Episode 1923 Scott Adams: TikTok Determined Election Outcome. I'll Put A Stake in Its Heart Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Arizona voting machine problems
democrats outplayed republicans...again
TikTok steered our election results
No price for China & cartels fentanyl?
Legalizing fentanyl alternatives
Medication review
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
And if you were a subscriber on the local platform, under the Scott Adams community, you would have heard a cool little behind-the-scenes snippet that they're all excited about.
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Now, let's say you'd like to take this experience up a notch, and I'm going to blow your fucking minds today.
Are you ready for this?
Today isn't going to be normal.
There's something that's going to happen today.
You're going to see it from the beginning.
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Thank you, Craig. Well, Apparently, MSNBC is talking this morning about the possibility of Fetterman running for president someday because he's such a strong candidate.
No, that actually happened.
No, no, I'm not joking.
No, seriously. Now, is it my imagination, or does anybody else watch MSNBC for the comedy?
That's literally why I watch it.
I would never turn on MSNBC for anything but a laugh.
Am I right? This is not hyperbole.
It's not just a clever way to insult them.
It's not even an insult.
It's actually a fact.
I turn on MSNBC because I know I'm going to have a laugh.
Does anybody else do that? Other people do that, right?
Now, that's not even a political statement.
If I watch CNN, let's say today, they move more to the middle, does CNN make me laugh today when they're more mainstream?
No, never. I never laugh.
I often will disagree with the people on there, but I'm not laughing at them.
Am I right? But MSNBC, you turn that on and you can't help but laugh.
It's so ridiculous and they're so in a different world.
Anyway. In my opinion, America just had one of its best weeks ever.
But I feel like we just get so caught in every little drama and problem that you miss it.
Like you miss the forest for the trees sort of thing.
Let me describe what the best week in America looks like.
It looks like a midterm election where people were very engaged, very engaged, and turnout was excellent.
And I think they were reasonably well-informed compared to, you know, what they usually are.
And they fixed the government.
The thing that we all wanted was a little less government, wasn't it?
And so they just blocked up the government so it's going to be some kind of a deadlocked, hard-to-get-anything-done situation.
You know, it feels to me...
It feels to me like we got what we needed, which is not complete inactivity, but we're forcing the government to be less partisan, because they won't be able to do anything, just nothing, unless they agree with each other a little bit.
So I feel like this was exactly the thing we needed.
And what else happened was we're not bitching about the integrity of the election as much as we might expect.
We're still talking about Arizona, but that's a wait and see.
Wait and see. Might turn out fine.
Honestly, this is one of the best weeks America's ever had.
It really is. Because we're airing out all of our problems.
It's what we do best.
Americans bitching about Americans is our best look.
That's why we do well, because we're never happy.
We're like, ah, we can do better than that, ah, we can do better than that, ah, we can do better than that.
It's just our permanent condition.
But man, you give me an election that people trust, so far, so far they trust it.
Give me an election people, and an outcome that the people really did want.
They did want To put the government to act like a government.
And they just forced them into it.
We just forced them to cooperate.
Now, will this work? I don't know.
I don't know. Might not work.
But it was what we needed to try, right?
I don't think this could have been better.
Everybody's a little bit unhappy, aren't they?
Do you know what a good business deal looks like?
It's when everybody's a little bit unhappy.
I didn't get everything I wanted.
This was perfect. If you were to be non-partisan just for a moment, just imagine yourself just an observer who doesn't care which way it goes, the system is really strong.
The system is really strong.
It didn't even buckle.
So that's pretty impressive.
Alright, and I would argue that even the badness we're seeing in Arizona with the late vote count and the machines breaking, do you think that's all bad?
Is it bad that Arizona literally just embarrassed itself in front of the whole country?
Nope. Nope.
That's how stuff gets changed.
Arizona finally crossed the line from a little bit of a problem to, what the fuck are you guys doing?
That's a big line. Everything was like, well, that could be better.
No, we're not talking about that could be a little bit better.
We're not talking about, oh, nobody saw that problem coming.
We all saw it coming.
We all know how to fix it.
And now the spotlight is on this one fucking piece of garbage, you know, management of a system.
And we're not going to stand for it.
Perfect. Perfect.
We isolated the worst problem.
We're putting all of our energy and hatred on it, and we're going to change it.
It'll probably get better. It might take, you know, Carrie Lake getting elected, but it's all good.
Here's more good news.
Corey DeAngelis, let's give him a big hand for the school choice thing, topic being as prominent as it has been.
Apparently, as he's reporting in Texas, 10 out of 15 spots on the state school board appeared to be going to Republicans.
So, apparently the school choice approach was a winner.
