Episode 1908 Scott Adams: Politics Reaches Peak Absurdity Just In Time For The Midterms. Buckle Up
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Content:
Twitter rumors and employee demands
Geraldo Rivera on democrat party failing
The many things reaching peak absurdity
John Fetterman's debate performance and health
The pace of AI advancement
The BQ COVID variant
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Probably the best thing that's ever happened to anybody or anywhere.
And if you'd like to take it up a notch, yeah, hard to believe, but it's possible.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day that makes everything better.
It's cold. The simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. This is the highlight of civilization.
Yeah, civilization, turns out the bar wasn't that high.
That was the surprising part.
Well, I'd like to start out with the most interesting story I just saw before I came on here.
At the University of Maryland, they've developed a sweatshirt that acts as an invisibility cloak against AI. So if you're worried that the AI will recognize you, facial recognition, they've developed a sweatshirt that it looks like the technique has like crowd faces in it or something.
But whatever it does, it confuses the AI. And they showed a live demonstration of the AI just became invisible, or the person became invisible.
So they literally, literally have developed a cloak of invisibility for AI. It's an actual thing, and it works.
That's why I say it's about time.
It's about time.
Get that AI cloak.
Some of you may have watched my livestream yesterday afternoon, a special livestream, in which I demonstrated how a senior citizen, me, gets a healthcare appointment through their healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente North.
If you think I ever got to talk to a doctor or got a doctor appointment, you'd be wrong.
Because I demonstrated how difficult it would be just to work through the system of just getting an appointment.
And it wasn't until this morning I realized that the problem is that the entire system is designed to prevent you from getting a doctor appointment.
Literally. Literally.
Not a joke. Because that's the only way they can handle it economically.
They need to take all the people who were marginal doctor requests and really should have been handled in some other way and they shunt them off.
So it's all about preventing you from getting to a doctor and the trouble is they got a little too good at it.
I actually can't figure out how to get to a doctor.
Now, it's not that I don't know the method.
It's that the method breaks for different reasons because of the complexity.
So when you reach a certain level of complexity, and then you say, okay, senior citizen, go figure out which of the five apps and...
Yeah, five apps if you count websites.
So the three websites, two apps, a phone system that gets you to a person who gets you to a person who gets you to a person.
And I actually couldn't solve it.
And I've tried several times.
I can't get through the system to get anything done, really.
So it's totally broken.
And I don't think it's really necessarily just a problem with the Kaiser system, which does seem completely broken at this point.
But it seems like a problem with complexity.
I feel like everything just had a creeping complexity until the point where it's just too hard to do anything.
And let me give you another example.
I now have, I think, five streaming services, because during the pandemic I was desperate for any kind of entertainment at home.
So I just signed up for five of them, thinking I'll keep the ones I like.
And so now instead of sitting down and watching a show for entertainment, If I've, like, allocated an hour or something, the whole hour is just looking for a show.
Because now that there's so many of them, I can't decide that the one I've found is as good as the one I haven't found yet.
So I'm in a continuous state of looking for the good one, and at the end of the hour I've watched no TV. And it happens every time.
Close to every time. 95% of the time.
Very rarely do I actually watch a show.
Very rarely. The exceptions are, sometimes there'll be a game on, and I'll say, oh, there's a game, and I'll turn it on, and then it'll go to commercial.
And I'll say, well, that would have worked, except that I can't possibly sit here for a whole commercial.
That's not going to happen.
So I turn it off, look for something else.
Anyway, so everything was too complicated, though.
Twitter, let's give you a little Twitter update.
Here are some things that are rumored, but I don't know if they're true.
Rumored that the Twitter deal with Musk buying it might close on Friday.
I don't know if that's true, but it looks like it's going to close.
So that's good. I heard a rumor that I do not have confidence in that Musk plans to be CEO of Twitter as well.
Did anybody hear that from a credible source?
Anybody? Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.
I can imagine it happening temporarily, like I can imagine for a month or something, but it doesn't really sound like the thing that's going to happen.
And then I thought to myself, if you were going to pick a CEO for Twitter, who would you pick?
Think about it. Who would you pick that could actually...
Actually do it in a way that you would...
Jack Dorsey, somebody says.
You know, I think people are going to miss Jack Dorsey.
Yeah. Me?
I would not be a good leader.
You know I am not a good leader?
I've told you this before.
Does anybody remember why I would be a terrible manager or CEO? And I've been in those jobs, and I'm not good at it.
Yeah, I have too much empathy.
You have to be able to abuse your employees more than they want to be abused or you're not a good manager.
I mean, the tension between what the employees want and what the company wants is what you're managing.
So you're supposed to manage them to the maximum amount of unhappiness That gets you the maximum amount of productivity.
I can't wrap my head around that.
I'm glad that people can, because it does make the system work.
I just can't bring myself to that space.
I need a job where everybody wins as much as possible, right?
If you read a joke and you laugh, everybody wins.
So Twitter put together a number of employees.
They put together some demands because they're worried about losing their jobs and worried about what Twitter might become under Elon Musk.
And so they've, among other things, they've asked in their letter that Musk, quote, not discriminate against workers on the basis of their political beliefs.
The employees of Twitter are worried that somebody would discriminate against them based on their political beliefs.
This leads me into what I'm going to call the theme for the rest of the live stream.
Don't you love it when I have a theme?
I have a theme today.
And it was accidental.
It's an accidental theme because the news just created the theme.
And here's the theme.
We've reached peak absurdity.
And by we, I mean the Democrats.
Democrats have reached peak absurdity, like it couldn't be any weirder.
Nothing could be funnier or more clownish than the Twitter employees worried that somebody would treat them as political entities instead of just, you know, citizens of America.
Huh. I'd hate to see that happen.
So there it is, peak absurdity.
I don't know. So who would you put in a CEO? Let's say you're Elon Musk.
Who would you put in a CEO that would either make everybody happy or, alternately, everybody unhappy?
Because you end up in the same place.
You don't want people to be too happy.
Yay. Now, well, that's interesting.
Ye just bought Parler, so that's not going to happen.
Lex, he's busy.
All right, I'm going to throw out a name just for fun.
You ready for this?
Mike Cernovich. The whole world would explode.
Every employee would quit.
But he is one of the few people I would trust...
To be balanced.
I would actually trust Sertovich not to limit people's freedom of speech.
And that's all you want.
I mean, that's all you want. You want somebody that you would trust to not limit somebody's freedom of speech.
And then, you know, I'm sure the rest of the people could make it profitable and all that stuff.
But you do need somebody you can trust on that one freedom of speech thing, and I couldn't immediately think of somebody else.
