Episode 2560 CWSA 08/08/24

Oh, we'll have quite a show today. It's going to be amazing. Possibly the best show you've ever seen. And we'll be ready for that in one moment. How do I look today? Is my T shirt on point? I think so, yeah. Looking. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. And there's never been a better time in your life. And if you'd like to take this experience up to levels that nobody can, Nobody, nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass of tanker chalice. Just tying 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, it's called the simultaneous sip. It happens. Now go. Oh, delightful. We've got sound, we've got video. It's all coming together. Now. How good is coffee for you? Well, believe it or not, there's another study on coffee. A brand new one says it's good for your skeletal muscle mass. So if you've got low skeletal muscle mass, maybe a few extra sips this morning, get your muscle mass going. You know, if you get to the point, like me where you drink enough coffee, you can lift this entire set of papers here. Look at that. Some muscle mass right there. Well, there's a new discovery on batteries almost every day. I tell you, there's a new scientific breakthrough on batteries, and most of them will turn out not to be anything but. But there's so many of them. There's so many really, really big things happening in the battery world. And there are very few things that'll have more impact on your life because it will change all of transportation. It will change whether you need nuclear power plants or not. It will change whether solar is as effective as it could be. It will change how long it takes you to charge your phone, your drones, everything. But now there's cu. Boulder scientists found a way using ions moving in tiny pores, whatever that means. But they look, they think they can get your phone charged in under a minute. It'd be more like a super capacitor, if that means anything to you. So your charging days of sitting there and waiting to charge may be over. Could be 5 minutes to charge your car and 1 minute to charge your phone, and good to go. Here's a little Data point. The AF Post is reporting that over 90% of US population growth since 2020 came from Hispanics. So 90% of the growth came from Hispanics. Now, I don't know if that means just immigration or if it means also babies, but I think we need to really talk seriously about opening immigration to the British. I think we should have barriers. In other words, we should say you have to prove that you can add something to the United States. So it'd be good if you had a job and a, you know, skill and stuff like that. But I feel like there are going to be a lot of people in England who are going to say, can you get us out of here? Is there someplace we can go to get away from the crumbling society that is England failing? And I think we should. And by the way, I'm completely serious about this. This might sound like I'm getting ready for a gag. No, you've got a failing country and you're going to have a lot of people who want to escape. We should make sure we get the good ones. You know what I mean? And somebody's going to turn this into some kind of racial thing. But it's not that I'm saying I just want the people who can hold the job. It doesn't matter who they are. If they're from Great Britain and they're regular lovers of democracy and they can hold a job. Let's open the door as wide as possible, get as many as we can. We should take millions. Honestly, it should be a special program because we've always had a special relationship with Great Britain. The only thing I want to make sure is that we don't start bringing in a bunch of Canadians and just ruin this country. I'm just joking. I love Canadians. But you do have some weird leadership up there. I hope it's. I hope it's not wearing off on you. Rubbing off. All right. According to the New York Post, there's a new poll that says the majority of Americans believe the first amendment goes to far. Okay, well, maybe the people from England should just stay where they are because we're dead. We don't have a chance. More than half of the of the United States thinks that free speech is going too far. Can you believe that? I. I don't know what that would have been when I was a kid, but I don't know. I feel like it would have been different now. Of course, everybody has the same opinion, which is, I like to limit the free speech from the other people. Everybody thinks their own free speech is fine. So if you're, if you're A liberal, you'd like to put whatever kind of books on sexuality into preschool. Well, not preschool, but into school libraries. And Republicans would say, what? That's crazy. Get them out of there. Get that free speech out of there. And of course the, the Democrats just want Republicans not to say anything. So there's no such thing as free speech. We, we just all think that there's some free speech that goes too far and some that doesn't. But we're pretty sure it's the other team that's going too far, not our side, that's for sure. So 53% of Americans believe the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it protects. Oh, I don't know how you can survive that. Honestly. It, you know, maybe the X platform can, you know, evolve to a point where there's something like a competitive free market of ideas with some, a little bit of fact checking going on as well. So maybe, you know, we're not dead dead. But I can't think it's hard to imagine a worse statistic other than the federal debt that would tell you things aren't looking good for the future. But I suspect that when people say the First Amendment is going too far, they're really thinking about a real narrow list of things they don't want to hear. So what they really mean is they don't like fake news, I think. But it's hard to know what is fake. The Wall Street Journal has a big article about the controversy from J.D. vance. And you know, should you have a traditional family unit and is that the only way to go? Or are the so called catwomen the single catwoman? Is that, is that a satisfying and productive life? What is this? Anyway, here's what I say. I say that for most people, at least in this country, the United States, for most people, neither single single life nor marriage works because civilization has changed. So in the old days you had two models, right? You're either married in a traditional looking marriage or you were not married. And most people thought, well, married would be better. But at least, you know, you understood what single was and you could make it work if you wanted to. But today I would say civilization has changed in ways that make it suboptimal to be single because you're going to be lonely and looking at social media and basically losing all your connection to human humankind, that's probably not good. And if you're married, it's even harder because the laws and the economics and just the pressure for people to cheat is so strong now that marriages are really tough. So I'm going to say for the millionth time that we need a third path. There needs to be some kind of path that doesn't look like being single and lonely and doesn't look like being married to somebody who's going to divorce you and take your kids and leave you in poverty for the rest of your life. Neither of those are good paths. There needs to be some third path. Now, I don't know what that looks like, but I do imagine that it might be some kind of voluntary tribal organization. You know, not by, hopefully not by race or religion, but just people who want to be part of the same crowd. Now, at various times in my life, I've been part of, let's say, social groups that were extended, whether it be, I don't know, 20 or 30 people in the group. And on any given night, somebody be having a party on the weekend and you would see, you know, at