Episode 1421 Scott Adams： The Most Delicious Coffee Sipping in the Solar System
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 2 minutes
Words per Minute
146.23686
Summary
In this episode of the podcast, I discuss the possibility that we are living in a simulation, and why it's a good thing we don't live in a real world anymore. I also talk about a 3.9 magnitude earthquake that I didn't feel, and the debate about intelligent design has died.
Transcript
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Well, well, well, look who it is. It's you, and you, and you, and you. Thanks for coming on time.
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Those of you who are ahead of the system, you're basically the high achievers,
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the people who get in here early. And that bodes well for your future. It really does.
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So, would you like to enjoy this live stream even more than you are already? And I know it's
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probably the thrill of your life so far. Well, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass,
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a tank or Chelsea, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite
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liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the
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day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to
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happen right now. Do you want a little writing tip before we get going? Listen to this sentence,
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the dopamine hit of the day, and the unparalleled pleasure. Those sentences have percussion in
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them, meaning that you can almost feel them like they're a drum. Like the dopamine hit of
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the day, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. The unparalleled pleasure, the unparalleled
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pleasure. That makes your writing a little bit more interesting if you have the percussion element.
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So apparently there was a 3.9 magnitude earthquake where I live yesterday at 6.40 p.m.
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Did not feel it. Now, my house is actually designed for maximum earthquake protection,
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and I guess it did a good job because my county was rocking and rolling yesterday, but I never felt
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it. So, so much for that. And I have to admit, I feel a little bit robbed because when there's an
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earthquake where you live and you don't feel it and everybody's talking about it and you don't get
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to say anything, well, I felt nothing. It really ruins a good story. Joshua Lysak, a ghostwriter
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extraordinaire, on Twitter, asked this question. He says, tell me about the moment you realized
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we're all living in a simulation. And I was reading some of the comments because I wondered,
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huh, I know I think I'm living in a simulation, but I wonder, I wonder what it was that convinced
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other people that we're living in a simulation. It turns out that for a number of you,
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the answer was me. So apparently I have convinced a number of people that we live in a simulation,
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which is interesting because in effect, I changed your religion. In effect, because I remember it
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wasn't long ago when if you said that you believed in intelligent design, you were considered a nut.
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Now, that was usually intelligent design in the traditional Christian god kind of a way.
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Typically, that's the way people talked about it. But if we're a simulation, there is an intelligent
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designer. It just happens to be some alien or pre-human programmer, just somebody who can program.
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So is it my imagination or has the debate about intelligent design disappeared? Right? Because
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was it maybe 15 years ago? It's all anybody could talk about whether intelligent design should be taught
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in schools and if it's true and blah, blah, blah. And now that there are plenty of legitimate smart
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people. Nick Bostrom being sort of the godfather of the simulation idea. A legitimate credentialed
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person. Elon Musk taking us to Mars. And he likes it. Oh, I'm just looking at some of your comments here.
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So it's sort of interesting. It seems to me that intelligent design died. Now, for those of you who
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have not heard this, this is one of the most interesting stories of my life. But I don't know
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if it'll mean anything at all to you. And I've had a pretty interesting life. But years ago, I did
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something really reckless. Maybe not the first time. I made a prediction that would guarantee I would
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be mocked for decades. But if it was right, it would be a big win. I would just have to wait 20 years
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or something like that and be mocked and have my reputation destroyed for about 20 years just to be
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right. Now, if that doesn't tell you a little bit about my warped personality, I don't think anything
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will. I literally signed up for 20 years of pain just to be right about something. And I think I am.
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And the thing I predicted was 20 years ago or so, something like that, that in our lifetime,
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while I'm still alive, I predicted that the theory of evolution would be debunked within scientific
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terms, not within religious terms. So I never predicted that we would find out that there was
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a genesis, etc. But I did predict that you could pick almost any popular theory in science and just
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look forward 20 years and it would be debunked. You could almost pick anything. And the reason for
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that is that you just go back 20 years and find out what did we think about pretty much anything.
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And it's almost all wrong. You could just go back 20 years at any time in history, rewind 20 years
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from there and find out that, you know, gigantic things we thought were true were all debunked.
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So, my problem with evolution was, there was just something about it that wasn't working for me,
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even though I understand, you know, the millions of years and the gradual change. I understand the
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mechanism behind it. I understand the mountains of evidence for it. And because there's so much
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evidence for it, evolution, the most reckless thing anybody could ever predict is that it would be
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overturned within your lifetime. Now, how stupid was that prediction? Pretty stupid. Because I got
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mocked for 20 years, exactly as I imagined I would be, because people said, you idiot, you don't believe
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science. Don't you know that science is smart and you are dumb? So if science disagrees with you,
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guess who's right? Is it you? Or is it science, Scott? Because science is always right. And you,
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well, you're kind of a fucking moron, if we can be honest. Science is up here. You, oh, you're like
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a little chipmunk eating a peanut. You're down here. Scott, don't you understand the gigantic difference
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between where you are, a fucking idiot, and science. Science. It's almost a god-like divine concept,
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the science. And so, Scott, if you were to question the divine perfection of science, well, you little
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moron. 20 years of my life. Fast forward, and the simulation is now widely accepted by smart people.
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Not all of them, but lots of smart people would say that the evolutionary model is maybe just a
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programmed thing that we perceive. All right. So enough of that gloating. But I've always wondered
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if you could change somebody's religion, and then I found out that I did it, apparently. Apparently,
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I've changed a bunch of people's religion in some sense. Senator John Cornyn. I guess he was one of
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the people, or maybe the main guy, who promoted this U.S. semiconductor manufacturing bill called
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Chips for America. Do you remember when you found out that the United States can't make microchips
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anymore, and that they're pretty much all made in China or Taiwan? Do you remember finding that out?
