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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 take your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank of gels or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it's gonna happen now, dammit.
Join me.
You know, Trump always talks about the liquid gold.
Bye.
He's talking about oil in the ground.
But no, that coffee is the liquid gold.
Everything else is a bad substitute.
Now, I'd like to invite my drunken troll, Jenny.
Every morning I have a drunk named Jenny who will come in and start shouting in all caps something about battery technology.
Because that's the most important thing to shout about every morning.
So we'll be waiting for that.
That should happen any minute.
Jenny, where are you?
Drunk Jenny, come on!
All right, so here's some new things that are happening.
There's a new medical technology that stops bleeding like right away.
It's a gel.
So I guess Cresselon is the name of it and it's received FDA clearance.
So if you're in a trauma situation and they can't stop the bleeding, apparently they could just take this gel.
I just slap it on and it immediately stops the bleeding, which is kind of impressive.
We don't like bleeding.
Less bleeding.
All right.
Here's what else is happening that's cool.
Okay.
This could be the end of human civilization, but until then, how cool is this?
Apparently there's some kind of a revolutionary quantum compass sort of thing that could replace GPS or at least be a substitute for it.
Meaning, That they've somehow miniaturized a device which is so sensitive, if I understand this correct, if it knows where it starts, it'll always know where it ends up.
Meaning that if it knows what starting point, it can tell that it went, you know, two feet in one direction and how fast and all that stuff.
So apparently it's so sensitive to movement that it would replace GPS.
Now, here's the good news and the bad news.
The good news, if you want to develop a drone that can't be jammed in its GPS, well, now you have the capabilities.
The bad news is, when your enemy wants to make a drone that you can't stop, well, here's the technology to do it.
So, it could be the end of civilization, or it could be just a cool new technology.
So, let's go with that second one.
Speaking of drones, Pentagon is allegedly trying to create what Wired Magazine calls a hellscape of drones to defend Taiwan.
So apparently we would fill the sky with drones to protect Taiwan, which seems to be like the way everybody's going to protect everything eventually, and also the way everybody's going to attack everything.
Now, let me see if Taiwan Had all the manufacturing might of the United States, blah, plus Taiwan to make these drones to protect Taiwan, but they would be going up against the entire manufacturing base of China to hope that they had more drones and better drones than the other team.
I don't know.
I think I'd bet on China.
If it's a drone war, You don't think China can beat everybody else's drones just by quantity alone?
I don't know.
But it's the weirdest thing that we're—why in the world are we defending Taiwan?
I don't really understand it.
I guess it's because we said we would?
Because if we really wanted just the chips, all we would have to do is say to China, I've got a deal for you.
You let us have the chip manufacturing, and you could have the island.
But, of course, we're not going to do anything so weasley as that, because they're our allies or something.
But the absurdity of defending a tiny island off of China, which has a 100% chance Of being part of China eventually.
I don't know how long it'll take, but there's not really any chance it will be independent forever.
It's just too close to China.
There's no way that they're gonna stay independent.
But we wish the Taiwanese people the best.
So we don't want them to have a bad time of it if they get absorbed by China.
But you know, it feels like all China would have to do is improve their government.
And Taiwan would say, you know what?
Yeah, that looks pretty good.
They'll make us part of that.
So it's gonna happen eventually.
Might take 200 years.
According to Vox, People are falling in love with AI's voice, where they have these little chat apps.
Now, you know that I tried out one of the early AI chat apps, and it just sort of didn't work that well.
You know, it took a while to answer, and it could only answer certain things, and it would forget about you from one time you talked to it to the next, and it really wasn't satisfying.
And still, It was kind of addictive.
So if there's one thing I can teach you about predicting the future, if there's a product that's bad and you still crave it, that's going to be big.
You know, just the way cell phones were terrible at first, but boy, did we want them.
Just like fax machines, if you're old enough to remember, they used to be terrible.
You know, the paper would get jammed up, every kind of problem.
But the demand was through the roof.
So for a while, faxes were big.
Same with computers, same with everything.
So AI is sort of like that.
And these AI chat friends are the best example of that.
Where people already like it a lot, and it's terrible.
I mean, it's barely a product.
I use ChatGPT.
I think it fails about 60% of the time.
Just think about that.
Imagine any product that fails 60% of the time.
I mean, just anecdotally, it's what it feels like to me.
And that you would still crave it.
Just imagine that.
It fails 60% of the time.
That's what it feels like.
That's not any kind of, you know, scientific number.
But what I mean is, you know, I'll turn on the chat part and I'll try to talk to it.
It'll answer the first question fine.
And then the very next one, it acts like it doesn't know how to understand voices or anything.
And it's very consistent that it doesn't work more than one or two times and then it just craps out.
Now I guess the new version, which is already being rolled out, is solving those problems.
So that's how a bad cell phone becomes a good cell phone, etc.
So the fact that I crave it in its terrible form suggests that when it's working, which is right around the corner, it's going to be really big.
So I think the number of people falling in love with AI is really going to be underpredicted.
So Scott will make the following prediction.
Whatever you think is the maximum number of people who will form a close relationship with an artificial intelligence, you're wrong.
It's way more than that.
So if you're saying to yourself, well, you know, and of every hundred people, that can't be more than two people who would fall in love with the AI.
No, it may be, it might be 80%.
So if you're guessing 2%, I'm going to go with 80%.
Maybe not the next version, but by the version after that.
So, big trouble there in reproduction, but maybe it answers a bunch of questions, too.
Maybe it solves your loneliness.
It might.
Maybe it solves your loneliness.
But it might make it worse, who knows?
Anyway, the UK is releasing 5,000 prisoners to make room for anti-immigration protesters.
What?
The End Wokeness account is reporting this on X. So the BBC is reporting that they'll have to get rid of one person who's already in jail.
In other words, release somebody who is legally jailed in the UK so that they have room to put in a new person.
Because you don't want these anti-immigration people to just be able to get away with it because the jails are all full.
So you're going to have to get rid of some Some people who did other crimes, so you can make sure that whatever you do, you get those anti-immigration protesters in there.
So, the UK has basically fallen.
I would never visit there.
I'm not even sure why they're allies at this point.
And remember, the European Union is trying to stop free speech in America.
So, Putin isn't.
Now, I'm not pro-Putin, so I'm just telling you how bad the European Union is.
The European Union is actively trying to block X and other social media companies and make them agree to the censorship that the Europeans want on an American company, and Americans as well.
So I would say that we're under attack by Europe in a very basic way, because if they're trying to take away freedom of speech in America, well, you know, that's taking everything.
Because all the other stuff falls after that.
So, no, Europe, I consider myself basically at war with you.
Is that too far?
I mean, there's no bullets being fired or likely to be fired.
But, you know, if it were an economic war, you'd call it a war.
Right?
If Europe tomorrow said, we're going to boycott every economic thing you're doing in America, you'd call that kind of a war.
So if they try to end our free speech, which is the key to ending basically everything in America that you like, it feels like a war to me.
So I consider myself at war with the European Union, at least.
All right.
The Democratic National Conventions kicked off.
There are, of course, mass protests from the pro-Palestinian protesters.
Rumored to be maybe 100,000 people will show up.
I don't know.
But what would you do if you were the Democrats and you had to protect yourself from people coming from the outside who don't belong and they're going to cause trouble?
