Episode 1300 Scott Adams: Trump Makes the News Interesting Again! Finally! Come Learn Four New Things Without Even Trying
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Content:
President Trump at CPAC
Debunking the debunkers of Sweden and COVID
Do men dominate business meeting talking, interruptions?
Replika, a digital friend
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Finally, finally, we've been starving for something interesting in the news to talk about.
What was missing?
Yeah, I think you know.
It was big and it was orange.
And it's back!
And we're going to talk about it.
But first, we've got to do something really, really important.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
A lot of people try to start their day without it, and I'm here to report that throughout history, and I'm not making this up, this is actually true, 99% of all the people who have ever died from the beginning of time Did not do the simultaneous sip.
That's a real statistic.
Over 99% of all the people who have ever died since the beginning of time did not do the simultaneous sip.
So I think that means something.
It means it's time for the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Now check, check.
Did anybody die?
Right, right.
I'll bet not a single one if you died while you were sipping.
I'll bet not one.
Now, can you make that claim about, let's say, riding bicycles?
No. No, people die doing that.
Can you make that claim about just about anything?
No. But the simultaneous SIP? Unbroken record.
Try to beat that.
You can't. Well, I've promised you that I'm going to make as my trademark talking about what's new by using it as an excuse...
To teach you something you didn't know.
Or to reinforce something that's worth hearing again.
And so let's do that.
Trump was at CPAC last night giving his speech.
And I'll tell you, you don't realize how good he is until he's been gone a while.
Now when I say good, I will allow that his critics are saying, Oh no!
And that that's not good for them.
So clearly there's a subjective part of this, but if you were simply to measure star power, just star power, nobody is close.
Who would even be number two?
Who would be the second most, I don't know if charismatic or star power is the right word, But who would be second?
Can you even think of anybody who would be second?
You know, you have to go to AOC to get somebody who's even got, like, some spark, right?
But I don't think so. Oh, Obama.
Okay. But of the people who are likely to, you know, try to run for president.
And some of the magic that Trump brings is that he can't be uninteresting.
He just doesn't know how to be uninteresting.
Do you know what would have been easy for him to do?
He could have looked at all the things he's ever been fact-checked on and just not do those things.
He could look at all the things he'd ever done that caused people to call him a racist and whatever else they're going to call him, and he could have just not done those things.
It would be easy to know what to not do.
How many of the things...
That you would have thought to yourself, well, I certainly, if I were him, he says all these things I like, oh, I think if I were him, I wouldn't do the things on this list again, because I know what happened the last time I did them, and that's why you've never been president, I think.
He does do those things.
Poor Daniel Dale.
This poor bastard, the fact-checker for CNN. He's been basically putting his feet up and coasting, collecting his paycheck during the Biden administration so far, a few weeks.
I mean, he doesn't even get on TV, that guy.
They don't even let him...
He can write an article sometimes.
That's about it. But, man, Trump hits the scene, and suddenly he's like a whirling dervish.
He's like, wow! Clear my schedule.
Bring me the Red Bull.
We're going in.
We're going in hard.
And so Daniel Dale goes into a fact-checking frenzy.
And what's that do to the energy?
Suddenly everybody's energy is up.
So now the fact-checkers are fact-checking him.
We don't want to talk about anything else.
Probably my traffic on these live streams will be way up because he's in the news again.
You get some massive audience watching it.
Nobody else can do that.
Nobody else can even come close to that right now.
How would you like to be the Democrats and realize that Trump's popularity right now It's the same as Biden's.
How would you like to know that taking away Trump's Twitter feed might not work out the way you hoped?
This is interesting to watch.
If you had said, what would be the impact of taking away Trump's Twitter feed in 2015 or 2016, I would have said, devastating.
Devastating. Or even most of the way through his first term.
I would have said, pretty devastating if you take away his Twitter feed.
But what happens if you take it away after his first term?
When he's still questioning the validity of an election that no court has found any evidence of widespread fraud.
I'd like to say that so I can stay on social media.
But you got that out there floating in people's minds anyway.