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I think I found out this year. When did chip manufacturing completely leave the United States,
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or mostly? I don't know if it's completely. But didn't that scare the hell out of you?
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The moment you found out that the United States isn't a main producer of microchips?
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So I don't know the details of this bill. But it apparently got passed. So it must have been
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at least good enough to get passed. And it says it's going to fix this critical issue. I don't know
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what that means. But I assume it means some kind of government benefits if you start a chip manufacturing
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plant, I guess. But we definitely need this. You know, this type of technology dominance
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is military. I mean, you can't not have this industry if you want to remain a superpower.
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So congratulations to John Cornyn for doing a solid thing for the country. It looks like good work.
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You know, most of the time I'm criticizing the government for one thing or another, right?
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And if somebody does something that is clearly and unambiguously in the right direction,
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I think that needs to be called out. So good job, Senator Cornyn.
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So remember, I've been telling you that over time, Joe Biden will have to morph into Trump
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in order to just do his job. And the theory was that Trump did so many things right,
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yet because he was Trump, he was criticized for being wrong, that if you tried to do the opposite
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of Trump, you would you would come to regret it, because Trump was doing the right thing in the
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first place. And you'd have to become him over time just to keep your job as president.
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Here we have another example. Apparently, Joe Biden said that Iran will, quote,
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never get a nuclear weapon on his watch. Now, I don't know if he's ever said it so clearly before.
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But his plan of giving them everything they need to make a nuclear weapon seems a little bit off
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target with his goal of having them never get a nuclear weapon. So I feel as though and now we
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also see Biden is is bombing some Iranian assets in Syria and Iraq. So did Biden, has he already
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become Trump on this topic? Because he kind of has to, right? I mean, that seems like that's where
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it's got to go. So keep an eye on that. I don't see any chance that Iran is going to, I don't know,
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they're not going to say, hey, we're done with all this nuclear stuff and prove it. So I feel like
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Biden just has to complete the circuit and just become Trump. Are you watching the drama with
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poor Brian Stelter on CNN? So you might know that that Brian Stelter is like the attack dog of CNN,
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one of them, I guess they got a lot of attack dogs. And he's often more prominent in criticizing Fox
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News, etc. But his own ratings have collapsed, according to, I think, the Daily Wire said that
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his ratings have collapsed over 72% since January. 72% reduction in his audience since January.
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Now, here's the funny part. He's still on the air. Now, I don't have any bad feelings toward Brian
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Stelter. And I'm not the person who calls for people to be taken off the air, because I don't
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like it to happen to me. But there's something funny about this story, which is, if any normal
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show lost 72% of its audience in this news realm, wouldn't they be fairly quickly replaced?
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But CNN is kind of in a trap here. Because the person who would be replaced in this scenario
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is the main attack dog for Fox News, the person who attacks Fox News the most. And if the guy who
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attacks Fox News gets canceled, Fox News won, because they want him canceled. You know, if you listen to
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Fox News, you'll hear Greg Gutfeld often taking a run at Stelter, and vice versa. You'll see now
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Tucker Carlson's taking a run at him. I guess Joe Rogan, not in Fox News, of course, but Joe Rogan on his
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own show railed against Stelter. So he's got all these people railing against him. But CNN can't get
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rid of him, can they? Because the moment they get rid of him, it would be like, it would be like
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surrender. It would basically be say, okay, Fox News, you have better content, your shows are doing
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well, we had to cancel our show that makes fun of your show. Imagine having to cancel the show that
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makes fun of the competition, because that show doesn't get enough ratings. I feel as if they want
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to cancel him for monetary reasons, but they can't do it because of the reputation. It would just be
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too much of an admission of defeat. Yeah, I'd like to see Jeffrey Toobin take that position.
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He'd be good at it, actually. No joke. Jeffrey Toobin is good at his job. Yeah, he's got a little
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reputational thing to clean up, so to speak. But it's funny, anything you say about the Jeffrey
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Toobin story sounds naughty. Like no matter what you're actually talking about, your brain
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immediately goes there. And when I said he has to clean up his reputation, where did your brain go?
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Tissues, yes. Tissues. All right, that's because you're awful. So I've decided that Brian Stelter is
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essentially the piñata of CNN. Everybody likes to. Wow, getting weird messages this morning. All right,
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let's talk about Trump and his legal problems. So the news is that Trump will not be prosecuted
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for now. For now, Trump is not being prosecuted for the, in the Manhattan DA's first indictment.
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So we don't know how many more there might be, if any. But in the first indictment,
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they're likely to announce charges. So again, so here's a leak, right? I assume that we know more
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than we're supposed to know. Must be a leak. So they're likely to announce charges against Ellen
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Weisselberg, CFO, sometime soon. And he is under scrutiny, we're told, for benefits he received,
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including a company-funded apartment and car. Now, how big a deal is it?
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How big a deal is it that there's some, maybe taxes weren't paid properly on benefits to employees?
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Well, it's sort of a standard corporate problem. And people don't really go to jail for that.
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I feel like this is one of those things where the corporation might pay a fine or something like
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that. But Trump isn't even named. Now, of course, the danger here is that the CFO being named might be
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simply a ploy to put pressure on the CFO so he can flip and give the prosecutors some dirt on Trump.
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But, first of all, is this lifetime employee likely to flip on Trump? I don't know he will, right?
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You know, you can expect a lot of people to do flipping, but I don't know that he will. And I
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don't even know if he really would have any jail time, because it's sort of a corporate crime. And it
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probably wouldn't be a ton if he did, but nobody wants to go to jail. So here's the question. Do
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we think that the real play is to squeeze the CFO until he gives something up on Trump? And here's
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my question. And for the lawyers who are watching, I always have lawyers watching. For some reason,
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this live stream gets a lot of lawyers. For the lawyers, can you answer me this question?
