Episode 2244 Scott Adams: Mutually Assured Destruction Activated. 2024 Losing Side Going To Jail
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Content:
Politics, Marriage Hesitancy, Marriage Counseling, Ban TikTok, Biden Bribery, Jesse Watters, MSNBC Bias, President Trump, Adam Schiff, Bidenomics Unhappiness, AG Letitia James, Trump Loan Allegations, Looting Retail Stores, FTC Amazon Allegations, Jeff Bezos, Washington Post Fake News, Rare Earth Materials, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Gender Ideology, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams because of the coffee and because of me.
And if you'd like to take this experience to levels that could only be described as platinum, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank of gels, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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Enjoy me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine, end of the day thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it's gonna happen now.
Cocoa.
We've got a health tip.
Somebody's coming in with a health tip.
John Smith says, penis health tip.
Eat garlic and apple cider vinegar and jerk off with cocoa oil.
Okay, you're probably not a doctor.
But I was pretty excited about all that good advice there until I got to the end.
But that's why I do this show, so that you can get good political and health advice, like that one.
You know, it's worth a try, and I'm not going to poo-poo it without trying it.
Obviously I'll try it, but... Anyway.
So there's a book, I think it's called The Two-Parent Privilege, getting everybody yakking, the same way that they yak when Larry Elder says, families are the answer.
And the idea is that people with two parents have all the advantages, and the kids have the advantages, and so it's good to have two parents.
But what kind of criticism could you ever have about that?
Who can disagree?
Does anybody disagree that having two parents is better than one?
No.
Here's the hard part.
How do you go back?
How do you go from where we are to there?
There's no path.
So it's one of those, unfortunately there are a number of things on the right that people want but they have no way to get there so it doesn't matter how much you want it.
Might as well stop talking about it.
So I looked on CNN to see a story about this.
Jill Filopovich had an opinion about this two-parent privilege problem and notes that most people want to get married.
Do you know why most people don't get married even though they want to get married?
According to Jill Filipovich in CNN, what is the reason that people are not getting married?
Now remember, it's CNN.
It's CNN.
So CNN had to be okay with the publication of the opinion.
So that's your hint.
What is the reason that there's not as much marriage?
Climate change was an excellent guess.
I think that's actually part of it, but it's not what's in this article.
Racism?
No.
No, but that's always a good guess.
Racism was an excellent guess, but not what I'm looking for.
No, the answer is because men suck.
Yeah.
The reason that men and women are getting married less, and I think this is obvious, according to Jill, it's, you know, you've got half of the situation is women.
And half is men.
You know, not counting the LGBTQ situation on top of it.
But of the men and the women, Jill has narrowed it down to the men.
So the men are worthless, and they don't have good jobs, and they're not worth marrying.
So logically, the women, who are complete and whole, and wonderful in every way, they're not going to pick the men.
Because the men used to be good, but now they're pieces of shit.
So, can't go back.
All right.
So that's the problem, it's the men.
Do you know who has an equally dumb opinion as the problem is the men?
Conservatives.
It is equally dumb to say that everything's fine, we should just get together and pair off.
And maybe if you tweak the tax code a little bit, None of that's gonna work.
Does anybody think that we can just go back to people wanting to be married?
some of the financial advantages of being single, and then people will want to get married.
None of that's going to work.
Does anybody think that we can just go back to people wanting to be married?
We're way past that.
No, we're way past it.
We might actually, because the pendulum always swings, so we might get to a place where people want to be married, but it won't be because we socially engineered it.
It won't be because you tweaked the tax code.
That's not going to make people get married.
People have changed.
The problem is not marriage.
The problem is people.
But it's not the men.
It's both.
Obviously, we are no longer valuable to each other.
Why does a woman need a man if she can get a job?
Right?
Why does a man need a woman if he can date multiple people?
You know, and there are a lot of people who say it's not worth it to have a kid.
They might be wrong, but it's a growing thought.
So the problem here is that nobody has anything that's even approximately a system or a plan or a scheme or a strategy to get us to where people want to be married and that works out.
Nobody has any idea.
So every day that we spend talking about, ooh, traditional marriage, it's probably just a waste of time.
And it's not because I don't think being married would be better.
I think all the statistics show that.
It's just you can't take the people who are not marriage material and then pair them off and expect you to get a good result.
The people who are married, happily, are really special cases.
They either got married really early or there's something about the two of them that's special.
But usually it's getting married early that's a big part of that.
So I think the whole marriage situation, we don't have the slightest grasp, not even the slightest grasp on how you would change that.
So I think here's what we need.
I think we need two tracks.
I think there needs to be a way to thrive without being married, which we don't have.
And there needs to be a way to thrive when you are married, which I would argue we don't have for most people.
Yeah, it works great for some people, but for most people, neither situation works.
So how could you tweak both situations so that you could have happy single people, maybe with kids, and happy married people with kids?
And I feel like the single people with kids problem is going to have to do something with some kind of tribal arrangement.
Where, you know, a dozen... I'll just toss out an idea.
Could be something like, there's an app that allows people who are single, and maybe want to have children or have children, who want to match up, so that there's somebody there to watch your kids.
If you're a single parent with two kids, your biggest problem is watching the kids.
If you are 12 single people, And you live, you know, walking distance from each other, then you would always have somebody who's home.
There's always somebody who could watch the kid.
There's always somebody who could watch your dog.
There's always somebody who could do an errand because you're sick that day.
Something like that.
So you could probably create mutual assistant groups that also have children involved that would work maybe not as good as marriage.
You know, if you'd like to maintain that marriage is the ultimate, I'll give you that.
It's just that not everybody is going to work in that situation.
So just create an entirely different model for the single people that also works.
Because they're not just going to get married.
So it's wishful thinking.
That they're just gonna go get married.
There's a lot in politics which is just wishful thinking with no structure, idea, plan, strategy to get to that magic place.
Alright, it's sort of like abortion.
Conservatives would like people to just stop doing it.
It's not gonna happen.
So...
