Real Coffe - Scott Adams - Episode 3109 - The Scott Adams School 03/06/26
Aired: 2026-03-06
Duration: 01:01:09


=== Get Out of Your Head (03:34) ===

[00:00:00]  He's always number one.
[00:00:02]  I thought I'd play a little bit.
[00:00:06]  Let's see.
[00:00:06]  Tell me if you can hear it, okay?
[00:00:08]  Somebody asked me for a reframe to help them get out of their head and people hear it in the chat.
[00:00:17]  And I suggested the reframe that I tried myself, and it worked.
[00:00:23]  Where you just say, get out, where you just say, get out, where you just say, get out, where you just say, I hear us.
[00:00:30]  Get out.
[00:00:31]  Get out.
[00:00:34]  Just say, get out.
[00:00:37]  Just get out of your head.
[00:00:40]  Now, the frame that makes it work is to realize that you are a person who has two completely different lives.
[00:00:47]  This is the key.
[00:00:49]  There's a part of you that lives only in your head where you think about the past, which literally doesn't exist.
[00:00:57]  It's imaginary.
[00:00:59]  It existed at one point, but now it's just thoughts of the past.
[00:01:03]  Get out.
[00:01:07]  Amazing.
[00:01:08]  Just say, get out.
[00:01:12]  I want you to help me get out.
[00:01:14]  But you also have thoughts of, oh, what will happen in the future?
[00:01:17]  I'm worried about the future.
[00:01:19]  And that doesn't exist.
[00:01:21]  And that doesn't exist.
[00:01:22]  It doesn't exist.
[00:01:25]  So the life you live in your head is a completely imaginary one.
[00:01:29]  Things of the history in your past that don't exist anymore don't exist anymore and worries about the future that doesn't exist yet.
[00:01:36]  But the outside world is all real stuff, stuff you touch breathe, the mom people dance.
[00:01:42]  We live in both of those worlds and so the idea that I had that work when I did it was I just said, get out.
[00:01:53]  I love that.
[00:01:54]  You guys just get out.
[00:01:58]  All right, we're going right in for a sip.
[00:02:00]  Is everyone ready?
[00:02:02]  Take us away.
[00:02:04]  And as you're streaming in preparing, do you notice the little ASMR noise I make?
[00:02:11]  Some of you are only going to listen to this on audio without watching, but watch how comforting it is to hear this.
[00:02:19]  This is me organizing my papers, That's right.
[00:02:23]  There's a whole industry of people who listen to little sounds like that to fall asleep.
[00:02:27]  True story.
[00:02:28]  It's called ASMR.
[00:02:31]  But that's not why you're here.
[00:02:34]  No, nope.
[00:02:36]  I know why you're here.
[00:02:37]  You're here for the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a bugger or glass, a tank or chalicerstein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
[00:02:47]  Fill it with your favorite liquid.
[00:02:48]  I like coffee.
[00:02:50]  And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day thing that makes everything better.
[00:02:54]  The simultaneous sip.
[00:02:56]  Go.
[00:03:04]  That's hitting the spot, isn't it?
[00:03:09]  All right.
[00:03:12]  I love those extended arms.
[00:03:15]  Good morning, everybody.
[00:03:16]  Welcome to the Scott Adams School.
[00:03:19]  My name is Erica, and I'm joined today by our beautiful Sergio with the beautiful springy background there.
[00:03:27]  Even more beautiful than Sergio is Marcella.
[00:03:31]  Good morning.
[00:03:32]  She's added lights in there.
[00:03:33]  Gorgeous.

