Episode 1835 Scott Adams: Trump Appears Unstoppable. Democrats Can't Stop Aiming At Their Own Feet
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Biden's army of IRS auditors
Kids are obese because of...climate change?
The odd legal definition of espionage
Who packed the Mar-a-Lago boxes?
Sri Lanka's anti-fertilizer President
TikTok, a Chinese cyberweapon
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And if you would like to enjoy this experience, if you'd like to enjoy ego death, and who wouldn't, really, all you have to do is find yourself a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now.
For the unparalleled pleasure, it's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that's going to make everything better.
It's called simultaneous sip.
Happens right now.
Go! Well, you on YouTube don't know how close it was to me not having a cup of coffee.
But I took the locals people with me on a little tour of the house before you got here.
And the coffee maker delivered.
So it's all good now.
So here's a story that I'm following.
I think I may have mentioned this, but it's getting more interesting.
So virtual reality apparently can simulate what people are describing as ego death, which is also how people describe a hallucinogenic experience.
Now, people also say they get all kinds of mental health and maybe even cures from addiction.
There are lots of claims from hallucinogenics, from LSD, mushrooms, etc.
Now, I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to tell you that those are good ideas or bad ideas.
These are just things that people report.
But they're reporting similar things with virtual reality, and they are now consciously comparing the two.
And there is some speculation now that you might be able to achieve some form of ego death with VR. And then if you did, there's some hopefulness that you might get some of the same benefits.
Maybe weaker than the chemical kind, but maybe useful.
For example, here's how they do it.
If you take a hallucinogen and you feel yourself connected to everything, that's a form of ego death.
Because ego is everything's about me.
I exist here and then I'm observing the outside world.
So the outside world is separate from me.
I'm just the observer. But with ego death, you sort of merge with the environment.
That's your impression of it.
And so you're not a distinct individual, you're connected to everything else.
And once you feel connected to everything else, allegedly, hypothetically, There's some kind of mental health benefit that could be substantial that comes from that.
I don't know exactly why.
Sometimes you don't need to know the why.
Sometimes you just see it works.
Use it. So, here's how they do it in VR. In VR, you imagine yourself in a space as just a glowing, sort of a gaseous, glowing form.
And that represents you.
So you come to see yourself in VR as this gaseous form.
And then three other people will appear in your room, just from anywhere, anywhere in the world.
So three other people will appear.
They will also be gaseous forms.
So the first thing that you learn is that your body isn't just what it looks like.
Your visual sense of yourself isn't all that there is.
So when you see yourself as a gaseous form, it allows you to get outside your mental model of being a body.
You just exist.
But then it gets interesting.
Then they have you move your gaseous forms together until you can't tell where your gaseous form and the other gaseous forms begin and end.
Apparently, reportedly, you experience something like ego death, because you've imagined yourself as this gaseous form, you've merged it with other gaseous forms, and apparently you can feel some kind of experience from that.
Now, it's hard to understand it just from having to explain to you, right?
An explanation is always going to fall short.
But it's the same problem with hallucinogens.
Try to explain a hallucinogenic experience to someone who's never had one.
Can't be done. Can't be done.
It is impossible to explain.
So maybe there's something there.
You know, the fact that I can't explain it well might actually be a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, so that's looking good.
I think we're very close to the time, to the point where...
Virtual reality fixes all of our mental problems.
With the exception of a few that are purely organic.
You know, like an actual schizophrenic might have, you know, a brain that's differently configured.
But for your routine stuff, where your programming gets out of whack, but your brain is still, you know, functionally a brain, I've got a feeling that VR will be able to program the hell out of us.
I don't think we have any idea how much that will program our entire existence.
So that's coming.
Could be good or bad. Probably both.
Here's something that nobody says out loud, so I'll say it first.
If Biden succeeds in getting his army of auditors, who primarily, as I understand it, would focus on smaller businesses, he's going to learn a very uncomfortable fact.
And I don't know if anybody in the Biden administration knows it.
Because administrations tend to be filled with people who have not worked in small businesses.
How many people who work in the Biden administration once ran a gardening business?
You know, where he mowed lawns, where she...
Not many, right?
And here's what I think is a problem that they're going to discover.
In my opinion, no more than 20% of small businesses could survive an audit.
And when I say survive, I mean stay in business.
What do you think?
Because small businesses live almost entirely on cheating on taxes.
Small businesses have small margins.
They're just getting by.
They're earning more than they're spending, but not by a lot.
And if you taxed what they earned, there just wouldn't be anything left.
So in my experience, at the smallest end, and I'll make a distinction here, if you're talking about a small business being one that only makes $10 million a year, That's not the small business I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the really small business, the cash businesses.
Those businesses really couldn't exist if they paid taxes.
Let's be honest. They couldn't exist.
So what happens if they start closing down 80% of small businesses because they can't pass the audit?
What happens if the...
It's the same problem that you would have if you cracked down on immigration.
If you crack down on immigration, probably 80% of small businesses in California would close tomorrow.
Did you know that? If you crack down on immigration, if you had a way to do it completely, you knew everybody who had fake documents, and you immediately fired them and sent them back wherever they came.
Every small business in California would be out of business just immediately.
So there are some laws that you can't enforce because the system has gone too far building an economy that depends on the lack of enforcement.
If you change it to an economy that has an enforcement, I think 80% of the smallest businesses would just go away if they got audited.
Now, I don't know if there are enough audits to get all the way down to the lowest level.
So maybe it's just companies that only made $10 million that year.
That'd be different. Here's an interesting comment I saw on a tweet, but I agree with it.
So, we seem to understand, as a species...
Based on science, that fields collapse when they're observed or measured.
In other words, reality seems to form after it's observed.
Now, I've heard some people argue that, but that's my understanding of it.
And I'm saying, the same guy saying, no, no, no.
All right, I'm going to say that I completely disagree with your disagreement of me.
I will accept your superior understanding of science, but I think that's a handicap in this case.
I believe that once you get into the quantum science realm, we're using words to describe things that words can't describe.
And we're using formulas to find truth when all we've really found is that the formula works.
It doesn't extend into our understanding of reality.
And so, in my opinion, it is true that reality does not become formed and solid until it's observed or measured.
And I'll accept that there's somebody who says that's not true, but that's my interpretation.
I'm going with it for now. Now, under that interpretation, the more people there are in the world, there are more people seeing stuff and measuring stuff.
So you would need more solid stuff in the world because there are more people who are experiencing it.
And the comment was that if you build a huge telescope, let's say a Hubble telescope, and you can peer further and further into the infinity, that the simulation that we live in has to process harder to create all this new stuff that's being seen.
And when you take it to seeing all of space with a telescope, you might be seeing things too fast for the processor to catch up.
And you might be seeing some glitches in our processing because we're trying to chunk too much data at the same time.
Now, what would that look like?
Well, one would be code reuse.
Like the system would try to become more efficient to find workarounds around its constraints.
So it might say, all right, I'm going to make a lot of these people the same people.
Because a lot of the NPCs don't need full lives and histories.
They don't need to be full people.
So you just make them a little more restrictive than before.
So they just say the same thing on social media.
I've been tagging people as NPCs on Twitter.
If they say the most obvious thing you can say in this situation...
And I think that's one way you'd save space.
You can make your NPCs never have a creative thought.
You just give them all the same three ideas.
So if you say, NPCs, what are you going to say about that Dilbert cartoonist guy?
Well, we'll all say we think he's the Garfield guy.
It saves a lot of processing, because there's no thinking, it's not creative, it's not new, and they just all say the same thing.
