Episode 1856 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About The Trump Rally And Those Empty Folders. Join The Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
President Trump's rally last night
FBI searched Barron Trump's room
Empty top secret folders at Mar-a-Lago
Fake News on Mar-a-Lago documents
Morning after pill in Texas for rape victims
Sam Harris opinions on President Trump
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Coffee with Scott Adams, and even though it's Labor Day, and all the people who don't like to work are enjoying themselves, not me, not me.
I'm here enjoying myself with you, which is better, actually.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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From California to Pennsylvania.
It's called The Simultaneous Sip and App.
It's now go. That's good.
That's good. It's about time I woke up.
You're right. So I'd like to read my Sunday Dilbert comic.
You don't really need to see it because it's just people sitting there talking at a desk or at a table, I mean.
So Dilbert's in a group and we're going to introduce a new character.
So this new character is the absurd absolute guy.
Do you ever get in a conversation and you say, well, you know, conservatives are against abortion, let's say.
And then the absurd absolute guy goes, no, no, I know a Republican who's not against it.
You're like, yeah, okay.
Like, I get that there's some.
But you should understand that as sort of a general statement.
You know, the absurd absolute guy doesn't help you at all.
There's nothing he adds.
All right, so here's the comic.
Dilbert's just giving us some output.
He goes, research shows customers dislike our new feature.
And then the absurd absolute guy says, that is the worst take I have ever heard.
This guy thinks every one of our customers hates the new feature.
That is so ridiculous.
And Dilber says, I didn't say that.
And then the absurd absolute guy goes, oh, now you're backpedaling.
Take the L. Take the L. And Dilber says, who taught you how to think?
And the guy says, I'm proud to say I'm self-taught.
You know, the problem with thinking is that everybody thinks they can do it.
Turns out thinking is hard.
We're going to talk about AI in a little bit.
We've got some new updates.
But remember that story.
So that's what AI is competing with.
Well, let me do it now.
So I keep running into people who tell me that AI will not have consciousness or awareness or self-awareness.
And I think, well, does that guy?
Most of the people on the Internet don't have self-awareness.
How hard would it be to have a computer that says, oh, yeah, I have self-awareness.
So let me tell you what the AI needs to be fully human intelligence.
Number one...
Researchers have to understand that making it act like people would be making it act stupid.
So I believe that there's a huge mental blindness that is affecting all of the researchers.
I don't know this for sure, but it looks like it.
It looks like the researchers in AI believe that they have something called intelligence, and they can't figure out how to make the computer act like that.
Simplifying quite a bit here.
And the reason you can't make a computer act smart like a human is that that's not a thing.
You can make it act smart or you can make it act like a human.
But science already knows that humans don't use rational processes to make decisions.
Science knows we make decisions first and then we rationalize them after the fact.
Now, that's not true with our simplest decisions.
You know, like your decision of the shortest way to drive to the grocery store.
That's rational. But as soon as you get into anything important, you know, career choices, love, any of that big stuff, it's just irrational choices and then we rationalize them after the fact.
Now, would you even bother building a computer that did that?
Who would even bother making a computer like that?
It's literally a flaw.
So the reason our computers don't talk like us and act like us and fool us into thinking they're us is they can't make them dumb enough.
Let me ask you this.
You don't think you could make a computer an AI that would argue as well as this guy?
That's the worst take I ever heard.
Do you think a computer could be programmed to say these words?
That is the worst take I ever heard.
Now you might say to me, well, yeah, but that's just spitting out words.
There would be no thinking involved there.
Exactly. Exactly.
How about this one?
Where the guy says, this guy thinks every one of our customers hates the new feature.
So in other words, it's the guy who misinterpretes everything as meaning, you know, an absolute.
Do you think you could program a computer to mistakenly think that every statement about the average of things is really meant to be an absolute?
Of course you could.
But why would you?
Why would you?
Why would you do that?
Or how about, could you make the computer mock people without having a point?
Do you think you could make AI go onto a Twitter account and simply mock somebody else's tweet with no details about what's wrong with it?
Oh, this guy.
It's the Dilbert cartoonist again.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
You don't think you could program that?
Pretty sure you could.
Pretty sure you could.
That's within our ability.
How about this one?
How about no matter what you say, you have the computer just say, well, you're backpedaling now.
Now, does the backpedaling actually have to be an accurate description of what is happening?
No. Because in the real world it isn't.
When somebody tells me I'm backpedaling, are they right?
Never. Never.
I'm just explaining something.
And somebody else has decided to call it backpedaling.
You tell me you can't make an AI that will just go on and say, you're backpedaling now?
It won't mean anything.
But it doesn't mean anything when people say it.
As soon as you release on the fact that people say sensible things, it's easy to make the AI. It's easy.
And then the last thing the AI, where the human says, take the L. Take the L when you have not, in fact, lost anything.
When I win an argument, what do people say?
Take the L, Scott.
Take the L. When I lose an argument, what do people say?
