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Content:
Politics, Giant Beavers, National Debt Doom, Trump New Cities Plan, Tim Walz Abortion Hoax, Abortion Policy Lies, Presidential Liars Race, Domestic Violent Extremists, ActBlue Donations, Elon Musk Transparency, Bout Griner Prisoner Swap, Kamala 60 Minutes Interview, Pathetic vs Dangerous, NC Disaster Politics, Trump Election Wins Record, Pollster Shenanigans, Accepting Election Results, Weather Manipulation, Mark Cuban, FEMA DEI, Scott Adams
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To the highlight of human civilization, it's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you're here for that enjoyment, well, let me tell you, sometimes humans with their tiny, shiny human brains cannot understand how much of a pleasure this is.
But if you'd like to find out, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine thing of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And it happens now.
Go. Oh, that was divine.
So good. I hope it was good for you.
Well, I found out that some of the news hosts on ABC News might be looking at a cut in pay.
So they're saying that maybe George Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan, who each have deals valued at $25 million annually.
Oops, we've got a problem with locals.
Locals is not working.
Why would Locals not be working?
Well, Locals is streaming.
Let's do this.
Let's do this.
I'm going to try something, which I've never tried before.
Let's see if I can stream on two devices.
All right, hold on.
I'm going to fix this. Let's see if this is fixable.
Start stream.
Huh.
Apparently not.
That just disappeared.
One more try.
Live stream has not started.
Interesting.
I'll just say it won't stream.
Try X or Rumble or YouTube.
That's awkward.
Alright, well, so we're not streaming perfectly on all the platforms, but three out of four.
Anyway, it turns out that the ABC News people make $25 million a year for doing a little less than I do.
So I basically have the same job, except I work seven days a week and they work five days a week.
And I'm thinking, I feel like I'm underpaid.
$25 million a year they're getting for just being on TV for an hour?
Wow. Anyway, in more important news, according to the Daily Star, scientists are trying to resurrect giant five-foot tall beavers.
They're bringing them back to Britain.
So apparently there used to be giant beavers.
But now they're not giant beavers.
But they said to themselves, you know what we really need?
Giant beavers.
So if you were thinking, you know, life is pretty good.
I've got this one problem.
Just one thing I'd like to fix.
The beavers are not big enough.
We need some giant beavers.
Well science has you covered.
There's a really good chance there will be giant beavers.
I think I might turn off the locals' comments because you're only complaining about the locals not working.
Should I turn off the locals' comments?
Yeah. Anyway, there's no video, but apparently there might be some sound.
Or not. I don't know.
Did you know that there was a movie called Joker 2?
I am so interested.
Oh, my God. All right.
I'm going to have to kill this feed.
Let's see. How do I get rid of...
Let's try something.
I can't even make it go away.
Well, at least turn this off.
That would be easier. So I have no idea who's watching or if you can see it or anything else.
But if you're on Locals, you probably want to go to Rumble or YouTube or X. They're all working, I think.
All right. So there's a movie called The Joker 2.
It looks like it's going to be one of the worst films of the year.
It lost 70 million dollars so far.
Rotten Tomatoes score is not so good.
And here's my question.
Who's going to watch a movie in 2024?
Well, it just doesn't even make sense anymore.
It doesn't make sense that the industry even exists to me.
I mean, it's just a complete...
I mean, I have no idea.
All right, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to start an entirely new feed on locals and see if a new one works.
It might kick the old one off.
I seem to try again.
We're at that weird point in history where you never know what the technology is going to do.
So I'm trying to start a second feed.
Interesting. Interestingly, it looks like it works.
Interestingly. All right.
So problem solved. The sound won't be as good on the local feed, but we're up and running.
I'm just using a second device.
That's what photons are for.
Anyway, in other news, scientists have hacked a bacteria so it can break down plastic waste according to the bite.
So wouldn't that be great to have a bacteria that can eat up all the plastic waste?
Do you have any questions about that?
So there's a bacteria that can sort of eat plastic.
So we won't have so much plastic.
There's sort of a question about that, isn't there?
Do bacteria poop?
What happens when they eat it?
Don't they just poop out a bunch of bacteria poop?
And wouldn't they be pooping roughly the same amount as they ate?
So when you're done, your plastic would just turn into bacteria poop, right?
I mean, I don't know how they poop, but I'm sure they do.
So, I'm not exactly sure what's going on with the bacteria eating plastic, but I would ask some questions.
Where are you going to put what's left over?
All right, well, apparently both candidates, Trump and Harris, their plans for Their policy plans have been scored by economists to figure out which one would destroy the country faster.
Trump's plan would destroy the country faster through massive debt compared to Harris, who would also be racking up massive additional debt.
So the current thinking is that both of them have a plan for destroying the country, if not the world.
And the next story, Why do we treat it that way?
Do you understand what's going on with the national debt?
That it's an unsolvable existential problem that will kill us all?
But I think maybe the problem is so big we can't spend time talking about it.
So we just have to pretend it's not real.
Is that what's going on?
Or is it really solvable?
And it'll be just, you know, one more of a million things we thought were going to kill us.
But in the end, we figured it out.
I don't know why we're not talking about this and only this.
Because we really only have one problem that's a big one.
Everything else is way, way less important.
I mean, way less important.
Still important, but way less.
You know, the war in Ukraine?
Way less important than the national debt.
Middle East, way less important, but all very important.
Individually, very, very important, but not even close, not even close to the risk with the national debt.
But we just sort of act like, well, it's just one more story, moving on to the next story about bacteria eating plastic.
And I do the same thing.
Like, it should be just a show about, okay, we're all doomed.
Anybody have an idea? No.
So I still do have hope that the Adams law of slow-moving disasters will kick in.
And given that everybody knows it's a problem, so that we'll figure out how to fix it.
But my bigger problem on this is, do you believe that economists can look at the two plans and calculate which ones will affect the economy and how they'll affect the debt?
Do you think that's possible?
Or did you just critically or uncritically, did you just accept what the news told you, that economists can figure out which one would be worse for the debt?
They can't do that, people.
That's not a thing.
If you're asking, are they accurate or inaccurate?
It's not even the right question.
That's not something anybody can do.
Nobody can figure out the difference between their two economic plans and what it will do to the debt.
