Episode 2119 Scott Adams: DeSantis & Musk, Trans Issues Boycotts, Decoupling, Trump's Meme Game
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Content:
DeSantis announcement on Spaces
Trump parody response
University bias
Electricity from air
Bud Light jokes
Lots more fun
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
We got a lot of fun stuff to talk about today.
I think today will be one of the best live streams I've ever done.
Well, don't just take my word for it.
You're going to have to see it for yourself.
If you'd like this experience to be somewhere between DMT and Bud Light, all you need is a cupper, a mug, or a glass, a tanker, gels, or styne, a canteen jug, or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join us now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dope of being here.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And it happens now.
Now go.
Maybe what?
Maybe Scott will allow Dilbert to be the face of a revolution.
I don't think Dilbert's really the face of a revolution.
I don't think Dilbert's exactly inspiring, at least in that way.
Well, let's see.
We'll get to the DeSantis situation.
But first, a little science note.
Scientists have figured out how to make electricity from air.
Would you like to hear more about that?
They can make electricity from air.
Now, it turns out that this is something that could be done for a long time.
I think maybe 20 years ago, an inventor showed me a video of a little shack in which he was harvesting electricity from the air.
Just some kind of static electricity or something.
And it was actually operating machinery.
Now the problem was that it wasn't economical.
So it wasn't really a good, clean way to get electricity out of the air.
You couldn't get enough.
So it might have some, you know, some use in space or something, but that's about it.
Well, this new thing makes electricity from air from any material.
Just hold that in your head for a moment.
You could use any material.
It doesn't have to be like nickel or something.
Here's all you have to do to it.
You have to put holes in it.
And that's it.
That's it.
You have to put holes in it.
Now the secret is that they're tiny holes and that they're just the right size.
And what happens is that the normal moisture in the air tries to get through these little holes.
The water in the air gets a little bit slowed down or stuck, and it creates momentarily a difference in charge from one side of the material to the other, simply because it has tiny holes.
Nothing else.
Nothing else.
Just tiny holes.
All you have to do is get the holes the right size, and it creates electricity.
Now you say to yourself, well how much can it create?
Obviously not much, right?
But you can stack them.
So you might have one little membrane and then it's just on top of another little membrane and I guess you can make them as big as you want and stack them as high as you want and some people are saying it's going to be a big deal.
Now, I'd like to remind the people who thought the climate models were telling you everything you needed to know, as well as the people who said electric cars will never work because we'll just run out of electricity.
You can't see what's coming.
It would be impossible to know what's going to happen in the next 30 years, technology-wise.
We didn't know in the last 30 years.
Why are we going to know in the next 30 years?
It's just not something that's knowable.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that this little, weird little battery situation... Well, not even a battery.
It's actually creating energy.
It's not storing it.
I'm not going to tell you that this is going to be the big breakthrough.
Maybe it's fusion.
Maybe it's Gen 4 nuclear.
Maybe it's this new battery technology, so it's easy to restore them.
Maybe it's a hundred different things.
But I can tell you for sure that the climate models did not anticipate any of it.
So, that's been my point from the start, is that projections are always, if you do everything wrong, look where you're going to end up.
And that never happens.
Because you never do everything wrong for 30 years in a row.
That doesn't happen.
You make some things right in 30 years.
All right.
As you probably know by now, DeSantis announced his campaign for presidency on Twitter's Spaces feature, which is audio only.
If you tried to attend it, as I did, and members of the locals community who follow me were with me, and we tried to listen to that thing and there were massive technology problems.
So how long did it take?
15 or 20 minutes to work out the technical problems?
It felt like it was something like that.
Here's how CNN covered the technical problems.
Huge disaster.
Let's see.
Let's use their exact words.
Glitches overshadow the announcement.
So this is CNN.
The glitches overshadowed the announcement.
It was a, quote, launch disaster.
And the DeSantis-Musk alliance has been a year in the making, and Twitter's turning into a right-wing site.
So CNN, you have to understand, Twitter is now their competitor for news.
So when CNN covers a Twitter event, they're not going to be kind.
And it's not news.
It's not news.
It's just marketing.
CNN wants you to think that CNN is where you should get the news and the announcements.
They don't want you to think that Twitter is where you go for that.
So, of course, they dumped on it.
And they acted like the technical problem was the story.
Do you think the technical problem was the story?
Well, all it did was bring attention to it.
If there had been no technical problems, they would have had less attention.
What was Ron DeSantis trying to accomplish?
More attention.
So yes.
So here's what the mainstream media gets completely wrong.
They're trying to sell you a narrative that the technical problems that are 100% Twitter's fault are somehow a reflection of Ron DeSantis' preparation.
Really?
Really?
You tried to sell us that?
What year is it?
It's 2023, people.
In 2023, I think we all got educated to understand how an entrepreneur works, Musk.
How a software company that's doing something it's never done before, which is host something on Musk's account of that size.
And what I saw was everything working the way you expect it to work.
How many of you thought Spaces was going to work perfectly when half a million people came in for the first time ever, you know, all at the same time?
They've had bigger events, but they didn't all come in at the same start time.
Yeah, I mean, so the fact that Twitter had a problem with it, I don't think hurt anybody.
Do you know what the sign-ups are on Twitter today?
Through the roof, according to Elon Musk.
So, did Twitter do a bad job yesterday because it was a technical problem?
Well, not if you judge by signups.
How about follow the money?
