Episode 2116 Scott Adams: Did Epstein Blackmail Gates? Schiff Expulsion Odds, Bakhmut, More
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Content:
Epstein blackmailed Gates?
Schiff expulsion odds
Trump/Truth sue the Washington Poop
Fentanyl bill
Attacking Cartels
Bakhmut
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Ah, yeah.
That was really good.
Better than I expected.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen.
Here's the news.
Yet another state, Texas in this case, got some legislation to ban DEI in universities.
So they would be following the Florida model.
So DEI is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
And two of our biggest states have banned it as dangerous.
In universities.
So regular colleges can still do it.
Now, how would you like to be a DEI, you know, head of a DEI market, and know that two states thought it was so dangerous they had to make it illegal?
How would you process that?
Would you say to yourself, well, there's two stupid states.
48 are smart, but two are stupid.
Is that how you would To think of it?
Or would you say to yourself, maybe I should look into why they did that?
You know, it's one thing to disagree, right?
People disagree all the time on politics, but it's fucking illegal.
That's a whole different level of disagreeing.
It's illegal.
You can't even do it if you're in a university, at least in Florida.
And Texas is trying to make that the case.
I don't know.
I feel that that would have an impact on my career decisions.
Huh.
Do I want to keep working on this thing that two responsible states, two of our bigger ones, have decided is so dangerous it can't even be an option?
Can't even be an option, even if you want it.
It's too dangerous.
They should at least look into why people think that.
Well, as you know, the House is trying to expel Adam Schiff for being the biggest liar in Congress, which I laughed when I thought of saying it.
Imagine being the biggest liar in your neighborhood.
If you were the biggest liar in your entire neighborhood, well, it probably wouldn't be that bad.
I mean, you probably don't have that many liars in your neighborhood.
How about the biggest liar in your whole zip code?
Well, that'd probably be a pretty big liar.
You know, if you knew somebody was the biggest liar in your entire zip code, that'd be a lot of lying, probably.
But Adam Schiff is the biggest liar in Congress.
That's sort of like being Michael Jordan.
It's like a whole other level of worst liar in the world.
Bigger than the biggest one in your entire zip code.
And will they kick him out of Congress for lying?
I don't see how they can.
How in the world can you kick people out of Congress for lying?
Just the idea of it is funny.
Because that's all they do for a living.
I don't know if it was ever different.
Was there any time in the 50s or something where we imagined things were awesome but they really weren't?
Was there any time when Congress was anything but lying?
I don't even know if you could get elected if you told the truth.
It's a group of professional liars.
So a group of professional liars believe they can expel one of their members for lying too well.
No, I do think he should be expelled, but I don't see any possibility that that could happen with the Congress being what it is.
But at least we get to talk about it, and that's better than nothing.
Glenn Greenwald is back to work after his tragic family situation.
His husband passed away, if you didn't hear about that, which was horrible.
Especially because of the young family situation.
So somehow that struck me as more tragic than a lot of things in the news.
I don't know, there was just something about that that really got me.
But anyway, Glenn Greenwald is back to his combative self.
He was talking about the corporate media.
And there was a new survey that he was riffing off.
But he points out how if you look at American opinions of what is true and what is not true, there are three gigantic stories that Americans believe are true, or they have a belief about these three big stories, I'll mention them, that according to Glenn Greenwald, the mainstream press just treats them like they don't exist.
The three stories are the Russia collusion hoax, the story being it's the hoax, we know that now, the Haunter laptop hoax, which we know is a hoax by the intel people, and the Haunter and Joe Biden's dealings overseas with whatever sketchy payments were happening there.
Greenwald's point is that the American public overwhelmingly believes that Russia collusion was fake and that it was a plan by the Democrats.
The American public does believe by a big majority that the Hunter laptop was real and that the government tried to tell you it wasn't.
And that Hunter and Joe have some questions to answer about their dealings overseas.
So the majority of America cares about these three stories, and as Greenwald points out, the media doesn't disagree with them.
It just tries to act like they're not there.
Which is just mind-boggling.
The fact that we could just sort of act like maybe it doesn't matter, and then Then because our opinions are assigned by the media, nobody's assigning an opinion that you should care.
And so you don't.
If you're a Democrat.
Well, the House is coming up with this fentanyl bill.
Now, fentanyl, of course, has always been illegal if you're dealing it in the streets.
But the trouble was that the dealers kept tweaking the compounds in it to make it technically different than the illegal one that was specified.
And so now Congress is trying to tighten that up so that any form of fentanyl, even if you've tweaked it, would be illegal forever.
Sound like a good idea?
Do you favor that?
The Congress should change it so if it's fentanyl, it's fentanyl.
It doesn't matter if you tweaked a few compounds, it's still fentanyl.
So it's still illegal.
I see somebody says no.
No?
You don't agree with that?
Oh, you want it to be legal.
That might be a different argument.
All right, well, yes, it seems like if you're going to make it illegal, you should do it right.
And there's a thing that I always criticize people for criticizing, but I'm going to do it.
Why'd that take so long?
Does this seem like a story of Congress doing the right thing?
