Episode 1398 Scott Adams: Puppies and Rainbows Are the Decoy Topics For Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
AOC's grandmother and Matt Walsh
President Trump and themes for 2022
Twitter vs President of Nigeria
Ransomeware, a form of terrorism
The problem with meta-analysis
Rebuilding social networks, post-COVID
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We're trying to game the system with the algorithm because the algorithm will demonetize me if I have any controversial topics in it.
I don't have any controversial content.
I mean, nothing that would get me booted off of Social media, but it's very controversial in its own modest way.
So before we do the simultaneous sip, and I know that's why many of you are here, can we talk about Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul getting ready to box?
What is happening with the world that Floyd Mayweather and Logan Paul even can be in the same ring?
Isn't one of them The best boxer in the world.
And the other one is Logan Paul.
It's good entertainment.
And I have to say, Logan Paul is a genius at getting publicity.
And I also have to say, I was looking at the video.
Man, he's doing a good job with his fitness.
But you know what the big story is?
So, I guess they were doing a little publicity thing, the weigh-in or whatever it is, where the The two potential boxers are basically doing a visual thing.
And Logan Paul said, and I quote, talking about the boxing match, he said, Tomorrow I break the effin' simulation and beat the greatest boxer in the history of the planet.
So even Logan Paul is describing the fact that he will be boxing the best boxer on the planet.
He says he must be living in a simulation.
What do you think of that? So even Logan Paul is talking about living in the simulation.
Now, if you were him, and you had the life that Logan Paul has had so far, wouldn't you believe you lived in a simulation?
Because I don't know a ton about Logan Paul, but it looks like he just decides what he wants reality to be, and then it becomes that.
Right? Well, let's have the simultaneous sip to that.
You know, and if you'd like to enjoy it, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug, a flax, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, a little oxytocin sprinkled in.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
Go. That's right, you made it in time.
Well, the big news, well, before we get to the big news, I love political pranks, especially if they're funny.
Now, you saw the story about AOC's grandmother down in Puerto Rico, and AOC blamed President Trump for her grandmother still having a suboptimal situation down there after the disasters in Puerto Rico.
So after AOC complained about her grandmother's situation, Matt Walsh, on the Daily Wire, he did a GoFundMe to raise money for her grandmother.
So it's funny because Matt Walsh is a right-leaning critic of AOC. So instead of complaining, he just fixes her problem...
The reason it's hilarious is because the Republican brand is more about fixing stuff, and the Democrat brand is more about complaining about stuff.
Now, this may be just my own impression, right?
But it feels like that.
It feels like one is about fixing stuff and one is about complaining about stuff.
So AOC complains about stuff and Matt Walsh fixes it.
He just fixes it.
Except there's a wrinkle in the plan, which is apparently somebody in AOC's family rejected the money so the GoFundMe people took it down and took her money away.
So imagine being...
Imagine being AOC's grandmother.
And she's having a bad time.
And then AOC, who's doing great, is complaining about her grandmother having a bad time.
And her grandmother's probably thinking, you know, you could probably fix some of this.
I'm just saying.
You're an AOC. I'm your grandmother.
You might be able to fix some of my problems if you really applied yourself to it.
I feel like she was thinking that.
I'm doing some mind reading now.
But then Matt Walsh comes along and fixes her problem.
Here's $100,000.
It's already pledged, right?
People actually put their credit cards in there.
They pledged $100,000.
So Grandma's problems are fixed.
And then Grandma finds out, and I don't know if this fact is true, but then Grandma finds out that somebody in her family decided to turn it down on her behalf.
Well, there's your $100,000, Grandma, right down the crapper.
So, as political pranks go, this one was one of the best.
Because number one, it didn't cost them anything, because the GoFundMe ended up getting cancelled.
The Democrats proved that they would shoot themselves in the foot rather than solve a problem.
They would rather shoot themselves in the foot Then solve a problem.
And you've never seen it more cleanly laid out.
Here's my problem.
Oh, okay. Here's a total solution.
Completely done.
No ambiguity.
Nothing's missing. You needed some money.
Here you go. And then they took it away.
I mean, you can't do a prank that works out better than this, although it's kind of cruel for the grandmother.
And I wish she'd gotten her money.
I mean, the prank worked just as well whether she got her money or not.
So, can't she get her money?
I mean, it feels like Grandma should get some money out of this.
She was part of the show.
All right. So the Republicans had their convention last night, and Trump was, I guess, the most interesting featured speaker.
And we're getting a sense now what the Republicans will be pushing in 2022 and beyond for their main themes.
So I'm going to run by you what I think will be their main themes based on what they've said so far.
And let's judge them, all right?
Put your persuasion head on.
Persuasion head-on.
Are these good ideas for Republican political interests?
And it looks like these are the major themes.
Number one, Trump said that China is responsible for the virus and should pay $10 trillion in reparations.
