Episode 2153 Scott Adams: Fun News Stories And My Strange Predictions. Come Join Us And Bring Coffee
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Fun news stories and strange predictions
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams, the highlight of human civilization.
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Alright, let's talk about all the news that's fun and exciting.
Today's one of those, the news is more funny and interesting than tragic.
I don't like the tragic news, so we're going to skip all the tragedies and just talk about the fun stuff.
Do you remember that I told you that I could feel the zeitgeist telling me that camping was going to be really big this year?
Does anybody remember me saying that?
I invested, don't do what I did, this is not a recommendation, but I bought some stock in a camping company.
Because I just had this overwhelming feeling, and I don't know why exactly, that camping was going to be good.
Now here's the persuasion reasoning.
The persuasion reasoning is that every time you turn on the news, they're showing homeless encampments, and they're always camping.
And if you have the same reaction I do, it's like, oh, I feel so sorry for those homeless people that have to be in those awesome tents.
And then I think, well, that is a nice tent.
It is a nice tent.
And there's part of me that envies them.
Has anybody had that feeling yet?
Has anybody had a little bit of an irrational feeling?
You envy the street people because they're living free.
They're living life on their own terms.
They don't report to anybody.
They don't pay any taxes.
They don't listen to your rules.
They don't even have laws, really.
They just have their own little civilization.
So all they do is do amazing drugs that make them feel incredible, and then they go live in their tent.
And they're happier than you are.
Now, I don't really want to change places with them, but I believe it's an objective fact that they're not doing so poorly.
If you were to look at how much of the day a homeless person enjoys versus how much of your day you enjoy, what do you think that would look like?
I'm pretty sure they sleep in every day.
So, I don't know that they hate it.
I mean, it looks like something you would hate if you were doing it, but I don't know.
There's a lot of choice involved in that.
But anyway, the Wall Street Journal had an article that camping's really big.
So I did correctly read the zeitgeist.
Camping's big this year.
All right.
I asked this question on Twitter just because I was curious, and I got half a million People looked at it, so I guess people thought the same thing.
Turned out it was a dumb question.
I said, is it true that men are not approaching women to ask for phone numbers in person in 2023?
But then I got the boomer treatment.
You know what the boomer treatment is, right?
Let me give you my example of the boomer treatment.
Me.
Me asking, so do men ask for women for phone numbers?
Oh, boomer.
Oh, Boomer.
No, they ask for their Insta, or their Snap, or their TikTok.
No, they don't.
No, no.
You're so old.
You're so old.
It's just funny.
You're like Joe Biden times two.
I mean, really, who asks for a phone number anymore?
And of course, my critics are right.
I was dumb enough to think that people would imagine that those were just texting apps and that it's all kind of the same and that they would know that that would be included in the question automatically.
However, upon thinking upon it, my critics are correct.
Because it is a lower risk to ask for somebody's Insta or Snapchat.
Am I right?
If you ask for a phone number, it says, I'm probably going to call you.
You're probably going to get a call from me.
You're probably going to get asked out on a date.
So that's what a phone number is.
But if you ask for somebody's Instagram, well, maybe they're interested.
I mean, it kind of seems like they are, but it's very noncommittal, isn't it?
It's like, how about why don't we just follow each other on social media?
And then, you know, maybe I'd have the access to your DMs, and maybe I'd send one, and, you know, maybe you'd check it, and maybe you'd want to answer, and it's a lot of maybes involved, right?
Yeah, so it's the weaker, indirect, low-risk way to do it.
So it turns out the question was moot, because young people in the dating world, Don't need to ask for a phone call or a phone number.
It's just sort of less useful.
So I don't know that any of it matters.
You know, it's one of those interesting trends that have changed, but it does suggest the following is true.
I saw somebody say this on social media.
Sound is fine.
I saw somebody suggest that if you were able to walk up and ask for a woman's phone number in 2023, you would seem to have a superpower and you would rule the earth like a god.
Because other people aren't doing it.
So it used to be if you went up to an attractive woman and asked for her phone number, you'd be the 10th person that day and your odds would not be good.
But in 2023, I'm hearing this a lot, If you ask for somebody's phone number, they're like, oh my god, finally, finally, finally somebody had the balls to ask for my phone number.
Yes, of course, here it is.
So, it looks to me like you would get a different reaction in 2023 if you were to ask for a phone number.
All right.
So as you know, Elon Musk and Zuckerberg are, at least allegedly, planning to have some kind of a battle.
Zuckerberg, of course, knows jiu-jitsu, and Lex Fridman, famous podcaster, is also a jiu-jitsu guy, and has wrestled with now both of them.
So he's trained with Elon, trying to show him some moves, and there's a picture of him training with Zuckerberg.
Do you think it's going to happen?
What do you think?
You know, I was looking at the stats of Elon versus Zuckerberg, and I think everybody agrees that Zuckerberg is a higher level Brazilian jiu-jitsu guy.
So, you know, if you were fighting somebody on his same size, you'd expect him to win if they were not trained.
But, Elon is 6'2", and weighs, I don't know, 230 pounds?
Whatever it is.
It's over 200, I think.
And Zuckerberg is listed at 5'7", and his weight looks on point.
So 5'7", weight on point, it's probably like 155, his weight, something like that.
I don't know much about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, but can a 5'7 person ever beat a 6'2 person if you're not punching?
If you're not punching.
So Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu would be strong enough that you could, you know, you could get on top of them and get the advantage.
Okay.
All right.
A lot of people who seem to know what they're talking about would say that's the thing.
I mean, the disadvantage is pretty big.
But here's the funny part.