You're going to have to deal with the fact that it's just not going to happen.
But I think a lot of it is just wishful thinking.
Well, what if it did happen?
But it's not.
But what if it did?
But it's not.
Feels like a lot of that going on.
All right.
So I saw a provocative comment here that I'm going to blame on somebody else.
One of the good things about what I do here is if I don't want to say something under my own opinion, I'll just find somebody else who said it and quote it to you.
Look at this guy.
Look at this guy.
I wouldn't say this.
So here's something I would never say.
I would never say this, but over on the X platform, Doc Anarchy, Doc Anarchy said it, who, by the way, publishes Renegade Health Magazine.
If you want some renegade health-related stuff from a doctor, check that out.
Anyway, Doc Anarchy said in the next post, I used to be a strong advocate for talk therapy.
You know, the kind where you go to a therapist and you talk.
And then he goes on, the profession has become overrun with college-educated women and effeminate men who act like college-educated women.
This is no longer a viable option for most people.
You are the enemy the second you walk through those doors.
That was my exact experience.
In my first marriage, we tried some marriage therapy, and I was pretty sure she treated me as the enemy when I walked in the door.
And everything that happened after that felt like I was the enemy.
And I didn't know where it came from.
Like, I couldn't understand it.
And I really couldn't understand it until this moment.
Until I read Doc Anarchy's post.
Oh!
Oh!
It's an industry of people who have been trained that I'm the problem.
And I imagined that I would walk in there and get something like therapy.
No.
I walked in there and I got blamed.
That's what happened.
I got blamed.
Completely.
And the ground rules were that my wife makes no problems and had no problems and did everything right.
But we need to work on me.
And that's before we even talked about what anything was.
It was just, that was like the basic idea when you walk in the door.
Yeah, no, talk therapy is completely broken.
All right, here's a little trend to frighten you.
You know how people wanted to ban TikTok in the United States?
I'm one of those.
But TikTok argued, hey, TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance.
Sure, ByteDance is a Chinese company, and we all know that the Chinese government has complete control over Chinese companies.
But they argued, no, no, no, we're running TikTok as a separate entity.
They make their own decisions, and they're not part of the Chinese machine, even though the parent company is.
So that worked until recently.
The reports are that there's a string of high-level executives from the parent company that have gone into the subsidiary and taken the top jobs.
So everything they said about these two entities operating separately is complete bullshit, because the people from the corporate jobs just took over for the people in the subsidiary.
That's all you need to know.
Of course China has complete control of TikTok, and of course they don't operate autonomously.
That would be ridiculous.
Now what's interesting is that this story was in the Wall Street Journal.
That's owned by the Murdochs.
I guess it's the father or son.
I'm not sure who owns it now.
I guess the son is running it, but the dad still owns it.
So while one Murdoch property was basically calling out TikTok, Fox News, which is also owned by Murdoch, is now doing advertising for TikTok.
So TikTok is a sponsor for one of the Murdoch properties, and the other one is calling it out for its connections to China.
It's a weird world.
If you're a billionaire, you end up on both sides of every issue.
Because you own something that affects both sides.
The Wall Street Journal just wants to tell the news.
Just tell them the news.
And this is the news.
And Fox News needs advertisers or their model doesn't work.
So they're, even though they have the same ownership, they're sort of on different sides of this, in a way.
I won't say sides, but you know what I mean.
There's an awkward situation.
All right.
So in my opinion, the bribery allegations about the Biden family, At least the Chinese part are now so well documented, there's no question about it, that he was literally bribed during his vice president years and maybe on both sides.
And we now have the money flows.
We know that it flowed to the address.
Hunter used his father's address.
We know that Biden talked to the person who sent money.
We know that he wrote a We basically have the whole story.
Total.
Complete.
Complete information.
There's no doubt about it.
Now, how in the world do we have this situation and he's still president?
threatening the guy, give us the money.
We basically have the whole story.
Total, complete, complete information.
There's no doubt about it.
Now, how in the world do we have this situation and he's still president?
How in the world?
Now, could it be that all of this information is fake?
Do you think that Jesse Watters is reporting on it in great detail?
By the way, I think Jesse Watters does the best job on all of the complicated legal stories.
Have you noticed that?
If you watch Jesse Watters, he'll give you the clearest, cleanest Brief summary of what's going on and these technical things until you listen to me go, oh, I get it now.
And sometimes it's the first time I understand the story is when he lays it out in context.
He's really, really good at that.
And I would also say that Jesse Waters is, he's got the Joe Rogan brilliance.
And what I mean by that is that they both pretend they're less smart than they are.
Right?
So Joe Rogan's the everyman, but it sort of hides the fact that he is smarter than most of the people who watch his show.
Right?
He's unusually smart.
And he just, it's a little less obvious because he's, you know, man's man and he's got a persona.
Jesse Waters plays the jester sometimes, mocking himself and his own opinions and stuff.
But then when he delivers, he delivers the cleanest analyses that anybody's doing in the news.
So it's quite impressive.
So shout out to Jesse.
But he's the one I would look to if you're looking to understand the whole China bribery thing, rather than me trying to explain all the ins and outs of it.
I'm just going to summarize it by saying, it's a fact.
I don't think there's any question whatsoever that China was, or at least one Chinese company, was bribing the Bidens.
And Ukraine looks close to a fact.
I mean, it seems completely obvious, and now that we know the whole Bob Menendez story, the person who took the job that Biden used to have, you know, the foreign intelligence chair, and now we know that he was probably, allegedly, taking bribes.
So it seems that everything, 100% of everything we've learned is confirming that Biden is crooked and has been taking bribes for a long time.
And we just go on, we wake up today like nothing happened.
Nothing's gonna happen on this, am I right?
Nothing.
Unless, unless you got a Republican president, and then I think he would go to jail.
And I also think that if Biden were to win, you know, if he stayed alive long enough to win, I think he'll put Trump in jail.
Not directly, but he won't pardon him and he'll let his hench people, who are the prosecutors, just put him in jail.