So if you see a lot of coincidences, and a lot of repeated NPC activity, maybe the processor's getting overloaded.
Maybe. Maybe. But watch out for those big telescopes crashing the simulation.
I didn't write down whose tweet it was who said that, so that wasn't my original thought.
I wish I'd written it down.
All right, this story is called, When Wokeness Gets Too Complicated.
So there was a tweet by the Twitter account, The Women's March.
This is a statement that they tweeted.
The Women's March tweeted, your feminism has to be intersectional or it isn't feminism.
They emphasized it with capitals and spaces.
Or it isn't feminism.
So your feminism has to be intersectional to be good feminism.
But there was some disagreement on that by somebody who's on the same team but disagrees with that framing.
So a Twitter account called Claire Shrugged Tweeted back and said, as a black feminist who considers intersectionality a core guiding principle, I am begging you, stop deploying it as a buzzword to problematize feminist politics which center women.
You undermine black feminist struggle and alienate many who support the vision, Crenshaw outlined.
I don't know who Crenshaw is.
Not the Crenshaw in Congress.
Did anybody understand that?
Did you know what any of that meant?
Now, here's the interesting thing.
I'm pretty sure everybody involved in these opinions has good intentions.
I believe that.
I believe they have good intentions.
And now here they are disagreeing with each other.
But my problem here is that it got too complicated.
So the thing that I make fun of that made Dilbert popular, and I've said this before, but it's worth reiterating.
Dilbert is not about something that somebody did wrong.
It seems like it.
If you read it, it's like, oh, management did this wrong, management did that wrong, management did that wrong.
It's not really what it's about.
It's actually a little bit more subtle than that.
Dilber is about a good idea that is implemented wrong.
So a good idea would be managing your employees.
Right? It's hard to have a company if you don't manage your employees.
But how do you do it wrong?
You micromanage. You do too much of it.
So doing too much of something is usually the way corporations do it wrong.
They've got some little idea that's a good idea in certain ways, and then they overextend it to everybody's got to be doing everything.
Everybody's got to be woke. Everybody's got to be whatever.
So that's where they go wrong.
But wokeism looks like it's going to destroy itself with complexity.
Because if the people who would be the wokest are arguing about feminism has to have intersectionality, or as a black feminist who considers intersectionality a core guiding principle, I'm begging you to stop deploying it as a buzzword to problematize feminist politics which center women.
You undermine black feminists' struggle and alienate many who support your vision, according to somebody.
A little bit too complicated.
A little bit. Alright, CBS Morning reported this, that today children are 30%, well, they're more obese, so they're 30% less aerobically fit than their parents were at their age, and the study points to climate change and rising temperatures as adversely affecting childhood obesity because children spend less time exercising outdoors because of the climate change.
Well, you're asking the right question.
Is that satire?
Is it? Is it?
Did I just make that up?
Go. Did I just prank you?
Did I read something that's definitely from a satire account that you couldn't tell?
Could you tell if that was real?
Was it real or not real?
It's real.
It's real. Yeah.
It's real. CBS News actually said there's a study that says the kids are getting fat because of climate change.
They don't want to go outdoors because the weather's bad.
Do we even need to discuss that?
Is that something where I need to get into the details of what else has changed?
Has anything else changed?
Can you think of anything?
Any other, I don't know, any other big impact on society?
Has anything changed lately?
You know, COVID certainly made a difference lately, but the bigger change is screens and, you know, not having, basically just lifestyles changed and food got worse.
Food got worse.
Our entertainment choices got better in the sense that there are more of them, but they're less physical.
They're video games, right?
So between video games and screens and terrible food, you have all the explanation you need.
Does anybody have the experience of they've exercised less because of the weather?
Is there even one person on here who believes that they exercise less lately Because of the weather.
Not one person.
Not one person.
Now, I don't know about where you live, but even on days when the weather is very much don't go outdoors weather, where I live, there's usually one part of the day where it's not that bad.
So it could be 100 degrees during the afternoon, but you can pretty much depend that 6 in the morning, if you wanted to go for a run, you'd be fine.
I don't know if it's as true in other places.
Some places where it's just cold permanently and some places just hot permanently.
But I've never seen a difference where I live.
I just heard the funniest question yesterday.
I'm going to share it with you.
I'm not going to tell you where it came from.
But somebody mentioned to me That they were going to go to Florida for their first experience.
Had never been to Florida before.
And going to Florida in August.
Florida in August.
And the person said to me, I hear it could be humid there.
It could be humid.
To which I said with a stray face, yes it can.
Yeah, it's true.
And then the person said, is a human like Hawaii?
Because I've been to Hawaii, so I know what humidity feels like.
I was tempted to say, yeah, it's just like Hawaii.
But I couldn't make myself be enough of an asshole to do it.
Yeah, I suppose Hawaii is humid.
Here's the difference.
I would like to give you my impression of walking, let's say, off of the airplane and feeling Hawaii's humidity for the first time.
And then I'll do feeling Florida's humidity for the first time.
Somebody who's never experienced either.
We'll start with Hawaii experiencing humidity for the first time.
Wow. What is up with this?
This feels great. Why does my entire body feel good?
I think the air feels better.
I feel great!
Let's have a vacation.
Snorkel, anybody? Alright, so that's experiencing Hawaii humidity for the first time.
Now I'd like to give you a similar impression of going outdoors for the first time in August in Florida.
For those of you listening, it was hilarious.
It was hilarious. So, Florida in August should be fine.
You'll be fine.
You'll be fine. Alright.
I was following a hashtag on Twitter and I see that the I see that the unvaccinated are taking a victory lap.
So the unvaccinated are saying, we were the smart ones.
We've been vindicated and validated.
Is that the news you're seeing?
How many would agree with the statement that the people who wrote out the entire pandemic with no vaccinations at all How many would agree that they were the smart ones and they have been totally validated?
Go. Yes.
So the people who are not vaccinated, they say they've been validated?
I'm looking at your answers.
They seem to be somewhat mixed.
Somewhat mixed. Why is it that we all watch the same news and the same science and the most basic question of the pandemic We still disagree on.
What causes that?
What would cause the unvaccinated to say, we won, we're the smart ones, and science has proven it, at the very same time that the people who were vaccinated were glad they did?
How do you explain that?
Can you explain it with two words?
Yeah, confirmation bias would be one.
But confirmation bias is sort of the weak form of what I'm talking about.
It's cognitive dissonance, right?
But the thing is, you don't know who has it.
That's the fun part.
So let me do what almost nobody will ever do in front of you.
This is very rare, what I'm going to say.
You will almost never see a public figure who talks, you know, somebody who talks for a living in front of people.
You will almost never see anybody say what I'm going to say now.
It could be me. Because that's how cognitive dissonance works.
I'll tell you my impression if you put a gun to my head and said, you're going to have to choose who's right.
I would choose that I'm right.
Whatever that is. It doesn't even matter for this discussion.
It doesn't even matter. I would still choose I'm right.
So if you ask me, all right, you know that there's a thing called cognitive dissonance, and you also know that you might be easily triggered by it, because I'm in a situation where I could be triggered into it.
So you should always look for the trigger, right?
If you're trying to decide who's got cognitive dissonance and who doesn't, you look for the trigger.
And the trigger would be that something happened that's opposite of what you believed was possible or could happen.
Now, did that happen?
Is there anybody who believed the opposite of what was proven to be true?
And here's the problem.
It's everybody. Everybody.
Everybody believed something that was the opposite of true.