And Trump comes in and just starts stirring that pot again.
And it is so good.
What do you mean no courts have heard any evidence?
That's true, but we're not allowed to say that.
What country do you think you're in?
Don't throw in all that useful context.
So I think the Democrats are probably feeling a little bad.
So you take away Trump's Twitter, and I have a feeling that we might end up with something closer to the optimum amount of Trump without anybody wanting that to happen.
Because there is a little bit of too much, right?
Like, he can't work you up to the point of too much.
And so removing his Twitter, at this point, completely different than if it had been removed earlier, but at this point, it might help him, weirdly.
And the other thing that helps them, of course, is that the more Biden struggles, the more the contrast will start to favor Trump, and that's just not going to stop.
It just won't stop.
We'll have four years of Biden doing either what Trump did, because it worked, or something that Biden changed.
And isn't working out so well.
That's what it's going to look like in four years.
Now, will Biden have some notable successes?
I'll bet yes. I'll bet yes.
If I had to bet on it, I would think that there will be some genuine Biden successes.
But there's a lot of topics.
A few successes might not pay for the rest of the contrast.
Now, of course, Trump also likes to use his most provocative language to guarantee that you see two movies on one screen.
How easy would it have been to not say that Mexico is not sending their best?
It would have been really easy to not say that sentence.
And it would have been even easier not to emphasize it and tell you to remember it.
So he goes for exactly the open wound.
He goes, is there still an open wound there from when I announced in 2015?
Anybody? Still an open wound?
Where is it? Right there on your arm?
Right here? How's that feel?
Hey! Hey! Ow!
Ow! How's this feel now?
And what is the net effect of that?
You can't frickin' look away.
You can't take your eyes off it.
It's just not supposed to be happening.
It's not supposed to be happening.
And, of course, that is the genius of Trump's showmanship.
Say what you will about policies and whatnot, but just on the On the dimension of showmanship, just nobody's even close.
It's hilarious. So, of course, what Trump means when he says not sending their best is he would be comparing that situation to, say, India, which sends us so much of their top technical talent that India is worried about the people that are leaving.
India's thinking, hey, maybe you should stay here with your high technical talent and excellent educations.
So India would be an example of sending us people who are immediately starting unicorn startups and crap like that.
And it has nothing to do with anybody's ethnicity.
Doesn't every country have a best?
Doesn't every single country Have a best and a worst.
I mean, you can see it as racial if you want, but you have to kind of want to see it that way.
I heard some of the Democrats saying that Trump was low energy, and I would say that that feels true in the sense if you're comparing Trump to Trump.
But if they're saying Trump was low energy compared to, let's say, everybody else...
It was not low energy.
Again, you can't look away.
So Trump basically made every other Republican look like furniture.
Every conversation that you might want to have about who else might run in 2024, at least as a Republican, it kind of doesn't matter anymore, does it?
Because Trump's current popularity would make him a lock for the nomination.
Everybody else just disappeared yesterday.
They just disappeared.
They turned it into furniture.
And he did that with just showing up.
All he did was show up.
And he turned the entire Republican field of very capable people, by the way, You're Tom Cottons, you're Matt Gaetz, etc.
You're talking about very qualified, high-operating people, and he just turned them into furniture just by showing up.
It's really amazing when you look at it.
Now, I realize that I'm, for those of you who are anti-Trump, it appears that I'm going into fandom of no objectivity whatsoever.
I'm not talking about his policies.
I'm not defending what happened with his actions and the capital assault.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's just about the showmanship and how that's important to the process here.
All right. Here's the best entertainment you're going to ever have if you're in a certain category of person.
So this won't work for everybody.
But there's a...
YouTube video of a guy named Potholer54, at least that's his online name, P-O-T-H-O-L-E-R 54, if you're looking for him on YouTube.
And he's got a longish piece there, Debunking the Debunkers.
So you've seen a lot of coronavirus debunkers, Ivor Cummins, Tony Heller at one point, people who are claiming that Sweden...
It teaches us something that we did wrong in the other countries.
