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May 25, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:11
Episode 541 Scott Adams: The Age of Enlightenment, End of the Republic
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Sublime! Alright, let's talk about a bunch of things in no particular order.
First of all, how good is the world when one of the top stories of the day, Is that there was a yoga instructor who was lost in the forest, I guess, in Hawaii, and then they found her and she's fine.
That's it! The most important news in the whole country, apparently, things are going so well that the news industry can't find any news.
Literally, their news was somebody was lost in a tropical paradise, but they found her.
She was fine. She'll be teaching yoga tomorrow.
That's it! That's your biggest problem?
Wow! Let's talk about a few other things.
I noticed in some advertisements for Fox News that they're doing something very clever.
So this is sort of a shout-out compliment to Fox News.
And what they're doing is that it looks like they're trying to advertise themselves, market themselves, and brand themselves, this is Fox News, as having opinion in the evening, but more news during the day.
Which is quite brilliant.
Can you see why that's brilliant?
Now, first of all, that's simply a description of what they do.
The people they have on in the evening are, I think, almost entirely opinion, maybe until Shannon Breen comes on.
But it's opinion in the evening, it's mostly news in the daytime.
Now, can you see how smart that is?
By calling it out to that specifically.
It's brilliant because CNN doesn't make that distinction.
On CNN, their hosts and their opinions are a little bit less distinct.
So it's very smart for Fox News to say, these are our opinions, so stop calling these guys fake news, because those are opinions.
But our news is solid.
You don't see a lot of fake news on the news.
But you do see some things that maybe you disagree with because that's part of the opinion show.
It's very good framing.
I think that they're smart to do that.
In no particular order, Andrew Yang, who's running for president, He's certainly one of the most interesting candidates.
I don't think he has a chance of winning, but he's certainly interesting.
He's got tons of policy ideas and all of them are provocative.
But he tweeted yesterday something that was practically...
Well, it wasn't Trump-like because it was too humble, but it was very funny.
So Andrew Yang, he tweeted yesterday that the only thing keeping him from being president is his popularity.
I think he meant it as a joke.
It was pretty funny.
So as a professional humorist, I endorse that joke.
Have you noticed how little pushback President Trump has gotten since he became president on some of the biggest issues that you imagined were going to destroy the world?
Here are some of the things which you expected more disaster or pushback from.
You thought when he started pushing China on trade that the world would end, but in fact the economy is doing great.
And he's figuring out a way to help the farmers who are hardest hit.
No big deal. I mean, it's a big deal for certain individuals, and we should do what we can to ease that pain because the pain is not distributed equally.
So if we can find a way to help those patriots who are taking most of the pain, we should.
And it looks like the administration is at least trying to do that.
Yeah, somebody in the comments is saying, Jerusalem, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, thought it would be the end of the world.
No big deal. Golan Heights?
Recognizing that as part of Israel?
End of the world? Eh, no big deal.
How about canceling the Iran nuclear deal?
End of the world?
I don't know. Doesn't look like it.
North Korea? Pushing North Korea?
End of the world? Nope.
He was right about that again.
Paris Accord? Yeah, getting out of the Paris Accord?
No big deal. Canceling TPP? No big deal.
Yeah, canceling NAFTA? Worked out fine.
Just think about how many examples there are where Trump correctly knew the importance of something and his critics did not.
And it works the other way as well.
So, what do his critics, Trump's critics, talk about the most?
They talk about his character, and they talk about his failing the fact-checking.
Now that a few years have gone by, where he has failed the fact-checking more than anyone has ever failed fact-checking, Although apparently 25% or so of the fact-checking he fails is actually fake news.
And about 25% of the things that are listed as Trump's lies are actually lies themselves.
But even if you accept the 75% is true, the president has failed the fact-checking more than any person ever has.
Yeah, net neutrality, we're still alive.
So it seems that the president has one skill that is a transcendent skill.
If you try to figure out why does Trump keep succeeding in lots of different places, of course he has some famous failures too, but it's pretty clear that at the moment he's on top of the world.
He is a billionaire.
He is the President of the United States.
The United States is doing great.
If he quit today, in my opinion, historians would still rate him as the best president of all presidents.
If he quit today.
And I don't think he's done.
So, I would say, if you could understand this president with one variable, And of course, that's always dangerous because we don't live in the one variable world.
You know, everything counts.
But there's one that seems a little bit more, let's say, enlightening.
You know, one thing about him that is so consistent across all the topics, and really across his entire life, that it seems to be the one thing you should focus on, which is, he can tell what matters.
Look for that trend in everything that the President does.
Do you remember when, I use this example too much, when the President first called Jeb Bush low energy, what did most of the world, except for a few people, except for me, except for Mike Cernovich, except for a handful of people, what did most of the world say?
It was a silly, trivial insult, unworthy of the president, but certainly not important.
Turns out, it was very important.
And Trump probably knew that the way he framed people, the way he brands people, would be effective and important.
And sure enough, it was effective and it was important.
When the president exaggerates something and the news spends all day talking about how that fact is wrong, the president knows that having that fact a little off, so long as it's sort of directionally correct, not important.
