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Content:
Politics, Mayor Eric Adams, Anti-Tank Robot, Chinese Manufacturing Techniques, 2022 Venezuelan Gangs Report, Estonian Prison Space, Gad Saad, Emotion-Driven Candidate Selection, Tenet Media Russia Funding, Jay Black, Jessica Tarlov, Allan Lichtman Prediction, Lichtman 13 Questions, Kamala Harris Reparations Support, James Murdoch, Foreign-Born Worker Hiring, Cost of Living Reductions, Trump Economic Plan, Tariff Purposes, Harris Economic Plan, Scott Adams
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What's happening There we go Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization in It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure you've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny, human brains, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Go.
It just gets better every time.
Well, there's a lot of news, so I'm going to run right through it.
And we're going to get to some fun economic analyses of the two candidates in ways that you will understand for the first time ever.
Economics is hard.
I will simplify it for you.
Well, the FBI has raided several homes of the aides of Mayor Adams in New York City, according to Blaze Media.
And we don't know why yet.
But if the FBI is all over the mayor and all over the top aides, there's something coming down.
And keep in mind that it's probably Democrats investigating Democrats, so whatever it is, it must be really bad.
I wonder, does anybody even have a guess what that would be about?
I have a hypothesis.
That if the FBI wanted to jail any mayor in America, it would take about 10 minutes of investigation to find out that they've done sketchy things with taxpayers' money.
So why would they pick this particular one?
So my question is, is this the one mayor that they've got some dirt on?
Or is there something they don't like about this mayor?
Was he about to endorse Trump?
I mean, what's going on here?
There's something that we don't know.
On top of the something we don't know about what the alleged crimes are.
So this story has layers is what I'm saying.
If the only thing you find out is that there's a crime and somebody's looking into it, I feel like we're going to be missing at least a layer or two.
You know what I mean?
Because I don't think that they have a process of going after crime because it's a crime.
You know, I told you to watch the, uh, there's a show on Netflix called Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy Wars.
It's based on real, real facts of the real Wyatt Earp and a war with some cowboys.
And when you learn that the country has always had a crooked Department of Justice and always had crooked politics and the news was always fake, it really blows your mind to see that nothing changed since the 1800s.
Well, Poland has an anti-tank robot.
So it's a robot that goes near a tank and then blows up.
I don't think tanks are going to be too useful for very long.
Now that we've got flying drones that look like dragons with fire-breathing fire, and now a robot that will blow up a tank, I'm guessing that the cost of the robot that blows up the tank is much less than the tank itself, so that should be the end of tanks.
I saw Tim Cook on some interview saying something that I was not aware of, Completely.
And it goes like this.
You think that the reason we do manufacturing in China is because the cost of labor is low.
Turns out that hasn't been true for a long time.
I'm sure the cost of labor is lower than America, but there would be other countries where it's even far lower.
So they don't go to China because the wages are low.
because they could get lower wages in a lot of places. They go there because China has a massive educational advantage in how to build a factory. Because building a factory is a special skill, especially if you're building an assembly line and you're building the robotics and the manufacturing techniques that go into the building.
It's not the building.
It's the manufacturing techniques.
So apparently the whole skill of tooling up a manufacturing site is something that there are tons of Chinese citizens who have been trained to do it.
And in America, you could put them all in one room.
So there's a skill in building manufacturing sites that we don't have, and we're in trouble.
How much difference does it make?
Oh, I don't know.
Let's ask Lucky Palmer, who is a young billionaire type who's building a defense business himself with more high-tech defense stuff like drones and whatnot.
But he says the United States says if we were to get in a war, we only have three weeks of ammunition.
After three weeks of war, the United States would have to say, hey, I got an idea.
Would you guys like to stop fighting?
Because we're out of weapons.
Yeah, well, we have the weapons.
We just don't have the things that go in them, you know, like rockets and, you know, we don't have any missiles and rockets and bullets left.
But you say to yourself, well, we could make more, right?
Nope.
We don't have the manufacturing capability to make more ammunition.
At all.
It's not like you can make the factory work harder.
There's no factory.
And if there is a factory, it depends on China for parts.
No, we can't make weapons.
If we started a war, we'd lose for sure, unless we went nuclear.
So basically the only weapons we have that work are nuclear, because everything else we just run out of them in three weeks.
Oh well.
Here's some good news.
The NOAA, the National Organization of Atmospheric Association of A-holes or something, I don't know, but it's the group that does the weather forecast, the climate forecasting for the federal government, and they've ordered a new $100 million high-performance computer to help them with their predictions.
Hmm.
Let me see if I understand this story.
Their predictions are currently perfect, or perfect enough that you would spend billions of dollars, maybe trillions, to believe them and operate under the assumption that you know the climate's getting warmer and the CO2 is causing it.
So if you know that, and you know it so certainly that the entire American economy is based on it, why do they need a new computer if they already know the answer?
Hmm.
Hmm.
Strange, strange, unexpected, hard to explain thing.
So everything is correct already.
But for a hundred million dollars, we can make it correct.
Although it's correct already.
And what about those elections?
Just today, I saw probably six to 10 stories about something about election integrity.
That somebody was looking to tighten up.
To which I said to myself, what?
Why would you need to tighten up an election in so many different ways when it's already perfectly safe and not rigged and we can audit it from top to bottom?
It's almost like the people who are the closest to it don't think it's perfectly secure.
I'm trying to reconcile why we need a new computer for the predictions about the climate that we already know are right, and we got to fix a hundred different things in the election that we already knew was not in need of any correction.
It's almost like the news just makes stuff up.
Well, what about that story about those Venezuelan prisons that Trump says they're emptying the prisons and the prisoners are coming up here, but the regular news, the fake news, the regular fake news says there's no evidence to support that, and he doesn't offer any.
Well, let me tell you the closest thing we have to evidence like that.
In 2022, Breitbart had a story.
It was reported by Randy Clark.
And so there was a, so this is 2022, there was a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report that was received by the Border Patrol.