No matter which side you were on.
Do you know why? Because truth bifurcated.
So if you thought that vaccinations were a good idea, there's plenty of evidence, studies, and proof to show you were wrong.
If you thought they were a good idea, there's plenty of evidence to say you were right.
So both sides have evidence that confirms they were right, and other equally strong-looking evidence.
You know, we're bad at knowing what's strong evidence.
But to many people, it looks strong.
The opposite. So you have a situation where 100% of the public...
Could be, potentially, triggered into cognitive dissonance.
But you don't know which half it was.
At least half.
Probably both. I'm not sure anybody is in a situation where they can stay for sure they have no trigger.
So let me give an example of no trigger.
If you predicted something correctly, so you're the only one who said, let's say, Let's say I predicted that Trump would get elected in 2016.
And then I was right.
Was cognitive dissonance triggered?
No. No, because what I thought would happen, happened.
But suppose you thought it was impossible he'd get elected in 2016.
Well, then you think there must have been something like Russian interference.
Because your cognitive dissonance couldn't allow that you simply saw something happen that you thought wouldn't happen.
Now, fast forward to 2020.
Trump supporters were positive, many of them, positive that he was going to win that election, and then things reversed late at night, and that looked sketchy, and that was the trigger.
So everybody who thought that Trump really won and the election was rigged I don't know what the truth of this question is.
So we're not going to talk about what's true and what's false.
That's unknowable to me.
Some of you think you know it, but I don't know it.
So, under those conditions, nearly 100% of Trump supporters should have been triggered into cognitive dissonance.
Should have. Now, there's a deep assumption in this.
The deep assumption is that the election was something like FAIR. But we don't know.
We only know there's no court-approved proof that it was anything but fair.
That's all we know. But if you believe that you obviously saw something that went wrong, then cognitive dissonance would kick in.
So can you tell the difference between, let me ask you here, this will be a test to see if you've learned anything.
Could you, individually, not other people, we're not talking about other people, you, Could you tell the difference between a stolen election and your own cognitive dissonance?
Go. Yes or no?
Could you tell the difference between a stolen election and your own cognitive dissonance?
The locals' people all have the correct answer.
The answer is no.
You cannot tell the difference.
But we act like we can, don't we?
And I'm no exception.
We sort of have to act on our beliefs.
I got a smattering of yeses.
So there's a small smattering of people who say, yes, I can tell the difference between a stolen election and cognitive dissonance.
But there are far more people...
So on locals, listen to this.
On locals, you should know that your answers are far more, let's say, intellectually valid than on YouTube.
There's a difference, and there should be, because I spend more time talking to locals people.
They would be far more educated on the fact that you can't tell the difference.
Cognitive dissonance, by definition, you can't tell the difference.
By definition. So it's not a question of whether you can use your power to power through the cognitive dissonance.
It's just what the word means.
The word means you can't tell.
If you could tell, you wouldn't be in it.
So it's just a definitional thing.
All right. I don't think anybody should be taking any victory laps about the pandemic, but we're all going to do it.
And this is one of those beautiful times when once we're after, you know, in my opinion, we're post-pandemic.
You know, there's lingering problems forever, but we're kind of post the worst part of the pandemic.
And what could be better than everybody thinking they were right the whole time?
Because I do. I believe that my choices were probably as close to the smartest risk-reward choices I could have made in my specific situation.
Not yours. Yours was different.
But in my specific situation.
Now, others would disagree with me.
But the beauty is, I will now be able to go forward and say, I did all the right things.
I was so smart. And the people who did opposite of what I did are going to do the same thing.
They'll say they were smart and they got the right answer and I'm an idiot.
So we all win. It'd be bad if we were in the pandemic, but once you're over it, you both get to celebrate how right you were, even though half of us were not.
Don't know which half, though.
We'll never know. Don't you love it when the Democrats try to make things different by just changing their names?
You know, the Inflation Reduction Act that was anything but, et cetera?
Well, here's the newest entry.
Did you know that if you remove or destroy any military information, it's espionage?
So there's something called the Espionage Act that Trump is being threatened with because of the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
But apparently if you read it, if you accidentally...
Well, I guess you'd have to do it intentionally.
If you destroyed any military records, which is a pretty big category, isn't it?
Military records...
Like, that's a lot of stuff.
Anything that's military-related, I'm not talking about, like, their actual records, but anything that references the military, if you move it without using the right process, I guess, or you destroy it, you're guilty of espionage.
Is that the word you would have used?
Would you have used the word espionage for mishandling classified information?
Now, I get why they would, Because they don't want to leave any opening that moving documents could ever have a good reason.
So I get why they're going extreme on that.
But when you see the news reporting that Trump is being considered for Espionage Act charges, is that news?
That doesn't feel like news.
I mean, it's new, but it feels like pure propaganda.
If they were even a little bit honest, they would say, the Espionage Act is written to be intentionally broad, and it captures even things like accidentally moving...
Well, I don't know if it accidentally counts, but it counts things like moving things without using the right process.
Or you would say...
Trump might be accused of doing something with moving documents, secure documents.
He may have used the wrong process to move secure documents, which weirdly, if you were writing the story honestly, you'd say, which weirdly is included in this big category called the Espionage Act, even though obviously the intention would not be espionage in these cases.
Now, There's no way you can call the news honest when they call this a problem of espionage.
Am I right? And by the way, I don't know if Fox News covers it this wrong way, but when you see, like, the trending stuff and a lot of the headlines, you'll see, you might be guilty of the espionage.
Now, espionage seems a little too close to Russia collusion, doesn't it?
Doesn't it? Yeah.
He was... I don't think so.
Now, let's dig forward to this.
By the way, here's the best Mar-a-Lago joke so far.
The best Mar-a-Lago joke was not mine.
Twitter user Greg Marchand, MD, tweeted this.
Actually, we're all good now because Trump declassified the documents the FBI planted, so they canceled each other out.
Okay, that's really good.
It's so good I'm pissed off that I didn't think of it at first.
I'm like, why didn't I think of that one?
Yes, yes, that was perfect.
But here's the funny part.
Obviously, it's not literally true.
But it could have been true.
You can imagine that if Trump had said everything in these boxes is declassified, And let's say there was some record of that, just hypothetically.
If there was some record of Trump saying, everything in these ten boxes is declassified.
He didn't do that, as far as I know.
But suppose he did. And then later, hypothetically, the FBI planted some evidence in it.
That would actually be, correct me if I'm wrong, but if nobody knew it had been planted, Wouldn't the legal standard be that it had been declassified if it's in that box?
Because that was in the box that was specified for declassification in a hypothetical world, not in the real world.
So it actually is true.
This is why it's so funny.
There could have been a situation where the FBI planted something that got accidentally declassified and then didn't work as a planted evidence.
Like, that's actually real, right?
I mean, it didn't happen.
But it's something that might have happened.
Like, in the real world, that could have easily happened.
Now, I say easily because, in my sense of things, the FBI planting information would be normal.
If you don't agree with that, fuck you.
Pay attention to the news once in a while.
If you don't think it's normal that the FBI would try to frame Trump by planting information, you haven't been paying attention.
That is now in the normal way of business for the FBI. I hate to say it, but I didn't create that situation.
It wasn't me. And if it had been me, I wouldn't have done it.
But that's where we are, right?
And every time you tell me in, I don't know, patriotic, emotional terms that we should not be criticizing the rank-and-file members of the FBI, I'm not sure that's us doing that.
You know what I mean?
I feel like the rank-and-file FBI members have been disgraced by their own coworkers and leaders.