That is not a thing.
We act like it is, because most people don't understand what it would take to do that calculation.
But I've lived in that world.
Without even looking into it, I'll tell you what's wrong with it.
So I'm so confident that without even looking at how they calculate it, I'll tell you what's wrong.
They cannot calculate growth.
Right? So, and I don't know if this is the case, but if all they did is look at the direct impact, they would say, oh, Trump wants to cut your taxes more than Harris does, so on day one, Trump will be running up more deficit.
And then if you just multiply day one times ten years, it's ten times as worse.
Now, I'm oversimplifying.
But here's the part I can guarantee you.
Nobody knows what the difference in growth would be between the two plans.
I think Trump's would be higher growth.
Lower taxes, higher growth, usually happens.
But we don't know how much.
So to imagine that you could calculate the difference between who would add more to the debt over 10 years, it's not really a thing.
It's not a thing you can calculate.
You can look at whether somebody's doing something dumb or not dumb.
And that's about it.
So, for example, you can tell directionally if lowering taxes would be, you know, stimulative for business, but also bad in the short term for the deficit.
But beyond that, you can't really look at 10 years down the road, especially when we're introducing AI and robots.
Do you think anybody can make a 10-year forecast?
Just think about that.
Think about AI and robots, both going to come online, auto robots and taxis and stuff.
Do you know how gigantic that is, potentially?
Do you think that the people who calculated a 10-year economic forecast, 10 years in this environment, that's nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
We have no idea what's going to happen in 10 years under any plan.
We have no idea.
So I will agree with the analysts who say it looks like the deficit will go up in the short run.
And that neither of them have a plan to really get rid of it.
But I'm not so sure they can tell which one's better than the other.
That's probably too fine a level for them to actually put on it.
There's also a calculation that says 45% of Americans will run out of money in retirement, according to Yahoo Finance.
Do you believe they can calculate that?
Do you think anybody can calculate who's going to run out of money in retirement?
Now keep in mind that a retirement calculation is going to be a, you know, a multi-year period.
So it's not like one year from now.
No, it's like what will happen over the next 20 years?
Do you think the economists can calculate what will happen over 20 years?
No. No.
Nobody's ever been able to do that.
That's not even close to something people can do.
So, is this a number that you should trust, that 45% will run out of money in retirement?
No. No, you should not trust that number.
But, is it directionally useful?
I won't even say accurate.
Is it directionally useful?
Probably. Because it does raise a little flag that says, I'm not so sure this whole retirement thing is well constructed.
Now that part's true.
I think the 45% could easily be 80.
I think 80% of the people could run out of money In retirement, under the current circumstance, because inflation is out of control.
Well, you could argue if it's out of control, but it's high enough that it's hard to imagine 80% of the world having enough money for retirement.
So, what do you do?
Well, I would suggest that Trump's new cities might be part of the solution.
If you tried to build a place that from the ground up was going to be both a great place to live, but also crazy inexpensive, you could do it.
You could do it. So imagine federal land.
Okay, your land is free.
Now imagine the cheapest building materials and some robots doing the building.
Labor is cheap.
There's a robot involved, but the labor is cheap.
The materials are cheap.
Slap it together. Now imagine standardizing all the construction so that there's no figuring out how to do anything.
Everything's the same. But maybe you put a little variety in the, I don't know, just the front windows or something, so it's a little bit something different.
You could easily imagine Bringing the cost of your phone service way down, your insurance way down.
Imagine what insurance would be if you got rid of all the risks.
You build it where there's no hurricanes.
You build it where there's no floods.
Right? So you just get rid of those risks.
Those are insurance costs.
And then you build it where in a way that there's almost no crime.
Because if you took it away from all the populated places and built it so there's lots of, you know, cameras on the streets and stuff like that, you could almost do away with crime.
And what about food?
If you grew your food locally, made sure there were indoor farms and stuff, you can get rid of the transportation costs, get rid of a lot of the middleman costs, depending on how you do it.
So it seems to me you could lower people's cost of living by 80% While improving the quality of life.
Because the worst situation is if you have money and you retire and you're all alone in a big house.
That's not really much of a life.
So I think we're going to have to radically change how people live, which will be very stimulating because you'll have to build the new places that are easier to live in.
So I've got a feeling this is all solvable.
But not if we just want to live exactly the way we want to live.
That's not solvable.
The math can't work.
We cannot just do what we're doing and keep doing it.
There's no way that could work.
Not even the slightest possibility that we'll just kind of go on.
Things will be the same.
No, nothing like that.
It's going to have to radically change.
But the radical change could be a big improvement.
Something everybody likes.
Well, let's talk about the abortion hoaxes.
So Tim Walsh, even after being fact-checked on Fox News, I'm sorry, Tim Walsh, yeah.
So Tim Walsh goes on Fox News, Shannon Breen, fact-checks him on the thing that they say Trump wants to have a national abortion ban.
Not only does Trump not want to have a national abortion ban, but he's pro-abortion.
Right? Am I wrong?
He's in favor of abortion.
My understanding is that in Florida, he thought the six weeks was a little too short, which suggests that there's some number below which he would say abortion's okay.
That would be in favor of abortion.
Now, not in favor of nine months abortion, which is my next topic.
But to go from somebody who has all his life been essentially pro-abortion, as long as it's within the first X number of weeks, to say that he would be for a national ban, That is so obviously not true.
It's just like super obviously not true.
And he says it's not true.
It's not true. It's not compatible with anything he's said in the past.
You know, basically he's been completely consistent all his life on abortion.
As far as I know.
If somebody has something different, let me know.
So that's a clear hoax.
Now, how does a national candidate get away with saying something on the most important topic to voters, you know, at least on the left, it's the most important topic, abortion, that's completely 100% a lie?
Well, Trump has his own version.
Trump has the nine-month abortion lie, which then the Democrats have a lie to respond to the lie.
So the entire abortion conversation is just people lying.
That's all it is.
So here's my take on the nine-month thing.
So you'll see Shannon Bream or other people asking somebody, is it true that it would be legal in your state to abort at nine months?
What is the answer usually?
The answer, I think Kamala Harris did this on the podcast recently.
The answer is, nobody does that.
