Episode 2202 Scott Adams: Wild Day In News & Opinion And I'm Here To Show You The Machinery. Coffee!
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 20 minutes
Words per Minute
150.86006
Summary
A tour company is giving tours of a city in decline, Elon Musk wants to make money off of newspapers, and a woman who used to work for one of the biggest corporations in the world tries to impress a woman with a lie about her past.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization, sometimes with proper lighting.
00:00:15.460
If you'd like to take this experience, which is going to be amazing just by itself,
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but if you want to take this to levels that nobody's ever understood or heard or could even speak of,
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All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a steiner, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
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And join me now for the unclearable pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day that makes everything better.
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There's so many weird and interesting stories today that I didn't even get to check the news.
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All right, well, I like to start with interesting stories before we get to the big meat.
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But so there's a tour group that gives tours of San Francisco.
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How would you like to be a tour group or how would you like to be a business whose job it was to give tours of San Francisco?
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Well, apparently they're capitalizing on the situation and they're now giving a tour that they call the Doom Loop Walking Tour.
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And it's a tongue-in-cheek ad, but it says, you've read the headlines.
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Now get close and personal to the doom and squalor of downtown San Francisco.
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Discover the policy choices that made America's wealthiest city, the nation's innovative leader of housing crisis addiction.
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So apparently, here's the funny part, the tours are booked.
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There's all these people who want to see the Doom Loop of a city in complete disarray and decline.
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Now, if there's one thing I love about America, there's more than one thing.
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But one thing I love about America is that we've never heard of a problem we can't make money on.
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You name it, if something's going wrong, there's one of us bastards who's figuring out how to make a buck on it.
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And I'm sure that that's what keeps the entire system working, is that the dumbest, most unproductive things in the world can be going on,
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and somebody's going to be sitting just off the sidelines saying, I think I can make this work.
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I think I can build a business model around this.
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Speaking of the free market, Elon Musk tweeted, he actually put newspapers in a quote.
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He goes, newspapers, just search the internet, particularly this platform, and print it out.
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Now, you know, there used to be a good reason to read newspapers.
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Does anybody remember when newspapers had a comic called, what was it called?
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Dilbert used to be in these paper things called newspapers, and they would be sent to people, like physically, to their homes and stuff.
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And then they would try to read them, and they would get, like their hands would be filled with kind of weird ink and crap.
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And after you read it, you couldn't talk, you couldn't touch your food.
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Did you ever try to read a newspaper and eat toast at the same time?
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Because your toast is going to taste like newspaper ink.
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Now, I might have a bad attitude about newspapers at the moment.
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The funniest question I get from trolls online is that the trolls like to come into my tweets and say something about how sad I must be that I got canceled by newspapers.
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Who would want to be associated with newspapers?
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Is there anybody here who, have you ever gone on a date and lied that you worked for the newspaper business?
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It's like, I don't want her to hear that I'm a quality assurance person at a big corporation.
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Because you'd like to feel good about yourself.
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Well, I was also watching some YouTube clips from Peter Zayen.
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Now, I do not know if Peter Zayen has, you know, amazingly good insights about everything geopolitical.
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I mean, I really can't tell what's true and what's not.
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But I'll tell you, his content is interesting from beginning to end.
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So, you know, use your adult filters to, you know, put yourself in the head of nobody knows the future.
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Because as Elon Musk says, the newspapers, but also the regular news, they don't have regular news gathering assets.
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So, when actual news drops, sometimes you can't find it anywhere.
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So, I haven't seen this in any news, so-called news, that we're working on a deal with Iran.
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But why have I completely missed that in reading the news every single day, several times a day?
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I guess it's because, as Elon Musk says, the newspapers are not real news.
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And by the way, that was another thing that Peter Zayon described.
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He described the evolution from having robust news bureaus in other countries to what we have now,
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which is people writing opinions and then other people writing opinions about the other people's opinions.
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And we're selling it as news because it comes out on the legacy platforms that you used to think were news.
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So, anyway, but if Peter Zayon is correct, it would look like the broad strokes of the deal would have something about the U.S. having, or the international community,
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the U.N. having more access to checking out Iran's nuclear situation.