I didn't do that.
Where was I disgracing the FBI by falsifying information on a FISA document?
I didn't do that. And you can't say that that has no consequences.
There are reasons that this stuff is illegal, because it has big consequences.
One of the consequences is on the rank-and-file members of the FBI. I didn't do that.
I didn't do that.
So if I say the FBI is completely discredited as an organization, which includes the rank and file, I didn't do that.
I didn't do that.
I'm just observing. It's not even an opinion.
An opinion means you're sort of adding something to the situation.
I'm not adding. I'm observing.
I'm observing a situation that has, you know, a degree of confirmed bad actors.
Confirmed. Nobody's questioning that the Mueller report found some issues.
Was it Mueller or was it not Mueller?
It was the other guy. You know what I mean.
Alright. So here's some more stuff we know about these Mar-a-Lago documents.
So I guess in June, in a letter in June, one of the Trump lawyers, I don't know which one, said that there were no more classified things at Trump's Mar-a-Lago.
Now, Do attorneys tell direct lies in a situation like that?
Now, I'm not going to say no attorney has ever lied, but there's a way that attorneys lie, right?
So an attorney could lie by omission, you know, if it was a situation where they could get away with it.
They could exaggerate.
They could prefer a narrative.
They could question somebody else's facts.
They could You know, put doubt on things that actually are true.
There are all kinds of schemey, weaselly things that lawyers can do.
But how likely is it that a lawyer who had reached a level of accomplishment that they worked for a president or an ex-president, somebody at that level, how likely is it they would tell a direct lie that if they got caught and it's very catchable, It would be very catchable because it exists.
It's a physical thing.
And someday somebody's going to figure it out.
Would a lawyer tell a direct lie, this does not exist, if that lawyer knew it did exist, could be later found?
I don't think they do.
In my experience, they do.
Have you ever seen...
I mean, I've dealt with a lot of lawyers, and any time they get even...
Anytime you get even close to asking a lawyer to say or do something that's not true, they immediately balk.
I'll acknowledge to you that there are lawyers who will lie just like there are anything that will lie.
But it's kind of unusual.
It's unusual. So remember, when we're looking into this fog of war situation, we don't know what's true yet, if we ever will.
But we can put odds on things.
What would you put as the odds that this particular lawyer, and you have to accept all of it, not just part of it, what are the odds that this lawyer knew the contents?
This is important. Do you think that the lawyer knew the contents of all of this stuff at Mar-a-Lago?
Probably not. Right?
Probably not. Do you think anybody did?
Do you think there was even one person anywhere in the world who knew the contents of all the boxes in Mar-a-Lago?
I would say that's unlikely because, you know, who would spend the time going through them?
Who would know for sure that they had all the boxes?
I don't know. It feels unknowable, right?
So what are the odds that Trump is in trouble if his attorney said there was nothing there?
Now, I don't know if you haven't operated at a level where you've got attorneys and accountants doing stuff for you, it is a real good cover for your own badness if there is any.
If your attorney says something's okay, you're in a much better position than if you decided on your own.
Because the judge and the jury are going to look at it and say, well, that was a qualified attorney who gave you that advice.
It might have been wrong, but look where it came from.
So if somebody who knows more than you do says, this is legal, and it's my job to tell you what's legal, and trust me, this is totally legal, and you take the advice, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's going to give you a little comfort if anything goes to court.
Is there a lawyer on here who can...
I'm not totally confident about this point.
Can you confirm or deny that point?
Say you're a lawyer in the comment...
But if a lawyer has advised you that something's legal, aren't you in better shape?
You're not safe. I'm not saying you're safe, but you're in better shape, right?
Any lawyers? Okay, so a lawyer confirms, yes, you're in much better shape.
Doesn't mean you're out of the clear.
You're out of the woods. Yeah, okay, lawyers are confirming.
Lawyers confirm that that would help.
So that's a point in Trump's favor.
Which doesn't tell you anything about the documents.
Now, here's a question that you all watch the news, right?
So all of you watch the news, so here's a question which is the most obvious question about this Mar-a-Lago stuff.
There's one question that's the most obvious question.
It's the one that you would ask if you were in charge of figuring out what's going on over there.
What's the first question you'd ask about the boxes?
Go.
First question you'd ask.
Really?
Really? Who packed them?
Yes. Right. The first question you ask is, who packed them?
What's the answer to the question?
You all watch the news. Give me the names of the people who packed them.
Give me their names. Don't just say GSA. Just give me the name.
What, you don't know the name?
What? What? Now, here's a moment where you need to...
This is a moment where the entire machinery of your reality just opened up for you.
Sometimes you can see the mechanism behind what we're seeing.
This is like the fact that you don't know the names, the actual name of the person who packed it or names of.
The fact that those people have never been asked to comment and we don't even know who they are.
What's that tell you? What does that tell you?
It tells you we're not serious about this.
Whatever is going on has nothing to do with the documents.
Am I right? Let me say this as clearly as possible.
If anybody in the news business had even the slightest interest in what was going on in that story, the only thing they'd be talking about incessantly was how do we find the names of the people who packed it and can we get permission to talk to them?
Because they might have clearance or whatever.
Am I wrong? Tell me I'm wrong.
It's the only question that matters, and the entire news industry is ignoring it like it doesn't matter.
What's that telling you?
It tells you nobody's serious about this as an issue.
They're serious about it as a political issue.
Nobody cares about the actual event.
Nobody. In fact, I've never even met anybody who cared.
There are people who say, oh, Trump was going to sell nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia.
Do they really believe that?
The people who are tweeting that Trump was going to sell nuclear secrets, do they really believe that?
No, they don't. It's just a political thing.
Do the supporters of President Trump...
Who say, as I do, it's very unlikely there's anything in those documents that is really important.
It's very unlikely. Am I saying that for political reasons or because I know what's in those boxes?
I don't know what's in the boxes.
I don't know. But I've got this political opinion that's pretty strong, which means I need to check myself, right?
Shouldn't I be checking myself for confirmation bias Team play and cognitive dissonance?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
I should be checking myself really hard if I could.
It's pretty hard to check.
But I don't think there's anything more completely transparent than the fact that all sides of the media, left, right, and in between, nobody has the fucking bit of interest in who packed the boxes and nothing else matters.
This is the strongest statement I can make.
Nothing else matters but who packed the boxes.
I'm not wrong.
And as soon as you hear it, how pissed off are you if you hadn't already, you know, realized that you were being gaslighted by both sides?
This is one of those times when both sides are equally guilty.
If Fox News wanted to find out about the topic, They'd be saying, can we talk to whoever packed the boxes?
You think they can't find them?
Let me give you another example.
Is this the first time that the most important question has not even been asked by either the left or the right?
There's another time this happened.
Can you think of it?
When was the time a really big story, and there was one question that was easy to answer?
It was easy to answer.
And nobody asked.
The Fine People March.
Yeah, Charlottesville.
What was the most important question?
The most important question, for which all of the news depended, is were there any attendees who were not racist and not actually marching with the racists?
Physically, they weren't with them, but they were there for their own reasons.
It's the only thing that mattered.
Because the president made a statement that they existed.
The media said, no, they don't.
And they went from that assumption.
How do they know? Do you know who talked to the people in Charlottesville who attended?
Just me. As far as I know, I'm the only person out of 7 billion who said, well, why don't we just ask them?
So I just tweeted, I think I tweeted it, is there anybody there who wants to talk to me and is not a racist?
And then a number of people contacted me.