And the report is that Breitbart, Texas, you know, the Texas office of Breitbart got to look at it.
So this would not be a public document.
It would be a reporter for Breitbart says they got to look at a document and the report Indicates that the Venezuelan government under Maduro is purposely freeing inmates.
So the report is that they would talk to Venezuelans and they would find out that they had in fact been in Venezuelan jails and they seem to have been released.
Now, there's a part missing.
The part that's missing is There is no indication that Venezuela is releasing prisoners for the purpose of coming to the United States.
There seems to be evidence according to one source.
Now, that's not enough for me.
If you're saying that one source is enough, you haven't been paying attention too much.
You should probably never take one source.
So even though there's one source that doesn't have any credibility problems that I'm aware of, It's just a good idea to have a second source.
So it's a one-source story, and the one-source story doesn't go to the second question, whether the Venezuelans are doing it intentionally.
But, does that matter?
Once again, Trump is directionally correct, even if he's not technically correct.
So he might not be technically correct that they're intentionally emptying the prison so that those people can come to America and get him out of the country.
It might be correct that they had some reason to reduce the prison population for whatever reason, and that some of them went to America.
So I would say that Trump is correct enough in a Trumpian, you know, directionally true statement that there are prisoners, people who were in jail recently for pretty bad crimes, did in fact come to America.
How many?
Well, he's probably exaggerating that, but how many would it take before you were pretty worried about it?
So there is more evidence that the so-called Venezuelan gangs conquering territory is a real thing.
We just don't know the details and the extent of it, but it does seem that Venezuelan gangs are conquering territory in the United States.
Here's a story that, I don't know what's the most outrageous story of the day, but in Great Britain, in the UK, they're looking to, since their prisons appear to be full, and they're going to be jailing a lot more people because of their new anti-free speech laws, they're looking to maybe rent space in Estonian jails, which have lots of space.
So the Estonian jails are just plenty of space.
They're not full.
And they've decided that they'll ship some of their prisoners there, maybe.
I think that's unconfirmed.
But one of the plans is they might ship the prisoners to Estonia.
Now, what's wrong with that story?
Let me tell you what's wrong with that story.
If you heard that Estonia's prisons have lots of room, What's the best way to play this?
What's your first thought?
Whoa!
Estonian prisons have plenty of room.
We could put our prisoners in the Estonian prison.
Okay, that's the way the UK is going.
Now, I don't know if they'll do it, but they're definitely considering it.
Here's how I would have played it.
Hey Scott, did you know that the Estonian prisons are largely empty?
Watch how I play this.
Why?
Why what?
Why are the Estonian prisons largely empty?
Did they overbuild their prisons?
No, no.
But why are some of them empty?
Does their Department of Justice not work?
No, it works pretty well.
They have a pretty good system.
So, what are they doing that is not producing criminals?
Because you should be asking more questions about that.
So the question you should not be asking Estonia is, can we use your empty prison space?
No, you should ask, what did you do right that you don't have to put your citizens in prison?
What did you do right?
Because do you know what the answer is?
Do you know what the Estonians do right?
Almost everything.
Estonia is this weird little country that just got to be sort of a special case in the world.
Where for whatever reason, their leadership are all rational.
I know!
You didn't see that coming, did you?
You can vote by an app.
You just open your app and you can vote.
Estonia is one of the, you know, best internets.
Pretty low crime.
Estonia is killing it.
The only problem Estonia has is they don't want Russia to conquer them, which is always a risk.
But no, let's ask why they don't have people in the jail.
Let's not ask if we can use their jail space.
That is the loser approach.
Alright, now there's stories about that school shooter that the father bought him the rifle for Christmas after he had been already talked to by the FBI for threatening a school shooting.
So, it looks like the father might be in some legal trouble for buying a deadly weapon for somebody who had been interviewed by the FBI as a potential school shooter.
So, Well, I mean, everything about this story just screams what is wrong with this country at the moment.
Well, author Gad Saad, writing in Newsweek, saying that Kamala Harris and her campaign are hoping you turn your brain off and use your emotions to pick your candidate, because Kamala Harris doesn't have as many detailed plans.
So the thinking is that they have to sell sort of the vibe or the feeling and And Gad gives some examples of that, and he's arguing that we should maybe use our sense of reason and not be taken in by the emotional appeal.
To which I say, Gad, you are halfway there.
He's halfway there.
So he understands that the other side is not being reasonable.
That's halfway there.
Until you understand that no voters make decisions based on reason, you're just going to be confused and annoyed by everything you see, because it won't make sense.
Now, nobody uses reasons to vote.
It is true that some ideas are better than other ideas, and people will mention those things and talk about them, but it's not why they vote.
Why they vote is some mix of how somebody makes them feel, their charisma, whether they're the same race as you, whether you just feel safe.
It's just the irrational stuff.
And then we rationalize it after the fact.
So why'd you vote for him or her?
Well, I like that tax policy.
No, that's not why you voted.
It just isn't.
We all have reasons, including me.
I'll give you a reason for why I voted, but I'm also aware That I would have voted that way if I had to make up different reasons.
So whatever it is that drives any of our decisions is always irrational.
Once you realize that, everything makes sense.
Well, you know that story about Tenet Media allegedly taking money from Russia and hiding it and hiring some conservative commentators to be under their banner, at least just on the YouTube site.
Part of that story is that it expanded into everybody accusing everybody of being a foreign agent.
So I jokingly said yesterday on X that I was feeling bad because nobody had put me on a list of potential foreign influences.
And no sooner had I done that than I hear that there's a Spaces going on talking about me being a An Israeli asset or something and I thinking to myself.
Well, that didn't take long.
I Didn't take long at all.
By the way, I'm not a I'm not an Israeli asset I don't even support their government You know, they're on their own.
I just observe simply observing and So Some people say What was Putin up to?
Why would Russia try to fund these people if it looks like there was no effort to change them editorially?
So there doesn't seem to be any evidence whatsoever that Tim Pool or Benny Johnson or Dave Rubin changed any of their opinions because of where their funding came from.