And sure enough, the country does not respond to it like it was important.
He's right. So look for that trend.
He seems almost psychic in his ability to know what's going to actually matter in the long run.
And you see, for example, when he does provocative things, people focus on the provocative thing, but it's pretty clear that he knows that getting attention is more important.
And in the long run, it is.
So look for that.
So the President used the phrase, Age of Enlightenment, in a tweet yesterday.
He said, we're in the Age of Enlightenment.
Isn't that interesting?
I don't know. I'm sure he A-B tests stuff like that.
So I don't think he necessarily assumes that he'll be using that phrase going forward.
He throws it out, sees what happens.
You know, if people respond to it, maybe he'll use it again.
I don't know that anybody's going to respond to that.
We'll see. But how interesting that he's calling it the Age of Enlightenment.
Now, if you recall, back in 2015, and I like to remind you this often, when I started writing about Trump, when he was running for office, I said that not only would he win the presidency, back in 2015, I said he would not only win the presidency, but he would change forever the way we saw reality.
Done. I would say that that prediction is probably the most accurate prediction I've ever made.
That he would change how we saw our very existence.
And he did.
Now, some people may not be happy about it, clearly.
But it's clear that he did.
And now he's called it out by name.
An Age of Enlightenment.
What does that mean? Let me put a little meat on that.
Well, one of the things it means is understanding what's important.
That's really central to this enlightenment situation.
You don't have enlightenment unless you can also tell what's important.
This president has taught the world what's important.
We didn't know.
We were worried about political correctness and social justice worrying and identity.
And we were trying to be nice to other countries and maybe they'd be nice to us.
And it was just all wrong.
Pretty much everything we were doing that we thought was right turned out to be illusions and mistakes.
And the president has largely replaced all of that stuff that was perceptually wrong With things that nobody, not nobody, but people who were his critics thought could not possibly work out well.
It can't possibly be a good idea to push China that hard.
It can't possibly be good to push Iran.
It can't possibly be good to be this friendly with Israel, so much so that they're naming things after him.
It can't possibly be this good to, here's another one, it can't possibly be this good to be so friendly with dictators.
But it is. It absolutely is.
He's creating the model of being respectful to the dictator so that you can negotiate as hard as possible without making it personal.
That model will forever be the model.
He has set a standard, which if a future president violates that standard, it's just going to look like They're just going to look dumb because he showed that that works.
Saudi Arabia, let's talk about them, speaking of dictators.
This is clearly a case, and you saw this again, apparently the administration has tried to bypass some laws so that they can go ahead and sell military equipment to Saudi Arabia and some other friendly countries over there.
And it seems that we're treating Saudi Arabia far better than you would think we should, given the Cheshogi situation and anything else that we don't like about how they handle their domestic situation.
But you know that in June, if the plan is still on in June, there is supposed to be some kind of a comprehensive peace plan.
Jared Kushner, I think, is behind that.
And so, the president is setting the pieces before June.
One of the pieces is, hey, Saudi Arabia, we're really going to be your friend, assuming you do something important for us on this bigger picture.
You know that something like that conversation is happening, because this president had Saudi Arabia's leaders back in a way that nobody expected.
In a way that nobody suggested.
Even his own team said, hey, I think you need to be a little tougher on Saudi Arabia's leader, you know, Prince Salman, because of the Khashoggi thing, if not other things.
And the president pretty clearly ignored everybody.
It seems that the president has once again decided that that relationship is important.
Probably important for the larger plans.
We may find out what that looks like in June.
Likewise, pushing Iran as hard as possible now is probably all just a setup for June when there's the big plan.
Because the reporting now is that Iran's proxies, all the people that they're funding to make trouble and cause armed problems in the region, That they're strapped for cash and Iran has told them that they're going to need to find money elsewhere.
Now that's pretty important because he's softening up Iran.
We're moving military assets in.
We're blaming them for things.
The administration has declared the Iranian National Guard to be a terrorist organization.
Now when you heard that, When you heard that the administration was going to call the Iranian National Guard a terrorist organization, what was your first thought when you heard that?
I remember my first thought was, why did that take so long?
Is there some reason we didn't do that before?
As soon as he does it, you say to yourself, well, wait a minute.
That seems so obvious after you do it.
Because that creates the mechanism where they can start strangling the finances of anybody involved with the Revolutionary Guard, creates another set of weapons that can be used to make life hard over for the administration.
So you see over and over again that the President seems to have this almost, I don't know, it's almost an unnatural ability to know what's going to matter in the long run.
And the fact that he's still president, his ratings are improving, the economy is doing great, the country is doing great, seems to be a validation that he has correctly guessed what's important.
All right, let's talk about some other stuff.
On healthcare, apparently the administration is going hard in three areas on healthcare to reduce prices.
Each of these categories...
Seem exactly right on target.
And again, when you see this stuff, I'm going to describe it in a moment, your first impression should be, why weren't we doing that before?
What about this was not available to every other president?
Why are we waiting for it now?
Jake Novak wrote about this before the administration focused on it.
And Jake's writing...
I think highlighted what was important and then sure enough the administration hit the same three points.
