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- [00:01]
Scott Adams
There you are. Let's get the comments going, and then we got a show. All right. Everything's working today. That's what I like to see. That's what I like to see. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time. But if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can even understand with your tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a copper mugger, glass, a tank of gels or spinach, nten chug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine is the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens. Now go. If it seems to you that I'm slurring my words, you would not be hallucinating. There's something wrong with this side of my mouth that I can't quite use it, so maybe I have to talk out of the other side of my mouth. I'll just talk out of this side. This side of my mouth's pretty good. All right, we'll see what happens. So after the show today, Owen Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces. That's the audio only feature within X. So you can find that by going to Owen Gregorian's page, or you could look for my page, Scott Adam says, and you'll see it near the top. So about a few minutes after the show, Owen will fire that up, as some of you know. And the only reason I'm telling you this is because she's been part of the show. My loyal dog, Snickers, has gone to the big farm in the sky. And you might wonder if that's why I missed the show yesterday. And the answer is no. Actually, I was in extraordinary pain for the last two days. Like, I've never even felt that much pain. It went away today. No particular reason, didn't do anything different, but I woke up, and that pain was gone. So I got to experience the end of my dog's life with the most pain I've ever felt in my life. So to say that the last two days were not ideal, that would be an understatement. They were not ideal. So let's get past that and talk about the news. According to SWPS University, whoever they are, practicing kindness reduces loneliness and increases cooperation. Now, can you believe it that when you're nice to people, they'd rather spend time with you. And also they'd be more cooperative because you're nice. Is there any way they could have saved some money on that study? Yes. Next time, just ask Scott. I'm pretty sure I could have told you that being nice has a rather wide range of benefits. Will it help you at work? Yes. Will it help you with your social life? Yes. Will it. Will it help you in every way that you can imagine? Yes. Be nice. Be nice. All right. Well, according to the University of Michigan, researchers are trying to figure out how to use the same kind of persuasion that the tobacco that was used against the tobacco industry to get people to not smoke. But in this case, they'd be trying to get people to not eat junk food. And here's the interesting part that you would imagine that the most effective way to get people not to do something that's bad for them would be to say, hey, that's bad for you. Don't do that. Turns out that's not the case. And what they found was focusing on industry tactics rather than individual choices. They could change perceptions. In other words, people are willing to hurt themselves if it's their choice. So if you say eating this fast food could make you fat and blah, blah, people will say, yeah, maybe it could, but I really like this food. But if you say to them, people you don't know are screwing you with their clever addictive treatments and they're basically taking your money and killing you, well, then it feels personal. It doesn't feel like you're making the choice. It feels like something that somebody's doing to you, and apparently that's more persuasive. So keep that in your persuasion bag of tricks that people care more about being manipulated than they care about even their own health. That's a good one to know. Well, according to Interesting Engineering, Japan did a little test and they moved a million gigabits per second over special kind of fiber. Now, you might say to yourself, isn't fiber already fast enough? Do we really need it to be that fast? And the answer is yes, because in the AI world, there's going to be a whole lot of lot of video and a lot of AI. And probably so. It also made me wonder if people are going to have to move to places where they have this kind of super Internet. I mean, it's going to take a while for this specific one to work its way into the market. But if you're a developer and you're working from home and you're doing AI stuff, how long will it be before you realize that Your connection at home just will never get the job done. And you're going to have to go into the office and, you know, get onto their super, super cable. I don't know, we'll see. But one of the things I never think about with AI is I don't think about the transmission speed, but that's a gaining factor, you know, not just how many servers you have, but can you move it back and forth? Well, Jake Tapper's CNN show hit his lowest rating since 2015 according to Fox News, who loves to report on that. So he had his lowest rated month in nearly a decade in May. At the same time he was out there promoting his book, which is doing very well by the way. His book is a big hit by comparison. Fox News, the Five and then special rapport with Brett Baer that runs at the same time as Tapper. Average, way more people. You don't need to know the numbers, but they just absolutely trounced him. What do we learn from this? Well, according to the ratings, mocking Jake tapper on the 5 is more popular than listening to him on his own show. If you turn on the Five at about the same time the Tapper is on, the Five is going to be mocking him for, you know, any various things. It's just more popular. They mock better than he does.
- [08:41]
Owen Gregorian
News Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, here's a interesting.