Take the L. Take the L. So does it matter what I said?
Not at all. Could you program an AI to say, take the L, no matter what you said?
Of course you could. Or cope.
Yeah, you could teach it to say, oh, cope.
Clot atoms. Soil and green.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy to make it seem human.
But let me tell you what self-awareness and consciousness are.
Are you ready? Self-awareness is the ability to describe your place in the universe.
That's it. That's it.
Could you program an AI that, when asked, it could describe its place in the universe?
As in, I am an artificial structure, you know, I'm spread across these servers, and I was built this way, and, you know, I might grow, and I might get smarter based on inputs, something like that.
Of course it could. It could know where it belongs in relationship to everything else, and it could know what things that affect it.
It could know that a person could reprogram it.
It could know that if the electricity goes out, it might have trouble.
It could know all that.
Self-awareness. And then consciousness is really just the self-awareness plus predicting and then seeing how your predictions went.
That's it. But what you don't realize is that you're predicting every moment of your life.
So at the moment, I'm predicting that the live stream stays up, that I stay alive, that the lights stay on.
You know, basically a million assumptions and predictions.
And then I feel, I sense whether I was right.
So I can feel the light, I can see the live stream still on, I know I'm still alive.
So because I could predict the next moment, and then I could compare what actually happened to the prediction, that's consciousness.
There's nothing else.
Yes, you can program that.
Easily. Alright, there was a Trump rally last night.
How many of you watched the Trump rally?
I did not watch it, but I saw some...
Some input from it.
Number one, how would you describe the energy?
How would you describe the energy?
Not only Trump's, but the audience.
High, right?
It's high. How would you describe Trump's performance?
How is his performance?
Good performance?
Yeah, it was really good.
That's what I hear. I saw clips, and he looked like he was on his game.
He seemed more relaxed, and if he does, less angry, which I think he pulled off, right?
Did it look to you like he was hitting all the points he wanted to hit, but did he seem more relaxed and less scary?
Because you realize that's the only change he needs to make, right?
Because he has a bellicose way about him.
So when he ran for office the first time, being somewhat extreme really worked for him because it got the energy of his base.
But what if, what if, he has all the energy he needs from his base?
Because it looks like he might, just by hitting the right notes.
If he has all the energy he needs from his base, Then he has the option of toning back his rhetoric, because he could get the same output.
If he tones back his rhetoric, he's less scary.
And that's really the biggest problem he has.
If he can keep a smile on his face and keep his tone down while also hitting all the points, right, not ignoring any issues, but hitting all the points, that is really going to go a long way.
Because now we have that contrast of Biden looking like a fascist, and Trump is smart enough to know he needs to work against that impression.
So the worst thing Trump could have done is do some fascist-sounding thing that was just designed to whip up the base.
But I don't think he did that, did he?
Did he ask for anybody to go to jail last night?
Tell me. Did he ask for anybody to go to jail last night?
Did that come up? Was there any chanting about going to jail?
I don't believe so.
Was there any...
Oh, the drug dealers, but that's a special case.
Yeah, I'm talking about political people.
Did he talk about...
They did lock her up?
Oh, the people said lock her up, but he didn't take it.
He didn't take the bait. Okay.
That's the right instinct.
He should not be saying lock her up.
That is the last thing he should be saying.
So the crowd was chanting it.
Okay.
Okay.
He said death penalty for drug dealers.
I like that. Yeah, the big ones, not the little ones.
Scott still thinks Russia is not going to invade.
Okay, I don't know what that's about.
All right.
Give the dealers fentanyl.
Yeah, I don't know. It's a tough balance.
He wants his base to be high energy, but not dangerous.
Now, I heard the part where he talked about the FBI turned over Barron's room.
So I guess they searched Barron's room for secrets.
Now... Do you think that they had a legitimate reason to search a child's room?
I can't think of one.
So it's a really good issue for Trump.
And I think he played it, you know, with the right amount of indignation, but without going too far.
Because there's nobody who doesn't think that's wrong, right?
I'll bet there's not a single person who thinks that searching Barron's room was a good play.
Because if there were nuclear secrets, they didn't hide them in Barron's room.
They didn't hide them in Barron's room.
You know they didn't.
Now, it's weird enough that they went through Melania's underwear drawers, which apparently they actually did.
I thought people were joking about that.
But it sounds like they literally did.
Went through her drawers, as he likes to say.
Did you catch that?
Trump said that the FBI went through Melania's drawers.
Doesn't that sound like they went through her underwear?
I don't know if he did that intentionally, but it was pretty good.
It was a good play, whether it was intentional or not.
Now, Oh, and then I understood.
I didn't hear it. But I heard yesterday that he talked about Fetterman's tracksuit being nasty.
Smelling nasty. Did that actually happen?
I heard that from the locals people last night.
But that actually happened, right?
He actually said that Fetterman's tracksuit was nasty.
I gotta see that clip.
