Episode 1706 Scott Adams: Watch Me Connect Politics, AI, The Simulation and Twitter Into One Story
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Medicinal mushrooms, a VERY big deal
Alex Epstein fought back successfully
Elon Musk's Twitter potential
Whiteboard: User Interface to The Simulation
A Black Dilbert cast member
New Democrats HOAX for next election
Free phones for illegal immigrants?
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of the entire civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and if you didn't think it could get any better, Surprise!
It's whiteboard day!
Yes, we will have a whiteboard in which I'll connect the seemingly different fields of politics, artificial intelligence, the simulation, and Twitter.
Yeah, I'll do all that today.
And in order for you to be primed and ready for that, this mind-blowing experience that is the simultaneous sip and coffee with Scott Adams...
You're going to need to get ready, and all you need to be ready for this amazing, amazing experience is a cupper mug or a glass of tank or gel, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! That, ladies and gentlemen, is amazing.
I'd like to start with a helpful tip.
Have you ever bought anything on Amazon?
Well, if you have, and you've bought more than one thing, you may have run into a situation I run into often.
It's called the scale problem.
As in, I think I'm buying a big old bag of something.
And it shows up like it's a free sample.
How many times has that happened to you?
You buy a chair for your living room and it shows up as a Barbie chair.
You're like, you know, that looked like a real chair.
In my defense, I did not check the specs.
It looked like a chair. It said a chair.
I bought the chair.
It just happened to be two inches tall.
Well, this brings me to my recent purchase.
Which should have been about this tall, about this wide, the big one.
But when you look at the little picture, it looks exactly the same.
And so I suggest the following human interface improvement for Amazon.
Jeff Bezos, if you're listening, I suggest this.
In any situation in which there might be Any potential ambiguity about the size and scale of an object, it is not good enough to include it only in the description, which you must click.
You must also have a human hand in the picture.
Preferably the same human hand.
Because if this had a human hand in it, I would know exactly how big it was.
Every single time. And how hard is it to put a hand in a picture?
Not very hard. You can even digitally add it, just nearby.
Hand. Picture.
So, please, user interface developers at Amazon, who are, by the way, some of the best in the world.
Amazon has some of the best user interface.
But that one thing, that one thing bites me in the ass about one time in five, probably, literally.
I just get some weird size.
All right. You know, lately, if you've been watching my live streams, you know that I've been adding quite a bit to civilization.
I've had insightful comments ranging from, oh, I don't know, geopolitics, one of my many fields of expertise, the supply chain, where I wasn't an expert until just a few weeks ago.
Now I am. And, of course, the global economy, something that You know, people like me know everything about.
So while I've made these tremendous contributions to society, it seems that the only thing that got picked up by the media that I did in the last two weeks was the following tweet in which I tweeted, Madonna is transforming into Jar Jar Binks and no one is talking about it.
Yes, of all the things I offer to this world, my many nuggets of wisdom, Only one left the little bubble, which is this livestream, into the larger world to make a dent.
And it was that tweet.
Madonna is transforming into Jar Jar Binks and no one is talking about it.
So that'll keep me humble for a while.
All right. In an ongoing trend, which you should watch very carefully, you've heard me say this before, But the more that it happens, the story gets bigger, right?
Which is that mushrooms are becoming mainstream almost instantly.
There's something about 2022 that's happening that is hard to explain.
But now the Washington Post has a story, the headline says, psychedelics may ease cancer patients' depression and anxieties.
You know, quote, these drugs were banned decades ago.
My clinical trial suggests they might have a meaningful positive effect in treating mood issues.
It's happening. I don't think those of you who have had no, let's say, experience with mushrooms, I don't think you know how big this is.
This is just about the biggest story in the world.
Obviously the economy and war and viruses are big stories.
But in terms of our subjective experience of life, this is the biggest story.
This is deeply transforming of humanity.
I'm not sure anything is going to be the same after this.
And you don't have to get everybody on mushrooms.
That's not necessary.
You just have to get the right people on mushrooms.
Right? Not everybody. You just got to get the right people out of.
You know what I mean? Let me ask you this.
Do you think Putin has done mushrooms?
Serious question. Serious question.
How many of you think Putin has done mushrooms?
I would bet a very large sum of money is not.
Because you know what? You don't find yourself in this situation if you had.
And again, people who have experience with this are saying, oh yeah, I get what you're saying.
And those who don't have experience are saying, I don't even understand what that means.
Like, how do you know he hasn't done mushrooms?
Do you know how I know Putin hasn't done mushrooms?
Because he wouldn't be Putin if he had.
It would have fundamentally rewired him.
Like, he'd be playing...
Yeah, exactly, he's an ego killer.
Russia, especially with Putin at the helm, is suffering almost a personality disorder.
That they have to own Ukraine, and they have to subjugate people, and they have to be awesome.
They have to protect their egos, and Russia's history, and the Russian people, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You take mushrooms once, that all goes away.
It all goes away.
And then you start thinking, well, what would make everybody happy?
And if I made everybody happy, would that work out for me too?
Probably. Probably.
So suddenly everything is different.
Yeah, mushrooms changes everything.