Now, when Trump says China should pay $10 trillion in reparations, is that good persuasion?
Or bad? Judge his technique.
Have I taught you anything?
Well, I won't wait for your answer, because it's really good persuasion.
Trump is just good at this.
You know, you don't realize what good looks like, persuasion-wise, until he comes back into the headlines.
The moment Trump enters the headlines, it's good persuasion again.
It's like it's been missing the whole time.
And then he comes in and he goes, well, let me show you how to do this again.
You don't say, China, we think maybe you owe us something.
You don't say, I don't know, maybe we should look into this.
You don't say, I think there are great economic problems caused by China.
Hand-waving. Hand-waving.
China. China.
That's bad persuasion. Let me show you what...
Good persuasion looks like.
China, you owe us $10 trillion.
That's good persuasion, right?
The fact that it's a big round number is perfect.
It's perfect. You can't forget $10 trillion.
How many of you will hear $10 trillion and never forget it for the rest of your life?
You probably remember that number for the rest of your life.
Imagine any other number that you would remember for the rest of your life.
Good luck. Good luck.
Come up with any number, like a number, that a politician says that you would remember for the rest of your life.
I'll bet 9-1-1 somebody says.
Yeah, maybe nine justices of the Supreme Court.
But basically, there's almost no such thing as a number that you remember forever.
Unless there's like a 9-11 event or something.
So Trump has this amazing ability to just say 10 trillion, sticks in your head, it's an insanely big number, feels like it could be in the neighborhood, like your brain doesn't reject it.
Your brain does not say it's too big.
It really doesn't.
But it's so big.
So here's the magic of Trump's approach.
How do you come up with a number that is insanely big and your brain still says, yeah, it's probably in the neighborhood.
It's pretty close.
He took two things that can't fit together And he made them fit together, and then your brain can't release on it.
Because two things that don't fit together just were made to fit together.
You don't forget that. How do you do that?
Right? He makes it look easy.
Because you're saying to yourself, I think you're making too big a deal about this.
He just threw out a big number.
No. No.
He's so consistent with the way he does this right that it's not an accident.
It's not just throwing out a big number.
This is designed.
It's designed persuasion and designed perfectly.
The other thing that the Republicans are going after hard is critical race theory.
Remember, Republicans like an enemy.
Everybody likes an enemy in politics, right?
But the Republicans, their enemies are going to be China, I give that an A-plus for a technique.
Critical race theory, that's going to get people to the polls, right?
That's going to get people out of their chairs.
So they know the things that will get people to stand up.
And certainly within the Republican Party, if you say your kids are going to be brainwashed to think they're inferior...
That's going to get you to the polls.
All right. The other enemy is Dr.
Fauci. Dr.
Fauci is the face that the Republicans, and Trump in particular, they're going to put Fauci's face on the idea that experts should be trusted in all cases, or that the experts are always right.
And he's also on the side of the, let's say, the overreaction Or maybe over-conservative, say the Republicans, approach to the pandemic.
What did he call?
Trump called Fauci a radical masker.
A radical masker.
He wants multiple masks, etc.
Now, as soon as you heard that, Trump said Fauci is a radical masker.
You knew that was a keeper, right?
Once again, Trump comes up with a phrase that's just a headline.
He's a radical masker.
Now, everybody else has been talking about Fauci.
Why did it take Trump to come up with a nickname that's certainly going to be the headline today, if it doesn't stick?
He's got that gift.
And then, of course, the Republicans will be going hard against what they would call election fraud.
So that looks to be their four big ones.
China, critical race theory, Fauci as a stand-in for all bad experts, and then election fraud.
Apparently there was some booing when the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, got up there, and I think the Secretary of State, Rafsenberger, got some booing too.
And that is shown as being reported as Evidence that Trump has control of the Republican Party.
What do you think? Does Trump still have control of the Republican Party?
Feels like it.
Because he has control of the public.
He has control of so much of the public that the Republican Party pretty much is going to have to give him what he wants, unless something changes.
So, you know, all the news was about Trump this morning.
If you looked at CNN, the entire top part of the news where all the important stuff is, I think it was all Trump stories.
And CNN was having a total Trump-gasm this morning.
They're like, Trump said what?
Trump gave somebody a nickname?
Trump accused China of $10 trillion?
So they're just having this massive serial orgasm over the fact that Trump's in the news again.
One of the big stories was Trump wearing his pants backwards.
What? On Twitter, there are all these pictures of what appear to be Trump wearing his pants backwards.
Now, I don't believe he wore his pants backwards.
Let me just say that. But there is a photograph where his pants don't have a zipper.
It looks photoshopped.
It looks like somebody just photoshopped the zipper out.
And the story was about the wrinkles in his pants and blah, blah, blah.
But I think it's photoshopped because I don't think he was wearing pants that have no zipper.
But that's what the photograph looked like.
Here's a hypothesis that I would need a fact check on.
