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Content:
Politics, Iran Secret Nuclear Site, Iranian Plot, Legacy Media Collapse, Big Pharma Media Advertising, Michael LaRosa, For-Profit Government, Ann Selzer's Kamala Poll, Alec Baldwin's RFK Jr. Impression, Anti-Trump Democrat Lawfare, Anti-RFK Jr. Chris Hayes, Vaccination Testing, Anti-Tulsi Gabbard Propaganda, Daniel Penny Trial, Afghanistan Withdrawal, NBC's Diploma Divide Slur, Kamala's Debt Plan, NASA DEI, Rick Rubin Creativity Philosophy, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and I'm pretty sure you've never had a better time.
But, if you'd like to take your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank of Charles Stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee!
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go.
Oh, delicious.
Probably the best one I've ever had.
Well, if you're thinking about what to buy for your Christmas loved ones, look at that stuff behind me, over my shoulder.
The Dilbert 2025 calendar, you can only find it at Dilbert.com and the link to the sales page.
And four books, one of which will be just perfect for somebody in your life.
So remember that.
Well, there's an article in the Spectator Index.
There's a new scientific study that says caffeine might have a protective effect on Parkinson's disease.
Did a very large study.
That's right.
Coffee can do anything.
So if any of you were coming down with Parkinson's, I think the simultaneous sip has protected you for at least one more day.
So no Parkinson's for you.
There's a study, according to SciPost, that finds that people who are in relationships tend to be happier than single people.
Huh.
People in relationships are happier than single people.
You know how they could have saved a little money on that study?
Maybe ask me why just about every human being who has ever been born tries to get into a relationship.
Could it be because it makes them happier?
Possibly.
Possibly.
Did you know, according to KnowRidge, I guess that's the publication, that if you've got extra 46 minutes of sleep, it can boost your gratitude, resilience, and well-being?
For those of you who didn't know that extra sleep is good for you, yeah, no, it turns out, sleep, healthy food, sleep, exercise, I know, I know.
Every day we're surprised to find out those things are good for you.
Just should have asked Scott.
But here's one that's surprising, according to Aarhus University.
I like this university name, A-A-R-H-U-S. Aarhus.
Where do you go to school?
Aarhus University.
I like it.
Anyway, they did a study and found out you can satisfy your appetite just by looking at pictures of food on your phone.
Well, that's going to save me a lot of time.
Because I've been wasting my time eating and pooping, and I can just scroll.
No, I'm just kidding.
You still need to eat, no matter what.
But here's the interesting part.
You have to see the same picture 30 times, and then you get bored with it, and then you don't want to eat it.
So if you're hungry and you see a picture of your favorite food, once, it's going to make you hungrier.
You'll be, oh, I'm so hungry, I want those.
French fries or whatever.
But if you look at it 30 different times, not only will you be bored, but you'll be less hungry.
Now, what does that remind you of?
Let me tell you.
Remember I taught you in my book, Reframe Your Brain, which is over this shoulder right there.
Reframe your brain.
One of the stories in there is that, if you don't already know this, along with my audience here on my live stream, we cured the common cold.
I'm sorry, the common sneeze, not the cold.
I haven't cured a cold yet.
Yet.
But it won't work in every sneeze.
What doesn't work in the sneeze is the, you know, sort of sneak up on you.
But if you know one's coming and you're petting a cat and you don't want to scare the cat, You can actually imagine the sneeze, and it cancels the sneeze.
Now, you don't believe that works, do you?
If you haven't tried it, you don't believe it works.
But a lot of people have tried it, including me, a bunch of times.
It works!
It won't work on every sneeze, like not the fast ones that just like hit you.
But if you know it's coming for like 30 seconds, just imagine yourself sneezing and it goes away.
It's the damnedest thing.
So I do believe this study about looking at food 30 times, I do think that could work.
Meanwhile, robots are going to get some sense of touch.
Because you know robots can already hear and see and some of them might even be able to smell, but they're not good on touch.
So they've got some kind of light-related thing.
They bounce some light off the surface, and then the robot can tell what kind of surface it is.
It can tell coarse sandpaper from smooth sandpaper, for example.
And I think we're all thinking the same thing, aren't we?
Are we all thinking the same thing?
Yes, we are.
Yeah.
You're not going to have any good real robot sex until the robot can touch.
That robot needs to know that your body is not coarse sandpaper, but rather something sent from heaven.
And then it can touch you just right.
Yep, we're very close to robot sex.
Can't wait.
According to Axios, Israel destroyed an active nuclear weapons research facility in Iran in that recent attack.
Now, this raises some questions.
So these are the things that we're told We can know.
We know that Iran had a secret nuclear site.
Okay, how do we know about the locations of Iran's nuclear sites?
I mean, that's pretty good intelligence.
Number two, not only do we know it exists, but we know where it exists, and we know what specific components they're building there.
So apparently there's something called a plastic explosive that surround the uranium and the nuclear device.
So if you don't have a way to make these specific plastic explosives, it's a little hard to detonate.
So the Israelis not only knew where the plant was, the secret facility, they knew exactly what component it was making for the nuclear weapons and how far along they were, And then they bombed it.
And then here's the punchline.
It was such a secret facility that only a small group of the Iranian government knew about it.
Okay, let me put it all together.
This is what Israeli and U.S. intelligence seems to know.
They knew that Iran was building a nuclear weapon, or at least working toward it.
They knew where the site was.
They knew the specific component that was made at the site.
But now here's the impressive part.
They knew which members of the Iranian government knew about it and which ones didn't.
If you were Iran, would you just surrender?
I mean, seriously.
If your enemies know this much about your most secret secrets, I would just give up.
Because there's something going on here that's seriously putting you at risk.