Because it doesn't look like that to me.
How many years have we known this problem existed?
Years, right?
Probably four or five years we've known that the bad guys were changing the formula to make it legal.
Because we knew they were doing it in China.
That's why China says, oh, there's nothing we can do.
We keep making it illegal, but then they keep making a slightly different version.
What are we going to do?
Nothing we can do.
And we always knew that was fake, because of course they could do it.
They just had to do what our Congress is doing and saying, you can't change a few compounds and call it a new thing, if it's still basically fencil.
So to me, this is an admission of massive incompetence of our Congress.
The fact that it took years to plug the most obvious hole you could ever plug, which is a few molecules doesn't change it.
Why is this taking so long?
Now, the thing I criticize when people say the things like I just said, is everything you want to happen takes too long.
Doesn't it?
There's nothing good This should not have happened sooner.
So I mock people who say, well, why didn't you do it sooner?
Because it's just the universal thing.
But this fentanyl thing is just, it's kind of unique.
There was probably everybody involved knew that this hole needed to be plugged.
They knew how to do it.
You know, you just have some legislation, just write it up.
And it took this long.
It took years.
I mean, to me, this is just a confession of massive, massive incompetence in Congress.
Massive.
I mean, it's hard to even hold in my mind the level of incompetence that they would try to make fentanyl illegal, know that they had failed because of this tweaking of compound stuff, and then just let it ride for a few years.
I don't even know how to describe that level of incompetence.
It's beyond what my brain can even hold.
And I can hold a lot of incompetence in there.
I'd do it for a living.
Anyway, so there are now three prominent voices, at least, and maybe you can list some more, who want to use the military to attack the cartels in Mexico.
So Dan Crenshaw has apparently been appointed to So Speaker McCarthy put him in charge of a high-profile task force to figure out effective strategies against the cartels.
So that makes me happy.
Again, you could say, what took you so long?
But I think maybe that had to do with the nature of the House.
So now that we have the House You know, a house that is going to be more aggressive about fentanyl.
Do you think Dan Crenshaw is the right person to be leading that high-profile task force?
Because I know there's a lot of critics of him.
I'm going to say yes.
I'm going to say yes.
Because he has the military experience.
Do you want somebody who doesn't have that specific kind of military experience?
I mean, that seems pretty important to me.
And I always prefer a military person recommending war.
Especially one who had, you know, an injury.
So, if somebody who's actually been in war says, you know, I hate war, don't do war, but you gotta do it this time, that's a little more credible to me.
It's a little more credible.
So I think he is the right choice.
Because Congress doesn't have an infinite number of people to put on anything, they've got to use the people they've got.
I think he has the highest profile, with also the right resume for the job.
I think that's a good That feels like a good move by McCarthy.
So now we know that Trump wants to attack the cartels militarily.
Vivek Ramaswamy may be more prominent than the others in terms of how often he brings it up.
And he's saying it too.
Now here's some of the pushback I get.
My God, you can't attack a neighboring country.
What will the Mexican military think?
How can you deal with your neighboring countries like that?
Well, the first thing I would like to suggest is nobody's saying attack the country.
Nobody's saying attack the Mexican military or the government buildings.
For 99.9% of all Mexicans, they wouldn't be aware there was a war on the cartels.
The cartel sites presumably would be attacked.
Maybe there would be some kind of black ops assassination campaign that was going on.
But most people wouldn't even know there was a war.
You would just wake up, do what you always do, and go back to bed again.
There wouldn't have been any bombs in your neighborhood.
They're going to go after well-identified cartel centers and laboratories and stuff.
Presumably.
It's not going to be some general war.
So everybody who says you can't go to war with Mexico, nobody's going to war with Mexico.
Mexico's on our side.
At least the population.
They're not fighting us.
They want to come here and be us.
The Mexicans are as interested in being us as opposed to fighting us.
It's just the cartels.
So I don't know what that would look like, but I'm glad everybody's talking about it now.
So there's a new survey out about how many Americans believe in God.
And it's a little murky because, you know, how you ask the question gives you a different answer.
But according to, let's see, we did this survey by the University of Chicago, some research organization there, that not quite 50% of Americans say they have no doubt about the existence of God.
So 50% are sure that God exists.
And the other 50% are either not sure, or presumably some of them are sure he doesn't exist.
Or she.
Don't want to give a pronoun to God, I could get in trouble for that.
But do you think this is going to be a continuing trend?
So there's been a long-term trend, and I guess that, believe it or not, the pandemic actually accelerated The reduction in religious belief.
But do you think this trend is going to be a good, not good, but let's say a long-term trend and that religion will continue to decrease?
Or at least maybe the strictest interpretations of religion.
Maybe they're the ones that are at risk.
Yeah.
I remember when I was a kid, it seemed like Newt Gingrich and all the conservative Christians were the ones running everything.
Because there were enough of them that since they operated as a bloc, often, it seemed like they had a lot of power, didn't they?
The religious right?
You never hear about them anymore, do you?
Do you ever hear about the religious right?
It's like it's not even a thing anymore.