least half of those people, but it would rotate through and. And so you'd have this huge group, group of people that you were close to and you would spend some quality time with on a regular basis. Now, I don't have that at the moment, after the pandemic and, you know, a pandemic plus a divorce, you know, really changes your. Your landscape quite a bit. So I've got to experience what it's like to be married in modern times and what it's like to be single in modern times. And one thing I can tell you for sure is that neither of them work. These are not workable models. And in the long term, civilization can't support this. These are two failing models because civilization changed. Now I would like to invite the NPCs. I know there are always some watching. What you should do now is tell me how your marriage is. Excellent. As if that would be addressing my point. You could also tell me that that marriage is the very best organization we've ever had, as if nothing's changed because it used to be the best. So telling me it's always been the best in the past is not addressing anything I'm saying because we're not disagreeing about what was good in the past. I'm saying at the moment, neither model works. You need a third model. Well, George Conway went on television and said that no normal people are left in the Republican Party. George Conway, he doesn't think there are any normal people left in the Republican Party. Well, Breitbart simply reposted what he said and added this comment. Look in the mirror. Oh, that's so unkind. Funny. Funny, but unkind. I would just note that if you don't know who George Conway is, he's someone who hates Trump. Boy, does he hate Trump. Yeah, it's Trump. Oh, no. I just saw him be him. That's gonna be in my head all day. He really hates Trump. You know why he hates Trump, George Conway? Well, I don't know exactly, but I. I think he just doesn't like attention seeking liars with weird haircuts and tumultuous family histories. All right? You'd have to know George Conway's history to know that he has the weirdest haircut in the world. He's an attention seeker and his family history has not been stable anyway. And by the way, to reinforce my earlier point, I don't think that George Conway is to blame because his marriage didn't work out or anybody else. I just think marriage doesn't work for most people in the modern day. Utah has done what the New York Post calls banning books. You New York Post, you, You there. That's what you wanted to say, right? Because when Utah bans books, what does that mean? You all know what that means, right? You don't have to read the story. Banning books means not allowing highly sexual material to young school children. It doesn't mean anything else. If you call that banning books, you're just a fucking asshole. Right? That's not an opinion. That's not a difference of opinion. It's not a preference. It's not news. You're just being a. There's no other way. You can. You can describe that. Stop being that way. Anyway, I would note that whoever calls a book ban a book ban is winning the persuasion war. So as long as. As long as conservatives say there are some books that are too naughty for our children, Perfectly reasonable opinion. Perfectly reasonable opinion, but it dies immediately as soon as the other team says, oh, so you want to ban some books? You're a book banner. Oh, you. Book banners. Whoever says you're a book banner first wins because people aren't paying attention to the details. 80% of Democrats will only believe that Republicans want to ban their opinions. No, no, I've never heard. I've never heard any Republican or conservative ever, not one time say that books for adults should be banned. Have you heard that even once in your whole life? I've never heard it. I've heard only young children maybe wait a little while for the deeply sexual stuff, especially if it's, you know, about which gender you're going to pick. And that kind of stuff. So there must be some way to attack this. But I don't know what it is. You can't really embrace and amplify because you'd have to add a bunch of heterosexual pornography. So, you know, I was thinking, all right, what would you do if you wanted to beat this persuasion play where they call it a book banning? And I would say, well, you could suggest adding a whole bunch of porn and just see what they say and make them ban it. Just make the Democrats ban it. Say, well, you're in favor of porn. Look at all these books. We consider this porn. Why can't we add some more porn? Now no conservative is going to suggest adding porn to schools. So that's not an option open to them. But I guess you just got to run away from this because it's a losing topic. Even though Republicans are on the right side of the issue. Totally on the right side. This one's unambiguous in my case. In my opinion, it's unambiguous. You can't win the persuasion on it. Just call it a book ban and the low information people will believe it. All right, I'm going to. Today's theme will be about all the brainwashing, but we're going to tiptoe into it. So the, the Democrat brainwashing operation has been fairly well revealed at this point. And you're going to learn some things, some scary things today. But before we get to that, RFK Jr. Just canceled an outdoor event at the Iowa State Fair because they were concerned they couldn't make it secure. Now, do you think that that is just sending a message or do you think that they were really worried about the security? Could be both. Could be both. But I like the messaging of it, which is basically putting some pressure on the Secret Service. And, and because here's what I imagine. What I imagine is they had a conversation about, you know, drones and, you know, anti sniper people, etc. And probably the Secret Service said, well, you know, we, we can't have somebody on every building. And then maybe Kennedy said, you need somebody on every building. We kind of learned that, well, we don't have the resources for every building. But you're going to have a drone up there, right? Well, we didn't bring the drone. So I have a feeling that maybe just the, the level of trust is so low that if you were going to bet your life on the Secret Service doing their job, it's not really the environment in which you could bet your life on the Secret Service doing their Job, whatever is wrong. There wasn't that one day right there. There's. Nobody thinks they had one bad day. Do you, does anybody think, oh, it's just weird we had that one bad day? No, obviously there's something structurally deeply wrong there. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift canceled her events, I guess European part of her tour. And there were specific threats that she was, she would be targeted by a terrorist and the terrorist is a 19 year old suspect and they found chemical substances and technical devices at the house. And so the concerts in Vienna were canceled. Now, I would like to note that President Trump was shot at an outdoor event. RFK Jr. Just canceled an outdoor event. Taylor Swift just canceled an outdoor event. Well, at least it was a big event. I don't know if it was outdoors. Might have been, but remember I've been telling you, oh, and then, you know, the Iranians are threatening to do God knows what. So remember I've been telling you the outdoor, large outdoor events will be a thing of the past. What happens when your, your battery in your drone, your personal drone can last for hours. So it can fly for hours. It's got AI on it. So even if it loses its GPS or gets jammed, it can still just look at the ground and figure out what to do and it can carry enough weight to be a bomb or a chemical, which would be worse. How in the world, how in the world could you protect outdoor events? I think they're just going to end. I don't know for sure, but I think literally we just