Episode 1837 Scott Adams: Is E.S.G. A Form Of Fascism, And Is The Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Legitimate?
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Flow by Adam Neumann
NBCNews, Michael Beschloss speculation
Flawless digital election systems
What's in the Mar-a-Lago affidavit?
ESG, a shadow government by design
Teachers' union contract says White people get fired first
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the slightly late, yet better than usual, Coffee with Scott Adams, a highlight of civilization, best day of your life, until tomorrow.
And how would you like to pump it up a level?
See if we can take this to the max.
I'm talking Uber.
I'm talking extreme.
Yeah, you'd like that.
And all you need for that is a cup or a cup.
A cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a gel sustain, 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.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it's happening now.
Go! Oh, God, that's so good.
Oh, that was a fresh one.
That was good. Shall we start with the good news?
Does anybody want the optimistic take on today?
I got it. If you were to pick one person that you would trust to tell you what is going to happen with the stock market in the United States in the long term, who would it be?
No fair saying me.
No, no. Because you know where I get my information?
I get my information from the person I'm going to talk about.
Yeah, the answer is Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett is still investing substantially in United States stocks.
Just bought a bunch of Apple, bought some other big investments.
He has Coca-Cola, Bank of America, some other stuff.
And here's what you need to know.
If Warren Buffett is still investing big in America, He hasn't been wrong yet.
It was something like 70 years of investing, and for 70 years he's been saying the same thing.
Don't bet against America.
And then he puts all of his money in America, and it works pretty much every time.
So if Warren Buffett thinks the economy is at least strong enough for him to invest in America, well, maybe you should too.
That's pretty good news.
No, I'm not telling you you should invest.
That would be investment advice, which I don't give.
I don't give. But it's worth noting that the person who can give such advice is investing in America.
Well, here's a little quiz for you.
I'm going to see how many of you get this right.
Rasmussen had a poll in which they were asking about the popularity of Attorney General Garland, And I want to see if you could guess what percentage of likely voters think that Attorney General Garland is doing a better job than most previous Attorney Generals.
Anybody want to take a...
How are you doing this?
What? How could it be that all of you are so close to the exact right answer?
It's 26%. How do you do that?
How do you do that?
Wow. Okay.
Look out for the fake Laura Ingraham quotes.
Are you seeing them all over the Internet?
So it's something taken out of context.
So what Laura Ingraham did say, on, I guess, a podcast, somebody else's, that we'd see if...
We'd have to wait and see...
If voters are tired of the drama of Trump and are ready for something else.
So she was speculating about maybe the voters would have a certain attitude at this point.
And that got turned into Laura Ingram's turning on the president, or turning on Trump.
Now, is that what you heard?
If somebody says the public might be You know, they might be ready to turn the page, but I don't know.
Does that sound like she's turned on the president?
No. It sounds like she's making an observation that literally every person in America has made.
Is there even one person in America who has not made the following speculation?
I wonder if America's had enough of this.
It literally is closer to saying absolutely nothing...
Than it is to saying something surprising and newsworthy.
Because there's literally no one in America who hasn't at least asked the question, not talking about themselves, but at least asked the question, are other people maybe over it, you know, and want something different?
And that turned into, you know, now it's like a big story.
Literally nothing. So here's the biggest story that I don't know anything about, and I'm excited anyway.
Do you think I would be stopped by a complete lack of useful information about a story?
No. Have you met me?
No, I'm not going to be slowed down by a complete lack of information.
I'm going to take the most positive spin I can take, and I'm going to give you my hot take on it.
Are you ready for it?
So you remember there was a company, or still is, called WeWork, and it got really big, and then there was a scandal.
Liz Cheney was defeated by a melted popsicle.
We have carpe donctum as letting us know.
Good to know. Anyway, this WeWork company, at one point it was worth $46 billion, but now it's only worth $4 billion, and there was some scandal, but none of that matters.
Here's what matters. The founder has a new startup that's already valued at a billion dollars.
And here's what excites me about the startup.
It's being funded, at least, I don't know if entirely or in part, by Andreessen Horowitz, Now, what's that tell you?
Do you know enough about investing to know if Andreessen Horowitz is in big, that that means something?
It probably means something.
That's not a company that invests big in something that's not a pretty darn good idea with somebody who knows how to operate, a good operator.
Yeah, Marco Andreessen invented Netscape, went on to create maybe the most substantial, or at least the most storied, venture capital firm around.
So they're in, but let me tell you what the service is.
So this is extremely vague, but I'm going to tell you why I'm excited about it.
So he's creating...
Some kind of community-driven, experience-centric service that would change the nature of residential real estate.
Does that sound good to you?
Would you put a billion dollars into that?
So it's meant to deal with the housing crisis and some kind of community-driven, experience-centric service.
To deal with the fact that there's a housing crisis.