So obviously they were important.
One was price transparency.
So the administration is trying to make hospitals and others in the healthcare field publish their prices.
Apparently there are gigantic differences in prices and if the consumers knew they could make different choices.
So that's one thing.
Then selling health insurance across state lines.
Apparently that change has already been made or it's in the works.
That makes things more competitive.
And then apparently there have been a lot of hospital mergers that reduce the competition.
So the administration is going to take a look at that to see if maybe there's something to do with hospital mergers to perhaps prevent them that would make more competition in the area.
And then I also understand this is not on the list of three, but that the Health and Human Services sped up the process for...
Is it Health and Human Services?
But anyway, the government has sped up the process for approving generics because there's some kind of rule where apparently when the second or third generic hits the market, the price plunges.
So they just make sure that they get to that second or third generic option as quickly as possible.
The FDA, I'm sorry. So the FDA has sped up the process of generics.
Now, if you look at those four things I mentioned, are not all of them so obvious that you say to yourself, why are we only learning that the government is getting interested in doing these things now?
Every one of these things is glaringly obvious after you hear about it.
You know, most of us are not educated on all the ins and outs of healthcare and where the levers are and what you've got to push.
But it's pretty obvious after they announce their priorities that those are pretty good priorities because the market will do the rest.
All right. I've got an idea.
That I want to run by you.
It's not a good idea, but I want to run it by you anyway.
You remember when Elon Musk's, one of his companies builds tunnels, so it's big equipment called the Boring Company, a funny name, and they bore giant holes, and one of the things he announced was that they were figuring out a way to make bricks out of the dirt that they were digging from the holes.
And This made me ask the following question.
How hard is it to make a brick?
What kind of equipment, I don't know, chemistry?
What do you have to mix together?
How hard is it to make a brick?
Can you buy a brick-making machine?
And if you did, is it a whole factory?
Or is it the size of a, you know, maybe a shipping container size?
Is it a tabletop?
What exactly does it take to make a good quality brick?
And I ask myself, suppose you have this following model for helping people at the low end of the economic situation.
And it looked like this.
Now, this is the bad idea, the bad version of the idea, but maybe this will stimulate thinking.
Take, for example, these urban blight areas where the land in the inner cities is so blighted that it's essentially worthless, and if you wanted to buy some, the city would practically give it to you just to do something productive on it.
So you do have a lot of land in the inner cities.
Likewise, there's lots of land in rural areas.
So we have enough land.
Land is not really the gating factor here.
And most of that land has dirt.
If you wanted to build a basement, for example, you would create a lot of dirt.
If you want to build a tunnel to run some cables or to run some geothermal pipeline or something, you need tunnels or you need holes or ditches.
So you can create a lot of dirt in any kind of building.
Imagine this model.
Alright, so now I'm going to get to the point.
The model looks like this.
The government organizes or approves some simple building mechanisms that are close to a kit that you can make with bricks.
Now, I would suggest making bricks that are not necessarily just rectangles, but rather are a little bit more like Legos.
Maybe they've got some shapes that are easy to snap together.
Could you design single-story homes That are really, really livable and really, really easy to build if you can slap bricks together.
Maybe there are parts of the construction that you still need to bring in outside help because there's a specialty, but I'll bet you that If you could take a neighborhood and, let's say, prep the plumbing and the electrical and the sewage, you probably could get people to homestead on a piece of land and say, okay, here's your land, and all you have to do is build on it.
But here's the cool part.
You give people two plots and One to build on at any rate they want.
They can dig their own holes.
They can make their own bricks.
They can build on it.
Once built, it will be almost pre-approved because they'll be building to a model that the government has already blessed.
The reason I say single story is because you've got to hold higher risk if you go more stories.
It's harder to build it.
It's more to fall down.
It's greater risk, right?
So just keep it simple. And Somebody's saying you need mortar, and I don't want to over-specify the mechanism for building.
I'm just saying that you probably could create a kit-like building thing that anybody could learn by looking at a YouTube video.
So every day you wake up and look at the YouTube video and say, okay, it says, put some bricks on this wall, and that's all you do that day.
You just look at the video and do it.
Now some people are going to say, Sears had kit homes, etc.
So I know that kit homes work.
The market has, for whatever reason, taken them out of the market.
But there's no reason we couldn't put them back.
So here's the key part.
You give people not one plot of land, but two, and they're contiguous.
They can build their own home from a base home.
So let's say that the builder...
It creates a bathroom, kitchen, and one extra room for sleeping in.
So let's say that's your basic house.
Let's say it only costs $20,000 to build just that little core.
But you build it so it can easily be expanded by the owner.
So the owner could add another bathroom, add another room.
They just do it one brick at a time according to the plans that are already approved.
And they can build it at any rate they want in their spare time.
But then the second plot of land, they simply own as an investment property.
So once they've built out enough of their own home, they can say, all right, I'll just keep going.
I know how to build a house now.
So I'll just build a second one on this second free plot that came with the first one.
And the second one will be for me to rent or to sell.
So that you create a place to live...
With an income, because the second plot of land is something that they can use their labor to invest in, build another home, rent it out, or sell it.
