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- [00:01]
Scott Adams
Come on in. We have extra chairs up in the front. Grab a seat. We're gonna have some fun today. Yes, we are. Sunday, when all the lazy podcasters are taking the day off and going to church and sleeping in and doing all that stuff. But no, I'm here for you. Ready for this? Are you ready? Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization, Skull and Coffee with Scott Adams. And you've never had a better time. But if you think. Oops. If you'd like to elevate your experience up to levels that nobody can even understand. What? They're tiny human shiny brains? I think I got that wrong. But anyway, all you need is a copper mug or a glass attacker. Charleston. A canteen jugger 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. End of the day, the thing that makes everything better is called the simultaneous sip. That happens now. Oh. Oh, that was extra, extra delicious. All right, let me make sure I see all my comments. Yes, I do. All right, well, those of you who follow the Dilbert Reborn comic, or you may have seen it on X, because I did a unprotected version of it today, you know that I solved a problem I've been working on for a while, which is I needed some way to refer to the people who can't get over the pandemic. Now I understand why you can't get over it. So there's no confusion there, But a lot of people's brains just got broken by the pandemic, and they see the world through that filter. And so I needed a name for people who were. Who were like the Japanese soldiers who didn't know the World War II was over and they were hiding in caves for decades. It feels like that. So the new character I introduced into the deliberate world is Covid Carl. And Covid Carl judges all of your opinions by what your opinion was during the pandemic. And if they don't like your opinion during the pandemic, well, they're not going to like any other opinion you ever have. Well, let's check the science and see if there are any studies that could have saved some money just by asking me. Oh, here we go. Eric Dolan is writing for PsyPost that the quality of friendships are strongly linked to the well being of single Americans. Is there anybody who didn't know that if you're single, the quality of your friendships is important to your well being? Well, I don't Know if any of you knew it, I suspect you did, but they definitely could have saved some money by going to me and saying, Scott, we're thinking about doing this study. And I would say, don't bother, don't bother, just ask me. Well, the first self driving big rig is on the road, a company called Kodiak Robotics. So it's a fully autonomous 18 wheeler. It's in Texas. Now this one runs on LIDAR, so it won't be as cool as Tesla's big rig truck that I think is coming. Right. I believe Tesla's working on that too. But AI conversation is the source of this. But did you, did you ever believe that you would be alive at a time when big rig trucks would be driving without a driver on the same road as you? You know, one way to make sure everything is self driving cars is people are going to be afraid to drive unless they're in a self driving car. I feel as if the self driving cars should have to communicate with each other, even if it's a different brand of car, because if one car goes bad, the other cars could say, hey, cut it out, you're heading right at me. So anyway, self driving everything. But even cooler than that, the Wall Street Journal is reporting about farm, an autonomous farm. So it's an outdoor farm, but it uses robot tractors and I think drones to maybe pick stuff. So it's a fully autonomous farm. Now how many of you have ever worked on a farm? I have worked on a farm. My uncle had a farm that was walking distance from where I grew up. And so my siblings and I would be pressed into farm related services of various types. And it's not very pleasant work. I'll tell you, if you ever want to convince somebody to study hard and get good grades in school, all you have to do is have them work on a farm for a summer and figure out what manual labor is like. They'll study pretty hard after that. But anyway, maybe I'll become a farmer because now you can do it without leaving the house. Imagine being a farmer. This is actually, you know, totally possible. Imagine being a farmer and you own a bunch of real estate and you planted something and you run it from your computer and the whole thing is just running itself with robots while you're inside having breakfast. Well, that's coming. There's a new laser technology from Illinois. I don't know why. Oh, University of Illinois and Next Gen Defense is talking about it now. The details are too boring for this podcast, but the world of lasers used to shoot down Incoming missiles and incoming drones is experiencing some big upgrades. So I feel like we're not that far away from the lightsaber. The only thing that stops you from having a lightsaber is the power source. You know, the size of the power source and the fact that the laser isn't going to stop on its own after five feet or whatever, whatever one of those is. But does it seem to you that if you could get the power source small enough that someday we'll actually have lightsabers? I'm starting to think you could limit how far the laser is still effective. Having it focus somehow. I don't know. Lightsabers. Maybe someday well make America healthy again as a new