How do you interpret that?
Well, I'm going to over-interpret it.
Here's my interpretation.
How long have you heard me say that the problem with home ownership and renting, really all of our housing, is that it's just poorly designed?
It's not designed from the ground up to meet our lifestyle and our needs.
I think what he's doing is designing a place you can live that's right from the ground up.
Here's the example I use all the time.
The best lifestyle I ever had Was in a cinder block room with one other person, my roommate, in college.
A college dormitory with a shared bathroom down the hall.
Was the best living experience I've ever had.
The second best is a 19,000 square foot mansion that requires an army of people to maintain it and takes all of my time and every day I wish I didn't have to do it.
Even the best kind of home ownership kind of sucks.
It does. I mean, there are tons of benefits, right?
That's why you do it. But every day, I wish I didn't own a home.
I wish there was some other way to just lead my life without the burden of owning a home.
And I could afford a different kind of home.
The reason I built my own home, which cost approximately twice as much as buying, if you've ever tried to build a house, you know, it's pretty expensive.
The only way you can get something that's even Modestly acceptable is to build it yourself.
Because there's no home builder who's building homes for our modern lifestyle.
That fits our economics and our health needs and our social needs and all that.
I've got a feeling that this WeWork thing, and largely because Andreessen Horowitz is behind it, I've got a feeling that they're going directly at the lifestyle part of living.
Because homes are built as little, let's say, little containers.
They're built as containers for people.
Oh, we built a good container.
We'll put you in the container.
But if you started from how do you make an awesome life, how do you create a situation where you're naturally interacting with people in a way that's positive?
You're not secluded in your little cell.
You have some kind of reason to deal with other people.
And it might be something like, for example, one of the best things about college was the cafeteria.
So the cafeteria was, everything you wanted was free once you'd paid a monthly fee.
So you could eat as much as you wanted of anything you wanted.
And it was a really good cafeteria.
The choices were awesome, and they changed all the time.
And I never had to cook.
I never had to clean dishes.
I never had to shop.
I never had to follow a recipe.
And I ate great food every single day.
It turned out that our cafeteria in my college was a model cafeteria for the company that managed cafeterias for colleges.
So whatever was the best stuff they wanted to use to showcase their other stuff, they do it at my little college.
So we had just a great situation.
Now, if you said to me, Scott, I will take away your gigantic house that you designed yourself, and I will give you a space that's got a nice view, and a cafeteria, and you'll have a reason to interact with other people.
It'll be healthy. I feel like I might go for it.
If it met my basic needs, had enough rooms and had an office, for example, I feel like it would be better.
Yeah, it's like assisted living, but maybe...
Yeah, actually, it is like assisted living, except maybe the turbo version of that for younger people.
So, like I said, I think residential housing is the biggest market in the next...
50 years. It will dwarf everything else.
And the reason is we're going to have to tear down and rebuild everything.
Because there are no homes in existence that meet our lifestyles.
Not even close. Housing is completely broken.
And it's going to be disrupted.
So are you following the Berenson case where...
Berenson got kicked off of Twitter for, what's his first name?
Why am I forgetting his first name?
Berenson, his first name?
Alex, right. Alex Berenson.
So he was saying lots of things that, let's say, the experts did not think were true about the pandemic.
So he got booted off of Twitter, but now apparently they're going to let him back.
And there's some documentation showing that the Biden administration may have been encouraging Twitter to kick him off for misinformation, according to them.
I'm going to test you here.
Probably most of you are familiar with Alex Berenson, a famous, let's say, skeptic of the government's handling of the pandemic.
In lots of different areas, he was a skeptic.
Now, was he proven right in the end?
Go. Was Alex Berenson proven to be right after all?
Go. Comments.
Comments. I'm seeing a wall of yeses over here.
Some not reallys. Don't know.
Yes, 25%.
Yes, yes, yes.
Some no's. Some no's.
But mostly yeses, and some people don't know.
So my audience thinks mostly he's been proven right.
I didn't see any of that.
Are you sure you're not hallucinating?
Because I literally didn't see him get anything right.
That I'm aware of. So maybe...
Has anybody done, like, a report card for his predictions?
Here's what I think happened.
I believe Alex Berenson got famous for being really bad at analyzing data, but every time he was really bad at analyzing data, he would come to the same conclusion that the government was lying and wrong about whatever it was telling you about everything.
Now, what would happen if instead of being bad at analyzing data, you were just somebody who didn't analyze any data at all, and you just said, I'm going to go out there and make a prediction that the government is lying to you, and what they're saying is not quite correct?
How well would you do?
So it's the fog of war, it's a pandemic, nobody really knows anything.
So you go out there and you make yourself famous by saying the government's wrong about everything.
How would you do as a public figure?
Really well. Really well.
In fact, people would come to believe that you were sort of magic because you kept being right about stuff.