Might be world peace. And by the way, I don't recommend that you try mushrooms.
Let me be clear. Because this is a public forum and who knows who's watching.
I do not recommend any illegal drugs.
Talk to your doctors only.
Um... I'm going to give you a little tip that may completely change the lives of some of you.
This is one of my favorite things to do.
And I'm going to make my claim really small so that it's not some ridiculous over-claim.
My claim is I'm going to give you a reframe that might solve, I don't know, 1%, maybe less, maybe fewer, of your mental problems.
Maybe. I think about one out of a hundred of you might just walk away from this live stream saying, okay, that just changed my life.
So I'm setting myself up for a pretty high bar.
It goes like this.
I'm going to start with this assumption, and then I'll give you the idea.
The assumption is this, and I want to see if you'll agree with the starting premise, that we think other people think like us.
Do you buy the first assumption?
That all of us were biased by the belief that other people's brains are processing things somewhat similar to ours.
Alright, so that's the first assumption.
I think you largely believe that we think they process like us.
Now, the no's I'm seeing, I think you're maybe interpreting the question a little bit differently.
Because we do know that people are different at the same time we think they're not, right?
So we do hold two beliefs that are opposites at the same time.
We hold the belief that people think like us, and that we act on it, at the same time we know it's not true.
We know people don't think the way we think, right?
But you act like it, even though we know it's not true.
So that's the first part.
That's just that. And I'm going to be talking to people who feel they have low self-esteem and that other people judge them poorly.
Is there anybody watching who would fall into that category?
You have low self-esteem and you believe other people are judging you.
Quite a few, alright?
That's a lot of yeses.
The yeses just start popping up on the locals' platform.
Now, not everybody...
All right? All right, now here's the reframe specifically for people who live in, let's say, their reality is that they feel they have low self-esteem or they feel worthless and they feel other people judging them.
Here's the reframe that fixes it.
Stop judging other people.
That's it. That's it.
Stop judging other people.
Do you know why? If you can train yourself to stop judging other people, which would take a while, you have to just keep reminding yourself not to do it.
The trick that I use is that I literally believe that everybody has the same value.
Because there's no such thing as some metric for judging your value.
You could say, who's more valuable for having a baby?
Well, women of a certain age and certain health situation.
But are they more valuable than everybody else?
No, they fit a certain requirement, a need.
They're important in that way.
But I don't fundamentally believe that anybody's worth more than anybody else.
The law doesn't judge you that way unless you break the law.
So if you could learn to simply talk yourself into not judging other people, do you know what would happen?
In theory...
In theory, if you stop judging other people reflexively and just train yourself, just don't think that way.
Just everybody's equal.
We're all the same. As soon as you do that, you're going to stop worrying about what they think of you.
You know why? Because you can hold in your head two thoughts that don't make sense together.
One is that everybody acts the same, and the other is that everybody thinks differently.
We kind of hold them the same.
But as soon as you see other people thinking like you do, if your view is that everybody is the same, and then you imagine that they have the same view as you, which they don't, but this is the trick, right?
If you have a bias, and you know you do, if you have a bias toward thinking people do or should think the way you think, then change the way you think, Are you following it?
If you change the way you think, it should change your subjective impression of what other people are thinking of you.
I think 1% of you just got cured.
I'm watching the comments come in on locals because they come in faster.
And people are having a good reaction to it.
Now, what would be the downside of trying it?
Do you see any? Is there any downside of simply trying to judge other people less as your own solution to how you feel about other people thinking of you?
There's no downside.
Can you think of anybody who would say, no, you should be more judgmental about people's worth?
Now remember, I'm not telling you that you should embrace their choices.
Not that. You can still disagree with their choices, of course.
Just don't judge them.
They're just people. We're all the same, value-wise, in terms of value.
All right. And I would say that as awesome as I often feel I am in some narrow areas, I have good self-esteem about some specific things that I do or have done, but of all the things you could do in the world, the things that you could be good at, what percentage of all the things that a person can be good at Am I good at?
Like, less than.001%?
That's about as good as you can get.
Like, if you take the most awesome person...
Just think of your friend or maybe somebody famous.
Whoever you think hits all the notes.
Like, oh, that's the person who's really got it together.
They can do this and they can do that and they're this and that.
Of all the things that people can do, what percentage can they do, really?
About.0001.
Almost exactly the same as you.
Like, if you look at it mathematically, nobody can do anything.
I mean, it all rounds to zero.
So to imagine that somebody else's.001 effectiveness in life is so much better than your.001, I mean, I guess it is mathematically, but not in any real way.
So that should help some of you.
Good news. The good guys win sometimes.
Do you remember the story of author Alex Epstein, who found out that the Wall Street Journal was planning a hit piece on him before his book even came out?
And so he actually organized a...
His book is called Fossil Future.
And I guess the Washington Post had come up with some kind of angle...
Maybe because they don't like a book that is, let's say, not as anti-fossil fuel as they would like, you know what I mean?
That they might try to suppress that kind of a book, especially if it's good.
They don't try to suppress a book that's bad, do they?
Bad in the sense that you won't want to read it.