- [09:15]
Scott Adams
Little factoid from Stanford University. So they were testing a little program. Well, program, not a computer program, but a system for teaching people financial concepts easily. And what they found was that a real good way to do it is in two minute stories about the real world. And I've tried to teach people various personal financial things over the years and it's hard. So if you just describe what a stock is and how to buy it and stuff, people kind of glaze over. But if you told a story, well, Bob didn't want to buy this stock, but I talked him into buying Apple 10 years ago and then he made a bunch of money, then automatically you would say, oh, okay, I get that story. I better learn how to do stocks. And then you would do a little bit of your own work to figure out what's going on. The first thing I'd say about this is this is one of the examples of systemic racism, but also systemic poorism. Now, I grew up in a family where my father was an active stock trader. Now, he wasn't very good at it and he had, what do you call it, a broker, which was probably ripping him off the entire time, I don't know. But the result of that was that he was always telling little stories. So when I was little, I was worried about stocks and buying stocks and things like that. So by the time I was an adult, I wasn't afraid of it. I knew enough to figure out how to do it and how to open up an account and what it was all about. And I had a degree by then, economics. The economics degree didn't teach me anything about stocks, but just the fact that I was exposed to it when I was young definitely made a difference and made me a little bit financially wiser. So I do think that's one of those situations that is a systemic advantage to people whose parents know a little bit about finance anyway. So the thing that I would find the most useful as a story would be anybody who has the same situation as I do and then they did something about it. So, so if somebody has a 401k at work and you find out they fully funded it and you're in the same company or you have a 401k, you say, huh, Bob fully funded his 401k. I don't even know what a 401k is, but I better figure it out. So little stories about what somebody did is enough to get somebody to research that thing and become somewhat self taught just by exposure. It's a real good idea. Well, Trump was asked, I guess it was yesterday if he would consider a pardon for Diddy. Now, Trump has a habit of never answering a question the way you think he should, but whatever he's doing is working, so I'm not going to complain about it. So who in the world would act like they're open to pardoning Diddy at this point? Only Trump, because I guess they used to get along until Trump got into politics and he said that nobody's asked, but if I think somebody is mistreated. So basically he was saying, I don't know anything about the details of the story, but I won't rule it out. Only Trump would say that this is the most provocative thing you could possibly say. But okay, I guess Trump won another legal battle. So I never understood why he was suing the Pulitzer Prize people. Well, actually, his lawsuit is against New York Times and the Washington Post. Oh, no. But the case is against the Pulitzer board. Now, the reason that he's suing them is that they gave a Pulitzer for the fake. The writers who did the fake Russia collusion stories. And because they have not been withdrawn, now that we know that was all fake, it kind of makes it look like maybe Trump was guilty because somebody won a Pulitzer Prize for saying he was. So it gets into the realm of defamation simply because they haven't withdrawn the award, which is actually a pretty good argument. It's a pretty good argument. I don't know if it'll pass legal muster, but it did get past current challenge to proceed. So the lawsuit will proceed. We'll see if he wins. I think he's got a case. According to Cash Patel, when Comey did his Seashell thing where he said 86:47, it caused a whole bunch of copycats to do the same messaging online, which caused the FBI to have to do a whole bunch of investigations because they can't really ignore any threat to the president. So that's the worst thing that I think came out of it is all the copycats. Now, some of those copycats might be thinking that it's something to act on as opposed to just message on. So that turned into just a horrible situation all the way around. So fewer FBI handling things like crimes you'd like to solve and more of them trying to solve seashell related Comey problems. That's not good. According to Tulsi Gabbard, who is on the Will Cain show on Fox, she's going to declassify, or she did declassify reports exposing how the Biden administration used intelligence agencies to target Americans who had dissenting views on Covid immigration and the 2020 election, labeling them domestic violent extremists. Now you know what's missing from this story. Where's the list? Am I on it? It's weird to be a citizen of the United States and to not know if you're on a list of violent domestic extremists. Yes or no? I'd like to know that. I feel like. I'd like to know that. So I don't know if this is a news story. It feels like a repeat.
- [16:54]
Ryan Reynolds
But anyway, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying. No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.
