Episode 2411 CWSA 03⧸12⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 25 minutes
Words per Minute
148.28955
Summary
One of the things I learned yesterday is that complaining about stuff works sometimes. You ever complain about stuff and nothing happens? I had this weird day yesterday where I complained about things and things happened. I complain about my blue check going away on X, it goes away if you change your profile picture. And it was back within an hour.
Transcript
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la-pa-pa. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's
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called Coffee with Scott Adams, and that's what you're going to do. Today's show may be the best
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show ever. Maybe. You never know. Stick around. Maybe we'll make some news, too. Let's see. But
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first, if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even imagine,
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all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen,
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jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing
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that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
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So good. Well, I saw a story today that there's a new wearable technology that helped researchers
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determine which coffee is the best. So you put a little thing on your head with a bunch
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of sensors, and you taste some different things. And no matter what your conscious brain tells
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you, the device will tell you how much you really liked it, which is awesome. By the way,
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I know somebody, a good friend of mine, who does this kind of work. So if there's an AI company
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that wants to train their AI how to figure out human emotions and human reactions, you could
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actually do that by capturing enough human reactions to things that it forms a database
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that AI could use to pretend to have some human reactions to things. Anyway, so that's a possibility
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if anybody wants a good resource there. One of the things I learned yesterday is that
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complaining works sometimes. You ever complain about stuff and nothing happens? I had this
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weird day yesterday where I complained about things and things happened. I'll give you an
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example. I complained because my blue check went away on X. It goes away if you change your
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profile picture. It takes a while to be sure that you're really the same person. And I
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complained that I didn't think it was ever coming back because it was taking longer than
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it should. And it was back within an hour. I think an hour after I complained, it came
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back. Coincidence? Could be. I don't know. But here are the other examples. So I complained
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about my, I complained about my internet because I've had a really, I don't know, years, years
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of bad internet. Literally years where it just goes in and out and, you know, glitches all
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the time. And I finally just had enough and it got so bad that I couldn't, couldn't even
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use it. And every time I'd done it, Xfinity would say they fixed something on a connection
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to the house or something. And sometimes I'd update my modem and it seemed to work a little
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bit, but not totally. And so yesterday I went through the normal tech support, but that wasn't
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working out. So they had to escalate it to the like level two. So now I had basically
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two levels of tech support. And then I complained about it on the X platform, which definitely
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got their attention. So then that gets the executive response team involved. So at one
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point I had, uh, I think I had three separate response teams working on it at the same time.
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Within an hour of the, uh, contact with the top guys, there was a truck outside my house
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doing something on the street, but when they were done, I had the best internet I've ever had.
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It was about twice as fast on the download and 10 times as fast on the upload. I didn't even
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know that was possible. So it was always in the network, had nothing to do with my house.
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And for 10 years or so, I've been dealing with this and fixed it yesterday by, I finally complained
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enough, I guess. Well, then there was also my complaint about TikTok, which, uh, got pretty
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big response. Uh, Vivek contacted me and also he DM to me just to make contact because he has a very
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different opinion on TikTok. And then he alerted me that he was going to do a, uh, a live stream.
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So he did a live stream last night. I think it was on X and I watched that and they'll talk about that
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in a little bit. So complaining worked three different times yesterday to get the attention
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I needed, which is weird. I don't, I don't usually recommend complaining. I'm not a big complainer,
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but it totally worked three times. Anyway, four years ago today, do you know what the anniversary
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is? It's your four year anniversary of the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
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Does it feel like four years since the beginning of the COVID pandemic?
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That, that was a long few years in there, wasn't it? I think those are the longest years of my life.
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Oh my God, I hated those pandemic years. Anyway, it's over. Uh, meanwhile, an update on the Tates,
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the Tate brothers. Apparently they've been arrested again, uh, in their Romanian country.
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They've been arrested on a UK warrant that's based on charges that were investigated first in 2012
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and then dropped. But suddenly those charges are back. Hmm. How do you explain that? How do you explain
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that the Tates are in renewed legal trouble, you know, years after charges were looked into and dropped?
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Well, one possibility is new evidence. Definitely a possibility. The other possibility is this is part
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of the larger trend of destroying any, uh, persuasive voices who might be pro-Trump. Now I'm not going to
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say that the Tates are pro-Trump because I don't know if they are or not, but you would assume that
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their general vibe and their general, what they believe in and promote seems more compatible with,
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you know, sort of a Trump point of view, not, I'm not counting their, the way they make money,
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but, uh, their political stuff. So do you think that the Tates are being arrested because of some crime
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or do you think it's political? What do you, what do you think in the comments? Do you think
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without even, I don't even know what the charges are. I don't know what the charges are. I couldn't
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find that in the news. Everybody was talking about it, but they didn't mention the charges.
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So what do you think? Do you think this is just political? I think it is. Yeah. I think this is,
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uh, political. I think the United States and maybe, maybe Great Britain wanted to do it on its own,
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but I think we might've twisted their arms to say, you know what? These Tate brothers are too
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influential and they don't say things we like. So take them out. Now I don't have evidence of that.
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Zero evidence, no evidence. It's just that it would be consistent with everything else we've seen.
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Let me ask you this. Has enough time gone by that you understand that my cancellation was political?
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You know that that was political, right? Does everybody know that? I don't know if that's obvious to observers.
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All right. I'm just looking at your comments to see if, if that's coming through. All right. Uh,
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you saw some, uh, post on, uh, X talking about how there's no such thing as a rich country that doesn't
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have a lot of energy or use a lot of energy. Now, uh, I wanted to use that as a jumping off point for
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this. Um, I guess it's a reframe. I believe that war, which ends up settling most of the things in
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the human industry, you know, war is usually the big thing that changes countries. I think war is really,
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really just economics. War and economy are almost the same thing. Uh, not in effect, but they're
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the same thing in the sense that the country with the biggest economy is usually going to win the war.
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The biggest economy usually wins the war. And what gives you the biggest economy?
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Usually access to cheap energy so that energy is really the same as your economy because it's the
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thing that has the most influence and your economy is kind of the same as your military in the sense
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that it has so much influence on the other. So when you see, for example, a country like the United States
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do what you think are terrible, dirty tricks and horrible things and coups, and you say,
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it seems all about the energy companies. We're doing this for the oil companies. Well, maybe we are.
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Maybe we are. Maybe it's exactly that. You know, the oil companies have a lot of money and a lot of
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influence. And so we just do what they want. But I would submit to you that if we did anything else,
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we'd already be dead. Do you get that? If we didn't go just really aggressively on energy,
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especially in other countries, I mean, basically overthrowing countries. So we, we have a supply of,
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you know, oil. I mean, we're very aggressive about energy, but, uh, because of our aggressiveness
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about energy and the fact that we're lucky enough to have energy in this company is in this country,
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our economy is booming. It's not the only reason, but it's a fundamental reason. And then we have the
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biggest military. So it's all connected. So if you imagine that, I guess here's the point. If you
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imagine that there's a conversation about war that's separate from the conversation about the economy,
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that's separate from the conversation about our aggressive energy posture in the world,
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stop that. It's all the same story. It's all one thing. It's just different windows into the same
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thing. Well, there's a, uh, a media company that, uh, went, uh, had a bad day, uh, Deadspin. So Deadspin
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was one of these, uh, dingleberry media companies that would do hit pieces on me on a regular basis.
