Episode 1826 Scott Adams: Will Democrats Run Paul Pelosi And Hunter Biden As Their Dream Ticket?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
CNN's Stephen Collinson, a substance free IFer
CNN fake news on Alex Jones verdict
NSC Coordinator John Kirby's dumb answer
Governor DeSantis suspends woke state attorney
Question for Democrats who believe their media
Brittney Griner's 9 year sentence
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another spectacular live stream, possibly the highlight of your entire life.
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Ahhhh.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So here's another sign of the golden age.
I'm going to make the following pronouncement.
Nobody is offended by anything anymore.
You probably didn't notice.
Kind of snuck up on you.
And you think it's true, right?
You think it's not true.
You think that people are offended all the time by language and insults.
Nope. What has happened is people are pretty sure that other people could be offended, and they're defending those people.
But we ran out of people who were offended.
I don't even know the last time I heard about anybody being offended personally.
Now, when people say they're offended, really it's just language.
They're just saying, oh, I'm offended that you called me bald.
Well, not really.
I get called bald fairly often, and I can't remember the last time I felt offended.
Maybe I didn't like it.
Maybe it's not the message I wanted to take forward about myself, but offended?
I don't know. It just feels like it's an opinion happening in somebody else's skull.
Can anybody remember the last time you were offended?
Sometimes you just don't like what people are saying, but offended?
Well, you just think there's something wrong with the person who said it, right?
So I just think we should recognize that we're no longer in a world where people are offended.
We're just pretty sure other people are.
Do you know what it means when you think somebody else is offended?
Think about it. Think about what it means for the people who say that.
Well, I'm not offended.
But on behalf of those other people, I'm going to defend them.
What's that really saying?
It's really kind of offensive, isn't it?
It's kind of offensive that somebody thinks they need to defend me, for example, or you, or somebody else.
Why is somebody else telling me that I'm so weak that I'm going to be offended?
Right? If you're offended by language, you're kind of weak.
Now, if the language has a real-world impact on you and you're complaining about that, yeah, by all means.
If it has a real-world impact.
But if I'm protecting you because I think you're going to be offended, I kind of think you're weak, don't I? I'm not sure that I want that.
Well, here's some fake news.
It wasn't on the real news, but it was on the social media.
But it's fake. That Elon Musk was considering building a private airport...
In Texas, near where he lives.
But Elon responded to that by saying that he lives five minutes from the Austin airport, and it would be dumb to build his own airport.
Kind of would be. Because if you have a private jet, it just sits there at the public airport until you're ready to use it.
Now, you do have to compete for a runway.
He said that they could use another runway.
So probably there are times when he has to wait 20 minutes to fly or something.
I don't think it's a big deal if you're five minutes from an airport and you have a private jet that's just sitting there.
You've just got to wait your turn to use the runway, right?
I can't imagine that he'd need to build his own airport in that situation.
Seems like it'd be a waste, so I believe in what he says.
That's fake news. So, as I've told you, Stephen Collinson is the person who writes opinion pieces for CNN when there's...
Really no substance to write about, but you still have to say something bad about Republicans or Trump.
He'll jump into the breach and find something there.
And here's how the start of his opinion piece on CNN starts today.
Quote, Liz Cheney has posed the question with which America may have to wrestle for months to come.
Here's the question.
If... If there is evidence that ex-president Donald Trump committed crimes in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, what message will he send if he's not charged?
Stephen Colson wants you to know that's a big question we should wrestle with.
Yeah, I'm going to stop thinking about war with China, supply chain, inflation.
Let me think about the hypothetical That the committee that has been investigating for however long has so far found absolutely nothing that looks even slightly like a crime.
But if they did, in the imaginary world, if we could find a hypothetical imaginary world in which Trump did commit a crime in the imaginary world, well, America would have to wrestle with it in that imaginary world.
Do you see where we're at?
We're at a point where he has to propose speculative hypothetical crimes because the January 6th committee didn't find anything.
Do you think that Collinson would simply say that if there was any evidence, if any evidence had been presented, if any evidence existed already, Do you think the January 6th committee would have said, you know, we're going to save the good stuff for last?
Would they do that?
Do you think we would get to this point and have no evidence that even...
Remember, this is not me saying there's no evidence.
That wouldn't mean anything to you.
This is his biggest critic, essentially admitting with his hypothetical question, I think that's how you'd have to interpret it, he's admitting that there's no evidence.
Of Trump committing a crime.
They've actually turned a complete lack of evidence into a hypothetical crime.
Alright, here's another one.
Hypothetically, if Stephen Collinson had murdered a prostitute, how would you feel if no charges were filed?
I'd feel bad about that.
I don't know about you. But if Stephen Collinson has ever...