So Twitter user Adam tweeted this at me this morning, and I thought it's worth mentioning.
Can somebody give me a fact check on this?
And it's an innocent explanation for why Sunday morning voting might have been limited.
Remember when you heard that the Republicans want to limit the voting on Sundays to, you know, certain hours?
And you said to yourself, voter suppression...
They're trying to keep the churches from voting or moving their people to vote directly after church.
It's a trick to stop the black voters from being effective.
Well, one of the other explanations is, and when you hear this, it's going to make you mad.
That nobody told you this before?
Now, I think this is true, but do me a fact check, because I can't say I'm positive.
And it goes like this.
That in some places, churches are also the polling place.
Did you see that coming?
The church is also the polling place.
So you can't have the church being a church at exactly the same time and day That the church is a polling place.
So it turns out that this change might have at least had something to do with the fact that they don't want to make it hard to go to church.
Give me a fact check on that.
Is that true? That the real reason for the law was to make sure that you had time to go to church?
And that they didn't use it as a polling place on Sunday morning when you wanted to use the church for a church?
Is that all this was?
Now, I never believe anything is all it was, right?
So even if there was a perfectly good reason, It might also have an effect on suppressing some votes.
So I don't think...
Okay, I'm seeing people confirm it.
Oh, John says, yes, my polling place is a church.
So doesn't it make sense that you should not make it legal to do polling before 11 a.m.
because that's when you're churching?
Is that the whole story?
I mean, is that actually the whole story?
Because I don't know.
It doesn't feel like it could be the whole story.
It just feels a little too simple.
But did we go this far without that being a headline?
Nobody brought that up until I saw it from a user on Twitter.
That wasn't on CNN. Nobody on Fox News thought to mention that.
Has anybody even heard this before?
How do we get this far...
In a topic that I've talked about in public, I've talked about this topic in public, and yet I heard this fact, or I guess it's a fact, this morning.
How in the world, I would consider myself, maybe you can judge me too.
If you were to judge all the people in this country in terms of how well informed they are on political stuff, where would you put me?
If you've watched me long enough, would you say it's safe to say I'm in the top 10% of citizens who are well-informed about politics?
Would you give me that top 10%?
Because I feel like if you just pay attention to it and it's part of your job and you do it every day, you're probably in the top 10%, right?
Now, it might be higher, but for the purposes of my point, if I'm in the top 10%, And I didn't know about this Sunday churches as polling place thing until today.
How uninformed are we?
I mean, seriously, people.
I should be in the upper realm of well-informed people, and I'm not even close.
If I were to judge how well-informed I am, and let's say well-informed means that you know enough about the context of things to make good decisions, I'm not even close.
And if you think you're close, maybe you should examine that.
Because I do this literally, I guess you could say I do it for a living.
You know, at least part of what I do.
And I didn't know that.
It's like the most basic part of the story, I think.
Or it's not true.
Alright? That's possible.
Maybe it's not true. And I still don't know.
How did we get this far...
Into the biggest story in the country, which is, you know, are people gaming the elections?
And I don't know that?
That basic fact about the Sunday morning voting?
How do I not know that by now?
I mean, seriously.
All right. Twitter is having a little fight over there in Nigeria.
So what happened was, looks like the president of Nigeria...
Was blocked on Twitter because he said some things that violated Twitter's rules.
And he said, I don't know, some part of his population would be punished for bad behavior.
So Twitter blocks the president, and then the president bans Twitter in all of Nigeria.
And then Twitter complained in a tweet, of course.
So Twitter policy tweet said this.
We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria.
Access to the free and hashtag open internet is an essential human right in modern society.
We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world.
Hashtag keep it on.
Do you see any, I don't know, inconsistency?
Is there any inconsistency that is highlighted by this story?
Well, let me point it out for you.
Twitter bans people for speech that they consider over the line of their terms of use.
And they consider that entirely appropriate, that Twitter makes the decision of what is allowed and what is not allowed.
Nigeria has adopted Twitter's theory that somebody can make decisions about what is allowed and what is not allowed.
Because if Twitter can make decisions about what is okay for the public and not okay, why can't others?
Was there a constitution or was there some kind of law or natural law that says that Twitter is the only group That gets to decide what is okay and what is not okay for speech?
No. No, Nigeria can do it too.
So if Twitter can make those decisions, and Facebook can make those decisions, Nigeria can make those decisions.
Right? And when Nigeria does it, you say, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Because your decision about what to allow and what not to allow is a bad decision.
That's not the issue.
The issue is not whether it's a bad decision.
The issue is who gets to make it.
Right? The decision is not whether Twitter always makes the right decision about who's on and who's out.
The question is who gets to make it.
Who gets to make it?
Nigeria says we get to make it.
Do they? Yeah, I guess they do.
Twitter says we get to make it.
Do they? Yeah, I guess they do.