And I talked to them individually, and they convinced me, with the totality of their story of how they got there, etc., that they were, in fact, not racists.
And they disavowed the racists in direct language, were not standing with them, marching with them, associating with them.
We're just in a different place.
They were at the event, but they weren't anywhere near the marchers.
So, why is it that Fox News has never reported that?
It's because they don't care about the topic.
They don't care. Because the topic is easy to discern.
You could do it today.
You could still just say, all right, did you go?
If you went, do you consider yourself a non-racist?
Defend yourself. And then they would.
And well, they would do it well.
So this is another example where the news has, I would say, it looks intentional.
It looks like neither the left nor the right have any interest in what's in those documents.
In the real world sense.
They only care about it as a story and as a political thing.
Because would the story just disappear if you knew who packed the boxes?
It might. The entire story would disappear.
Suppose you talk to the people who packed the boxes and just suppose they said something like this.
Well, Trump did tell us what to put in the boxes.
But he just sort of went in the room and said some general things and we did the best we could because we were in a hurry and we couldn't really ask him every single question.
So we did the best we could.
We just threw things in the boxes.
And then you find out, did Trump ever know what was in the boxes?
Did his lawyers ever know what was in the boxes?
Did anybody ever do a full inventory later to find out from Trump's perspective whether there was anything bad in those boxes?
Probably not. So would the whole story go away if you knew that the people who packed the boxes were making their own decisions, while the people who received them never really fully knew what was in them?
The whole thing would go away, wouldn't it?
The moment you realized that people who packed the boxes were operating a little bit independently, that's the end of the question.
Because nobody thinks that Trump was down there with a clipboard doing an inventory of the boxes, and I doubt he ordered anybody to do it.
Have you ever seen any reporting that says, well, Trump ordered somebody to look through all of the boxes and really double-check to see if there was any classified stuff in there?
I don't know. That would be an obvious story if we'd ever heard of it, right?
So, Scott the Sophist.
All right, we're going to stop right there.
So one of the ways to know an NPC is if they listen to your point and then they call you a sophist.
Because there are like a dozen things that you can say that you don't have to show your argument.
So, Acme Trader is the name of this account here on YouTube, says, Scott the Sophist, edit again.
That's an NPC. I bet if you asked the ACME trainer to tell me a story about your childhood, he'd say, I'd love to, but I'm busy.
That's a person who has actually no soul, in all likelihood, and is a walking NPC.
Any more?
Stop saying pack the boxes, it sounds so nasty.
It does sound a little dirty.
Do you know most of the news sounds dirty if you read it that way?
Let's try that. Who packed the boxes?
They packed those boxes hard.
Yeah, it does. It works a little bit.
So, you know, there's a story that was a big national story, or a global story, really, and I totally ignored until there was something that was funny about it, and then it caught my interest.
But how many of you know what happened in Sri Lanka?
Like, I saw a lot of headlines about Sri Lanka, and I ignored all of them, because I couldn't figure out what Sri Lanka had to do with me.
So I didn't know what was going on.
So I knew there was some big meltdown, and Sri Lanka was falling apart, and the government was not popular, something, something.
But that's all I knew.
So here's the actual story.
Um... They elected a new president who was anti-fertilizer.
He thought that fertilizers, he didn't have any scientific backing for this, but he thought that some kinds of fertilizers were causing kidney diseases.
And so then he banned fertilizers in 2021, which caused the yield of crops to go way down, which, when you combine it with the pandemic-related stuff, caused a full meltdown.
And so, here's the actual story, and I'm not making this up.
I'm just going to give you the headline, the way I see it.
Here's the headline, the way I see it.
Sri Lanka ran out of fertilizer because their president was full of shit.
Well, now you have my attention.
They ran out of fertilizer because their president was full of shit.
That really happened. Now I understand it.
Because until you can put it in the form of a joke, to me it's just noise.
I need the joke.
So now that you have the joke, we can understand this.
The bigger issue here is that this fertilizer question, apparently is a pretty big one.
So I didn't even know there was an anti-fertilizer group of people.
But there are.
And this anti-fertilizer thing would be one of the scariest things in the world.
I think we'll figure it out.
I think we'll figure it out.
But this is one of the biggest problems in the world, the lack of fertilizer, and one of the least discussed.
And I've known about this for 15 years.
This is one of those that you can see coming for a long time.
The first time I heard about it was about 15 years ago.
And it's just gotten worse since then.
So at the same time that that's happening, apparently Europe is having a drought like they've never had.
And I swear to God, every time there's a national story, it's really about me.
Like, this is one of those things that makes me think none of you are real, and I'm just creating this out of my own mind.
I'm not big on travel.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned that.
I've done a little bit of, you know, big trips.
But it's usually because somebody else wants to do it, right?
You know, a spouse wants to do it.
I'm not really, I gotta go to Europe, I gotta go to Asia.
I'm not that guy. I just don't.
I built a world in which I don't need to leave, you know, in case there's a pandemic or something.
Worked out pretty well, didn't it?
Yeah. I would like to take a moment to pat myself on the back.
I literally built my house to be something I could live in if I couldn't leave the house.
That was actually a design element.
If I ever have to not leave the house, I was thinking of house arrest, actually.
I was assuming there's always a good chance.
If you're at a certain income level, there's a good chance you're going to have house arrest at some point.
It doesn't even matter if you commit a crime.
Somebody will accuse you of something.
But there was one exception.
Every time I saw the advertisements for the so-called river cruises in Europe, where they have the smaller cruise ships that they could go down the rivers, and they stop at these great castles and have amazing scenery the whole way, you know, I clicked on a few of those one day, and then I get unlimited, repeated ads.
And every time I see one of these things, they look beautiful.
And I just think, you know, yeah, the Viking cruises in particular.
And I looked at them and I think, God, of all the things I could do, that really looks like the most appealing one for my specific sensibilities.
And today I learned that the rivers are drying up in Europe and the entire river cruise industry might have to get shelved.
So that felt like it was about me.
Somebody says it's for 70-year-olds and up.
It's also for people who like to write.
Because I would love to just be able to sit on the balcony while the scenery is going by and, you know, just finish my book.
So, yeah, there are times to vacation actively and then, you know, there are times when you don't need to.
But we're watching that.
And at the same time, Europe is having these gas and electric shortages.
So in Europe, it looks like, depending on the country, various countries are handling it differently, because of the energy shortages.
They're going to have cold showers.
Some places, they won't be able to turn on the business lights at night for some hours.
They won't be able to have open doors with the AC on, which probably is a good idea.
And... And in California, I got a call from my local energy company asking me if the energy company could control my AC in my house to turn it off when they have the load balancing issues.
That's right. My PG&E, the energy company in California, called me home And says, can we stick some technology to your house so we can turn off your AC if we need to?
Now, they did say, let me be clear, that it would be for 15-minute periods in which they would keep circulating the air so you'd still be circulating.
And they said you should experience maybe a 2-degree increase in temperature before it kicks back on again.
Now, if that's what it did, that wouldn't be too bad.
Would it? If they could really deliver that, if they could keep the lights on everywhere they need to be kept on, and all you had to do was maybe twice a day on the hottest days, you set your temperature at 75, for 15 minutes it goes up to 77, you go shopping for those 15 minutes, you come back, it's already down to 75, you're fine.
No big deal, right? It's a reasonable thing to ask.
Is it? Because once they can control your AC, do you think they're going to stop with 15 minutes?
They say they would.
Say they would. But I immediately said no.
And I didn't say no because I didn't want to be a team player.