=== Alternative Reasons for Skepticism (15:42) ===

[00:03:34]  We've got Owen, who's just still stoic and serious up there, Owen.
[00:03:40]  Good morning, everyone.
[00:03:41]  And our one of our best friends ever in the whole world.
[00:03:46]  We have Joel Pollack returning.
[00:03:48]  He is Scott's biographer, and he is also the, what are you at the California Post?
[00:03:56]  I am the opinion editor.
[00:03:58]  Oh, I love opinions.
[00:04:00]  That is my favorite.
[00:04:01]  I have so many.
[00:04:03]  Does that mean you edit other people's opinions?
[00:04:05]  That's correct.
[00:04:06]  When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you.
[00:04:08]  All right.
[00:04:09]  I love that.
[00:04:11]  Well, so the news crew is joined by one of our favorite newsy people, Joel.
[00:04:16]  So we don't have too much time with him, just a half hour.
[00:04:19]  So we're going to ask Joel to, you know, help us break down what we're seeing, how the Iran situation is progressing.
[00:04:27]  What do you think we need to know?
[00:04:29]  Where is it going?
[00:04:30]  Are we nervous?
[00:04:33]  Hi.
[00:04:33]  Okay.
[00:04:34]  So let's talk about the situation in Iran and with the Iran war.
[00:04:40]  And I think back to the last ever show we did with Scott the day before he passed away.
[00:04:48]  And I was on that show and we talked about the situation in Iran, actually.
[00:04:54]  And I said that my preference was for a negotiated agreement that would include some very strong human rights components.
[00:05:03]  And that obviously did not happen.
[00:05:06]  I actually shopped that idea around a little bit and I found that nobody was really interested in it, which is interesting.
[00:05:15]  When I say nobody, I mean nobody in the administration was interested in it, other than to say that's kind of interesting, which is another way of saying we're not doing that.
[00:05:24]  And I think that's partly because, from their perspective, what they were seeing was that the Iranian regime and their negotiators were completely intransigent.
[00:05:32]  They weren't going to budge on anything.
[00:05:35]  On the other side, there was no interest from the anti-war people either.
[00:05:40]  And that's curious to me because, as Scott points out in Loser Think, you never have an alternative in isolation.
[00:05:52]  You can't just say, how do I feel about X without considering the alternative Y.
[00:05:59]  So you can say, I'm against war in Iran, but you have to have an alternative or compare it to an alternative.
[00:06:06]  There's no vacuum in which you can just have one thing without considering the other alternatives or the costs.
[00:06:12]  He used to call that a half pinion.
[00:06:14]  So I'm against war in Iran.
[00:06:17]  Great.
[00:06:17]  What do you do about the fact that they are still pursuing nuclear weapons and they're still building ballistic missiles?
[00:06:23]  What do you do then?
[00:06:25]  Well, I don't know.
[00:06:26]  I haven't thought about that.
[00:06:27]  So in the real world of adults, where there are trade-offs for everything, we have to consider that not going to war doesn't necessarily mean you avoid war.
[00:06:37]  So the reason the human rights idea was interesting was it provided an alternative, at least interesting to me.
[00:06:44]  So if you were anti-war, this was something that you could have seized on and said, look, there's this idea that is out there of a diplomatic agreement that would avoid war and impose human rights conditions on Iran.
[00:07:00]  It has a precedent.
[00:07:01]  This happened with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and eventually we got to where we wanted to be.
[00:07:07]  And the Soviets at least signed on to it and got to survive another 15 years or so.
[00:07:12]  So maybe this is an alternative.
[00:07:14]  We can look at that and let people in Iran decide their own future rather than us playing any kind of direct role.
[00:07:21]  It was interesting to me that nobody picked up on that from the anti-war side.
[00:07:26]  And it tells me that people weren't really thinking this through, at least in that part of the argument.
[00:07:33]  And that's not necessarily a surprise.
[00:07:35]  A lot of the debates that we see in social media are, in fact, half-pinions, people not really wanting to consider the full range of possibilities.
[00:07:45]  One of the things Scott says we should do is think like economists, if we can, because economists often anticipate all kinds of different possibilities, or scientists, for example, scientists never fit one explanation to a bunch of different observed phenomena.
[00:08:03]  They consider other explanations might be possible, other factors.
[00:08:08]  So that was my attempt to provide that alternative.
[00:08:13]  It didn't really go very far.
[00:08:16]  And I think the reality is probably more like what the Trump administration was seeing, which is that the Iranian regime was not willing to work with us.
[00:08:27]  Now, I want to take another step back and say, what would Scott have thought about going to war generally?
[00:08:34]  Scott was opposed to foreign wars.
[00:08:36]  And one of the reasons he supported Trump was because Trump was very keen on avoiding war and ending war and resolving war while using military force where necessary.
[00:08:47]  So Scott was, I think, generally supportive of Trump going after Qasim Soleimani, and he was supportive of the result in the 12-day war last summer when we attacked the Iranian nuclear sites.
[00:09:01]  But generally, he thought the Iraq war had been a terrible idea, and he thought Trump was a refreshing antidote to the establishment politicians who always seemed to want to bomb everything.
[00:09:12]  So I think his attitude toward the Iran war would have been skeptical.
[00:09:16]  And I want to lay out a few reasons for skepticism.
[00:09:21]  Even if it might turn out to have been the best alternative, here are some reasons to be skeptical.
[00:09:25]  Number one, we don't know what happens afterwards.
[00:09:28]  And I don't think Trump knows what happens either.
[00:09:31]  Because the Iranian people, while much more coherent than the Iraqi people in the sense that Iran has been a nation and a civilization for a lot longer.
[00:09:46]  Iraq was sort of cobbled together by colonial powers, carved up out of the map of the Middle East.
[00:09:52]  Iran has thousands of years of history.
[00:09:56]  It has a fairly sophisticated economy that goes beyond just oil and gas.
[00:10:01]  And it has educated people.
[00:10:04]  It has advanced technology.
[00:10:07]  So you would expect that Iran might have a better transition to whatever happens after this tyrannical regime.
[00:10:16]  And yet we just don't know.
[00:10:18]  There are other things that could happen to Iran.
[00:10:21]  It also has ethnic groups, for example, just as Iraq did, that could lead to the breakup of the country.
[00:10:27]  We're starting to see perhaps some warning signs of that now.
[00:10:30]  There are Iranian Kurds.
[00:10:32]  There are Iranian ethnic Azerbaijanis.
[00:10:35]  I think they're called Azeris.
[00:10:36]  I could be wrong about that.
[00:10:37]  But basically, you've got these different ethnic groups that form large portions of the Iranian population in different regions of the country.
[00:10:45]  So you could see the breakup of the Iranian state.
[00:10:48]  So we don't really know what's going to happen.
[00:10:51]  And we also don't know if it's going to be a democracy.
[00:10:55]  We don't know if the Shah or the son of the Shah, who has been making a lot of media appearances in the West lately, if he's going to come back.
[00:11:03]  President Trump seemed skeptical of him.
[00:11:05]  And perhaps rightly so.
[00:11:07]  I don't know enough about him.
[00:11:08]  Maybe he could be a transitional figure, which is what he said he would be.
[00:11:11]  He would run Iran until a new democracy could take shape.
[00:11:16]  So we don't really know what happens afterwards.
[00:11:18]  And I don't think Trump does either.
[00:11:20]  Trump has basically said to the Iranian people, once we stop bombing, we'll let you know, and then you can rise up and take your destiny in your own hands.
[00:11:28]  But again, we don't know what that means.
[00:11:30]  And it could be chaos.
[00:11:32]  In Iraq, it certainly was chaos.
[00:11:34]  I don't know if the same thing would happen.
[00:11:36]  And Scott also warned against assuming that history would repeat itself.
[00:11:42]  And in Loser Think, which is a book I'm going through right now, he says don't think like historians do.
[00:11:49]  He's not disparaging historians, but he's basically using historical thinking as a model for what not to do in the sense that history is not necessarily something that repeats itself.
[00:11:59]  So don't assume that because one set of circumstances produced one result, it would necessarily produce the same result the next time through.
[00:12:05]  So we might not see bombing and terrorism and all kinds of other things, especially because the ethnic groups are different, the causes are different, and we don't know what's going to happen.
[00:12:16]  So that's a reason to be skeptical.
[00:12:18]  It's just a big unknown.
[00:12:20]  We don't know really what's going to happen.
[00:12:21]  And I don't think there's a plan.
[00:12:23]  And if there's a plan, nobody's telling us about it.
[00:12:25]  And it seems to be that this is the kind of thing that you want to have people talking about because running a country is something that has to be done publicly.
[00:12:33]  So you'd want people talking about it already.
[00:12:35]  And I just don't see that really happening just yet.
[00:12:38]  That's one reason to be skeptical.
[00:12:40]  Another reason to be skeptical is we don't know yet what our own military capabilities are and what the will of the other side is.
[00:12:50]  So there are all kinds of reports.
[00:12:52]  There were all kinds of reports in the days before the war that we don't have enough ammunition, for example, because we had sent so much ammunition to the Ukrainians that we didn't have enough to maintain our own war effort for a long time.
[00:13:06]  Since then, Trump has said that we have basically unlimited supplies of ammunition.
[00:13:10]  He could be right.
[00:13:11]  We don't know.
[00:13:11]  We don't know what our own military capabilities are, and our own government may not know.
[00:13:17]  So that's another reason to be skeptical.
[00:13:19]  And then finally, there's just the X factor of unknown events.
[00:13:23]  We don't know if this could lead to terrorism.
[00:13:27]  We don't know if this could lead China to attack Taiwan because we're tied down in the Middle East.
[00:13:34]  We just don't know what other unknowns might emerge.
[00:13:38]  And whenever you launch a war, you have the possibility of destabilizing the situation.
[00:13:44]  So those are all reasons to be skeptical.
[00:13:47]  Reasons not to be skeptical, reasons to be more hopeful.
[00:13:51]  Thus far, overwhelmingly, the story has been one of success, military success.
[00:13:57]  The United States has taken out the regime's weaponry, the regime's leadership, and the regime did something very stupid, which was attacking all of these Arab countries in the region where the United States has bases or interests, as well as Israel.
[00:14:13]  And there really can't be much of a strategic goal to that other than to try to influence the media debate by saying, hey, America's war is costing you something.
[00:14:21]  It's causing you some risk.
[00:14:23]  But I don't think that that was the effect of what happened.
[00:14:27]  I think it rather tended to rally those countries around the United States, almost proving the case that the Iranian regime was too dangerous and that it was really the common enemy of the other countries in the region, especially the Sunni countries, Sunni Arab countries.
[00:14:45]  So I think the Iranians continued to make mistakes.
[00:14:50]  And I said before the war, the only way I really saw war happening was if the Iranian regime miscalculated.
[00:14:55]  I think they did miscalculate.
[00:14:56]  I think they miscalculated the will and resolve of the Trump administration and they miscalculated the union and unity of the other countries that are allied with Trump.
[00:15:09]  There's no real break in that coalition despite Iran attacking these other countries and imposing costs on them.
[00:15:16]  So I think that's going well in the sense that we are achieving military goals.
[00:15:20]  We're holding a coalition together.
[00:15:23]  Another reason, and this really is crucial, another reason is that we haven't seen any kind of large-scale global effect yet of this war.
[00:15:35]  Gas prices are rising, but they're not rising in a catastrophic way.
[00:15:40]  We also haven't seen any really effective or even determined or aggressive response by Russia or China.
[00:15:48]  So this is going pretty well.
[00:15:51]  And it is conceivable at least that within a week or two, the Iranian regime would be gone and we would be at that day after question pretty quickly.
[00:16:00]  The Iranians also don't seem to be able to kill as many people as they once hoped with their retaliation.
[00:16:07]  They're firing at civilians.
[00:16:09]  Just a reminder, I mean, they do target some military sites, but they're using means that almost always hurt civilians.
[00:16:16]  And while Israelis are spending most of their days in bomb shelters, very few of them are being killed.
[00:16:22]  So the missile defenses are holding and there are just reasons to look at this thus far as a success.
[00:16:28]  Let me talk about China and Russia for a minute.
[00:16:30]  And this is where we want to step back and look at what is really going on here.
[00:16:36]  So the part of this I think that Scott might have actually thought is, I don't want to say good, but at least useful, is the Chinese and Russian piece of this.
[00:16:48]  Iran sells almost all of its oil to China because it's under sanctions.
[00:16:53]  It can't sell a lot of its oil on the open market.
[00:16:55]  And so it sells to China, and China is heavily dependent on the Middle East for oil still.
[00:17:00]  So what President Trump is doing is cutting off a key supply of energy to China.
[00:17:07]  He's also cutting off a key military ally.
[00:17:10]  And it's clear that Chinese were supplying components to the Iranians.
[00:17:15]  I've even seen reports that Iran was building missiles using components and fuel that were supplied by China.
[00:17:20]  One report I saw suggested that one of the reasons Trump acted when he did was because there was a danger of reaching a point of no return.
[00:17:28]  Iran can build these missiles apparently a lot faster than we can build the anti-missile defenses, which are much more sophisticated, the interceptors, they call them, the missiles that can catch and destroy other missiles.
[00:17:40]  Iran can produce about 100 a month and we can produce maybe 10 a month.
[00:17:44]  So the longer this goes on, the more China can export the materials to Iran, the more Iran can reach a point of no return where they would have tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of missiles and we'd only have a few thousand interceptors and Iran could then overwhelm any attempt to stop them.
[00:18:00]  So there had to be perhaps that calculation.
[00:18:03]  But regardless, now we've cut that off.
[00:18:04]  So we've cut off a key point of Chinese influence in the Middle East.
[00:18:08]  And that could raise prices of energy for China and cause some real problems to the Chinese economy.
[00:18:14]  And in fact, I've seen a report that China has now encouraged people not to export oil or it's encouraged its own domestic oil industry not to export energy.
[00:18:23]  They need all of their resources internally in China right now.
[00:18:27]  The other piece of this is Russia.
[00:18:30]  And Russia gets most of its drone technology from Iran.
[00:18:34]  And keep in mind, Trump's been trying to drag Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.
[00:18:39]  And I think that he had the Ukrainians more or less where he wanted them early in this second administration when he was able, after some arguing and some publicly embarrassing exchanges, he was able to get Zelensky to agree to accept whatever diplomacy he was going to put forward.
[00:18:58]  And then Putin basically took advantage of that by going harder on the military side.
[00:19:03]  I think what Trump is trying to do is force Putin to the table by saying, I'm taking away your drone supplier.
[00:19:08]  So it could be that by going after Iran and getting rid of the drone supply to Russia, that you make peace more likely in Ukraine.

