Episode 2120 Scott Adams: Trump vs DeSantis, RFK Jr. vs Biden, Feinstein Decomposing, Target, More
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Content:
Trump vs DeSantis
Biden's bad numbers
George Floyd HOAX
Feinstein bad numbers
Finland solves for energy
Target update
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to another highlight of civilization.
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Ah.
Delightful.
Well, Finland has a new problem, and their new problem is they have so much green, cheap electricity that the price temporarily went negative.
Now, in the real world it wasn't actually negative, but the price of electricity basically dropped to zero.
Do you know why?
Take a guess why Finland's electricity went to zero Is there any idea, and also, it was green.
It was totally green.
Nuclear, yeah, they just opened a big nuclear plant.
Now they also had lots of water this year.
So their hydro, their dams and stuff, also were producing record electricity.
But at the same time that the nuclear plant went online and started just pumping it out.
So for a while, Finland's energy costs for consumers was almost zero.
And how did they get there?
They did the obvious things.
Nuclear.
And, you know, hydro if you have it.
So, are you still worried about climate change?
If you could drive your electricity costs down to close to zero, At the same time that you're getting rid of all the, you know, all carbon emissions.
I don't know.
I feel like we have a solution here and it's just screaming at us.
Nuclear.
Well, I saw an article that said Bill Gates thinks that he doesn't know who's going to own the AI market.
It could be a big company like Microsoft.
He hopes so.
But it could be some startup.
And he mentioned one in particular.
A company that's called Inflection.
And they already have a little app called Pi.
P-I.
And here's what caught my attention.
Number one, that Bill Gates called it down specifically.
And he said he'd used it and it looks like it could be one of the winners.
One of the ones that will really be the thing.
Now he described it as a personal agent.
Basically like a little AI personality that can talk to you.
So I said to myself, whoa, that sounds good.
If Bill Gates says this might be the one, and obviously he's tapped into everything that's going on, I'm going to download that thing and I'm going to see what makes this better than all the rest.
And let me tell you, I was blown away.
Blown away.
Do you know what it can do?
It can talk to you as stupidly as all the other AIs.
That's it.
That's all it can do.
It can talk to you.
It can't make any important opinions because it's not allowed.
It doesn't have access to the internet.
Just hold this in your mind.
Bill Gates was blown away by it.
Doesn't even have access to the internet.
And it doesn't say anything that Chad GPT doesn't say, or Bing AI, or all the rest.
And none of them can do anything useful.
Because they're not allowed to do anything provocative.
Which is the only thing we care about.
And he was blown away by it.
Now here's a... I'm going to connect some conspiracy theory dots here.
Ready?
I'm going to go full conspiracy theory.
What I say after this point is not backed by fact.
Are you okay with that?
What I say next is not backed by fact.
Pure speculation.
No more likely than the moon landing was faked, for example.
Bad example because a lot of you think it was faked.
Going pure conspiracy theory.
One of the founders of this app that Bill Gates seems to think is good is Reid Hoffman.
Do you know who Reid Hoffman is?
So he was the founder of LinkedIn, now sold to Microsoft.
So he's a multi-billionaire.
Also a famed investor.
You know, one of the early Facebook people, early on Airbnb.
So he's one of the most famous investment geniuses, but he's more than that.
He's also one of the people who came up with some of the social media algorithms that make Facebook work, such as recommending your friends and turning it into a network effect.
So Reid Hoffman is sort of the...
You could sort of say he was the father of the network effect, where if you get into an app, it's hard to go anywhere else.
That's what LinkedIn was.
If you're on LinkedIn and somebody else started a similar app, you weren't going to go there because all your friends were in LinkedIn.
And LinkedIn would keep suggesting you, you know, to get other people in there.
Same as Facebook.
So here's the other thing about Reid Hoffman.
Do you recognize his name from before any of these things?
Do you know where he first succeeded?
No, you're thinking of a different read.
Netflix is a different, that's a different read.
He's the, he's one of the PayPal guys.
So the so-called PayPal Mafia, which were the, includes Elon Musk, and It's people who went on to become billionaires.
So did you ever wonder how PayPal succeeded?
I was always curious about that.
Imagine being the first startup that makes an app that can move money around.
How in the world did that ever get past regulators?
How in the world did that get past the banking industry?
Do you ever wonder about that?
Because the technology that PayPal had was probably trivial in terms of what was possible at the time.
It probably wasn't hard to make the app.
What was hard is to get it in the market, get people to trust it, get banks to not try to stop it or not succeed, and get the government to say, yeah, you can do this.
Almost impossible.
Have you noticed that the PayPal people all have really good powers of persuasion?
And that they went on to start companies which you'd say to yourself, you know, I don't even think that company could have succeeded unless the government was somehow, you know, a little bit on their side, right?
Didn't you think that about Tesla?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't there very large subsidies?
They're government subsidies, right?
So Tesla basically can exist because of the government.
How about SpaceX?
