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Content:
Politics, UAE Indoor Farms, President Trump, Chicago Turf Wars, Chicago ShotSpotter, Jake Tapper's Bait, Voter Economic Concerns, Kamala Harris, CNN/NYT AZ Poll, Historical Election Polling Pattern, Mayor Ameer Ghalib, Kamala Rally Attendees, Crypto Debt Payoff, Harris Economic Policy, RFK Jr., Olivia Nuzzi, China Ship Building, Save Act Failure, Scott Adams
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Good morning everyone and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. That's called coffee with Scott Adams You've never had a better time.
And if you'd like to take your enjoyment up to levels that no one could possibly comprehend with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank of gels or a sign, a canteen 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 of the dope being hit at the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go.
Ah.
Man, I can feel that all the way down to my mitochondria.
And I don't even know what a mitochondria is.
Thank you.
Well, let's start with some science news before we get into the politics.
There's a study, according to Science Alert, that says that owning a cat could double your schizophrenia risk.
Huh.
Now, they do say it's not necessarily causal.
It could be just a correlation.
But let's dig a little bit deeper.
Let's see, what would schizophrenia mean?
Well, that would mean emotional blunting, delusions, and hallucinations.
Huh.
I wonder if I can tie this topic to politics in any way.
So there's not really a huge difference between having schizophrenia and watching MSNBC and thinking it's real.
I mean, there is a difference.
It's not like a giant difference.
So let's see.
The other thing that would be a tip that there might be some connection with politics is if there was something about cat owners that we knew What do we know about cat owners?
Well, let's see.
I checked a statistic and 58% of cat owners are women.
Hmm.
So only a cat can make you hallucinate and be delusional and emotionally blunted.
And most cat owners are women.
And most Harris supporters are women who own cats who would make them hallucinate.
That Trump is going to steal their democracy.
There, pulled it all together.
Bet you didn't think I could bring that one home, did you?
Yeah, pulled it all together.
No, I don't believe necessarily that cats are giving anybody any schizophrenia, but it's not a giant coincidence that the people who support Harris have a lot of cats.
Maybe that's just a coincidence.
You never know.
If you would like to know more about most of my science-y related topics, you should follow Owen Gregorian on X.
It's spelled just the way it looks, Owen Gregorian.
So I get a lot of my, especially the science-y tips from Owen.
So follow Owen for more.
Did you know that fewer than 50% of the students in Washington State are at grade level in science and math, according to the Postmillennial?
Fewer than 50%!
Huh.
Now, wouldn't it be great if the writer of that story was really good at math?
Because it's a story about other people who are bad at math.
You know, it would be awkward if the person who wrote the story about other people being bad at math didn't really Connect all the dots with the math.
Because within the story about the public schools being way bad at science and math, and maybe worse than they've ever been, in the same article, it says that the Washington State has the highest private school attendance.
So in Washington State, nearly 25% of the K-12ers are in a private school.
Do you think that's related?
If you saw this story, just the headline, you'd say to yourself, whoa, those schools used to be bad, but they're getting worse at a faster level.
Now, it might be that they're getting worse.
But what would happen if you took any public school, and then you took 25% of the best students and moved them to private schools?
What would happen to the average of the people who are left?
It doesn't mean they're doing worse.
It just means who's left.
Am I wrong?
Who are the kids who go to private school?
Because it costs more?
It's not the dumb ones.
The dumb ones are not being pulled out of public school and put in expensive private schools.
It's usually the richer, smarter kids.
So if you took the richer, smarter kids out of the public school, that alone would drop the number of You know, people who are good at their school by a lot.
So I would suggest that this is a little more complicated.
It could be that what's happening is that the public schools are so bad that they have the highest number of people trying to get out of them.
So that could be what's happening.
The other possibility is that Washington State is lucky and that has the most school choice.
Because school choice could get you to the same place Except that it would be a positive story about education.
In other words, the high percentage of private school students could be telling us that Washington State is producing the best trained students in the country.
But if you were to look at the headline, you'd say, whoa, they might be producing some of the worst students in the country.
And that's because if you're just looking at the public school, you're missing out that they have the highest percentage of private school.
And that's gotta be a big part of the math.
Meanwhile, the UAE, uh, They're going big on indoor farms because they're a desert, so they need indoor farms.
Otherwise, they have to ship stuff in from far away, which is expensive.
So there's a company called Pure Harvest Farms looking for more funding to expand.
But here's the part that I found interesting.
I'm going to make you all interested in indoor farming.
That's my goal.
My goal is simply to make you interested.
indoor farming. Because if you get interested, then other people get interested, and it spreads, and then it's easier to get them funded. It just becomes sexier. So I'm going to make indoor farming the sexiest thing in the country. So here are a few things we know, so you're all smart. Did you know that the indoor farm could lower your water usage by up to 95% in some cases?
So maybe 80% would be more reasonable. But imagine if you could reduce by 80% what you need for farming.
Farming is what sucks up most of your water.
We have this big old water problem in California.
It's largely the farming.
But indoor farming can solve that.
What about fertilizer?
We're running out of fertilizer, and plus you don't want a lot of fertilizer on your food.
Well, indoor farms use less, or I think it could use none.
If you have a controlled environment, I think you can get down to none, but I'm not sure.
You might need some.
What about labor?
Well, in the short run, labor probably would be similar, you know, whether it's indoors or out.
Because it would take a human to walk around and pick stuff.
But what happens if the robots are doing all the work?