Because everybody else is either so overtly political, and even though Cernovich is political, he's political in a whatever-makes-sense way, not in a I'm-a-Republican-to-death way.
Nothing like that.
Mark Cuban. Yeah, he's busy.
Yeah, I don't think Mark Cuban wants a CEO job.
Interesting thought experiment.
It'll be somebody you've never heard of, probably.
So Fox News' Geraldo Rivera, He has an idea that George Floyd is the person most responsible for the failure of the Democratic Party.
Not because of what George Floyd did, specifically, but he became the focus of attention.
And the focus on that, Geraldo wants to call as maybe the turning point.
Now, I don't know that...
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the cause.
I don't think George Floyd was a cause of things that happened not directly related to George Floyd.
But on the other hand, I do think it marks the beginning of the top.
Don't you? It feels like the beginning of the absurdity started then, where people had the best intentions, I think.
I think actually most people had good intentions one way or the other about George Floyd.
They wanted the right answer.
I mean, I felt like everybody just wanted the right answer in that one, and they weren't quite sure what it would be.
But I don't know if it was a cause.
I do think it might have been a coincidental marker of the beginning of something that got worse.
Kat Abu, Twitter user, reports that, also about Geraldo, Noted that Geraldo mentioned that cops are, quote, besieged and, quote, under attack because more than 250 cops have been shot this year in the line of duty.
Doesn't that seem like a lot?
Like, in my mind, if you had asked me, And I guess it's a higher number than before.
But if you asked me, in the whole country of 350 million, whatever we are now, how many cops are shot in the line of duty per year, what would you have guessed?
If you didn't know the number, you would have guessed 1,000?
Some people say 100, 50.
Yeah, I would have guessed 50 to 100, which is outrageous.
But 250, that does sound like...
It's funny that we would even have any sense of what is too high.
How do I even have any idea what's the right number for that in a normal world?
But somehow I still have that sense.
I have this weird sense that it's too high.
I mean, one would be too high, but...
I don't know.
It's weird that I have a sense of what's right without knowing what standard I'm comparing it to.
That just shows the limits of our rational minds.
But as Cat Abu mentioned when Geraldo said 250 cops have been shot in the line of duty this year, Cat says what he didn't mention was that 804 people have been shot and killed by police this year as well.
So, now I didn't realize it was a competition.
Apparently, we're scoring it as a competition, and it's cops 804 and citizens 250.
So far, the cops are winning, shooting more citizens than the citizens are shooting cops.
Now, as somebody pointed out, probably all 804 of those people who were shot by police were criminals.
Some of them might have been a little bit innocent.
Maybe. Maybe a few of them were innocent.
But I'm not sure you could compare the number of police officers enforcing the law killed to the number of people breaking the law killed.
It feels like that's the wrong comparison.
Have I ever mentioned to you that the difference between people who are good at analysis versus bad is if they know what to compare?
That's the one thing that always divides the good from good comparers to the bad comparers, is what did you compare it to?
And I wouldn't compare those two numbers.
Michael Schellenberger had a provocative tweet that involved a psychologist, Sam Vaknin, who studies narcissism.
And he says that the potential for aggression and victimhood movements is much larger than in the general population.
So in other words, if you're part of a movement that says, we are victims, stop doing bad things to us, you're more likely to turn into a violent movement than somebody who just wants different policies, I guess.
Now that makes sense, doesn't it?
The victims are the ones who are going to be the most energetic about changing things, and usually you have to get violent to change anything big, unfortunately.
So that kind of makes sense.
So would you say by this measure that the Democrats are more likely to be violent, or the Republicans?
If this hypothesis holds that the victimhood people are the more dangerous, who is more dangerous?
Really? Now, just check your first answer, the reflex answer.
Your first answer is the other side, right?
Whoever's the other side. So your first answer is definitely Democrats.
It's all the wokeness, right?
The wokeness is basically about victimhood, right?
Now, tell me what has been the main message of the Republicans lately?
That all the wokeness is making victims of the Republicans.
The Republicans have a total victimhood policy as well.
They don't express it the same way, it's a different kind of victimhood.
And the Republicans are saying their biggest issue is stop killing babies.
Stop killing babies, right?
Stop hunting.
I'm responsible for that being a meme.
Hashtag hunted. Yeah, the Republicans definitely feel like victims.
Definitely. But is one of them more victim than the other?
What do you think?
I don't know. So it probably has to do with how you feel as much as what you say.
Or more, I guess.
So I'm not sure that standard is as useful as it should be.
Because you always think the other side is the one that's complaining, and you think your side is making good points, but the other side is just being victimhood complainers.
Do you know what the left says about the right?
The left says about the right that the right is complaining too much and acting like victims.
And I don't know how to compare.
So how would you compare those two things?
I don't know. I have no idea how you'd compare those and decide who's the bigger victimhood person.
But I could tell you it's a bad idea to have victimhood as your primary brand.
So much so that I will make the following prediction, sort of a generic prediction.
That someday a Republican will run against victimhood But it has to be in favor of something.
So against victimhood as an organizing principle, say, let's not use victimhood as the basis for all of our policies.
Instead, let's use engineered solutions that can be tested for effectiveness.
So imagine anybody, it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be a Republican, but imagine anybody saying, all right, here's the deal.
I'm against victimhood as an organizing principle.
Go ahead and complain, because we'd like to hear your complaints.
So free speech, squeaky wheel, that's all good.
Complain as much as you want.
But don't use the victimhood as the basis for policy.
The victimhood is for the victims to complain and make sure we know what's happening so we can incorporate it.
But it shouldn't be the main operating principle.
The main operating principle should be what works, and do you have a way to test it first?
Now, how would that person lose an election?
Think about it. Because you're allowing the victimhood to, you know, be fully, fully expressed.
You're not saying, stop saying that.
You're just saying, don't use that as the basis for decision-making.
Your decision-making should be based on what works, and that should be tested whenever you could test as small.
It just sounds like one person is a smart operator and the other one's just a whiner.
So your comparison, again, it's all about comparison.
The person who said you should test it and just do what works is going to win that every time, unless they have some other gigantic negative following them around.
I say it again, winning a national office could not be easier.
It's just nobody's doing the obvious thing it would take to win it.
They all just revert to their team, because probably that's the only way they get funding, I guess.
So, I saw something that I read wrong.
Somebody in their profile said they were working on anti-effectives.
And I think it was in a medical sense.
There's some kind of medical term there.
And I thought it would be interesting for somebody to run against ineffectiveness.
Just say, I don't care if you're left or right, don't do things you know won't work.