win. Breitbart is writing about this. Jasmine Jordan that pepsico is dropping artificial colors and flavors from their chips, from their lays and their Tostitos. What would a lay's potato chip or a Tostito look like without artificial dyes? I don't know. I'm not sure it will look good, but maybe if it tastes good, your brain will just say, ah, that's fine. I don't know if it'll make any difference at all. Well, remember I kept saying a few days ago, is today the day that there will be national protests called Good Trouble, in which there were dozens or maybe hundreds of cities that were supposed to be protesting Trump? And I thought it started, but then I didn't say news, so I thought, well, it must be the next day. And then the next day came and there was no news about it. Well, apparently the whole thing fizzled. It was supposed to be this big, organized national protest. Zero hedges says that it fizzled. And I never even saw it. I didn't see any news coverage. And the speculation is that the, the Trump administration defunding of all those NGOs, you know, the stuff that the Doge people found was probably just money laundering. Could it be that there's not the right kind of money in the right place to organize another fake protest that's nationwide? Or did Democrats figure out that it doesn't move the needle whatsoever and that I would say the more protests there are, the more law and order people are going to want? Because there's always trouble when there's a big protest? And doesn't that work in Trump's favor no matter why they're protesting, as long as there were also violent people in the protest or vandals or whatever? And there always are. There always are. If it's a big one. Wouldn't that always work in Trump's favor. Maybe they just figured it out, this doesn't work. I don't know. But if you were expecting big nationwide protests, you are disappointed. According to PJ Media, David Manny is writing that 140 people leave California every day and a lot of them are going up to Washington state. So Washington State, I guess has no state income taxes. How many of you know what the state income tax is at the highest rate in California? Do most of you even know if I gave you a quiz? It's 13.3%. That's just the state tax, 13.3. And then our gas is something like, I don't know, 40% higher than other people's and our housing is much more expensive and the traffic is bad and the government is terrible and bankrupt practically. And you can't buy fire insurance in most places. And you probably ask me why do you stay? And the answer is today's high temperature will be 79 degrees. There won't be a cloud in the sky, the wind will not be blowing. And at least where I live, not really any insects to speak of. No mosquitoes, no humidity. Yeah, I don't think you can understand how addictive California is. It's not really easy to move out of this place. Depending on what part you're in, I wouldn't want to live in downtown LA or San Francisco. But if you're not living in those places. Yeah, it's really nice. It's hard to find a place you want to go. And I was thinking the people moving to Washington state are going to discover what it's like to have overcast rainy days, like way more than they expect. And a lot of them are going to be ending their own lives because there's a pretty high rated that up there. A lot of it has to do with the weather. So good luck with that if you're moving. I laugh now, but someday, you know, could happen to me. You never know. Remember yesterday I told you the story it was in the news that apparently the Department of Defense was contracting through Microsoft to handle some Department of Defense technical networks and stuff and that Microsoft had hired Chinese nationals, actually Chinese people living in China, to do some tech support which gave them access to some percent of the entire Department of Defense network. And I wondered if that was even true because I thought to myself that sounds like something that couldn't possibly be true. Now PXF has said that they're going to force Microsoft, I guess to cancel those contracts because it was true. Unbelievable that Microsoft had delegated sensitive access to the Department of defense computers for Chinese nationals who are forced to tell the government whatever the government wants them to tell them. Wow. So, but what I don't know yet is what percentage and whether it included our most sensitive stuff. I don't know. It might have been just some systems, and there's a little ambiguity about how many systems were involved. So it might have been a big deal or it might have been a minor deal if it wasn't the most sensitive systems. Don't know. Well, the ex chair of the dnc, Jamie Harrison, he started a new podcast. Why? Because as he says, people want Democrats to just be real. So I guess he started a podcast to show us how to be real or so the Democrats how to be real. The, the fact that Democrats believe that they can manufacture a Joe Rogan, this just blows my mind. You can't manufacture these things. There's like this magic that sometimes hit some things. You could do lots of things and then hope some of them get popular. But the idea that you can manufacture your own Joe Rogan and make it the Democrat version, nothing works that way. That's just not how anything in the real world works. But keep trying. So Hunter Biden was on Jamie Harrison's new podcast, and Hunter wants you to know that he never had