Either there are agents in just like every part of Iranian government, which I imagine might be the case, or they're lying.
The other possibility is that we don't know this stuff, and we're just speculating.
Because if we had bombed, let's say Israel had bombed a site that wasn't anything.
Let's say they'd bombed the wrong site.
One way to cover that up is Would be to say that even the Iranian government wasn't aware of what was happening there.
Because then when the Iranian government says there was nothing there, we could say, see, that's what I told you.
I told you even your own government didn't know it was there.
It's a good thing we blew it up.
What was in there?
Well, you should ask us.
Don't ask your own people.
They don't even know what was there, but we do.
It was plastic explosives.
I don't know.
I'm not sure how much of that story I'm going to believe.
So there's a report that Elon Musk met with some Iranian diplomat or diplomats.
Now, we don't know exactly what he might have been talking about, but people speculate it might be to try to get some kind of progress toward an eventual peace deal.
Now, we just assume that, because why else would he be talking to him?
But here's my question.
Why aren't they acting like that's illegal?
Because you can't just go negotiate with another country if you're not in office, right?
Is that even legal?
I'm in favor of it.
Let me be clear.
I'm completely in favor of Elon Musk talking to Iranian diplomats, even if he's not negotiating per se, but if he's seeing what's possible and what's not possible.
I'm totally in favor of it.
Why?
Because he's not a politician.
He's a problem solver.
He's an engineer.
He's a technologist.
And if you wanted to get past the politics and just figure out what works, he'd be the person I'd ask.
I'd probably ask him first.
Okay, we need to just engineer a way around this.
How do we do it?
Because the trick is, how could you create a situation where everybody has security and good economics and they feel that the past has been dealt with in whatever way it needs to be dealt with?
It's hard.
And one thing we know for sure is that our politicians are not capable of it.
So if I knew that there were no politicians capable of threading that needle, I'd ask somebody who's capable of threading every needle in different situations.
So he'd be really high on my list of somebody I'd want to talk to at least once.
Now, what are the odds that Elon Musk had a solution?
And he just said, well, here's what I'd do.
And then the Iranians are thinking, hmm, that might work.
Low.
I mean, it's close to being an unsolvable problem.
But I sure love the fact that both sides took a run at it.
Maybe it moved something forward.
Maybe it didn't.
But here's the interesting thing.
I think this was in Axios.
It said...
This sentence is in Axios.
Tehran is attempting a diplomatic hairpin turn...
From allegedly plotting to kill Trump to floating direct talks with his government.
Now, do you see anything wrong with that sentence?
That Tehran is attempting a diplomatic turn from plotting to kill Trump.
What is the evidence that Iran was plotting to kill Trump?
The evidence was that the people we think were plotting to kill Trump were using Iran as their scapegoat.
Now, it seems to me that it looked like it was an internal job that we were trying to blame on Iran.
I don't think there was any chance that the leadership of Iran planned to kill Trump.
Let me say this as clearly as possible.
If I had to believe Iran when they said we were never planning to assassinate Trump, or I had to believe our own government saying, oh, we've got information, we're trying to kill Trump, do you know who I'd believe?
I'd believe the one that's saying something completely logical and credible.
There is no way that There is no way that the Iranian leadership wanted to kill Trump.
I mean, they wanted to, but there's no way there was a plan.
Because their country would be destroyed.
They would have to know.
Iran would have to know that killing our president would remove all of our options.
We would eliminate their government.
You know that, right?
There's no chance.
There's no chance that the Iranian leadership could have survived killing Trump.
No chance.
Zero.
You don't do things where you have no chance.
If it were a coin flip, you'd say, oh, those crazy bastards.
Those crazy bastards are going to take a 50-50 chance of killing our president.
It's not 50-50.
It's 100% chance you're all fucking dead.
Every time.
Whatever it takes.
It wouldn't matter.
We wouldn't care about collateral damage.
We wouldn't care about anything except wiping out every single part of their leadership.
They know that.
Of course they know that.
That would be the easiest thing you could know.
You don't even have to do any research on that.
It's just obvious.
So, no, I do not believe for one second that the leadership, there might have been some crazy elements in Iran, but I don't believe the leadership wanted to take Trump out, not even for a second.
All right.
So, on the All In pod, I guess Jason and David Sachs were talking about the collapse of the legacy media.
And part of the conversation was about how pharma is the big advertiser there.
And one of them, was it David Sachs?
One of them said, if they lose advertising from pharma, it's over.
Because that's their main advertising, is pharma.
MSNBC ratings are down, like, by half.
Blah, blah, blah.
And now they realize they're deceived by MSNBC and they've lost credibility.
So I don't know which one's on the all-in pod because I take bad notes.
I think it was probably David Sachs.
But do you think that's the right explanation of why their viewership dropped by 50% as soon as the election was over?
Do you think it's because people said, oh, I can't trust my news source?
I don't think that's what's happening.
Here's my take.
MSNBC is designed as a dopamine source.
It's a dopamine source.
It's not news.
It's things that will feel good to a certain segment of people who are their viewers.
So, if you want news, you'd find out facts without opinion.
If you go to MSNBC, they'll say, let me explain this to you for the millionth time.
You, dear viewer, you are ethical and moral and smart.
Oh, you're smart.
You care.
You have empathy.
Unlike, unlike, have you heard about this Orange Hiller?
Oh, my God.
You are so much better than Orange Hiller.
You're smarter.
You're kinder.
You have better ideas.
You believe in science.
That's how awesome you are.
And so if I'm watching MSNBC and I'm a little low on my dopamine, I'll be like, really?
I didn't even know I was that smart.
Can you tell me more about how smart I am?
Oh, look.