won't have stadium activities or big concerts. I think those days will just end. Maybe it'll be replaced with 3D, whatever. But I worry that there is no way to protect large outdoor events as long as the world is a dangerous place and drones are part of it. Well, just the news is reporting about the Iranian threat. Apparently the US Customs and borders said that they're concerned about Iranian proxies trying to get into the country to do terrorist attacks. Now I don't know if that's just some kind of, you know, brainwashing PR thing or is there really some new kind of risk that we didn't have before? Have we really not had the same level of risk since 9, 11 and before? So I don't know if this is really a new risk or just they want to tell us there is. You know, maybe it's more about managing expectations or something. I would think that if Iran or anybody else wanted Trump to win, that if there's any kind of a terrorist attack before the election, wouldn't that put Trump in. In the presidency, it seems to me that people would say, oh, if you're not protecting the country from terrorist attacks, there were no, no big ones under Trump, so maybe he did a better job on that. Close the border. So I would think that Democrats are just shitting their pants about some foreign actor doing a successful terror attack, because I feel like that would have the same impact almost of Trump being nearly assassinated. Yeah, it feels like that would just sort of sweep him into office. Here's something that's kind of interesting on the X account, Matt Orphalia. He's got a long thread there in which a zoom call was found, a recorded zoom call in which Democrats were talking about their brainwashing operation. Now, they don't call it a brainwashing operation, but it's a brainwashing operation. They call it controlling disinformation and misinformation. But do you know what Democrat operatives call misinformation? Anything that's bad for their team. So the specific examples included people who were incorrectly saying Biden had cognitive problems. Oh, yeah. That's what they consider misinformation. And so they had a whole program set up to counter the misinformation that Biden had a cognitive decline. Now, that was just one example. You. You could argue with whether the other ones are. Are true or not. But here's what we learned. So there's this Biden Harris digital director guy, Rob Flaherty, and he was on the zoom call saying how the DNC created a program to detect, track, and censor what it deemed misinformation and said it was critical. But here's what they mean by targeting. So they would use the technique where they would target you as an individual as opposed to just putting out a commercial thing anybody could see. So they would make sure that you specifically would be followed online. If you had, let's say. Let's say you had searched for something like a Biden dementia. If you were looking for Biden dementia, they could target you as a person who suspects that Biden has some mental problems. And then you know what would happen when you were searching for something else. It might return you some videos of Biden looking really strong. So in other words, they would simply feed you things that would change your mind without you knowing you'd been targeted. Because they wouldn't be the. It wouldn't be a search result. You know, like if you were looking for something and then a bunch of results came up, you would be more alert that some of the results might be Biased. But if you're not doing the search, you're just going along with your normal business, and then things are fed to you on YouTube and things are fed to you on Google and other parts of the Internet. You would not be aware that they were manipulating you. You would simply see the usual thing, which is all kinds of things come to your attention. You wouldn't know that they had picked what went to your attention to specifically target you for that specific opinion. How effective would that be? Really effective. Really effective. Because they can target their persuasion to you personally. They can figure out what kind of person you are and what you care about, and then they can tail it to the perception to be the strongest version that would work for you individually. So that's. Apparently that was a major program going on, so that you were being. They call it a psychographic targeting. Now, I talk about persuasion all the time, and one of the question is, when is persuasion ethical and when is it unethical? And I'll give you kind of a working definition that works for me. I think persuasion is ethical when the person being persuaded knows you're doing it and largely knows how you're doing it. For example, if you go to buy a car, the salesperson is going to say good things about their car and maybe a little less good things about the competition, and they're going to shade things, and maybe there's a little hyperbole, but you know, it. You know, you're talking to a salesperson, you know they're going to put their product in the best light. That would be persuasion. And if they lied to you, of course that would be unethical, but you're largely, completely aware of it. If you see a candidate giving a stump speech, you say, oh, that's a person trying to persuade me, all right, and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it would be perfectly ethical. Changing people's minds is sort of ordinary, you know, ordinary activity. If you saw some marketing for a product and it looked like it was saying a little too much about how good its product is, you wouldn't feel that's unethical unless there was an outright lie involved. That it would be. But here's what is deeply unethical. Persuading people who don't know they're being persuaded and don't even know the topic of the persuasion. That's what this is. This is people not knowing they're being persuaded or even what the topic is. It's simply finding out what people are thinking and then using brainwashing techniques. These are brainwashing techniques to change their minds without them knowing they've ever even been targeted for persuasion. You wouldn't even be aware that anybody targeted you specifically. Now, that is deeply unethical. Now, that's a personal opinion. You know, maybe you. You would draw the line somewhere else. But to me, if you're targeting somebody and doesn't even know they're on the topic, they don't even know they're on the topic, and you're changing their minds with, you know, deep, scientifically proven persuasion techniques. Deeply, deeply unethical. I don't know if it should be illegal. That would be something worthy of discussion. You know, I think it depends on the details, but, yeah, that's as unethical as you could possibly get. And that is brainwashing. That is not selling. That's not persuading. That's brainwashing. And it should only be seen in that light. Deeply, deeply unethical. By the way, somebody's going to say that then in 2016, some pro Trump people did the same thing. If they did, it was also unethical. It may work, but it would be unethical no matter who did it. All right? And it would be unethical. Certainly. It's even worse if some foreign power is doing it. All right? Speaking of unethical, I've told you before how to identify the paid trolls so you can look at them. I was going to do a demonstration where I would tweet something and then I would show you a paid troll coming on, and then I'd point it out, because if I do it in real time, it's going to be kind of fun. Should I do that? You want me to send a. Send a post on X and then we'll just watch it during the show and I'll tell you when the page troll comes in. All right, let's do that. I have to think of something that would be provocative. Okay. So I'm going to do something generic about walls. So it'll be sort of a generic character attack on walls. And watch. Watch the