=== Iranian Leadership Attacks (15:20) ===

[00:19:17]  So that could be the other piece of this.
[00:19:19]  So it's possible that- So many moving parts.
[00:19:22]  Holy cow.
[00:19:23]  So I'll ask for questions in a second, but it's just possible that this war has a much bigger geopolitical aspect to it with regard to confronting China on the one hand, which Scott was in favor of, and bringing Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table on the other hand, which Scott was also in favor of.
[00:19:44]  So I think that's a reason to look at this at least as potentially a positive development.
[00:19:50]  A lot of it depends on what happens over the next few weeks, and we'll see.
[00:19:56]  I do think that although the American public generally is skeptical of war and of this war, Trump's supporters are still on board about 80%, according to some polls, with the war, as long as it doesn't impose huge costs on the United States and we don't see a lot of Americans dying or boots on the ground exposing people to greater danger and that sort of thing.
[00:20:17]  So, I think thus far, I'm cautiously optimistic about it.
[00:20:22]  Although I think there are some very big risks that we talked about.
[00:20:25]  So, with that, happy to field any questions you might have.
[00:20:30]  And just these are my own opinions.
[00:20:31]  I've infused some of what I thought Scott would think about and talk about.
[00:20:35]  Yeah, that's amazing.
[00:20:37]  I think you know, I'm learning more about it, but understanding the component of Russia and China and really, like as everybody says, 3D, 4D, chess.
[00:20:48]  I mean, the effects that the domino effect could be amazing.
[00:20:52]  So, yeah, Owen, I know you definitely do.
[00:20:55]  Yeah.
[00:20:55]  Do you think Israel's agenda is different than the United States?
[00:21:00]  And do you think we're actually coordinated with them?
[00:21:04]  Because I did make a note as I've been watching the coverage that it seems like the stated objectives and the military actions being taken by the United States is primarily taking away the missiles, taking away the capability to strike.
[00:21:20]  Whereas it looks to me like at least the reports are that Israel is targeting the leadership.
[00:21:26]  They're trying to take down the Ayatollah.
[00:21:29]  They're trying to take down all the replacements, all the leadership, all the military leadership, political leadership.
[00:21:37]  And do you think Israel's objectives are kind of at odds with what the United States is doing?
[00:21:42]  And do you think there'll come a point where we may, you know, for example, want to stop and Israel wants to keep going?
[00:21:50]  I don't think so, at least not in this war.
[00:21:53]  I think the United States and Israel have the same objectives, although not exactly the same set of objectives on each side, but there is an overlap in Iran.
[00:22:01]  I think right now both sides want to get rid of the Iranian regime, and that would be victory for both sides.
[00:22:08]  For Israel, getting rid of the regime means not being under constant existential threat because the regime has vowed for many decades to get rid of Israel.
[00:22:18]  So the Israelis would like to see the Iranian regime replaced.
[00:22:22]  The American goal for a long time was not to replace the Iranian regime.
[00:22:28]  And I actually thought a couple of weeks ago that it might be better to have the regime weakened but still in place as long as they continue to become weaker over time.
[00:22:43]  The president may have had better intelligence on that understanding that they were either closer to a nuclear weapon or that they were still gaining strength in conventional terms.
[00:22:51]  And so they weren't going to be able to be brought to some kind of weaker position through a diplomatic agreement.
[00:22:59]  I don't think there's any divergence right now.
[00:23:02]  I do think that we have broader interests than the Israelis.
[00:23:06]  The Israelis don't necessarily share our interests on Russia and China.
[00:23:12]  They're a small country, so they don't think in those terms.
[00:23:16]  There has been a sort of, I don't want to say conflict, but there's been a tension between the U.S. and Israel for quite some time, maybe about a quarter of a century or so, over Israel's trade relationships with China and Russia.
[00:23:31]  And until about a decade ago, Israel had pretty warm trade relations with China, for example.
[00:23:37]  Also, a significant proportion of Israelis are former Soviet citizens.
[00:23:42]  There was a huge wave of emigration from the post-Soviet world to Israel over the last 30 years.
[00:23:48]  So Israel had reasons to have closer relationships with Russia and China, and we have had a problem with that.
[00:23:55]  We have told the Israelis, you can't trade certain things with China.
[00:23:59]  You can't sell certain things to Russia.
[00:24:01]  And for example, there's a big port deal in Haifa, Israel's main Mediterranean port, that we have a problem with because the Israelis in an earlier, friendlier era, before even we took China seriously as a threat, the Israelis made a deal where China could build its own port terminal, basically, in Haifa, and they've done it.
[00:24:20]  And I think they've even allowed them to open another one because it was in the contract that they originally signed.
[00:24:25]  So we've had a problem with Israel's close relations, and the Israelis trying to comply with what we want have scrambled to try to unravel some of these relationships.
[00:24:35]  But that's where I think the interests diverge.
[00:24:38]  The Israelis aren't playing that same game.
[00:24:40]  I think, in a sense, they're glad that we are playing that game in this war because it means that our interests line up with theirs with regard to Iran.
[00:24:49]  But I think if you just look at the situation in isolation in the Middle East, and I'll just be honest with you as someone who supports Israel very strongly, I thought that Israel's interests were served by not having a war.
[00:25:03]  That was my assessment of it, that because the war could go any way, it could go in any direction, you know, because of all the unknowns, and because the Israelis are tired of war.
[00:25:14]  You know, we sit here and I'm sitting at a dining room table talking to you.
[00:25:19]  Most of my Israeli friends are in bomb shelters underground and they post cute videos online of parties in the basement and things like that.
[00:25:26]  But in reality, it's pretty uncomfortable.
[00:25:29]  And I think that the Israeli people are ready to move on.
[00:25:32]  They want to go back to work.
[00:25:33]  They want to go to school.
[00:25:34]  They want to have holidays.
[00:25:35]  They want to have a weekend.
[00:25:37]  They don't want to endure this anymore.
[00:25:41]  So they would prefer not to have a war.
[00:25:43]  I think they support the war because they understand that getting rid of Iran means they would be more secure in future.
[00:25:48]  But I think the gains of the last three years for Israel were so significant that you almost wouldn't want to jeopardize them by risking them on another war.
[00:25:58]  So I am a little bit, I mean, I'm not surprised by it because people have conspiracy theories about everything, but I don't agree at all that Israel dragged the United States into a war.
[00:26:10]  I think if anything, this was a situation where the leaders of both countries agreed that there was an opportunity to take out the Iranian leadership, but that this was not necessarily a war that would have been in Israel's interest, at least right now, other than the fact that the United States was ready for it, that Iran had not negotiated in good faith with Trump, and that the Iranian leaders were all gathered in one place at one time.
[00:26:37]  I'll just say something small about that.
[00:26:41]  Apparently, the Israelis had the intelligence that the Iranian leadership was all in one place at one time.
[00:26:45]  And that was the same situation that happened in 2024 when all the Hezbollah leaders were together in Lebanon.
[00:26:54]  Israel basically dropped a bomb on their leadership and essentially won the war in one attack.
[00:27:00]  And it looks like the Iranian leadership basically made the same silly mistake.
[00:27:04]  Doesn't seem suspicious to you.
[00:27:07]  No, because I think the Israelis have done such a good job of penetrating the communications networks in these places that I think the Iranians, like the Lebanese terrorists, were convinced that only face-to-face meeting would work.