Except that the way he got there is by being amazingly wrong at analyzing anything.
That's how it happened.
He analyzed incorrectly Just study after study.
That's what it seemed like to me.
So this is my subjective impression of what was going on.
So it looked to me like he got everything wrong, but he got the right outcome, or something close to it.
So it drives me crazy, because you knew that there would be people guessing on both sides, and whoever guessed right would say that they were right all along, and it was obvious that you shouldn't believe them.
But it's sort of a trick. Because either the government was going to be mostly right, and it would have been good to follow their lead, or it would turn out that maybe they were more wrong than right.
It was going to be one of those things.
And there were people on both sides.
So, one of the people...
Let me ask you this.
The people who were completely opposite of Berenson...
How close were they to being correct?
The people who were completely opposite of him, how close were they to being correct at the end of it, now that we can see things a little bit clearly?
You're saying not close.
Yeah, of course I'm priming you for this answer.
Well, the opposite would be, I guess the opposite would be that masks do work, that vaccinations do stop the spread, that they are safer than not getting them.
That it's good for children.
That sort of thing. I would say they're mostly, at best, half right.
At best. So the people on the other side from Berenson didn't come out too well.
But, what did I tell you in the beginning of the pandemic?
My clearest, most often repeated warning.
Everybody's guessing. Somebody's going to guess right.
When it's done, whoever guessed right is going to claim genius.
That's what happened.
That's what happened.
I called that exactly.
However, we have the two movies on one screen phenomenon, so we have both sides with opposite opinions claiming victory after it's all done.
The people who are pro-vaccination We'll tell you, well, sure, you know, it didn't stop the transmission so much, but it sort of did in the first variant a little bit, but mostly it kept people from dying, so that's a big win.
Right? That's what they're saying.
They're saying, yeah, you know, it wasn't as good as we hoped, but it saved millions of people, so darn good thing we did it.
We better give it to those children.
And by the way, as far as I know, do a fact check on this.
100% of all civilized, let's say, industrialized countries, if that's even the term anymore, I would say 100% of all industrialized countries believe that the vaccinations are and were a good idea.
Fact check me. There are no civilized countries who think the vaccinations were a bad idea.
Can you fact check that? Now, I'm not saying that they're right.
I know most of you are anti-vaccination, and I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm just asking you what the facts are, and if we're all aware of the same facts, see if we're on the same page.
In my opinion, I think 100% of the industrialized countries are on the same page, which most of you think is wrong still, right?
That one's kind of hard to explain, isn't it?
Kind of hard to explain. Now remember, if somebody stopped vaccinations during Omicron, you know, that's where opinions start to diverge, legitimately, because Omicron is a different level of risk.
The problem was the lack of conversation.
The WEF explains it.
So you think it's the WEF that explains everything?
So one view would be that all of the industrialized medical communities are slaves to, what, the WEF? Or slaves to, possibly, Fauci.
Because I wonder if the American medical community, if you got COVID after getting a vaccine, you have a trigger that others don't.
Okay, maybe. Could be.
Could be. All right, so we're not talking about whether any of this is true or not true.
Those conversations are no longer interesting.
But I do think it's fascinating watching the Berenson...
So, one view is that...
And by the way, I think that he's valuable, although mostly wrong.
Valuable, but mostly wrong.
That's my opinion. You need somebody on the other side of a big issue like this.
And he did a good job as a, you know, making attention on the, you know, hey, maybe we should, you know, tap the brakes on this.
So I think he did... I think he was a solid...
In my opinion, I think he added.
But it's a controversial opinion.
I think he added to the process.
Alright, would you like an update on the 13th hoax?
Everybody knows what the 13th hoax is, right?
So the 13th hoax is that Trump had any kind of important nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago.
To me, that's ridiculous.
Or at least he knew about it.
The suggestion that he knew about it, and there were sensitive nuclear secrets, and he didn't want to give them back?
No. No.
There's no chance that's true.
Really. People.
There's no chance that's true.
Just thinking through.
Trump had sensitive nuclear secrets, Put them in a warehouse in Mar-a-Lago.
Had some reason to keep nuclear secrets.
I don't know what that would be.
And when asked to return them, refused.
That's sort of the story we're being told.
There's no chance that's true.
None. I mean, really, there's no chance that's true.
Anyway, so here's my summary of the 13th hoax.
And I have to do it in this accent.
Fool me 12 times, not gonna fool me again.
So that's the tagline for the 13th oaks.
Fool me 12 times, not gonna fool me again.
But I guess they are. So I saw Greg Gutfeld mentioned this, and I was just sort of catching up.
A few days ago, historian Michael Beschloss asked this question on Twitter.
He said, any possibility that certain foreign governments Trump loves wanted American nuclear secrets from him?