Nobody's going to write a whole article about a book nobody's going to read.
So they're afraid of this book, clearly.
There wouldn't be a hit piece on it unless they were afraid of it, in terms of it threatening the worldview which they present.
So... What followed was Alex Epstein quite brilliantly organized a number of Blue Check and other people on Twitter, and maybe other social media, I'm not sure, but on Twitter at least, and many of us had a dog in the fight.
I certainly did.
To me, this was personal.
This was absolutely personal.
I mean, I know Alex Epstein just from, you know, digital contacts.
But to me, it was personal.
Because I have been the subject of hit pieces, and there's not much you can do about it.
It's a pretty helpless feeling.
So the fact that he was taking the fight to the Washington Post and found a way to actually get traction, which is organizing enough people to embarrass them, preemptively embarrass them, the result was the article did come out.
It was delayed...
how long?
Delayed a week, I think.
And when it did come out, they had removed 90% of the bad content, you know, the hippie's content, including any allegation that when he was 18 years old, he wrote something that somebody thought was racist.
If you looked at it, it wouldn't be, right?
It isn't. But that's the way things get framed.
Completely gone. The main thing that he was concerned about was the...
I would say inappropriate allegation that just didn't make sense in a good world, right?
Like, you have to live in a bad world for that kind of thing to exist, those accusations.
And he did what I've never seen anybody do.
He actually preemptively took out the hippies.
It's pretty hard to do.
I mean, maybe some billionaire's done it by money and threats or something, but I've never seen a regular person, you know, an author do it before.
That's a first. And I wonder if there's any kind of...
Is this telling us there's any kind of shift in power?
Because I've been telling you that the power of the Internet dads or just the people who have some credibility on Twitter is growing, right?
And it's pretty important.
I think this really is sort of a turning point in understanding where power lies in society.
I'm going to tie together a few stories in ways that will amaze you.
So keep in mind that story.
About the press and about Alex Epstein.
So... Because we'll circle back to some things.
So I've talked about this before, but it's more relevant today.
Do you remember when PayPal was started?
PayPal had a little group of people who went on, several of them, to do bigger things than PayPal.
So, for example, Peter Thiel, I believe, was one of the early financers for Facebook...
So Peter Thiel saw the potential of Facebook really early.
Became a billionaire, in part because of that.
Reid Hoffman, who was part of that PayPal group, he founded LinkedIn, which is effectively an online resume, but it's a social network as well.
So kind of weird that two of the PayPal people would later go on To have major influence on what became social media networks.
Now Elon Musk, one of the PayPal originals, is buying into Twitter, which again shows at least his appreciation and understanding of social media in a way other people don't.
Now what are the odds The three of the people from this one company, which is often talked about as being special in some way, have all had major influence on social media platforms specifically.
Not just going on to do other unicorns, but social media platforms.
And I ask, what is it that made PayPal work?
Because I've never understood how the original digital money products ever got anybody to trust them.
They weren't a bank.
They were a startup. How does a startup of nobodies get you to trust you with their money?
How did that ever happen?
Because the hard part wasn't the technology, I'm guessing.
I'm guessing the hard part was convincing people to use it.
How the hell did they do that?
I mean, really? That's one of the most impressive untold stories, or maybe it's in some book or something, but I've never heard it.
So I say that because there's something extra going on with all of those PayPal founders.
And what I mean is, here's what it looks like from the outside.
So this is just my speculative outsider's view of what it looks like.
It looks like they all learned to engineer comprehensively.
And what I mean by that is, people sometimes engineer a product, but they don't engineer the human who's using the product.
Is there something about the interface or the way it's used or how it touches our minds that's incomplete?
What's different about PayPal and then Facebook, LinkedIn and now Twitter is that all of them have found an interface that connects the product right to your brain.
Product directly connected to your brain.
What does that make you think of?
Elon Musk's other product, Neuralink, where you'll have actually chips in your head, potentially, someday.
So connecting the product directly to the brain and treating it as though it's one system, you're going to say, well, everybody does that.
They all consider the human user and they all consider the product.
But nobody does it like they do it.
Nobody has done it in a way that you can't stop using the product.
Nobody's come close to the effectiveness that these folks have in understanding the brain-product interface.
Keep that in mind, because it's going to come back today.
Here's an interesting question about Elon Musk, since he's in the news a lot.
Why do conservatives like him so much?
Do you ever wonder about that?
Because I'm pretty sure he's never labeled himself a conservative.
I'm pretty sure he's never labeled himself a Republican.
What is it that makes people like him?
And if I told you that there's somebody who started the biggest electric car company, would you say, well, there's somebody conservatives are going to love because he's all about the green stuff and climate change?
It doesn't really make sense, does it?
But he's very much embraced.
Let me tell you what I think it is.
And you can take this just as a compliment to conservatives, because it's one that I feel, because I feel the same thing.
I do not identify as conservative, don't identify as Republican, and I feel that I'm fully embraced by conservatives all the time.
And I think it's the same reason, or at least there are some similar reasons.
And it goes like this.
Let's just take Elon, for example.
Oh, and also he's an immigrant.