Do you think that CNN reported that Twitter has record signups because of that event?
Record signups.
Like, probably the biggest day ever.
No.
No, they made it look like it was a failure.
Unambiguously, follow the money.
Twitter made more money yesterday and increased their base and power and prestige.
Everything about that worked for Twitter.
That was 100% successful.
The people who are competing with Twitter have to find something bad about it and put that on DeSantis so people don't want to use Twitter for this in the future.
But I don't think it worked at all.
I think that from the public's perspective, here's what they took away.
Ron DeSantis is using a more modern form of campaigning.
Is that good or bad?
Ron DeSantis understands modern forms of campaigning.
It's all good.
That's 100% good.
There was a big delay in the technology and everybody's talking about it.
Bad or good?
Well, if everybody's talking about it and they're signing up for Twitter like crazy, I don't even know how that could have been better if you're trying to get attention.
Here's something I said in the man cave last night when I was just talking to the locals people.
I'll hold off on that.
I'll hit you with that later when it's in its proper place.
So here's some of the things that DeSantis said and did.
I'll give you my persuasion.
grade for DeSantis.
So the first thing you have to consider is that it wasn't an interview.
I thought it was going to be more of a conversation interview with maybe a little pushback, but it wasn't.
Now, given that it wasn't an interview, I'm not going to grade it as an interview.
It should be graded as an announcement.
Would you agree?
It should be treated as just a speech, an announcement.
Because all they did is really introduce him and then let him talk, basically.
With a little variation in that, but basically they just let him talk.
So there were things he was not asked about.
For example, I don't think Trump ever came up.
Am I wrong?
I think he made one passing reference to Trump Being too woke, which made me laugh.
Because, you know, he's got a little argument there.
He didn't explain his argument, but there's a little bit of an argument that he's a little less woke than Trump, I suppose.
You know, you can make it sound like that.
I mean, it's not true, but you can make it sound like that if you want to.
So not mentioning Trump was brilliant, because what would have happened if the mainstream media was the ones who handled this?
What questions would the mainstream media ask DeSantis?
Nothing but Trump questions.
They would have just asked him one Trump question after another, and it would have turned into a Trump event.
But by doing it on Twitter, and not having questions per se, he could Just handle it any way you want it.
And that was good.
Some more things.
Overall, I would say that DeSantis' presentation style was A+++, on persuasion.
The only negative he has is that he sounds like an AI-generated voice, and he does not have the zing that Trump brings.
He doesn't have the sizzle.
There's a complete lack of sizzle.
However, allow me to give him a compliment for handling his lack of sizzle.
The worst thing he could have done is to try to compete with Trump by our sizzling him.
How would that go?
It would look like Mario Rubio.
Yeah, it would look like Rubio.
Trying to joke with Trump about, you know, penis size.
It just wouldn't work.
Because you can't go to Trump's home court and expect to win a game.
You're not going to win on his home court.
You've got to say, I'm playing a different game and then play it better than he's playing his game.
And I think that's what DeSantis is doing because he characterized himself as a, quote, energetic executive.
What do you think about that?
An energetic executive.
That's how he described himself.
Perfect.
It's perfect.
Because he's not competing with Trump for the sizzle.
And it's the sizzle that gets Trump in trouble.
Now I'm not going to be over there sizzling and getting in trouble.
I'll be over here getting stuff done.
Now, countering Trump, as opposed to competing with him, is exactly the right play.
So politically, It appears he's getting good advice.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think DeSantis is getting good political advice?
Does it look like it?
I'm seeing yeses and nos.
What would be an example of the no?
I got lots of examples of yeses, but what would be an example of no?
What's he doing wrong?
Just saw him next.
Hiding too long?
Well, no, he was just getting ready to announce.
He's not going to be hiding.
Overly scripted?
Yeah, okay.
So, I would say that in terms of describing what the problems are and then describing how he could be the right person to solve them, I don't think I've ever seen better.
I would say in terms of selling himself as a capable, energetic executive, that's what I saw.
I saw somebody who did a perfect sale for an energetic executive.
But here's what makes that tricky.
If you think he's competing with Trump to be more Trump than Trump, then it doesn't look like he did it, right?
It looks like he didn't do that.
But he's not trying to do that.
And I don't think that trying to do that would have been the right play.
He's trying to carve out his own unique brand, and then he's selling that brand.
And I thought he sold the hell out of it.
That was one of the best, probably one of the best just communication jobs you'll ever see.
Now, I've said before that Vivek is almost unparalleled in his communication skills.
And he brings a little more, a little more x-factor, a little more zing.
But, you know, he's starting from way behind.
DeSantis has got a big advantage on him.
So DeSantis, as a capable, smart person who can say, these are the problems and here's what I'll do about them.
He nailed it.
A+++.
However, as Trump points out, maybe he needs a personality transplant.
So he'll never be as exciting.
And that does matter.
And Trump knows it.
Trump knows that people will vote for entertainment.
I hate to admit it, but I'm very biased by entertainment.
I'm very likely to vote for somebody who looks good or sounds good or makes me laugh.
I don't like to admit it.
I mean, it doesn't make me look good, but I know myself and I know that I am influenced by those things.
Absolutely.
So, let's see, what else?
Words that DeSantis tried to focus on for his brand would be focusing on merit.
The system should be The United States should be merit-based, not based on your color.
Based on sanity, and of course that's an indirect attack on both Trump and on crazy Democrat stuff.