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I'm aware that if you were trying to take down a mafia boss, you could try to squeeze people and get
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them to give up some stuff about the mafia boss. But if you're not talking about a mafia boss,
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can you just fish for a crime for somebody who's just the CEO or owner of a company? Can you just
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grab some lower employee and say, we don't have any specific crime we're investigating for the CEO,
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but if you give us something, we'll reduce your sentence or drop your charges? Is that even a
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thing? I mean, if you're not actually like a mafia boss, you can... I'm seeing some yeses. I don't
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know if you're attorneys. But tell me if you're an attorney, if you're going to give an answer to
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this in the comments. But I don't know that you can just fish for a crime, can you? Wouldn't you have
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to have a specific crime that you at least have some indication of before you can dig into it?
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I'm seeing most of you saying that this can be done and it's completely legal.
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Well, if it's legal, it's pretty crappy. Thomas is an attorney and says yes. All right. So there's
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one attorney and probably some of you are also attorneys saying yes. All right. So let's take
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that as a yes that they can do that, which is pretty shitty. I mean, I feel like you could almost
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take anybody down with those rules. Yeah, it seems deeply unethical. But let's say that's happening.
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All right. Here's another take on it. So Ross Garber on Twitter, who's got legal background and
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expertise, was pointing out the fact that maybe this is a squeeze on the CFO, but also points out
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that approving financial crimes, I'm just reading Ross's tweet, beyond a reasonable doubt and unanimously
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under New York state law can be a challenge. And he goes on, Ross does, there are issues,
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these issues are normally investigated, prosecuted by the feds who have expansive mail and wire fraud
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statutes. So basically, if you thought there was some financial crimes going on, you would expect the
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feds to be involved because they would be more effective at prosecuting. But we have no indication
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that the feds are involved, which means, which could mean, and I don't want to like over interpret
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this because this is well outside my expertise. I'm just trying to draft off of what Ross Garber is
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saying. But it could mean, because we haven't heard any leaks that the feds are involved,
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that they don't have anything. That there may not be enough for the feds to say, yeah,
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let us in on this. Maybe the feds say, well, we would get involved, but you need a crime.
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We don't have any. I feel as if the fact that the feds are not at least, there's no leak to say
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that the feds are involved, that probably means something. And the fact that Trump is not named
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probably means something. And I would think that all the Stormy Daniel stuff will probably turn into
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nothing, at least in terms of, you know, Trump going to jail or something like that. That's just
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not going to happen. At worst, some of this stuff will be fines, I think. So my prediction all along
00:21:42.880
is that Trump will not have a, you know, any kind of a jail sentence or even be prosecuted or even,
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yeah, I don't think he'll even go to court for anything that would be a jailable offense.
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So that's still my prediction. Some of you, as someone pointed out on Twitter recently,
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are still waiting for Hillary Clinton to go to jail. And I think at some level, just people don't
00:22:05.760
go to jail. I think it just doesn't happen. Now, one of the things that Trump has done correctly for
00:22:11.800
his entire career is not use email. So it's really hard to prosecute someone who doesn't write things
00:22:21.100
down. Doesn't text. At least, at least he didn't use the text. I don't know if he does now. But he
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didn't use email and he didn't text. So even if somebody said, I did this because Trump told me to,
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how do you prove it? You can't prove it. Trump can just say, I didn't tell you to do that.
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And that's it. That's the end of the case. No, no paper trail. You're done. So the odds of Trump
00:22:49.040
going to jail, I think, are really small. And I've been predicting this from the start.
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And so far, it's looking good. But with that caveat that maybe there's a squeeze on the CFO,
00:23:00.900
and maybe that produces something. But I think we'd know by now if there was any smoking gun.
00:23:07.820
So this is something Mike Cernovich tweeted about the Trump legal stuff. He said,
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prosecutors who leaked to New York Times make it seem like this is a fringe benefits not taxed
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properly case. And Mike says, if this is it, Trump ran the most honest real estate company in New York's
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history. Exactly. Do you think that you could do a deep investigation of any major real estate
00:23:44.740
company in New York City, and they would come out clean? Any of them? And I'm talking about people
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who don't even know they're committing any crimes. Probably any big real estate company is going to
00:23:58.660
have a lot of subjectivity in their, let's say, valuations. A lot of subjectivity in whether they
00:24:06.860
handled the taxes correctly. Right? These are, there's a lot of gray area when it comes to real
00:24:13.300
estate. All right. Apparently, Bill Barr is quoted as saying that he didn't believe any of the election
00:24:21.980
fraud claims by Trump, at least he didn't believe that any of it would be big enough to overturn the
00:24:27.180
election. And has referred to it as it was all bullshit. So Bill Barr is not a believer that the
00:24:37.040
election will turn up anything. There are two parallel stories here that I think are weirdly paired,
00:24:45.280
which also makes you think there's a simulation going on. Because remember, I predicted
00:24:51.300
that 95% of anything you heard about election fraud would be bullshit. Can anybody confirm in the
00:25:00.760
comments, anybody who heard me say it a bunch of times, that before we even looked into the election
00:25:06.980
through audits and anything else, I told you that on the surface, 95% chance any specific thing.
00:25:15.020
Now here I'm talking about a specific claim. I said there was a 95% chance that any specific claim
00:25:20.880
was bullshit. So now Bill Barr and I are, you know, within 5%, right? So I was still allowing,
00:25:27.660
okay, well, maybe. Now my take from the beginning, and I think you can confirm this as well,
00:25:34.020
is that we don't have overwhelming evidence of election fraud. We probably are not going to be
00:25:40.680
looking in the right places to find it if it exists, because I don't know that they're going to do an
00:25:45.480
audit of the software, the databases, etc. But my take was that if there was not fraud already,
00:25:52.100
you can guarantee there will be in the future. Because it's the type of system that is guaranteed
00:25:56.980
to be corrupted by state, you know, intelligence agencies, either domestic or foreign, eventually.