trolls come in and I'll tell you what to look for. So look for a troll that comes in immediately. It'll be like the first or second comment. They will be a follower of me more often than not. Not 100, but more often than not. And they won't be a fan. So that's the first tip off. They follow me, but they're not a fan. Okay. It's so they can be first with their comments and then the nature of the comment would usually be a personal attack on me. So I'm going to do something that will invite this and we'll see if we can get one. So look for the anonymous person. They often have in their profile that there's some kind of military veteran, which I don't know is ever true. But look for military veteran. Anonymous account follows me but hates me a few number of people. And the first one to come in, these are the paid trolls. All right, so let me first. Do this. Oh, screw me. Well, it appears I can't crack the. The password on my own account. So let me point you away from it for a second. I'm pretty sure I know my own password. All right, third time. Third time's the charm. All right, so here's what I'm going to post and we'll see if the troll comes in. All right, remember, this is just a. A total fake opinion. Right. I'm going to say, now that we understand Wall's character, I don't see how he stays in the race. All right, so it's just a general thing. Now that we understand Walls character, I don't see how he stays in the race. So watch for the first or second comment. All right, so we'll let that percolate. I'll check the comments. If somebody sees the troll come in. Now, here's what you need to know. These are paid trolls. Like actual honest to God, it's not hyperbole. They're paid and they're paid to make me feel bad. So what they'll do is they'll come in and they'll say something personal about either my marriage or my stepson who died of an overdose. That's one of their favorites or being cancelled. They'll say stuff like, how's your career going? So look, for that, somebody says, I got two already. Really? All right, First off, I'm not a fan. You lied and supported operation warp Speed. All right, so the conservative trolls all believe that I supported vaccinations, so they put that first. I can't tell if they're the pros. Somebody said, ben, get. Yeah, you're bald. And I'm a military veteran. Somebody says, First off, I'm not a fan. Let's see if this is one. Well, he might be a patrol. We don't know. Keep an eye on that. All right, so the patrols is one of their unethical persuasions. And then we know America First Legal is on this case about the FBI was trying to control a lot of the free speech on X. And apparently the FBI's National Election Command Post back in 2022 received lists of multiple Twitter accounts posting misinformation. So the FBI was in on this. This is misinformation which must be blocked. So you've got. You've got the. The fake persuasion people feeding you ads to change your mind that you don't know are happening. You got your paid trolls making you feel bad. If you use social media, you've got your FBI suppressing accounts through social media. And then yesterday, I saw at the Harris Walsh rally in Wisconsin, the crowd was chanting, this is what democracy looks like. Now, if you heard it, it was really scary, because getting people to chant is a brainwashing technique. You could call it persuasion, because people know what's happening, but I don't think they know how powerful it is. If you could get a group of people to chant anything, you would be pretty deeply. Wait, what's this? You'd be pretty deeply persuaded. Oh, all right. That wasn't what I thought it would be. All right. So chanting is a tell for somebody who has deep persuasion talents. If you thought, oh, that's just a fun thing to get people involved in a rally. Well, it is. You know, anytime you can get your crowd to participate in some way. Yeah. So the chanting is something really to be afraid of. Now, of course, you know that Trump crowds chanted, lock her up. That was a common thing. Lock her up. Lock her up. Which I thought was a terrible idea because it guaranteed that they would lock up Republicans, and they did. So if you want to know what caused Republicans to go to jail for January 6th, I think a lot of it was the chanting, lock her up. Honestly, I think that created a lot of energy to. They're going to lock us up. No, we're going to lock you up. So I think there was a little bit of maybe you had that coming. Every time I heard that locker up, I thought to myself, oh, you're going to pay for that. You're just asking for trouble. And sure enough, trouble showed up. Don't chant. All right. As you know, there are a number of polls that don't seem to be completely credible showing that Harris has pulled ahead. The other way that the bad guys persuade is with fake polls. If they can make the polls look like, oh, my God, this new team of expert candidates is going to win. Look at these good poll numbers. They've already jumped into the lead. If they can do that, then suddenly the people who donate money say, whoa, I can donate to a winner. My money will be well spent because they'll, they'll owe me some favors and they'll be in office. Perfect. So I'll give some money. So it's partly a fundraising thing, but it's also because there's a social proof element. And if you tell other people, hey, this is what all the smart people think by majority, you're more likely to get the undecideds. Well, everybody seems to be going this way. Maybe that's the right way to go. But Rasmussen has a poll that says Trump is still up. This is their newest. In a two way matchup, Trump would be up 49% to 44 over Harris. But in a, with everybody in these, with everybody in Trump still wins the Handley. So I think still about the same actually. So which one is true? Rasmussen has had a good record in the past for presidential polling, but the other polls seem to be pretty disagreeing. Now, some of the polls are about swing states, this one's a overall one. But I don't see any scenario where Trump could be up by 5 or 4. I don't see him being up by 5 nationally without sweeping the, at least most of the swing states. So if you're saying to yourself, hey, I don't trust any of the polling, that is the correct instinct. I don't think any of the polling is credible right now. None. Now here, here's two reasons. One is the summer. If you're not aware of this, the late summer polling gets wonky because people who would normally be home to answer the phone are on vacation, their minds are in different places than they normally are. But sometime in late September you're going to get polling that's a lot closer to reality. We hope so. I wouldn't believe any polling yet. But the other thing is, what good is polling if you've never heard Harris do a press either a presser where she has to answer tough questions, an interview with a, let's say aggressive question asker, or any kind of a debate. If you haven't seen any of that, I would suggest that all polling is ridiculous because you're comparing a, a thing to an unknown. It's a complete unknown. We don't know if she can piece two words together. We really don't because there's so many examples where she didn't that, you know, it's not. Let me put it this way. If she could talk in public, she would have already had a press conference. She would already be doing interviews with tough interviewers. But obviously she can't and obviously her handlers know she can't. Right. And if her handlers know she's not capable of doing it, what are we supposed to think? If her handlers don't believe she can do it, and obviously they don't believe it now, they might think, well, we'll get her, you know, we want to make sure her policies are, you know, ones that she agrees with, not just Biden policies. So there might be a little tightening up of what the policies are so that