Look.
Half of the country is dumber than me.
Oh, look at the dumb people.
Oh, my God.
They're all, like, weird.
They're weird and crazy, but not like us.
Not like us.
We got our college educations.
We got our...
Wait, what just happened?
What just happened?
He's ahead?
No, he can't be ahead.
What?
He just won the election?
He couldn't have...
No, I've been watching in the news for four years.
He couldn't have...
He couldn't have won the election.
What?
By a landslide.
And people are wearing their hats in public.
Click.
And then you turn off MSNBC. Why?
Are you turning it off because their news was not accurate?
No.
You're turning it off because your source of dopamine went away.
There's no dopamine.
That's it.
It was just like an addiction to feel good.
So as soon as it became plainly obvious to everyone that the viewers of MSNBC were the dumbest people in the entire country, and I say that, unfortunately, it's just true, because they believed that the news on MSNBC was real.
Those are the dumbest people in America, if you believe that the news is real.
Sorry.
If you think the news, about politics anyway, and geopolitical stuff, if you think that stuff's real, you're the dumbest people in America.
If you think that science should be trusted, Because it's science.
You're among the dumbest people in America.
You don't understand how anything works.
And the realization that you're among the dumbest from going from the smartest all the way to the dumbest, that's devastating.
So here's what's going to happen.
Do you recall that there was the same drop when Trump won the first time?
I think there was a big drop the first time.
Most of that will come back.
Do you know why it will come back?
Well, at the moment, Trump isn't doing anything except awesome things that they have a little bit to talk about, but mostly he hasn't done stuff because he's not in the job yet for the second term.
So as soon as he's doing stuff, then they're going to have stuff to complain about, and they'll be able to complain their old way.
Oh, dear viewers, let me tell you how smart you are, because you never would have made this mistake that Trump and all of those mega-fools are making.
Look how smart we are.
You know, we were right.
Kamala Harris never would have made this problem, would she?
I guess all those voters were dumb after all.
So, if there was any temporary moment when you thought you were the dumb ones, well, let me talk you out of this.
We're the smart ones, you're the smart ones, and let's stay away from those other, those terrible MAGA people.
And if they show up for your holidays, well, don't even let them in.
Don't let them in at all.
So, yes, I think their viewership will come back when they can right their ship and start doing more dopamine direct, you know, fake news.
But the other point I wanted to point out is something that I didn't know for a long time, but I didn't know how cable news, the so-called legacy news, makes their money.
I thought, hey, they advertise, so they're making their money from advertisement.
And the reason that people advertise is so that you will buy their products.
Turns out none of that's true.
Which is quite a mindfuck that the advertisers are not trying to get you to buy their products.
That's not even why they do it.
And the advertising is not the most critical part of the revenue.
Number one, the cable news people get revenue from the cable provider.
So if the cable provider wants to offer MSNBC, they got to pay for it.
So most of the money comes from the fact that you can't offer a cable network with a full package of programming unless it includes your major news entities on both sides.
Nobody's going to buy that package.
So as long as the consumers would expect to see these news programs in their package, The news programs get paid.
Now, when I said that the advertisers are not trying to sell products, I mean the big pharma.
The pharma companies advertise so that the news doesn't want to say bad things about pharma.
Now, the news will say bad things about pharma if the news sort of comes out on its own.
But what you're not going to see is any of the legacy news media put together a team to do a deep dive on whether Big Pharma is screwing us and killing us.
There will be no investigative journalism on their advertisers.
So the reason Big Pharma advertises is not so that you can watch a commercial that says, and if you had...
That's the name of a new drug.
They're all hard to pronounce.
But if you took...
Then you would cure your suspicious disease that you never knew you had.
So it has nothing to do with getting you to buy it.
It has everything to do with just bribing the news entities not to go after the big pharma.
All right.
Mark Penn.
He was an advisor to the Clintons.
He says that all the insulting Trump as a Hitler and a fascist didn't work.
He said the politics of demonization did not work.
Quote, I think that they went over the top here.
Hitler, fascists, picking up on these things.
I think that voters just tune out those eventually because they're way over the top.
Hmm.
What do you think of that?
Do you think that the reason it didn't work To go non-stop fascist, fascist, Hitler, Hitler is because the people listening just say that's over the top so they tune it out.
Well, I don't know anybody who voted for Trump who took any of that seriously, but here's how I would have framed it.
I wouldn't have said it was over the top so people didn't believe it.
I would have said this.
The election came down to people who believe news is true and Versus people who know it's not.
And I think there's simply more people who know it's not.
So it didn't matter that it was a story about fascists or Hitler.
It could have been a story that Trump murdered a baby.
It could have been a story that he did anything.
It's just that the people who voted for him just assume all the news is fake.
And I think that the number of people who think the news is fake is now bigger than the number who think it's real.
So when you hear stuff like that, you go, oh, that's the fake one.
Now, it works both sides, by the way.
Fake news doesn't come from only one direction.
It comes from both ways.
But if you understand that, you're more likely to just make your own opinion about whether you want Trump's economic policies and let the rest go.
So, yeah, I think that's what it is.
I think it's people who believe the news versus people who know it's mostly hoaxes.
There's a study by, this was on Axios too, a study from Columbia Business School.
They did this after the 2016 election, and they did find that two out of three people who didn't want to tell you their opinion about politics, two out of three voted for Trump.
So it is true, it's confirmed by studies, that in 2016, when I was telling you every single day there are secret Trump supporters that are lying to pollsters, it was 100% correct.
Now, a lot of you saw it, too.
It wasn't like I was the only one who had that idea.
But I said that that was also going to be true in this election.
I said that this election, too, the people who act like they're undecided or don't want to Tell you what they think.