[00:27:22]  They couldn't talk like we're talking now because it would be intercepted by somebody.
[00:27:25]  And so that's just a result of a kind of relentless covert espionage and war over time.
[00:27:33]  I was a little surprised that the Iranian leadership would do that.
[00:27:36]  But maybe the other thing that they've said is that, or I've seen reports of this, that they assumed the Israelis wouldn't attack during the day because it's more typical for Israel to launch air attacks at night than during the day in broad daylight when you can see the planes.
[00:27:50]  And so I think they just assumed they were going to be safer.
[00:27:54]  So I think some of this might just have been triggered by opportunity.
[00:27:58]  In other words, all of these costs and benefits to various different plans and options might have been on the table before President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Etanyahu.
[00:28:06]  And all of that might have been worth whatever it was worth.
[00:28:09]  But then all of a sudden they knew this event was going to happen, that all of these people were going to be in one place at one time.
[00:28:14]  And they might have only known with a few hours advance notice.
[00:28:17]  And that might have changed the calculation altogether, because if you can take out the entire leadership at once, maybe the costs of the war are a lot lower and that changes everything.
[00:28:26]  So that might have been what triggered it rather than all these other broader decision-making items.
[00:28:31]  Right.
[00:28:32]  Interesting.
[00:28:32]  So what's your reaction to the comments from the Iranian foreign minister?
[00:28:38]  He's talking a strong game like we were planning for this for decades and we actually lulled the United States into thinking they could do this and we wanted them to do it and we're going to fight forever and we have this capability that can go on forever.
[00:28:52]  And, you know, he's he's talking almost like he thinks they're winning and that we're doing exactly what he wanted us to do.
[00:29:00]  It all seems like BS to me, but I just wanted to get your take on it.
[00:29:04]  Well, I think it probably is BS, but we can't know.
[00:29:06]  I mean, the reason we can't know is because of the unknowns that remain.
[00:29:11]  And what we're seeing right now is that the Iranian regime, the core of the regime, is still intact.
[00:29:18]  We're not seeing, at least not yet, we're not seeing defections.
[00:29:22]  We're not seeing people break away.
[00:29:23]  We're not seeing the Iranian military turn on the leadership of the country.
[00:29:27]  And I think there's a strong conviction among our enemies that we just don't have the staying power for this thing.
[00:29:33]  I mean, they'll look at things like the bad jobs report that came out today, 92,000 jobs lost in February.
[00:29:39]  You know, it's one thing to miss expectations.
[00:29:41]  It's another thing to be in the red, to be negative.
[00:29:43]  And they'll say, oh, you know, Trump's got political problems at home.
[00:29:46]  He's got the economy to worry about.
[00:29:48]  He can't gain this for longer.
[00:29:50]  All we have to do is hold out for long enough.
[00:29:53]  And that means we win the war.
[00:29:54]  If we survive the war, we win.
[00:29:56]  So, and look, they have recent history to look at.
[00:29:59]  I mean, the Israelis wanted to destroy Hamas entirely.
[00:30:02]  And Trump, to end the war, said, no, we're just ending this and you're going to have to deal with Hamas on the other side.
[00:30:08]  And I think Trump understands that Hamas is not really someone you can deal with.
[00:30:12]  But the Iranians look at the same situation and say, look, if you just stay around long enough, eventually you survive.
[00:30:19]  These Western countries, they don't have the stomach for this.
[00:30:21]  They don't want to deal with casualties.
[00:30:23]  They don't want to suffer in any way.
[00:30:25]  They don't want to pay any price.
[00:30:26]  We're willing to force our people to pay the price of war and we're just going to stick around.
[00:30:30]  So he might be right.
[00:30:32]  I mean, they might have drawn us into a situation where we have all the negatives of a war, including hurting our international reputation and domestic political problems in a midterm election year, while they get to survive.
[00:30:47]  And then if they survive, they come back stronger.
[00:30:49]  And then maybe they race to a nuclear weapon if they can still build one, assuming we haven't taken out their capacity entirely.
[00:30:55]  And then they'll use it at the first opportunity because they'll say, look, we have no choice.
[00:30:58]  We have to defend ourselves.
[00:30:59]  The only way to do this is to blow our enemies up now because otherwise we're just going to get attacked again.
[00:31:03]  So I think we don't know.
[00:31:06]  I do think that the stronger probability is that he's just lying because this is what we see totalitarian regimes do all the way to the end is they reject this false sense of strength, but we don't know.
[00:31:18]  Yeah.
[00:31:19]  And how do the people in Israel feel about this?
[00:31:24]  I think they're cautiously optimistic.
[00:31:26]  And I think the reason they feel that way is that there are fewer and fewer missile attacks.
[00:31:32]  So even though people are still in the shelters, a lot of the time, the attacks are less frequent.
[00:31:38]  They're less deadly.
[00:31:39]  The worst ones were in the first 48 hours of the war.
[00:31:43]  And also the attacks from Iran's terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas haven't been as bad as they would have been a few years ago.
[00:31:51]  Hezbollah has no capacity to fire at Israel the way it once did.
[00:31:55]  So I think people feel like over time, this is getting better in the sense that the defense position in Israel is getting stronger.
[00:32:03]  Again, though, I think Israelis, if you talk to Israelis, what they just want is to be safe and they have felt unsafe for a long time.
[00:32:11]  They felt safe during the first Trump administration.
[00:32:14]  The Biden years were pretty terrible because Israel's enemies felt emboldened to attack them.
[00:32:20]  And I think Trump is restoring a sense of security, but it takes so much more work to do once you've lost that sense of security and you've emboldened the enemies to do all kinds of horrible things.
[00:32:31]  And so I think that it's going to take a while to get there.
[00:32:35]  But once Iran folds, and I do think it's more likely that it will than that it'll survive, I think you could see things happen fairly quickly.
[00:32:43]  It's possible the outcomes could be really, really good.
[00:32:46]  But we just don't know.
[00:32:48]  So, you know, again, the big risk for Trump in all of this is just how many unknowns there are.
[00:32:53]  And you have to think that given his aversion to war in general, he had to see a pretty big set of payoffs down the line to do this.
[00:33:01]  And I guess skeptics have been wrong so often when it comes to analyzing what Trump's doing that you almost want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
[00:33:09]  But I think we have to just wait and see what happens.
[00:33:13]  Before we let you go, do you want to give us a quick, quick update on your loser governor?
[00:33:21]  I see you railing at him hard lately.
[00:33:24]  I love it.
[00:33:25]  Yeah, so Newsom is doing very unhelpful things.
[00:33:31]  So one thing, for example, I'm involved in the effort to try to rebuild the Civic Palisades, my town.
[00:33:39]  And one of the things that's helpful is if local leaders say to the president who's offering to help, thank you, Mr. President.
[00:33:49]  We may not agree on ICE and we may not agree on Iran and we may not agree on all this other stuff, but we want to work with you and we want to rebuild the town in time for the Olympics and all of that.
[00:34:00]  So Mayor Bass, who I thought should have resigned after the fire, is actually doing that.
[00:34:08]  She's actually saying, hey, we'll work with the Trump administration.
[00:34:11]  Okay.
[00:34:11]  That's the mayor.
[00:34:12]  That's like the left-wing borderline communist mayor, sort of like Zorhan Mamdani is saying, hey, I'll work with Trump if he's going to deliver housing.
[00:34:20]  And maybe that's because they are running for re-election or newly elected.
[00:34:25]  They have a political future ahead of them in the offices they currently hold.
[00:34:29]  Newsom, who is termed out of office and now looking ahead to president and is competing with all these other rabid Democrats, may have a different set of incentives.