So every stereotype you should imagine about conservatives or Republicans, he sort of violates, I don't know, some of the biggest ones, right?
And yet he's widely liked.
So here's what I think it is.
Number one, I've never seen him disrespect Republicans or conservatives.
Agree or disagree?
I've never seen it.
Have you ever seen him disrespect Republicans or conservatives?
And you could say almost everybody's done that.
Almost everybody's done that.
If they're on the left.
And if they're on the right, even the people on the right insult themselves.
Conservatives fight with each other.
But I've never seen him disrespect anybody on the right.
Now, has he ever disrespected anybody on the left?
Well, he's going after woke-ism a little bit, hasn't he?
Yeah, I feel like he has.
Now, that doesn't mean he's associated with the right.
It could mean that he's more bothered by something he sees somewhere else.
It doesn't mean he's associated with one side.
Bill Maher talks more about the problems on the left lately, but it doesn't make him on the right.
Here's some other things.
But Musk, as I just talked about with the PayPal people, he incorporates human motivation and psychology into his systems.
Who does that sound like?
Somebody builds a system.
In his case, it's more like a product that's supported by various systems.
But who is most like that?
That's conservatives.
Republicans. They consider human motivation when they design a system, which is, well...
If we build a system where we just give you stuff, what's the human motivation?
Take the stuff and not work.
So I think conservatives appreciate him for understanding that if you forget about the human motivation, you get everything wrong, like Democrats often do, with their systems.
The next thing is that he's transparent about both his thinking process and his motivations.
Wouldn't you say? Do you ever think to yourself, I think he has a hidden agenda?
I guess people say that about all billionaires.
But it doesn't feel like it.
It doesn't feel like he has some hidden agenda.
Because I feel like he tells you exactly what he wants, and then he does it in public.
It's pretty clear.
So people like that, just in general, people like transparency.
He shows his work, right?
And obviously he likes freedom, so that binds him to the right, even if he's not associated with the right.
He just likes freedom and free speech.
And he also works harder than most people.
Have you ever seen a conservative dislike somebody who works as hard as Elon Musk?
You could do almost everything else wrong from a conservative's point of view, as long as you're obeying the law.
You have to get that right.
But if you're obeying the law and you're working, I don't know, 14 hours a day or whatever the hell he was doing, 18 hours a day, conservatives kind of like you because you work hard.
It's pretty basic. It's not hard to be liked by the right.
And he has lots of kids.
What does he have, six or seven kids?
Conservatives like that. You know, family-oriented.
In his own way. And I think his family situation is completely non-standard.
And still, still, conservatives embrace him.
So here's the message from this.
We're locked into a world in which we think the only way you can run for office is to be totally one thing or totally the other thing.
You're either a Republican or you're a Democrat.
I think Elon Musk proves that if you were smart about it, you wouldn't have to be on a team.
That you could get the other team to like you easily.
Respect them. Give some appreciation to what it is that they want.
Like freedom. Be transparent.
Outwork them. Right?
How hard would it be?
You can have very different opinions from conservatives and still have a lot of them.
A lot of them say, you know, damn it, I don't like all your policies, but I love the way you're treating everything.
Like, I love the way you approach it, even if I'm not on the same page with your solution.
Right? You could totally get people to switch sides if you played it right.
Now, I tweeted the other day, and I said I didn't know if Twitter was already changing its algorithm to, you know, maybe sweep things under the rug before Elon Musk gets a look at the algorithm.
And I wondered if my engagement and number of followers per day was going up because of that.
But then somebody pointed out that Elon Musk had liked one of my tweets, which would also explain why my number of new users went up.
So today it's still up over 1,000.
New users today, which is about, I don't know, five or ten times normal.
But that could still be the spillover from the one tweet.
So the tweet he liked was this one.
And this is really telling.
This actually should be the biggest story in the news, but it's not.
The biggest story in the news should be that Musk liked this following tweet because it suggests that his mind is at least...
If he hasn't decided this, at least it's compatible with how he's thinking.
So here's the tweet he liked.
I said, wait until Elon Musk starts looking under the hood at Twitter and finds out how the algorithm works.
I said, that's coming, and it is going to be glorious.
Now, he liked that.
Now, does that not suggest that he plans to, or would like to, get access to the algorithm?
That's everything. That's like the whole game.
Civilization will be completely changed if he gets access to that algorithm, I think.
I think it's that big.
And it looks like, you know, by the fact that he liked the tweet, it looks like he at least has some impulse in that direction.
Don't know if he can do it.
Don't know what will come of it.
But he liked it.
So he's not disagreeing with the notion that him looking at the algorithm would be maybe interesting.
We're also hearing that Twitter is working on an edit button.
That makes sense to me in the Elon Musk era of Twitter because the edit button does add some, let's say, clarity to things, doesn't it?
Now, I do think the edit button should be constructed this way.
If you edit something, it should be shown as an edit, and you should be able to swipe that edit and see the original.
It should be that easy.
It should just be a swipe, if you can engineer it easily.
Now, I don't even want to have it a link, because you know how Instagram has the swipe model?
You can tell they're in... Amazon does it, too, where there's little dots at the bottom of a picture, so you know there's some more pictures if you just swipe in that direction.
