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Politics, Tate Brothers Arrested, Deadspin, Haiti Cannibals, Same-Sex Marriage Support, Vivek Ramaswamy, TikTok Ban, Persuasion Detection, Thomas Massie, Banning Websites, Chips Act DEI Requirements, Teacher DEI Requirements, Hur Report, J6 Committee, John Barnett, Boeing Whistleblower, Never Trumper Mike Rogers, 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 that's what you're going to do.
Today's show, maybe the best show ever.
Maybe.
You never know.
Stick around.
Maybe we'll make some news, too.
Let's see.
But first, if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even imagine, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice of stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine, the other day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go.
So good.
Well, I saw a story today that there's a new wearable technology that helps researchers determine which coffee is the best.
So you put a little thing on your head with a bunch of sensors, and you taste some different things, and no matter what your conscious brain tells you, the device will tell you how much you really liked it.
Which is awesome.
By the way, I know somebody, a good friend of mine, who does this kind of work.
So if there's an AI company that wants to train their AI how to figure out human emotions, In human reactions, you could actually do that by capturing enough human reactions to things that it forms a database that AI could use to pretend to have some human reactions to things.
Anyway, so that's a possibility if anybody wants a good resource there.
One of the things I learned yesterday is that complaining works sometimes.
You ever complain about stuff and nothing happens?
I had this weird day yesterday where I complained about things and things happened.
I'll give you an example.
I complained because my blue check went away on X. It goes away if you change your profile picture.
It takes a while to be sure that you're really the same person.
And I complained that I didn't think it was ever coming back, because it was taking longer than it should.
And it was back within an hour.
I think an hour after I complained, it came back.
Coincidence?
Could be.
I don't know.
Here are the other examples.
So I complained about my internet, because I've had really, I don't know, years and years of bad internet.
Literally years, where it just goes in and out and glitches all the time.
And I finally just had enough and it got so bad that I couldn't even use it.
And every time I'd done it Xfinity would say they fixed something on a connection to the house or something and sometimes I'd update my modem and it seemed to work a little bit but not totally.
And so yesterday I went through the normal tech support But that was it wasn't working out so they have to escalate it to the like level two So now I had basically two levels of tech support And then I complained about it on the X platform, which definitely got their attention.
So then that gets the executive response team involved.
So at one point I had, uh, I think I had three separate response teams working on it at the same time.
And within an hour of the, uh, contact with the top guys, there was a truck outside my house doing something on the street, but when they were done, I had the best internet I've ever had.
It was about twice as fast on the download and 10 times as fast on the upload.
I didn't even know that was possible.
So it was always in the network, had nothing to do with my house.
And for 10 years or so, I've been dealing with this and fixed it yesterday.
I finally complained enough, I guess.
Well, then there was also my complaint about TikTok, which got a pretty big response.
Vivek contacted me and also You DM'd me just to make contact because he has a very different opinion on TikTok.
And then he alerted me that he was going to do a live stream.
So he did a live stream last night.
I think it was on X. And I watched that and I'll talk about that in a little bit.
So complaining worked three different times yesterday to get the attention I needed, which is weird.
I don't, I don't usually recommend complaining.
I'm not a big complainer, but it totally worked three times.
Anyway, four years ago today, do you know what the anniversary is?
It's your four year anniversary of the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Does it feel like four years since the beginning of the COVID pandemic?
That was a long few years in there, wasn't it?
I think those are the longest years of my life.
Oh my god, I hated those pandemic years.
Anyway, it's over.
Meanwhile, an update on the Taits, the Tait brothers.
Apparently they've been arrested again in their Romanian country.
They've been arrested on a UK warrant.
That's based on charges that were investigated first in 2012 and then dropped.
But suddenly, those charges are back.
Hmm.
How do you explain that?
How do you explain that the Taits are in renewed legal trouble?
You know, Years after charges were looked into and dropped.
Well, one possibility is new evidence.
Definitely a possibility.
The other possibility is this is part of the larger trend of destroying any persuasive voices who might be pro-Trump.
Now, I'm not going to say that the Taits are pro-Trump, because I don't know if they are or not, but you would assume that their general vibe and their general What they believe in and promote seems more compatible with, you know, sort of a Trump point of view.
I'm not counting the way they make money, but the political stuff.
So, do you think that the Taits are being arrested because of some crime?
Or do you think it's political?
What do you think in the comments?
Do you think, without even, I don't even know what the charges are.
I don't know what the charges are.
I couldn't find that in the news.
Everybody was talking about it, but they didn't mention the charges.
So what do you think?
Do you think this is just political?
I think it is.
I think this is political.
I think the United States And maybe Great Britain wanted to do it on its own, but I think we might have twisted their arms to say, you know what?
These Tate brothers are too influential, and they don't say things we like, so take them out.
Now, I don't have evidence of that.
Zero evidence.
No evidence.
It's just that it would be consistent with everything else we've seen.
Let me ask you this.
Has enough time gone by that you understand that my cancellation was political?
You know that that was political, right?
Does everybody know that?
I don't know if that's obvious to observers.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments to see if that's coming through.
All right.
I saw some posts on X talking about how there's no such thing as a rich country.
That doesn't have a lot of energy, or use a lot of energy.
Now, I wanted to use that as a jumping off point for this, I guess it's a reframe.
I believe that war, which ends up settling most of the things in human history, you know, war is usually the big thing that changes countries.
I think war is really just economics.
War and economy are almost the same thing.
Not in effect, but they're the same thing in the sense that the country with the biggest economy is usually going to win the war.
The biggest economy usually wins the war.
And what gives you the biggest economy?
Usually access to cheap energy.
So that energy is really the same as your economy, because it's the thing that has the most influence.
And your economy is kind of the same as your military in the sense that it has so much influence on the other.
So when you see, for example, a country like the United States do what you think are terrible, dirty tricks and horrible things and coups, and you say, it seems all about the energy companies.
We're doing this for the oil companies.
Well, maybe we are.
Maybe we are.
Maybe it's exactly that.
You know, the oil companies have a lot of money and a lot of influence, and so we just do what they want.
But I would submit to you that if we did anything else, we'd already be dead.
Do you get that?
If we didn't go just really aggressively on energy, especially in other countries, basically overthrowing countries so we have a supply of oil.
We're very aggressive about energy.
But because of our aggressiveness about energy and the fact that we're lucky enough to have energy in this country, Our economy is booming.
It's not the only reason, but it's a fundamental reason.
And then we have the biggest military.
So it's all connected.
So if you imagine that, I guess here's the point, if you imagine that there's a conversation about war that's separate from the conversation about the economy, that's separate from the conversation about our aggressive energy posture in the world, stop that.
It's all the same story.
It's all one thing.
