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Dec. 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:15
Episode 758 Scott Adams: Schiff's Rehabilitation, Weird Predictions, Funny Trump Tweets
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Alright, well, there's a whole bunch of fun and interesting stuff in the news.
Interestingly, here's what's not in the news.
Lots of bad stuff.
Think about that.
Do you remember when the news used to be about disasters and people dying and tragedies and all those things?
Not anymore. We have entered the Golden Age, my friends.
In the Golden Age, everything's trending good.
And when something bad happens, we take care of it pretty quickly compared to the past.
Hello, Azerbaijan, Glenn.
All right. Alright, let's talk about a few things.
Devin Nunes wrote a letter to Adam Schiff, which was sort of mocking and sort of serious, and the headline there is that Nunes said, in direct language, that Schiff needs long-term rehabilitation after his many public lies that he knew were lies and now have all been exposed as lies.
Now, I could not love this more.
If Devin Nunes had said, oh, you lied, we were right, you were wrong, that would be kind of normal, wouldn't get any headlines, and it wouldn't be very clever.
But by suggesting that Schiff needs rehabilitation, he's kind of taking it to another level.
He's making you think past the sale, which is, did Schiff do something bad?
And all the way past that to, should we consider rehabilitation?
Now, he doesn't specify what rehabilitation means.
But the implication is that it's sort of a mental health character issue.
And I'm starting to think that that's actually accurate for perhaps Nadler and Schiff.
You know, when you're watching Schumer or Pelosi say stuff that is the same stuff, often the same stuff that Schiff and Adler are saying, you can kind of tell that they're just being political.
Can't you? When you say that when you're watching Nancy, she doesn't seem crazy, she doesn't seem mentally ill, she's just taking a side, and you know why, and you know what's in it for her, and you know their strategy, but it doesn't look crazy.
Same with Schumer. Schumer never looks crazy, does he?
You know, he's very political, etc., but not crazy.
But when you look at Schiff and Adler, I wouldn't say they're crazy in some typical medical sense, but clearly these are people who have a different level of issue with the president than the purely political people do.
I don't think Hillary Clinton is crazy.
There are lots of Democrats who are not crazy.
But when I look at Schiff and Adler, there's something else going on.
Would you not agree?
There's some emotional character something.
There's a little extra going on there.
I don't know what it is. But when Nunes suggests that Schiff needs rehabilitation, It kind of hits that part of your brain that says, yeah, there's something about Schiff.
He's not like the other politicians that you disagree with.
There's something extra going on there that maybe needs to be looked at.
Now, we're not medical professionals.
We cannot diagnose things.
But as a political strategy to reframe Schiff as somebody who's got a problem as opposed to someone who has a different opinion, Not bad, Devin Nunes.
Not bad. Thumbs up.
Speaking of reframing, Lindsey Graham finally came in with the, well, I'm not going to call it a kill shot, but it's a very strong reframing.
Hasn't it been driving you crazy, listening to the Democrats talking about the president and impeachment in Ukraine and saying, and I quote, He's not above the law.
He's not above the law.
He's not above the law.
Now, what makes me crazy about that is that it's pretty effective.
It bothers me because it works.
And what it works to do is make you think past...
Think past the question of whether the president committed a crime.
You think past that to the question of should he be free of punishment for that crime?
So it's a tricky persuasion trick to say he's not above the law when there's no suggestion at the moment that any law was actually broken.
In fact, the impeachment articles don't even mention a law.
There's no law even mentioned.
After all that investigation, they couldn't even find a law that was broken.
I mean, I think you and I, if you and I got investigated, they'd probably find some law that we broke that we don't even know we broke.
But they've investigated the president up and down.
They can't find a law that he broke.
So, they keep saying, the president's not above the law, which is good persuasion, bad ethics.
But Lindsey Graham has countered in the interview, he said, I love Joe Biden, but none of us are above scrutiny.
So that's talking about whether President Trump had a right to look into Burisma and the Bidens.
So this is good framing from Lindsey Graham.
None of us are above scrutiny.
Now, since Biden is not accused of breaking a law, and Lindsey Graham has said directly, and I think he said it before, that he does have a real affection for Joe Biden.
He actually likes the guy.
So he's not saying Joe Biden isn't above the law, because that would be pretty weaselly.
That would be weaselly, because it would make, again, it would make you imagine that there had been a law that somebody is suggesting Joe Biden broke.
But nobody is suggesting that.
There is no law that anybody suggests he broke.
There is only the question of swampiness that maybe needs to be looked into because you don't know what you find once you look into it.
Scrutiny. So when Graham says no one is above scrutiny, that's pretty strong persuasion.
Good wording, good choice of words.
A-plus Lindsey Graham.
Let's talk about Trump.
Trump tweeted...
He does his funniest tweets on the weekend, I think.
He has more time to think about it while he's golfing and whatnot.