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And, uh, so I like to dance on their grave a little bit. Their company got purchased by a European
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company who immediately said they were going to fire every single person in the company
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and just use the assets. So I asked this question, what would be a good name for a media company
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that spins the news until the company is dead? Spins the news until the company is dead.
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Dead. Deadspin. Now I will also accept as an answer, CNN, Huffington Post, MSNBC, all good answers,
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but the proper answer was deadspin. Now I'd like to share with you the most important
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story of the day. It's about a sheep. You're probably saying to yourself, how could that be
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important? Oh, it's important. You have to see it to see how important it is. Let me scroll down here
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and find that sheep. So there's a sheep that, uh, had found a lazy way to eat grass.
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It just, it just sits there and I don't know if you can tell, but it's munching the grass as it lays
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there. So it's actually eating, eating and resting at the same time. See this little mouth munching.
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And the reason I bring this up is because, stop it. The reason I bring it up is, uh,
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the economy is so bad that even the sheep had to get a side job.
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It's a side job. All right. Uh, also very important. Uh, if I were to own a sheep, um,
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what would I name it? I would name my sheep, uh, James Woolsey, Jr. James Woolsey, Jr.,
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who used to be the head of the CIA, but it'd be a great name for a sheep. James, get over here.
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Um, but, uh, somebody in the comments had a better idea for the name of the sheep.
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Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran. Damn it. That's good. Damn it. I wish I'd said it. All right.
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But still, she has a side job. Economy's bad. All right. Uh, uh, I love a good cannibal story.
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Uh, you know, I'm not a nice person, I guess. I guess that's all I can conclude.
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That whenever I hear a story about cannibals, my first thought is not for the victims.
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My first thought is not for the victims of the cannibals.
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I know it should be. I know it should be. I know how I'm supposed to act. I just can't.
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No, my first thought when I hear stories about cannibals is, well, this is going to be funny.
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Uh, and sure enough, I was not disappointed. So Ian Miles Chiang, who's got a big account on
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X platform. He posted, uh, I just received a request for comment from NBC news asking me to prove
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cannibalism exists in Haiti. I wish I was making this up. And then they showed the actual, uh,
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request. It was from an NBC reporter and the NBC reporter was asking, is his source only the
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one article in the British star slash express with the one unnamed source. Now I said to myself,
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is it possible that the entire story about cannibals came from one sketchy publication with an unnamed
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source and we all just ran with it? Did it all come from there? I don't know. I saw people in the
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comments saying they'd seen videos. I'm not sure I would believe any video that comes out of Haiti,
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but, uh, I think it's hilarious that it's entirely possible that there were no cannibals.
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Now, is that as funny to you as it is to me that we, we could spend a entire like two days news cycle
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talking about something that's just patently absurd and NBC news just, just figured out,
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maybe they should ask where it came from. All right. So I don't know if there's cannibals in Haiti.
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All I know is that the criminal leader who seems to be in charge of the whole island at the moment,
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And he doesn't own a barbecue, if you know what I mean.
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So some say he has that nickname because he likes to
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light his opponents on fire. That's a possibility.
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Or maybe he's a giant cannibal. I don't know. Nobody said he's a cannibal. It's just a funny nickname.
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Uh, and then other people have suggested that, uh, if we, if we, uh, allow enough of the cannibals,
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if we allow enough of the cannibals to migrate to the United States, it will
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So it's, it's sort of like when they introduce, uh, wolves into an area to get rid of the other
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animals, you can introduce some cannibals into our ecosystem just, it's just to trim the fat.
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All right. No, we're not going to do that. All right. NBC news is also reporting that
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according to a poll support for same-sex marriages has actually dropped. It's actually dropped. So
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in the comments, somebody's yelling at me and saying, that is not funny.
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Well, you know, it's really funny. You telling me that's not funny. That's pretty funny. Anyway,
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uh, support for same-sex marriages dropped researchers from PRRI found. So this among young
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adults, which is even more curious, it's among young adults, the ones who supported same-sex
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marriage declined to 71% last year from a high of 79 in 2018. What do you think? What do you think
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changed? Uh, what do you think was the difference in support for same-sex marriages and why it declined?
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My hypothesis, I don't have proof of this, but my hypothesis is that the entire decline
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in support for same-sex marriage is from the people who tried same-sex marriage.
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It seems like that drop from 79 to 71 would be roughly the same as the number of people who tried it.
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I don't know if you've tried marriage. All right, let's just move on to the next story. No reason to beat
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that to death. Um, so you might be aware that, um, I had some choice things to say about TikTok
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and the people who were opposed to the ban. Um, and I thought that people opposed to the ban may not be
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opposed to it for, uh, pure political and ethical reasons that there might be some monetary influence
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and, or maybe they're just analyzing it wrong. But, um, I had some harsh words for Vivek to his credit.
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He contacted me later on DM. We, we follow each other on X, so he could just send me a private message
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and we followed up and we had a little back and forth. I don't want to, I don't want to tell you
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anything about a private conversation, but, um, he alerted me that he was going to do a live stream
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and he would be addressing it then. So I watched the live stream and I'll give you all my comments on it
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here. So I'll do my best to try to represent his point of view, which I'm going to apologize in advance
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because if you heard his point of view, you'd know, it's, it's just wonderfully complex, like in a good
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way, um, and nuanced and has lots of context that he added about Chinese persuasion and all other
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domains and stuff. So it was a masterful, uh, really it was quite masterful and impressive, um, explanation
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of the whole situation and then his view of it. So I want to give you as best I can, uh, his view
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and I hope I'm doing him credit and not misinterpreting. Now, normally the way these
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things go is that I would now misinterpret what he said so that I could score my points.
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You know, that's the normal way this goes, right? So the next thing, you know, I'll say something that
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isn't what he said and then I'll mock it and it won't be what he said, but that would be the normal
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way this kind of thing goes. I'm going to try not to do that. I'm going to try actually to, you know,
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maybe steel man his argument and, um, make it as strong as possible so that if I say anything that's
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counter to it, it's a fair contrast. So I'm going to try to do it fairly. I have, I don't have complete
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confidence I can do it because his, his, uh, intellectual grasp of the entire domain is,
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is pretty deep. So let's see if I can get anywhere near it.
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First of all, he started off with a long explanation that was very good and really
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interesting about how China uses access to its markets to influence American companies,
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such as the NBA, uh, that, uh, need or want that Chinese market. And so they will bow to whatever
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they want. And he made a connection I hadn't heard before that China wanted to, you know, stir up a
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racial division in America because it would take the pressure off of China for their treatment of the
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Uyghurs. Now I'd never really heard that frame before and hadn't heard that China might, you know,
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be one of the influences behind black lives matter. Now, I don't know in what direct ways that's true,
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but it does kind of make sense as a, you know, an influence narrative because apparently China was
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saying out loud that, uh, as long as black lives matter is a thing, um, don't give them any advice.