There are going to be Trump supporters.
And sure enough, I just asked perplexity, the search engine, if this 2024 election had secret Trump supporters.
And according to perplexity, the answer is yes.
And the reason the answer is yes, it says, is because if you look at the, let's say, the average of the polling, on average, it under-polled Trump.
And if all the polling companies, all under polling, I think most of them did, maybe, I don't know, 80% or so, under polled them, then that's a pretty good indication that the Trump supporters are hiding.
Not that every single one of them did a bad poll.
So, here we are again.
Now, here's the fun part.
Do you know how I always tell you about my, quote, smart Republican or smart Democrat friend?
So I have a longtime friend who's very Democrat, and things have not been good through the Trump era with he and I, because he believes the news is real.
And I say that not as a joke.
He reads the New York Times and he watches CNN and he believes that he learned news and it's real.
Now, obviously, I can't have a conversation with him about anything because he thinks those things are real.
But on top of that, he's also an expert in polling.
Like he gives public speeches on polling techniques and what to expect and how to interpret them and stuff.
An expert on polling.
So prior to this election, I asked him if he thought the polls were going to be right.
And he said, you know, I told him I thought the polls were under sampling Trump again.
He said, oh, that may have happened the first time.
Indeed, indeed, he was under-polled the first time.
But pollsters have now figured out a number of ways to correct for that.
And I thought to myself, really?
How do you correct for the data you don't have?
What exactly is the method for correcting for the data you don't have?
Now, I used to work in the data analysis field before I was a cartoonist.
Mostly I was looking at budgets and data and projections and financial forecasts and stuff like that.
I know what it means when you don't have the data and you adjust.
It means you're guessing.
It just means you're guessing.
You can't adjust for data you don't have.
That's not a thing.
You can't apply an algorithm for the data you don't have.
So once again, and by the way, he was really confident that this time the polling was going to be accurate.
So now I suppose he could still say most of the polling looked like it was going to be a tie and the end result was only within a few percentage points, but it did all tip in one direction.
So I think I'm going to claim a win on that one.
Apparently, Amazon's selling a lot of MAGA hats, according to Zero Edge.
It's among their top ranked thing.
So they've got MAGA things and several things in the top 31 hottest new releases.
So here's my question.
What do you think it was that changed Trump from somebody you couldn't possibly support in public To somebody that you want to support in public, like you want to wear the hat.
What changed?
Now, I've got a few theories and it's probably not one thing.
Number one, everybody likes winning.
Everybody likes winning.
But we saw this change even before the election results.
So it's not just that he won, although that certainly is going to help.
It happened before he won.
And some of it was happening before the assassination attempt, right?
I think the assassination attempt and his response to it certainly got him more support.
I mean, no doubt about it.
So that was a little bit.
But it was happening anyway.
And a lot of it was economics and inflation.
And a lot of people saying, how about I'll just care about myself instead of caring where he may or may not have put his penis 30 years ago.
I'll just care about myself for a moment.
That's probably a lot of it.
A lot of it is that Kamala Harris is the worst candidate we've ever seen in our lives.
And Trump is the best.
But I think by the time Trump was in the garbage truck and McDonald's and going to the black barber shop, he just broke through some kind of barrier.
So I think he just broke through the barrier and people realized that their news is probably fake.
And that when it went way too far into Trump is Hitler and we'd seen four years of him.
We'd watched four years of him and it wasn't Hitler even a little bit.
So I think it's like several factors coming together.
So sort of a perfect storm situation.
But I do think that probably the main thing Is that there are prominent Democrats and hero kind of Democrats, really popular ones like RFK Jr., who saw the light and moved over.
And then Elon, of course, probably moved a bunch of other people.
So people like to be on the winning team.
They like to understand that the news is fake.
And they like their income without inflation.
All right, here's a smart Democrat.
So apparently the Jill Biden's former spokesperson, whose name is Michael LaRosa.
Now, I'm going to quote him because here's where I'm getting worried, because he's actually figured out what the real problem is.
Watching the other Democrats not know what the real problem is so they can't possibly fix it is just entertaining to me.
But then when I see Michael LaRosa, I go, oh, oh, uh-oh.
He actually knows what the real problem is.
So here's, in his words...
He says, this shit has to stop.
He said, calling President-elect Trump's defense secretary nominees and former Fox News host a white supremacist and all the DEI stuff and the fascist stuff and the Hitler stuff.
He said, the answer to extremism is not more extremism.
Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke.
Thank you.
Now, that's not pulling a punch.
He's saying that the Democratic Party has turned into a joke.
That's actually what's happening.
It looks ridiculous.
It just looks like a joke.
It doesn't look like just a different political opinion.
It looks like, what's wrong with you?
Do you have mental problems?
He says, we've got to knock it off and get a serious guess.
We're going to diagnose politics, not make it worse.
He says, name-calling, vilifying, and defaming nominees you oppose, even if there is very good reason to oppose them, represents everything the Democratic Party should be running away from.
Wow.
Wow.
That's exactly perfect.
Yes.
Everything they're doing is everything they should be running away from.
It's everything they should oppose.
Now, he didn't mention that the Democrats oppose free speech.
If he asks them, they say they don't.
But you see the gigantic network of censorship that's built up around the Democratic Party.
Clearly, it's a major move, because Trump's trying to dismantle that network of NGOs and fact-checkers that are all part of the fake news, the fake facts world.
So, yes...
The Democratic Party should not be demonizing one group of Americans.
That's the opposite of their brand.
They're supposed to be inclusive, but they're demonizing.
They should be for free speech.
They're against it.
They should be against war, and they're for it.
They've literally thrown away every one of their valuable principles just to win.