But he tweeted, and I quote...
Talking about Nancy Pelosi, Trump says in a tweet, because Nancy's teeth were falling out of her mouth and she didn't have time to think.
That was in reference to somebody else was saying she was confused about something or got something wrong.
And Trump actually tweets about her dentures falling out.
Now, here's the funny part about this.
The funny part about that is that's all I'm going to be seeing the next time I see her talk.
I'm just going to be looking at her mouth and listening to hear the click of her dentures.
I think there are dentures.
I'm not positive she even has dentures.
Can anybody confirm that?
Because it could be that she's just slurring her words for whatever reason.
But it does sound like she has dentures.
So What's funny about this is that Trump is the master of trash-talking like you would in a sport.
So my favorite, I think, was when Trump said that Marco Rubio was sweaty.
That is the ultimate...
Excellent, excellent trash talk.
Because it gets in his head and makes Marco Rubio think, am I sweating?
I hope I don't sweat. I have to worry about everything, but I also have to worry about sweating.
Oh my God, thinking about sweating is making me sweating.
Am I sweating now? Oh no, I'm sweating.
Sweating makes me nervous. I'm sweating more.
If you ever want to really get in somebody's head, the Trump, he sweats too much play on Marco Rubio...
You can't beat that.
That gets in the head and is so self-reinforcing, especially during moments of stress.
It's just so good, you know, in a bad way, right?
I'm not saying you should do this.
You know, you can make your own moral and ethical judgments about things, but you can't argue it doesn't work.
It's really strong.
Pelosi grip. I see that, Andrew.
All right. Likewise, when Trump calls out Nancy's false teeth, if they even are false teeth, I have no idea if that's true, but it's going to make her self-conscious as all get out.
Now, when you become super self-conscious when you're speaking, what happens?
You don't do your best.
And I don't know how Nancy Pelosi could possibly not be self-conscious when the President of the United States calls out her dentures flapping around when she talks.
If she has dentures.
I just don't know if that's even true.
So... Again, it's a classic Trump get in your head kind of thing.
And it's good stuff.
Now, he had another one today.
I think I wrote that one down.
Oh, darn it. Forgot to write that one down.
Oh, yeah. So Trump also tweeted, he was talking about the debates for the general election, and he said, I look very much, this is a tweet today from Trump, I look very much forward to debating whoever the lucky person is who stumbles across the finish line in the little-watched do-nothing Democrat debates.
Ha, ha, ha. Stumble.
I have to read it again because it's so damn funny.
I look very much forward to debating whoever the lucky person is who stumbles across the finish line in the little watched do-nothing Democrat debates.
There are so many insults in that one sentence.
It's like...
Now, as you know, when the Democrats read this, anybody who's anti-Trump, they're going to say, well, that's not funny.
That's not clever. That's just mean.
You know, he's just being a bully.
Why are you laughing at that?
That's not clever. The joke is not what he writes.
That's not the joke, and he knows that.
The joke is the reaction to it.
That's the joke. So when you read this, you know what the reaction is going to be, and that's the thing that makes me laugh, is what he's done to people, how much he's gotten in their head.
So I tweeted this morning that for the last few years, people have been arguing with me when I would say that President Trump is the most persuasive person I've ever seen in my lifetime, as far as a public figure.
And people would argue that point, and they'd say, are you kidding me?
He's not persuasive.
And then I was jokingly tweeting this morning that, well, if you say he's not persuasive, you have to explain, I didn't say this part, but I'll say it now, you have to explain his 95% approval among Republicans, or whatever it is, it's something pretty high.
At the same time, he's managed to convince the Democratic Party to work full-time for his re-election.
Now, it's called the impeachment process.
But the effect of it is, because Trump has managed to sort of take control of the narrative, if you will.
He's winning the narrative.
He's winning the persuasion, if you will.
And the effect of it is that he has the entire Democratic Party working as hard as they can, literally working overtime.
They're actually working long hours into the night, Literally working overtime to get him elected.
Because that's the obvious outcome of all of this.
So that's funny.
So what else we got?
I had to delete a tweet.
I tweeted yesterday because the world is so darn dumb.
I tweeted a suggestion for filtering on Twitter to filter out trolls.
Now, what happens on Twitter if you make a suggestion of any type?
Doesn't matter what the suggestion is.
If you tweet a suggestion, you will get the following results.
Something like two-thirds of the people who will be in your comments will misinterpret what you said into something stupid.
And then go after you like crazy for being so stupid.
But they're rarely criticizing what you said or suggested.
Rather, they've turned it into some weird stupid thing.
Just so they could criticize it.
So I was spending too much time yesterday going into the comments and saying, no, I didn't say that.
No, that's not the idea.
No, that's not how it works.
Until I realized that it could never end.
You know, there would be just thousands of people who just would be misinterpreting it and blaming me.
So I deleted it, but I'm going to tell you what the idea was.