But I guess the numbers for that went from like a quarter of the country down to the teens.
Yeah, the moral majority.
Right, the moral majority.
Exactly.
So basically, they're half as big as they were.
Yeah, the evangelical type.
I'm not sure specifically evangelicals, but the people sort of in that camp, there are only half as many of them as when I was a kid or when I was younger.
So there is some kind of a trend happening.
What do you think is behind that?
What do you think is causing that trend?
If you had to say, what is behind it?
Because I wouldn't say that the mainstream media is behind it.
Usually they are behind stuff like this.
It doesn't seem like mainstream media.
Because they don't say any anti-religion stuff.
I mean, Bill Maher is the only one I can think of who's openly anti-religion.
Exactly one person.
You think it's social media?
Some say it's Satan.
Satan's doing it.
But Satan's been here.
Why is Satan suddenly winning?
Like, what changed if you believe that Satan is active?
What changed?
Did Satan get smarter?
Smartphones?
But how did the smartphones make you less religious?
Education?
Do you think they're getting less of it in school?
Oh, that's probably true.
I'll bet they get less of it in school.
Yeah, that's probably it, isn't it?
Because I'm pretty sure all of my teachers in school were religious and you knew it.
I think they all were.
And you knew it.
But if you had a teacher who was not religious, you'd probably know that as well.
That probably has some effect on kids.
I don't know if that's the answer, but maybe that's part of several variables that are changing.
Lawsuits against the Catholic Church.
Well, it's not just that people are less likely to go to church, which is also true.
They're less likely to think there's an afterlife.
So, aren't you interested in what's changing that?
Because I don't think we know.
And that's such a big, big fundamental cultural change.
Shouldn't we know why that's changing?
I'm not saying it shouldn't change.
Maybe it should.
I don't know.
It's hard to estimate whether that's helping or hurting.
But shouldn't we know?
I mean, that is such a fundamental part of the country.
You think just science is doing a better job, so people are picking science?
That doesn't seem right.
Science is not exactly killing it lately.
Lack of humility.
All right, well, I don't think we know.
But apparently... All right, I'm going to offer a guess.
Here's my guess.
I believe that there's a breaking point.
And the breaking point is when ordinary people can profess that they are not religious.
And there's no pushback.
Maybe we reach the number of people, like, you know, if only 1% of the country were atheists, they wouldn't talk, would they?
Am I right?
If only 1% were atheists and everybody else totally believed, that 1% would shut up, because it wouldn't be safe to give your opinion.
But we have sort of gradually crawled toward a place where you could run for office and say you don't believe in God.
What do you think?
Do you think you could run for president in 2024?
There is nobody doing it.
You wouldn't win, just to be clear.
You wouldn't win.
But I don't know that it would be a fatal error.
Yeah, I think we've reached a point where people would say, all right, you can be non-binary, you can be, you know, whoever you want to be, and one of those things you can be is a non-believer.
Now, of course, there would be some people who held that against them, and they could vote based on that, but that's the same way it is for everything, right?
If somebody's too religious, you might hold that against them, too.
So, I mean, we always... But it seems like it's safe to be a non-believer now.
What would you say?
Is it safe to be a non-believer?
I think it is.
I don't think you would lose your job for it.
Would you?
Have you heard of anybody losing their job because they didn't believe in God?
I mean, maybe it happened, but I've never... You've heard of it?
I haven't heard of that.
Anyway, so maybe it just got safe to say you're not a believer and that could be it.
Trump and, I guess, Truth Social are suing the Washington poop.
You call them the Washington Post, but to me, they're the Washington Poop.
Oh, by the way, the Washington Post are collecting their Pulitzer Prizes for all their great work last year.
You know, I've told you this story before, but when I learned how the Pulitzer Prize is awarded, I'd no longer wanted one.
You know, early in my career, I was like, oh, if I could win a Pulitzer, because sometimes cartoonists got them.
I thought, if I could win a Pulitzer, that would be like the feather in my cap.
That would be the ultimate thing.
They can't take that away from you.
You would always be a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist if you just win once.
So I thought, oh, I sure, sure want to win once.
And then I get interviewed by a guy whose wife I won't mention who it is.
It's somebody well known.
But their wife was on the committee, the Pulitzer Committee.
Now there are a number of little Pulitzer groups that judge different categories.
And do you know what it takes to be on the Pulitzer Judging Committee?
Do you know what qualifications you need?
Ability to read.
That's about it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not even sure how they select them.
But basically, if you can read, and you have an opinion, you're on the committee.
So it's literally nothing but a little group of people sitting around a room or Zooming with each other and saying, what book did you like?
Of the ones submitted, oh, I like this one.
What did you like?
Oh, I like this one.
And then whoever gets the most likes from that little group of randomly selected people, they decide that one gets the Pulitzer.
Is there anything that means less to you than that?
Now, you've seen award shows where whenever it's the audience is the ones who votes, the actors are always, they always talk about it.
It's like, yeah, this means more to me because this comes from the public.
If the public votes for you to get an award, that probably means quite a bit.
If a little group of judges votes for you to get an award, Doesn't mean much at all.