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So that's good context. So we know that China is, uh, trying to influence America. Uh, so that's,
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um, and, uh, and also Vivek demonstrated his complete understanding that persuasion,
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you know, is a sort of an apex concern. So he was quite clear on that. All right. So here's some
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other things he said. He says he wants to ban all social media under age 16. He said that before,
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and I like that. I agree with that. And it would go a long way toward, uh, fixing a problem because
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the younger the mind, the more easily corrupted it could be. You know, if it were up to me, I'd extend
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it to 25. There's no chance in the world that that could be approved. But if people's brains are not
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formed until age 25, do you want tick tock to be the thing that forms it? I mean,
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because that literally would be part of the formation of your brain from zero to 25. So
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you could argue it should be, uh, an older age, but since that would never be approved in our world,
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16 is a good, that's a good place to start. So I'm going to be completely supportive on
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banning all social media under 16. And I'll also say that it would take a big chunk out of my
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concerns about persuasion. Um, I don't know if it's more than half, but a big chunk, maybe 20%,
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could be even 60%. It's a lot. I don't know how to put a percentage on it, but it would count.
00:23:29.040
All right. So here's some other things that Vivek said. Um, he said that we can't beat China by being
00:23:35.120
like China. In other words, um, if we were to put our heavy hand on this specific company,
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uh, that would be more like a Chinese way of being than an American way, which would be more free
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market and, um, banned behaviors. We'll get to that. So, um, and I'll give you my counters to it
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as we go. Uh, can't beat China by being China. Well, what's your reaction to that statement? So we want
00:24:03.760
to keep our core American values and not just throw them overboard because we see China, you know,
00:24:11.120
doing some stuff we don't like. Good point, good point, bad point, no point. What do you think?
00:24:19.120
Tell me in the comments. Um, my take is that it's a good persuasion and it reminds me of, uh, you know,
00:24:28.080
if the glove fits, you must acquit. You repeated it a number of times and it is one of those sticky,
00:24:34.080
you persuasive things because I don't want to be like China. So I'm already predisposed to liking
00:24:39.920
this idea that we can't beat China by being like them. Like, Oh, I don't want to be like
00:24:45.760
people locking up Uyghurs. I don't want to be, you know, the government putting too much of a finger on
00:24:52.320
the free market. So no, I don't want to be like China. So it can't be China by being like China.
00:24:59.120
However, uh, you know, it's nonsense, right? It's good persuasion, but it's not an argument.
00:25:08.880
It's not even close to an argument. Uh, so let, let me give you an example of what I mean.
00:25:16.000
We don't, we can't beat China by being like China. So for example, China is growing their military
00:25:21.360
right now. So our best response would be to shrink our military in response to them growing their
00:25:27.920
military because we don't want to be like them and they're growing their military. Um, if China spies
00:25:34.960
on us and we know they do, our best response might be to not be like them and spy on China,
00:25:42.000
but to find something else. And if China has strong borders, we might not want to be like that. And
00:25:49.920
we might want to just open ours up. Now, those are stupid examples that have nothing to do with
00:25:55.680
TikTok. I'm just saying that as a general claim, you can't beat China by being like China is absurd.
00:26:03.200
It's absurd. So from a persuasion perspective, it's really good. Like a plus for persuasion on a logic
00:26:12.160
level, it doesn't have anything. It's completely empty of any logic. So I, I, uh, uh, I disregard that
00:26:20.800
as being something you should consider when making the decision. No, we act like China when it makes
00:26:27.120
sense exactly like China, when it makes sense. And when it doesn't make sense for a national interest,
00:26:33.360
then we don't act like China. So the real question is, what do you do for the benefit of America?
00:26:40.880
You don't ask yourself, what do you do for a benefit of America that's also incompatible with China?
00:26:46.240
Yeah. It's just, it's a nonsense idea, but the, he had real, he had real reasons too,
00:26:54.480
that are stronger than that one. Uh, his best argument, the strongest, I think that there wasn't,
00:27:01.040
uh, persuasion based, but more, you know, more nuts and bolts is that he would prefer to ban the
00:27:07.700
behaviors, not the company. So, and part of that argument is that our domestic platforms, uh,
00:27:16.080
might be doing something that's also very bad. So Facebook, for example, may be biasing their
00:27:23.760
results and trying to change things. And that would be bad behavior. TikTok might be trying
00:27:29.040
to persuade America politically or otherwise socially, that might be bad behavior. So wherever
00:27:35.280
there's bad behavior, just, um, put a control on the behavior. What do you think of that?
00:27:41.600
Um, because it would be sort of a Chinese thing to ban a company. It wouldn't be an American thing.
00:27:50.160
And if you start banning companies, you know, slippery slope, they'll ban you. He didn't say that,
00:27:55.200
but it seems reasonable. If you ban them, they ban you. But I think, uh, our social media is already banned.
00:28:01.040
So, um, there's that. So do you think that we could ban the persuasion behavior of TikTok? What
00:28:13.040
do you think? Is that something we could do? Is it a practical plan that we could ban persuasion?
00:28:20.960
Well, this is probably where he and I have our biggest, um, difference in assumption. Now I come from
00:28:27.280
the, I come to the persuasion, um, topic as a trained hypnotist. So I've written books on persuasion,
00:28:37.360
when bigly, notably, and I talk about persuasion all the time. And it's sort of a lifelong study of mine.
00:28:43.680
And like I said, I'm literally hypnotist. So when I look at the field of persuasion,
00:28:49.600
uh, there's something I know that maybe other people don't know. And I just assumed it was obvious.
00:28:55.840
So this is not obvious at all. So if Vivek has never had this thought, maybe it's the first time
00:29:02.480
he's hearing it. You can't detect persuasion. So how do you, how do you monitor it or police it?
00:29:11.040
How would you ever tell them to stop doing it when you can't find it? Now you're going to say to me,
00:29:15.440
I can find persuasion. Remember that researcher Epstein who looked at Google and he found that
00:29:21.600
the search results were super biased. That's persuasion. And definitely you could find it.
00:29:30.320
Now, what do you do about it? Suppose you found it. So you go to Google and you say, Hey,
00:29:36.320
stop this behavior. And they're going to say, what behavior? It's just the algorithm.
00:29:42.480
And then what do you do? Do you get access to their algorithm? And if you did, could you find the bias?
00:29:50.560
Do you remember the Twitter files? When Musk started digging into what the Twitter, the old Twitter code
00:29:57.360
actually did, it was so complicated and so distributed across multiple domains of people
00:30:04.320
who could influence it, that you couldn't even find all the places bias had been programmed in.
00:30:11.120
It just wasn't even findable. So if they say it's not there and that it happened naturally,
00:30:17.680
how are you going to prove it? You can't be, you'll never be able to look at their code and know what's
00:30:22.400
happening. Because even if you found some bias in the code and removed it, just like the Twitter
00:30:28.000
files, you would look at your output and it kind of didn't change. And you'd say, okay,
00:30:33.760
there must be some other place in the code. There's also some bias and you might never find the end of
00:30:39.280
it because there's, there might be, you know, literally hundreds of little tweaks that all move
00:30:46.720
in the same direction and you'd have to find them all. Now, so I don't think there's any practical
00:30:52.960
way to detect it based on output because it, you would never know what's natural. For example,
00:30:59.680
let's say a lot of output was negative on Trump. Isn't that because the news is? If the news is
00:31:07.200
nonstop negative on Trump, and then you do a Google search and it comes up with more negative Trump
00:31:13.280
stuff, are you going to say that the search was wrong? Do you ban that behavior? Because that
00:31:18.880
behavior would be super biased. It would also be natural because they're looking at the news
00:31:26.720
to give you search results. So in a real world, you could never win the argument,
00:31:32.080
hey, this is bad behavior. You can't win that argument because the other side just will have
00:31:37.840
infinite technical philosophical reasons why it isn't. And there's no objective standard for it.