Would SpaceX be a viable company without government contracts?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
I'm thinking no.
I'm thinking probably not.
Or at the very least, there must be incredible hurdles that you have to pass to get into the space business.
So we see a pattern here of people who are involved in the PayPal mafia seem to be able to create new companies.
They have that same weird quality that PayPal had, which is how did you get the government to go along with this?
You ever wonder about that?
How in the world did they get past all those regulations and stuff?
Well, I'll give you one hypothesis.
They're CIA backed, and always have been.
Now, I'm not saying I have any, I have no data, no information whatsoever to back that hypothesis.
But there is a pattern, there's a pattern of success that has that weird quality to it that the government really had to be on your side in some important way.
I don't know how you do that over and over again, unless Unless the CIA wants you to.
Now, why would the CIA do a thing like that?
Why would they do that?
Well, why would the CIA want to know that people were moving money around in a digital way?
Of course they want to know that.
They want to know who's doing illegal things.
So if people are paying cash, you can't track them.
But if they start paying on a digital app, You could catch all the bad guys.
So of course the CIA would want to be a backer to any kind of digital movement of money, obviously.
Of course they would.
That doesn't mean they did.
I'm not saying they did.
I'm just saying they would have an obvious incentive to do that.
And likewise, the CIA would say, you know, if we don't own space, we're going to be in trouble.
So they might say, well, let's get one of our guys To build a serious space industry and we'll make sure the government has enough support that it can succeed.
CIA might say, we need to own electric cars.
Because if China becomes the only place you can get a good electric car, we're really screwed.
So maybe the CIA says, well, let's help cut a little red tape for you here.
We'll make sure you get some subsidies so that you can be a proper industry.
Now, nothing that I've mentioned so far would be against your interests as a citizen.
Would you agree with that?
Everything I've described would be for the benefit of the United States.
It would be a little more for the benefit of CIA doing their job, perhaps.
But it would all be compatible with your interests, so it's not like something... It's nothing to be alarmed at.
But this story where Bill Gates was somehow impressed by an app that has nothing to impress you.
There is nothing about that app that's impressive.
It's just nothing.
But why is Bill Gates pushing it?
Bill Gates is sort of mysteriously successful, isn't he?
Ever wonder how Bill Gates did so well?
Bill Gates, friend of Epstein.
Epstein, clearly connected.
Do you think that maybe one of the reasons that Bill Gates and Epstein met more often than you think they should have, what if it wasn't about sex?
What if it was actually because they're both just CIA-involved people?
Not employees, obviously.
But maybe it was just some dark business.
It could have been.
Could have been.
Because I would give you another reason why Bill Gates would do something that seems so obviously dumb.
Right?
What are the other things that Bill Gates does that are obviously dumb?
Name one.
It's just something he doesn't do.
He just doesn't do dumb things.
But continually meeting with Epstein after he'd been convicted is unambiguously dumb, and even he says so.
So, why do you do dumb things if you don't have to?
There's some reason.
Now, the reason he's accused of is having some kind of sexual interest in common that would be a little sketchy.
That's what we assume.
Because that's the obvious thing, right?
That's the most obvious thing.
Or blackmail.
Those are the obvious things.
But the less obvious thing is that they might both be obviously connected to intelligence agencies.
And they might have had some common work.
That would be something that he could never mention.
So he'd be sort of screwed.
He'd have to let the sexual impropriety thing just sit there because he can't explain the real one.
I remind you That 100% of stories about public figures are false.
I know it's hard to believe, but trust me, they're false at least in terms of being incomplete, where the part that's missing would change how you think about it completely.
So, when you look at something like Bill Gates, the thing I can guarantee is you don't know the story.
Ever.
There's always something very important about the story that you think you know that you don't know.
That is just always the case.
And the more public the figure is, the more true that is.
And the more complicated their situation is, the more true that is.
So you don't know anything about Bill Gates.
It would be impossible, because the news won't tell you.
He's not going to tell you.
How would you know?
There's no way to actually know.
What the hell is going on with Bill Gates, ever?
If you think you ever knew, you didn't.
Because there's no accurate news about public figures, ever.
None about me, that's for sure.
All right.
Well, I'll just put that out there that it's weird that this app is getting some attention from people who are interestingly similar in pattern to people who might have an intelligence connection.
Just by pattern.
So just to say it again, none of what I said about any of these characters is based on any facts that I'm aware of.
It's just pattern recognition.
That's it.
Which is a weak form of predicting the future, but there it is.
I'll put it out there.
Have you come to this conclusion yet?
I know we've all been heading there, so I think maybe you were all there before me, but sometimes you just have to put a thought in words that we were all thinking, and then we can go, oh yeah, that's it.
You just put that in words just right.
So I may have done this with this tweet somewhat accidentally, because so many people liked it.
I didn't think people would like it that much.
But I tweeted that the legacy media, its only purpose is to prevent citizens from finding out what the government is doing.
Didn't it used to be the case?