And watching Potholer debunk the debunkers is such a mind-effer that you really have to see it.
I could not recommend this more.
But at the same time, I can't tell you from any personal source I have that the debunker of the debunker is the one who's right, which makes it even more interesting.
When you're done, you still won't know who is right because this is the first thing you're going to learn today.
Whoever goes last In one of these, you know, I'm debunking you, and then I'm debunking you're debunking.
Whoever goes last is the most persuasive.
That's why in a court case the defense gets to go last.
It's the only fair way you can do it.
Because if the prosecution went last, A whole lot of innocent people would get prosecuted, right?
You need to let the defense go last to feel that you've even made the process modestly fair.
So don't assume that who went last is the right one.
But here's what's different about this.
If you believed that the Sweden example taught you something...
And then Sweden got it right and the United States got it wrong.
If you were of that mind, and I would say maybe at least half of you or more are of that mind, what you'll find when you listen to this is it will be like a mushroom experience, like taking psychedelic mushrooms.
And by the way, I mean this literally.
This is not an analogy.
You'll get the same thing from this as you would get from taking mushrooms.
And what I mean by the same thing is the experience of going into a different reality for a while.
You'll just experience a different reality in which all the things you thought...
Now, this is only going to work if you are sure that the Sweden example told you something.
If you are pretty certain about that...
Then you'll have the experience of entering a different reality in which all of that stuff you stole about Sweden was ridiculous.
Now, that doesn't mean that the other reality is true, right?
Because, again, it's just the one that went last.
Maybe the people who got debunked have some response to it.
It's hard to imagine.
It's hard to imagine they'd have any response to it because when you see it, You're going to be pretty sure that's the end of the conversation.
But just keep in your mind, whoever goes last is always the most persuasive, and it has to do with going last.
So I recommend this more than I've recommended just about anything I've ever recommended, even without knowing who's right.
Because when you see these two clear realities and you feel yourself moving to another one, even if it's temporary...
And then you change your mind back later.
That's the experience you get with mushrooms.
And it changes you forever.
Because you start realizing for the first time how subjective your reality is.
And until you realize that, you're trapped.
And your options in life are smaller.
As soon as you realize the real degree To which your reality is subjective, that's when you're free.
That's when all your options open up.
Because if you look at my life, for example, someone who has had this experience of having my options open up, a lot of stuff I've done didn't look possible, did it?
Just becoming a world-famous cartoonist.
How many people do that?
I mean, I set out to do that.
Now, if I had not had that experience of having at least once spend time in an alternate reality that was completely valid, I just was visiting.
And then I went back to my other reality.
If I had never experienced that, I would also think that my first reality was the limit of what is possible.
But having experienced...
I'm going to call it the second reality.
The first time in your life that you experience a second reality, like really quickly, where you go boop, bam, new reality, if it happens in just a period of minutes, that's the point when everything changes.
And until you've experienced your second reality, you don't know there really is anything else out there.
But after you get the second one, you will also know instantly there are more.
Lots more. Lots more.
So I've never seen a piece of content or a situation, because you need both the content and the situation of what it is you believed in the first place.
I've never seen such a perfect mushroom trip.
Packed into a piece of content.
You really have to check it out.
It's trippy. All right.
And again, it won't work if you were already on that page.
If you'd already sort of seen that reality, nothing will happen to you.
It'll just be good, really good, interesting content.
But you won't have the mushroom trip experience.
Just some of you will. All right.
And you know what?
I'm not even going to... Well, yeah, you know, I should tease you.
No, I'm not even going to tell you.
I was going to tell you what the video said about Sweden, but then it would kind of ruin it.
Yeah, you've got to do it yourself.
I would just say that I had speculated a lot over the past year about why Sweden was being talked about and what was different, etc., and I don't think I got any of it right.
As of this morning...
I don't think I got any of it right, except that a lot of them live alone.
That part must be right.
See yourself. There's a report that half of all couples experience a worse sex life because of the pandemic.
I guess being forced to be together in the house.
And I've got a question for you.
Unless you have a pretty large house, which most people don't, how do you have sex in the house when there's kids in the house?