If you could swipe it and see the original, that's a good edit to me.
I would also like a notification sent to everyone who interacted with it, if it gets edited, with one exception.
If you go to edit your own tweet, it should give you a choice to say, are you editing for, let's say, grammar?
Might be a better way to express it.
Or content. In other words, are you changing the content?
If you say you are changing the content for whatever reason, doesn't matter the reason, then everybody who interacted with it gets a notice with the new content, and this is an edit.
How about that? You can do that, right?
Because the problem is that people see the fake news and they don't see the correction.
It's one of the biggest problems on the internet, right?
But you can fix that by making sure that every person who saw bad news that got corrected sees the correction.
Just the system does it.
You interacted with it, you get the correction.
Now, immediately you can see that the edit button is way more than a user interface.
Am I right? As soon as I said this, did you suddenly connect that this isn't just about how easy it is to edit things.
It's about free speech.
It's about mind control.
Because if the edit process allows people to rethink what they may have believed on first look, which the current process doesn't.
Right now you look at something and you never know it's corrected.
You just move on. So this gets to transparency, it gets to brainwashing, it gets to fake news.
This is like deeply, deeply important.
And it's happening coincidentally at the same time Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter.
On April 1st, Twitter said it was working on an edit button literally as an April Fool's joke.
April 1st.
Like, was that not too long ago, right?
And suddenly, Elon Musk buys 9.2% of it, and now it's real?
Now it's suddenly real? They're really working on an edit button?
I feel like that might have been a recent change, right?
Who knows? It's also possible that part of Twitter thought it was a joke, and part of it was actually working on it, and the other part didn't know about it.
That's possible. All right.
So here's how you fix everything in the world.
Let me tie everything together for you.
You buy 9.2% of Twitter to gain influence over it.
You don't need to buy the whole company.
You just have to buy enough to get a board seat and influence.
Then you use that influence to introduce algorithm transparency.
Let everybody see the algorithm and maybe even Jack Dorsey's plan of choosing your own algorithm based on what you prefer.
Once the algorithm is transparent, you've created the first unbiased platform.
Right? It wouldn't be biased by the algorithm.
People would just be getting what they wanted.
Now, of course, that could be its own bias, but in theory, you could have a more unbiased platform.
And here's why that changes everything.
Whiteboard time!
It's whiteboard time!
Here's how everything in the world works.
All on one whiteboard.
Twitter is like the user interface to the simulation.
In other words, Twitter is the lever that ultimately, through its connections, makes us think the way we think and imagine a reality the way we imagine it.
And it works this way. Journalists are all on Twitter.
When I speak in absolutes, you can adjust it in your head to, well, he means most of them.
So most journalists are on Twitter.
And journalists are the ones who create the narrative, and the narrative is what programs the citizens.
In other words, changes everything.
If you can program the citizens differently, or better, more effectively, more honestly, perhaps, you get a whole different outcome.
So now, Elon Musk...
Now has some kind of control, we don't know how much yet, on Twitter.
That means that he will be feeding journalists potentially.
Potentially. We don't know this yet.
But he could be feeding them for the first time something like accurate news.
Imagine a journalist who is reporting fake news on television while Twitter is accurately allowing people to see what's true.
Because that's not the case.
The case right now is that people watch Democrat news and then they go to Twitter and they see Democrat tweets.
So there's nothing to check their work.
And it's the same the other way, right?
Republicans watch Republican news and then they go watch Republican tweets.
But what if the algorithm could be tweaked so that people could actually see reality across bubbles?
Can Elon Musk...
A member of the PayPal Originals, one of the three people we know, understands human motivation and how the wiring of the brain and the wiring of the device have to be considered one system in a way nobody else ever has as effectively.
Can he create a situation where journalists would be, and here's the key, embarrassed, embarrassed to tell biased stories on television?
I think he can. I think that's within the doable range.
And once you get a situation where a journalist can't go on another platform and lie, because they will be devoured on Twitter for lying.
By their own team, by the way.
I'm not talking about Republicans yelling at, you know, Jim Acosta.
Right? I don't think Acosta cares how many Republicans are mad at him, but I bet he cares how many Democrats hear that his story is fake.
Am I right? Because that would hurt.
So if you can create a situation where the journalists are embarrassed into telling the truth, and you would only need one major platform to do that, and Twitter is the one that journalists are pretty much stuck on.
They're not going to leave Twitter. That changes the narrative.
That changes the citizens. The citizens can change anything.
And so this story is way bigger.
The Elon Musk buys 9.2% of Twitter is way, way bigger than you think it is.
And yet here's the cool thing about it.
Musk believes in the simulation.
Or at least he talks about it a lot.
We don't know his internal thoughts.
But he talks about the simulation being the most likely explanation of reality.
And I also embrace that same idea.
And I have this impression that when you embrace the idea that you are living in a simulation and that we're literally software, you can start to see the machinery.
And I don't know how much of it is an illusion, probably all of it, but you get the sense that you can start seeing how to reprogram it from the inside.
And that feels like what all the PayPal people can see.
I feel like they see themselves in the simulation, but they can also see the code.