So he wants to bring sanity.
And then integrity of institutions, which I think we're all caring about at the moment.
Those are good.
In terms of selling his brand, that's right on brand.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think given that Musk is making this available to everybody, he's getting a lot of unfair attacks, Musk is, for apparently looking like he's a right winger now.
Because he gave DeSantis a platform to really showcase.
But he says publicly, and he just tweeted it today, that all the presidential candidates are invited.
And I would assume it'd be the same basis, meaning that they would get to talk, and there wouldn't be a lot of pushback, and they'd just get to put their thing out there.
Now, as long as there are other places that the candidates can debate, and other places that they could get challenged by the interviewer, I think you have everything you need.
I like the fact that DeSantis just got one really big announcement platform.
So he could put out there everything he wants to put out there.
And now other people can, you know, poke at it and push it.
But now it's out there.
So I thought that was a great service.
I appreciate it.
And I was mostly entertained.
He got a little boring toward the end.
All right.
Here's my favorite subplot of that entire thing.
Number one, is the simulation kidding us when it has Elon Musk Buying a feature on Twitter called spaces like he's literally the space guy and then just a coincidence that the feature he's Using is called spaces.
I don't just weird coincidence.
There's a few more of those.
But here's the question I ask I would love to know what happened to When they went live and they had the technical problems.
Because the way they solved it was, according to Musk, that having all that traffic on Musk's account has a different impact than when they made it work by moving it to David Sachs' account.
And it had something to do with the uniqueness of his account or the number of followers or something.
But it crashed until they figured out how to move it to Sachs' account and they started from there and then it worked.
Wouldn't you love to know how that conversation went in real time?
Because here's my question.
Who solved that?
It turns out, because I was telling my followers at the time, the locals people, I was saying, if it's a volume-related problem, they're not going to fix it.
If it's just volume, there's just nothing you can do in real time.
You're going to have to go back and retool and try it again.
But it turns out it wasn't just volume.
It was a combination of volume plus the unique account it was coming from.
And here's my question.
Who figured that out?
Who knew that moving it to the other account would make it work when it was the same amount of volume?
And I have a hypothesis That because the person sitting there being embarrassed by it not working is the most storied engineer in the history of the United States, Elon Musk.
And don't you wonder if he told the engineers to try that, based on intuition, that that probably would be a way to go?
Or did the engineers suggest it to Elon?
Which way did it go?
Are you curious about that?
Because if Elon is the one who figured it out in real time, that sort of goes more to his legend, that he would be, hypothetically, surrounded by the top engineers in Twitter and he had to tell them how to fix it.
That might have happened.
I have no reason to believe it did, except that he's the most storied engineer and he was in charge, and he was the one who wanted it fixed.
So, I kind of wonder if he thought of it.
I'm just so curious about that little technical question.
Anyway, did everybody see the Trump parody that came out right after?
So apparently it had been prepared in advance, and it showed the Spaces page, which is just a page of profiles of different participants.
Except the parody version, the only participants were, besides Musk and DeSantis, there was Hitler, Soros, Klaus Schwab, Satan, and Dick Cheney, and the FBI.
Now, I can't do it justice.
You have to listen to it.
This one falls into the category of one of the best of all time.
It's not just funny.
It's one of the best political humorous parodies you'll ever see.
It's just genius.
So go see it.
You can see it on True Social.
You can see it on Twitter, on my account, and a number of releases.
But it's worth five minutes.
Trust me.
Just trust me on this one.
This is five minutes you will not regret.
All right.
Oh, let's talk about DeSantis.
One of the things he talked about with the wokeness that he's against is, you know, getting into college.
And he used this visual language.
He said, talking about, you know, your daughter who's going to college and saying you don't want her to be roadkill in the woke Olympics.
And if you listen to everything that DeSantis said, it was sort of a brilliant example of visual language.
Because he was on an audio-only platform, but when he talked, you could see pictures forming in your head.
That's not normal.
That's not normal.
That's somebody who's probably been trained in persuasion by somebody who knows what they're doing.
Because I don't think that was part of his normal tool bag.
That stood out as being obviously visual preparation.
And very well done.
Let's see.
Here's what C.S.
CNN's page was hilarious.
If you just look at the headlines in the top left of CNN's page, because that's where they put the stuff they want you to see first.
That's what they think is important.
So here are the headlines.
Why DeSantis is as dangerous as Trump.
How completely predictable was that?
Oh yeah, DeSantis is totally normal unless it's possible he could win.
Well, if he could win, then he's just as dangerous as Trump.
Otherwise, he's just a normal, sane person and nothing like Trump whatsoever.
Unless he could win.
And then he's just as dangerous.
You don't even have to read the article.
It's the headlines that are funny.
What else did they say?
They said the glitches overshadowed the show, it launched disaster, blah blah blah.
Yeah, so let's see what New York Times said.
Oh, here's some other things CNN said.
That he was sending a message of incompetence.
The DeSantis was trying to be the capable, competent executive, but his launch was incompetent.
So that's, you know, against his brand.
That's not what I saw.
What I saw is Twitter had some issues because so many people wanted to see him.
If you ever have a chance to fail, and somebody gives you a chances of ways to fail, hey Scott, I'll give you 10 different options of how to fail.
Pick the one that makes you look popular.
I failed because too many people wanted to hear my message.
That's what CNN is calling a failure.
The technology broke.
It's built as a mass communication product.