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And one of the surprises is, now this is from Peter Zayon, one of the surprises is, when Iran recently was re-inspected,
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is that that uranium that they were processing up to nuclear grade, they actually started going in the other direction.
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They took half of what they had up to, like, 90%, and half of it they've already downgraded it to, is it enrichment is the right word?
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So, it's beginning to look like Iran either didn't need that much, or maybe they weren't so dead set on building a nuclear weapon.
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But, I guess part of the deal is they would allow more inspections.
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They would give $6 billion of their own money back, or somebody else's money.
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But, the background on this is that the Russian sanctions, in an indirect way that he can explain, but I can't at the moment,
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And so, Biden may have accidentally done more harm to Iran's economy than Trump did, but not because he was trying,
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but because he, you know, the Ukraine war had a side impact on Iran, which is pretty devastating.
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So, that made an opportunity for a deal, because Iran was more desperate than they have been.
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I don't know, you know, I'm not there, so I don't have any counterclaims to bounce against it.
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But, the idea is that Iran might be flexible about nuclear stuff.
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And, here's, and if Zayn is right, Benjamin Netanyahu, head of Israel, says that they're looking at a deal that he can live with.
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So, there might actually be something going on that's entirely positive for everybody, meaning that the Middle East would get back into some kind of balance.
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I believe part of the deal is that Iran would stop funding attacks against Saudi Arabia and some of their neighbors.
00:10:05.240
So, you would get fewer funding, less funding of proxy attacks.
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We'd get, we'd get some prisoners back, I guess some drug dealers were in prison.
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They would get six billion dollars of their own or somebody else's money that had been held up, but it wasn't our money.
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And, then we would get access to their, you know, nuclear inspections.
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Now, the fact that maybe Netanyahu could live with it.
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So, the Abraham Accords got a lot of the players on the same team, at least economically and on paper.
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But, Iran was specifically carved out as somebody you couldn't deal with at the moment.
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But, that caused a problem because Iran is a funder of proxy wars and, you know, they're the big problem over there.
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So, it looks like we're heading toward, don't get too excited, but, you know, the chatter is that Saudi Arabia might be willing to recognize Israel, which I think might be a separate conversation, but I can easily see them folded together.
00:11:16.140
So, Saudi Arabia might get relief from the proxy wars, is it the Hutus and the whoever's, so that we're attacking Saudi and Saudi interests, Yemen.
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So, the Yemen thing might get some relief, at least in the funding sense.
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Relief meaning they're not funded to attack anybody anymore.
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And, that would create the hope would be some balance in the Middle East sufficient that we don't need to be involved with the United States.
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We might be right on the cusp of two administrations doing the right thing, in one case maybe a little bit accidentally, but, you know, taking advantage of it.
00:12:06.240
We might be seeing something like a gigantic two administration, because I think you'd have to include both, two administration achievement that would be kind of amazing.
00:12:22.700
Okay, I don't know my, assume everything I said about that area is wrong.
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The two warring groups in Yemen are the, the, the, the Who's and the Who's.
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The Houthis, all right, well, somebody's fighting over there.
00:12:51.740
But the other thing that Peter Zahn said is that, I hadn't heard this before, that the primary reason for Russia's, let's say, aggressiveness against his neighbors, and I'd never heard this before.
00:13:04.460
Now, you'd always heard that it was, you know, maybe defensive, and maybe, maybe it was building up his empire to get it back to where it was.
00:13:12.240
But, you know, everything that you hear in the United States through the regular news about Russia and Russia's intentions and Putin's intentions, that's all fake propaganda bullshit, right?
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So, you, but Peter Zahn has a take, and it goes like this, and I don't know if I believe it.
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So, I feel like there's probably a lot more to it.
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Yeah, you've heard it's about warm water ports.
00:13:46.180
Here's his take, that the topography of Russia and the surrounding countries that are, you know, between it and Europe proper, the topography is really disadvantageous for defense.
00:14:02.020
Meaning that if somebody were to attack Russia, prior to Russia being aggressive and, you know, taking Crimea and Georgia and all those things, there were some easy attack points that the homeland of Russia would be vulnerable to.
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But, in the old days, under the Soviet Union, they had controlled enough territory that they could control choke points.
