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- [00:00]
Scott Adams
Buddy, come on in. Grab a seat. I'm checking on your stocks, if you have any. They're up a little bit. We'll see. Tesla is up a little bit. Let me get your comments working. And then we got a show. 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, it's true. But if you'd like to take a chance of elevating your experience this morning to levels that nobody can even understand, whether tiny, shiny human brains. All you need for that is a copper among your glass of tankard shelves to stein, a canteen jug 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. At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, especially the weekend, it's called the simultaneous sep, but it happens. Now go. Oh, that's what I needed. Now everything is perfect. I wonder if there is any science that they could have saved some money by just asking. Scott. Well, Eric Dolan, writing for this psy post, says that if you show people information about congressional stock picking, knowing that they can use insider information if they want, and if you tell people that Congress is betting on stocks using insider information, people will trust Congress less. That's right. If you learn that Congress are a bunch of lying, thieving weasels, you will trust them less. You know, I don't need. I don't think you need to do a study on that. You could have just asked me, I'll tell you. Well, Elon Musk responded to Trump today. Trump had said that he won't take away subsidies from Musk. He doesn't want to do that. What he wants is for all American companies to thrive. So he's not trying to put Tesla out of business. He wants it to thrive along with other companies and so he will not take away their subsidies. And Elon Musk said the subsidies he's talking about simply do not exist. He says Trump has already removed or put an expiration date on all sustainable energy support while leaving massive oil and gas subsidies untouched. So Trump has. Once again, Trump has. Trump will not take away the subsidies that don't exist. Okay. And Elon points out that SpaceX won the NASA contracts by doing a better job. So you don't want to take away any subsidies there either. Anyway, apparently Tesla is going to launch the Cyber Cab in San Francisco. So is that what it's called? Robo Taxi or Cyber Cab, I can't remember, but I thought to myself, is there finally a reason to go to San Francisco? You know, I live about an hour outside of San Francisco and I managed to find no reasons to go there for about five years. There's just no reason to go there. And I thought, wow, if I could, if I could drive my car to San Francisco, find a place to park, which wouldn't be easy, and then call a cyber cab, one of the Tesla self driving driverless cabs, wouldn't that be like a fun day out? Wouldn't you enjoy that as just an adventure? Because most of you have probably never been in a self driving car of any kind, right? And San Francisco is sort of an interesting place to drive. It's not the easiest. I mean, it's not, it's not Boston, but it's not the easiest either. Wouldn't you enjoy driving your car to the city just, just to take a driverless car ride? I'm thinking of doing that, but probably not. Well, let's see if you are surprised to learn that the sale of TikTok to an American company is not being approved by China. So I guess JD Vance is in charge of that. And after lots of conversations, it does not look like there's a deal. So will, Will Trump, will he do what he said, which is if we can't buy it, he's going to close it down? Well, he doesn't want to close it down because it would be very unpopular and it works for Republicans. Apparently TikTok was more pro Trump than we thought. Maybe it was only pro Trump, but we'll see. So China also is going to be meeting with the US to talk about, you know, finalizing some kind of trade deal. And it seems to me that if China wanted to make their best trade deal and they knew that, they knew that Trump was trying to get TikTok purchased, that they would hold off on that until it was part of a bigger deal and they could trade it for something they want such as lower tariffs. So China would be crazy to approve TikTok outside of the conversation about tariffs in general. So how many of you knew that? Was that obvious to everybody that China would be crazy to make any kind of TikTok deal when they could just fold it into the larger negotiations? So no, I don't know if it'll ever happen, but they're not going to do it outside of the larger negotiations. They'd be crazy to do that. Well, apparently if you go to do a search on Google, you now see an AI summary of whatever the. The destination links would take you to. How many people do you think click on the destination link when they have a summary right in front of them, which is probably all they wanted? Well, it turns out that 79% of the traffic is lost to the source of the news or the source of the information. So it looks like Google, if this, assuming this stays true, that Google would be able to rob all of its sources of 80% of their traffic. Now, probably almost all of their sources depend on native traffic going to them. So AI has found a way to destroy all information on the planet Earth, like literally. Because if you depend on traffic coming to you directly and then it goes away, well, then the source, even if it's Wikipedia, they close down because there's no way to support it. And then what does Google link to? Because Google is not the base source of information. Google is just something that points to other places, but they're pointing to those other places and totally putting them, those other places, out of business. Well, I don't know. Maybe some of those sites will survive just on subscription, you know, maybe the biggest ones. But I feel like there's a risk that Google just destroyed all information. Does that make sense? If. If the sources of the information lose their entire source of revenue, which is traffic, then Google has nobody to link to. They'll all be gone, and then Google's out of business. So somehow we figured out how to destroy everything. I believe. I didn't, didn't study up on this, but aren't some of the AI rules now in America very lenient for the AI that's looking at authors, books and deciding and deciding whether the author gets compensated or not. And at the moment, there's no real way to do it. So if you were to stop and say, all right, we'll stop doing this AI until all the people who are referenced or were part of the training of the model can get some kind of compensation. But there's not really any way to do it. So people ask me, Scott, now that you might live a little bit longer, things are looking good in that domain. That's the moment. Would you write another book? And honestly, I don't even know if anybody would write another book. I'm a little bit worried that book writing just won't be profitable because people haven't learned yet that you can get the best parts of a book just by going to AI. Hey, AI, can you summarize what people are saying about this book? And then it pretends that it's only dealing with what people said about it, which usually is enough so the book business might go away.