It's just different windows into the same thing.
Well, there's a media company that had a bad day.
Deadspin.
So Deadspin was one of these Dingleberry media companies that would do hit pieces on me on a regular basis.
And so I like to dance on their grave a little bit.
Their company got purchased by a European company who immediately said they were going to fire every single person in the company.
And just use the assets.
So, I asked this question.
What would be a good name for a media company that spins the news until the company is dead?
Spins the news until the company is dead.
Deadspin.
Now, I will also accept as an answer CNN, Huffington Post, MSNBC.
All good answers, but the proper answer was Deadspin.
I'd like to share with you the most important story of the day.
It's about a sheep.
You're probably saying to yourself, how could that be important?
Oh, it's important.
You have to see it to see how important it is.
Let me scroll down here and find that sheep.
So there's a sheep that had found a lazy way to eat grass.
It just, it just sits there and I don't know if you can tell, but it's munching the grass as it lays there.
So it's actually eating and resting at the same time.
See his little mouth munching?
And the reason I bring this up is because... Stop it!
The reason I bring it up is that the economy is so bad that even the sheep had to get a side job.
It's a side job.
All right.
Also, very important, if I were to own a sheep, what would I name it?
I would name my sheep James Woolsey Jr.
James Woolsey Jr.
He used to be the head of the CIA, but it'd be a great name for a sheep.
James!
Get over here!
But somebody in the comments had a better idea for the name of the sheep.
Ed Sheeran.
Ed Sheeran.
Damn it, that's good.
Damn it!
I wish I'd said it.
All right.
Still, she does the side job.
Economy's bad.
All right.
I love a good cannibal story.
You know, I'm not a nice person, I guess.
I guess that's all I can conclude.
That whenever I hear a story about cannibals, my first thought is not for the victims.
My first thought is not for the victims of the cannibals.
I know it should be.
I know it should be.
I know how I'm supposed to act.
I just can't.
No, my first thought when I hear stories about cannibals is, well, this is going to be funny.
And sure enough, I was not disappointed.
So Ian Miles-Chiang, who's got a big account on xPlatform, He posted, uh, I just received a request for comment from NBC News asking me to prove cannibalism exists in Haiti.
I wish I was making this up.
And then they showed the actual, uh, request.
It was from an NBC reporter and the NBC reporter was asking, is his source only the one article in the British star slash express with the one unnamed source?
Now I said to myself, is it possible that the entire story about cannibals came from one sketchy publication with an unnamed source, and we all just ran with it?
Did it all come from there?
I don't know.
I saw people in the comments saying they'd seen videos.
I'm not sure I would believe any video that comes out of Haiti, but I think it's hilarious That it's entirely possible that there were no cannibals.
Now, it's not as funny to you as it is to me that we could spend an entire, like, two days news cycle talking about something that's just patently absurd and NBC News just figured out maybe they should ask where it came from.
All right, so I don't know if there's cannibals in Haiti.
All I know is that the criminal leader who seems to be in charge of the whole island at the moment, his nickname is Barbecue.
And he doesn't own a barbecue, if you know what I mean.
So some say he has that nickname because he likes to light his opponents on fire.
That's a possibility.
Or maybe he's a giant cannibal.
I don't know.
Nobody said he's a cannibal.
It's just a funny nickname.
And then other people have suggested that if we allow enough of the cannibals...
If we allow enough of the cannibals to migrate to the United States, it will take care of the rest of the migrant problem.
So it's sort of like when they introduce wolves into an area to get rid of the other animals.
You can introduce some cannibals into our ecosystem just to trim the fat.
All right, no, we're not going to do that.
All right.
NBC News is also reporting that, according to a poll, support for same-sex marriages has actually dropped.
It's actually dropped.
So, in the comments, somebody's yelling at me and saying, that is not funny.
Well, you know what's really funny?
You telling me that's not funny.
That's pretty funny.
Anyway, support for same-sex marriage has dropped, researchers from PRI found.
So this among young adults, which is even more curious, it's among young adults.
The ones who supported same-sex marriage declined to 71% last year from a high of 79% in 2018.
last year from a high of 79 in 2018. What do you think changed? What do you think was the difference in support for same-sex marriages and why it declined?
I have a hypothesis.
My hypothesis, I don't have proof of this, but my hypothesis is that the entire decline in support for same-sex marriage is from the people who tried same-sex marriage.
It seems like that drop from 79 to 71 would be roughly the same as the number of people who tried it.
I don't know if you've tried marriage.
All right, let's just move on to the next story.
No reason to beat that to death.
So you might be aware that I had some choice things to say about TikTok and the people who were opposed to the ban.
And I thought those people opposed to the ban may not be opposed to it for Uh, pure political and ethical reasons that there might be some monetary influence and, or maybe they're just analyzing it wrong.
But, um, I had some harsh words for Vivek to his credit.
He contacted me later on DM.
We, we follow each other on X, so he could just send me a private message and followed up.
And we had a little back and forth.
I don't want to, I don't want to tell you anything about a private conversation, but, um, he alerted me that he was going to do a live stream and he would be addressing it then.
So I watched the live stream and I'll give you all my comments on it here.
So I'll do my best to try to represent his point of view.
Which I'm going to apologize in advance, because if you heard his point of view, you'd know it's just wonderfully complex, like in a good way.
And nuanced and has lots of context that he added about China's persuasion and all other domains and stuff.
So it was a masterful, really it was quite masterful and impressive explanation of the whole situation and then his view of it.
So I want to give you as best I can his view and I hope I'm doing him Credit and not misinterpreting.
No, normally the way these things go is that I would now misinterpret what he said so that I could score my points.
You know that's the normal way this goes, right?
So the next thing, you know, I'll say something that isn't what he said and then I'll mock it and it won't be what he said.
That would be the normal way this kind of thing goes.
I'm going to try not to do that.
I'm going to try actually to maybe steel man his argument and make it as strong as possible, so that if I say anything that's counter to it, it's a fair contrast.
So I'm going to try to do it fairly.
I don't have complete confidence I can do it, because his intellectual grasp of the entire domain is pretty deep.
So let's see if I can get anywhere near First of all, he started off with a long explanation that was very good, and really interesting, about how China uses access to its markets to influence American companies, such as the NBA, that need or want that Chinese market, and so they will bow to whatever they want.
And he made a connection I hadn't heard before, that China wanted to stir up racial division in America, Because it would take the pressure off of China for their treatment of the Uyghurs.
Now, I'd never really heard that frame before, and hadn't heard that China might be one of the influences behind Black Lives Matter.
Now, I don't know in what direct ways that's true, but it does kind of make sense as an influence narrative, because apparently China was saying out loud that as long as Black Lives Matter is a thing, Don't give them any advice.