There's a picture online of Zuckerberg having Lex Fridman in a chokehold.
It looks to me like exactly the chokehold that has killed two people recently.
One on a subway and one George Floyd.
It's the exact same chokehold.
They do it for recreation.
Recreation.
And then a number of people told me, oh, that's a thing.
When you're practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, it's not unusual to choke each other out.
So that you have experience being choked out.
You know what it feels like, it doesn't scare you.
Is that real?
Is that a real thing?
That the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu people choke each other out for recreation?
People are saying yes, that's a real thing.
So, do you feel that you've been totally gamed by the whole holding person, somebody in that chokehold is going to kill them?
Don't you feel like you've been kind of gamed by the whole system here?
Yeah.
I feel like the choking is not how people are dying.
I think it's the drugs.
But anyway, we've been over that.
So Lex Fridman, I believe he's alive, but according to the news he's dead at least twice.
Here's a shocking, shocking poll.
This one actually does shock me.
You know, usually when you say, oh, it's a big poll, I'm shocked.
It usually doesn't shock you at all.
This one shocks me.
Right?
This is Rasmussen.
66% of likely U.S.
voters are concerned that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will be affected by cheating.
Two thirds, people.
Two thirds.
Now, Do you remember back in, let me take you back to 2015, when there was this new candidate, his name was Trump.
And I said, oh, watch out.
I watched him just a little bit and I could tell he was the most persuasive person in political life.
And so I warned you back in 2015.
He's going to be your president.
You don't see this coming.
His ability to persuade is like off the chart.
And what did people say to me?
You idiot.
Oh my God.
Oh my God, would you just stick to cartooning?
Oh my God, this is embarrassing.
It's just embarrassing.
You're embarrassing yourself, Scott.
He's not persuasive.
He's not going to win more than, I don't know, 7 to 10% of the primary vote and that's the end and he's just doing it for, he's just doing it to get attention and don't take it seriously.
And I said, no, seriously, you don't know what's coming.
The monster is right behind you.
Like, no, there's no monster.
Turn around!
Turn around!
It's right behind you!
Just turn around and look!
There's nothing behind me, Scott.
Just go back to cartooning and calm down a little bit, will you?
So, Trump loses the election, claims the election was fraudulent.
Time goes by.
Two-thirds of the public agrees with him, or at least agrees that the risk of the next one being fraudulent is high, which would suggest that they think the last one was maybe fraudulent, right?
I mean, those are pretty connected ideas.
So, now do you think that Trump is persuasive?
Is there anybody who wants to have an argument with me about whether Trump can persuade the public of things?
Two-thirds of them now agree with him.
That's way more than just Republicans.
Way more than just Republicans.
They agree with us.
Going further, 49% of voters agree with the statement, quote, there is no way Joe Biden got 81 million votes in the 2020 election.
49% of the voters believe 2024 or 2020 was a fake election.
of the voters believed 20, 24 or 2020 was a fake election, according to Rasmussen.
Now, when I said that I'm not often shocked by a poll, but this one shocks me.
Is anybody having that same experience, or is it just me?
This is like mind-blowing.
I had no idea.
I had no idea that the idea of a fixed election had gotten that much traction.
Now, probably I'd want to see at least one other poll.
You know, to see if other polls are coming up with the same numbers.
Because Rasmussen is pretty heavily, let's say, engaged in retweeting the voter stuff.
So they're pretty much on the side on this issue.
So I'd wait for at least one more poll.
But this is pretty shocking.
Alright, I saw some tweets that Google has a habit of hiring a lot of ex-Intel people.
How many, you say?
165 of them?
So, at least according to a tweet.
I don't know.
I suppose this needs some fact-checking.
But Google's trust and safety team is managed by three ex-CI agents.
So three ex-CI agents, CIA agents, are in control of what you say.
So what is considered misinformation is determined by three ex-CIA people.
Ex.
See, they're no longer in the CIA.
But what I'm saying is the CIA does not pay them any kind of a salary.
So they're completely ex, as in they don't work for them anymore.
Nope.
Nope.
So don't worry about that, because they don't work for them anymore.
Yeah, the CIA, there's 27 ex-CIA people, 52 ex-FBI, 30 NSA, 50 DHS, and 6 ODNI.
Does it look like maybe they are looking for these people?
It feels like they might be recruiting them, or they're recruiting themselves, or each other.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
Now the other way to explain it, Would be that these are highly qualified people and Google offers them more money than intelligence work.
It could be that they're just excellent people to have on your staff.
They're highly qualified, they know a lot about the world.
That sort of thing.
They have maybe experience in other countries.
That would all be stuff that would be insecurity.
So that would all be stuff that Google would want.
So it wouldn't surprise me.
That they were hiring a lot of people from that world.
But it does seem like too many, doesn't it?
As in, there's something going on here that's not exactly what it looks like.
So we got questions, don't we?
First of all, I cannot confirm that these numbers are correct.
So before you get too excited, may not even be true.
I don't know.
But somebody seemed pretty confident online.
All right, let's talk about RFK Jr.
YouTube banned one of his videos, just took it right off.
A conversation with Jordan Peterson.
Can you even hold that in your head that this just happened?
I just told you how many ex-Intel people work for Google who owns YouTube.
Then YouTube just took a major candidate, one of the biggest challenges to Biden, just took him off, just removed his video completely.
Now they would say there was some misinformation there or something dangerous, but do you imagine, like in your wildest dreams, can you imagine a conversation between Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr.
that would literally be dangerous?
Does that feel like a thing?
And even if it is dangerous, aren't we allowed to see it?
We're not allowed to see anything that might be dangerous?
