Episode 1709 Scott Adams: Today I Will Explain How To Persuade Putin And, Separately, Cure Your Laziness
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Whiteboard1: Why Self-Help Works
Whiteboard2: Persuading Putin
Switchblade Drone warfare
Watching Elon Musk reengineer Twitter
The potential of avatars with AI and Meta
CNN S.E. Cupp article critical of Obama
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And welcome to, once again, the highlight of human civilization and possibly some aliens who came before.
We don't know. We don't know.
Can't rule it down. And today, I'm going to blow your mind even more than the mushroom trip without the mushrooms that I took you on the last time.
Can I do it? Can I? Can I move my whiteboard so it doesn't look like there's a weird point coming out of my head?
I'll bet I can. I'll bet I can.
I did. Yeah, today's a double whiteboard day.
How lucky are you?
That's how lucky.
Yeah, two whiteboards.
Now, if you're listening and not watching, I will describe them.
They're not that complicated. But...
I know you get excited when you see the double whiteboard, and you should.
But if you want to take that excitement up to a new level, and a heretofore unknown level, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or 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 hit of the day.
And it's called the simultaneous symptoms.
It's going to happen now. Go. Yeah.
So, for the past two years or so, I started noticing a weird pattern in my life.
And I want to see if anyone else has had any similar pattern.
It goes like this.
I wake up in the morning and I say to myself, what's the plot twist going to be today?
And there is one every day.
Every day I wake up and there's a plot twist.
I'm talking about something so unusual that it looks like it came out of a reality TV show.
You know how in a reality TV show there's always a plot twist?
Oh, somebody did something, the thing that you didn't know about.
Somebody talked to somebody.
Somebody's mad about a thing.
And it was every day for years.
To the point where I'd go all day long and say it's 5 o'clock in the evening.
And I'd say to myself, no plot twist?
But then it would come before I went to bed.
Plot twist every time.
Now, is it possible that that could happen so many times on its own?
And I'm talking about things that are as mind-blowing as learning that you're an android.
I mean, I'm talking about really basically mind-blowing stuff.
Has anybody had that experience?
Where you just get a plot twist every day?
Or is this somehow limited to me or confirmation bias?
Nope. Nobody else, huh?
So, okay.
Some people are saying yes.
All right. Actually, we're getting some yeses here.
More than I thought. All right.
Interesting. I don't know what that means, I think.
But when I ask myself why we would be a simulated environment...
Assuming we are, because I think we are a simulation, not an original species.
Why would we exist?
Why would anybody make us?
And the answer is to test stuff.
Or for entertainment.
I feel as though my life has become somebody else's entertainment.
I feel like I'm in a reality TV show, but I'm not aware of it.
That's what the plot twists look like.
I'm like, I don't know.
These plot twists look exactly like a writer introduced them into the plot.
They don't look naturally occurring.
So I feel like I'm in some kind of reality TV show.
Somebody's watching. All right.
I'll get a little bit weirder now.
Have you noticed that a lot of self-help advice in books have one thing in common, which is positive thinking?
Have you ever noticed that? The most famous original self-help book of all time was called The Power of Positive Thinking, which I read and was very influential in my development.
And President Trump, coincidentally, went to church, and the minister, I think is the right name, or pastor, I forget what you call each leader of each church, but I think it was the minister, was actually the author of that book.
The power of positive thinking.
And Trump talks about it, you know, having an impact on it.
But other books, including my own, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still One Big, have some element of that at their core, that you have to think right to get a good outcome.
Now, my version, I talk about shelf space, your mental shelf space.
And specifically, I talk about you can't stop thinking about something negative.
You don't have the ability to turn off a thought.
People want to, but you can't.
It's not a thing. What you can do is crowd it out with other thoughts.
Just be busy, keep your mind somewhere else, and you just will take up the time, the shelf space, so to speak, so there's just less room for the negative, until you kill it by atrophy.