It really doesn't.
It just means a little group of people picked you.
It almost has no meaning whatsoever.
But anyway, so much about that.
But True Social is suing the Washington Post for $3.78 billion.
Their complaint is that the Washington Post has been doing what they would call some hit pieces on them.
And has been on a years-long crusade, they say, against the truth, against the parent company, characterized by saying that they were concealing relevant information and some various wrongdoing about what?
Securities fraud.
So apparently Truth Social is confident enough That they did not do any of these crimes which the Washington Post was suggesting they did, but they're going to sue him for $3.78 billion.
What if that worked?
It would put the Washington Post out of business, wouldn't it?
Because I can't imagine they could pay that, or any version of it.
So this is actually an existential threat, isn't it?
A true socialist trying to take out the Washington Post.
You know, as we were in the run-up to the 2024 election, you realize that the election left TV and came to your house, right?
Like, people like me, who think we're just talking about the news, we're just taken out.
You know, just get canceled.
The Washington Post could just get canceled.
If you imagine that somehow the lawsuit goes the true social way.
I don't know if it will.
They're probably just warning them off.
But suppose it did.
They would take the Washington Post off the chessboard.
Do you know what a big blow that would be to the CIA and the Democrats?
That's like their crown jewel.
That's where they push their fake news.
The Washington Post's primary purpose is to launder fake news into credible news.
Let me say it again.
The primary purpose of the Washington Post is to launder fake news into real news.
Because they have a reputation that they're a real news entity.
And so if they say it's real, their readers say, oh, I guess maybe that's real.
But I don't think it's been a news organization for a long time.
I think it's just a fake news laundering organization at this point.
Do you remember when they cancelled me?
So they cancelled the Dilbert, the Washington Post did?
Do you remember when they called me to find out, you know, what was the context of my situation?
No, they didn't.
They didn't call me to check out the context.
After a 30 year successful business A partnership in which they'd carried my comic to great success.
They didn't even ask what was going on.
Didn't even ask.
That's because it didn't matter.
It really didn't matter because they're not in the business of being credible or, well, they're in the business of looking credible.
So, I believe that I was just one more chess piece taken off the board.
If Republicans had cared about what I said, then I would probably be saying, oh, I think it's what I said.
But given that only Democrats cared, is there anything else you need to know?
Only Democrats cared.
There were some people who didn't hear the whole story who might have cared, but of people who heard the whole story, it was just Democrats.
It was purely political in the end.
It was purely political.
All right.
I'm watching the Biden administration once again do the same trick that the Democrats do with reparations.
They try to bribe with other people's money.
So they tried to bribe the students by delaying their requirement to start paying back the loans.
Yeah, at least through the pandemic.
But it looks like they won't be able to delay it anymore and those loans will come due.
That is really bad for Biden.
Because I'm pretty sure he was depending on continuing to bribe young people.
And now he can't bribe them anymore with their student loans.
So that's the bigger story is what's that going to do vote wise?
But I love the fact that the Democrats have this pattern of promising people money that they can't possibly give to them.
Reparations?
Oh, yeah!
Why don't you come back with a recommendation?
Student loans?
Oh, we'll delay those.
You don't have to pay any student loans as long as you keep electing Democrats.
Well, maybe you do have to pay them.
All right.
Let's talk about the story in the press that is the least credible story I've seen lately.
That Epstein was maybe blackmailing Bill Gates because Epstein knew that Bill Gates had a young girlfriend who played bridge.
Some Russian, young Russian girlfriend.
And the rumor comes from one message from Epstein to Gates, Bill Gates, in which Epstein mentioned he wanted some repayment because Epstein had paid for the young woman to go get some coding classes because she had talked to Epstein about funding her startup for this bridge startup.
Just because Epstein said to Bill Gates, you owe me money to pay this back because it's your girlfriend, basically.
He didn't say the girlfriend part.
That has been taken as evidence that Epstein was sort of cleverly and subtly blackmailing Bill Gates by mentioning that he knows about Bill Gates' girlfriend.
And then people said, oh, that's how he blackmails people.
So he finds out their dirty little secrets and he just sort of mentions them before he asks them for money or to donate to his funds or whatever.
Now, I don't think this is enough.
Do you think that's enough?
I'm not defending Bill Gates.
I'm just saying, you know, innocent until proven guilty and all that.
But do you think that one message that said, you know, you should pay me back for paying for coding school?
Now the weird thing is they were both so rich that that amount of money is something that normally they would not ask each other for.
Like a billionaire doesn't ask somebody to pay him back $10,000.
Do they?
If you were a billionaire, would you ask your billionaire friend to reimburse you $10,000?
Or would you just say, ah, let it go.
Let it ride.
I think you wouldn't even care.
So it seemed weird that he was asking for the money.
And that's why people would say, oh, it wasn't really asking for the money.
It was reminding him that he knows about his girlfriend to, like, soften him up to get what he wants.
Maybe.
What exactly is the Bill Gates crime here, besides having a girlfriend, which everybody knew?
I don't know.
To me that's kind of thin, but I don't discount it.