anything to do with any decisions in the White House. And he said, quote, hunter said this, you ask one person to go in the record that would ever tell you that I was in any way making a single decision about anything, anything in that White House. Biden told Harrison, I stayed as far away as I possibly could. Which, by the way, broke my heart. Well, I believe him. I believe him because it seems to me that there were so many people around Biden and probably every single one of them would have tried to keep Hunter's, Hunter's influence at the, you know, the minimum. So, yeah, I don't think Hunter had that much influence. I believe him. He's. He's not a credible character. But on this specific topic, I don't think he had that much influence. Well, the, the Trump administration has reportedly, so far, and probably more to go, have eliminated 22,000 federal workers from around the Washington, D.C. area. So Bloomberg is reporting on that. Is that good? 22,000? Fewer. How many? The thing that this, this report lacks is context. That's why when I read the news, I spend at least half of the time asking Grok to explain the news that I just read. And again today, what I didn't have time for is I wanted to ask how many government employees there are do you know in the comments? Give me a number. If somebody has an extra screen open, how many government employees are there? Because aren't there many millions? Is it many millions of government employees? Is it more than 10 million? Somebody says 1.3 million, 4 million, 4 million. All right, yeah, I feel like it might be in that 4 million range or something like that. So we'll, we'll do a fact check on that. But low millions, 22,000. No, it's way better than adding people. I think Biden added people, a lot of them. So good job on the getting rid of excess people. Apparently the Obamacare insurance, according to the Hill, is going to spike in costs. So a lot of people who have Obamacare are going to find that a lot of the insurance that they have for health will go up 15, 20% this coming year. Now, the reason for the increases is if they say things just cost more than they used to. But they also blame, blame Trump policies. Right? So they blame some Trump policies. It doesn't matter. Just know that your health care costs will go up if you happen to be buying it through the ACA or the Obamacare. Was it more than a quarter of the insurers are looking for big increases. So I don't know if that's going to have an impact on the midterms or elections after that. Let's see, would it affect the midterms? No. Yeah, the midterms are next year, right? The midterms happen in 26. So yeah, that might affect the midterms. We'll see. Well, there's a company called Thingiverse that apparently prints plans for 3D items and some of those items, a number of them, were weapons. But it looks like the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has convinced them to stop offering a way to 3D print your own gun. So apparently the so called ghost guns, the guns that you don't know where they came from in New York city, tripled since 2020. And a lot of that must be people making their own gun under 3D printer. But at least one of the companies, I don't know how many there are, but one of them said they will stop doing that. Now, I liken that to what's going to happen with AI that I predicted a while ago. But I'll remind you, in theory, AI will help humans get past all their fake news and false beliefs because it'll be a super intelligence in practice, much like the 3D printer thing, even though the 3D printer could allow you to make a gun, there will be human beings will limit that from actually happening now, probably not eliminate it, but humans will always try to limit what the technology can do because they don't want it to do bad things. So with AI, I'm predicting that every major field of human endeavor will have some kind of organized element to it that will force the AI companies to distort the AI's impression of stuff. So if you were, you know, if you had enough leverage, you could go to the AI companies and say, we don't really want it to say that the climate models are unreliable. So you're in real trouble if they say that. So you might want to put a little code in there that prevents them from doing that. You're going to see that with every industry it will be completely distorted because nobody wants the AI to tell the truth. If you're in an industry that depends on people not knowing the truth, apparently the likelihood of Jerome Powell staying in office through May, the end of his contract is pretty good. And the odds of him being fired before that are pretty low. I guess the reporting from the Wall Street Journal anyway is that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant made the argument to Trump to not try to fire Powell for cause, even though they were looking for some cause. He thought it would disturb the markets and he thought that he thinks the Fed will, or a lot of people think the Fed will lower rates on its own before the end of the year. So it wouldn't buy you something that wasn't going to happen anyway and it would roil the markets. I gave you some serious fake news yesterday and some of you probably still think it's real. Do you remember I was talking about the alleged drawing that allegedly Trump did on a greeting card for Epstein when Epstein had his 50th birthday. And the story was that Trump drew a naked