You know, Twitter and the spaces.
It's meant for mass audiences.
And he brought such a mass audience, he broke it.
But it got fixed by, maybe, The most storied engineer of all time in America, in real time.
I don't know how that could be more perfect.
Like you can't even get, you could not have scripted that better than having it fail because too many people wanted to hear it.
That's, you can't get better.
All right.
They said it was predictable.
CNN said Twitter's problems were predictable, given Twitter's, you know, recent technical problems in the past.
Was it?
All right, maybe the risk was higher than normal.
I would agree with that.
But was it predictable that it wouldn't work?
Was that predictable?
Twitter didn't know, but CNN somehow knew.
Yeah, it's all predictable.
And they said, there is such a thing as negative attention.
So they're trying to make the case that he brought on negative attention.
No, he didn't.
No, he didn't.
It's not negative attention when there are too many people who want to hear you.
That's positive attention.
Sorry, that's positive.
All right, New York Times did some fact-checking, and I will use the lawyer standard for this.
Which is if you can see that one of the fact checks is obviously fake, it's a fake fact check, meaning it's just propaganda, you don't have to listen to the other fact checks.
Would you agree?
If one of them is obviously just propaganda, you can ignore all the rest as well.
All right.
So they fact-checked DeSantis saying, the whole book ban thing is a hoax.
So the accusation is that Florida is banning books.
But DeSantis says, the whole book ban thing is a hoax.
There's not been a single book banned in the state of Florida.
You can go buy or use whatever book you want.
And they fact-checked that this way.
They said it's misleading.
It's misleading.
So I hope that they're not misleading in their fact-check.
Wouldn't that be terrible?
Because their whole point is that he's misleading.
So he's misleading, they say, because there has been no statewide ban on books.
Oh, so he's completely right, because he said there's no statewide ban on books.
Oh, that's misleading.
Oh, but it's misleading because But, Mr. DeSantis is vastly playing down the extent to which individual school districts and libraries in parts of the states have removed books.
In fact, Florida ranks second behind Texas as the state with the most bans at 357.
at 357.
Did they leave anything out of the story?
Is there any fundamentally important part of the story that the New York Times left out when they were telling you that DeSantis was being misleading?
Anything left out?
That the bans were specifically about material that was too adult for children.
That's it.
It was too adult material for the age of the children.
Do you know how many other books are banned everywhere because they're too adult for the age of the children?
Probably a hundred million.
Is there any place on earth that doesn't restrict pornography from children?
The New York Times is actually in favor of adult material for children.
Don't you think that they should have mentioned that in the fact check?
That it only applied to material that they thought children were not ready for, but when those children reach an age where their minds can handle it, it is 100% available.
100% available to adults.
You don't think the New York Times knew that and thought that maybe that was important to the fact check?
They leave that out.
So therefore, you are free to say that all their other fact checks are bullshit.
They're probably not.
I mean, some of them probably are right.
But you are allowed to say there's no credibility to their fact checking, because this one's obviously bullshit.
Just obviously.
They know it.
They couldn't not know it.
NBC, this is their take on it.
Now remember, NBC is also a competitor to Twitter for political news.
So they're going to talk about them as a competitor.
And here's their take.
Democratic strategists said the joint must-distance event was only the latest example of the tech billionaire aligning himself and Twitter with increasingly conservative politics in a rightward shift.
Do you think that's what happened?
Or do you think he said, Every candidate is invited, and one of them said yes.
It's not some right word shift.
The right word shift is the narrative that their competitors are trying to put on them.
It's purely a competitive statement.
It's not news.
It's propaganda.
Well, it's not even propaganda.
It's marketing.
It's less than propaganda.
Propaganda, at least, Even propaganda sounds better than marketing.
I guess that's my bias.
NBC is just marketing their own product.
But they're making the customers think, oh, that's news.
No, it's not.
No, that's just marketing.
I thought this was an insightful, as usual, comment from Mike Cernovich about DeSantis versus Trump.
This is a really important point.
And as Mike points out, I think it's undervalued.
So I agree with Cernovich.
So here's what he says in a tweet.
DeSantis can hire people who won't see it as their last job.
He's comparing it to Trump.
In other words, if you take a job with Trump, it might be the last time you ever work.
Now, I'm actually an example of that.
Do you think I would have been cancelled if not, you know, known as a past Trump supporter?
I don't know.
Probably not.
Probably wouldn't care.
However, I find this correct.
So Cernovich says, this is underweighted by people who aren't professionals.
That's right.
If you're a professional, you know that your reputation and who you've associated with will determine your next career arc.
And as Cernovich says, you're Trump's lawyer?
That might be your last final client before being disbarred.
And then he says, to online people, stuff like this doesn't matter.
In the real world, it's huge.
And I agree with that completely.
If you're looking at DeSantis, or anybody else, versus Trump, I don't know who Trump hires to work for him.
It was a problem before, but it's probably a bigger problem now.
Because at least he had Jared and Ivanka, who, in my opinion, were superstars of the administration.
I think they were really strong and useful players, but it looks like they won't be involved if Trump wins.
So it's hard to know what his inner circle would look like and how that would work.
I think this is an entirely valid point, that a professional going to work for DeSantis would think that's a stepping stone in their career, whereas working for Trump has shown it's a career suicide.
And I can prove it.
If you'd like an example of a career suicide, right here.
RFK Jr.
had an interesting comment, I think it was on Megyn Kelly, about Trump.