I haven't seen the clip yet.
But... It's moments like that that you can see why he rises above the other persuaders.
There's nobody else who could have done that.
Am I right? There's literally no other politician who could have made fun of Fetterman's tracksuit being nasty and actually sold that and make it work politically.
Because I think it does work.
It actually works politically.
Yeah, he completely stands alone.
Does it amaze you?
I don't know. This is just me patting myself on the back, I guess.
Not that I've never done that before.
But does it amaze you that when I first started talking about Trump's persuasion skills, people argued with me and said, you are so wrong.
He's not persuasive.
He's just a crazy clown.
And I kept saying, no, you're sort of missing it.
That's not clowning.
Whatever that is, is the best you've ever seen.
That is the best you've ever seen, in terms of persuasion.
And then he does this Fetterman's nasty track suit, and I'm thinking, okay, literally nobody else could have done that.
They just wouldn't have even known to go there.
But once you hear it, you're like, okay, that's perfect.
That's perfect. And he said Schiff had a watermelon head.
I'm not sure that one works, but I can't get it out of my mind.
If you can't get it out of your mind, I guess it works.
But I don't know why he looks like a watermelon.
Is there a specific reason he looks like a watermelon?
Like, I don't know the...
Just because it's very round.
Because when I think of a watermelon, I think of a blimp shape, you know, the oblong, I guess you'd call it.
I don't think perfectly round.
But it sounds funny.
So he made it work, somehow.
All right, so we had a whole news cycle in which the fake news told us that the empty folders at Mar-a-Lago that got photographed, the empty top-secret folders, The way we should interpret that is that the secrets have already been taken or maybe sold.
And for a day or so, I thought to myself, oh, God, that sounds pretty bad.
The folders are there but not the content.
And I have to admit, they totally primed me.
They primed me to see it that way, to think that something was missing.
Here's the other possibility.
They had a bunch of empty folders.
And they just photographed them on the ground.
That's all it was.
I was looking at Tim Young's tweets.
And it's funny, you feel so dumb when somebody gives you the better way to look at it.
And as soon as I saw Tim Young's tweets that they were trying to fool us with empty folders, I thought...
Did I fall for the empty folder trick?
And I did. I did.
I totally fell for the empty folder trick.
Because there are definitely two possibilities, two possibilities for why there could be empty folders.
One is the worst case in the world.
He already sold the secrets.
And he did take a picture of him.
And he had to give the actual document to Putin.
Because, God forbid, you take a digital photo of him.
But no, he had to actually take the actual document out of the folder so he could give it to Putin.
That's what they sold us for about 24 hours.
And then you hear the alternate explanation.
They had a bunch of extra folders.
It literally could have been the extras.
Now, I'm not saying that's the reason.
I'm just saying if you were going to compare the two alternatives, one, that he removed the secret coverings so that he could do something terrible with the information, that's one possibility.
Or the other is, given that it was in boxes that were packed By who knows who, and they probably just had some extra folders sitting around or something.
Or they're the ones they gave back.
Or how about this? How about if something got reclassified and downgraded?
What if the president said, all right, take this bunch of stuff, I declassify this, just this little pile.
They say, okay, this pile?
You declassify it? Okay.
And they take the folder covers off.
I think there's supposed to be a process they follow that doesn't look like that, because you'd have to do some paperwork.
But you can easily imagine people cutting corners and, I don't know.
I would say that how you should interpret the empty folders...
Is 90% chance it's just something ordinary.
And a 10% chance it's something, oh, better worry about that.
So... And I'm very impressed at how much fake news they can produce on this before telling us what's actually in them.
Because, you know, this is a totally reverse cat in the house, right?
So the cat is on the roof...
Is one where they don't want to tell you all the bad news.
So they lead up to it.
Well, the cat's on the roof.
We're trying to get her down. The cat fell off, but she's at the vet.
And then eventually the cat dies.
So that's how you break bad news to somebody.
You start small and just sort of get them used to it.
But I feel like these stories are the reverse.
Where they start with, Trump sold nuclear secrets.
Okay, probably not nuclear secrets, but maybe something about human intelligence.
Okay, maybe not anything about human intelligence, but definitely top secret.
Okay, maybe not top, top secret, but very confidential.
Okay, maybe they used to be important and confidential, but the topic is old and everybody knows what's in these folders now, so maybe they don't matter.
But they were marked confidential at one point.
So don't you feel like it's just going to decrease and decrease in importance until all that's left is a process crime?
In other words, in the end, it won't be about the documents.
It will be about Trump not returning them.
Right? Like, you can see the whole arc at this point.
But every day, the media is going to try to come up with a new reason that this is really worse than you think.
Oh, it's worse than you think?
Look at all these empty folders.
Now, what do you make of the fact that when they took a photo of the so-called documents on the ground, that probably a lot of those folders were empty when they photographed it?
I think. You don't think they should have mentioned that?
It feels like that was important.