Seems to me that an indoor robot would be much cheaper than an outdoor robot.
For one thing, you could optimize the robot for the exact configuration that would be very predictable, but also it won't be sitting outside getting ruined.
Because I can't figure out what would be worse for anything than sitting out in the elements.
So you could save money on labor when you got your robots.
You could save money on... Oh, so the negative.
So these are the negatives.
You need to construct it.
I think that one of the big future advances Will be modular indoor farms.
Cause right now, you know, it would take some money to build an indoor farm, but how much money would it take to build like segments?
So that you could just buy as many segments as you need to make it as long as you want.
And it's just delivered on a truck and there's not much putting it together.
I feel like you could take the cost of construction of the indoor farm.
Down by 80% with mass production and more modular kind of stuff.
Maybe 80%.
What about the shipping?
If you can put the food closer to the people, you can get rid of a whole bunch of refrigeration time and you don't have to gas the vegetables so they look good.
Because you just grow them until they're ready and then people eat them within hours.
So you've got this big transportation advantage.
Of course, you need power.
But you can use solar, I suppose.
I think indoor farms are the future.
Especially for newly built design cities.
Have you heard of anybody saying, boy, you know what you should try is ayahuasca?
It's some kind of very dangerous hallucinogen.
Now I say very dangerous because that's the nature of the story I'm going to tell you.
I don't know how dangerous it is.
I'm no doctor.
Some people say it's not so dangerous, but there's some new evidence that maybe it is.
But one of the stories we're hearing, this is anecdotal at this point, is that a number of CEOs of startups, they go and they have their hallucination experience with Ayahuasca.
It's supposed to change your brain forever to be, I don't know, happier or more productive or something.
But once they come back from their Ayahuasca experience, they quit their jobs.
So it turns out that it makes you not care about chasing after the billionth dollar, I guess.
So there's some concern that as the CEO has become happier and more well-balanced through some kind of a hallucinogenic experience, That they're not as hungry, and so they're not chasing success, and that that might hurt the Silicon Valley.
I don't know.
I don't know if that's a big problem to worry about, but Ashley Vance was talking about that.
I thought I'd pass it along.
But in related news, according to New Atlas, psilocybin, you know, that would be the mushroom-related hallucinogens, They tested it compared to the normal meds for depression, the SSRIs.
And what do you think worked better?
Well, I wouldn't be telling you if it were the SSRIs.
So not only did they get similarly great results, but that the mushroom people had longer lasting positive benefits in their life.
So basically it wasn't close.
If you believe this one study that wasn't super powered and wasn't, uh, it wasn't a gold standard study.
So use your judgment.
But when studies agree with me, I like to tell you about them because that's the best you can do.
Just find stuff that agrees with you and pretend it's credible.
That's what I do.
That's what you should do too.
According to Slay News, um, Trump has more favorable ratings among voters than Taylor Swift.
Now remember, that's among voters.
So it might not be that there are more people who like Trump.
It's just that a lot of young people who can't vote might be the Taylor Swift fans.
So it's kind of close, but there is a difference.
And Trump is a little bit more favorable than Taylor Swift.
So a number of you said, is Trump being stupid and crazy and, uh, you know, being chaotic or something, because he said, I hate Taylor Swift.
And people said, no, don't, don't offend Taylor Swift's, um, fans.
That's bad for politics.
And I said, I'm not so sure that's bad for politics because I wasn't sure at the time, if there were more people who disliked her than liked her.
But he may have played that right.
So his comments, his anti-Taylor Swift comments, may have actually gained him votes.
You know, I doubt it, because I think people have mostly decided.
But it didn't hurt him.
I don't think it hurt him at all.
Well, I keep following the story about Chicago where the old gang members, the existing gangs, are mad at the new gangs.
So the new gangs are the Venezuelans.
Pretty tough.
And so not only did Chicago ship in a whole bunch of violent new gangs, but they decided, their local government decided to turn off ShotSpotter.
Now, ShotSpotter is a technology that they put in cities where they've got listening devices.
And they can hear where there's a gunfire.
And if it's a presumably unauthorized gunfire, because it's in the city, then the police can immediately dispatch and they know where to go because they know where the gunfire came from.
So that used to be in effect and they just turned it off.
So they shipped in new gangs and then they turned off the shot spotter.
Does anybody see any problems coming?
The gangs are just going to shoot it out.
I think they found a way to get rid of the original gangs by bringing in, you know, better armed, more violent gangs.
I don't know that there are two ways to take over territory.
The only way I know of, if you want to be the drug dealer of choice in a certain block of the city, I think you have to kill the people who are already there.
And I'm not recommending it, just to be clear.
I don't recommend it.
Don't kill anybody.
Don't be violent.
I'm just saying, I'm not aware of a second method.
So if the new criminals are coming in, and the shot spotter's turned off, and probably the police have been defunded—I don't know if that's true, but it feels like it fits the story—I feel like they just gave up on Chicago.
They just gave up.
Anyway.
Good luck, Chicago.
If you live there, I would recommend you should get out.
Get out.
Get away.
I saw Joshua Lysak, who I worked with on my books.
I'm still working with on my books.
And he's an editor, ghostwriter, very successful.
And he noted on X that YouTube has been artificially limiting my live streams.
And he showed the page of all my live streams and they had 31,000 and they just stopped.
No matter what my topic is, or no matter what's happening in the world, 31,000 and we're done here.
We're done here.
Now do you think that my numbers could be 31,000 pretty much every day?
Does that sound real to you?