00:26:03.560
So it's only a matter of time. It's either already happened, and we haven't detected it,
00:26:10.240
or it'll happen in the future, for sure. Because it's a system that's vulnerable,
00:26:16.080
and people will just keep, you know, hacking on it until something gets it. It's kind of like saying,
00:26:21.580
we're going to start a virology lab, and we're going to be looking at deadly pathogens,
00:26:26.540
and we're going to do a really, really good job of containing them. Isn't it really just a matter
00:26:32.680
of time? If you wait long enough, do you have to wonder if anything is going to get out of the lab?
00:26:41.080
No, not in the long run. In the long run, it's guaranteed, right? It's just in the short run,
00:26:47.600
you're not sure. Did it happen this year? Did it already happen, or is it something that's going to
00:26:51.640
happen? Take nuclear energy. You've got lots of older nuclear plants around the world. The newer
00:27:00.400
ones, the Generation 3, have had no problems, at least no notable problems. But the earlier
00:27:07.760
generation, could you predict that there'll be, say, another problem with one of the older ones?
00:27:13.800
Yeah, probably, probably, right? So there's some things that you know are a problem.
00:27:20.180
It's just guaranteed. You just don't know when it happens. That's the only thing you don't know.
00:27:25.560
So the things that are kind of paired are Trump's legal problems, which a lot of people who are
00:27:35.180
anti-Trump said, there is so much smoke there, there is definitely a fire there. We just have
00:27:41.320
to clear out the smoke, and we're going to find all these financial crimes. We're going to find stuff
00:27:46.620
with Russia, you know, bribes, you know, tax cheating. Oh, it's going to be glorious. There'll
00:27:53.900
be so many crimes. And I said, probably nothing that's going to be a problem. Probably a whole
00:28:02.680
bunch of smoke that gets cleared away, and that's just steam. Right? That was my prediction. So far,
00:28:09.220
we're so good. And on the election, oh, there's so many, so many specific proven cases of fraud,
00:28:17.080
to which I said, no, there aren't. No, there aren't. There's lots of suspicion. There's lots of smoke.
00:28:25.500
But clear that smoke out. There's maybe nothing you're going to find there, because you're not
00:28:32.220
So anybody who expected that Trump would go down for his legal problems will probably be
00:28:39.140
disappointed. And anybody who's expecting that the Maricopa County audit has got the goods,
00:28:45.800
I think you're going to be disappointed. Do you think there's any chance we wouldn't know by now
00:28:51.940
from a leak, or at least somebody announcing it, that the Maricopa audit had the goods?
00:28:58.100
You would know by now, right? Do you think there's any chance that all of those people involved in
00:29:06.760
the Maricopa audit, do you think that all of them shut up, and they've really got it, and it's going
00:29:13.100
to be like a, it's going to be a kill shot when that gets released, and we do, and we haven't heard
00:29:18.460
a hint about it? If that's true, it would be the most amazing story of the year, simply that the
00:29:26.040
secret was kept. So even forget about, you know, forget about the question of what's actually in
00:29:34.360
there. The fact that they kept it a secret would be amazing, and inexplicable, really.
00:29:41.700
So, yes, Matt Brainerd has lots of statistical evidence of things that look amiss. But that's not
00:29:50.320
what the audit's going to prove, right? I think that you could have lots and lots of statistical
00:29:56.360
oddities that might actually even indicate there's a real problem, but it doesn't get you to the finish
00:30:02.700
line, right? If you can't translate the statistical oddities into a physical ballot and a whole bunch
00:30:10.400
of them that caused a problem, you're going to need the physical part. The statistical stuff
00:30:16.100
is a real red flag, and genuinely it's a red flag. I mean, and there's enough of it that you've got
00:30:23.200
all kinds of questions. That's true. But you've got to have, you've got to have, like, the physical
00:30:29.180
proof, or else it's nothing. And I don't think that connection's been made yet. Which does not mean
00:30:34.940
that Matt Brainerd is wrong. It just means they might not be looking in the right place to find the
00:30:40.360
kinds of things that the statistics are suggesting is there. Here is the most disturbing, no, well,
00:30:49.540
two very disturbing stories. Writer Andy Ngo, spelled N-G-O, you've probably seen him on Twitter,
00:30:56.720
et cetera. He says that SoundCloud, which is the platform his podcast was on, they dropped him
00:31:03.460
permanently. He's permanently banned. Now, here's somebody who's an editor-at-large for the Post
00:31:10.460
Millennial, a legitimate, serious publication. And he's a high-profile journalist, I guess would be
00:31:20.020
the best description. Has made a huge impact, right? Very important, substantial person doing good work
00:31:30.480
that the public appreciates. And he gets kicked off the platform. Do you know what the reason was?
00:31:36.400
Can anybody guess the reason that Andy Ngo got kicked off the SoundCloud platform? Well, if you could
00:31:43.540
guess the reason, you'd be the first one to know. Because they didn't tell him.