woman and signed his name so it would look like pubic hair on the naked woman. And then I showed you a drawing which I incorrectly believed was that drawing. That's the fake news part. If you saw a drawing that was purporting to be the one that Trump did on the greeting card, it's not real. It's just people who took their own shot at it and then other people thought it was real. So there is not in evidence anywhere. It was not in the Wall Street Journal article either. The Wall Street Journal simply described it without showing you an image of it. So nobody in the public domain has ever seen the so called image that was the biggest source of news for the last several days. So that was all bullshit. That drawing was B.S. now, it doesn't change my opinion. What I like about this, this story is that the whole greeting card hoax probably brought the MAGA supporters back together. You know, there was a lot of talk about the MAGA people being, you know, sort of split apart over the Epstein revelations. But now that Trump has seemingly moved in the direction of more. More disclosure. He approved the DOJ asking to unseal the. The grand jury testimony. I don't think it's going to happen, but. But if it did, it would look like Trump was at least trying to make things more transparent. But at the same time, he gets attacked with what looks like fake news about that greeting card, which makes the Republicans say that's not cool. Every time Trump gets in trouble, he gets a little bit more popular with his base. So I feel like he may be what he calls the Epstein hoax, which is an interesting way he frames it. So it's not like the Epstein story is fake. Not all of it, but the part that says that Trump is covering up for himself in some way is. Yeah. Is probably a hoax. That part. So I'll remind you what Alan Dershowitz is saying about Epstein, because I saw something he added to opinions I've told you about before. According to Dershowitz, he is not aware. Remember, he was Epstein's lawyer for the first set of trouble that Epstein got into. But Dershowit says that there were, as far as he knows, there were no videotapes of any bedrooms. That the only. The only videotape was in a public area. And the police put it there because it was just in one of his homes in Palm Springs because he reported had gotten some money was stolen from his home. So somehow he convinced the police to put in their own video to look for, I don't know, the next criminal. But according to Dershowitz, that's all there was. So he would say that there are no videos, you know, blackmail videos. Now, you've heard the FBI and the Department of Justice refer to all the videos of underage people. I believe that those were not taken on the property. I think that they were just from the Internet. Right. So I believe there were lots of videos of horrible things, but not horrible things involving amateurs who were. Who had just visited the island. It was just video that anybody could have gone and gotten from the Internet if that was their thing. So that's what I think. That's my current view. Dershowitz says that no current office holders were named as potential abusers. Now he would know again because he saw all the Names. He just can't tell you what he saw. But he says no current office holders. Do you believe that? Well, he's quite sure that Trump was not incriminated in any of that, so that's cool. And then Dershowitz says he asked his sources in Israel, and he would have good sources if Epstein was part of Mossad. And guess what Mossad said. You'll never guess. He asked Mossad if Epstein was. Was their guy, and Mossad said no. Now, would you find that credible? No, you can't ask the spy, you know, the spy organization, if the worst person in the world was on their payroll, what do you. What are they going to say? Now, I personally believe he probably wasn't personally, I believe he was not on the payroll of a Mossad, nor the CIA. And I'm very much being influenced by. Influenced by the Mike Benz opinion that the real story of Epstein might be that he was the money launderer supreme for any number of bad characters or maybe even intelligence characters who wanted him to connect people who had money with people who wanted to use that money. And some of those uses, but maybe not all, may have been some intelligence network asking for a favor. Now, there's a big difference between being on the payroll and being a secret spy versus those same spy networks having probably more people who don't work for them do stuff for them than the people that they pay. Wouldn't you guess for every one person that the CIA has on their payroll, wouldn't you assume that there are maybe five or 10 people who are not on their payroll? But the people who are on the payroll may ask for favors, and then the people doing the favor might not even know why, and they might not even doing it for any specific payback they might be doing. Doing it. Oh, let's say, hey, here's a deal. If I can get. Get this thing funded for you, or if I can hide this money you want hidden, can you do me a favor later? And we would never know what that favor was, but there would be no payroll. And if asked there was intelligence people would say, no, doesn't work for us. And they would be telling the truth. Just maybe they know. Maybe somebody in the organization knew them. Maybe somebody in the organization asked them for a favor. We'll never know. But it seems likely.