I said no because it's just too much control over my life.
And also I work at home and I need a certain temperature and I don't want people controlling it for me.
Yeah. Slippery slope.
Alright. There was a surge in cartel violence in Tijuana.
Hundreds of National Guard got called up to quell a bunch of violence and murders and stuff in Tijuana.
And The cartel that owns Tijuana, they said they were going to respond to it by killing any citizens who went outdoors.
The cartel just threatened that if, I guess, some of their members got imprisoned by the military action, and they said if they don't get their people back, they'll kill everybody who goes outdoors.
So, let me ask you this.
The first time you heard me say, let's drone the cartels, what was your first reaction?
Well, that can't happen.
I mean, sounds nice, talking tough, but it can't actually happen.
And then you heard that Trump had brought up the subject during his term, and he had been sort of scoffed at and dismissed.
No, you can't attack Mexico.
What do you think now? What do you think now?
Now I think that the odds of it happening are 50-50.
What do you say? If you asked me two years ago the odds of droning the cartels, I'd say, really low.
5% tops, right?
No more than 5%.
What do you say now?
What would you give the odds of the U.S. taking direct military action against cartel assets in Mexico?
Go. Give me the odds.
Give me your odds.
I needed a percentage.
25, 25, 100, 60, 40.
I'm reading some of these off now.
65, 25, 50, 0, 10, 25, 35, 70, 100, 0.
All right, so we're all over the board.
We're from 0 to 100%.
But there are a lot of people in that middle zone now, aren't there?
So how many times have you seen this pattern emerge?
That when I take a position, the issue itself seems to be moving at about the same time.
And have you ever wondered, am I just good at finding a parade that's already moving, or am I moving the parade?
Have you ever asked yourself that?
What do you think in this case?
Because I'm positive...
That public opinion about attacking Mexico has directly followed my lead.
But is it a lead, or am I following?
What do you think? Am I leading or following?
Is it just obvious that this is the question we should be asking, and other people would be asking it at the same time.
If I didn't exist, it would be exactly the same.
What do you think? Well, here's the thing.
I can't tell, so I don't know the answer to this question myself.
I'll tell you what I do know.
I do know that members of the government pay attention to me.
Can anybody confirm that?
Because that's the sort of thing...
I'd rather see you say it, because if I just say it, it doesn't sound differently.
It sounds different. But can you confirm that from your own observation?
Would you say that somebody is watching?
So on locals, they're saying yes, and I see some yeses over here.
So, I don't know, could be a coincidence, but here's what I think happened.
There are some ideas that you can't entertain until somebody has normalized them.
And that's what I did, intentionally.
I took the wildest idea, attacking Mexico, and I said it until it was normalized.
That's what I did. Now, all you have to do is say it in a reasonable voice and say it often, and people will get used to hearing it, and then they'll think, well, I don't know, it's not impossible, right?
That's all it is. So the persuasion that I used was to normalize through exposure, a very common, easy-to-predict method.
Because you can get used to anything if you do it long enough, including hanging.
If you get hung, you'll get used to it if you do it long enough.
So that was the joke.
But the idea of directly attacking the cartels is unimaginable until people are talking about it.
And then you go, well, people are talking about it.
I guess it's not so unimaginable.
So that's where we are. We're talking about it.
TikTok. I saw a thread by BowtiedRobin on Twitter talking about how TikTok presents different content to Americans than it does Chinese youth.
Uh-oh. You see any problems?
So TikTok, a Chinese company, I guess we know this.
This is not a guess. It presents very different information to youth in China than it does to Americans.
What do you think it gives to Chinese youth that's different from Americans?
What would you guess?
Well, they give American youth useless people dancing and they addict them to it.
So they make American youth, they addict them to useless nonsense that doesn't help them and probably hurts their health.
What they do to Chinese use is the algorithm feeds them valuable life skills.
Just think about that.
China is feeding valuable life skills to Chinese consumers of TikTok, and they're feeding useless twaddle to Americans and everybody else, I guess.
Which teaches them nothing and actually removes their ability to have critical thinking and turns them into just puppets, basically.
Now, let me say something that just seems shocking to you.
TikTok is not banned in America.
What? How many of you remember the first time I said TikTok should be banned in America?
Does anybody remember that? What happened the first time you heard it?
The first time you heard it, you said, that's a little too far.
Right? And then I said it a few more times.
I said it a few more times.
And then you probably heard that the Trump administration wanted to ban TikTok.
Right? And then, I guess...
It didn't happen, and the Biden administration doesn't seem to be on that track.
But it doesn't sound crazy, does it?
Banning TikTok, if you know anybody who uses it, you know what it's doing to them.
Now, let me make a confession.
I don't use TikTok, and the reason is it's a Chinese company.
I know it would be maybe good for my business, you know, raise exposure, introduce myself to a new generation, all that.
But I'm not going to use it because of the Chinese connection.
But I have been consuming, accidentally, Instagram Reels.
Now, if you don't use Instagram, let me explain.
A reel is a quick little video that's basically what TikTok is.
So Instagram has within it a feature that mimics everything TikTok does.
And it's a popular feature.
And I made the mistake of clicking on some reels in Instagram, I don't know, some time ago.
And I flipped through, and maybe one out of five was kind of cool.
I liked it. Gave me a little dopamine hit.
Four out of five were annoying people dancing.
There's nothing more annoying than a reel in which the woman acts cute, and then she has to do a self-conscious laugh at the screen.
I can't stand it.
You know what I mean? It's the woman's dancing, and after she does the dance...
Or she's looking pretty, and she's just walking.
And then after she's walking pretty, she does the look at the camera.
This one. And turn off the camera.
Because I'm so self-conscious.
I wasn't trying to look pretty.
No, no. You might have thought I was looking pretty, but no.
No, no. I'm not pretty.
Stop it. Stop it.
I'm not pretty. I can't stand it.
I see those things, and if I accidentally have the sound on...
Now, there's one that's worse.
Because people use these voiceovers that they pair with their own video.
Have you heard this one?
I love my puppy dogs.
My puppy dogs. You've heard that one, right?
And once you click on one of those, you just keep getting it.
Hey, my puppy dog!
My puppy dog is...
Anyway, so here's my point.
Do you know how addiction works?
It's not the way you think.
Addiction is not getting what you want.
Addiction is getting what you want occasionally.
That's what makes you addicted.
So if you look at four reels...
Let's say you look at five reels.
One of them is awesome and you love it, and the other four you wish you hadn't seen, you will become addicted.
Better than if you liked all five.
If you liked all five, you'd just get used to them.
Then you'd be like, I have enough of that.
But because you have to hunt for them, you have to work for it, and you're getting all these false ones and bad ones before you get one that just moves you, that's addiction.
Now, I started using the reels, I don't know, a few months ago, and I found myself taken over.
Now, it might be because I study this for all my life, brainwashing and hypnosis and persuasion.
I'm kind of really tuned in to that part of life.
I could feel my brain being taken over.
I could feel my body no longer being able to stop doing it.
I have the actual feeling of, I can't even stop my finger.
I would like to go...
That's pretty funny.
I would like to be doing something...
Oh, that's not funny.
That's not funny. I wish I were exercising...
Wow, that's funny. Have you had that experience yet?
Has anybody experienced actually having their body taken over?
Because that's a total takeover of my body.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now, Twitter does the same thing, but I rationalize it as, you know, part of my entertainment and also part of business.
If I didn't use Twitter for business, you know, as part of connecting with an audience, if I didn't do that, I would run from that fucking thing so fast.
