In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, I talk about Apple's new virtual reality glasses, my first prediction for the 2024 election, and why I sold my Apple stock a few years ago. I also talk about why I no longer want to have exposure to Apple.
00:10:34.940A lot of it is just a change in the names of it.
00:10:37.140Some of them are changing their framing of it to more of the environmental part.
00:10:42.360They're going to focus on the E, not the G so much, the governance part.
00:10:47.820But I think this is a good sign that businesses are embarrassed to be in the ESG business.
00:10:53.820As you know, BlackRock was pushing it, and then they backed off from it, at least the words.
00:10:58.720So, what do you make of the fact that it's embarrassing, it's actually embarrassing, to admit to your shareholders that you're involved in ESG, that it's all downside.
00:11:12.480And, by the way, you know, I don't have the big problem that companies would try to be better corporate citizens, but the ESG stuff's crazy.
00:11:25.320University of Michigan has DEI employees.
00:11:30.120Take a guess if you didn't see the story.
00:11:33.340How many DEI employees do you need to staff your college DEI department?
00:15:13.040Remember I told you that you don't really know a story until you know the players and who they're married to and how they make their money and all that stuff.
00:15:22.420Just what they say doesn't tell you much.
00:15:25.540But if you know who they are plus what they say, that might tell you something.
00:15:31.000You know, you all know the story of General Austin, Secretary of Defense, and he disappeared into the hospital without getting the message out to his bosses.
00:15:46.780But whatever the problem was, he was off the grid and maybe not even conscious he was in the hospital without people knowing he was missing at a time when the country is at great military peril.
00:15:58.340So I think it was CNN, maybe MSNBC, it doesn't matter.
00:16:04.300But one of them had John Brennan on to talk about this.
00:16:08.380Now, what do you know when you hear that John Brennan was asked to be a guest and he talked about this problem?
00:16:20.160John Brennan is who you invite on the news when you have the following situation that you want to accomplish.
00:16:28.340What you want to accomplish is there's a news cycle that's working against you, and that means Democrats.
00:16:35.500So the news is unfriendly to Democrats.
00:16:38.280And everybody believes they understand the story.
00:16:41.100Oh, I understand this story, and it's bad for Democrats.
00:16:44.280In that case, you need somebody to come in and introduce a new narrative that will give you at least some question about whether the obvious explanation is the true one.
00:17:23.340But he introduced a new narrative that might be Russian disinformation.
00:17:28.820So now you've got this embarrassing story about the Secretary of Defense, which would suggest that Biden's White House is completely unmanaged.
00:17:37.460Because if you're not managing military command during days like this, you're not really managing anything.
00:17:45.080So there's a story that's bad for Democrats.
00:17:48.360The Secretary of Defense was unavailable and nobody knew.
00:17:50.860So they bring on John Brennan, and he introduces a new narrative.
00:17:57.520And the new narrative is, well, he just said it sort of as a toss-off.
00:18:01.560He goes, well, we're not sure if his medical condition is a reason for his poor judgment and why he didn't inform people.
00:18:37.540It's like, well, you knew he was in the hospital, and he couldn't function.
00:18:41.800So if he's in the hospital and he can't function, and then he does something that sounds like somebody who couldn't function, it all makes sense.
00:18:57.220So you give it a different vibe to it.
00:19:02.780So my only point about this, I'm not really too interested in the General Austin story, but the fact that they bring John Brennan on to introduce it to a new narrative, you understand that's pure propaganda, right?
00:19:39.600Now, again, put this in the context of an election year.
00:19:45.120Does it surprise you to hear that as we launch the election year, that Axios is reporting, oh, the biggest surprise story you could ever have in an election year, that 2023 was the hottest year in 125,000 years.
00:20:04.760Now, could you have predicted that the news would tell you, and Axios in particular, would tell you that it was the hottest year last year?
00:20:17.120I could have predicted that without any science at all, because it's bad for Republicans and good for Democrats.
00:20:52.060That's how you measure the temperature in an election year.
00:20:55.520Now, do I have to go through the details to convince you that we can't measure the temperature over 125,000 years?
00:21:04.760Does anybody need even five seconds of why nobody in the fucking world can measure the temperature of the earth to within a degree or two over 125 fucking thousand years?
00:21:18.140Because, you know, I could give you the conversation about why you can't measure it today.
00:21:25.080Do you think you can measure it today within a degree or so and then measure it over time?
00:21:30.660It is absurd to imagine that that's a capability that humans have.
00:21:38.740And the problem is that even if you have lots of thermometers, things can happen to the thermometer.
00:21:46.800But also, the earth does not have a uniform kind of common temperature.
00:21:52.140Rather, it has hot pockets that can stay hot for a long time, cool pockets, and sometimes those change around.
00:21:59.600Sometimes your hot pocket becomes cooler and vice versa.