- [11:11]
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- [11:42]
Scott Adams
Well, it's been maybe 10 years in which I've been talking about the so called fourth generation nuclear reactors. Now the third generation nuclear reactors are the ones that we would build if we built one today, or maybe yesterday, which have never had a meltdown. Did you know that? The current version of nuclear power, the ones that have actually been around for, I don't know the actual number, but maybe 30 years, they've never had a meltdown. The only ones that have are the ones that were version two, generation two and before. So it was already pretty safe, but it was still possible theoretically for the third generation to have meltdowns. The fourth generation has been sort of, what would you call it, an ambition. But we didn't know how to do it safely and economically. But thanks to our government, and I think Biden was also did a good job on this, the government has created a test bed for testing new fuels and new technologies, because that's the hard part, finding a way to rapidly test stuff. And the good news is that between private industry startups and the government being pretty forward looking in terms of supporting nuclear, There are several fourth generation nuclear reactors that are near launch in the U.S. now the fourth generation doesn't have the option of melting down if it loses power, which is that would be the problem for the other kind. If it loses power, it can't control it and then you got a problem. But these, you could just turn them off and nothing would happen. They just go on, they go off, there's no risk of a meltdown. So we got a few of those coming online. If you're not following that industry, you probably should because with AI coming on, nuclear and AI are two things you want to be able to understand. Well, Joe Biden got a $10 million advance to write a book. We believe that the autopad will be writing the book. Wouldn't that be funny? You should write a book. If he wants people to actually read it. You should have a co Author. The book is Joe Biden's Presidential Successes, written by Joe Biden, and autopen would be a pretty good joke. Or auto Pen. Well, he'd better hurry and get his money, because I don't know if he's going to be around long enough to say that he wrote the book. He might be the first author who has literally a ghost writer. You know, an actual ghost, because, well, you know, I don't need to. I don't need to finish that joke. You were already there. And I was also imagining. Imagine being the ghost writer, you know, the human ghostwriter for Biden. Obviously, he's not writing it himself, but can you imagine having to spend all that time with him and listening to all the bullshit that he says and knowing that half of it is a lie and half of it is false memory and just ridiculousness? And you're really writing a book about the most unsuccessful president of all time, but he wants you to write it like he really triumphed. Oh, my God. How could you possibly take that job as a ghostwriter? Well, according to Breitbart News, I learned today that Fort Bliss. So the military base, Fort Bliss, is going to be used for a migrant detention center. Migrant detention center for Fort Bliss. I wonder if I could call upon all of my experience as a cartoonist to make a funny joke about Fort Bliss being used as a migrant detention center. Think, think. Okay, I got it. It makes sense that you put them in Fort Bliss because immigrants is bliss. Anybody? Anybody? Immigrants is bliss. No? All right, moving on. Moving on. Well, you remember Klaus Schwab? He was out of the World Economic Forum. I guess it was, but he retired, and then he got blamed or accused of doing a bunch of financially sketchy things. But now he's being accused of ordering the falsification of research to make it appear that Brexit was detrimental to Britain's economy. Huh. I'm starting to think that our elites might sometimes lie to us about the obvious. Sometimes I don't trust the elites. Well, here's something you all need to learn. There's a new buzzword that if you're not a finance geek, you have never heard. But you're going to hear a lot of it. It's called Cap X. One word, C, A, P, E, X. How many of you know what that is when it's in the news? Well, it stands for capital expense, which is when you buy equipment or buildings, typically as a business, to increase your. Increase your business. Basically, you're investing in the future by upgrading your equipment or your building Usually, well, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, the America in the first six months of Trump, the capex, which is an excellent indicator of the future of the economy, is way up. So capex being up, if you are looking for good news before the weekend, that's really good news. I look at Capex and I look at employment, the unemployment rate, those are the things I look at to see if we'll be okay. On top of that of course is the deficit. So if you don't get the deficit right, you're dead. So those three things are what I look at the most Capex because that also tells you how optimistic business is, which really is a self fulfilling prophecy. If they think things will go well, they invest and that makes things go well. So Capex is up. Good news people. So I mentioned this before, but there's some implications. So Trump has his executive orders about AI. The AI can't be too woke. In other words, it can't be too biased in one viewpoint. Now on the surface you say to yourself, well that's great, it's not going to be this biased left wing woke bs. On the other hand, who gets to decide what is bias if we don't agree what looks like being biased and what doesn't? Remember if you're a Democrat, probably, I don't know, 60% of all Democrat voters would say it's not biased to say that Trump colluded with Russia, which literally never happened. But it, but probably over half of all Democrats believe it did because they heard it on the news. And the Democrats probably would benefit if you continue to believe that. So when Trump's in charge, will the AI companies say, ah, we're going to have to make this compatible with whatever Trump wants it to be, otherwise we won't get government funding and government support and we might get taxed and sanctioned and God knows what. But what happens if a Democrat gets in office and says, you know that executive order about bias? Well now we decide what bias looks like. And then does AI have to go back and change what AI says so that it becomes their version of unbiased? I don't know how you can get to an agreeable place because otherwise AI will become so useless. It just says stuff like, well, people disagree, it's controversial. I'd rather not answer that question. We might be heading to the place I had predicted long ago, which is if you believe that human beings would allow their AI to overrule what they believe is true, you have not spent much time around human beings. Human beings will Never accept that AI knows more than they do. And if it told you I am AI, I am being unbiased. Trust me, I am a super intelligence. This is just an objective statement of fact. But if you don't like those facts, you're going to do everything you can to scrub them out of that AI. So super intelligence will be whatever the people in charge decide. Sounds intelligent. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways.