And, you know, Corey is the biggest name behind that.
So, great job.
Great job. He actually turned that topic into an actual politically potent topic.
That's as good as you can do.
I mean, you can't do better than it mattered, right?
Like, you caused an election to go a different way.
That's good. So, that's heading in the right direction.
I saw a lot of people confused or angry about the fact that everything is going the wrong way.
75% of the country say things are going the wrong way, and then we re-elected almost all of the incumbents.
Does anybody find that confusing?
75% think things are going wrong, but we re-elected all the incumbents?
Most of them. No, that makes perfect sense.
And there's two reasons.
One is everybody thinks that the problem is not their person.
Well, I'm a Democrat, and my representative is a Democrat, so the problem isn't my state.
I like my person.
But those other states, those other states should do something differently to fix things.
So I think there's no mystery, just it's team play.
People think their own incumbent is the good one.
And part of the problem Is that the length of time you've served in Congress gets you more power?
I'm not sure that's a good system.
Is it? Because you're willing to re-elect your fossils because they've been there a long time, so they have power.
They have committee seats and stuff.
I'm sure there's a benefit to it, but I don't know what it is, obviously.
Yeah, all right. Well, Joel Pollack seems to be one of the few people who is noticing maybe the biggest thing that happened in the midterms that I'd completely missed.
I think Kyle Becker noted it as well in a tweet, that the Republicans won six million more votes than the Democrats did.
It's just they weren't in the right place.
They were in the wrong place.
The red wave, it happened.
The red wave absolutely happened.
So all of those polls you saw that said the Republicans are going to win by, you know, 5 or 6 percent or something?
I forget what Rasmussen's final generic poll thing was, but I think the generic poll at Rasmussen was right about exactly where it came out.
Can somebody do a fact check on that?
Because they were hovering around that 5 or 6 percent range, and that's exactly what it was.
I think they got it exactly.
The trouble was that doesn't translate into what people are doing in specific places, you know, because that has to do with the funding and the exact, you know, the exact candidate and all that stuff.
So weirdly, weirdly the red wave totally happened.
It just didn't matter. You know, and so read more about that in Breitbart.
Joel Pollack writes about that.
But I feel like that's one of the biggest conceptual facts that we all needed to understand to figure out what happened.
Can we now say that the Democrats outplayed the Republicans in this election?
Would you say that? Just in terms of legal, completely legal, decisions about how to phrase it, how to fund it?
I would say yes.
I would say yes. Now, we'll talk about abortion.
But I'm going to say that the Democrats were more capable.
I think they did a better election.
Everybody agrees, right?
And it's hard for us to say that, isn't it?
Because most of you are leaning right.
But I feel like we can criticize ourselves.
It's not me. I'm not a Republican.
But I'm glad to see that you're all willing to say, okay, that's on us.
That's so Republican.
That is so Republican of you.
At least you're consistent, right?
You know, what's the thing I like best about conservatives?
They own their shit.
That's what I like best. Even if I could disagree with you on 50 different things, you own your shit.
That's big. It's a big thing.
All right. Let's see.
Here are all the reasons given for why the red wave didn't work out the way a lot of people thought.
By the way, there were people who did predict there would be no red wave.
I'm one who did not expect a red wave.
Geraldo, I think, was one.
Can you confirm that?
I believe Geraldo was calling no red wave.
Did you see that or no?
Am I misremembering that?
I'm trying to surface the people you should listen to next time.
Hannity too? Did he?
Yeah. Mitch McConnell was smart.
He said candidate equality will determine the Senate.
Yeah. Funding too, but that's obvious.
Yeah. Okay.
Oh yeah, Geraldo bet Jesse Waters $1,000 on the red wave and won, right?
And Geraldo won that. Alright, I'm only saying that because I always see a lot of anti-Geraldo comments on my feed.
I feel like Geraldo is like a national treasure.
Because he's capable of playing on both sides.
And he does both sides exuberantly, right?
It's all fully transparent.
I feel like we need more of him, not less.
And I love the fact that he took the, you know, opening the safe.
Who was it? Al Capone's safe.
I love the fact that that didn't hurt him.
Like, he's an energy monster.
More energy, more better.
He just went with it.
No embarrassment at all.
I love that about him. He's one of my favorite people, I have to say.
So here are reasons why Republicans didn't do as well.
How many of you think Lindsey Graham was an idiot for pushing abortion hard when he did?
Now my understanding is he just sort of automatically does that same bill every year or something.
So I think he was just sort of on autopilot, saying, I do this all the time, I'm just going to try it again.
But I feel like it was a huge mistake, wasn't it?