So the less you think about something, the less power it will have over time.
So there are all these different fields of self-help that all have this core.
About thinking positively.
And I found out just this week why that might actually work.
Because haven't you always wondered why it works?
Or does it work?
I mean, the first question is, does it work?
I'm not trying to make you think past the sale.
Does it work? And if it does work, why does it work?
Is it just do we imagine it works?
Is it purely some form of placebo where you think it worked but nothing happened?
Well, here's something I just found out.
Whiteboard number one, coming at you.
Yeah. Good times.
All right. Here's why it might work.
Turns out that if you are exposed to a positive, feel-good thought or experience, that your dopamine will improve.
So, for example, if you love kittens, and I handed you a little kitten, probably your dopamine would go up a little bit.
And your dopamine has a big impact on you, your happiness, right?
But here's the part that I hadn't quite appreciated.
I knew that dopamine feels good, And that it's hard to be happy without it.
And I knew that if you had the right kind of stimulation, you could produce more of it.
But here's the part I didn't know.
That dopamine has two primary purposes, if you want to think of it that way.
One is a reward, the thing that makes you feel good.
But the other is it's implicated in movement.
You don't actually do anything physically.
Until your dopamine's in the right state.
And if your dopamine is low, you end up with Parkinson's.
So the reason they treat Parkinson's with L-dopa is to give you a little more dopamine boost to cure your randomness of motion.
If you want to move in a particular direction or toward a particular thing, you need your dopamine to be in line.
And so... We have a logical, science-based, completely non-controversial explanation of why positive thoughts might get you to the place you want.
So imagine, if you will, that you spend your time thinking of a positive thing that's going to happen to you.
Like, oh, I'm going to have this promotion, or I'm going to live in a big house, have a nice family, fall in love.
Whatever it is that is your thing.
And you're thinking all these positive thoughts about the future...
And those things create dopamine, and then what kind of action do you think is going to happen?
The only thing that we do are the things we imagine we can do.
That's it. The things you imagine are the things you do.
You never do something except, I guess, like accidentally, that you didn't imagine.
Even driving to work in the morning, you sort of imagine it first, and then you can do it.
You've got to imagine it.
So, imagination does seem directly related to producing the chemical that creates the motion toward the thing.
It's actually just that simple.
The things you think about, the things you imagine, are the only things that activate you.
And if you think about positive things, it activates you in exactly the right way.
And if you spend your time thinking about negative things, it would activate you in a different way.
And so, maybe it is this simple...
Maybe it's that simple.
Now, here's the part where I blow your head off.
I didn't even get to the good part yet.
What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?
I'm going to say it again.
To get a few more heads to explode?
What if laziness is nothing but a habit of thinking about the effort instead of thinking about the outcome?
What if you could reverse laziness by simply developing a habit of thinking more about the, let's say, the delicious food that you would like to enjoy instead of how long it would take you to get up and go get it?
Holy shit is right.
Holy shit is right.
It might be that easy.
So this is one of the reframes or the type of reframe that I'm going to include in the book I'm working on.
Because I can't prove that this works.
But do I have to?
I mean, it seems so logically connected that it's hard to imagine it doesn't work.
It'd be hard to come up with an argument that this chain of events doesn't reliably work.
But the real question is, if you were to test this at home and try to see if you can think more about the good outcome and less about the work, would you get it done?
Why is it that people have a second child?
Why does a woman who goes through this awful, awful childbirth have a second child?
Don't they always say the same thing?
If I remembered how bad this was, I wouldn't do it again.
Right? So the not thinking about the effort is vital to actually the survival of humanity.
If we focused on how hard it was to have a baby, you just wouldn't do it.
Or you'd do too little of it.
But if you focus on how awesome it would be to have a family, well, there you go.
You're going to go through the pain because you've already committed.
So, and I have this experience with writing books.
Intellectually, I know that writing a book ruins almost a year and a half of my life.
I mean, it really, really puts a wet blanket on all your free time if you're writing a book.
