nager sizes and adult that it would be seen as a product for people under 18.

So I'm not going to defend Target, but it looks like more of a mistake than some kind of a strategy to turn teens into something. So my current take is that if you would like, hold on, if you would like to in your secret thoughts believe that Target did this intentionally, I have nothing to argue against that. Are you okay with that? If you think they did it intentionally, there's no obvious proof that it wasn't intentional. However there is an alternate explanation which is perfectly reasonable, that it could be just because they don't have a size distinction and they wanted to do it for adults and then there it was.

So at the very least they didn't put up a guardrail. Would you agree with that? At the very least they did nothing to make it look like it was limited to adults, and that would be a corporate mistake that they're paying for. But there is not evidence of their thoughts. Would you give me that? There is no evidence of their thoughts, right? If you believe you know their thoughts you might be right. You know, if you look at the larger context of society you could totally be right. But there's no evidence of it. There's no evidence of their thoughts. So I always do this innocent-until-proven-guilty thing because I think it's important. But I tell you that when it comes to the government that doesn't count. When it comes to the government they're guilty until proven innocent. It has to be that way. They have to prove they're not screwing you all the time or else you assume they are.

But what about a company like Target? Is Target presumed innocent at least in their thoughts, not in terms of their actions, but are they presumed innocent? Or are they a big corporation and that's more like the government? You say, you know, you're actually gonna have to prove you didn't do this. Yeah, somewhere in between. All right, well I'll just leave that where it is.

Here's what I, oh there's a kind of interesting news that Ford has agreed with Tesla to use Tesla charging stations for the Ford electric vehicles. Is that foreshadowing something? I always wondered, you know, I had a question whether that was going to be a thing. Now obviously this is a good move for consumers. If you're a consumer this is just great. But the question is why did Musk make this available? What was Musk's play? What do you think? Why would he, I mean as a competitor, why would he make it so much easier for a competitor to sell cars that compete with him?

Well I'll give you one answer. One answer might be that Musk wants to control charging stations, and if he can prevent Ford from building out their own charging stations he can sort of get the public used to using his, and then he can charge other companies a little fee for being part of their system. And that he makes money by monopolizing the charging portion, because Ford probably would have built out their own anyway if they had to. So and Ford will pay to build more, you said. Yeah. So this is very compatible with Musk's philosophy that I don't think we've ever seen before, which is he's trying to build profitable companies of course, but he's very focused on making sure that the public is served. And that's one of the secrets of his success. He is very obsessed. Same with Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos gets this right as well. They're obsessed with giving the public what the public actually wants.

And I don't think there's much the public wanted more than to know if they got an electric car they'd be able to charge it, because a lot of people want electric cars and they're worried about charging stations, right? So you just took that worry away. Also for his competition, which is a very enlightened way to do business, but also something you can do if you're doing well, right? He has such a dominant position that he can think of what's good for everybody and not give up anything. I like everything about that story. It suggests something positive happening in business.

Speaking of business, here is the index fund I would like to invest in now. I am aware that somebody has created an index fund of companies that are not ESG woke. So I know that exists. That's not what I want. Do you know why I don't want that? Because it's too much of a gimmick. Yeah, that's what's called the Strive fund. It already exists, right? So it already exists. But I do think that there might be too much in common with the companies that are woke versus the ones that are not. The companies that tend to go woke tend to be the high-end companies. Am I wrong? The high-end companies, that's for big funds, okay. The high-end companies will tend to be woke, as they have to. But within the universe of woke companies, would you agree that some went too far, right?

So here's what I want: an index fund of all companies, the Fortune 500 in America, subtracting the worst 10 percent of the woke, but only 10 percent. I'll tell you why. If you only take 10 out you're still going to have a good chance of having a good portfolio because that's plenty of diversity. Taking 10 percent out, you know, it might take out your best performer, but it's 10, so maybe not. If you failed to invest in the worst 10 percent of the woke, then the woke would no longer compete to be the most woke. You want them to say, oh I guess I can do a little bit of woke but keep us out of the top 10 percent. I would invest in that. Whereas I have not been triggered to invest in the Strive fund, which is only unwoke companies, because I think one thing that makes you unwoke is being unprofitable.

Oh, here's a better way to say it. Profitability and wokeness are probably very correlated, because if you're already profitable the only thing you want to do is stay out of trouble. So you say, wokeness? Oh yeah, yeah, plenty of it. And if that wokeness makes you let's say a little less profitable, you can afford it if you're already wildly profitable. So Apple as a company can afford all kinds of wokeness because they have so much profit. Even if they took a hit you wouldn't even notice it. But if you are struggling, the last thing you want to worry about is wokeness. So the reason I don't want to fund that is just all the unwoke companies is that that would include the struggling ones. I want just a good basket of the top 500 companies minus the top 10 percent worst woke wokesters, and that would be enough over time. That would be enough to tamp down the worst excesses of wokeness to get it down to something you get used to.