Like, I would not use it for entertainment.
To me, it just feels dangerous, right?
But for business, you do some dangerous things, risk-reward, blah, blah, blah.
But I can't justify using Instagram and just looking at Reels because there's no business purpose there whatsoever.
And I can't stop.
Yeah, slot machine theory, exactly.
So the TikTok question about whether TikTok should be legal in America is a no-fucking-brainer.
TikTok absolutely should not be legal.
It should be shut down today.
It's one of the most dangerous things.
I would also think that we should put some kind of limit on addictive social media.
Oh, the other thing that Chinese social media does, TikTok, is they ban it for certain hours for certain ages.
In China, you can't even use the damn thing during certain hours.
That's not true in America.
So when we're watching the Chinese right in front of us destroy the youth of America, and more than the youth, because we're addicted to it too, destroying America while trying to build up their own internal capabilities, what side?
What side is our government on?
Who exactly is on the side of keeping TikTok?
Tell me. More sophistry.
I'm going to guess that that's being funny.
But tell me this.
I've heard an argument that TikTok should be banned.
Have you? How many of you have heard the argument that TikTok should be banned?
Go. You watch the news.
Have you ever heard the argument that it should be?
Mostly yeses, right?
Yes, yes, yes. Now I'm going to open up the mechanism again.
Like we did before about who packed the boxes.
I'm going to open...
You're going to see the mechanism again.
Who's arguing to keep TikTok legal?
Name their names. Who is arguing to keep TikTok legal?
No, not Big Tech.
Not Big Tech in the United States.
Mitch? No. No, the answer is no one.
Now... Process that for a moment.
There's a strong, very strong argument for banning it.
Very strong. There's nobody on the other side.
Am I wrong?
Show me a major politician who's in favor of keeping TikTok legal in the United States.
Name one. Give me a name of any congressperson, senator, anybody.
Did you know that? Did you know that we have an issue in which there's no disagreement by anybody who's willing to show their face?
Nobody who's willing to say, my name is X, I'm a senator, and I think TikTok should stay just the way it is.
Nobody. Think of another topic where there's nobody on the other side.
There are people who maybe haven't thought about it, but there's nobody on the other side.
You're saying Swalwell, but that's a joke, right?
You're saying Biden, that's a joke.
McConnell, that's not true.
Kinzinger, no, that's not true.
There's literally nobody who's made the argument.
You see that? See, if you hadn't noticed that that was missing, you wouldn't know what's going on.
There's something going on that's protecting TikTok that our news has never looked into.
Think about that. Have you seen the news look into it on the right?
Nope. I haven't.
How about the left? Nope.
I haven't. So the fact that the single most important question about social media, in my opinion...
The low-hanging fruit is TikTok, because it's a Chinese company.
If you're talking about Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, those things...
Those are American companies, so you have to treat that whole situation differently.
But a Chinese company that's addicting our youth?
That's easy. That one's not a challenge.
If we're treating that like that's a hard question, there's something else going on.
And the something else going on could only be one thing.
Which is? What's the one thing it could only be?
Chinese influence.
What else could it be? You know, if somebody wants to come forward and say, oh, it's not Chinese influence, I have a good argument for it.
It has to do with freedom or something.
By the way, I just realized, what is Thomas Massey's opinion on TikTok?
Um... So let's ask him that question.
Because he would be interesting.
Because I think he's more keep the government out of a guy.
But would he be willing to keep the government out of a Chinese cyber weapon?
I mean, that's what TikTok is.
It's a Chinese cyber weapon.
So would he be in favor of it because of freedom?
Letting them employ a digital weapon on American soil?
So let's redefine TikTok as a Chinese cyber weapon.
Because it's a Chinese cyber weapon.
And I think it should be regulated by the military.
It should be a military regulation, not...
It should be a Homeland Security thing.
Give me an interview with the head of Homeland Security and have that person explain why TikTok is still allowed in the United States.
If we had anything like a real news business, either on the right or the left, Fox News, I'm coming at you on this.
Fox News is not even close to giving me the news that I want.
Not even close. So, here's what I want Fox News to do.
Give me an interview with the head of Homeland Security about one topic, just one topic, TikTok, and tell me why that's not a cyber weapon.
And tell me why Homeland Security should not be banning that on security issues.
It's an attack on the Homeland.
So I don't even know the name of the Homeland Security person, do you?
Can anybody name who's in charge of Homeland Security?
I'm not sure I ever could, but...
Who is it? I mean, Biden, but...
Mayorkus? Oh, you're a smart group.
Mayorkas, okay. So let's get Mayorkas on an interview and say, defend TikTok being legal.
I would make him defend it.
I wouldn't say, give us your opinion.
I'd say, defend it. Defend why we should allow a Chinese cyber weapon to continue to target our youth.
Go. Now, what do you think Mayorkas is going to say?
Freedom. Is that going to be a defense?
Yeah, they're targeting our youth, and we see it, and we know it, but, you know, freedom.
Freedom. Do you think you'll say that?
I don't know. I don't know what Majorca would say, but wouldn't you like to see an interview?
Now, does it seem to you that the topic of my live stream today is that the news isn't even close to giving us anything we need?
Didn't give us anything on the Charlottesville thing?
They're not giving us anything on who packed the boxes, just obvious questions.
And they're not asking the head of Homeland Security if TikTok should be allowed or banned.
People, these are the most obvious questions in the country.
How about this one?
What are we going to do in the United States about a fertilizer shortage?
That's a pretty big question, right?
Who's asking that?
So I feel like there needs to be some kind of new entity where the public can register the questions it wants to ask, and you could compare what the public wants to ask, let's say they get voted up to the top, with what the entities are actually asking.
Because there's a real difference between what the news is asking and what the public wants them to ask.
And that's left and right, and I don't know why.
I mean, I could speculate and make the worst assumptions in the world...
You know, that they're either incompetent or China owns them or some damn thing.
But I'd rather have a real answer.
You think that behind the curtain everybody's colluding?
Maybe. We'll just use hydroponics?
They're still fertilized, aren't they?
Hydroponics are fertilized.
All right. Tractors burying baby formula?
I didn't see that. Apple and Google profit from the app?
Yeah, but let's get people on record defending that.
Takes a lot of fertilizer to create cattle feed?
Oh, that's interesting. Is somebody arguing that if we went vegetarian, not that that's practical, but if we went vegetarian, we'd have enough fertilizer?
I don't know if that's true. I feel like we would have to replace the beef with growing more vegetables.
I don't buy that.
I'm not buying that. You think the U.S. will fight the CCP? No, I don't think so.
Not directly. So it seems to be that there's one...
Well, nitrogen is not the only fertilizer.
So if nitrogen was the only thing we needed, we'd be in good shape.
That's not the problem. Yeah, manure is fertilizer.
Are you for banning the porn industry?
That's interesting. I've never talked about that.
How many of you would be in favor of banning porn?
Let me give you answers. I'm saying no, no, no, yes.
Yes, no, yes, no.
No, yes, yes, no.
See, the problem with banning porn, people are mixed.
Looks like you're pretty mixed on this.
Should be paid access?
I don't know. I'm not sure you can ever stop it from being freely available to children.
Should be banned. I'm a little...
My problem with porn is my problem with guns.
It goes like this.
With guns, it is unambiguously true that some people are less safe when there are more guns around.
But it is also unambiguously true that some people are more safe if they have access to guns.
So the problem with gun ownership is that we have people who are operating from self-interest doing this sort of theater work.