00:22:04.040But if you don't have a thermometer probably, you know, every square mile or so over the entire earth, including the oceans, you're not really measuring anything.
00:22:15.060You might be able to measure the measurements you have changing over time.
00:22:21.240But there might be other reasons for that change.
00:22:23.960Could be where they are, what happens since they were put in, could be that the heat sink is going somewhere it didn't used to go.
00:22:42.340You know, a hundred years from now, there will be history courses where they laugh because they thought that they could measure the temperature of the earth with some thermometers and some satellite images.
00:23:19.820So this might be on the side that you agree with.
00:23:22.300So if you agree with the people who are not worried about climate, you might agree with the people who say that the amount of ice is increasing instead of decreasing.
00:23:32.640Do you think we can measure the amount of ice?
00:27:33.180But I think, you know, I'm not predicting this will happen.
00:27:38.460But I think we're at a place where you could actually have a president and you would never meet anybody in your whole life who voted for them.
00:28:15.340Trump is doing his usual provocations that get taken out of context.
00:28:19.660So here he's being quoted as saying that he hopes the economy crashes in the next 12 months because, quote, I don't want to be Herbert Hoover.
00:28:30.220Now, Herbert Hoover was president when the economy crashed.
00:28:34.740So he was always famous as our worst president for economics, although there's a dispute whether he was really that bad.
00:38:31.000Here's the real story that's just coming out.
00:38:34.700Actually, I don't know how recently this came out.
00:38:37.160But it turns out that these so-called fake electors, there's documentation describing what they were up to.
00:38:51.340So in writing, you know, contemporaneous, when it was happening, in writing, there's documentation that shows they were not intending to be fake substitute electors.
00:39:04.180They very clearly said the only point of this is to have some people lined up to be replacements if the legal challenges succeed so that you can maintain your legal right to continue your challenge.
00:39:19.400So apparently the whole point of having the alternative electors in writing and in words were not to be fake electors.
00:39:29.780It was to preserve their legal rights to continue the procedural challenges.
00:39:35.020So the entire basis of the claim is known to be debunked on documents that very clearly say the intention of this is just to keep our rights open, not to take over the country.
00:39:49.120Isn't that freaking amazing that that that kind of news is just sort of bubbling up now?
00:39:57.540I think it's been known for a while, but it wasn't known to be.
00:43:54.520You can put in a monkey that will change its behavior.
00:43:56.800You can turn a little macaque monkey, you can make it lower its risk or increase its risk.
00:44:06.560And so you could make a monkey have a gambling addiction by tweaking the chip one way, and you can tweak it the other way, and you can remove the addiction.
00:44:16.180Now, they're already saying, of course, this may have application for people.
00:44:21.360But I would be more worried that we're weaponizing monkeys because I don't want a monkey with a chip in its head.
00:44:35.340Because if the monkeys start coordinating, I don't know.
00:44:39.940I just don't like the idea of chips in the monkey's brain.
00:44:43.180It just feels like that could go wrong.
00:44:44.840Well, the Missouri Secretary of State has a clever thing to say.
00:44:52.180So the Missouri Secretary of State is opposed to attempts by Colorado and Maine to remove Trump from the ballot.
00:45:00.940Obviously, Missouri is a Republican kind of a state.
00:45:03.900So if that happens, if Colorado and Maine take Trump off the ballot, the Missouri says they'll remove Biden from the Missouri ballot for giving aid to the invasion of our southern border.
00:45:17.120To which I say, how in the world is that legal?
00:45:20.060And then the second thing I say, oh, I actually don't care.
00:48:57.240If he chose Haley as a VP, that might be a problem.
00:49:02.800But I'm going to disagree with Peter Zayn.
00:49:04.520I think the Republicans will form up just the way they always do.
00:49:09.620I don't think it'll be any different this time.
00:49:13.900Rasmussen says that two-thirds of Democrats approve of keeping Trump off the ballot.
00:49:20.760Two-thirds of Republicans approve of keeping Trump off the ballot.
00:49:27.240And I'm pretty sure that most of them understand they're not doing it legally.
00:49:30.960In other words, it's pretty obvious that the Supreme Court will reverse it.
00:49:36.180So you can't really say that they're saying they agree with the law because they probably know that it's not going to pass legal muster eventually.
00:49:45.780But still, two-thirds of Democrats are in favor of it.
00:49:50.340Now, you know what's scary about this?
00:49:52.060If you reverse the parties, the exact topic, you just changed Biden with Trump,
00:49:59.160I'll bet two-thirds of Republicans would be in favor of keeping Biden off the ballot for similarly stupid reasons.
00:52:00.800That if you simply counted the votes, I think Trump would win.
00:52:05.520But if you look at the number of people who would be willing to take him off the ballot, whether that's legal to do it or not, if you look at the framing of him as Hitler, etc., you've created a situation where the Democrats have to rig the election.