Because unlike many of the people in my audience, I don't mind calling people what they like to be called. I've never understood why that was a problem actually. As long as they don't give me a hard time for using the wrong word, I'll be happy to correct. Because to me it's just, I've said this before, it's just manners. When people introduce me in public they usually ask me, how do you want to be introduced? You want to be the cartoonist, an author? You want to be the creator? You know, what word are you comfortable with being described with? And then I tell them. Usually it doesn't matter. I don't care. But I tell them and then we're all comfortable. It's just a polite way to deal with other people.

So if somebody is born a biological male, they've decided to transition, and they look and present themselves as female, I have any problem using the pronoun they prefer? I don't even know why anybody would. Because if you look at somebody who's in full female presentation it shouldn't be hard to remember what pronoun they want to be using. And why does that affect you in any way? Now I get that if you start accepting the base reality of their claim then maybe that gets to rights. You know, what restroom you can use, what sports you can play in. But I separate those. I just think you can call people what they want to be called, and that's separate from the conversation of do you want a 200-pound trans woman who used to be, was born a man, to compete in a boxing match against somebody born a woman? No, that's just obviously something you need to work on. But I don't mind a little bit of wokeness. You know, I don't mind making sure that we don't discriminate. That's all good.

All right. Biden's numbers have collapsed, and even CNN is saying, oh my God. Jake Tapper was just blown away by how bad Biden's numbers are. Here's the specific poll released Thursday shows the whopping, this is CNN's take on it, 66 percent of Americans, two-thirds of them, view a Biden victory in the upcoming presidential election as either a disaster or a setback for the United States. Two-thirds of the country believe that a Biden president's second term would be a disaster or a setback. Two-thirds. Two-thirds means you're getting a lot of people who are not just Republicans. You know, independents and Democrats now. CNN also pointed out that that's not that different than Trump. So Trump's numbers aren't that different. But Biden I don't think has ever had numbers this bad.

So as Jake Tapper and others have pointed out, it looks like we're actually heading for an election of the two candidates that the country least wants to be president. Am I wrong about that? We've somehow developed a system to give us the two choices that we all understand are wrong. But we still favor our own choice because we don't want to give up our own choice, and we think our choice could beat the other choice, and winning is more important. Yeah, we're more about winning. But how in the world did we drift into a situation where we're almost guaranteed the two candidates of the two we least want as a country? Least want. You might like one better than the other, but both sides want somebody else because of age.

Now in my opinion it's just age alone would tell you the whole story. Yes, I want somebody younger than Trump. Absolutely, absolutely. And younger than Biden, of course. I saw Mark Cuban tweet today talking about as long as we use the system of primaries that we have now we're always going to recreate this situation, and that we need some kind of a better selection process for picking from the primary. We just don't have a functional system. If we had a functioning system it would not have given us two choices of people who are clearly older than you want them to be. Although to be fair Trump does look perfectly fine at the moment.

All right. And even CNN was sort of talking up RFK Jr., you know, noting that he had now a good solid bite on, I think he's up to 20 in the Democrat primary, and I think you're going to see that increase.

All right, here's the story I heard today. I don't know if this is true, but in the 70s the CIA developed a heart attack gun. They can shoot you with a dart gun that would give you a heart attack, and then the dart itself would dissolve, and then the poison that it gave you would be denatured quickly so even an autopsy would not pick up the poison or the injection site because there'd just be a little spot, and then the dart would somehow disintegrate. Do you believe that? Do you believe that developed in the 70s? I don't know. I'm going to say I'm going to put a big maybe on that one.

Now of course people connected it to the Andrew Breitbart situation where he died of a heart attack at a relatively young age and without warning I guess. And he was exactly the kind of person that you would kill if you were a CIA operative who was helping the Democrats. So that's interesting.

There's new George Floyd hoax going around today. So in 2020 the coroner's report, it's being resurfaced. So it's being treated as if it just came out, but we've seen the coroner's report on George Floyd since 2020. And one of the things it said on the report was that there were no neck injuries, which people are taking to mean that it must have been an overdose, because if Chauvin the cop was on George Floyd's back or neck you should have seen some kind of neck injuries. But the hoax part is that we've known this since 2020 and it was not terribly important to the coroner's opinion. So yeah, the news is on the back exactly. So there was no reason you would expect the neck to have an injury. But the argument was that given the position of everybody it was the police officer's actions that caused the death.

And here there's a new part that I'd never heard before. So the coroner ruled out drug overdose, fentanyl overdose or opioid overdose. And the reason he ruled it out is because the typical way you die from an overdose is you just sort of close your eyes and go to sleep. Whereas George Floyd was not acting like somebody on fentanyl. He was sort of struggling until he stopped struggling. So therefore it did not look like a fentanyl death, because the fentanyl death is just somebody sitting in the chair and they close their eyes.