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So, there are some choke points that if you controlled them militarily, it would be very difficult for an army to attack Russia.
00:14:33.420
If you don't attack them, apparently it's kind of easy on the ground.
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Now, so the thinking is that even if Putin left tomorrow, the other senior people who were, you know, his people would have exactly the same policy,
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because they all see it as an existential risk to Russia, whether soon or in the next thousand years.
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In other words, they're looking for a permanent security situation for Russia.
00:15:03.140
Now, have you ever seen that reported in regular news?
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How many of you have never heard that before, other from Peter Zand?
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This is the, I think, the most informed and smartest audience in politics,
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because you actually are engaged in trying to figure out how to figure out,
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which is way more important than figuring out what the news said.
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You know, this is a group of people who are very actively trying to figure out,
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And if they are lying, how can we figure it out?
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That's such a basic thing that you should need to know about the Ukraine war.
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Now, here's the part that I'm going to disagree with Peter Zand.
00:16:00.360
He says that the war can't end unless one of them just has a convincing victory,
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So that if Ukraine doesn't outright win and pretty much demolish Russia as a major power,
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or Putin somehow magically win, if that doesn't happen, the war will just go on forever.
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What I hear, if it's true, that their primary interest is the choke points,
00:16:34.460
how could you not have a way to negotiate that?
00:16:38.920
That feels like the easiest thing to negotiate.
00:16:40.960
Now, that doesn't mean you necessarily say, oh, these choke points can belong to you.
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But it definitely tells you that if you've got something called NATO,
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don't expect them to give up on the choke points.
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I mean, you'd have to look at the whole situation, right?
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Like, how about the whole trade economic situation?
00:17:05.360
You'd want to loosen that and maybe get Russia into the European or American domain a little bit more.
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So, to me, the fact that we understand what the Russians want,
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or at least I do, maybe for the first time I understand that element,
00:17:24.620
The times when you can't negotiate is when two sides want the same thing,
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This is a situation where Russia wants something unique to Russia,
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and other people want their own things, like their own security, etc.
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And I would say, as a general negotiation fact,
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that when people want the same one thing, you've got a problem.
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But if you've got a situation where what the Russians need
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there's probably a number of ways to get to that.
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So, in other words, you don't have to give up something of your own too much, necessarily,
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And that usually suggests a deal could be made.
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two of the most surprising things you'll ever hear from a Democrat.
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He means whatever it takes to close the border.
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and he tells a story that's associated with his documentary he did.
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He spent a lot of time interviewing people there.
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I heard a story from RFK Jr. that I'd never heard.
00:19:02.600
Apparently, we always knew the cartels are managing the illegal flow of immigration.
00:19:10.300
So, again, this might be something you already knew.
00:19:12.180
I didn't know that their operation, the cartel operation,
00:19:15.820
had spread globally to the point where almost all of the immigrants
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Almost all of them are from Africa, everywhere else, China.
00:19:30.800
And he pointed out that the vast majority of them are military-age men,
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He's just saying that if you were to look at them,
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They're coming from any place they can get out of.
00:19:54.740
Now, and apparently, this system is built to look like we have a system,
00:20:05.780
If you come in, let's say, the legal way where the government is checking your fingerprints
00:20:11.760
and giving you a court date, your court date is in seven years.
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You have seven years to live in this country completely legally.
00:20:22.320
Now, you're not a citizen, but you're completely legal because you've checked in.
00:20:28.660
Do you think that in seven years they're going to be sent back?
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Do you think there's a court in America at seven years from now
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who's going to say, well, you've been living and working here for seven years
00:20:41.300
Do you think that we're going to send them back?
00:20:52.300
And he's basically saying that the news has been kept from you.
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Not only has the news been kept from us, but even from the right.
00:21:01.760
I would say that I have not seen any right-leaning publication,
00:21:14.300
But I haven't seen it on Fox News that 98% of the people coming in
00:21:22.080
And Kamala Harris has that all worked out, right?
00:21:25.100
So Kamala Harris is working on Central America,
00:21:35.860
That whatever is going on, it doesn't look like incompetence.