And he said that Trump is the best debater since Abraham Lincoln.
He said, quote, President Trump has shown himself to be the most devastating debater probably since Abraham Lincoln.
And RFK Jr.
says the key to this so-called success is Trump's, quote, capacity to obliterate and dispatch opponents.
And he thinks that Biden would just get rolled if he debated him.
Now, of course, RFK Jr.
wants to bait Biden into a debate.
So this is probably part of his, you know, his priming to see if he can get a debate going.
Which I doubt.
I don't think it's going to happen.
But once again, you find something to love about RFK Jr.
How did the Kennedys do that?
Why does it take a Kennedy to just keep picking out winning frames?
That's a totally winning frame.
Do you know why?
Is it obvious to you why RFK Jr.
complimenting Trump's His debating skill.
Is it obvious to you why that's a good strategy?
Well, let me tell you why.
He wants to win Trump supporters, and he's the only person who ever tried.
Am I right?
He's trying, as a Democrat, he's trying to win Trump supporters, and he's the only one who's ever tried.
And I think to myself, well, wait a minute.
Did you just show respect to Trump supporters?
He actually showed respect.
And there wasn't a but there.
You know, you're waiting for the but?
He's a great debater, but... And there was just no but.
He's confident enough that he can compliment his potential competitor.
He could give him a full-throated compliment and just let it sit there.
That is so baller strong.
Don't you interpret that as strength?
He doesn't need to shut him down.
He can say what you see.
What you see it.
You see it with your own eyes.
I'm not going to deny what you see with your own eyes.
Let's accept that is true.
And then I have this other basket of stuff I'm offering.
You can't beat that.
And honestly, it makes you wonder, do the Kennedys have some extra speed or something?
How the hell can they all do it?
It's like you just have to be born with that last name and you can do that.
Show respect to citizens of the country that disagree with you.
That's pretty strong.
And he's the only person who's running that people are saying, do you think he could be a good vice president for Trump?
How many times have you heard that?
Which is crazy.
There's no way that's going to happen.
But just think about the fact that so many people have suggested it.
Have you ever heard that before?
In your whole life, your whole life, have you ever seen anybody suggest that a major Democrat candidate should be the vice president for the Republican candidate?
That's crazy talk.
But only RFK Jr.
has ever been treated that way.
The other thing that I love about him is that even if It turns out he's totally wrong about, let's say, childhood vaccinations.
And I don't have a strong opinion about that, except that I agree they're under-tested.
I don't know it's real.
I just agree with him that they're woefully under-tested.
But even if it turns out he was wrong, and I know you think he's not, but suppose he did, he would still be a hell of a candidate.
And I think that would be his biggest weakness, and I don't even see it as one.
Because even that was sincere, and even that was at least attempted to be completely data-driven, scientifically compatible, without believing Big Pharma.
So he's carved out a place where you can believe science, but disbelieve all the corporations who are doing the science.
It's kind of perfect, right?
Because everybody else is sort of the simplistic idiots.
Science is bad, or science is good.
Experts are bad, experts are good.
And he's very cleanly made this distinction.
Science is good, but the corporate science is all bad.
To which all of us say, well that's true.
We love science, we just hate it when corporations pay for it.
So, anyway, the reason that RFK Jr.
would never be Trump's vice president, if we could put this to bed so nobody asks me about it anymore, nobody's gonna pick a 70-year-old vice president.
Can we just stop there?
Is there anything else I need to say?
I mean, I could have started with nobody's gonna pick a Democrat to be vice president for a Republican, because that's also true.
But nobody's gonna pick a 70-year-old vice president.
Especially if you're elderly at yourself, right?
I mean Biden won't either.
Biden's not going to pick a 70 year old vice president.
So there's no way that that's going to happen.
It's just amazing that it comes up so much that tells you something about how people are thinking.
You say he's bad on the climate?
I'm going to reserve judgment on that.
So It's my opinion so far that RFK Jr.
is not compatible with current science on nuclear energy and climate.
I don't think he's fully compatible with what I understand to be the best science.
Doesn't mean I'm right, but he has so far demonstrated a legitimate mental flexibility and an ability to understand complicated things.
That I suppose his opinion could change, because the facts seem to be changing, right?
So I believe he could evolve, or find a nuanced position that you wouldn't hate.
He has not shown that yet, would you agree?
I would say that his climate framing is not compatible with the right, and that's a big problem.
I think he could do it.
I think he has the skill and I think there's room to do it.
Just by slightly modifying or updating his understanding of nuclear energy, for one thing.
It might be enough.
It might be all it takes.
But he could get pretty close to the Republican take just by doubting projections, which wouldn't be hard, right?
He's a science, yes, but a skepticism, yes, at the same time.
He wears both hats just as often.
So he could get away with a nuanced take on climate.
Don't count him out on that.
Just wait and see on that.
But you're right, his game is not where it needs to be on climate.
We all agree on that, right?
If he wants to get any votes from the right, he's not where he needs to be.
But hold on, he might.
He might find a way.
Alright, we'll test your IQ in case you want to see how genius you are about all things political.
Rasmussen had a poll and they asked, the question was likely U.S.
voters and they said how many people believe the FBI officials involved in promoting the false Russia Trump claim should be criminally prosecuted and how many should not.
So our test will be how many people, how many of the voters, think the FBI officials involved in promoting a hoax that tried to overthrow the government.