00:31:44.880
But there's a worse, much worse fear. Do you think you could detect my persuasion?
00:32:00.480
What do you think? You've been watching me for a long time, most of you.
00:32:03.120
Most of it's obvious. And I usually call it out. I say, I'm persuading on this. You know,
00:32:09.280
I'm persuading on TikTok, for example. So usually I just call it out and then you can see it.
00:32:15.520
But do you think that I could fool you if I wanted to? Do you think I have the skill
00:32:21.680
that I could persuade you and you wouldn't even know it was happening?
00:32:25.680
Of course I could. It wouldn't even be hard. Anybody with my level of experience could do it.
00:32:31.760
Everybody could. It is trivial. You would never know. I've told you before that I see the world
00:32:38.720
like a Harry Potter book, that there are muggles and then there are people who are trained in persuasion.
00:32:45.280
The people who are trained in persuasion are invisible to you, just like the wizards.
00:32:52.320
You see them, but you can't tell. They have an invisible magic power of persuasion that sometimes
00:32:59.280
they'll show you just so you think you can see it all. Oh, he showed me all his persuasion. I trust that one.
00:33:05.920
No, they're not going to show you all their persuasion. They're just going to do it.
00:33:11.840
So no, there is no practical world in which people who don't know persuasion can identify it.
00:33:17.920
And that's what you'd need. And even experts who looked at other people's persuasion wouldn't
00:33:22.560
necessarily be able to identify it. And if they did, you wouldn't be able to prove it. So for example,
00:33:29.440
I could look at what some big platform does and I'd have all kinds of opinions. Oh, that looks like
00:33:35.920
persuasion. But could I prove it? Well, I don't have access to the code. I don't know if it could have
00:33:41.120
happened naturally. I don't know if it just follows the opinion of the public, even if I don't like it.
00:33:48.240
So no, there is no logical, practical way you can monitor the behavior of the companies
00:33:55.120
because they can always say, quite persuasively, this behavior is normal and natural and we didn't do it.
00:34:05.760
All right. For example, suppose your platforms said something about either climate change or
00:34:16.000
whether January 6th was an insurrection or a protest. So which answer from social media
00:34:25.600
would be persuasion and which one would be just the truth? Well, how can the platform get that right
00:34:32.320
if we can't decide? If I see the platform say all the results are insurrection for January 6th,
00:34:40.480
I'm going to say, hey, that's not fair because that wasn't an insurrection. And then the very
00:34:45.040
next person who uses the Google search sees insurrection and says, those are good results
00:34:50.240
right there. Because definitely it was an insurrection. So that's what I'd expect to see.
00:34:56.560
So I hope I made my point that if you are inexperienced in persuasion, you might think
00:35:04.640
that you could monitor the behavior. I took as an assumption, and I think it's my mistake that I
00:35:11.120
never said it out loud, that you could never monitor the behavior. If you could, it would be the better
00:35:16.320
way. So let me say, if there was a practical way to monitor the persuasion behavior of platforms,
00:35:25.920
that would be probably a better way. But you would also have to do it immediately.
00:35:30.000
How do you do that? See, the other thing about the persuasion of TikTok, and Vivek made this point
00:35:37.440
as well, that if you don't have data that says that Facebook is a worse, let's say a worse risk
00:35:45.600
to the United States than TikTok, if you don't have any data that would suggest that, why would you
00:35:51.440
treat them differently? Is that a good point? Because even Trump was saying that Facebook is the enemy
00:35:57.840
of the people, and he doesn't want TikTok to go away, and then all that traffic move over to
00:36:02.800
Facebook, because Facebook is anti-Trump, and how's that making the country better?
00:36:09.040
So that's not a bad argument. Trump's argument that the traffic would just go over to another enemy,
00:36:15.840
maybe. But I would argue that you cannot compare what an adversary is doing, or an adversary country's
00:36:25.440
product, versus a domestic company. In my opinion, the Zuckerberg risk is that we all turn into
00:36:33.520
Democrats. I know, terrible, isn't it? You don't want that to happen, do you? Oh my God, what if all the
00:36:40.880
Democrat policies got put into effect? Well, Zuckerberg is not a crazy person. He wants the economy to work
00:36:48.640
and the country to succeed. He needs that. His new Hawaii home that's being upgraded,
00:36:57.840
it's no good if the country fails. There's not a deep enough bunker. So Zuckerberg doesn't want America
00:37:05.040
to fail. I assume he's on our side. He just has a different idea of what's good and what's bad.
00:37:11.360
So even if you lost everything to Facebook, you might hate that situation, but we'd probably still
00:37:20.560
be a country. China might have a different opinion. China might be better off if the United States were
00:37:27.360
less important than China. So that's a completely different risk profile. And the big problem with
00:37:37.680
the detecting persuasion is that you might detect it, but it might be too late. So remember that
00:37:45.040
that researcher Epstein I talked about who found all the bias in Google? He didn't find it the day it
00:37:51.280
happened. He found it way later after it had already been done. So if one of the platforms did something
00:38:00.000
that was, let's say TikTok, did something that was really persuasive and then later we found it and said,
00:38:05.840
hey, you can't do that. They'd say, oh, we didn't know we did that. We'll stop doing that.
00:38:11.280
It'd just be too late. So on a practical sense, you can't monitor behavior, but you could make sure
00:38:18.240
that an adversary is not in the game. Is that worth it? Is it worth it just to make sure that the
00:38:27.440
adversary is not playing? And would that be, would that be American? Would that be consistent with
00:38:34.960
American values? Because this is Vivek's point. Would it be consistent with our American values
00:38:41.680
if we banned TikTok after we saw them persuading?
00:38:54.080
All right. So I don't need any evidence that Facebook has been no worse than TikTok in the past
00:38:59.280
because I'm not living in the past. I'm living completely in the future. And you don't know,
00:39:05.120
and nobody knows, will TikTok push that heat button on something that will be devastatingly bad for America
00:39:12.080
in the future? I don't know. Will Facebook in the future do something that's worse than what they've
00:39:19.520
done in the past? Maybe, but probably only, you know, preferring Democrats. It's not going to be the
00:39:27.920
end of the world. Whereas TikTok might want a weaker United States in general. All right.
00:39:35.840
And, um, so that, so let me, uh, let me just summarize that. So the main points are, uh, Vivek
00:39:48.560
wants to ban all social media from people under 16, completely agree. That would make, that would
00:39:54.400
make a big difference in the TikTok persuasion. Um, can't beat China by being like China is a
00:40:01.120
meaningless bumper sticker in terms of how logical it is because whenever it makes sense for us to
00:40:07.840
be like China, we act like it just like anybody would. So that's the whole story. When it makes
00:40:13.600
sense, you do it. You don't care what China's doing. Um, ban the behaviors. There's no practical
00:40:20.800
way to ban, uh, persuasion. You'd never be able to detect it in time. And as far as Facebook being
00:40:28.160
being as bad as TikTok, I do agree that the Facebook risk is, is enormous. And I do agree
00:40:34.000
that we don't have data. I just know that, um, if I'm walking down a, let's say a darkened alley late
00:40:42.240
at night and I see somebody coming toward me and it's a family member, I'm not worried at all. I'm like,
00:40:52.000
well, I suppose a family member could murder me in this dark alley, but they don't want to.