Anyway, I'm going to throw that idea out there.
It would require standardized plans.
It would require some kind of a kit material that the average person could use.
It would require land that could be easily acquired.
It would require the concept that you get two pieces of land and And you would need the professionals to set in the basics.
So you would need the professionals to put in the sewage, the main electric to the house.
But you could probably get to the point where even an individual who didn't know plumbing could add a bathroom, if you did it right.
Because if you always use the same plumbing, the same set of things, they would stick together pretty easily.
You know, it's only hard to do construction if everyone is different.
And you have to cut logs, not cut logs, but you have to cut wood, and you have to shape things, and you've got to take big things and turn them into little things on the job site.
If you never had to do any of that, if everything was a set of things that always fit together just right, the average person could do it pretty easily.
You might need inspectors just to make sure they did it right.
All right, so that's enough on that.
Let me talk about a little poll I'm doing on Twitter right now.
Some of you have seen it.
I did a poll and I asked how many people have had the experience of following me on Twitter only to have Twitter's system, for one reason or another, unfollow them so that they had to later follow me again.
And so I did a Twitter poll.
Now, first thing you need to know is that the Twitter poll is not scientific.
It doesn't mean that these numbers are accurate in the way that you would like a poll to be accurate.
All I was trying to find out is if there are a lot of them or not a lot of them.
And I thought, for that purpose, it doesn't matter how scientific it is.
There will either be a lot of them or there won't be a lot of them.
So here was what I found out.
Over 8,000 people have responded to the poll.
From the beginning, from the first 100 or so people who responded, approximately 17 or 18% were saying that they had the experience, sometimes more than once, of following me and then finding out that they had been somehow unfollowed.
And What's interesting is that as that number of people who answered the poll grew from a few hundred to now close to, I think, 9,000, for most of that entire time, the ratio of people who said that their followers had been unfollowed, on my account specifically, stayed around 17 to 18 percent.
Does that mean something?
I don't know.
It could easily not mean anything.
But I asked myself, that is a very consistent number.
I would have expected to see more fluctuation.
I would have expected that maybe it started out being a big number and shrunk over time, but it stayed consistent at around 17 to 18%.
Now, as many people pointed out, some developers pointed out, and Twitter themselves had explained this to me as well.
There is a real situation in which this can happen through normal, just normal error.
And the way it works is, if you've got your device in your hand, and you're in the app on Twitter, and you say, We're good to go.
Now apparently there are fairly frequent times when you lose a connection or just that handshake between Twitter and your phone doesn't work.
So you can have times when you think you've liked something, you think you've followed somebody and it didn't get registered at Twitter, and then the next time you check it's not there.
So that's some of it.
So I would say it is confirmed that sometimes that happens.
Likewise, it is confirmed that probably people think they followed me and didn't, probably confirmed that, you know, they pushed the wrong button, they thought they followed me, but they liked it, they remembered it wrong.
So some of it's probably human error and bad memory and all that.
But I now have, I think, over 1,500 people 1,500 people said that they followed me and got automatically unfollowed.
About 18% of all the people answered.
Do you think that 17 or 18% of all the people who followed me had a technical error?
Maybe. Maybe.
You know, if you added the possibility of technical errors to confirmation bias, to the fact that the poll is not scientific, so, you know, it may be skewed quite a bit just naturally.
If you added together all of the possible reasons why people would have the impression that they were unfollowed, could it get to 18% of all my traffic?
And maybe 18% is not accurate because it's not a scientific poll.
I don't think so.
You know, I can't rule it out.
There's no way I can say it's a 100% chance that something weird is going on here.
But as I've said before, if you can't tell, and there's no mechanism to know, so I have this question, it's suspicious by its nature.
If I can't tell if that's really stopping me or not, then democracy or the republic, as we call it, does not exist.
Because it means that the social media companies can do anything they want, and they can put their finger on the scale any way that they like, and nobody's going to know the difference.
There's no mechanism to check.
Now, you may say to yourself, well, wouldn't it be more obvious if they were doing this?
And of course, a lot of people think it is obvious, but confirmation bias is too much of a possibility there to know that just people's thinking they see it means anything.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
But let me draw a picture to tell you how dangerous this is.
Some people, when I made the comment that social media has eliminated Really, the democratic process for all practical purposes, and concentrated it with the few people who can control those platforms.
People said to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, we've always had the news, and the news has always been fake news.
So if you went back to the 20s and read a newspaper about politics, it probably wouldn't be all that accurate.
And so we've always lived in a world In which our democracy was greatly influenced by big companies.
In the past, it was more just the news.
In the present, it's the news plus the social media.
So nothing's different, Scott.
Why are you talking about this?
But here's the difference that they do not account for.
If you go back to the 20s or the 50s or any time in the past, or even 60s, 70s, or 80s, you could go back to the 90s, and it would be completely different than today.
And the reason is that we now know so much more about how to influence people.
We know what works in general, and we can rapidly test it to find out if it did work.
And we have so much better analytics, we know how to get the exact message to the exact person, the type of message that affects the right person.