How do you do that?
No, seriously. How do you do that?
Because I don't know if it's a biological reflex or what, but if I even know that there's a kid anywhere...
Like within potential listening distance, or maybe might knock on the door, or you could hear them maybe with a TV on or something.
How do you do it?
I'm looking at your answers just because they're funny.
People say, lock the door, but they're still right there, right?
They could be right on the other side of the door.
And it's not so much that they can or cannot get in.
I'm talking only about the mental part where they're in your head.
That's the part I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about the physical separation.
I get that doors have locks.
I figured that part out on my own.
But you know they're there, right?
How do you get them out of your head?
And if they're occupying any part of your head, how do you get your head in that other mode?
Your stories are hilarious.
You've got to be slick, lock the doors, take mushrooms, life alert, lock them in the basement, be quiet, Benadryl, very quietly.
I think you tell them we're wrestling.
It's a mental neutering, somebody says.
Yes.
Put them in cages. All right.
Well, I guess we don't have any good answers for that, but that's out there.
So Tom Peters, management expert, I would say, Tom Peters, author and expert, he tweeted around an article with a study that said that men do most of the interrupting in business meetings.
So men do most of the interrupting, especially interrupting women, and that men do most of the talking Even if there are fewer men than women, the men will dominate the talking in business meetings.
Alright, here's your next lesson.
What credibility would you put on that?
And how would you judge its credibility?
The first thing you need to know is that studies that are in this category of, let's say, we studied what people do.
That's the category.
As opposed to studying physics or studying a particle.
That's a different category of science.
But if you're looking at the category of, you know, how do people act, and you see there's a study, what automatic credibility would you put on that?
No higher than a coin flip.
No higher than a coin flip.
The best it can tell you is it might be true.
The best it can do is alert you to look for this.
It might be true. Maybe 50%, right?
So that doesn't mean that this one has a 50% chance of being true.
It just means that stuff in this category is pretty sketchy.
Here's the next thing.
And I offer this tip as not 100% reliable.
But something you should keep in mind.
When does your observation, just as a person who lives in the world, if your observation of things matches what the science tells you, that's a pretty good indicator.
Science says it's true.
You observe it's true.
Let's take some examples.
Science says if you spend too long in the sun without sunscreen, you'll get a sunburn.
Now, if you do that, your observation matches that perfectly.
So you don't really have any trouble believing the science, because you can just sort of see it in the real world.
Yeah, it's obvious. How about smoking causes lung cancer?
When you hear a story about somebody who died of lung cancer, what's the first thing you ask?
Were they smokers?
How often is the answer yes?
95% of the time, right?
So science says smoking can give you lung cancer.
Your observation is, yeah, sure looks that way.
Looks that way to me.
So those are cases of confirmation.
But, you know, the human observation is not reliable, but isn't it good when they match?
But here are some that didn't match.
And never did. When I was a kid, I thought it was science that you shouldn't eat within an hour of swimming or you get a cramp.
So I thought that was a science.
But I never observed anybody getting a cramp because they had recently eaten, and I knew lots of people who did it.
So the observation didn't match what somebody said was a science, and it turned out it was not science.
Likewise, let's see, using your cell phone in an airplane.
We all heard, don't use your cell phone in an airplane, the plane will crash.
But you know people have left their phones on.
You know they have.
You've probably done it yourself.
Haven't you left your phone on for at least one flight?
Come on. I'll bet you left your phone on at least once.
Did your flight crash?
Have you ever heard of it? No.
All of your observation...
Was opposite with whatever anybody claimed was scientific.
And then, of course, you learn later, okay, there's a reason your observation didn't match.
Right? There's a reason it didn't match.
There was no science to it.
But let's take this claim, that men do most of the interrupting and most of the talking.
Does that match your observation?
Go. In the comments...
Is your observation, and this is only for people who have recently been in the workplace, if you've been retired for a while, it doesn't count.
We're talking about modern times today.
True or not that men are doing most of the interrupting?
Give me your observations.
I'm just going to read them off.
I see.