The idea was to have an option per tweet Now listen to this.
It's the per-tweet part that's important, that the author of the tweet can say that for this tweet, and just this tweet alone, I won't accept, or I won't see, let's say you can just mute them automatically, anybody who's anonymous.
So you can still comment all you want.
If you're an anonymous account, you can keep your anonymous account.
You can comment, you can tweet, you can do anything you want.
But I personally would have the option of not seeing it.
Now, the stronger version of that is that they can't actually comment.
I'm not opposed to that, but if you wanted to give everybody their full freedom of speech, you could just say, Well, actually, I think I would prefer it if I could just block them.
Now, here are the complaints that people made when I made that suggestion.
Somebody says that Jack Dorsey doesn't like suggestions.
He literally liked my suggestion.
So on Twitter, Jack Dorsey actually hit the like button.
Now, that doesn't mean he thinks it's a good suggestion.
The way I interpret it is...
You may know that Jack Dorsey on Twitter recently announced that they formed some external working group to try to figure out better ways to filter and run algorithms on Twitter.
So he's actively looking for suggestions.
They're actively brainstorming.
How do we make Twitter healthier, etc.?
So I think the like that you put on the suggestion had more to do with encouraging the brainstorming than liking that specific idea.
That's my interpretation of it anyway.
So some people asked, how can you tell if somebody's anonymous?
How could you detect it?
And that's a real good question.
And I don't know the answer to it, but I imagine it could be done.
Because when you sign up for Twitter, you at least have to give them a phone number or an email.
And there are probably a number of ways that you could sort of determine if somebody is real.
Now there's the Blue Check verified system, but that's only for some people.
So is there a way that you could build into Twitter A way to test whether they're being anonymous or using their real name that would not be maybe 100% accurate, but would work alright.
Here's a suggestion.
If you want to be able to comment and be known as a real person, You could maybe upload your ID. So you could upload your driver's license.
And if your driver's license matches the name you're using in your profile, then that would be a real person.
Now, I don't know if that's practical.
I don't know if you could do that.
It's an international thing, so you'd have to handle IDs from different countries, etc.
But it would be a nice option.
Yeah, so ID theft would still be a problem, but most people would not bother.
I think most trolls would not bother to get a fake ID just to pretend to be a real person when it would be just as easy to continue being anonymous.
What would be the point of pretending to be a real person on Twitter when you could just have an actual, you know, fake profile?
So I don't think there's incentive.
To get a fake ID just so you look like a real person on Twitter except for a few pranksters or whatever.
It should be a trivial problem.
The other thing I wonder is if you were to put your name and address into Twitter when you signed up, there are probably enough public resources that know where people live.
In other words, you could probably find out if somebody lives in that zip code Under the name that they're claiming and they are the age that they claim.
Because right now you can sign up for a service to do a background check on anybody.
If you do a background check on anybody, you can find their address.
You can find their age, their date of birth, their real name, stuff like that.
So you can imagine a process where somebody has to put their name and address in and Twitter could at least check to see if there's somebody by that name who lives in that area.
Now, that still allows you to take the name of somebody who's not on Twitter, right?
So none of these are foolproof systems.
They're all just some brainstorming suggestions.
Anyway, so here's the main point.
Some of the people who didn't like the idea thought, hey, you're taking away my freedom to speak anonymously.
And since I have to speak anonymously because I might get fired from my day job if I give my real opinion, Wouldn't you, Scott, be missing out on good opinions?
To which I say, probably not.
Probably not. If I were to block all the people who are anonymous, but still allow all the people who are under their real identity, would I miss anything important?
Because it seems to me that the opinions that move the world, in other words, opinions that actually matter, are the ones that people will say out loud.
If you have an opinion that you're not willing to say out loud because you would get fired, I understand that.
You know, it's tough to be a Trump supporter these days.
But you can guarantee that there's somebody who will say that same thing under a real identity.
There's probably nothing that you would be afraid of saying because you might get fired.
There's probably nothing that there isn't somebody else who is perfectly willing to say it in public under their real name.
So would I miss any of the excellent opinions of the anonymous people?
Theoretically, yes.
But I think in the real world, essentially, no.
Because most people have pretty similar opinions on each side of the political realm.
And if the anonymous people I never see on a particular tweet, I'll see people who are not anonymous, probably with the same opinions.
So I probably won't miss anything.
The other point is that your freedom of speech is not impinged By my freedom to ignore you.
So I certainly have the freedom to not see your speech, while at the same time you have the freedom to speak all you want, tweet all you want, etc.
All right, so I just put that idea out there for thought.
So what it is not is something just for the blue checks.
You would need some other way to verify people's identity.
Don't know what that is. All right.
Speaking of that sort of thing, I've started posting these Periscopes, which, as you know, get posted over to YouTube.