00:31:51.480
Somebody says, cussing. Yes, cursing is called for in this situation. I'm trying to hold back,
00:31:58.960
but I don't know if I'll succeed. So, he didn't get taken down for cursing. I think you were talking
00:32:07.160
about me cursing. So, here's the scary part. The scary part is not that somebody was taken off a
00:32:13.400
platform. The scary part is they didn't tell him why. Right? They just, I think they just sent their
00:32:20.300
terms of service and said, you were bad. You're taken off. That's not cool. These platforms
00:32:28.460
are big enough that they become quasi-governmental accidentally. Right? You kind of can't exist in
00:32:38.440
the real world and make an impact unless you can use social media. And if you're getting kicked off
00:32:43.740
of these platforms without pretty specific reasons, and apparently there's no process for
00:32:51.380
appeal. So, basically his platform is just removed. No reason given. Now, do you think this was done
00:33:01.860
for political reasons or for business reasons? I'm pretty sure it was for political reasons,
00:33:08.580
maybe dressed up as legal reasons, as business reasons, but it looks political to me. And if
00:33:14.440
it looks political and they don't give you a reason for doing it, you have a right to assume it was
00:33:19.360
political. Right? The SoundCloud has a responsibility to tell us specifically why he was banned, or at least
00:33:27.780
to tell him. And if they don't do it, you have every right to assume it's illegitimate. That should be
00:33:34.820
your default assumption that this is illegitimate. It might not be, but it should be your default
00:33:41.140
assumption under these conditions. So, this is deeply disturbing. Deeply disturbing. And it looks
00:33:50.180
like it's part of a larger effort to just de-platform people who have a certain point of view. How many
00:33:56.200
people who were prominent Trump supporters no longer have a platform in 2021? If you start counting
00:34:04.840
up the number of people who have been de-platformed, it gets kind of scary, doesn't it? Now, you can
00:34:11.480
start and say, well, you know, this one had a good reason, and this one went too far, and now this one
00:34:17.280
maybe broke a rule. But, I don't know, is this happening to the left? Or is it only happening to the
00:34:23.620
right? Yeah, it's a pretty long list of people who have been banned. But, it gets worse. Tucker Carlson
00:34:31.240
reports that a whistleblower has told him that the NSA is spying on Tucker Carlson's private
00:34:38.840
communications, private meaning business, I think, emails and text messages, apparently, and proved it
00:34:46.580
by telling him something that was in his private communications. How would you like that to happen?
00:34:53.080
How would you like a whistleblower from the NSA, a government entity, how would you like a whistleblower
00:35:00.540
to come tell you what your fucking email says? Think about that. Just put yourself in that position
00:35:08.220
for a moment. Just imagine you're Tucker Carlson, and somebody says, hey, I'm a whistleblower,
00:35:14.140
and they've been looking at your communication, and I'm going to prove it by telling you something
00:35:19.640
that's in your email that nobody else would know. Holy fuck. Holy fuck.
00:35:30.740
This isn't cool. And according to the whistleblower, the purpose of it was to de-platform him.
00:35:38.660
The purpose of it was to de-platform him, according to the whistleblower.
00:35:42.620
This might be one of the worst stories in American history, I would say. One of the most
00:35:53.360
horrible examples of government abuse I've ever seen. I mean, you'd have to go to something
00:36:03.660
like the Tuskegee experiments or something, where you're doing human experiments on people
00:36:09.720
to get down to this level of fuck you. This is pretty deep. Now, I'm still open-minded that
00:36:18.900
there's something we don't know about the story. Maybe, you know, maybe the whistleblower is not
00:36:23.620
exactly what we think it is. But, and it's also possible that, you know, an email could be hacked
00:36:30.140
from some other entity, you know. So there are other possibilities. But man, you don't want this to
00:36:35.640
be true, do you? But you kind of feel it is, don't you? Don't you kind of feel it's true?
00:36:41.800
Imagine, if you will, the chessboard for, you know, Republicans versus Democrats. Imagine which
00:36:49.800
pieces on the chessboard are the powerful pieces. You know, which ones are the real chess pieces that
00:36:55.880
can make a difference. Where is Tucker Carlson on that chessboard? Right? He's basically the queen.
00:37:07.280
He's the fucking queen. Now, I mean, in terms of the queen being the most powerful part of the
00:37:13.240
chessboard. Because his show is so impactful, so highly watched, and he does such a good job of
00:37:20.620
the communication and the packaging of the points, etc. Tucker's not like the rest of us.
00:37:26.920
You could take me off the field, and I don't know if you'd notice. You could take, you know, name,
00:37:32.980
name three other people on Fox News, right? You can name three other people, take them off the
00:37:39.000
network. You'd notice. You might miss their show. But I don't know that politics would be different.
00:37:46.040
But Tucker's not like the rest. Tucker changes the news. Tucker decides, in effect, what a lot of
00:37:55.440
people are going to think. Tucker decides what's important. You know, if it's on his show, that's
00:38:02.220
important. If he decides to ignore it, then you know it's not. So the horribleness of this story is
00:38:12.320
hard to understate. This is not a free country, if this is true. If chess pieces are being taken off
00:38:19.940
the board, where am I in this process? You want to get a little bit more scared? It's my understanding
00:38:28.120
that if you're looking at a target for whatever you're investigating, and you're checking out a
00:38:34.800
specific target, and let's say it's the NSA that's snooping on their communication, do they have a right,
00:38:41.040
then, to look at the communication of the other people who are communicating with the target?
00:38:48.420
Yes. Because at the very least, they can see the communication from the other person.
00:38:55.300
I'm going to go a little further now. I have personally communicated with Tucker Carlson
00:39:00.760
in electronic form. So in a trivial way, it wasn't any special. I complimented him on the show or
00:39:10.960
something, got a text from Tucker thanking me, blah, blah, blah. But I've actually had digital
00:39:18.120
communications with somebody who is being snooped on by the NSA. If my communication with him
00:39:25.840
had been of substance, they would be fucking spying on me.
00:39:33.480
Now, as I tell you the story, you're probably plenty mad just being an observer. I'm in this
00:39:40.620
fucking story. I'm in the fucking story. Right? I'm a subject who could potentially... Now, in my case,
00:39:48.840
there's nothing of importance. It was a few years ago, haven't had a contact since then. So there's
00:39:54.560
nothing of mine that actually matters in this. But this is a little too fucking close to home.