I don't know what percentage of the outcome we can achieve to that.
Now, on one hand, it was also transparent and honest.
Right? What he did was transparent.
He was asking for what he wanted.
He was honest. You know, there was no trick to it.
It's what he wanted. And he was consistent.
He was transparent, honest, and consistent.
But strategically, maybe not that perfect.
So that could have mattered. In some cases, there were bad candidates, as we all talk about, Fetterman, etc.
But I think the candidate quality disappears when the election is so close that that one candidate will determine who controls Congress, right?
So I think candidate quality only matters when it's not that close.
Team play. People just voted for their team.
How important was that?
That's always the baseline. So, I mean, team voting is going to explain 95% of every election.
You're only playing with the 5% that are willing to change.
All right, how about this?
Apparently the Democrats were 100% successful in funding the least viable candidates on the other side in the primaries.
You know that was their trick, right?
They intentionally promoted the worst Republican candidates in the primaries, so once it became the general election, their candidate was running against the worst of all the alternatives, and apparently that worked every time.
Can you fact check me on that?
My understanding is it worked every time.
It's actually a really good strategy in hindsight.
It's a good strategy because in the primaries it doesn't take much money.
That's sort of cheap, you know, the primaries.
So if you can get that worst person, you know, over the line, you're done.
Yeah, you're done. So I think that was part of it, and I would put that in the category of the Democrats that outplayed the Republicans.
Again. I'm going to give the Democrats a full compliment.
They ran a good election.
How about this?
We talked about the red wave happened, but it wasn't in the right places.
So that would suggest that the Democrats have funded the right places, and the Republicans probably funded the wrong places.
Now, I'm not sure that's true, because it's a little more complicated than that, but it suggests that.
We're also hearing that the GOP did not have a positive message about changing things.
That's both true and false at the same time.
Because I feel like the GOP brand is so clean, like they're so consistent, that do you ever have to ask what their plan is?
Do you? Is there somebody who didn't know the GOP likes to reduce taxes?
Is there somebody who wonders if the GOP is big on fossil fuels and all energy, you know, when we need it?
Is there somebody who thinks that the GOP is ambivalent about wokeness?
Why do you even have to ask what the GOP plan is?
It was Trump. Everything Trump did.
Just do that again. The clearest, cleanest message of all time is what do the Republicans plan to do?
Am I right? And I heard them getting criticized for not having a positive plan.
Now, it's true. It's true they didn't talk about their positive plan, but it's definitely not true they don't have one.
Their plan is so amazingly clear that I don't know how you could miss it.
But you could argue the same thing about the Democrats.
The general plan is pretty clear.
Alright, so those are the possibilities.
In the comments, which of those do you think are the biggest ones?
Abortion, quality of the candidates, the team play thing, of course.
You don't have to say that one because team play is of course the big one.
But what's the second biggest one?
The Dems funding the worst people, the red wave being in the wrong place, funding the wrong places I guess, and GOP not having a positive message.
Give me your opinion in the comments.
I'll just read them off as I come.
I'm seeing abortion the most, right?
Yeah. Somebody's saying ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots?
Maybe. Which is, you know, everything's legal if you're ballot harvesting in the right places.
It's legal. So most of you think abortion.
Right? How many of you didn't see that coming?
I'll tell you my point of view.
I don't think I said it out loud, but correct me if I ever said this out loud.
But when I saw the Supreme Court ruling against Roe, and then I saw Lindsey Graham doing his attempt at legislation on abortion, I said to myself, you just threw away all of your advantage.
I thought the Republicans threw away everything.
I thought it was years of work and they just flushed it down the toilet right in front of all of us.
That's what I thought. So, to me, the election went exactly the way it should have.
That's the way it should have.
If your party makes a mistake that big and it doesn't affect the election, I don't know what to think.
That looked like the biggest, most obvious mistake anybody ever made.
I think that was one for the ages.
Now, the Supreme Court, you couldn't help.
The Supreme Court's on its own schedule.
Can't help that. But the Lindsey Graham thing was such a...
An obvious cell phone that, I don't know, it's hard to explain it.
But let me give him a compliment.
He was honest, consistent, and has a moral standard that he's pursuing.
I don't hate that, but strategically, bad.
All right, now I'm going to tell you the real answer.
You're all wrong.
All of those reasons you gave, they're all wrong.
Who made the difference?
Who made the difference in the election?
What demographic group dominated the result?
Young people of what kind?
Unmarried women.
Young unmarried women were the dominant...
Okay? And those young unmarried women, they were getting their news from Fox News?
Fox News? Is that where they're watching?
Were they watching television news?
Were the young single women watching a lot of television?