But YouTube demonetizes all of my stuff and then makes me go through the manual process to re-monetize it when it's too late, because all the traffic's already going by.
So that's still happening.
And by the way, I have verified that YouTube does still run ads...
On my stuff that's demonetized.
Now, I don't know the details of that, but wouldn't you assume that if we can observe it, I mean, we could just look at it, and we could say, okay, it's demonetized.
You can check that for sure, because it says so.
And then you can also check that you're looking at an advertisement.
At the same time, it says demonetized.
So it's not like you can't see that the advertisements are running when it's demonetized.
Now, do you think that they're running advertisements and not collecting money from the advertisers because I'm demonetized?
Well, anything's possible.
I'm thinking that's not what's happening.
I'm thinking that YouTube is keeping the money from the ads and simply not giving them to me.
Now, I would need confirmation that that's true, but if it is true, it's obviously a class-action lawsuit, and I would imagine that there would be a lot of people in my situation who would join them.
So, let me put this out to you, if there are others having exactly the same problem, but only if you have some visibility on the question of whether YouTube is really making money While at the same time demonetizing me.
If that's true, then I would have to say that's certainly lawsuit material.
But it's an open question.
I believe that the trend of Trump supporters lying to pollsters is growing.
And it should grow.
I recommend, and I'm going to say this unambiguously, if you're a Trump supporter and you get polled, you should lie.
And say you're not.
Now, you don't have to, of course.
It's a free country. You can say whatever you want.
But wouldn't it be funny if the polls were amazingly wrong?
You have to admit, it would be funny.
But also, why would you take the chance...
Of giving your information to an anonymous pollster in an age when absolutely nothing is anonymous.
Could the pollsters identify who you are?
They have your phone number, right?
If they have your phone number and they know that you said you're a Trump supporter, does that information exist in a database that could someday be bad for you?
Yes, because the Democrats are saying explicitly that they're going to come after Trump supporters.
It's not even a theory.
It's happening right now.
If they had a list of who voted for Trump, they would use that list.
Do you think the polling companies are so secure that there's no employee of a polling company who can get a hold of that data and put it on the Internet?
Of course they can.
Now, I don't know what the odds are.
But of course that could happen.
In fact, I would say the odds of it happening, what, at least 20%?
Minimal, right?
20% chance that you'll be on a list that says you're a Trump supporter based on answering a poll.
If you're a Trump supporter and you honestly answer a pollster, that's just bad thinking.
Because it doesn't help Trump To say that he's more popular, because he's running anyway.
He got the nomination.
You don't have to help Trump.
He already got the nomination.
He's the candidate.
So you can't help him by answering honestly.
You can't help me by answering honestly, because I don't want you to lose your job.
I don't want you to be on a list that says you should be shunned in the future.
So it won't help me if you tell the truth.
Can you think of anybody in the world that would help if you told the truth to a pollster?
I can't. I can't think of any benefit to that.
I can think of a lot of risk.
I can't think of any benefit.
All right. As you know, I've been field testing the response to people who say, okay, boomer.
And depending on the context, I continue to find that my clever response, Mark Schneider is one of the proponents of this, is I say, okay, Doomer, with a D. Okay, Doomer, so far...
Seems to stop all conversation.
So when there's somebody who's afraid that Trump is destroying the world, or ISIS is taking over, or climate change is going to kill us all, OK Doomer just totally stops the conversation.
But test it yourself.
That's anecdotal. I have a new criteria for blocking people.
I blocked somebody this morning.
Every now and then, as many of you are aware, I will retweet a Democrat or somebody who's anti-Trumper because there's something they said that I think you should see or I agree with it.
Yesterday or today, I forget, I tweeted AOC And it was part of a larger rant she had about health care, but one of them was that she had 60 options that she had to figure out which one she wanted, and that nobody should go through that kind of paperwork.
So AOC had a tweet complaining about the complexity of making a decision on health care in the current system.
I completely agree with that criticism.
And so I retweeted it.
And then somebody came after me in the comments and said that I need to explain why I've retweeted that, as if I'm not allowed to retweet somebody who's on the other team according to you.
That's an instant block now, okay?
So I want to make sure I've warned you all.
If you tell me that I should not have or could not have or it's bad form or it's a bad idea to retweet somebody on the other team, instant block.
I don't want to have any association with people who are only seeing this as a team sport.
You can see it as a team sport, and you're welcome to do that.
I just don't want to hear from you, because that's just nothing useful.
So, if you got blocked today, that's why.
I continue to test my provocative theory that I call artists versus economists.
And on Twitter, I was tweeting that you can tell if somebody is more likely to be an artist or more likely to be one of the fields where you learn critical thinking, economists being the stand-in for that.
As is the way on Twitter, this was radically misinterpreted, and then once again, I had to spend my whole day explaining to people that they didn't understand the point, and they were sure that I had contradicted myself, and so I ended up just deleting the tweet, because it was just exhausting to explain to people that they can't read over and over again.