There's no evidence of that.
And I doubt it happened.
But Lauren Chen, one of the owners, with her husband, I guess, of Tenant Media, people are reporting that she seemed to be creating some division among the conservative world.
But I would note that there tends to be, at the moment, a huge amount of division in the pro-Trump side of the world.
More than I've ever seen, maybe.
Probably more than I've ever seen.
And you have to ask yourself, did that happen on its own?
And then Putin was asked who he prefers in the American election.
Well, let me give you some workup to this.
I saw a post yesterday from Jay Black, who's just apparently a Democrat.
And he uses this technique on his post, you've seen it before, where somebody really wants to emphasize how dumb you are.
They'll put their sentence with a period after each word.
You know what I mean?
So if I said, you, period, are, period, not, period, well, period, informed, like, not only would I be making a statement, but I'd really be calling you an idiot with all the periods.
It's like, you are so dumb, I have to speak slowly.
So Jay Black did that.
He wanted me to know how dumb I am, and maybe some of you.
So he said, and I'll quote, I'll say this slowly so MAGA can understand it.
If, period, Russia, period, wants, period, your period, candidate, period, to, period, be, period, elected, period, then he, period, shouldn't, period, be elected, period.
So the idea is that, you know, if Trump is supported by Putin, That should be enough.
I mean, that should be enough by itself to tell you not to vote for Trump because of all that Putin support.
I mean, that's obvious, isn't it?
I mean, how much more obvious can it be?
I'm going to say it with periods.
It's period, obvious, period.
Well, a few hours after Jay said that, Putin endorsed Harris.
So, several million people danced on the The living grave of Jay Black for being the most obnoxious wrong person on the internet.
Let me give you this advice.
We're all wrong sometimes.
And we're all a little arrogant sometimes.
Don't combine them.
Don't be arrogant and exactly terribly wrong.
You can do one or the other and probably get away with it.
Don't combine them!
Don't combine them, Jay!
Anyway, so that happened.
I saw Jessica Tarloff on The Five say that the influencers like Tim Pool were getting $400,000 per month from Russia.
Now, I have not looked into it.
But I'm going to bet a very large amount of money that they did not get paid $400,000 a month apiece.
Does anybody want to take the other side of that bet?
I hate watching the news and thinking, okay, I don't even have to research that to know that's not true.
No, it's not true that anybody paid them $400,000 a month, especially in not asking them to change their opinions whatsoever, which appears to be the case.
No, I don't think so.
Anyway, so conservatives are divided, and I think there's lots of forces from the outside that are doing that, but I don't know if it's all Russia or just happens on its own.
I finally figured out, with a little help, Why it is that polls that should all look the same, let's say presidential polls, if they're all done scientifically and appropriately, they should all be pretty similar.
But sometimes they're not.
And here's one reason why not.
So the pollsters can determine how to weight their results.
So for example, they can ask a bunch of people, And then they could, you know, find out that they had accidentally talked to too many people in one party, and they could either just report it, say, well, you know, we had too many people in one party, but here's what we got.
Well, that wouldn't really tell you anything, because you expect the people in one party to vote one way, predictably.
So if you were to take that approach, that would suggest you were not interested in a real answer.
But rather, we're interested in influencing what people thought about the situation.
So that'd be the opposite of a poll.
It would be persuasion.
Another way you could weight them is by the percentage of people who voted in the most recent election.
So you could say, well, in 2020, the total votes were this percentage Democrat and that percentage Republican.
So you can use that.
And that wouldn't be a bad assumption, would it?
That there would be roughly the same mix as there was in the most recent election?
Wouldn't change that much in a few years.
So that's a reasonable way.
But here's another way you could do it.
You could weight it by likely voters.
So you could balance it by the correct number of Democrats to Republicans to Independents.
But then you've got a problem because the Independents are not really Independents, are they?
So couldn't you accidentally have gotten a whole bunch of independents who really are just Democrats.
They just don't like to say they're Democrats.
So you wouldn't necessarily know that, would you?
You wouldn't know if you accidentally talked to too many Democrats.
They just happen to call themselves independents, because half the country is calling themselves independents.
So that's a problem.
So you can weight it by likely voters.
You can do it by 2020 mix, or you could not wait them at all.
How different do you think those answers would be?
Pretty different.
Yeah, quite different.
So, here's my question.
Are these polls telling you what is, or is their selection of what assumptions they make really the whole poll?
Was there any reason to even talk to the public?
Because once you made an assumption about, you know, what you're waiting would be, you kind of already knew how it was going to come out by the assumption.
So as a person who used to collect information for corporate bosses for many years, that was my job.
Let me tell you, it's always the assumptions that determine the result.
The public Believes it's the data.
Nope.
If it were the data, everybody would get the same answer.
And if they didn't, they would know why pretty quickly.
It's like, oh, you wrote that data down wrong.
Look, here's the real data.
You got that wrong.
No, it's the assumptions.
It's the same thing with climate change.
Polling and climate change have the same problem.
The person who makes the assumptions decides what the outcome will be.
It's not the data.
All right.
Jordan Peterson is predicting that Biden is going to quit in a few weeks so that we can have, quote, Vice President Kahlil Kamala as the first U.S.
DEI Barbie president.
Well, Jordan Peterson, don't hold back.
Tell us what you're really feeling here.
I feel like you're just holding back too much.
Well, I would add to that what others have added to it, I think, by now.
That may be the reason Hunter decided to wrap up his situation and plead guilty without saying he was actually guilty in that weird legal way.
That maybe he just wants to wrap things up so his father will have time to pardon him before he leaves from office.
And I think that is a reasonably good prediction.
I don't think it's 100%, but if I had to make a small bet on it, I would bet that he will quit in time to give Kamala Harris a boost for having already been the first black woman president.
So we might get one of those, kind of through the back door.
Biden was giving a little rally speech in favor of Harris, and he said out loud that the Inflation Reduction Act was really just a fake, and it was really the Green New Deal bill, basically, and it wasn't really to reduce any inflation.