I don't know that that's a standard.
When did that become a standard?
There's lots of things I look at that, you know, you could make an argument, could be dangerous one way or another, but what about that free speech and, you know, letting everybody decide for themselves business?
What about that?
I think I'm aghast as most of you are.
RFK Jr.
is a serious candidate for President of the United States.
They just took down his message.
Because they didn't agree with it?
Because what?
Because they're all scientists and they know what's true and what isn't?
And what if they just disagree?
What if RFK Jr.
has his experts and maybe YouTube has some other experts to say his experts are wrong?
What makes their experts right and his wrong?
Who gets to decide that?
Do you get to decide which presidential candidate we get to see?
That feels pretty extreme to me.
Pretty extreme.
Now, let me be clear.
I do not endorse all of RFK Jr.' 's, let's say, assertions about medical stuff.
I don't know that I know them all, or that I know them with the right nuance the way he explains them in the current year.
I don't know that.
So I haven't seen anything that he's explained lately that I disagree with, but I'm sure there's stuff there.
So I'm not saying I agree with him.
I'm just saying that why in the world can't you see it?
That's insane.
And this also goes under the umbrella of outrage fatigue.
If this were the only thing that's going on that's not right with the world, we'd probably get more excited about it.
But there's so much in the news that's like this, I don't even know where to aim.
Goodbye, all caps.
I'm getting rid of the all caps, and it doesn't matter what you say, what use, even if you're just talking.
If it's all caps, it's...
It's distracting to the host, so I'll just delete everybody who uses them, no matter what the purpose is, okay?
Nate Silver was saying, now if you don't know Nate Silver, he would be, you know, one of our nation's most credible statistical polling You know, kind of the people.
He gets a lot of hate from the right but I've been following him for a long time and I believe his opinions are about as close to objective as you can get.
He's got some bias that sneaks in but he's really close to objective.
Better than most.
So I always recommend him as a good follow.
He has good comments, too, on Twitter.
But he said this.
He said, there's this notion that Kennedy's doing kind of well in the polls, and he just isn't.
Now, his polling shows Kennedy lower than that 20%.
Shows him at, like, 9%.
And his polling has done well compared to other polling in the past.
So maybe he's right on that.
You may have seen Jessica Tarloff on The Five on Fox News.
She often says she has never met a Democrat who supports RFK Jr.
It's just a Republican thing.
She says she's never met one in the wild like an actual human who's a Democrat who supports him.
Now I say that is not predictive.
It seems like it would be, right?
It seems like it would be the single most predictive thing you could ever have.
But I don't think that's predictive.
Because as RFK Jr.
points out, whoever ends up being the nominee is going to get the Democrat vote.
Because the Democrats, sure as hell, aren't going to vote for the Republican.
They're going to take what they can get with a D next to it.
Anything they can get.
So he just has to be the nominee, right?
But, of course, he's way, way behind Biden for that.
So it really comes down to whether Biden's really going to be running.
Do you believe he's really going to run?
Now, you may have seen that Tucker Carlson dropped another video.
And he says that Newsom is being groomed to be the last-minute replacement for Biden.
This is something you've heard me say for a while now.
What would make most sense for the timing?
That was six to nine months before the Democrat convention.
So in my opinion, sometime towards the end of the year, maybe through February, will be the time that Biden will have a sudden turn of health.
And he's gonna say, well, I really did plan to run.
I really did.
But it just, you know, won't work.
My health is failing.
And that it'll be too late for anybody else to get serious, but Newsom will already have been out there talking about DeSantis, etc.
So he just seems like the obvious one who's not RFK Jr.
So this may be the way to keep RFK Jr.
out of the thing, is to stick Newsom in toward the top.
Now, That seems very, very likely to me.
But if it's Newsom versus RFK Jr., does he get a debate?
Now we're getting interesting, aren't we?
Does he get a debate?
Because Biden can say no to a debate and the world can say, all right, we don't like it.
But it is, at least that there's some precedent, right?
There is precedent.
Even Trump is considering not debating because, you know, he thinks he has it locked up.
Why do it?
But if you're the last minute replacement candidate, and RFK Jr.
has been there campaigning hard for over a year, how do you not debate?
I mean, not debating would be pretty devastating If you're coming in as the competitor that's not even putting in the same work as the guy that's been there.
So what happens if you put RFK Jr.
in a debate with Newsom?
Here's what I think happens.
I think RFK Jr.
would solve all of his reputation problems in one night.
Because Newsom would say, you think all vaccinations are bad.
And RFK Jr.
would say something like, I've never said that.
I've never said anything like that.
You're just making that up.
And the news is on your side.
You're all just making up an opinion for me.
Here's my opinion.
They're under-tested.
Anybody want to have an argument with that?
Under-tested.
Not tested to my satisfaction.
I don't think they're tested to your satisfaction.
Here's why.
That would really just change everything.
Because he could easily sell under-tested.
Or he could easily sell, I would like to introduce standards for more rigorous testing.
Because even if you think the testing was good, who's going to object to more rigorous standards?
No.
Just Big Pharma, right?
That's it.
But if you're just a reasonable Democrat and you're listening, you hear Newsom make a claim, you hear RFK Jr.
call him out as a liar, nope.
That's not my opinion, and why do you in the news keep saying so?
My opinion is they need to be tested better, and that there's a lot of correlation stuff that's scary enough we need to look into it.
But I don't know.
I mean, it looks like it could be causation.
But I can't say that for sure.
I'm saying it's scary and you should not ignore it.
He wins.
He wins.
And there's also a contrast problem that's really bad.