And they can reach in and tweak it.
Musk is doing that with Twitter.
The code that holds our illusion of reality together is what we collectively see in the media.
He figured out how to control it through Twitter.
Now, Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post and got a big voice.
But the Washington Post is lower in the chain of influence than Twitter.
Twitter affects all journalists.
Washington Post just has a few.
So whoever controls Twitter controls the Washington Post.
So if you're watching your billionaire chess...
Elon Musk just took one of Bezos' pieces off the board because he's now at a higher level of influence than any of the organs below it, including the Washington Post.
In other news, I asked on Twitter if I could get a black American cartoonist to help me design a black cast member for the Dilbert comic.
Now, I have forever wanted to have a more diverse cast because all the usual reasons, right?
You want to attract other...
You want more of the public to like your product.
So why wouldn't I put people in there that would attract more customers?
So, of course, I've always wanted to have more diversity in the cast.
And the reason I didn't do it is I couldn't figure out how.
I couldn't figure out how.
Because if I put diverse characters in a strip...
And give them character flaws, which you have to, because it's a comic.
If the characters don't have flaws, they're not funny.
Imagine me...
I have a character right now, Wally.
He's a white character with six strands of hair.
Now, his defining characteristic is that he's lazy.
He doesn't do work. Could I have introduced a minority character and given that character any kind of a defect, like the Wally character?
Nope. No way I could get away with that.
How about my Alice character?
She's defined by her, you know, easily angered kind of tough attitude.
Imagine if I put that exact attitude into a minority character.
Suddenly I'm in trouble, right?
But these are just universal qualities that everybody has in every group.
There's no group who doesn't have an angry person, a lazy person, etc., right?
But because of my situation and the way the world works, I can't do the thing everybody wants.
Like, you know, not everybody, but the world wants me to be more diverse, I think.
And I appreciate the impulse.
Makes sense. I'm seeing some super racist things in the comments, but because they're funny, they don't bother me as much.
I've told you that rule, right?
That you could be pretty offensive if you're also funny.
Like, people will accept that balance.
But if it's not funny, it's just racist.
It's just racist if it's not funny.
So, anyway, I guess that was done well in this case.
So, I started writing for this character because I hit on an angle that I think I can make work.
I'm going to preview it for you.
So before it appears in Dilbert, and I'm not sure it will, I've already written them, and they will get drawn, but they might not run.
By the time my editor takes a look at it and somebody has a conversation with me, they might not run.
But here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to introduce the black character, and the character is going to have one interesting, let's say, personality characteristic.
The black character will identify as white.
And it's going to cause a huge problem for everybody.
Do you know why it's a problem?
Because he's hired for the diversity targets, but he refuses to identify as black.
He is black, but he refuses to identify.
And then here's the second level.
You'll never know if he's joking.
That's the second level.
You don't know if he's just fucking with the boss because it makes everybody uncomfortable.
So I think the character will be somebody who is having fun with the fact that people are getting uncomfortable with the way he chooses to identify because it just screws everything up.
Nothing works. Now, I think I can make that work.
Somebody says cringe.
Does anybody else think that? There's one comment that says cringe.
I think it's actually a good angle.
Right? Because here's the thing.
You haven't seen it before, as far as I know.
It would be fresh, which is weird.
Yeah. All right.
Yeah, it's hard to not pander, isn't it?
That's the thing I wanted to avoid.
From a creative perspective, it would be easy to pander.
It would make the audience happy.
But it's just too icky.
I want to treat the character respectfully while highlighting something irregular.
I've told you before that the sign of a good comedy approach is if the setup makes you laugh.
You haven't even heard the punchlines.
So the joke isn't even present, but you just hear the situation and you're already laughing.
So that's one of these where it's easy to write to because the situation itself is fun.
That's your humor tip of the day.
All right, here's a question for you.
Given that we know Democrats believe they will lose in the upcoming elections, 2022 and probably 2024, what are they going to do about it?
It seems like they need a nuclear option.
Am I right? Because all of the normal things that Democrats do, they don't really look like they're going to work.
And I think the nuclear option...
I'm not talking about cheating in the elections.
I think the nuclear option is going to be a new hoax.
And my God, it's going to be a big one.
So I'm going to predict that the next hoax will be bigger than anything we've seen.
And just crazier.
Because they've got to get bigger than Russia collusion, January 6th insurrection hoax, the fine people hoax, drinking bleach hoax, the Russian bounty in Afghanistan hoax.
I mean, they have a lot of hoaxes.
That sort of set the quality expectation for hoaxes.
I feel like they've got to take it up a level.
And what the hell is that going to look like?
I mean, this is stuff that Democrats actually believed.
Democrats believed all of us.
Like everything I just listened, they actually believed it all.
Yeah, Democrats believed that Black Lives Matter was an organic movement.
And it wasn't about somebody funding people.
They believed everything.
Now, I'm not saying that Republicans don't also believe things that aren't true.
But it's less relevant to this question because the Democrats need a hoax, whereas the Republicans don't.
Do you know what the Republicans need to win?
Play it as straight down the center as you can.
Just talk about reality.