So I'm against ineffectiveness.
I'm neither a Republican nor a Democrat.
I'm against things that don't work.
How would the public like that?
And say, well, you can be a Democrat and you can be a Republican.
And I respect both of those choices.
But I'm only going to be for what works.
So if we can't prove it works, I'm not for it.
It doesn't matter whose side it came from.
And you could pick a team.
You could say that you're, you know...
We'll let you go away, Robert, since you seem like sort of an asshole.
All right. Here's another indication that we've reached peak absurdity.
Wall Street Journal had a little piece yesterday noting, and this was an opinion piece, but that the ESG bubble is deflating.
Now, do you think somebody could print in the Wall Street Journal, without any correction, that the ESG bubble is deflating?
Now, I'd say that's right on schedule.
What did I promise you about ESG? Do you remember what I promised?
I said I would destroy its reputation before the end of this year.
And now the Wall Street Journal is publishing that the ESG bubble is deflating.
There's another article that I tweeted around where somebody noted all of my ESG comics in Dilbert.
And said, you're in bad shape if Dilbert is mocking your thing.
And noted BlackRock.
So, if you look at my Twitter feed, I've got a link to...
All of the ESG-related comics.
And if you like, they're all licensable.
You know, there's a link on there for buying it or licensing it if you want to use it for your own purposes.
If you use it for your own purposes without legally licensing it, Just make sure you're an individual, not a corporate entity, right?
If you're just doing it with your friends, that's fine.
Yeah, I don't care about copyright if you're forwarding to your friends or tweeting it, you know, if you're just an individual.
But don't do it in a corporate way.
That would require a license.
Don't do it under a corporate entity.
So that is my gift to you.
I hope it helps. All right, here are the things that seem the most absurd.
So ESG seems to be deflating.
So I think ESG has reached peak absurdity.
True or false? Has ESG apparently reached peak absurdity?
I say yes. Because people now can, out loud, they can criticize it, right?
How about trans athletes?
So there's a story out of which Carolina?
North or South? About a trans athlete, a volleyball player, who is apparently so powerful that people are being injured.
Where the hell is that now?
Oh, there it is. A North Carolina school district voted last month to forfeit all high school volleyball games against a rival school because the rival school has a transgender athlete on the female team who apparently is really talented.
Relative to the other players and a little bit stronger than maybe they expected.
So apparently the trans-athlete spiked the ball so hard into the face of an opponent that the opponent had some injuries.
Which could be kind of bad.
I mean, head and neck, it could be pretty bad.
Doesn't say how bad it is. But I think this is the way this will be settled.
I think that trans athletes will be allowed to join teams.
That's the current situation for the most part.
But that the teams who would be scheduled to play against them will just forfeit.
And I think that that's how this will be handled.
Now what would happen if every time somebody joined your team, you didn't have anybody to play?
Because the teams that cancel, they cancel for safety.
And if you cancel for safety, nobody can touch you.
Nobody can touch you.
The schools that cancel for safety are completely safe.
Because they did it for a specific reason, and it was based on evidence.
It was an evidence-based decision.
So I think that's the way it's going to go.
I think that the freedom of the trans athletes, and by the way, if you're new to me, I've always supported the trans athletes, because I think that the athletic world needs to be reconfigured for a variety of reasons, not just for the trans.
Sporting is an elite, highly harmful process for some people.
Meaning that the superstars who were born with genetic gifts, we treat as heroes, and they get all the girls and the boys and everything else.
And the people who are not athletic don't get any benefits from athletic organizations.
And probably only the top maybe 10% are good enough athletes to be on a team and get all the goodness.
Now, if you're good enough to be on a team and actually play, as opposed to sitting on the bench, it's amazing.
I'm very in favor of organized sports See, I always see this NPC comment that Scott is not athletic, and therefore he does not understand athleticism.
I've played every fucking sport you could imagine.
When I was a kid, I would play five sports a day, literally.
Five different organized sports a day.
And that was just normal. You'd do one at lunch, one at recess, one after school.
You'd play catch with your brother.
You'd have a pick-up game.
You'd have five sports a day.
You'd do every one, right?
And that was sort of not even that untypical when I grew up.
I feel as if you might be young if you were imagining that I was non-athletic.
Because when I grew up, there weren't any, well, I won't say any, 90% of boys We're athletic and played all the sports, typically.
But today, kids might play one sport.
Right? It's really different.
But if you're looking at somebody my age and you say that they didn't participate in sports, you're almost always wrong.
Almost all males my age played every sport.
You know, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but you get the idea.
So, no, that's not it.
My opinion is based on this.
I've played co-ed sports.
So co-ed soccer and co-ed tennis, and the co-ed soccer and the co-ed tennis were really, really fun.
Really, really fun. All you have to do is make sure that the tennis player you're playing is about the same level, or can hang with you, and make sure that the soccer players are not that different.
So the female soccer players tended to be the ones who could run You know, when I had a co-ed, I had a co-ed soccer team as an adult in my 50s, and the women that I recruited ended up being like college soccer players, they had been, and they were current marathon runners.
So I just sort of accidentally recruited a whole bunch of marathon-running women, and many of them played in college, and so suddenly we had this powerhouse soccer team.
You had to have mixed.
You couldn't play just all men on the field.
And it was really, really fun.
So while I do think there's a place for every kind of combination of sports, I think what we need more of is the just-for-fun sports where everybody just plays people of their relative ability.
You weren't competing for scholarships, though, yes.
And the competing for scholarships is a terrible, terrible process.
I think that competing for scholarships is awesome for the 1% of people who can get them.
So for them, it's great.
For the rest of us, it's just we're paying money for your kid.
Why am I paying money for your kid?
If my kid isn't an athlete but the college or whatever that that kid goes to pays a lot of money for athletics, and maybe it doesn't make money for them, depending on the school, why am I subsidizing your child?
Why is that right? Now, I'm completely okay with your child excelling in sports and doing great, but do you think I should pay for it?
That's the only question. Like, I want your kid to have every opportunity and do everything that they want to do.
I want just as much for your kid as you do.
I'm just asking you, should I subsidize it?
Or should you subsidize my kid who's got more problems because they are not good at sports?
I know. It's a weird situation.
But we have reached peak absurdity in that.
I think we've reached peak absurdity with both Fetterman and Biden.
We'll talk about Fetterman a little bit more.
But don't you think that the fact that Fetterman and Biden are both legitimate Democrat candidates That is peak absurdity.
And I don't mean to be unkind for the differently abled.
It's not about that. Anybody who wants to paint me with that brush, good luck.
It's not about that.
