Episode 966 Scott Adams: I Mock the Kids Table, Talk About Musk, Update You on Stuff
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Elon Musk's Neuralink company
Fake news and enemy of the people news
Business model of the news is evolving
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Have you ever noticed that mothers is one of those words that either sounds really nice or really bad?
Hey, it's my mother.
Sounds good. Hey you mothers, get in here.
Sounds bad. Same word.
What's up with that? Well, it's good to see you all.
And I can't think of a better way to start off Mother's Day than with the simultaneous sip.
That's right. You're way ahead of me.
And all you need for the simultaneous sip on Mother's Day is a mother.
It'd be good if there's a mother there.
Optional.
But otherwise, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or snide, a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go.
Mmm.
Ah yes, it's getting better all the time.
Alright, for those of you who did not watch, somebody in the comments says, you blew my mind last night.
That's what I wanted to bring up.
So last night I did, I revealed the user interface for reality.
Now if that sounds like I'm over-claiming, just look at the comments, it'll probably go by in a moment here.
So I realized that a lot of things that I've been mentioning in my books, etc., had finally reached a point where I could put them all in one clean package and boost the value.
So in many ways, it's things you've heard from me before, but you've never seen them collected this way.
And it's the way they're collected and presented that gives them the new power.
So I pinned I pinned the tweet that has that video.
I would recommend that everybody who finds any value from anything I do, that's the one you want to watch.
So if there's just one thing you ever watch from me, that would be the one.
So I'll give it that boost.
Also, if those of you who have not found me yet on the Locals platform, localswithans.com, I'm moving...
I'm moving all the content that you can still see here.
Sorry, my cat's causing trouble here.
I'll move all the content that you already see here.
You'll still be able to see here, but in addition, I'm putting extra stuff on Locals for subscribers.
Just an update, my normal business pretty much is...
I'm pretty much out of business as a cartoonist.
I'm getting the early indications from my syndication.
Well, the newspapers, they're trying to negotiate and they might close down.
So my old business model doesn't work.
I'm going to see if in the long run it won't work.
It's sort of advertiser-based because newspapers are advertiser-based and online everything's advertiser-based.
So I'm moving at least some of my stuff to a subscriber model to be part of the future.
Alright, enough about that. I watched, everybody told me to watch Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan show.
I didn't get through all of it yet, but I was fascinated by this talk about Neuralink.
So one of Elon Musk's companies is Neuralink.
And what they're going to do is literally implant little electronics in your skull and They'll actually remove a piece of your skull, the bone, and insert there a little piece of electronics.
They'll have wiring that goes into your brain.
Where the wiring goes into your brain depends on what problem you're trying to solve.
But Elon actually has made the claim that this device could be useful for a broad range of anything that's wrong with your brain.
Now, I don't know how big anything is, but the examples he used Or maybe Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or maybe even people who are quadriplegics, if you can believe it.
You might even be able to get people to walk and use their limbs that they couldn't use before.
That seems like quite a big, let's see, goal.
But... I don't know.
It's Elon Musk. I don't think he'd be involved unless there was some science behind it.
They might actually see the first one implanted for whatever the first purpose is within a year.
So, how weird is that?
Will it cure TDS? That's funny.
It's funny how many of you spontaneously said, will it cure Trump derangement syndrome?
You know what the funny thing is?
It could. It could.
I'm sure it will not be used to change opinion, but you can definitely change people's opinions by stimulating their brain or changing the chemical balance, and that's well established, right?
If you just took somebody and said, write down all your opinions, and then you started shooting them up with either male or female hormones, and then you just wait a few months and then test them on their opinions again, I think they'd be a little different.
So we know we can change people's opinions by changing their chemical state.
All right. So, yeah, I wouldn't call it shock therapy, but it seems like it has a lot of potential.
The other Elon Musk story is that, you know, you heard the story about he was getting rid of all of his properties, and he had a bunch of houses, and he was getting rid of them.
And I thought to myself...
Wow, you know, he probably has houses all over the world and doesn't use them enough, so he's going to get rid of them.
But it turns out the story is a little different than that.
So he had this one house somewhere in Southern California.
Across the street was, I guess, Gene Wilder's house, and somebody was going to buy it probably and do construction for three years.
So he bought the house across the street just so there wouldn't be construction there.
And then he started buying other houses in the neighborhood just so he'd have more privacy and stuff.
So it turns out he was basically just buying up his neighborhood.
And so, yeah, I guess he's decided not to do that.
So it wasn't quite exactly the way you thought of it.
But he does seem to be serious about getting rid of physical possessions.
We'll see. We'll see if it's All the right reasons.