So, how long do we wait between the time that, you know, the Democrats make claims that the news supports, to the point where the Democrats themselves can just say, well, you know, actually we made all that up.
It wasn't even about inflation reduction.
Now, it's not that we didn't figure it out, but when I say we, I mean the people who really paid attention to the news, but the average voter Probably thought, hey, look at them reducing inflation.
Good job, Biden.
I saw Peter St.
Onge.
He's on X. He's got some videos on various topics, PhD.
And he was noting that weak men and single women tend to vote left.
And not just because of abortion.
Because they do it in other countries as well, no matter what the abortion laws are.
So, weak men and single women tend to vote Democratic here and Left in other countries.
Why is that?
Well, it seems to be evolutionary.
And it seems to go like this.
If you feel personally weak, then you're worried about what's in your immediate environment.
Does that make sense?
That makes sense, right?
If you feel personally vulnerable, you barely can walk outside because your environment is dangerous.
So the first thing that you'd want to fix Is your environment when you walk outside.
So you'd want to make sure nobody had guns and you'd want to make sure all the poor people got fed so they don't need to rob you.
And you would make a bunch of assumptions that might lean, lean left.
Um, if you are Republican and you're either a strong man or a married woman who would feel like she has some protection, you would say, I don't need the government to protect me like On my own property, because I'm married and, you know, I got a strong husband.
I've got the protection, but I am worried about the country.
So Republicans and strong men and married women tend to be more concerned about people coming across the border.
And women seem to be more concerned about, you know, what's in their immediate environment in terms of what, what they should be afraid of.
So that feels to me like there's something to it.
I don't know if they got exactly the right genetic explanation, but I do feel it can't be a coincidence that people who feel weak and unprotected are looking for the government to immediately give them some protection.
Makes sense.
We got some new economic reports.
I'm seeing them described in different ways.
Julia Pollack, Said the jobs report is very much in line with expectations.
Um, it's all boring.
It's, you know, everything's sort of in the general area that we thought it would be a little bit more, a little bit less.
Um, I think there was another job report.
They got the July job report.
I think that, uh, revised down again, of course.
Anyway, there's, uh, I think I would describe the report as somewhat anemic.
Somewhat expected, but anemic, which means that we'll probably get a rate cut, which would be good for the stock market.
But don't make any investments because of me.
I'm not really good at investment advice.
How many of you have heard of a historian who predicts the outcome of elections in the United States, and he's been right pretty much every time?
His name is Alan Lickman.
And he's got this 13 point true or false questions that will tell you who's going to get elected.
And he says right now that 8 out of 13 go in favor of Harris.
So that his thing, which has never been wrong, You're saying there's a strong signal for Harris to get elected.
Do you believe it?
He's got 13 questions.
It's been right every time.
8 out of 13 go for Harris, so she'll probably get elected.
Do you have any questions about that?
Maybe the questions would be, what are those 13 questions?
Have you ever heard the 13 questions?
And if I told you the 13 questions, do you think you would still be confident that this is a good prediction method?
Let's find out.
All right.
So here are the things that would be positive for the, let's call it the incumbent.
Let's call Kamala the incumbent.
If the White House party gains seats in the House in the midterm.
All right, so that didn't happen.
So that would be negative to the White House party in office.
The incumbent president is running.
Well, I would say that's not the case.
It was when it was Biden, but it's not the case now.
So that would be two that I would score against him.
I believe Alan Lickman scored this for Harris because she would be like the incumbent.
I say she's not the incumbent.
The polls changed immediately as soon as she got in.
Her mix of people who supported her changed.
Her policies, she says, are going to be different.
So I don't think she's the incumbent.
And beyond that, I think that Trump was a little bit of an incumbent once, too.
So I don't think this one applies.
And if it does apply, it leans, in my opinion, toward Trump.
Next one is the White House party avoided a primary.
So the reason behind this is if they avoided a primary, it's because their candidate was so strong.
Did the Democrats avoid a primary?
Yes.
Was it because their candidate is so strong?
No!
No, they gamed the system.
So you can't give this one to Harris and say she was so strong, well, we didn't even need a primary, really.
No, that didn't happen.
She went in despite being weak.
So this one doesn't count.
How about a third party candidate is running?
So that would be usually good for who was in the White House.
Except the only third party candidate with any weight just decided to join the Trump team.
So how do you weigh this?
Do you say RFK Jr.
counts as a benefit for Harris when he joined the Trump team?
No, this one is completely irrelevant in this weird situation.
How about the short-term economy is strong?
Is it?
It depends who you ask.
In my opinion, it's weak.
But I know that other people, Democrats, would say, oh, it's pretty strong right now.
No, it's completely weak.
If you talk to people, they'll say that everything costs too much and it's not easy to get a job.
That sounds weak.
Things are too expensive and he can't get a job.
So, that one looks like it goes for Trump's way.
How about, uh, growth of the long-term economy has been as strong as the last two terms?
Well, again, this is a weird one because of the pandemic.
But it doesn't look like our growth is impressive, so I don't think that works in their favor.
If the White House has enacted major national policy changes, that would go in favor of the White House.
But shouldn't you say that the major national policy changes are popular?
Because we have a national policy change on Ukraine that we're balls to the wall, and it's unpopular.
We have, you know, support for Israel, and that's pretty mixed.
So, and then there's that infrastructure thing that nobody's seen anything happen from.
So, I don't really think there's anything positive that was a major national policy change.
So that doesn't seem to apply.
How about, there's no social unrest?
I don't know.
What do you call January 6thers being locked up, and, you know, complete division in the country, and some people are asking for reparations, and some people are looking for a new country to move to?
I would say there's plenty of social unrest, but it's not on the streets, because Republicans get hunted, so they can't be on the streets.
So that seems not applicable.
Uh, there is no scandal in the White House.
What are you talking about?
The whole Ukraine, Hunter Biden, uh, you know, uh, and the whole coverup, the whole coverup of, uh, Biden's cognitive ability.
These are gigantic scandals, gigantic scandals.