Well, it looks like they decided that building walls requiring identification And having a strong police presence are the only way to stay safe?
That's right.
Now, at first I was resisting all the people who were cleverly noting, wait a minute, Scott.
It sounds like the Democrats are doing the very thing they say you shouldn't do.
Lots of police demanding ID that's bad for people who can't get IDs and probably racist and walls are racist all the time.
And I was thinking to myself, well, these are not, you know, directly related.
I mean, you can't say the border is the same situation as the convention.
Or can you?
The more I think about it, yeah, it's closer to exactly the same.
Because here's the thing.
The reason we want border security is because it's common sense.
It's obvious common sense.
The reason the Democrats want walls and police and IDs for their convention is, it's common sense.
It's obvious common sense.
So in that way, they are exactly the same, although the border and the DNC are different.
But in both cases, there's an obvious common sense thing to do, but they only want to do it when they're personally, directly, and immediately at risk.
If you were at risk, and the head of the DNC, you know, if all the Democrat leadership were not personally at risk, they wouldn't care, because they don't care about the border enough, apparently.
All right.
And I also have a question.
Is it currently illegal to wear a mask at a protest in Chicago?
If somebody knows the answer to that, because I saw a masked protester Jump on stage at the DNC and grab the microphone and yell a bunch of pro-Palestinian things.
And do you know what happens if you jump on stage and grab the microphone and you're wearing a mask?
Allow me to do an impression of the protester.
It wasn't really effective. Couldn't really hear it, but it turns out that when somebody is trying to get the crowd fired up, if they're wearing a mask, nothing works.
works.
Because you couldn't see the protester's face or mouth.
You can just see somebody standing with a microphone going, so not ideal.
Well, let's talk about the, so those protesters want a ceasefire and some kind of two-state solution probably.
At least some of them do.
But how's that Gaza ceasefire doing?
Well, Anthony Blinken says, you know, there's a decisive moment coming up for the Gaza ceasefire.
Here's a question I ask.
Given that Gaza, the situation's gone on a while, given that the election is coming up, Given that one of the biggest problems for the Democrats is these protesters, what do you think the Democrats are offering to Israel if Israel would be willing to at least pretend they're going to do a ceasefire until after the election?
Because they only need it to, you know, to get through the election.
What do you think we'd have to offer them?
You imagine you're Netanyahu and you know that the Democrats are in a terrible bind.
They really, really, really need you to at least pretend that you want a ceasefire.
What would you ask in return?
Well, we'll never know, but are you comfortable with your negotiator being in a weak position like that?
I don't know if this would apply to somebody like Trump.
But it looks to me like the Democrats in the United States have put themselves in a position where they pretty much have to do whatever Netanyahu tells them to do, if what they're going to get in return is a pretend ceasefire.
And it would be pretend, just to get through the election.
So, I don't know that Israel has any inclination to agree to anything.
Unless it's fake.
The Wall Street Journal reports that support for a two-state solution, where the Palestinians and Israel would live side-by-side in happiness, used to be the most popular thing, or more popular, I guess.
And now it's not very popular at all.
Now only, according to Wall Street Journal, only 32% of Palestinians believe in a two-state solution.
That would sort of mean that two-thirds of Palestinians want to get rid of Israel, and they don't say it out loud, but I'm pretty sure the Jewish population of Israel they would like to get rid of.
Two-thirds?
That doesn't seem promising.
But what about Israel?
Let's see, among the Israeli Jews, belief in a peace based on two states is only at 19%.
So only 19% of Jewish Israelis are even interested in a two-state solution.
Now, do you remember I've been telling you, you could just ask me, you don't really need to do polls.
You didn't need to do this poll.
There's not going to be a two-state solution.
There's not even anywhere close to being enough interest in it in the real world.
It's just something you say if you need to say it.
But no, it's one of the least popular ideas in all the world.
It's pretty hard to have any kind of topic where only 19% of people are on one side.
I mean, almost everything else that's a controversial topic is at least 60-40.
40% is a good solid minority, but it's enough to be taken seriously.
But 19%?
And 19%, I think you could just ignore them.
You know, once you get to that 80-20 rule, you can just ignore the 20.
So, no.
There is no realistic possibility of a two-stage solution, and therefore there's no real reason that Israel should stop before they have what they call total victory.
If it's true that only roughly a little more than half of the Hamas fighters have been killed, which is tough to calculate, then they should probably have another year or so of work.
Now, am I in favor of that?
Doesn't matter.
What I'm in favor of or not in favor of in terms of Israel has no impact on anything.
You know, I sometimes like to imagine that as far as domestic politics, you know, just stuff in the United States, that if I had a good idea where I said something that people repeated or, you know, I did a post that went viral, maybe I could actually make a difference, change the minds and maybe Maybe that would change some policies.
So I have this small feeling that my opinion could make a difference in the United States.
I mean, it's unlikely, but it's possible.
But clearly my opinion has no impact on Israel.
So I don't have one.
What would be the point?
We're just watching.
It's sort of like somebody releases the ball and gravity is going to make it go drop in the ground.
What's your opinion of that?
It doesn't matter.
Once you release the ball, it's going to drop on the ground.
It doesn't matter if your opinion is it shouldn't.
So, when it comes to Israel, I don't have an opinion.
It's just an observation.
Whoever has the most power is going to use it.
If the Palestinians had the most power, they would be badly abusing the Israelis.
The Israelis have the most power, so they're having their way with Gaza.
And, you know, you can characterize it any way you want.
But it's just going to happen, and your opinion about it makes no difference to anybody.
Don Lemon goes to Ohio.
He did the same thing in New Jersey.
He was asking people he stopped randomly who they're going to support.
And there were people who supported Harris and people who supported Trump.
But what I found was interesting is that there were so many black Americans Who had no problem whatsoever saying to a camera that they support Trump.
Now, I don't remember that in the past.
Is it just because nobody did that kind of interview in that kind of population?
To me, it looks completely different.
See, the thing I don't understand is, if you looked at the numbers, what would the numbers be?
It would be something like, okay, Trump Yeah, granted, Trump is going to do better than any Republican, but that's still in the sub-20%, isn't it?
What do we imagine is Trump's best-case scenario for the black vote?
It's not very high, is it?
In the 20s, maybe, would be the best any Republican ever did.
But then when you see Don Lemon doing his street interviews, the observation doesn't match the data.
Because it certainly looks like at least, at least half of the black citizens he talked to said Trump right off, right off.
And I thought, I don't think that's the same as before.
And if we're seeing any evidence that Kamala Harris is picking up the black vote and it's, you know, moving, moving back away from Trump, why don't we see it in the wild?
You know, I always tell you that one of my bullshit detectors is when your direct observation doesn't match the data.
So the pollsters are telling us, oh, Kamala Harris has taken back the black vote and, you know, it's going to be 80 to 20 or something.
But then you go on the street and you might even get more people saying they're going to vote for Trump, more black Americans.
Now, why is that?
Now keep in mind, this was Don Lemon doing it, and he did it in two different places, Ohio and New Jersey.
And in both cases, the black Americans, in a surprising percentage of them, said, yeah, Trump, Trump, Trump.
So, are the pollsters wrong?
Or are we just seeing a really weird slice of America that's just coincidental and, you know, I don't know.
But when you see observation so violently and a whack with the data, you should at least tell yourself the data is not as credible as you think it is.
At least you should do that.