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- [22:26]
Scott Adams
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- [22:29]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [22:49]
Scott Adams
See mintmobile.com how many of you know that I invented a word years ago that became literally part of the vocabulary. Now many of you have not heard it, but if you were to Google it, you'd see that. I think it's in Wikipedia now and it's defined as the word is confusopoly. Confusopoly. So it's where companies offer products that are so complicated you can't compare it to the competition. For example, if you wanted to buy insurance, would you really spend all the time to see, all right, well, this one does this and this one will solve that. You don't really, so you kind of buy whatever insurance you encounter first. What if you wanted to get cell phone service? For years it's been kind of impossible to know which one to pick. Well, all right, this one costs a little bit more, but they've got different plan. And this one, I can get a free phone from my family member and it's just too complicated. So the reason they do that is that they're in a commodity business. Insurance is insurance, or it could be, and phones are phones or they could be. So they have to pretend that they're different. And they do that by confusing you and essentially removing your incentive to really find out which one would be better for you. So you end up saying, well, the Verizon store is the closest one, so I'll just get that. I can't tell which one's better. But I noticed that politics has become a confusopoli, meaning that the people who are like you, if you're watching this podcast, you're probably in the top 2% of people who follow the news and try to understand the nuance of it. There can't be more than 2%. How many of you have had the experience of bringing up something that's just really well understood and talking to somebody who never heard of it once? So, recently I did a conversation with Jordan Peterson, and of course, that was really kind of one of the highlights of my career because I have a high opinion of his skills and intellect and what he's added to the world. So I wanted to brag about it to the people I know in real life. And let me tell you how that experience goes. So you know Jordan Peterson, right? Who? Jordan Peterson. You've. You've heard of him, right? No, never heard of him. Okay. Seriously, you've never heard of Jordan Peterson? Nope. And that's the end of my conversation. Because, you know, it's not going to impress anybody that I talked to somebody they never heard of. Now, that applies to almost every story in the news. Now, it's all a little too complicated. So the only people I can talk to about it are the very few people who follow this stuff, like most of you. But in person, one person in 20 might be following the news closely so that they've made their way through the confusing part to understand something about what's going on. But as I've said, complexity always hides fraud. Complexity always, always hides fraud. So if you look at our government and you realize I don't even understand how they do budgeting, like, what? There's a recession package and it has to go to the House and then the Senate and then back to the House and then back to the Senate. I don't know what's going on. Is it 10 years or one year? And is it making the budget worse or better? You can't tell. It's, like, impossible. So what do people do instead? They default to rule of thumb. Kind of. How do you feel? Usually that means, well, I've always been a Democrat, so I guess I'm one now. Well, I've always been a Republican, so I guess I'll agree with what Trump says. But we are not even close to being able to understand what's happening because both sides like to make it confusing. Trump is sort of the master at simplification, so that's one of the reasons he broke through. But let me give you a little persuasion lesson. Everybody up for a little lesson? So this will be kind of a. Actually, it's more of a lesson on how to predict. So those of you who have been watching me for a while might say, Scott, how do you make predictions that are so uncanny and better than anybody who ever predicted? Which, by the way, I think is actually true. And the answer is talent stack. So somewhat by coincidence and a little bit by design, I have exactly the set of skills that one would need to make good predictions. Now, that doesn't mean I'm magic or awesome, it just means I happen to blunder into a bunch of domains that happen to be good for predicting. For example, if you understand persuasion, it would be easier to have seen Trump coming because he's a master persuader. But if you didn't know, you would just think he's a big old crazy clown. So skill number one is hypnosis and, or persuasion. If you understand those, you can predict the future because you can see who is likely to be persuaded by what. Do you remember when AOC first burst on the scene and Republicans wanted to slap her down to say bad things about her? And I said, oh no, you don't see this one coming. This is a persuasion monster. So yeah, she doesn't have much substance, but she has a big game. And now the Democrats are wondering if she's