So, mutually assured destruction has been activated.
We're in a situation where you could pretty much predict that the losers go into jail this time.
The loser's going to jail.
That's where we are.
And not just the loser.
Trump has actually threatened that he would investigate NBC and MSNBC for crimes.
He thinks they should go to jail too.
And I agree.
I agree.
But when I watch MSNBC, I feel like it's a crime being committed, because it doesn't look like they're really even trying to show the news.
It looks like they're a government operation, which I'm sure would be Trump's accusation.
It looks like it's a wing of the government that's used to clamp down on free speech and on opposition.
So, should it be illegal?
I don't know.
I don't know if any crime has been committed.
If no crime has been committed, then of course I don't want anybody to go to jail.
But to me, the whole MSNBC situation looks criminal.
It doesn't look like a different opinion, it just looks criminal.
Like it's a plot or a scheme to affect power in the United States, regardless of the facts.
Now you could say, but Scott, but Scott, Fox News is just like that.
But I would say Fox News is more like CNN.
An obvious bias which they don't try to hide.
MSNBC is a completely different animal.
They're not just biased.
There's something different going on.
And I think Trump's instinct about that is right.
There's something very crooked about that situation.
I don't know exactly what it is.
So I think we're at a point where if you're going to threaten to put Trump in jail, it is perfectly appropriate that he threatens that if he wins, everybody's going to jail.
Like all of his enemies.
I think we're at that point where I could support that totally.
I completely support it.
I wouldn't have said this maybe even a month ago, but we've reached the point where it's obvious they're going to take Trump down for what looks like politically motivated stuff.
If you're going to take the leader, probable, probable leader of one side of the country down for bullshit, you better get it done.
Because if he wins, He has all moral authority to take every one of his enemies down and put them in jail.
Because the January 6th thing showed that you can jail people for political reasons.
You know, you can make up a reason.
You can always make up a crime.
But the motivation is political.
So yeah, mutually assured destruction.
If you are a leading Democrat, you should be worried.
Actual jail is a possibility now.
And I would go deep.
I would cut deep.
I mean, I would indict just a shit ton of people if I were the winning Republican guy.
I'd take out... I don't know.
You can make your own list, but do you think Schiff should be walking free?
Adam Schiff?
I think he should be in jail for lying to the country about what was in the skiff.
To me, that seemed traitorous.
I don't know.
Is there any law that was broken?
Well, if no law was broken, then no.
He should not go to jail.
But I'd look into it.
He was certainly trying to put another person in jail.
So I think the controls are off.
The guardrails are off.
It's win or jail.
Win or jail.
That's our new situation.
And I'm down for it.
All right.
What else is going on here?
So you know the story about how the Russians, maybe they didn't collude exactly with Trump.
Maybe it wasn't exactly collusion, but that they interfered.
So once it was shown that Trump didn't collude, then Hillary Clinton and her hench monkeys decided that, well, but they interfered on his behalf.
That's why it was a crooked election.
Russia interfered.
And one of the biggest interferences was that the Russians allegedly hacked the DNC.
And that caused some embarrassment, and maybe that might have been one of the factors that changed the election.
Now, when you first heard that our government said they caught Russian hackers hacking the DNC, did you believe it?
Did you believe that our people could, first of all, know who hacked, and second of all, they would tell you, and that it's honest?
There was no part of me that believed that story from day one.
I never believed that they could identify the hackers, or if they did, that they would tell us the truth.
And now, there's some indication in Racket News, I think Matt Taibbi has something to do with that on Substack.
I think it's a Matt Taibbi thing.
That the Georgia Tech team that led the researchers into a different hoax, there was the alpha server story.
I don't remember a lot about that, but it was some story that turned out to be false.
It was just a hoax.
Well, it wasn't a hoax.
It was an intentional fake story.
And some of the people behind that intentional fake story about the Alpha servers and, you know, some bad financial behavior between Trump and some European entity, but it wasn't true.
However, the same people who pushed that, so we know they're criminal, are the ones who are the first to say, hey, it looks like Russia.
It was Russia that hacked this DNC.
Now, is it a coincidence that known liars, or hoaxers, are the same ones behind the least credible piece of information ever?
You can discount any credibility.
It might be true, by the way, but there's no credibility to the story that the Russians hacked the DNC.
They might have done it.
I'm not saying they didn't do it.
I'm saying there's no credible information because you, as the public, don't know where stuff comes from.
You know, the news might tell you, hey, blah, blah, blah, but you don't know where that came from.
If it came from this set of cats, It's bullshit.
But we didn't know that until today.
It took until today for me to find out that the first people who reported it, and then it became a thing, that it was the Russians that hacked it, they had no credibility at all.
None.
So I don't think that the Russians necessarily did it, but we can tell there's something sketchy about the whole thing.
All right.
In a recent poll, NBC poll, 72% of voters said they're dissatisfied with the Biden economy and Biden economics, Bidenomics.
72%.
Would a 72% of people not happy about the economy suggest that the incumbent is not going to win?
Yes.
Yes.
It suggests that the incumbent, Biden, couldn't possibly win re-election because it's the economy, stupid, right?
And the economy is bad.
According to 72% of people, it's not where it should be.
So under those conditions, what would you do?
What would you do?
If you were Biden and you were so deep in a hole and the person that you're going against is 10 points up in a recent poll.
I don't know what you do.
Oh, let's let's switch to the next story that has nothing to do with this story.
Trump's in deep legal trouble.
So it looks like the state of New York and Letitia James is pushing their case.
That, and I guess the judges agreed, that Trump wildly exaggerated the values of his properties, which allowed him to get good loan rates and maybe, I don't know, it couldn't have helped his insurance, but somehow he lied on these things and exaggerated and it's all illegal.
So, what do you think of that?
When you first hear it, and you haven't heard the other side, sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
When you've only heard the accusations, and you haven't heard the response, yeah, that's bad.
Pretty bad.
It looks like he exaggerated the size of things, or the value of things, like maybe by billions.
Maybe by billions of dollars.