And there's no evidence he's ever done this, by the way.
I don't want to suggest there's any evidence he ever has or would murder a prostitute.
But if he did, if he did, I think we all have to wrestle with the question of, what would happen if he didn't get charged?
What would happen? That's all they have.
There's a great piece by Joel Pollack in Breitbart today in which he's noting that there's a lot of stuff moving in the right direction in this country.
What could be a better endorsement that things are moving in the right direction than the biggest issue?
There's nothing there.
Our biggest issue is that so-called insurrection.
That turns out not to be an insurrection, and it wasn't an insurrection.
It was just people getting a little worked up over something that was bad, but not as bad as they say.
All right. Alex Jones apparently lost his case there in court, so he's got to pay $4.1 million to the parents of the Sandy Cook parents.
Now, let's check the fake news on this.
CNN reported today that Jones has made, you know, dozens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, they say, peddling his conspiracy theories.
And so $4.1 million would be a drop in the bucket because, according to them, at one point he was making over $800,000 a day in 2018.
Now, let's compare that CNN reporting that he has tons and tons of money to the fact that he's declared bankruptcy, which doesn't mean he's out of money.
That just means he might need time to generate the cash to pay any debts.
With the fact that I asked my digital assistant what Alex Jones' net worth is, and it's pretty close to the $4.1 million.
Amazon says $5 million if you use their digital system.
Now, what do you think?
Do you think Alex Jones' net worth is closer to $5 million, in which cases $4 million would take him down quite a bit, 80%?
Is he already being charged 80% of his entire net worth, or does he have tons and tons of millions left over?
You have no idea.
No idea. But Alex Jones has said that it was a mistake.
He doesn't believe what he said about the Sandy Hook thing being fake.
And he apologized unreservably.
In my opinion, it was just a direct apology for a mistake.
Now, he does claim that he didn't know he was wrong.
What do you think? Do you think Alex Jones knew it wasn't true?
Or do you think he thought it was true when he was reporting it?
What do you think? I actually don't know.
I don't know. I really don't know.
Because there are plenty of people who are educated and well-informed who believe ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Look at how many people believe that President Trump said that you should maybe think about drinking bleach.
A lot of well-educated, well-informed people literally believe that, like actually believe it.
So if you tell me that Alex Jones, who appears to be a capable communicator, somebody who's built a big entity that made a lot of money apparently, so how can he be so capable and yet believe something that's so ridiculously untrue in your opinion?
But you just have to look around.
Almost everybody that you know is believing something just as ridiculous.
But sometimes you don't notice because you believe it too.
Right? If you believe it's true too, you don't notice that people are believing ridiculous things all the time.
So is it possible?
I mean, I can't read his mind.
I don't know what he believed.
I really don't. But I would say this is a genuine mystery, in my opinion.
I think it's a genuine mystery what he really believed.
I have no way of knowing. Well, China suspended some diplomacy and some, you know, various things that we were dealing with them in international relations.
And I guess that's the real...
They're trying to be tough and respond to Nancy Pelosi going to Taiwan.
And... I feel like nothing good came out of this.
Am I wrong? On one hand, you want to protect the right of any American, especially high-ranking American politician, to travel wherever they want to an allied country.
So on one hand, it's just preserving her right to do so.
But nothing good came of it.
It just made China more angry and they're going to stop talking to us about some things that might matter.
So I don't know. It looks like a loss.
Yeah, it looks like we didn't gain anything at all.
On the other hand, if China is going to be a dick and stop talking to us about anything productive, I think we can go in and kill their fentanyl dealers in-country.
Now, I know it's really hard to get CIA assets into China.
It's probably pretty hard.
But if we can, I think we should just take out their fentanyl dealers, just murder them where they are, as terrorists.
In fact, I think we could declare China a terrorist state as long as they're sending us fentanyl.
We should talk about it.
Why would we consider saying that the cartels are terrorists if we're not considering the people who send them their weapons part of the terrorist organization?
In this case, weapons being the fentanyl.
So I think we should declare the fentanyl production facilities and anything that helps them, maybe including the government, if the government is helping them.
I don't know if they are. Just declare them terrorists and then declare our intention to kill them.
We should also start sending home Chinese resident students that are in the United States.
Just kick out 10 a week, 10 a day, whatever it takes, until they're all gone.
So if we're going to be that way, let's be that way.
Looks like maybe we are going to be that way.
New Cold War, which I know.
So here's a story that I keep seeing on the internet, but I believe there's nothing to it.
How many of you believe the following thing to be true?
And I'm telling you in advance, I see no evidence to say this is true.
I believe this is completely made up.
But I've seen it a number of times on Twitter, so I'll tell you what it is.
You tell me if you think this is true.