And we can even tell what kind of people might be influenced and which ones not to bother with, because they'll never change their mind.
Imagine all of that technology, that knowledge, that ability to measure and to influence people.
Nothing like that ever existed before.
And the public at large is unaware of it.
The average member of the public doesn't know that the technology and the knowledge of how to influence people has gone from, you know, the Wright brothers barely getting an airplane in the air to putting a rocket on Mars.
So if you say, it's no different, we had newspapers then, we've got social media now, it's all fake news, nothing's that different.
Completely wrong.
Because we didn't know how to do it until, I'd say, the last several years.
That's when we started getting really good.
That's when AI got into it, and the deep dives into the data, when we really knew who everybody was, people lost their privacy, and we could tell even a slight difference in a color on an interface or a headline, the way it was worded, and we could tell which ones stimulate people and which ones don't.
Now, as good as we are at the moment at influencing people, consider, and I said this yesterday as well, consider that we've had, we will have had, four years from 2016 before the next election in 2020, the smartest people in the universe, who are the tech people, the people who work at the big tech platforms, Let's admit, they are some of the smartest people in the universe, as far as we know.
Let's say the solar system.
And they have a great incentive to do better at influencing elections.
They have the means, they have the intelligence, they have the time, they have all the resources, and they've got everything they need.
And by 2020, they will be able to completely determine the results of an election.
Let me give you a specific example.
Suppose they found out, and I think this is all discoverable, something that they could find out.
Suppose social media found out the people in the electorate The voters who could be influenced.
So they start with all these people, all the people who vote, and they know that most of them are going to vote their party no matter what.
Most of them are going to vote or not vote, and there's not much you can change.
It's hard to turn non-voters into voters.
It's hard to change people's party.
But there's some small sliver of people who can be influenced, and I'll bet they can be identified.
So step one is, can the social media platforms identify the small group of people who can be influenced?
I'm sure they can.
I'm sure both parties can do it.
I'm sure that this is available information.
Once you've identified the people who can be influenced, can you change the ratio of messages they hear from one side Versus the other side.
And could you do that without being noticed?
Well, if you took all of the people who were looking at me, And you said, all right, hypothetically, let's mess with Scott.
We've identified that Scott is unusually persuasive because he has training and because he has a large following on social media.
So those two things are the first flag.
Uh-oh. He's persuasive.
He knows how to do this.
And he has a large following, so it's a big platform.
So suppose they said, why don't we just change how his message gets to, not the whole group, because the whole group largely can't be persuaded about anything, but suppose we only limit his message from the few people who could be influenced.
Would I notice?
And what would that look like when I looked at my traffic?
What it would look like is that I didn't go down by 90%, because I would notice that.
I wouldn't go down 80%, or 70%, or 60%, 50%, I would notice that.
40%, I'd notice that.
30%, 20%.
Ah, at around 20%, I can't tell.
So if I were going to game the system, I would make sure that the only people who didn't see Scott's message are the people who could be influenced, and that can't be more than 17 or 18 percent of the public.
I mean, and that would be generous, probably closer to less than 5 percent.
So, I can't determine if anything inappropriate, Illegitimate is happening in my case.
I cannot make that determination.
But I can say with complete certainty that if someone wanted to game the system, they would look for people like me, And you could probably make a small list of the other people that would be on the list.
You'd see Jack Posobiec.
You'd see Mike Cernovich on the list.
You could make your own list of 50 people.
Let's say if you took the 50, maybe 100, let's say if you took the 100 most influential people on one side, let's say the pro-Trump side, and you said, the only thing we're going to mess with Is how often the persuadable sliver of the world sees their content.
Everybody else can see everything.
It doesn't matter because it's not going to change their votes.
Could they do that?
They could certainly identify who the people they don't want me to see the message, and they could change, for example, which YouTube gets suggested.
Would you know the difference If your YouTubes were not being suggested as often to the small sliver of the public that are the influential ones, you wouldn't notice.
You might notice something like what I saw with my 17 or 18 percent who seem to get automatically unfollowed.
It could be that the people who are getting automatically unfollowed, wait for it, are the persuadables.
Now, I'm not going to make that claim because I don't have the sufficient data to say that that's true.
I'm just saying that it would look kind of exactly like this if there was something going on, some mischief.
But we don't know.
The fact that we don't know creates the following situation, which I talk about in different contexts.
Whenever you have...
The following variables, you're going to have mischief.
The following variables are a huge upside, you know, either making money or getting power.
So there's a huge upside gain that you could get.
It is almost impossible to get caught.
And there are a number of people involved.
The number of people involved is to make sure that there's at least one person who's willing to do something Mischievous, let's say.
If you only had one person who saw a big upside game and it was only one person and they knew they wouldn't get caught, you might say, well, okay, it's one person.
Sometimes that one person will do the ethical thing and they won't do the thing they could do.
If it was just one person.
Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't.
But if you have a number of people, you can guarantee somebody in that number of people is going to take the free money Big upside gain, either in power or whatever it is that they're trying to gain, no chance of getting caught.
In what situation have you ever seen those variables?
Gigantic upside gain, no chance of getting caught, and lots of people involved.