I think it is because he's more about focusing his energy on his businesses than his house, I guess.
He's also threatened to move his headquarters from California to Texas because of the lockdown.
I don't know how California can keep any business.
It's hard for me to imagine that there's just any good reason for a business to stay in California.
I hate to say that because it's my state, but I imagine he's going to move to Texas in the long run.
So we're starting to see the worst kind of fake news now.
It's probably... When you talk about fake news being the enemy of the people, there are times when it really, really is the enemy of the people.
For example...
If somebody is trying to overthrow the government with bad information, that's how they're doing it, trying to overthrow the president, you would think that if the media was aiding and abetting the coup, that the media would be certainly the enemy of the people in the most direct way.
I mean, you can't be more enemy of the people than supporting a coup against the president elected by at least the Electoral College and the system and the people.
So that's pretty dangerous, but here's a new dangerous thing that the media is doing.
The press, anyway.
We're going to see lots of stories, there's one today, about the Trump administration and anybody who wants us to go back to work sooner having a certain callousness about life.
A callousness.
Now, here's the thing.
In the real world, with the possible exception of a few actual sociopaths and psychopaths, there aren't that many of them.
But once you get past that little group of people, everybody cares about human life.
To pretend that there's some entire class of people who care about life, let's call them Democrats, And yet there's some other class of people who don't care about life.
Let's call them Republicans.
It's such a childlike view of the world that it should just be dismissed without comment, even though I'm going to comment on it.
Because in the real world, these are just tough decisions.
Whatever you choose to go, whatever direction you go with, with the coronavirus, people are going to die.
If you had a choice of nobody dying...
We would look at that pretty seriously, but we don't have that choice.
And so it's like news from the kids' table.
And I like that frame.
You saw Greg Gutfeld uses that a lot as well, because I really think it captures it.
The adults have to make decisions about who lives and dies, and there's just no way around it.
But for the kids' table to claim that the adults are being callous, It's anything but that.
And it's way more ridiculous when Democrats accuse Republicans of callousness about life.
Do I even need to finish the sentence?
I mean, think of the ridiculousness.
All right, my cat's really starting to be a problem now.
She only wants to stand between me and the iPad.
You'll see her little hat in a minute.
But as long as the issue of abortion is still a gigantic national issue, it's hard to say that it's the Republicans who are callous about life.
Now, I'm not giving you my opinion on abortion.
You already know that my opinion is women should work it out, and they can tell me what they want the law to be, and I will just support whatever women want.
I just think women should decide on abortion laws.
That's just my personal opinion.
You can vote. You can do anything you want.
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't.
I'm just saying that personally, I don't have anything to add to the conversation.
I would rather keep my opinion out of it.
And if women collectively want the abortion law to be one way or the other, I don't have anything to add to that.
But I'll support their decision.
All right. So...
That's just going to bother me, the whole callousness argument.
That's really the enemy of the people situation.
Because to the extent that it handicaps the leaders who have to make the adult decision, they don't have an option.
It's not like the leaders have an option.
They've got to make a tough decision.
Lots of them. All right.
Some Canadian doctors did a little write-up in which, in their opinion, the spread of COVID-19 is entirely from droplets.
Meaning, it comes out of your mouth and falls on a surface.
So in their opinion, there's so little chance, it's just completely unrealistic, that it's going to travel through the air for much of anything.
It's not really aerosoled unless you're in a very unique situation, like a medical situation where it actually gets aerosoled.
But in the normal life, these Canadian doctors say, that you could almost ignore the risk of it traveling through the air.
In other words, if you were super, super careful about not touching objects, and also careful about disinfecting, and you were super careful about not touching your face, then you'd probably be fine.
Which is interesting because what it suggests is that there might be some better thing than a mask.
I've actually considered the thought of tying something to my...
Oh, here's an idea. Have a wristband.
Have a little wristband that can tell when your arm is as high as your neck.
Because during the day, you've probably seen me touch my face 15 times on Periscope already this morning.
It's sort of automatic.
But what if every time you raise your hand...
Your arm buzzed.
And you'd be like...
I think that very quickly you would train yourself not to do it.
Now my problem of course is I get itches.
Especially when I'm on camera.
Whenever I'm on camera my face itches.
Especially when I think I'm not supposed to be touching it.
So that's why I use my back scratcher to take care of that.
Um... I'm starting to think that the business model or the nature of news and how you get it is going through an interesting transformation right now.
So the old news was you got your news networks, your news organizations, but it seems to me now that we're sort of, especially with this coronavirus stuff, it feels like there are individuals on social media who are becoming news channels themselves.