- [17:18]
Scott Adams
Of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required int 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com if you haven't already heard it. Journalist Glenn Greenwald is having what the Daily News is calling a scandal. A scandal. That's their opinion. There's no scandal, as far as I can tell. But somebody released some sex videos of Glenn Greenwald and some consenting partner. So nothing illegal is alleged. But I like the fact that Greenwald just says, essentially, yes, that was me, and he says he's not embarrassed and it was two consenting adults and we're done here. And I thought to myself, aren't we way past the point where somebody being exposed for having gay sex would have any impact whatsoever on their career? It feels like it wouldn't have any impact at all. But. And we also don't know the source, but he says he's getting close to finding out who release it. But in a related story, or maybe it's not, you be the judge. According to the Daily Wire, support for gay marriage has plummeted among Republicans. In a Gallup poll. Do you think that somebody was devious enough to know that support for gay marriage had plummeted among Republicans? And Greenwald is at the moment more popular with the Republicans. So was this a way to spoil him for his main audience of Republicans? And would it work? Because I had no idea that the support for gay marriage was way down among Republicans. And I ask you, is that because of the trans issues? I feel like trans and gay got conflated and you could argue whether they should have or shouldn't have. But I feel like the bad feeling about trans, especially in sports and especially how much attention they were getting, may have just sort of had a spillover effect for Republicans on just ordinary gay people who were minding their own business. So these two stories are kind of disturbing when you see them together. It's disturbing that Republicans have had such a shift in opinion about gay marriage. What bad thing happened because of gay marriage? I'm not aware of anything that went wrong because gays were getting married. Did something happen I don't know about? It has to be the trans stuff, right? What else could it be? But perhaps somebody was taking advantage of that shift in attitudes to take a shot at Glenn Greenwald. And I Expect it's somebody who doesn't like his political opinions. We'll find out. But the way he's handling it, I always say that a lack of embarrassment is a superpower. Well, you're definitely seeing the superpower now, so. And most of us are never going to see the, the videos. It's not like they're on regular Internet. You know, you're not going to see them on X or Instagram or anything. So you'll never see them, most of you, unless you go looking for them, which I don't recommend. Maybe just leave them alone. Yeah. Here's a little bit about Harvard endowments. So you've heard that Harvard has $50 billion in endowments, and everybody says you don't need any government money. Why don't you spend your endowments? But most of you know that, at least by now, that 80% of those endowments are limited for specific uses. It's not like a big bank account. So it's stuff like this is for the athletic teams, and this one's to build this building and put my family name on it. So only 20% of it is even in play. But it's worse than that because there's some kind of rule that says universities, they can only spend like 5% of it or something. So there's a couple of rules that they have internally that kind of limit how they can even spend any of that money on their regular operations. And then some of it's a grab bag of smaller donations, so they'd have to figure out who's got what, restrictions on what. So they might be able to squeeze a little bit out of there. But if you're looking at the 50 billion is probably closer to 1 billion, and maybe not even that. So if you're saying how much could they spend on operations if they really tried? Maybe 1 billion. And how much is Trump taking away from them? Like 3 or 9 billion or something like that. So they do have a problem and the endowments are not going to help them, except a little bit. Well, Trump was bragging at his recent presser that he used the trade to stop the Pakistan and Indian war. Now, we don't know what that means exactly, but instead of threatening somebody with, if you do this, we'll take a side and bomb you or we'll do something else to you. Apparently he either gave them a carrot or a stick, maybe both, and said, if you want to be trading with the United States and our allies here, I'm just speculating. You can't, you can't be at war, you're going to have to calm down a little bit and then you can have a normal trading relationship with the United States and the rest of the world. So I don't know exactly what Trump said, maybe it was more threatening than that, but something like that. And he's reminding us of that. I like it. I do think we want to. The only way we could end war in a serious way is if everybody got financially entangled to the point where you just couldn't do it. And we're almost there. But instead of letting Russia get financially entangled, we did the opposite. So they're creating their own system. So it might be the worst case scenario. We'll see. Meanwhile, over in China, they've got a problem because there's a number of companies that are trying to make the cheapest car they can make. And one of them called the, I guess by the company byd, they're making a Seagull ev and that with subsidies, it would only cost the end user $7,800 for a car. $7,800, which is forcing the rivals, I guess they have rivals, Geely and Cherry to have to lower their prices, too. So China, the government, Beijing just told the auto giants to quit their quote, no winners, price war madness before the entire industry crashes. So I guess, I guess it's not just China worrying about prices in other countries. They're having a price war within China. This, that's destroying their entire industry. And so the, so the bosses had to say, cut it out. We see if that makes a difference. Meanwhile, Financial Times is reporting that OPEC is boosting oil output for the third consecutive month. So that should cause prices to come down. Right. I'm kind of amazed that there are still increases in production of oil because the price of oil is already down to the point where a lot of them can't make money. Right. Right around 60 bucks a barrel. That's where some people say, I'm out. I can't produce oil at less than that anyway. But in a related story, according to the Daily Color News foundation, they're talking about how Democrats were claiming that Trump's tariffs would raise all of our prices. But we haven't seen that happen yet. Some of that might be because energy prices are going down. Some of that might be because we have no idea if any tariffs are even in place. How many of you have any idea what real tariffs are in place? I don't. How many tariffs as Trump tried to put on people? Hundreds. If you count all the different countries, and then how many of them have been blocked by district judges? I don't know. I've totally lost count. How many of the ones that were blocked by district judges have then been overturned by higher court? I don't know. I've lost count. I have no idea what's going on with tariffs. I don't know. Do we have them? Do we have some of them but not all of them? I don't know. I can't tell. But it's funny that the Democratic strategy seems to be to block all tariffs and then complain that the tariffs don't raise prices. Well, let me say that again. The Democrats would like to see prices rise so they can blame the tariffs, but at the same time, they're blocking all those tariffs. So even if it's true that the tariffs would make prices rise, and it's the only hope the Democrats have of ever winning again is if prices rise, the Democrats are blocking the tariffs so the prices can't rise. So I'm not sure they have any kind of a coherent plan. They should either block them or let the prices rise. I guess we'll see where that goes.
