Episode 2250 Scott Adams: Lots Of Media Trickery. Also, I'm Halfway Off Of Prisoner Island
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Politics, Nate Silver, Meta Subscription Plan, Mike Benz, Mainstream Media Collapsing, Jake Tapper, General Kelly, President Trump, Election Integrity, Mr. Beast, Deep Fake Videos, Josh Kruger, AG Letitia James, Malicious Prosecution, News Manipulation, Omnibus Scam, Matt Gaetz, Kevin McCarthy, Thomas Massie, Nobel Prize Physics, Prisoner Island, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Human Civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and if you'd like to leave, the only way you can do it is by pulling the fire alarm.
But if you'd like to stay and elevate your experience to levels that can only be considered infinite or possibly galactic, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or sty, and a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go.
Well, some of you may have noticed I'm about halfway off Prisoner Island.
So we'll talk about that in a little while, but other fun stuff first.
I keep quoting Nate Silver, because he's having some fun conversations about what's real and what isn't real on the X platform.
And I think he finally reached his limit, because he's sort of a, let's say, respectable member of the smart people.
And he sends this post yesterday.
On some level, it's kind of amazing how well society functions, despite people believing a lot of super dumb and fucked up shit.
Are you ever amazed by the fact that civilization works at all?
And it's just filled with idiots?
And it still works?
Well, I would say there are two reasons for this.
Number one reason is that the economy is a failure engine.
So most things that people do in economics Fail.
They start businesses that don't work and then businesses that do work are introducing new product lines that fail.
Mostly.
Mostly failing.
So we've developed this system that everybody does well if 90% of us fail and 10% of us succeed.
And it's enough.
Because even when you're failing, you still get a paycheck.
Most of the time.
So, failure is actually the, it's almost the operating system of why everything works.
It's just full of failure.
Which is another way to say that nature rewards action.
Nature rewards action.
So if you don't know what to do, just do something.
That's probably the best advice you'll ever get.
If you don't know what to do, do something.
Because nature rewards action and energy.
The other thing I would note is that it only takes a few smart people to allow everybody else to live comfortably.
So you don't need too many geniuses.
The rest of us need to just make sure we don't litter too badly and don't stab too many people.
Everything else seems to work out.
All right.
Meta.
The company Meta, which you might think of as Facebook, is floating a plan to charge people, at least in the EU, $14 a month to have an ad-free version of Instagram or Facebook.
Now, I don't know if that'll work out, but I would make the following point.
Civilization can no longer depend on advertising for your information.
If you want your information to be accurate and available to people, it cannot depend on advertising.
Because advertisers have a very narrow band of what's allowable, whereas free speech is a wide band by definition.
So if you limit all of your speech and truth to this little narrow band, that's bad news.
So anything that gets us away from ad-supported Anything is good.
So I'm no longer ad-supported.
Well, I guess I am, in a minor way.
On YouTube I am.
So I guess on YouTube I'm ad-supported.
But I believe it's obvious that YouTube is suppressing me.
Because my YouTube traffic has stayed largely the same for years.
Which is pretty much impossible, I think.
Pretty much impossible.
Well, everything else has gone up.
So...
I'll be looking to alternatives for YouTube, but technically sometimes that's difficult.
One of the things I'm thinking of doing is just discontinuing YouTube altogether and just do it on Rumble.
Takes a little more technology to do that, so that's why I've been putting that off.
But we'll see.
I haven't made any decisions yet.
But we have to get away from ads supporting everything.
Do you know Mike Benz I keep mentioning?
So on the X platform he's Often doing little videos and tweet threads in which he's exposing the powers that be.
Typically the intelligence operations that were behind the things you see.
And I've never had such a clean look into reality than I do when I absorb his stuff.
But he tweeted this yesterday, just so you know how dangerous it is.
He said, they have to kill me because I'm spilling their secrets.
Here's how it'll go.
Now keep in mind, his other predictions have been spookily accurate.
And he's predicting his own demise.
And he's serious.
He says, first they'll flood with hip pieces on bullshit rhetoric grounds.
I think that already started.
I think there's already a hip piece about him.
At least one.
Then they'll flood with lawsuits on bullshit tort grounds.
So they'll use lawfare to break him.
Then they'll flood with charges on bullshit criminal grounds.
And then he says bookmark this.
So he believes he'll be taken out by fake criminal charges.
What do you think?
I think that's very possible.
And I like that he's calling it out in advance so we can watch it as it happens.
So we'll see.
So that's something that Sarah Fisher put together on On the X platform, which was the social media is just destroying normal news.
So the clicks that used to come from social media and divert people over to regular news platforms, it just collapsed.
So neither the meta platform nor the X platform are sending much of any traffic to the major media.
So Whereas you might have seen a lot of clicks from social media to CNN, now you see very few.
Now, here's like a sign of the times.
Every morning, literally every morning, seven days a week, even on holidays, I get up in the morning and I check the news so that I can do a live stream in which I talk about what's happening.
A number of times lately, let's say in the last month, I have completely prepared my live stream, you know, notes and notes and notes about the news without ever looking at a news site.
Sometimes I don't even leave the X platform, because at least there you've got stuff I care about, people know what to send me, you know, I get tagged in things.
And usually it's a summary of the news stories, I don't necessarily have to go see the story.
I usually do if there's a link, but lots of times I don't have to.
And I realize that the news on CNN is all just garbage.