When those are the variables, when do you not see mischief?
Never. In the history of humankind.
You've never, not once, seen a situation like that where people don't jump in and aggressively exploit the system.
It's what we do. We're humans, right?
You would expect nothing less.
So, I would say at this point that whatever you thought about the republic and about the democracy is over.
And we don't have to worry about losing our democratic process because it's already gone.
Now, and by the way, I mean that sincerely, without hyperbole, we don't have the same political system we had 10 years ago, and nobody decided to make it that way.
We didn't have a national conversation.
Let's change our government by really putting the social media platforms largely in control of this stuff.
Nobody made that decision.
It just sort of evolved that way.
That's what we got. Now, I've said before that if I ever reached a million followers on Twitter, that I would largely run the world.
Meaning that because, again, I'm a skilled persuader.
I've studied it. I know how to do it.
If my platform were bigger, and I'm just using a million as sort of my, you know, there's no science behind that number.
It's just a big number.
There's somewhere at around a million followers I would be so hard to ignore that I would become part of every conversation.
And once I become part of a conversation, it starts changing things.
Now somebody said, look how big your ego is.
I'm making a claim that anybody who has my skill set and reaches a million followers is going to have this kind of influence.
My skill set is simply that I've spent time learning these things.
It's not that I'm magic.
It's not that I'm smarter than other people.
It's that I spend time learning a specific skill set.
Anybody could do it. Now, you add that to the fact that...
That I would have more followers.
That magnifies the message.
So, here's the thing.
As we're entering this new age of enlightenment, where we understand that voting is not what we thought it was, but rather we're being influenced by all these dark forces, if you want to get your way, the best way to do it Aside from voting, is to boost the voices on social media that are the closest to your own.
So I think you're going to see sort of a race to promote certain voices so that they have more influence on social media, because...
That's the thing. Now, keep in mind that if it's true that I'm being shadow banned or throttled back in any way, and I don't have conclusive evidence that that's the case, but if it were true, the more users I have, the harder it is to make me invisible.
So, as some number of users, it would be almost impossible to game the system To keep me away from people.
So, if you want to get your system back, you would find people you agree with, it doesn't have to be me, but just people you agree with who are persuasive, try to boost their social media traffic, and then those voices become sort of the proxies for you.
Alright, let's talk about...
Let's talk about Star Trek Discovery.
So Jack Posobiec asked on Twitter, what were people's favorite science fiction shows?
People had a lot of opinions, as you might imagine.
I mentioned Star Trek Discovery, which is on CBS All Access Pass, and I got a huge pushback.
And I do know that at least...
There's a huge number of people who are seriously mad about that show because it's too politically correct.
Now, it is politically correct in the sense that they make a female character the most ass-kicking character, but that's all science fiction.
The entire genre of science fiction has gone to a female-centric model where the women are the badasses and they're the ones who are beating up the aliens and stuff.
So that part I just started getting used to.
Yeah, it's probably a phase that society is going through.
But the reason I like it is that the first season was confused and wasn't that great.
So if you only watched the first season and then you bailed out, You missed the best second season ever.
The second season introduces a new character, Captain Pike, who's just great.
But what I like about the show is they have the best actors, the person who plays the main character, Michael.
She's a woman, but her name is Michael for reasons that are not explained.
She's a great actor.
Or do you say actress?
I don't know what is the proper term.
But all of the actors are the best that I've seen in the sci-fi ensemble.
And the effects, the stories, the actors, second season is great.
First season? Let's talk about Assange.
Somebody on Twitter sent me some articles showing me that both Rand Paul and Rudy Giuliani, not too long ago, in the not distant past, have suggested that Assange maybe not go to jail for different reasons.
Rand Paul was suggesting that we offer a pardon, the government offers a pardon, in return for whatever he knows about Hillary Clinton's email.
Separately, Rudy Giuliani was making the point that you couldn't really criminalize what WikiLeaks or Assange did because it's the same thing that the New York Times and other organs do all the time.
And so that was more of a legal opinion.
Rand Paul was more of a practical, political opinion.
Giuliani was more of a preliminary, obviously not a deep dive, but a high-level legal opinion.
So remember I said before that this whole Assange situation could be laundering him through the process with the understanding that there's no way he's ever going to get convicted for anything.
In return, he may be giving up some secrets, but because there would not be a deal per se that we were aware of, maybe we never even know the government made a deal.
Because the government would take a lot of heat if it made any kind of a deal with Assange.
There are enough people who want Assange in jail or executed that it would be very awkward for our government to say, ah, we made a deal.
But There are deals, and then there are deals.
And it's possible that the deal could be to charge him with things that they know full well could never get a complete jury to agree on.
Because that would launder him through the system.
Nobody could say we ignored it.
Nobody could say he was above the law.
Nobody could say that the government did not act aggressively to try to put the greatest harm upon him.
It would look like that.
But, at the end, he would be a free person, at least in this country.
He'd still have problems with other countries, I think.
But, yeah, we would have run him through the system, and then we would say, all right, well, maybe we don't like how it turned out, but we do respect our own legal system, for the most part.
And that would really hurt.