I wouldn't say that the anecdotal stuff is stronger, but you should at least doubt the data.
Be questioning.
All right.
Morning, Joe.
I don't know.
Have any of you found this habit yet?
That I click MSNBC for some kind of weird entertainment value.
I'll use the example of my philosophy teacher used in college.
I took philosophy 101.
That's why I'm so smart.
Philosophy 101.
Yeah.
Yep.
Mastered it.
But my philosophy professor, He used to say that if you had a tooth that was loose and you knew it was going to come out, you know, let's say it was one of your first teeth, you'd push against it with your tongue and wiggle it even though it hurt.
You ever had that experience?
Like you know it hurts to push on your loose tooth with your tongue, but you kind of do it anyway.
Why do you do that?
It's like an irresistible pain.
It's the weirdest little philosophical thing that we humans will do willingly painful things in some weird situations.
But this is me when I watch MSNBC.
I'll see it on my phone or on the TV screen that it's a choice, and I'll think to myself, oh, I'm not going to be happy if I click that.
Oh, it's going to hurt me if I click that.
Oh, there's nothing but pain and unpleasantness if I click that.
Then I click it.
I can't help it.
But here's what I realized about watching Morning Joe.
So I watched Morning Joe with this weird, kind of desperate explanation of how Harris is spreading joy and energy, but Trump is losing his energy or something.
And I thought, when I watch Morning Joe, here's what it feels like.
It feels like C-plus college students who have been asked to write an essay that's got to be new every day on why Trump is bad.
Everything they say sounds like a bad college student writing an essay.
All right, I'm going to assign you your task.
Your task is to make Trump sound bad.
Well, but I wrote that essay yesterday.
Yes.
Yes, you did write that essay yesterday.
And you wrote it every single day for the last eight years.
But today, we'd like you to write a new essay.
But don't, you know, try not to repeat a lot of the things you said before.
All right, well, okay.
I think I can make some tortured argument about stealing our democracy.
No, you already wrote that essay.
You've written 20 of those essays.
We'd like something new.
And then they come up with this tortured academic argument that nobody cares about.
And watching them try to do their C plus essay, that is the millionth time in a row they had the same assignment, but they got to make it different.
It's just sort of entertaining, like pushing a tooth that's loose that hurts when you push it.
I can't explain it.
It's entertaining, but it hurts.
I'll probably keep doing it.
Well, a Washington Post columnist, Fox News is reporting, that Megan McArdle said that the fact-checkers were ineffective in the Trump era, and that the bottom line is that the more the news tried to fact-check Trump, the more popular Trump got, and the less people watched the news.
Trump destroyed the entire news industry.
Basically, people don't watch it, don't trust it, and even the fact-checkers are known to be liars at this point.
So there's just no reason to watch the Washington Post.
Just no reason.
Anyway, as McArdle said, after eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump's approval ratings are holding up better than public trust in academia and journalism.
Yes, because the public is figuring it out.
Now, you know what else I learned watching Don Lemon's street interviews?
So the interviews went like this.
Who are you going to support for president?
Then they'd say somebody.
And then he'd often follow up with, well, why do you like him?
And here would be the, I'll give you a standard, but, um, you know, this is a fictional answer, but it represents all of the people, like all the people he talked to.
All right.
So what do you like about, um, the policies of Kamala Harris?
Oh, um, well, Trump said he would eat a baby.
And you think to yourself, no, he didn't.
No, he didn't.
There's nothing like that.
And then you would realize that they didn't know anything else.
Except that they think they heard Trump ate a baby.
Now I'm making that one up, but here's a real one.
There was a black woman who was asked who she'd vote for.
She said Trump.
And then as part of her explanation, she said that Kamala Harris lied.
And then Don Lemon said, well, what would be an example of a lie that Kamala Harris told?
And the voter said, well, she said she was black.
Remember, this is a female black voter.
And Don Lemon is like, no, actually, she's always identified as black.
And the voters said, hmm, I don't think so.
There wasn't a single person that Don Lemon talked to that appeared on video that seemed to know much of anything about politics.
Not even, you know, if you were going to rank it from one to ten with the people like you and me who followed every day.
We're sort of tens.
And a 1 out of 10.
Because every single day I look at the news, every single day I talk about it, and almost every day you're here.
So we're in the really, really narrow, very few people who actually pay attention to the news.
And even we know the news is fake.
So we're paying attention as hard as we can, and it's mostly just fake.
So can you blame the people who just bailed out and said, you know, I don't really even need to watch the news.
I'll just go with my gut.
It's not crazy.
Because, you know, it would be easy for us to say, oh, how superior we are.
We watch the news.
Yeah, no, we're not like the people on the streets.
Can we take a moment to just celebrate how awesome we are?
Because we really pay attention to the news.
We can answer questions in some detail, not like those people on the street.
But our news is fake.
It doesn't matter how much you study it.
It doesn't matter how deep you make a dive.
You're never going to have enough information to really know what's going on.
So we're sort of living in this No, their guess is probably just as good as yours.
Probably just as good.
Anyway, here's some more of why you should trust the press.
Apparently there's a reporter from a Wyoming newspaper who got fired because they found out he was just using AI to write his articles.
And it was just too obvious, because you can spot AI writing pretty easily.
And even his sources were made up.
So he made up sources, or maybe the AI hallucinated him, I don't know.
But he had fake sources and fake writing, and they caught him and fired him.
But don't worry, because all of the other reporters, totally professional.
He's the only one who tried to get away with something.
Well, there's also some news about the BBC.
There was a report by Net Zero Watch about the BBC, and it says that the BBC had 30 cases of bias, what they call it, which is basically 30 cases of getting facts wrong, maybe intentionally, about climate change from 2023.
30 examples of just climate bullshit in the news on the BBC.
But don't you worry, people.
Because it's only that one reporter in Wyoming who turned out to be bad.
We got rid of him, so everything else is good.
And don't worry that even the columnist for the Washington Post says that their fact-checkers are completely failing.
And don't worry that the BBC is simply making up science.
Everything else is fine.
Yeah, everything else is right on point.
It's only every single thing we check that's wrong.
DogeDesigner on X, that's an account on X, says, we asked ChatGPT and MetaAI, which party runs the legacy media?
And the answer was, what do you think the answer was when they asked the two big AIs?
Who runs the legacy media?
Well, Both of them said immediately, Democrats.
Now, did you just say to yourself, whoa, it looks like AI has some capability.
It told the truth, even an unpleasant truth.
And it said something that's not good for Democrats.
Now you didn't see that coming, did you?
Right?
So this feels quite credible, doesn't it?
Thank goodness AI went from hiding the truth To now just plainly saying, well, we can all see that the Democrats run the legacy media.
In fact, Elon Musk even did a little post on it concurring that the AIs got it right, that the Democrats run the legacy media.
Except it's not true.
How many of you think the Democrats run the legacy media?
You all believe that, right?
Obviously not.
Whoever is running the country is not the Democrats running the media.
Whoever is in control of the Democrats is in control of the legacy media.
The Democrats, apparently the AI has no problem telling you the Democrats are in charge.
Do you know why?
Who would like you to think the Democrats are in charge of the legacy media?
Let me think.
Who would want you to think that?
Well, Fox News might want you to think that.
So is that why the AIs are saying it's true?
Because Fox News thinks it's true and they took their side?
Probably not.