That doesn't happen.
But was that the question?
No. No, the question is, does the law allow you to do it?
If you did it, would it be legal?
And the answer will be, nobody's doing that.
Okay, again, that was not the question.
The question is, does the current law say that you could abort at nine months?
Nobody's doing that. Again, can you answer the question?
So I think what you see is that everybody just answers a different question.
So So there's a what really happens, and then there's what's legal.
According to some laws, would it be legal for a doctor and a woman to decide to have an abortion at nine months?
I think it is.
But that the situation where that happens would be an extreme situation where the mother's life is in danger and the child isn't viable in the first place.
In other words, everybody knows that once delivered or aborted, whatever they do with it, it's not going to make it.
Now, I'm not giving you my opinion on what they should do in those situations because I leave that to women.
I think women should be the primary deciders on all of it.
But when we're discussing it, just understand that people are trying to conflate two different questions.
One, is it legal? And the answer is yes.
As far as I can tell, it's legal in some states at nine months.
Has there ever been even one example Where somebody had a healthy mom and a healthy nine-month baby inside them and then aborted it for let's say just didn't want it and then the doctor said you know all right you really don't want this baby that's perfectly healthy at nine months and you're perfectly healthy and there's no no reason you can't deliver it yeah let's let's just abort this thing has that ever happened even once i don't know the answer to my own question But my belief is it hasn't in the whole country ever.
Recently. Recently.
Now, some of you are going to say, yes, it has.
But be careful.
You might be looking at some cases that everybody would assume were illegal.
It seems to me that even though the law allows you to do it, That if the doctor and the mother decided to do it at nine months, and there was no medical necessity, or even medical argument, not even necessity, just an argument, there's just no medical argument, do you think that would be legal?
Think that doctor would stay out of jail and retain his doctor license?
I don't think so.
I don't think so. To me, that would be murder.
But I ask you this question.
Regardless of whether that law existed or did not exist, couldn't a mother and a doctor and whatever willing nurses around, can't they murder babies now, no matter what the law says?
As long as nobody knows, right?
If the only people who know about it are the doctor who's willing to say, oh, it was a medical necessity, even if it wasn't.
So the problem is, if people are willing to do the worst thing that humans could do, The current law or any other law isn't going to stop them.
Because if nobody's watching, well, if people want to do it, they're going to do it.
So I don't think that the risk of having a baby in nine months that maybe the abortion didn't work and the baby was born alive, I don't think these are babies that are going to survive.
Now, again, I'm not telling you my opinion on what should be done.
I'm just clarifying the issue.
That if you think there's a whole bunch of healthy babies being born and then killed after they're born, I think that's probably zero.
And if it has happened once, that would just be a murderer.
There are murderers.
Murderers exist. So I'm not discounting the fact that there might be murder, but it's got to be so trivial that it shouldn't be part of the discussion, really.
In my opinion, it is not worthy of being in the discussion.
But here's the thing.
If you're in a presidential race, and it's basically a liar's race, and your opponent says you're in favor of a national abortion ban, and you're not, I don't have any problem whatsoever with Trump completely lying that they're going to allow healthy babies born at nine months and then murder them.
It's not close to true, but neither is the national abortion ban.
So if they can both just tell outrageous lies about what the other believes, if they're both going to do it, that's fine.
I think I would have more more trouble with it if one was doing it and the other wasn't that would feel like okay what's wrong with this but if they're both selling outrageous lies in my opinion outrageous lies about what the other is planning to do or will do or has done yeah it's just a liar's competition I guess anyway So, but the important thing you should know is Kamala Harris announced she's in favor of mandatory burkas.
Wow. So apparently, in order to win the Islamic vote in the United States, Kamala Harris has come out in support of all women having to wear mandatory, you know, full body covering.
I told you it's a liar's contest.
If you can say anything about abortion, you can just make up any shit you want, right?
Fine people hoax, drinking hoax, drinking bleach hoax.
Once it's a liar's contest, all the gloves are off.
There's nothing that it's not in.
Oh, yeah, she's in favor of eating babies.
The babies have to be in burkas and then abort it.
Let's just make up any kind of shit, as long as we're just making stuff up.
All right, CBS News is warning that there might be domestic violent extremists around the election, because they would have election-related grievances.
And let's see, domestic violent extremists.
Do you think they're talking about Antifa?
Because they would be domestic and extreme.
No. I think that they're trying to set up the country so that if they steal the election, which I do believe they plan to do, the Democrats, that they can put you in jail if you resist.
So they'll be saying, well, we told you that the domestic violent extremists were coming to complain about the election, and here they are.
But of course, it's also signaling a strong intention to rig the election.
That's how I hear it.
So am I right?
Well, I don't know. I don't know.
I can't. I mean, I'm not magic.
I can't see the future. But the way I receive this is, oh my goodness, the news organizations, which we all know are rigged, Are trying to get us used to the thought that if you were doing anything protesting, let's say, or getting a little too agitated about the election results, that you would be called a domestic violent extremist.
And this is just another way to say you're going to end up in jail if you complain about the election.
Now, is that literally what they're doing and saying and why they're doing it?
I don't know. That's how I receive it, though.
Under the current circumstance, that's how I receive it.
I'm sure you do, too.
Well, there's accusations that the Democrat funding entity called Act to Blue...
has been acting as a money laundering organization and that it's not small donations coming in from all over the country, but rather there might be some rich sources that are laundering things into smaller donations and putting it through ActBlue so it looks like it's all appropriate.
And there are some attorney generals from several states looking into it.
There is strong indications early on that there is something there.
You know, there's a lot of smoke.
We don't know if there's fire, but where there's smoke, there often is.
Now, remember, Act Blue is not a government.
It's a bunch of individuals in an organization.
Individuals are innocent until proven guilty.
So although I say there's a lot of smoke, we cannot say there's fire.
Because it doesn't work that way.
If it were the government, I'd say, oh yeah, there's so much indication.
They're going to have to prove they're innocent or I'll assume they're guilty.
But these are individuals.
I'm going to assume they're innocent unless somebody has the goods, which I haven't seen yet.
All right. CNN and some of the left-leaning media is trying to make a big deal about Elon Musk supporting Trump and especially going to the Trump rally, etc.