Terrible.
Really bad.
And with that kind of criminal behavior, I think we can feel bad for the victims.
Don't you?
I mean, let's give a little bit of thought to the victims of the crimes.
So let's talk about the victims.
Let's see, there were the banks that testified they made a lot of money off him.
And the loans were all paid.
The bankers had no problems.
The bankers are not complaining.
Well that's okay, but what about the insurance?
Well he paid his insurance premiums, and if he said his property was more valuable than it was, that would suggest he paid more insurance than he needed to.
So maybe the insurance companies made extra money, because they were insuring things that could be replaced at much lower cost than he estimated it was its value.
So, let's see, so the victims made money, or in another case they made money, and they were perfectly happy with the arrangement.
Okay.
And now I'd like to add some context.
I've often told you that two of the best skills you could combine to understand the world are, number one, economics, If you know how business works.
And number two, persuasion.
Hypnosis, persuasion.
Those two things give you this amazing visibility.
Because follow the money usually explains everything, right?
So if you understand economics, you know how to follow the money.
And if you understand persuasion, you know what people are thinking, and that's pretty predictive as well.
Now, I have both of those backgrounds.
And one of my backgrounds includes working for a bank.
I have a degree in economics, an MBA, and also an MBA.
And I worked for a big bank as a lender.
I made business loans, or I approved them.
You know, the branch would initiate them.
They'd send it into headquarters, and I was one of a small group of people who would look at them, mostly for doctors and lawyers and doctors and dentists, mostly.
And there were small business loans.
Now, Do you imagine that I did this?
Just try to imagine me getting the loan application.
Oh, it's a loan application.
All right, what does the person who wants to borrow the money say their house is worth?
Okay, they say it's worth $2 million.
Okay, I will totally believe that.
And now I will base my approval or disapproval on what the person who's asking for the loan says they're worth.
Do you think that's ever happened in the history of the world?
No.
There's no banker who believes people who apply for things.
Do you think that if you say you're worth something, the bank goes, whoa, I didn't know that, okay.
In no world, in no world has that ever happened.
Not even once.
Do you know what I did when people would do an application for a loan?
I would look at every number that mattered, and then I'd say, prove it.
So they had to show me their tax returns for three years.
Do you think I believed what their income was or do you think I just looked on their tax returns?
Were they the same?
Not always.
Not always.
But which one did I believe?
The tax return or what they said they made?
I believe the tax return.
That's the only thing I looked at.
When they said, my business will be so good, you know, it's going to be a rocket and I'll have 10 times as much money as I need to pay back your loan.
Did I take their word for it?
Do you think I took their cash flow projection and said, well, that looks good to me?
No, not even once.
I took their cash projection and I reduced it by 75%.
And I said, well, if they're off by that much and they can still pay off the loan, this is a good deal.
But if I depended on their projection, they didn't get the loan.
If I couldn't make my own argument for why it made sense, I didn't make the loan.
I didn't approve it.
Now, what about if somebody says their building is a certain size and therefore is worth a certain value and they lied?
That shouldn't make any difference.
Because they always send out an appraiser.
The appraiser actually goes out with a measuring device and measures the size of things.
Like literally, physically, they measure it.
And then they compare it to all the comparables.
And they, you know, look at your argument.
Now, in Trump's case, I think he made an argument that the brand, Trump, added some value.
Do you think that the bank Consider the brand value, which Trump might have said, oh, that's worth billions of dollars.
Do you think that they considered that when they made the loan?
Not if they were good bankers.
No.
You might, if you were not a banker, you might say, yeah, that's, I mean, that has a real value.
The brand has a genuine value.
So therefore, I will include that in my analysis.
But if you're a banker, oh no.
No, no.
You're not going to count the goodwill when you make a loan.
No.
Goodwill is not part of the loan package.
So do you think that the banks made an exception for his case and said, oh, but in this case, his intangibles really are important?
Probably not.
Probably not.
They probably just looked at the real estate.
They probably sent their own appraiser.
And they probably said, all right, that looks good.
Now is it possible that Trump said something was worth, I'll just make up some numbers here, is it possible he said something was worth a billion, and therefore you should give me a loan of a billion or even half a billion, but like you'd still pay off the loan because he's got good cash flow.
I don't care that you lied about the value of your house.
We checked it ourself.
And our own appraiser says it's not nearly worth what you say it is, but the loan still works.
The numbers still work on the loan, so no problem.
They would just make that loan.
Do you think they would report Trump to the police because he said his building was bigger or was worth more than the appraiser that they sent said?
No.
That's business as usual.
Business as usual.
The bank wouldn't even blink.
They just say, oh wow, his numbers were way off, but I'm glad we have our numbers and we'll base it on that.
Nobody would even blink, that's so normal.
Now, when I insured my house, just a private residence, it's a little bit bigger than a normal house, and so the insurance company said they wouldn't take my word for what it was worth.
Like, it would be easy to, you know, look on Zillow and you can see the house and, you know, you could estimate what it was worth based on comps and stuff like that.
But that wasn't good enough.
At a certain scale, they send a person out to walk around.
And that person, you know, measured and asked a million questions about my house and how it was built and all this stuff.
Now, you don't think they did that for a Trump property?
Do you think they took his word for what Mar-a-Lago was worth?
You don't think they actually sent somebody to look at Mar-a-Lago?
Of course they did!
Of course they did!
Now, one of the things I saw Eric Trump argue was that I guess the legal... whoever it was in the legal process said that Mar-a-Lago was worth around 18 million dollars.
Now, do any of you know anything about real estate?
Do you think Mar-a-Lago is only worth 18 million dollars?
Does that sound a little low?
Now, Eric says that some estimates were up to a billion dollars, but that's a Trump estimate.
So, you know, I don't believe Eric Trump's estimate that it's worth nearly a billion.
But it's not worth nearly 18 million.
18 million is just a crazy low number.
I don't know what the number is, but it's not 18.
I don't think you have to be a real estate expert to know that's low.