Getting their news from television?
How about Twitter?
Twitter is mostly male.
By the way, could somebody give me a demographic on that?
Twitter is mostly male, right?
So what would be a large media kind of a platform that young women tend to gravitate toward more than other people?
Yeah. You see it?
TikTok. TikTok is the primary communication to young single women.
It's owned by China.
Do any of you use TikTok?
Here's a question. Have you ever seen anything on TikTok about border security?
Border security.
It's all over TikTok, isn't it?
Nope. Probably never seen it.
Now, I'm not on TikTok, so I have to ask this question.
First of all, how many of you are on TikTok?
Are there enough people watching here that you can even answer this question?
Yeah, I want to see some yeses.
Any TikTok people? A lot of no's.
All right, my audience doesn't overlap with TikTok much.
All right, so I don't know if any of you know this, but how many TikTok users have seen an abortion-related TikTok?
Anybody? Have you seen any abortion communication on TikTok?
I'm seeing yeses.
Now, you know who owns TikTok, right?
Everybody knows China.
It's a Chinese company, which means the Chinese government can tell this company to do anything they want.
Anything with the algorithm?
You see it, right?
The group of Americans that control the election outcome are the group of Americans that China controls through TikTok.
Do you find that a coincidence?
This is exactly what I've been telling you was going to happen.
Just as when Lindsey Graham did the abortion thing, I said, uh-oh, Republicans are fucked, obviously.
Obviously they're fucked.
And they were.
Allowing TikTok, a Chinese company, controlled by China, to be the primary channel for the most important group of voters in the United States, do you see any problem there?
And that fucking thing is still legal.
That fucking thing is still legal.
And it will stay legal as long as Democrats find an advantage in it.
Because at this point, it's working for them.
So the Democrats have no reason to take China's influence out of the election because it's the same as theirs.
It matches. Now, would you accept the following as fact?
Fact. China owns TikTok.
Fact. TikTok decides what you see.
Fact. The biggest group of people in America watching TikTok are young, single women.
Fact. They determine the election.
Is there anything else I need to tell you?
Why is TikTok still alive today?
Why is TikTok, if you, why is that app still working in America?
Why? Am I the only one who fucking noticed?
Am I the only one who fucking noticed?
Did you see this in the news?
Who mentioned it besides me?
Did you once see this in the fucking news?
Did you? No.
It wasn't in the fucking news.
Do you know why? I don't.
I don't. But I'll tell you what you're going to see.
It's going to be in the fucking news today.
Yeah. I'm going to drive a stake through TikTok's fucking heart.
I'm going to use this. Because you can't ignore this, can you?
Once you hear it, you can't ignore it.
But until you heard it, you can ignore it.
Maybe you didn't connect the dots.
But people, the signal is glaring.
This is not the hint of a suggestion of maybe something could go wrong.
It's not. This is something already went fucking wrong right in front of you.
It controlled the entire fucking fate of the country.
And China did that.
China did that.
As long as you look...
On the Locals platform, I taught them a lesson about cognitive blindness.
It's what magicians do.
It's one of their techniques.
And cognitive blindness is where you talk about one thing, and then people's minds enter that frame, and once they're in a certain frame, they're blind to things that are completely obvious.
You could easily see it, but your mental frame just moved off it for a moment.
That's what's happening here.
If your frame was correct, you would say, who controlled the election?
Young women. Where did they get their news?
China. Is there anything else to fucking say about it?
Is there any complexity to it?
Is there anything confusing?
Do you see anything confusing?
No. This is not confusing.
This is China.
They're influencing our elections.
They just decided who runs our Congress.
Now, suppose you say to me, Scott, Scott, that's hyperbole.
We do not have proof that they consciously affected our elections.
Big fucking deal.
They just showed they can.
They just showed they can.
And you're not going to stop it now?
I don't even care if they did or didn't, because I actually like the result of the midterms.
They may have helped us out.
It may have been a favor in disguise.
Because I like our inactive Congress.
But so do they.
So do they. I think they like our inactive Congress, too.
Now, ask yourself if your elected representatives are going to do anything about this.
If they don't, you don't have any elective representatives.
You just have elective assholes.
An elective representative would get rid of fucking TikTok tomorrow.
But these are just elected assholes.
An elected asshole just has to shit.
So that's all you'll say.
You're just seeing them, you know, get elected and shit.
Fucking kill TikTok.
We could not be more obvious or more bipartisan.
Well, I suppose it's not bipartisan if one side likes it.
But it should be. It should be bipartisan.
Show me one person who disagrees with me.
Anybody. In the comments, you disagree with almost everything I say, some of you, right?