if she gets interviewed, she can have a tight answer for each one. Might be that. So if, you know, if tomorrow you hear that she started doing pressers and then she just keeps doing them or keeps doing interviews all the way to the. The end, then it really was just. They wanted to make sure that they had a good tight package before they go out. And then I would revise my thinking because that actually would make sense. You don't want to just run out there and ruin everything. If you can keep your base excited, at the same time, you can keep working with your candidate and practicing, making sure that she can give a tight reply to any, any policy question, it makes sense that they would delay. But the longer they delay, the more you think, is it because they think she could never do it? And that's what it's feeling like. It's starting to feel like. I think you think that she can never do this, that she's not qualified for the most basic part of the job. All right, so the Guardian, just talking about a study that found that watching just minutes of Tik Tok content can negatively impact a woman's body image. Imagine that just a few minutes on Tik Tok can give a woman mental health issues. Because if you have body image issues that are triggered by Tik Tok, that's a mental. That's a mental problem. So you can actually give somebody mental illness in minutes. Just think about that. You can, you can induce mental illness in an ordinary, normal, healthy person, a woman, in less than 10 minutes. Now, how much do the. How much time do they actually spend on the app? About four hours a day. Teens, about four hours a day. But they can have mental illness in 10 minutes. And there's no, you know, the body image stuff is mental illness, right? It's not a. It's not a body problem, it's a mental illness. Now, let me ask you this. If you could make somebody mentally ill in less than 10 minutes, how persuasive is it for politics? It's that persuasive. If you can make somebody Stop eating until they die, which is what we're talking about, people having eating disorders. In less than 10 minutes, they can die. You know, if you stop eating enough, your body will fail. You just die. So TikTok can actually kill a person in less than 10 minutes of exposure. Just hold that in your mind because every time somebody says to me, scott, it's just social media. It's just social media. Come on, free speech. Well, I'm in favor of free speech, but you should be aware that this is such a powerful tool, it can kill you in under 10 minutes. Now I'm connecting some dots. If it can give you a, a body image problem in less than 10 minutes for some people, it's going to make them eat less. And for some of them they're not going to recover from that. So it can actually kill people in less than 10 minutes. And you want that to run wild in your democracy. You want people's opinions to be controlled by a Chinese controlled company that can give you lethal mental illness in less than 10 minutes. I don't, I don't think I've ever come up with a better example of how to teach you how dangerous TikTok is. It's off the chart dangerous. It's just off the chart. All right. Gateway pundit has a new report about the so called sloppy handling of mail in ballots at the post office. I guess the post office has this process where they would, you know, have a tight control over ballots because it's so important, but turns out they're, the post office is not so good about, you know, doing their own controls. So there are plenty of reports of ballots that were found later that weren't delivered on time. So, huh, there were ballots that were found after the election when it was too late to count them, but they were found. How hard would it be just to throw away ballots? If you, if you were a male person in a pro Trump neighborhood, for example, and you knew that three out of four votes would be pro Trump wherever they were dropped off in your neighborhood and you didn't like Trump, you don't think you'd find a way to put those in the trunk of your car and drop them in the river? I don't know. It seems like the whole mail in ballot thing is just begging, just begging for no clean election. Let me say it this way. If you have a big mail in ballot portion of the, of the election, I don't think we can call it an election because an election would be that you'd have some confidence that the vote was accurate. As long as there's massive mail in, I don't have any confidence that the vote is accurate because I don't know that the ballots from the real people reached the counting place. And you could tell me all day long that we counted it twice. How's that going to help? Just think about it. The ballots got thrown away, or somebody collected a bunch of ballots from, let's say, illegals and filled them out. And by the time they reached the counting offices, everything worked fine. So they go to do a recount and the recount is fine. And so then the courts say, well, we don't see anything wrong. Can you show us, you show us the problem and you say, yes, we can, but it's going to take months and we're going to have to do lawsuits and we're going to, we're going to have to sue to get access to information to check the ballots. Then the courts say some version of. So you have nothing now? Well, no, but we will. I mean, if we looked at it, I'm sure we could find it. But you have nothing now. Okay, we certified the election. Do you think any election would ever be reversed? Do, do you think that. Let's say there was some really good lawsuit, they had some good suspicions, and it was going forward, but the country has to move forward, too. So whoever wins the election gets installed. They move into the White House, they're doing the job. Two months are going by, they've picked their staff, the, the, the government's working, and then all of a sudden, one of these court cases that always take months, they discover that, wow, a whole bunch of fake ballots determined the election. Are they going to say, resident of the White House. It looks like you're going to have to move or we'll have to redo the election. No, there's not a chance of that. The courts will say the, the challenge was too late because, you know, life went on. We, we don't want to upset the country. It's not our job to change politics. If you had been here sooner. Well, yes, but once it's certified and once the country is moving forward. No. So I believe that the mail in ballots create a situation where you can never find in time. The. In time is the important part. You, you don't have any mechanism to find out in time that there was cheating, and you have no mechanism to know that anything was thrown away. If you don't have those two assurances, you don't know what was thrown away before it ever reached the counting office. And even if you could find that massively there were fake ones filled out, it would be too late. Life would go on. So I don't feel like there's an election coming up, and I also don't feel like there's any real chance that the country will accept whatever the outcome is either way, really doesn't matter which way it goes. We have a system which is designed for lack of credibility. Why would anybody do that when it would be so easy to design a system people did trust? Vote the same day on paper. Have people watch you. All right, so that's happening. Joe Biden managed to do a, some kind of a CBS interview in which he did look completely mentally incapable, but he, I mean, it just looked terrible. And he said that he's not confident there'll be a peaceful chance for a power if Trump doesn't win. He said it wrong the first time, but corrected himself. So here's what I think. I think he's creating a situation where if they steal the election, they can just put in jail anybody who complains. So they're, they're creating the, the, let's say, the frame that anybody