What is Newsom's biggest advantage as a politician?
Let's see, he's got name recognition and he's a tall, good-looking guy with good hair.
What's RFK Jr.
have?
All of that but better.
All of that.
All of that but better.
He's a slightly better version.
Newsom is the poor man's RFK Jr.
RFK Jr.
says things that sound to me genuine.
When he talks.
You know, who knows?
I mean, I'm not a mind reader, right?
So if there's any politician lying to me by doing a good job of it, I wouldn't know.
I'd only know what they say.
But when RFK Jr.
talks, he sounds like he's telling me the truth.
As he understands it.
Doesn't mean he's right about everything.
Just means it sounds like he's telling me the truth and means it.
When Newsom talks, he sounds like he's lying.
All the time.
He always sounds like he's lying.
Even when he's not.
Even when he's not.
He just has that slimy, politician-y, too-big-of-a-smile thing.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, this question for the ladies only.
If you were not in a relationship, which of those two men would you rather go to bed with?
Newsom or RFK Jr.?
You're not in a relationship.
Imagine you're single.
You have a shot.
Which one?
It's like solid RFK Jr., right?
Solid.
Now, you don't think that matters?
You don't think it matters that the ladies would choose RFK Jr.
as a sex partner over Newsom?
You don't think that matters?
It does.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, here's one for the men.
You get invited to have a beer.
You know, alcohol is poison, but let's just go with this.
You can have a beer, and it's either with RFK Jr.
or it's with Governor Newsom.
Who do you pick?
It's not even close.
One of them would be fascinating, and the other one would be Newsom.
Am I right?
One of them would be fascinating, like you would just hang on every story and everything, and the other would be just some foolish, greasy guy that's got good hair and he's tall.
He's got a tan.
There's just nothing there.
He's just an empty suit.
So the matchup between RFK Jr.
and Newsom is somewhat devastating for Newsom.
And then RFK Jr.
has the other advantage of not having governed, which is weird that that's an advantage, but he doesn't have a bad track record as a governor.
Newsom's gonna have to explain why you can't walk down the streets of San Francisco and why the border is open and all that stuff.
So I think that the matchup is really favorable to one.
So it really comes down to, I would disagree with Nate Silver on this.
He's, I think he, again I can't read his mind, but in context it looks like he's looking at the polling as the major indicator of what's gonna happen.
And it usually is.
I would agree that in most cases, the polling's your best way to determine what's going to happen.
But in this one weird case, because Biden's health is really the key variable in all of it, the polling doesn't pick up his health.
So that's sort of a blind spot, I think.
But we'll see.
Alright, Bud Light fired its woke marketing department so the first woman who was hired to market for a major beer brand is now the first one also fired.
So would you consider this a sign of peak wokeness and the wokeness is reaching its highest level and now there's going to be pushback?
I think so.
To me it looks like a signal of the end.
How about the fact that Larry Fink CEO of BlackRock and the biggest pusher of ESG has said that he doesn't like to use ESG now because it's embarrassing because DeSantis made it a dirty word.
It wasn't just DeSantis, right?
He didn't do it alone.
DeSantis would have never even said it except that his base, you know, is solidly on the same side.
So now we've got The biggest pusher of ESG saying, I don't even like to use the word, it's so demonized now.
You've got Bud Light firing its wokest marketer.
And this morning I see a tweet that controversial Republican Stephen Miller.
I don't know what his involvement is, but I guess he's promoting this nonprofit, American First Legal.
It's a hotline for American workers and families victimized by illegal racist equity policies.
So there's now a line you can call if you're white or Asian or male, I suppose.
And it looks like you've been discriminated at work for being white or Asian or male.
Now you can get some legal representation.
What do you think?
Of all for it.
Yeah, I could have used that at least twice in my career.
Had that existed, I would have had a number to call, and I would have gotten legal representation, and I'd still be working at a big bank.
So I'm glad I didn't have that legal representation, because I'd still be working at a big bank.
Yeah.
So, Now do you see a pattern developing yet?
So now you've got a number to call if you've been discriminated against for equity, and how do you like the fact that you can just do a tweet on this, you can just say it out loud, hey there's a lot of people being racist against white peoples, now we've got a phone number that white people can call, and Asian Americans, and I guess males, and straight people I guess, to say that you've been discriminated against.
Do you see the pattern yet?
Yeah, woke is definitely broke.
There'll be lots more woke.
So I'm not saying that you're seeing the end of it or anything like that.
It's going to be whack-a-mole forever.
But in terms of the peak, it is now discredited.
I'm going to call the top.
Calling the top.
Woke is discredited, and it's now actually embarrassing to be on that side.
It'll take a while for everybody to get the message, but it's actually embarrassing.
All right.
So that was good news.
I did a poll asking who's the bigger racist, me or Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, and Larry Fink won, you know, hands down.
He beat me.
And then I tweeted that I think he might be the biggest racist in the country.
Now, how would you measure who's the biggest racist?
Now, some people said, but what about David Duke?
And what about the Ku Klux Klan?
And I say, maybe internally, you know, maybe in their minds, they're bigger racists in the sense that they have more racist feelings.
But they don't have much effect, do they?
Not much effect.
So if you look at people who are racist and have an effect, I don't think you could possibly beat Larry Fink, because he's the main pusher of ESG, E being equity, equity being racist.
Would you argue?
Now somebody said Joanne Reed, but do you think she has as much impact on the real world?
Because I think people watch the news as just entertainment.
I don't know that they watch.
So he was actually forcing people to be racist all over the place.
So he was leveraging his power to make the entire industrial base racist.
I've never seen a bigger example of racism than that.