Reality is all the Republicans need to get elected.
But the Democrats can't get elected based on reality.
That option is gone.
I guess this is the best way to say it.
Republicans can definitely get elected based on reality.
Right? Anybody disagree?
That the polls and just the facts we all observe are just so clear at this point...
All you need to do is tell the truth.
Just be straight with the American people.
How could you fail to get elected at this point?
But the Democrats can't use transparency because that would work against them.
The only thing they have is a bigger hoax.
It's all they have. And ordinarily, it would be hard to predict they could outdo the Russia collusion hoax, but they have to.
They have to. They don't have any other play, except losing, I suppose.
So I predict that the next hoax is going to be magnificent.
Just magnificent.
China collusion hoax.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
All right. China's in lockdown, 23 cities.
So over 193 million people have some form of lockdown, and they represent 22% of China's GDP are in some form of lockdown, according to brokerage firm Nomura.
However, I love something about this story, which is the resilience of humans.
People are really damn resilient.
Maybe not every one of us, but collectively, my God, we can adjust the stuff fast.
Apparently in China, since there's lockdowns, but they don't want the banking system and everything to collapse, there are a bunch of people who have put tents next to their cubicles to keep the banking system open.
So they literally live on the floor next to their cubicle because they have to.
To keep the country running.
Now, I think we would have done that here.
I think in America, if you had to, if you didn't have any other choice, I think we would have pitched tents next to cubicles, too.
But I just love how spunky people are.
They'll do anything to keep the system working.
Or work for home.
Yeah, I don't know that banks always have a work for home option because of security.
That may have changed, though.
Somebody do a fact check on me.
Back in the old, old days, you sort of had to be on site for some of the highest security stuff.
Has that changed?
Maybe it's changed with better security systems.
I don't know. Banks work from home now.
But every job in the bank...
I feel as if...
There are secure ways of logging in now, remotely...
There should be. Yeah.
Okay. Well, let's assume they could have worked for home, so I have no idea why they're sleeping in tents.
So we learned today that the Biden administration is giving free phones to illegal immigrants.
What's your first reaction to that?
Free phones to illegal immigrants.
My first reaction was I thought it was a joke.
Did you? The first time you saw it, did you think it was real?
Well, they're not giving phones to illegal immigrants.
Nobody would do that. It's real.
It's real. Now, does anybody remember an idea I had about giving free phones to immigrants?
Let's see if anybody can remember that.
So if you've been following me for a while, do you remember my idea for giving free phones to immigrants?
Yeah. What did Jen Psaki say was the reason for the free phones?
To track them. And also to allow them to check back in.
Is that good enough?
Is that a good enough reason for you that they can track them?
Well, they don't plan to deport them, so what's the point?
If you're not going to deport them, why do you even need to track them?
Just to call them and tell them to, hey, really, I'll turn off your phone if you don't show up to the court appointment?
I think they would let their phone be turned off, right?
So I don't know how it works the way they've designed it.
Let me tell you how I suggested designing it.
The way I suggested it is that the only way an illegal alien could be paid was if they had the phone and it had tracking on, And the payments came digitally through that phone, like it would have to be that phone, no other phone.
Because if you said the only way you could get paid for your work is through the phone, maybe they'd keep them.
And maybe that would be a way for people to get temporary workers and that the phone would act like a work visa.
Right? So, you know, you need a Republican administration to make this work.
So if there was somebody who had the phone and they were just living here illegally and they weren't working or adding anything to the system, you know, then the Republicans could say, oh, well, we know where you are, and they'd go get you because they're tracking your phone.
Wouldn't be much of that, I suppose.
But I do think...
So here's what I think. There's one thing I agree with AOC about, and I know you're going to hate this, If there's anything that would trigger you more than that, I don't know what it would be.
There's one thing I agree with AOC about when it comes to defund the police and also the economy in general and capitalism, and you're not going to like it.
She thinks that maybe we should just rethink the whole system from scratch, generally speaking.
I don't want to speak for her, but I think she says we should rethink capitalism You know, rethink the criminal network system.
Now, when she says that, what do we do reflexively?
Her critics then say, well, if we're going to rethink it, let's think of the worst possible way to do it and then blame her for it, which is, you know, what critics do.
Okay, yeah, we'll rethink capitalism in the worst possible way that could never work, and we'll say AOC came up with it.
Or we'll just get rid of the police and blame AOC for whatever happens.
That's not exactly re-engineering the justice system.
That's just getting rid of police.
That's no plan.
So here's what I like about the phones as a, let's say, the seed of something that would be better than border control.
Maybe the phones are your immigration control.
Could you design a system where the phone became indispensable to the illegal, let's call them immigrants, which would actually be legal because we would develop a system for them to come into the country, add to our system, add to the system.
So if money is coming through the phone, it means there's some employer that wants them.
That means they're adding to the system.
At least in that sense.
And maybe there's some way to have massive inflows and outflows of people coming in seasonally, for example, for farm work.
They come in, they help us, we help them, they take their money back to Mexico, Mexico gets more money, good for them, right?
So if you were going to rethink immigration completely, Could there be a way that the phone idea sort of binds them to the country in a productive way?