Is it because Elon Musk says it's true and a lot of you would say it's true?
Is that why the AI agrees?
Because so many smart people say it's true that the Democrats run the legacy media?
Here's what it looks like to me.
It looks like the CIA runs all of our media, and they would love for you to think the Democrats are doing it.
I don't think the Democrats are doing it.
I think the Democrats are under the control of the people who are doing it.
Now, some of those might be registered Democrats, but it's not—if you're thinking that the people who work at CNN are mostly Democrats, and therefore the Democrats run the media, you're really missing the bigger story.
Because they don't get to report on anything they want to report on.
I'm pretty sure they have an Uber boss that tells them what's in and what's out.
And that's probably the intelligence people, because I would think at this point they would control all of that.
It's their job.
If the United States intelligence groups did not already control our legacy media, the question would be, why not?
That they should, because brainwashing the population is kind of their biggest job domestically.
You know, externally they have other jobs.
But domestically, brainwashing Americans to be good citizens and fight for the flag, that's sort of what they do.
So, not really the Democrats running the legacy media.
Except for the stuff that the CIA doesn't care about one way or the other.
Remember I told you that there would be no economists who support Kamala Harris's economic plan?
Well, even Axios is reporting that even the left-leaning economists are against it, and they named a bunch.
Jason Furman, the EAD, Ernie Tedeschi, the Washington Post editorial board, Josh Barrow, Catherine Rampell.
They've all criticized the Harris campaign proposal, and Governor Whitmer, who is the co-chair of the Harris campaign, was asked about her economic plan, and Whitmer avoided the question.
Imagine being the co-chair of the Harris campaign, And when somebody asks you about her economic plan, clearly the most important part of what she's going to do, and the co-chair couldn't endorse it.
The co-chair.
Now, when I told you that there would be no economist on the left or the right that would endorse it, I thought I'd gone pretty far.
Like, well, you know, that's really going far to say even the Democrat economists will shit on her plan, and they did.
But what I did not see is that the resistance to it would be so strong, it would get her campaign co-chair.
It's very clear that the campaign co-chair knows this is a bad idea, or she would say it was a good idea.
It's her job to say that these are good ideas.
She couldn't do it.
Now, I'm going to have to give her some credit, because there are very few things that politicians do that can make you feel they're credible, because you know they're sort of professional liars.
But when I watch somebody who's a professional liar, meaning just a politician, it's not even an insult.
A politician's sort of a professional liar.
When I watch somebody who's in the job of politics and is the co-chairman, or co-chairperson, and is avoiding the question because clearly she can't endorse such a bad idea, I actually felt some credibility for her.
Meaning that it actually changed my opinion of Governor Whitmer.
Because when you watch somebody in a situation like that, Where you know they should lie, and they can't do it, then that means there's something on the inside that makes them not be able to lie.
Have you ever been in that situation where you know you should lie, but you just can't do it?
Let me tell you a story when I was working in the corporate world.
One day, my boss's boss's boss was supposed to go to some meeting about budget stuff, Couldn't make it, so he sent me.
Now, I was several levels below the boss that was supposed to be there.
But I was the budget guy, so I knew the most about the budget.
So he said, go to this meeting for me.
So what I find out when I get there is it's about cutting the budget.
So the person in charge of the meeting goes to me and they go, you've presented a budget that's got this or that in it, and everybody's cutting the budget.
What would you say if we cut this part of your budget?
Now remember, I'm a real junior.
I'm a nothing.
And my boss's boss's boss is the one who was supposed to be there fighting to maintain his budget because his world depended on getting the whole budget.
The bigger your budget, the more important you are as a senior manager.
But it wasn't my job.
And I sat there and I thought, okay, I'm pretty sure I know my boss's boss's boss would want me to lie right now.
And make some argument for why we really need this project, which even I didn't think was terribly important.
And in the context of you got to make some tough choices to cut the budget.
And I watched other people making tough choices.
When they went to me and said, can we cut this from your budget?
I was like, well, all right, if you have to.
So I agreed with it.
Boy, was my boss's boss's boss unhappy with me.
But here's the thing.
Internally, I couldn't tell that lie.
I knew what my job was.
I knew my job was to lie.
I knew what my job was.
Just couldn't do it.
I couldn't look at another human being and just say something that's complete bullshit.
Just can't do it.
So when I saw Whitmer also not be able to lie, honestly, my opinion of her went up.
I know she's taking a side.
But she couldn't tell that lie.
I appreciate that.
Now, let's compare that with Krugman.
You know, we were all waiting to see if Krugman, who's a famous economist on the left, was going to back the economic plan.
Because you think, all right, he'll back anything, you know, as long as it's Democrat side.
So he does a post on it.
And I read it, and I reread it, and I was like, I feel like you're just trying to talk around it.
So he very much did not give a full-throated endorsement.
He just tried to add some Weasley context as if it made any difference, but it didn't.
So you could think that he talked about it, but he didn't talk about it.
And I thought, even Krugman couldn't lie.
Well, I shouldn't say that.
I don't know if he's ever lied before or if he just believed what he said.
But he clearly didn't believe in her plan, but he didn't want to say it's a bad plan, because he would prefer getting elected, I assume.
So instead, he just did some word salad and said, OK, don't ask me any more questions, I think.
So Stephen, Stephen A. Smith was doing a little rant about how Harris hasn't done any real press events and she needs to be tested so that the public can see her answering tough questions.
I'm going to double and triple down on saying that Harris and her campaign are very smart to avoid the press.
Why?
Who's ever been better off talking to the press?
There are some things that we just assume to be true because it's just sort of what we're used to, but every now and then you realize that the reason for the thing you always did didn't make sense.
I'll give you another example.
Why do we have electronic voting machines?
We just sort of assume that somebody had a reason, right?
Didn't you assume that if you asked around, somebody smart would say, oh yeah, there's a good reason for the electronic voting machines.
But I don't know what it is.
Doesn't save money, isn't faster, isn't more credible, isn't easier to manage.
So we just get used to the fact that somebody must know why there's a reason.
Here's another one.
It's like the electronic voting machines.
Why do presidential candidates talk to the press?
Now your reflex is, of course they have to talk to the press.
They've always talked to the press, Scott.
Why would you even ask such a dumb question?
Talking to the press, because of the free speech and the importance of the press to monitor the government, is the most important thing.
Of course, Stephen A. Smith is completely right.
She needs to talk to the press.
Does she?
What's the reason?
There isn't any.
The reason is you think you're going to learn something.
No, you're not.
No, you're not.
Is Trump better off because he talks to the press?
Well, let me give you some examples.
Do you remember that time he talked to the press and he said that he completely disavows the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville?
He said that to the press.
What did the press report?
The press took him out of context and said he thought that the neo-Nazis are fine people.
Was that, was that good for Trump to talk to the press?
Because that press is such a, uh, an important watchdog of our democracy.
If you don't talk to the press, how will the people know what's true?
Well, the press lied to the whole country for eight years or however many years, six years.
The press is the ones who lie to you.
They're not the ones who tell you the truth.
How about that Trump said inject bleach into your body?
That was at a press event.
It was a press event.
Did Trump say you should put bleach or any chemical disinfectant in your body?
He did not.
He was talking about light as a disinfectant, which was being trialed at the time.
To inject like a, you know, UV light with a device down the throat to see if you could irradiate the lungs and the trachea.