And because he owns a big media platform and he's a billionaire and he's putting money into his preferences, they're saying that he is somehow distorting the process.
But how do they ignore George Soros?
The only thing that Musk is doing is trying to match the energy and strategy of the other billionaires on the other side.
I don't see him as being the one billionaire who got involved in politics.
Years ago, somebody explained to me the best way to understand politics is like Game of Thrones, meaning it's a bunch of kings, these would be the billionaires, who are all vying to be the big king of it all, or at least to influence the things they care about.
And that if you don't understand it as just a billionaire competition, and the people running for office are always, you know, usually puppets or patrons of the billionaires, Then you don't really understand the country, because it's mostly a billionaire fight, and the rest of us are pretending that we know what's going on, but don't. The things we see are like a level below that reality, so we're just seeing the weeds.
We're not seeing the sky.
The sky is just the billionaires fighting with each other, trying to gain authority or resources or whatever.
Now, Trump kind of broke that because he came in as his own billionaire, but he also has billionaire donors, right?
So he's got a few billionaires on his side as well.
So there's Peter Thiel, for example.
And who's the widow of the Las Vegas casino guy?
I can't remember. Anyway, so he's got his own billionaires.
But why they think that Musk is somehow special, and he's more special than Mark Cuban being on TV every day, or Reid Hoffman being the biggest funder.
So why is he special?
What makes Elon Musk the one billionaire who's not supposed to be actively using his money and power and influence to influence the election?
Everything he's doing is completely legal, and where it needs to be, it's transparent.
Is that a problem?
No. You know, I can put up a lot with a lot when there's transparency.
So this is why I don't complain as much about AIPAC, the Israel lobby that some say is running the United States policy, at least on the Middle East.
Now I say, yeah, they're very influential.
Yes, they absolutely have a lot of control over the government.
But then I say, it's all transparent.
The reason that we believe that AIPAC has a lot of control over our government is that we can just look at the data, and we can look at how much they donated, and then we can look at what they vote for, and then, oh, yeah, it's really obvious they have a lot of influence.
But Completely legally.
Completely transparent.
There's nobody who's fooled by it.
There's no trickery involved.
And these are our laws.
And it's free speech.
So you can hate it all you want.
But personally, I'm just prevented from full-throated complaining about it because we built this system.
It's our system. We built it.
If we want to change the system and make it so that nobody can influence with money, we can do that.
But we don't have a system that can change itself that way because the people in it need that money and they don't want it to go away.
So anyway, yeah, billionaires in politics.
I would say the only thing I'll ask is for lots of transparency.
But let's not be naive.
It's always going to be billionaires fighting and, you know, we'll think it's something else while we're lost in the weeds.
Well, I do remember that there was this big prisoner swap where Putin wanted back the Merchant of Death guy, Victor Bout.
So he was this big arms dealer, and we had him, and they had, who was it?
The Griner, the basketball player.
And we traded the basketball player for the arms dealer.
Then the basketball player went back to play basketball, and the arms dealer is arming the Houthis.
I'm not so sure that deal worked out, because the Houthis are the ones who are going to block up international trade, which will cause your inflation to go up, which will make you not be able to afford to be retired.
So, you know, On one hand, I like the fact that the United States will do whatever it needs to do to get a citizen out of jail, or at least they'll try pretty hard.
And this is definitely trying hard, because what they gave up to get this one basketball player was seriously bad.
So I guess I have mixed feelings about this.
I can't give you a preference.
I'm glad we got back an American, but boy was that expensive.
I mean, that could be a trillion dollars.
But we got back one American.
And that's not nothing.
You know, I do appreciate living in a country where they're going to burn down anything they need to to get you freed from another country.
Now, I'm oversimplifying because it's always political on top of that.
But, you know, this is disturbing no matter how you look at it.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was on 60 Minutes with her usual word salad.
You know that...
Just think about this.
Every time Kamala Harris does a public anything that's unscripted, the next day all the news will be about how she didn't make any sense and she totally looked like an idiot.
Now, I'm going to say she seems the dumbest presidential candidate I've ever seen.
How many of you would agree with that?
Is she the dumbest presidential campaign you've ever seen?
We've seen some VPs that were not exactly lighting up the universe, but as a presidential candidate, I think she comes off, I mean, I don't know how she'd do an IQ test, but she comes off as the dumbest one I've ever seen.
Here's an exact quote when asked about the U.S.'s relationship with Israel, especially in the context of what's happening over there now.
And she was talking to somebody named Bill.
And she said, and I quote, Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel They were very much prompted by or result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.
What? What?
That doesn't even sound like you did your homework for being the president.
That is so embarrassing.
That is pathetic.
If you want a word that will cause young people to not vote for, go with pathetic.
Because they're thinking that Trump is dangerous.
Do you think they're going to vote for dangerous or pathetic?
If you're young, pathetic is worse.
Dangerous is, well, especially if you're male.
Did you say he's dangerous?
What's his name again?
And he's dangerous, you say.
I'm kind of attracted to the dangerous one.
But nobody, nobody, male or female, old or young, is attracted to pathetic.
Her performance in these realms where she's unscripted is pathetic.
It's pathetic. And that is a killer, kill-shot word.
You can't get people to endorse somebody who's pathetic.
So I would use that.
It's probably too late to influence anybody at this point, but that's your persuasion lesson for the day, is that the word pathetic is super powerful.
Dangerous? Not so much.
You know, unless it's real. If everybody agreed that they were in immediate danger, then the danger would be much more persuasive.
But when the danger is sort of this political rhetoric danger, people don't exactly feel that is real.
But pathetic they do.
Yeah, pathetic's a conversation ender.
Use that one. Anyway, she also said, when asked about her economic plan, she said, quote, my plan is about saying when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class.
My plan is about saying?
So her plan is to say things?
Her plan is to say things.
So CBS follows up and says, the question was, how are you going to pay for it?
Now that you know the question was, how are you going to pay for it?
Now listen to her answer of how she's going to pay for her policies.
My plan is about saying when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class.
The question was, how are you going to pay for it?
And then she said, I'm going to make sure the richest among us pay their fair share in taxes.
And then CBS, but we're dealing with the real world here.
How are we going to get this done?