So you've seen this with the coronavirus, where people will become sort of a prominent Twitter account for doing a good job of surfacing information and arguments.
And I feel like that in some way I kind of fell into that because it's the topic of the day, so I do a lot of tweeting on it.
But I realize that if I do a good job of taking other people's suggestions of, you know, this is a good article or this is a good tweet...
And if I do a good job of just curating the information that people are sending to me, that I become like a little news channel.
So reading my Twitter feed would give you an angle on the news that I've curated to be reliable or provocative or just something that I'm looking for some experts to weigh in on.
And I think we're heading toward a model where The major news organizations largely just tell you what the topic is.
And then once they've said, okay, what we're talking about is this story, I think social media is going to become sort of the detailed news channels where you say, okay, it's a story about that.
Who on social media is going to be good at curating that stuff?
And then you go find them and say, all right, I'll do a deep dive on this.
Let's say it's a Story about some military thing.
There's probably a retired general with a good Twitter account.
So you say, oh, it's one of those stories.
Go to the Twitter account and then that's your news channel.
It's whoever curates that news.
So remember I keep telling you that you should forget about testing to save us?
Now it's not that we won't someday have enough testing to do anything we want, because it is increasing in ability all the time, but it won't happen fast enough that we can wait for it.
So that was the main point, is that it's way slower than you think, it's way worse than you think, testing isn't going to save you.
So CNN had some good points on that, to reiterate that point.
You've heard about the highly touted Abbott system that can rapidly, you know, it's like a laboratory in a box, and it can rapidly give you a result in minutes.
So when you heard that, you said to yourself, whoa, there are these devices that are already in lots of places, so you don't even have to buy them.
They're already in lots of places.
And you can do a test with those existing devices in minutes.
That's like a big deal, right?
But... You can have up to a 15% 1.5 false negative rate.
And one test showed up to a 25% false negative rate.
Meaning that you can miss a diagnosis up to 1 in 4 times.
That's not so good.
Secondly, it can take most of the tests, the other kind of tests that are not the ones you do in a few minutes, They might be a little more accurate, but it takes days to get your results back.
Days. Meanwhile, you might be wandering around infecting everybody you know.
So those are really big problems.
And I just wanted to give you that update because I just don't think we should...
It's the kids' table who keeps saying, well, why don't we do more testing?
And it's the adult table saying, you know, we'd be doing that if we could.
It's hard. We can't instantly scale up.
I mean, there are a lot of companies working really hard and a lot of money, a lot of attention.
It's probably a top national priority.
Everything that can be done probably is being done.
I doubt there's anything being left on the table when it comes to getting testing up and running.
But the kids' table is, I've got an idea.
Has anybody thought of doing more testing?
Because I read that somewhere, that's good.
So if we're not doing that, we must be all idiots.
So that's the news from the kids' tables, that nobody thought of testing.
Have you wondered, as I have, what was the problem that Obama had with General Flynn?
Have you...
Somebody says, you are mistaken.
You can give a reason.
Just don't say you are mistaken.
I block people for that.
You might be new. So, I saw for the first time a little bit of a teaser for what problem Obama had with Flynn.
How many of you know why Obama specifically warned Trump not to hire Flynn?
I think he was the only person that Obama called out specifically.
Just one person.
It's only one person. And somebody says the Iran deal.
Maybe that's what Flynn was fired for.
So here are the things in the CNN article.
There's one reference to crazy ideas.
That Flynn had, quote, crazy ideas.
I don't know what they were. There's a reference to Flynn having aggressive stance on combating Islamic terrorism and Now, is his aggressive stance on combating Islamic terrorism, is that the category in which he had the, quote, crazy ideas?
And what about, and there was also a reference to insubordination in the Obama administration.
Was Flynn insubordinate because he disagreed?
Was he insubordinate on specifically the Islamic extremism?
What does that mean, insubordination?
And then I guess he also was criticizing Obama policy.
So obviously somebody that Trump would say, he's perfect for my team, it seems unlikely that he would also be perfect for Obama's team.
Somebody's saying he was against the Iran deal.
Now isn't that interesting that you think...
I'm not saying you're wrong, because that sounds quite reasonable.
Isn't it interesting that those of you who follow the news...
Probably more conservatives on this audience than other.
That you knew that.
And I think you're probably right.
I'd have to fact check that.
But you knew that it was about the Iran deal.
But yet when I read CNN and I was looking for details, I didn't see Iran mentioned.
It was just Islamic extremism.
Alright. So I'm still curious what the exact...
The point of concern was.
Obama could not count on Flynn's loyalty.
