew he didn't do anything wrong.
He's the only person who could have known that for sure.
And I think this was his play.
And I think it worked.
It looks like it worked.
Now, of course, half the country will say it didn't work and he's been proven guilty because that's the way it works.
But it looks like it worked.
It looks like it worked.
And once again, you'll see that the things have gotten so bad in terms of the gaslighting in this country that we won't know the difference between the thing and the opposite of the thing.
We are observing in real time that there's no evidence for the allegations of a planned insurrection.
We're seeing it right in front of us.
But half of the country will literally look at the same thing you're looking at and say, I saw plenty of evidence.
And so I would offer you, and I tweeted this earlier, if you want to see what cognitive dissonance looks like and practice, this will sound like a joke, but it's not a joke.
You should practice identifying cognitive dissonance in those rare situations where you know you can produce it.
Sometimes it just pops up in the wild.
And you don't know there was any trigger, so you don't know if that's really cognitive dissonance or it's just somebody acting weird.
But if you know you can trigger it, then you get to watch the face, and then you can recognize the look, because there's a look.
The best way I could describe it is a person who looks like their eyes have light and there's some intelligence, they will suddenly turn into an NPC for about half a minute.
So let me give you, this won't help if you're listening on Spotify, but I'm going to give you my visual representation of somebody being triggered into cognitive dissonance.
They'll start like I am.
You can see that I have the light of intelligence in my eyes, I hope, unless I'm an NPC. But it looks like if you looked in my eyes, you'd say, oh, he's thinking, there's stuff going on there.
The moment cognitive dissonance goes in, the eyes change, and they get...
And then things come out of their mouth that seem disconnected with the light of intelligence that used to be in the eyes.
The light of intelligence just clicks off.
Yeah, and you'll see word salad.
You'll see word salad.
You'll see anger. You'll see completely irrational arguments that something proves something that doesn't even make sense.
And shark eyes, somebody says they'll have shark eyes.
Confusion, word salad, yeah.
So the way you can trigger that is to say that the January 6th committee was a big success because it cleared Trump of insurrection charges and opened his path to the White House.
Say that to a Democrat and then look at the eyes.
Seriously. There's no joke here.
Seriously? I sounded like Joe Biden there.
No. No joke. Yeah.
All right. So try that.
Let's see. So the Wall Street Journal did some kind of a weird hit piece on Musk.
Here's the story, which I think has been completely debunked.
Musk says that there's no truth to it.
And there's evidence that there's no truth to it.
But apparently the Wall Street Journal is reporting that one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin, broke up with his wife because his wife had an affair with Elon Musk.
Elon Musk says he's never even been alone with her.
He's only met her in some places where other people were there.
A few times, that's it.
He doesn't even know her, basically.
Except for those few public events.
And then, here's the funny part.
Oh, and the story says that Musk got caught in the affair and allegedly got down on one knee and begged Sergey Brin for forgiveness.
Can I get a simultaneous sigh?
Can I? Yeah, this is a little bit too on the nose, right?
Do you have to wonder if this is fucking true?
It's not fucking true.
As soon as you see this part, you got down on one knee and begged Bryn for forgiveness, please, please, who thinks that happened?
Really? Really?
Come on. But here's the funniest part.
So Musk responded by showing a selfie that he just took partying with Sergey Brin.
So apparently those two don't have any issues.
So that part seems to be demonstrated.
But then Musk said this in a tweet.
I'll let you wrestle with this yourself.
He said that in fact he hasn't had sex in months because he's too busy.
I'd like to introduce the world's first simultaneous scoff.
Now, I'm going to combine this with a simultaneous sip.
And I'd like you all to join me.
And again, I'll prompt you, but it's going to go like this.
In this case, the beverage will just be a prop.
And so once I read you the lead-in, I want you to do this.
You have to do it just like that.
Remember, the SIP is just a prompt.
It's just a prop.
So I'm going to read the news story again.
And then you give me the simultaneous scoff.
But I'm going to add a little to it, okay?
So I'll enhance it a little bit.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, the richest man in the world, who is single and flies around anywhere he wants and does anything he wants in his private jet, according to them, or according to Musk, he hasn't had sex in months.
Okay.
Now, you have to love Elon Musk for that.
Because, first of all, here's a question.
Is it a lie if you know it's not true?
It's sort of a weird question, right?
Is it a lie if you know it's not true?