Do you think that all-cause mortality is way up, meaning...
People who are not elderly are dying from things that they weren't dying from two years ago.
That the baseline of just ordinary, non-COVID-related, as far as you know, non-COVID-related deaths are way up for basically everything.
Do you think that's true?
Because you've seen things on Twitter that say it's true, right?
But try Googling it.
You can't Google it.
There's no news story that supports it.
If you can find any credible source, please tweet it at me, because I didn't see any.
And I looked. I looked for it.
The only place you can find it, though, is on sketchy sources on Twitter.
Now, I know you're saying the ethical skeptic, some of you would say he's not a sketchy source, but I don't know who he is, and I've seen a lot of stuff out of him that I don't understand.
Meaning, he prints a lot of stuff that I look at and I go, I don't even know where the data come from, where it came from, or how to interpret it.
You're lying? What am I lying about?
Somebody's accusing me of lying.
Lying? Why would I lie about any of this?
What would even be the point of it?
I hope you're not talking to me.
I need at least an incentive to lie.
What would be my reason?
I can't even think of one.
Anyway... I looked around and I could not deduce that was true.
I did see a video of somebody who claimed to be an insurance company CEO making the claim that there's no other explanation except that the vaccinations must have caused some autoimmune problem that makes every other kind of disease seem worse for a while.
Except the name of that insurance company wasn't even in the video.
Right? I mean, are you going to believe somebody who says they're insurance company executive and they don't name the company?
And what about the other executives?
Do they say the same thing? Is there anybody who's actually associated with an actual company that I've heard of that would say all-cause mortality is up and we don't know why?
And secondly, we really don't know why?
If you just made everybody fatter and more sedentary, And then made them worry more.
Wouldn't they die of everything more often?
Am I wrong? I mean, I'm no doctor.
But just take the baseline health of people and don't change anything except you make them way fatter, exercise way less.
And I'm going to throw in another one.
Spend two years avoiding germs.
What's that do to your immune system?
Spend two years avoiding germs.
Pretty well. Let's say you successfully avoided germs.
During the COVID lockdown, I didn't get any other illness.
Did you? Did anybody catch a common cold during the pandemic?
I didn't. Did anybody catch a common cold?
I feel like we have an entire civilization that just took its own immune response down by avoiding germs for two years.
So... So, we're getting fat, we were more sedentary, we had more to worry about, we didn't have the same social Benefits we had.
We had more fentanyl.
There's more crime.
And we probably avoided germs maybe too much for two years.
It might have weakened our ability to fight the next group that come along.
I'm saying germs as, you know, a general word for...
I'm just saying germs as the general word for anything that affects your autoimmune system or your immune system.
So I'm going to call BS on this until somebody gives me a real source.
Alright, here's this little fucking asshole, Sir Croth.
Scott Adams, the most desperate pro-vaxxer on the internet.
First of all, I'm not pro-vaxx.
Second of all, you're uninformed.
Thirdly, you're defaming me like a cunt, so stop doing it.
And thirdly, or fourthly, you're gone.
Boom. You have to get a little bit higher level of interaction than, you're coping.
You're coping. No, I'm not coping.
Goddamn. Fucking idiots.
Alright, let's get back to some positivity.
So a question asked of...
Kirby in the government, in the Biden administration.
He was asked by FBN's Edward Lawrence.
This is the question. It's a good question.
Given the aggression we're seeing from China, and the FBI director saying that China is the number one threat to the U.S. in the next 10 years, would Biden caution companies from expanding in China?
That's a good question, isn't it?
If the Biden administration is saying China is our biggest threat...
Wouldn't the Biden administration also be responsibly acting to caution companies not to expand business?
And the answer was that private companies make their own decisions.
Since when?
Since when do private companies make their own decisions?
How about this new tax plan that Congress looks like they'll probably pass that would raise the minimum tax on corporations?
Was that the corporations deciding to pay more taxes?
Or was that the government telling companies what to do?
Pay more taxes.
I mean, since when does the government not tell companies what to do?
It's the very thing they do all the time.
So that's a dumb answer.
And it's an avoiding answer.
If we think that China is our number one threat, our government should be warning us against it.
In fact, I would say that would be pretty basic to their central mission.
I would say the government's central mission is to find out what's happening in the rest of the world and warn us about it, and tell us where to do business and where not to do business.
That's exactly what they should be doing.
I want more of that, not less.
Totally. Now, if they told me not to do business in a place that didn't have any reason not to do business, then I would say, oh, well, that's inappropriate.
I want to do business with this country.
You don't have any good reasons.
Don't tell me not to do it.
But if they know that the United States is likely to continue pressuring China and vice versa, if we know that, Don't you think a little bit of a heads-up to our corporations is appropriate?