Unless somebody else makes it for them.
Like in Nigeria. Now, of course, I would be in favor of Twitter winning this battle and getting access back to Nigeria.
So I'm definitely backing Twitter over Nigeria on this topic.
But I love how it highlights the problem with the philosophy, which is if some people can decide what you can see, and it's up to them, and it's subjective, then other people can do it too.
All right? It's either all or none on that subjective censoring.
So I want to say this again because I don't understand why it's not the way it's framed nationally.
So apparently the US, the Biden administration and the US Department of Justice, they've elevated this ransomware business to similar priority as terrorism.
Now what they're doing is making sure that all ransomware reports are reported centrally.
And they'll have some kind of a group that will look at it more holistically to get a better idea of who's doing it and how to stop it and all that stuff.
Now, compliments.
I'll give my compliments to the Biden administration because I'm not a partisan in all things.
I'm partisan in some things, I guess.
Everybody is. But I try not to be partisan on certainly any kind of national defense things.
And if Trump had done this, I would have said it's the right decision, and Biden's doing it.
I'll also say it's the right decision to just make this terrorism.
I will go a little bit further than Biden's administration and say that if we determined that we could find these people, and let's say Russia wasn't willing to pick them up, we should drone them.
So if we can find the bad guys, the hackers, and they happen to be in Russian territory, we should kill them where they stand.
And we should send copies of the mission to Putin, show them all the video, tell them everything we did, completely transparently, after the fact, after we killed them.
So we should kill them, and then we should bill Putin.
We should send him the bill, For killing his citizens.
Now that's persuasion.
Bad persuasion would be just to kill him on Russian territory.
Because that would be, well, an act of war, right?
It's an act of war to kill a Russian citizen on Russian territory, I would think.
So instead of making it look like an act of war, send them the fucking bill.
Send them literally an itemized fucking bill.
Say, Putin, this is what you should have done.
Right? These are your guys.
You didn't do it. We're going to kill your fucking people, and we're going to give you the fucking bill.
And if you don't pay it, we're shutting down all trade.
Pay the fucking bill.
Now, if your story, Putin, is that these guys don't work for you, then let's keep that story.
We'll take care of it for you.
We'll send you the bill.
You better fucking pay it.
That's how I'd do it. I don't think Biden will do that.
I would not rule out the fact that Biden's a badass on this stuff.
I don't know if he's going to be a badass on China.
He's got a little China problem.
But I do think Biden has at least a chance.
We'll give him a chance. We'll see what happens.
I think Biden might push pretty hard on Russia.
We'll see. El Salvador made a big move today.
So El Salvador's president, he's going to send a bill to his Congress to make Bitcoin legal tender in their country.
So El Salvador will make it legal to accept Bitcoin.
And I think part of the reason for that is that people living abroad can send remittances back home more easily by Bitcoin.
Now, I don't know how many countries it will take or businesses to accept Bitcoin before it makes a big difference to the price, but this feels like a big deal.
It did not, however, change the price of Bitcoin.
So I thought that Bitcoin might get a little pop on this news, but it actually wouldn't.
Last I checked, it was down 1%.
We'll see if it makes a difference.
Do you know what our system of government has evolved into?
You know, I feel sorry for the founders, and it's a good thing that they stay dead, you know, the founders of this country, because when they came up with the Constitution and they designed our system, I'm not so sure.
Somebody says, treat China the same with fentanyl.
Yeah, maybe so. Put a drone attack on their fentanyl dealers and send them the bill.
That's not a bad idea.
By the way, the sending the bill part is the persuasion.
Because when you send the bill, that's all anybody's going to talk about.
If you bill them, there's going to be a physical bill, and people are going to look at it.
And they're going to look at the itemization.
So billing Putin for killing his The leader of our country is always selected at this point.
The leader...
Well, even Congress, I would say.
They're all selected based on who can game the election system the best.
There's plenty of documentation that shows that Biden probably won because the Democrats just did a better job using the legal system to get a set of rules that favored their outcome.
So, it didn't really probably have much to do with the voters' preferences.
It probably had a lot to do with who gamed the system better.
Now, the complaints from the Democrats are that the Republicans are catching up, and they're regaming, and they're changing the system so it might favor them.
But you do all this work to create a democracy and have these elections, And basically the outcome is determined by the people who make the rules.
So the rule makers are the ones who decide who got elected.
But on top of that, when it's all said and done, and you've elected your leaders, then the next phase is ignoring the leaders, because the only person that matters is Joe Manchin.
Because as long as things stay really close, you know, if Congress is really close to even, Republicans and Democrats, then the only person who has any power is a person who's willing to sometimes vote on the other side.
And that's Joe Manchin.
So Joe Manchin is the only smart person in Congress because he's openly told the world, I could vote this way, but I could also vote that way.
That's all you have to do when you run the country.
That's it. Somebody says Kristen Sinema.