And I don't even believe that CNN or Fox are paying anybody to do any reporting anymore.
They have writers who are writing things that they see on television.
That's what it looks like.
So I think that the economic model of the news is so degraded at this point that it feels like they're pretending to be news without actually being news.
So, for example, we'll talk about this in a minute.
Oh, actually, we'll talk about it next.
CNN has a long piece to fill up a lot of real estate on their so-called news page about, I guess Jake Tapper wrote this, and it's an exclusive.
John Kelly, so he was the chief of staff under Trump, general, he goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump.
Now, is that news?
It's the opposite of news.
It's a story about something that we already heard of years ago, and the same person is going to say it again.
And that's like a really big part of CNN's entire real estate today.
They're going to tell us a story about what a guy thought, one person.
Now, do you think that there is new information?
Do you think they've got, oh, a document?
No, no.
It's just the same person, and he's got some complaints about Trump.
And that's news.
That's the news.
It didn't used to be like this, right?
There's no news value to this at all, but it'll be funny when I tell you what he actually says.
So, basically this is the new worse than Watergate.
I think CNN just got so tired of saying everything was worse than Watergate when it wasn't, and getting mocked for it, that they needed a new go-to.
So it looks like they're going to use the generals.
So it's going to be all of Trump's ex-generals are going to be the new worse than Watergate.
Oh, the thing he said!
Oh!
Now, Here's my take on General Milley and on General Kelly.
I swear this might be pure bias on my part.
It might be.
But they come off as stupid.
Does anybody else have that?
I mean, Trump called him stupid, and I know I'm being primed by that.
So he's influenced me to maybe look at him in those terms.
But they actually act stupid in public.
Like, actually, literally.
And I don't say that about people that I disagree with.
You know, it's not automatic.
Like, I don't say that Eric Swalwell is stupid.
I don't think he's stupid at all.
He does things I don't like.
That's completely different.
He seems smart.
But honestly, the generals don't seem smart.
I don't know what to think about that.
Is that just me?
Because it could be me, right?
If we're being honest, it could entirely be me.
Do you see it too?
Or is it just me?
Is anybody having the same vibe?
That they don't look smart?
Yeah, that's worrisome.
Well let's see what John Kelly says and you tell me how credible this sounds.
You should use all of your tools that I've taught you about what is a credible report and what isn't.
So then I'll quiz you and ask you if this is credible.
Alright?
So it starts out by saying that General Kelly confirmed several remarks his former boss Trump made.
Now he's gonna, the story is that he's confirming several things Trump said.
What does that mean, confirming?
It means he's saying it a second time.
If you saw confirming, wouldn't you say to yourself, oh, there's a document that shows it, right?
That's what your brain would say.
Or there are more people who are backing him up because they were in the same meeting.
That would sound like confirmation.
Oh, a second person says the same thing.
But now listen to the story and see if this sounds like he's confirming anything or just restating what he's already said.
All right?
A little bit about him and then says, all right, so here's what Kelly says about Trump.
A person that thinks, oh, a person that thinks.
So now he's going to tell us what Trump thinks in his inner thoughts.
He thinks that those who defend the country in uniform or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat or spend years being tortured as POWs are all suckers because there's nothing in it for them.
Do you believe that even slightly, even slightly, is a good summary of what Trump thinks in his inner thoughts?
No.
Number one, it's mind-reading.
Number two, it's a made-up quote.
Right?
So he's basically inventing something to get mad at, and he actually calls it out as talking that he knows what somebody's thinking.
But the other tell is this.
This one's always good.
Basically, he uses the word all.
So he says that Trump says everybody who served, all of them, are suckers.
Does that sound like anything that Trump would say in the real world?
That all of the people who served in the military were suckers?
That doesn't sound like something he would have said.
Very inconsistent.
And what is the evidence for this?
None is given.
It's just a statement.
I think he thinks this.
Now, there is more evidence, but it's not in this part of it.
He also says that Trump was a person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because, quote, it doesn't look good for me.
Do you think that's the right context and exactly what Trump said?
Because somebody said he said it, who doesn't like him?
So a disgruntled person said he said something.
No, it doesn't even sound slightly true.
Here's what I think could be true.
I think it could be true that privately, he would talk about what was a good photo op.
Is it a good photo op to show you next to desperately ill people?
Maybe not.
Maybe not.
Is that something that you could say privately?
You know, that it's not making you look good?
Yeah, I think that's fair.
And it has nothing to do with how much empathy you have for the soldiers.
It's purely a visual persuasion statement.
Now, I don't think he actually said it.
My guess is it never came out of his mouth.
But if he did, it's more likely in the context of persuasion.
It has nothing to do with respecting or disrespecting anybody.
That would be my guess.
That would be the obvious context that's left out.
A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family.
Yeah, one.
One Gold Star family that was attacking him.
He displayed contempt for somebody who was attacking him.
That's not exactly a problem.
Now, doesn't he make this look like it's some kind of disrespect for all Gold Star parents?
Right?
Is there anything that would suggest that Trump has disrespect for all Gold Star parents?
Or just the one that was on stage publicly, you know, publicly criticizing him?
I don't know.
If you're a Gold Star family and you publicly criticize me, I'll go after you.
In a heartbeat.
It would have nothing to do with any Gold Star anything.
He's also saying that Trump called the people who defended America losers and wouldn't visit their graves in France.
None of that sounds true.
None of that sounds even slightly true.
What is the proof?