Didn't it used to be the case that you thought the news was to tell you what the government is doing?
Didn't you?
But it's very clear that that's no longer the case.
The legacy media Is in the business of preventing you from knowing what the government is doing.
The legacy media.
Now, fortunately, we have social media and there's competition in the field.
So, you know, you can get some of the story, but that's literally their purpose.
Because the news that isn't about politics isn't that interesting either.
Have you noticed that?
Yeah, we need to know when a hurricane's coming.
But that's not the fascinating news.
It's the political stuff that interests us.
And that is entirely designed to mislead you.
So the legacy media is the phrase I'm going to use for what used to be called the news.
Because I don't think news is even and I'm not I'm not using hyperbole here.
This is not intended to be an exaggeration.
News is the wrong word.
Am I wrong?
Because news implies that you think it's true, whereas the legacy media is clearly not in the business of saying things they think are true.
I'm not wrong, am I?
They're no longer in the business of saying things that even they believe to be true.
It's one thing if they're wrong.
We accept that people can be wrong about the news.
That's not even a big deal.
But it's now obvious they're not trying to be right.
That feels different.
It's not news.
Whatever they're producing couldn't possibly be called news if the idea is to prevent you from knowing what's happening.
And clearly that is.
To prevent you.
Well, here's an example of that.
If you want some data to support that point, Rasmussen did a poll asking about the Durham Report and when it first asked the questions about, you know, what did people think about the Durham Report and the idea that officials in the government were aware from the beginning that the Clinton campaign was going to make up the Russia collusion hoax.
That our government, at the highest levels, were completely aware that it was made up.
Now, when Rasmussen asked people, hey, what do you think should be the penalty?
It kind of lined up by politics, right?
We expect all the political questions to be roughly Democrats say this, Republicans say that.
But they found out that when they primed the people with a one-sentence summary of what the Durham report said, it completely changed the answers to the poll.
In other words, the public was so misinformed that they didn't know because they watched legacy media.
If you watched legacy media exclusively, you wouldn't even know that the biggest thing ever had happened, which is that the Durham report showed that the people in charge were fully aware that the Russia collusion was a hoax from the start.
They always knew it.
And so when Rasmussen asked the question before priming people, you know they have a certain set of answers that line up by politics, but as soon as you told them the Durham report proved that the government and the FBI knew that the Russia collusion was a hoax, suddenly you get
When told of the Durham conclusion, this is from Rasmussen, when told of the Durham conclusions, 44% of the people who thought Trump might have colluded with Russia, keep in mind that people still think that, 44% of the people who still thought Trump had actually colluded with Russia, after they were told what the Durham conclusion was, that it was the opposite, It was Hillary's team that made it all up.
44% of those people changed their mind immediately and wanted the FBI officials criminally prosecuted.
44% of the people who just weren't aware of the news, as soon as they heard an accurate summary of the news, the Durham report, changed their answer immediately.
Because they had never heard the news.
And this was the news that, if you could call it news.
So this is the story that made me think, holy cow, we no longer live in a world where the news is even trying to be news.
It's only trying to prevent you from hearing stories.
That's it.
It's news prevention.
All right.
Speaking of polls, there's a Berkeley IGS poll on Feinstein.
And as you know, Feinstein is decomposing in her chair and doesn't remember that she was gone for three months from the Senate.
Basically, she's completely dysfunctional.
And while we feel human empathy for her situation, she does work for us, right?
She works for us, and she's not doing the job.
So those are just facts.
But there was a poll.
Well, let me just do a little test of my audience.
Let's see if you can get this within two basis points.
I'm going to see if you can guess the answer within two.
How many people polled do you think favor Feinstein continuing to serve her job to the end of her term?
What percentage?
Wow, you're very close, and some of you got it exactly.
It's 27%.
Yeah, about roughly a quarter of the people asked had no problem with a vegetable being a senator.
Oh, you'd like a potato to be a senator?
Well, one quarter of us are totally on board with that.
How about a piece of broccoli?
Would you like a piece of broccoli to be your senator?
Represent your state?
25% or so?
27.
About a quarter of the people said, yeah, I'll be okay with that.
I like a big piece of broccoli representing me in the Senate.
All right, so there's that.
As you know, the opinion of billionaires in this country are more important than yours.
Would you all agree with that?
The opinion of billionaires are way more important than your opinion.
At least in terms of influencing things.
Right?
They're not more important in a constitutional sense.
They're just more influential.
So that makes you wonder, where is Murdoch on all this stuff?
Well, Murdoch, as you know, owns the Wall Street Journal.
And the Wall Street Journal editorial board did a piece today on DeSantis.
That I would say is pretty close to an endorsement without actually saying those words.
So I would say it's unambiguously true that Murdoch is backing DeSantis.
Now, he hasn't said that.
I'm just reading between the lines.
It looks like that's the case.
Yeah, no surprise, right?
Because Murdoch wasn't pro-Trump anymore.