So that's good context.
So we know that China is trying to influence America.
And also Vivek demonstrated his complete understanding that persuasion is sort of an apex concern.
So he was quite clear on that.
All right, so here's some other things he said.
He says he wants to ban all social media under age 16.
He said that before.
And I like that.
I agree with that.
And it would go a long way toward fixing a problem, because the younger the mind, the more easily corrupted it could be.
You know, if it were up to me, I'd extend it to 25.
There's no chance in the world that that could be approved.
But if people's brains are not formed until age 25, Do you want TikTok to be the thing that forms it?
I mean, because that literally would be part of the formation of your brain from 0 to 25.
So you could argue it should be an older age, but since that would never be approved in our world, 16 is a good, that's a good place to start.
So I'm going to be completely supportive on banning all social media under 16.
I'll also say that would take a big chunk out of my concerns about persuasion.
I don't know if it's more than half, but a big chunk.
Maybe 20%?
Could be even 60%.
It's a lot.
I don't know how to put a percentage on it.
But it would count.
All right, so here's some other things that Vivek said.
He said that we can't beat China by being like China.
In other words, if we were to put our heavy hand on this specific company, That would be more like a Chinese way of being than an American way, which would be more free market and ban behaviors.
We'll get to that.
So, and I'll give you my counters to it as we go.
Can't beat China by being China.
What's your reaction to that statement?
So we want to keep our core American values and not just throw them overboard because we see China, you know, doing some stuff we don't like.
Good point.
Good point.
Bad point.
No point.
What do you think?
Tell me in the comments.
My take is that it's good persuasion.
It reminds me of, you know, if the glove fits, you must acquit.
He repeated it a number of times, and it is one of those sticky persuasive things, because I don't want to be like China.
So I'm already predisposed to liking this idea that we can't beat China by being like them.
Like, oh, I don't want to be like people locking up Uyghurs.
I don't want to be, you know, the government putting too much of a finger on the free market.
So no, I don't want to be like China.
So it can't be China by being like China.
However, you know it's nonsense, right?
It's good persuasion, but it's not an argument.
It's not even close to an argument.
So, let me give you an example of what I mean.
We can't beat China by being like China.
So, for example, China is growing their military right now.
So, our best response would be to shrink our military in response to them growing their military, because we don't want to be like them and they're growing their military.
If China spies on us, and we know they do, Our best response might be to not be like them and spy on China, but to find something else.
And if China has strong borders, we might not want to be like that, and we might want to just open ours up.
Now, those are stupid examples.
They have nothing to do with TikTok.
I'm just saying that as a general claim, You can't beat China by being like China.
It is absurd.
It's absurd.
So from a persuasion perspective, it's really good.
Like A plus for persuasion.
On a logic level, it doesn't have anything.
It's completely empty of any logic.
So I disregard that as being something you should consider when making the decision.
No, we act like China when it makes sense.
Exactly like China when it makes sense and when it doesn't make sense for a national interest, then we don't act like China So the real question is what do you do for the benefit of America?
You don't ask yourself.
What do you do for a benefit of America?
That's also incompatible with China it's just it's a nonsense idea, but The he had realized he had real reasons to that are stronger than that one His best argument—the strongest, I think, that wasn't persuasion-based, but more nuts and bolts—is that he would prefer to ban the behaviors, not the company.
And part of that argument is that our domestic platforms might be doing something that's also very bad.
So Facebook, for example, may be biasing their results and trying to change things, and that would be bad behavior.
TikTok might be trying to persuade America, politically or otherwise, socially.
That might be bad behavior.
So wherever there's bad behavior, just put a control on the behavior.
What do you think of that?
Because it would be sort of a Chinese thing to ban a company.
It wouldn't be an American thing.
And if you start banning companies, you know, slippery slope, they'll ban you.
He didn't say that, but seems reasonable.
If you ban them, they ban you.
But I think our social media is already banned.
So there's that.
So do you think that we could ban the persuasion behavior of TikTok?
What do you think?
Is that something we could do?
Is it a practical plan that we could ban persuasion?
Well, this is probably where he and I have our biggest difference in assumption.
Now I come to the persuasion topic as a trained hypnotist.
So I've written books on persuasion, Winn-Bigley notably, and I talk about persuasion all the time, and it's sort of a lifelong study of mine.
And like I said, I'm literally a hypnotist.
So when I look at the field of persuasion, there's something I know that maybe other people don't know, and I just assumed it was obvious.
So this is not obvious at all.
So if Vivek has never had this thought, maybe it's the first time he's hearing it.
You can't detect persuasion.
So how do you monitor it or police it?
How would you ever tell them to stop doing it when you can't find it?
Now you're going to say to me, I can find persuasion.
Remember that researcher Epstein who looked at Google and he found that the search results were super biased.
That's persuasion, and definitely you could find it.
Now what do you do about it?
Suppose you found it.
So you go to Google and you say, hey, stop this behavior.
And they're going to say, what behavior?
It's just the algorithm.
And then what do you do?
Do you get access to their algorithm?
And if you did, Could you find the bias?
Do you remember the Twitter files?
When Musk started digging into what the Twitter, the old Twitter code actually did, it was so complicated and so distributed across multiple domains of people who could influence it that you couldn't even find all the places bias had been programmed in.
It just wasn't even findable.
So if they say it's not there and that it happened naturally, How are you going to prove it?
You can't be, you'll never be able to look at their code and know what's happening.
Cause even if you found some bias in the code and removed it, just like the Twitter files, you would look at your output and it kind of didn't change.
And you'd say, okay, there must be some other place in the code.
There's also some bias and you might never find the end of it.
Cause there's, there might be, you know, literally hundreds.
Of little tweaks that all move in the same direction, and you'd have to find them all.
Now, so I don't think there's any practical way to detect it based on output, because you would never know what's natural.
For example, let's say a lot of output was negative on Trump.
Isn't that because the news is?
If the news is non-stop negative on Trump, and then you do a Google search, and it comes up with more negative Trump stuff, Are you going to say that the search was wrong?
Do you ban that behavior?
Because that behavior would be super biased.
It would also be natural because they're looking at the news to give you search results.
So in a real world you could never win the argument, hey this is bad behavior.
You can't win that argument because the other side just will have infinite technical philosophical reasons why it isn't.
And there's no objective standard for it.
But there's a worse, much worse, fear.
Do you think you could detect my persuasion?
Do you think you can?
What do you think?
You've been watching me for a long time, most of you.
Most of it's obvious, and I usually call it out.
I say, I'm persuading on this.
You know I'm persuading on TikTok, for example.
Usually I just call it out and then you can see it.
But do you think that I could fool you if I wanted to?
Do you think I have the skill that I could persuade you and you wouldn't even know it was happening?