No, you can't read. Try reading it again.
Maybe if you read it, perhaps you should read the tweet and then comment.
So I just got exhausted doing that.
But here is what I've learned.
I continue to do this test, and it continues to work in ways that are scary.
Because I used to think maybe there were smart people and dumb people in the world, and I'm starting to think that's not the case.
At least in an IQ sense.
I'm starting to think that a lot of our differences in terms of how we see the world are based on what education and experience we have in what domains.
And that some of them don't teach you how to think.
But here's the worst part.
You don't know that.
You don't know that you don't know how to think.
So that you think you have common sense.
You think you're equal to the other people who have learned how to think.
Because you can't tell the difference.
So look for that.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The number of crazy comments that come from people in the arts is astonishing.
It's very consistent. Somebody was mentioning Krugman.
Now, I shouldn't have to say this.
I shouldn't have to say this.
You're adults, right?
Most of you? You understand there's something like this, where I'm saying artists or economists.
You understand that doesn't mean every time, every person, right?
And you should understand that when I say artists have a certain characteristic, most of the people who came after me said, but Scott, you draw Dilber.
You draw Dilworth, Scott.
So isn't that inconsistent with you saying that artists are not good at critical thinking?
Scott! Now that, of course, is a complete misunderstanding of the point.
The point is that if the only thing you studied was art, On average, you're probably not going to have the same thinking tools as somebody who studied, let's say, art and also economics and also science and also psychology.
So there are very few people who have only studied art or only studied economics.
It's a generality.
It's meant to be a generality.
And there are no absolutes there.
So if you're arguing it from a perspective of there's an exception, Hey, is Krugman an exception?
I'm just not interested.
Of course there are exceptions.
You don't have to ask me about every one of them.
Alright. Did you see Rudy Giuliani's tweet thread which suggests he's found out all kinds of damning things over in Ukraine?
So I guess he's been traveling over there digging up dirt on something.
I don't know. But he seems to indicate he's got all kinds of You know, good stuff.
I don't know if any of that's real.
But it's interesting.
It's interesting. Here's a random thought.
You know John McAfee?
He was the person who created McAfee, the antivirus stuff.
But he's an interesting character.
I think he would get arrested if he came to this country.
But I realize that he follows me on Twitter.
And I follow him.
Would you be interested in having me ask John McAfee to come on Periscope?
Because he's announced his presidential run.
And I think...
I can't imagine who would be more interesting than him.
So I'll just put that out there.
If you want me to invite John McAfee on the Periscope, I don't know if he'd come.
But I can't imagine anybody who would be more interesting.
All right. Here's a study.
Have you been seeing all the talk about the damage of porn and, let's say, self-gratification?
So there's a lot of conservatives especially talking about porn and people who are using it, doing a certain thing, and how it's damaging people.
So I was reading this study, and it said that the erectile dysfunction rates For men under 40, it has gone up quite a bit.
So the number of people with low libido is skyrocketing.
And the article I was reading says no variable related to youthful erectile defunction has meaningfully changed since then.
So they're saying that the only thing that's changed Is that there's more porn, or better porn.
So the suggestion is that the men who are looking at porn, and then when they try to have sex with real women, they can't function because the porn has sort of rewired their brain.
I think that's true.
So I'm going to say that's, you know, my assumption is that that's completely demonstrable.
But here's my only quibble.
There's definitely something else that's changed.
So when the article says nothing else has changed except there's more porn, that's not true, is it?
Let me suggest some other things that have changed.
Diet, soy, as people are saying.
I don't know if that has any scientific bearing, but it's changed.
And certainly it's implicated in the whole sex hormones situation.
Here's another thing that's changed.
The Me Too movement.
Now, the Me Too movement, I think most of us generally think it's a positive thing in the sense that women have been harassed for eons, and now at least they're starting to get at least a little bit closer to some kind of relief from that, and the Me Too movement being a big part of that.
But here's my controversial statement.
If you were a young man working in a corporate environment in the, let's say the 80s, just to pick a decade, you were surrounded by sex, sexual suggestions, and it was just a completely...
That was my experience anyway, is that being a young person working in the corporate world was so sexualized, it was crazy.
And the number of people who were in the office who were having extramarital affairs and coupling up with each other was through the roof.
And the conversations were often sexual.
By today's standards, they would all be grounds for firing.
But back then, it was common, good or bad.
There's no judgment on this, right?
I'm just describing.
So when my trolls take this out of context later, I'm not saying the old days were better.
I'm just describing the difference.
And then you were also in an environment where people were addressing In some cases, more provocatively, probably more so than today.
So I think there was also more continuous daytime exposure to real-world things that were getting men kind of worked up during the day.
So that changed, because I'll bet you that men are not even making eye contact in hallways as much when they're walking down the hallways, if a woman is walking the other direction.