To which I say, I wonder how much experience the coroner had with people who had just taken the fentanyl and were being forcefully held on the ground. Is that something you've seen a lot? Somebody who just took fentanyl? Allegedly. I don't know if that's true, but some say he took it when he got pulled over so he wouldn't get caught with it. But has he seen people who just took fentanyl, like just took it, and then you know three or four people are holding him down? What would that look like if it were a fentanyl overdose? What would it look like? Well I'm going to give you my impression of what I think it would look like. Struggling, struggling, struggling, struggling, struggling, not struggling, dead. That's what I would expect. I would expect him to be struggling while he could while the fentanyl was reaching his system. Because allegedly he just took it. As it reached the system he would stop struggling. He would get quiet. It would happen kind of suddenly. And you wouldn't know that that was the problem because you were sort of in a different mode. You were in struggle mode and then you just stopped struggling. You think, oh he finally stopped struggling. But it could just be the fentanyl kicking in.

Now I'm no coroner, but to me it looks like the coroner gave the safest opinion he could to protect his own life. And you cannot predict, you cannot put any credibility in a coroner who if he had ruled the other way would be killed. How in the world Chauvin doesn't get some kind of an appeal because the coroner was in a position where his life was at risk if he had given an opinion in the other direction. His life was at risk. Obviously like anybody who says his life was not at risk, you don't know anything. He clearly was at great personal risk. Family too. So I would say that there was no coroner's testimony. If I'd been in the jury I would have said, okay well I'm not going to believe that guy because there's no reason to believe him. If somebody is under threat of death you are not advised to believe what they say. That would be a dumb thing to do. And yet the jury did. Do you know why the jury did believe him? Because they were at great risk of being killed. Everybody involved was at the risk of being killed. There was no way it could go any other way. Everybody just was protecting their own life and they didn't particularly care about Chauvin because he didn't come across as a sympathetic character, right? They didn't really care about him but they certainly cared about themselves. Certainly cared about themselves.

All right. I saw a tweet by a Twitter user who goes by the title Unhoodwinked in which he was noting my persuasion successes according to him. All right, so now this is his opinion not mine. So in his opinion I had influence on the following things. And he says Scott's scoreboard on issues that you changed the world. So that's not my claim. I'm not claiming I influenced these things. I'm just claiming there's a lot of coincidences here. So here's the list. China is now deemed unsafe for business. You will recall I was the first one who started saying that. Now it's obvious. ESG is now a negative value. I would argue it depends who you're talking to, but definitely the reputation of ESG is way worse than it was when I told you I was going to try to destroy it. That's not all me of course.

Bombing Mexican cartels is now accepted as the best strategy by all of the Republican front-runners. I would argue that somebody had to say it out loud and then see how people reacted for anybody else to say it out loud. So I said it out loud first publicly. Trump picked it up. Once Trump picked it up nobody could be soft on that. So all the Republicans have to line up. Could be a coincidence. TikTok is under pressure to be banned or at least adjusted in some way. I think I was the first among the first to talk about TikTok but not the only one of course. And fentanyl overdoses now considered a top concern. That's similar to the bombing the cartels one. Nuclear power is considered green. You remember when I started persuading on that it was not considered green but now it is. Now obviously the bigger persuaders were, you know, Sheldon Burgert and Mark Schneider and Bjorn Lomborg, and so they're the ones with the heavy lifting. But I was on the right side of that.

And then I'm not sure about this one but Unhoodwinked puts this on my list: safe to discuss moving away from areas deemed to be unsafe for certain groups. I know. Do you feel it is now safer to discuss racial topics because of me? Yeah, I'm not sure about this specific example but I do think that's happening. Yeah. So as somebody pointed out, a critic, that all I really did was pick topics that other people had seen as common sense, and then common sense usually wins. And so all I did was spot some common sense things early and talk about them. So it's not influence. It's just I saw a parade forming, stood in front of the parade, and I just made it look like I was in charge of the parade.

The only counter I would put to that is that all of those things I talked about were common sense before I talked about them. They were common sense for a long time. It didn't make any difference. Didn't make any difference. Common sense doesn't move anybody. You need persuasion. So there is a coincidence between when I applied public persuasion and when those things started to change. You cannot rule out coincidence. You can't rule out coincidence. And you can't rule out, well it wouldn't be coincidence. You can't rule out that I'm looking at the wrong pattern. It could be that the pattern isn't, just good at spotting winners. How could you rule that out? How could you rule out that I'm just good at spotting winners in advance? Because I do believe I am. But I think I am pretty good at spotting winners. Yeah.