00:39:59.640
Right? The NSA is fucking spying on people like me now. In the sense that anybody who had
00:40:07.460
communicated in a digital form with Tucker got spied on. Do you know how much I hate that?
00:40:15.720
A lot. A lot. A lot. And I don't know if this puts me on any enemy's list, but I have long imagined
00:40:29.220
that my communications are being monitored one way or another. What do you think? Do you think my
00:40:37.540
communications are being monitored by anybody, foreign or domestic? What do you think?
00:40:42.840
Yeah. Almost certainly. And I'm a private citizen. I didn't run for any office. Right? I just go on
00:40:53.220
here and I talk about politics. But if I had to guess, I mean, I live my life. I live my life as if my
00:41:01.600
communications are all being monitored. Which, by the way, I recommend. I do recommend that. That if you're
00:41:08.580
using a private app like Signal or WhatsApp or something, and you say to yourself, ah, I've got
00:41:13.760
an encrypted app. Nope. No, you don't. If anybody's logging your keystrokes on your device,
00:41:22.120
they catch it before it gets into the encryption. Or they catch it on the other side. But no, you don't
00:41:28.580
have private communications. That's not a thing. So that's your scary thought for the day.
00:41:36.140
Rasmussen reports that 52% of likely U.S. voters believe America needs to spend more on police.
00:41:44.580
But 23% say the current amount of funding for police is about right. What do I tell you about
00:41:51.120
the 25% rule? That 25% of the public will have a wacky opinion on any poll. It doesn't matter what
00:42:01.600
the topic is. 25% of American voters will have whatever is the dumbest opinion. And in this case,
00:42:10.260
that the current amount of funding is about right. Now, I'm not saying it's not about right.
00:42:14.920
But how would you know that? How would anybody know if it's about right? It's just like sort of
00:42:22.600
a dumb opinion. You could certainly say you need more. And you could, you know, people do say you
00:42:28.820
need less. I don't understand that opinion. But people do. But who are the people who say it's
00:42:33.500
about the right amount? They don't have any information. Is this somebody who's looked at the
00:42:38.900
budget? Anyway, 66% of voters, according to Rasmussen, agree with the following statement.
00:42:47.520
The radical and reckless decisions by some jurisdictions to defund their police forces have
00:42:53.000
had a real and devastating effect on American communities. So two thirds of the public say that
00:42:59.420
the pressure on the police is devastating American communities. Has there ever been an issue
00:43:05.660
where we were so unified? I mean, if you think about it, this is probably the most unifying
00:43:14.020
topic there is, right? Can you think of another one? Where's maybe immigration, where 66% of the
00:43:22.000
people are on the same side? It's kind of rare. But here's what I was going to say about that.
00:43:35.660
AOC got in a little bit of trouble for saying something like this. She said, this is actually
00:43:44.900
a quote from AOC. Now, I want to say that any amount of harm is unacceptable. So she's talking
00:43:49.700
about police and funding. Any amount of harm is unacceptable and too much. Now, of course,
00:43:56.900
when she's quoted, they take that out of the context. So she's being taken out of context.
00:44:02.020
But I want you to hear the whole context. But I also want to make sure that this hysteria,
00:44:08.500
you know, that this doesn't drive a hysteria, and that we look at these numbers in context,
00:44:14.220
so that we can make responsible decisions about what to allocate in that context. Now,
00:44:19.680
it's a bunch of word salad here. But what she's trying to say is that we shouldn't look at the
00:44:24.760
percentages, because that would be misleading. Is she right? Here are some of the percentages
00:44:31.820
that she thinks we should not take too seriously, but to rather keep them in context in terms of
00:44:38.900
their size. Shootings have increased more than 60% in New York City compared to last year.
00:44:44.580
So that's a percentage. Should you ignore a 60% change in one year in shootings? AOC says keep that in
00:44:55.540
context. Well, let's say the number of shootings went from, I don't know, 100 to 200. Would you notice?
00:45:04.860
If you weren't the police, would you even notice? If shootings doubled in a major metropolitan area,
00:45:14.580
how would you even know? Because very few people are actually the subject of a shooting.
00:45:22.340
So her point that you barely would even notice it if you look at the raw numbers. But if you look
00:45:30.240
at the percentages, of course, your hair is on fire. So that's where the hysteria comes from. Oh, no,
00:45:34.960
the hysteria, the percentages are high. So I would say she is right on the math.
00:45:41.200
But I feel as if a 60% increase in one year is something you ought to be pretty hysterical about.
00:45:50.480
I feel as if a little bit of hysteria about a 60% increase in shootings. Yeah. Even though that
00:45:58.740
number is still smallish compared to the total number alive, 60%? What happens next year? Is next
00:46:08.620
year it's going to level off? Or does next year it goes up 100%? You have to worry about the direction
00:46:15.360
of things. So this is what AOC is getting wrong. That 60% doesn't suggest that we're done. That might
00:46:23.380
be the start. If it's the start, it's the worst problem in the world. If we're done, why would that
00:46:32.440
be? Like, why would it top off? There's nothing that would stop it. Here's some more statistics
00:46:38.620
that we're not supposed to worry about. The number of shootings has spiked 126% in Portland in the last
00:46:44.880
year and 51% in Los Angeles. Those seem like pretty big numbers percentage-wise. Homicides in New York
00:46:54.620
surged 12% compared to last year and other cities have, you know, huge percentage increases. So AOC is
00:47:02.740
in a tough spot right now. And she reminds me of, I may have told this story before. This is a very dark
00:47:09.160
story, but it's kind of funny, but very dark. Years ago, when I worked in a bank, there was a human
00:47:19.180
resources person who told me the following story. We were at lunch and he said, you know, I was
00:47:25.380
counseling one of your coworkers who had lots of personal problems and was very distressed,
00:47:31.620
but I thought I did a good job. You know, they were, they were really having a bad place in their
00:47:35.460
life, but I feel like I counseled them up and really made some progress. He finishes the counseling
00:47:42.160
with this employee, feels pretty good about it. Things went about the way he expected, goes back down to
00:47:48.100
his office. And as he's in his office, feeling pretty good about how he helped this employee
00:47:53.880
through a tough time, he watched the employee's body fall past his window in the high rise.