- [28:49]
Owen Gregorian
What is daddication?
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Darian
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Darian. We call him Day Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we work together. We did a good job.
- [29:10]
Owen Gregorian
That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov Brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
- [29:18]
Scott Adams
Trump's approval level, according to the Hill and a new. A new poll by the Decision Desk HQ shows that he's doing pretty well. So his polling average is as high as 47.1 this past weekend, and that would be a good number for Trump. So in last two months, he's gone up and down. But at the moment, and I think that has everything to do with tariffs being put on hold, the public has no idea what's going on. Now, the average voter, if you ask the average voter, so what country does Trump have a tariff on that has not been postponed or stalled by a corps? How many people can answer that question? So I think people are just sort of discounting the tariff thing, like it doesn't matter. And if they like everything else Trump's doing, they're like, well, we like him. According to. Let's see, where did I say this? Wall Street Journal, conservatives kind of screwed themselves by making executive order lawsuits against Biden. So apparently during the Biden administration, when Biden was trying to do executive orders and conservatives were trying to stop him, they came up with some kind of major questions doctrine. So the courts came up with a major questions document doctrine. So if it's a major thing, then Congress has to act on it. But if it's not major, let's say it's a tweak or just a little redefinition of something, then the executive order can stand. Unfortunately, while this might have been a clever thing for conservatives to do, it created a situation where now the left can use it against Trump. And they are. So there's a unanimous decision by the U.S. court of International Trade that relied in part on that major questions doctrine. So it is true that anytime one side comes up with a new tool to bash the other on the head, that tool is going to bash them back as soon as things change. And that's where we are. So Wall Street Journal had a good article on that with Jess Bravin and JAN WOLF. Meanwhile, CNN's Harry Enton is reporting that the courts have blocked Trump's agenda 181 times in four months. That's over half of all the cases. And judicial lawfare, of course, looks like it's out of control 181 times. It's like we don't even have a normal government. All we have are lawsuits. We might as well just take everything to the court and just forget about Congress and forget about executive orders and just say, all right, lawyers, it's going to be decided by the court anyway. So you take over anyway. Meanwhile, the according to Fox News, the Supreme Court has handed Trump a win on revoking parole for the 500,000 foreign nationals. Again, I'm losing track. So now they got the Supreme Court said that the 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela can be deported. But is there anything stopping that? So sort of like tariffs. I'm losing track over which challenges have worked and which hasn't. But it looks like Trump's doing better on immigration than he is on tariffs in terms of the legal aspects of it. So it looks like there'll be some freedom to deport. Meanwhile, according to where this come from, there's a the Gaza food aid has been reimagined so that Hamas is not happy apparently the old way that and not very old. But you know, the, the recent way that aid was given to The Gaza residents is that they'd send trucks through with aid, and the truck would try to go where the people are, and then Hamas would stop the truck and steal all the food and sell it so they could buy more stuff for Hamas. So basically, it wasn't working. So then the change is that now the people are going to come to where the food is. So it's not stopping a bunch of trucks. Hamas would have to stop all the individuals. So they tried. They said, basically, if you go get that free food, we will kill you. Imagine being a Gaza resident and the United States is trying to distribute you food, which is done by American contractors, but I think is paid for by Israel and maybe Saudi Arabia and some other countries over there. But if you're a Gaza resident, you think that the United States is helping you get food, and Hamas is telling you that if you eat that food, they'll kill you. So sort of. I hate to say it's an ideal situation for Israel, but in terms of hearts and minds, it looks like they've solved one of the biggest problems, which is if you're sending trucks of aid, it doesn't work, and Hamas gets stronger. But if you tell the people, okay, you're all in this little area now, so go get some food and take it home, apparently that works better because Hamas can't kill everybody. They might try. Anyway, I'm going to keep it short today. Yesterday, I was in extraordinary pain, but today I'm all good. I don't know what the pain was, and I don't know why it wouldn't. Why either, but that's the good news. But anyway, Owen Gregorian is going to have a spaces event right after we're done, and I'm just about done. So look for Owen Gregorian on X, and that'll give you the link for the spaces. Or you can go to my account, Scott, Adam says. And find the spaces there. All right. Yeah. So today's a short one because the news isn't giving us much, and we've got something to do right after. So, Owen, I probably surprised you because I'm finishing a little earlier than usual, but go ahead and get that going. And everybody wants to go there. You can have some extra fun. And happy Saturday, everybody. I hope you all have a terrific time. And I'm going to say just a few words to the people on locals, but I'm not going to keep them long. The rest of you see. See you tomorrow. Same time, same Sam.