And then she said something about, oh, Congress knows it has to be done, which is not a real answer.
So, pathetic.
Not bad.
Bad is better than pathetic.
You know, there's like great job, good job, pretty good job, poor job, terrible job, bad job, and then below all of them is this.
It's not even good enough to say it's bad.
It's just, well, that's kind of pathetic.
So not exactly who I want to be the brand of my country.
There's another big migrant caravan being organized south of the border.
This could be a bad visual if that caravan starts crossing and maybe there's a big fight over it and they get stranded at the border and there are lots of visuals of the massive number of people coming across the border or trying to.
It could actually move the election.
You know, if the major news covers it, so they won't.
Fox News is going to have, you know, wall-to-wall pictures of the migrant caravan.
And if you go to CNN, they'll be like, and there's a caravan.
In our next story, Trump said something we don't think is true.
But what about that caravan?
Oh, there's a caravan.
And then Trump said something else we don't think is true.
We're going to fact check them.
So you won't hear much about that, except on Fox News.
Now, the other thing affecting the election, as we all know, is that North Carolina, the hurricane has made it impossible to communicate or travel for a huge number of people in North Carolina.
Our concern number one, just so I make sure I say that first, is the lives and the well-being and the survival of the people there.
The destruction is massive and unprecedented.
Some of the worst things you've ever seen, and maybe it's not getting better as fast as it should.
So, saying that first, there is also a political element to it that can't be ignored.
But here's my question.
Take this setup.
There's natural disaster.
So there are physical limitations to voting.
People have lost their ballots.
So now if they were going to do mail-in ballots, it might be too late or too hard to even get their new ballots because, again, there's no transportation.
You know, they don't have the internet to order new ballots.
So you've got lots of Republicans, and you've got physical obstacles.
Roads are washed out, and communication is broken.
But I get back to my first point.
It's filled with Republicans.
So now, game it out in your head.
If you were going to write this movie, what happens?
It's full of Republicans.
They know that their votes in their state could be the difference between Trump and Harris.
But there's huge physical problems, like big, big physical problems.
The road is just washed out, like lots of roads washed out.
So what happens?
Game it down in your head.
Republicans equals trucks, probably lots of trucks.
Republican equals power tools, bulldozers, ATVs, physical labor, And don't fuck with me.
There is some chance, and I don't want to get optimistic because, you know, they're dealing with very survival.
So survival comes first.
But it seems to me that if the Republicans as a group could communicate and again they can't communicate so organizing might be tough but I don't know if they need to communicate because everybody knows what they need to do men They know what they need to do.
They need to figure out how to build temporary bridges.
And if they can't build a temporary bridge, they need to figure out how to drive up to it, unload the senior citizens, put them on a boat, cross them over, put them on the next pickup truck and take them to the next place that they need to cross another road or another something washed out.
I think that Republicans might self-organize.
Meaning that they will realize that the government can't fix the roads in time.
And if they let the country down, they're going to know that they let the country down.
And Republicans don't do that.
Not the men, you know, the women either, but the men will be moving the big equipment and driving the trucks and building the workaround.
I've got a feeling that already there's a whole bunch of bulldozers and trucks and stuff going on.
I think there are people with chainsaws taking down trees and building temporary workarounds to the roads that are around.
How long would it take a state that's packed with Republicans to make temporary roads and workarounds and transportation and then organize caravans so if your car can't go through the mud, don't worry.
You get on the back of a pickup truck and it will take you the half a mile through the mud, then you get to another bus, you get on the bus, the bus takes you to maybe not even the regular polling place because that already washed away, but it takes you to the temporary ones that they set up because they had to.
Now, imagine the images of that.
Imagine watching it happen in the, say, three weeks up before the election, watching the chainsaws come out, the earthmovers come out, the pickup trucks come out.
They'd have to figure out how to get gas to all these people, because it's not easy to even get gas.
um and they'd figure have to figure out how to coordinate and they could probably do it without communications so you send one truck up into the stranded community and you say on election day there's going to be a truck here and it's going to take anybody who wants to vote tell everybody telling everybody will get done if they don't have internet and stuff they're all talking right they're all outside they're all talking so you could you could potentially Coordinate the most massive patriot caravan that the country has ever seen.
It would be visually as inspiring as the Canadian truckers.
The thing that Canadian truckers got right is the tonnage.
It wasn't a bunch of people.
It was the tonnage.
They were moving gigantic amounts of weight in the form of trucks and putting them where they wanted it.
So there's something about persuasion and humans that when you see humans moving tonnage, that means something more than somebody just talking.
Hey, here's my piece of paper.
Read my piece of paper.
All right, that's kind of weak.
But if you see somebody with a bulldozer, if you see somebody who built their own temporary bridge because they had to, and they did it with a chainsaw, and they just, like, knocked down a couple of big trees and then put some boards across it and said, it's not safe, but it works.
You could see the most inspiring thing that we've ever seen in recent American history.
Maybe. But will it happen?
Well, some of it depends on whether the regular recovery is good enough that people think they have a way to get to the...
Three weeks is a long time to go without roads.
So I think that some official FEMA or government entities would be working hard as well to make sure those roads are passable in three weeks.
So we'll see. But I'm going to put my confidence in the citizens of North Carolina.
I think that they're going to work just as hard to recover from their own disaster as they will be to make sure that the country is served.
I think that's who they are.
So we'll find out.
It's sort of a deep character test.
What I would expect of people is to take care of themselves and take care of their neighbors.
That's the only thing I'd expect.
That's way enough.
But they do have a certain character.
And maybe they will do all of that stuff, taking care of their neighbors, taking care of their families, and also take care of the country.
Because I think that's just who they are.
But we'll find out.
So North Carolina? We're counting on you.
Pennsylvania? We're counting on you.
Georgia? It's time.
It's time. Men?
It's time. I saw a...
Well, let's do this.
I realized yesterday that Trump could have the weirdest record of all presidential candidates, which is that he could win three out of four contests.
Because if you think about it, he won in 2016, so he's got one in the books, but he also beat Biden.
He beat Biden, right?
He didn't go all the way to Election Day, but Biden got nominated and Trump beat him.
Would you agree? He got replaced, but I call that a win.
Trump beat him.