What percentage do you think, just roughly, let's say within two basis points.
See if you can get it within two and then I'll be impressed.
27 is wrong.
Now, 27 is wrong, but try to get it within two.
23!
Yes, very good estimate.
23% of voters think that the FBI should not be criminally prosecuted for trying to overthrow the country with a hoax.
If anybody's new, you don't know why we're laughing.
It's sort of an inside joke for this live stream.
Roughly a quarter of the public will get every question wrong.
It doesn't matter what the question is.
Now I don't think it's the same quarter of the public that gets every question wrong.
It's probably like a different quarter for every question.
But it's always about a quarter.
The regularity with which that one out of four shows up is just crazy.
It just doesn't even look like it could be natural.
All right.
Let's talk about Ukraine.
So we know maybe a little bit more about the attacks on Russia proper.
So Russia says that it was Ukraine that was behind sending some drones toward the Kremlin.
And you probably believe that, don't you?
It was probably Ukraine was involved, unless it was a total false flag.
You know, it might have been all fake.
But then we also know that there were some alleged Russian citizens who allegedly were against Russia's involvement in the war and against Putin and they allegedly crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia and attacked in a few places in Russia.
Which would be, you know, an escalation of attacks on Russian homeland.
Now do you think that those minor attacks, you know, it didn't end up conquering any territory that they held and a few citizens got killed and, you know, it didn't amount to much.
But do you think it was a success?
Do you think those incursions with the, you know, somewhat sketchy, artificially created Russian You know, revolutionaries.
Do you think it worked?
I think it did if the Russian people heard about it, which I don't know.
I'm guessing they did.
But it works psychologically.
Because if you're a Russian citizen and you oppose the war in Ukraine, you're probably saying to yourself, well, it's over there.
It's not affecting me.
I still go to work.
I'm still buying groceries.
It doesn't have any effect.
And if you don't know somebody personally who was in that war or got killed or wounded, then you're probably thinking, well, just let Putin do what he does.
We'll see how it works out.
But as soon as you hear that Ukraine is attacking your homeland, that changes everything, doesn't it?
And I was trying to put my head in that place.
Imagine the United States Gets into some war with Iraq or anybody else.
And then imagine that there's a substantial attack on the homeland where an actual city in America like stuff blows up and there's firing and soldiers and it's like fighting in the streets.
Could you hold that in your head?
So it'd be like 9-11 exactly or Pearl Harbor is a better example.
What did the United States do when Pearl Harbor happened?
Now we may have been, you know, there's theories about we knew more than we knew, etc.
But when the homeland of the United States is attacked, do we act the same as when our military is attacked in a war that's in a theater?
We don't.
No.
If you attack the homeland, we just drop all the rules.
All right, we've got all these rules about what's fair in war and what's not.
And we're going to follow the rules because we like to be good rule-following military.
We'll try not to do any atrocities.
We won't use the really bad weapons unless we have to, you know, following the rules.
And then they attack the homeland.
What's the first thing we do when they attack the homeland?
Get rid of all the rules.
The rules go away.
So you don't act the same when your homeland is attacked.
I don't know if it works the same in Russia.
But I wouldn't be surprised.
You know, people are people.
Mostly.
So I would imagine that the psychology of the Russian people changed.
But because of the nature of the war, it's sort of cousin on cousin war.
I don't know if that makes them want to fight harder.
It certainly would in America.
If anybody hits American soil, We just open our pocketbooks and say, whatever this costs.
Hey, military, whatever this costs, go do that.
It's going to be really expensive.
Yeah, go do that.
Go do that.
We'll probably be killing a lot of citizens and innocent people in the process.
OK.
Because it's the homeland.
All right.
So I think that those attacks are successful psychologically.
Probably a good idea.
I think it's funny that four out of seven of the GOP candidates for president are people of color.
Four out of seven.
That's pretty good.
Right?
You've got your Tim Scott, your Larry Elder, you've got obviously Rama Swamy, and who am I forgetting?
Nikki Haley, yeah, and Nikki Haley.
So the top, the only three who were announced for Democrats are three white people.
So the Democrats are running three white people, and the Republicans, all those big old racists, four out of seven candidates are people of color.
Four out of seven.
But at least the Democrats have more women running, right?
Nope.
It's a tie.
It's a tie.
They got Marianne Williams and the right has Nikki Haley.
So why is it that people vote for Democrats?
Is it for increased diversity?
I love the look of that because it's so counter-narrative.
And if Trump were to select Tim Scott as his running mate, then that's super anti-narrative.
Mike Pence, I think, didn't help in terms of the brand.
He was a great vice president, stayed out of trouble.
But Tim Scott would actually help.
I mean, he would be an addition to the whole brand that would be very substantial, I think, more so than most vice presidents.
Anyway, that's funny.
Here's an update on Bud Light.
Apparently, they're having so much trouble selling Bud Light now, and some of it's going bad on the shelves.
If you wait too long, you can't sell it.
You have to throw it away.
And so, Anheuser-Busch is offering all these rebates and stuff to the retailers, and some of the rebates are so big that the beer is free.
And it actually says so.
After rebate, it's free.
So they went from Selling beer, to having to lower the price of their beer, to now lowering the price of the beer to free, what happens if free doesn't work?
Well, if history is any judge, what's going to happen is that if they can't give it away for free, they'll probably team up with Big Pharma and They'll tell people that Bud Light is rumored to cure COVID as effectively as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine combined.