I don't think so.
You should see my Instagram numbers.
My Instagram numbers are also flat forever.
Not that I do much on Instagram, so you're not missing anything there.
But I don't think it's an accident.
Doesn't it look like exactly what it is?
I don't know.
Yeah, what I'd be interested in is if my live stream audience differs a lot.
Because if the livestream audience goes way up and way down, that would suggest that there's some capping going on.
But if my livestream audience, who are sort of well-trained to know where it is and when it comes on, if that's going all over the place, but my total number is flat, that would raise an eyebrow.
So, I'm going to say it seems most likely that I'm capped.
Now, would you call that rigging an election?
Of course you would.
That's rigging an election, if it's true.
Now, I can't say it's true, I'm just looking at the numbers and saying, well, it would be one heck of a coincidence if it was always the same number and nobody else ever has had that experience.
So, given that what I mostly talk about is politics, and mostly it's leaning in one direction, If you cap that, what does that do to an election?
Well, in theory, it should influence it.
And it should influence it in a way that is unstated and somewhat secretive, even though it seems obvious.
We don't know for sure.
Cannot confirm that that's what's happening, because the other possibility is an amazing coincidence.
A gigantic, amazing coincidence.
Could happen.
Coincidences do happen.
Or maybe they have some other explanation about monetization or something else.
Looks kind of sketchy to me.
Apparently I was trending this morning on X over that topic.
So remember Trump the other day said to some Jewish group he was talking to that, quote, any Jewish person that votes for her, meaning Harris, Especially now, should have their head examined.
He said that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish voters, according to Jake Tapper.
So Jake Tapper was talking to Tom Cotton, who didn't really take the bait.
But here's what I would say.
If you want to judge whether you should say that Trump is being somehow anti-Semitic, replace Jews in this story with any other group.
And it works for every group.
If you were talking to a women's group and he said, if I lose and women didn't vote for me enough, you're going to feel bad about it.
It's going to be your fault.
And then he goes to the next group and says, all right, black Americans, if you don't vote for me and I lose, you're going to feel bad.
It's going to be on you.
Then he goes to the next group, said, are you senior citizens?
If you don't make it to the vote, it's going to be on you.
Now, am I wrong that it works for every group?
All it is is normal talking.
Well, normal for Trump.
He's basically saying, here's the upside.
Here's the downside.
The upside is terrific.
The downside is terrible.
And you're going to feel bad if you're part of the downside.
What part of that exactly is anti-Semitic?
Now you might say, but Scott, He only said it to the Jews, to which I say, so?
There's probably lots of things he only said once to one group, or put it in a certain way.
I don't think it means anything.
And I would be hard-pressed to find an actual living human being who said, you know what?
I was personally offended by that.
But watching the news, CNN, in this case, tried to turn it into something.
It's clearly a nothing.
I mean, Trump could not be more pro-Jewish American and more pro-Israel than anybody you've ever seen in your life.
So it's the stupidest, weakest attack.
And it's, it's lame and it's disgusting.
And, uh, you know, but it's Jake Tapper.
So there you go.
And it's a political season.
Well, apparently there's some thinking, I think this was in the Hill, that Senate Democrats are worried that pollsters may be, they might be undercounting the Trump voters.
What do you think of that?
That's crazy, isn't it?
Crazy, crazy.
The thought that the pollsters might be undercounting the Trump voters.
I mean, what would be behind that, other than the express intent to not answer pollsters, and the fact that we saw it in 2016, and we saw it in 2020, and every single time that's looked at, the Trump supporters are undercounted.
So what would make you think it's going to happen again, just because it happened every time?
I mean, come on, where is your reasoning?
Just because it happened every time, what makes you think it's going to happen again?
Well, pattern recognition, maybe.
Um, there's a, uh, article by Doug, uh, Douglas McKinnon.
And, uh, he was saying that, uh, the working class voters are the scared voter majority.
He noted that the working class people are more frightened of their economic future than any time you can remember, and that they're Trump supporters by nature.
Meaning that they're leaning toward Trump as the solution to their economic plight and that they may be underappreciated just how angry they are or scared.
I think scared is the proper term that Douglas was using.
So let me ask you this.
You're sitting on your couch.
Sometimes you remember to vote and sometimes you don't.
Sometimes you care, sometimes you don't.
You're kind of a sometimes voter.
But this time, you're scared.
You're actually scared.
Are you more likely to vote?
Yes.
So I'm not sure that you can measure likelihood to vote when a gigantic swath of potential Trump voters are the most frightened they've ever been, at least, you know, after the depression, I suppose, about Harris.
Now, the potential for them to be undercounted is pretty high, because I don't think anybody in the media has any sense of the pulse of just how angry and scared they are.
So that could be a surprise coming.
Could be.
There are new polls that came out today that are all over the place.
Some of them saying Harris is up and some of them saying that Trump is up.
But here's one that feels like foreshadowing.
This is a new poll by the CNN New York Times.
Now you might know that the New York Times is not pro-Trump.
And the last time they looked at Arizona and polled it, they said Harris was up by five.
Now you might say to yourself, well, really?
Up five in Arizona?
I mean, if you follow the battleground states and all, you'd know that that would be a shocking, kind of weird result.
Up five?
Well, they have a new result.
They say now Trump's up five.
So they went from Harris up 5 to Trump up 5?
10 bases point swing?
What?
How's that happen?
Do you think that that many people changed their minds since the last time they pulled them?
No, they didn't.
What's different?
How about North Carolina?