A little bit of heads-up.
And the question was not, will the government make it illegal to expand in China?
That wasn't the question. If the question had been, should the government make it illegal to expand, then I think the answer, we're going to let corporations decide, would be appropriate.
But... But I think at least a warning would be fair.
And what do you think about this question of whether private companies will make their own decisions?
Let's say the government doesn't get involved.
Is it still true that private companies make their own decisions?
I would add a caveat to that.
Private companies do make their own decisions as long as I'm not interested.
If I'm interested, and I am in the case of China, then they're not going to make their own decisions.
I'm going to make China so toxic that they can't decide to work there.
So you have to ask yourself, what is free will and what's their own decisions?
There's some gray area here.
Because I do think that I can pollute China enough in terms of people's opinion about how smart it would be to do business there.
I do have the platform.
I have a big enough platform.
And because I'm the Dilber guy, I have enough of a track record of telling businesses what they can't do.
I've been doing it for years.
For probably 30 years now, I've been telling corporations what they can't do.
And then they stopped doing it.
Do you know how many companies have told me that they stopped a policy because they saw it getting mocked in a Dilbert comic?
A lot. A lot.
It's not a random, rare thing.
A lot. The entire business management business book market fell apart when I started mocking it.
I don't know if there's anything in business anymore that I've mocked that has survived.
I mean, even dress codes.
Dress codes have largely gone away.
I mean, I was mocking those in the 90s.
Cubicles started to go away.
I mean, pretty much anything I mock ends up being at risk.
So, no. The companies do not have their own say about China.
I will make it so difficult to do business in China because of the risk.
It's a real risk, by the way.
I'm doing you a...
Patriotic, positive thing here.
So there's no negativity to this.
I will make it impossible.
What about ESG? The only reason that ESG still exists in business is that I haven't taken it on yet.
But when I do, I give it six months, and then it's going to get really embarrassing.
Now, Dilbert doesn't have the same clout it used to have.
In the 90s, I could pretty much take something out in a week.
Right now, it would take a little while.
But mockery is a really powerful force in the corporate world.
No CEO wants to be on the receiving end of mockery.
It's really terrible.
Now, I was waiting for this comment.
What took you so long?
Somebody on YouTube said, I'm drunk with power.
I was looking for a little more pushback.
I was looking for somebody to say, Scott, you're dreaming you can't actually cause corporations to...
Yeah, I can. I actually can cause corporations to act differently.
That is absolutely demonstrated in my history.
And there's no reason to believe it wouldn't continue happening.
So I'll only use my powers for good.
Speaking of power, Ron DeSantis...
Has suspended a Tampa state attorney for being too woke.
I guess the attorney wasn't going to act on the state's new abortion restrictions.
And DeSantis suspended him without pay for basically just not doing his job.
What is the point of hiring a state attorney who doesn't believe the laws of his own state?
No matter what you think about the abortion laws, no matter what you think about social justice and wokeness, no matter what you think about any of that, if a person gets hired to do a job and then says, I'm not going to do it, I don't think there's any question about whether they have to go.
I love this. Alright.
The other thing we learned is that DeSantis claims that he was not aware that his staff Turned down the invitation to be on The View.
Now, I think he agreed with their decision, but what kind of staff turns that down without talking to the boss?
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that DeSantis' staff turned down an invitation to The View in very news-making language without checking with it?
It's possible.
It's possible. Because, you know, bureaucracies and big companies and blah, blah, blah.
It's possible. But I would probably fire that staff.
No, no, no, no.
Somebody's saying that's a smart staff.
No, no, no. You have to fire them.
He should fire them.
Because they made a decision that was his decision, and that wasn't theirs to make.
Because he may have played it differently.
Right? I... He may have said, you know, this is one time that I might want to go into the belly of the lion.
I'm strong enough now that I can survive that.
I'm quick enough that I can make this work.
I think they took that option away from their boss, and they should be fired for that.
Like, if somebody did that to me, I'd at least demote them, whoever made the decision.
Can you imagine having... Would you put up with the risk of that happening again?
If your employee made that decision for you and presented it as your decision and did it flamboyantly, it's the flamboyant part that's cause for termination.
If you make a decision on my behalf flamboyantly without checking on me, oh, you're so fired.
You're so fired.
How many people who have ever managed employees would agree with me?
That that's a firing offense.
I want to see if anybody agrees.
Now, you'd have to take the entire situation into effect, so I'm oversimplifying it.
It's not the only variable in play.
But if it were the only variable in play, that's a firing offense.
I guess some of you agreed with me.
So I think we can all...
There's no inconsistency.
You can like DeSantis and still say maybe that was a staffing problem.
It's not like there's anybody at his level who doesn't have staffing problems.