Is there a document?
No.
Is there a video?
No.
Is there another person who is saying it at the same time?
Well, we'll see.
Several senior staffers told The Atlantic Several senior staffers, you mean anonymous people, told The Atlantic the most lying publication in the world.
The Atlantic is the least reliable source on anything Trump.
They literally are the primary maker-uppers of bullshit about Trump.
So several, how many are several?
Three?
What are their names?
Oh, they're all anonymous.
Oh, isn't that convenient?
Anonymous people talk to the least credible entity in the world.
That's some of the evidence.
Trump allegedly said, why should I go to that cemetery?
It's filled with losers.
Do you think there's any chance he said that?
Even privately?
No.
No.
It doesn't even sound like him.
If you're going to do a fake quote, you should at least put in the time to make it sound like something he would say.
This doesn't even sound like his style of talking, much less his opinion.
All right.
Kelly also criticized his former boss, saying Trump was not truthful in his political positions.
Yeah, that really makes him stand out among presidential candidates.
Oh my goodness, there's somebody who thinks a politician didn't tell the truth.
Okay, we've got to factor that in with all the politicians.
And he says, Kelly says that Trump is a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.
That's the best you can do?
That you don't know what America is all about?
So you're arguing definitions of America, or whose history lesson was better?
Doesn't he sound like a desperate, just sort of an asshole?
I mean, he just feels like an asshole to me.
Then he says that Trump is, quote, a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators.
Does he?
Or does he admire them the same way we do?
Same way I do.
Do I admire Putin when I say that he's very effective at getting what he wants?
Is that admiring him?
Or is that just a statement, an observed statement of fact?
If I also say he's a murderous, evil bastard, but he's really good at getting this country to support him and getting stuff done, am I, would I be then admiring him?
No, admiring is an asshole word.
It's imagining you're reading his mind and then you're interpreting it in the worst possible way.
A person who has nothing but contempt for democratic institutions.
Really?
Trump has only contempt for democratic institutions.
More so than the normal person?
Don't you think a little bit of contempt is just about right?
If you don't have a little bit of contempt for our democratic institutions, you have not been paying attention.
So a little bit of contempt is just about the right amount.
And the rule of law.
Yeah, he hates laws.
And then Kelly says, there's nothing more that can be said.
God help us.
Now just keep in your mind that Jake Tapper Decided this was newsworthy enough and he called it confirmation.
Where was the confirmation?
Was it the several senior staffers who are anonymous who told the Atlantic the least credible publication in the world?
So CNN, the second least credible organization in the world, is pointing to the Atlantic's reporting about some anonymous people to confirm.
That's their confirmation.
If I may end this segment with what I call my only good impression.
I call it the Jake Tapper Tilt or just the Tapper Tilt.
It's when you ask a question of somebody that you think is lying and you want them to know with your face and your head tilt and it goes like this.
While listening.
Try it.
Try it on the holidays next time somebody's explaining to you their political opinion if you don't like it.
Just look at them and give them the Tapper Tilt.
Just like that.
If you're listening on audio, you're missing one of my best impressions.
Oh, it's fantastic.
Head is tilted, mouth in a mocking position.
It's good stuff.
If only you had seen it.
All right.
So Rasmussen had a poll asking people, how likely is it that cheating will affect the outcome of the next presidential election?
What would be a number that would represent a healthy country?
Like, what percentage would you feel, oh, that's about right?
I would have said that if 24% thought it's likely, or 25% thought it was likely, but if 75% thought, oh, no, the elections are fine, I'd feel like we were pretty safe.
Because as I often say, 24%, 25% will get every question wrong.
But if 75% said, I think everything's fine, I would feel comfortable as well.
Probably.
But it's the opposite of that.
So it's closer to, let's see, the people who think that cheating will affect the outcome, very likely is 30%, somewhat likely is 24%.
So you've got 54% think it's somewhat likely or very likely that the election will be affected by cheating.
Does that feel like a dangerously high number?
And would anybody like to argue with me about whether Trump is persuasive?
Do you think that this number would be anywhere near what it is if Trump had simply said, I accept the election as it is?
No, this is totally Trump.
Trump actually convinced more than half of the country that elections are not credible.
Think about that.
Trump, right?
I mean, other people mimicked him and said the same things, but only because he did.
Trump by himself got 54% of the public, the voting public, to think that the elections are at least somewhat likely to be crooked.
That's pretty remarkable.
In terms of persuasion, that is one of the all-time most persuasive things I've ever seen.
Can you think of anything more persuasive?
I mean, the country had a very solid opinion of how safe elections are.
I doubt it had changed much in the years until recently.
It probably had a big change recently.
Well, Do you think this is a bad sign or a good sign?
Is it bad news or good news that more than half of the country thinks the election might be sketchy?
I think this one's too close to call.
It's bad in the sense that we wish that the elections were not only good, but everybody knew it.
So it's bad that way.
But it's good in the sense that nothing gets fixed until people admit there's a problem.
And at the very least, the elections do not have the fully auditable, transparent nature we all want.
So maybe having half of the public doubt that it is even a real election will get you closer to actually fixing something.
I'm going to say again why I think the election is not auditable, and that it's done in a fashion that gives us, let's say, less comfort than they could.
I think it's intentional.
And I think it's because both sides cheat.
I think that's the whole story.
Both sides cheat, so neither side has a really strong incentive to change the whole system in a way that nobody can cheat.