It went from Harris was up two to Trump is up two.
Four-point swing.
And they've got Trump ahead by four in Georgia.
Now, it's important to know that there are current polls that are very different from this.
But the New York Times is not a pro-Trump poll.
So they're not cooking the books to help him.
So why do you think that they reversed So blatantly.
Do you think any other pollsters are gonna find that maybe their prior answers were a little bit off?
Do you think that what I predicted a year ago, and all the smart people predicted a year ago, that the polls over the summer would be completely fake, and they would be meant to create a certain voting pattern, and that when we got close to the actual election, Which would be October, coming right up, that the polls would tighten.
And would the polls tighten because the voters would tighten in their opinions?
No, I never said that.
I said the polls would tighten because they were a fake, and they need to become more real when you get to the actual election, so that when everybody grades them, the only thing they will be graded on is how they did on the day of the election.
Everything else they can say, well, it was true over the summer, but then people will change their opinions.
So we just caught up with their changing opinions and everything's credible.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah, everything's fine.
We didn't change our methodology.
Yeah, just maybe people change their minds.
But in fact, we expect that they will change their methodologies.
Could it be?
That the Siena New York Times has decided to get ahead of it, and they went early.
What do you think?
Do you think there's any change in their methodology?
I don't know, one way or the other.
But how do you get this much of a swing when there wasn't much that happened that should have changed the polling?
So I'm going to say, keep an eye on this space.
If in the next week or two you see another one like this, where, huh, it really went from one direction to the other kind of quickly, and I don't see anything in the news that would have caused that.
Look for that.
Anyway, here's another little sign.
Colin Ruggs talking about this on X. There's a Democrat mayor who's a Muslim, And he's a mayor in, uh, Hampton, Michigan.
Now it's a smallish city.
Um, but, uh, it's notable because he's a Democrat and he's a Muslim and he's in politics and he is announced he's endorsing Donald Trump.
In 2021, they elected they're the first nation in the first city in the nation to have an all Muslim city council.
So we're talking about a place that politically is very Muslim and the mayor, who's a Democrat, just endorsed Trump.
What's going on here?
Have you noticed that, um, It's sort of hilarious, the endorsements that Harris is getting.
So instead of getting the Teamsters Union, which would be a nice, really meaty, solid endorsement, they decided, eh, maybe we won't endorse anybody.
We always, seems like we always do the Democrats, at least for the last few decades, but maybe you just won't do one this time.
Well, that's pretty bad, but don't worry.
Because she did get the Cheney endorsement.
And she got the IRS endorsement.
Wait, what?
We're a country that was literally founded on dumping tea in the harbor because we didn't want to pay taxes.
So anyway, um, I've got a feeling that, uh, and do you remember the story of, uh, there was a CBS reporter who went to a bunch of restaurants in one of the battleground states and could only find one person in each restaurant that was a Harris supporter and everybody else was Trump.
And then you look at the polls and it looked about even, but.
Is that because Democrats don't go to restaurants?
Why is it that the anecdotal stuff is so far off the data consistently?
I wonder what that is.
What's that all about?
Then you look at the fact that people are wearing MAGA hats in public that they've never been able to do before.
What's that all about?
One of the BS filters that I teach you is when observation doesn't match the science.
Now, what you shouldn't do is assume that the observation is somehow scientific proof.
It's not.
But if your observation violently disagrees with the data, You should start asking some questions.
And I always use the same example.
The data says that smoking cigarettes can give you lung cancer.
And sure enough, I observe across my entire life that I only know one person who died of lung cancer who was not a smoker.
Everybody else was a smoker.
So that fits.
Anecdote.
Science.
Perfect.
Got it.
But why did the polls say that the election is close?
But every time you talk to a group of people, it doesn't look that way.
Shouldn't there be also some anecdotes where somebody went somewhere and everybody was just accidentally a Harris supporter?
Have you seen the work?
I can't remember.
Maybe you'll tell me in the comments.
A gentleman whose last name is Saruga?
Sarugo?
I think I'm butchering that.
So in the comments, you'll know who I'm talking about when I mention him.
So on X there's some expert who has some equipment and allegedly they can go to a Kamala Harris rally and they can determine how many of the people who have been to that rally had been to prior rallies because they would use the same equipment at various rallies and they seem to determine that a huge percentage of the people who attend to rallies
Have attended prior rallies in very different places, meaning that they would have to be bused in or drive in and that they would be essentially professional attendees.
Now, I don't know if there's something like that with Trump supporters, because I wouldn't be surprised if it's like the Grateful Dead, you know, that both candidates have people who maybe just travel around because they love the environment.
Maybe they just love how it feels.
So there could be, Some correlation that everybody has this, but it's been reported as a Harris specific thing.
So there again, I don't know the accuracy of the claims.
I don't know if the equipment does what it's supposed to do.
But again, these are anecdotal.
So everybody who's looking for the ground-based support of Harris doesn't find it.
Everybody.
Let me say it again.
Everybody who looks for it, in just the population, the public, they don't find it.
But the polls do.
So, what's going on?
Now, I remind you again, don't believe the anecdotal over the data, but don't believe data in general.
Because most of our data is motivated and fake.
For everything.
Motivated and fake.
Trump said at some event he was at just yesterday.
Now, I think he was sort of joking or maybe testing.
This didn't sound like it was yet serious, but it does suggest that the idea is in his head.
And Trump said this in public about crypto.
He said, maybe we'll pay the $35 trillion debt in crypto.