And by the way, I've completely stopped making eye contact when I remember to do it.
Because my reflex, let's say I'm walking by somebody in a hallway or on a sidewalk or something, my reflex is to look at their face, In case it's somebody I know or in case they're just friendly, male or female, and just say hi.
But if I catch that it's a woman walking the other direction, I'm more likely to just look down or look the other direction now.
So here's my point.
If you're male...
Your body chemistry is greatly influenced by the inputs during the day.
And if the inputs during the day used to be more, let's say, overtly sexual, and now they're less so, because people are actively trying to avoid looking and thinking and acting a certain way, that would make a difference, wouldn't it? Is it not also true that the testosterone level of men has dropped every decade?
That's true too, right?
I don't know why, but that's changed.
So wouldn't the drop in testosterone explain things as much as porn?
Unless the porn is causing the drop in testosterone?
Maybe. All right.
And let me pivot to some of my predictions.
Alright, so I'm going to get back to the porn thing because that was one of my predictions.
So I've told you often that if you want to test your world view, The best way to do it is to see if you can predict things.
So I've made a number of predictions, some you've seen, some you don't know about, I'll tell you about.
And I test them.
So I'm going to test them right now.
And what I found is that I have a bad track record on, let's say, ordinary stuff.
Like if just some ordinary person is running for office and I try to predict who's going to win, I'm not especially good at that.
Because there's nothing there that works to my special knowledge.
But if there's somebody in the race or in the world who has special persuasion skills, I probably have a little advantage there because I can recognize them.
So, for example, as you know, I identified Trump as being persuasive and likely to win the presidential election before other people.
And I also noticed AOC as having a special skill When most people were calling her a flash in the pan and a bartender and stuff like that, and now she's practically running the Democratic Party.
So I seem to be good in certain categories, but let me tell you some of the least, let's say the wildest predictions I've ever made, and see how I've done on the most unusual ones,
okay? In my book, The Dilbert Future, that was published in 1997, I made a prediction that still catches me flack 20-some years later.
And the prediction was this, that evolution would be debunked in my lifetime.
In scientific terms, not in religious terms.
So I never said that evolution would be debunked in favor of, you know, Genesis.
But I did say that science would debunk evolution in my lifetime.
Has that happened?
Yes. Now when I say debunked, that's of course a strong term.
But it is true that there is an alternate explanation of evolution that is backed by a small number, but real scientists.
Nick Bostrom, who's, I believe, a scientist, is the one who came up with it, and it certainly would make evolution not applicable.
So imagine how wild that prediction was.
The entire scientific community was saying, no, we scientists all agree, for the most part, evolution, evolution.
And I publicly predicted against that, not in terms of a religious explanation, but as a scientific one.
Here was my thinking.
My thinking is, specifically, and here's the reason I gave, for why I thought it would, Why it would be rethought.
I said that the next hundred years will be a search for a better perception instead of better vision.
In other words, my prediction about evolution was based on our perception of our reality.
And that's what simulation theory is.
It's about a perception of our reality.
It's not about whether this fossil is real.
It's not about, you know, whether DNA can mutate.
It was about whether our entire perception of reality would be transformed.
So that was in 1997 I made that prediction.
Not bad. All right?
I also predicted in the same book that virtual reality in the form of something like the holodeck Would make real sex extinct.
And as I just mentioned, just regular porn that's not yet even 3D, for the most part, has lowered men's interest in having sex with real women, substantially, enough that some are considering it an emergency.
What happens when this level of porn moves into the 3D world?
Well, if you have not experienced virtual reality, and I have.
I've got a virtual reality box over here.
If you've not experienced how real it feels, even while your brain knows it's not real, but you see the world like it's real, if you haven't experienced that in person, you don't know how bad this is going to get.
Let me tell you, whatever level the porn addiction slash crisis is right now, you haven't seen anything.
It's going to take a whole new level, and it's going to make sex with humans seem like a stupid idea.
That's happening. And there's nothing you can do to change that.
There's nothing that would change that.
So I think that prediction...
It certainly has the indication that it's happening.
I made a weird prediction, also in 1997.
That there would be a rise of something that I called Harry Reasoners.
Now, Harry Reasoner was a real person.
He was a news guy back in the old 60 Minutes, you know, original days.
He's passed away.
But it was a play on words.
Instead of Harry like a person's name, I referred to them as Harry, as in the hair on your head.
And the thought was that on the Internet there would rise a number of, let's say, voices or pundits Who would have bad hair and would come to be sort of the voices of reason.
And the prediction was that we wouldn't be able to discern our reality from the news because the news wouldn't be reliable.
1997, folks.
And I said that instead of relying on the news for the truth, you would need certain people who would emerge just as credible figures that would have bad hair, but they'd be good at explaining stuff.
That's exactly what I'm doing.
I've got bad hair, and I'm good at explaining stuff.