Speaking of DeSantis, he said he would pardon some January Sixers.
Obviously, you're all the smart audience.
You know that he doesn't mean every one of them.
He means the ones that it makes sense to pardon.
But he also said he'd pardon Trump.
What do you think of that?
What do you think of that as a persuasion play?
That he would pardon Trump.
It's right.
It's right on target.
Exactly.
So I'm going to say this again.
DeSantis does look like a genius of persuasion.
He hasn't made a misstep.
I mean, if he has, it's been minor.
But he is hitting bullseye after bullseye in the messaging and communication area.
And that's hard to ignore, right?
He's picking up the easy money everywhere.
So this is another example of that.
It's pitch perfect and he's reading the room perfectly.
Let's put it that way.
Do you think that DeSantis reads the room?
Yeah.
Like he reads the room better than, just about better than anybody.
Yeah, Trump does too.
So I'm not going to take that away from Trump.
But he's just hitting it.
He's just hitting every note.
So Wall Street Journal likes him.
And a lot of people like him.
And he's saying that Trump ruined people's lives with the lockdown.
This is what DeSantis says.
And that he was too close to Fauci, basically.
So DeSantis is going to try to paint Trump as a Fauci.
Just like Fauci Plus.
Which is pretty good.
Politically, Fauci is so poisonous right now with the Democrats.
I'm sorry, with the Republicans, that that's a perfectly smart play because he can just let all the badness of Fauci bleed onto Trump.
And you'll just feel different about him, Trump, and you won't know why.
It's just because the Fauci ugliness could get transferred a little bit if DeSantis keeps on it.
So a real good technique.
Here's an update on the Target stores and what they did or did not do in terms of offering trans-friendly things to children, allegedly, but not really.
So here's what I've learned.
Target, some time ago, did away with child sizes for teenagers.
Now, I'll need a fact check on this, but this is what I understand.
So, in other words, a 13 or 14-year-old would be buying adult-sized clothing just because they found no reason to have different sizes for people who are largely the same size, right?
A 16-year-old girl is not going to be that different than a 30-year-old adult.
So, some time ago, Target got rid of these teenager sizes.
So, the question is, did they make trans-specific clothing with, we're only limiting this to the tuck swimsuits, did they make a tuck swimsuit targeted for teens?
And the answer is, only accidentally.
Because if they made one for adults, it would be the same sizes as the teens use.
So accidentally, yes, they did.
Intentionally, it doesn't look like it.
It looks like a really bad mistake.
It looks like they didn't realize that because their sizes were no longer discriminating between teenager sizes and adult, that it would be seen as a product for people under 18.
So I'm not going to defend Target.
But it looks like more of a mistake than some kind of a strategy to turn teens into something.
So my current take is that if you would like... Hold on, hold on.
If you would like to, in your secret thoughts, believe that Target did this intentionally, I have nothing to argue against that.
Are you okay with that?
If you think they did it intentionally, There's no obvious proof that it wasn't intentional.
However, there is an alternate explanation, which is perfectly reasonable, that it could be just because they don't have a size distinction, and they wanted to do it for adults, and then there it was.
So at the very least, they didn't put up a guardrail.
Would you agree with that?
At the very least, they did nothing to make it look like it was limited to adults.
And that would be a corporate mistake that they're paying for.
But there is not evidence of their thoughts.
Would you give me that?
There is no evidence of their thoughts.
If you believe you know their thoughts, you might be right.
If you look at the larger context of society, you could totally be right, but there's no evidence of it.
There's no evidence of their thoughts.
So, you know, I always do this innocent until proven guilty thing because I think it's important, but I tell you that when it comes to the government, That doesn't count.
When it comes to the government, they're guilty until proven innocent.
It has to be that way.
They have to prove they're not screwing you all the time, or else you assume they are.
But what about a company like Target?
Is Target presumed innocent, at least in their thoughts, not in terms of their actions?
But are they presumed innocent, or are they a big corporation that's more like the government?
You say, you know, you're actually going to have to prove you didn't do this.
Yeah, somewhere in between.
All right.
Well, I'll just leave that where it is.
Here's what I... Oh, there's a kind of interesting news that Ford has agreed with Tesla to use Tesla charging stations for the Ford electric vehicles.
Is that foreshadowing something?
I always wondered, you know, I had a question whether that was going to be a thing.
Now, obviously, this is a good move for consumers.
If you're a consumer, this is just great.
But the question is, why did Musk make this available?
What was Musk's play?
What do you think?
Why would he, I mean, it's a competitor.
Why would he make it so much easier for a competitor to sell cars that compete with him?
Well, I'll give you one answer.
One answer might be that Musk wants to control charging stations, and if he can prevent Ford from building up their own charging stations, he can sort of get the public used to using his, and then he can charge other companies, you know, a little fee for being part of their system.
And then he makes money by monopolizing the charging portion, because Ford probably would have built out their own anyway, if they had to.