Of course I could.
It wouldn't even be hard.
Anybody with my level of experience could do it.
Everybody could.
It's trivial.
You would never know.
I've told you before that I see the world like a Harry Potter book.
That there are muggles and then there are people who are trained in persuasion.
The people who are trained in persuasion are invisible to you, just like the wizards.
You see them, but you can't tell.
They have an invisible magic power of persuasion that sometimes they'll show you just so you think you can see it all.
Oh, he showed me all his persuasion.
I trust that one.
No!
They're not going to show you all their persuasion.
They're just going to do it.
So no, there is no practical world in which people who don't know persuasion can identify it.
And that's what you'd need.
And even experts who looked at other people's persuasion wouldn't necessarily be able to identify it.
And if they did, you wouldn't be able to prove it.
So for example, I could look at, you know, what some big platform does and I'd have all kinds of opinions.
Oh, that looks like persuasion.
But could I prove it?
Well, I don't have access to the code.
I don't know if it could have happened naturally.
I don't know if it just follows the opinion of the public, even if I don't like it.
So, no, there is no logical, practical way you can monitor the behavior of the companies, because they can always say, quite persuasively, this behavior is normal and natural, and we didn't do it.
All right.
For example, suppose your platforms said something about either climate change or whether January 6th was an insurrection or a protest.
So which answer from social media would be persuasion and which one would be just the truth?
Well, how can the platform get that right if we can't decide?
If I see the platform say, uh, all the results are insurrection for January 6th, I'm going to say, Hey, that's not fair.
Cause that wasn't an insurrection.
And then the very next person who uses the Google search sees insurrection and says, those are good results right there.
Cause definitely it was an insurrection.
So that's what I expect to see.
So, um, I, I hope I made my point that if you are inexperienced in persuasion, You might think that you could monitor the behavior.
I took as an assumption, which, and I think it's my mistake that I never said it out loud, that you could never monitor the behavior.
If you could, it would be the better way.
So let me say, if there was a practical way to monitor the persuasion behavior of platforms, that would be probably a better way.
But you would also have to do it immediately.
How do you do that?
See, the other thing about the persuasion of TikTok, and Vivek made this point as well, that if you don't have data that says that Facebook is a worse, let's say, a worse risk to the United States than TikTok, if you don't have any data that would suggest that, why would you treat them differently?
Is that a good point?
Because even Trump was saying that Facebook is the enemy of the people and he doesn't want TikTok To go away and then all that traffic move over to Facebook, because Facebook is anti-Trump, and how's that making the country better?
So, that's not a bad argument.
Trump's argument that the traffic would just go over to another enemy, maybe.
But I would argue that you cannot compare what an adversary is doing, or an adversary country's product, versus a domestic company.
In my opinion, the Zuckerberg risk is that we all turn into Democrats.
I know, terrible, isn't it?
You don't want that to happen, do you?
Oh my God, what if all the Democrat Well, Zuckerberg is not a crazy person.
He wants the economy to work and the country to succeed.
He needs that.
His new Hawaii home that's being upgraded, it's no good if the country fails.
There's not a deep enough bunker.
So Zuckerberg doesn't want America to fail.
I assume he's on our side.
He just has a different idea of what's good and what's bad.
So even if you lost everything to Facebook, you might hate that situation, but we'd probably still be a country.
China might have a different opinion.
China might be better off if the United States were less important than China.
So that's a completely different risk profile.
And the big problem with detecting persuasion is that you might detect it, but it might be too late.
Remember that researcher Epstein I talked about who found all the bias in Google?
He didn't find it the day it happened.
He found it way later, after it had already been done.
So if one of the platforms did something That was, let's say TikTok, did something that was really persuasive.
And then later we found and said, hey, you can't do that.
They'd say, oh, we didn't know we did that.
We'll stop doing that.
It'd just be too late.
So on a practical sense, you can't monitor behavior, but you could make sure that an adversary is not in the game.
Is that worth it?
Is it worth it?
Just to make sure that the adversary is not playing?
And would that be American?
Would that be consistent with American values?
Because this is Vivek's point.
Would it be consistent with our American values if we banned TikTok after we saw them persuading?
I don't know.
I guess that's a judgment call.
All right, so I don't need any evidence that Facebook has been no worse than TikTok in the past, because I'm not living in the past.
I'm living completely in the future, and you don't know, and nobody knows, will TikTok push that heat button on something that will be devastatingly bad for America in the future?
I don't know.
Will Facebook, in the future, do something that's worse than what they've done in the past?
Maybe.
Probably only preferring Democrats.
It's not going to be the end of the world.
Whereas TikTok might want a weaker United States in general.
All right.
And so let me just summarize that.
So the main points are Vivek wants to ban all social media from people under 16.
Completely agree.
That would make a big difference in the TikTok persuasion.
Can't beat China by being like China is a meaningless bumper sticker in terms of how logical it is, because whenever it makes sense for us to be like China, we act like it, just like anybody would.
So that's the whole story.
When it makes sense, you do it.
You don't care what China's doing.
Ban the behaviors.
There's no practical way to ban persuasion.
You'd never be able to detect it in time.
And as far as Facebook being as bad as TikTok, I do agree that the Facebook risk is enormous, and I do agree that we don't have data.
I just know that if I'm walking down a, let's say, a darkened alley late at night, and I see somebody coming toward me, and it's a family member, I'm not worried at all.
I'm like, well, I suppose a family member could murder me in this dark alley, but they don't want to.
So I don't even worry about it.
They have no incentive.
But suppose it's somebody who's poor and has a gun and doesn't know you.
Well, then maybe they're going to rob you.
So yeah, I'm way less afraid of somebody who is directionally on my team.
And Zuckerberg, directionally, He's on my team.
He's an American.
Do I like all of his persuasive stuff?
Nope.
All right.
So that's where we're differing.
I think I have a experience difference.
And so I know it would be impractical to stop persuasion and maybe that's the big difference.
However, I would like to announce today that I am opening an account on TikTok.
As soon as I get around to it, it might be today or later.
And so I'm going to join TikTok.
Here's my reasoning.
Number one, it won't be banned.
Do you need a reason for why I say it won't be banned?
And the fight's already lost?
It won't be banned for 35 billion reasons.
There's a gigantic donor who owns 15% of TikTok, who's one of the main donors to Republicans.
And I don't know, maybe he donates to some Democrats when it makes sense to him.
But as long as that's the case, that's way more money than any political process is going to overcome.
Now, one of the things Vivek said is he mocked people Who were suggesting that he was, um, flip-flop or not flip-flopping, but that he was, uh, not going hard against TikTok because there was some financial gain for him.
I want to make clear that I've never thought that.
All right.