00:40:58.000
So I don't even worry about it. They have no incentive, but suppose it's somebody who's poor
00:41:03.920
and has a gun, doesn't know you. Well, then maybe they're gonna rob you. So yeah, um, uh, I'm way less
00:41:10.800
afraid of somebody who is directionally on my team and Zuckerberg directionally. He's on my team.
00:41:20.640
He's an American. Do I like all of his persuasive stuff? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
00:41:29.440
No. All right. So that's where we're differing. Uh, I think I have a experience difference.
00:41:34.240
And so I know it would be impractical to stop persuasion and maybe that's the big difference.
00:41:39.520
Uh, however, I would like to announce today that I am opening an account on TikTok, uh,
00:41:45.600
as soon as I get around to it might be today or later. And so I'm going to join TikTok. Here's my
00:41:50.800
reasoning. Number one, uh, it won't be banned. Do you need, do you need a reason for why I say it won't
00:42:01.520
be banned? And the, and the fight's already lost. It won't be banned for 35 billion reasons.
00:42:10.400
There's a gigantic donor who owns 15% of TikTok, who's one of the main donors to Republicans.
00:42:21.040
And I don't know, maybe, maybe donates to some Democrats when he, when it makes sense to him.
00:42:26.160
But as long as that's the case, that's way more money than any political process is going to overcome.
00:42:32.480
Now, one of the things Vivek said, he is he, he mocked people who were suggesting that he was,
00:42:38.960
um, flip flop or not flip flopping, but that he was, uh, not going hard against TikTok because there
00:42:46.320
was some financial gain for him. I want to make clear that I've never thought that.
00:42:52.800
All right. Uh, and, and then I worried after I heard it, I was like, oh,
00:42:56.480
I hope I didn't sound like I was saying that I did say that money is the reason.
00:43:00.720
And I did put his name in that conversation and I'm going to do it again because I don't
00:43:05.200
think that at any point there was any in my own mind, I had no suspicion or worry that he would
00:43:12.320
take money from some rich donor. Cause first of all, he doesn't need it. He pointed out he is
00:43:18.400
worth nearly a billion dollars and no, no, no. There's no way that Vivek is being bribed.
00:43:24.480
Like I just doesn't make sense. Yeah. That would be like the same as your family member in the dark
00:43:31.200
alley. They don't have a reason, right? He doesn't have a reason to take a bribe,
00:43:35.920
but where the money influences is on the Republican party of which he is a big supporter, especially
00:43:42.320
the Trump world. So Trump definitely, and other, uh, uh, big Republicans absolutely definitely
00:43:52.160
need money for campaigns and they need money for paying off law fair maybe, which is also a campaign
00:43:57.840
expense or it could be. So yes, I think money's part of it, but no, I don't think there's any chance
00:44:03.920
that Vivek is, you know, taking some kind of, you know, personal enrichment. I don't, I don't think
00:44:08.640
that's possible. All right. So I wonder this about the tick tock ban. I'm trying to remember
00:44:17.600
who were the first people who said you should ban tick tock? Could you tell me in the comments who
00:44:23.120
were the first public figures you saw say it? Cause I kind of wondered if it was me.
00:44:28.560
And so I did a search, uh, using Grok. So that's the AI that's built into X and it said that the
00:44:40.320
first public figure to bring up a band was Mike Pompeo in 2020. Does that, does that sound like
00:44:48.880
the first place you saw it? Because my memory is that it was me, but you know, I, I like to,
00:44:56.240
I'm a grandiose narcissist. So I tend to remember things about myself better than they actually
00:45:01.440
happened. But my memory is that it was me. Did anybody have the same memory or am I literally
00:45:09.120
just hallucinating? All right. So I see at least one person who thinks it was me. All right. I don't
00:45:17.600
know the answer to that. So when I asked Grok, here's what it said. Uh, I, I asked literally,
00:45:25.440
um, you know, if I was one of the first people and it said, uh, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert
00:45:30.880
comic has been vocal about his concerns regarding tick tock. So far, so good, particularly in the past
00:45:38.400
year. Exactly. However, he has not explicitly called for a ban on the platform.
00:45:47.440
Wait, what? He has not explicitly called for a ban on the platform. Instead, Adams has emphasized
00:45:55.120
the need to address the potential risks associated with tick tock, such as data privacy and security
00:45:59.360
issues, as well as his influence on young people. Um, in a recent tweet on March 11th, 2024, Adams
00:46:07.600
expresses concern about tick tock, stating Congress must be owned by China to some degree, because the
00:46:12.560
case for banning tick tock is both obvious and critical to the survival of the United States.
00:46:16.880
And Grok goes on and says, he further argued that tick tock poses a greater risk to America
00:46:21.680
than other issues such as Russia, climate change, ran and expended.
00:46:25.360
It is important to note that while Adams has not explicitly advocated for banning tick tock,
00:46:43.680
thinks that the person who probably started the whole fucking thing isn't in favor of it.
00:47:01.920
A.I. is erasing history and rewriting it in real time.
00:47:14.320
In the future, are you going to do a direct Google search or will you always be talking to A.I.?
00:47:19.840
And we're probably just a few months away from all searches would be A.I.
00:47:26.080
Now remember, this is an A.I., the A.I. that's built into X, that does not, as far as I know,
00:47:35.440
So there's no bias because I've tried to see if there is any.
00:47:39.280
When I search it, it doesn't have any bias against me.
00:47:48.000
That if it's true that I was the first person to say it, public figure.
00:47:55.760
I still need a fact check on that because I've got faulty memory.
00:48:00.160
But at the very least, I'm one of the most prominent people who's been saying it should be banned.
00:48:06.880
And it says exactly the opposite, that I've never said ban it.
00:48:12.560
Am I making too much of a big deal about it just because it's about me?
00:48:20.240
Or does this scare the living shit out of you that history is just being erased?
00:48:26.640
Now why in the world would Grok have this opinion?
00:48:33.040
Or did it make the opinion based on what it didn't find?
00:48:44.640
Thomas Massey is talking about TikTok being a Trojan horse.
00:48:48.240
And he says that it would give the president the power to ban websites, not just apps.
00:48:54.960
And the person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. or offshore internet hosting service or app store, not the foreign adversary.
00:49:04.500
So in other words, the criminal would not be China or even TikTok, I guess.
00:49:14.500
So they could ban the app, but it wouldn't be punishing China, the country.
00:49:18.820
So do you buy that the president should not have the power to ban websites and apps under the commander-in-chief role?
00:49:34.600
Should the commander-in-chief be able to ban a website or an app?
00:49:39.480
Well, the worry here would be that the commander-in-chief, being a political animal, would use this new power to do things that you would not want them to do.
00:49:50.840
And maybe they would ban a platform that just says bad things about them politically.
00:50:01.720
What the hell do you think the commander-in-chief's job is?
00:50:09.480
The job of the commander-in-chief is to make decisions that would be too hard or wouldn't make sense to be done by committee
00:50:19.500
because they're so big and so important, and you don't need anybody but somebody who's looking out for you to make the decision.
00:50:31.760
Now, the one good thing about most of the commander-in-chief stuff is it's public.