So there's something going on here that doesn't look too copacetic.
And apparently Trump lost business licenses in New York.
I don't know which ones, but they might make it difficult or impossible to do business in New York.
So Trump may not be able to do any business in New York, which presumably is a big hub of his real estate empire.
And does this look like anything except political It just looks completely political, right?
Yeah, it looks like he's being hunted like a lot of Republicans.
And I'll tell you, if he survives this, which might require him to, you know, pardon himself.
Oh, but he can't pardon himself from state charges, so he can't even pardon himself out of this, can he?
But this might end up being more financial than jail.
I don't know.
But it does look like if he does get into this trouble, he should really jail everybody, including the prosecutors.
I think the prosecutors in this case are acting criminally, because I don't think that they're treating him the way they would treat other people.
So if he got into office and immediately had this prosecutor arrested, I don't think he could, because it's probably a state affair, not a federal affair.
But if he could, I'd be okay with that.
I think this prosecutor is not doing the country's work, and if there's some crime that he could, you know, in any way connect her to, I think she should be arrested.
Because this doesn't even look close to justice.
Not even close.
It's not even in the zip code of anything that looks credible or legitimate.
So yeah, should totally be arrested.
All right.
Tonight are the undercard debates of the Republicans minus Trump, who wisely is not going.
And let me tell you that the less that Trump makes trouble, The stronger he is.
If he just doesn't make new trouble, and he just says the same things he's always said, he's just going to sail into the office, it looks like.
Lots could change, but at the moment that's the trajectory.
So I'll be watching tonight.
I did I did see a story that said that Fox News was not getting the audience for this based on the last debate.
The audience for the undercard debate's not that big, because there's no Trump.
But I saw that Dana Perino is one of three hosts, so she'll be hosting that tonight.
And this will be interesting, because I think that Dana Perino will draw a big audience independent of the content, just because she's very popular.
And I can't wait to see it.
I'm actually very excited to see it.
Who are the other hosts?
So the other hosts, I don't even remember their names.
It's Stuart Varney or somebody?
Who is it?
Stuart Varney from Fox Business.
And then there's a Univision host, whose name I should say because I don't want to be a jerk.
What's the name of the Univision host?
If you know that, let me know.
You're just guessing at the name.
Stop guessing!
Alright, we don't know her name, but I'm sure she's very good.
Alright, the Apple Store in Philadelphia got looted along with a bunch of other things in Philadelphia.
I guess the looting's crazy.
One BLM protester was yelling, it just started, we ain't finished.
Lots more stores to loot.
Now, what would you do if you were a store owner in Philadelphia?
Would you stick it out and say, ah, we can work through this?
Or would you get the F out of Philadelphia?
I'd probably get out.
In San Francisco and a bunch of other places, I guess, Target stores are going to close stores because there's too much looting.
And there are three of them that will be closed in the Bay Area.
So my hunting ground here will be three Bay Area stores will close their Targets.
And it looks like they'll shutter nine stores across four different cities or something.
Now what would you do if you were Target and you were in San Francisco and you kept getting looted?
What would you do?
Would you stick it out?
Not me.
I'd get the F out of there.
In an unrelated story, There was a study of how many applicants for S&P 100 jobs went to white applicants after George Floyd's death.
So after George Floyd died, in the year that followed George Floyd's death, only 6% of the people hired by S&P 100 were white.
So 94% of the new hires were non-white.
So for a year, white people basically couldn't get hired at the top 100 corporations in America.
What would you do if you were a white male?
I'll say male had to be worse.
If you're a white male and You knew that you couldn't get a job at the S&P 100, and if you did, you're definitely not going to get promoted.
So even if you got lucky, ah, I'm in the 6%.
Yes!
I made it into the S&P 100.
Well, that's the end of your journey.
You got hired, but you're not getting promoted in that context.
So what would you do?
Would you stick around at the S&P 100 and keep trying harder?
I wouldn't.
I would get the F out of there.
Just get the F out of there.
All right.
As I continue to be more right every day, let's go to this next story.
So Amazon's been targeted by, interestingly, the Federal Trade Commission.
Now this is the Biden administration going after Amazon in a really aggressive way.
Meaning, specifically for being a...
Monopoly.
So essentially the charge is that they force their sellers to do things the sellers don't want to do, such as use Amazon's delivery service that costs more, etc.
So the idea is that Amazon is abusive to the smaller businesses that they depend on for their supply of goods.
And the argument against that Which is pretty strong, is that Amazon has a razor-thin margin, which looks the opposite of a monopoly.
It's a pretty good argument.
It might be true they're doing all these things, but they're not doing all these things and then reaping a monopoly-like profit.
They're doing all these things because they have a razor-thin margin.
They pretty much have to do those things or there's no Amazon.
So that's the idiot's simple version of it.
So how interesting is it that the Biden administration's FTC is going hard at Amazon in a way that could be, like, devastating if they were successful?
I mean, it could be really bad.
At the same time, Jeff Bezos owns a big part of Amazon.
He owns Washington Post.
Which most smart people who pay attention to politics would say, does the bidding of the administration.
How do they square that?
Is Jeff Bezos just saying, you just lost the Washington Post?
Do you think Jeff Bezos is gonna go after the Biden administration hard in the Washington Post?
Because that's the opposite of what they do.
Watch the fun.
So very much like Murdoch, you know, one billionaire, has an interesting situation because he owns the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
One is talking shit about TikTok and the other is using them as an advertiser.
It's a complicated world.
Jeff Bezos has an even more complicated world because the Biden administration is going after his main business while depending on his other business for their own future.
And I think he just has to turn that knob and the Washington Post goes out of business.
Am I wrong?
If I were Bezos, I would tell the administration I'm going to turn it off.
Do you know how much panicked they would be if they lost the Washington Post?
Try to hold that in your head.
If the Democrats lost the Washington Post, They would be absolutely fucked because the Washington Post is their main source of fake news.
It's how they control the minds of their people.
The Washington Post says it's true, even if it isn't.
