Scott Adams talks about a new kind of robot dog, and the future of the Ukraine war, and why you should get yourself a flamethrower for $9,000. Plus, a new gadget that could make your life better.
00:18:06.480I think that people actually go into those jobs because the corruption is what the payoff is.
00:18:13.800So while I don't rule out the fact or rule out the possibility that there's some city where the mayor and all the employees are totally legit
00:18:23.540and they never try to do kickbacks to their campaign donators or anything like that, but I don't think so.
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00:22:01.920Thomas Massey was, what would you say, interviewing or talking to Horowitz, the guy who did the report on, well, he was doing a report on January 6th to figure out, you know, what really happened and who did what and who's to blame and all that other stuff.
00:22:25.920And that report, after three and a half years, is not ready.
00:25:18.820But, apparently, we're not going to know about that until after the election.
00:25:23.540I'm going to say what you're going to say, which is, to me, this all looks crooked.
00:25:27.900So, even though Horowitz is not, you know, not suspected of anything specific, like, you know, nobody thinks he's done a crime or anything,
00:25:38.060I'm saying that it feels like way, way too coincidental and unusual to explain just by being slow.
00:25:51.120They would at least tell us what they know about how many feds were there, et cetera.
00:25:56.640So, now, to me, there's something crooked about this.
00:26:01.300So, I'm not buying into the, it has, you know, we're not going to have it done before the election.
00:31:47.800Now, I always like to bring out my famous quote, that fairness was invented so children and idiots would have something to argue about.
00:31:57.040If you were a serious person and you were talking about taxes, you would never use the word fairness.
00:32:05.500Because it's ill-defined, it's subjective, and you can't have an ill-defined subjective tax policy.
00:32:14.080Here's what you could decide whether a tax change, either up or down, is for the greater good, without too much attention to how it's allocated.
00:32:28.760You could, you could, you can pretty much pick out the greater good, it would be a tax level where we don't discourage business, but maybe we get a little closer to paying off our debts.
00:32:43.020Now, ideally, you'd rather bring your expenses down to do that instead of raising taxes.
00:32:47.540But my point is, fairness is not what economists talk about.
00:32:52.300She has 400 economists who just backed her.
00:32:55.480Ask one of the economists to define fairness for you.
00:33:49.680But Stephanie Rule, to her credit, she said directly that she's on MSN.
00:33:56.180You see that Harris doesn't answer the question where she'll get the money from, which means she's not answering the question on the most important parts of her policy.
00:34:05.200Because if her policies were free, I don't think anybody would have a problem with it.
00:34:10.680I'd like to give a $6,000 tax credit to people.
00:34:32.940But if you leave out the part about what it costs or what it does to inflation, you're not really a serious candidate.
00:34:40.920Stephanie Rule also, to her credit, pointed out to Harris that the Biden administration has tariffs.
00:34:49.560So what the hell are you talking about with tariffs not being a good idea?
00:34:53.360So then, because all the viewers of MSNBC are uninformed idiots, Harris got to say, well, you just don't want to throw out, like Trump does, the across-the-board tariffs, which nobody is recommending.
00:35:14.060Literally nobody on the whole fucking planet, including Trump.
00:35:20.140There's not one person who thinks tariffs should be applied to everything.
00:35:35.780But to her credit, Stephanie Rule did point out that Biden uses some tariffs when it makes sense.
00:35:44.560He even said he might add some more or add to them where they make sense.
00:35:48.840Now, if you watch a useful political show, such as The Five, you'll see Greg Goffeld explain, at least every other day, that if you put tariffs on an industry you're trying to protect, it makes perfect sense.
00:36:05.180Because you don't want some other country destroying your entire industry, like the car industry, for example.
00:36:10.980But, if all it is is something that nobody in America makes, and you're getting a good deal on it, of course you're not going to put a tariff on that.
00:36:18.980But, that would just be, what, just a tax.
00:36:24.040So, this is one of those situations where people are in 100% agreement, Democrats and Republicans, 100% agreement on tariffs.
00:36:33.960That there's some special cases that make sense, but the general case, you'd be better off not doing it.
00:37:53.060Then, she was asked about housing, because housing costs is too much, and what would she do about that?
00:38:01.320And, instead of answering anything about housing, because she didn't have an answer, she tried to make the case that if you did things that made life in general more affordable, that people would have extra money from just an affordable life that they could afford, or better afford housing.
00:38:21.620But, the way she tried to explain it is with a keyword that obviously had been given to her.
00:38:32.040And, you'd see that she lights up whenever she hits the keyword.
00:38:34.960So, you can tell when she's clicked in, because she's operating on some set pieces, where if they say this, make sure you put this keyword in there.
00:38:46.220So, watching her light up when she hits the keyword and then repeats it is kind of just creepy.
00:38:54.560So, her argument being that even if you don't directly give financial support to the housing part, if you financially support the life in general, they'll have a little extra money for housing.
00:39:07.720Now, that's not an illogical argument.
00:39:39.320At the incentives we are in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing.
00:42:46.760And I don't know how completely serious he is about it because it sounds like the most boring, terrible job for somebody who's had a lot of fun in their life.
00:42:55.680On the other hand, anytime I see somebody with his capability wanting to be part of the government, I'm a little bit interested.