Now, may I invite the NPCs to weigh in?
If you're an NPC, what you should say now is, Scott!
Scott!
He doesn't understand!
You can't just print extra bitcoins!
Bitcoin does not work that way!
And then you would mansplain Bitcoin to me.
Even though Bitcoin is not the topic.
Because he said crypto, which is all the cryptos, He did not say Bitcoin.
So if you're an NPC, you must be obsessed with how this doesn't apply to Bitcoin, and you should school me on it.
I'm already seeing people jumping into the comments on X to do that.
Scott, apparently you don't understand how Bitcoin works.
To which I say, commenter, apparently you don't understand what the topic is, because it's not about Bitcoin.
So let's get that out of the way.
NPCs, you're still welcome to join in, but now we all know who you are.
So please explain how you can't just print some more bitcoins.
We know it.
We know it.
All right.
But the other cryptos could have different nature.
So Bitcoin is special.
It's the one that's limited.
You can say algorithmically limited, mathematically limited, limited by formula.
I don't know what would be the correct programmatically limited.
But you can't just make more.
You can mine it, and they get harder and harder to find the more you find.
But you can't just make one.
Anyway.
Is Trump's statement, maybe we will pay the $35 trillion debt in crypto, serious or non-serious?
Here's my best guess, and I can't read his mind.
So I'm not going to try to read his mind, but if I were him, I'll just do it this way.
If I were him, this is what I would do.
I would throw it out there and just see what people said.
I've told you this before.
There's the Hollywood concept for brainstorming.
The Hollywood concept is, I call it the bad idea.
You know, I didn't make this up.
It came to me when I worked a little bit in Hollywood.
Um, the bad idea is you think there's a good idea that could be had, but you don't have it.
You just know it might be maybe over in this area.
So the bad idea is the idea that just puts your brain in that area and said, okay, here's the bad version.
So the bad version is, We pay off the debt with Bitcoin.
And then somebody says, no, no, no, that doesn't work that way.
You can't just print extra Bitcoins.
That would just be inflationary.
And then somebody else says, but wait a minute, suppose, suppose we did this or suppose we did that.
And then it wasn't obvious, but finally somebody smart enough says, you know, there is one and only one way you could make this work.
It's if you do this, this and that, and then you've got a solution.
Now, do I think that there's a crypto solution to the $35 trillion in debt?
Not that I know of, but I did the same thing most of you saw a few months ago.
I was asking the same question, again, not about Bitcoin, but I was asking the same question.
Is there a path where you could just convert the debt into crypto and you could say to the people who hold the debt, we're going to pay you back.
It's just going to be in crypto.
Now, you might say to yourself, wait, Scott, that would be disruptive and have all these problems.
And you'd be right.
But remember, I'm not giving you a solution.
I'm just taking your brain to an area where if there's somebody smarter who could just see around a corner better than I can, maybe you see something.
Then you tell me.
So I'm not telling you what the idea is.
I'm trying to prime you so there's somebody smarter who can tell me what the idea is.
Is there a crypto play?
I think maybe.
Here's the thing.
I can smell it, but I can't see it.
And this is something that creative people experience maybe more than other people.
I don't know.
So being a creator for a living, you know, I literally create several things a day of commercial value.
You can usually sense, I'll say smell, but you can sense that there's something there long before you know what it is.
Have you had that experience?
So I can tell you that I sense there's something there, but I definitely don't see it.
There's no part of my logic or my knowledge about the area that could connect the dots.
Yeah.
I'm seeing in the comments from Adam that Trump has one thing going for him that most, maybe all, politicians don't have.
That he's willing to put a crazy idea out into the public.
Just see what happens.
You know, he got criticized for, allegedly, I don't know if this even happened, bringing up the idea of nuking hurricanes when they were young, so that they didn't turn into full hurricanes.
Now, that turned into, when it became public, if it really happened, we don't know if it really happened, but when it became public that allegedly said that, people said, my goodness, that's the worst idea in the world.
To which I say, I don't think you understand what that was.
That was this.
That was, I'm going to throw out an idea that I'm pretty sure is terrible.
But is there somebody else who could tell me how to make it work?
For example, you know, you wouldn't want to nuke something and have all the, you know, the nuclear waste doing all the things it does.
But what if, what if somebody said, you know what, if you caught it early enough, you could use a mother of all bomb and it's not even, It's not even nuclear.
Now, I don't think that's an answer.
I don't think that a mother of all bomb would be big enough to stop a hurricane.
But then somebody else would say, well, wait a minute, we're talking about stopping hurricanes.
I've got an idea.
My idea is if we're even in the topic of stopping hurricanes, let's forget the bomb.
And let's go to the Sahara Desert.
Well, the desert is part of Northern Africa.
And let's work really hard at planting trees and reforesting it.
Because it turns out that the temperature difference in the deserts of Northern Africa are so different than the temperatures in other places that that's what causes the wind to start moving fast.
So if you could change the temperature differential You could actually stop hurricanes, or you could lessen them because there'd be less differential in temperature.
And that probably would work.
Like it'd be expensive and it'd take a while, but you could actually maybe stop hurricanes that came from that one direction.
So that's the way I see Trump's ideas that sound crazy.
I think he lived in the real world, and he's also lived in the Hollywood world.
What do you learn when you live in the Hollywood world?
Remember, he had a hit show on TV, surrounded by the same people I was surrounded by when I worked in the L.A.
Hollywood world for the Dilbert TV show.