- [32:03]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [32:34]
Scott Adams
I believe there's now was it Laura Loomer who had to scoop about a whistleblower who said he saw the FBI destroy Epstein documents? Do I have that right? We're doing that from memory. I'm not sure I have that right. But would you be amazed if he found out that everything you heard about Epstein's sexual escapades was true and you even found out that he got lots of rich and powerful people involved in similarly illegal sexual activities, but it was never videoed and there was no documentation of it ever made. Would you be surprised by that? If my job involved knowing as many important people as possible so I could get favors from them and I could introduce one to the other, which is a favor. And I was also doing this illicit sex stuff, would I write any of it down? Would I send an email and say, hey, head of state on Thursday, we've got you set up with a underage person. There's never going to be any documentation. And why would he video it if it would get him in trouble, too? So the I'm kind of evolving to the opinion that it's entirely possible that the illicit sex stuff did happen, but there will never be any record of it because why would there be? So I feel like that's going to be a dead end. We'll see. Maybe some names will come out, but that's going to be quite a shade show if they do, because some of them people will be innocent. Jeffrey Epstein's ex girlfriend, this was on CNN, is accusing Trump of way back in 1993, of what CNN is calling groping her in front of Epstein. So CNN reports that Trump groped Epstein's girlfriend in front of Epstein. But then you hear what she describes and doesn't grope sound like he's grabbing her in her private parts? But then what she describes is that he's just really handsy, but not necessarily on her private parts. Now, I'm not defending him. I'm just saying that the way CNN characterized it didn't exactly match how she described it. It's not good if he was too handsy and it made her uncomfortable. Just to be clear, I'm not defending that. I'm just saying they may have added a little, may have added a little spice to that by Calling it groping. When you hear groping, don't you automatically think the naughty parts are involved? Well, I don't know. So that's her story. Nobody cares. It won't change anything. There is a story now that Trump and his team did ask about canceling some SpaceX contracts over the Elon Musk Trump disagreements that were kind of public, and that when NASA was asked, all right, are there any SpaceX contracts we can cancel? They learned that everything SpaceX does is sort of vital to our entire space program. So there wasn't really anything that our government could cancel without hurting the government more than it hurt Elon Musk. So I'm not sure I completely believe that this story is possible, that maybe they just wanted to find out if there was something they could threaten to cancel. So you don't know if they meant, you know, that they had decided they were going to cancel something. If they could find something good and cancelable, it could be that they just wanted to have a little, you know, a little leverage over him. We don't know. Anyway, Eric Schmidt, who was once the CEO of Google and one of the smartest guys in the tech world, is saying that traditional user interfaces are going to go away with AI. I saw this on an account on Exvichupo, and apparently there's an acronym for the old user interface. It's called wimp W I M P stands for Windows, icons, menus and pull downs. And Eric Schmidt points out that the user interface that we have on our phones and computers and iPads and all that, it was designed 50 years ago. 50 years ago, and the AI was will simply change its UI on the fly based on what it is that it knows you want. So does this sound familiar? The reason I bring it up is not that this specific topic is fascinating, but rather this is what I've been telling you is going to happen. And it helps when somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. In Greece, my perfect user interface would be a blank screen. And then I just start doing stuff. And because it's AI, it knows and guesses pretty quickly what it is I'm doing, and it just conforms to whatever user interface I need to get that done. Yep, it's the no Apps phone. Exactly. So, Eric Submit, who is way smarter than I am about this technology stuff, agrees, if I asked you, and I will, if you had to estimate how many illegal immigrants have been arrested so far during Trump's second term, what would you estimate? So the news is all about the deportations. So if I said to you, how many of there have been so far? What would your answer be in the, in the comments? Give me your best estimate, because I don't think you. I don't think we often see that number. Sometimes we see, you know, per day numbers and stuff like that. All right, I'm seeing your guesses from 200,000 to 25,000. 150,000. All right, some of you read the news. The answer is 150,000. Does that sound like a lot or not a lot? Because I believe that Obama, over his eight years, maybe deported around 3 million. It's really hard to deport a lot of people. Surprise. It's really, really hard to do it in gigantic numbers. So you can try as hard as you want. And at this rate, that's the first six months. If it stayed at that rate, and it won't because they have new funding, so it'll probably increase, but it would only be 300,000 a year. And so we wouldn't even reach Obama numbers. At that rate, you would be below Obama deportation numbers. So we'll see if he can make up the difference. But remember what I've been warning you about, that there will be a point where the deportations start affecting people who are not directly being deported and are not family members. It's going to start affecting just other people in a variety of ways. Then we'll see if it stays at the same rate or if there's any kind of counter movement that says, you know, you got most of them, you did a good job, you could slow down. I think that might happen. I'm going to predict that. But we'll see. Apparently the government is ramping up to deport more people, and part of that is using military bases, and there are few of them being discussed for housing illegal aliens waiting to be deported. So not only will