Now, apparently winning makes a big difference because you can do insider trading and make a lot of money that way.
We probably shouldn't make the government a for-profit enterprise, because it is right now.
As long as you can do insider trading legally, it's completely legal if you're in Congress.
So if they know that a bill is coming up or some change is going to be made, they can bet on it.
It's not really betting, because at that point they know the stock's going to move.
So we probably need to make the government a non-profit if we're going to have the government work for us.
Otherwise, the government's going to work for itself.
Very profitable.
Do you remember toward the end of the election cycle there, there was this one poll from Ann Seltzer, Apparently a famous pollster I'd never heard of by Ann Seltzer had a poll that was unusually, weirdly pro-Kamala.
And it disagreed with basically all the other polls.
But...
It allowed the Democrats to talk about it for a week or so.
Hey, this one poll shows she's going to win.
You're going to be surprised.
Give us some more money.
Donate some money.
Go vote.
She's going to win.
And people like me and people who have been watching the news for more than five minutes said, oh, just ignore that.
That's fake.
Most of you said that, right?
When you saw the news that there was this one outlier poll that was like wildly out of touch with the other polls, didn't you say to yourself, oh, it's just fake, right?
Well, of course, it turned out not to be accurate.
But Ann Seltzer has announced her retirement.
So, the account CEO Branding Expert.
Look for that account, which is a good account to follow.
If you like takes on persuasion and branding and stuff.
CEO Branding Expert.
He's one of my internet buddies.
So his opinion is, she announced her retirement, which means this poll she did was likely a golden parachute.
Oh, now we're getting deep.
So there's the thought that somebody who was so good at polling, for them to coincidentally have the worst poll ever that was good for Kamala and also coincided with her retirement, The suggestion is that somebody with a big bag of money might have said, you know, you're going to retire anyway, so wouldn't you like to go out with a big bag of money?
All we need from you is a couple of assumptions on this poll that are not your normal assumptions.
Now, I'm not making that accusation because I have no evidence to support it.
But if you're that good at polling and you're that off and then you retire right after, it's going to raise some questions.
It raises some questions.
Meanwhile, I saw a quote from RFK Jr., but I don't have a confirmation that he really said this.
So maybe you can tell me if this is a real quote.
I just saw it on a post on X. Did he say that Bitcoin is, quote, a hedge against inflation for middle-class Americans, a remedy against the dollar's downgrade from the world's reserve currency, and the off-ramp from a ruinous national debt?
That doesn't really sound like something he said.
Is that fake?
Because I don't even know what it means to be an off-ramp from the national debt.
I don't know what that would mean.
So, fake?
What do you think?
Is that real or fake?
I haven't heard him say he's against Bitcoin.
I have no idea.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy working in the DOGE project, the Department of Government Efficiency.
And of course, they're going to try to figure out where to downsize government and make it more efficient.
And they're looking for, I love this, they're looking for volunteers who want to work 80 hours a week and have super high IQs and for no money.
So, let's see, 80 hours a week, no money, super high IQ. Okay, that's going to be tough to find, unless they're already very rich, which they might be if they have a super high IQ. But good luck with that.
You know, if anyone else asks that, you would just laugh it off.
But if Elon Musk and Vivek say, we want you to work eight hours a week, it's going to be terrible.
You have to be brilliant and we're not going to pay you.
It's actually attractive.
If I were younger and smarter and live closer to New York, Washington, D.C., I guess, I'd be thinking about it.
And the reason I'd be thinking about it is that I could be working with a whole bunch of geniuses who are doing the most important thing that maybe the country's done in years.
So that's appealing to me.
Just being part of something that would have that much impact and importance and requires smart people.
You're not going to do it with dollars.
You're going to need extra smart...
Because the level of complexity that's going to be involved is going to be through the roof.
The complexity is just going to be crazy.
But I won't be joining that group.
I'm not quite a demographic.
But I love this sentence.
Probably from Elon.
Quote...
We don't need more part-time idea generators.
We need super high IQ small government revolutionaries willing to work 80 hours per week on unglorious cost-cutting.
I like it.
We don't need more part-time idea generators.
Do you know how many people decided that they had a good idea for cutting the government and sent it to Elon?
Must be like a million of them.
Anyway, Saturday Night Live had Alec Baldwin on.
As you know, he had his legal difficulties with the tragic death of a staff member that got shot accidentally when he pulled the trigger on his gun that should not have had a bullet in it.
But he's getting some pushback.
Because he did an RFK Jr.
impression, so he played RFK Jr., and he did a voice imitation in the raspy voice.
Now, here's my question.
If you're going to do an impression of somebody who has a non-standard voice, don't you have to do it in the way that they actually talk?
Is that really an insult?
I mean, when people would do Stephen Hawkins, they would talk like Stephen Hawkins.
I don't know what is happening.
I am talking through a machine.
And I never thought that that was disrespectful to Stephen Hawkins, because that's actually the way he talked.
Likewise, and I'm speaking as someone who had this exact problem, if somebody had done a skit about me when I talked the same way before my spasmodic dysphonia got cured with surgery, I spoke the same way that RFK Jr.
does, worse actually.
If somebody had done an impression of me during that time, I think it would have It bothered me, but it would only bother me that it was reminding me that I had a voice problem.
I wouldn't feel like it was disrespectful.
In fact, I think it was weird if they didn't copy my voice.
That would be weirder.
So, if there's one thing we know about RFK Jr., he has a very, very thick skin.
I am almost positive that didn't bother him.
Or if it did, it was for half a second.
So, I don't think there's any victim here.
And also, the way...
The way he did, Alec Baldwin did the impression, he didn't do it as bad as the original.
He gave it just the flavor of it.