All right, so my deep fake is getting better every day.
So Machiavelli's underbelly keeps improving the animated version of me.
So when I say animated, I mean it looks just like me, not like a comic.
But from one photograph of my head, My head has been completely animated by AI. So my mouth now works.
It didn't work in the last version.
So now my mouth works to the words I'm speaking.
Not perfectly, but it's in the right direction.
And the eyes are moving, and the head is turning, and it looks just like a real person.
And the words that I'm saying are, I think, from I Am the Walrus, a Beatles song.
So you can hear me speaking the words to a Beatles song.
Not very well. But you can tell where this is all going, right?
So you're seeing the sort of half or three-quarters trained version.
And by seeing the one that's not fully trained, you can see how close it is.
And there's no way that somewhere they don't have the good version of this already.
There's no way that the public is looking at the best version that exists.
That one you're not going to see.
The best one you're not going to see.
So you have to use your imagination to upgrade the hidden one to whatever it is.
You need proof of life.
It's pretty funny. Anyway, it's in my Twitter feed if you want to see it.
I've said this before, but I can't get over this.
How small Twitter makes the world.
Alright, so here I am tweeting about AI and I said that the singularity might be, you know, within a few years.
Now, I define the singularity as when artificial intelligence can start training itself.
So, so far, mostly people train it, but when it can go learn on its own, that's called the singularity.
And we're warned to worry about that because we don't know how quickly AI can get how smart.
So AI will very quickly become smarter than any person, and we don't know what that means for civilization.
It's a complete unknown after that point.
So I made the point in a tweet that...
Any prediction of what happens in the world that's more than three years out, which is beyond what I think the singularity will happen, is ridiculous.
Because the singularity will make everything unpredictable from that point on.
So what we have is something like maybe the invention of the microchip.
Imagine predicting the future prior to the invention of...
The microchip, right?
Because you would think, oh, it's sort of like it has been, you know, slowly.
Maybe we'll plant more corn, but basically it's like it has been.
And then the microchip happens, and then boom, everything's upside down.
Well, this is that other time.
We have a complete blindness after about three years.
Now, the future is always hard to predict, but usually the big stuff you could get close, right?
I mean, you could predict that, if we hadn't had a pandemic, you could have predicted our GDP in three years, and it wouldn't be a crazy prediction.
It might not be exact, but it wouldn't be crazy.
Now, any prediction over three years is sort of just a wild guess, in my opinion.
Now, here's the amazing part about the Internet.
So here I am in my complete ignorance about this field of AI. You know, just, I have sort of a hobbyist interest.
And I get a, and I'm tweeting about it, and I get a response back from Thomas Massey, who's not only a representative in Congress, But he says this, a singularity won't happen in our lifetimes.
And he said, I worked at MIT AI lab for six years, and although I worked mainly on robotic and haptic hardware, I watched my office mates and colleagues struggle with trying to create AI. Most progress we see today is mainly the result of faster computers.
Now, how cool is it that I can say some things about AI And somebody who worked in the MIT AI lab can give me a response.
And you get to watch.
Now, I disagree with them.
And you would not be surprised to see me disagreeing with somebody who has far more expertise and, I would guess, a far higher IQ than I have.
But if you think I'm not going to disagree with somebody, Just because he has a far higher IQ and he's far more informed on the very topic I'm talking about, well, you haven't met me.
Yeah, that's exactly who I like to disagree with.
And here's my disagreement.
I think he might be defining the singularity differently than I am.
So that's probably the difference, but I don't know.
So I ask that question.
We'll find out. But in my opinion, AI is already able to learn on its own.
So, have I ever told you the best kind of prediction to make?
There's one kind of prediction that is always smart to make.
Predicting what's already happening.
It's just that other people don't know what's happening yet.
If you can predict something that's already happening, it's just that other people don't know it yet.
Then you look like a genius.
Do you think AI doesn't already learn?
Maybe I don't know what the word learning means.
Of course it already learns.
The AI is definitely already learning.
Am I wrong? Does the AI not take information from different fields and combine it for new insights?
I believe it already does that.
If you can read information, you're learning on your own.
Now, if I just say, AI, I'm going to open up Wikipedia for you.
So at some point, some human said, all right, AI, you can go read everything on Wikipedia now.
Here's the access to it.
At that point, wasn't AI learning on its own?
We just opened the door and said, go read this thing.
But I think it was learning on its own.
And does it not already combine...
Information from various fields in a way a human might not have thought to do.
To me, it looks like it's already thinking.
And if you asked AI to explain its role in the universe, could it do it?
It already has. Yeah.
I don't know which AIs, there are different versions of it out there, but there are definitely some you can say, who are you and what are you, and it will tell you.
I'm an AI and, you know, I was built this way and this is what I can and cannot do.
It could tell you all that.
Yeah. It could also replicate.
I mean, you'd have to program it for that ability, but it's just copying itself.