And then Big Pharma will have to support Bud Light and not only support it, but it might become mandatory.
Might become mandatory.
So I can see a place where once Big Pharma realizes that Anyway, you see where I'm going.
I don't have to, I don't have to beat that joke into the ground.
Yeah, that's where it's going.
It's went from you have to buy it to we'll pay you to drink it to it's going to be mandatory.
And you have to do you have to drink at least a case of Bud Light before you're allowed to operate a motor vehicle.
Because of COVID.
All right.
Read an interesting article by Helen Andrews and the American conservative is apparently there are Two very important lawsuits going on.
The first one in California, where they're trying to get rid of the SAT and the ACT tests for college admissions.
Do you know why?
It's so that they can get more minority participation, because some groups do not do well on those entry exams.
In fact, a study in 2013 showed that if Harvard Had not used affirmative action.
In other words, if they just let people in based on their scores and their objective performance, that Harvard would have had 43% Asian, 38% white, and 0.7% black.
43% Asian, 38% white, and 0.7% black.
So although there were only 5.6% Asians in America, there would have been 43% of Harvard.
And then blacks would be less and white.
So that's what it would be if they used.
So they're trying to get rid of the test.
But also in Yale, I guess Yale's in trouble.
Because Asian-Americans and whites have only one tenth to one fourth of the likelihood of admission compared to black American applicants.
Imagine being, well you probably don't have to imagine it if you are, but Asian-Americans having a one-tenth the chance of getting into an Ivy League school, one-tenth the chance, with higher qualifications.
Higher qualifications, but only one-tenth the chance.
I don't think that big colleges can survive.
This is a really bad look.
It's just terrible.
Now, one of the things that DeSantis said in his announcement is that he would use the Department of Education to take accreditation away from universities that were woke.
So if a university was promoting woke stuff, they wouldn't be accredited.
At the moment, it's opposite.
At the moment, you have to be woke to get accredited.
Now, the problem with this plan, it sounds brilliant on the surface.
The problem is that as soon as there's a Democrat president, do they just reverse it back again?
Maybe not.
Because wherever you're at, it becomes a little bit sticky.
It's hard to change things.
Maybe if you change it, it could stay the way DeSantis wants it.
Maybe.
But I had never heard that idea before.
I've only heard that people wanted to get rid of the Department of Education.
But DeSantis says, let's keep it and use it as a weapon.
And I thought, is that brilliant?
Give me a fact check on that.
Because, well, when I heard it, it sounded brilliant and innovative and smarter than anything anybody else was doing.
But is there a problem with it that's not obvious?
All schools in California would close.
Let the states decide?
Well, if you let the states decide, well, I guess that makes sense constitutionally, of course, but I wonder how it would fall out.
You'd still have a lot of woke universities.
Maybe, wouldn't it be interesting if a university marketed itself as non-woke?
See what happened?
It's probably too early to do that, but I think that's where we're heading.
Anyway, how many of you would agree with the fact that wokeness has hit some kind of a peak, which doesn't say there won't be more of it, right?
I'm not talking about an end, I'm talking about a peak.
After the peak, there's lots, lots, lots more.
But it would be slowly declining in power and relevance.
Because here's what I see.
I see now that it's now safe to challenge woke ideas directly.
And I don't think it was safe before.
Would you agree?
There's just a little bit more you can say than you could have said even one year ago.
And partly that's because of the boycotts.
I think the boycotts work.
I'm usually anti-boycott.
But it seems pretty clear that the Bud Light and now the Target, you know, Target has sold some trans-friendly clothing that people on the right don't like.
And by the way, I don't really understand the Target one.
Because the Target one, I guess they were accused of selling tuck-friendly swimwear to minors, but they weren't.
They only had adult sizes.
So do you really care if Target sells clothes to To trans?
Like, why is that a problem?
Adult clothes to adult trans?
How in the world is that a problem?
Yes, you have a problem with that.
But why?
But why do you have a problem if other people want to wear clothes?
Like, the store is full of clothes that I don't wear.
Do you care that stores carry both men's and women's clothes?
Because you only wear one of them?
I don't know how you could be mad about that.
But independent of whether the boycott makes sense or doesn't make sense, and I think the boycott was based on people thought it was kids clothes.
Now the fact check is that it was never kids clothes.
They do have, I think, LGBTQ friendly clothes.
But the tuck one for the trans, that was adult sizes only.
That's their defense.
I'll just tell you what they're saying.
I can't say that they're telling the truth.
It was the in-your-face display.
I'm telling you the truth.
They did sell clothes for LGBTQ children.
True.
The tucket swimsuits, which were the thing that got featured in the news, were only adult sizes.
True or false?
Michael Scott Howard said, I'm 100% incorrect.
What do you say?
Now, I think that you're believing your news sources when you say I'm wrong, right?
You're saying I'm wrong because you saw a news source that said something else?
Did Matt Walsh debunk it?
So you're saying that the fact check was wrong?
All right.
I would say it's... Here's my trick for identifying the fake news.
Suppose you had never heard this story.
So here's just a way to identify fake news.
Suppose you'd never heard the story about the Target thing, so you don't know anything.
And then somebody came in and said, hey, they're selling Tuck swimwear to children.
Would you believe it?
If you hadn't heard anything about this story, and you heard they were selling Tuck-friendly swimwear to children, would you believe it?
The answer is no, you would not believe it.