And then the other followers say, well, it was in the Washington Post, so we're going to go with it.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, the New York Times is a slightly different animal.
Some say the Washington Post is CIA-directed, and some say the New York Times is FBI-directed.
I don't know about any of that, but it looks like it.
It looks like it.
So keep an eye on Washington Post's coverage of the Biden administration.
I would bet you that you're going to see a turn toward he's too old and he's decrepit and he's got to go.
That's my guess.
Because I don't think Amazon's going to put up, or at least Bezos, I don't think he's going to put up with being targeted at the same time he's carrying water for the people who are targeting him.
That doesn't feel Bezos-like, does it?
Do you think one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, Bezos, is going to allow himself to be this fucked without a strong response?
I doubt it.
It's going to get fun.
Well, my next segment I call, It's Hard to Know if You Killed a Russian Leader.
So, Ukraine had claimed that they killed this General Viktor Sokolov, who would have been the commander of their fleet, their naval fleet in the Black Sea.
And they did a missile attack in Crimea and they said they got him with a bunch of others, but he appeared on a video, seemingly alive and participating in a meeting.
Does that sound familiar?
Sounds like the editor of the Wagner Group, Rogozhin.
Yeah, he's dead.
He's totally dead.
Wait, why is he on that video?
Oh, he's totally dead.
He's on the video again.
We can't tell.
So you really can't tell if a Russian is alive or dead after a certain level.
Once they reach a general level, Ah, they might be dead.
Or they might be participating in meetings.
We're not entirely sure.
Either dead or in meetings.
Even though that's not a big difference.
Being dead and being in a meeting are very similar.
All right, here's another story that I'm sure we don't understand.
So Mexico had a deal with a big Chinese lithium company that they were going to mine for lithium in Mexico.
And apparently there were some deal points, so the Chinese investor had to meet some criteria in order to be still allowed to have this investment in Mexico.
And Mexico just said, nope, you didn't do your part, and they're yanking back the rights.
Do you think that what really happened was the Chinese investment company, who says they did everything they were supposed to do, do you think they did everything they were supposed to do, and Mexico didn't know it, so they're making a mistake?
Or did they not do what they were supposed to do, and Mexico is just, it's just business, and so they're just, you know, just doing what business people do.
If you didn't do your part, I won't do my part.
Or do you think that none of this story is exactly what it looks like?
To me, it looks like Mexico just stole back their own resources.
That maybe it was a bad idea to license these resources to a Chinese company, but it looks like they're just making up an excuse to take them back.
Now, do you think they did that on their own?
Or do you think the United States said, you know, We're going to let your cartels do whatever they want, but we really, really need lithium.
And we don't want to get it all from China.
So why don't you screw your Chinese friends, take back the lithium, and we'll help you develop a mining operation.
And if you do that for us, we'll go easy on the cartels and let them keep operating.
Because the cartels and the Mexican government, not that different entities.
Now I'm not saying that's what happened.
I'm just saying it looks exactly like that's what happened.
That's all we know.
We know it looks like that happened.
We certainly don't know there's any connection between the cartels and the lithium.
We don't know that the United States had any conversation with Mexico.
We don't know if they just did it for their own economic good.
The other possibility is that the cartel told the government to steal back the resources because the cartel wants to own the mine.
Totally possible.
Could be just the cartels told them to steal it back from Mexico and the Mexican government said, okay, we're going to do what you say.
Maybe.
I'm not sure lithium will be the material of the future.
I'll tell you the story I'd love to see is do we have a good grasp of which rare earth materials only are in China and nobody else has any and nobody's trying to create more?
Because Yeah, rare earth materials are not rare, that is correct.
What is rare is a country that is willing to exploit them for a variety of reasons.
Yeah, I feel like we're not well served in the reporting because I can't tell you that all our rare earth mineral problems are solved, or it's unsolvable, or we're halfway to solving it, or maybe there's one mineral or material that we can't get but we're doing okay on the others.
Isn't that super important?
Like if you're trying to figure out what's the future of the country.
You would need to know where we are on these rare-earth materials because without them the technology sector just dies.
And I don't think that's... I don't remember seeing a story about it.
You see a story about with like one material and a context.
All right.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
San Francisco had tried to experiment to Make sure that all the kids did well, because there were some segments of the kids who were not doing well in math, and they thought they could fix it by delaying the teaching of algebra to 9th grade.
So normally they started teaching in 8th grade, and the thinking was that some demographic of the kids could do math as well as everybody else in 9th grade, but they certainly couldn't do it in 8th grade.
Because reasons.
Reasons and stuff.
That's why.
But so I tried that for a while, and now this will be a deep surprise to many of you.
Deep surprise.
But it turns out, believe it or not, it didn't make a difference.
Can you believe that?
It didn't fix the disparity.
It was a racial disparity, it turned out.
But it didn't fix the disparity by teaching it in 9th grade instead of 8th grade.
Are you blown away by that?
It was such a good idea, so logical that it would work, and then it didn't, so it looks like they're going to reverse it.
Wow.
Quite a shocker.
Now, let me ask you this question.
If your child was really good in math, and you knew it from the beginning, like from first grade you could tell, and that kid looked like he was headed for college and maybe some kind of a professional career, in which math was important?
What would you do if you were a kid, had to be in a school where math was being degraded so that everybody could catch up?
What's the best strategy there?
Stick it out?
Stay there and just do the best you can with the lesser math?
Oh no, it would be get the fuck out of there.
Yeah.
You should take your kid out of there and move to another town.
You just get the fuck out.
All right.
Unless you want your kid to have fewer options for success.
So we could have called today, Scott is right about everything, but I feel that would be too egocentric.
Even though I am.
So, did I miss any big stories?
Any big stories I missed?
Now, Most can't afford to pick up and leave.
No, they can't.
But it's the only way that they can get good math at a Target store.
If you wanted to shop at a Target store, and you wanted your children to have math classes like everybody else, would you live in San Francisco?
No.
If you did not want to walk on feces, would you go outside?
Would you go to San Francisco?