So, and Ford will pay to build more, you said?
Yeah.
So, this is very compatible with Musk's philosophy that I don't think we've ever seen before, which is he's trying to build, you know, profitable companies, of course, but he's very focused on making sure that the public is served.
And that's one of the secrets of his success, is he is very obsessed, same with Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos gets this right as well.
They're obsessed with giving the public what the public actually wants.
And I don't think there's much the public wanted more than to know if they got an electric car, they'd be able to charge it.
Because a lot of people want electric cars and they're worried about charging stations, right?
So he just took that worry away, also for his competition.
Which is a very enlightened way to do business, but also something you can do if you're doing well, right?
He has such a dominant position that he can think of what's good for everybody and not give up anything.
I like everything about that story.
It suggests something positive happening in business.
Speaking of business, here is the index fund I would like to invest in.
Now, I am aware that somebody has created an index fund of companies that are not ESG woke.
So I know that exists.
That's not what I want.
Do you know why I don't want that?
Because it's too much of a gimmick.
That's what it's called, the Strive Fund.
It already exists.
Right, so it already exists.
But I do think that there might be too much in common with the companies that are woke versus the ones that are not.
The companies that tend to go woke tend to be the high-end companies.
Am I wrong?
The high-end companies will tend to be woke because they have to.
But within the universe of woke companies, would you agree that some went too far?
So here's what I want.
I want an index fund of all companies, the Fortune 500 in America, subtracting the worst 10% of the woke, but only 10%.
I'll tell you why.
If you only take 10% out, you're still going to have a good chance of having a good portfolio, because that's plenty of diversity.
Taking 10% out, you know, it might take out your best performer, but it's 10%, so maybe not.
If you fail to invest in the worst 10% of the woke, then the woke would no longer compete to be the most woke.
You want them to say, oh, I guess I can do a little bit of woke, but keep us out of the top 10%.
I would invest in that.
Whereas I have not been triggered to invest in the Strive Fund, which is only un-woke companies.
Because I think one thing that makes you un-woke is being unprofitable.
Oh, here's a better way to say it.
Profitability.
And wokeness are probably very correlated.
Because if you're already profitable, the only thing you want to do is stay out of trouble.
So you say, wokeness?
Oh yeah, plenty of it.
And if that wokeness makes you, let's say, a little less profitable, you can afford it if you're already wildly profitable.
So Apple, as a company, can afford all kinds of wokeness.
Because they have so much profit, even if they took a hit, you wouldn't even notice it.
But if you are struggling, the last thing you want to worry about is wokeness.
So the reason I don't want to fund that it's just all the un-woke companies, is that that would include the struggling ones.
I want just a good basket of the top 500 companies, minus the top 10% worst woke, wokesters.
And that would be enough, over time, that would be enough to tamp down the worst excesses of wokeness, to get it down to something you get used to.
Because, you know, unlike many of the people in my audience, I don't mind calling people what they like to be called.
I've never understood why that was a problem, actually.
As long as they don't give me a hard time for using the wrong word, I'll be happy to correct.
Because to me it's just, I've said this before, it's just manners.
When people introduce me in public, They usually ask me, how do you want to be introduced?
Do you want to be the cartoonist?
An author?
Do you want to be the creator?
What word are you comfortable with being described with?
And then I tell them.
It usually doesn't matter.
I don't care.
But I tell them.
And then we're all comfortable.
It's just a polite way to deal with other people.
So if somebody is born a biological male, they've decided to transition, and they look and present themselves as female, I don't have any problem using the pronoun they prefer.
I don't even know why anybody would.
Because if you look at somebody who's in full female, you know, presentation, It shouldn't be hard to remember what pronoun they want to be used as.
And why does that affect you in any way?
Now, I get that if you start accepting the base reality of their claim, then maybe that gets to rights.
You know, what restroom you can use, what sports you can play on.
But I separate those.
I just think you can call people what you call them and that's separate from the conversation of do you want a 200 pound trans woman who used to be a, was born a man to compete in a boxing match against somebody born a woman.
Now that's just obviously something you need to work on.
But I don't mind a little bit of wokeness.
I don't mind making sure that we don't discriminate.
That's all good.
All right.
Biden's numbers have collapsed and even CNN is saying, oh my god, Jake Tapper was just blown away by how bad Biden's numbers are.
Here's the specific poll.
Poll released Thursday.
This is CNN's take on it.
66% of Americans, two-thirds of them, view a Biden victory in the upcoming presidential election as either, quote, a disaster or a, quote, setback for the United States.
Two-thirds of the country believe that a Biden second term would be a disaster or a setback.
Two-thirds.
Two-thirds means you're getting a lot of people who are not just Republicans.
You know, Independents and Democrats.
Now, CNN also pointed out that that's not that different than Trump.
So Trump's numbers aren't that different.
But Biden, I don't think, has ever had numbers this bad.
So as Jake Tapper and others have pointed out, it looks like we're actually heading for an election.