Somebody just said Alan Dershowitz.
Exactly. Exactly.
Exactly. Somebody said Joe Rogan.
Exactly. Bad hair, good at explaining stuff.
I was going to say Jordan Peterson, but he actually has excellent hair, but he has a beard.
I don't remember if I said it in the book that they would be hairy in that way.
But it is true that Levin...
It is true, it seems, that, well, Sertovich has good hair.
He's a bad example. Malcolm Gladwell.
Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell.
So, not all of the important figures who are explaining things have bad hair, but I'm going to claim partial victory on that one.
I also predicted in the early 2000s that there would be a caliphate in the Middle East.
There was. And that they would be using small drones for terrorist attacks.
I think that's guaranteed.
I also predicted in this book years ago That the news industry would start killing celebrities to generate news.
I predicted that the actual news would be so positive that we would figure out how to make stuff work pretty well in the future that the news industry would have to actually start creating news by killing people.
That was shortly before Princess Di died trying to avoid photographers.
So I'm not going to say that proved it, but we are watching the news trying to assassinate people's careers.
Wouldn't you say that it's true?
That the news industry, especially the news on the left, is literally assassinating people, at least politically and career-wise, to generate news.
Would you say that's not true?
Are you watching it every day?
The news is not physically killing people, in most cases, but they're actually targeting people for destruction To make news.
It gets clicks. That's almost all we're watching now, is the news targeting and destroying people to create more news.
Think about that. I predicted in 1997 that video cameras would be so ubiquitous that it would be impossible to get away with crime.
Almost there.
When was the last time you saw a crime that involved any kind of a public event or business in which there were not video cameras?
It almost never happens anymore.
So that one was correct.
I also made that weird prediction that Hillary's health was bad during the election.
Now, that was a pretty bold thing to say.
And she's the only candidate I know who, during the election, passed out at a public event, had to be dragged into a car.
And there's more to the story that's rumored, but that's not confirmed.
But apparently she was pretty darn sick.
So a few people were on the same page on that one.
I predicted, of course, back in 2016, I said that the two movies on one screen was what we were about to see.
And I said that reality itself would be changed by Trump.
True? It's true, wouldn't you say?
True. I think that, in fact, there was just yet another article, I think, in the New York Times in which somebody was saying exactly the same thing, that our world has separated into two versions of reality.
Think about what a weird prediction that was in 2016.
I literally predicted...
That reality would split into two movies that are playing on the same screen, meaning we'd look at the same facts, but we'd see different movies.
Think how weird that was when I said it.
And now it's literally ordinary.
Like, everybody agrees it's true.
When I first said it, I don't think anybody thought it would be true.
That's about as contrarian a prediction as anybody's ever made in the history of predictions.
Here's another contrarian one.
When the Vegas shooting happened, And ISIS claimed that it was an ISIS event.
I said, in public, it wasn't ISIS. At the same time, ISIS was actually taking credit for it, and the experts said, you know, ISIS doesn't take credit for stuff unless it's really them.
And I said, this will be the exception.
And it was. Think how weird that was.
ISIS was taking credit, and I still said, in public, it's not them.
And then we found out it wasn't.
Remember the Cuban sonic weapon?
I said it's not a sonic weapon.
When everybody said it's a sonic weapon.
At least everybody I know of.
Maybe somebody thought it wasn't.
And sure enough, years have gone by and they can't find any sonic weapon.
As I predicted.
And somebody gave me a hard time because I predicted that Kamala Harris would be the nominee for the Democrats, and she's already dropped out of the race or suspended her campaign.
But am I wrong yet?
Let me just suggest that if Kamala Harris became Joe Biden's running mate, that people are going to look at that situation, especially since Joe is talking about having won Having only one term.
And the reason he's talking about that is because if we see more of him, and you'd have to in the general election, once it reaches the general election, the news will no longer be able to ignore Joe Biden.
And he's going to look less and less appealing until his vice presidential running mate is being talked of as, wait for it, the real nominee.
Because people are going to say, you know, Joe is technically the head of the ticket, but we're kind of voting for the vice president in this specific case.
That would make Kamala Harris effectively the nominee without getting nominated.
It might not happen, but I'm just saying that my prediction about her being the nominee is not yet dead, except in a technical sense.
Somebody says, your predictions are often wrong.
Well, I covered that in the first part you might have missed.
So when my predictions are wrong, they're usually in certain categories.
So the ones that tend to be wrong are sort of ordinary things like which ordinary candidate will win this race, which way will the vote go, stuff like that.
I don't think I have any special insight in that stuff.
But, in terms of understanding reality and the trends of how we see our world and persuasion, I seem to have a good record there.
And you would still lose the bet, that is correct.
Yeah, even if Kamala Harris were vice president that everybody thought should be president, I would still technically lose the bet.
The evolution was wrong, artist's opinion. - Thank you.
Well, I'm not going to argue that with you.