00:21:38.860
It looks like some kind of a very determined effort
00:22:03.280
cleverly shipped their people to the blue cities
00:22:24.360
Do they really think they're going to get extra votes?
00:22:29.920
I think that these immigrants are being shipped into cities
00:22:33.060
where they're being shipped into the filth and crime
00:22:45.800
in my own city where I'm living for seven years at least.
00:22:50.960
is there anybody who's offering to take care of it?
00:23:14.200
Imagine a busload, the cartel's got a busload of immigrants,
00:23:17.960
and they've been taken from everywhere from China
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how many are conservative and how many are liberal
00:24:12.400
they're bringing in way more conservative people
00:26:11.000
He interviewed busloads of people individually.
00:26:16.760
And if you want me to finish this conversation,
00:26:49.620
I mean, this is a well-known, understood phenomenon,
00:26:53.040
and he talked to families that had a member taken away
00:26:58.680
And traffic, by the way, would be the good news.
00:27:25.040
RFK Jr. says that when he talks about the environment,
00:27:29.400
he rarely talks about climate and climate change risk.
00:27:34.840
for why he doesn't talk about climate change risk,
00:27:44.740
and moving toward energy that's less polluting in general?
00:27:50.760
Do you know why he says he's not talking climate change risk?
00:27:55.100
Doesn't believe scientists and doesn't believe the model.
00:28:01.380
You know, how long have people been telling me,
00:28:09.900
when you know he's like a climate change crazy guy,
00:28:13.360
and he's always been a climate change crazy guy?
00:28:43.360
And his skepticism about scientists who are, you know,
00:28:50.140
His skepticism does apply to climate change models.
00:29:00.260
Isn't everything that RFK Jr. has said about pharma,
00:29:09.680
I mean, isn't everything he says consistent with not believing the scientific climate change models?
00:29:22.920
and so he doesn't believe any of the corrupt parts.
00:29:31.360
but Scott, he said he wants to get rid of coal and oil.
00:29:38.420
Do you think it's true that RFK wants to get rid of coal and oil?
00:29:53.260
Do you know what he wants to do to get rid of them?
00:29:59.820
He wants the free market to properly price all of our energy components
00:30:06.380
so that one of them is not accidentally subsidized
00:30:09.420
for no good purpose other than the profits that they subsidized.
00:30:21.660
I just don't know if the free market is as efficient as he'd like it to be
00:30:27.500
But do you hate the fact that he's anti-coal and anti-oil
00:30:32.640
in only the sense that it needs to compete fairly against the green energy,
00:30:37.960
and if it wins, it wins, and if it doesn't, it doesn't.
00:30:42.060
And if it wins for a while and then doesn't, that's the free market.
00:30:50.660
He wants to breathe and eat and go to the doctor
00:31:05.020
I'm just saying that when you see somebody enter the race
00:31:09.520
and look at, like, really, really show complete,
00:31:30.800
Now, that doesn't make him your candidate, right?
00:31:32.800
You may disagree with him on an abortion or something else.
00:32:20.220
See if you don't think this is the cleanest take on Taiwan.
00:32:37.340
and we're not really that close to replacing them,
00:32:43.080
China's not going to take Taiwan if he's president.
00:32:58.040
recaptures its ability to do advanced microchips,
00:33:19.700
that we're not going to give up our microchips.
00:33:42.380
I feel like the good trolls take the summer off.
00:34:19.560
I'll try to say what they're saying politically.
00:34:54.760
believe that as a vice presidential running mate,
00:35:26.800
usually it's like somebody will ask a question,
00:35:40.000
No, my viewers give the answer before the question,
00:35:47.520
You know I've got a new book, Reframe Your Brain,
00:35:52.400
The update is I am banned for life on Amazon KDP.
00:35:57.180
Now, that's the service that independent publishers use
00:35:59.780
to put books on Amazon, so to make it available.
00:36:18.980
which have been provided to them from the start.
00:36:22.720
So from the start, they had the documents showing my ownership.
00:36:28.320
what's wrong with my documents showing my ownership,
00:36:31.300
they say, well, we'll have to study this in Quebec,
00:36:49.640
We'll get, well, five days, we're going to look at it again.
00:36:53.660
because these were email exchanges with the support.