Because they want to keep their district, right?
Clearly there are power centers that stay Republican, and the Republicans would like to not lose them.
So I think we've reached a point where both sides are, and this is just speculation based on observation, that it looks like both sides are going to accept cheating and then compete on the cheating itself to see who can out cheat the other side.
And cheating in this sense would include legal stuff.
You know, things you didn't see coming but somebody had a clever legal maneuver, totally legal, that changes the outcome.
So I think we'll see all the legal and maybe less than legal competition.
So it looks like a competition of cheaters at this point.
Otherwise, I don't know what I'm seeing.
I cannot explain why Republicans would not want to fix a system they don't trust.
Only one reason.
The people who can fix it don't want it fixed.
I can think of no other reason.
Well, there is no other reason.
If you can think of any other reason, then maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part.
Because it could be.
Lots of times it's just a failure of imagination.
I just can't imagine any other explanation.
But don't you think somebody would want to tell me what the other explanation is?
You feel like Republicans would want to say, you know, we're trying real hard to get these elections to be fair, but those darn Democrats keep stopping us for one reason or another.
Wouldn't you like to hear that?
To at least know that one side was trying to fix the transparency?
But I've never heard anything like that.
Nothing even close to that.
Not at all.
So I have to assume they're both in on it.
Otherwise, nothing makes sense.
I assume the same about corruption.
If it were only true that Bob Menendez is the crooked one, I'd be amazed.
But if you don't think that Republicans could have known what this guy was doing or that people do this and that job, That's probably because Republicans are doing the same thing in a different way.
So, again, I would assume that corporate or congressional corruption probably is because they're doing it on both sides.
Probably.
Not every person.
Not every person.
But it's probably on both sides.
Alright, there's this new study that says you can make yourself look good in interviews and just look good to other people at work by praising your co-workers at the same time you maybe say good things about yourself.
So the research says...
Instead of saying, uh, I did this and I did that, you say, ah, my co-worker Bob, he's great, he's really killing it, and together with, you know, Alice and Joe and Isaac, uh, you know, and I did my part, I think I did a good part too, but man, we got a good team.
Supposedly that makes you look like the best person you could hire.
Now, did you need to do research to know that?
Or could you watch every athlete doing an interview ever who had been trained by professionals and had ass?
All right?
Let me give you every athlete.
Scott, you scored 80 points in the basketball game today.
It's the most anybody's ever scored in decades since Will, I guess, anyway, Will Chamberlain or something.
And so how do you feel about your great accomplishment?
Well, Carl, I like to think it's a team effort.
The team played really well.
I don't think too much about my personal stats.
I was just thinking about getting the win.
And if we can get the win, then our team is working as one unit.
And that's all I care about.
Literally everybody has known forever that if that same athlete had said, you know, I did this largely alone.
You know, normally I'd expect my teammates to be like kicking in a little bit of scoring, but my God, they were slow today.
So I had to take all the scoring upon my own shoulders.
I hope they can pick up the pace tomorrow, but what the hell happened to the rest of the team?
If I'm scoring 80 points, something's wrong with the rest of the team, let me tell you.
Doesn't everybody know not to do that?
Did we really need to study the people who give credit to those around them?
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
Hold on.
This will shock you.
It turns out that according to science, the people who are generous to the people around them are more liked by who?
Who?
The people who are generous to the people around them Are more well-liked by the people around them.
Yeah, the people around them.
So that's quite a shocking thing.
They have not studied this, but I have a hypothesis that if you did a control group, one group of people was punching the people around them every time they saw them.
Hey, hey Bob.
Punch you.
That they would be less liked, probably.
I mean, you'd have to do the science.
But probably less liked than the people who see you, and every time they see you, they give you a compliment.
So if you were to compare the two groups, the complimenting everybody versus the punching everybody, I feel like you'd see a difference.
Now, don't say I'm some kind of a scientist, because I'm not.
I just have some theories that I think should be checked out.
I think we should do a study on that.
Pfizer can fund that.
All right.
Mr. Beast, who's a beast on social media, I believe his number of followers, Mr. Beast, is one trillion.
One trillion people follow him.
I don't know, it's a lot.
I think he has the most followers.
But there's a deepfake scam of him A little video in which he's scamming people to, I don't know, do something.
Pay them some money.
And he was tweeting around to make sure people knew it was a scam.
And he says, this is a serious problem.
But is it?
Is it?
I wonder if the deep fakes are going to be so obvious that everybody will just stop giving money to everybody.
Like, I can't imagine seeing a video of somebody saying, give me money in any context, unless they were selling me a product and I knew it was an advertisement.
But I can't imagine being influenced by a person talking, because I just wouldn't believe that, if they were a real person, I wouldn't believe them.
But then the possibility that they're AI, you know, twice as many reasons to not believe them.
I think we'll just stop believing everything.
I think people will adjust.
So instead of being super gullible and we keep falling for this stuff, that'll happen in the short run.
In the long run, we'll just not believe anything.
I think that's where we're going.
That's not a good place to be.
Well, you're probably wondering about this story I haven't talked about yet.
There was a journalist named Josh Kruger.
Who was fatally shot seven times early morning.
I think it was yesterday.
And he was in Philadelphia.
Now the story is notable for a few reasons.
One is it was a journalist and an activist and a Democrat type.
But also he was quite active on social media including two days before he was shot to death in his home.
He was mocking me on Twitter.
I didn't know it.