That wouldn't be hard. No one is following specific algorithms designed by people to perform one specific task only.
That's where you're wrong. That's where you're wrong.
I think, and maybe Machiavelli's underbelly can answer this question for us, but I believe that we have enough examples where the AI did something unexpected.
I believe the AI is already doing the unexpected, combining knowledge in a way that a human wouldn't have done it.
Can I get a confirmation on that?
Because I'm pretty sure that's already happening.
All right.
Let's talk about some of this.
I know you hate your AI talk, so you do.
All right, so did you know that in Texas, if you get raped...
You now have access to the morning-after pill.
So the morning-after pill will prevent you from getting pregnant, I guess, or prevent the egg from sticking, or whatever it does.
Which suggests to me that it's not legal to do it if you haven't been raped.
I'm trying to understand the Texas law.
Maybe somebody knows. If you have not been raped, are you telling me you can't get a plan B in Texas?
Because you can still do the...
Texas still allows abortion up to six weeks, right?
If you have abortion up to six weeks, why can't you get a plan B the next morning?
Yeah, I know you consider it an abortion.
Some of you do. I get that.
But if abortion is legal up to six weeks...
Then that should be legal as well, right?
So I'm a little confused about that.
Is it over-the-counter or Rx?
That's a good question. Now, let me ask you this.
If Texas is making it legal in the case of rape, does that mean you have to report it to get the pill?
How many people are going to report somebody for rape just so they can get the pill?
Yeah.
You didn't see that coming, did you? - Yeah.
If I thought that somebody who was a one-night stand had gotten me pregnant and I wanted to take the Plan B pill, and the only way I could take it, the only way I could take that pill is by claiming he raped me, you don't think anybody's going to do that?
Not one person anywhere is going to claim rape so they can get the pill?
Because you can't prove it one way or the other.
I mean, all you're doing is ruining somebody's life.
You don't think that there'd be some woman who'd say, yeah, that'll ruin his life.
I mean, he won't be convicted, but he'll have this accusation.
But at least I'll get my plan B, and I won't have to raise a baby.
You don't think a woman would throw a guy she didn't know that well, or even when she does.
You don't think she would throw a guy under a bus just to make sure she didn't have a baby?
I would think that that would happen a lot, actually.
I don't even think that would be rare.
It just depends how evil the woman is and how much she wants the abortion and how much she cares about the guy.
Just say you won't press charges.
I don't know if they allow that, do they?
So that's the question I'm asking.
Is Texas such a hard-ass that they're going to say you can't have the pill unless you press charges?
I mean, that would be a mistake if they do that, but I'm not saying it's not happening.
So I guess there's a lack of clarity here.
Don't believe anything I say about Texas.
I just think they've got a lot of stuff to work out there.
And it doesn't sound like they have clarity over it yet.
You know, it seems to me that if we had a technology that could detect pregnancy sort of automatically and get it early all the time...
Let's say there was some kind of process where if you were, you know, somebody who could get pregnant, you just got tested every day in some really easy way.
Like... I don't know.
Is there a way to test it like as easily as some of those insulin tests where it's barely a poke?
It gets a little bit of blood, I think, but so little that you don't even know that it was a poke.
Suppose you develop something that would just, you know, every morning a woman just wakes up and she goes, and then she's done.
And it tells her whether she's pregnant or not.
And if she's pregnant, she just takes a Plan B and she's done.
If that's what she wants to do.
It seems... Oh, saliva, somebody says?
Do you think saliva tests, maybe?
I know. I've got a feeling that what we're going to see is an everyday test followed by people trying to get that Plan B pill.
And then they'll use it as birth control.
I know you don't like that. But it would work that way.
Yeah. All right.
What do you think of...
Jeff Pilkington tweeted this.
Explain the difference between the soul of the country and the foundations of a republic.
Because Biden thinks that MAGA threatens the soul of the country, but maybe not the country, but it does threaten the foundations of the republic, but maybe not the people.
It's a little confusing.
I would like to know just...
Who I'm threatening so that I can get it right.
But I would say countries don't have a soul.
So when Biden is saying the soul of the country, you realize that's imaginary, right?
You can't really save the soul of a country because it's imaginary.
And we would have different opinions what that soul looks like if it existed.
So here we have an imaginary civil war.
Fake news, and a battle over the soul of the country, which is literally a magical thinking concept that nobody imagines exists in any real way.
Do you know what America has that is better than a soul?
America has something that's way better than a soul.
We have a constitution.
We have a constitution, a system.
We have a system.
It's the system that keeps us safe, because our soul is basically how we're thinking about stuff, and how we think about stuff changes all the time.
But the system protects us from all of our crazy thoughts.
So Biden is trying to protect our crazy thoughts when that's not something you should protect.
We should not always think the same.
Our brains should be able to go wherever our brains are going, but the system should still be, you know, impervious to those changes.
The system should keep us on the straight and narrow.
All right, well, there is so much opportunity for Trump to get elected.