And I think, I think the historian sort of discounted it about, uh, The incumbent party candidate has charisma.
Well, to his credit, the historian did say that Trump has the charisma and Kamala is not the charisma candidate.
So that one he gave to Trump.
How about the challenger is uncharismatic?
No, again, that one goes to Trump because he's charismatic.
How about the White House had foreign policy success?
What was the White House's foreign policy success?
Opening the border, war in Ukraine, or not helping Israel enough?
I don't see any big foreign policy success.
Or how about leaving Afghanistan?
How about the White House had foreign policy failure?
Well, I think they got some failures.
Here's how I read this.
There are 13 indicators in favor of Trump.
Or they're inapplicable.
They're either inapplicable or they favor Trump.
Now, do you remember what I told you about data versus assumptions?
The data is in favor of Kamala Harris, 8 out of 13.
But how did you get the data?
It's all based on assumptions.
And the assumptions are whack.
I mean, they're not any worse than any other voter's assumptions.
But it's just one person's assumptions.
And I look at it, and I go, well, I'm one person.
I pay attention.
I look at the news.
I don't see any of these as being the right assumptions.
They all look like the wrong assumptions to me.
So, how could it be that I have so many questions about this, and yet it accurately predicted who would win the White House a whole bunch of times in a row?
How do you explain that?
Well, I have a hypothesis.
Do you remember when James Carville told the Clinton campaign, the Bill Clinton campaign, it's the economy, stupid?
He said, basically, just ignore everything else.
People are going to vote on the economy.
And then it was true.
That was the most important part.
Well, one of his 13 things is that the short term economy looks good.
It could be that the person who wins is the one who has the best argument about the economy.
And that's the whole game.
It might be that you didn't need 13, you just needed one.
And you didn't need the historian, you just needed James Carville to say, it's the economy, stupid.
Well, well, well, but about the social unrisk, the scandal and the charisma.
Well, no, it's the economy, stupid.
Well, what about who had a primary contest?
What about a third-party candidate running?
What about the... No, it's the economy, stupid.
It's the economy, stupid.
So, I'm going to take Carville over the historian.
Kamala Harris said out loud yesterday that she will sign a reparation bill.
This fills me with deep hatred.
Deep hatred.
There are other things that I say, oh, that would be a problem.
Um, you know, this might not work out for me.
You know, I don't like higher taxes, for example, but this one fills me with hate.
I just hate her fucking guts.
And I hate anybody who would be in favor of this.
Why?
Because your problems are not magic and special.
Is there any legacy of slavery that has impacted current black Americans?
Yes.
Absolutely.
The systemic racism?
Completely real.
But I don't care.
Because I've got problems too.
Everybody I know has problems.
Some have health problems, some were abused as children.
Some had parents who were addicts.
Some just were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some were born in bad parts of the world.
Your problems are not special and magical.
They're real.
They're real.
And if you want to say the government caused it, I'd say, sure.
I just don't care.
And that is not an argument that I need to fucking pay for it.
You can make your little, you know, academic argument that connects all the dots, and I can look at it on a piece of paper and I'll say, yes, I get that.
That dot, yep, that does connect.
Those dots are all connected.
You've made your point.
But I don't care.
And there's no reason I should care.
Because nobody has magic fucking special problems.
We all got problems.
I would take having the legacy of slavery if the trade-off was that I got free college and I was 6'4 and looked good.
Handsome, healthy, 6'4, free college.
I'll take that.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I'll take that.
And we don't see a lot of people pretending to be white to get into college, do we?
No, we don't.
And do you think that the Asian Americans should be paying some fucking reparations when the only impact that black people have had on their lives since, you know, they came in after slavery was a done deal?
The only impact that on their lives is that they got fewer jobs and they were victims of crime.
And now they're going to pay the black, black Americans for something they had no connection to.
And indeed it should be paid the other direction.
No.
No, this is dumb, divisive, terrible, illogical, evil, and I fucking hate you if you're looking at this as a reason to take my money, that I worked for under a system that I was told that if I did all the right things, I'd get to keep my money.
And now Harris is making it very clear that if I do all the right things, I still have to give money to people who didn't.
Now there are other reasons people don't succeed, but I'm not buying into this at all.
No, you cannot make me think that one group of people had special magical problems and therefore I have to give them my money.
Nope.
There's no argument that connects that dot.
88 corporate leaders just backed Kamala Harris.
Including James Murdoch, the former CEO of 21st Century Fox, and an heir to the Murdoch family media empire.
Hmm.
So that would mean that everybody on the left-leaning side of the news is in favor of Kamala Harris, but also the primary major entity that would be potentially on the other side is in favor of Kamala Harris.
At least in terms of ownership of the Fox network.
There would be plenty of individual opinions that will vary, of course.
That's not good.
Now, here's the question.
If you were a stockholder of any of these 88 corporations, would you be happy that they just volunteered you to make less money?
Because they decided to back the one who's going to tax them the most.
You fucking idiots!
Here's my advice for company leaders.
You got two choices that don't make you look like the biggest idiot in the world.
One, stay completely out of it.
I would use as my example Jeff Bezos.
I imagine Jeff Bezos has strong opinions about things political.
I'm quite impressed At the degree to which he's managed to stay out of it.
Now, of course, Amazon, like every company, is going to have some wokeness and DEI and stuff.
It's somewhat unavoidable in the corporate world at the moment.
But I'm not even sure I could tell you what Jeff Bezos' personal opinion is.
And Zuckerberg also told you he was going to stay out of it.
This time.
What do I think about those two leaders?
Excellent.
I only need you to make money so my stocks go up and the country does well and your employees get paid and then they can buy things from me.
That's all I need.
I don't need you advocating for you to pay more taxes.
I don't need the fiduciary leader of the thing I invested in to be saying in public, you know, I'd like to give some of my money away.
Um, not for any particular reason.
It's just, uh, I don't know.
I just thought I should back this candidate who's going to take more of my money and therefore your money.
I can't even believe that these idiots would sign up for the, we're going to back the one who wants to take more of our money.