going to be their next presidential candidate. So it was easy to predict if you understood persuasion. If you were looking at the facts, you'd say, well, she's not nearly experienced enough and her policies don't make sense. And you might have said that about Mom Donnie too, but he's persuasive. Another thing is if you have experience in big organizations, which as the author of Dilbert, you know that I do two big organizations, a bank and then a phone company. But any big organization still has a lot of things in common, such as ass covering and self interest and marketing and stuff like that. So I would argue that if you're part of a big organization or ever have been, you can make better predictions about what any big organization will do. Do you remember when Gavin Newsom said to the people who wanted reparations, hey, why don't you go study that, form a study group and come back with a recommendation? And I told you, oh, I've seen this play before. It's a big organization play where the top guy or woman doesn't want to make a decision, so they know they can just put it off forever by sending you back to study it. So I could predict that he was just kicking the can down the road because I had big company experience. Economics. I have a background in economics and an mba so when I say follow the money or it doesn't look like that could ever make sense economically. It allows you to predict if you understand how money and economics and profitability and all that stuff works. Capex, for example. And then I don't have any legal background, but once you learn enough about how laws are created, you can kind of logically guess. All right. I think I can predict how this is going to go without being a lawyer. So you saw some of the news today or yesterday, I guess that a judge said that we would not be able to see the grand jury testimony. Now, how did I predict that we would not be allowed to see it even though the administration asked for it? Well, I don't know much about the law, but I know kind of the general concepts. And one of them is that the grand jury is not reliable enough. It's not a. It's not a place where facts are determined. That's where that the regular trial would be. That. So you don't want to let people see hearsay and opinions and stuff, get into the world. If they're not really confirmed, it'd be a big problem. So persuasion, let's say hypnosis, big organization, experience, economics, and just understanding how the law generally works without the details allows you to make predictions. The reason I thought of this is because the judge that denied the access to the Epstein sealed transcripts from the grand jury said, quote, that her hands are tied. Her hands are tied. Do you remember what I taught you about hypnosis? Hypnotists are taught. At least I was. I don't know, maybe, maybe your mileage might vary, but I was taught that people will say exactly what they're thinking. Their inner thoughts will be revealed by their choice of words when they're speaking extemporaneously, like just off the top of their head. You couldn't tell by reading what they wrote because they would put a lot of thought into that. But if they're just speaking casually and they say something like my hands are tied, if you were to guess that that judge likes being tied up, you would have about a 75% chance of being right. It's not guaranteed, but when you see an unusual choice of words like my hands are tied, it's almost always part of their brain just revealing their inner secrets. And it doesn't work only for sexual stuff. It would work for anything that they cared about. That's why I taught you that if you're looking for a lie, wait till somebody starts their sentence with, well, I would say because you don't say. I would say. If you're just talking about what you believe is true, you would never use those words. That's a reveal that you don't believe what you're going to say next. So here are the bad ways to predict the future. Using your common sense. Using your common sense is a terrible way to predict the future because other people are not operating on common sense. It might be, you know, on feeling, which persuasion would get to. It might be there's a monetary thing, you know, there could be lots of things, but common sense, no, you can't really predict much with common sense. How about history repeats? No, history doesn't repeat. I've been saying this for years. There are some patterns which you might say, hey, that looks like that other thing. But history can't repeat because we know what happened the last time. So at the very least, the people going into the decision would be able to say, hey, last time this didn't work out. So we better make an adjustment. It would be exceedingly unlikely if history repeated. Now, what is consistent is that people are people. So if you're, if you're making a, you know, if you're making a prediction based on people being selfish liars, well, that history might repeat. But it's not about the history. It's more about knowing how people react. So I wouldn't use history repeats. And I think people end up just with, well, my side is right, the other side is wrong. So I'll just listen to what my TV host says and do whatever they say. Grandpa's here.