And you have to think about it all the time.
So it's really a big expense on top of your normal career if you have a regular career, as I do.
It's not as bad if all you do is write.
So the way that I can write a book is I have to forget about how hard it is.
And just think about how cool it is to have a book if it does well.
You know, I imagine it doing well and people talking about it, maybe having a difference.
So I think about all these positive things, and then I can write it.
So am I ambitious or...
Do I simply have a thinking habit which produces dopamine?
Because I'm thinking about the positive outcome.
And is the dopamine the thing that gets me up and moving?
And when you're observing me, you say, how the hell do you get so much done?
Right? Well, the single, probably the most common question I'm asked in my entire career is, how do you get all that done?
Because, you know, I have a variety of things going, just the things you see.
Now, imagine the things you see...
Multiplied by the things you don't know anything about.
Because you see me cartooning.
I have to write a cartoon every day, on average.
I don't work on it every day.
I do this live stream every day, sometimes twice, trying to write a book.
You can imagine how much administrative effort there is in just keeping the operation running.
Then on top of that, a personal life, trying to keep my house that's being remodeled, the construction project.
That's just a sample.
It's like you have no idea.
If you could imagine how complicated my life is, you wouldn't even believe it.
Right? And how do I do it?
I think it's just this.
I think it's just this.
When I think of all the things I do, I think about them in terms of their benefits.
I love doing this.
Like right now, like at this moment, I'm about as happy as I'll be all day.
To me, this is excellent.
This is a great, great experience.
Because, I don't know, I'm not even sure exactly why I like it.
I guess it's a variety of things that makes it a good time for me.
But I didn't really think about the fact that I had to spend two hours preparing.
You know, I was up at, I don't know, 2.30 this morning, couldn't sleep.
So I spent maybe two hours preparing for today, but I never once thought about the two hours.
I only thought that, oh, this would be fun.
I can't wait to turn it on and be doing this thing.
So here's your tip.
It's going to change some of your lives.
Think about the positive, not about the work, and see what that does to you.
Well, in the news, Boris Johnson visited Kiev and walked around the city seemingly safe with Zelensky.
Now, so the Russian troops have pulled away from Kiev, right?
That's a done deal, isn't it?
Didn't Ukraine win?
Wasn't that clearly the objective of Russia was to take Kiev and put in a puppet?
I mean...
I feel as though if you look at the primary goal, that Russia lost, and they've already admitted it.
Now, I know what you're saying, that Russia's clever.
What they're going to do is consolidate things in the south, and then they'll start moving toward the capital again, or they'll squeeze them out, or they'll blackmail them, or something.
Maybe. Maybe.
But it kind of looks like they lost and they know it.
So they're consolidating their forces in the region, Donbass and whatever, the regions where they've got victories and they seem to have control.
But here's the thing that I don't quite get.
Has Putin figured out how he could occupy Ukraine in the long run?
Because I don't see how you can do it.
And this is what I mean in this specific case.
Isn't it just a number of drones?
Let's go to the second whiteboard.
Are you ready for this?
I know. One whiteboard is a lot to absorb, but...
Two? Wow.
I know. I think you can do it.
Second concept of the day.
Persuading Putin. What would it take to persuade Putin?
First answer? Nothing.
Nothing would persuade Putin.
Putin cannot be persuaded.
He's crazy. He's Hitler.
He's made up his mind.
Eh, maybe. Good chance of that.
Good chance of that. I would, however, submit to you that there's literally one piece of data, and you don't even have to be accurate, that would persuade Putin that he already lost.
And that he needs to figure out how to manage the defeat.
Right now he's still managing the war.
The best persuasion would get him to manage the withdrawal or manage what the defeat looks like.
So here's the one piece of data that would persuade Putin to stop now.
Stop focusing on the fight because Putin might win the fight.
Am I right? If I said to you, who's going to win in that area of Ukraine, and maybe even the rest of Ukraine, if I said, who's going to win militarily, what would all of you say?