=== Clint Eastwood's Political Pander (03:42) ===

[00:34:37]  But either way, he's just being a jerk.
[00:34:40]  And if you'll, for I won't use the words, I don't want to get, I don't want you guys to get demonetized if that's a thing on Rumble.
[00:34:47]  But you know, he put up on X a post yesterday that said, Donald Trump is a piece of you know what.
[00:34:53]  That's not helpful.
[00:34:54]  You know, if you're trying to get Trump to help your state, saying the most crude and offensive thing you possibly can is not helpful.
[00:35:03]  And again, Scott pointed this out a lot.
[00:35:05]  Democrats seem to have done some kind of focus group where they decided that swearing was good.
[00:35:09]  But, you know, Trump doesn't just swear for no reason.
[00:35:13]  I think I might have recommended this to you before, but there's a scene in Gran Torino with Clint Eastwood where he's trying to teach one of these young guys how to talk like a man.
[00:35:21]  And he models the right kind of conversation and it involves some profanity.
[00:35:26]  And he's talking to the barber with, you know, some four-letter words and whatever.
[00:35:30]  And then the young guy tries to imitate Clint Eastwood's character.
[00:35:33]  And instead of being cool about all the swear words, he just walks right in and insults the guy and calls him horrible things.
[00:35:39]  And Clint's like, you don't come in and insult the man.
[00:35:42]  That's not how you talk.
[00:35:43]  And the young guy says, but that's what you said.
[00:35:45]  And Eastwood's like, no, no, no, that's not how I said it.
[00:35:48]  And I think Newsom and the Democrats and Swalwell, these other people, they don't get how Trump uses profanity to emphasize a point, not just to insult people.
[00:35:58]  The other thing about Newsom is he called Israel an apartheid state, which it isn't.
[00:36:05]  And that's the standard line on the far left, like Zorhan Mamdani left.
[00:36:12]  Oh, interesting.
[00:36:12]  And it's really shocking.
[00:36:16]  A lot of the Jewish community is really upset about it because they thought Newsom was kind of a moderate and he's now trying to be a left-wing radical.
[00:36:26]  And aside from irritating moderates, and Jewish Democratic voters tend to be moderate, the other thing it's doing is it's showing all voters, including ones on the left, who are supposed to be impressed by this display.
[00:36:39]  It's showing people that Newsom has no principles and that he's not a leader.
[00:36:44]  Because what people see is that he's just stuck his finger in the wind and he's decided he's following where the base is going.
[00:36:51]  Now, that might please some people in the base, but it's not going to make him look like a leader.
[00:36:55]  He is a follower, not a leader.
[00:36:57]  And so I actually think this trip into Zorhan Mamdani territory makes him look a lot worse, not just to people who don't like him and people who like Israel, but to people who he's trying to impress.
[00:37:11]  You know, pandering doesn't really work in the way that maybe politicians think it does.
[00:37:16]  And so I think Newsom is starting to circle the drain a little bit.
[00:37:21]  I don't see a lot of strength there right now.
[00:37:24]  Yeah, he's got a best-selling book, his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry.
[00:37:29]  I mean, it's kind of uh false advertising because he's not that young.
[00:37:33]  But, you know, I think he's selling a book, he's getting big audiences.
[00:37:38]  He can't show his face in my town in California.
[00:37:41]  He won't appear in public.
[00:37:43]  He'll talk to people privately, but he won't appear in public in my town.
[00:37:46]  You know, so he's appealing to Democrats who just are excited about the upcoming presidential primary.
[00:37:51]  They can't wait to vote against whoever's going to replace Trump as the Republican nominee or whatever.
[00:37:56]  But I think he's basically circling the drain, and you're going to start to see some other maybe more viable Democratic candidates come out.
[00:38:03]  Democrats who can win votes from the African-American community.
[00:38:06]  I mean, Newsom's ridiculous comment about low SAT scores being a way to relate to black voters.
[00:38:11]  I mean, has anyone ever self-destructed as hard as he just did?
[00:38:14]  So, I mean, you know, I think he's circling the drain, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be fun to watch.