Of the two candidates that the country least wants to be president.
Am I wrong about that?
We've somehow developed a system to give us the two choices that we all understand are wrong.
But we still favor our own choice.
Because, you know, we don't want to give up our own choice and we think our choice could beat the other choice.
And winning is more important.
You know, we're more about winning.
But how in the world did we drift into a situation Where we're almost guaranteed the two candidates are the two we least want as a country.
Least want.
You might like one better than the other, but both sides want somebody else.
Because of age.
Now, in my opinion, it's just age alone would tell you the whole story.
Yes, I want somebody younger than Trump.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And younger than Biden, of course.
I saw a Mark Cuban tweet today.
Talking about, as long as we use the system of primaries that we have now, we're always going to recreate this situation.
And that we need some kind of a better selection process for picking from the primary.
We just don't have a functioning system.
If we had a functioning system, it would not have given us two choices of people who are clearly older than you want them to be.
Although, to be fair, Trump does look perfectly, you know, perfectly fine at the moment.
All right.
And even CNN was sort of talking up RFK Jr., you know, noting that he had a now a good solid bite on, I think he's up to 20% in the Democrat primary.
And I think you're going to see that increase.
All right.
Here's the story I heard today.
I don't know if this is true.
But in the 70s, the CIA developed a heart attack gun.
They could shoot you with a dart gun that would give you a heart attack.
And then the dart itself would dissolve.
And then the poison that it gave you would be denatured quickly.
So even an autopsy would not pick up the poison or the injection site, because there would just be a little spot.
And then the dart would somehow disintegrate.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that?
Developed in the 70s?
I don't know.
I'm going to say, I'm going to put a big maybe on that one.
Now, of course, people connected it to the Andrew Breitbart situation where he died of a heart attack at a relatively young age and without warning, I guess.
And he was exactly the kind of person that you would kill if you were a CIA operative who was helping the Democrats.
So that's interesting.
There's new George Floyd hoax going around today.
So in 2020, the coroner's report, it's being resurfaced.
So it's being treated as if it just came out.
But we've seen the coroner's report on George Floyd since 2020.
And one of the things it said on the report was that there were no neck injuries.
Which people are taking to mean that it must have been an overdose, because if Chauvin, the cop, was on George Floyd's back slash neck, you should have seen some kind of neck injuries.
But the hoax part is that we've known this since 2020, and it was not terribly important to the coroner's opinion.
So the knee was on the back, exactly.
So there was no reason you would expect the neck to have an injury.
But the argument was that given the position of everybody, it was the police officers' actions that caused the death.
And there's a new part that I'd never heard before.
So the coroner ruled out drug overdose, fentanyl overdose, or opioid overdose.
And the reason he ruled it out Is because the typical way you die from an overdose is you just sort of close your eyes and go to sleep.
Whereas George Floyd was not acting like somebody on fentanyl.
He was sort of struggling until he stopped struggling.
So therefore it did not look like a fentanyl death.
Because a fentanyl death is just somebody sitting in a chair and they close their eyes.
To which I say, I wonder how much experience the coroner had with people who had just, just taken the fentanyl and were being forcefully held on the ground.
Is that something you've seen a lot?
Somebody who just took fentanyl, allegedly.
I don't know if that's true.
But some say he took it when he got pulled over so he wouldn't get caught with it.
But has he seen people who just took fentanyl, like just took it, and then, you know, three or four people are holding him down?
What would that look like?
If it were a fentanyl overdose, what would it look like?
Well, I'm going to give you my impression of what I think it would look like.
I would expect him to be struggling while he could.
While the fentanyl was reaching his system, because allegedly he'd just taken it, as it reached his system, he would stop struggling, he would get quiet, and it would happen kind of suddenly.
And you wouldn't know that that was the problem, because you were sort of in a different mode, you were in struggle mode, and then he just stopped struggling, and you think, oh, he finally stopped struggling.
But it could just be the fentanyl kicked in.
Now, I'm no coroner, But to me it looks like the coroner gave the safest opinion he could to protect his own life.
And you cannot put any credibility in a coroner who, if he had ruled the other way, would be killed.
How in the world Chauvin doesn't get some kind of an appeal?
Because the coroner was in a position where his life was at risk if he had given an opinion in the other direction.
His life was at risk, obviously.
Anybody who says his life was not at risk, you don't know anything.
He clearly was at great, great personal risk.
Family, too.
So I would say that there was no coroner's testimony.
If I'd been in the jury, I would have said, okay, well, I'm not gonna believe that guy.
Because there's no reason to believe him.
If somebody is under threat of death, you are not advised to believe what they say.
That would be a dumb thing to do.
And yet, the jury did.
Do you know why the jury did?
Believe him?
Because they were at great risk of being killed.
Everybody involved was at the risk of being killed.
There was no way it could go any other way.
Everybody just was protecting their own life.
And they didn't particularly care about Chauvin, because he didn't come across as a sympathetic character, right?