Maybe another one, yeah.
So I don't know what's wrong with everybody else in Congress.
All they have to do is sometimes vote for the other team.
And then you're in charge of the country.
But I suppose you need to be more loyal to your party these days.
So Manchin is probably paying the price from his own party.
But it's a clever move.
I would have done the same thing.
If I were in Congress and I saw this opening the way Manchin does, I would have said to myself, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Can I understand this correctly?
All I have to do is sometimes vote for the other team and I can actually be running the country?
I would take that in a heartbeat.
I would be all over that.
I would run this country If they give it to me.
I mean, basically, it would be the whole country just handing you the keys and saying, can you decide for us?
Because we can't really decide.
Joe Manchin, can you just make up the decision for us?
We don't like all this representative democracy.
We'll just let you do it, Joe Manchin.
So I did a little reading up on the problem with meta-analyses.
So I've mentioned that You know the story about ivermectin, the proposed potential therapeutic for COVID, that there is some suggestion that if you do a meta-analysis, which is you sort of sum up all of the imperfect studies, that the imperfections can be sort of...
Smooth down, if you will, speaking very approximately here, if you add them all together and treat them as one big study, even though they were individually imperfect studies.
And Andres Beckhaus, who knows more about this stuff than I do, had mentioned there's some problems with meta-analysis.
And I didn't know exactly what they were, but here's the, let's see, the idiot's version.
The hideous version is that if you were to do an analysis of studies, so you're looking at a whole bunch of studies, and you're deciding how to add them all together into one big ball, you have a lot of decisions that you make.
Oh, I see your comments are crowdly, and I don't understand all that context, but maybe I should.
it.
So the question on the meta-analyses is that if you're looking at which studies to include in your meta-analysis, then it's automatically subjective.
So apparently one of the things you might do is you say, we're going to do a meta-analysis of all the studies, but of course we're going to leave out any of the pre-print stuff.
So the pre-print stuff is the stuff that hasn't been You know, published in a major publication and peer-reviewed and all that.
It's like before that stuff happens.
So, do you include that?
Should you include stuff that's not quite far enough along in the pipeline?
Because if you decide not to include it, you might get a different result than if you included it.
There might be other criteria where you say, well, I'm not going to include a study unless it's at least a certain size.
It has to have a certain number of people.
Or it's done in a certain place.
Or they looked at it in a certain way, maybe in the beginning versus later on.
So my point is that the outcome of the meta-analysis is determined by the person who decides what to look at.
Alright, Luz, I see you saying I'm lost.
Let me see if I can do this one more time clearly.
If you're going to look at a bunch of individual small studies to kind of take their average direction, if you will, you still get to choose what's in the average.
And what you decide to put in there will determine what the average is.
So you can say to yourself, I'm not going to include this kind of study because it's not the kind that looks good enough.
Or you could say, let's include everything.
Because the whole point of it is to average out.
So the point is that you think you're doing an analysis, but you're not.
It's an illusion of analysis.
Because the illusion is that there's some kind of objective process going on when nothing like that happened.
In fact, it was subjective because you chose what you were going to look at, and it was the choosing what you look at that probably determined the result.
Now, here's the counter to the counter.
If every one of the studies shows a strong effect in the same direction, probably none of this matters, right?
So if 100% of the studies showed that, let's take an example, I don't think this is true, but If 100% of the studies showed that ivermectin worked really, really well, well, it wouldn't matter which one you picked, because they'd all be the same.
But if that were also true, you wouldn't need a meta-analysis.
So here's what one expert said.
The situation where you don't need a meta-analysis is where it's so obvious without one that you don't need to do it.
But the moment it's not obvious, The meta-analysis also doesn't work because that's when you put the subjectivity into it.
So the meta-analysis actually is logically illogical, meaning that you either don't need it or it doesn't work.
Those are the only two possibilities.
You don't need it because it's so clear without it, or if it's murky, it's really subjective and it doesn't work.
Now, What's the counter to that?
And I think in the ivermectin study, I believe the counter is that they're all in the same direction.
That the entire point of it is that there's nothing in the other direction.
So in that case, a meta-analysis, I think, actually makes sense.
But you can't trust it because of its subjectivity.
Or let me say this. Maybe you didn't need the meta-analysis so it fits that model.
You didn't need it because they're all in the same direction.
Now, Fact check me on that.
I don't know if they're all in the same direction, but I feel as if that was the main point, is that they were, in fact, all in the same direction.
And that was some of the few things that I needed to talk about today.
I feel as though we're entering the summer where things are going to slow down a little bit, and I would like to ask this question of you.
I told you yesterday that in my town, there's some kind of a golden age situation going on.
My main street turned into a festival every weekend, where the street is closed to traffic and it's outdoor dining.
People have their masks off.
People are so happy they can't stand it.
Oh, thank you, Ron.
I'm going to mention that in a moment.