Now I get that, you know, the argument is more than just taxes, but if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, I feel like you should pay attention to the taxes, and maybe not the other issues.
That would be my advice.
Otherwise, you were in the wrong jobs, my friends.
You should all be removed.
Honestly, the boards of each of these companies should remove them.
Imagine that you were a leader of one of these ADA companies, and you just endorsed Harris, and you didn't need to.
It was optional.
You could have just said, we're staying out of it.
Don't you think that that automatically costs them business?
Because the Republicans would say, all right, if I have a choice, I will no longer buy from your company because I wanted you just to make money.
But now you're, if I give you money, you're going to be using it to destroy the country as I see it.
So if I were the board, I would remove all 88 of them and I would do it right away.
I mean, I wouldn't even wait till the end of the day.
I would say, look, You are absolutely free to endorse anybody you want.
As long as you're not working here.
Because if you're working here, you're just crushing our revenue potential.
Forever, by the way.
Bud Light is not catching up.
So, yeah.
That's 88 boards that should be meeting today and should be removing every one of these people.
I just don't think people in corporations should be backing any candidate.
I'm here.
This is going to sound inconsistent.
But if they backed the candidate who wanted to lower their taxes, I would back off.
Because I would say, OK, that that does feel like you're getting into politics, but not really, because you're really into just lowering your own taxes.
And that's your job.
You're supposed to be trying to lower your taxes.
So if so, if a if a CEO or CFO says we like the one who's going to lower our taxes, fine.
That's like not even political.
That's just your taxes.
I wouldn't even think about not shopping there for that reason.
Maybe Democrats would, but I doubt that too.
According to the Zero Hedge, the jobs that people are getting are mostly going to foreign-born workers.
So the foreign-born workers were up 635,000 in jobs in August, while native-born were down 1.3 million.
Now you're going to say to yourself, that's terrible, because the foreign-born people are getting all the jobs.
But I would hedge it this way.
Why did they get the jobs?
Remember, it's foreign-born, it's not just undocumented.
We're not talking about the people who walked across the border with the clothes on their back.
Quite often means that you're a technical expert or a doctor or a scientist and you came to America because it's a better opportunity.
Well, of course they're employed because they're here because they have those skills that are in high demand.
So without knowing if the quote foreign born workers Are mostly people who walked across the border with nothing, including an education and English ability, or people who were fluent in two or three languages and had a skill stack like you can't believe, and they would just rather work in America, to which I say, come on in, the more the better.
So it's not really clear that they're taking American jobs.
It might've been there weren't Americans for those jobs.
We don't know.
So I say that could be good and it could be bad and we can't tell.
So well, Trump, Trump was asked about childcare at an event, I think the other day, and some say his answer was incoherent.
Um, I would agree with that.
I think he's got some idea like, you know, using, uh, tariffs to pay for it or something.
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like a real plan.
So I'm not going to bullshit you and say, oh, he's got the good plan.
I don't think, I don't think he's got a plan.
But here's my way I would approach it.
I would approach healthcare the way I would approach a number of other topics like transportation, for example, insurance.
If you were to design a city from scratch, With the understanding that only the federal government would have any regulatory or law authority over it.
This would be similar to Trump's idea of using federal land to build some cities.
If you built a city from scratch, one of the things you could do is you could design away the cost of child care.
Now, I'm going to give you the bad version of how to do that, just so you can kind of understand it conceptually.
But don't argue too much About the details.
I'm just trying to sell you on the idea that you could design away a lot of expense.
Right?
So suppose you had a new community and a facility that is owned by the public in which you could drop off your kid or your pet.
You could drop your dog off.
And there would be somebody there to watch it, but they'd be mostly volunteers.
So if you're lonely and retired or unemployed at the moment, Or you're single and it's your day off, and you just want to be around people in a productive way, you could go there and you could help out.
Or you could just work out on some gym equipment that's there, but maybe they want to, you know, keep the males away from the kids.
But you'd have video everywhere.
There would be no dark corners, no closets that anybody could go into, no matter what.
So that if anybody tried anything that was inappropriate with a child, it would be like any public space.
If you saw somebody doing something inappropriate with a child in, let's say, a restaurant, you would immediately intervene, so it doesn't happen there.
So, if you create a situation where there are a few paid employees, and somebody at the door to make sure that nobody gets in unless they're vetted somehow, you could create a situation where there's just a natural collection of people who are meeting each other, sometimes bonding even.
And they could create a social life.
They could get some oxytocin.
They'd have purpose.
They'd have a place to go.
They'd have a schedule.
Things that people are really, really going to need, especially as the robots start taking our productive work.
So you may say to yourself, but Scott, I have this or that complaint about that situation, to which I say, don't worry about the details.
The only point is we're not organized in a way that We could lower that cost, but we could.
It seems very doable.
Now let's take rent.
How can you lower the cost of rent?
Well, one way would be there are a lot of seniors who have extra rooms, empty nests, spouses died.
And there should be far more of a effort to get them a college age roommate who can't pay for rent, but they might be able to help out with some chores.
And, you know, if you fall down and die, they'll call the 911.
So there's just a whole bunch of ways you could organize that would take away expenses.
What about the expense of transportation?
Well, if you design your city so that you get the self-driving taxis if you need them, but mostly you can walk everywhere you want.
If you had bicycle paths from every house to every school, you could completely eliminate driving kids to school.
And buses.
They could just take their electric skateboard or bicycle and just park it at the school and come back.
Right?
So, you can think of a hundred different ways that you could just drive the cost of living down to practically nothing, and your quality of living would be through the roof.
I always use my college experience as my example.
My college experience was the, on paper, the worst living condition.
I was in this, you know, tiny little room with a roommate for the first couple years.
And, you know, had to share a bathroom and, you know, there's no kitchen there.
You gotta walk through the snow to get food.
On paper, it's the worst place.
But because it was designed to give me everything I needed, And it surrounded me with people I wanted to associate with.
It was the best experience I've ever had.
There's nothing in my life that will ever come close to that.