So here's the only credit I will take unambiguously, which is if you're good at spotting winners and then you can productively be part of that persuasion then you're part of a very large team of people who are trying to push things in the right direction. So that's the credit I would take. The credit I would take is that I've been early pushing useful things that Americans are better off with. That's the only thing I can say for sure.

Let us know when you buy a new stock. Yeah, I would now say that my stock buying skills are anything you should emulate. The pattern supports the Christian end of days prediction. Well the other thing that that fits is that we always think the world is going to hell. So if there had never been any Christian predictions about the end of times we would still be talking about everything going to hell because that's just what we do. It just means you're human.

Tell us what stock. I'm selling. I sold my Apple stock because I don't think that Apple is going to easily navigate the AI era, because AI is almost a full replacement for your smartphone. And I don't know what they do about that, because even if they make their own best AI smartphone ever it won't be that better than everybody else's, will it? You think you're going to buy back Apple? You know, betting against me is not crazy. You know, betting the opposite of me would probably make you money in the long run.

Vanguard I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but Vanguard is low ESG compliance, right? They're not an ESG investing company. Yeah, so I think Vanguard was in the top two I believe, maybe number two in being unaffected by ESG and just putting their investments in where it makes sense. And stay out of stocks. Vanguard is the main owner of BlackRock now. That doesn't sound right. You mean it the other way around, don't you? Vanguard probably does have ESG funds because everybody would have one, but I think that they also have a non-ESG fund. They own each other. All right.

Is there a big story that I missed? The hospital Karen story. There's, well the hospital Karen story was exactly what I said. Two people who legitimately thought that the bike was theirs, and that was the whole story. And that's what I saw from the start. Because unless you're a racist I saw two people who believed that they owned a bike. I didn't see color in that story at all. Did you see color in that story? I didn't see a Karen and I didn't see a black guy in that story, although that's the way it was presented. It's like a black guy and a Karen. I didn't see the black guy meaning that he wasn't acting like in some way that's like only black people act. He was just a guy who thought it was his bike and he was not taking no for an answer. And he wasn't, well he wasn't being physically scary, was he? And I think he thought he was a victim and she was defending her rights. I don't know. I ended up liking both of them. Is that wrong? I think we're supposed to not like both of them, right? Like that's what the media narrative is. How about you don't like both of them or one of them? Why don't you like one of them and dislike the other one? I refuse. I absolutely refuse. I like both of them. A nurse who's probably an angel, pregnant nurse, I'm totally on her side. Guy who innocently believes somebody's taking his bike that he paid for, totally on his side too. I could be on both of their sides. There's no conflict with that. I can support both of them. They were just in a bad situation. I hope they go on to happy lives.

The U-Haul truck at the White House, that feels like a crazy guy thing. That was too disjointed to even be any kind of an intel operation or Russian op or anything. That just had crazy guy written all over it. No, we know for sure, well at least the reporting is that both of them had a reason to think that they owned the bike, like a good reason, and one of them was just wrong but they had some reason. If you saw an extremely pregnant woman you would let her have the bike? Well not if you thought you had just paid for it. Because I don't think anybody's saying there were no other bikes. Am I right? It's not like she couldn't go somewhere. There was just a question of whether he'd paid for her bike, you know, and he was a young guy. Do you think this young guy had extra money that he could just buy somebody else a bike?

You're wrong Scott about what? Right, the Covington response is the story. Well I agree the Covington response was that the first reaction of the story was misleading totally. So yes it is a Covington story. You're right.

Whoa. And there is your Patriot Squirrel says, Scott I never did get to thank you and President Trump for saving my life. I was strung out on heroin for 20 years, started my recovery in 2016, have been clean for four years. Happy as hell. Good for you. That's the story that I like better than any other story. Anytime somebody tells me that they got off drugs or got off alcohol or just built their talent stack and got a better job, I could hear that all day long because that's what we're here for.

So one of the things, here's a little business advice I heard this a long time ago, that you don't decide what your product is. The customers decide. So if you think you're selling Pez dispensers but your audience thinks you're an auction site, although that's not a real story but I'll use it anyway, then you become an auction site. So your customers tell you what you are. And that certainly happened with Dilbert. With Dilbert the audience said, hey we like this office comic. And I would say it's not an office comic. He just goes to work sometimes but it's not really about the office. And then people would say, yeah we love the office comic. And I would say stop saying that. It's a general comment. I can do any kind of topic I want. And then the audience would say, yeah but you really should do the office ones. They're the ones we like. So I changed it into an office comic strip. And that's how you do it. That's why it was successful. Dilbert wasn't until I gave the audience what they told me I was selling. They told me I was selling that before I sold it. I just wasn't even selling that product. And they said thanks for that product. And I said what? And now I make that p