who challenges an election is a criminal. That's what the January 6th prosecutions were. So anybody who challenges in an aggressive protest way is a criminal and will go to jail. And, and he's making sure that, you know, that they're ready for the trouble. So that's a scary thing coming. But at the same time, according to the George account on X, which is a real good follow, by the way, George, that one of the. Some of the J6ers are being released because that recent court, Supreme Court decision, they said that stopping, I guess the one that said that stopping an official procedure was not a correct application of a law that was designed for Enron and some special case. So people who were mostly in jail for just that, it looks like some of them are being dismissed. There's a specific guy here, Jake Lang, who was in jail for three years and half of it was in solitary confinement. Try to hold this in your head. One of the J6ers was in jail for three years still there hasn't been released. And half of that was in solitary confinement. And now we find out that it wasn't even a real law. Does that guy have a lawsuit? God, I hope so. I hope the January 6ers have just the biggest lawsuit in the world because they were convicted on something the Supreme Court says is not even the right application of the law. And we all knew that. We didn't really need to wait for the Supreme Court. Everybody who looked at us that that's not the applicable law. You don't have to be a lawyer to know it. You just look at what the law was designed to do, then you look at what the January 6ers did and you say, that's not the right law for that. It was obvious. Now, when it's that obvious, don't you have a lawsuit? I would think you would some kind of class action. Well, the new leader of the Project 2025 thing that was confusing the messaging with the Trump campaign because they wanted different things. So the guy who, who hacked into my locals account and I blocked is saying that he wants to hack back into it. I wonder if he can. That would be scary. We'll find out. But anyway, the new leader of the project 2025 was going to publish a book about it, but he's now going to delay that until after the election. That is the correct decision. Thank you. Now, now, I want to be clear. I'm not saying that I'm disagreeing with what's in the Project 2025 recommendations. I don't really know what they have exactly. What I'm saying is that you can't have two people being the messenger of what the Republican candidate wants. It's just completely unacceptable that you're messing up Trump's messaging with your own messaging that is easily conflated with Trump's messaging in a negative way. So I do appreciate that the Project 2025 people are fully embracing that risk in making adjustments appropriately. You know me, I have one standard for judging people, which is not the mistake, but what you did about it. Because everybody makes mistakes, right? If you judge people by, did you do something that didn't work out? Well, we would all look like. Because we've all done things that didn't work out. Right. But if you say, all right, let me judge you by how you responded to it once you realized this wasn't going the way you hoped. Project 2025 was confusing the public. There was pushback. They make adjustments. That's what I asked for. That's exactly what I asked for. I'm completely happy. All right. Virginia Governor Youngkin, he's issued some executive orders. Oan is reporting this and to remove non citizens from the voter rolls. I think Nevada did the same thing. And there are other challenges to other states to get them to do the same thing. Why is this even a question? How could you even imagine that there's an intention to have a fair election when you know the voter rolls are completely rigged. If the voter rolls are rigged and nobody's willing to change it in those states, that shows you their intention. It's an intention to cheat. There's nothing else that could be. Here's a message to my engineer. If you're watching this engineer, could you find that Dean Davis on the YouTube platform and see if you can block him during the show? I think you have access to that, but if you have access, it's a Dean Davis on YouTube. Just a block him if you could. Anyway, we'll see if any of that makes a difference. You know, I think the Lara Trump action is probably a big wild card for this election because Lara Trump has this big operation to get a lot of witnesses and, you know, people to be basically just watching all the counting of the votes. The thing I most want them to watch is any kind of late night shenanigans. Now, the, the universal belief among conservatives is that Trump won the election in 2020 and when he went to sleep, then all the cheating happened and the, the alleged trucks with the ballots pulled up with the fake ballots and then a bunch of fake ones were counted or there was some double counting or whatever, and then suddenly there was a completely statistically impossible surge for Biden and anyone. Now, given that we know that's how it looks like it was done last time, I don't have confirmation that that was a rigged election. It just looks like it in every possible way. Not only do you assume that it must be rigged because everything else in the country is rigged, it would be quite amazing if the most important thing in the country is the only thing not rigged. I don't think so. Yeah. I think you have to assume that we live in a country where the odds of our elections not being rigged are kind of close to zero. I don't mean every election there might be local ones that are not rigged, but at a national level, how could it possibly be true that they're not rigged? 100% of everything you know about reality and life in America says they're rigged. Can I prove it? No. Nope. But that's the point of rigging, is that you do it so you don't get caught. Are there mechanisms to do it without getting caught? Of course there are. Of course there are. Is it the biggest benefit you could ever get? Yes. Yes. If you're one side or the other, if you can cheat and get away with it, that's about the biggest benefit you could ever get. So if you know you have the opportunity, you Know, you have the incentive and you've got lots of people in lots of different places, and nobody can possibly audit it 100% under those conditions. If you were to just describe this on paper, say, let me, let me describe the system. There are lots of ways to cheat. There are no ways to catch them. There are some ways to catch some things, but generally, most of the ways to cheat you wouldn't be able to catch. There's a huge incentive, and there's lots of time going by. And the people who have the incentive to cheat have also convinced the country that they're stopping Hiller. So you have the biggest incentive you've ever had, bigger than any incentive the United States has ever had, except maybe winning World War II under those conditions where it's possible. And the incentive to do it is through the roof and there's lots of time to get it done. And you probably wouldn't get caught under those conditions. It's a hundred percent. You know that, right? If what I just said is true, and I think it is, I'm just describing a machine. You know, it's a machine that's got these holes, and over time, this is guaranteed to happen. If you have these holes, it's like I'm trying to sell you a bucket, and the bucket has holes in it that are like 1 inch up from the bottom of the bucket. Now, can you predict what will happen if you continue pouring water into the bucket? Yes, you can. Is it because you're magic? No. Is it because there was a court case that says there's a hole in the bucket? No. Is it because you know how people act? No, it's because there's a hole in the bucket. The, the elections are just a bucket with a hole. Everybody sees it right