=== Monkeys Learn to Fight Back (03:23) ===

[00:38:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:38:20]  I agree.
[00:38:21]  Oh, Joel, thank you so, so much.
[00:38:24]  You gave us so much time today.
[00:38:25]  We love you.
[00:38:26]  We appreciate you.
[00:38:27]  We enjoy you.
[00:38:29]  Thank you again from all of us.
[00:38:31]  And we'll be following you on the X and at the California Post.
[00:38:37]  And what else can I say?
[00:38:40]  The great Joel Pollack.
[00:38:42]  Thank you so much.
[00:38:43]  I love you guys.
[00:38:44]  We love you.
[00:38:44]  Thanks, Joel.
[00:38:46]  Thank you, Joel.
[00:38:48]  Oh, you guys, I love Joel.
[00:38:50]  He's so great.
[00:38:53]  I mean, that was some serious Iran talk.
[00:38:56]  And I'm glad that that's behind us for this part of the day because it's a lot to take in.
[00:39:03]  And Owen and Marcella also picked some other stories for us.
[00:39:08]  And so we'll see what else we can cover.
[00:39:10]  And Owen, just make sure you save time for my very important story for my well-being.
[00:39:17]  You want me to do that last?
[00:39:19]  Okay.
[00:39:20]  I can do it first if you want.
[00:39:22]  No, do it last.
[00:39:23]  All right.
[00:39:25]  You sure?
[00:39:25]  We can, we need a, is it a pick-me-up?
[00:39:28]  It's, it could be.
[00:39:29]  We need some pick-me-up.
[00:39:30]  We need some pick me up.
[00:39:31]  It depends how Owen presents it.
[00:39:33]  All right.
[00:39:33]  Well, I hope I can present it in a positive way.
[00:39:37]  It was an article I posted about Punch the monkey, and it's asking, you know, why did Punch's mother abandon him?
[00:39:44]  Because most macaques don't do that.
[00:39:46]  And it talks about how, you know, in the wild, at least, it's a very communal group-oriented thing.
[00:39:54]  And I read in a different article that it's like for the adult population or for the overall population, it's like 35% adult females and 15% adult males, and that the females kind of all work together and learn from each other in terms of mothering and things like that.
[00:40:09]  But this article points out that they do kind of learn how to be a mother from each other.
[00:40:15]  And so being in a zoo might kind of mess with that.
[00:40:18]  And that may be part of it that they notice that sometimes new mothers in this macaque community would like hold their infant upside down or become distracted when their infant is in trouble.
[00:40:29]  And so it's not uncommon that it takes a while for a mother to figure out how to take care of their babies.
[00:40:36]  And so, you know, the theory, I guess, is that it might be that being in captivity is what led to this, that maybe there isn't, you know, the same instinct and they don't necessarily have all the other females to learn from.
[00:40:53]  And it points out that something like 7.7% of the time, this infant abandonment happens in captivity.
[00:41:02]  But it also does add out a positive note saying it's a behaviorally flexible species.
[00:41:07]  And so the good news is that, you know, monkeys can learn from the monkeys around them and that Punch is starting to learn to communicate with the other monkeys and find his place in the group.
[00:41:18]  And, you know, he may have got off on a wrong foot initially by kind of communicating somehow a signal of like, I'm afraid of you or I'm dominant over you.
[00:41:29]  But I think the more time Punch spends with the other monkeys, the more he's going to learn how to behave and he'll be able to integrate into his group.
[00:41:36]  And I think we're already seeing.
[00:41:37]  He's just a baby and he doesn't have his mommy and he's scared.

=== Barbie's Intermezzo (06:32) ===

[00:41:42]  And so it, I can't, I can't clearly understand like what date certain posts are on because everything's fake.
[00:41:50]  But I feel like he might still have his stuffy.
[00:41:55]  I'm not sure.
[00:41:56]  But somebody bullied him again yesterday and he ran off and ran to the stuffy and laid down on top of it and put its arm around him.
[00:42:04]  And I'm like, he needs to fight back, Erica.
[00:42:07]  He needs to fight back.
[00:42:08]  He needs to learn how to fight back.
[00:42:10]  But he's so little.
[00:42:11]  He's okay.
[00:42:12]  He can fight back.
[00:42:13]  All right.
[00:42:14]  Well, thank you for that.
[00:42:15]  That was our intermezzo story.
[00:42:19]  Can we talk about my father favorite story?
[00:42:22]  Oh, okay.
[00:42:23]  The New Jersey one or no, Christy Noam.
[00:42:27]  Okay, okay.
[00:42:28]  Barbie is out, you guys.
[00:42:31]  I'm sorry.
[00:42:32]  Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam is out and plans to replace her with Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen.
[00:42:41]  Did I say his name right?
[00:42:42]  The decision came after Noam faced intense grilling in a combative Senate hearing this week where criticism from both parties focused on her leadership of immigration enforcement in a costly ad campaign that she said Trump approved.
[00:42:57]  And Trump actually made statements that he did not approve that.
[00:43:03]  And hopefully she's not facing any kind of false statements that she made at the hearing.
[00:43:09]  And she will be moving on still with the administration.
[00:43:15]  She'll transition in a new role.
[00:43:17]  We still don't know what that new role entails until this weekend.
[00:43:22]  It's called a special envoy for the shield of the Americas.
[00:43:27]  It's 13 countries.
[00:43:28]  Okay.
[00:43:29]  Yeah, a freshly created position focused on new security initiatives in the Western Hemisphere with details set to be unveiled this weekend.
[00:43:38]  I hear we heard from Marco Rubio either yesterday or this morning that he's happy to have her under him.
[00:43:48]  And whoa, that could mean a lot.
[00:43:51]  Never mind.
[00:43:52]  And then another very sexual story.
[00:43:58]  There is allegations that Corey Lewandowski, which worked for DHS, was having an affair with her.
[00:44:06]  And that's what the reasons why Trump got rid of her.
[00:44:10]  But anyways, I've moved forward.
[00:44:12]  Senator Mullen, I did not know too much about him.
[00:44:15]  I think Erica said he's awesome.
[00:44:18]  He's actually an MMA fighter.
[00:44:21]  So just that alone, I was like, whoa, that's great.
[00:44:27]  He was funny and he's very smart.
[00:44:29]  And you'd be proud of him, Owen.
[00:44:30]  He was the press came up to him while he was walking, you know, in by the Capitol.
[00:44:38]  And he was like, I just heard about this like a few moments before you guys got the news, but I have to ask my wife before I make any decisions.
[00:44:50]  And that was like an awesome way of him saying it.
[00:44:53]  And he also was very gracious with Ice Barbie.
[00:44:59]  He said that she was a, he didn't call her Ice Barbie people.
[00:45:02]  He called her Secretary Gnome and how he worked well with her.
[00:45:10]  And he's, you know, I'm assuming he will go for it.
[00:45:15]  So any comments?
[00:45:19]  Yeah, the only thing, Kevin ETF, I feel your frustration in the chat today.
[00:45:23]  So I want to shout you out.
[00:45:25]  And yes, I too hope Bondi is next because I think Bondi is horrible.
[00:45:30]  I think she's, I can't even believe she was put in attorney Barbie.
[00:45:34]  Oh, I can't with her.
[00:45:36]  Useless.
[00:45:37]  That's my only comment.
[00:45:39]  Is that your only comment, Owen?
[00:45:41]  That's what sexist would say, right?
[00:45:44]  Yeah, if I were a sexist, which apparently I am.
[00:45:48]  My comment is that I didn't see it coming.
[00:45:50]  I didn't think that she was going to get fired like this.
[00:45:54]  How did you not see that coming?
[00:45:56]  Well, the pattern was that all these women are around Trump doing amazing jobs, right?
[00:46:03]  You got Susie Wiles and then you have Kelly.
[00:46:09]  And you have other ladies there, you know, very strong doing a lot of things, right?
[00:46:13]  But I don't know the details.
[00:46:14]  Not all women are the same, Sergio.
[00:46:16]  Well, Marcela is the only one that said I heard saying that she was going to be out.
[00:46:22]  And I'm like, okay.
[00:46:24]  No, you didn't tell me, but like, I didn't know.
[00:46:26]  I'm going to tell you everything from now on.
[00:46:28]  Yeah.
[00:46:28]  Tell me every time now.
[00:46:29]  So now I'm thinking like, okay, who's next?
[00:46:33]  Is it for you guys, Bondi?
[00:46:34]  Do you think it's going to be there?
[00:46:36]  That's what I'm hoping.
[00:46:37]  Okay.
[00:46:39]  I think that you might be right.
[00:46:42]  But Trump knows how to work with, he knows how to work with the look with the women that are he wants to push, right?
[00:46:50]  That's strong.
[00:46:51]  Yes.
[00:46:52]  Well, I mean, it's for the men too, right?
[00:46:55]  You know, he wants to.
[00:46:57]  He wants to be.
[00:46:59]  Do you think it is just because of this bad performance in front of Congress?
[00:47:05]  Or do you think there was more to it and it was shut up?
[00:47:09]  It's the result, right?
[00:47:11]  She created a lot of hate on Necessary to do this.
[00:47:16]  So it helps sometimes to have that extreme.
[00:47:20]  Like that guy that was sent to Minnesota too, and he was like very rough.
[00:47:26]  He had like an Italian name.
[00:47:28]  Maybe you know Erika.
[00:47:29]  He had like a song with this guy.
[00:47:33]  So this guy, he was like super strong and they took him out because he was being too strong.
[00:47:39]  So Christy, you know, she killed a dog, right?
[00:47:41]  She shot a dog one time just because she had a dog.
[00:47:45]  Just for being a dog.
[00:47:46]  No more.
[00:47:47]  This is my favorite story we've ever done.
[00:47:49]  This is so funny.
[00:47:50]  I'm not really sure she did kill her dog, but I don't believe it now.
[00:47:55]  I don't believe it.
[00:47:56]  I don't think she was too ruthless enough to shoot a dog.
[00:48:00]  She could have hold the gun, right?
[00:48:04]  Anyway.
[00:48:05]  Do you really think a woman would go out and take the dog out back with a rifle or a pistol and shoot it?
[00:48:12]  No.
[00:48:13]  Maybe Marcela.