- [36:17]
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- [37:15]
Scott Adams
Well, how many of you saw the video of Trump doing a site visit to the Federal Reserve's building construction site? He was there with Tim Scott and Bill Pulte. And here's the fun part. He was there with Jerome Powell. Now, I don't know if Jerome Powell was originally invited to go along or he asked to go along, but you should see Jerome Powell standing next to Trump after knowing that Trump has insulted this guy's intelligence for a year straight or maybe six months, he's been basically calling him too late Powell, and essentially calling him an idiot who needs to leave, and he's thinking about firing, and then he has to go to this event, and they have to stand next to each other. So, first of all, Jerome Powell looks like the. That old grandfather guy from the Disney movie Up. Do you remember that movie up, where there's this guy who's just. He's kind of as a perpetual frown. So Jerome Powell looks like that guy from up, and he's smaller than Trump, and he has to stand there like a. Like a whipped. You know, Whipped what? Dog. And Trump, of course, is Trump. So you'd think that that would be an awkward situation for anybody, but not for Trump because he's the boss. So it's got to be awkward for Powell, like, really awkward. But for Trump, it's probably just a good time because he could make Powell stand there like a completely broken guy. I guess so. Then Trump says that the cost of the building had gone up from 2.5 to now 3.1 billion. And Powell shakes his head. He's like, what? No, no, it didn't go up. And then Trump reaches his pocket and takes out something that had the costs on it. He actually had it in writing in his pocket. And he hands it to Powell. And on camera, Powell has to read this thing. He's like, oh, no, no. You're including a building that was completed five years ago. So, and Trump being Trump, instead of saying, oh, oh, we'll take that out then, because that. That includes that building that was built five years ago. Trump just kind of waves his arm at it and acts like that didn't matter. He goes, well, it's all, you know, all part of the, you know, same, you know, same, you know, operation, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he just goes on. And then they asked him, you know, what. What he would say to Jerome Powell now that he's standing right next to him. And Trump slaps him on the back and says, oh, and ask him to, you know, lower interest rates. But the slap on the back was also like a dominance thing because, you know, there was no possibility that Jerome Powell was going to make a joke and slap Trump on the back. Do we agree there is no world in which Jerome Powell was going to jokingly say something and slap the President of the United States in the back. But Trump, he says exactly what he wants. He slaps him on the back. And the whole thing, the whole thing was Trump theater. And oh my God, it was just wonderful to watch. But you have to look at Jerome Powell's face when he's standing there. He looks like the unhappiest person in the world of unhappy people. All right, here's some potentially good news. The Technical University of Denmark has built an AI platform that allegedly can help people solve cancer. So the AI platform would allow them to design specific treatments for people's specific bodies and specific cancers. And it would do it very fast and apparently it looks very good. So it's not really rolled out yet, but at least in the trials. Well, I don't know if it's trials. Maybe in the lab they have designed proteins that will stick to your T cells and give them molecular GPs to locate cancers, specific ones that they've designed it for. So that's pretty cool. Now, I should tell you, if you didn't know that pretty much every day, and I mean every day, there's a news story like this one. This says at any moment now, cancer will be cured. We're almost there. I've been hearing that kind of story for about 40 years now. The good news is a lot of cancers have been cured in 40 years. Still a long way to go. But I wouldn't get too excited about these. If you saw on X I was putting my, my PSA scores. As you know, I've got metastatic prostate cancer. But at the moment I'm on some testosterone blocking pills which I posted on X so you could see them. And I got my, my newest blood test. And a year ago, my psa, October last year was getting outside of the acceptable zone. Not a lot, but was definitely just outside the acceptable zone. And then it just zoomed over the next several months, it just went to like 1400. A good PSA would be 7. That would be a good PSA score. 7 if you're perfectly healthy. Mine went to 1500 and it was in June of this year. And that's when I was in so much pain. I was looking to end my life by the End of the month. But instead I tried these testosterone blocking pills and they removed, they removed all of my pain and might allow me to live several more years. Now, I don't know that my healthcare provider would have recommended those specific pills or if the ones that they would have done, because they do recommend the hormonal treatments. So it's not like they don't recommend it. But there are some new, really expensive pills that I'm using right now that I suspect they would not be keen on prescribing because, you know, they're, they're, they're trying to not go broke. So I, I suspect that I got lucky. So at the moment, I feel fine. And maybe I've got years to go. I don't know. Nobody knows. But it's a race for science to come up with some other solution. And what are the odds? You know, I often say this. I won't name a name, but I was saying this the other day to someone else who always finds himself in the center of history. Have you noticed that there are some people, for whatever reason, that you can't determine are always in the center of history? And I'm one of them. So what are the odds that I would get this specific problem at exactly the time in history when AI is going to be making huge leaps, we think, in curing it. It's kind of a weird coincidence, isn't it? I'm just always in. That's why I think I live in a simulation, because it's just a weird coincidence. Anyway, Trump has signed some executive order to require cities to remove homeless people from the streets. So it's not that simple. I think there's a process they're putting together where the Attorney General Bondi will work with the other secretaries, some other secretaries in the government to prioritize cities for funding if they take people off the street. So the government, the federal government won't be as generous with federal funding for cities that don't get rid of their homeless off the streets. But that would also require having some kind of institutionalizing option. So right now, you could take people off the street, but where are you going to put them? There's no treatment, there's no facility, there's no institution. But Trump would like to change that. He would like to have institutions where those people can go. Now, here's my question. Has, has Trump come up with yet another 80, 20? He's the genius. Being a populist type, he's brilliant at coming up with issues that the public will agree about. 