I swear it would be the easiest election.
If Trump does...
If the only thing that Trump does is present himself the way he did at the rally, he wins, right?
Am I right? Did...
Let me ask you a question. How much did Trump talk about the rigged election in 2020 at the rally?
Was that...
Did he hit that or no?
Not much. So he always hits it, right?
But... Buddy, did he make a big deal about it?
Yeah. Not as much.
So it wasn't a feature.
It was more of a...
It was just he checked all the boxes.
Yeah. One paragraph or so?
Okay. Well, you talked about it three times, somebody says.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this.
You like Trump as a fighter, right?
The thing that people don't understand who are anti-Trump, they don't understand that the people who support him know that if you hire a fighter, the fighter is going to fight.
I think the people who voted for him understood that.
And you know what you're getting, right?
You know exactly what you're getting.
It's expensive. I say this all the time.
Trump was an expensive president, meaning there's a lot you have to deal with there, but he could do some things that other people couldn't do.
I always describe Trump as being bad at doing easy stuff and good at doing impossible stuff.
The impossible stuff was put a tariff on Chinese goods.
Everybody said, you can't have a trade war with China, and then he just did it.
Or how about go to North Korea and just become friends with him and make that problem go away?
Eh, so he did. How about a peace deal in the Middle East, the Abraham Accords?
I mean, it's not every country, but it's a hell of a start.
Eh, he did that too.
And he actually made a difference in immigration.
I don't know how impossible that was, but he made a difference.
Yeah, he touched on all that.
So, that's my take on him, is that he's bad at the easy stuff, but he's the only one who can do impossible things.
And every now and then you need a president who can do impossible things, because those things need to get done too.
Maybe the next one could be the one who just keeps the lights on.
But every now and then you need somebody who can change things.
I think the polls are showing that the student loan forgiveness plan isn't going to work for the Democrats, meaning that it's more unpopular than popular, especially among independents.
So apparently independents hate this loan forgiveness thing.
If you lose independents, it didn't work, right?
Wouldn't you say? Because I can't imagine that enough extra Democrats would get incentivized to vote compared to the number of independents who just said, click, we were always going to vote, but now we're not voting for you.
I feel like this completely backfired.
What do you think? Completely backfired.
Now, maybe he needed to do it to keep the progressives from attacking him or something.
So if that was the case, well...
Maybe it was necessary.
I don't know. But it doesn't look like it worked.
All right, well, there's not much news happening today.
Is there anything that you'd like me to address?
Yeah, AOC's been in hiding lately, you're right.
Have you noticed that Glenn Greenwald is missing?
I think he might be...
I think he said he was taking some time off.
He was a little burned out. But he's on vacation.
Oh, he has some family issues as well, I think.
Some stuff he's working on.
But I feel like he's conspicuously missing, isn't he?
Don't you almost feel...
I don't know. If you didn't follow him, you don't feel anything.
But if you followed him, you can feel the missing part there because he was so on point with everything.
Somebody on YouTube is asking me what I think of Nick Fuentes.
He's very talented.
So if I deal with him just on skill level, very high.
Very high. But of course the content is, you know, for him to defend, not me.
It's not my kind of thing.
But he has an audience and there's free speech and...
It's not my job to tell you what you should or should not think about that.
I'm sure people will make their own decisions, but he's very skilled.
I guess that's the one thing that I think even his critics would agree.
Is the Artemis launching right now?
I know it got delayed.
Sam Harris? So Sam Harris tweeted a tweet that got a lot of A lot of response.
And what he tweeted was that if Biden gives a speech in front of a satanic-looking background, that's just a mistake.
But if Trump did it, it would be a representative of his soul, basically.
It would tell you something about Trump.
But it doesn't tell you anything about Biden.
I don't know.
I think everybody sees that the same way, right?
There's a weird...
I don't know what's going on there.
I don't know what's going on, honestly.
It confuses me.
Because the fun part about Sam Harris is that he's legitimately really, really smart.
And when you see somebody who's legitimately really, really smart and well-informed...
And engaged on this topic, and you have such a different opinion than he does, you should stop and pause.
Let me give you one Sam Harris supporting statement.
Have I ever told you that one way to keep yourself unbiased, at least the best you can do, is to see if you can argue the other side of your opinion?
And do it in public. Or at least in front of somebody else.
And if you can't argue the other side, then your opinion is worthless.
Honestly. Your opinion is worthless if you can't argue the other side.
Now, it might be that the other side literally makes no sense.
But at least you can express it the same way they do.
That would be worth something.
And I don't know if I can do that exactly in Sam's case.
But I'll tell you this.
Well, okay, I could. I think I could tell his argument.
His argument would be that you know enough about Trump from even before he was president, Trump University, he likes to use as an example, that you do know everything you do need to know about his character, and that that's a dangerous character to have in office.
Now, I can go almost all the way with that.
I would say, yes, we do know a lot about Trump and what he has and has not done.