They didn't really care about him.
But they certainly cared about themselves.
Certainly cared about themselves.
All right.
I saw a tweet by a Twitter user who goes by the title unhoodwinked, in which he was noting my persuasion successes according to him.
So now this is his opinion, not mine.
So in his opinion, I had influence on the following things.
He says, Scott's a scoreboard on issues that he changed the world.
So that's not my claim.
I'm not claiming I influence these things.
I'm just claiming there's a lot of coincidences here.
So here's the list.
China is now deemed unsafe for business.
You will recall I was the first one who started saying that.
Now it's obvious.
ESG is now a negative value.
I would argue it depends who you're talking to.
But definitely the reputation of ESG is way worse than it was when I told you I was going to try to destroy it.
But that's not all me, of course.
Bombing Mexican cartels is now accepted as the best strategy by all of the Republican frontrunners.
I would argue that somebody had to say it out loud and then see how people reacted.
For anybody else to say it out loud.
So I said it out loud first, publicly.
Trump picked it up.
Once Trump picked it up, nobody could be soft on that.
So all the Republicans had to line up.
Could be a coincidence.
TikTok is under pressure to be banned or at least adjusted in some way.
I think I was the first among the first to talk about TikTok, but not the only one, of course.
And fentanyl overdoses now considered a top concern.
That's similar to the bombing the cartels one.
Nuclear power is considered green.
You remember when I started persuading them that it was not considered green, but now it is.
Now, obviously, the bigger persuaders were your You know, Schellenbergers and Mark Schneider and Bjorn Lomborg.
So they were the ones who did the heavy lifting, but I was on the right side of that.
And then, I'm not sure about this one, but Unhoodwinked puts this on my list.
Safe to discuss moving away from areas deemed to be unsafe for certain groups.
I don't know.
Do you feel it is now safer to discuss Racial topics, because of me.
Yeah, I'm not sure about this specific example, but I do think that's happening.
So, as somebody pointed out, a critic, that all I really did was pick topics that other people had seen as common sense, and then common sense usually wins, and so all I did was spot some common sense things early and talk about them.
So it's not influence, it's just I saw a parade forming, stood in front of the parade, and just, you know, made it look like I was in charge of the parade.
The only counter I would put to that is that all of those things I talked about were common sense before I talked about them.
They were common sense for a long time.
It didn't make any difference.
Didn't make any difference.
Common sense doesn't move anybody.
You need persuasion.
So there is a coincidence between when I applied public persuasion and when those things started to change.
But you cannot rule out coincidence.
You can't rule out coincidence.
And you can't rule out, well it wouldn't be coincidence, you can't rule out that I'm looking at the wrong pattern.
It could be that the pattern is I'm just good at spotting winners.
How could you rule that out?
How could you rule out that I'm just good at spotting winners in advance?
Because I do believe I am.
I think I am pretty good at spotting winners.
So here's the only credit I will take unambiguously, which is if you're good at spotting winners, And then you can productively be part of that persuasion.
Then you're part of a very large team of people who are trying to push things in the right direction.
So that's the credit I would take.
The credit I would take is that I've been early pushing useful things that Americans are better off with.
That's the only thing I can say for sure.
Let us know when you buy a new stock.
Yeah, I would not say that my stock buying skills are anything you should emulate.
The pattern supports the Christian end of days prediction.
Well, the other thing that that fits is that we always think the world is going to hell.
So if there had never been any Christian predictions about the end of times, we would still be talking about everything going to hell because that's just what we do.
It just means you're humans.
Tell us what stock I'm selling?
I sold my Apple stock.
Because I don't think that Apple is going to easily navigate the AI era.
Because AI is almost a full replacement for your smartphone.
And I don't know what they do about that.
Because even if they make their own best AI smartphone ever, it won't be that better than everybody else's, will it?
You think you're going to buy back Apple?
You know, betting against me is not crazy.
Betting the opposite of me would probably make you money in the long run.
Vanguard, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but Vanguard is low ESG compliance, right?
They're not an ESG investing company.
So I think Vanguard was in the top two, I believe, maybe number two, in being unaffected by ESG and just putting their investments where it makes sense.
Yeah.
Stay out of stocks.
Vanguard is the main owner of BlackRock?
No.
That doesn't sound right.
You mean it the other way around, don't you?
Vanguard probably does have ESG funds, because everybody would have one.
But I think that they also have a non-ESG fund.
They own each other?
All right.
Is there any big story that I missed?
Oh, the hospital Karen story?
Well, the hospital Karen story was exactly what I said.
Two people who legitimately thought that the bike was theirs.
And that was the whole story.
And that's what I saw from the start.
Because, you know, unless you're a racist, I saw two people who believed that they owned a bike.
I didn't see any color in that story at all.
Did you see color in that story?
I didn't see a Karen and I didn't see a black guy in that story, although that's the way it was presented.
It's like a black guy and a Karen.