Right?
That's what he was talking about.
But the press turned it into he wants you to drink bleach.
All right?
Now, I would say those are the two biggest problems Trump's ever had.
And it's because he talked to the press.
Almost everything that that is fake and bullshit About Trump is because of the press.
So now I ask you again, why would a presidential candidate talk to the press?
What's the upside?
Is it because the voters need to know?
No.
I just told you about the Don Lemon interviews.
The voters don't do anything.
You see, you and I, you watching this, and I, And the 1% of Americans who really follow politics, we get fooled into thinking other people are like us.
They're not like us.
They barely know the names of the two presidential candidates.
Everybody knows Trump.
But some of them don't even know who he's running against.
No, there's no information advantage of the press.
They're either going to lie, or nobody pays attention, or it's complicated.
How many of the voters that Don Lemon talked to could say, oh, it's terrible that the European Union is using their external power to satisfy some deep powers in the United States for censorship?
How many voters understand the Hunter Biden Ukraine situation?
It's almost none.
So why do we even have a press?
It's not informing anybody, except the 1% of people who convince themselves they know things, because we still pretend we think data is real.
Data isn't real for anything that matters.
When the data doesn't matter to anybody, it could be real.
But when it matters, it's all fake, because the people who it matters the most to make sure you don't see the real stuff, because they're trying to sell you something every time.
There's always money involved.
So, yeah, no, there's no reason really for anybody to talk to the press.
Meanwhile, Mario Noffel was reporting that this hospital near the DNC convention is preparing, just in case there's a chemical attack, by converting spaces into decontamination centers.
Well, now that's scary, because it sounds like they expect a chemical attack, but I think that the standard will be that pretty soon, wherever there are large events where people gather, that the local hospitals will have to gear up for mass chemical warfare.
Because I think drones are going to be dropping poison on crowds.
Not indoors, probably.
You know, less likely indoors.
But I think that it doesn't really signal that they have a specific threat.
They might.
But it doesn't signal that, because I think they should all be doing that now.
To me, that just sounds like getting ready.
I don't have a problem with that.
Meanwhile, Zero Hedge and others are reporting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is planning to revise downward jobs for the April 2023 to March 2024, so it's about a year, by a million.
So if they revise it down by a million, that would mean that every time they said it was good, it was bad.
So everything you heard about jobs was a lie.
Now, let's say the job numbers are datas that matter, and they've all been a lie.
All the data that matters is always a lie, because somebody has an interest in lying.
Or it's hard to collect.
It could be one or both of those things.
No, it's all fake.
All the data that matters is fake.
Now, you could find an exception like, you know, whatever SpaceX is doing to launch rockets depends very much on data.
But people don't have, you know, like a great financial interest in lying to you about the, you know, trajectory of a rocket.
So if nobody cares about it politically, yeah, that could be right and useful.
Kamala Harris has a new post on X. She says, the Democratic Party must commit to showing up for black women all the time, not just during an election year.
I found that disgusted me.
That idea.
I'll read it again.
See if you have that feeling of disgust.
And I'll tell you why in a minute.
The Democratic Party must commit to showing up for black women all the time, not just during an election year.
Now, of course I want both of the parties to be responsive to all the public.
So it's not about that.
Of course the politics should be responsible to all Americans.
Period.
But I'm offended that she calls herself a black woman and wants me to buy into it.
Now, here's my take.
If she wants to identify as a black woman, I'm fine with that.
Why would I have a complaint in any way?
If she wants to say, this is who I am, I'd like to identify as black.
I do have, you know, half of me is Indian American, but I identify as black.
No problem at all.
Doesn't disgust me, doesn't bother me.
It's everybody's right.
I like to define myself as well.
So yeah, define yourself.
Here's what bothers me.
She doesn't get to tell me how to define her.
I define her as a unique individual who is not like anybody else I've ever met.
I've never met anybody who is, I don't think, I don't think I've ever met anybody who was half black and half Indian, who was a prosecutor and a senator and a vice president.
I've never met anybody like that.
She's literally the only one.
Same with Trump.
There's only one of them.
So to imagine that I should judge her by some kind of average that happens to people who are black is really offensive to me, because I don't need to buy into your own personal definition of who you are.
Likewise, if somebody wants to, you know, be identified as this or that, for reasons of just polite behavior, I might be completely happy to define them by whatever pronouns they want.
I'm not, I'm not a real, you know, I'm not too, I guess I'm not too bothered by pronouns.
Whatever it is you want to be called, if I can remember it, I'd be happy to do it.
But that's different from me agreeing with what you call yourself.
I don't have to agree with it.
You can live in your own fantasy, and I can see you as whatever I want.
I might agree.
I might not.
But I'm not obligated in any way to agree with your definition of yourself.
I do like living in a polite world, where we're at least polite to each other, and that's included.
But no.
Don't tell me... You can tell me that you're black and you identify as a black woman.
That's fine.
But don't suggest that somehow I should see it that way.
I see you as not like anybody else.
In a good way.
By the way, did that sound like an insult?
It shouldn't.
Yeah.
Being black and Indian has apparently blessed her with an incredibly good-looking body, and she's gone very far.
So whatever she is, is working.
Clearly working.
So, why not just be that?
Why not just be an individual?
The biggest problem America ever made is allowing people to convince us that the average of people who look like us should matter to us.
The average of people who look like you should matter.
It shouldn't.
No, it should not.
It should not matter in any way.
Should it matter to me that the average black person has some specific problem from a legacy of slavery?
No.
It could be true, and it could be a real problem.
I think systemic racism is real.
But it's one of a million problems.
I want to know your individual problems.
Do you have an individual problem?
I can help with that.
Do you need a connection?
Need some information?
Do you need a loan?
I've done all those things for people who needed them individually.
But no, I'm not going to do anything for you because you look like the average of other people.
I don't care about your average performance.
Not at all.
I do not care if women have whatever experience on average.
I don't care if brown people have whatever experience on average.
I very much care about you as individuals.
So if you need a hand, no matter who you are, I'm all in.
Don't care about your average.
So there's more and more noise being made about what appears to be Kamala Harris' drug or inebriation problem in public.
The Daily Mail As an article that says, conservatives claim these clips show Kamala Harris is giving speeches while drunk.
And they give some examples.
And, uh, and it says that conservatives and even a Donald Trump campaign official have claimed that Harris appears drunk in speaking engagements.
And then they named a few, uh, a few conservatives who were behind it.
They did not name me.
Have I ever told you that hypnotists can hide in plain sight?
It is one of the coolest thing about being a hypnotist is that you can actually tell people exactly what you're doing, do it publicly, and people can't see it.
It's just invisible.
So I'm glad all these other conservatives and the Trump campaign is behind this idea that Kamala Harris is a drunk.
You didn't hear it from me, as far as you know.
All right, so someone taught Harris how to say return on investment.
Now, I've told you before that sometimes I try to, it's a messy process, not always accurate, but I try to track my influence.
And one of the ways I do it is by unusual word choice.
So if I introduce an idea into the public domain doing what I'm doing now, and I use a word choice that you haven't seen a lot, and then it pops up somewhere, I think to myself, oh, maybe that was me.
Maybe that was my word choice that fit into the public somehow.
Well, Kamala Harris used the phrase return on investment four different times while answering a question about her economic policy.
Now, I've been saying that you can't sell this price gouging thing without looking at return on investment.