00:48:01.640
Immediately after he was done counseling this person, he thought successfully, that person climbed
00:48:07.700
up on the roof and jumped off right past his window as he was standing in front of it. True story.
00:48:14.580
I think of that story when AOC defends defunding the police. Whoa, what the hell is that?
00:48:27.300
Loco Valdez, Richard says, if I have been unfair or misunderstood you, sorry, thanks for everything.
00:48:34.080
Well, I don't know what you're talking about or why you just gave me $100, but thank you.
00:48:38.980
Did I block you or something? I'm not sure what that's about. But let me know if I blocked you. Let
00:48:45.740
me know. I shouldn't allow people to buy their way back from being blocked.
00:48:55.200
But if you really paid $100, I would do it. I don't want to make that a business to unblock people.
00:49:04.160
But if it meant that much to you, then I would do it. So let me know if you were blocked.
00:49:14.420
So about AOC. So she became the, I would say, the face for defunding the police. She was not the
00:49:22.200
only one who said it, right? Lots of people were on that side. But wouldn't you say that AOC,
00:49:27.180
just because of her prominence, etc., became the face of defunding the police? So how would you like
00:49:33.420
to be the person who's became the face of defunding the police when shootings are up 60% in your city?
00:49:41.120
And that's kind of on you, isn't it? Doesn't it feel like AOC killed a bunch of people this year?
00:49:46.920
Like actually? If you took AOC's influence out of this topic, would there be as much, you know,
00:49:54.920
juice toward defunding the police? I feel like she killed a lot of people. Like actually, literally,
00:50:03.520
literally, her approach to this topic, literally, no exaggeration, it appears, killed a lot of citizens.
00:50:15.680
Right? And a lot of innocent citizens. People who weren't necessarily committing any crimes,
00:50:22.000
although I suspect a lot of criminals were shot by other criminals. So that's as bad as the HR person
00:50:30.520
watching the person they counsel just go past the window. Every time AOC picks up a paper or looks
00:50:36.660
at the news, I doubt she looks at a physical newspaper, but looks at the news, she has to see
00:50:42.440
how many extra people were killed because of her preferred policy. How do you go on? Like,
00:50:50.960
wouldn't you quit politics if you did that? If you had been like the face of a cause that just killed
00:50:58.560
a bunch of people and destroyed a bunch of cities, wouldn't you quit and say, well, I guess politics
00:51:04.680
isn't for me. I just killed hundreds of people personally, like my own actions killed hundreds
00:51:11.780
of people legally, apparently. So let's talk about Gwen Berry, the flag snubbing hammer thrower.
00:51:25.440
Number one, don't you love that there's somebody who is a woman in a sport that involves throwing a
00:51:34.040
hammer a long distance? Why is that even a sport? That's the most useless random sport.
00:51:42.880
You know, who can throw a heavy object the longest distance? Oh, for a woman. Now, if you were saying
00:51:49.460
who could throw at the farthest distance just in general, which I imagine would be mostly men,
00:51:56.580
then I would say, well, that's cool, because I would like to see what's the furthest distance
00:52:01.160
any human being can throw a hammer. It would be kind of interesting, actually. It'd probably be
00:52:05.280
impressive. But the longest thrown hammer by a woman, presumably not that far compared to the top
00:52:15.640
male hammer thrower, I don't know that that's worth anything. I don't know that that has any
00:52:21.720
entertainment value. Now, I get the whole, you know, women and men should have equal access,
00:52:26.760
no argument. But really, you're going to make up a sport that only depends on how big you are,
00:52:34.700
basically, and how strong you are. And then you're going to say, you know, we're going to watch the
00:52:39.740
group of humans we know don't do this well, because they're biologically not capable of lifting as heavy
00:52:47.140
objects. You know, no, it's not an insult. It's just a fact. It's just the most random thing to care
00:52:54.940
about. And then I guess Biden said, quote, according to Jen Psaki, Biden said, pride in our country means
00:53:03.140
recognizing that we haven't lived up to our highest ideals. Okay. Okay, I get that. And freedom of speech
00:53:13.440
is important. There's somebody named Ronnie Hunt who needs to get blocked here, Patrick says. I'll
00:53:25.500
look for that. I haven't seen him. So anyway, I don't have really, I don't really care about hammer
00:53:34.400
throwers. And I don't care about the Olympics. And I also don't care if somebody disrespects the flag.
00:53:39.520
My personal opinion on disrespecting the flag is that's what makes it stronger. Right?
00:53:47.600
Now, I seem to be completely alone in that opinion. Not many people agree with me. But if you can't
00:53:54.560
burn your flag, and actually you don't observe people doing it, it's no good. Right? The power of
00:54:02.340
the flag, all of its power, 100% of its value, is that you can fucking burn it. You can piss on it.
00:54:12.560
It's annoying. That's very offensive, isn't it? Right? That's like one of the most offensive things
00:54:17.480
you could think if you're a patriot. But that's why it has value. The moment you take that away from the
00:54:23.540
flag, I don't give a shit. Then it's just a piece of fabric. But the flag is imbued with this,
00:54:31.540
this power that you can burn it, and it gets more, more powerful, gets stronger. The more you hurt it,
00:54:40.680
the more you disrespect it, the stronger it gets. That's what makes it cool. Right? I don't want to
00:54:48.040
lose that. So I don't care that somebody disrespected it. That's sort of on them. That's
00:54:53.300
for their reputation, their career. It cost her a lot of money. But she got what she wanted. Right?