Don't discount it.
It does look a little bit Black Valley, but you have to connect a lot of dots in your mind that aren't in the story to be sure about it.
But I would like to dovetail on that topic to this question.
Everybody seems to want this Epstein list.
Why would there be a list?
Who believes there's a list?
So when I said this on social media, let me tell you the answers I got.
Some people said, Scott, of course there's a list.
There was references to the Little Black Address books.
So he had little black address books.
Do you think that anybody in the address books was not a sex criminal?
Or was it an address book of only sex criminal contacts?
Don't you think he also had a general address book?
All right.
Then other people said, Scott, you already have the flight logs.
And since you know that nothing happened on that island, Epstein's Island, that was legal, the flight logs is all you need.
If they went to the island, they're guilty.
Is that a standard you're okay with?
That all the women who went to the island were sex criminals?
Does that even make sense?
Are there that many adult women in government who are sex criminals?
Probably not.
Probably not.
If it were men, I'd say, well, maybe.
But women?
Probably not.
Some others said, okay, so there's not an actual list, but the FBI could pull one together, because they've got the CDs and the computer records and they've got everything from the black little address books to everything else, and they could create a list.
Could they?
Could they?
They could create a list from the evidence they have?
Well, if they had evidence of specific people doing sex crimes, do you think they're sitting on that?
Or is it more likely that they don't have enough goods on anybody to actually win a case?
They just suspect there was something going on.
Well, here's what I think.
If you're a high-end blackmailer, you do not make a list of the people you're blackmailing.
Do you know why?
Answer me this.
Why would you not make a list that is exclusively a list of the people you're blackmailing?
Why would you not make that list?
Because if somebody found the list, they would, they would blackmail you.
You'd have to be the worst blackmailer in the world to leave a list that you could be blackmailed for having.
I mean, you know, there are dumb criminals, but did Epstein look like a dumb criminal?
I mean, he's the very definition of a smart criminal, but you think there's a list of just the people he's blackmailing?
No, he's got a list of Of people he has contacts with, and probably every single person in his address book is somebody he would like to blackmail.
Probably he would have liked to blackmail all of them.
But there's no way you can know if the list is just somebody he knows, that he thinks maybe someday he could blackmail, but he doesn't have anything on him.
Versus people he has blackmailed.
He would just commit that to memory.
Now they might have a list of the girls that they were trafficking.
Because he wouldn't know them by name necessarily and you have to keep track of them.
So Giselle probably had a list of the girls.
But the list of the clients?
You think he would keep a list of clients?
How many of them do you think they were?
I mean, don't you think he could remember 30 to 50 famous people?
I think he could remember what 50 famous people did without any prompts.
You wouldn't have to put them on a list.
Can't you remember everybody you ever had sex with?
There's some things you remember.
If you found out that Bill Gates was receiving a Rusty Sanchez, would you ever forget it?
No!
No, there's some things you don't need to write down because you would never forget them.
Then I asked, I did a little Twitter poll, and I said, how many of you would be in favor of producing something like a client list, however you put it together, if you knew for sure that there would be innocent people on the list?
Would you be in favor of the public seeing the list if you knew for sure they weren't all guilty?
And over 60% of the people who answered said yes.
They'd want to see a list, including people who are not guilty, who would be considered, from the moment the list was published, would all be considered guilty by the public.
60% of the people who answered that said, yeah, that's still worth it.
Because the people who are innocent, they can explain why they're innocent.
That is so not how things work in America.
In America, you don't Put people on a probably guilty list and then make them defend themselves.
That's messed up.
So I'm actually against a list being produced.
But I'm certainly in favor of, if the FBI have evidence to convict any individuals, of course.
Of course.
But I don't want to see a list that's a mixture of totally innocent people that maybe he wanted to blackmail later.
Mixed in with a list of pedophiles?
No!
No, not in America.
In America, I don't want to see that list, ever.
Ever, ever, ever.
Not even after the people are dead, I don't want to see that list, because they still have families.
So, I think you need to check your thinking on that.
And the standard that I would want to suggest to you is, if you were one of the people who was innocent, But he had you in a list of addresses because he did some charity work and he seemed to know everybody famous.
Do you think that would be fair if you were on that list?
Anybody?
See, I mean, you have to do the shoe on the other foot test on this one, the Dershowitz test.
You just have to do the shoe on the other foot because you can't make standards for your fellow citizens that you would not be willing to suffer yourself.
If you think you'd be okay being on a list of pedophiles when you're innocent, if you're okay with that, well, all right, then your opinion is consistent.
If you're not okay with that, and I'm definitely not okay with that, then maybe you should say innocent until proven guilty and let the FBI go after individuals if they have evidence.
We do worry that the FBI is not doing their job, which is actually a good question.
Now, there were some people when I mentioned this stuff online who thought it would be really clever that since I was bringing up the topic, they could suggest that maybe the reason I don't want to see the list is that I'm on it.
That's not funny, and I will block you forever.
It doesn't matter if you thought it was a joke.
If you think it's funny, You may think it's funny, but you also would be blocked forever.
And there's no coming back.