All right.
So what else we got going on here?
Um...
Somebody asked me why I cared if YouTube demonetized some of my videos.
It's a fair question, so I think I'll give you a fair answer.
And the context of that is that since I've said I have FU money, and what's the point of needing to be monetized if you're not doing it for the money?
Completely fair question.
Here's my complete answer.
The demonetization has more to do...
What has more to do is about more than money.
The money, of course, matters and it is an incentive.
I would work harder for more money even though I have money.
If you don't understand that, you don't understand human beings.
It doesn't matter how much money I have, I would still work harder for more money.
In other words, if I were monetized, I would more likely do, let's say, a second video in the afternoon instead of whatever else I was going to do.
I'm almost sure I would still do one a day because I enjoy it so much, but I might do more.
I might put a little more effort into it.
I might improve the quality of the production.
I might buy a new microphone.
At the moment, 100% of my monetization Which comes through Patreon for people who still are okay with Patreon.
It comes through these super hearts that you can do on Periscope.
If you click the super heart, you can donate money.
And then the monetization that I just turned on for YouTube, just to give you a sense of scope, my total lifetime monetization on YouTube, which has only been this past week, is a little bit over $200.
So, just so you know what monetization means, in my case, about $200 over three days, I think.
So, essentially, all of my monetization goes to pay for my assistant, who moves it from Periscope over to YouTube, adds captions, etc., and for improving the production.
So, we're a long way away From me actually making anything like money, you know, all of the monetization that I expect to, you know, experience over the next year would be more related toward improving the product.
So I'm not expecting to make a profit on it.
But if I did, let me say this as clearly as possible.
I would love to make money.
On this or anything else.
I'm a capitalist. So if I do more work and people like it, and that causes me to make more money, then I'm very happy and I'm more likely to do a better job.
But the other point I was getting at is that the demonetization, I'm pretty sure, I think this is safe to say, would also affect its visibility.
In other words, when YouTube says, we suggest this next video because you watch this one, it seems unlikely to me that they would suggest demonetized videos.
Because the reason they got demonetized is that they're not as suitable for the general audience as an advertiser would like them to be.
So it makes sense to me that demonetized and less visible are sort of the same thing.
So it does matter if you're demonetized.
That's the answer to the question.
This is a random point.
You saw, I tweeted last week, I think, a study that said that racism in the United States is sharply down under Trump and was not sharply down under Obama.
Now, you have to be careful of this kind of science because it just might be wrong.
So I would wait for more confirming studies to feel comfortable that that's true.
But people said, well, how could it be true that there could be more crazy people doing violent mass shootings at the same time that racism in general is down?
And I think that those are completely compatible.
One, the crazy shooters are literally crazy people.
Crazy people are more likely to be triggered because the news business is stimulating our fight or flight instincts.
So you would expect that the people most sensitive to having their fight or flight instincts tweaked, most sensitive to being, you know, radicalized online would be crazy people.
And sure enough, crazy people are doing more crazy stuff because everybody's amped up.
Like, whatever you were feeling about politics five years ago, I'll bet you feel more about it now.
You might not care more, but the way you feel is probably higher.
So you could easily have the crazy people being triggered at the same time you wake up in the morning, you see your neighbor who is some different ethnic group, and you're better than you've ever been.
So my experience is that racism, at least against Blacks and against Hispanics, it feels like it's downed.
My regular life, I just don't see any signs that anything's getting worse for racism against those groups in particular.
But, of course, there's greater racism against white people.
I think that's obvious.
It's just that there's a different level of sympathy when it happens to the group that people think are running the patriarchy.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It just means that people don't care as much.
I like this quote.
Who said this first?
That the demand for racism is outstripping the supply?
Was it Greg Gottfeld who said that?
That the news business has to go out and generate some racism because they need it for the news, but there's just not enough of it happening, so they've got to go gin up some, get their own racism going.
By the way, I've agreed to go on Candace Owens' show, but I might wait until my, closer to when my upcoming book is out.
Oh my God, somebody's reminding me.
Poor Naomi Wolf.
I died a thousand deaths.
I hope you saw this story. So author Naomi Wolf wrote a book, which I think it was about the prosecution of homosexuals in England back in some period.
And she was doing a BBC interview.
And Because I'm an author, and because I've gone on many book tours, and because I'm going to be going on another one this year, I could feel the pain like it was so personal to me.
It hurt. So what happened was, she goes on the BBC to talk about her book, and it turns out that two really important concepts she misunderstood.
which caused really the main premise of her book to be completely flawed and in summary there were There's a phrase called death recorded.
She interpreted meaning that they were executed.
So she thought, well, there were lots of executions of homosexuals, and that was an important point that I guess was part of the theme of her book.
Turns out that that word, that the phrase death recorded, was an old-timey way to not specify what happened, meaning that you could record the death without killing the person.
Apparently that was the common usage of the term, is they wanted to say, well, we'll record it like we killed you, but we don't want to kill you, so we'll just write down that we killed you, or something like that.
I may have that wrong. But the point of it is that on a live BBC interview, this book that she probably worked on for a year or two or whatever, she's completely unmasked for her central theme, just being wrong.