00:54:59.020
She got her free speech. She got her free speech. She made her point. Cost her some sponsors, I guess.
00:55:08.300
So she paid a price. But that was her decision. So I don't really have a problem with any of this story,
00:55:14.260
or anybody's opinion on it. That's the country we live in. That's the one we prefer. Now, have I told
00:55:20.240
you that one of the ways I know I live in a simulation is that the news is always about me?
00:55:26.820
One way or another. I feel like every day there's at least one news story that has some connection to
00:55:32.860
me personally. And it's the weirdest thing. Now, some of it is because, you know, I'm famous, and I
00:55:38.400
operate in this realm of the news. So I just meet more people and, you know, connect more topics and
00:55:45.200
stuff. So some of it's just that, right? Just chance. But here's another one. I like to point
00:55:50.700
them out because they're fun. So are you following the Britney Spears situation? And if you are,
00:55:59.060
and you're watching the gossipy stuff in the news, Britney Spears and her boyfriend are vacationing
00:56:05.040
in Maui. And she's doing a bunch of videos of them having fun on their vacation, because she's in
00:56:10.680
the news about the conservatorship stuff. And I'm looking at the videos. And I think she's in the
00:56:17.400
room that Christina and I recently stayed in. So she's definitely in the hotel we stayed in. And
00:56:24.460
she's definitely, you know, within one room of where we stayed, because the view from our room was
00:56:29.860
identical. And you and we can tell it's the same same hotel. So you know, so I was just talking to
00:56:37.460
Christina, that it's our favorite place. And we, you know, we've been there a number of times. And so
00:56:42.940
I was just saying we should make plans to go back to that place, literally to that room, or might be
00:56:49.980
one right next to it, I don't know, but it's the same view. And, and then I that I look at a video,
00:56:57.920
and there's, there's Britney Spears dancing around in her bathing suit in that room, or the one next
00:57:03.860
to it. I, the number of times that the news reaches out and taps me on the shoulder, it's just freaking
00:57:11.240
weird. It's just weird. But anyway, that's what makes me think we're living in a simulation. Let's
00:57:19.080
see if I talked about everything I needed to, because I think you did. Yes, all of the interesting
00:57:24.320
news has been discussed. There's nothing else to say. So not only do we have summer, which is always
00:57:33.600
slow news, we don't have Trump in the news much. That makes everything boring. We've got Joe Biden,
00:57:41.040
who is barely sentient. That's boring. We've got, it looks like the end of the pandemic. I don't want
00:57:48.400
to say it too soon. But it's looking good. I feel like we're hitting a boredom patch that's
00:57:56.020
unprecedented. Now, question for you. Will we see lots of summer riots for, let's say, defunding
00:58:05.600
the police and violence by the police against citizens? Or were those protests? Well, let me
00:58:16.960
ask you this. Were the protests from last year, especially the ones about the police, did they
00:58:22.560
accomplish what they wanted? And now the problem is fixed? Or are we going to see exactly the same
00:58:30.160
amount of problem in the world, but no protesting? How do we fight the nonstop Kafka traps the left
00:58:41.500
uses? You're going to have to be a little less obtuse, because I don't quite understand that
00:58:45.640
question. For $4.99, you did not get your questions value worth on that one. But at least I read it.
00:58:52.680
So, anyway, I don't need to go any further on that point. Here's a thing to expect. In a context of
00:59:04.740
super slow news, how long will that last? If we live in a simulation, there's something coming.
00:59:13.680
There's something coming. Might not be something you like, but you don't have slow news for this long.
00:59:21.020
Something's coming. We just don't know what it is. And I want to ask you this question. Have any of you
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decided to not fly long distance because of masks? Because this week alone, I decided to not do a long
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distance trip because of masks. And it's the only reason, right? Or it's the tipping point reason. I had other
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reasons. But the tipping point reason was that I'm not going to get on an 11 hour flight and wear a
00:59:53.980
mask. I did that. And I've done that twice during the pandemic. And it is awful. Now, I've got a little
01:00:02.420
asthma. So I get like a whole different feeling with a mask on if I wear it too long. So the feeling
01:00:09.620
that I get is like being waterboarded. Like I feel like I can't breathe, etc. If I fall asleep,
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I wake right up feeling like I'm gasping for air. And I think it's mostly psychological,
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maybe a little bit real. I don't know. But I'm not going to fly anymore. That's it. I'm done flying
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until the masks are gone. I might fly an hour, but I'm not going to fly six hours. So
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as I've told you before, economics is all that's going to matter. Right? Economics is the only thing
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that's going to matter to getting rid of masks. It won't be the government. And the airline business
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is hopping right now. So as long as they got plenty of business, they can keep the masks.
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But if they feel enough of us are waiting until masks are taken off, imagine if you will, they said,
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I think they do say that we're going to wear masks until September. Would you book a flight
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one month before and actually fly one month before masks go away? If you could just wait one more month
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and know you could have the same, let's say a vacation trip, or even business trip, but you didn't
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have to wear a mask, would anybody book a flight in that one month period before the masks are scheduled
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to go away? Right? You wouldn't. A basic understanding of economics is that the long haul flights should
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just be destroyed a month before the mask mandate goes. So how do you fix that? People probably are
01:01:48.160
going to do the same number of flights if it's three months before the mask mandate ends. But when you get
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that last month, people are really going to postpone because it makes such a difference. I think they're
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going to drop it early because that month will destroy the airline industry for the long haul stuff
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unless they say, okay, we're going to, we're going to say get rid of masks a month early. So here's your
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prediction. Prediction is that the mask requirement will be dropped early and not in September. And it
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will be because they have to, the business will just fall off a ledge if they don't do it.
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All right. That's all I got for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.