Where they pretend they're arguing from some social or constitutional right.
It's never that. If you think you need a gun or you might need one to protect yourself, you want the right to own one.
If you think you'll never want a gun because you're afraid of them and your only risk is other people having them, then probably you're against it.
And then we act as though the theater of the high level, oh, my constitution, that's really why you're doing it.
That's not why you're doing it. You're doing it because you want a gun or you don't want a gun.
That's it. Now, you might want a gun to protect yourself against your government, but it's still just wanting a gun to feel that you're safer.
So, the same thing with porn.
If you say porn should be banned, what does that do to the person who can't get access to humans?
Is that fair? Because if you're looking at porn from the perspective of someone who can get sex in the real world, that's not fair.
That's not fair at all.
If you're married and you're getting everything you like, and you're telling somebody else that they can't have porn because your sex life is good, well, the only thing I can say is an ironic fuck you.
It's ironic because they're having sex.
Yeah. No, don't tell people who can't get sex that they can't have porn.
If you can fix it so they can have sex, well, then maybe your opinion that they should have porn is something I'd listen to.
But until most people can have access to sex in some kind of a timely, useful way, which is not even close to where we are, I think you've got to give people options.
Now, is it true that porn ruins marriages?
I don't know. I'll tell you what they do.
It changes the balance of power.
So I believe that marriages stay together when the woman has all the power.
Meaning that she can control the man completely.
That's your stable situation.
As soon as the man discovers that he can get off without the wife...
With porn, suddenly her power diminishes, and he doesn't need to listen to her so much because he's not getting sex there anyway.
So I think porn changes the balance of power in a way that's very bad for women.
It might be bad for men too.
That would be a separate question.
But I think women want a band because it definitely reduces their power and it increases the power of men because they have an option that doesn't require being nice to women to get sex.
And that's a very big thing.
And men don't say that out loud, by the way.
But porn is the substitute for shitty women.
Sorry. Porn is the direct substitute for shitty women.
And the percentage of shitty women is at an all-time high.
Now, you might say to me, Scott, the percentage of shitty men is at an all-time high, and I don't know.
It might be. I wouldn't deny it.
But it's absolutely true that the percentage of women who are shitty is at the all-time high.
Probably true for men.
Maybe it's just true for people.
I don't know. But my vision on this is sort of limited, so I'll admit that.
But it's true. And here's why.
Everybody is getting too picky about everything.
Right? Right?
Too picky about everything.
Imagine being my age and finding somebody who's within 35 years of dating age.
I like to have a broad range.
Imagine me finding anybody within 35 years of my dating age who doesn't have so many preferences that it's really hard to manage them at the same time.
Imagine that. So, Somebody says lots of men are weaker and feminized now.
Yeah, there is something to that.
I don't know what it is. Shut up, Bart.
Oh, no.
When I say that everybody's too picky, I don't mean just women.
I mean people. And I think it's because we have so many things that we can access.
Have you ever tried to watch a TV or movie with another person?
Here's me trying to watch a movie with another person in 1986.
This is my impression of wanting to watch a movie with another person in 1986.
Hey, you want to go to see a movie?
Sure. What's playing?
We've got three choices.
They all sound pretty good.
Why don't you pick one?
Eh, we'll probably watch all three, but let's watch this one tonight.
Okay. And then you get some popcorn and maybe you hug, curl up, watch a great show.
That's 1986.
Now here is 2022, trying to get somebody to watch a show.
Hey, you want to watch a movie?
I don't know. Is there anything out?
Yeah, there's tons of movies out.
So many, it's going to be hard for us to find one that we agree on.
How about this new Thor movie?
Oh, yeah, that was great.
I just watched it on my phone.
Oh, okay. Well, how about Top Gun?
Top Gun. We all agree on Top Gun, right?
Yeah, yeah. Just saw it.
All right. Two hours later...
You've picked a movie and you watch it and it's way too boring because your attention span has changed and you can't even tolerate it.
One of you will bail out of the movie before it's over.
When was the last time you sat down with one other person to watch a movie and one of you didn't want to bail out of the movie before it was over?
In the old days, I used to watch the whole movie even if it wasn't perfect and I didn't care that much.
But today, I will bail on a movie the moment somebody's tied to a chair or an animal is endangered.
So I have two hard rules of turning off a show.
If somebody's tied to a chair or there's an animal in danger in any way, off.
Then there's a bunch of times that I have to fast-forward it.
So as soon as there's the male and the female usually, in the traditional movie, the male and female are like getting together and they're showing love for each other.
And you know that the next 10 minutes of your movie will be you being convinced that they're really in love.
So that when something bad happens, you'll feel bad.
And I say to myself, God, fast forward, it makes no love, looks like you're kissing.
A little more talk.
Oh, now they're having sex.
Got it, got it, got it, got it.
Done. I can't even watch a movie without fast-forwarding through all the scenes that are establishing something that I already got.
It's a dangerous situation.
Got it. Fast-forward.
Fast-forward. You get a torch room for information.
Got it. Fast-forward. Fast-forward.
You can have a conversation with that confidential source.
Got it. Got some information that'll tell you where to go.
Don't need to know the rest. There you are.
You found the guy and it looks like there's a bunch of bad people in the room.
Oh shit. There's one hero and a bunch of bad people in the room.
I wonder what's going to happen.
Could it be a fight? Would it be a fight?
Yes, it's a fight. Will the hero beat up all the people in the room?
Fast forward. The hero is beating up the people in the room and the action is so fast I can't really see it anyway.
It's just going to be a bunch of images on the screen for a bunch of minutes and noise, and okay, that's over.
How do you watch a movie anymore?
If you're watching by yourself, don't you fast-forward through all the got it?
I got it.
I got it.
Scenes.
Right?
And is there anybody who can watch an entire porn movie before it gets to the good parts?
Thank you.
I mean, those were always interminable.
I mean, just, you couldn't handle them.
But now, it's impossible.
Like, what would be the point?
If I'm not looking at a compilation clip, I'm already bored.
And here I'm talking about that one time I looked at porn for ten minutes.
Yeah. Ten minutes and it was ruined for life.
But yeah, compilation clips.
It's all I could handle. Alright.
I think that's all.
The audio is okay now?
Did I lose my audio when I said something you didn't like?
Alright, that's enough for now.
Move hands from face?
You don't like my hands in front of my face?
Is that bothering you? Does it bother you when my hands are in front of my face?
I'm sorry? Alright, you're right.
I should not put my hands in front of my face.
That's actually good advice.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, and the other problem with movies is the wokeness.
I don't mind...
I remember there was a show called...
Something, La Femme Nikita or something, where Nikita played a woman who weighed about 90 pounds and could beat up any 200-pound man and throw him around the room and stuff.
I remember thinking, oh, that's, it's like, it's cute because it's so ridiculous.
And she was attractive, so I didn't mind looking at it.
But Once that becomes the standard way of all movies, that a 90-pound woman can beat up a 200-pound man pretty much with ease, anytime they want, then it's like, I don't know.
I thought you took an interesting concept where there was a movie where it was true, where I'm like, okay, there's a movie where it's true.
And then suddenly all movies have to be true, that the women can beat up the men.
Went too far. Wasn't she enhanced?
I don't think so.
She was just trained well, right?
All right, I have to read this comment to YouTube over on Locals.
Somebody said, somebody said, is there any porn for old people or does it accidentally turn into a snuff film?
Oh, that's really funny.
I think that's where we're going to end.
Because I can't top that.
Porn about old people accidentally turns into a snuff film.