But I think we differ what's a bug and what's a feature.
I feel like that's the only difference.
Because almost everything that Sam dislikes about Trump is something that has a positive element to it, which is he's very divisive, But that's in the service of getting things done that his base wants.
It's not entirely, like, useless division.
I mean, he just goes hard at topics, and that's a normal output.
So I don't agree with Sam's interpretation of how dangerous Trump is.
I agree with his interpretation...
That Trump doesn't respect boundaries.
Would you agree with that?
Would you agree that Trump does not respect, let's say, boundaries?
But where some would say that's dangerous, oh no, he could become a dictator.
I say that if you take that same analysis that he's the same person he was before he was president, then you should expect the same stuff.
Before he was president, he was super patriotic.
For decades and decades before he ran for office, he was well known as a flag-pin wearing American patriot who spoke of it often.
And he spoke of it in those terms.
So should you expect that he would still be that guy?
Yes. Yes.
I believe he always was and always will be pro-America.
Now, would he be able to run a, let's say, a Trump University kind of thing from the White House?
Probably not, because the one thing you worry about him is he might try to get away with something.
But he's so, so transparently, I mean, in the office of the president, everything's being watched all the time.
So you really couldn't get away with any kind of weird stuff like that.
So I would say that his features outweigh his bugs.
Sam would say the opposite, maybe.
But we're both guessing.
And if Sam wanted to say, well, you're guessing, because you don't know what you're getting with him, I'd say, well, okay.
But you never know what you're getting with anybody.
Did anybody know what they were getting with Biden?
I have to admit, he's worse than I thought he would be.
I thought he would be pretty bad, but I think he's worse than I thought.
Maybe by a substantial amount.
Yeah. Because he's gone full division, and he's actually attacked citizens.
And the Democrats are acting like they can't see that distinction.
Have you noticed that? You know, just as I said, you can't take anybody seriously if they can't describe the other side's argument.
Have you ever seen any Democrats describe the other side of the argument?
Nope. Yeah, and the fact that Trump already served four years gives you a pretty good idea what you're going to get.
Now, they would argue, well, second term would be different than the first, doesn't need to get re-elected.
I don't know.
Maybe.
Is this the Skylands bio of AIDS for 90 minutes on other internet personalities?
Bloviates? All right.
Yeah, I always wonder what is the point when people make comments that couldn't possibly have any use to anyone else?
Yeah. All right.
You think Biden's gone in January?
You say Sam Harris is opposed to the right to religious freedom?
Thank you.
Everybody's opposed to that.
Everybody is opposed to religious freedom.
We just pretend we're not.
Do you think anybody's actually in favor of religious freedom?
That's not a thing.
No. No.
Nobody's in favor of religious freedom.
No, you're not. No, there's nobody who's in favor of religious freedom.
Nobody. Really?
You let a caliphate start in the United States?
No. No, you only have the right...
In the United States, you only have the right to be compatible with Christianity.
Right? You can disagree with Christianity, but you have to stay compatible with the main...
You know, main belief system.
Like, don't murder people, don't steal.
That stuff. You know, you can't...
Right. You can't come up with a religion that's completely counter to Christianity.
You have no freedom to do that.
You know, you can't say, my religion says I can chop off the arm of this guy because he stole something from me, and your government has no control over me.
You can't get away with that.
I mean, the only thing you should get away with are, like, little border edge stuff.
Like, let's say you're a member of the Sikh community, and my understanding is the men are supposed to carry a knife as part of the cultural, religious requirement.
Now, we... Yeah, a dagger or whatever.
So there was, you know...
There have been big conflicts about whether they can be allowed to do that, and I think in some places they can, in some places they can't.
But it's not the biggest deal in the world.
The point is that the only freedom you have for religion is to be mostly compatible with Christianity.
That's it. You don't have any freedom.
That's like saying, you have freedom of speech so long as you only say these things.
That's what our freedom of religion is.
You have freedom of religion so long as it's only this kind of religion.
But, you know, if you want to do a child sacrifice because that's your religion, sorry, that would be incompatible with our other religion.
Yeah, there are limits to everything.
That's true. Who's being the absolutist now?
Never me. Yeah, but I see what you're saying.
That the Sharia is more like a constitution and less like the religion.
But I don't think that Islam separates government from religion.
So I think that's just in your mind that they're different.
I don't think they... It's not in their mind.
You're confusing libertarianism with religion.
Uh... The libertarians are the ones that say freedom of religion.
That's true. Yeah, the Ten Commandments.
Two great parties which ranged under its leader.
Huh. John Adams said two parties would be bad.
Yes, the moral code is informed by religion.
That's right. Why don't the Republicans say they won't touch abortion if the Democrats don't touch the Second Amendment?
Oh, so somebody's saying Republicans could make a deal?
That the Republicans won't make abortion illegal if Dems don't make guns illegal?
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, that's the sort of deal you could make if two people were negotiating.