00:50:36.160
So if the commander-in-chief says, I'm going to take out this terrorist, well, you might say to yourself, I'm not even sure that's legal.
00:50:44.920
But you also say to yourself, well, but it's definitely what a commander-in-chief is supposed to do.
00:50:53.000
So I would say that if the commander-in-chief used commander-in-chief power to ban something for purely political reasons and everybody could tell,
00:51:01.440
well, there would be such an uproar that it just couldn't happen.
00:51:06.880
And politically, it would be, you know, suicide.
00:51:11.240
But if the president banned a website that clearly was damaging America, would you have a problem with that?
00:51:18.580
So remember that Massey's point is not that the commander-in-chief might ban TikTok specifically.
00:51:25.980
The bigger worry that he's expressing just in this opinion specifically is that it could be overused.
00:51:31.820
I don't buy that because the commander-in-chief is a position in which overusing it is built into the job description.
00:51:42.720
We do give them the power to do way more than you'd expect, you know, would be part of some legal structure.
00:51:51.760
So I would say this is normal and that the commander-in-chief has to not just look at missiles and bombs, but needs to look at persuasion as a military tool.
00:52:08.740
And, yes, the calling it a Trojan horse, it's hyperbole, but not too far off.
00:52:15.320
If we were not aware of this, that would be a fair statement.
00:52:18.820
And I don't think we would have been unless he pointed it out.
00:52:22.060
So you could say that's reasonable hyperbole in this situation.
00:52:34.620
Imagine Biden and the complicit press making the case that the conservative treehouse website is full of domestic terrorist oath-breaking insurrectionists.
00:52:43.660
So that is the risk that you're saying is the one I'm acknowledging.
00:52:46.820
That the commander-in-chief could act in a way that's purely political, but it would be suicide.
00:53:00.460
But the political blowback, it wouldn't be worth it.
00:53:04.340
So the thing you count on is it just wouldn't make sense.
00:53:12.400
What would happen if Biden banned a, let's say, a conservative-leaning website for being a dangerous source of misinformation?
00:53:21.140
Well, the very next president would ban a liberal website.
00:53:28.260
So there's some mutually assured destruction going on.
00:53:37.980
I just think that when you're commander-in-chief, it's your job to manage gigantic risks.
00:53:50.560
Yeah, there are checks and balances even within the commander-in-chief job.
00:53:57.760
The commander-in-chief can't just sign anything and it happens, right?
00:54:01.100
There will be a giant bureaucracy that's going to say, if you do that, do you understand all the problems that that's going to cause relative to what small problem you solve?
00:54:13.200
If Biden banned the conservative treehouse, that's a website, that would be a tiny, tiny little blow to the entire conservative ecosystem, although you've heard of it.
00:54:31.040
But compared to Fox News and all the larger entities, it's a small percentage.
00:54:36.020
But the political blowback from banning a website primarily for politics, and everybody would see that, would be so big that the benefit you got from silencing a smallish website couldn't possibly make sense, in my opinion.
00:54:59.220
It turns out that my biggest social media account is on TikTok already.
00:55:09.520
So there's something called Scott Adams underscore official, and it has 1.3 million followers and shares my clips from this show.
00:55:20.880
So I'm going to get on TikTok with a separate device so TikTok can't get into my stuff.
00:55:30.120
And then I'm going to contact my lawyer, and I'll have my lawyer contact this account or TikTok and see if they'll transfer it to me.
00:55:43.140
I don't think there's any law that would require that.
00:55:45.480
But I will lawfare them to death if they don't.
00:55:50.880
So, whoever is running the 1.3 million followers is obviously a fan.
00:55:56.500
And if you see this, and you probably will, you should contact me, and we should talk about turning over the account to me.
00:56:05.160
Because that's the one way that you can survive this.
00:56:15.620
I only have two modes, which is, well, I don't care.
00:56:33.900
And if you want to fight about it, I'm up for that fight.
00:56:40.160
I will put all of my attention into that fight.
00:56:43.140
So if you want to fight, and I don't think you do because I think it's a fan account, literally a fan account.
00:56:48.860
If you'd like to do what's good for me and you'd like to TikTok people to see my content, I'll help you out with that.
00:56:57.580
I'll make sure the content is still there, as long as I can monetize it.
00:57:32.700
That's the dumbest fucking thing anybody ever said.
00:57:37.780
If he had had permission, it would be different.
00:57:51.340
The Hill says that 37% of the people surveyed say Biden is respected by world leaders.
00:58:05.600
Do you remember when the news told us it mattered, that foreign leaders respect our president?
00:58:12.580
And that, you know, because it was Trump, it was going to be a big problem.
00:58:17.040
Do you think that only 37% of people thought that world leaders respected Trump by the end of his term?
00:58:26.980
So why did this go from the biggest problem in the world to nothing?
00:58:33.480
It's not the biggest problem in the world suddenly?
00:58:40.660
Black Lives Matter and all this police brutality was the biggest thing in the world until it didn't need to be.
00:58:47.980
Well, here's more evidence that our opinions are assigned to us by the medium, media.
00:58:57.700
They were happy to assign the opinion to us that the respect of our president among world leaders was a critical, critical thing.
00:59:16.480
There's more talk about the Trump revenge tour and will he just get in office and spend all this time and resources getting revenge.
00:59:25.040
And, but he's done a good job of reframing that as revenge is just doing a good job.
00:59:33.680
He also reframes his, quote, conservative policies.
00:59:37.400
And he says he's not really a conservative, that he has common sense policies.
00:59:43.480
Now, you could argue how technically true it is, but if you're running for president of the whole United States, I think it's a mistake to say you have conservative policies.
00:59:55.140
You know, once you get outside the primary, you want the president to have common sense.
01:00:03.860
I think everybody is so disgusted with, you know, the, the Democrat versus Republican thing that simply saying you're, you're not just doing everything conservative.
01:00:16.640
And by the way, that actually fits because if you take something like IVF, Trump's in favor of it, but the, you know, there are some extreme, I don't want to say extreme.
01:00:29.860
There's some members of the conservative group who say no.
01:00:36.860
So I think he does, he does have a claim that he is doing what makes sense and not what is just dogma.
01:00:47.240
It's persuasion, but I think it's actually true.
01:00:51.920
He's repeatedly pledged to investigate Biden and his family after he becomes president, I guess, again.
01:01:04.560
The fact that the press wants to call it revenge, if Trump gets into office and then, let's say, initiates some legal action against people who he thinks deserve it.
01:01:15.600
Doesn't it feel like the press is priming us to see whatever happens to Democrats is revenge and not justice?
01:01:29.020
So, so the, the, the, the comments on here are whether I look more like I have AIDS.
01:01:40.480
But basically the, the commentary is about my physical appearance.
01:01:44.280
You, you know, that's not what I lead with, right?
01:01:50.600
Are you concerned that my, my ego about my physical appearance will be, you're going to damage me somehow?
01:02:06.980
You're commenting on every single internal thought.
01:02:14.860
The cannibal clown jokes are getting less funny every time you clowns reword it.
01:02:33.740
There's some people here that don't like cannibal jokes, apparently.
01:02:35.880
Anyway, there's another story that says a litmus test for Trump's VP pick will be what they say they would have done if they had been in Mike Pence's position about certifying the 2020 election.
01:02:49.800
And one of the better answers was from J.D. Vance.