=== 2008 Shift (03:26) ===

[00:48:15]  What?
[00:48:17]  You would do it if you had to do it.
[00:48:18]  Could you do that?
[00:48:19]  I could.
[00:48:20]  Me?
[00:48:20]  Yes.
[00:48:21]  Oh, yeah.
[00:48:22]  No, I'm talking about Erica and Marcela.
[00:48:26]  Yeah.
[00:48:27]  I mean, if it was needed, I could do that.
[00:48:29]  Not me.
[00:48:31]  Nope.
[00:48:31]  I have no problems.
[00:48:33]  I would try to convince it that it can change and be loving and sweet.
[00:48:37]  Like, wouldn't you take it to a vet and have it being put down humanely or at least?
[00:48:41]  Depending on how far is the vet?
[00:48:43]  You tell your husband you got to go do this.
[00:48:45]  How far is the drive?
[00:48:47]  Oh, my God.
[00:48:49]  Well, I mean, yeah, technically, you would have like a vet do it.
[00:48:54]  Yeah.
[00:48:55]  Listen, I want to bring a macaque monkey to my house.
[00:48:58]  I am not killing anything.
[00:49:00]  It's going to eat your face.
[00:49:02]  What are you talking about?
[00:49:03]  They're not.
[00:49:04]  Yeah, they're scary.
[00:49:06]  I could convince it.
[00:49:07]  All right.
[00:49:07]  Enough with these people, but let's go.
[00:49:10]  Bondi on deck.
[00:49:14]  Okay.
[00:49:16]  I think, Owen, you have another story?
[00:49:18]  Well, on the psychology front, Karina Petrova from SciPost is talking about how there's a study or a set of studies about how American issue polarization surged after 2008 as the left moved further left.
[00:49:31]  I think Scott would definitely say you could have just asked me.
[00:49:34]  You didn't need to spend money on this study.
[00:49:37]  But it is interesting that they point out that between, I think it was 1988 and 2008, there really wasn't much of a drift, that it was pretty stable through that period in terms of how different people thought about things on the left versus the right, and that there was a 64% increase from 2008 to 2020.
[00:49:57]  Now, what happened in 2008?
[00:49:59]  Obama.
[00:50:01]  Yeah.
[00:50:01]  Thank you.
[00:50:02]  Yeah.
[00:50:03]  Obama.
[00:50:04]  Isn't that the time that racism also picked up?
[00:50:07]  Yes.
[00:50:08]  100%.
[00:50:10]  It was the birth of DEI and CRT and all this other stuff that he brought into this.
[00:50:17]  So I think, you know, they don't mention Obama in the article, but I think it is kind of pointing in that direction.
[00:50:23]  And I think certainly it probably got inflamed even further once Trump got elected in 2016.
[00:50:29]  But I think 2008 is when it really kicked off.
[00:50:32]  And they'd point out that they did another study globally and they found out that that didn't happen anywhere else, only in America.
[00:50:40]  They did point out that less developed countries tend to be majority conservative and more developed countries tend to be more liberal.
[00:50:48]  I think we probably all knew that too, that countries tend to be a little more liberal once they're more wealthy.
[00:50:55]  But they said, you know, the differences didn't increase the way they did in the United States.
[00:51:01]  So I did think that was interesting.
[00:51:03]  Good times make weak men.
[00:51:06]  But you also have your scientific backing now.
[00:51:08]  If anyone wants to dispute that the left moved further left, that's exactly what happened.
[00:51:12]  They basically found that the conservatives didn't really change very much, but the left went super far to the left.
[00:51:18]  Yeah, I mean, look at the Democrat friends you guys might have.
[00:51:22]  You know, back when Bill Clinton was president, if they kept thinking and saying who they were back when Clinton was president, they'd be Republicans now.
[00:51:35]  So it's very weak-minded to watch all these people just be like, oh, just sticking with the party.