Uh, and, and then I worried after I heard it, I was like, Oh, I hope I didn't sound like I was saying that.
I did say that money is the reason.
And I did put his name in that conversation and I'm going to do it again.
Because I don't think that at any point there was any, in my own mind, I had no suspicion or worry that he would take money from some rich donor.
Because first of all, he doesn't need it.
He pointed out he is worth nearly a billion dollars.
No, no, no.
There's no way that Vivek is being bribed.
It just doesn't make sense.
That would be like the same as your family member in the dark alley.
They don't have a reason.
Right?
He doesn't have a reason to take a bribe.
But where the money influence is, is on the Republican Party, of which he is a big supporter, especially the Trump world.
So Trump definitely, and other big Republicans, absolutely, definitely need money for campaigns, and they need money for paying off lawfare maybe, which is also a campaign expense, or it could be.
So yes, I think money's part of it, but no, I don't think there's any chance that Vivek is, you know, taking some kind of, you know, personal enrichment.
I don't, I don't think that's possible.
All right.
So I wonder this about the TikTok ban.
I'm trying to remember, who were the first people who said you should ban TikTok?
Could you tell me in the comments, who were the first public figures you saw say it?
Cause I kind of wondered if it was me.
And so I did a search using Grok, so that's the AI that's built into X, and it said that the first public figure to bring up a ban was Mike Pompeo in 2020.
Does that sound like the first place you saw it?
Because my memory is that it was me.
But, you know, I like to... I'm a grandiose narcissist.
So I tend to remember things about myself better than they actually happened.
But my memory is that it was me.
Did anybody have the same memory?
Or am I literally just hallucinating?
Alright, so I see at least one person who thinks it was me.
Alright, I don't know the answer to that.
So when I asked Grok, here's what he said.
I asked, literally, if I was one of the first people.
And it said, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, has been vocal about his concerns regarding TikTok.
So far, so good.
Particularly in the past year.
Exactly.
However, he has not explicitly called for a ban on the platform.
Wait, what?
He has not explicitly called for a ban on the platform.
Instead, Adams has emphasized the need to address the potential risks associated with TikTok, such as data privacy and security issues, as well as its influence on young people.
In a recent tweet on March 11th, 2024, Adams expressed his concern about TikTok, stating, Congress must be owned by China to some degree because the case for banning TikTok is both obvious and critical to the survival of the United States.
And Grok goes on and says, he further argued that TikTok poses a greater risk to America than other issues such as Russia, climate change, RAND, and the next pundit.
It is important to note that while Adams has not explicitly advocated for banning TikTok, he has consistently raised concerns.
That's right.
Apparently Grok Thinks that the person who probably started the whole fucking thing isn't in favor of it.
Just hold that in your head for a moment.
AI is erasing history in real time.
Let me say that again.
AI is erasing history and rewriting it in real time.
Do you think that'll get fixed?
In the future, are you going to do a direct Google search, or will you always be talking to AI?
We're probably just a few months away from all searches would be AI.
This is what AI thinks.
Now remember, this is an AI, the AI that's built into X, that does not, as far as I know, have a bias against me.
So there's no bias, because I've tried to see if there is any.
When I search it, it doesn't have any bias against me.
But this is completely opposite.
If it's true, That I was the first person to say it, public figure.
And I don't know that's true.
I still need a fact check on that because I've got faulty memory.
But at the very least, I'm one of the most prominent people who's been saying it should be banned.
And it says exactly the opposite, that I've never said ban it.
Is that scary to you?
Am I making too much of a big deal about it just because it's about me?
Or does this scare the living shit out of you that history is just being erased?
Now, why in the world would Grok have this opinion?
It didn't get it from any kind of a search.
Or did it make the opinion based on what it didn't find?
I don't know.
Should it make that kind of inference?
So, that's scary.
Thomas Massey is talking about TikTok being a Trojan horse.
And he says that, uh, give the president the power to ban websites, not just apps.
And, uh, and the person breaking the new law is deemed to be the US or offshore internet hosting service or app store, not the foreign adversary.
So in other words, the criminal would not be China, uh, or even TikTok, I guess.
Um, no, he could ban the apps.
So they could ban the app.
But it wouldn't be punishing China, the country.
So, do you buy that the President should not have the power to ban websites and apps under the Commander-in-Chief role?
Commander-in-Chief.
Should the Commander-in-Chief be able to ban a website or an app?
Well, the worry here would be that the Commander-in-Chief, being a political animal, would use this new power to do things that you would not want them to do.
And maybe they would ban a platform that just says bad things about them politically.
Is that a risk?
Well, here's my take on it.
What the hell do you think the Commander-in-Chief's job is?
What do you think his job is?
Or her?
The job of the Commander-in-Chief is to make decisions that would be too hard or wouldn't make sense to be done by committee because they're so big and so important and you don't need anybody but somebody who's looking out for you to make the decision.
And you got to do it fast.
Well, that's what the Commander-in-Chief does.
Now the thing, the one good thing about most of the Commander-in-Chief stuff is it's public.
So as the Commander-in-Chief says, I'm going to I'm going to take out this terrorist.
Well, you might say to yourself, I'm not even sure that's legal, but you also say to yourself, well, but it's definitely what a commander in chief is supposed to do.
So you let it go.
So I would say that if the commander in chief used commander in chief power to ban something for purely political reasons, and everybody could tell, There would be such an uproar that it just couldn't happen.
And politically it would be, you know, suicide.
But if the President banned a website that clearly was damaging America, would you have a problem with that?
So remember that Massey's point is not that the Commander-in-Chief might ban TikTok specifically.
The bigger worry that he's expressing, just in this opinion specifically, is that it could be overused.
I don't buy that, because the Commander-in-Chief is a position in which overusing it is built into the job description.
We do give them the power to do way more than you'd expect would be part of some legal structure.
So I would say this is normal, and that the Commander-in-Chief has to not just look at missiles and bombs, but needs to look at persuasion as a Uh, military tool.
So yes, it's a risk.
And yes, um, the calling it a Trojan horse, it's hyperbole, but not too far off.
If, if we were not aware of this, uh, that would be a fair statement.
And I don't think we would have been unless he pointed it out.
So, so you could say that's reasonable hyperbole in this situation.
There's such a thing as reasonable hyperbole.
Uh, let me read this comment here.
Uh, Scott, I think you're wrong on this.
Imagine Biden and the complicit press making the case that the conservative treehouse website is full of domestic terrorist oath-breaking insurrectionists.
Right.
So that is the, the risk that you're saying is the one I'm acknowledging.
That they, that the commander in chief could act in a way that's purely political, but it would be suicide.
It would be suicide.
Yeah, so they could do that, but the political blowback, it wouldn't be worth it.