Don't know. But I think it's such a provocative idea that I'm sort of attracted to it, even though I don't know how you do it exactly.
It just feels like there's something there.
I don't know. Maybe not for every immigrant, but for some who are coming in for work, specifically.
Not the criminals, obviously.
Have you ever thought of this, that the only thing that holds our country together is racism?
How do you feel the first time you hear that?
The only thing holding America together is racism.
Do you know why? There's a reason.
See if you can come up with it before I tell you.
Racism is the only thing that holds the country together.
Here's the reason. If you didn't have racism, we would realize that it's a case of the rich against the poor, and that all the poor people are on the same team, and there's a shit ton of them.
There's a lot of them, and they're all on the same team.
Do you know why they don't know they're on the same team?
Because of racism. They think they're on a race team.
They're not. Not really.
If all the poor people said, hey, you know, I get that there's differences and discrimination.
I get all that. That's real.
But what if we poor people just all banded together and said, give us some shit.
You rich people, we want to take your stuff because we have enough votes.
The only thing that keeps the country together is that the rich have found a way through the media to convince people that their main filter should be race.
As long as their main filter on life is race, they're oblivious, just like a magic trick.
It's a distraction, so you don't see how the trick is done.
The magic trick is it's always been about money.
Dave Chappelle says exactly what I'm saying, except not exactly what I'm saying.
He uses different words.
But the same message, that racism is a distraction from the actual inequality of our time, which is income or wealth.
All right, there's a weird story about some two people posing as federal agents and giving gifts to a number of Secret Service officers, including, like, apartments and high-powered weapons and spy technology and stuff.
And I'll just read the names of the two individuals who were captured, pretending to be Members of Homeland Security.
You can make your own racist judgments about who they might be working for.
Okay? One of them is named Arian Teherzadi and the other is Haider Ali.
Now, if these two are working for any foreign country, I think that would narrow it down to probably a Middle East country.
Iran, I'm looking at you, but I don't know for sure.
I'm not even sure if those names specify the region, do they?
Could you tell the region from the last names?
I don't know if you could do that.
And we don't know if they're...
I mean, they could just be Americans.
So don't make any racist assumptions about their allegiances or their nationalities by their last names.
Can we all agree with that?
I think we're all adult enough to know that the last names are a red flag, but we're also adult enough not to just assume that race is telling you something.
Race doesn't tell you something.
It might tell you where to look, and I guess that's racist enough, but it doesn't tell you what their motivations are or where they came from.
It doesn't even tell you they're Islamic.
All right. So we'll wait and see what's on that.
That, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the conclusion of the best livestream that's ever happened.
And I hope you enjoyed this breathtaking romp from artificial intelligence, which I haven't mentioned yet, but I'm going to now, through the simulation, through politics, through it all.
Let's talk about AI. Have you seen the new AI art?
That's being created. Apparently there is AI that can make you a perfect image just by describing it in words.
So if you say, for example, a monkey doing his taxes, which was one of the actual examples, the AI will draw you a picture of a monkey, not a picture, but like it looks real, like an actual monkey, over a piece of paper, like struggling over his paperwork.
You just have to describe it, and it draws the picture.
And some of them are just like crazy, like your mind is blown, and they're actually pleasant to look at.
So now imagine the AI can do art, because it is.
It is doing art. And now imagine that the AI can rapidly test which of these two pictures is better.
It just has a website or...
Maybe it's got some people who do this for it, for money or whatever.
And they just respond.
They'll get a notice and say, oh, do you like the one on the left or the right?
And they go, ah, the left.
That's all they do that day.
Just one person, one click.
But there are lots of people doing lots of clicks.
So AI immediately goes through a bunch of iterations and finds out the best piece of art.
You don't think artists are in trouble?
As an artist, let me tell you that art is mostly a formula.
It doesn't seem like it because you don't know how to do it.
I hate to tell you that.
But the reason you think art is mysterious and there's some magic to the creative process is because you don't do it.
If you do it, you see the machinery, right?
Do a Google search on the six dimensions of humor.
It's literally a formula for knowing that the humor is there or not.
I've just turned it into a formula, and I use it.
And everything else that I've done that has any creative element to it, eventually, sometimes I start out intuitively.
But eventually I can see the machinery.
And I go, oh, I see what's happening now.
When I follow this formula, it works.
When I follow this formula, it doesn't.
So that's the machinery. So yeah, AI is going to take over art, and it's going to influence your social media algorithms and everything else.
It's all connected.
And if you had to have somebody who sort of has their finger on the user interface for reality, somebody who knows AI, somebody who knows social networks, somebody who knows How the human mind is interfacing with products.
Somebody who's so clever about these things, he or she might not even need a marketing department.
That's kind of who I want to have their finger on that lever.
So I think we might be in good shape thanks to good people trying to make the world better and maybe making some money at the same time.
Maybe making some money at the same time.
Perfectly acceptable as long as it's transparent and as long as he has the country's best interests in mind and it looks like he does.
So, on that note...
On that note...
I'd like to say goodbye to the YouTube people.
I'm going to talk to the locals people a few more minutes, and I think you'd agree.