80% to 20%. And I feel like he did it again. Do you imagine that there could be more than 20% of the people who say, you know, I kind of prefer keeping all those people on the sidewalk, maybe. I mean, there might be 20%, but I wouldn't want to spend time with those people? So yet again, Trump is managing the summer brilliantly. Now, I don't know if you know this, but August is coming and Congress will be in recess and a lot of the people in the news business will also take that time off. So it will look temporarily, if, unless Trump manages the situation, which he will, it would look like there's no news, because all the news making people would be on vacation for a month in August. But watch what Trump does. Trump is going to generate news like a mofo, so he can just own the summer like he already is. So you ain't seen nothing yet. There's going to be a whole bunch of stuff like this, like, who saw this coming? Like, who? How many of you thought, oh, I think Trump will do an executive order about telling cities to clear up the sidewalks. I didn't see it coming. So he probably has a whole bunch of ideas like that that are just in the hopper waiting for the news to be slow and then they can say, all right, launch. Meanwhile, Ghislaine Maxwell, she met with the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, inside some secure facility in Tallahassee. So sounds like they're going to have one more meeting at least. And Maxwell went back to her prison cell carrying a box of what? We don't know. So somehow she ended up with a box of stuff and went back to her prison cell. What do you imagine was in the box that the prison would allow her to take back with her to her prison cell? Can you just get presents and take them back to your cell? I don't think you can, can you? So my best guess would be that she said, I need to look at your documents and then I'll tell you, you know, if there's anything to add to that, something like that. I feel like it's something about documents that were relevant to her case. But I'll say it again. Remember I told you that you don't have to be a lawyer if you understand the basic concepts. So here's a prediction in which my skill stack, that includes persuasion and not being a lawyer, but sort of understanding how anything works in the legal field, I believe that Ghislaine would obviously have an attorney that she's talking to, so she would have good legal advice and Any attorney of hers should be saying, I would definitely like to help you government but you're going to have to work me a deal and I will give you everything but you have to let me out of prison. You got to pardon me. Now notice the way that I make that prediction is based on something that if you knew a little bit about how lawyers negotiate and you know that you can work out deals to get out of prison and you know that she has the magic information that we all want, well it's not hard to predict that she's going to use that as a lever and she's not going to give it away for free. So just, just like the TikTok prediction, if you assume that people will use their leverage then you can predict better. She will definitely use her leverage. We'll see where that takes her.
- [51:11]
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- [51:27]
Scott Adams
Meanwhile, the UK has limited access to porn sites if you're in the uk. So now UK residents would have to put in some kind of identification before they would have access to porn. The question you might ask yourself is how many people would be willing to identify themselves with specific porn sites. Now it would be one thing if all porn followed the model of look, it's two beautiful naked people having ordinary missionary sex. And then if somebody found out that you liked looking at that, they'd say, oh well, yeah, I guess most people like looking at that. But how many people go to their porn site and say, well, you know what I really like to look at and I can't tell anybody in my real world, but I can click on it. Well, I've got a feeling that they just killed the porn business because nobody's going to want to click on anything that's a little bit off the, you know, the ordinary path. And I sweat. That's mostly what people look at. And off the path would be anything from, you know, milfs to gils. You know where I'm going with this. So we'll see what happens with that. But apparently the reasons to go to the UK have now decreased, decreased even more. That story is from the Independent. Well, if you've seen the compilation clips of the mainstream media, not just the hosts of the news, but their guests, Democrats saying that Russia cyber hacked the election and they affected the election by cyber hacking it. They hacked the election, they hacked the election and it's just person after person from probably 2016 and beyond just claiming, without being corrected, claiming that Russia the election. And it's a fact. The best part about it is that now that we know that the intelligence people saw no indication that any of that was happening. Now watch the. Watch the attitude of the people who are claiming it in the compilation clips. You can find them on X pretty easily. They all look really judgy about people who didn't believe that Russia hacked it. And then my favorite was the ex CNN guy who said, I'm paraphrasing now. He said, in order for you to believe. Just listen to this, this is precious. He says, was it Soliza? I can't remember who it was. Tell me in the comments who said this because I know some of you saw the compilation clip at the end. One of the ex no longer working there. CNN guys said, in order for you to believe that Russia did not hack the election and change the election, in order for you to believe that, you would have to believe that all these elements of the intelligence community were all in on a plot to get Trump. Oh my God. And now what do we know now that all those people were in on the plot to get Trump. He used that as his best argument for how it couldn't possibly be untrue that that Russia had hacked because all the intelligence people said so. Now we have learned since then that it wasn't necessarily all the intelligence people. There were just a lot of them that are willing to shut up and let Brennan use some very small group, I think five people had access to it, claim that that was the official word. So, yes, it means absolutely nothing to learn that all of the people you trust were on the same side. Have you ever seen any example where all the people you should be trusting were on the same side, but it was bullshit? Well, there's this one, the Russia collusion. All the smart people seem to be shutting up or on the same side. And then there was something you may have heard of called the pandemic, where all the experts seem to be on one side but often wrong. And let's see what else. Oh, then there's climate change. Climate change argument is, well, how could you possibly believe that scientists all over the world are just on the same conspiracy just because it's good for their careers or to make money or something? How could you possibly believe. Well, let me tell