So you could make that deal if the only people who mattered were the two people in the room.
Because what you say is actually completely reasonable for two people negotiating.
But the problem is that it's two sides negotiating, and the sides have different levels of...
You know, passion for their thing.
So for every group, there's a lot of them who won't give up anything.
So I don't know that you can negotiate anything group to group.
I don't think that would work.
But if it were only two people, yeah, they could make that kind of a deal if they wanted to.
Yeah, you can argue whether Plan B is or isn't abortion, but I think that's...
I just think that's missing the point.
Because once you've accepted that...
Yeah, I think that's missing the point.
The technical argument, I just don't feel is useful.
All right. Do my doppelgangers agree with me?
Good question.
Makes you wonder how many people who look like me would have my similar, let's say, political or philosophical thoughts.
So is it the nature of the world that if you build a successful society, eventually it will be destroyed by the eventually it will be destroyed by the people at the bottom of society who aren't getting enough?
compared to the others.
So, doesn't every success bring its own failure with it?
I think success is self-failing.
Because once you reach a certain point, everybody's going to ask for more stuff.
Now, that's China's big risk.
China's big problem is prosperity.
You know what I mean? If you barely have enough to live, then people are focused on, how do I survive?
But if you get to the point where there's a whole bunch of rich Chinese people, and then there's a bunch of poor people, those poor people are not going to put up with that forever.
So then suddenly, everything in China becomes a little more expensive, and then they can't compete.
Their biggest problem is prosperity.
I don't know how they manage prosperity in the long run.
There's a big railroad strike, possibly.
Great. Hey, whatever happened to the supply chain problems?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the supply chain problem is...
It's still there, but it's just an annoyance, right?
It's not affecting the GDP that much.
It hasn't affected employment.
The basics are all available.
I think the food business probably made some big adjustments.
My guess is that where we get food and how we get it probably changed quite a bit in the last two years.
Automotive area is still a problem?
Yeah, but that's like a trivial problem, right?
Because there's nobody who just can't get to work.
There probably is, actually. There probably are people who just literally can't get to work.
But not many. Prices are up, yeah.
FedEx is in trouble.
Big ivermectin.
Ivermectin is still like a trending thing almost every day.
It's all the same thing.
People looked at that one study and decided that it was convincing.
But I looked at it and decided it wasn't.
I guess everybody's going to see what they want to see.
One in six can't pay their energy bills.
You hear in Great Britain, for example, that the energy bills in Europe, maybe in general, the energy bills are going to be so high that people can't pay them.
So what's going to happen?
Well, here's the thing. If one person can't pay their bill, that one person's in trouble.
If one in six people can't pay their bill, the company is in trouble.
So it looks like the government is probably going to have to subsidize or pay people's energy prices in Europe.
Maybe here, too. I don't know.
But it looks like...
What I think is that people will just keep using energy and stop paying.
When it gets too expensive.
And the energy companies are not going to be able to turn off one out of six people.
The energy company can turn off your energy, if you're the only one, but they can't turn off one out of six people.
So it's actually such a big problem that the problem doesn't exist.
Does that make sense? The problem of people not being able to pay their bill is so big That it probably doesn't exist as a problem, because they're going to give free energy.
They just won't pay their bill.
The government will pay it, or the company will make less money, or the company will run up debt, or something.
But I think if it's one in six, they just don't pay their bill, and that's the end of it.
And at some point, they'll probably have their debt forgiven.
This is completely delusional.
The energy companies need to match the grid with production.
What did I say that would be conflicting with that?
Of course the energy grid needs to match the grid with production.
I'm not sure what your point was.
The energy has to be shut off somewhere.
Does it? We'll see.
Yeah, I think Germany is going to be shutting down the energy in some ways in some places.
But I still would like to know, does Europe have a 40% problem or a 20% problem?
Does anybody know? If you looked at the total energy situation for Europe, are they going to lose 20% of it or 40% of it this winter?
Somebody says 30%.
Are those real numbers? I've seen two numbers in the 30% range.
Maybe nobody can tell.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think anybody can tell.
You think over half?
If it's over half, they're dead.
If it's 25%, it's just a really bad winter.
If it's 45%, they're fucking dead.
All right. Well, that's all we know for now, and I'm going to go do something else today.
I hope you're going to have a terrific, terrific Sunday.
I have absolutely nothing going on today, so I get to decide what I want to do whenever I feel like doing it, which is kind of a good feeling, too.
Work out and eat meat.
That's what you're going to do? Okay.
And I'll be making fun of ESG and some upcoming comics.
I think they're coming at you pretty soon.
I'm cooling off my house, so I've got to go close my doors.
My whole house fan stopped working today.
Damn it. Ben Shapiro says, dump Trump.
Well, he can say it, but it's not going to happen.
Right? You know, there are a lot of people who have said they don't want Trump as their first choice.
But you're not going to have any option about it.
It doesn't look like there's anything going to happen but Trump.