But I think we could do that for adults.
I think you create a situation where you just met a bunch of awesome people without any effort at all, because they were just there and you were doing something in common.
All right, so I think there's nobody's got a good plan for childcare.
Let's talk about the Trump economic plan.
I asked Grock to summarize it, so I may have missed a few things.
So he wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%.
Kamala Harris wants to raise it.
But Trump also wants to put a tariff on a lot of stuff coming into the country.
Now, how many of you think you understand tariffs?
How many of you think an economist can tell you if a tariff is a good idea or a bad idea?
How many of you think that it sort of depends, you know, you could see it could be a good idea in some cases, bad in others, but that we could do the math and we could know that?
How many think you can know it?
Well, here's what you need to know.
There are two reasons for a tariff.
The good reason for a tariff Is that there's some country that's trying to destroy an entire industry in your country.
So because the country is behind it, not just the company selling goods, the country is behind it, like China.
They could subsidize the product until nobody would ever buy an American car because they seem too expensive.
So we'd all have Chinese cars and then we would have no car industry.
And then China would slowly start raising the prices, because it's the only place you can buy a car from China.
So in that case, tariffs are not about what you paid extra for the car, although it might end up in your price for your car.
What it is, is a way to keep your entire industry from being destroyed.
Now when people talk about tariffs, what is the dumbass thing they say?
I'm going to do it with a stupid face.
So the next time you hear it, you can remember my stupid face.
It goes like this.
A tariff!
A tariff is a tax on the consumer.
A tariff is a tax on the consumer.
Is it?
What do you think?
Is it a tax on the consumer?
It can be.
In the sense that if you raise the cost on a foreign producer, they might say, well, You're still going to have to buy it because you can't get it anywhere else.
So I guess we'll just raise the price.
So it depends whether you have a choice.
So let me give you an example.
If China was trying to sell table salt in the United States at 10% of what Americans make table salt for, if America makes it, I don't know, just making this up, then we should, we should put a tariff on them.
But, would you pay more for salt?
No, you wouldn't.
No.
Because the tariff would take the foreign price up to about the domestic price, or maybe higher.
If it's higher than the domestic price, you just say, oh, well, I'll just buy them more salt like I always did.
There's no difference in your price.
Now, you do lose the opportunity to get the lower price, but there's nothing to be passed on to you.
You're simply not buying Chinese salt.
Because why would you?
Same price as the Morton Salt, and it's Chinese, and well, you might as well give it to America.
Now, let's say it's a different situation.
It's not something like salt that you can get anywhere.
Let's say it's a specific component or material that if you didn't get it from China, you couldn't even build the thing you want to build with their material.
Well, in that case, if you put a tariff on it, you're just paying for it.
Because they're going to say, all right, where else are you going to get this?
And you'd say, ah, OK, good point.
There's literally nowhere else I can get it.
So how about you pay whatever we charge you?
I guess I have to.
So the first thing you need to know is that it completely depends on what product it is.
If you're saying in general it's good or in general it's bad, well, you're just stupid.
All right?
It's not in general good or in general bad.
It depends entirely upon the specific thing that's being tariffed.
So remember this.
The first thing you need to know is it depends if you had options.
If you have plenty of options, then your price doesn't go up at all.
It's just that that company doesn't do business in the United States.
It's too expensive.
If you have to buy it, then the government shouldn't put the tariff on it.
Does that make sense?
If we do it right, there wouldn't be any tariff on something that you had to buy, so there'd be no cost to pass on.
Did you already understand that?
How many of you already understood that before I explained it?
Because tariffs are kind of wonky and confusing.
And then you get to the tariff to defend an industry.
Here's what they never calculate.
When the people tell you, so they'll just pass along the price.
It's just like a tax on the consumer.
It's just going to pass along the price.
Did they calculate what it costs the United States to get rid of the car industry?
Because that's kind of big.
If you lose the entire automobile industry, And the only way you could have kept it was with some tariffs.
Did they include the cost of losing the entire automobile industry, and all that pay, and all the things that those people would have bought, and they might have bought more things from you, whatever it is that you're selling?
No, they don't.
No, they don't.
And that cost is enormous, and they just sort of act like that's not part of the question.
No, losing an entire industry is the question.
It's not the, oh it was a little tax, the tariff was a little tax that got passed on to the consumer.
No, that's the dumb view, right?
The sophisticated view is you're protecting an entire industry, in some cases, because the value of the industry is critical to America.
In that case, even if you paid a little more, it'd be worth it.
So if you put a If you put it on something that you have to get, it's a bad idea.
If you put it on something that you could get at the same price from America, it's a great idea.
If you put a tariff on something that would destroy an entire industry in America, if you don't do it, it's a great idea.
So, on balance, are tariffs good ideas or bad ideas?
Well, in the political realm, we deal with tariffs the way we deal with people.
Stupidly.
So, let me give you an example.
There was a Democrat once who did some bad things, and therefore all Democrats are bad.
That's how we look at tariffs.
That, well, there's one situation I can think of where a tariff would be bad, which would be a tariff on a good that we couldn't get anywhere else, and so the price is passed on to us.
Yeah, don't do that one.
Don't do that one.
This is not hard.
You just don't do that one.
So I'm in favor of tariffs because a country has to have them to protect itself from, uh, protect its important industries.
All right.
Um, let's see, what else?
Um, Trump wants to do an emergency declaration to drastically increase nuclear energy production.
So he would, uh, get rid of some regulations and be faster about approving new things, et cetera.
But also approving new drilling, so he'd be emergency declaration to get the government organized and just very quickly getting our energy production up.
That is exactly right.
That is 100%.
Economically, logically, geopolitically, correct.
All good.
So he wants to eliminate 10 regulations for every new one.
He wants to get Elon Musk working on efficiency of the government.
That could be amazing.
Just copy Estonia.
And let's see.
Sovereign wealth fund.
So Trump wants to use the tariffs.
He wants to use the money he gets from the tariffs To create a sovereign wealth fund.
Now what that is, is a fund that's managed by a country.