That's probably what is true.
If I told you they were selling LGBTQ friendly clothing to children, meaning it could have, you know, messages and colors and images on it, would you think that sounded impossible or true?
Pretty normal.
I would think that was true.
So the common sense view of this is that they did, in fact, promote LGBTQ, let's say, lifestyles and fashion.
And that's not even that strange or weird or anything.
But if you told me that they really sold tuck-friendly swimwear to children, I'm going to say I don't believe that ever was a thing.
I don't believe it.
Now, can we test this?
How about we test it?
So I'm going to make just one very narrow claim.
That you cannot produce a photo of a child's size for a tuck-friendly swimmer.
If you can produce that, and it says target on it, and it's obviously a child's size, then I would like to correct myself.
So I'm open to being corrected.
Will you take that bet?
Let's take this as a challenge just to see how the filter works.
So a number of you are claiming superior information.
So when you were fact-checking me here, it's because you believed you had better information than I have.
More current information or more accurate, right?
That might be true.
So if you'll allow me, I'd like to say that might be true.
That could be the whole story.
However, it's a good test of my filter.
My filter says I'm not even going to look for that story.
I wouldn't even fact check it.
Because I would believe it's so obvious it's not true, I would never even look for the truth of it.
I would just assume it wasn't.
But you're claiming that I'm wrong with that filter and that it really did happen.
So if you can produce for me, maybe on Twitter or somewhere else, a credible picture Do you accept the challenge?
It's very simple.
You just have to show me one example and then you're right.
There's nothing else to say.
And even if it's just one store at one time, you're 100% right.
Can we agree on that?
I won't try to weasel out by saying, oh, that was one store.
Can we agree?
If it was even one store, you're right.
My belief is it never happened in any story anywhere.
So let's test it.
And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
And then I'll tell you.
Right?
Simple as that.
I'm not going to be the guy who just needs to be right about tucked swimwear.
Like, I don't have any, I have no ego invested in that whatsoever.
But I'm very curious whether the filter is working this time.
It might not be.
It might not be.
Crazier things have happened, but not often.
All right.
Are you gaslighting?
Target took it down two days ago.
So Case, somebody says, are you gaslighting?
Target took it down two days ago.
Are you saying that therefore it would be hard to get a picture because they already took it away?
Oh, well, OK, maybe.
No, I'm not gaslighting you.
So I promise you, I'm not gaslighting you.
I'm simply using my rule that if something sounds ridiculous, it probably didn't happen.
That's all.
That's my entire intellectual approach.
If it sounds ridiculous, and it's in the news, it probably didn't happen.
Here it is, somebody says.
Well, I can't check it without turning off the thing.
I'll look at that yesterday.
Yeah, you have to watch out for it being photoshopped.
It sounds ridiculous to give porn to kids.
Well, if it was porn, it'd be ridiculous.
If they thought they were educating them on sex education, we've had debates forever about what is too young and too far.
So that's not completely crazy that somebody had a different opinion of how young and how far.
That's a discussion that's been going on forever.
But the tuck swimwear would be kind of new.
All right. - Right.
Send me a link.
What would you consider a believable link on this?
Oh, let me do this.
Let me see what Bing says.
I know, I know.
I'm not saying that Bing is subjective.
I'm just curious what they say about it.
All right.
I'll say, did Target sell Trans-tuck-friendly.
Swimwear.
What do you think it's going to tell me?
Swimwear.
Where?
For children.
You know it's going to say no, right?
No matter what the real answer is, it's going to say no.
Snopes.
Let's try Snopes.
I know.
I know, you don't have to tell me.
You don't have to tell me you don't believe Snopes.
I'm just telling you what they said.
Because if Snopes agreed with you, then I'd say, well, that's pretty... Alright, so they say it's false.
So Snopes says Target's 2023 Pride Collection includes items labeled in stores as tuck-friendly, but none of these are available in kid sizes designed for children or marketed to children.
But Matt Walsh said... It's a video.
A viral video of Matt Walsh's refers to two items with a...
All right, so this is probably what you're talking about if you saw Matt Walsh.
So they're talking about what Matt Walsh says.
So the viral video is referencing two items with a tag highlighting the bathing suits tuck-friendly construction, blah blah.
Several viral videos said you will find these in the kids section.
Both these products can be found on their website.
Neither of them is designed for children.
Claims that the products were for kids appears to come from an apparent disbelief in the notion that some adults are small.
And the fact that some Pride collections were near a children's clothing section.
So Walsh says either those sizes are for kids or for very, very, very small adults.
So I was once married to a size zero woman.
And it was so annoying that she could pack all the clothes she would need for a two-week vacation and a carry-on.
Like 100% of all of her clothes could be squished down to like something that you put in your hand and it would be like three weeks of different outfits.
Did she talk? - No.
Well, so does it come down to... Oh, I was going to say something terrible.
I was going to say something terrible.
But I pulled back.
Let me think about it for a minute.
Because it's terrible.
I can't do it.
Can't do it.
It was pretty funny in my mind, but I can't do it.
All right.
I might tell the Locals people after I get off of YouTube.
All right.
I'll make a deal.
I'll tell the people on Locals because they pay a subscription so they can get the good stuff.
I'll also tell you a little bit what I said I wouldn't tell you yesterday because I told some of the people in the Man Cave livestream yesterday that there was something I couldn't tell them.
But I found a way I could tell you without violating any ethical hang-ups.