If Fetterman were blind, do you think we'd be having this conversation?
No. If Fetterman had one leg, Do you think we'd be having this conversation?
No. And everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that.
And watching the Democrats argue that everything's fine with both Biden and Fetterman, do you feel that that is peak?
Yeah, right. Nobody's saying that Crenshaw can't do the job.
So have we not reached peak absurdity?
Would you agree that I'm calling the top?
The fact that Fetterman and Biden are both considered legitimate candidates, forget about their politics.
I'm not talking about any of their policy preferences.
It's not even about that.
But the fact that we're seriously considering both of those people, it's insane.
Alright, and also the Ukraine situation seems to be reaching some kind of absurdity, like the bottomless pit.
Alright, let's...
So here's some more absurdity.
Don't you think that the Democrat policies on COVID have now reached peak absurdity?
Would you agree with that call?
The people wearing masks outdoors by themselves.
You know, the still requirements for things.
Yeah, I mean, almost everything.
Energy policy?
Energy policy clearly has reached peak absurdity.
Yeah. But correct me if I'm wrong, all of these things are sort of coincidentally reaching DEI, they're all reaching CRT, they're all reaching peak absurdity right before the midterms.
Is that a weird coincidence?
That the absurdity is happening all at the same time?
Am I wrong?
Give me a reasonableness check here.
Now, I'm going not on any data.
I'm going entirely upon just what it feels like.
If you read the news every day, what it feels like is all of those things that when they first came out, they sounded a little sketchy to you, but you were never sure how big they would get.
Right? You didn't know how big anything would get.
So when things were little and sort of squirrely, You ignore them.
Well, it's squirrely.
It's kind of small.
And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger until the trans stuff couldn't get any more than whatever it is.
Would you agree? There's nothing more.
Is there? Now, I'm not arguing what's good or bad about it.
I'm just saying we've got to the limit of more.
There's nothing more. So that's the peak.
If you think it's absurd, then it's peak absurdity.
If you think it's all good, it's reached the peak.
Goodness, I guess, that would be the other view.
All right, let's talk about the progressives.
There was this brief shining moment yesterday when, I think it was...
I saw a tweet saying that the progressives were going to be anti-war for Ukraine, similar to some of the right-wing people, and that maybe for the first time, and this was really unusual and special, it could be that the far left and the far right would agree on the anti-war.
They would come together.
They would fix something that was important through their being on the same side.
And for a while, I thought to myself, America.
America can finally come together when it matters, when the big things matter.
America comes together, the progressives.
And then I read an article that says that the progressives didn't mean it, and Representative Jayapal, she withdrew that letter that was the subject of all this, and says it was released by staff without vetting.
How does staff...
How in the world would your staff release a letter like that without vetting?
How in the world?
Alright, you're an asshole.
If you waited two seconds, you would hear me saying, I don't believe them, instead of saying, Scott believed the squad.
He never learns.
He's red-pilled now.
I guess he's coming around.
How about waiting four fucking seconds before you criticize the messenger asshole?
Goodbye. So let's talk about Fetterman as we're talking about peak absurdity.
So he started off his thing by saying, good night to everyone.
He said, good night everyone, when he began his debate.
Now, is that an example of someone whose brain is not working?
Good night everyone.
Probably not.
Probably not. Suppose he had said, Good evening, everyone.
Good evening. What's the difference between good night and good evening?
It was night.
He said, Good night, everybody.
Does good night mean goodbye, or does it mean hello?
Good evening usually means hello.
Good night usually means goodbye.
But correct me if I'm wrong, was he not working off a teleprompter?
What was not his first sentence on the teleprompter?
We don't know that, do we?
Because I've got a feeling that the teleprompter said that.
He probably just read it. Now, if all he did was confuse evening with night, not the biggest problem in the world.
So I don't know how to judge that one, but it happened.
However, he did, I guess his team accused the closed caption company of being laggy and maybe inaccurate, and so it made him look bad because he was reading things that didn't read right.
And the company that made that system and tested it with him and gave him more opportunities to test it to make sure it was just what he wanted says, we gave you all the time you wanted to test it.
You didn't do it.
And it's exactly what you said was good.
And then you said it wasn't good after we gave it to you.
So I think I'm going to side with the, probably with the company that produced it.
Because they did, I do think they gave them a chance to test it.
John Cooper, who's a Twitter user, tweets that every time MAGA hears Fetterman stumble over a word tonight, they mocked him.
Every time I heard him stumble, I felt inspired by his selflessness and bravery.
That's the difference between a liberal and an asshole, says John Cooper.
And I thought to myself, this has stirred my competitive juices.
Now, I'm not proud of this, but I'm just sort of reflexively competitive.
Like, I can't turn it off.
It's just always there. And when I see a competition like this to be who could be the most peacock-like person in public, and who could say the thing that makes them look the best while pretending they're talking about an issue.
So I thought, I can top that.
I can fucking top that.
All right, so here's the bar he set, John.
I'm going to try to exceed this.
He says, every time I heard him stumble, I felt inspired by his selflessness and bravery.
I'm thinking, okay, that's good.
That's really good. I can beat that.
And so what I tweeted was, I'm too competitive to sit down on all the peacocking today, so I would like to submit my entry that proves my humanity and awesomeness.
And this was my entry. John Fetterman is so brave and selfless that I have commissioned a statue of him for my front yard.
If all you did was vote for him, I win.
I win. Right?
I think I win. I mean, I might be a little biased in the scoring, but I think I win.
Statue beats tweet, doesn't it?
Statue beats tweet every time.
All right. Declaring victory.
I saw this other two movies on one screen tweet from Twitter user PointLogic.
His Twitter handle is SocratesBigBird.
So this is somebody who likes logic and Socrates and stuff.
And so this logical person says, according to the maggots, So I'm picking up some cues that it might be a Democrat or a left-leaning person, because he's calling the MAGA people maggots.
According to the Maggots, Fox News, and a load of other goons...
Hey, I wonder if I'm one of those goons.
But according to the Maggots, Fox News, and a load of other goons, he says their message is that vaccines kill you, Paxlovid kills you, and Remdesivir kills you, but...
These meds used for other things that are PROVEN AND EFFECTIVE FOR COVID, in all caps, are, quote, MIRACLES. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine.
And PointLogic asks, why is this happening?
Why is it happening that we've divided into two movies on one screen where one says vaccines kill you, Paxilovid kills you, Remdesivir kills you, and the other says ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine work.
What's your answer to how that happened?
How did it happen?
Well, I have a hypothesis.
Here's my hypothesis.
The complete collapse of experts.