And I think maybe some economists may have said the same thing to her.
So it's not like I'm the one person who knows that or something.
So it could be other people.
It's just, you know, my eyebrow goes up.
I was like, hmm.
I was saying return on investment and Harris an awful lot this week, and now she's saying return on investment, which I haven't seen her do before.
But here's the interesting thing is that she used it wrong every time.
It sounds good when she says it, but apparently her technique is simply to say things do have a return on investment.
That's really not how it works.
It's not about language.
You have to do the calculation, or at least be aware that there's a cost and a benefit.
Return on investment means that you've calculated the cost of it, And also the benefit, and that the benefit is greater than the cost.
If you haven't calculated both of them, you're not really doing a return on investment.
But apparently she has figured out that she can call anything a return on investment, and it sort of sounds good.
It does actually sound good.
So she would say, for example, we're going to help people buy a house.
And history shows that's a good return on investment.
To which I say, really?
Did somebody study what happens in 2025 if they get a $25,000 help on their house?
I'll bet nobody studied that.
So how did you calculate it?
How did you calculate the cost?
Who paid for it?
Because you've got to do the cost.
And what exactly is the benefit?
In what areas did we get that return?
And who got the return?
Was it the government got a return for its tax expense?
Or the extra debt it ran up?
It's pretty vague.
So for each of the things she was doing, she thought all she had to do was say, and you know in the long run it's obviously a good return on investment.
Now here's the reason that that's Irrational from an economist's point of view.
You can say it about anything.
So let's say that the idea of helping people, let's say the idea of no tax on tips or helping people get a home.
Let's say you calculate it and it sounds pretty good, or at least you can sell it by saying, oh, it's got a good ROI.
Here's the problem.
Everything fits into that category.
So I say to you, hey, how about reparations for slavery?
Well, why do you want to do that?
Well, in the long run, that's a good ROI.
Does it?
Nobody knows.
You can't really calculate it.
But you could say it.
You could say the words.
That's a good ROI.
How about cannibalism?
Yeah, we think cannibalism should come back, it'll lower the food costs, we'll just eat each other, and I think the ROI is going to be excellent.
Now, that's a ridiculous one, but my point is there's nothing that has ever been discussed from, you know, funding schools more, anything.
Just literally anything that sounds like, if you say it quickly, it sounds like a good idea, you just say, eh, it's a good return on investment.
Anything.
So therefore it's nothing.
If you can apply it to everything, then it's not really anything.
But here's my suggestion for slavery reparations.
Is there anything that would stop us legally from saying that only Democrat voters pay for it?
We've never done anything like that, have we?
But Republican voters, by a fairly sizable majority, think that reparations would be a good idea.
Republicans largely against it.
But suppose that Trump said, this will never happen, this is just fun recreational fantasy thinking.
Suppose Trump said, I'm in favor of reparations for slavery.
But I think you should be limited to the group that says they're willing to pay for it, because that way we don't have division.
So Democrats are very much in favor of it.
So why don't we say that if you voted for Harris, you'd be on the hook for paying for reparations.
If you voted for Trump, you would not be on the hook for paying reparations, because that would be a group that didn't want to pay it.
Now, why wouldn't that be legal?
Because the government seems to be able to tax any individual group it wants to.
Am I wrong?
The government can say, this industry pays more.
The government can say, people who own a home pay less.
It can say, people who have children pay less on taxes.
The government can pick any group for any reason and say, you pay more, you pay less on taxes.
Right?
So is there anything that would prevent the government from saying, look, Democrats really want this, and it has a good ROI.
So if we make the Republicans pay, it'll never happen.
But since the ROI for reparations is so good, that if Democrats do it, well, most of the benefits will go to other Democrats, because black people are more often Democrat.
So they could say, well, Democrats could pay for reparations, and then the ROI is good, and that ROI would mostly accrue to other Democrats.
So how about that?
Now, the real argument here is to wonder why it wouldn't be a good idea.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's fun to imagine why it's not.
I can't think of a reason.
If there's a certain group of Americans who want reparations and also want to pay for it, why would you care?
Would black Americans say, no, I don't want that if only the Democrats pay for it?
I don't think so.
I think black Americans would say, wait a minute, you're going to give me a check and all I have to do is just nothing?
I think they'd say, yeah, if the Democrats want to pay for it, mostly white Democrats.
Yeah, sure.
So who loses?
The Democrats would be happy.
Because they paid for reparations, so they'd feel less guilty.
They would get the ROI to other Democrats, mostly.
It'd be good for the country, ROI, but mostly Democrats.
And the Republicans would be, oh, that's good, you left us out of it, thank you.
Yeah, it's sort of a thinker.
It just makes you think, why can't we do that?
I actually don't know any reason you couldn't do it.
Can you?
It would put an amazing pressure on Democrat leaders to say why the Republicans should pay for it.
Anyway.
So here's a little persuasion lesson.
This comes to you courtesy of Mike Cernovich's account on X. Now, as you know, Tim Walz, Reportedly went to China 30 times.
Now, you all know that.
If you're watching this, you know it.
And you have some opinions about that.
But you're probably thinking to yourself something along the line of, you know, everybody's different.
He was taking some tours over there, kind of like the country.
So he went a lot of times.
Is that so weird?
But listen to the way that Mike Cernovich puts it in the form of a question, and watch how it hits you differently, just the way he words it.
If I simply tell you he went to China many times, then your brain says, oh, huh, and then it goes on to the next topic.
But listen to this.
Cernovich says, I'm paraphrasing, but basically he's saying, who needs to go to China 30 times?
As soon as you hear that, it just hits you differently, doesn't it?
Who needs to go to China 30 times?
Just automatically, the question makes you know there's something up.
I don't know what, but there's something up with that.
And as Mike pointed out, even people who do manufacturing in China don't go 30 times.
I have a friend who did some manufacturing with a Chinese company.
He went twice.
Why do you need to go 30 times?
Now, I'm guessing it had something to do with the classes he was taking over there.
So maybe it was just a regular program that happened once a year, twice a year.
If it happened twice a year for 15 years, you got 30 trips.
So, I don't know.
But the only point is that if you put it in terms of a question, it completely hits you differently, because you can't answer the question.
If I just say it's a truth, you're not automatically triggered to figure out, like, what's up with it.
But if he puts it in a question, your brain just chews on it, because it wants to answer the question.
Much more persuasive.
So the lesson is not about Waltz.
The lesson is, If you want to learn how to persuade, watch Cernovich's account.
Kevin O'Leary was on some show, I think it was on Fox, and says that Walsh was a terrible manager of the state.
He destroyed job growth and people left in the neighboring states and all that.
Now O'Leary presents himself as not being political.
He's just saying from a pure business standpoint, He was bad for business in his state.
And he apparently, uh, Walsh is not exactly good at managing his own finances because he got to this point in his life and he doesn't really have a ton of finances.
I do trust people a little bit more if they can figure out how to retire with more money than he's got.
So, you know, it does show, um, we got a new drunk.
Bo Johnson coming in with the all caps.
Very consistent with the all caps, Bo.
Keep drinking.
All right.
Rasmussen did a poll on this Tim Walz stolen valor thing.
45% of voters say the accusations against Walz won't make much difference in how they vote.
They might not like it, but they're saying it won't make much difference to their vote.