That couldn't possibly be true.
Now, if the real story has some medical problem, I'd say, oh, okay.
But he probably would have mentioned it, you know, because it seems like it would be important to the story.
No. That's funny.
All right. I believe I've covered everything.
It was a very newsy day.
Did I talk about Bob the Engineer yet?
Or did I imagine it?
Did I do that yet? I was talking to the locals people before I came on live here.
I don't think I did. Alright, well, so there's a good chance that I will be cancelled by the time I'm done here.
Not because of something I said today.
But because of a comic that ran today, in which some of you know I introduced a new character called Bob.
I'm sorry, not Bob.
Let me talk about Dave.
So the character's name is Dave.
The reason I said Bob is that I have like a...
I always use Bob as my example name.
If you've noticed that, because it's a funny sounding name and it's a short name.
So I got confused.
So Dave the Engineer is a black engineer.
He's a new character in Dilbert.
And the backstory is that I wish I'd introduced more diversity earlier on, but it's a minefield.
If you're a white creator and you add a black character or even a female character, anything that isn't you, you're going to get...
He said ages? I think he said months, actually, in a different context.
But he did say ages as well.
Anyway, ages, months, whatever it is.
It's still funny. So here's what happened.
So I create the daily comics in black and white, line drawings, and then the colorization is done by a third party that I don't know.
So somebody I've never met adds the color to the daily comics.
Now interestingly, if you like nerdy behind-the-scenes things, I do the color for, or my assistant does, for the Sunday comics.
So if you see a colorization problem in the Sunday comic, that's on me.
If you see a colorization problem in the daily comics, you know, the three-panel ones, that means that somebody else that I've never even met made that problem.
So here I did a comic that I only thought was safe enough for me to do because the character doing the talking was a black character.
The colorizer turned my black character white, And the backstory would be erased by that.
And turned it into something that I wouldn't have published.
Because it would be sounding too insulting.
So here's the comic, and you can see my black character, Dave, has been turned white.
Against my will.
Now, believe it or not, I don't get to see these before they're published.
So there's no part of the process where I see it and approve the coloring.
Normally, there's no problem, right?
And here's what Dave, the engineer, who should have been black, should have said to the boss.
From now on, my pronouns are she and her, and I will report to HR any bigoted use of the wrong pronoun.
And then the boss says, is this parody or are you serious?
And then Dave says, as he's walking away, I think you will find it doesn't matter.
Now, if you make this character black...
It adds a whole new flavor of, you know, you understand he's just messing with the system, right?
If you make the character white, you're not really sure if he is serious, right?
So I feel like this removed a layer of safety from me in which it makes the intention of the author ambiguous.
If the black character who is known for screwing with the system...
Screwed with the system, then you say, oh, that's what he intended.
That guy always screws with the system, so there he is doing it again.
But if it's a different character, you don't know if his background is he screws with the system or if he's serious.
So the whole joke falls apart.
Now, if I don't get some pushback from this by today, it could mean that people are just tired of the whole pronoun thing, which I feel like that's happening.
Does it feel to you like the pronoun thing...
Is going to die out?
Feels like it. Yeah, it feels like it lost its energy.
But we'll see if I get cancelled for this.
So this will amuse you.
So I did send a message to my editor to ask the person who does the colorizing to give me a call.
How worried would you be if you were the person who does the colorizing and instead of just asking them to correct this next time, if I asked you to call me directly?
That's sort of a no-shit morning.
Now, I'm going to be gentle because mistakes are mistakes.
Typically, I'm not going to go off on somebody for a mistake.
So I need to put that out there.
I don't go off on people for mistakes.
I go off on people for doing something intentionally.
If you do something intentionally, and I don't like it, you're probably going to hear about it.
But if you run over my dog, and I'm genuinely convinced it was an accident, I'm very sad about my dog, but I'm not mad at you, because an accident's an accident.
So whoever did the colorizing probably wasn't aware that I have a standing instructions to make that character black and that it's important.
So that would just be a mistake.
I'll make sure it doesn't happen again.
But I wouldn't...
All right, so I just got a notice that the correct version is live.
Let's see that. Let's call that up and see if the correct version is live.
It's going to take a moment.
Oh, there it is. While I was talking.
He got recolorized literally while I was talking.
So there's the new one.
But here's the thing.
It's already in newspapers.
So online, Dave will be black, but in newspapers that run color.
They don't all run color on the weekdays.