Once experts became no longer credible, and I think that that's a fair summary of the last few years, wouldn't you say?
Would you all agree with me that the experts took a real hit in the last two years, like we've never seen before?
Has there ever been a time in human history when the experts Did so poorly in any, you know, one or two year period.
I mean, it was sort of an unusually bad performance.
You know, maybe witch doctors or something, if you go back further.
But, to my mind, the complete collapse of expert credibility left us all on our own.
And when you're on your own and the experts can't help you, or you don't trust them to help you, you just default to your team.
So what happened was the experts were the only thing that kept us from being complete team players.
Like, sometimes you'd say, yeah, like, I'm a Democrat, but I also believe in science, and science says that nuclear power plants are okay, so even though that's the thing Republicans say, you know, the science allows me to connect with them in that one thing.
Right? But now, once the experts are completely discredited, which is unfortunately where we are, then people just agree with their team because it's all they have left.
Well, might as well agree with my team.
Now, nobody thinks it through that way.
I'm not saying that's a conscious decision, but it's the default.
If you can't trust the experts, you trust your team.
That may be a terrible idea, but it's just what happens.
I saw an expert on AI. Ethan Mollick did a series of tweets, which I retweeted, and it's definitely worth reading.
This is one of those threads where if you read this thread, you will just see the future.
And I promise you, you will.
Like, you will see the future more accurately than the people who did not read the tweet.
And basically, the gist of it is that the public doesn't have any idea how fast AI is coming right now.
Specifically for, he was talking about the creative jobs, such as writing.
And he used this analogy, which I approve of in this case.
He said that people probably are imagining that the pace of AI is similar to the pace of microchips, where it doubles every x period, right?
So microchips we're used to, we're sort of acclimated to a certain level of improvement in technology that crosses all technology.
Am I right? Everything that is from social media to microchips to everything else, every year it's better.
It could be significantly better, like 20% better, right?
But 20% is nothing like what you're going to see, what we're already seeing in AI. AI is going to hockey stick.
It's already in a hockey stick.
So AI is not waiting for the hockey stick.
It's in the hockey stick.
It's in the total upswing.
This is a short path to the singularity.
Like, if you were wondering when the singularity was going to happen, the one thing you had to know is it was going to be nothing happening, nothing happening, nothing happening, nothing happening.
It seems like a little is happening, but barely nothing.
Barely nothing, barely nothing, barely nothing, the whole fucking world changes.
Alright, if you don't know that's coming, You better get ready for it, and that's what this will tell you.
I've said before that predicting the future three years out is now impossible.
And that's never been true before, even when you could be surprised by wars and shortages and stuff.
Even with a war, it still looked like a continuation of the world you knew.
There just happened to be a war, right?
Three years from now, nothing will be familiar.
AI will change everything.
And there's nothing that can stop it.
And it might be in one year.
I mean, it's probably only the commercialization of it that makes it three years.
Probably in one year, it will already write better than all humans.
In one year. AI will write everything we want written.
Because it will do it better and faster.
You will still be able to write, because you learned how.
You just won't have a reason for it.
There will never be a reason to write after about a year.
Now think about that.
Just think about that one thing.
Writing could be obsolete in a year.
That's a real thing.
Writing, by humans, could be obsolete.
Now it might turn into some version of editing.
So here's how I imagine I would write a Dilbert comic in a year from now.
So roughly one to three years from now, this is how I would write a Dilbert comic.
I'd say, all right, Dilbert's talking to his boss.
They're in the office. Show me a new angle that we haven't seen before.
The first panel, Dilbert says, blah, blah, blah.
Second panel, the boss responds, blah, blah, blah.
And then the third panel, add something funny.
Put a punchline there.
And then I'm going to walk away.
And that's going to be my entire job that day.
In the future, the only asset I will own for Dilbert is the rights to the IP. I will no longer be the only person who can make it.
Basically, you will be able to make your own Dilbert comics at home just by speaking to your AI. Hey, make some Dilbert comics for me.
Bup, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup.
No, no, make some Dilbert Comics on me just on this topic.
Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
It'll be done.
That's probably one year away.
Now, if you didn't know that was one year away, you really don't know what's happening.
It's coming. And it's not just art and writing that will change.
It's everything. It's everything.
The entire economy.
Wars. Everything.
Three years. It will be exciting.
I hope it will be good. Here's some more absurdities.
The Hunter laptop, Hunter's activities when his father was vice president and even when he was between jobs, still sort of amazingly being ignored by one half of the media.
All right, amazing.
Absurdity is everywhere.
The whole Fetterman versus Oz thing, if you're making fun of conservatives for their, let's say, their ableism, If you're mocking Fetterman because you say that it is maybe temporary, disability is preventing him from doing the job, then you are against disabled people.
To which I say, there's still a Special Olympics, right?
Has anybody pushed for the Special Olympics people to just be thrown in with the regular Olympics people?
Is that happening? Or do people understand that your ability affects, and I know I'm going to go out on a limb here, this is not widely understood, and I realize it's provocative, but it's possible that your ability has some kind of a correlation, maybe a causation, to your ability.
Now, I realize we haven't connected those traditionally, because a lot of times people think your ability has nothing to do with your ability.
And with Fetterman, we've decided to disconnect those.
So his ability, we can't talk about how his ability is related to his ability to do the job.
Now, if his ability was unrelated to his ability, To do this specific job, then I would say that would be unfair.
Same with the Special Olympics.
If the Special Olympics participants, if their ability was equal to the ability of the regular Olympics, I would be in favor of them playing together.
All right. To me, it's just amazing that this is even a conversation.
Fetterman, I guess, came out with saying he fully supports fracking.
He loves fracking. He's fracking in love with fracking.
Did fracking...
Didn't we always think he was against it?
He's just lying, right?
Isn't there a video of him saying the opposite?
Or am I imagining that because I got fooled by the media on one side?
Yeah, so he's just lying, right?
And apparently that works.
How many Democrats do you think know he's lying about fracking?
How many Democrats do you think know he's lying?
25%. It works because they don't read the other media.
So a Democrat...
Let me give you this as a model.
A Democrat can make any lie...
And be comfortable that their voters won't see the truth.
Would you say that's true?
Because the left does not read Fox News' website at all.
But the right tends to see both arguments because the mainstream argument is mainstream.
So they're more likely to see it.
It's not really a fair fight.
There's one side that knows both sides.
We saw that clearly, and we already talked about this, the MSNBC interview, I guess you'd call it, with a bunch of Trump supporters.
And when you saw that the ordinary Trump supporter, just a citizen, knew more than the professional political reporter and demonstrated it by correcting her twice on facts.