00:36:57.780
It took me a while to realize I'm talking to an AI.
00:37:02.220
I'm pretty sure the responses didn't have any tells for a human.
00:37:09.680
so several of the messages had different names.
00:37:11.620
There was Christopher, and there was somebody else.
00:37:14.340
But the message, and two of them came back identical, right?
00:37:20.000
Now, I made sure that I wrote my message in a way, the last one,
00:37:25.520
that it would be impossible to ignore what I said
00:37:29.640
and simply say some canned response, but I got a canned response.
00:37:32.980
And it would have been impossible for a human to ignore what I said.
00:37:41.640
So we're going to look for alternatives, and we'll see if we can solve it.
00:37:49.240
there's no indication it's anything but maybe a system problem.
00:37:54.080
Probably, if I had to guess, it's because my old publisher
00:37:58.200
had some placeholders online for the future book,
00:38:06.900
It's probably some AI system that checks content
00:38:09.140
to make sure you check something, to make sure you own it.
00:38:18.880
Now, it is true that I was cancelled in newspapers
00:38:23.060
primarily because the Washington Post, I think,
00:38:31.180
oh, if the Washington Post does it, we all have to do it.
00:38:39.960
and he also owns Amazon, which just banned me for life.
00:38:43.700
So the two Jeff Bezos properties have banned me for life
00:38:48.120
to make it impossible to be a public figure and earn a living.
00:38:52.700
But we're going to still call that a coincidence.
00:38:59.920
Now, because the problem is he owns so many things
00:39:04.360
that the odds of running into him are pretty high.
00:39:08.760
The odds of running into a Bezos something is pretty high.
00:39:16.180
However, if I were him, I'd be deeply embarrassed.
00:39:30.380
Amazon's one of the greatest companies ever created.
00:39:43.440
that you forget how many mistakes somebody could make
00:39:53.200
but they operate so well in an amazing, complex environment,
00:39:59.240
So I think Amazon's one of the greatest companies of all time.
00:40:13.640
that he had made some personal decisions in any way.
00:40:49.480
because it's going to come through a different path.
00:41:01.660
he says that the situation in the United States
00:41:06.280
is fitting a pattern of polarization and demonization.
00:41:24.340
And then prosecutions that you think are bullshit.
00:41:37.740
And people will be killing people in the streets?
00:42:01.920
But, you know, I don't spend a lot of time around people.
00:42:40.080
But although some of you probably have family members
00:42:45.140
even your own family looks like a civil war at this point.
00:43:00.820
which is this stuff can get in the hand really quickly.
00:43:25.880
we'd have lots of a warning before it got that bad.
00:43:50.520
what's it mean when the country is heavily armed?
00:44:12.800
but I don't think we're going to full genocide.
00:44:18.200
Trump, apparently they want to get a Trump mugshot,
00:44:35.520
But if you're the most famous face in the world,
00:44:56.760
Because you see this smile when he poses for pictures.
00:45:04.600
but he has sort of a smile for the camera's look
00:45:15.740
But you do what you can if you're a politician.
00:45:33.420
The one I want to see is the dad coming home stare.
00:45:46.660
it's going to be the most memed image of all time.
00:46:17.800
Trump does a video in which he's claiming the election was rigged.
00:46:29.640
How long did it take for somebody in social media to say,
00:46:37.240
Is this another one of those racist things he's saying without saying it?
00:46:48.080
but he's using the R word to try to beat it in some kind of a clever workaround?
00:46:54.660
Do you think he's calling people who do elections the N word?
00:47:03.640
do you think it ever crossed his mind that it would make a lot of trouble if he used the word?
00:47:30.540
The reality that we're told is reality that is that the election was clean.
00:47:35.120
And the way that you know the election was clean is that they didn't find any problems.
00:47:41.240
And half of the country thinks that makes sense.
00:47:45.080
Let me say it again so we can laugh at half of the country.
00:47:47.820
Half of the country will say this on social media in public like they think it makes sense
00:48:00.260
The elections were definitely clean because there's no publicly known information that would refute that.
00:48:14.880
The smart take is that they didn't find any problems.
00:49:27.420
I'm not saying we're necessarily in a simulation,