So the thing you count on is it just wouldn't make sense.
Now, is it a risk?
Yeah, it's a risk.
What would happen if Biden banned, let's say, a conservative-leaning website for being a dangerous source of misinformation?
Well, the very next president would ban a liberal website, and nobody wants that.
So there's some mutually assured destruction going on, and it's a known risk.
So I will not minimize the risk.
I just think that when you're Commander-in-Chief, it's your job to manage gigantic risks.
And this should be part of the job.
Yeah, there are checks and balances even within the Commander-in-Chief job.
That's a good point.
The Commander-in-Chief can't just sign anything and it happens, right?
There will be a giant bureaucracy that's going to say, if you do that, do you understand all the problems that that's going to cause relative to what small problem you solve?
Let's take your example.
If Biden banned the conservative treehouse, that's a website, that would be a tiny, tiny little blow to the entire conservative ecosystem.
Although you've heard of it, I mean, it's a substantial entity, but compared to, you know, Fox News and all the larger entities, it's a small percentage.
But the political blowback from banning a website, primarily for politics, and everybody would see that, Would be so big that the benefit you got from silencing a smallish website couldn't possibly make sense, in my opinion.
But yes, it could be abused.
Anyway, here's why I'm joining TikTok.
It turns out that my biggest social media account is on TikTok already.
It's just illegal.
So there's something called Scott Adams underscore official, and it has 1.3 million followers and shares my clips from this show.
Illegally.
So, uh, I'm going to get on TikTok with a separate device so TikTok can't get into my stuff.
And then, uh, I'm going to contact my lawyer.
And I'll have my lawyer contact this account, or TikTok, and see if they'll transfer it to me.
Now, they don't have to transfer it to me.
I don't think there's any law that would require that.
But I will lawfare them to death if they don't.
So, whoever's running the 1.3 billion followers is obviously a fan, and if you see this, and you probably will, You should contact me, and we should talk about turning over the account to me.
Because that's the one way that you can survive this.
Because I'm not going to go soft.
I only have two modes.
I only have two modes, which is, well, I don't care.
And, oh, now I have to make something happen.
So I'm not in the flexible mode.
I'm in the, uh, I'm going to own this account or destroy it.
And if you want to fight about it, I'm up for that fight.
So let's do that.
I will put all of my attention into that fight.
So if you want to fight, and I don't think you do, cause I think it's a fan account, literally a fan account.
Uh, if you'd like to do what's good for me and, uh, you'd like to TikTok people to see my content, I'll help you out with that.
I'll make sure the content's still there, as long as I can monetize it.
Can you monetize on TikTok?
I don't even know if you can.
Who knows the answer to that?
I have so little TikTok exposure.
Do they monetize?
Pay him for it, Jackoff.
I don't have to pay for it.
Why would I pay somebody who stole from me?
That's the dumbest fucking thing anybody ever said.
No.
If he had had permission it would be different.
But it's theft.
It's just theft.
Alright.
The Hill says that 37% of the people surveyed Say Biden is respected by world leaders.
That's in the Gallup poll.
Do you remember when that mattered?
Do you remember when the news told us it mattered that foreign leaders respect our president?
And that, you know, because it was Trump, it was going to be a big problem?
Do you think that only 37% of people thought that world leaders respected Trump by the end of his term?
I don't know.
So why did this go from the biggest problem in the world to nothing?
Now it's just a poll result.
It's not the biggest problem in the world suddenly?
Yeah, what happened?
Well, maybe it's like BLM.
Black Lives Matter and all this police brutality was the biggest thing in the world until it didn't need to be.
And then suddenly it just went away.
Well, here's more evidence that our opinions are assigned to us by the medium.
Media.
They were happy to assign the opinion to us that the respect of our president among world leaders was a critical, critical thing.
And now it's not.
Doesn't matter.
So yes, we, our opinions are assigned.
There's more talk about the Trump revenge tour and will he just get in office and spend all this time and resources getting revenge?
But he's done a good job of reframing that as revenge is just doing a good job.
He also reframes his, quote, conservative policies.
He says he's not really a conservative, that he has common sense policies.
Very good reframe.
You could argue how technically true it is, but if you're running for president of the whole United States, I think it's a mistake to say you have conservative policies, you know, once you get outside the primary.
You want the president to have common sense, and that's actually a strong reframe.
I like that.
I think everybody is so disgusted with, you know, the Democrat versus Republican thing that simply saying, You're not just doing everything conservative, you're just doing things to make sense.
And by the way, that actually fits, because if you take something like IVF, Trump's in favor of it, but there are some extreme, I don't want to say extreme, there are some members of the conservative group who say no.
So he does pick his policies.
So I think he does have a claim That he is doing what makes sense and not what is just dogma.
I think that's actually true.
It's persuasion, but I think it's actually true.
He's repeatedly pledged to investigate Biden and his family after he becomes president, I guess, again.
Here's what I think.
The fact that the press wants to call it revenge, if Trump gets into office and then, let's say, initiates some legal action against people who he thinks deserve it, doesn't it feel like the press is priming us to see whatever happens to Democrats is revenge and not justice?
Doesn't it feel like priming?
So the comments on here are whether I look more like I have AIDS.
What was the other thing?
But basically the commentary is about my physical appearance.
You know that's not what I lead with, right?
Are you concerned that my ego about my physical appearance will be... You're going to damage me somehow?
I have a mirror.
I have the mirror.
I know what I look like.
Your commenting on every single internal thought is amusing.
The cannibal clown jokes are getting less funny every time you clowns reword it.
Cannibal clown jokes?
You mean jokes about cannibals and clowns?
Or you just don't like cannibal jokes?
There's some people here who don't like cannibal jokes apparently.
Anyway!
There's another story that says a litmus test for Trump's VP pick will be what they say they would have done if they had been in Mike Pence's position about certifying the 2020 election.
And one of the better answers was from J.D.
Vance.
I'm not going to say there's a right answer.
I'll just say the better answer for both getting the job and for communicating.
J.D.
Vance has a good answer.
He said he'd tell the states to send more than one slate of electors and he'd let Congress sort it out.
Now, I don't know enough about the process of the government to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea.
I really don't.
But, it makes sense.
Like, as an answer to the question, it's pretty good.
See, this is the difference between was it an insurrection or was it a protest in which we were trying to find out what was true.
The Democrats are unaware, because nobody will tell them, that the so-called fake electors that the Trump people were trying to put together was for the purpose of keeping their option and making sure that they've established a strong claim with the knowledge that it always has to be worked out by the courts or the Congress, whatever.
It's always going to be some combination of the courts and the Congress.
It's not like Trump Could just individually make a different slate of electors stick?