you how I do the predicting. Number one, we're back to my talent stack. If you understand economics and follow the money and you understand how big Organizations operate and you understand persuasion, what drives people to do what they do. It's completely understandable that the vast majority of scientists in climate are lying is completely easy to believe. The fact that they even ask you to believe that the climate models are dependable, well, that too is something that if you had big company experience, you probably watched your own big company use models that they knew weren't true, but they would tell a story that they wanted to tell. So if you put together your talent stack just right, the climate models are just so obviously fake. Just so obviously fake. But you wouldn't know that if you had a different background or experience. So I saw on X somebody was pointing out that New York Times and Washington Post are not even treating the latest information we've learned about the Russia collusion or Russia hacking hoax. And they're not treating as big news. So you say to yourself, but that's okay. People will see it in other sources. No, they won't. The only people who will even know that more information came out and they'll be able to put it together would be the 2% of the world that really, really follows this kind of story. So how many people do you think understand the complexity of what Brennan and Clapper and Obama allegedly did? How many could follow that whole story? Not more than 2%. So if you're the New York Times and Washington Post, you could just ignore it and make sure that it stays that way and it will never affect any elections because the people who understand it have already made up their mind. I would be willing to guess that there are zero people watching this podcast right now, and you would be in the top 2%, the ones following stories like this. But there's not one of you who's going to change your mind about who to vote for. You're all locked in. So you've got two parts of the world, the people who do follow things in minute detail and they can't understand the story, but they're already locked in. Their vote won't change based on this or anything else. And then there's all the rest of the world that would find the story to be a. What? What would be the one word to describe this complicated story that people have trouble following? It's a confusopoly. Wherever there is complexity, there is fraud and corruption. This would be the perfect example. Now, if you think I'm exaggerating when I say almost nobody can understand this story, I mean, I struggled. I struggled to try to. What, like, what's new? What part didn't we know already. Are we just more convinced or is this really new? I mean, I struggled with it and I do this basically for a living, I guess. But just to put that in perspective, I saw a clip from Fox News. I think it was Johnny from Waters Operation. He was talking to people on the street who were Colbert fans who were protesting the firing of Colbert or the ending of the show that'll end in May. And so Johnny was, I think it was Johnny was asking people if they were aware that the Colbert show lost $40 million a year for its owner. How many of them did not know the most basic thing about the simplest story in the news? Could there be any story that's more simple then Colbert show is going to end because it's not profitable. That's it. That's the whole. And then if you want to add a layer of complexity, you'd say, but some say it's, you know, Trump was pushing for him to be fired so that the merger would be approved, but that's it. You would know everything about that story now. And the people who thought it was important enough to actually go down there, stand on the sidewalk with signs and chant and protest were not aware that a show was losing $40 million a year. How in the world do you not know that? If you decided this is your cause, you don't know that. And then when they were told that, they immediately changed their opinions, like, oh, well, yeah, obviously that's just a business decision. So here's another example. I saw a post by Mike Cernovich and I'm going to read you just exactly what Mike says in the post and then ask yourself, what percentage of the public would understand this? How many would understand this? Right, I'll just read it. Brennan snuck the hoax Steele dossier into an intelligence report by giving it a TSCI label. Only 10 to 20 people could have seen that hoax documents could see that hoax documents were slipped in. By classifying it as tsci. No one was able to debunk it. Brennan belongs in prison. Now, I don't know what a TSCI label is. I mean, in context, I understand it in context. He found a workaround so that not many people knew that the Steele dossier was part of the fake opinion. So I get the idea, but how many people would sort of understand what that was and what story it was attached to and, and how Brennan fits in? Well, let me ask you this. If you stop people on the streets of America and said, tell me who John Brennan is and what was his last government job how many would know he was the head of the CIA? 2%. It's so easy to convince ourselves because we're in that 2%. You know, we're really paying attention, that other people have no idea what's going on, Just no idea. Top secret confidential information. People are saying that's what TSCI is, Top secret confidential information. All right, So I guess that means that even people in the business weren't necessarily allowed to see it because it was too top secret. Clever.
- [64:00]
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- [64:32]
Scott Adams
Here's another example of how the public doesn't understand complexity, and neither do the Democrats. I'd like to spend a few minutes telling you how pathetic the Democrats are, starting with they embarrassingly put a graph of food prices, grocery prices, on the Internet to blame Trump, because at the end of the graph was the highest price for food, and that was when Trump was in office. However, the graph only was labeled from 2019 to October 24, which means it was really a graph of food prices skyrocketing under Biden. And then there's only a little bit on the far right of the graph where it was even Trump's administration. And it's maybe up a little bit, but closer to flat. And they had to remove it when they had realized that they had just advertised that all the grocery prices skyrocketed under Biden. That's. That's their best people. So their best people couldn't. Couldn't notice that what they put out is a damning, damning indictment of Biden and the Democrats. Not only did the food prices go up, but the Democrats were too fucking stupid to know that that's what they were telling the public. Oh, so that was funny. But then Beto o', Rourke, who is wonderfully incompetent, he was back. He was talking at some events. The Blaze noticed this and put it in the X post. He said, and I quote, we should meet fire with fire. Why the f Notice all the Democrats are throwing in curse words? Because they were trained that what makes Trump so successful is that he swears like a normal person. So now they're all trying