now. If you, if you're saying. But Scott, I really do believe they can audit it. So you wouldn't get away with that. How are you going to audit the post office throwing away a, a bucket of, of mail in ballots? You tell me how you're going to find that you're not. And as I explained earlier, the things you can find are going to be too late. So they wouldn't make any difference if you found them. All right, so let's talk about crime data. National Review has a big story about why sometimes it looks like crime is going up and sometimes it doesn't. And you know why the numbers are all fake. I could go through that. But here's the bigger point. All of our data is fake. If you believe any of these things you are, you are brainwashed. All right? Any of these things, one side is brainwashing and the other side is not. If, if you believe that you are brainwashed, both sides are in heavy persuasion. Both sides are trying to brainwash you by using different techniques. Now, I would argue that the Republicans are generally persuading in a more ethical way, meaning that you can tell what they're doing and it's obvious. I would call Fox News a case of ethical persuasion. Fox News does not pretend to be anything but a right leaning opinion news site where the news people do play it pretty straight and the opinion people are overtly, transparently, clearly on one side. And I say that's completely ethical because if you sign up for watching Fox News, you know you're going to get persuaded in a certain way. But it's brainwashing if you don't know somebody's doing it to you or when, that's brainwashing. So the persuasion game is different in an ethical sense. But I would remind you that there's no important data that's also true. If you believe that some data is true and some data is untrue and that you have magically found the true data, you are brainwashed. You might be right, but it's brainwashing. Why you believe it. Right. So if you said, I know what these crime statistics are, you don't. Nobody has any idea because the data is all bullshit. It's the same with measuring the temperature of the earth. There's no real data and there's certainly no real data that says you can measure the temperature of the earth accurately over decades. That's not a real thing. Couldn't be in the real world. No, that's not a real thing. And it's not real that you can measure crime either, because the people are reporting it differently. There are changes in the policing. People aren't reporting as much. Sometimes they're, they're looking at how many they caught, sometimes they're looking at how many were the crimes. You can't compare them. It's just not any data you can compare. What about immigration? You saw Trump trying to estimate immigration the other day. He's like, I think we have, you know, 10 million people. Well, some say more. It could be 15 million. I think it could be 20 million. If you don't know if you have 10 million or 20 million illegal immigrants, do I need to make my case? The old data is fake. All data is fake. And, and do you know who agrees with me? Everybody who's ever worked in data Analysis, everyone. I will challenge you to find anybody who, for a living, not just as a hobby, but for a living, produced data for other people to consume. You show me that person and I will ask them, is data ever real? And they will look at you and say, no, no, there's only data you're paid to put together. There's data that persuades, but there's no real data on anything. And once you learn that, things start making sense. Well, anyway, the. There's a account on X called the Contextualized Hot Damn Historian. He's at Hot Damn Historian. At Hot Damn Historian talks about how there are some liberal women who are sad that they've lost their fathers to Fox News. And there was one young lady who was saying that Tim Walsh reminds her of her father being lost to Fox News. Now, that doesn't make a lot of sense since he's the opposite of Fox News. Tim Walsh is. He's liberal. But they, they're just going to vibe. They get that vibe. So. Anyway, do, do you think that any of them are aware that Fox News is not the one place that is brainwashing people? I think the young women who are sad they've lost their fathers to Fox News, they are correctly picking up that their father is being propagandized to the point where he may not know what's true and what's not. That may be true, but what they don't realize is that the same thing happened to them. And if you don't realize that you're both brainwashed, you'll never be able to have a relationship if you simply said to yourself, you know what, Dad, I think you're totally brainwashed by this Fox News stuff. And then he says, you know what? Maybe I am, but it looks to me like you're totally brainwashed by TikTok and whatever you're looking at. And then she says, you know what? You might be a little bit right about that. Do you want to go to lunch? So we should be able to get past it, but only if you are at a level of awareness where, you know, the brainwashing is on both sides or the persuasion, if you prefer. Justin News reports that the Georgia State Election Board on Wednesday voted to request that the state attorney general reopens an investigation into Fulton County's counting of the results in 2020. If you don't follow the accounts that I follow, and you know, mine are really artificial in the sense that if you follow a few kinds of accounts, you end up seeing a lot more and then following more so I'm inundated all day long on social media with credible looking. As opposed to credible credible, I can't tell. But credible looking reports that there were all kinds of discovered anomalies in the Georgia election. Now, I also heard about Arizona and was it Michigan or Wisconsin or something, so. Or Minnesota, I can't remember. But I, I, I'm continually seeing reports that, look, they look credible. I don't know what the conclusions are, but of massive irregularities in 2020. Massive. Now, if you're not seeing any of them, then you're, you're, you're being brainwashed in a completely different way than I am. But I'm aware of it. So the best you can do is to say, okay, I'm being fed a fire hose of what are allegations of. We found some bad behavior in the elections in 2020. I feel like some of them are probably true, but I wouldn't pick any one of them and say this one's true because, you know, most of them probably won't be. So they look credible and there's a lot of it. And apparently the Fulton county people had enough people who also thought it looked suspicious that they're willing to put time and resources and reputations behind looking into it. Now, I don't know if they'll find anything before the election, but I will remind you for the millionth time, reality is running too much like a movie to ignore. And this movie requires a reveal that has not happened yet. It requires to be a proper movie. We have to learn that our elections were rigged in a way that everybody agrees. Now, that's not me saying that I know that we're going to do that or that it's findable or even that I have some special knowledge that it was rigged. I don't, I do not have any, what I would consider reliable information that any elections were rigged. I have no proof of that. I just have the understanding that if you have a bucket with big holes in it and you keep filling it with water, there's going to be some water lost. So you can't change my mind on that, but I don't have any proof. However, when you've got the actual election board people who are suspecting that there's something worth looking into, I think the movie is going to be satisfied. And it might happen before election day, it could happen after, but the best reveal would be some kind of court case that determines that Trump won the 2020 election before this election. Now, would you agree that that would make the proper