No.
You would not.
No, you finally did a blip on Trump being politically charged.
Well, everybody knew that the charge was political.
Did you need to hear that from me?
It was sort of overtly obvious.
All right.
New UFO videos released by the Border Patrol.
Sure.
Anything to talk about something that's not immigration?
Hey, there's a lot of immigration on the ground here.
Look at all these immigrants coming across legally.
It's like they're all military age.
Look at this.
Well, sure.
But look at that.
Do you see that?
No.
No.
Where are you looking?
No, it's up there.
Where?
It's over there now.
So that's sort of what's happening at the border.
So let me talk about... Why can I never remember his name?
The physicist, scientist, Dyson... He's got a three-part name.
Neil... Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Neil deGrasse Tyson.
So he's getting a lot of attention for being in favor of trans...
Athletes.
Trans competing on women's teams.
And I was listening to his argument with some podcasters.
I think Trigonometry guys went after him for it.
Others have as well.
But I don't think he's as wrong as you think.
Now, I'm not going to argue for trans in women's sports.
I think sports should be completely refigured so that everybody gets to play on a team that makes sense.
So I think the sports are broken, but that's a whole other conversation.
Everybody should have a place to play.
People who are roughly their ability.
Whatever that takes.
You just have to make that happen.
In my opinion.
But when Dyson is destroyed and the right shows how wrong he is, I listened to his argument and it didn't sound wrong to me.
Let me tell you what I heard.
Now maybe I heard it wrong.
There might be a part I'm missing, so you can tell me if I missed it.
I believe he knows that there's a genetic difference between a man and a woman.
So that part doesn't seem to be in question.
And I think that that's what people thought he was doing.
But he knows that if you're born with a certain physical structure, that that would be the male or female gender.
So I don't think he's questioning that there's a physicality that's You know, that's part of sex identification.
But he goes further.
He says that sometimes people wake up and they feel more feminine and they want to have makeup on and someday they might wake up and feel more masculine, don't feel like makeup, dress like a boy.
And he says that you have this infinite variety of people and it's too simplistic to say that they are just their chromosomes.
They're just the X and the Y. Too simplistic.
I agree with that completely.
What part of that do you disagree with?
Because I think he just said everything you agree with.
He agrees that there's a physical difference.
That's what all of you think.
He agrees that that physical difference would, you know, make some people stronger in sports.
Nobody would argue that.
But on top of that, he says that people have an internal feeling in which they feel more like one gender or another, and he would like them to have the freedom To self-identify in the way that they feel.
What's wrong with that?
If they're adults and they're not bothering you, do you have any problem with that?
Do you have any problem with an adult waking up anywhere and saying, I feel like makeup today?
No.
No, he's actually very close to your opinion.
And I think he's being unfairly demonized.
You know, I spent a lot of time talking about people on the right who are unfairly indicted or demonized.
But I feel like I should defend people who may have more of a left reputation.
And I think that he's unfairly being targeted.
Now, he has some suggestions about how to fix sports, which I have not evaluated.
Right.
He's not evaluated.
I haven't evaluated that plan.
But I'm on the same page that maybe you should look at the structure of sports to make sure you don't have big people and little people competing.
I saw a viral video the other day in which there was some young male football competition.
And one of the young men, I think they probably were age 10 years old.
I'm guessing they were somewhere around maybe 10 years old.
And one of the 10-year-olds just happened to be enormous.
So they were all boys, but one of the boys looked like he weighed 300 pounds.
He was just a giant.
And they give this big guy the ball, and he just runs and just mows down all these little kids.
Should that kid be playing with those other kids?
No.
No.
It looked very dangerous.
He was way too big to be pushing these little kids around.
No.
So to me, that problem of that big kid is exactly the same as the problem of somebody born male and had some physical advantages and ended up on a woman's team.
In both cases, you need to fix it.
When it's all men, the way they fix it is usually they have the big one play on a higher level team with older kids.
So that's a fix to the sport without saying anything about anybody's wrong.
Like there's nothing wrong with the big kid.
There's nothing wrong with him.
He was born big.
That's the whole story.
He's just big.
So fix the sport so he gets to play where he doesn't hurt people and gets to compete.
So, I'm pretty close to Neil deGrasse Tyson's view that people can be people, adults, we're talking about adults, that people can be people, but you should get them a fair place to play a sport.
That's all.
Now, I don't think there's a perfect answer for any of this.
Now, the argument against trans in women's sports is partly that it takes opportunities away from the women who were born as women.
And that's true.
So there probably should be a place that only biological women can play.
That'd be fine with me.
As long as there's also a place that 100% of all trans athletes also have a place to play that makes sense and is good and gives them what they need as athletes, etc.
So, I think it's ridiculous that women have their own awards for sports.
And that women have their own special college scholarships.
At the same time, I don't think men should get college scholarships either.
I think sports and college just shouldn't mix.
But that's the way it is.
I'm not going to change it.
It's not like I care.
But the problem was mixing sports and college in the first place.
Didn't make sense.
College sports should be intramural.
College sports should be everybody gets to play against somebody that's the right level.
When I played college sports, Which I played a lot of.
It was all intramural.
And our teams were usually, at least when we were just messing around, usually co-ed.
So we played co-ed soccer.
And it was great.
It was great.
Nobody had a complaint about it.
So anything that works is okay with me.
I think we should look at our systems and not just the individuals.
So that's why I'm more pro-trans than I think all of you, because I think that we need to fix the systems for people, not penalize the people because they don't fit in the system perfectly.
And when I say change the system, let me be clear, I'm not saying change sports for the benefit of trans athletes.
I think I misled you, right?
I do not say you should change sports for the benefit of trans athletes.
There are not enough of them.
But you should definitely change sports for the benefit of everybody.
Which means everybody has a team that's the right level they can play on.
Including that giant kid who was playing football that I talked about.
You should fix it for him.
And for the little kids he was knocking over, fix it for them.
And then everybody's got something that they can do.
But I don't think we should be rewarding people for sports, frankly.