So it's a little harder, honestly, to listen to RFK Jr.
than it was to listen to the impression of him.
So I thought that was sufficiently acceptable.
So I know we like to make fun of SNL if they don't have a home run.
But I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that.
The post-millennials says that the Democrats are putting together an army of lawyers to try to thwart everything that Trump does, like several hundred lawyers, and they've got hundreds of legal challenges they're going to take.
So basically, the Democrats have decided to tie up the government with lawyers, to which I say, oh God, that's going to work.
I hate the fact that it's going to work.
It's going to delay everything, make everything impossible.
So, Democrats trying to be as unhelpful as possible.
Surprise!
All right.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at the MSNBC propagandist trying to take down RFK Jr.
And it's funny that they're criticizing RFK Jr.
when MSNBC is most famous for being wrong about everything.
Wrong about politics, wrong about the pandemic, wrong about science, wrong about climate change.
I mean, MSNBC is the most wrong about science and most wrong about reality I've ever seen.
I mean, it's actually sensationally entertaining to watch how wrong they are.
But...
Here's Chris Hayes trying to insult RFK Jr.
He says, it's all like nutty, and in a lot of cases, just genuinely dangerous.
He's talking about RFK Jr.'s opinion on stuff.
Dangerous fear-mongering.
They just corroded, corrupted, conspiratorial thinking.
And Kennedy's most disqualifying statements, the reason for him being appointed to HHS, are just as so grave as his views on vaccines.
He goes, and I don't want to overstate the case here.
Vaccines are one of the five greatest achievements of human civilization, bar none.
In fact, we've got a pretty good recent example.
He says, just four years ago we managed to develop a vaccine in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
It was the one unambiguously good achievement of Donald Trump's first term.
Really?
Even Trump's best supporters don't think it was an unambiguously good achievement.
No, that's not my opinion.
So I'm holding back my own opinion on this.
But it's certainly not unambiguous when even his own best supporters don't think the vaccine was a good idea.
Now, I'm not saying it's a good idea or a bad idea, because I don't believe any data from the pandemic.
In order for me to know that it saved more lives than it hurt, I would have to believe data.
And as far as I know, there's no data that's reliable that came out of the pandemic.
It's certainly possible that it saved more than it killed.
It's also certainly possible that it hurt and killed more than it is saved.
I don't think there's any way to know.
Because to know, you'd have to have data.
And I wouldn't believe any data from the pandemic.
So, I don't know.
But it's definitely not unambiguous.
And certainly his views on vaccines, as I understand them, is that they need to be better tested and maybe there should be some, let's say, some more risk on the manufacturer and not entirely on the public.
That's pretty reasonable to me.
Here's what I think you're going to find.
I think there's going to be this slow evolution of From people who have been told that RFK Jr.
is a total crackpot who thinks that all vaccinations are bad, which he's never said and never believed.
Never said it, never believed it, that all vaccinations are bad.
And that as he explains what they've been doing to you for years, and you start waking up, do you remember the first time you found out that vaccines are not tested?
At least the way you think science should test things.
Do you remember when you first found that out?
To me, I think it was during the pandemic.
I always took it, I just took it for granted, that if you're going to approve a drug, that it goes through at least one gold standard, you know, kind of the best kind of trial.
And then I thought, obviously, they also follow it for years, so they'd know even 10 years later, they'd know if it caused a problem later.
Turns out nothing like that's happening.
And once you find out that they don't test vaccines the way they would test anything you'd expect to be tested, once you learn that, like your brain can't ever get back.
Your brain can never recover from that.
You'll never trust anything in science again once you realize that you thought they'd been testing them for years.
Nope.
And they've never tested them altogether.
I mean, just think about that.
They've got like, what is it, 70 vaccinations or something?
But they never tested them like, okay, let's give 70 of them to this baby, and then we'll have another baby or a bunch of babies that are getting nothing.
So one of them will give 70.
And the other will get nothing.
And we'll check all the babies over time.
Now, that would tell you something.
But we've never done that.
And there are reasons we don't do it, right?
There are reasons why it is the way it is.
So it's not completely irrational.
There are reasons.
But I didn't know.
I didn't know that they had reasons to not test it.
What?
It's a total mind-breaker.
So I think what's going to happen is RFK Jr.
is going to slowly train even MSNBC that the issue is that the way we do it and what we tell citizens we have done and your informed consent, those are the topics.
The topic is not, did this vaccine work?
That's not exactly the topic.
Sometimes it is, but it's more about are we doing right by the people that we're serving in a variety of ways.
Meanwhile, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is going on TV, of course, MSNBC, I think.
And she says, and I don't even believe, it's just amazing that there's a human being who can do this.
She says, oh, yes, there's no question.
She's talking about Tulsi Gabbard.
I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.
And who would be, as the DNI, responsible for managing our entire intelligence community, hold all of our most significant intelligence information secrets, and essentially would be a direct line to our enemies?
Can you imagine going on television and saying there's no question that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset?
No question?
Not even, you know, maybe we should worry about it or maybe there's an indication or, you know, we've seen a little too much closeness and I'm uncomfortable with it.
No.
Just a flat out statement and there's no question about it.
The Democrats are terrible people.
The politicians, not the voters.
The voters are mostly just confused, I think, and been lied to like crazy.
But Debbie Wasserman Schultz, that is such bad behavior.
And that's really, really bad behavior.
This is a human being.
Tulsi Gabbard is a patriot and an American citizen and an adult human being.
She does not deserve this, because there's no evidence of this.
And I think it's stupid, really.
But wow!
Wow!
And she can just go on with her life, Wasserman Schultz can, after dropping that bomb.
Because once you've said that, it never goes away.
Right?