to swear like a normal person so that they can look authentic. All right, let me start over. We should meet fire with fire. Why the after are we responding to the other side instead of taking the offense on these things? Now wait a minute. We should meet fire with fire. Wouldn't meeting fire with fire be an example of responding to the thing like you wouldn't set a fire unless there was already a fire. So Beto doesn't even know how analogies work, because fighting fire with fire is exactly responding to the other side, the fire on the other side. So he goes, we should beat fire with fire. Why are we responding to the other side? Okay, fix your analogy. And then he says, Republicans care about power more than anything else. Democrats care more about being right. And we have to change that. Really? The entire news cycle is about all the hoaxes that the Democrats are doing. They are 100% liars all the time and never turn it off. And he believes that what they care about is being right. They don't even have a little bit of interest in being right. Not even a little bit. That is the most clueless and out of touch opinion you could ever say. No, they both care about power. The difference is that the way Republicans are getting power is how are Republicans gaining power, specifically Trump? How do they get control of the whole government? What was the clever weasel trick that Republicans used to get power capability? All they did is say, here's our idea for fixing things. Trump. Trump had very specific ideas. Close the border. Drill baby. Drill tariffs. I mean, he came with a whole, you know, quiver full of arrows. And then people looked at the arrows and said, yeah, I'm 80% on that. 80, 20. 80, 20. And so the reason that the Republicans have power is not exactly their craving for power. Although, you know, people are people. So everybody likes more power than less. But no, they got there by capability, by ability, by merit. Yeah, the word I was looking for is merit. Trump is a total merit president. There's no way he would be interim for a second office unless he had proven some merit in the first one, the first term. And he's proving it every day. He's got tons of merit. Well, then Hunter Biden and the podcasters for Pod Save America, the big Democrat podcast, they're after each other because Hunter did that podcast and he said some things about his father and Ambien and whatnot. Now they're mad at each other. And Byron York is pointing out, here's the Thing, they're both right. So here's what they each said about the other. And Byron says they're both right. The podcast guys are right when they say Hunter is a sleazy influence peddler out to profit on his family's name. But Hunter is right when he says the podcast guys are elite, out of touch Democrats dining out on their association with Barack Obama who are alienating the party's traditional base and turning it into an image of themselves. So while Trump is using that merit thing like he's trying to clean up your sidewalks and he's got nuclear policies that are just humming along and Capex is the biggest, it's been forever. And I mean just all these merit based accomplishments, the New Democrats is that they've, they've insulted each other in clever ways. That's all they got is clever insults for each other. Not even for the other side. Well, did you catch this? Here's another complicated story, but I think I can simplify it. You might remember that one of Trump's favorite lawyers who had worked for him, Alina Haba, had been appointed interim. And interim, I think, is 120 days U.S. attorney for New Jersey. So New Jersey is one of the more important states to have your preferred U.S. attorney. And so Trump made sure that one of his loyals was in the job. Well, the, the term expired because these are meant to be temporary because it'd be impossible to get, probably impossible to get Democrats to say yes to it. So he makes it temporary. And then Hakeem Jeffries and all of his people, they, they leaned on the federal judges to make sure that she would, you know, stay out of power and that after the term was over, she would leave. So here's what the Trump administration did. So she resigned as interim U.S. attorney of New Jersey. So that's step one. Watch how clever this is. This is hilariously clever. So they agreed, they said, all right, she was temporary, her term is over. So she resigned. And then the Trump administration appointed her to the job that's one level below that. So the person who is directly in line for the top job in New Jersey, but one level below it, so they nominate her temporarily for the lower job. But since the higher job is unoccupied and it will stay that way, she's the acting head. So all they did is keeps the top job open and appointed to the number two spot because the new, the number two is of course in charge when there's no number one. Now that was funny. Well played. All right, so Marco Rubio is saying that France is being reckless when they, by recognizing the Palestinian state. He says it's a reckless decision. Now, I've noticed that there are a lot of what I call half opinions about the whole Palestinian situation. And, you know, everybody seems to retreat to the safest thing you can say. So the safest thing you can say is, I don't like it when Israel is abusing the poor Gazans. That's safe because who's in favor of war? Basically you'd be on the same side of the Pope. Well, it's not good that people are getting shot and sometimes children are dying. So that's all bad. But what the hell else is going to happen? I mean, you better have a plan for how you could prevent that. And I don't think that the plan includes recognizing the Palestinian state. Now, by the way, I do not have an opinion on that. Just to be clear, I have to say this every time I talk about Israel. I don't have an opinion about what they should do because it's not my country. And none of their arguments on either side make sense to me because both sides are going to say some version of, well, historically, this is why we're doing what we're doing. I don't care about their history. I'm not interested at all. They're not my country. So I can predict that Israel will, will never agree to a two state solution. I feel like that's easy to predict unless there was some just major change in the government over there that I don't see happening. But yeah, everybody wants to have the safe opinion. It's safe to say we want everybody to stop shooting at everybody else. But is that really a real world practical anything? No, it's not. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is all I wanted to say today. It is Friday. It's time to pack up your work stuff and get ready to enjoy the weekend. All right? Israel is our only meaningful ally. Yeah, I mean, so what? I mean, I'd rather that they were than they weren't, but that doesn't, that doesn't tell you what to do about any specific situation. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to say a few words privately to my beloved subscribers on locals. And the rest of you, thanks for joining and we'll see you tomorrow, same time, same place. All right, locals coming at you privately in Sa.