Well, in the current times.
Obviously, Hitler had a monopoly on things.
Then somebody said that Randy Weingarten would be a bigger racist.
Because she is the biggest protector of institutional or systemic racism.
So it's a little hard to measure the various racisms against each other.
But I think it's down to that.
I think Larry Fink or Randy Weingarten would be the biggest racists.
You could argue Biden.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Some people said Obama, but I'm not going to count anybody who's not currently influential.
And he's not really, in a sense.
All right.
So, what do you think of the fact that I can casually retweet that Larry Fink is the biggest racist in the country, and people simply think about it whether that's true?
That's all they did.
I don't know, is he the biggest?
All right, I see your argument, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if he's the biggest, because, you know, Randy Weingarten, but yeah, he would be in the top three for sure.
Just what do you think about the fact that I can just say that casually, he's the biggest racist in the country, and you all just go, yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.
It's peak wokeness.
Do you think there'll be any pushback tomorrow Like there'll be a big viral video about how I called Larry Fink a racist?
No.
No.
Because it's not shocking.
It's not even interesting.
It's just a fact.
And everybody can see it now.
All right.
Harvard is introducing an AI teacher.
So students will have some kind of a science teacher chatbot for at least one course.
The CS50 course.
And it's experimental, of course.
We'll see how it goes.
But isn't there an obvious question here?
May I ask the most obvious question?
Why would you pay to go to Harvard if you're going to be talking to a robot?
Is it like the special Harvard-trained robot?
Do you get to, are you going to network with a robot later?
Well, you know, I didn't meet any people, but I got this great friend who was a robot who was teaching me science.
Isn't Harvard eliminating itself?
If I were Harvard, the last thing I'd do is introduce a robot.
Because the robot has, you know, none of the qualities that Harvard does can be easily reproduced down to the community You know, community college level.
It just takes all of the value out of Harvard.
But I guess they don't have any choice.
If they don't do it, somebody's going to do it to them.
So they, you know, maybe they can build some kind of a hybrid situation that makes them look like they have some value.
But interesting that they would go first.
All right.
So there is, of course, more rumors and whistleblowing and speculation that the investigation into Hunter Biden was blocked.
So now there's a whistleblower that says that they were told to not pursue leads that would certainly go directly to the question of whether Joe Biden accepted any bribes or did any bad stuff.
And they were told not to.
And then there's a story that Weiss, the prosecutor, tried to get some prosecutions going in Washington D.C.
and also in L.A.
but in both locations they rebuffed him and they said, go away, we're not doing that.
But Merrick Garland The boss of this whole situation has told Congress that there was no obstacles, nobody blocked them, they had free reign to do what they wanted.
I don't know if those are necessarily opposites, because Garland is not in charge of, you know, the two other states that are set now.
But, collectively, collectively the picture is becoming very clear.
It looks like there's no question whatsoever That Hunter Biden was selling access to his father, taking huge amounts of money, and finding ways to not pay taxes on it.
It looks like it's all true.
It's like, it's exactly what you thought it was, times 10.
And I think we all know it now.
But we got totally cat-on-the-roofed, you know what I mean?
We got a soaked cat on the roof.
So the cat on the roof is like, oh, your cat's on the roof, trying to get her down.
Oh, the cat fell off the roof, and it's a little bit injured, but we took it to the vet, and we think it'll be fine.
Oh, the cat died.
So the Hunter thing started with, I don't know, the laptop probably, and then there were all these stories, and time goes by, and stories and time, and time and stories, until you get to this, and you realize that every worst assumption you had was true.
They were all true.
That the Bidens have been a criminal organization for decades.
They've been a criminal organization For decades.
And he's still president.
Nobody's talking about impeachment.
Well, I guess we talk about it, but it's not serious.
And we're just going on like this is a normal day.
It's just a Wednesday that we found out the president is actually a crime syndicate kind of a guy.
All right.
Which also makes sense why the Democrats try so hard to paint Trump as what the Bidens are.
As we've learned, Tucker taught us this, the Democrats always accuse you of whatever they're doing, and if you look at all the accusations against Trump, they do seem to mirror all the things that Trump is not doing, or did some small way, and Biden is doing a lot.
So, that's for sure.
All right, how many of you, let's talk about the increase in the trans community.
So, I saw Vivek tweet this, 5% of American adults under 30 identify as trans.
Five years ago, it was 0.6%.
So there's a huge percentage increase in number of people identifying as trans under 30.
Now his conclusion is somewhat obviously a mental illness driven phenomenon.
How many of you would agree with the assessment that the increase in trans is primarily a mental health contagion?
How many would accept that as the most likely explanation?
Alright, so that was my opinion as well.
And I was quite confident in my opinion, I have to say.
Quite confident in my opinion that there was no other reasonable explanation other than it was just getting in people's minds and they were talking themselves into it because there was so much in the press about it.
However, how do you rule out the following two hypotheses?
Because I'm gonna fuck you up a little bit here and that's why you watch, I know.
I want to take something that you're pretty sure about and leave you with some doubt.
All right?
So I think it was... Was it Jordan Peterson?
Somebody smart said the following thing.
There's so much more trans happening in California than there is in Ohio.
How do you explain that?
Is it because... How do you explain that?
Other than it's a mental phenomenon.
Because you know that the mentality in California is different than the mentality in Ohio, right?
So isn't it obvious that if California has lots of trans and Ohio doesn't have as many, it's kind of obvious that California is more, let's say, mentally promoting of it.
So that would support the idea that it's a mental contagion.
Would you agree?
That the high rate in California relative to Ohio supports the hypothesis that it's a mental contagion.