Do you think he's ever heard the idea, or been in the room when it happened, that somebody threw out the bad idea?
Because that's where it comes from.
It's like a Hollywood thing.
You throw out the bad idea to get to the good idea.
But if he takes that and he's standing next to a military general, and he says, the bad idea, why don't we nuke a hurricane?
Is the military general going to say, well, there's a man who knows how to make people think more deeply about things.
I'm not going to take the nuclear part too seriously, but let me really focus on, are there any solutions?
To stop a hurricane before it gets going?
So you can see how the rumor would start, but you could also see that the smarter people are asking the dumbest questions.
But let me give you another dumb, like really dumb.
Here's a dumb one.
We keep sending rockets into space, but then the rocket itself gets wasted, like it just falls in the ocean.
So is there any way for the rocket To just land.
Oh, you idiot!
You idiot!
Have you ever seen a rocket?
Let me explain this to you.
Okay, so, your rocket is this tall thing, and it's falling through space.
It's not gonna land upright.
That's not a thing.
It's crazy.
Except that that's what Elon Musk made work.
Let me say this.
Let me trade out the general.
All right?
So let's go back to where, allegedly, again, I'm not even sure it happened, but allegedly, Trump said in front of a general, could we nuke a hurricane?
Now let's just replace the general.
And it's Elon Musk, and he's walking with Trump, and Trump says, you think we could just nuke a hurricane?
What does Elon Musk say?
Does he say, oh, I can't wait to leak this about this idiot, like the general did, who should be fired immediately?
No.
Elon Musk would say, I don't think that'll work because of the radiation.
But you know what?
There are some ideas floating around.
Maybe.
Now that's what I think he'd say.
Obviously, I can't predict what somebody who's smarter than me would say, right?
The dumbest thing you can do is try to predict what someone who's smarter than you would do in a given situation.
So I can't predict what Elon Musk could do.
Let's all agree on that.
But the point is, if you put a creative person in the same conversation, suddenly it turns into a solution.
If you put one creative person who tosses out an idea, and the other one is a war general, whose job is to make sure you don't get too creative, you know, kind of use the stuff that works, you get a whole different story.
All right.
So I like Trump's throwing out the idea of paying off the debt, even though I don't know any way that it could possibly work.
Harris is going to unveil her own economic policy this week, according to Reuters.
Do you think that's going to help her or hurt her?
Because I've got a feeling that Harris's economic policy is going to sound so much like Trump's, and she's going to have to leave out reparations and mass transfers of wealth from one to the other.
I don't really know where she's going to land on any of this, but I don't think it's going to help.
It could be if the fake news gives it a big boost and they'll fawn over it.
That's enough.
Because most people don't understand economics.
If you knew nothing about economics and you turned on MSNBC and you saw Joe Scarborough talking about Kamala Harris's next plan, Well, it would look like Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call, except that he would be screaming in more complimentary terms about this economic policy.
And so you're just flipping through the channels and you see Scarborough, oh, oh, this is the best economic plan, oh, oh, I've never seen anything like this, oh, oh, oh.
You're going to say to yourself, well, he probably looked into it.
I mean, he seems to like it, and these other people on this show that I think is news seem to like it.
So it could be that all they need is some fodder for the fake news to sell.
It doesn't matter if it's good or bad or indifferent, because the public can't tell the difference between a good idea and a bad idea.
They're going to have lots of stuff on tariffs.
Oh, here's the awkward part.
Trump, I think, does a bad job of explaining tariffs.
But it is true that both Democrats and Republicans keep tariffs in place when it makes sense, and they don't do tariffs when it doesn't make sense.
And what both of them try to sell is that, you know, it makes sense, what Trump would say, and then the other team says, but it doesn't make sense if you use it in these other contexts, which he's not using it.
So the time to use a tariff is when you're protecting your whole market from an attack from another country where they're artificially lowering their prices and the government is supporting them in the other country so that they come in and basically bankrupt all the American companies in that business.
We don't want that.
That's not exactly fair competition.
If the only thing that's happening is we're competing, they're competing, but theirs is a little cheaper.
Well, maybe the tariff doesn't make sense in that case.
But what's the Harris going to do?
The Biden administration has tariffs in place, which were Trump's tariffs, and they could take them off anytime they wanted.
The reason they don't take them off is that they agree with tariffs.
Indeed, I think pretty much all economists agree with them if the context is protecting an entire market.
And then I think most economists would disagree if you're just throwing a tariff on for no reason.
I think they'd disagree with that, but we're not doing that.
So anyway, I think the Harris economic plan is going to be a study in fake news.
The fake news is really going to have a hard time hiding the fact that she's copying Trump on everything that matters.
And the things where she's not copying him are never going to happen.
But that might be enough.
Because if people like Trump's economic policies, and then she seems to be triangulating more toward them, that might be enough for some normal Democrats to say, well, I was worried that she might be a communist.
But that looks pretty capitalist, so good enough.
So it's really hard to predict this one.
It could go either way.
Her polling could drop or climb.
Well, meanwhile, Israel is attacking Lebanon like crazy.
I heard a number over 100 killed, maybe up to 200 by now.
400 wounded, more by now.
300 targets and more by now, because it's just this morning.
And the fighting continues.
Of course, you know that Israel blew up the pagers and the walkie-talkies of the Hezbollah fighters, which is making the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard, they've all been ordered to stop using all their personal communication devices, including cell phones, radios, and pagers.
So, that would make Iran unusually susceptible to attack.