And... Is anybody else having the experience that their town is just insanely happy right now?
Gun control is racist, says Marussia, that the Republicans should say that.
Yeah. I'm not sure Republicans feel as comfortable as you might imagine saying that gun control is racist.
But I see your point.
Yeah, I can see your point.
That'd be a hard message for the Republicans to take.
All right, back to your town.
Somebody says yes in Texas, no in Santa Cruz.
My town is happy. Portland isn't very happy.
New Jersey, not so good.
I see a yes from Karina.
No, I'm in Canada.
I'm sorry. Not in Canada.
Canada is sad. All the Canadians are complaining here.
Canada's not too happy.
Yes, Jan says, a lot more people are out walking.
That's definitely true. Where is Jack Ma?
Yeah, that's a good question. Montana is great.
New York City sucks.
Connecticut, good. Atlanta, definitely.
New York City is back, baby.
Wichita has been great for a while.
Philadelphia is the pits, sorry.
Missouri, yes. Alright, well, it looks like we're coming back, folks.
We're coming back. How about taking a moment?
Take a moment for me to go back in time.
Do you remember...
About this time, last year, people were afraid that the entire economy was going to fall apart.
And it didn't.
It didn't. And we did rally, and we beat this damn thing.
I mean, I think it's beaten even if it lasts forever.
I mean, we're back to nearly normal at this point, and we're looking good.
So, I feel like we all lived through something amazing.
And I think we'll all be changed because of it, and changed in lots of ways.
But I think the golden age is just going to impress itself upon us, whether we like it or not.
And I so feel that the pandemic was some sort of system reboot.
The pandemic did more than anything in my life to just change everything.
About the way you think about people.
You had to re-engineer your entire life from scratch.
And I would like to ask you this question.
How many of you are having trouble rebuilding your friend network and social network?
Is there anybody who lost their social network during this pandemic who needs to rebuild it?
And you're saying, where are all my friends?
I need some friends now.
I just want to see in the comments if that's a common problem or not.
Kevin says, oh, we're getting a lot of yeses to that.
Yep, yep, yep.
All right, so I was going to do a micro lesson on that.
Oh, there's a lot of yeses. Wow.
I'm sorry about that. So I feel the same situation.
I feel like I have to intentionally rebuild my social network because it just completely shrunk to the family.
Let me tell you a system for doing this.
I was going to do a micro lesson on my local subscription service on how to make friends.
Would you like that? I'm going to give you a quick little lesson on how to make friends.
And I actually wrote it on my whiteboard over here, which you can almost see.
I shouldn't have showed you that other one, I guess.
And here's the technique.
Number one, Making friends, don't think of it as a goal, think of it as a system.
It's the same process I use for everything.
A goal approach would be, I think I'm going to identify somebody I want as a friend, and I'm going to try to make that person my friend.
That doesn't really work.
It's hard to just say, well, I think you'll be my friend, I'm going to make you a friend.
I don't ever see that work.
So that would be a goal approach and it just doesn't work.
Here's a system approach.
It goes like this.
Number one, have defined interests.
Become the person who cares about X. Now, X is up to you.
Could be politics.
Could be a sport.
Could be a hobby. Could be an interest.
Could be a cause. Find something to define you so that when your friends describe you, they say, Oh, have you met Scott?
He talks about politics.
He plays tennis. Become a stereotype.
Here's why. As soon as you become known as the person who does X, whatever X is, then all of the other people who like X are drawn to you.
And they have a reason to talk to you.
And you have a reason to talk to them.
And your friend will say, hey, I know you're interested in X. You should meet my sibling who also likes X. Or my ex who likes X. So, be the moth.
Be the flame that attracts the moth.
Don't be the moth. Be the flame.
Be the person who says, here is what I am, and now I'm going to attract stuff.
So first of all, have a defined interest that other people recognize, and that will attract people of like interest.
So that's the first part of the system.
Next, be valuable.
Be valuable.
You would like to live in a world in which friendship is based on some, let's say, Conceptual value that you'll just say, you know, I like people.
People are good. I like Bob.
Bob's a good person.
Bob's my friend.
I'll tell you how a goal is different from affirmations in a minute.
Friendship is a transactional situation.
Your family might not be.
In your family, you might have something close to, you know, complete love without any restrictions.
But friends are transactions.
Now, you don't want to think of it that way, but I'm sorry, it's just true.
It's always true.
Your friends are people for whom you provide a value, and they provide a value back.
If that's not happening, get rid of your friend.
Unless, I suppose, they're giving you value and you're giving them nothing.
That would be okay for you. But it's only a friendship if you both know what you're getting and you're both delivering it.
For example, you might be valuable because you're funny.
And people say, I love being around a funny person.
You might be valuable because you're an empath.
And people say, man, when I have a problem, I sure like talking to X. You might be valuable because your home...
It's a good one for getting together.
You might be valuable because you're an organizer.