I don't think you should get money because you're good at sports.
Maybe you should get money if you're good at classwork, you know, college, because that's kind of what college is supposed to do.
But no, I don't think anybody should get any special treatment for being good at sports.
That's a hobby.
Sports is a hobby.
You shouldn't get paid for your hobby.
All right.
I'm picking winners and losers.
Am I?
Yeah, North Korea returned an army private.
Is that surprising?
Are you surprised that North Korea returned the guy who tried to defect?
I feel like probably they didn't trust him, and they thought there was no benefit in holding him or killing him.
They probably thought he was a spy, or that he could be.
I don't think they got any benefit from keeping him.
But I also wonder, would they have returned him if Trump had never been president?
If Trump had never softened up Kim Jong-un, would they be returning that soldier, or would they just hold the soldier for leverage?
I feel like this maybe is a Trump-related thing.
I would also not be surprised if Trump asked for it personally.
If you were Trump, And you knew there was an American that was being held in North Korea.
And wouldn't you ask the State Department?
I think you should ask permission.
But ask the State Department, do you mind if I just send a personal note to Kim Jong-un and say, I feel a lot better about you.
I'm probably going to be president again.
I feel a lot better about you if you let this guy go.
Just sort of on the down low.
Maybe even without any attention.
Because how long would it take?
It would take Trump 10 minutes to write a little personal letter, somebody else would deliver it, and then the guy goes free.
Do you think Trump would let that opportunity pass when he probably knew that one note would get him free?
I feel like you might find out Trump was behind it.
You might also find out, well you wouldn't find this out, but it's possible that Kim Jong-un is just playing, he's playing it cool because he thinks Trump might come back.
And you don't want to be on the wrong side of Trump when he comes back, because they're buddies.
So.
Would we find out?
I think Trump would eventually tell us if he was behind it.
He knows Trump is coming back.
Your perspective that sports serve for people to feel good is unique.
Well, it's not just to feel good.
I mean, obviously has some entertainment value and some physical fitness value.
Sports excellence requires intelligence, work and reasoning, and it belongs at college.
Boy, that's a stretch.
Stretch.
Because sports require intelligence, work, and reasoning.
It belongs at college.
Man, that's really trying hard.
That's a real... I mean, I'm gonna have to give you some kind of award for even attempting that.
All right.
I do think sports are beneficial.
I don't think having a professional team in a college, effectively, is good for anybody except the people on the team and making money for the college.
Sports have given many poor people a great opportunity for an education.
Really?
Many?
What percentage of poor people got college scholarships?
Whenever you find a student, tell me if this is true or this is just me being biased.
You've got to check my bias here.
I feel like every time you hear there's some really successful college athlete, and let's say in the black community specifically, when you see there's like some really successful high school student who made it to college, what do you always find also?
Incredible parents.
Am I right?
Just about every time.
And even the case of that blindsided guy, I don't know what's true about that, But the point was that with good parenting, the kid thrived, allegedly.
There might be something else to that story.
So I ask you this.
If that same kid who had these incredible parents who created an athlete with good character, don't you think that they would have created a good citizen with good character if the kid was good at school?
If the kid was just a good student, same parents, Aren't they going to create a really good like executive of something?
Because the parents were so good and the kid obviously had some qualities.
So I'm not so sure that that was the one way that those kids could be successful in sports because they had something going on that they had to have going on or they wouldn't have even made it in sports.
So there's that.
You need to have good grades?
Well, not good grades.
You don't need good grades.
You just need to not have terrible grades.
All right, somebody tell me what I got wrong about the trans topic.
Because a lot of, just in one sentence, tell me what I got wrong.
And watch how you will, the thing you think I got wrong, I guarantee is a misinterpretation of my question.
But go.
Tell me what I got wrong about the trans thing.
Didn't talk about changing rooms.
Men will have a physical advantage, of course, that's part of my opinion.
So you don't actually have anything that's counter to my opinion.
God does not make mistakes, that had nothing to do with my opinion.
Somehow feels has zero to do, that doesn't make sense.
Contradicting yourself with no details.
Yeah, so your comments are obtuse.
Nobody has an actual comment about my opinion.
It's degrading to women?
In what way?
How in the world is that degrading to women?
It's racist?
Alright.
I think people have strong feelings about it because they have preferences.
If you have a preference that your female athletes are on female-only teams, just say it's a preference.
I wouldn't disagree with that.
Because your preference is your preference.
You can have any preference you like.
I wouldn't argue with your preference.
All right.
Your preference is reality.
One of the biggest problems on the right, and maybe it's the left too, I just notice it more on the right, is that people try to win arguments with definitions.
And so you should check yourself on this dimension.
Here's what is not an argument.
Life starts at conception.
It might be your opinion, but it's not an argument.
That's not an argument.
That's a definition.
Definitions are not arguments.
So you win your argument by just putting a word on it.
Oh, it's alive.
And then the alive part wins you the argument.
That's not an argument.
That's just a definition.
And the same goes with the trans stuff.
A lot of people are trying to win the argument just by saying, a woman is a woman.
All right, we all agree that there are certain chromosomal, you know, situations.
It's not an argument.
It's the opposite of an argument.
It's just trying to win by a definition.
A lot of people, when I ask what's wrong with my opinion, you see a lot of spinning.
It's because people are doing word thinking.
And as soon as you say, all right, well, if you leave the word thinking, where you're winning by definition of words, give me the argument or tell me why I'm wrong, there's nothing there.
It just turns to dust.
Because a lot of what we think is intelligence is just like AI intelligence, where it's just the combination of words Gives you the impression of intelligence.
And on the big issues where you just have a feeling about something, all you're doing is searching for the word patterns that support your point of view.
Because with trans, people really feel something about that topic.
And it's the feeling that makes your decision.
And then you rationalize it after the fact.
Same with abortion.
Abortion is about how you feel about it.
And then you reason backwards from your feelings to get your conclusion.
That's how it works.
I guess that's all I have to do to offend everybody today.