I didn't realize it until after he was already dead.
But apparently he had just been mocking me for an old tweet of mine from 2020 that I said that if Biden is elected, this was before the election, the last election, I said, if Biden is elected, there's a good chance he'll be dead in a year.
And he mocked me for saying that and mocked my ability to see the future.
And he was slain violently in his home hours later.
Now, today's news is that there was another person who had tweeted some trash at me recently who was also stabbed to death at Malcolm X Boulevard.
A 32-year-old activist who was sort of anti-fossil fuel.
So that would be two of my critics who were slain within days of criticizing me.
And people are asking, Is this some kind of a trend?
Do you have alibis?
Well, I do have alibis, but no, it's coincidence.
It's a coincidence.
Also, there's a report that in Washington, D.C., there was a member of Congress who got carjacked.
Yeah.
Who was it?
Henry Cuellar?
So a Democrat member of Congress who got carjacked in D.C., which is also a coincidence, right?
Now, I would have said you should get out of D.C.
because there's a lot of crime there.
But Congress is going to wait around and just keep getting victimized, I guess.
That would be their choice.
So I would like to report that I'm about halfway off a prisoner island.
You remember what the middle phase is, right?
I'll remind you what Prisoner Island is.
Prisoner Island is the story that I hold in my head about, you know, when things get bad, what that's about.
So Prisoner Island is, I imagine that if you drop me on an island full of just prisoners and no law, they would beat me and rape me on the first day and leave me for dead.
But I'd probably live.
And then the next day they'd do the same thing and beat me and rape me.
But if you came back in a year, they would all be dead and I would be, everyone who touched me would be dead and I would be the king of Prisoner Island.
Because I don't like to lose.
So, that's just a story I tell myself.
So when I got cancelled, it did look like I'd been dropped on Prisoner Island.
But, if you were worried about me, you should pay attention to the news.
Because the news is just one story after another, confirming that we have a dangerous situation, And that it's being made more dangerous every day by Democrats poisoning the racial relations and not handling crime.
And that as Democrat bodies start to fall, all of them tragedies, not making fun of anybody's death, it will start to create a pattern which will suggest that there was something wrong, and maybe I had a point, which had nothing to do with anybody's DNA.
Nothing I said.
Nothing to do with anybody's culture.
It has everything to do with the fact that we've been trained that one group of Americans are the oppressors and they have your stuff and you should go get it back.
And if you happen to be in that group that has been labeled the group that oppressed you who has your stuff and you need to get it back, you should be very cautious about that.
All right.
Let's talk about Laetitia James or maybe Laetitia.
Does anybody know how to pronounce her name?
I've heard it.
People just say it quickly because they're not sure.
Laetitia.
Laetitia.
I think it's sort of a, you know, everybody just does it the way they want.
Laetitia.
Laetitia.
It's exactly how it's spelled.
Well, I'm going to pronounce it any way I want.
So, I saw a tweet by a kind of the great showed a video from 2018 of Letitia James vowing to use the law to get Trump.
Now, if you hear it, it's very clear that she is a political person who's going to use the law to weaponize the law to go after Trump.
So, she made a bunch of claims that she couldn't back up.
And ended it with saying, understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.
Wow.
And so, after all these grand charges of colluding with other countries and money laundering, all these charges, the thing that they're trying to nail him on, after all those great charges, are that he took out a loan and paid it back with interest.
That's what he's being charged with.
Now, as part of that, they say that he overvalued his assets.
But their argument is ridiculous on his face, because the way they valued his assets were so laughably wrong that it wouldn't matter what he did.
Their case is so laughably, obviously, purely political, that I think Letitia James should go to jail.
I mean, when I listen to her and then I see what she's doing, I think, how in the world is this legal?
I mean, she's using the legal system, so she's not committing a crime per se, but it looks like a crime, it feels like a crime, it has the effect of a crime.
Why isn't it a crime?
The crime should be, well actually there probably is a crime.
There probably is a crime about unsupported prosecution.
What would be the name for that?
Not just defamation, unsubstantiated frivolous prosecution.
Malicious prosecution.
Let's go with malicious prosecution.
If I were a lawmaker, I would have made a law against malicious prosecution.
There must be one.
Is there not?
Is there no law against using the law maliciously?
I feel like there should be a specific law against that.
Because there's no way.
I don't believe there's any way that Letitia James and her staff believed their own charges.
I think they should have to prove that they believed their own charges.
Because do you think they have any evidence of any crime?
I think I would have seen it.
I've seen nothing that would suggest they have evidence of a crime.
Have you?
So, should they not be pushed to show that they had evidence of a crime before they pursued it?
I think you could show that they did not have any evidence of a crime and they pursued it anyway.
Don't you think?
So I think that Trump should get elected and that one way or another she should be brought to justice.
Could you do it on federal charges or would it have to be a state charge?
Is there any way the feds could get at her for breaking the law?
If she goes after a federal candidate?
Oh, she would be interfering with a federal election.
There we go.
Yeah.
She would be interfering with a federal process by trying to put a candidate in jail without legitimate charges.
And it would also be RICO.
So you could get Rico, because I'm sure it's coordinated, you could find, if you got a hold of her communications, you don't think you would find that she's talking to Democrat leadership?
Of course you could.
So if you got a hold of her communications, you could find out just how coordinated it was.
And I do think there's enough evidence of a crime that you should at least be able to indict, because you can indict for just about anything.