And that was the perfect example of how the right sees both arguments and the left only sees one side.
These are not similar things.
They're not even a little bit similar.
All right, Biden said in public, quote, almost everyone who will die from COVID this year will not be up to date on their shots.
Put on your analytical caps.
Give me two possible reasons why this could be a true statement.
Give me two. One of them would be vaccinations protect you.
But what's the other possible explanation for why this might actually be true?
Almost everyone who dies from COVID will not be up to date on their shots.
Could it be because most people will not be up to date?
So most people in the world will not be up to date.
Therefore, doesn't it kind of make sense that most people who are also coincidentally dying would be dying for reasons unrelated to COVID? Unrelated to COVID, but I don't know.
It's amazing that Biden can say that kind of stuff out loud.
But, at the same time, do you want to get into real cancellation territory here?
Who's with me? Let's fly close to the sun.
Ready? Sun?
Scott? Let's do it.
There's a Twitter user I've mentioned before called Ethical Skeptic.
How many of you are familiar with the Twitter account of Ethical Skeptic?
Many of you on Twitter is very well exposed.
And this is what the ethical skeptic says.
This is not what I say.
So I'm reporting what somebody said.
I am not endorsing it.
And therefore, I cannot be cancelled.
Do we all agree on that?
I think we do. So ethical skeptic says the same thing, which I do not endorse, nor do I rebuke.
So you will see no opinion from me yet.
He says, the latest variant to come on the block, what they are calling BQ, is seeking out vaccinated individuals 3 to 1 over unvaccinated and has a particular taste for those who are recently vaccinated as well.
So he's famous, this user, Twitter user, for being an expert on data and for using public data sources.
And putting them together in ways that show different possible conclusions than the mainstream ones.
I don't know if anything he does is real.
Let me say it as quick, as clearly as I can.
I cannot judge whether the ethical skeptic is a genius who's doing a service for the country, because many people are looking at it that way.
And it might be. It could be.
Or if it's somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, but I can't tell the difference.
I have no idea.
I have no opinion on whether this is valid or invalid, smart or not smart, true or not true.
I have no idea. I really don't.
I'm not kidding. I'm not joking.
I really can't tell. And it's one of my mysteries I'm trying to solve.
But is there any other reason...
First of all, do you think it's true, as a fact, you fact-checked this, do you think it's true that the recently vaccinated are more likely to get COVID? Because remember, the vaccinations don't prevent you from getting it, but what would the recently vaccinated have in common?
What would the recently vaccinated have in common?
Wouldn't they, well, Democrats, yes, but wouldn't they also believe that they needed the booster?
Wouldn't it be people who self-assessed, and probably their doctor as well, said, oh, you're in a situation where you're either going to be around a lot of people, you're either around a lot of people, or you might be extra weak.
So it may be true that the vaccinated are more likely to get infected, but there's nothing about the vaccinated that is common to the public.
Or let me say that clear.
The people who are recently boosted are a special group of people, and they're special in a variety of ways, so it doesn't tell you anything about the public at large.
Right? Is ethical, skeptical, showing us something that is of the greatest national importance and we're all missing it?
Or is it as simple as the population of people who got boosted is not like the rest of us?
I don't know. I know.
And I would guess...
That if ethical skeptic were here, he would say, Scott, Scott, here's why what you're saying is wrong, and it would probably make sense.
Like, I'm not selling my opinion as right.
It's just a mystery to me.
I don't know. Anyway, keep an eye on that.
I heard a theory about China...
Two theories about China that spell its doom, and maybe the United States doom too, but let's talk about China.
One of them is that they're already lying massively about their population decrease, and that China's population is substantially smaller Than what you thought it was.
Because they've already constrained their population.
And that when you do that, you end up with way too many retired people compared to workers, and it's just basically a time bomb.
And there's nothing they can do about it.
So basically, they would be doomed by demographics.
That's one theory of why China's doomed.
Number two. There's a theory that the main thing that makes any country look successful is that they're overspending on infrastructure because they need it.
And that when Japan overspent on infrastructure, it looked like they were booming and they were going to eat our lunch.
But when they stopped spending on infrastructure and got down to a normal level, they had no GDP growth for years and years and years.
And that the United States might, you know, suffer a similar thing where if government stops spending massively, as has been recently, then maybe we don't have any real growth.
Like it's all been government.
So by that argument, when China reaches its limit of, not a limit, but when it does most of its infrastructure projects, and then it slows down because it's done most of what it needs to do, it's just in a new stuff mode, that there won't be enough government spending in China to keep the GDP coming.
And then it all falls apart.
What do you think? Well, in economics, there's one rule that I like to stick with, which is people are terrible at predicting any of this stuff.
And the Adams Law of slow-moving disasters suggests that people will make whatever adjustments they can.
So these are gigantic threats to China, but I wouldn't say necessarily that that means they're doomed.
But then they have this third thing going on, which is they're no longer trustworthy.
And being not trustworthy...
It means that people don't want to do business with you.
And I think that's going to hurt more than it's hurting now.
You know that trick where we said Hillary Clinton was warning that the Democrats would try to steal the election, which is a signal that...
I'm sorry.
Hillary warned that the Republicans would try to steal the next election, which is really...
Priming the environment for the Democrats to steal the election because you won't see it coming if they've made you think Republicans are going to do it.
It's just a good way to cover your evil.
And now NATO is blaming Russia of using the same trick.
Russia is saying that Ukraine is planning to use a dirty bomb, you know, a nuclear dirty bomb.
Whereas NATO says, no, no, no, that's what Russia accuses the other side of before they do the thing.
So apparently that's a known strategy, that Russia accuses you of what they're planning to do.
So if Russia accuses you of a chemical weapons attack, they're definitely going to use a chemical weapon.
If they accuse you of using a dirty bomb, or planning it, they're definitely planning to use a dirty bomb.
Now, maybe to blame the other side, maybe just because they want to use it, but I'd worry about this.
It looks like an understood problem, and NATO's all over it.
All right. So, back to my theme.
My theme is that we've reached peak absurdity.
Look at every story I talked about.
There's a story that maybe Russia will nuke itself because Russia thinks Ukraine is part of Russia.
So we're literally acting serious about the possibility that Russia will nuke itself.
Personally, I think that's absurd.
I don't see any possibility of that.
Now, I also thought that Russia wouldn't invade.
So you have to put my opinion in context, right?
So my ability to predict what Putin will do has been demonstrated as low ability.
By the way, do you know what my most frequent criticism is?
I never admit when I'm wrong.
I will submit to you that no one has admitted they're wrong more often or reliably than I have of any public figure.