I say the same thing about Cuomo.
I think Cuomo took a lot of heat for maybe a staff mistake about the nursing homes.
Maybe he's the one who signed off on it, blah, blah, blah.
But he was advised... Somebody presented him the option.
I just think everybody has staffing problems.
I'm not sure exactly how much you can assume is the top boss's actual problem or they caused it.
So here's a question that I want all of you to start asking your Democrat friends just for fun.
Just for fun.
The question is, If you could rig the...
If you believed...
Let's put it in...
I'll just paraphrase a bit.
If you believed a racist were coming into office for the presidency, and you believed this was definitely a terrible racist, and you had the option of rigging the election, let's say you were in a position to do so, if you had the option of rigging the election to keep a known racist out of office, would you do it?
And if you say no, that you wouldn't do it, what the hell is wrong with you?
Are you a coward, or are you not a patriot?
Because I would. Let me say it as clearly as possible.
If there was somebody running for president who was a confirmed, known racist, or I believed it to be true.
I mean, I could be wrong.
But let's say I believed it to be true, because I'd accepted what the news told me.
If I believed it to be true, and I was in a position to stop that person from coming to office, pretty sure I'd do it.
Especially if I thought I had a chance of getting away with it.
We all like to think that we would have shot Hitler if we had a chance, but people aren't that brave, really.
I feel like if I could get away with it, and I could stop a racist from coming to office, I feel like that would be the patriotic thing to do.
I remind you that we are a nation of laws created by the biggest lawbreakers the world has ever known.
So do you do what they say or what they did?
Because the founders were the biggest lawbreakers.
A revolution.
A revolution is about as hard as you can break the law.
You can't break the law any harder than that.
We were created by lawbreakers.
That's our DNA. And our DNA says completely clearly, correct me if I'm wrong, if you're an American, read your own DNA. Doesn't your DNA say, follow the law, totally follow the law, unless things go too far, and then break the law?
Right? Now, nobody says that directly.
But it's in your DNA. Everybody follows the law unless there's some weird situation that just has gone too far.
And then you pick up your rifle if you need to.
You break the law. You cheat.
You do what you need to do.
You're not protected from the obligation to protect your country because there's some legal way that the other team is doing it.
Your obligation to your family, your country, It doesn't go away in a real emergency.
That doesn't go away because there's some law in the way.
No, the law is the least important thing if you have a genuine emergency.
The genuine emergency says, do what makes sense.
A genuine emergency doesn't say, do what is legal.
It's the opposite. A genuine emergency says, always do what makes sense.
Period. You never get outside that bubble, or you're in trouble.
So I feel like that's a fair question to Democrats.
If they didn't cheat in 2022 under their belief that Trump was literally some kind of a racist, white supremacist dictator monster, if they didn't cheat, they need to explain that.
And if they're not willing to cheat in 2024, they need to explain that why they're not on the side of the country.
Now, they might be mistaken in their beliefs.
I believe they are. But they're not acting on their beliefs in a way that you would even imagine could be slightly patriotic, slightly positive, even slightly worthy of praise.
There's a real character problem if they're not willing to act on their beliefs.
Or maybe it's telling us those are not real beliefs, right?
I've said this before.
If you're standing in the middle of the street and you see a truck coming at you and it doesn't look like it's going to stop, and you don't get out of the way, that's somebody who doesn't believe there's a truck, because they didn't get out of the way.
But if you get out of the way, well, that means you believe the truck was there.
So if you're not acting on the thing you believe on, there's something going on.
So if they said Trump was a big old racist dictator who was going to destroy the world, they say that very clearly and often.
If they were not willing to act on it, what's wrong with their character?
And I think you could guess that directly.
Isn't your character defective?
Like, why don't you do something about that?
So the analogy, let me teach you how to use analogies.
An analogy should tell you exactly one point.
It is not trying to be the same as the subject you're talking about.
The one point from my analogy is that people will act on what they think is true.
Will you accept that somebody standing in front of a moving truck will act based on what they believe is true?
Is that really a truck coming at me?
Don't fucking tell me the analogy is wrong if you don't know how to understand an analogy.
There's just one minor, thin little thing that an analogy tries to do.
And if you go beyond that and say, well, those are not exactly the same thing, well, then you should not be in this conversation at all.
Now, if I may criticize myself, why am I using an analogy when I know they don't work?
Because there are too many people too dumb to process them.
Case in point. Somebody who is too dumb to process an analogy.
I keep making the...
I keep making the assumption that my audience is smarter and you can handle that.
But some people sneak in on YouTube who don't understand how analogies work.
Oh, your analogy is not exactly the same thing as the thing you're comparing it to.
If it were the same thing, then there wouldn't be any point.