So I think you would have to not understand how anything works to believe the claim that Trump believed that simply having fake electors would make him the next president.
It would not, and I don't believe anybody believes that, because it's absurd.
All it was was to, you know, persuade and create the impression that they have a strong claim, Buy some time to look into some specific allegations about the election, which might have been 48 hours.
That's what they were asking for.
And then they would either have, you know, one slate of electors or the other certified.
So in other words, there was never anything that happened on January 6th in terms of the certification stuff and the electors.
That wasn't part of our process.
The process allowed all of it, right?
So, let's talk about it.
The Haiti Prime Minister resigned.
He stepped down.
So, Haiti has no government.
He said, well, he's going to resign upon the creation of a transitional presidential council.
So if they come up with a transitional council, he'll step down.
I think the, I think we already have military over there.
The U S does.
So at this point, um, the U S is exerting control over it and we'll, I'm sure we'll get our puppet back in play.
Um, well I asked on the, uh, another poll on X today.
I said what's more dangerous to America?
What's the bigger existential threat?
Climate change or DEI?
And of course DEI won, I don't know, 90% of the vote.
Why is that?
Well, first of all, I like Alex Epstein's reframe that we shouldn't be talking about climate change.
We should be talking about minimizing any risk of it.
So minimizing the damage instead of stopping the thing, because you might not be able to stop the thing.
Maybe it doesn't need to be stopped.
Maybe warmer is better.
Who knows?
Maybe some places better, some place worse.
But if you concentrate on keeping people alive and fed, That makes a lot of sense.
Where if you say, our problem is the change...
Well then you do a bunch of crazy stuff and real expensive stuff.
So it's a good reframe to work on the, let's say, the survival and the thriving of the humans and not measuring the temperature and trying to change that.
All right, but big story you already heard it is that the reason we can't have good things in America is because the CHIPS Act, which was supposed to put a bunch of money Government money behind building manufacturing for chips in the United States, so we didn't have to depend on a little island off of China, Taiwan.
And apparently it's not happening.
Do you know why it's not happening?
It's because the DEI requirements, the CHIPS Act, had 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a chief diversity officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing Scientific cooperation with what it calls minority-serving institutions.
And more and more and more and more.
So, anybody who's an entrepreneur or has investment money, they look at this and they say, well, I like the part about getting money to help build a chip factory, but I am not in any world going to agree to these onerous DEI requirements, so we don't get chips.
So let me ask you again.
What is a bigger existential threat to the country?
That the climate is changing slowly?
Or that if something happens with China, we would lose access to all modern civilization?
Because we can't make the chips.
Which is a bigger threat?
It's not even close!
These are not even in the same galaxy!
Climate change might actually kill people and be a risk in some future time.
It's far more likely we'll figure out how to manage it than it is that it'll kill us.
But we are basically one order from President Xi that says, don't get near Taiwan or we'll sink your ship.
And our entire civilization is done.
That is a really big risk.
So DEI is destroying the world.
And you say to yourself, Scott, if DEI were such a problem, it wouldn't be just in this CHIPS Act, you know, manufacturing thing.
You'd see it in other domains.
You would see it like creating a crisis of incompetency, not because minorities have less competence, but because the math of it is the pipeline doesn't have enough.
For the people who want to hire.
So necessarily because humans are humans, they will meet their objective of diversity by hiring less qualified people.
Again, not because minorities are less qualified, but only because they're in short supply relative to the demand.
So if that were the case, and that's also bad, I mean, imagine what we would see if that were true.
I mean, you'd see suddenly stuff like, I don't know, like airplanes would be having all kinds of maintenance problems they never had before.
And we're not seeing anything like that.
You might see like massive lawsuits being filed over racial discrimination against white people.
Okay, we are seeing a lot of that coming out from Stephen Miller's group, the America First legal thing.
They're looking to sue over that.
OK, well, maybe the planes are having massive maintenance problems and maybe there are massive lawsuits being formed over discrimination.
But I mean, those are just a few items, right?
I mean, there's the chips, the airlines, the discrimination hiring.
But there's another story in the news that there's a Kobe Bryant statue in L.A., I guess outside the stadium, and there are quite a few misspellings on the placard.
A lot of misspellings.
I don't know who made the Kobe statue, but I'm going to guess some DEI was involved, maybe.
And if DEI were such a bad thing, I mean, you can imagine that you wouldn't even have access to, and this is horrible, but imagine that the general public would no longer have access to their favorite comic strips.
But we're not seeing anything like that happen.
So... Sarcasm, off.
Alright, do you ever wonder why so many teachers are idiots?
Robbie Starbuck reports that if you apply to be a teacher in Nashville's public schools, you have to agree to all the racist DEI questions or you can't get hired.
So they've got a little test where if you don't basically fully embrace being a racist against white people, you can't get hired as a teacher.
You actually have to prove in writing you're a racist against white people, or you can't get hired.
Now, you would say, Scott, you're mischaracterizing what it is, it's really just a bunch of questions that show that somebody is, let's say, woke and cares about diversity.
No, it's nothing like that.
It's pretty much proving that you hate white people and you can't get hired.
So you can look at it yourself.
And the other thing that's funny is the multiple choices only have the choice of strongly agree or strongly disagree.
Talk about putting your thumb on the scale.
All right.
The HER hearings are happening.
H-U-R hearings.
So this is the special counsel who is looking into Biden's Retaining of those private documents, and the first thing I heard about this is brand new, so I don't have details.
Apparently in the HRSA report it says, quote, my team and I conducted a thorough independent investigation.
We identified evidence that the president, that's Biden, willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.
Willfully retained classified materials.
Now, that's worse than what Trump did, because my argument goes like this.
Trump at least has a cogent and reasonable argument, a common sense argument, that when he was president, he had full control over what is declassified.
And the very act of putting them in boxes and taking them out is a de facto classification.
Now, will that argument work?
I don't know.
But if you ask me from a non-lawyer point of view, does that make sense?
Completely.
In fact, I'm pretty sure if the situation reversed, I would say, oh, okay, if Biden knew he was taking them and he was president, Then that's a de facto declassification and there's no specific requirements of paperwork to declassify if you're president.
You just have to want it declassified and it is.
So it looks to me that what Biden did was worse because he was retaining things that had never been declassified or even de facto declassified in an arguable way.
But he did not get penalized because we believe that her thinks he's an old man and his memory is gone and the jury would not convict him.
All right.
Stephen A. Smith.
Do you know Stephen A. Smith?
He's black, which I only say because it matters to the story.
And I'm not really familiar.
I guess he mostly talks about sports and I've had only passing exposure to him.
Never had an opinion one way or the other.
I just didn't know his deal.
But he did a little three minute speech on video in which he is sort of mocking Biden for, you know, making it an hour in a speech and people acting like, oh, that's it's all we need to know.