Now, Michael Beschloss, and this is what Greg pointed out, I thought he was like a serious historian.
Like he's somebody with some weight, right?
He's somebody we've been seeing for years, talking about presidential history, etc.
What I didn't know is that he apparently is associated with NBC News.
What's that mean? Yeah.
So, I don't think Trump is selling nuclear secrets to foreign countries by storing those documents in Mar-a-Lago.
So here's the question.
Is that even serious?
When Beshlaw says, is there any possibility Trump might want to sell nuclear secrets to some foreign country, am I supposed to take that comment seriously?
Like, actually.
What I mean is, is he saying something that's purely political and we should recognize it as such?
Which would be fine. On Twitter, people make incredible hyperbolic leaps to the absurd.
But if you know what it is...
Then you put it in context.
Oh, that's one of those hyperbolic absurd statements.
It's just sort of a political gotcha.
But is that what he's doing?
Is this just a political gotcha?
You know, sort of exaggerating something.
Or does he actually think we should believe this?
That this is on the table.
There's a possibility of this.
But then I was informed that he worked for NBC. NBC, the entity most closely associated with, allegedly, the CIA. Is the CIA wanting us to believe that Trump is selling nuclear secrets to a foreign country?
I think so.
I don't know. But it would be consistent with what we've seen from the CIA in terms of trying to affect internal politics before.
It would be consistent with what we've seen.
Ridiculous, but consistent.
And, you know, I like this what-if thing that the Democrats are doing.
What if Trump sold, tried to sell secrets?
What if? And I thought, I like that.
So, I added my own.
What if? I tweeted earlier.
What if? I'm not saying it's happening.
I'm not saying it's happening.
But what if? What if?
What if Democrats are intentionally creating more right-wing extremists to justify their tactics against regular Republicans?
Now, I'm not saying that's happening.
All I'm saying is that all of their actions are consistent with them needing to create extremists because there are not enough of them.
So they seem to be doing things that, when you look at them, they seem only designed to create extremists.
And I think to myself, shouldn't you be trying to reduce the number of extremists?
That being actually the job of our FBI. And I thought, it doesn't look like they're trying to decrease it.
it actually looks like they're trying to increase it.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
So... I'm not saying it's happening.
I'm just saying they're acting like they're trying to create more extremists.
Here's a little story for you that should make you feel good.
So Twitter, I guess the Department of Justice, has found guilty an employee of Twitter who formerly was of Walnut Creek, California.
Do you know where Walnut Creek, California is compared to me?
It's like right over there.
It's like where I shop.
It's where I go to dinner at Walnut Creek.
So it's like right here. So this guy from Walnut Creek, but he wasn't working in Walnut Creek at the time.
He was residing in Seattle.
And he's accused of, and apparently they have evidence of, That he was giving private Twitter information to Saudi Arabia and the Saudi royal family, specifically about critics of Saudi Arabia, I assume. So what do you think of that?
So there was an insider, but here was his job.
He was the media partnership manager for the MENA region.
So he was a media partnership manager.
Do you think that somebody with the title Media Partnership Manager should have access to private Twitter information?
What kind of job has access to the private Twitter information?
Could the manager of media partnerships look at my direct messages?
Can my private direct messages be seen by the The media partnership manager?
Really? Maybe.
I don't know. But apparently, I mean, according to the legal system, yes.
Now, how many other Twitter employees can look at personal information of people?
Don't know. How many Twitter employees can tweak the algorithm to change the results?
One. Lots of them.
Are there lots of people who could make a change in their little area, but as long as it compiles right, nobody really knows?
I don't know. If you told me that an employee who is the manager of media partnerships could access private Twitter data, I would have said that's not a thing.
Nobody's going to do that.
No company would allow that.
But apparently it happened.
So if you think this is bad news, I think you're just a pessimist.
Because here's what you should think is the good news.
Despite the fact that Twitter had this fairly massive hole in their security, don't you feel good to know that all 50 of our election systems in the United States don't have this kind of problem?
They don't have an insider who has access to anything or could change anything.
And... I feel as if we don't give enough credit to the programmers for our 50, I guess their 51, different election systems, because they use different digital technology.
It's not all about paper, right?
Because even the paper stuff has to be reported digitally.
So all the systems have some digital connection.
And unlike Twitter, and I think some of these state election people, maybe Twitter should hire them to find out how they do it.
Because Twitter, you know, you probably thought Twitter is like a big billion, multi-billion dollar company, and you're thinking, well, they hire the best security people, but obviously they're not operating at the level of each of these state election systems.
So the state election systems that have operated flawlessly without any insider problems whatsoever seem to be able to do this.
And not only do they do it, they do it every election, time after time.
So they're doing it for congressional, local elections, state elections.
They're doing it for national elections.
The internal digital security for all 51 of these elections is tight as a gnat's ass, as my dad used to say.