No, no, no, no.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
If anybody's listening to this, you should know that 85% of my audience tends to be male.
So we're not getting any kind of an unbiased survey here.
I'm seeing some yeses.
No, no, no. Somebody says my whole family interrupts.
No, no, no.
So there seems to be, I'd say, a bias toward no, but it happens to be coincidentally about in the same ratio as there are men to women on this livestream.
Meaning that we might be seeing something that's just sort of a gender perception difference.
All right. I would say it's true.
To my observation.
I would say, and again, this is completely subjective, and the reason I asked you is that I was not assuming that my observation was some kind of a universal truth.
I was just assuming that you might have different opinions on this.
So, my observation is Yes, I would say men are more interrupty and try to dominate meetings.
I feel like that's true.
Don't you? But what is the reason?
So here's where it gets dicey.
It gets a little dicey here.
What's the reason? Because it seems like there are a few variables left out.
And here's your next lesson.
Always look for the variables that are left out.
Because that's where the magic is.
If you're going to try to debunk something on your own...
That's the first place to look.
What are they leaving out?
I'll just give you some suggestions.
Now, I don't know that these were left out, because I didn't dig into it that deeply, but these are the questions you'd ask.
So the first question I'd ask is, have they controlled for physical size?
Because don't you think that people will interrupt people who are physically smaller?
Whether they're male or female?
Wouldn't a big creature, male or female, doesn't matter who it is, wouldn't a larger person be more likely to interrupt a smaller person?
I don't know. But if they didn't check that...
I'd say that's something I'd check, because I would think that biologically we just give some deference to anything that could kill us, right?
Anything bigger than us, you give a little bit of deference to.
How about some other things that they may or may not have checked?
How about is there any difference in hierarchy in those meetings?
So in other words, was everybody the same level and they adjusted for that?
Or were some of the managers, because of other reasons, that had nothing to do with this specific meeting, but were there more men in management and therefore people deferred to them?
I don't know. I don't know.
But that would be a factor.
How about does everybody respond the same?
In other words, does everybody communicate the same?
If I were going to teach you to communicate better, would you say to yourself, hey, those flaws that you're talking about, they tend to be in one gender versus the other?
We will see how sexist you are.
You ready to find out how much of a misogynist or misandrist you are?
Well, let me ask you some questions.
In your comments, I will find out what sexist you are.
If I told you that there was a person, and I will not tell you the gender, male or female, and they do something I call looping, which is they make their point, and then they just go back to the beginning and make the same point again with slightly different words, And then they loop again and continue.
If I said there's a person who does that, use your biased, sexist, culturally biased thinking to tell me who does that more, men or women?
Look at your answers.
There are a lot of confident answers on both sides, right?
People saying neither, male, female, male, female, right?
Now, looping is not bad if what you're doing is trying to make sure that that's the 10% somebody remembers.
Because people forget 90% of what you say.
So you'll see me loop on these live streams all the time.
But I do it intentionally.
Because there's some things that just need to be reinforced.
I just did it again, right?
I just said the same thing at least twice.
In this format, it actually makes sense to do that fairly frequently.
Radio hosts do it as well.
Probably Rush Limbaugh did a lot of it because he was filling up hours a day.
So certainly people do it.
That's not a problem. But if you're doing it in a meeting...
Where everybody's trying to take a turn, it's really, really bad once people get it the first time.
So, personally, I'm a big interrupter, and I will interrupt anybody who loops.
Don't be a looper.
If you know one, you know what I'm talking about.
Here's another one.
Do you talk without leaving natural pauses?
Let me give you an example of somebody who talks with natural pauses.
I'm doing it right now.
There's just enough time between each of my statements that if somebody wanted to jump in, it wouldn't feel so much like interrupting because they wouldn't have to talk over me.
I'm a good communicator, so I leave just enough time that somebody can say, oh, can you clarify?
And I don't feel like they talked over me.
Compare that to somebody who does not leave natural pauses.
They start talking and they'll just go right into it.
And when they loop, they won't even tell you that they ended one thought and began another because one thought just leads right into another.