Unbelievable.
Wow.
So what a terrible person.
So the Daniel Penny trial has more what I think would be eventually good news for Daniel Penny.
I didn't realize that there was one of the witnesses was a Marine.
So there was a Marine.
They say he served with Daniel Penny, but I wasn't sure if they knew each other or they just served at the same time or something.
I was a little unclear on that.
But the other Marine who was right there, right, as close as you can get, like right there, the other Marine, He said at one point he thought it was a blood choke, which would be deadly if he did it too long.
And then there's another kind called an air choke, which would not be deadly if he did it right.
And so his current testimony is that it could have been an air choke and that Penny did appear to loosen his grip when Neely began to struggle.
Now, if the person who is trained in exactly the same techniques as the person who is using them was right there and cannot say he used the wrong technique because now he's saying it looks like he loosened his grip when the guy struggled, that would be a clear indication that you're not putting a blood grip on him because he's still alive when you loosen your grip.
That should be everything you need to know.
That should be the end of it.
The person who knows the most was standing right there, says, no, I cannot confirm that he had the wrong grip.
And in fact, he loosened his grip when he struggled.
That should be the end of it.
We need this penny to drop, if you know what I mean.
The golden age has begun, but there's just this drag.
There's just like this little drag on it.
It needs to go.
NBC says they have an exclusive.
They say the Trump transition team is putting together a list of U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There was a big debacle.
And exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement.
All right?
So let's put all the things together.
It's an NBC News exclusive.
It's an anonymous source.
And it's bad for Trump.
In a way that's important.
You know, his relationship with the military.
So only NBC has a story.
It's an anonymous source.
And it would be negative for Trump.
Do you believe it?
No, of course not.
Of course not.
No, that's every tell in the world for a fake story.
NBC is a tell for a fake story.
Exclusive is a tell.
Anonymous source is a tell.
Anti-Trump is a tell.
You put them all together, I would say there's almost no chance this is true.
Here's what I think is probably true.
I do think that they may be looking at the people who were involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal.
I do think that they may have, in terms of conversation, said, I wonder if any of these people should be court-martialed.
That's not like they're starting with court-martial and then looking for people to put in jail or to court-martial.
It's more like they're looking into it because something really, really bad happened and they want to understand it and avoid it.
Now, if it turned out that they found some unusually bad behavior, Well, a court-martial would be a perfectly acceptable outcome, except for the court-martialed person.
So I feel like this is closer to maybe something that was conversation that NBC is trying to turn into a little bit more than just, you know, if this happens, we might do this.
Let me give you another exclusive for NBC. If a UFO lands in my backyard, I might keep it a secret.
That's it.
There's your news.
I don't know.
If it did, I might.
All right, here's some more NBC News.
So NBC News says the election showed what they're calling a diploma divide.
Where voters are increasingly split by education level.
Huh?
Let me see.
Let's see.
The Democrats just went through a humiliating loss that showed that their framing for just about everything didn't match what the American public was seeing.
So wrong about everything, but now their new take is that what's happening is there's a diploma divide, and uh-oh, there are more people without diplomas than with, so that would explain why those dumb old MAGA people won, because they don't have diplomas.
That's kind of fucked up.
Let me tell you my interpretation.
My interpretation is that the people who believe in fake news...
Got everything wrong, and the people who knew that fake news was fake came pretty close to getting everything right.
So what we've proven is that a diploma makes you more brainwashed and likely to think that you know that science is real, and not having a diploma apparently is correlated with having a much better understanding of what is real.
Yeah.
So how about instead of showing that the losers were the smart ones?
Yeah, the losers were the smart ones because they got the diplomas.
So they're the smart ones.
Still, they're the smart ones.
Yeah, they lost.
They lost.
But it's because there's so many dumb people without the diplomas.
Now, how about the people who won are smart?
Because they knew how to win, and they knew what was true, and they knew what was not.
And how about the people who are all the smart ones are pretty fucking stupid.
And surely they know it by now.
Surely they understand that as a group, they were very wrong about not only their strategy, But all of their policies, all of their policies and all of their strategies and even their top candidates were just fucking stupid.
All right?
Now, you can tell me, oh, but all the stupid people have the good diplomas.
Well, apparently a diploma doesn't help you.
I guess diplomas are worthless.
Because if what you can get with a diploma is a Democrat...
I would say that disproves the value of a diploma.
No, I don't mean that.
I still think diplomas have value in this world.
They're overpriced, but if you can get one, it's probably worth it.
Yeah, but this is not a diploma problem.
It's a people who believe fake news problem.
And the reason NBC News can't find that frame is that they're part of the problem.
They're part of the fake news.
So they've got to sell you some other frames so it doesn't look like their fault.
Meanwhile, Kamala...
Harris' staffers, they thought they were going to get paid until year-end, but they are already cut off because they're out of money.
Post-millennium is reporting on this.
Do you realize how much of a bullet we may have dodged by keeping Harris out of office?
Is there anything happening in her campaign with her fiscal responsibility that suggests to you in any way that she would have handled the national debt?
Where was her Elon?
Was she going to get Elon and Vivek to bring down the national debt?
No.
As far as I know, she had no plan for bringing down the national debt.
Am I right?
No plan.
Trump had a plan, and he's implementing it.
And it's a very aggressive plan.
It's probably the only one that would work, which is massive restructuring of the government and doing it fast.
Nothing else is going to work.
Certainly nothing else.
So she had no debt planned.
And she brought in about twice as much money as Trump and spent more than she had.
Trump brought in half as much and didn't even spend it.
Which one are you going to trust with your money?
I mean, I feel like these are really easy questions.
Who are you going to trust with your money?
Now, I get that Trump was once bankrupt, etc.