Tighter than a gnat's ass.
And isn't the obvious thing is that Twitter should just hire some of these people to teach them how not to have any insiders working for your company.
Who could take a bribe or something like that?
So it's pretty amazing.
So a lot of you are looking at the negative side of this, and you should really look at the positive.
The positive is that our election systems have figured out how to do something that Twitter can't do for data security.
You know, what's interesting is that not only can Twitter not do it, but none of the large companies can.
Google hasn't figured out how to never have an insider do something bad.
But all 51 election systems have nailed that.
And standing ovation.
For our election systems, please, give it up.
Everybody, give it up.
51 election systems with no security problems, no problems with insiders doing things that we don't know about.
That's the kind of accomplishment that does not get heralded as much as it should.
Not as much as it should.
So let's all take a moment to thank the excellent men and women who are working on our election systems, the digital parts, the digital parts, because those are flawless.
All right, so the DOJ says it's not going to release the affidavit, the part that tells us anything interesting about the Mar-a-Lago situation.
But maybe we'll get to see it because Justice Watch and I think Tom Fiddin, who by the way is not an attorney.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned that before.
Has anybody ever brought up that point to me?
Actually, Tom Fitton told me himself he was not an attorney, because I mentioned he was once.
I just figured he should be, because he seems like he should be.
I just assume everybody's an attorney.
He does have too many muscles to be an attorney.
Are you allowed to have that many muscles if you have a law degree?
I don't think I've seen anybody with arms that big who also has a law degree, so I think there's some kind of prohibition against that.
Anyway, so the Trump legal team, instead of saying, yes, release the affidavit, they're saying, we're just going to wait and see how this lawsuit turns out, which is an interesting, weak way to say it, isn't it? And I think Trump came out a little bit stronger in favor of it, but not until he found out it wouldn't be released.
I think Trump is confident that it won't be released.
Because remember, he doesn't know what's in there.
Trump would just be guessing that if it got released, it would be somehow positive for him.
But he doesn't know what's in there.
Do you? I do.
I know what's in there. Do you know how I know what's in there?
Because the hoax pattern is always the same.
So Jack Posobiec has some reporting.
He has some kind of sources.
And if you don't follow Jack Posobiec on Twitter, you need to.
He's one of the must-follows, because he just hears stuff before other people do.
He's going to give it to you in a way that you haven't seen in other places.
That's a must-follow.
His take is that the affidavit is probably full of stuff such as A Maggie Haberman report in a newspaper, followed by some innuendo and maybe some rumors,
it's a little bit of hearsay, wrapped up in the little media smear thing where somebody reports on it, and then somebody talks about the report, and then you can talk about everybody talking about it, and pretty soon there's lots of innuendo, but really it's all just manufactured.
So, the most likely contents of the affidavit are bullshit.
You know that, right?
Most likely, the affidavit is complete bullshit.
Because we've seen it. It's their play.
Yeah, it's the wrap-up smear, you know, the Schiff and the Skiff play, the anonymous sources, the what-if-ing.
What if it's worse? What if it's worse than Watergate?
Until in your mind it's true, but it's not true at all.
It's the same play.
If it turned out that this was the one time that the affidavit was actually valid and legitimate, that would be a break with pattern.
You get that, right? I can't tell you what's in the affidavit.
I don't know. But if...
What if? If it turns out that the affidavit had actual, solid evidence of some kind of a criminality, let's say intentional criminality, if that were true, that would be a break-with pattern for Trump-related stuff.
So the most likely is that it's a bullshit.
All right. I'll tell you what.
So Kyle Becker tweeted.
He's sort of on the same page with all this stuff.
He said, it would be the ultimate irony if the search warrant affidavit that is so sensitive that it has to remain a state secret is actually a few New York Times, Washington Post reports stitched together with some speculation thrown in about nuclear weapons codes being in Melania's walk-in closet.
And Jack... Basabek, who must have some insider information about what's to come, tweeted, this is very close to the truth.
That's just complete bullshit.
We'll see. So, I guess the...
The FBI is raising the alert about white supremacists and extremists, and there's even some chatter about a dirty bomb attacking the headquarters of the FBI, and that's pretty alarming.
But here's the question that I can ask that the rest of you can't, because you have jobs and you need money and stuff like that.
This is why you need me.
There are just some things I can say that other people just can't say in public.
Here comes another one.
I tweeted this, too.
If your actions cause American citizens, the people who are on your side, to openly discuss bombing your headquarters, self-reflection is in order.
And I recommend this sample question.
Was it something we did?
Now, you know why you can't say that?
Tell me why you can't say that, but I can.
Because it will obviously be misinterpreted as I'm encouraging violence against the FBI. Of course I'm not.
When have I encouraged violence against U.S. citizens?
I don't do that. Yeah.
So I can say it because I can take the heat.