That's my claim.
That literally, of all public figures of all time, nobody has ever spent more time admitting they were wrong in public than I have.
Well, if you think that's false, name the other person.
I think that the number of times I've admitted I'm wrong in public would be maybe 20 times.
Those of you who have watched me since the beginning, put a number on it, if you can remember.
Just roughly. How many times do you think I've admitted I'm wrong in public?
20 times? Somebody said 100.
Yeah. But you wouldn't disagree with my estimate of 20, would you?
Like, that's not crazy.
Somebody says 10 or so.
Between 20 and 100?
Alright, so whatever it is.
If you're on YouTube, you're not seeing the comments.
The people on the Locals platform, most of them have followed me for the longest time.
And they're not arguing with my estimate.
They're just putting different numbers on it.
But they're arguing with the main point that I've admitted I'm wrong a whole bunch of times.
A whole bunch of times. Now, if you say you're wrong more than anybody in the world, or at least you're in the top 1% of that, people will tell you you never admit you're wrong.
And it's the most frustrating thing.
It's the most frustrating thing.
Because I don't mind being accused of things I've done.
I mean, that doesn't feel good, but at least you feel you're in a just world that makes sense.
Well, I did make that mistake.
They are criticizing me.
Okay. So when people criticize me for being wrong about Russia invading, I don't insult you, right?
I just say, well, yep, you got me on that one.
It's hard because you're a comedian and your audience has lots of hecklers.
Maybe. I'm not sure if people even see me as a comedian when I'm doing this stuff.
Oh, okay. Gino says you've recommended me to others because I've admitted when I'm wrong.
The thing about admitting when you're wrong is that I don't think people understand that it makes you stronger.
If people understood that, they would do it.
Now, obviously, there's a right and a wrong way to do it.
But if you do it fully, And by the way, is there anything more surprising?
I like to use Mike Cernovich for all of my examples.
It's amazing how many situations he fits into as a teaching point.
So Mike Cernovich did the whole Pizzagate situation, and then instead of explaining it away or making it look like the real problem was his accuser, he just put it in his movie.
So he made a movie, and he just, you know, he featured it.
Instead of explaining it, apologizing for it, he just featured it.
Any other questions?
And I feel like that's what allowed his Twitter traffic to grow, etc., is that people saw, oh, okay.
He just accepted that, and then he moved on.
Mike made the movie Hoaxed, with an E-D on the end, Hoaxed, which, by the way, I've recommended very highly.
It's a tremendous movie.
And I think we need Hoaxed, too, because the number of hoaxes since that movie, it's just begging for Hoaxed, too, which I hope he makes.
All right. Yeah, or the hoax quiz.
Yeah, similar to the superpower of saying, I don't know.
You don't want to overdo that one.
But there is power in admitting you don't know something.
That's true. Yeah, so now we have 16 hoaxes.
And, you know, that's an abbreviated list.
And even the people who know that 12 of them are real hoaxes, They still act like their side is the good one.
That always amazes me.
All right. Is there any story I missed today?
Any big thing happening?
I saw Mike Pence teasing that...
Yeah, the Susan Sarandon tweet.
I'm trying to remember. I saw it, but I can't remember what that was.
All right. Where can the hoax list be found?
Good question. I think if you went to Twitter and just searched for it, it's also on Locals.
I published it a few times on Locals.
It's not a pinned tweet anymore.
I changed my pinned tweet.
There's a book about race hoaxes.
Yeah. But I think the race hoax is...
It's too narrow. Yeah, there was an earthquake, I guess, this morning.
I did not feel it.
Or yesterday? Or yesterday?
It's a 5.1.
What jobs would I advise a teenager in?
That's tough. You know, I used to advise teenagers to go into the arts because that would be the last thing that AI would get to.
But... That's all wrong.
So now AI does better graphic art and it does better writing already.
It won't be long before it does humor better.
The expensive toilet in San Francisco, yeah, that's...
So the stories that I typically stay away from are the Air Force was charged $2 million for a screw.
I'm talking about a physical screw, not prostitution.
And the media gets that story wrong every time.
Every time. The reason that the one little part cost a million dollars is that nobody made that part.
They had to build an assembly line just to make the part.
And so they charge you what it costs.
It's a retooling cost.
And when the media reports that, they report it like it's a market price and they just gouged.
It's never that. Not once.
Not once has that story been true.
Every time you saw that story, and how many of those have you seen?
Every one was fake.
They were all fake.
And everybody who had an economics degree knew it.
Everybody who watched it was like, No, there's a reason it's a million dollars.
Now, they may have padded the million dollars, which is related by a separate point.
But the reason it's so expensive is because they had to retool.
They may have also padded the retooling price.
I wouldn't be surprised.
But the big answer is that they had to retool.
Explain the $2,000 Air Force heated mugs easily.
There was a special requirement.
If you look at their $2,000 heated mugs, I think you would find that they either had to, you know, work if your airplane is flying upside down or something.
There was probably some weird requirement that required them to retool something to make them.
Something like that. Or maybe the demand was low, so the only way to make them is in economically.
But if you looked into it, you'd find there was always a reason.
Here's what you wouldn't find.
Well, honestly, it did only cost us $10 to make these mugs, honestly.
But we thought we could get away with charging $2,000.
I don't believe that's ever happened.
And if it has, somebody probably got caught and got fired.
Now, the hospital bills are different.
I'm talking about the military contracting.
Hospitals charge whatever they want.
They just make up numbers, whatever they can get away with.
Hospital prices are just based on what you can get away with.
Wouldn't you say? Am I right?
I mean, it's always priced, if they can price it over cost, of course, so that's the minimum.
But hospitals only look at what they can get away with.
It's purely, I mean, it's closer to a scam than it is an actual business model.
Trump's testimony to be on tape today.
That's going to be interesting.
So, how surprised are you That the January 6th thing followed the following arc.
It was the primary thing that the Democrats thought they could use against the Republicans.
And as of this week, Trump is still telling...
Do a fact check on this.
But I think Trump told Oz that he needs to talk more about the election being rigged to win his election.
Do you believe that?
We went all the way from it's the biggest problem that Trump has ever been in, to if you don't accept it, his view on it, you can't even get elected.
That might be the biggest switch, maybe the biggest persuasion movement we've ever seen.
Oh, his masters, right, I'm sorry.
It was Blake Masters who was receiving a phone call from Trump.
It was not Oz.
But it's the same point. It doesn't matter who it was.
The same point is that Trump can say out loud, you'd better talk about election integrity if you want to win.
And I don't think he's wrong.
I think he's actually right.