there be these additional alligator Alcatraz situations, but Department of Defense will be using some of its facilities to house people until they can be shipped back. So that's pretty, pretty serious stuff. According to Just the news. Nicholas Ballzi, or maybe it's Balazzi, anyway, is writing about Obama just went on his wife's podcast and Michelle Obama and her brother have a podcast. So Barack Obama went on it for the first time and he made a little news by saying that he had a gay professor when he was in college and was a big positive role model to him. And he believes that young men should have friends who are gay now. I agree with him. It would be very helpful if people had friends who were of all different types of including gay and including other races and religions and stuff. And that would make the world a better place if you just had more contact with people who were more different from you. So I agree with the general concept which he is selling. However, I must ask this question. If you are the Democrat Party and what you wanted was to improve your, improve the votes you got from American men, young American men, is the message, that is the message that you want that you should get a gay friend. Did he talk to Tim Walsh about the code? Talking to men now? Again, I'm all for it. I'm not saying it's a bad idea that young men have at least one gay friend so they've got some contacts and you know, the world's a better place. I'm all for it. But the choice of what to feature as the story of the day, I'm not sure that's exactly the one they wanted if they're trying to increase their general male voting. Anyway, good job, Democrats. All right, let's talk about the Tulsi Gabbard's release of new information that suggests that the Obama and Brennan and Clapper and that crowd had cooked up the Russia collusion hoax, that they knew that Russia wasn't that involved and that they tried to sell it to the public anyway to destroy Trump's, you know, his time in office. And so I'm following the story, I'm reasonably well educated. I do want to understand it. So I'm putting some effort into it and I don't understand the story. How many of you are having the same problem, that it's just complicated enough and it spans many years and there's lots of characters and there's lots of claims. And when I hear the story, I'm watching the right leaning pod, sphere and news act like it's a really big deal and Obama could be taken away in handcuffs. And you know, maybe everything's changed, but you know that the other news that is not right leaning is treating it like nothing happened. Do you know that? So it can't both be true. That it's sort of the gigantic bombshell changes everything at the same time. Nothing really changed. So here's what I think is happening. Do you remember when the, the Hunter laptop was being spun by the 51 intelligence related people who signed on to a document that said that the Hunter laptop had all the, I'm paraphrasing, but they said it had all the markings of a Russian spy craft? Basically, those are my own words. But that's Basically, what it said, that all the indications consistent with being Russian dirty trick. But they were so clever that they didn't say, we have concluded it is Russian dirty trick. They left themselves this little weasel. This little weasel room. No, no, no. And of course, as I predicted would happen as soon as that all blew up, and we found out that that was all a lie. Brennan and Clapper both said, I believe. Fact check me on this. But I think they both said, we didn't say it was true. No, we didn't say it was true. We just said it had all the markings of something that would be consistent with the Russian plot. We didn't say it was a Russian plot. No, no, we didn't say that. We just said it was consistent. And it looked like the same kind of things you would expect. Right. Now, when I look at the Russian collusion stuff, I'm getting that same vibe because. Let's see if I can pull this together. So the. The memo that Tulsi Gabbard surfaced. Let me see if I can get this so complicated. At one point, the intelligence agents were saying that there's no evidence that Russia wanted to or tried to target election infrastructure. So there was no evidence that they wanted to or that they tried to change any votes directly by hacking into it. Now, the first thing I would say is if there's a legitimate discussion of whether or not the Russians hacked into our election system and changed votes, is there something missing there? Is there a dog not barking? Yeah, there is. And you would miss it if you got wrapped up in the story they're selling. Here's the part that they're not selling. But you would have to accept at the same time, if they even talked about the possibility that Russia had hacked and directly changed our voting system, you know, the vote count. Aren't they. Isn't the intelligence community also accepting that it was possible? And I'm pretty sure we've been told it wasn't possible. So, you know, any technology, it seems like there's a way to thwart it. But that was my first reaction, was, wait a minute. Why is there even a conversation about whether Russia might have changed the vote count? Why was that even possible? We were told that nobody could do that. Maybe we were lied to. Maybe. Maybe the intelligence community assumes that anything is riggable, then you wouldn't necessarily know it. Well. So we started with targeting election infrastructure. Now, at one point, we were told that the Russians absolutely, definitely were targeting election infrastructure and they were doing it for the benefit of Trump. I feel like the only people who said it was for the benefit of Trump were the politicians like Hillary. So Hillary was claiming, oh, it's definitely obvious, they were interfering with the election in 2016 for the benefit of Trump, but she didn't offer any proof of that. You know, it was just sort of her opinion she was trying to sell. But the intelligence community never said that Russia was interfering for Trump, did they? I'll take a fact check on that, but I think they, I think they use the same weasel approach that Hillary could say whatever lies politicians say, and nobody's surprised. But the intelligence community would just say, no, we have proof that they targeted our election infrastructure. Now, is