Agree?
Alright.
There are two hypotheses that I don't think you can rule out.
Number one is that it's just safer to come out in California.
Or that if you suspected you might later come out, you might move to California instead of Ohio.
What's wrong with that hypothesis?
Would that explain the difference between California and Ohio?
In California, you're completely safe to come out.
In Ohio, maybe not so much.
Maybe not so much, right?
So, are you so sure it's a mental contagion?
When it just coincidentally, coincidentally, just this is a total coincidence, right?
That the one place it's the safest in the world to come out in any way you want to come out is California.
And that we have the most people coming out.
Just a coincidence?
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
How about the idea that there might be something in our environment that's changing our sexuality?
You know, the gay frogs theory?
Do you think there's anything in our environment that's changing our sexuality, even to the point of sexual identification?
Do you think?
Well, have you heard that the burn levels in men have gone down for like 40 years in a row?
What happens when you're no longer chemically male?
Thank you.
I mean, what makes you feel male is testosterone, I think.
Doesn't it?
You know, there's one thing about how you look and how you're born and, you know, maybe your natural biological instincts, but on top of that, If your testosterone is high, you're going to look and act and feel kind of male.
Because you're going to watch yourself picking fights and doing dangerous shit.
Like all the male stuff.
But if your testosterone was low, for let's say environmental reasons, something in the water for example, wouldn't you feel less male?
And might you reasonably be expected to say, I don't know, I'm not even sure I'm totally male.
I don't feel it.
I'm not doing what the other males are doing.
They seem to be throwing shop puts and climbing walls and stuff.
I'm not doing that.
I like to knit.
So maybe I'm a woman.
So, there are three hypotheses, and I think that they're all strong in their own way.
When I see a group of four friends, and all four of them are questioning their sexuality, and they're 13 years old, which is a real thing.
Somebody I know has that situation.
Do you really think that the four of them, like the four friends, just coincidentally, they're all non-binary and maybe trans?
Really?
Doesn't that seem completely psychological?
To me it does.
But here's a nuance I'm going to throw in there.
I think you could easily figure out that mental health would cause somebody to be maybe a little non-binary or not so sure if they're gay or not.
I could see mental contagion doing that fairly easily.
That would be actually normal, not surprising at all.
Because you could definitely change people's, let's say, non-solid sexual preferences with persuasion.
You could turn somebody who maybe had a little inclination to be bi into somebody who lived the life of a gay man.
That would be completely normal.
You could do that.
I don't think anybody who is a hypnotist would disagree with what I just said.
You know, somebody's leaning in a direction, you could push them a little further.
Very normal.
So you could do that with a mental contagion.
I don't know that you could make somebody fully trans with mental contagion alone.
Now, when I say anybody, well, probably somebody, right?
I just don't think it would be the, I think that, and this is just speculation because I'm not trans, right?
So I want to be, I would like to have appropriate Respectful humility.
I don't know what it's like to be trans.
So let's all agree that I can't know what it's like.
But my speculation is just living in the real world and being a person who tries to pay attention.
That probably, if you're super trans, like you were born that way and it's like a real thing, your dysmorphia, the experts would say, okay, this is the real thing.
This has nothing to do with mental persuasion.
This person is trans.
Do you think they don't know it?
It seems to me that in those cases, persuasion is probably not the key variable.
So I'm leaning toward a theory that it's three different things.
I think the environment is one of the variables.
I think whatever is dropping testosterone is clearly messing with sexual chemistry.
If you know that the environment is messing with your sexual chemistry, at least for sperm, you don't think it would affect the others?
That it would be something that only affects sperm?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Can't rule it out.
But it seems to me that something that's taken your sperm down is probably fucking you up pretty good.
Like in a variety of ways that just are not obvious.
And one of them, the most obvious would be your sexual identity.
I would think that that would be assaulted by any change in your sexual chemistry.
So I'm going to say all three things are probably in play.
I think there's a social contagion that affects some.
I think it's safer to come out in California, so you should expect more people to come out in California than Wyoming.
I would expect that.
And, you know, some of it is environmental, I think.
It's probably in the water or the air or the food or something.
All right.
So I would just like to leave you with a little bit of humility and doubt that you know why anybody is coming out as trans or non-binary or anything.
You really don't.
We just don't know.
But certainly all of those things are worth a close look.
And I don't think Vivek is wrong.
He may be overstating a little bit.
But not wrong.
There's a social contagion element to it for sure.
All right.
I was re-watching Putin's recent speech the other day about, you know, the alleged insurrection or whatever it was, and he looked like a deepfake.
Did anybody else have that experience?
That his video, his speech, he looked like a deepfake.
Now, I don't think he was.
But the difference between how he looked in his real world, because he was pale, and concerned, and very tense, and he wasn't acting like the relaxed, happy Putin that you could sometimes see.
And when he takes away his happy layer, and he's got his tense, serious layer, the difference between his tense, serious presentation, and a deep fake, It's just almost nothing.
Now, if he had been, say, jocular and joking around and, you know, a good laugh and ha-ha-ha and shaking hands and stuff, that would be really hard to deepfake.
Simply because there's more action, you'd see more things to go wrong.
But when he's just standing there looking at you, ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba, I looked at it again, and I said, if that had been a deep fake, I wouldn't know.
Again, I don't think it was.
But if it had been, I don't think you could tell.
I think we're already at the point where that could have been faked, and you wouldn't know it.
And we're only 5% away from there at most, so that means that maybe the government can already do it.
Let's talk about Prigozhin.