Let me give you an analogy the way this gentleman would like you to see them.
I'd like to talk about this little power pack.
It's a little extra battery.
I'd like to make an analogy by comparing this to this identical one, because that's a good analogy.
So we'll compare this to this identical one, and everything I say about this one will be true to this one.
What is the point?
No. The analogies are supposed to be different.
If you don't get that part, You should find a less challenging podcast.
Alright. Rasmussen tells us that the midterms are narrowing just like everybody told you would happen.
Did I tell you that by the time Election Day comes along that the polling that said at one point Republicans had a nine-point advantage of a generic Republican against a generic Democrat in the midterms?
Nine points. And then for a while it hung around eight.
And it dropped to five, but five is still pretty big.
And now it's down to three.
So we went from nine to three.
I'll get rid of you for just being a jerk.
Goodbye. All right.
So why is it...
That is narrowing.
Why is it that I knew it would narrow, that the lead would narrow, and then it did?
Why is that? That's an honest question.
Why? Why was it such a big gap, and now it's narrowing?
Is it the media?
Because it seems to me the January 6th thing fell apart.
The January 6th thing showed apparently no crime for Trump and no insurrection planning, so he has a free path to the White House.
You would think that all of these things would make Biden less popular.
Here's what I think it is.
There was a Rob Reiner tweet that said...
Provocatively, that Biden has accomplished more in his term so far than any president in 60 years.
And I read that and I thought, actually, you know, I think it's a little hyperbolic, but it's directionally probably true.
If you look at the legislation that Biden has done, if you look at the impact he's had on things, I would say he's accomplished a lot for his base, or he's on the cusp of doing so, assuming his latest legislation gets through.
If you were to just look at his legislation, it looks like he will have his name on some pretty big pieces of legislation.
Right? Now, don't confuse accomplishment For things you want.
I'm saying things his base wants.
I feel like he has moved the bar on some things that his base wants.
So we've got gas prices coming down at the moment.
That should make a difference in the vote.
We've got inflation is bad, but we also might get used to it.
It's weird, but you can get used to something that just sort of lays there in the baseline.
And I worry that although inflation may stay high, if it starts drifting down all before the midterms, that will be enough.
If inflation, say inflation's 9.5% today, whatever it is, it's in that range.
Now let's say that drifts down to 6%.
Still way too much, right?
But let's say it drifts down to 6% before Election Day.
It's going to take all the energy out of it.
Because you're going to think to yourself, well, it looks like it's under control.
And it could easily drift down a little bit.
It wouldn't take much. It just has to directionally look like it's going down.
So I think that Biden's got legislative successes.
At least the news will report it that way.
Ukraine seems to be a stalemate, so we just stop thinking about it.
His disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan happened so early in the term that we're already forgetting about it.
Employment looks pretty good.
Employment looks pretty good.
And he's starting to do some Trump-like things like build a little bit of the wall and maybe promoting the Abraham Accords that he had been a little negative on.
So if you take the fact that he's first of all triangulating, in other words, he's quite consciously, it seems, accepting some points of view that are a little bit Republican that I just mentioned.
So I would say that it's all of those things.
I would say that basically he's just sort of getting everything trending in the right direction, probably by luck.
Probably by luck. But I feel it too.
I was saying it the other day.
In my opinion, our country is moving in the right direction.
We're decoupling from China.
That seems real. I think nuclear is now getting the attention it deserves.
I think that we're starting to look at all of our energy sources a little bit closer to not crippling one to benefit the other.
That looks good. We have more people being covered by healthcare.
If you don't mind the expense of that, that looks good.
I don't know. I see a lot of things moving in the right direction.
And I feel like that's probably the reason.
The reason that his poll numbers are improving is that I feel like other people feel it too.
Now you might say, but what about Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan?
I feel like that's popular.
Right? It might, in fact, increase our risk with China, but I feel like it's popular in the United States.
Is it not? Is it not popular?
So... Stop watching CNN. I watch both.
I watch the left and the right.
If you're not watching the left and the right...
All right.
So we're all getting used to being screwed?
No. No, I'm not saying that at all.
You know, the inflation's a real problem, and I don't have a solution for that, nor does anybody else.
Stop watching MS&Bs.
You know, everybody who's telling me to stop looking at the news on the other side, does that feel like good advice?
It's literally the basis of this show is I'm looking at the news on both sides and trying to tell you when being on a team is less smart than looking at the issue.
Like, it's exactly what I'm trying to do is look at both sides.
No, I'm not going to stop doing that.
If I didn't look, who would?
So you think it's pollster corruption?
I disagree. Because there are too many polls...