But that wouldn't be a reason for him to warn Trump not to use Flynn.
Yeah, then there's also the theory, I think this is just unconservative news, the theory that Flynn would have seen all the secrets.
So if Flynn had gotten the top job, He would have access to all the top secret information and he would uncover all this bad stuff.
Here's what's wrong with that theory.
Whoever got the job would have been able to do that.
How does that make sense?
Do we think that Flynn would be the one person who would look into it deeply once he had all that access?
I don't think so.
Wouldn't literally anybody who got that job look into everything?
It seems to me that whoever had the job was going to look into the whole Russia collusion origin.
It was going to happen. In fact, it did.
So we didn't have Flynn there.
And the exact thing that some of you think they were worried about was that Flynn would research what was happening.
That's exactly what happened.
There was no Flynn. But you get your Attorney General Barr.
Basically, it happened anyway.
So I'm not really buying...
The argument that the Obama administration wanted to get rid of Flynn just for that reason.
Because that doesn't make sense.
That's about all I had to talk about today.
I didn't have much going on.
Just making sure.
Yes, that's true.
Flynn knew everything.
Wasn't Flynn undercover?
I don't know if he was undercover.
Talking point. Flynn was an agent of Turkey.
Yeah, what's up with that?
That feels like another case of fake news, right?
Because the Turkey situation, I believe we know that Flynn was getting paid by somebody in Turkey to do some kind of advising.
But if you don't know the real details of that, do you know anything?
Because that's not the sort of story that if you know most of it, that you'd know anything.
Because first of all, Turkey is a NATO ally.
So is there necessarily anything wrong with a retired general...
You know, working for or advising or even lobbying for a NATO ally?
Well, as long as we know it's happening, I suppose it's okay.
So if there's some issue there, that would be separate, I guess.
Lots of evidence coming out on Obama now, somebody says.
So he says, Scott, it was because he knew the DOG and IC were corrupted.
But my point is, no matter who went into that job, would have looked into it.
It doesn't seem like the FBI could have reasonably thought that Flynn was the only risk and that you have to take him out.
It seemed like a big play to take on a guy who would probably just be replaced by somebody else who would do the same thing.
Clapper's sworn testimony in transcripts contradicts his sworn live congressional testimony, somebody says.
I'll bet not. I'll bet not.
I'll bet if you looked at what Clapper said in public and then compared it really word for word closely with what he said under oath, I don't think you're going to find the difference that you hope.
Because when he's talking on TV, he can say things such as, well, you know, Don Jr.
went to a meeting and Trump did say in public, hey, Russia, help us out.
So he can say, I was talking about those things.
And you know those things happened.
You're watching the same news I am.
So yeah, I thought there was some evidence.
I saw it. You saw the same thing.
So I think all he has to do is say that.
And I doubt there's much there that would really...
He probably hedged himself just about right, is my guess.
So I'd be surprised if he's in legal trouble.
If you take out the Logan Act, you have nothing.
Yeah, that whole Logan Act thing was so lame.
The thought that the incoming administration couldn't have a brief conversation with the people they'll be negotiating with in a few months, that is as big a flag as you could have for...
It's as big a flag as you could have for somebody...
Anyway.
But nobody did until Barr...
Trump was almost taken down.
Yeah, I suppose you could argue that Trump was almost taken down.
Ah, so somebody says no, he was replaced by McMaster, who someone says is a deep stater.
Alright, good point. But how did that happen?
How did that happen, that somebody who was Not going to be helpful.
Got that job. I guess Trump had a lot of jobs to fill about that time.
Scott is woefully behind on Obamagate.
Well, I don't know if I'm behind or if I'm not making the same leaps of assumption that other people were making.
I mean, I know what the transcript says.
I know that Obama...
I know Obama was aware of the Flynn wiretapping, but that's all we know.
What was the name of the book you suggested about colonial America?
I can't remember the name of it right now.
I can't see my bookshelf.
Uh... It wasn't under oath in public, so it doesn't matter.
That is correct. It doesn't matter what he said in public if you're not under oath.
All right. Oh, they were all claiming access to secret evidence on TV. Well, that's the point, though.
It doesn't matter what he said on TV. I would like to see a clip of the things that Clapper said on TV That we know to be false now.
I haven't seen that.
Have you?
It seems like somebody's probably working on a compilation.
Did I post a picture of the whiteboard from last night?
I did, yes. You can see that on YouTube.
So, if you go to YouTube, or I think...
I'm not sure if the podcast has that.
It might but if you go to YouTube you should be able to see the photos All right, I don't have much else I And I will talk to you tonight.