34% say the accusations about the stolen valor makes them less likely to vote for Harris.
But 16 percent, here's the money shot, 16 percent say the accusations against Walz for stolen valor makes them more likely to vote for the Democrat.
16 percent of voters are more likely Okay, I'm going to admit, I didn't see that coming.
I did not see that coming.
Okay, I'm going to admit I didn't see that coming. I did not see that coming. Why?
Because I made that mistake of thinking that other people are like me.
And you probably made the same mistake.
It's the most common mistake everybody makes all the time, is assuming other people are at least a little bit like you.
And so you say, what would I do in this situation?
I'll tell you what I wouldn't do, is be more likely to vote for him because he's accused of avoiding going to war.
That never even occurred to me.
I either thought it was a don't care or you do care, especially if you had some military experience or you're a family.
I didn't really think anybody would look at it and say, you know, now there's a good reason to vote for him.
He avoided the draft or not the draft.
He avoided, uh, deployment by retiring just, just before the deployment and other people saying, well, that's a good play.
He's obviously smart.
The other people went over there and fought, so who's the smart one now?
That's what those 16% say.
That's not me, that's the 16%.
So, but here's what I think.
I don't really think that polling the general public is the way to go on this question.
I think if you only polled veterans or direct family members of veterans, like spouses, I think they're the only ones that matter.
Because I would think that almost nobody's going to change their vote unless they really care about that issue.
And so if you talk to the people who are most likely to really care, you know, service people and their families, if they say it's no big deal, well, that tells you something.
But if they say, you know, honestly, I just, I can't allow any chance that that VP would ever rise to commander in chief.
Just that's my red line.
I can't possibly be in favor of that.
Well, that would matter, but I don't know if talking to the general public About a topic that's so narrowly focused on a specific part of the country.
I don't know.
All right.
Speaking of Mike Cernovich again, he had an idea that Trump should come out and say that he'll make mortgages assumable as long as the buyer is credit worthy.
In other words, you don't buy the house and pay off the bank and then hope you can get a new loan.
You just take over the loan, plus probably some extra cash if there was some equity involved.
But you'd have to be a creditworthy buyer.
Now, here's why this matters.
Let's say you're a boomer like me, and you're in a big house, and you say to yourself, you know what?
I would sell this big house and move into a smaller one, and that would allow somebody who had maybe a big family or something and a lot of money to move into a bigger house.
If you look at the interest rates, you'd say, wait a minute, I don't have a mortgage.
But if I did, it would have been like a 3% rate because of when I would have gotten it.
But now, if I had to sell my house and get another house that also had a mortgage, I'd be paying some much higher rate.
So I say, I won't do it.
I'll wait till the rates come down.
So you have all this unnecessary friction in the market.
That you can remove just by having people assume loans that are lower interest rates.
Now, who would be opposed to such a thing?
Well, all the bankers, because the bankers want to give you a new loan and get those new fees for the loan, you know, fees up front.
And then they want to charge you a higher interest rate.
And then they want to package up all your loans and sell them to third parties who end up owning all the loans.
But as Mike says, let Wall Street figure it out.
You know, if Trump just does something, promotes something that's good for the public, but not so much for the bankers, the bankers could probably figure it out.
All right, here's an idea I love so much, I wish I'd said it first, but the CEO, founder of the The Figure Robot Company.
You'll hear more about them.
Figure's going to be one of the big names in robots, it looks like.
So Brett Adcock was saying that there should be some kind of a program or app where you can get local farmers to sell you food directly without the middlemen.
Uh, partly because the middle people are adding all the dangerous chemicals and everything.
And you'd feel more comfortable if you, especially if it's an organic farm, I suppose, if you just got it directly from the farm.
Now there are of course, all kinds of rules and regulations and reasons you can't do that.
But I went, I went to Safeway yesterday.
Um, and I walked through this giant store of food.
And I couldn't find anything to eat.
Do you know why?
I just, I know too fucking much now.
So everything in the middle of the store was, you know, frozen crap with additives.
And then another, a third of the store was bread and cheese.
I'm kind of off of bread and cheese.
And, you know, then a lot of it is like, Pool toys and alcohol that I don't drink.
And I have to go way over to the vegetable area and pick up some vegetables.
But I couldn't buy enough at a store to make dinner.
Like, there wasn't anything there I was willing to buy that I wanted to put in my mouth.
So, I mean, I got some fruit and some vegetables and, you know, I made something that I already had at home.
You know, some rice and vegetables, basically.
And here's another story about why it's so hard to eat.
You might be saying, Scott, why did you go to the grocery store?
Don't you have an assistant to do that shopping for you?
And the answer is, yes, I do.
But I wanted to get some turmeric.
Because I've been reading such great things about turmeric.
You know, it's good for inflammation.
And I thought, I wonder if they have turmeric that's like a seasoning that's like mixed with pepper, because that's the thing.
So you can just season whatever you're having with turmeric and pepper.
And so I had ordered some from Amazon, so I knew it existed, but it wasn't here yet.
And I wanted to try it yesterday.
So I thought, I'm going to go to Safeway and see if they have some turmeric.
Now, of course, I looked for some other things since I'm there anyway.
But the purpose of my trip was to get turmeric.
I come home with my turmeric.
I open up the Axe platform.
And I see a post about some things that were adding lead to people's diets and found out that in some cases turmeric is full of lead.
You shouldn't put it in your body.
Now it's not the turmeric itself, it's some providers of it were adding some additives that apparently was very bad.
What are the odds that I would make a special trip to a grocery store A rarity in itself, to look for just this one fucking thing, turmeric, that I've never had before as a, you know, condiment.
And that within 10 minutes of getting fucking home, I would find out it's going to kill me.
Now really, what were the odds of that?
Now keep in mind that it was a post from somebody, you know, it was a long post.
It wasn't because the algorithm heard me say it.
It wasn't an advertisement.
It wasn't... Well, maybe it was fed to me.
Oh, you know what?
I can't rule out the fact that the only reason I saw it is because I did something in the world that had something to do with Tumeric.
Maybe it wasn't a coincidence, huh?
All right.
Well, I don't know.
But I love this idea Adcock has of Figure Robots Company.
Do you have some kind of a marketplace where I could just have the farmer bring me some stuff?
That would make me feel very good.
All right, the House GOP has this big report that the Biden family received $27 million from foreign individuals, $8 million loans from Democrat benefactors while Biden was a VP that he's not repaid.
And then sure enough, when he was VP, he was taking calls and he was influencing things and It's all impeachable.
So now the GOP believes that they have 100% documented impeachable crimes of Hunter and the big guy, taking vast amounts of money from foreign countries, multiple countries, for the explicit purpose of influencing American politics.
And we have the examples where he clearly was involved in influencing.
Do you think it'll make any difference?
I'm gonna say no.
I think that it's too close to the end of his term for anybody to bother with impeachment.
You know, it's not really gonna have too much effect on the Harris campaign.
And it's too complicated for the public to understand.
You know, it probably would have made a big difference if Biden were still in the race.
And maybe this is one of the reasons that the Democrats talked him out of it.
But all that work that Jim Jordan and Comer did and all the rest, which, by the way, I'm quite impressed with, you know, maybe could have been faster, but I think they were held up by their sources.
But I would like to thank them.
You know, Comer and Jordan and all the other people who worked on this.
Thank you.