there proof, Is there proof that Russia targeted our election infrastructure? Well, there's a little bit. Apparently there's reports, I don't know if it's true, but the reports that Russian sources did try to hack into, or maybe they did get into, two state databases of voters and what they got into voter registration databases in Illinois and Arizona. So they didn't break into something that would directly, even possibly change the votes, but they did apparently break into some databases in two states. That doesn't look like they could do much damage, but they got in there. So would that be enough to claim that the Russians hacked our, that they targeted our election infrastructure? And the answer is, yeah, tactically, you know, technically, you could say that the, the voter registration databases in those two states, if in fact we know that the Russians are the ones who act it, that would be part of the infrastructure. But there was no real chance that they could have changed votes, as far as I can tell. And there's no indication they did. And if they had, there would further be no indication that they did it to help Trump. But then they do the trick where they conflate it with the hack of the DNC emails which produced, according to Grok, the one thing that might have had some impact on the election is that the internal databases embarrassed the Democrats because it showed that they were definitely trying to screw Bernie Sanders to lock in Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Now, do you think that anybody changed their vote because of that? Might have been, maybe, but would that be an attack on the election infrastructure? I don't know, because they lump it into the same conversation. But that's not exactly election infrastructure. So what I think is going on is that we haven't learned anything new. And that's why the regular news, the non right leading news, is treating it like nothing happened, because I don't think we learned anything new, did we? And there's something. There's a story, there's a sub story about the intelligence community said there's no indication that any votes were changed by Russia or that they even wanted to. And I guess that was part of the President's daily briefing. But then somebody, and we assume it was Obama himself, decided to not do the daily briefing because allegedly the person running for office also got the presidential daily briefings, and that would be Trump. So the worry was that if, if Obama allowed the daily briefing to go ahead, it would say, the intelligence community says Russia didn't change any election results, nor is there any indication that they intended to. And that that would have made it, that would have put the lie to all the allegations that Trump was being helped by Russia. But the, the thing that the intelligence community said was really specifically, did Russia change any votes or do anything that would have changed any votes, and probably not. So I don't know. That's a little extra that we know, but we don't even know the full story behind that. There's a little speculation. So there's a couple of themes I'm giving you. One is that I don't think this story is going to have a big impact on, I don't know, let's say, the midterms. I don't think there's enough here that's going to put anybody in handcuffs. So what I'm not expecting is anybody to go to jail because of it or for it to change any future votes. So to me, it looks closer to a nothing than a something. And keep in mind that I think all the players who were named here are dirty as hell. And I think they did try to rig the election. And I do think that it was, you know, bordering on trade risks at the very least. So I'm definitely not supporting or trying to defend any of the people involved, from Obama to Brennan or Clapper. All I'm saying is if you're getting really excited because you think the smoking gun has been found and now we got them, I don't see it, maybe because it's complicated and I'm just missing something. But what it looks like is there's too much conflating of things that are slightly related but not the same. Yeah, maybe they got into some email. Did it affect the election? Were they trying to, were they trying to throw it to Trump? I don't know. So there's too much complexity, too much conflation, not enough new stuff. I don't know that it's much of anything. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with.
- [57:04]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [57:33]
Scott Adams
Meanwhile, over in the Middle East, Israel is ordering the evacuation of central Gaza. So they need to do some more attacking of Hamas in that area. So they're asking to evacuate it. Now every time I see any photograph of Gaza, it is of completely destroyed buildings. How many people were still remaining in those buildings? Or are there other buildings that have electricity and water and are not destroyed? It looks like everything's destroyed. So I'm surprised anybody is still living there. But the, but the. Then also in a related related act, Mossad is allegedly, according to Zero Edge, is pushing for US assistance in getting other countries to accept the Gazans. Now I don't believe there's any talk of America accepting Gaza refugees and I would be very against that because you wouldn't know what you were getting. But the idea is that some other countries may be pressured to take in the Gazans. Now Israel says, well, Netanyahu says that any relocation of Gaza's population would be voluntary. So it wouldn't be genocide because they can stay if they want, but that they would create the option to voluntarily relocate outside of Gaza. To which I say, well, that word voluntary is doing a lot of work. You can stay in Gaza and your house might blow up, you won't have any electricity, everything's toxic and your children may be killed in our next bombing run. But totally voluntary. If you wanted, I mean just if you wanted it, you could relocate. But we're not saying you should and we're not forcing you. We're just saying maybe if you wanted to reduce the risk to your, your body and your family, you might want to strongly consider not being in the bombing zone. So yeah, and I saw some. Was it the, that of the adl? Greenblatt was on a show recently and he was talking about the, the negative feelings that Americans have or