But you can't. So, freedom of speech is really sort of spotty, isn't it?
In this case, I have it, sort of.
You know, I'm going to pay for it.
But I didn't mind the price, so I get to say it.
But you can't say that.
You can't say that if somebody's talking about bombing your headquarters, you should first of all try to stop them.
And treat it as a crime, right?
You should treat it as a crime if anybody has a legitimate threat against anybody in the United States.
So first of all, it's a crime.
But if you don't ask the question, was it something we did that caused somebody on my team?
Remember, it's somebody on your own team.
If somebody on your own team wants to kill you, you should at least ask the question, is it something I did?
Am I wrong? I'm not saying that they should have done anything differently, but you should at least ask the question.
Could I have done something differently, such as handled the Mar-a-Lago raid in a different way?
Maybe. Well, here's something That we're all waiting for.
Judges ruled on the Twitter versus Elon Musk situation that Twitter must turn over its hidden documents that have something to do with how many bots there are or how they calculate it.
So I don't know exactly what they're going to get.
Or what Musk's team is going to get.
I don't know exactly what they're hiding, but they've got to give it up now.
So it could be that Musk is going to get information that would tell us something that we have not heard about Twitter's bot activity.
In other news, the Trump company longtime CIO, I think, right?
He was the chief financial guy, or CFO? CFO. Mr.
Weisselberg, he's going to get five months in prison with no cooperation because he received benefits while working, pretty big benefits, $1.7 million over years, without paying taxes, though.
Now, if an employee gets lots of employee benefits, such as a free car or any kind of perks, those are, in theory, taxable.
And then the Trump organization would be separately in trouble for paying him in a way that was untaxable.
So both of them are in trouble.
But not Trump himself.
So there's no legal jeopardy for Trump himself, just the company and the CFO. But here's the question I ask.
In a normal situation where you've got a taxpaying person and a taxpaying corporation, if the taxpaying corporation decides to give you something and not write it off on their taxes, I think it's roughly tax...
Equal, right? So, in other words, even though the CFO who received these benefits didn't pay taxes, the Trump organization presumably couldn't have written them off.
But if they did write them off, then that's a crime.
It's a crime somewhere.
I don't know whose crime. But it would be a crime if you actually were avoiding taxes with that method.
The only question I have is, were any taxes actually avoided?
In other words, did somebody lose a write-off that was roughly equal to how much wasn't paid?
So I'm just wondering if it was neutral.
Probably not, or they wouldn't be so up in arms about it.
So remember I told you that I was going to destroy ESG before the end of the year?
My comics on that theme have not even come out yet.
It's going to be a while before they come out.
But already 39, no, how many?
18. So Arizona plus 18 others, that's 19 in total.
State attorney generals are seeking answers from BlackRock, who's sort of the big entity that's trying to force companies into doing this ESG stuff.
And these companies are basically demanding to know why BlackRock is causing their...
Causing the companies that they influence to invest unwisely when the states are putting their pension money into these investments.
So they're basically saying ESG might be a good idea, might not be a good idea, but it definitely is going to lower the returns of the investments.
Or has that risk, anyway.
And so the attorney generals are saying, we're investing our money in these companies and we need these for retirement accounts and such.
Can you please stop telling them to stop making money?
And maybe focus on the profits and a little bit less on the social good.
So we'll watch this.
And here's the question I asked.
Is ESG fascism?
Now, fascism would be defined as the government controls not only the corporations, but also the labor unions.
So if the government controls business and labor, that's fascism, because it's one entity controlling all the important stuff, all the money.
But ESG, by its nature, is sort of like a shadow government, By design.
It's meant to look like a shadow government in the sense that it's creating a bunch of standards and then putting pressure on companies, a variety of pressures, to make them conform to what this one entity is telling them to do.
Now, it's not technically fascism because they're not technically the government, but they are designed to operate like one in the sense that they're trying to impose standards on On people without them electing them.
So, to me, it looks like a pseudo-fascism.
It's not really fascism, because they're not technically the government.
But if you set up an entity that acts like a government, and it controls not only business but labor, directly and indirectly through influence, it's fascism-like.
It's exactly what you don't want.
One entity telling your companies and labor what to do.
You want them to compete.
You do not want them controlled by one entity in that way.
So I would say the ESG is a form of fascism.
It's like a pseudo-fascism.
That's what it is. It's a pseudo-fascism.
All right. Well, it seems to me...
That we've covered all of the important points of the day.
And it's 747.
Well, 1047, where you are, perhaps.
All right, um...
Do you think many want to believe the fake news?
Yeah. I mean, the reason fake news works is that some portion of the public wants to believe it.
So if the fake news said, you know, Trump murdered somebody on Fifth Avenue, really?
People want to believe that.
This would be a good story.
So yeah, the fake news is based on people wanting to believe it.