You know that the reporting is that his plane took off from Russia and landed in Belarus, and Lukashenko, the head of Belarus, is saying, oh yeah, yep, he's here.
We got him.
Yep, yep, yep, he's totally here.
Have you seen a picture of him?
Do you see that picture of him getting off the plane?
Confirming he's there?
Because you know Lukashenko wants to confirm he's there.
Because he would like you to know that he's an important deal maker, and that he's the one who negotiated it, and it worked out, and here's my success.
Here he is.
Ba-boom.
I told you.
I told you I would solve this problem.
I'm the one who solved what could have been a mutiny against Putin.
I'm the one that worked that out.
Here he is.
Here he is.
Here's my buddy.
Where's that picture?
Kind of missing, isn't it?
Kind of the most obvious picture you would expect.
He's there.
Lukashenko knows where he is.
And they're friends.
They're friends.
They've been friends for years.
You don't think he caught up with him when he landed and said, hey, how you doing?
Here's the deal, and here's where you can stay, and here's what you can't do.
Yeah, but no pictures of his good friend.
Who is probably hanging out with him right now.
Couldn't just take out his phone, snap a little selfie for us, so we'd be sure he's there?
Alright, here's my fun speculation.
First of all, he might be there.
So if tomorrow you see the picture, don't act like I'm surprised.
I wouldn't be too surprised if he's there.
But I think a slightly bigger chance is the following.
He's already in custody.
That's what I think.
I think Putin already has him.
And he's probably in Russia.
I think you'll never see a picture of him.
Because if Putin just killed him in some way that everybody knew that Putin killed him, he would have to deal with the Wagner Group itself.
Because the Wagner Group itself probably has some pretty loyal people in there.
And they're dangerous people.
As it is, I saw Kash Patel saying that Putin wins because he gets this whole new army to put into use any way he wants, but I didn't understand that comment because he already had that.
Putin could make the Wagner force do anything he wanted.
It was under his control.
They just pretend they were independent, but not really, not even a little bit.
So I don't understand the argument That Putin suddenly got a bunch of new soldiers.
They were already his soldiers.
He could make them do anything he wanted.
So I don't get that.
But I do think that the Wagner Group might be dangerous to Putin.
And the very best thing he could do is say, you know what?
Your dog didn't die.
No, no, your dog didn't die.
No, no, he went to live in a farm where there are beautiful fields and other happy dogs.
Yeah, that's where he is.
Yeah, you live forever on the farm.
So my guess is that Putin had the airplane, he had the private airplane fly, so that everybody would assume he was on the private airplane.
There would never be any pictures.
You would never know if he made it to Belarus.
Maybe someday you'd find out he didn't.
But at the moment, it's a way to calm everything down, make it look like he's in control.
But probably he's in Russia and having a bad day.
That's my guess.
I don't know about Dad.
Because they might be interrogating him to find out who's working with him.
Now there's also indication, and I believe he heard it from me first, that he would never have tried to march on Moscow with his, you know, tiny force that had no chance of really taking over the city, unless he assumed that he had high-ranking people who were going to flip.
And the reporting today is he had high-level people he expected to flip.
And there were people who knew about it for a long time, including Senior Russian General Serovkin.
So he allegedly had advanced knowledge.
But if he had advanced knowledge, did he tell everybody?
Did he tell Putin with his advanced knowledge?
Because there's some indication he might be in trouble.
Right?
So it's not clear that Putin's happy with that guy.
So it might be that he's the one they expected to flip and then he didn't flip.
Now remember I told you that if I were the CIA and I were trying to help Ukraine, I would try to make Purgosian and Putin mad at each other so that they would do exactly what they did.
And so that's what it looks to me.
It looks like the intelligence agencies got them all ginned up to fight each other.
But then I further said that if I were the CIA, I would tell Pergrosian that he had allies that were going to flip, but don't contact them because you'll get caught.
If you contact them, the communication will be intercepted.
But trust us, we've talked to them.
They're going to flip.
And then he marches and finds out that was all a lie and there's nobody flipping.
And then he's got to run back.
So that's what it looked like to me.
It looked like they expected flipping.
Did not get any flipping and then the secondary question would be, is it because somebody told them there would be flipping but they lied?
Or did the flippers actually plan to flip and change their minds?
Don't know.
But also it's likely that the families of the Wagner Group were threatened and that's the only reason they turned back.
I saw a YouTube documentary on the Wagner Group's history and purpose.
Do you know what the history of the Wagner Group is?
It was way more interesting than I thought.
So apparently it started with Russia taking over Crimea, and they wanted some force there that they could say was a local force, but really wasn't.
So that's what Wagner was.
They were basically military people who were pretending not to be run by Russia.
Eventually it formed into a group and they've done a bunch of criminal syndication things.
So basically, as some people say, Russia is like the mafia.
And the Wagner Group was the hit man.
The people would go out and make the money.
They were the earners.
So the way they would earn is the Wagner Group would go to, let's say, Syria, and say, the ISIS and the bad guys are going to take over your oil wells.
But we'll protect your oil wells, or even get them back from ISIS, if we can keep 25% of the revenues of the oil well forever.
And by we, it's Russia.
And then Syria says, well, we've got no choice because we can't get them back ourselves and nobody else is helping us.
So they hire him.
Now you've got this Russian military that's starting to get important.
It's got a place in Syria.
So Syria's a little bit afraid of Russia because they've got a military that's working with them.
But will they always work with them?
But the most clever play was in an African country.
I can't remember.
One of the African countries you never talk about, I forget.
But they have some natural resources.
And so the Wagner people go in and they say, hey, you've got lots of enemies and, you know, you've got a little revolution brewing.