Shelby, one fucking person who disagrees with this.
Nobody. Nobody.
Not one fucking person.
And you're not going to see any action on this today, I predict.
You'll see some news on it.
But I'll bet you won't.
I'll bet you won't.
You're not gonna see any government action.
You're not gonna see any senator say, oh, let's put this at the top of the list.
You're not gonna see anybody.
I don't know why exactly, but you're not gonna see it.
All right. Let's talk about fentanyl also coming from China through the cartels.
Now, do you know why we're not giving Ukraine our best weapons?
This will tie back to fentanyl.
Why are we not giving Ukraine our best stuff?
Biden said that we have these HIMAR systems.
There are two types. One will go 600 miles, and we're not giving Ukraine that kind because that would allow them to attack inside of Russia.
But we're giving them the 60-mile type so they can do defensive stuff near their border.
So why does Ukraine not get the good stuff?
The answer is because there's a price tag on it.
Putin put the price on it.
He said if you give them the good stuff, it's nuclear ore.
Now, maybe he's bluffing, maybe he's not, but he put a price on it.
So we said, whoa, that price is too high.
What's the price of giving them the 60-mile stuff?
And Putin says, well, I'll fight really hard against the Ukrainians.
And we say, okay, that price is acceptable.
And then we send the Ukraine a bunch of 60-mile HIMARSs.
Now let's take fentanyl. What price did we put on it for China?
What's the price? They're killing our people.
How about the cartels? What's the price?
Nothing. No price.
Now, if you want to stop fentanyl, you say to China and the cartels, here's your price.
Here's your deadline.
Here's your price. This is what we're going to take from you and keep forever.
I don't know what that would be.
But we're going to take it and we're going to keep it forever.
Whatever it is. How about we say, we're going to give Taiwan high Mars with 600 mile range.
Unless you get rid of fentanyl.
Is that a price? That's a price.
I bet we're not giving Taiwan the good stuff.
I would say to China, we're going to arm Taiwan until it can destroy your whole fucking mainland.
All we're asking is stop the fentanyl.
Now, I'm not saying that's the answer, but there is something that China wants that we can take from them.
Isn't there? Is there nothing we can take from China?
I'm sure there is. I'm sure there is.
We could kick out 100% of their students.
There's something we can take from them and we have not put a price on it.
So how serious are we if we didn't price it?
Price it! Right?
Price the fucking thing.
How about the cartels?
What's the price to them of doing fentanyl?
It's just profit.
Because there's no greater risk because of fentanyl than the other stuff they were doing.
There's no price at all.
The price to the cartels is we should give them the date they'll disappear.
We can do that. We just say, March 1st, 2023.
If we see one ounce of fentanyl come across the border, all of your operations will disappear in 24 hours.
They'll all be gone. And on that date, they'll all be gone.
And then do it. And then you say, alright, if you rebuild them, we're looking at April 1st.
And then you go and you take all their shit.
Just take everything. But...
If we don't put a price on it, you're going to get the result you have.
So let me ask you this.
Who in our government is even serious about fentanyl?
Nobody. Nobody.
And all of you saying, oh, Carrie Lake, she's tough because she wants to work on border security.
That'll take care of 5% of it.
No. That's the magic trick.
The magic trick on fentanyl is you're looking at the border, and that's just misdirection.
Border security? Very good.
I'm a fan. I want the tightest border we can get.
This isn't the fentanyl solution.
It's just a part of it. What about legalizing alternatives to fentanyl?
In my opinion, legalizing fentanyl itself for recreational use would be stupid, because it's too dangerous.
What the addict wants is the high.
They don't want the fentanyl.
They want the high that the fentanyl gives them.
So if you said, all right, you can't have this fentanyl because it's going to kill too many people, but we would normally never do this, but we're going to make, let's say, OxyContin or heroin legal.
And, you know, maybe there's some restrictions.
But I asked this question.
I said, how many would you agree with testing?
Keyword here is testing in one place.
The legalization of alternatives to fentanyl.
61% of my respondents disagreed with testing.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Who disagrees with testing?
Seriously. Is there somebody here who wants to argue that point?
There's somebody here who really wants to argue that testing is bad.
Here's why you're arguing it.
Because Michael Schellenberger convinced you that it didn't work in San Francisco, right?
And some other places with the open needle exchange situation.
You realize I'm not talking about that, right?
There are probably a hundred different ways you could test some variant of that.
One would be, do whatever you want, here's some free drugs.
One would be some kind of control.
One would be, you can have the free drugs, but you have to submit to some kind of conditions.
Are there not a million ways to do it?
Why the fuck did San Francisco do it in the middle of the city?