So I think it needs to be Mutually assured disaster.
I think that if Trump doesn't go to jail, that the prosecutor does have to go to jail in this case.
Yeah.
Yeah, mutually assured destruction.
I think that the prosecutors all need to go to jail if they lose.
If they win, we're in bad shape.
But if they lose, they'll have to go to jail.
That's my take.
All right.
Rasmussen also asked how many people think our intelligence agencies in the U.S.
are influencing the news media.
Sixty-five percent think it is likely that U.S.
intelligence agencies are influencing news coverage.
Sixty-five percent.
So two-thirds of the public thinks the news is fake and fake because our intelligence people are manipulating it.
How in the world is that not 100%?
That's low.
It's amazing that there are that many people who don't understand how anything works.
If you actually believe that the news operated independently, you would be so confused by what you're seeing.
As soon as you realize it's all fixed, I'll tell you, I stopped worrying about Rob Reiner's tweets.
They used to drive me crazy.
But then I look at him and I go, oh, he's probably just working with somebody, if you know what I mean.
And then once you realize that, and I don't know that that's true, it's just observably, it looks like the logical conclusion.
It looks like the obvious conclusion.
Doesn't mean it's true, but it looks obvious.
That it doesn't bother you anymore.
He's just like a commercial.
Commercials don't bother you.
All right, let's talk about Gates trying to vacate McCarthy's seat, the Republican Speaker of the House.
Let's see if I can summarize this for those of you who are not paying attention.
So every year the Congress has to pass a budget, but nobody wants to cut anything because that makes you unpopular.
So they all get together and they try to screw the public by putting all the separate bills into one big one.
So that if you vote against the one big one, you're a loser and you're terrible.
But then they can get all their little budgets through without being cut.
So PJ says, Scott, is purposely undervaluing your properties tax evasion?
For a loan?
No.
Was that the question?
How about for insurance?
For insurance, it would be paying more insurance than you need to pay.
If you're talking about property tax, I don't believe that's part of the charges.
So here's what I would advise you, because based on this comment, if you're looking at the Trump legal jeopardy, and you're looking at what he did with banks and insurance companies, if you do not have a business education, Shut the fuck up.
You have no idea what's happening.
Just shut the fuck up.
Or talk to a banker.
Talk to a banker.
Ask a banker if they take the customer's word for what they're worth.
Nobody does.
So your minimum requirement for being part of this conversation is you have to have a business background.
If your background is art, you might be an awesome person that makes great art.
But you shouldn't be in this conversation.
You're not qualified.
If you think the news is telling you something useful...
About the nature of the charges?
They're not.
Not even close.
The story is so botched.
I think it's partly because there aren't that many business people who do the news, but I doubt it's even being reported correctly on the business channels.
I haven't watched them, but I'll bet the business channels are totally botching the story.
Have you seen any of the business stories say, there's no such thing as a bank that trusts you when you say your asset is worth a certain amount?
In the history of the world, that's never happened.
But only business people know that.
Artists don't know that.
The artists think that this is real because the court is involved, so it must be real.
No, it's not real.
It is just a political attack.
You need to understand you don't live in the country you thought you did.
We do not live in a country where the law is being properly applied and that our political participants are being fairly treated.
We're not in that world.
They are being absolutely targeted for destruction by very bad people.
And part of that is fooling you with complicated stories so that you think you understand what's going on.
Oh, he's in court for a banking thing.
I guess he tried to do some fraud.
No, there's absolutely no evidence of that.
None.
And there probably won't be, because the nature of a banking relationship is that the banking checks everything themselves.
That's core to their job.
It's not something that might have happened this time and maybe not.
No, it's central to what a banker does.
They check.
I was a banker, so I'm not talking from, and I was a lender as well.
So I'm not talking from, you know, because I read a book about it.
I was an actual bank lender.
We don't take anybody's word for anything, ever.
There are no exceptions to that.
All right.
If the property tax thing comes up, maybe there's more of a story there, but I haven't even heard that one.
I don't even think that's part of the charges.
So let me explain this Gates-McCarthy thing.
So Gates said he got McCarthy some months back in order to, as part of Gates agreeing to support McCarthy to be the Speaker, Gates and his little pack of rogues got McCarthy to agree that they would only give them spending deals in packages that were separate.
But then I guess he did a trick where he waited until they didn't have time to read the packages, which was just as good as putting them all in one place.
So there does seem to be some trickery involved that clearly the process cannot stand transparency.
So there is an obvious observable move to make the budget dealings less transparent.
In front of the public, whose money it is.
If anybody's trying to make the process less transparent, as in, you're not going to have time to read the bills, you got to vote on it, but trust us, you don't have time to read it, no good.
Or if they take a bunch of bills and they stick them together into one big Frankenstein bill, so you don't quite know what's going on, no good.
No good.
You've got to be transparent because it's our money.
So Gates is working toward that transparency and also making politicians keep their word because McCarthy promised to deal with them one way and Gates says that he's not doing it.
So even Thomas Massey thinks that McCarthy should not be removed because in many ways he's a better speaker than the Republicans have had before.
That's what Massey says.
But Is this one issue, the one that you want to throw everything away for?
And my answer is yes.
Yes, this is the one issue to throw everything away for.
You should put the entire country at risk to get this done.
Normally, I would say, no, no, no, don't do anything that puts the whole country at risk.
But this, you have to do it.
This is an existential risk.