And the reason I would recommend this is I don't know if I've ever seen anybody give a better presentation about anything.
Oh my God, he's talented.
So, um, my statement here is not about Biden.
I don't, you know, we've talked about his energy enough, but oh my god, if you want to see the best you could see of just somebody making a point in three minutes, watch Stephen A. Smith give you the best Body language, visual, sarcastic, funny, right on point, um, presentation.
I mean, I highly recommend it.
So it's in my, um, my ex feed if you want to go look at that.
Really, really good job.
Anyway, um, apparently the hoax about Trump wanting to grab the wheel of the beast, the so-called beast is the car the president drives in.
And Cassidy Hutchinson, who had been the Chief of Staff for Mark Meadows, said that she's the one who said that the President not only lunged at the steering wheel and that the Secret Service had to grab his arm because Trump wanted to go to the January 6th protest, but the Secret Service wasn't going to let him.
And then Hutchinson said that he lunged for the clavicle of the Secret Service driver.
In other words, like his neck.
A clavicle just below the neck.
And then we find out that there was testimony from the actual Secret Service who said nothing like that ever happened.
The Secret Service, under oath, the Secret Service, under oath, said it never happened.
And, of course, you're all familiar with that.
No, you're not, because it turns out the January 6th Committee hid that.
They hid it.
You don't think that would be a little bit relevant to the question of whether it happened?
Talking to the person that it allegedly happened to, who is a Secret Service, And under oath, and said no, nothing like that happened.
Or he was not aware of anything like that happened, didn't see it, and he was obviously would see it.
So it seems to me that the January 6th Committee should be in jail.
No, you agree?
If they intentionally hid this testimony, there's got to be some law.
You tell me there's no law that allows, there's no law that prevents them from doing that?
There's got to be a law.
I mean, I would make up a law.
So if Trump became president and he said, look, you just made this shit up and you hid the evidence that it didn't happen.
And it's a horrible thing to the country and we're going to put you in jail for it.
Would that be revenge?
Would you call that revenge?
If the people who hid the exculpatory evidence knew they were doing it, obviously they knew.
Did it anyway.
Again, I don't know what crime it is, but you can always find a crime in these situations.
I think they belong in jail.
It's one of the worst things I've ever heard in politics.
This is in the top 1% of the worst things in American politics.
What about the McCarthy hearings?
Not as bad.
Not as bad.
In my opinion, not as bad.
This is the worst thing.
I've ever seen in American politics.
Now, that assumes that the facts, you know, stay the facts we know.
Yeah, it's hard not to be in favor of revenge in this case, but I wouldn't call it revenge because this would be just the thing that should have happened.
Why do you call it revenge if it's just the thing that should happen?
All right, Congresswoman Tlaib.
Is trying to get together some kind of living wage for artists so that the ones who don't make money on streaming in other ways can make some money.
Her claim is that if you had 800,000 plays of your song on Spotify, you would only be making the equivalent of, well, nothing basically.
$15 an hour.
It'd be like a minimum wage job.
Can you imagine having 800,000 listens and you got paid, you know, like a few hundred dollars?
Now compare this.
In the old days, if you were making an album, you might, I'm just going to make up a number.
Let's say you sold it for 10 bucks.
Uh, people would pay $10 for one album.
Now you can pay $10.
And again, I'm just making that up.
It's in the ballpark for all the music in the world forever.
$10 per month.
So where did all the money go?
It went to the streaming services.
The streaming services just basically robbed the musicians of immense amount of money because they could.
They just could.
Generally speaking, whenever you see that your work as an artist is being combined with other people's work, For some distribution reason, that's always bad for the artists who are at the top of the chain.
It will always be stealing their money.
And if they agree to it, they're idiots, but sometimes you get forced into it.
Um, I'm on Spotify for this as well.
So Spotify just lowered my, um, my, uh, amount of income, royalties, whatever, from Spotify.
I don't know if it's a permanent change cause they're also moving me to a different kind of advertising.
I moved from, um, what do they call it?
Ambassador ads to they would place the ads themselves, but it went from, uh, well, it decreased by 90%.
So what I was getting already, which was small, they decreased it by 90%.
But I don't know if that's permanent.
I'll have to wait a month to see if it evens out.
So yes, I would say that Spotify and the streaming services, when it comes to music or podcasts, I don't like to use the word fair, but it would certainly make sense if the better artists got off that platform.
If they could.
All right, Rasmus says that eight months before the presidential election, 91% of likely U.S.
voters think the economy is the biggest issue.
Almost as many.
86% think immigration-related issues, but that's sort of tied up in the economy, so that makes sense.
And then 71% say the issue of abortion will be important, including 44% who say it'd be very important.
What do you think?
Do you think abortion is going to be very important?
I don't know.
Probably.
So there was a Boeing whistleblower.
He said that Boeing, I guess his claim was that they weren't doing a good job of building their planes, meaning that it would be unsafe.
That would be the claim from the whistleblower.
And he was found dead of an apparent suicide by gunshot while he was in his car.
So, do you think that's a coincidence?
That the whistleblower is dead of a gunshot parent suicide?
Well, it could be.
Here's why.
I believe that being a whistleblower and committing suicide are largely similar.
You don't become a whistleblower until you have devalued your own life.
Let me say that again.
You don't become a whistleblower Until you've already devalued the value of your own survival.
Because that's built in.
If you're not willing to take that risk, you don't become a whistleblower.
Right?
You've devalued the value of your own life.
And that's what suicide is.
So, you have to ask the question, This is a pretty big coincidence, but on the other hand, it would be consistent with somebody who had blown up his entire life and he just said, well, I just threw away everything to be a whistleblower and nothing changed.
What would you do?
You're a certain age.
I couldn't tell his age, 60-ish, maybe.
You're a certain age and you just threw away everything and you got nothing for it.
You got nothing.
And then he killed himself, they say.
That's not crazy.
So we should all be concerned that he got Epstein'd, and I would certainly be investigating it like a possible murder.
But this is a special case.
Could have been a suicide.
Rand Paul is sounding the alarm that Trump is endorsing Mike Rogers for his run for office in Michigan.
And this is what Rand says about Mike Rogers.
Donald Trump just endorsed the worst deep state candidate this cycle.
Mike Rogers is a never-Trumper and a card-carrying member of the spy state that seeks to destroy Trump.
You have to ask yourself, who gives Trump this awful advice?
Who's next?
John Bolton?
Good question.
But I assume, Trump being Trump, I assume he has taken all of that into consideration, and that whatever reason he's doing it for is at least well considered, even if you don't agree with it.
So there must be some play here.
It could be that he thinks Rogers will be on his side, and maybe he will.