Right?
I'm not going to change my mind.
If you say that in public, on Twitter, you're not fucking coming back.
You understand that?
So I just want to be clear.
I can take a joke, but that's not funny.
That's not funny at all.
All right.
Let's talk about Soros.
So I've been tracking this weird story trying to understand why does Soros think these liberal prosecutors are better when it's so obvious that they're destroying the country.
And here's the best answer I have.
Soros, in Soros' own words, he said that the data is on his side.
And he says that the cities in which the progressive prosecutors have been hired Have a lower crime rate after the progressive people are in there.
Lower crime rate, not higher, lower.
So I'm waiting for the comments.
But you know that's bullshit, right?
Because the reason the crime is lower is that they're not arresting people.
Right, they're just not arresting people.
Now if it's also true that violent crime went down, That might actually be true, depending on when the study was taken.
Because violence spiked during the pandemic.
But didn't it?
Or do I have that backwards?
Did violence spike during the pandemic?
Violent murders and stuff?
Or do I have that backwards?
Right.
The murder rates?
So here's my point.
None of us believe that that data could be true.
Because the data that says that the progressive people letting people in a jail ends up with lower crime is only because they're not charging them.
Right?
You're all on the same page, right?
The data couldn't possibly be useful Because if you stop charging people with crimes, then the data shows there was no crime.
But it has nothing to do with how much crime there was.
It's just that you're not keeping the records anymore.
Now, apparently there was only one study that Soros looks at to defend his position.
And it was some brief little study that I don't think anybody knows anything about.
So here's my point.
Instead of calling him Satan, which buys you nothing, How about going after his data?
Is there no one who could fund, let's say, a proper study to somehow try to capture the fact that people are not being charged, and whatever else is not being picked up by the survey we saw, to actually find out what the data says?
Because if it turns out that not punishing people for a crime gives you less crime, Well, I'm going to be pretty surprised, but I'd like to know that.
I mean, that would be a shocking, impossible-to-imagine result.
But hey, I'm open to an argument.
Could be wrong.
The reason we do data is because you can't just look at stuff and know what's going to happen.
That's the reason you look at data, because you don't know just by looking at it.
I would suggest that you knock off the anti-Semitic, wants-to-conquer-the-world, he's-just-evil, wants-to-destroy-the-fabric-of-America, and go after the data.
Just create a stronger data story and see if you can sell it.
But it makes me think that the data doesn't back the anti-Soros view, or we already would have seen it.
Unless it's just impossible to gather the data, I don't know.
But I would love to see Soros or his son defend that point of view.
To actually say, yes, we know this is working because of the study.
The data says it's working.
And so we're going to keep doing it because it's really working.
But apparently there's only one study.
If there's only one study and it goes their way, that's the end of the story.
You have no argument if they're using the data.
To make their decisions.
So you're gonna have to fix the data.
Fix the data by, you know, doing a study.
You want us to work?
Well, somebody should.
So if there's so many people who are sure that Soros is destroying the country, and I'm one of them, by the way.
I'm not defending Soros.
It does seem to me he's destroying the country.
Like, this seems really obvious to me.
That he's destroying the country.
I just need to know why.
And if it turns out it's really because of the data, then that's where the battle should be.
The battle should be over the data.
And if you think that the problem is something about him, maybe.
But I wouldn't start there.
I'd start with the argument he's making, and see if you can counter the argument he's making.
If you're not going to argue that his data is wrong, and all you're going to do is say, oh, he's part of the world alleged Jewish conspiracy, he's trying to destroy the world, I can read his mind, and he's evil, he's Satan, and he's trying to make up for his youth helping the Nazis.
I don't know.
Maybe.
Maybe.
But if he's starting with the data and you're ignoring the data, you're not really taking the fight to him, are you?
You should take the fight to him where the fight is, with the data.
Alright.
Then if he ignores the data that's stronger than his data, well then you have to go to whatever is phase two.
But I feel like you skipped to phase three where you're condemning him for being Satan without questioning the data first.
Which I don't think to date is true.
All right.
You would not be surprised to know that AI is already composing music, and it can take two genres and put them together.
So you can say, write me a new Nirvana song, even though Kurt Cobain is dead.
And I listened to the AI-written Nirvana song, put on my headphones, because I wanted to really You know, listen to see if it was doing right.
And I found myself listening to the entire song.
Do you know why?
It was pretty good.
It was pretty good.
I couldn't... I feel like I wouldn't have been able to know if a computer had generated it.
I thought that it fit the pattern of a song well enough that there were definitely parts I was grooving to.
So it wasn't just, oh, that sounds like him.
I was actually head-bobbing.
I was getting into it.
I listened to it several times.
And then I saw Brian Rumeli.
I always pronounce his last name wrong.
Sorry about that.
He did a mash-up in which he said, Do the Beach Boys song, God only knows, but do it as if the Beatles were performing it.
And suddenly you listen to it, it's actually, it sounds just like the Beatles performing a Beach Boys song.
And it sounded just like the Beatles.
Now, the first thing that I say as a creative person is, hey, it's not creative.