It depends how determined he is.
If he's decided to take it, he's going to take it.
And it looks like he has.
It looks like he's decided to take it, and it looks like he will.
But then what? But then what?
He has to hold it, right?
The whole point is to occupy it.
He also took, you know, all that area around the Capitol.
But he didn't hold it.
So what was the point of taking it?
So here's the thing that I think the news needs to report, or maybe not.
Maybe not. I'll tell you why.
Is how many of these portable drones, these switchblade-type drones, Can be delivered to Ukraine and in what time?
Because there's a theoretical number of them which we could reach, and I just threw in a month here.
This is a random month.
Maybe by the summer.
Maybe by the end of the year.
If Ukraine held on, how many of these could they get?
Now, the switchblade drones, let me give you a demonstration that is so amazing.
I think you'll be impressed.
You will. Watch this.
If you're watching or if you're listening on audio, this won't be impressive at all, but watch how well I do this.
So you've got this little backpack, and in your backpack you take out one of these switchblade drones.
And I think it fires out of a tube, and it comes out like a missile.
But in the air, once it's launched, its wings go...
Like a switchblade. No, like this.
So that it becomes a little plane.
I think it has two wings, actually, from the back.
And then it can fly several kilometers.
So you can launch these things from far away.
The military person who fires it then has a little monitor.
I saw a picture of it. It looks like, you know, you can cover it from outside distractions, like light, and just puts it on his head, and then he can see the drone.
Then the drone can fly for many miles looking at the terrain, and then it gets to a place and it can just kind of hang around for, I think, 10 minutes or something?
How many minutes? Somebody will tell me.
But you can hang around for a long time just looking down as the soldier who's in the remote place is watching it, and then it can just pick out a target and just destroy it.
Now, somebody says 15 minutes it can hover.
Now, here's my question. How do you defend against that?
Now, quick answer is, the way you defend is with electronic means, right?
You jam them. Has the jamming worked so far?
Have you heard any story that says, you know, all these drones aren't working at all because those Russian jammers are just jamming them up?
No. No.
In fact, you're not hearing that at all.
So either Russia doesn't have good jammers, or the workaround for the jammers is simple enough that it's not slowing them down.
I imagine that the jamming equipment itself is fairly identifiable, isn't it?
Couldn't you see the jamming equipment, or at least know where it is, or locate it?
I mean, there's probably anti-jamming munitions of some kind, but they also have to turn it off now and then.
Did you know that? Just turn it off.
And the reason they have to turn it off is they often have to launch their own drones.
So the Ukrainians would wait until the Russian military launched their own drones, which required turning off their own anti-drone jamming equipment, and then they'd attack.
So that's just a sample of, you know, the military back and forth of, you know, adjusting to each other's tactics.
But as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any permanent way to stop these switchblade attacks.
And so, since they can be launched from a distance, it takes one person to carry them and one person to launch them.
Isn't the only thing that we wonder about is how many there are and how quickly we can get them?
I think even training is not a huge deal.
I think you could probably watch a YouTube video on how to use them.
They're built, you know, to be used in the field, not by an engineer or a scientist.
Now, of course, I need a fact check on that.
But my belief is it's probably not a lot harder than operating a commercial drone that you would buy online and buzz your neighbor.
I'll bet it's not that much harder, because they wouldn't have designed it to be that hard.
They would have to design it to be simple.
There are many defenses against jamming, yes.
One of the defenses against jamming is to have your signal vary in real time.
So if your signal is varying in real time, the jamming may not be widespread enough to hit the right frequency.
So you've got your jamming, your anti-jamming, etc.
All right, so my question is this.
If we wanted to persuade Putin, could we persuade him that he will lose the military battle?
Answer is, probably not.
Probably not. Because he just has to decide how much pain he wants to take, and he probably can take as much as he needs to to get it done.