So he's two for two.
Now, 2020, you could say, okay, technically, the system says he lost in 2020.
Now, what if he wins this time?
If he beats Biden, Harris, and Hillary Clinton, he will have won three out of four presidential elections.
Let's take it to the next extreme.
If we someday find out how the 2020 election was stolen, because I think most of you think it was stolen, I do, he will have won four out of four presidential races.
And that's not impossible.
He might actually win four out of four.
Remember when I told you I thought he was the most persuasive human I've ever seen?
You know, politician for sure.
You can't get much more persuasive than winning four out of four presidential elections when the entire media machine is against you.
That's pretty impressive.
Now, I'm not going to say... I'm not going to call that a fact because the 2020 election is more of an opinion.
In my opinion, we haven't had fair elections probably in my lifetime.
There's nothing about the way our system is set up that suggests it's intended to be fair.
You have to meet the first standard.
The first standard for me is, can you tell me that it even looks like it was intended to be fair?
And it doesn't really meet the first standard.
You don't even have to check if it's fair.
It's designed where you just look at it and go, really?
I mean, I wouldn't know if somebody mailed in a vote or if the mailman threw it away.
That's your design. And I'm supposed to believe that that's fair?
All right. So we could go four for four.
Speaking of polling, Rasmussen says their new numbers have Trump up by two nationally, two points nationally.
And Atlas Intel, who, by the way, you should know, Rasmussen and Atlas Intel have been in the top five.
So they're both top five pollsters.
Now, top five is really, really good because there are a lot of pollsters.
So if you're in the top five, I mean, that's pretty impressive.
So in recent election, they're both top five.
So Alice Intel has them up three.
Now keep in mind, I think I'm right about this, that if everything goes in a normal fashion, If a Republican is up two or three, that's a landslide in the electoral vote because Republicans can win nationally if they're below the competitor in the national election.
So when you look at the national election, you really shouldn't be seeing a Republican ahead at all.
They should be a few points behind even if they're going to win.
But if you're a few points ahead in two of the most accurate polls a few weeks before the election, The landslide signal has gone from a faint hum to sort of a beep, beep, beep, beep.
Not guaranteed.
Still a lot of time before the election.
Could be more surprises.
You know, the future is unpredictable.
But at the moment, the landslide signal is very distinct.
And you should expect that the other pollsters are likely to converge on Rasmussen and Atlas Intel, because I suspect that they use a more reasonable set of assumptions for the mix of who's actually going to vote, how many Democrats and how many Republicans, because there are a few different ways you can measure that.
You can say well it's the same as this prior election or it's the same as the people who say they're going to vote.
There's a whole bunch of ways to say whether somebody's likely to vote and that's the whole game.
The likelihood. Anyway, here's a persuasion tip for you.
I've tried to give this one but maybe I did it better this time.
If you're a politician and you're in this race and you go on the news and let's say you're a Republican and somebody says, when the election comes in, And if Trump doesn't win, will you accept the outcome?
Will you accept the vote?
Now, this is not a sincere question.
A sincere question would be, hmm, I'd like to know the answer to that question, and I believe my audience would too, so I'm going to ask the sincere question because I don't know the answer.
It's not a sincere question.
It's a priming question.
The priming is so to see if you'll trap yourself.
If you say, well, I don't know, it depends, then you've just outed yourself as someone who will not respect the democratic process.
You're probably a dictator.
So that's the trap they're trying to set up.
But if you go the other way, so you can't win by saying, I don't know, maybe I won't.
You'll definitely lose if you say no or if you don't say yes.
But suppose you say yes.
Well, you just found a second way to lose.
So it's sort of a, do you still beat your spouse?
It's the yes doesn't work and the no doesn't work, which is how you know it's not a sincere question.
If you could lose just as badly by saying yes as saying no, it's not a real question, right?
It's a political question.
So how do you answer a question that's a setup?
Here's the way you do it.
You call out the setup.
And you say, so ask me the question, Scott, will you accept the election if Trump doesn't win?
And you support Trump, and if he doesn't win, will you accept the election?
And I say, oh, let me ask for a clarification on your question.
Now, is there anybody who's going to say, no, I won't clarify my question?
No, no. Everybody says, of course I'll clarify my question.
Say, are you saying that would I accept an election that had no indication of any fraudulent behavior?
See where I'm going?
Then they say, well, you know, no, I'm just sort of general, you know, forget about the assumptions.
I'm just asking you, would you accept it?
I go, but I don't quite understand the question.
Are you saying that you think I should act the same if there's no indication of fraud than I would if the fraud is just glaringly obvious?
So let me return the question to you, Mr.
Stepanophilus. Would you accept an election result if Trump was polling even with Harris, but he won by 20 points on election day, which you would probably suggest would not be an accurate result?
Would you accept that?
Or would you say, wait a minute, there's something that's so far out of line, we should take a day to look into this at least?
What would you do, George?
Now, Why can't any of our politicians figure that out?
Because the making you think past the sale is just so obvious.
The thinking past the sale is that you're asked to uncritically accept that the outcome of the election looks credible on the surface.
That was not the case in 2020.
In 2020, Republicans said, on the surface, this looks obviously rigged.
Were they right? Well, I don't know.
I assume all elections have been rigged in my lifetime, but I don't know the details of any specific ones.
So don't allow them to make you think past the sale.
They have to back up a level.
So make them back up before you answer the question.
Oh, that's an excellent question, George Stephanopoulos.
I think we should all answer that question.
In fact, I'm going to give you my answer to the question, and then I think your audience would like to hear your answer.
If the election looks totally credible, would I accept it?
Yes. Would you, George?
If the election looked totally credible and you didn't see any problem, would you accept it?
Well, of course I would. Yes, okay, we're on the same page.
Now, if it looked like it was obviously, or at least potentially, something's wrong with it, and you know that a lot of other people are seeing the same thing, And it could be a big, big problem if you don't know why it's so on a whack.
Let's say it's completely on a whack with exit polling and completely on a whack with what the polls were before you went.
And under those conditions, George, would you accept the outcome if it looked obviously rigged?
Because I would say we should take a pause and maybe look into it.
What would you say, George? Because I think your audience would like to hear your answer.
Do you think there would be a better response than that?