=== Settling for Silence (07:54) ===

[00:51:42]  Any insane thing they put in front of me, I will sign off on it.
[00:51:45]  And it's like, wow, how much can you change as a person?
[00:51:48]  Like you're believing things you would have thought were completely batshit crazy, you know, eight years ago.
[00:51:55]  And now you're like, yeah, like more of that.
[00:51:58]  So the party changed and a lot of weak people went with it.
[00:52:02]  The suicidal empathy that some of we have talked about before, I think Gadsad mentioned that or somebody else.
[00:52:09]  And that started there, right?
[00:52:11]  Like people say, you know what, let's give this a chance.
[00:52:14]  Not you, Erica, or but many people on the middle they were saying, you know what, this is Obama had an amazing um propaganda game.
[00:52:24]  All his photos are always showing these young, vibrant man and ready to take on anything, right?
[00:52:34]  It really shows hope, right?
[00:52:35]  The hope, the hope.
[00:52:36]  Uh, I was the one of those people that fell into it.
[00:52:39]  I was Republican before that, actually.
[00:52:41]  I was pro-Bush and even McCain at some point.
[00:52:45]  But with Obama, I started drifting, so I can totally understand how that happened.
[00:52:49]  And I was surrounded by people that also believed that Obama was the next Messiah.
[00:52:54]  Well, he was very persuasive.
[00:52:56]  I mean, a lot of people.
[00:52:59]  I was a big fan of his personal photographer.
[00:53:02]  He's the White House photographer.
[00:53:03]  His name is Pete Sousa and an award-winning guy.
[00:53:07]  And it was all manufactured, you know, it was all like put together, you know, and they will duplicate things, you know, basically to show him to be like the black JFK, basically.
[00:53:18]  You know, they wanted to be like that.
[00:53:20]  So, yeah, yeah, good story, Owen.
[00:53:25]  Okay, next up.
[00:53:26]  Then, um, Congress votes overwhelmingly to keep sexual misconduct reports secret.
[00:53:31]  Oh my gosh, shocking, shocking news.
[00:53:33]  The U.S. House Representatives has overwhelmingly voted to reject a push for greater transparency on sexual misconduct in Congress, according to multiple reports, including NBC and political lawmakers.
[00:53:45]  Voted 357 to 65 on March 4th to refer a resolution by Representative Nancy Mays to the Ethics Committee, effectively killing the measure that would have forced the public release of investigative reports on allegations of sexual harassment, unwelcome advances, or improper relationships involving members and staff with victim information redacted.
[00:54:12]  It was introduced amid fresh scrutiny over allegations against Representative Tony Gonzalez and other cases.
[00:54:20]  The resolution drew bipartisan opposition for the ethics committee.
[00:54:24]  In regards to Representative Tony Gonzalez, he actually is no longer running because he did come out and say that he did have a love affair with a staff member who then that staff member then killed themselves set herself on fire.
[00:54:44]  Well, that would be an odd way to commit suicide.
[00:54:50]  Just saying.
[00:54:52]  So what are your thoughts on this?
[00:54:54]  It's it's again I think Scott, I think Scott might have been, might have, might have said that this is okay, or that, you know, at least that he wasn't surprised by it.
[00:55:06]  No surprise there.
[00:55:07]  No, I'll make the case to defend it and you can then criticize me.
[00:55:13]  First of all, these women, I'm assuming they're mostly women, but there probably are some men in there too.
[00:55:19]  You know, the victims, they agreed to these settlements, right?
[00:55:22]  And part of the deal was to say that they get this money in exchange for not talking about it.
[00:55:29]  And the other piece of it is, especially in the wake of all this Epstein stuff, you don't know how many of these claims were legitimate.
[00:55:39]  Like it could have been that somebody made a claim and they just said, you know what, it's better to just settle this rather than having a lawsuit and having all this bad publicity for Congress.
[00:55:48]  And so let's just give this person some money and make them be quiet and keep the gears of government moving.
[00:55:56]  And so some of these things may have been BS claims.
[00:55:59]  And if you just release all this information against the alleged perpetrators who were never given a trial, right?
[00:56:07]  Then you don't know how many of these things are true, but they're going to be assumed to be true if you release this information, right?
[00:56:14]  Whose money are they getting?
[00:56:16]  Our money.
[00:56:17]  Well, it's our money.
[00:56:19]  My money.
[00:56:21]  That's a legitimate claim.
[00:56:22]  And I accept that that's the other side of it, that if this is taxpayer money.
[00:56:27]  But then, you know, my argument there would be if the whole point of it was to keep this quiet, then there just shouldn't be this fund.
[00:56:35]  They want to keep it quiet.
[00:56:37]  Okay.
[00:56:37]  So if they want to.
[00:56:38]  They won't do it.
[00:56:39]  Well, that, or it has to come out of your own pocket.
[00:56:43]  And they all have the freaking money.
[00:56:44]  They're all skimming off of all the NGOs and everybody else.
[00:56:49]  Yeah.
[00:56:49]  Why are you using our money?
[00:56:51]  It's just disgusting.
[00:56:54]  Show us the names and the amount.
[00:56:56]  Don't tell us what it was.
[00:56:57]  Be like, here's the person's name and here's how much of your tax dollars went to that person.
[00:57:02]  And then let the constituents know what they're dealing with.
[00:57:05]  Somebody that has to have our taxpayer money get them out of trouble.
[00:57:09]  And what, and what's the incentive not to do these things if you're just going to have it kept quiet and our money is going to pay to make it go away?
[00:57:16]  It's just very strange.
[00:57:18]  And Nancy May said she tried to subpoena what Ilhan Omar's immigration record.
[00:57:25]  She said all the Republicans block that, that the Republicans and the Democrats are protecting her.
[00:57:30]  And they're like, no, no, we're not giving it to her brother husband allegedly.
[00:57:36]  But, you know, like, what's up with that?
[00:57:38]  Like, no, I was going to bring a point, though, that Owen was talking about in California.
[00:57:44]  If you do sue somebody for sexual misconduct and you do settle out of court, you're not allowed to, in the settlement, it's illegal to not to basically not allow you to talk about it.
[00:57:57]  You're allowed to talk about it.
[00:58:00]  And there is no NDA clause you can have in it.
[00:58:06]  So I'm sure that in DC, it might be the same.
[00:58:10]  So you are able.
[00:58:12]  It's not a secret.
[00:58:13]  So if the victims wanted to come out and talk about it, they probably could.
[00:58:16]  Yeah, I just feel like if you're going to take my money to pay someone off, like, well, could you just fill me in on where it's going?
[00:58:22]  Maybe?
[00:58:23]  Like, where I'm.
[00:58:24]  But the whole point in paying them off is to not have them talk about it, right?
[00:58:27]  And use your own money.
[00:58:29]  No, it's to pay for their pain and suffering.
[00:58:32]  So legally.
[00:58:33]  I didn't do it.
[00:58:35]  Legally.
[00:58:36]  But I'm saying, like, if they didn't, I mean, maybe there is another motive of saying, let's keep these things out of criminal trials.
[00:58:44]  But, you know, assuming that someone was raped, for example, I would hope that the victims in some cases at least would have the courage to just charge the person with rape or whatever the sexual assault charge would be.
[00:58:57]  And I would think most of these, if not all of them, are not that way because they didn't go through any kind of criminal.
[00:59:03]  These are our lawmakers.
[00:59:07]  How would you fix it, though?
[00:59:09]  You know, that's the thing.
[00:59:10]  You know, how will what would you do to fix it?
[00:59:13]  I think the fix would be to say you're not allowed to use taxpayer funds for that.
[00:59:16]  That's it.
[00:59:16]  That's what I'm saying.
[00:59:18]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:59:18]  Use your own money.
[00:59:20]  Like, for example, the same thing with the college, right?
[00:59:23]  Like with the college loans, you know, that people is irresponsible anytime you give them all these money.
[00:59:29]  But I'll throw in another thing that Scott has said before.
[00:59:32]  Every famous person has been accused of sexual misconduct of some way, in some way.

=== How to Fix It (01:32) ===

[00:59:37]  Figure it out.
[00:59:37]  Get a lawyer, just like you would ask them.
[00:59:40]  Okay, so to make it illegal, but how do you get all the votes to people to do this now?
[00:59:47]  Yeah, they wouldn't vote for it, would they?
[00:59:49]  Yeah, how would you get them to vote?
[00:59:52]  Oh, we can make this happen.
[00:59:53]  I'm wrapping it up, but the last thing I want to show you is from Dr. Deborah Fauci on Twitter on X.
[01:00:01]  She wins.
[01:00:02]  So she shows, here's Oprah and Gail.
[01:00:07]  Oh my gosh.
[01:00:09]  I mean, yeah, you know, whatever.
[01:00:11]  So she, look at them.
[01:00:15]  So anyway, she wrote, here's Oprah and Gail, who I am now calling Okra and Kale.
[01:00:23]  I freaking love that.
[01:00:25]  Okra and Kale.
[01:00:27]  I love it so much.
[01:00:29]  And she was pointing out how Gail's always walking two steps behind her, but I just think that's amazing.
[01:00:34]  So you guys, thank you so, so, so much for being here.
[01:00:36]  Oh, and tell us what you're doing tomorrow.
[01:00:40]  I'm having a party.
[01:00:41]  So okay, so if he was glitchy for you, he has his after party tomorrow on Spaces at 7 Pacific, 10 Eastern.
[01:00:54]  He'll be with Sergio and SJV talking news all day long.
[01:00:59]  Please go over there and participate.
[01:01:01]  We'll be back on Monday.
[01:01:04]  I love you guys.
[01:01:06]  The chat, the sippers, the beloves, X, we love you.