I mean, even the Democrats are talking nonstop about the elections being a rig-a-bull.
Hillary Clinton is agreeing with Trump that the elections are not secure.
And Trump did that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he went all the way from our elections are perfect to not a single person in the country trusts the elections.
I believe he did that all himself.
Right? There's no Democrat and no Republican who fully trusts the system.
Now, if you do a poll, you're going to get 25% saying everything's fine, but that 25% is brain-dead on every question.
I mean, all the thinking people are worried about election integrity, and should be.
Which doesn't mean there's a problem, but you should be worried about it.
Yeah, the Dems have been complaining for years.
True. Once again, Trump has shattered reality.
True story. Now, I'm going to throw in two unlikely predictions.
Are you ready? Number one, most of the smart people say we're headed for a recession in 2023.
I'm going to say that 2023 will be better than we expected economically.
I don't know what that means, but I'm going to say that the consensus of experts will be way worse than the economy.
And I'm going to base it on some sort of a rule of thumb type stuff without a lot of analysis.
Number one, employment stays high.
Number two, we've had enough time to adjust our supply lines.
Maybe enough. Next, every other country will be doing worse than us.
Which, I think there's an argument that that helps you to be the best of the worst.
Because that keeps your currency strong.
Am I wrong about that? That as long as your currency is better than all the other places that are worse, you're still okay.
It's just that if your currency started looking bad compared to others, well then you're in trouble.
So we don't have to be good, we have to be better than other places.
So being better than other places is easier than it's ever been.
That's never been easier.
And I think the United States has more...
The United States is willing to shoot itself...
To rebuild faster than any other country.
I don't know that that's true, by the way.
And that could be pure bigotry on my part.
But it feels like the U.S. is more able to bury its own mistakes and just say, all right, everything we're doing up to this point was wrong.
Let's do it all different. Rip it out.
Rip it out by the roots.
I think we do that faster and better than anybody.
So I'm going to predict that our economy, except for inflation, I'm going to allow that inflation will stay high for a while because it has to.
And I'm going to give you a counterintuitive.
When I say inflation stays high because it has to, it has to for good and for bad.
Like we had to drain some cash out of the system.
It's the only way to do it, as far as I know.
But as long as everything else keeps humming along, and as long as America is less bad than all the alternatives, I feel like we're going to have a good year next year, which will be a problem for the 2024 election, because Trump or whoever's running might run into a strong economy, a weirdly strong economy, and you might be used to inflation by then.
Yeah, inflation will not be good next year.
So let me be clear.
Inflation will not be solved next year.
That will be the problem that stays with us.
But if everything else works, it's going to be absorbable in the long run.
All right? So I'm going to make that prediction that the economy will be better than the consensus of experts.
I don't know how much better.
Here's my second one.
Trump has an opportunity that only one person has ever had before.
Only one person in the history of the whole world has been in a position that Trump is likely to be in.
And it goes like this.
George Washington walked away from power when he didn't need to.
For the good of the country, he said, although, you know, I think that's the historical interpretation.
I suspect it was a little bit good for him as well.
But it got interpreted as, you know, the greatest move that really defined the whole country, didn't it?
Pretty much the most fundamental part of our, you know, national DNA is that George Washington walked away from power.
I would argue that nothing is more central To the United States' success, then George Washington walked away from power, and everybody learned it.
You learned that when you were whatever grade, right?
Trump will be projected to, you know, sweep the field.
Everybody thinks he could get the nomination.
And I think any Republican can win now.
So if Trump decided not to run, he would be the first president ever Who could do a legitimate George Washington?
And if the reason he gave was that he was too controversial, and there are other Republicans, let's say, who have similar policies but less controversy, he would not only redeem himself for losing the first election, but he would pass into legend territory.
It would be legend.
If he does a second term...
Half of the country will think it was the end of the world and will always imagine it that way.
And half will think he did a good job, probably.
If he walks away when he's guaranteed to win and allows a Republican, let's say, to get in there and just do a good job, could be DeSantis, somebody else, he would be legend.
He would be legend. And you can never take that away from him.
Even the Democrats would say, oh, shit.
The only problem we had with him was he was too provocative and he didn't want the country to go through that again.
Think about it. Now, I don't think he's going to do it, so this is not a prediction.
It would seem counter to everything he's done.
It would also be a big risk because it would take him out of the game Like, too early.
Because he's not done.
Like, he's got more to do, clearly.
So unless he had more to do, let's say, working on Truth Social or working on fixing the media, if Trump left and said, I'm going to work on fixing the debate, so I'll host a debate show so you can see which side works.
If Trump hosted a legitimate debate show, he would run the country without being president.
Doubt me. Go ahead.
Tell me I'm wrong about that.
You can't. If Trump said, I'm not going to run because I don't think people this age should be president...
I don't think it's going to happen.
But if Trump said, I've aged to enter the job and I'm a little too provocative, he would be legend.
He would ascend, basically he would ascend to just God-like territory in the annals of presidents, in my opinion.
That would be my opinion.
And nothing could be a higher accomplishment than that.
And I'm right that I'm wrong.
Yeah, he's not going to do it. So the trouble with my prognostication here is that everything you like about Trump tells you he won't do that.
Am I right? Everything you like about him is he doesn't give up.
Doesn't apologize. Doesn't quit.
Like, those are all the things you liked.
So if he apologized and quit, I guess it wouldn't be an apology, but it would be accepting his own limitations, I guess.
If he did that, that would be so on a personality that you can't even imagine it, really.
I think he needs to win.
Now, imagine he won with a strong vice president.
Imagine he wins with a real strong vice president.
And then he steps down in two years because he's not feeling well.
He still keeps the option.
But that would not feel as selfless because it would be stepping down and putting your own chosen vice president in charge, so that's not exactly George Washington material.
Yeah, and I don't see him stepping down under any condition.
I don't think that Trump would pick Kerry Lake.
Tell me why. Go.
Tell me why Trump will not pick Kerry Lake as a VP. Well, too soon.
That's probably all the reason you need.
Too strong. Yeah, too strong.
You don't want to pick somebody that people will continually say, you know, you know, Maybe you should make her president.
You don't want that conversation to happen at all.
And that didn't happen with Pence, did it?
Was there a lot of conversation about how Pence should have been the top of the ticket?
I don't remember hearing that even once.
Yeah, Pence was perfect.
That was just...
I can't say enough good things about Mike Pence.
I don't want him to be president, but my God, do I respect that man.
For the service he did to the country.
Alright. I think we've done everything we need to do today.
Let's go do some other things.
Am I right that this was the most amazing livestream you've ever seen?