was it the whole world? I think Americans about Israel and things are not looking good. So in terms of reputation, Israel is having a tough year. But as I often Say I'm not judging them because it's not my country and we would probably do something very similar. And I also ask, what are they going to do? Are they just going to bomb Gaza and then say, all right, everybody go back to work and reconstitute Hamas and do it again in a few years? So all the choices are horrible. Would you agree with. So depopulating Gaza and making the voluntary offer that they could go to another country perhaps is awful. It's just terrible. But if you're Israel, letting them just resettle in Gaza would be awful. It would be terrible. So all of the choices are just hideous. So if all of the choices are hideous and somebody chooses one of the hideous choices, that's at least better for their country. Am I going to judge that? It's hideous, but it's exactly what we would do if we were in the same situation. I hope so. That's why I don't judge it. You can observe it and you can predict it and you can comment on it, but don't judge it. That just doesn't make sense when you're looking at international stuff. Countries always act in their best interest, no matter what the moral or ethical boundaries are. So this is just more of that. Meanwhile, over in Ukraine, Ukrainian and you know how the Ukrainians like to produce a lot of video of their drones blowing stuff up. Well now they have some seriously good machine gun robots that are on wheels or tracks, I'm not sure which, but they're ground based and they had some video of their machine gun robot attacking a bunch of Russians and just machine gunning them. And I remind you that my prediction, I don't know if anybody else is making it, is that there's nothing that looks like it's going to stop that war anytime soon. But when the US says we're going to make make available our good stuff. How many of you think some of the good stuff might be these ground based machine gun robots? I feel like if we weren't making them, we should have been. I mean, it looks like the obvious tool you would use against a human front line. So I believe that the front line, Ukraine versus Russia, will be the first robot only frontline of war because eventually it will just be impossible for humans to be there, but the robots will still be operating. So it'll. Right now it's robots against humans on both, both directions. But eventually it will be robots against robots. So the robots will be attacking other robots. That's almost guaranteed. According to the BBC, the writer there is Paul Adams. Which, weirdly, is my father's name. But he's long dead and I don't believe he's writing for the BBC. I don't know which would be worse. But Paul Adams reports that Ukraine is gamifying the war so that the people who are operating the drones, I think, can win points, as if they're playing a game for destroying Russian soldiers and Russian assets. So they trialed it, and it's called army of Drones Bonus. So are you worried that human beings are being rewarded, as if they're playing a game for being operators of drones that are killing actual human beings? Well, I'm not surprised. But, you know, as I said before, this is hideously, you know, sort of immoral. But on the other hand, it's not my country. And if we were in the same position and we came up with an idea that worked, but everybody thought it was gross and disgusting and immoral and unethical, we do it, if it worked. I don't know if it works, but gamifying it is really icky. But it might work. China says, according to the Epoch Times, that it will start sentencing fentanyl traffickers to death. Now, I guess Trump is the source of that because he says that in his talks with China, they've agreed to do that. I am going to predict that that's not going to happen. Now, there might be a report of some, you know, fentanyl dealer being executed. So I'm not saying that nobody will get executed because they do have the death sentence for a number of things. But what I don't believe is that China has any intention of decreasing the fentanyl precursor traffic to Mexico so that they can turn it into fentanyl. I don't think that China means it. So I think that every time they make any kind of agreement about fentanyl, time goes by and then you find out it didn't happen or it wasn't what you hoped. So I feel like they might kill some sacrificial people that they wanted to kill anyway and then say, look at us, we're killing these fentanyl dealers, but that the big players will just keep on doing what they're doing. That's what I think. I believe that that will not bear fruit. And then lastly, Owen Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces event, but only for his subscribers on X. So if you subscribe to Owen Gregorian and you want to be part of a Spaces event on X, that'll be right after the show. A few minutes after the show, you'll know where to Find them. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's all I got for today. It's a happy Sunday. I hope you're all enjoying your perfect weather, even though you're not in California, most of you. And I'm taking opinions about whether I should keep my beard. Should I grow it out? To me, it doesn't look good, and it sort of disappears on my face. You can barely see it if you're 10ft away. I don't know. What do you think? Beard or no beard? Well, we'll see. I'm going to decide today. Probably the only reason I grew it is I had that shingles attack on the side of my face. So I was waiting for that to heal before I shaved or got a haircut. And now we're just about there. I don't know. It's just so weird. I'm so surprised that people like it. There are some who don't, but there are way more people telling me to keep it. I'm a little bit insulted by that. Not really. But I do ask myself, how much my face do you want me to cover? Oh, I just realized it would cover up my biggest wrinkles. The biggest wrinkles in my face. Or. Well, would it? I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't. I don't know. All right, we got Mexican opinions on the beard. I'm going to talk privately to my beloved subscribers on locals. The rest of you, thanks for joining. I will see you again tomorrow at the same time, same place. I hope. Hope you enjoyed it. And locals in 30 seconds.