Don't let them make you think past the sale.
They're trying to make you think that the election will look credible And that anybody looking at it would say, oh yeah, that looks like our normal election, so we know who won.
Don't accept that assumption, because that's not what people saw in 2020.
They saw things that didn't look like the bellwethers were going the way they normally go.
There were some very unusual outcomes.
Now, there might be reasons for it.
There could be entirely valid reasons why one election is radically different than the polls.
Could be a reason that is radically different from other elections in the past.
But would you uncritically accept it if you didn't know why it was different?
It's a good question for the question asker as well as the answer.
All right, so Elon Musk's mom, May Musk, she was commenting on X about the fact that there are places where you're not going to be asked your ID to vote, and she said that Elon should tell his followers to use 10 fake names to vote.
So, she's basically saying, well, you know, if they can't tell who you are when you vote, why don't you all just use ten fake names and vote?
Now, here's the fun part.
She said this on X, and the X platform fact-checked her and said, uh, that's illegal.
That's illegal. So, just to clarify, It's possible for somebody who is not a real person to vote because you don't have to give your ID. It is not legal to do it.
It's just possible. And you might get away with it.
I suppose that's possible.
I don't know the odds.
It's possible. I wouldn't take the chance.
So let me say as clearly as I can, don't cheat in the election.
Don't do it. It would be crazy for you as an individual to do that, even if you're positive the other side is doing it.
Don't do it. So I think May might have been speaking more With more hyperbole than it looked.
So I'm not sure that she meant that, like literally.
But it's funny that she got fact-checked on X. All right, I know you want me to talk about weather manipulation and did the government or the democrats or somebody else cause the hurricane to be worse or to make it aimed?
There is lots of evidence that the United States has and other countries have tried and maybe successfully tried to alter the weather.
Now the way that we know it works is we know that they can seed clouds.
So we know that they can make it rain more than it was supposed to rain.
And one of the problems with the North Carolina earthquake, I'm sorry, the hurricane that hit North Carolina and neighboring states, is that it rained a lot before the wind hit.
So you had the double whammy.
So, could it be that some terrible evil entity in our government or anyplace else saw that the hurricane was coming and they thought to themselves, well, if we add a little extra rain and over these Republican areas, that hurricane is going to be way worse and they won't be able to vote.
What do you think? Do you think that happened?
Let me take the temperature of the audience.
That would be an outrageously evil thing.
And then other people are saying, but Scott, it's basically what they did in Lahaina in Maui.
And it's sort of a version of the same play.
You know, there's weather manipulation or a laser from space or space lasers changing the weather, something like that.
I'm going to say unlikely.
I'm going to go with unlikely that there was weather manipulation.
Now, apparently it was sort of an unusual event and the two hurricanes being in the Gulf at the same time, the new one's coming.
You know, there's definitely some unlikeliness to it, but hurricanes break records all the time, don't they?
It's not that unusual that there's a new pattern or a new thing that happened any given year.
And then you can also imagine that maybe the climate change alarmists would like to have a little extra emergency to push their climate change crisis alarm message.
But I can't see anybody doing this.
It would be hard for me to imagine That you could get enough people, because it's not like a one-person job if you're going to change the weather.
Changing the weather seems to me like kind of a big job.
You can have at least several people who know what's going on.
At least several.
So, could you get several people to do basically genocide in the United States?
I don't know. That'd be a stretch.
You know, the odds of a whistleblower seem pretty high.
Because anybody who was messing with a hurricane that was going to hit the mainland would know they're messing with mass murder.
Everybody would know if you intensify a hurricane, you're killing people.
So how many, could you get like seven Americans, I'm just going to pick a number, some small number of plotters who are all on board with killing hundreds or maybe thousands of Americans with a trillion dollars of damage to affect the election?
There probably are people that are that evil in the world, but it'd be hard to get five or seven of them without at least one of them saying, I got to talk to somebody about this.
It's possible though.
So I'm going to say that the odds of weather manipulation being part of this story, I'm going to give it 5%.
5%.
Now remember, 5% doesn't mean it's impossible.
So if it turns out tomorrow we find out it was happening, I'm not going to say I was wrong because I'm saying it's 5% possible.
I'm just saying if the only things you know are the things that we know so far, I wouldn't expect it to be true.
But you honestly can't rule it out.
We live in a world where evil things do actually happen and as scale.
Pretty evil things at a pretty big scale.
So 5% seems like a big number to me.
Anyway, did you watch the All In Pod and Mark Cuban?
So David Sachs got into him a little bit.
There was some controversy about whether it should have been moderated differently or not.
I watched a clip and I thought it was fine.
I liked watching them go at it enthusiastically.
But I would remind you, people keep asking me what's up with Mark Cuban.
Like, what's going on there?
Is he... Is he being blackmailed?
Or does he have some kind of profit motive?
Is he really dumb?
And that's all we're saying.
Is he brainwashed? Does he have TDS? Is it personal?
And I would say, it doesn't matter.
If you spend any time trying to figure out his personal thoughts, it's probably a waste of time.
Here's the thing we can tell.
It doesn't look serious, meaning that it looks like he's enjoying it as a competition, a sport.
Yeah, he seems to be playing it like a sport.
And I don't think he's super well-informed on the topics he's talking about.
You can see that with David Sachs filling in some things that he was apparently unaware of.
And I don't think that that even matters.
It would matter if he were trying to be a serious, you know, voice in the competition, the political competition.
But I think it's just team play and it's competition.
And if he says some anti-Trump things in public and people hear him and believe him, he wins a little bit.
But here's what I don't think.
I don't think that the things he's saying and doing are indicating what his private thoughts are.
That's what I think. Because the things he says and argues when it comes to Trump are so qualitatively different than what he talks about on any other topic.
On any other topic, I stop what I'm doing to listen to him.
Because he's really smart.
On a wide range of things.
So the odds of him being really smart on a wide range of important things in the world and having demonstrated talent in a variety of fields, it would be really weird if he had just this weird pocket of stupidity that only applied to this one category.
So I can't believe that it's dumb.
He might be a little less researched than some of you, but also because he's not playing it like it's a serious thing.
I think he's just having fun.
And so if you make too much of it, I think you're just being drawn into the game.