You're the person who brings everybody together.
You might be valuable because you have lots of friends, and people want to be your friend to have access to your network of friends.
But make sure you have a value.
If you're not offering a thing of value, why would anybody be your friend?
Seriously. Why would they be your friend?
It's not because your inner Your inner you, your soul is so good.
Forget about that.
Nobody can see your soul.
Nobody can see your inner thoughts.
People can see what you do.
So do something valuable for the people you would like to be friends with.
If you can't do something for other people, don't complain you don't have friends.
They need you to do something for them.
That's how it works. So get over your Your romantic notions that friendship is based on some connection in your soul.
It's not that at all.
It's just people have stuff in common who have an interest and a value that is exchanged.
That's all. It's transactional.
But there's nothing wrong with that.
The world has gone on forever exactly with this system.
You don't have to be the one who bucks it.
Use the system. Don't fight the system.
Use it. It's been tested for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years.
You should also either join groups or organize them.
So find a group of people who are doing a thing that you're interested in and join that group.
The best way to make friends is simply by doing the same stuff with people that you didn't know that well, and then you get to know them.
You got something to talk about.
Oh, you do X, I do X. Let's talk about X. And then you're on your way.
So if you can't join a group that Is it of interest to you?
Be the organizer.
Are you worried that if you're the organizer, people will say no to you?
Here's the trick. Don't say to one person, would you like to do X with me?
Because if you get turned down for that, that feels kind of personal, doesn't it?
Would you like to go to a movie with me?
That's tough for some people to ask.
Nobody likes to be rejected.
So don't do that. Instead, be an organizer and say, I'm thinking of going to movie X, put out a message to your network.
Does anybody want to go with me?
That's it. I'm going to do something on this day.
Who would like to join me?
Then you don't know who turned you down.
Nobody has to answer.
It's just the people who want to join you say yes.
If you get nobody joining you, nobody even knows.
Nobody's going to know if you went to the movie.
They just know you put it out there.
That's all. If they didn't go, they didn't answer, that's all they know.
So there's nobody turning you down, and there's nobody saying yes.
Well, I mean, somebody might say yes.
So don't ask one-on-one.
Organize a group. Put in an offer.
Offer to host.
Offer to create an event around something.
Be the organizer.
And next thing is diversify and prune.
Don't think that your process of making friends is to get some friends and then you're done.
No good. Your process of making friends should be a continuous process where you're adding new friends all the time and you're diversifying so that if you lose a friend, eh, you got ten more.
You lose another friend, eh, you still got ten more because you added a new friend.
What you don't want...
Is to have two friends and then one of them gets pissed off at you.
And you lost 50% of your social network because you made one person mad.
Right? Diversify.
10 friends, 20 friends, 30 friends.
That's what you're going for. And if you get to 10 and you say to yourself, well, that's enough friends.
No! Because you need to prune friends too.
How many of your friends are just users?
They're just toxic.
Are you getting rid of the toxic ones?
Because they're taking your time.
You've got to get rid of the toxic ones.
And people can become toxic even if they didn't start that way.
So you've got to get rid of the toxic ones.
And the only way you can get rid of toxic friends is to have diversified your friend portfolio so that you can grab one and say, ah, toxic, get rid of it, and it doesn't even change the average.
You don't even notice it.
It's just better. So diversify, grow your friends, and prune viciously.
Prune, prune, viciously.
And the other tip is there are people who are good organizers and connectors.
You probably know some.
If you know 20 people, probably maybe only one of them, or even fewer, it could be zero, maybe one of them Would be the person who knows lots of people and has parties and introduces you to people.
If you're going to put any interest into a person, find one of those.
Find one of those, the organizer, the person who has lots of friends, and then how do you make that person your friend?
Do you call them and say, hey, be my friend?
Nope. That doesn't work.
And plus they might say no. You don't want to do that.
Offer them something. If there's somebody who's a good organizer, have a party and invite them.
If you invite an organizer to three parties at your place, there's a 100% chance, and let's say the organizer goes three times to your place, there's a 100% chance that you will get invited to their next party.
And that's the one that's the good one.
That's where all the people are, because that's the organizer.
That's how you do it.
You find the people who are the highest value connectors, you make sure you put more attention toward them than other people, because they're the high value.
Somebody says, I'm the toxic one.
Then the other thing you ought to work on, because that's a good comment, is don't bother to make friends if you're an asshole.
Okay? Work on that.
If you know you're an asshole, or you know you're not very, let's say, generous to your friends, your problem is not ability to make friends.
The problem is, if you made friends accidentally, your work friends or the people that you just met casually, it doesn't matter.
If you're going to be an asshole, there's no point.
Alright, so that is your goal for today.
Now, the reason that systems are better than goals is because a system is something you can do every day.
So what I just described is stuff you can be working on every day.
Join a group, organize a group, send a text to that organizer person just to remind them who you are, that sort of thing.