I didn't see the black guy, meaning that he wasn't acting like in some way that's like only black people act.
He was just a guy who thought it was his bike.
And he was not taking no for an answer.
And he wasn't being physically scary, was he?
And I think he thought he was the victim.
And she was defending her rights.
I don't know.
I ended up liking both of them.
Is that wrong?
I think we're supposed to not like both of them, right?
Like that's what the media narrative is?
How about you don't like both of them?
Or one of them?
Why don't you like one of them and dislike the other one?
I refuse.
I absolutely refuse.
I like both of them.
A nurse who's, you know, probably an angel.
Pregnant nurse.
I'm totally on her side.
Guy who innocently believes somebody's taking his bike that he paid for?
Totally on his side too.
I could be on both of their sides.
There's no conflict with that.
I can support both of them.
They were just in a bad situation.
I hope they go on to happy lives.
The U-Haul truck, the White House, that feels like a crazy guy thing.
That was too disjointed to even be any kind of an Intel operation or Russian op or anything.
That just had crazy guy written all over it.
Now, we know for sure, well, at least the reporting is, that both of them had a reason to think that they owned the bike.
Like a good reason.
One of them was just wrong.
But they had some reason.
If you saw an extremely pregnant woman, you would let her have the bike.
Well, not if you thought you had just paid for it.
Because I don't think anybody's saying there were no other bikes.
Am I right?
It's not like she couldn't go somewhere.
There was just a question of whether he'd pay for her bike.
And he was a young guy.
Do you think this young guy had extra money that he could just buy somebody else a bike ride?
You're wrong, Scott.
About what?
Right.
The Covington response is the story.
Well, I agree.
The Covington response was that the first reaction to the story was misleading.
Totally.
So yes, it is a Covington story.
You're right.
Whoa.
Patriot Squirrel says, "I never did get to thank you and President Trump for saving my life.
I was strung out on heroin for 20 years, started my recovery in 2016, and have been clean for four years.
Happy as hell.
Good for you.
That's the story that I like better than any other story.
Anytime somebody tells me that they got off drugs, Or got off alcohol.
Or just built their talent stack and got a better job.
I could hear that all day long.
Because that's what we're here for.
So one of the things, here's a little business advice.
I heard this a long time ago.
That you don't decide what your product is, the customers decide.
So if you think you're selling Pez dispensers, but your audience thinks you're an auction site, although that's not a real story, but I'll use it anyway, then you become an auction site.
So your customers tell you who you are.
And that certainly happened with Dilbert.
With Dilbert, the audience said, hey, we like this office comic.
And I would say, it's not an office comic.
He just goes to work sometimes, but it's not really about the office.
And then people would say, yeah, we love the office comic.
And I would say, stop saying that.
It's a general comment.
I can do any kind of topic I want.
And then the audience would say, yeah, but you really should do the office ones.
They're the ones we like.
So I changed it into an office comic strip.
And that's how you do it.
That's why it was successful.
It wasn't successful, Dilber wasn't, until I gave the audience what they told me I was selling.
They told me I was selling that before I sold it.
I just wasn't even selling that product.
And they said, thanks for that product.
And I said, what?
And now I make that product.
And everybody's happy.
So likewise, with the live streaming, what I thought I was presenting was some entertainment that people would watch for an hour or whatever.
But what I'm quickly learning is that some kind of a...
I don't know if community is the right word, but there's some sort of non-traditional support group that got accidentally formed through the just normal interactions of whatever this is.
And one of the weirdest outcomes is the number of people who quit alcohol or got off drugs.
And there's a number of people who have helped each other.
So it's not just an audience.
It's an audience that is literally involved in the betterment of the other members of the audience.
Which is unexpected.
So I certainly did not create, I did not start out to say, oh, I'll create an audience where everybody's trying to help each other.
It becomes like a virtual support group.
Wasn't my plan.
But it happened.
That's basically a big part of my audience is people who are here for the other people in the audience.
As well as, you know, I'm an organizing principal.
But I didn't see that coming.
There's no way you could have planned that.
Or I don't think you could have made it happen.
I don't think you could have pushed it to happen.
It just sort of evolved that way.
So when I see that comment, somebody who got off heroin and changed their life, you're not the only one.
And a lot of it has to do with the fact that people feel some common support.
And then when I say things that Or, let's say, useful, it gets reinforced by the other people who say, yes, that's useful.
And then I think it makes it more powerful.
So effectively, it creates like a peer influence that's positive.
Because your peers, in a sense, are the other people who are in the audience.
And if the other people in the audience are happy with you, ...quitting drugs, as you saw.
You couldn't see the reaction on YouTube, you couldn't see the reaction on the locals' platform, but they were delighted.
Just delighted that somebody here had changed their life, and it was hard.
But it worked out.
We all want to hear that.
So more of that.
If anybody else has any winning stories, bring that up next time and we'll call you out.
Happy birthday to Frank.
I'm going to say goodbye to YouTube and talk to you tomorrow.