00:43:24.780Because when it comes to business, I think he's more about what works.
00:43:29.440You know, when he talks about politics or Elon Musk, he gets into the hyperbole and the trolling and the arguments and stuff.
00:43:38.920But I'm pretty sure that he's a legitimate American patriot who wants the SEC to work the way it was supposed to work.
00:43:50.000So I'm not even entirely sure I wouldn't want him there under a Republican administration.
00:43:56.160I'm not going to commit to that opinion.
00:44:00.540But I do like the fact that Trump can work with people from, you know, historically the other team, if they're offering something specific, which they have a strength in.
00:44:12.380You know, like Elon Musk reducing the government waste.
00:44:16.180Like RFK Jr. working on the food and pharma.
00:44:22.100I'd like to hear more about that argument.
00:44:24.580Because I'm not sure that anybody would have a problem with somebody like a Mark Cuban, a strong personality who knows how to get things done, going in and fixing something that maybe would be good for all of us.
00:45:28.020He says directly in public when he talks about trolling with Musk that he just enjoys getting under people's skin and, you know, he's having fun with it.
00:45:40.540So I think that's probably the primary motivation.
00:45:44.220But the secondary motivation is Cuban may have found a way to leapfrog all the political stuff and get into a position of power.
00:45:56.700But by being very prominent on social media, arguing for the Democrats, Democrats probably just start seeing him as one of their leaders.
00:46:07.320So he may have found a way to hack social media, to hack the Democrats by, you know, agreeing with them more than they agree with themselves and arguing better than they argue until they say, you know what, this guy's good.
00:46:24.620He may have found this clever play, which honestly looks like it's working, which is if he's in the conversation for being the head of some cabinet position, it worked.
00:46:40.300He basically just mixed it up on social media, did all the interviews and podcasts that people asked them for.
00:46:47.220Didn't matter at all whether his arguments were good or bad, because nobody can tell.
00:46:51.680Honestly, we can't tell whether his arguments are good or bad.
00:46:57.820So if he creates all kinds of energy, you start to see him as the guy who used to be doing, you know, the tech company and used to be doing the basketball stuff.
00:47:08.940And I think he retired from Shark Tank.
00:47:12.620So you see somebody who is still in his prime, has all these capabilities.
00:47:17.120You associate him with politics and he's looking for work.
00:47:26.580He may come out like at the top of some entity when this is all done.
00:47:32.200And it could be, like I say, I'm not, I wouldn't predict it.
00:47:35.760But he could easily be, have some important job in a Republican administration if he negotiated, you know, where the guardrails are.
00:47:46.800So anyway, you know, you have to be careful of the energy monsters because Cuban has a little bit of the Trump magic, which is as long as you're paying attention, he's winning.
00:48:01.120Oh, by the way, he said that pretty directly in his own ways.
00:48:05.400He's talked about how getting attention, Trump's good at it and it works.
00:48:10.020So if he just learned something from him, he's doing it and he's just trolling until all the energy is pointed at him and then he can pick his job.
00:48:46.500Does this matter as much as it did even a few years ago?
00:48:50.080Because I have the experience of I do way less searching on Google than I used to.
00:48:57.820I used to do it multiple times every day.
00:49:00.980Now when I'm searching on Google, I'm usually looking for maybe a product I heard of.
00:49:07.160I'm not really looking for any politics on Google.
00:49:09.860And if I were looking for a campaign web page, it would still come up where I could find it.
00:49:18.780You know, I wouldn't even search for it unless I was willing to really look for it and go there.
00:49:23.100So if it's not optimally placed on the page, but I knew I wanted to go there, I'm still going to find it.
00:49:29.620And when I want to see the news, I go to X.
00:49:34.700If I were a different person, I might be going to TikTok.
00:49:38.160But you can search for the news on X, which I'm far more likely to do.
00:49:42.400And you can search for things with your AI, you know, using it as the interface to the search.
00:49:48.040I'm going to say that Google has the potential for changing an election, but that potential may be shrinking as Google's search is becoming less a reflex.
00:50:15.220And here's what I wanted to add about that.
00:50:19.880Do you remember in 2016, I was somewhat famous for saying that there would be a shy Trump supporter effect.
00:50:29.760Now, I didn't invent the idea, didn't invent it, but I was probably one of the biggest carriers of that message at the time.
00:50:37.500And the theory was that people wouldn't want to admit they were supporting him because he had been so maligned by the press that you just didn't want to be on a list.
00:50:48.280Now, 2016, allegedly, a lot of people believe it caught the Democrats by surprise.
00:50:58.400You know, maybe they would have done more.
00:50:59.880Some say they would have cheated harder.
00:51:02.000Some say maybe Hillary would have campaigned differently if she thought that it was going to be that close.
00:51:07.560So, most people think that 2016 surprised the Democrats in one way or another, and that's why Trump won.
00:53:09.600I think there's a whole different motivation for Republicans to lie to pollsters in 2024 that did not exist at this level any time before,
00:53:20.340which would suggest, when you combine this with the fact that the consumer confidence dropped like a rock when Harris got into the thick of it,
00:53:31.340those two factors suggest that Trump's already won the vote.
00:53:36.420I'm not predicting he will get into office.