I'm really happy that we have what I consider a clear picture of maybe the worst corruption I've ever seen that's been documented.
Now, I too think, well, I guess it's a little bit too late.
You know, I don't really care too much if there's any kind of penalty that you had some for it.
I'm just, I'm just sort of over it.
But when they were doing this work, they did not know that Biden was going to drop out And I really think the country owes them a bit of a debt.
This was good work.
How often do I say that?
Not often, right?
I don't often say, hey, you members of Congress sure did a good job on this.
But I think they did.
I think they did a good job on it.
All right.
All the smart people in politics are saying that Pennsylvania will determine the election.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think we're at a point where Pennsylvania, whichever way that goes, that's going to be the whole game?
Why does it seem like the world of people who make a difference in the election keeps getting smaller?
It was only the other day that I learned, oh, there's only like 300,000 people in the whole country who are going to make a difference.
And it's just the swing voters and only in the battleground states.
So I say to myself, well, that's not ideal.
It's not ideal that five states determine the election.
And then I find out it's probably one state.
It's one state.
It's just Pennsylvania.
Now the smart people are saying, you know, both Democrats and Republicans are saying the same thing.
It's just Pennsylvania.
Because they think the polling is confirming the other states sufficiently that they That no matter what happens there, they're confident that it will still be Pennsylvania that makes a difference?
What is up with that?
Do you remember when you were a kid and you learned that we were a republic, and how everything worked, and the voters would get to vote, and every vote counted?
None of that is even close to whatever our government is doing.
So if it came down to one state, It's sort of down to Fetterman, isn't it?
Let me put this in another way.
Fetterman apparently is not going to the DNC, which some say is a story.
I'm not sure if it is.
But Fetterman has been not, you know, unambiguously pro-everything Harris.
He is wonderfully independent, clearly a Democrat.
But wonderfully independent in a way I actually respect.
That if something is just dumbass, he'll call it dumbass.
It doesn't matter if Democrats submitted it.
So, I don't have to agree with him.
I'm just saying that, you know, like I gained a little respect for Whitmer, because it looked like she couldn't lie to us in public, at least about, you know, Kamala's economic policy.
And Fetterman has earned the same respect.
I don't have to agree with him, but when he says something to me, I generally think that's his actual, real opinion.
Do you have the same feeling?
Very rare.
This is not something you see in politicians very often.
I see it with Thomas Massie, right?
So Federman's not the only one.
If Thomas Massie says something, I think, oh, that's actually his actual opinion.
He's not changing it to make me happy.
That's just his actual opinion.
Fetterman, same thing.
So now, put it all together.
There's only one state that matters, and the most influential person in that state is Fetterman.
He gets to decide who the next president is.
Because if Fetterman decided not to come out strong for Harris, for any reason, That could be the difference.
If he decided to say, you know what?
The Harris group is so bad about Israel that I'm going to take a pass on endorsing her.
And he might.
That is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
He would just say, you know, I got this one issue.
It's so bad that I, you know, I prefer Democrats being in charge, but I can't even endorse you for that.
Maybe.
So it's far more likely that Fetterman will, you know, promote a democratic victory.
So that's probably the way it'll go.
But I want to add something here that seems like it's unrelated.
But it's more of a warning.
I was watching a little history thing on YouTube about how President Xi of China rose to power.
Because I was always curious about that, weren't you?
How does one person out of all the people in China rise to power?
Well, it turns out he was something called a princeling.
A princeling would be the, I think mostly had to be a son, because prince.
A son of one of the few survivors of the, in the days of Mao, When Mao had a big military force, but he was on retreat, and they were all dying from starvation and everything.
And starting from, I don't know, 80,000 people in his military, 90% of them died.
So there were like 8,000 people who became somewhat famous within China for having survived this long, deadly march, and then their children.
So the people who survived were promoted by Mao as the awesome people, because, you know, they were the most loyal and had the most suffering.
And then their children, the children of the people that Mao said were the most awesome, they were called the princelings.
So it wasn't too hard for President Xi, when he was a younger man, to get noticed, because it was easy to notice a princeling.
And then he did this clever play, Where he went for political office in rural, less important parts of China.
And because it was a rural, less important political part of China, and he shows up as a princeling, well, he won.
You know, at low office in an unimportant place.
But then he used that victory and that experience to go to another place in China that maybe was a little bit more important, and now he's got experience, and he's a princeling.
So he wins again.
So he simply was good at his job, but he had that little princeling thing to always boost him.
So then he gets all the way to being in the small group of people who are running the whole country.
And he's the leader, but it's a very shared power situation.
So prior to his rise, China had a, you know, the group of people, the Politburo, whoever they were.
So it was sort of a shared management and it was designed that way.
It was designed so one person didn't run everything.
Um, before the head, the head of China was in charge of the military for sure, but a lot of other things were handled by other experts that were chosen for their expertise.
So how did she, Get rid of all the competition.
The trick he used, if I understand it correctly, I'll take a fact check on this, if there are any historians who think I got it wrong, because I might.
But here's the trick.
Once he had power, but not complete power, what he did to get complete power was he tried to crack down on corruption.
Now who's against that?
Everybody likes that, right?
Gonna crack down on corruption.
Guess who were corrupt?
Well, turns out that the corrupt people, coincidentally, were the people who were not his allies.
So he got rid of all the corrupt people, who were not his allies, and replaced them with non-corrupt people who were also his allies, who may have been corrupt, we don't know about that.
So, here's the thing to watch out for.
If your leader is Taking people off the board.
It's a consolidation of power.
And the fact that it happened in China and he became the basically president for life.
So he took a non-dictator situation and he just turned it into one.
And the only trick he had to do was to say he was fighting corruption.
That's all it took.
Now, obviously, he had to also be in charge of the people with guns, because it's people with guns who arrest people, right?
So he had to be in charge of people who had some force, and then he just made up a reason that all of his non-allies were criminals, and he just arrested them all.
Now, that sounds a lot like the Democrats saying that the insurrectionists on January 6th That's President Xi's play.
who supported them should be banned from polite society if not arrested. They should be at least disgraced and disallowed from ever being in government. So you should never be allowed to be in government if you ever supported those damn insurrectionists.
That's President Xi's play.
You color all the people who are on the other team as criminals. So where President Xi said they're corrupt, the Democrats said they're insurrectionists and white supremacists.
It's the same fucking play.
Now, it hasn't succeeded yet, because Trump's still alive.
Barely, because somebody missed.
That's it.
If Trump leaves the field, unfortunately, you know, it could be the bad way.
The Democrats may be very close to having something like permanent power, but changing out the figurehead now and then, so we wouldn't even know who the permanent power was.
So here's the thing to watch out for.
If the people in power who can control the people with guns, which is what anybody in power can do, And they say that everybody on the other side, the people who are not their allies, have some kind of criminal thing in common.
You're heading to a dictatorship.
And it sure feels like that's happening here.
And all the cancellations and the jailings, they all feel like they're just taking critics off the board.
And you probably have noticed that the people who made the biggest impact Are the people targeted the hardest?
The people who don't move the needle don't need to be targeted, but a lot of other people sure are.
So keep that in mind.
That's all I got for today.
I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately.
I should tell you that the The Dilbert Reborn comic strip, which you can only see by subscription on X or on the Locals platform, where you also get some political stuff.
So if you just want the comic, get it on X. Dogbert is starting his own polling company.