Antifa is against ESG, are they?
Oh yeah, Minneapolis Teachers Union agreed to a contract which gives priority to non-white teachers.
So there's a union contract for teachers that says if there are layoffs, the white teachers go first.
If there are layoffs, the white teachers go first.
it's in the union contract so there's some stories where you don't need any commentary Is there anything I need to add to that?
Your mind just filled in everything that needs to be said about that story.
They have an actual signed contract that says that white people will be fired first.
Do you know where that happened before?
Where I worked.
Yeah, where I worked. So that was, you know, many years ago now.
Over 30 years ago.
And you all know my story.
I tell it too often. I was told directly by senior management that I couldn't be promoted because I'm white and male.
Directly. In those words, I was told that I would no longer have a chance of promotion.
Until something changed and they couldn't tell me when that would ever happen.
Because it would take years, presumably.
But think about that. 30 years ago, I was told that directly.
And here we are, 30 years later, and these teachers in the school district are being told in writing, in writing, that they'll be discriminated against.
Now let me ask you this.
If I were to give advice to Black Lives Matter...
It would go like this. Black Lives Matter should go shut that shit down.
Do you know why? Because they're a joke if they don't.
And they're already, you know, they already got some criticisms that are valid, I think.
But if Black America doesn't shut that down immediately, fuck every one of you.
Let me be as clear as I can be.
If Black America isn't against that, Fuck every one of you.
Fuck every one of you.
Right? I'm not giving you anything.
You need to be against that.
Because if I saw that, if I saw a contract that said black people are fired first, I wouldn't stand for that.
I wouldn't stand for that for you.
You think I would let that stand?
Not a fucking chance.
No. No way.
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
No, if that happens to you, I'm activated.
If you're going to let, it's not happening to me specifically, but if you're going to let this happen so directly to a bunch of white teachers, if you're okay with that, and you even justify it, well, fuck you.
You get nothing from me.
You need to fix that.
That's not for white people to fix.
If you want any credibility going forward, you've got to fix that.
Now, I know you've got bigger problems, right?
You have your own problems. I get that.
But at least in words.
Give me a tweet. Give me an opinion.
Just tell me that you're against it.
You don't even have to fix it, right?
That's asking a lot.
But I would do it for you.
I would do it for you, and I'd do it in a heartbeat.
And if you try to give me any argument about, well, systemic, fuck you.
Fuck you. Too far.
You have to read the room.
Read the room. The room wants to help.
I've put substantial reputation, money, and time into helping the black community.
You've seen it here.
I do it publicly in a variety of ways.
And you see that I take a hit for it.
It's not cheap. It is not cheap to help some other group, right?
Because you get attacked for it.
And this is too far.
This contract that explicitly discriminates against white people, that's too far.
You need to hold your credibility By drawing a line there.
So this is advice that's a benefit to the black community.
I mean this to be productive, by the way.
It sounds like I'm just being a critic, but I mean this to be productive.
If you want to get help from the white community, and I think you do, why wouldn't you?
The most obvious thing is get everybody on board to recognize your situation and help when they can.
We'd love to do it. Love to help.
In fact, I'm investing right now in turning one of my books into a study guide, and I've always imagined it would have more value in the black community than the white, because I think strategy is the thing that's most missing.
And I think it's one of the advantages of growing up in a, let's say, a more prosperous family, Is that you get the benefit of some of the advice and seeing how things are done the right way, just being around it.
And so that's the benefit I'd like to bring to lower-income people who don't have that.
And that's going to be skewing more non-white than white if people take it seriously.
So it's good persuasion advice.
You can't maintain your credibility If you just believe everything that's bad for white people is good for you, that's just not the world you live in.
You've got to read the room. Read the room a little bit better.
So, all right. I think I made my point.
It's a bit woke to assume they want help from the white community.
What? Is that really in question?
Is there anybody who wouldn't want Free help from the largest population that has the most money.
Of course, everybody would want that.
I'd want it myself. All right.
All right, I'm seeing if you have any comments that are worth jumping on.
Yes, who is they, exactly?
Do you think wokeness is going to go away as a term?
I see comments go by that I don't...
I never know how true they are.
Somebody on YouTube says the first...
was it...
monkey to dog?
Monkey pox? I don't know.
I'm not going to believe that.
All right. End the labels now.
Davos. Yeah, I don't have much to say about that.
Do I believe in fate or destiny?
Well, you know, I used to believe in a clockwork universe where everything that's going to happen has to happen because that's just the way the cause and effect goes.
But since I started to appreciate the simulation theory, there's something else going on there that suggests that your intentions can control your reality.
Now, ten years ago, if I said, maybe your intentions can control your reality, all of the science people would say, oh, that's crazy.
But if you imagine that we're a simulation created by another entity, there's no reason to believe that we don't have some powers within the simulation, because they could just be programmed in.