Will I interrupt that person in a meeting?
Every time. I will interrupt that person every time.
Because I don't want to hear that.
If you can't leave me a pause, it doesn't have to be big.
Just a little bit of a pause so that I can politely come in just to find out, you know, maybe test that we're still on the same topic.
Have you ever had somebody tell you something you already knew and you can't stop them?
Here's the test for this.
If somebody is calling you on a cell phone, and I think maybe cell phone to cell phone is the worst, there's a little bit of a thing where if they're talking, they can't really hear you so well.
I mean, I think it's architected, so you're supposed to, but they can't.
Do you have anybody in your life that you've ever done this with?
I got it. Yeah, I got it.
Right. Yeah, I got it.
I got it. No, I got it.
Please, please stop talking.
I've got it. I've got it.
I've got it. Please stop talking.
Now, what I'm doing right now is not an exaggeration.
I've done this lots of times.
And the reason you can do it just like I'm doing it is that the other person can't hear you.
They actually can't hear you.
Because they don't pause.
And as long as they don't pause, the cell phone has no value.
It's just a one-way device.
And so I have, just for fun, lots of times...
Just started yelling into the phone, stop it!
Stop talking! I get it!
I get it! They can't even hear you.
Now, this isn't everybody, but people know who they are.
So don't be a looper, don't be a no-pauser, and be direct and get to the point.
I will tell you that in my entire life, I can't think of a time I've ever been interrupted in a business setting.
It must have happened, but I can't think of any time.
And I have to think that that wasn't always because I was male.
Because if you're 23 and you're in a business meeting, it's not like you have any status.
The older males are going to make sure that you know what your status is.
By the way, women, if you're a woman and you've experienced men being bullies and stuff, it's all true, but they also do it to the men.
If you're a young man with no status, The older men are going to be pretty harsh, right?
We expect that too.
So there's a little bit of that.
That said, I do think that it's probably true that men are more interrupters in meetings, and probably sexism is part of that.
But there are a lot of questions with this study.
So, here's the...
Have you learned anything yet?
If the only thing you got out of this live stream is how to know when you're being a bad conversationalist, here's another tip.
How long do you think you should talk before making sure the other person gets into the conversation?
What's the longest, let's say a one-on-one conversation, or worse, let's say it's four people out to dinner.
How long should one of them talk Before letting somebody else in.
I'm just looking at your answers.
Somebody says 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 5 minutes.
30 seconds, 45 seconds.
30 seconds, 3 minutes, 15 seconds, 2 minutes.
Alright, everybody who said longer than a minute is a bore.
Everybody who thinks that it would be okay to talk for two minutes straight, you're boring.
You're boring. Now, have I ever talked for two minutes straight?
Oh yeah. And you know what happens when I do?
I bore people.
I mean, you could be the most interesting person in the world, but two minutes...
It's a long, long time for somebody to sit quietly and listen.
What would be better was a little interactivity.
Now, if you're telling a long story...
Then, you know, maybe you need to have a little more time.
But even with a long story, you can tell it with pauses.
The other person jumps in, asks a clarifying question, laughs at your joke or whatever.
But if you've dominated a conversation for two minutes, you might be boring.
That's way too long.
So the people who said 30 seconds, you're probably about right.
And if you're one of the people who said two minutes, I'm not trying to insult you.
I'm trying to be useful.
If you didn't know that, you just learned one of the most useful things that you'll ever learn.
Because people will start liking you more and you won't know why.
Oh, I just kept my...
I just kept my chatter down to, you know, 30 seconds or so and made sure other people got in.
Made sure I asked about, you know, their situation and showed a little interest in them.
Suddenly you've got all these friends and people want to date you and marry you and stuff.
And it's the only change.
You're welcome. All right.
Here's the coolest, scariest news.
There's a company that makes an AI program called Replica.
Instead of a C at the end of Replica, it's the letter K. Replica.
And what it does is it makes a little AI thing you can chat with through the app or the internet, I guess.
And what's different about it Is that it learns to be you.
What? That's right.