And I died.
I couldn't even get to the end of the interview.
To her credit, and a lot of credit, how often do you see people sort of trapped about the facts on live TV or live interview, and they just lie?
Typically, when people get trapped with a fact check, they just change the subject or they just lie.
But Naomi Wolf hears this, probably realized that she's totally in trouble, and she just says, well, that's an important fact that we should research.
So she actually immediately acknowledged that she could be wrong, And that she needs to look into it.
Now, here's my take on that.
And I'm going to give you the author's take.
I don't expect you to adopt this opinion because I know it's kind of fun to watch people suffer in public.
My respect for her actually went up.
Because she accepted that at the hardest possible time.
I mean... That took some stones to simply even acknowledge that that could be the case.
Now, of course, I assume she'll do some research, and maybe we find out she's right.
Maybe the BBC guy was wrong.
But the fact that she took that like an adult and she accepted completely the possibility and said she would look into it, My standard is not to judge the mistake.
And I've told you this before.
If you judge people by their mistakes, you just end up hating everybody, including yourself, because everybody makes mistakes.
But if you judge people by how they respond, how they handle You have a much more useful standard.
There's more to this story.
She'll have to deal with this maybe forever.
Who knows? But the way she handled it initially seemed brave and somebody who was in control of her ego and had an appreciation for the truth.
Even beyond her own well-being.
So that's what I saw.
So I would say maximum respect to Naomi Wolf for just taking a bad situation in a graceful way.
Very impressive. So I would judge her by that, not by whether the book has a mistake in it.
All right. There was something I knew I wanted to talk about.
That I wrote down and probably can't find it now.
Alright, I think that's all I have to talk about today.
Oh yeah, old nads.
So Jerry Nadler fainted, had some kind of health scare in public yesterday.
Now, I'm not going to be happy about anybody's health problems, but I have to point out that President Trump is the luckiest guy in the world because of who his enemies are.
If your enemies are literally collapsing, Hillary Clinton was the first one to collapse, and now Nadler's literally collapsing, it's not a good look for the opposition.
Now, again, I don't want to make fun of anybody's health problems.
And, you know, I hope that he's...
I hope he's fine health-wise.
But you can't overlook the fact that the quality of the president's critics is getting worse and worse.
I think it was Feraldo who said on The Five yesterday...
That the president had the most unattractive critics.
Now, when he said unattractive, I don't know if he meant physically or just their whole persona, their character.
I think he probably meant it comprehensively.
But Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, and now Pelosi, being the, I would say, the faces of the opposition, It's really problematic for people who want to be on that side.
Because even if you agree with Nadler, people are team players and they feel that anybody on their team is a reflection of themselves, sort of like an accessory.
You put on your own outfit, but your team is your accessories.
And Nadler is not a good accessory for most people.
They're happy to agree with his opinions about the president, but it's hard to promote him as your brand, because he doesn't have a good look, he doesn't have a personality that you love.
He's just not very likable in his public persona.
And Schiff is the same thing.
Schiff is... Odd-looking.
And I've noticed that a number of the President's critics, the Democrats, are unusual-looking.
Is that a coincidence?
Because I said this the other day.
I've said that I believe that the people who have the most genuine hatred for the President are people who have been bullied.
Which is no laughing matter, right?
Now, do you imagine that Jerry Nadler has ever been bullied in his life?
He is short and stout and not a good-looking guy.
Almost certainly, right?
Because we live in a cruel world, and almost certainly he has been bullied in his life.
How about Adam Schiff? Do you think he's ever been bullied in his life?
Probably. I mean, most people have been bullied, so it would be hard to find people who haven't.
Blumenthal. Yes, Blumenthal.
Do you think Blumenthal, big critic of the president, do you think he's ever been bullied in his life?
I'm trying not to be mean, but it's hard to overlook...
That the critics who are the most vocal and out front about this president do have a look.
And again, I'm not trying to be mean.
I don't mean this as an insult.
It's an observation.
There is sort of a look to the people who have what seems to be an emotional hatred of the president.
Now, I would exclude, as I did yesterday, Chuck Schumer...
Pelosi and a number of other people.
There are a number of people who are just legitimate critics of the president.
They're sort of professionals.
I don't see Pelosi as somebody who was necessarily bullied as a kid, or at least not more than anybody else.
I don't know that Chuck Schumer was bullied as a kid, but neither of them seem like they're emotionally involved.
They seem like they're professional critics.
Nadler, Blumenthal, Schiff, They don't seem like that.
They seem like there's something else going on.
Now, some of the younger ones, like Swalwell and AOC, they also seem like just professionals.
When I see Swalwell talking about the president, does it look to you that Swalwell was bullied as a child and he's got an emotional problem with the president?
No, I don't see it.
I see Swalwell doing the things that make sense for somebody who's a politician on the other side, saying the things he says, some of them true, some of them seem a little exaggerated.
But he doesn't look like he has a mental problem.
He doesn't look like he's emotionally involved.
Ted Lieu, same thing.
I would say Ted Lieu is not emotionally involved.
He seems like he's just playing his part.
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