But if you look into the history of that, you'll see it has more to do with some really unusual things that happened.
One of the things that Democrats like to say is that Trump failed in a casino in New Jersey.
And you think to yourself, how in the world do you fail in a casino?
And the answer is that things changed in the local government that made the casino no longer viable.
So who saw that coming?
Like, who would have seen that there was some change in government that made your business suddenly unviable, inviable?
And then also with his real estate stuff, there was a period where I think there was a tax change that made what he was doing suddenly a bad idea from a good idea.
So I think the story of Trump's, where he's had financial problems, were because the government made a change, not because he made a bad mistake.
And it wasn't the kind of change you could have foreseen.
So keep that in mind.
And then he also came back from it, which is an even more interesting story.
There's a Connecticut teacher who got fired for saying terrible things about Trump supporters on a video on social media.
Breitbart is reporting this.
She was a special ed teacher.
And she is really mad at Trump supporters and she got fired for it.
Now, the question I ask you is, would she have been fired in 2017 for doing exactly the same thing?
I don't know.
I'm hoping that what's happening is that we're seeing some normalcy returning, where if you're a school teacher and you say that you want to physically abuse half of the country, maybe your employer needs to act on that.
There's a story that NASA employees have asked Elon Musk to, quote, clean house.
Because they say that they've wasted a bunch of money on DEI stuff, just millions and millions on it, and it's just slowing them down.
They want Elon Musk to help them get rid of all that DEI stuff.
This is also the post-millennium reporting on this.
I don't know if that's every NASA employee.
There might have been a few.
This is one of those stories where when you hear NASA employees, it doesn't say how many.
So it could have been five NASA employees say we spend too much on DEI and the rest of them decided to stay quiet because it's too dangerous.
But I don't disagree that there are NASA employees who think they spend too much on DEI, i.e.
every single white male.
And now, finally, do you know Rick Rubin?
Rick Rubin, one of the most successful music producers in the world, has worked with some of the biggest names.
All the big ones you've heard of, you're familiar with a lot of the music that came out through his production of it.
Anyway, he's got a philosophy about creativity that says you should create for yourself.
So you should not be thinking, what does my audience want, and then make what they want.
Rather, you should make the very best thing that you would want, and then that's the most likely to also be successful.
Because if it's something you really want, well, chances are somebody likes it too.
Well, that is, on one hand, Good and standard advice that matches Guy Kawasaki, I think, was the first one who I heard say it.
That you should only invent products that you would use yourself.
If you wouldn't use it, why are you trying to get somebody else to use it?
Now, the exception to that, of course, would be some industrial thing that you would never use yourself.
It's only for somebody else.
So there'd be exceptions.
But I think humor is an exception.
Because when I tell the story about my travels from being a cartoonist who was not as successful to one who was, the biggest change was doing the opposite of what Rick Rubin suggests.
So I started out making comics that were entirely amusing to me, only to find out that I'm not like other people.
I'm not like enough other people.
So the things that would be absolutely hilarious to me, other people would say, oh, that doesn't really touch me.
You know, I don't relate to it, that sort of thing.
And then one day, an experienced cartoonist, the cartoonist who did the family circle, or circus or circle, I forget, He told me I should make my cartoons for other people.
That I should make them for the audience.
And I got really mad because he said it in front of a crowd of people.
I didn't like where he said it.
They were my customers.
But it was the most useful...
Yeah, Bill Keen.
It was the most useful professional advice I've ever gotten.
I was, in fact, making comics that I liked.
And they weren't going anywhere.
As soon as I said to myself, well, what would they like?
And then paying attention to the feedback, everything took off.
Specifically, here's what I learned.
Let's say I've never worked as an accountant, which is true.
But I know as a cartoonist that if I make a joke about the accountant that you're dealing with, You're probably going to like it if I execute it right.
So that's a perfect example.
So I would do a lot of jokes that were about somebody in a particular job or a particular boss employee situation that you could relate to.
If I could make you relate to it, then the bar for making it funny was lower.
Because you would laugh at anything you relate to, basically.
So I learned that if I can make something that you relate to, then I can be successful.
If I make something that I can relate to, and man, is that funny to me, eh, 10%.
10% of the public says, yeah, yeah, I get that.
So, while I have no doubt that Rick Rubin's advice makes sense within the domain that he's worked primarily in music, I can see that.
I think the Beatles were an example of that.
They literally just said, that sounds good, so we'll put it in there.
If it sounded good to them, they made it, and of course it worked.
I just don't think it's a universal, and I don't know if cartooning is the exception.
Rick also mentioned that it's one reason that movies are so bad, because the movies are being made for the public.
The public is presumed to be dumb and only want to see car chases, so they make bad movies.
I have a slightly different take on that.
I don't think that has to do with giving the audience what they want.
I think it has to do with the people who have the money think that's what makes money.
So if you need money to make your movie, you've got to get it from somebody who says, yeah, it needs to have a car chase scene.
You've got to have somebody tied to a chair.
Your hero has to change.
They're going to tell you it's got to hit all these notes.
But I don't think that's what the artists want.
I think the director actually wants to do something that they like.
So movies are kind of a hybrid where you don't get to do what you want.
You have to do what the money people want you to do.
But anyway, I think Rick Rubin is one of the most brilliant people in the creative field.
So he has a new book out.
And I recommend it.
I haven't read it, but if Rick Rubin wrote it and it's about how to make something work, I definitely recommend it because he's one of the smartest people out there.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my prepared remarks.
I'm going to talk privately for a few minutes to the local subscribers.
So thank you on X and YouTube and Rumble for joining today.
On a Sunday when all the other podcasters are sleeping in, we're having a good time.