If we just keep voting money that we don't have, we are guaranteed to be out of business as a country.
So we have a design that guarantees failure.
Nobody's arguing with that statement.
Let me say it again.
And keep in mind that there's nobody, left or right, who will disagree with this following statement.
Our current design of how we approve things guarantees the destruction of America.
It guarantees it.
It's not even up for debate.
You couldn't find anybody who would debate with that point.
Nobody believes you can keep spending more money than you have forever.
That's not a thing.
But we're in that system.
And there's exactly one person who's willing to take the risk that's big enough that maybe could fix it.
I don't even know if it would.
I don't know if it can be fixed, but I know there's only one person trying and he will be almost, if he's not completely destroyed by this, he's going to be totally attacked.
They're going to try to impeach him and remove him from everything.
I mean, they're going to go really hard because transparency is something that the Congress can't handle.
They can't do their job if you're watching, which tells you something about the job they're doing.
So, I'm going to take a different position from Thomas Massey, and it's because I have a different risk profile.
So if you're a member of Congress, I can see how you'd want to not take super big risks, which is a good impulse.
So I still like Thomas Massey's way of thinking.
I like his transparency.
I like that he says in public why he's doing what he's doing.
So I respect all of that, even when I disagree.
This is a existential moment.
And there's only one person who's even acting like he understands it.
The rest don't even act like they understand it.
Like, I think they do.
But they act like they don't.
That's no good.
So I hope Gates succeeds in completely destroying the effectiveness of Congress until something useful gets done.
All right.
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Let's see, for studying how electrons zip around the atom in the tiniest fraction of a second.
So I guess somehow they figured out how to get a video of an atom or an electron zipping around.
It's a fuzzy picture and they don't know what to do with it or how useful it will be, but someday that might be super important.
They're not quite sure how.
But the three are, let's see, Pierre Agostini, Now, it's two guys and a woman, and the AP did a big story about it, and that's where I saw it.
Do you think they showed the three of them standing there?
No, they didn't.
They showed a half-page photo of the woman.
Now, how many women, either individually or as part of a team, do you think were nominated for the Nobel Prize?
You know where I'm going with this, right?
She wasn't a black lesbian, but you know where I'm going with this, right?
Did you used to think the Nobel Prize was something you'd be proud of if you won?
I used to think that.
I used to think, wouldn't it be great if I won a Nobel Prize for something?
Doesn't matter what.
And now I see this, and the first thing I think is, this is terrible for the woman.
Because the woman is a scientist, and for as far as I know, she did a great job and she absolutely deserves this.
Right?
Let's say that first.
It's entirely possible, if not probable.
That the woman was an important part of the team, her contributions really opened up a field of study that wasn't there before and could be really important.
But, in the context of overdone wokeness, I assume the opposite.
I assume she didn't deserve it.
That's what I assume.
And that is really fucked up.
It sounds like it would be misogynist, but it's not because it has nothing to do with the woman.
It has nothing to do with other women.
It has to do with the wokeness is going to give the prize to the woman if there's one running.
The only thing we have to know is that there was at least one woman on at least one team And then you could have predicted she would win the award, as well as the rest of the team.
Now, I would love to think it's all legitimate and this was, you know, the best team and as best the judges could determine it was the most impressive accomplishment and everybody contributed.
It's actually probable.
But the entire process is, has no credibility left at all.
There's just no credibility.
So, the All of these words went from being the best thing that could ever happen to you in your life to absolutely being sort of icky.
Like, imagine if you're the guys.
Imagine the two men on the team.
Do you think that they're going home and saying privately to their spouses, this is like the greatest thing that's ever happened to me, but do you think we would have won if we didn't have a woman on the team?
And the spouse will say, I don't know.
It's really messed up.
So even the guys are not going to have a clean win, like I would imagine.
In their minds, they're probably thinking, yes, our teammate, you know, the woman on the team was great, but probably a lot of other people did great things too.
Why did we get picked?
And it's going to make their accomplishment feel lessened.
So that's going on.
Here's a story that made the social media news that trans women will be banned from female hospital wars in the UK under a new plan to push back against wokery, as the tweet goes.
Now, why is that news?
Why is it news that trans women, which would be people who are born biologically with male parts, why would they be banned from a female hospital ward?
Well, the reason given is for the safety and comfort of the other people in the female ward.
But more importantly, why is it news?
Just think about this for a moment.
Why is it news?
Because it gets clicks?
No, not really.
It's news because somebody did something smart.
Normally that's not news.
Think about it.
When is it news to do something that's obvious and smart?
Right.
That we've reached a point in history, we've actually reached a point where our level of incompetence is so stunningly thorough that when somebody does something that makes sense to you, it's a fucking headline.
We're very close to the point where it'll be news that there was a vote in Congress On a specific bill, you know, without being lumped with other things, and nobody pulled a fire alarm.
And that would be like a headline.
Whoa!
There was transparency in the vote, and there was no fuckery, and nobody pulled an alarm, and they just voted on it, and then they passed it into law, and then it was a thing.
Like, we're so close to complete incompetence that any little glimmer of smartness feels like, Can you do that?
I would argue that my cancellation was national news because what I said made sense, not because it was offensive.
If it was simply offensive, it probably wouldn't have made news.
It's because it made sense.
The people heard it in context.
Again, I've never said anything about anybody's DNA or their culture.
I don't do that.