But a lot of the newspapers run color comics on the weekdays, and so this character will be a different ethnicity in those comics.
All right. You're going to have to probably refresh the page to get a change, as I did.
Was there any other topic?
Can you make an NFT of the White Dave?
Well, that would be a copyright violation.
But that's a heck of an idea.
Oh, kids and monkeypox.
Alright. So, I was going to tweet this, but I didn't want to get cancelled.
So, I think I can do this live, because I'll add some explanation.
Did you see a tweet by...
It was about the story that there were two children who had monkeypox.
And they believe that they contracted it at home.
And then there's other reporting that suggests that it might be sexually transmitted.
And the tweet was, are we allowed to ask any questions?
Are we allowed to ask any questions?
It might be sexually transmitted, and two children got it in their own home, and are we allowed to ask any questions?
I love that tweet.
That summed up the whole last five years, didn't it?
Are we allowed to ask any questions?
Oh, my God. Any news from behind the curtains?
Well, I did give you some, which is that it's not hard to hire some Nazis.
So I don't know if you knew that.
All right. Sudafed is great, yeah.
So I had an interesting experience.
I suspected that I don't have real allergies, even though I appear to have the worst seasonal allergies in the world, and that it was actually food, and that I had narrowed it down to cheese.
And I thought there was some kind of sulfites in the cheese, because that seems to be my allergy.
And sure enough, Parmesan cheese has sulfites.
And I've avoided cheese when my voice was clear, and you could tell I didn't have any congestion.
Those were days that I'd gone without Parmesan cheese for several days.
When I went to an event, really the first event where there were lots of people this weekend, in two years, the only food that was vegetarian had some Parmesan cheese.
And so I said to myself, well, no, it's not lactose intolerance.
So it has nothing to do with the dairy.
It has to do with the additive in one kind of cheese.
And Parmesan cheese.
It was sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, and for three days I've had allergy-like symptoms.
And I think if I just go to a couple more days without eating any Parmesan cheese, then I'll be clear again.
Now, here's some of the best life advice you could ever get.
Some days, if you could pick like a couple of weeks...
And try to bring your diet down to the most minimum clean diet you can.
Just for like two weeks as an experiment.
And what I mean by that is just eat vegetables and avoid anything with a sauce on it.
And just get really, really basic.
And see if your allergies go away.
Because I have a theory that our food is poisoned.
And, you know, not every kind.
I think if you get some, you know, a bag of washed broccoli florets, you're probably fine.
Probably, as far as I know.
But I think everything that's in a can or a freezer, they've got additives.
And I think we're allergic to the additives, where many of us are.
Have you noticed that everybody's anxious and everybody's got allergies and everybody's got asthma?
There was an epidemic of adult-onset asthma, which was historically unusual.
It's in the food.
I mean, at this point, we just have to say our food is fucking killing us.
Have you gone to a large event for the first time, let's say, after two years of the pandemic?
Did you notice anything about the shape and size of the attendees?
No. Oh man, did people gain weight in the last two years.
Oh man, did people gain weight.
A lot of weight.
And, you know, so our food is just killing us.
It's absolutely killing us.
And if you just eat clean for two weeks, tell me how much inflammation you have.
There are days when I have so much inflammation that it's hard to walk up and down stairs.
Like actually, it's sort of a struggle.
There are other days when it doesn't seem to be related to exercise.
I can run up and down the stairs with no inflammation like I'm a teenager.
No difference at all.
And it's something I'm eating.
There are days when I'm eating something that's making me inflamed for 48 hours, and I don't know what it is.
It's probably not the sulfites.
It might be something else. But there is something...
That is fucking killing me.
And it's in the food, and it's killing you too.
We just don't know what it is.
It's probably more than one thing.
I think I actually ate too little salt not long ago because I was eating so clean that my salt, I think, got lower than I needed for the amount of heat and exercise I do.
Is it a pot allergy?
No, pot actually cleans up my allergies.
Pot actually decreases the symptoms.
Quality sea salt.
Microplastics in the water? It could be.
It could be. Microplastics in the water?
Yep. Yeah, you need a little salt and fat, that's true.
I can overdo it sometimes.
Seed oils? Not intentionally.
I don't intentionally eat any seed oils.
All right.
Did I miss a comment you wanted me to see?
Yeah, I've tried honey.
I don't believe in that. I think soy is probably a problem in our diet.