Watch this. If you see Rasmussen and also a lot of polls that are clearly left-leaning start to agree that the gap is narrowing, I wouldn't worry about pollster corruption in that situation.
But if you saw Rasmussen saying there was a nine-point gap when the sketchier pollsters started saying there was no gap, well, I'd worry about that.
But I think you're going to see all of them moving, you know, a few points apart, but moving toward the same answer, I think.
Yeah, let's talk about Brittany Griner.
So we've got this American basketball player who had some weed, and in Russia, that's a pretty bad offense.
She got nine years for some weed.
And she wasn't selling it, she was using it for her own purposes.
Now, obviously, I say obviously, I can't confirm it, but to me it's obvious that Putin is using this as a negotiating thing.
If it looks like that's what's happening, given that we've offered some, I think we've offered an arms dealer or something in return, I feel like we should just grab some Russian that they care about and just trade them back.
I mean, if it's literally going to be a hostage situation, well, let's just take a hostage.
You know, they did. If Russia takes a hostage, we can take a hostage.
I mean, we would need some bullshit reason for why we're doing it.
Lavrov would be top of my list.
I know, you can't arrest a diplomat.
Or can you? Scott, do you like golf?
I hope that's a joke.
But how hard do you think we should go on Russia to release Brittany Griner?
Now, she knew what was illegal.
She probably didn't know it was a nine-year thing.
I wouldn't have known that.
I mean, I wouldn't have imagined it would really happen.
It's hard to imagine it.
Like, your head has a hard time holding that as a possibility.
But it was real.
How hard should we go?
So some are saying, no, that's her own problem, right?
Uh, no.
While I would agree with you that she made her own bed...
And when people create their own problems, they have to answer for it.
However, that's not really the context here.
The context here is that Putin just took an American hostage.
And that's not good.
If Putin takes an American hostage, we have to respond in kind.
I don't know what that looks like.
But we're going to need to take somebody hostage that we don't already have to trade him back.
So... I'd say take a hostage.
They did. All right.
So jobs looks good.
Employment is up.
Added half a million jobs.
We thought it would be half as many as that.
Unemployment still looks not bad.
Who thinks it's a good idea to take drugs into a foreign country?
Well, I'm not going to excuse Brittany Kleiner's mistake.
I'll just point out that she is a young person, and she is American, and she didn't get arrested because of her drugs.
I mean, maybe that was the reason she got arrested, I guess.
But I don't think the nine-year thing is political.
And I think we have to treat it that way.
I think it's just an act of war.
I realize it's compatible with their laws, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it's obvious in this context, it's obvious it's just an act of war.
What would Trump do in this situation?
Because I feel like Biden is just being kind of quiet about it, maybe quiet diplomacy.
What would he do? You think Trump would do nothing?
I don't know. I think Trump likes saving celebrities.
I think for Trump, saving a black woman would be too irresistible.
I think Trump would be...
He would throw everything on it.
Am I wrong?
Do I not know Trump or something?
You don't think...
You don't think Trump would throw everything at this?
Because it would look so good.
It would be counter to his narrative.
It would be pro-American.
It would be right on message.
In fact, if you want her to be released, I think Trump's your best shot.
I think all it takes is making it a priority.
I'm not sure there's much more nuance to it than that.
I think if Trump just said, hold on, stop everything.
Just stop everything.
If you don't give her back, we're going to send Ukraine shit you'd never want them to have.
Or something like that. Something like that.
All right. He's already working on it, you think?
Maybe he is. Maybe Trump is already working on it.
But I don't think China wants Trump to succeed, so they're not going to do it when he's out of office, that's for sure.
I don't think so.
Why didn't Trump legalize marijuana?
I don't know.
But my only assumption is that he's just so anti-drug that he just can't get there.
That's my guess. But I don't know.
It's just pure speculation because I can't read his mind.
But there's no... I don't believe there's any argument he's ever made.
I've never heard him make an argument one way or the other about legalizing marijuana.
Yeah, I think he just doesn't like any of that business, period.
And... You know, while I disagree with him on that point, it's not a terrible position to take.
But I think it would be consistent with Republicans to at least get the federal government out of that business.
So why he didn't do that, I think, would just be a mistake.
How about that? Can I just say that's just a clean mistake?
On Trump's part, to not...
At least make some motion to legalize it.
Because he always had the cover that it's up to the states, and that would be the most consistent thing any Republican ever said.
So there are several topics which I would say Trump failed completely at.
He failed completely at fentanyl.
Completely. There's no...
I can't give him any... I thought he took a run at it, but he failed.
I'll give him credit for taking a run at it.
I think he failed on healthcare.
I think he failed on prescription drugs.
I think he didn't get the wall built.
You could say that was his failure, that was Congress, maybe.