So it's fun to note what he did and, you know, note who he's talked to and maybe how they responded, but I wouldn't take his argument seriously because I just don't know that that's the game he's in.
I don't think he's in the game of, I want the best outcome for the country, so let's, you know, let's make sure we've transparently looked at all the issues.
But he's not alone there.
It's not like the rest of us are doing that.
It's not like it's common for people to say, you know, really, we do have to look at both sides.
Nobody's doing that. Nobody.
I mean, my show is mostly about trying not to be just in the pocket for one side or the other.
And even I am at this time of season.
I mean, I can't pretend I'm not 100% in the bag for Trump.
I'm 100% in the bag for Trump, right?
I mean, so, you know, when I argue things, am I being biased?
I assume so.
I'm trying not to be.
I mean, I do make an effort not to be, but I'm also aware that it's not really completely possible.
Yeah, I'm biased as hell.
Well, speaking of bias, there was an alleged video of some people from FEMA on some kind of a Zoom call, and the funny part is I could not tell if it was parody, like a deepfake parody, or real. Because the real world has become so absurd that you can't exaggerate enough that your parody looks like it's fake.
So what they were talking about is that they should focus their attentions on the LGBTQIA people because they struggled the most before the storm.
And somebody said, FEMA relief is no longer about getting the greatest good for the greatest amount of people.
It's about disaster equity.
Now, if you told me that the people in charge of disaster recovery had rejected the notion of the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and instead were looking at what kind of genitalia they put in their mouth, say, all right, this group of people Uh, what kind of genitalia do you like to put in your mouth?
Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay.
So we're going to treat you a little bit better.
And, uh, you people, what do you, oh my God, what do you put in your mouths?
Oh no, no, no, no.
You're, you heteros.
You heteros are boring me, first of all, and you've had too good a run.
It's time that we balance things out.
If you told me that that was really happening in the real world, I would have said, that didn't happen in the real world.
You wouldn't say that out loud even if you thought it.
So I don't know.
So I actually, even now, I'm not sure it was real.
Now it's not so hard to tell an AI fake, unless the original image is really bad.
So there was one fake, I'm sure it was fake, where the image of the person's face was smudged out, allegedly for protection or privacy, but really it also made it harder to know if it was an AI fake.
Because you couldn't see the lips moving in the eyes and stuff.
But on this one, it was a bad Zoom call.
So there was like a natural delay between the lips and the audio anyway.
And it was a bad picture.
So with the bad video, you actually couldn't tell if it was fake.
So I don't know. I have no idea if that was real or not.
As of today, I have no idea.
But the fact that you can't tell a funny parody from reality is funny by itself.
I mean, that's how bad things are.
Anyway, so apparently in North Carolina there were 40,000 absentee ballots were mailed out to people, but less than a thousand, fewer than a thousand, were returned.
So if that's the case, then the difference in voting patterns for North Carolina could be completely reversed By the fact that just most people won't be able to vote.
So yeah, the state's completely in jeopardy now, election-wise.
Andrea Mitchell was talking about politics.
I think it was today or yesterday.
And in the middle of a sentence, she just dropped in the thought that Trump supporters might be undercounted in polls.
So that's Andrea Mitchell.
She thinks Trump supporters might be undercounted.
Now, I need a fact check.
We know they were undercounted in 2016.
I heard somebody say that Trump supporters were undercounted in 2020, so even though there were more Biden votes, allegedly.
Was it also true that Trump did better than anybody expected Trump to do?
And that his performance was under...
He did better than they expected?
Is that true? Because if it happened twice, there's not a chance in the world it's not happening a third time.
Because whatever people thought in 2016 and 2020, they still think, meaning that if a pollster calls them, their incentive to say, I'm not a Trump supporter, might be for a different reason now.
Because in 2016, maybe you just didn't want to admit it because you'd sound like a racist.
In 2020, you might have been playing a little bit of that game, but also the game of you just wanted to make sure the pollsters were surprised.
But this time, in 2024, I don't think there's a single Republican who isn't at least aware that other Republicans are lying to pollsters.
Which means it's in play.
As a strategy, everybody has it right there.
They can just say the words and they can be part of the prank.
So, yes, I believe that Trump voters are being underestimated again.
I think they are.
So we'll see. Israel's always asked when it's going to stop fighting and ceasefire.
And Netanyahu said they're going to keep going militarily until they've achieved all of their goals.
Now, what would that look like to you?
If Israel is going to keep fighting until they achieve all of their goals, one assumes that their primary goal is to make sure there's not anybody shooting missiles at them.
How far would they have to go to make sure that their neighbors are not shooting missiles at them?
Really far. Like farther than anything we've ever seen before, by a lot.
So if you want to know what the future looks like, it doesn't look like there's anybody who's going to restrain Israel from doing what it thinks it needs to do.
And if you think that Lebanon is just going to work on a deal of like, no, no, we're not going to shoot any more missiles, that's not going to work.
As long as there's even one missile left in Lebanon, Israel can say we're not done.
So I think that Israel will just keep going.
And I think they're going to take it on offense.
I don't know if they're going to do something today because it's October 7th.
I'd be worried about a terrorist operating today.
But I can't tell if Israel is going to look for payback on October 7th, because that would be a meaningful date, or are they just going to focus on the victims, which would be, that would make sense, and maybe take the day off from fighting, because, you know, just one day to concentrate on what they lost.
Maybe. But it's a dicey day, so anything could happen today, so be alert.
Be alert. And I guess Columbia saw their donations dropped 29% this year, according to New York Post.
So, you know, Columbia had all those anti-Israel protests, and apparently that cost you 29% of your donations.
I would expect this would be a common thing to happen around the other colleges as well.
All right, that's all I got for you today.
Remember, my book, Win Bigley, second edition, is now out if you want to learn persuasion the Trump way.
This was written around the 2016, after the 2016 election, about how he did it.
And it will be twice as relevant now as you see that the predictions in the book about his persuasion skills have certainly been solidified.
And also the Dilbert page-a-day calendar, if you didn't know, is now available but can only be purchased at the Dilbert.com website link.
Go there for the link.
It'll take you to the page.
But you can't buy it on Amazon and you can't buy it in the bookstore or anywhere else.