We can protect you from your enemies.
Now it wasn't Chad.
We can protect you from your enemies so you'll be safe.
And all we want is a little cut of your diamond mines or your mining operations.
So they basically sell security the way the Mafia does.
But now let's say you're an African leader and you've accepted help from the Wagner Group.
And the Wagner Group is by far the strongest military in your country.
Stronger than your own military because you don't have much of a military.
And then you start working with them and they're inserted in the government.
How long does it take before Wagner basically owns the country?
Not long.
So Russia has this business model where they can go into a struggling country that has resources, they can pretend to be the saviors of the leaders, but really they're just controlling the leaders and taking 25% of their money home forever.
So it's basically a robbery, extortion, you know, kind of situation.
Blackmail, whatever you want to call it.
But it's always presented as helping the leader.
But once they get in there, they're the powerful force.
So the leader doesn't have good choices, so they take the least bad one.
All right.
In case you didn't know that, it's a very deliberate criminal enterprise.
I saw this interesting tweet from the Prince of Fakes, or the Prince of Deep Fakes.
And some of you know him.
I'm not going to say more than that.
And he was tweeting about a story that said, now this is an allegation which I believe is ridiculous.
So I don't believe this allegation.
I know you do.
So you don't have to tell me.
That I'm being gullible and stupid and Scott, Scott, Scott, why don't you believe this?
It's obviously true.
And the rumor is that Bill Gates let out some mosquitoes to create malaria that had already largely been handled and is causing a malaria outbreak because he coincidentally is investing in some company that has a treatment for malaria.
Now, I do not believe there's any chance whatsoever that Bill Gates intentionally released mosquitoes to intentionally create malaria so that he can make money with his company that did something for malaria.
Now, I know you do.
I know you do.
I know some of you do.
And I'm not going to talk about that today.
I'm just going to talk about the comment made by Prince of Deepest Fakes.
And he said this, I'm not sure how people who believe things like this, you know the Bill Gates malaria thing, I'm not sure how people believe things like this aren't out there taking vigilante justice into their own hands.
The lack of assassinations in the world makes me believe everyone is just LARPing.
In other words, just pretending to be in character.
There are conspiracy theories regarding the elites.
If this were true, it would be an evil beyond anything.
Meaning that if Gates had actually allowed mosquitoes out to create malaria, it would be evil beyond anything.
What does it say about a believer that the most they do in response is tweet?
Exactly.
So reality and fantasy have merged, so that when we get it on social media, we're playing it like it's a game, but a fictional game.
So you can say anything to anybody, you know, I could maybe trade a tweet with the richest man in the world.
I mean, it doesn't seem real.
Does it?
It doesn't seem real.
So when you're on social media, I believe that people adopt personas, and then they play the character.
And that if the character would say, oh, Bill Gates is releasing malaria mosquitoes, if that's what the character would say, then they say that.
But it's not like they actually believe it, like in the way that you believe things in your actual physical so-called reality.
And his point is fair.
If you actually believed, if you really believed that Bill Gates had just released viruses to create malaria, you should take your Second Amendment rights and go do something about it.
You should kill Hiller.
But number one, I'm sure he never did that.
I'm sure of it.
If I'm wrong, if I'm wrong, I'll tell you I'm wrong.
But my confidence is pretty high that he did not do that.
And the reason he didn't do that is follow the money.
Follow the money is very predictable.
And if you believe that Bill Gates would think it was a good risk reward to release malaria in some way that could be determined that he did it just to make money on a new smaller company that would add, what, $1 billion to his $200 billion?
So you think he's really going to take a chance of being in jail forever to make one more billion?
Do you really believe that?
Because that's not how money works.
If you're going to follow the money, you'd say he wouldn't do it.
Follow the money says he doesn't do it.
Because it wouldn't make sense as an investment.
It wouldn't make sense as an investment.
So he's not going to do something that's going to put him in jail where he can't make money.
He's going to, at the very least, stay on a jail.
So he's not going to do that.
So if you believe he is, I believe that you don't really believe it.
I believe that you believe it like a character, You don't believe it like an actual human being who lives in the world.
What do you think?
I'll just put that out there and you can wrestle with it as you as you like.
Did I miss any stories for today?
That concludes my prepared remarks.
Oh, there's a malaria vaccination?
Yeah, probably.
Can you explain Sam Beckman Freed's decision making?
Well, once Sam Beckman Freed got away with some stuff, I believe he became blind to what he could get away with.
So I think the Sam Bankman Freed story is kind of a slippery slope thing, where they sort of slid into some sketchy things and they couldn't back out.
And so they just did more sketchy things, maybe talking themselves into it wasn't so sketchy after all.
So I think there was sort of a mental thing that happened there.
But you could very easily imagine that they were following the money.
I think that was the nature of your question.
He was following the money because everything he did brought him more money.
But to your point, he was not good at risk reward.
Right?
He was a young guy and apparently a terrible business person.
Bill Gates is a very experienced business person, already has his billions, already has his reputation such that it is.
He doesn't need that.
So for him, he would look at the risk reward, as he does for everything, and he would really say, OK, this is not a good risk reward.
It's not a good investment.
Sam Bagman Freed clearly was not good at risk assessment.
Would you agree?
He wasn't good at it.
So you can try to be pursuing your best financial interest, but if you're not good at it, you still might make a mistake.
Okay.
Oh, the Epstein.
Yeah, there's more Epstein stuff, but I'm just bored by it.
He's a planted stooge.
What?
All right.
You can block report.
It's always above the law.
Do you have a mosquito problem?
Just looking at your comments, see if anything I missed.