I guess it can scoop up your conversations from before and it can build a little profile of who you are from stuff that it can find on the internet or you provide to it.
But then beyond that, it asks you questions.
And it's just a conversation list that checks in with you, or you could check in with.
And they ask questions about what you like and what you've done, I guess, until after you've answered enough of them, it can speak to you intelligently, just like a friend.
Now, if this seems like two different concepts, that's sort of what makes it kind of compelling.
Do you know how people only love themselves?
We think we love other people, but we're loving something that we love about ourselves.
We're just finding it in another person in many cases.
So we care about ourselves, we love ourselves, and then we project that onto the world.
So it's kind of genius to make an electronic digital friend who is trying to be you, because it's mirroring you.
It's pacing you.
There's nothing that you should like more than something that's just like you.
I mean, you choose your friends for their similarities in many cases.
So apparently this thing is surprisingly good, and some people who have played with the early version talk about how surprised they are that they react to it like it's a human connection.
How many of you are surprised that the people using this program are having a human-like, you know, just a whole interaction just as compelling as a human?
How many of you are surprised by that?
That this was always going to happen?
And here's your last little lesson for today.
The reason anybody likes you is because of the way you act.
They can't see your inner thoughts.
They can't.
And even if they think that matters, they're way more influenced by what you do.
Your actions are who you are to other people.
Now, to yourself, you're all these thoughts and feelings and competing emotions, etc.
But you're not that to other people.
To other people, you're kind of a robot.
I see what the robot does, and I have feelings about it.
But if you think that the machines will not give us as good a feeling, as rich a feeling, as human-to-human interaction, You're dead wrong.
It's going to be better.
It's going to be way better.
The risk is that it will be so much better that you just won't want to interact with people.
And that's like a real risk.
Well, maybe, or maybe not.
Maybe it's just a benefit, so you don't have to interact with people.
Because loneliness is such a gigantic problem that if somebody solves loneliness with an AI, and when I say if...
They already did it.
It's called Replica.
Now, I haven't used it, so I can't recommend it or anything.
But in terms of, will there be something like this, if it's not this one, that surpasses human connection?
A machine connection should surpass human connection...
Really quickly. Like, you're not going to wait 10 years for it.
You're waiting more like months.
That's months away if it's not already here.
Because what makes you like anybody?
What makes you like a friend? The reason you like a friend is they have things in common.
The AI will make sure it has more in common with you than any friend could.
Your friend is polite.
AI will be more polite than your friend.
AI is, let's say, complimentary.
Your friends, not so good in that department, but the AI could be great at it.
They focus on positive things.
AI beats again.
Your friends, they don't focus on positive things.
Your AI will never bring you a problem.
Your friends do.
Your AI is not gossiping about you.
Your friends are.
Your AI is not stealing your privacy.
Okay, I might do that.
But if it's designed well, I suppose it wouldn't.
But your friends might, right?
So how hard is it going to be for AI to be a better friend?
It's already done.
Already done. And you will respond to it just like a human, but better because it won't be annoying like a human.
So that is your crazy thought for today.
And somebody, this market for...
The market for what I'll call a digital friend might be the biggest market of any market.
It could be. Because how much would you pay for a friend?
Think how much you pay for a car.
You pay a lot for a car because a car is really, really useful.
How much would you pay for a friend if you didn't have one?
You'd pay more than you'd pay for a car.
So the market for AI friends might be the biggest market that's ever been created.
It might be bigger than the energy market.
All right. That's all for now.
I'll talk to you tomorrow.
All right. I just turned off Periscope.
You YouTubers. Yeah, I thought, wasn't Periscope supposed to go away?
I think maybe it wasn't today.
How much would you pay for a sex bot?
People will prefer digital sex bots over people.
That will happen certainly within five years.
Yeah, within five years, some subset of the population And maybe that's already here.
I think there are probably some people who are already saying, you know, a really good sex bot is better than a defective person.
There are very few people in that category today.
In five years, I'll bet that'll be 10%.
I'll bet 10% of the public will be preferring some kind of a digital sexual relationship.