Yeah. I would say there's all kinds of things that he just unambiguously failed at.
But compare it to the alternative.
Was the other candidate going to succeed at all that?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Scott is messing with your heads now?
Well, I'm not trying to do that right now.
Completely disagree with marijuana.
Well, it's up to Congress to change the laws, correct?
But the leader of the United States should be weighing in.
And if Trump had said, I will sign it if you send it to me, I would have loved to hear that.
But it didn't happen.
All right. I have standards when it comes to Trump, but none for Joe.
What the fuck are you talking about?
How did you watch this podcast and say that I have standards for Trump and not for Biden?
Because I've never criticized Biden?
Biden hasn't fixed the border.
He messed up energy. Have you missed me criticizing Biden?
Are you kidding?
Really? You're a member of the local subscription service, which means you have enough interest in my content that you subscribe to it.
And you've never heard me criticize Biden?
I just gave Biden a long list of kudos.
Did I? I just said he did things for his side.
Are you disagreeing with the factual statement?
Because the people on his side are saying, thank you for that.
We like this bill. We're going to vote for it.
Right? Oh, man.
You guys got to grow up.
You got to grow up. Somebody on YouTube is saying I'm sounding pro-Biden.
You know, you're too fucking dumb to be on this podcast.
You're sounding pro-Biden today.
All right. I'm going to delete you.
Honestly, if you think this is pro-Biden...
You're too dumb to be with us.
Let's just increase the IQ, get rid of those people.
Does anybody else think that saying the good and the bad of both people is taking sides?
Is anybody so fucking stupid that they think showing the pros and cons of something is taking a side?
Anybody? Because I'd like to get rid of some more idiots.
I really don't want to be talking to people who are too dumb to understand that.
If you can't understand that, you are too fucking dumb to be here.
Just go watch...
I won't name names.
I was just going to name names, but I don't think I will.
Because I'm mad at some of you.
I'm not mad at them right now.
Yes, in all capitals.
So 2 Wall Street says, in all capitals, you did say things are going in the right direction.
Yes, because that's what the data says.
All right, so I'm going to hide you from this channel.
Anybody else? If you'd like to prove...
All right, here's another. I'm looking at all the ones in all caps.
The ones in all caps are the good ones.
Duane K says, I have to yell talk it because it's in all caps.
When Scott talks Ukraine, it makes me enraged, but I'm respectable of alternative opinions.
Why'd you put that in caps?
Okay, that one's acceptable.
All right, so that's acceptable.
Even with the capital letters, I'm going to let that go.
Because he's angry at what I'm saying, but he's at least accepting that an alternative opinion might have some value.
Okay. Very good.
For a moment there, I was going to go off on you, but that was...
You pulled me back from the edge.
Carl... Carl writes in all caps.
Here's a sentence in all caps.
Carl! Carl!
I don't care about the Breonna Taylor cops.
Isn't there a story about the Breonna Taylor, the cops who killed her, falsified some paperwork?
If they did, then they need to pay for that.
I don't generally like to spend too much time on the individual crime stories.
I feel like there's not enough there.
And the news handles that.
All right.
Put a cap in it.
Yes.
Butter your bacon, I'm being told.
All right. What about loud noises?
Some of you, I think, come just for the blocking.
Is it my imagination, or are the top three spokespeople for the Biden administration incapable of speaking, at least coherently?
Their current spokesperson, Corinne Jean-Pierre, is she one of the worst that we've seen?
I think she's one of the worst.
Just in terms of communication skills, I think she's one of the worst.
Biden is terrible, and then Kamala Harris is a nightmare.
But have we ever seen the three top speakers for the administration having no communication skills whatsoever?
I mean, just being terrible at it.
Christopher Wray and Cruz.
Is Tom Cruise going after the FBI?
All right, is there any stories I missed here?
Who's really running things here?
Yes, we do wonder. Why do I let trolls troll me?
Sometimes the trolls are just energy.
Sometimes I feed on them.
My mascots, I call them.
Stocks are down. Yeah.
Oh yeah, Cary Lake was a confirmed winner in Arizona.
Can somebody explain to me why they thought that the Cary Lake primary might be rigged?
Why would they think that one was rigged?
The thinking was that the Democrats would cleverly try to get the less qualified Republican elected.
I don't know, do they bother rigging that when they could just rig the ultimate thing?
If they were going to rig, which I'm not alleging.
Tesla's going to split 3-1.
Yeah.
All right.
Yes, Blake Masters looks like he has a good shot for the Senate.
Do you think democracy has been redefined to mean bureaucracy?
Yeah, I don't think so.
Although, I can see your point, though.
Yeah, that's a little too conceptual, I think.
All right. That's all I got?
So, I think we're going to make you short today and go do some work.