All it's doing is mashing together things that are known.
But can it create a new thing?
Because even the new thing it wrote for Nirvana was obviously derivative.
If Nirvana did nothing but create new albums like A.I.
created, they wouldn't be famous for very long.
So they would have to innovate and change the way the Beatles did.
I mean, the Beatles' early music completely different from their later music.
So humans are adding mistakes and experimentations and stuff.
So at least the humans have a little advantage.
Because here's what I wouldn't want to listen to forever.
Suppose AI said, I can give you infinite Beatles music.
And it'll all be new.
Every day it'll be a new song, but it'll be in their style.
How long would that stay interesting?
Would you say to yourself, I love the Beatles now, I've got a new one every day?
Or would it all start to sound a little too alike?
A little too similar?
Because I think it ends up being generic.
I think it would turn music into elevator music eventually.
And that only humans have the flaws and the emotion and the The propensity to err, and it's sort of the errors that make it interesting.
You know, I've said this before, when I was learning to play drums, I thought I was hitting the drums exactly as they should be hit, but it didn't sound like music.
And really, you have to play it wrong to make it sound right.
You know, adding the stank or the attitude or the funk.
Those are all things that are basically changing your timing from perfect to less than perfect, but somehow it's better.
It's the less than perfect part that makes it feel human and gives it that energy.
So I don't know if, you know, maybe AI could do that too.
Maybe AI could say, oh, I need to put some errors in there to make it sound good.
But I think humans will still be creating new things faster than machines for a while.
Because we can test it on ourselves.
I say this all the time.
When I'm thinking of a new idea, I'm also instantly testing it on my body.
Do I bob my head if it's music?
Or do I not bob my head?
Do I laugh if it's a joke, or do I not laugh?
Now, AI can't do that.
It can say, I think this is a form of a joke, but it can't test it against its own sense of humor.
So until that happens, you know, real humorists are going to have an advantage.
All right.
Here's my suggestion about AGI.
Advanced General Intelligence, that's the one we're afraid of.
So we're afraid of the AI that's like an actual sentient thinking entity.
But here's what makes a human a sentient entity.
That we're thinking all the time, even when we're not doing a task.
Will AI think all the time?
The AI that we currently use, I feel like it doesn't do anything until I ask it something.
Then it does it, and then it comes back, and then it's idle.
It's not sitting there thinking, oh, why doesn't he ask me a question?
It doesn't have any kind of loop of self-inspection, right?
But if we build an artificial general intelligence, the only way I would be afraid of it is if it could sit there and think on its own.
In other words, when you're not using it, is it processing and thinking about how its ideas fit together?
Is it thinking how it will answer the question if it's asked?
Will it come up with some hypotheticals and some imagination while it's just sitting there?
If it does, it's dangerous.
Would you agree?
If it just sits there and thinks without humans asking it for a task, it's dangerous.
But if it only responds to tasks by doing the task, it's a little bit dangerous, but not end-of-humanity dangerous.
So you can see how, for example, it would turn off your energy grid accidentally.
But not because I thought about it.
Not because I thought, oh, humans are bad, machines are good, kill all humans.
That's the part that you should never program into it.
So where I'm heading with this is we're all trying to think how we can create legislation that would keep you from making the AI that would destroy the world.
And I think the simplest legislation would be you can't build an AI that thinks independently.
It can only do things.
So it can do things all day long, but it can't just think.
Have you ever heard anybody bring that up?
Because I haven't heard anybody frame it that way.
I'm only afraid of it if it can think when it's alone.
Think about it.
Just consider that model.
I don't know if this is a good idea or not, because I'd have to know a lot more about AI to know that.
But, commonsensically, I'm not going to be afraid of something that gives me a good Google result, or summarizes an article.
Because as soon as it's done summarizing the article, it has no thoughts about the article.
It has no thoughts about me.
It has no thoughts about what it did or why I asked it to do anything.
It has no thoughts.
As long as it has no thoughts, I'm safe.
Or at least the danger comes down to 1% of what we imagine.
And I don't know that anybody would want to build a machine that could think.
Why would you do that?
All it would do is you'd be creating artificial suffering.
You could actually create a machine that suffers because it would look at its own thoughts and start to come up with maybe mental health problems.
You might actually invent poor mental health in a computer.
So is there any reason that your computer needs to think when you're not using it?
Can you think of any utility for that other than making it dangerous?
There's no utility to it.
As long as we keep the AI just do my task and then rest until you have another task, I think we're fine.
It may be as simple as that.
All right.
But I'm also going to allow that if anybody who knows AI is listening to this, they may be slapping their faces and saying, no, why are you saying it's so stupid?
He's ignoring the biggest risks.
And maybe I am, but if somebody could easily explain them to me, I would be smarter.
All right.
Do you believe that the Durham report told you that Obama and Biden both knew that Clinton, Hillary, was going to do the Russia collusion hoax, knew it was fake, knew it was a hoax, And listened to it in the room and then either okayed it or were fine with it.
They didn't stop it.
Do you believe that happened?
Because the Durham Report suggested that happened, right?
Or at least they were in the room when it was discussed.