movie. Forget about Reality for a second. You know, forget about the odds just for a second. Just say if it was a movie, does it require that we learn that the 2020 election was in fact rigged against Trump? I say yes. I say this movie. I'm not going to watch the movie until I find, until I know that scene is in there. And that scene has not yet revealed itself, if it ever will and if, and if it's even true. But I sure would bet on it, honestly. I would bet that something's going to be emerging that looks quite credible before Election Day. There's a lot of attention on it. Let's talk about all the attacks on Walls, Tim Walls. Let's see, there's the stolen valor attack that he retired from his unit to avoid going to Iraq. The, his supporters are saying, no, no, he retired months before the deployment. But other people say, but he knew what was happening months before the deployment. So, yes, he left months before the deployment, but he knew it was coming, so that's why he left. Some say we don't know what he was thinking, but that's the attack. Some are saying he wore a Special Forces patch or indicator on his hat once or at least once, and that he wasn't in the Special Forces. So that would be a case of over claiming your involvement in the military. But it could also be that just somebody gave him a hat and he wore it. So I don't know. How do you judge that one? I have no idea. There's a video of him saying that he carried a rifle and, you know, war. I'm paraphrasing, but he wasn't actually in a battle. He was never in a shooting war. He was in the military during war, but he wasn't in the, in the field. There's a story that he was demoted before he retired. I don't know what the reason was, but his, his final rank was not as high as his rank at one point. So he was decreased in rank before he left. I don't know how much that matters. And so here's my take on it. I am not a military veteran, so I have no insight on how this makes people feel. I'm told reliably and consistently that people in the military, or military families especially, would be very affected by this issue. But the specifics of the issue are a little bit not the strongest things in the world because, you know, you'll never know if he really left because he wanted to run for office. Was he trying to avoid war? Is it really dumb to avoid war if he can yeah, there are a lot of questions I would have. So I'm going to recuse myself from the stolen valor conversation. So I'm going to say I don't have any insight in that. I believe it. When people say it's going to affect other people's opinions, I believe that, but it didn't affect my opinion in any way. And yeah, you, you could presume that that makes him a coward. You could presume that. And I'll, I'll listen to all of your arguments, and I will not dismiss them. Right. So if, if you feel that any of this is a big deal and you feel that other people will think it's a big deal, I'm not going to argue that it might be a big deal, but I don't. I don't feel it. So I'm gonna have to rely on other people to tell me how much of an impact this has. And then there's a weird issue of he approved tampons in the boys bathrooms just in case some trans person wanted a tampon. Everything about that issue is dumb. You know, the, the Democrats are just going to say that all he did was make available tampons for women. And separate from the question of whether anybody should use any restrooms or not. And I don't know, it's just a small issue. It just doesn't feel like there's any traction on that one. I don't care about it one way or the other. But more, more interesting is his connection with China. So apparently he was over there during Tiananmen Square that may have killed. May have been 10,000 protesters that was. That were killed by the government. Nobody really knows the number, but, you know, estimates are that high. But the weird thing is that five years later, he planned his honeymoon on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square event, and he went to China with 60 kids in tow, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, in 2018. So he was a, he was a teacher and also a coach for football, and he also taught kids in China, and he set up some kind of a student exchange situation. So I'm assuming that the 60 kids he took with him were part of that cultural exchange program of some sort. But one thing we know for sure is he really likes children. So that's for Michael Ian Black. Yeah, I'm talking to you. All right, I don't want to talk about that. But it's funny. There's a new story about Hunter Biden and taking money from Romania. So Ken Vogel in the New York Times was posting about this so apparently there's prosecutors that say that Hunter was hired by a Romanian oligarch to say, to make sure the United States thought good things about Romania and that they cut the deal. So it didn't look like Hunter was getting the money in any kind of a FARA violation. Fara. Fara, meaning that if you're going to do work for a foreign country to persuade Americans, you need to register so that everybody knows you're persuading again. Remember I told you it's ethical to persuade if everybody knows you're persuading and what. What you're trying to do. So that. That's why you would register. It would be legal if you register to say, I'm persuading on behalf of this foreign company or foreign government and they're going to give me money. Totally legal. You just have to be transparent. But the allegation here is that that soon after Hunter was engaged to do this work, there was a meeting with then Vice President Biden and the Romanian president, and that two weeks after the meeting, Biden publicly stated that he was happy with Romania's effort to combat corruption. So there seems to be a smoking gun that wasn't thrown away in the trash, so to speak. There seems to be some dots that look connected. Of course, the court will have to decide if this is true, but what it looks like is Hunter made a deal with a Romanian oligarch to do some good stuff, good persuasion. He talked to his father. Again, this would be allegations. This is not proven. They talked to his father, and then his father made a statement that the Romanian government would like to hear that they'd made progress against. Against corruption. And then here's the. The money shot. And then one month later, the billionaire started making deposits into the bank account of a Robinson Walker llc, an entity owned by Hunter's associate, Rob Walker. And then Rob Walker may have been generous after that, may have spread some of that money around. So I guess it would be not a far violation if the money went to the business partner who wasn't doing the deal. But I'd ask the question, what was the source of the income? What did the business partner do to get paid? So that's left out of the story, if anything. And then there's an update to the story. It said the special counsel's team does not intend to charge Hunter with violating fara, but a signal that would show how foreign interests wanted to influence the government. What? Wait, what? How is this possible, a far of violation if. If these facts were true and all these dots were connected to a far of violation that would be right at the top of things that you should prosecute. But the so called special counsel just wants you to know. What? How is this even true? I. I feel like there must be something missing from the story. What? All right, we'll keep an eye on that. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I gotta run and do some things today so I won't take long, but I'm going to talk to the, the beautiful and lovely and sexy local subscribers privately. But I'm gonna say bye to the X and YouTube and Rumble viewers. I will see you tomorrow. Thanks for joining for another amazing coffee with Scott Adams. All right, locals coming at.