You missed the deep state, did I? So what I said was that the deep state was not an organized coup, but rather it was probably people with Trump derangement syndrome acting individually, They may have been complaining to each other collectively, but I imagine their decisions were sort of individual decisions.
They may have been blinded by the thought that it was good for the world, something like that.
We still don't know what the deal is with Brennan and Clapper.
If there was anybody who specifically was planning on an overthrow, it would be those two.
But we don't have that information.
Yeah, if the deep state is just a bureaucracy that has some preferences, then of course that exists.
You totally missed the boat on any conspiracies, such as?
I still have stocks.
I own a few stocks.
I'm into index funds, so I'm mostly in stocks.
What about the meeting in Andy's office?
We still don't know what that was about, so I don't know if I had a...
But I did say, and I did say that the so-called insurance policy was not a reference to a coup.
And I believe that Horowitz has validated that, right?
Do a fact check on this.
Did Horowitz...
He did not conclude, as far as I know, that the insurance policy conversation or the meeting in Andy's office, all that conversation, I believe he did not conclude that that was coup talk.
I need a fact check on that.
Yeah, so somebody is agreeing with me.
Now, that doesn't mean it wasn't.
But he looked into it pretty clearly.
He asked what was their other explanation for things, and he must have heard them.
What about cartels as terrorists?
Dead in the water? I think that there will be continuous movement toward treating the cartels as terrorist organizations.
I'm guessing that we've got a secret deal with Mexico because the Mexican government can't say that they're going to work with the United States to take out the cartels because the cartels probably have too much control over the government of Mexico.
So, The way that it could happen is the Mexican government says in public, no, no, no, we're not going to do this, while in private they turn a blind eye or help a little bit.
So depending on how much in the pocket the president of Mexico is, in the pocket of the cartels, that's the part we don't know.
But I wouldn't be surprised if the United States is already organizing and planning military action.
Maybe you'll never hear about it.
Because if a cartel facility in the jungle blew up, would that ever be on the news?
Because it's not like there's any press.
I don't know if we'd ever know.
So it seems to me that we could have massive military action against the cartels.
You'd never even hear about it.
Do you remember when there used to be a problem with pirates?
Remember the Somali pirates?
Do you remember that? It was like pirates, pirates, pirates, and it looked like there was nothing that could be done because there were so many pirates, and it was good business, and there were just more pirates every day, pirates, pirates, pirates.
When was the last time you heard about a pirate?
Think about it. When was the last time you heard about a Somali pirate?
Do you think they all retired?
They're not taking any more ships.
What do you think happened? Well, speculate.
What happened is the Somali pilots got wiped out.
By who? Doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because you're not going to hear about it.
Wasn't on the news.
We'll never be on the news.
But I can tell you one thing for sure.
There are probably a lot of dead Somali pirates.
We just don't hear about it.
So what's the difference between the Somali pirates who just sort of quietly all disappeared?
Dead. And the cartels?
Kind of a similar situation.
I suspect...
That the cartels are going to have some bad days ahead, but you might never hear about it.
So, there's that.
I think I've hit all my top points.
Oh, so, I'm watching the Democrats who are trapped in a losing movie.
Trying to explain the reality, and it's kind of funny to watch them flail.
Now, the problem with the Democrats' movie, or their version of reality, is that it doesn't predict, and they have to deal with that.
Now, my version of reality is predicted quite well.
So, for example, I said, no, the president did not collude with Russia, and sure enough, And I said, Ukraine is not a crime.
I don't see anything there. And sure enough, doesn't seem to be much of anything there.
But if you're a Democrat, you think that all of these things really exist.
And you're probably trying to explain...
Why 30% of Hispanics are supporting the president.
And probably, I'm guessing, there will be a historically high number of African-American voters for Trump for re-election.
Now, if you're a Democrat, how do you explain that?
Because they believe that it's obvious to the entire world that this president is the biggest racist in the world.
And yet, something between, you know, 10 and 30%, depending on which minority community, are actually voting for him.
Do you think that millions of people didn't notice what the news says is just true, that the president is obviously, just obviously, a big old racist?
And you think that all of these people who would be the victims of this racism, you think they didn't notice?
How do they explain their world?
So they're trying to explain it away as saying that everything the Republicans believe is conspiracy theory, or it's gaslighting, it's lying, it's stupid, or it's selfish behavior that's some kind of a con.
So those are their go-tos, the big five.
Conspiracy, gaslighting, lying, stupid, or selfish.
So that's sort of the material of the walls of their bubble.
As long as they can explain everything away with one of these five things, oh, that's a conspiracy theory, or gaslighting, lying, stupid, selfish conman, then they can stay in their bubble.
But, man, as their bubble continues to be terrible at predicting, I don't know how long you can stay in a bubble they can't predict.
That would be very painful.
All right, that's all I got for now, and I will talk to you later.
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