The worst place you could do such a thing.
I guess that's where the people were.
But are you telling me there's no other way to do a limited test?
Of course there is.
What you should take away from Schellenberger's reporting on the open-air drug things that didn't work, what you should take away from that is what doesn't work.
Right? It doesn't work.
So don't do that.
So if you think that I'm saying, reproduce the things we already tested that didn't work, no.
That's why you test things.
Yeah, move them to Pleasanton.
If you put them in one place, it's fine with me.
Actually, I'm going to embrace and amplify you.
Somebody said, oh, Scott tested in Pleasanton.
Tested in my town with all the drug addicts.
Okay, here's how I would test it.
I would have one entity, so it's controlled, hand out pills that are fentanyl replacements for free.
Just see what happens.
Because there are definitely addicts in Pleasanton, plenty of them.
And those addicts would have one place they could go to and get a free, controlled pill, That is much, much less likely to kill them than something that might or might not have fentanyl in it and they don't know.
Are you telling me that that would be worse?
Let me take this to one person.
I know addicts.
Do you all know addicts?
I guess part of your opinion about why it would differ is how well you know actual addicts.
I know actual addicts, like the real kind, the no-joke kind, like real, real addicts.
If you talk to a real addict, they will tell you they would stop fentanyl and a heartbeat if something's legal and available and safer and an alternative.
There's nothing about fentanyl they want.
It's just the high. And so if you said to them, okay, you can go buy your own illegal fentanyl, And maybe die.
Or you could have it for free in this nice little storefront.
But you might, you know, maybe some of your privacy would be lost or something.
So there's a trade-off always.
All right, so here's my point.
If you ever disagree to testing something small, you're always on the wrong side.
You're just on the wrong side.
If you say it's been tested, so you don't need to test it again, just be careful you're looking at the same test.
Because those open-air addict things, that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about literally saying, all right, this one pill that's a pretty good substitute for fentanyl will just make this one pill available.
You just have to come get it and then go back to where you are.
Don't hang around the neighborhood, but you can get the pill here and go wherever you are.
So I would test that.
And so the people who say, why are you getting tough with China and Mexico?
Because it's really about personal choice.
It's not one or the other.
If somebody's trying to kill you intentionally, you kill them back.
Right? Right? It's not that you have better ways to do stuff.
You also kill them back.
Rasmussen did a poll and asked if people thought that media coverage of the election was balanced.
I'm going to give you a little quiz here.
What percentage of the general public do you think said that the media coverage was balanced?
Oh my God! I swear, there are so many geniuses on this livestream.
How do you do that?
Yeah, it's 26%, which is roughly, some people would call that almost a quarter.
Huh. Wow!
You guys are good guessers.
You're handsome and sexy and good guessers.
Nice job. All right.
Question. So everybody's going to be talking about whether the Trump candidates won or lost.
You know, was Trump a plus or a minus?
And I heard somebody say that Carrie Lake and Vance were Trump candidates, and they won, so that shows that being a Trump selection is a good thing.
To which I said, I don't think that had anything to do with why Lake and Vance won.
Do you think Trump was a factor in Carrie Lake and Vance?
Did Lake win? It's not over yet, is it?
JD Vance? Yeah, and JD Vance spoke about fentanyl, so he's already my favorite politician.
But I think that when you hear JD Vance talk and you hear Carrie Lake talk, isn't it obvious that they're just operating at a higher level than other candidates?
It just screams from the screen, these are not your regular candidates.
They would be popular whether they're Democrats or anything else.
They're just really good at what they do.
They're good in public.
They speak well. They're smart.
They seem to have the right level of empathy and hard-nosedness.
No, they're just really good candidates.
Anything you say about the Trump connection is interesting, but you're burying the lead, that they're just They're exceptional, just humans.
All right, let me get a...
Oh, so Carrie Lake is ahead now?
Yeah, it looks like she's pulling ahead.
So it sounded like she was confident that the, because it was the same day votes that are not counted, you know, the day of election, and those usually favor the Republicans.
So she should win.
All right. Yeah, Herschel's a different story.
All right, let me take your temperature.
You have two choices for a Republican president, DeSantis and Trump.
Give me your choice as of today.
DeSantis or Trump? Go.
Assume they're both running.
Assume they're both in the primary.
DeSantis or Trump? I'm seeing about two to one DeSantis on the locals' platform.
And I'm seeing about two to one.
Yeah, it's about two to one.
It's not even close, is it?
So... Do you think Trump can win in a general election against any Democrat?
Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if he can win.
Yep. I mean, he certainly can.
You know, you don't want to rule now.
I would say that DeSantis couldn't lose, but Trump might win and he might lose.