But certainly you can say things about the way people are trained and educated, and if one group of people are trained and educated to think that the other group are their enemies and the enemy has your stuff and you should get it back, that's a bad place to be.
If you had a choice, you should go somewhere else.
There's not really any practical way to do that, but that was the hyperbolic point.
Well, I saw a story that I don't believe, which is the Sinaloa Cartel, which has traditionally been a big fentanyl source.
Now, I guess since the boss, El Chapo, got locked up, his cartel is now partly run by his four sons and partly run by some other leader who took a part of it.
And I guess the other leader is continuing to do fentanyl, but the four sons allegedly, don't know if this is true, were trying to tell their own operation to stop doing fentanyl and get out of the fentanyl business.
Now what do you make of that?
First of all, does that sound even a little bit true?
That any part of the cartels for any reason would try to get out of the fentanyl business?
It doesn't sound true.
But you could imagine that El Chapo was being pressed in some way like this.
Here's the deal, El Chapo.
We've got five or so, I don't know how many, maybe at least four Republican presidential candidates who are going to send the military in to destroy you.
If you don't want that, go back to just selling marijuana and cocaine and heroin, which don't kill nearly as much as fentanyl.
If you go back to that, we won't invade the country.
We'll just do the usual interdiction stuff and try to arrest you as we can.
We'll go back to our cat and mouse thing.
And by the way, we might even do some business with you.
Some secret business.
Maybe our CIA needs a little secret money.
Maybe we could go easy on you.
You help us out.
That sort of thing.
That's what it looks like.
So my guess is that somebody tried to negotiate a deal in which the Sinaloa folks would get out of fentanyl in return for some kind of, you know, easier action.
Or somebody gets out of jail or something.
El Chapo's wife was released.
Could it be possible that El Chapo worked a deal where his wife would be released in return for Causing his sons to get out of the fentanyl business.
Maybe.
You can imagine that being a deal.
I don't know that it was.
But this was always the way to get this done.
The way to stop fentanyl was probably for intelligence people to work a deal with the cartels.
So that they could still be rich, but we wouldn't send our military in because there was too much public pressure to do it.
So something's happening, but I doubt it will have any impact on the supply of fentanyl.
All right, so yesterday I did a podcast interview.
And I'm going to do one tomorrow.
I'll let you know all about those.
So yesterday I talked Pearl, of pearly things.
I'll let you know when that's up.
And in theory, unless it gets postponed, I better check my messages.
So unless it gets canceled, I'll be doing Russell Brand today. - Okay.
And I think it would show up for your viewing a little later this week.
But I don't want to give you a date on that until it's confirmed.
Because with podcasting, things get rescheduled just all the time.
All right.
So that's happening.
My other podcast would be Megyn Kelly.
If you want to do a Google search.
I'm told the Megyn Kelly interview and the Michael Malice interviews, you can Google both of those, were some of my best work.
So if you'd like to see some of my best work, apparently it's there.
All right.
Yeah, I don't have any.
Those are the only ones that are scheduled right now.
Can you go in the all-in podcast?
Well, I don't know.
I've got a few other podcasts I'll be looking at going on, but they're not all practical.
They're not all really in my sweet spot.
If drugs were legal, dosages would be known and consistent, and overdoses would decline.
You know, I used to think that.
So there's one view that if drugs were legal, people would get, let's say, a legal fentanyl pill and then they would take it and it wouldn't be enough to give them any kind of an OD.
That is from somebody who has never met an addict.
Can I explain an addict for you?
Hey, your fentanyl is now legal?
And it's all regulated, and it's free.
It's free.
Just come in and we'll give you a fentanyl pill that definitely won't kill you.
What does the addict do?
Every time.
Not sometimes, but every time.
They go in, they get their free pill.
Oh, thank you for the free pill.
And then they send their friend in to get another free pill.
Friend is not an addict, but they go in and say, oh, I'm a totally addict.
Give me a free pill.
Friend gets a free pill.
He gives it to the addict, so he has two pills.
Because the addict says, one pill's not enough for me.
I've built up so much tolerance, I'm like a three pill person.
So the addict keeps taking the free pills, as much as he can get.
And then if the free pills are not enough, what does he do?
He buys illegal drugs to add to the free pill.
Now, if you didn't know that that will happen every time with a serious addict, then you shouldn't be part of this conversation.
That's basic.
If you don't understand the addicts will do whatever they can to get more, and that more is the only quantity that makes sense, there's no such thing as, here's enough, hey addict, why don't you try that with alcohol?
Why don't you say to alcoholics, hey, alcoholic, I got a deal for you.
One free beer every day.
That should take care of your problem, right?
Because your problem is drinking too much.
But I will give you one free beer every day.
No more alcoholics.
Hey, I solved alcoholism because I gave them one free beer every day and it's well measured and safe and I guarantee you that nobody's gonna have an overdose or die of alcoholism from one beer a day.
So, I guess I nailed that, didn't I?
Is there any other problems you'd like me to solve?
No, so that's the problem with legalized drugs.
If you look at legalized drugs from your own non-addict point of view, it sort of makes sense.
But as soon as you say an addict only wants one quantity, more.
There's only one quantity an addict wants, more.
Once you learn that trick, then everything makes sense.
Like why things don't work, why things do work.
It all makes sense when you realize that they only want more.
In all cases, every time.
That's what addiction is.
Addicts always go to 11.
That is correct.
They don't stop at 10.
All right.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, That was everything I needed to do today.