So that's the sovereign part.
So other countries have these.
And it can be used for infrastructure and other national projects.
Okay.
I mean, it would depend what the other projects are, I guess, but in concept, that sounds okay.
Trump wants to spur the economic growth, of course, and make the borders secure and lower the crime.
And he wants to put a bunch into R&D, offering 100% bonus depreciation for new manufacturing investment.
So these are good things.
Now, by the way, Harris has some good things, too.
So it's not all good things compared to bad things.
They've both got some things.
But here's my problem with analyzing economic plans.
If part of your plan is growth, and part of your plan is tax changes, which of those two things can somebody measure easily?
Well, maybe not easily, but if you're an analyst, you could look at the change in taxes, and you could make some assumptions about revenue, and then you could say, okay, Trump's plan will do this to the deficit, and Kamala Harris's will do this to the deficit.
Do you think somebody did that?
Yes, they did.
I'm not going to name names, but if you see somebody say, the Trump plan will increase the deficit by four trillion dollars or something, and the Harris plan will increase the deficit by one point something trillion, are we done?
Oh no, one of them increases the debt more than the other.
So we're done, right?
You don't want the one that increases the debt, or do you?
Here's something I learned in corporate America.
You only manage to the things you can measure.
You can measure, predict, what the tax income will be if you just make assumptions that everything else will be the same.
If everything else is the same, and the only thing you did is change the taxes, you could kind of calculate what the tax Games would be.
But here's what you can't calculate.
The offsetting benefit is the growth.
So if you cut your taxes more aggressively to get more growth, where's that?
They don't even calculate it.
So if you see somebody say that Trump would add to the deficit more than Kamala Harris, they're only looking at half of the equation.
They're just looking at a direct tax cut.
How much would you collect?
But that's not the game.
The game is that the taxes should be modified to get you the optimum growth number.
So if you're not looking at the total benefits of the growth over time, you know, looking at like a 10-year period, then you haven't even done the math yet.
If the only thing you're looking at is the direct tax change, you're looking at a publication that's either selling you propaganda, or they don't know how to do their job.
Because the growth part's the important part.
You just leave that out?
Trump isn't saying cut your taxes just to make them less.
He's saying cut them so you spur the economy in all these variety of ways.
You've got to measure the spurred economy.
Now, if you say it won't move at all, I mean, I'd have to hear that argument.
But if you think it wouldn't change the economy at all, I mean, that's hard to believe.
But if you believe that, I suppose you should state that.
All right, Harris has a plan of some kind of price gouging control on food and maybe meds.
And of course, nobody thinks that the price gouging thing is a good idea.
Now, well, let me modify that.
If there's real price gouging, then I think we'd all be in favor of doing something about it.
But I don't think they're going to find evidence of that in the food business.
You might find that there was a little bit during the pandemic, but I think the free market keeps their margins to a relatively reasonable level.
She wants to do stuff for housing, giving $25,000 in down payment assistance and blah blah for starter homes.
That might be good.
Again, there's a tendency to just look what it costs and not a tendency to look at the economic benefit of it.
She wants to put a cap on insulin prices.
That's probably not too different than what Trump was doing.
Childcare credits.
She wants to improve those.
It makes it look like she wants to do more for childcare.
I mean, at the very least, she'd increase the tax credits.
Tax policies.
Increase the corporate tax to 28 from 21.
That would make your stock market fall in value, which would make you feel less wealthy, which would make you spend less.
So you gotta calculate that, which they don't, of course.
Then some kind of a tax deduction for startup businesses, so they'd get a $50,000 write-off, as long as they made money eventually.
I like it in concept.
I don't know if a lot of people would change their behavior because of it.
But, you know, my philosophy is if you need to solve a problem, and we do, you know, how to grow faster, if you've got an idea that could work, well, let's try it.
You know, the downside isn't, you know, death.
So maybe this would make a difference.
So I'd be willing to try it.
You know, it wouldn't matter who suggested it.
If it doesn't work, pull it back.
You know, you'll know in a year.
Is it worth a year of this?
Probably.
Might be worth a year.
There's going to be, you know, cheating and graft and all that stuff.
Corruption.
But you'll know in a year.
And then Harris has to figure out how to be different from Biden.
I guess that's important.
All right, ladies and gentlemen.
The most important thing you need to know is If you get the Dilbert 2025 calendar, the desk calendar, which is available now, there would be no tariff because it's made in the United States.
Yeah, no tariff made in the United States.
But for the first time, and because it's more expensive to make it in the United States, I had to cut out the publisher and cut out amazon.com and cut out the bookstores.
Now you can only get it from one website.
And if you go to Dilbert.com, you can find the link to buy.
It's right at the top.
And we're not going to make a wall calendar this year.
There wasn't as much demand for those.
I know some of you will miss it, but it will just be the daily.
And to make it even better, there are comics on both sides of each day.
Double the comics you've ever seen in a Dilbert comic.
And if you pay a little more for shipping, Maybe that should take the sting out of it.
And I say, if you're going to buy more than one, it'll make your shipping costs look a lot more affordable.
So that's happening.
Um, that's all I got for you today.
And, um, I'm going to talk to the locals people privately.
Uh, hope you learned something.
Did anybody learn anything about economics today?
Let me ask you this question before I go.
Was there anything I said about their, Tariffs or anything else that you said, oh, I never saw it that way before.
Salt mines in the USA.
I don't know.
Do we have any salt mines in the USA?
We might not.
Why are they buying our farmland?
Well, if I had to guess, it's for food.
Here's the thing with China.
If we got in a war with China, we wouldn't have ammunition in three weeks, but they wouldn't have food in three weeks.
We're really not going to get in a war with China.
Yeah, I feel like China is the pretend adversary.
Like we're pretending that war is an option.
It's not an option.
War with China is not an option.
It's just not an option.
We've got to stop pretending like it might happen.
No, no.
One of the sides would have to want it at least a little bit before you could consider it.
Neither side wants it even a little bit under any situation, under any scenario at all.