Because their military, at least the part of the military they trust the most, wouldn't be able to communicate effectively.
So.
So anyway, we'll keep an eye on that.
Apparently two more Hezbollah leaders were killed in Lebanon by Israel.
I don't know how many leaders they have in Hezbollah, but there are a lot less of them now.
And it makes me wonder if what's happening is that since it's impossible in the modern world not to turn on your cell phone, I feel like there are just people that would be in the general circle of these leaders who probably do not use cell phones, but that the people in their circle may have just turned it on for five minutes.
Like, I'd love to know the details, but I'll bet they're still getting them through electronic signal, you know, following.
It could be that they've penetrated so well that they have, you know, informants everywhere.
So it might be partly that, but I feel like it's just lower level people who turned on the phone for five minutes because they couldn't stand not having it.
and then they just bombed the house where that person was.
I think.
Harris allegedly wants another debate with Trump, which is probably a smart thing to say because it sounds smart and it reinforces that people thought she did well in the last one.
But she knows that it's not going to happen, because he's not going to do another rigged debate, and she's not going to go on Fox News, because she would feel that would be rigged the other way.
So it's easy to say when you know it's not going to happen.
And Trump would be crazy to do it, actually.
You heard that Usher, whose, uh, his name is getting dragged into this P Diddy situation.
When he was 13 years old, he stayed with P Diddy and, uh, learned to party and we don't know what else he learned, but, uh, there are rumors of horrible, horrible things that happened.
And, uh, then Usher, uh, his ex account, all of his posts were removed and everybody said, oh no, he must be trying to, You know, hide his past connections with Diddy or something like that.
And then Usher stated today that he got hacked and you shouldn't have believed it.
Believed all the news.
It was all fake and that somebody hacked him to delete all of his posts.
So does that sound like something that really happened?
I'm going to say no.
I'm going to say no.
I don't think he got hacked.
I mean, it's possible.
I would just say that if you're going to play the odds, that when a celebrity says they were hacked on social media, I don't know how often that's real.
By the way, I'm setting myself up now, because if somebody hacks me and does something, I'm telling you right now, it wasn't me.
So if I get hacked, I'm going to change my story entirely.
Anyway, keep an eye on that.
You know that story about journalist Olivia Nuzzi, who allegedly started out as saying she had an affair with RFK after interviewing him, and then it turned out, well, no, not an affair, not like a physical affair, but more like they were sexting each other.
And then it turned into, well, okay, It wasn't so much that they were sexting each other, is that she was sending increasingly pornographic, say, RFK Jr.' 's lawyer, increasingly pornographic messages.
He tried to block her a few times.
She found other people's accounts that she could reach him.
She convinced him to unblock her because she had important information, but that was a lie, just to unblock him so she could flirt with him some more.
Now, I think there's some passing reference to the fact that when he was sent pornographic images, he found it hard to stop it right away.
To which I say, well, I really have to see the messages.
For me to have an informed opinion, if I looked at the messages and I said to myself, oh, he was all in, well, that would look one way.
And if I saw the messages and I said, oh, it looks like he's trying to just be polite, but she's taking it as more than that, and now she's upping the game, and he's, again, just trying to be polite.
You know, not insult her or anything, not make it a scene.
Just, you know, be a friendly, polite answer.
Maybe she took it as more.
So, I'm going to say I'm not going to believe anything about the characterization of the messages.
Because that's not a category that would be credible in this conversation.
Don't believe anything that somebody tells you about what somebody else messaged to somebody else.
You should not believe any of that.
If you see it, even then it might be out of context, so be careful.
But if somebody's telling you and characterizing what somebody else said, don't believe any of it.
It has no evidentiary value whatsoever.
Now, to that point, the news says that RFK Jr.
might be looking into a possible lawsuit.
Which would be useful, I would think, if he really wants to make the case that this was her coming after him and not anything mutual.
So, I don't know if it's a good idea.
I can't imagine he'd win the lawsuit, but it might be a good strategy to frame it as a victim and victimizer instead of two people on the same page.
Anyway.
Can you imagine how many people hit on that guy?
Like probably everywhere he goes he gets hit on by women just continuously.
Even at his current age.
Anyway, Wall Street Journal says that, did you know that China is way ahead of us in shipbuilding?
Which is bad because those ships are military ships.
So now China actually has more military ships.
I've heard other people say, You can't, you can't know anything by counting the number of warships.
Um, because apparently our, uh, our Navy capabilities are far beyond what they have in their ships.
They just have a lot of them.
I don't know.
I'm not sure if that's true.
It's just something I saw in the news, but, uh, apparently the U S is trying to compensate by getting South Korea.
Given that they're good allies of us, and they have a really strong shipbuilding industry, as does Japan, that we're trying to get them to help us build our military stuff.
That sounds like a good short-term idea.
It does seem to me that the robots need to build those warships, or we need to build drones.
I think I saw a headline that Putin is Trying to increase his drone production by 10 times?
It's just going to be drones.
To me, I'm always curious how a naval battleship can survive any battle.
It seems to me that the ability to destroy a ship that's sitting out there like in this big ocean, even though they have, you know, I know they have defensive battle groups around the battleship, for example, but around a aircraft carrier that have lots of support ships to shoot things down before it got there.
But even with that, it's hard for me to imagine that a superpower couldn't take out 100% of the ships of any other side.
So I feel as though every surface ship would be destroyed within an hour of a real war with China or Russia, which is yet another reason we're not going to do it.
We're not going to get in a real war with them.
It would be dumb.