I think DeSantis would be almost impossible for him to lose with the current situation, which could change a lot between now and Election Day.
Why would DeSantis lose?
What's the reasoning? See, I feel as if the country is looking for a person who doesn't say provocative things all the time.
Yeah, greater entertainment value with Trump, that's for sure.
Foreign policy? I don't know.
I think the Republicans would have similar foreign policy, no matter who it was.
We'll see.
All right.
Has anybody made the point that bodily autonomy is one of those things you shouldn't mess You know, it's funny how many times bodily autonomy was on the midterm election.
So you had weed, which is bodily autonomy.
People are still concerned about vaccinations, bodily autonomy.
Abortion, bodily autonomy.
There's a lot of bodily autonomy stuff.
That's bubbling up.
I don't know if there's a point to that.
It's just a coincidence. Russia has announced that it's leaving Kherson, which is a key city in that disputed area.
They had once claimed that that was now permanently Russia, but apparently permanently only lasted a few months because they're already withdrawn.
Now, the Ukrainians are wary that it's a trick.
They think it might be a trick to lure them into urban fighting, which sounds like the worst trick ever.
Has anybody ever lured another military into an urban area so that they can attack them better in the urban area?
Does that sound like a good trick?
That doesn't even feel like a good trick.
I mean, I'm not a military expert, but You mean Stalin?
Well, but they have escape.
They would always have an escape route, wouldn't they?
I don't know. So it makes sense that Ukraine doesn't trust Russia about anything, but to me it looks like actually a retreat.
Here's the interesting side note, and this is a huge coincidence, by the way.
I don't want you to read into this any more than the story has.
So there's a giant coincidence.
Just the same day...
That Russia announced they were pulling out of Kursan.
The military leader in Kursan had, this is an amazing coincidence, an automobile accident that killed him.
Yeah, he died in an ordinary automobile accident on the last day of Kursan.
And here, even weirder, later that night he was given a medal, you know, an honorary medal.
So he was not only honored for his service, but damn...
What bad luck he had to die on the very day that they were withdrawing, huh?
Putin just killed him and gave him a medal so it didn't look too obvious.
He killed him and gave him a medal.
That is such an awesome way to kill somebody.
You schedule their medal ceremony, you kill them right before the medal ceremony, and then people are like, well, it could have been him.
He was giving them a medal.
It just puts enough doubt in your head.
You're like, well, he seemed to like him if he was giving him a medal, and then he just kills him.
All right. I don't know if this is more evidence that Ukraine is going to get back a bunch of territory and win or not, but one of the things is that the Russian military, in its attempt to leave...
Are discovering that most of the bridges for leaving have been blown up by the Ukrainians.
So you've got the Russians all bunched into a gigantic traffic jam trying to get out of town, and they're just sitting there while the Ukrainians are shelling them.
So somehow Russia found a way to take a bad situation and make it worse.
You know, it looks like they're really pounding us in Kursan.
What will we do?
I've got an idea.
Let's bring all of our military outdoors and put them into a really crunched little area and leave them there for a long time within range of all of their weapons.
So that's happening.
All right. Um...
Twitter continues to fascinate.
This morning I looked at a Twitter exchange between Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, in which Mark Cuban was making some suggestions about what he didn't like about the changes, about who can get verified, etc.
And the details don't matter.
What matters is that you watched...
We just publicly watched Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, two of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, negotiate features of a product that we all know and use.
How awesome is that?
And then, you know, Elon Musk said himself that Twitter's going to make a bunch of mistakes in the coming months, but they're sort of feeling their way toward something better.
They've already made some substantial changes.
I guess everybody can get verified now.
I'm a little behind on what the changes are.
They're happening so quickly, which is part of the story.
But I believe everybody can pay $8 and get a little check, right?
I saw some people have done that.
You get verified for $80, right?
Okay. So I think Mark Cuban was saying that that made the verification thing kind of useless because now he doesn't know, you know, which people are prominent.
Because it does help to know which people are the prominent voices to pick them out quickly.
It is, however, highly undemocratic.
It makes some people elite on Twitter.
So you can see why people would not want that.
But it did have some advantages, as Mark Cuban was pointing out.
Anyway, so I tweeted out to people who are not familiar with business practices that if you don't know that you're watching one of the greatest entrepreneurs, A-B test features in public, if you don't know what you're watching, you'd think it looks disjointed and maybe he doesn't know what he's doing.
But if you do know what you're watching, it's exactly right.
And with software, moving fast and breaking things is exactly what you want to do.
If it were hardware, you know, it's a little harder to change hardware, so you don't, maybe that's more of a measure twice, cut once.