I didn't talk about Bakhmut yet.
I believe it.
Yeah.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe it.
And have you noticed that there's no consequences for that?
Somehow we're acting as though that was just business as usual.
That the president and the vice president okayed the biggest disinformation operation that the United States has seen, that we know of, and it was basically a coup.
It was essentially a coup attempt.
And that we just know it, we know it, and we're just not doing anything about it.
Because there's no specific law that was broken?
Is that why?
Why in the world are we complacent about that?
Why is that not the biggest story that it's the only thing you're talking about every single day?
It's because it's not Trump.
That's the only reason, right?
If any of this had been Trump, imagine if we knew for sure That Trump and Don Jr.
cooked up the biggest hoax in American history.
What if you knew that for sure, like we know that Obama and Biden were part of the origins of it?
Can you imagine it being ignored?
It's all you talk about.
It's so weird that the mainstream media or whoever is behind everything, it's so amazing that they can make you not care about the most important things in the world.
And they can do it easily.
Just don't put it in the news.
If they don't put it in the news, we're trained to think it's not important.
So that's all they have to do.
Just don't put it in the news.
End of story.
It's the easiest thing in the world.
Yeah, and who's going to prosecute, right?
All right.
I saw an amusing exchange on Twitter.
In which David Sachs had some opinions about how things were going over there in Bakhmut and otherwise.
And somebody mocked him online for saying that he's never led anybody into battle and he's no military expert.
Now David Sachs, not being the average Twitter user, He responded by saying that not being part of the military-industrial complex is actually an advantage in analyzing military situations.
Now, I don't have a mic to drop, so I'm going to unhook this one, just so I can drop it.
Come on.
Seriously?
All right, I'd like to repeat his line.
Actually, not being part of the military-industrial complex probably makes you a better analyst.
There we go.
I had to drop that mic.
Because it's true. - I know.
It's funny because it's true.
It's totally true.
The military-industrial complex are paid liars.
They're paid Indirectly, they're paid to lie.
So this guy is arguing that you should get the good information from the people who are paid to lie.
Not the person who's proven that he's an excellent analyst of world events.
No, not that guy, who has nothing to gain.
He's just an internet dad basically trying to help us think better.
No, I think I would take David Sack's military opinion, of which he has no experience, over the experts.
Absolutely.
We don't live in a world where that doesn't make sense.
Double negative.
All right, so here's the update on Bakhmut.
As you know, the Russians have claimed that they've completely captured Bakhmut, but the Ukrainians are quite plucky, and they insist that they still control a pile of rubble that's approximately, I think it's about six feet in diameter, and goes to almost four feet in height.
So, that's why Ukraine controls that pile of rubble.
But, hey, hey, they still control that pile of rubble and they're going to turn things around any moment now.
They have their eye on, it might be a little premature, but they have their eye on another pile of rubble.
Yeah.
They actually think that they can maybe consolidate their control over the little pile of rubble that's 6 feet by 3 feet tall.
But they're looking at a pile of rubble that's nearly 8 feet tall.
Nearly 8 feet tall.
And they think they can take it.
And the new rubble has a diameter of almost 20 feet.
So if you added those together, the six-foot diameter pile of rubble that the Ukraine says they control, I mean, I don't know for sure, but they say they control that little pile of rubble, they could almost triple the pile of rubble if they were successful in gaining control of the other rubble.
What the hell is going on?
The whole Ukraine situation has become so absurd That anything you say about them sounds like a joke.
Just talking normally about Ukraine sounds like you're joking.
Right?
Parody and reality have merged.
That we don't know what we're fighting for exactly, but it's really expensive and we're pretty sure we're winning.
It's all nuts.
It's completely nuts.
All right.
They lost you at Sean Penn.
Okay, that's an old reference.
Yeah, so we understand Bakhmut is tactically significant.
So there's nothing there anymore.
But it is sort of the front door to larger attacks.
That seems to be the case.
All right.
Why don't we ever see video from the Ukraine War?
Good question.
Now I do see video, but it's Ukrainian propaganda where the Ukrainian soldiers are all very happy to be there.
Have you noticed the Ukrainians are singing and dancing and laughing?
And they're all big.
The Ukrainians are all like six feet tall, but if they capture a Russian, and that's on the video, the Russian will weigh 85 pounds.
And he'll be surrounded by, you know, several Ukrainian military people who are like 6'4".
The Ukrainians are really good with the propaganda.
They make it look like their soldiers are just delighted, delighted to be there, all volunteers.
I'm not sure that's exactly what's going on.
Yeah, and then the Russia propaganda is just as good.
The Russian liberation people are currently invading Belgrade.
What?
Yes, it's all propaganda from both sides.
There's nothing we can believe.
Malcolm Nance came back.
He survived.
All right.
And now we're hearing that those F-16s aren't going to make that much difference.
So it went from, they gotta have F-16s, it'll make all the difference, to, yeah, F-16s aren't going to make that much difference, for a variety of reasons.
All right.
YouTube, that's all for today.
I'm going to talk to the locals people, who are special, and thanks for joining.