01:02:58.140
I'll just say the better answer for both getting the job and for communicating.
01:03:04.700
He said he'd tell the states to send more than one slate of electors and he'd let Congress sort it out.
01:03:11.240
Now, I don't know enough about the process of the government to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea.
01:03:22.180
Like, as an answer to the question, it's pretty good.
01:03:26.340
See, this is the difference between was it an insurrection or was it a protest in which we were trying to find out what was true.
01:03:34.540
The Democrats are unaware, because nobody will tell them, that the so-called fake electors that the Trump people were trying to put together
01:03:45.520
was for the purpose of keeping their option and making sure that they've established a strong claim
01:03:53.300
with the knowledge that it always has to be worked out by the courts or the Congress or whatever.
01:04:00.160
So it's going to be some combination of the courts and the Congress.
01:04:02.400
It's not like Trump could just individually make a different slate of electors stick.
01:04:09.000
So I think you would have to not understand how anything works to believe the claim that Trump believed that simply having fake electors would make him the next president.
01:04:23.520
And I don't believe anybody believed that because it's absurd.
01:04:26.700
All it was was to, you know, persuade and create the impression that they have a strong claim, buy some time to look into some specific allegations about the election,
01:04:43.480
And then they would either have, you know, one slate of electors or the other certified.
01:04:48.540
So in other words, there was never anything that happened on January 6th in terms of the certification stuff and the electors.
01:05:15.120
And he said, well, he's going to resign upon the creation of a transitional presidential council.
01:05:22.980
So if they come up with a transitional council, he'll step down.
01:05:28.740
I think the I think we already have military over there.
01:05:32.880
So at this point, the U.S. is exerting control over it.
01:05:37.640
And I'm sure we'll get our puppet back in play.
01:05:40.080
OK, well, I asked on the another poll on X today, I said, what's more dangerous to America?
01:05:48.560
What's the bigger existential threat, climate change or DEI?
01:06:01.020
Well, first of all, I like Alex Epstein's reframe that we shouldn't be talking about climate change.
01:06:08.760
We should be talking about minimizing any risk of it.
01:06:13.800
So minimizing the damage instead of stopping the thing, because you might not be able to stop the thing.
01:06:25.720
But if you concentrate on keeping people alive and fed, that makes a lot of sense.
01:06:35.280
Well, then you do a bunch of crazy stuff and real expensive stuff.
01:06:42.760
We'll say the survival and the thriving of the humans and not measuring the temperature and trying to change that.
01:06:51.820
But big story, you already heard it, is that the reason that we can't have good things in America is because the CHIPS Act was supposed to put a bunch of money, government money behind building manufacturing for chips in the United States.
01:07:08.300
So we didn't have to depend on a little island off of China, Taiwan.
01:07:16.500
It's because the DEI requirements and the CHIPS Act had 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a chief diversity officer at the National Science Foundation and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls minority serving institutions and more and more and more and more.
01:07:38.560
So anybody who is an entrepreneur or has investment money, they look at this and they say, well, I like the part about getting money to help build a chip factory, but I am not in any world going to agree to these onerous DEI requirements, so we don't get chips.
01:07:56.920
So let me ask you again, what is a bigger existential threat to the country, that the climate is changing slowly or that if something happens with China, we would lose access to all modern civilization because we can't make the chips?
01:08:18.800
Which is a bigger threat, which is a bigger threat, which is a bigger threat, it's not even close.
01:08:29.280
Climate change might actually kill people and have to be a risk in some future time.
01:08:34.900
It's far more likely we'll figure out how to manage it than it is that it'll kill us.
01:08:39.920
But we are basically one order from President Xi that says, don't get near Taiwan or we'll sink your ship, and our entire civilization is done.
01:08:56.260
So DEI is destroying the world, and you say to yourself, Scott, if DEI were such a problem,
01:09:03.840
it wouldn't be just in this CHIPS Act manufacturing thing.
01:09:12.240
You would see it like creating a crisis of incompetency, not because minorities have less competence,
01:09:20.520
but because the math of it is the pipeline doesn't have enough for the people who want to hire.
01:09:26.340
So necessarily because humans are humans, they will meet their objective of diversity by hiring less qualified people.
01:09:33.320
Again, not because minorities are less qualified, but only because they're in short supply relative to the demand.
01:09:43.620
So if that were the case, and that's also bad, I mean, imagine what we would see if that were true.
01:09:50.620
I mean, you'd see suddenly stuff like, I don't know, like airplanes would be having all kinds of maintenance problems they never had before.
01:10:03.320
You might see, like, massive lawsuits being filed over racial discrimination against white people.
01:10:11.500
Okay, we are seeing a lot of that coming out from Stephen Miller's group, the America First legal thing.
01:10:20.460
Okay, well, maybe the planes are having massive maintenance problems,
01:10:24.440
and maybe there are massive lawsuits being formed over discrimination.
01:10:30.340
But, I mean, those are just a few items, right?
01:10:33.180
I mean, there's the chips, the airlines, the discrimination hiring.
01:10:40.020
But there's another story in the news that there's a Kobe Bryant statue in L.A., I guess outside the stadium,
01:10:45.900
and there are quite a few misspellings in the placard.
01:10:53.780
I don't know who made the Kobe statue, but I'm going to guess some DEI was involved, maybe.
01:11:07.280
And if DEI were such a bad thing, I mean, you can imagine that you wouldn't even have access to,
01:11:14.620
and this is horrible, but imagine that the general public would no longer have access to their favorite comic strips.
01:11:22.280
But we're not seeing anything like that happen.
01:11:30.540
All right, do you ever wonder why so many teachers are idiots?
01:11:35.360
Robbie Starbuck reports that if you apply to be a teacher in Nashville's public schools,
01:11:39.620
you have to agree to all the racist DEI questions or you can't get hired.
01:11:44.620
So, they've got a little test where if you don't basically fully embrace being a racist against white people,
01:11:54.460
You actually have to prove in writing you're a racist against white people, or you can't get hired.
01:12:00.400
Now, you would say, Scott, you're mischaracterizing what it is.
01:12:03.680
It's really just a bunch of questions that show that somebody is, let's say, woke and cares about diversity.
01:12:12.280
It's pretty much proving that you hate white people, or you can't get hired.
01:12:18.720
And the other thing that's funny is the multiple choices only have the choice of strongly agree or strongly disagree.
01:12:28.960
The HUR hearings are happening, H-U-R hearings.
01:12:34.220
So, this is the special counsel who is looking into Biden's retaining of those private documents.
01:12:41.440
And the first thing I heard about this is brand new, so I don't have details.
01:12:45.160
Apparently, in the HUR's report, it says, quote,
01:12:48.480
My team and I conducted a thorough independent investigation.
01:12:51.120
We identified evidence that the president, that's Biden, willfully retained classified materials.
01:12:57.340
After the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen, willfully retained classified materials.
01:13:06.420
Now, that's worse than what Trump did, because my argument goes like this.
01:13:15.800
Trump at least has a cogent and reasonable argument, a common-sense argument, that when he was president, he had full control over what is declassified.
01:13:26.880
And the very act of putting them in boxes and taking them out is a de facto classification.
01:13:37.480
But if you ask me from a non-lawyer point of view, does that make sense?
01:13:43.680
In fact, I'm pretty sure if the situation reversed, I would say, oh, okay, if Biden knew he was taking him and he was president, then that's a de facto declassification.