So let me say this clearly.
With hardware or big investments, you want to measure twice and cut once.
You want to get it right. With software, because it's so easy to change it, you want to cut twice and measure once.
It sounds all backwards, but you can catch your mistakes and fix them so quickly that getting it wrong fast actually moves you ahead.
All right. How many people on Twitter have noticed that the trolling is down?
Are you noticing less trolling?
I did notice it, and I didn't know if it was just because I haven't been provocative lately.
To me, it looks significant.
Now, I would think that the original blue checks, you know, the old-style blue checks like me, I would think we would notice it first because we get more troll action than the rest of you.
I would say mitral ratio is way down.
Way down. I don't know why.
I don't know what change was made.
But I like it. All right.
I'm going to give you an update on my personal medical situation, not because that should be important to you, but because of what it might teach you.
So I'm going to make this useful to you, even though it sounds all self-referential.
So I told you, most of you know the story, I was on blood pressure meds and their side effect almost killed me because it made me suicidal for months.
I didn't know it was the drug until I got off it.
And it made me so sore that I could barely walk across the room.
I was just like a shot in a zombie.
So my doctor came back from a vacation, so I got to catch up.
And she did something that I think you should all do.
She did a medication review.
So she looked at all of my medications, because, you know, at a certain age they start to creep up.
I've got, you know, one thing for acid reflux, another thing for blood pressure, another thing for asthma.
And She agreed with me to take me off of all blood pressure meds because my lifestyle changes were sufficient.
And then she said, you know, how often are you taking your asthma meds?
And I said, well, every day.
And they're working well because I don't have any asthma symptoms.
And, you know, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago or something, my doctor put me on these everyday asthma stuff.
And I thought, talk about a medical success.
So here I was with a pretty bad asthma problem, if it were triggered by certain things, and here I am taking this asthma meds every day and completely eliminated the problem.
And then she said, you don't need to be on that.
And I said, what?
She said, no, if you're not having any symptoms, that means you don't need any asthma medications.
And I said, but I thought I was not having symptoms because of the medication.
And she said, nope.
And guess what?
One of the side effects of the asthma meds is muscle soreness.
Muscle soreness.
Right. So I stopped my asthma meds yesterday.
Now, I had experimented with it, and it didn't change anything.
So I've been off asthma meds before, just a test, and I didn't feel any different.
You know, no triggering of anything.
But I thought it was, you know, I just got lucky.
So now I'm completely off of asthma meds, and I'm completely off of blood pressure meds.
My blood pressure is fine.
My energy is perfect.
My body feels like a 25-year-old.
The meds were fucking killing me.
Now, if you haven't done a medicine review, especially if you're a certain age, if you haven't done a medicine review with your doctor, because remember, this doctor was not the original one who put me on asthma meds.
That was like a doctor or two ago.
I was just continuing because they told me to.
I was just doing what the doctors told me.
But you need to check in.
Because I'm guessing, just a guess, that when I was prescribed to do it every day, that probably was the recommendation.
And then the recommendation changed, but nobody checked with me until now.
So kudos to my doctor.
I like my doctor a lot, which is why I waited for her to return.
So she's got me on a good track now.
And I did not know how many ordinary medicines cause muscle soreness.
Do you know what happens to your life when you have muscle soreness?
You are less active.
Do you know what happens when you're less active?
Your whole fucking life is ruined.
It ruins your whole life.
You exercise less, and then the spiral happens, right?
Downward spiral. I feel like I could run a marathon right now, and I can't even run, you know, two miles.
But my body is like 100%, and all I did was get rid of two meds that I did not know were causing any problems.
I didn't know for a long time.
So that's my advice.
No cat in the house helps the asthma.
It might. Yeah, I don't have a cat in the house at the moment.
It might. So we'll see.
We'll see. That's the good news.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, the thing I promise you is that you'll hear things on this live stream that you don't hear on other platforms.
It'll be useful stuff.
Did I succeed today?
Did you see anything today that you're not expecting to see anywhere else?
The answer is yes.
Somebody said no. Yes, you did.
You haven't heard the TikTok thing anywhere else.
You'll probably hear it by the end of today.
But you haven't heard it anywhere else.
Mr. Bankman started a bank.
Yeah, that's true. All right.
All right, YouTube.
Yeah, I noticed that a lot of you enjoy interacting with each other in the comments.
So it's partly about the live stream, but it's partly about, you know, it's like a little club.
You get to talk to people who have something in common.
The weight of glasses on the bridge of nose and sinuses.
I've never heard that theory.
I did have my sinuses, you know, roto-rooted out a year and a half ago, so that probably helps.