There's nothing that would stop you from having powers.
If they had been programmed into the simulation.
So one of the powers might be that when we focus and imagine something clearly, it's more likely to materialize in what we understand to be our reality.
And I think there's nothing that rules that out.
And there's, at least anecdotally, it looks like it's true.
The people who seem to think they can control their environment Do seem to have outcomes that look unusually good.
I'm one of those people. I believe I can control what I perceive as my reality anyway.
Maybe not a real reality.
But what I perceive as my reality, I feel I can control in ways that don't make sense by any cause and effect, traditional, classic way of looking at the world.
Now, I'm still skeptical enough that I'm open to the fact this is just a psychological artifact.
It has nothing to do with reality.
But it's where my head is at at the moment.
So, at the moment, I do not believe in fate.
I believe that we're authoring our reality, or that some of us can.
I don't know if everybody can.
All right. Yeah, right.
A model of reality doesn't need to be true.
It just needs to work.
And what that usually means is that it's predictive.
If your model of reality predicts, it's probably pretty good.
It's the best you can do.
How do you practice these intentions?
Well, that's what affirmations are.
So if you just visualize what you intend, you act on your intentions, your body, your brain, your focus, the amount of time you think about it, the clarity, especially the clarity.
Vague intentions don't have any power.
A clear intention does.
So when Bill Gates said, we're going to put a computer on every desk or something like that, that's as clear as you could get.
Microsoft did okay.
And I think also that Steve Jobs was a master of clarity.
And I don't know how he did it.
Maybe it's by being a bigger bastard or something.
But I feel in my life, if I say, all right, I'll give you a concrete example.
When I was designing my house and it was time to do the landscape, I had a landscape architect.
And I said, I have one primary number one rule for designing what plants and bushes are on my lawn.
They can't be the kind that lose their leaves in the winter.
Because this is California.
Why in the world would I have any kind of a plant life that loses its leaves just because it's winter?
There are plenty of them that don't.
So I said, that's the rule.
It's the only rule. I'm not going to over-design it.
I have one rule. They can't lose their leaves.
So a few weeks later, I get the design.
It's very complete, and there's a drawing of every bush with a name of every bush.
And I don't understand the Latin names of the bushes, so I can't really even tell what they are by looking at the picture.
So I asked, okay, since I only had one requirement, do any of these plants lose their leaves?
He goes, well, you know, I go, all right, let me point to one.
Does this one lose its leaves?
Well, yes, it does.
And I said, what?
What? What part of there's only one fucking thing I care about did you not understand?
And then he explained it to me this way.
The plant that I put in there for a month or two a year will have these wonderful little flowers.
You're going to love them. And I said, yeah, I get that.
I get that. It doesn't change the fact that I don't want ten months of the year or six months of the year to look at a bunch of branches.
I'm not going to trade a few flowers for a month for empty branches for six months.
Just don't do that.
They said, okay, what about this one?
He was like, you know, they sort of lose their leaves.
But the flowers for that one month are awesome.
And I went through this discussion with plant after plant.
Most of them were evergreens, but there were just a whole bunch of them you put in there.
Now, that's a normal experience, right?
I'm talking about my very specific experience, but don't you recognize that?
You say, I only want one thing, and then they give you something else.
Like, what is hard to understand about one thing?
That's the real world. So somehow, Steve Jobs managed to avoid that.
And it's got to be with how big of an asshole he was.
Because I can't think of another way to do it.
Because I wasn't a big enough asshole that when my landscape designer presented me exactly what I didn't ask for, That he didn't...
Well, he did get fired.
Basically. He did get fired.
So, I don't think he expected that.
I do not think he expected to get fired.
But if you only ask for one thing and you don't get it, it's game over.
So, one of my problems in management is that my personality fools people into thinking I'm flexible.
If I were your boss, wouldn't you think I'm pretty easy going?
Well, he's not going to give me any trouble.
He'll be flexible. I can work from home, come in late, whatever I want.
And the problem is that I'm flexible until I'm knobbed, and then there's no warning.
There's no warning. You can do anything you want within the zone of stuff I don't care too much about.
But the moment you get into the zone I do care about, well, I don't have any problem firing your ass within 10 seconds.
I've fired enough people that it's pretty easy.
Same, right? So I'm a terrible manager, if I can confess.
I think a good manager would either be, you know, give you lots of warning, you know, try to manage you back into line the whole time.
I don't have that kind of personality.
I wish I did. And I'm not bragging.
It's a personality flaw that I'm talking about.
I just don't have that warning thing.
If somebody goes too far, I'm just kind of done with them.
All right. That's all for now.
That's right. I'm not a manager.
I'm a leader. But I think I can't be a good leader either because Steve Jobs has had that I will destroy you if you don't give me what I want personality.