01:13:55.240
And there's no specific requirements of paperwork to declassify if you're president.
01:14:00.020
You just have to want it declassified, and it is.
01:14:03.220
So it looks to me that what Biden did was worse, because he was retaining things that had never been declassified or even de facto declassified in an arguable way.
01:14:15.320
But he did not get penalized, because we believe that Herr thinks he's an old man and his memory is gone and the jury would not convict him.
01:14:35.760
He's black, which I only say because it matters to the story.
01:14:47.860
I guess he mostly talks about sports, and I've had only passing exposure to him.
01:14:57.980
But he did a little three-minute speech on video in which he is sort of mocking Biden for, you know, making it an hour in a speech and people acting like, oh, that's all we need to know.
01:15:13.140
And the reason I would recommend this is I don't know if I've ever seen anybody give a better presentation about anything.
01:15:25.680
You know, we've talked about his energy enough.
01:15:28.240
But, oh, my God, if you want to see the best you could see of just somebody making a point in three minutes, watch Stephen A. Smith give you the best body language, visual, sarcastic, funny, right on point presentation.
01:15:52.340
So it's in my X feed if you want to go look at that.
01:15:57.740
Anyway, apparently the hoax about Trump wanting to grab the wheel of the beast, the so-called beast, as the car the president drives in.
01:16:08.280
And Cassidy Hutchinson, who had been the chief of staff for Mark Meadows, said that she was she's so she's the one who said that that the president not only lunged at the steering wheel and that the Secret Service had to grab his arm because Trump wanted to go to the January 6th protest.
01:16:27.500
But the Secret Service wasn't going to let him.
01:16:30.300
And then Hutchinson said that he lunged for the clavicle of the Secret Service driver.
01:16:39.200
In other words, like his neck, a clavicle just below the neck.
01:16:43.300
And then we find out that there was testimony from the actual Secret Service who said nothing like that ever happened.
01:17:07.480
No, you're not, because it turns out the January 6th committee hid that.
01:17:14.420
You don't think that would be a little bit relevant to the question of whether it happened?
01:17:18.620
Talking to the person that it allegedly happened to, who is a Secret Service.
01:17:34.340
So, it seems to me that the January 6th committee should be in jail.
01:17:41.140
If they intentionally hid this testimony, there's got to be some law.
01:17:47.940
You tell me there's no law that allows, there's no law that prevents them from doing that?
01:17:57.080
So, if Trump became president, and he said, look, you just made this shit up, and you hid the evidence that it didn't happen, and it's a horrible thing to the country, and we're going to put you in jail for it, would that be revenge?
01:18:14.980
If the people who hid the exculpatory evidence knew they were doing it, obviously they knew.
01:18:24.900
Again, I don't know what crime it is, but you can always find a crime in these situations.
01:18:31.060
It's one of the worst things I've ever heard in politics.
01:18:34.020
This is in the top 1% of the worst things in American politics.
01:18:48.700
This is the worst thing I've ever seen in American politics.
01:18:52.700
Now, this assumes that the facts, you know, stay the facts we know.
01:18:56.700
Yeah, it's hard not to be in favor of revenge in this case, but I wouldn't call it revenge, because this would be just the thing that should have happened.
01:19:06.760
Why do you call it revenge if it's just the thing that should happen?
01:19:10.920
All right, Congresswoman Tlaib is trying to get together some kind of living wage for artists, so that the ones who don't make money on streaming and other ways can make some money.
01:19:22.820
Her claim is that if you had 800,000 plays of your song on Spotify, you would only be making the equivalent of, well, nothing, basically, $15 an hour.
01:19:40.340
Can you imagine having 800,000 listens, and you got paid, you know, like a few hundred dollars?
01:19:50.780
In the old days, if you were making an album, you might, I'm just going to make up a number.
01:19:55.940
Let's say you sold it for $10, people would pay $10 for one album.
01:20:02.280
Now, you could pay $10, and again, I'm just making that up, it's in the ballpark, for all the music in the world forever, $10 per month.
01:20:17.240
So, the streaming services just basically robbed the musicians of an immense amount of money, because they could.
01:20:29.000
Generally speaking, whenever you see that your work as an artist is being combined with other people's work for some distribution reason,
01:20:36.880
that's always bad for the artists who are at the top of the chain.
01:20:43.840
And if they agree to it, they're idiots, but sometimes you get forced into it.
01:20:53.400
So, Spotify just lowered my amount, income royalties, whatever, from Spotify.
01:21:02.460
I don't know if it's a permanent change, because they're also moving me to a different kind of advertising.
01:21:06.940
I moved from, what do they call it, ambassador ads, to they would place the ads themselves.
01:21:18.780
So, what I was getting already, which was small, they decreased it by 90%.
01:21:27.680
I'll have to wait a month to see if it evens out.
01:21:30.280
So, yes, I would say that Spotify and the streaming services, when it comes to music or podcasts,
01:21:37.180
I don't like to use the word fair, but it would certainly make sense if the better artists got off that platform, if they could.
01:21:50.200
All right, Rassman says that eight months before the presidential election,
01:21:55.940
91% of likely U.S. voters think the economy is the biggest issue.
01:22:01.280
Almost as many, 86% think immigration-related issues.
01:22:05.300
But that's sort of tied up in the economy, so that makes sense.
01:22:09.600
And then 71% say the issue of abortion will be important, including 44% who say it would be very important.
01:22:20.560
Do you think abortion is going to be very important?
01:22:28.820
You said that Boeing, I guess, his claim was that they weren't doing a good job of building their planes, meaning that it would be unsafe.
01:22:38.880
That would be the claim from the whistleblower.
01:22:40.620
And he was found dead of an apparent suicide by gunshot while he was in his car.
01:22:46.440
So, do you think that's a coincidence, that the whistleblower is dead of a gunshot, apparent suicide?
01:22:58.880
I believe that being a whistleblower and committing suicide are largely similar.
01:23:06.300
You don't become a whistleblower until you have devalued your own life.
01:23:14.620
You don't become a whistleblower until you've already devalued the value of your own survival.
01:23:23.500
If you're not willing to take that risk, you don't become a whistleblower.
01:23:32.100
So, you have to ask the question, this is a pretty big coincidence, but on the other hand, it would be consistent with somebody who had blown up his entire life and he just said,
01:23:47.960
well, I just threw away everything to be a whistleblower and nothing changed.
01:23:58.400
You're a certain age, and you just threw away everything, and you got nothing for it.
01:24:12.040
So, we should all be concerned that he got Epstein'd, and I would certainly be investigating it like a possible murder.
01:24:26.100
But, Rand Paul is sounding the alarm that Trump is endorsing Mike Rogers for his run for office in Michigan.
01:24:38.680
Donald Trump just endorsed the worst deep state candidate this cycle.
01:24:43.520
Mike Rogers is a never-Trumper and a card-carrying member of the spy state that seeks to destroy Trump.
01:24:50.040
You have to ask yourself, who gives Trump this awful advice?
01:25:02.260
But, I assume, if, you know, Trump being Trump, I assume he has taken all of that into consideration, and that whatever reason he's doing it for is at least well considered.
01:25:19.220
It could be that, you know, he thinks Rogers will be on his side.
01:25:25.680
But, but that concludes my amazing show for today.