Whereas a goal, you might do nothing that day on your goal and you just feel depressed.
But a system, you can just work every day.
Join a gym, right?
There's something you can do every day.
Join a gym, people with common interests, you'll probably run into some.
And then all your friends ask to borrow money.
Well, that is a very negative comment.
Any friends in any mafia organization?
That is a weird question.
Now, the question was asked, what's the difference between an affirmation and a goal?
It's an excellent question.
And I like to put it this way.
A goal would be I'm going to get that promotion at work.
Very specific, right?
I'm going to get the promotion that just opened up at work.
An affirmation would be I will become wealthy.
The affirmation allows you to be wealthy in any way.
It's not restrictive.
So that's what's good about it.
A goal would be, I want to get that promotion at work.
You only have one thing. What are the odds that everybody gets that one thing they want?
Well, not nearly as good as the odds of something good happening.
Something better. So your affirmation should be in the direction, but not too specific.
So let's say you want to be in love.
A goal would be, I will be in love with that person.
Is that always a good idea?
Or would it be better to say, I will find love?
Or I am loved.
Or I'll have a robust social life.
Anything like that.
Let me tell you a real-life situation that happened that makes me wonder about this simulation.
Without getting into details, the other day I went into town and one of the people with me was talking about a certain other individual in her life.
And there had been some situation there.
And as she was talking about this one person in her life who was a problem, that one person walked directly past us.
There was only one person we were talking about, one person who was a problem to this one person.
I live in a pretty populated place, right?
There are millions of people who live around here.
But as she was talking about that one person, and was walking in a part of town in which neither of them would normally be, that one person that she was talking about walked directly past us.
Now, how often does that happen?
It happens a lot, right?
Do you notice that things like that happen a lot?
Now, you're saying it's a small town, but it really isn't.
Because the entire time we were walking, we saw nobody else we knew.
Nobody. Saw hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of people, and saw nobody else that we knew except the one person we were talking about.
And you see people say, yeah, that happens to me.
It's one of those things that just makes you wonder about the nature of the world, doesn't it?
It happens a little too often.
Now, when Jake Paul, I'm sorry, Logan Paul, when Logan Paul was talking about his upcoming fight with Floyd Mayweather, and I guess that's coming tomorrow, and Logan Paul says, I'm going to break the effin' simulation, Do you think that Logan Paul has noticed that his own life doesn't seem to correspond to anything that statistics would suggest?
Because how in the world do you become Logan Paul in the first place?
I mean, that's not easy.
But once you become him, how in the world do you get a boxing match with the best boxer in the world?
Like, how in the world?
Oh, it's tonight. People are telling me that the That the boxing match is tonight.
Now, I get that it's an exhibition.
And I get that people would expect Mayweather to win.
But how in the world does any of this happen?
I mean, really? What's my null hypothesis for the simulation?
Ask that a different way.
Yeah. Is it a cage match?
Or a boxing match?
I'm not sure which.
I've got to say, the reason that people like Logan Paul and Elon Musk and even me, I think the reason that we believe in the simulation is that our lives don't make sense.
Does my life make sense?
Those of you who have been watching me long enough, let me just ask this question.
Does my life make sense, based on just what you've observed, You don't even have to know my inner life.
Just look at what I've done, what I've been involved in, the things I've touched.
Does any of that make sense?
It kind of doesn't, does it?
I see yeses and nos.
But in my mind, it's too coincidental.
Like, it doesn't make sense.
Unless we live in a simulation.
Um... Do I have a null hypothesis for the simulation?
Can you explain what you mean by that?
So tell me what you mean by a null hypothesis for the simulation.
You mean an alternative to it?
Alright, so I'm asking you to ask the question in English as opposed to a science wonky talk.
Will I be your friend?
Absolutely. I might not contact you often, but I'm totally your friend.
Oh, prove it's not true.
Well, why didn't you just say that?
Yeah, how could you disprove the simulation?
In other words, is there something that, if true, would prove that the simulation is not true?
And I think the answer is that can't happen.
Because if we're a simulation, then the simulation would prevent it from being disproved.
I mean, it would be built into the simulation that you can't disprove it.
So I don't think that the normal rules of disproving things could be applied to the rule of rules.
It would be the only time that you would not expect it to work, I would think.
Well, somebody says, can you prove something doesn't exist?
You could prove something's not true.
That could be done. But you can't always prove it doesn't exist.
For example, I could prove that I don't have something in my hands right now, but I can't prove that I won't be hit on the head with a rock next week.
So that's the worst example you ever heard.
Just forget I was talking.
All right. Is truth singular?
I don't think so. You can't prove reality.
Yeah, I mean, by its nature, you can't really.
All right, yeah, bad analogies.
Forget all of my... Forget all...
Yeah, I had air in my hands.
Damn it. You can't prove there isn't an invisible pink unicorn in the room with you.