Anyway, so South Korea to the rescue, maybe.
According to just the news, there's an effort to train judges on climate change.
So if you're a judge, you know about the law, but you don't know as much about science, and then a lot of lawsuits come in about CO2 usage and climate change, and then you've got to be educated.
So they're educating them in advance, so they know enough about climate change to be good judges.
Does that sound like a good idea to you?
Do you think these judges are going to get the whole picture?
Do you think that when somebody teaches them about climate models, They're going to tell them, well, you know, most of the scientists think these are good, but there's an argument against them and it goes like this.
Or are they just going to say, all the climate models say we're in trouble, so we're in trouble.
I feel like this is so illegitimate and unethical that it should be illegal to educate judges when really what you're doing is brainwashing them.
Is it legal to brainwash a judge?
Especially if they don't know they're being brainwashed.
They think they're being educated.
It should be.
Am I wrong?
It should be.
You know, even if there's not a specific case that's brewing, even in general, it should be illegal to brainwash a judge so that you can win future cases.
Seems to me.
But I don't know.
I'm no lawyer.
Well, you know, as you know, that SAVE Act did not pass in Congress.
The SAVE Act was the one that would say you can't vote in any state unless you've proven you're a citizen.
Now, why did Democrats, and it was only Democrats, vote enough to not do that?
What would be the reason you wouldn't want to need to know if the voters are citizens?
I can't think of one.
Not a legitimate one.
The only reason I can think of is that Makes it easier to cheat.
When they give legitimate answers, it's stuff like, well, you know, we don't want to disenfranchise people who don't have ID but really want to vote.
To which I say the same thing you say.
All right.
Let's compare the data to the anecdotal experience.
Again, anecdote doesn't mean that that part's right.
But if they're different, that should raise a flag.
So let's see, the experts on the Democrat side say that there's some big problem with people who don't have ID, but definitely want to vote.
And yet, we've never found one.
Nor have we ever found anybody who knew one.
Think about that.
It would be hard to find one, but you could find somebody who knows one.
So take anything else in the world that you've ever heard about.
Have you ever tried to do autoerotic asphyxiation yourself?
No?
Have you ever heard of anybody who did?
Yes, you have.
You have actual names of real people.
Do you know anybody personally who ever died in a parachuting accident?
Probably not.
But I do.
I know somebody personally who died in a parachuting accident.
And you know me.
So, you know, you could reasonably guess, if you've watched me enough, that I wouldn't make that up.
That'd be a dumb thing to just make up.
So, there's evidence that people die in parachute accidents.
Parachuting.
In fact, almost anything that you could think of that's ever been mentioned, or you've been told exists, You could either find it in your own life, or you know of somebody who knows about it, right?
But I don't know anybody who knows anybody who knows anybody, who'd ever found anybody who wanted to vote and couldn't figure out how to get an ID.
Not anybody.
Not anybody who knows anybody who knows anybody.
Not a Kevin Bacon situation, six degrees of separation, not anything.
And again, I tell you, That I only have to go one degree of separation to identify everything I've ever heard of about murder with a gun.
Well, I don't think I know anybody personally murdered with a gun, but I definitely know people who know people who were murdered with a gun, right?
Everything has that quality.
You at least know somebody who knows somebody, but not anybody who wanted to vote but couldn't get an ID.
Not one. So, also, Alice Sharpton on MSNBC and some of the other cohorts were saying it's terrible that Georgia has decided, their election board decided just recently, that all of their voting would be on hand-counted ballots instead of using machines.
And the MSNBC people want you to know that there's no way One of their guests said, there's no way they'll be able to count 10 million votes.
How can you possibly do that?
To which I say, yeah, you can do that.
Everybody knows you can do that.
Every one of us knows they can do that.
Will it be done that night?
It's not going to be done that night, no matter how they do it.
It doesn't matter how they do it.
It's not going to be done that night.
We know that.
Why would you be opposed to the most secure way of voting, and everybody knows it?
Everybody knows it's the most secure way of voting.
Well, it's the same reason you'd be opposed to the SAFE Act.
The Democrats are telegraphing their intention to cheat so clearly.
I've never seen anybody so clearly tell you they're going to cheat.
Here's what it feels like.
Hey, Scott?
I'll be robbing the bank down in the corner there on Friday.
And I'll say, wait, what did you just say?
I'll be robbing the bank down in that corner there by the gas station?
I'm going to rob that on Friday.
And I'll say, I feel like maybe I should do something about that.
They could not be telling us more clearly that they intend to cheat.
Now, I tell you all the time that you can't read people's minds, but they have all the time in the world to tell us what their reasoning is.
And their reasoning is so patently stupid that you don't have to wonder if those are real reasons.
Of course they're not real reasons.
So, yes, they are telling us as clearly as you possibly can that they hope and plan to cheat like crazy.
So, there it is.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes my prepared remarks for today.
I'm going to go talk to the people on the locals privately, but I remind you that the Dilbert 2025 desk calendar, the page a day, is back!
but you can only get it at the link at Dilbert.com.
It is not going to be available on Amazon and not going to be available in regular stores.
And that was the way I could do it to have it made in America, longer story.
But if you have it made in America, it's prohibitively expensive unless you cut out all the middlemen.
So that's what I had to do.
So, and if shipping looks expensive, which it is, then buy more than one and your shipping costs will look pretty reasonable after that.
Because you know you want some for gifts.
All right, everybody.
I'm going to go say hi to the Locals people privately, the rest of you.