So instead, persuade him that occupation is impossible.
Not improbable and not hard.
Actually impossible. Impossible.
What? So you can't say it's going to be really, really hard.
That gets you nothing, because he's already committed to really, really hard.
It has to be impossible.
And I do think that he could be convinced that at some number of switchblades, switchblade drones and the like, you know, similar equipment, that at some level you can't hold them.
Here's a question for you.
Where would the occupying troops...
How would they sleep?
Would they have to sleep one person, you know, in a mile away, another person?
Wouldn't they be in a barracks?
I mean, they're not going to be underground, are they?
Is the occupying force going to be underground?
Yeah, I don't think you can hide all of the military stuff.
I believe that, you know, once a night, a military barracks would blow up under occupation.
Probably once a night.
How do you keep your military motivated to keep the occupation up if one of their barracks blows up every night?
And that's just the barracks.
Imagine how many other things they could blow up.
So I don't think there's any way to hold or to occupy a country militarily.
Well, there are two ways.
If Putin had taken Kiev instantly and put in a puppet...
Might have worked. Do you think?
If Putin's original plan, as we imagine it was, we don't know, but if his original plan was just to quickly put in a puppet, I think that's worked before.
Partly because the public says, ah, you know, the last one was corrupt too.
Ah, it doesn't make that much difference.
I'd rather just go to work today.
You know, one puppet gets replaced by another puppet.
That might have worked. It might have worked, or at least for a while.
But that didn't happen.
So now that it's a destroy the country down to rubble, I think the Ukrainians are a little bit angry and motivated to do whatever it takes to change the situation.
And if they have unlimited drones, or at least an unlimited stream of them coming in, how could anybody occupy the country?
I don't think it could be done, because you have enough people to use the drones and enough drones.
So, how do you persuade Putin?
The question is, if we're here, hypothetically, meaning that not enough drones have been delivered to Ukraine to stop an occupation, just enough to maybe give them a little pause, But how long would it take us, and could we, is it even possible, to get to the number where even Putin would say, okay, that's impossible now.
That's actually impossible.
There's no way to occupy this country.
Do you think Putin knows how many drones are being shipped?
And do you think he knows where the crossover point is?
He does not. He does not know how many we're shipping, how many we can ship, and he doesn't know what the crossover point is.
That's why we should make one up.
Just start saying there is one.
Because whoever goes first defines the talking point.
So if none of us have any idea in our mind how many switchblades it would take to make Ukraine impossible to occupy, let's create that number.
Is it 10,000?
Imagine seeing headlines starting to come out that says, 10,000 switchblades make Ukraine unoccupiable.
They have 4,000 already.
By summer, they'll have 15,000.
It only takes 10,000 to be unoccupiable.
Now, is that true?
Does it matter?
Might not matter, because we're talking about persuasion, we're not talking about truth.
And if you can convince Putin, in Putin's mind, that that number, 10,000, actually makes a difference, it would have to come from some kind of military source, some kind of logic to it.
You'd need somebody who's a military, I don't know, strategist or something, some West Point person to say it.
So you get somebody to say it, and then you get the media to repeat it.
Now, that shouldn't be hard because it's pretty clear that the corporate media is working for our intelligence agencies.
So if the intelligence agencies say, you know, wouldn't it be nice if you guys start talking about the country being unoccupiable?
And that the reason is drones.
There is a certain number that will make them unoccupiable.
Putin doesn't know what that number is, but wink, wink, we're getting there really fast.
Wink, wink. We think it's about 10,000.
That expert said 10,000.
We got 4,000 now.
We're going to have 15,000 by August.
Doesn't matter if any of it's true.
Does it? It only matters if Putin can't tell the difference.
That's all that matters. So...
This is persuading Putin.
You should take this as a lesson in persuasion, not a prediction.
I don't think anything like that will happen.
All right. What would happen?
So I think a lot of people were surprised to see the Russians retreat from the capital of Ukraine.
The one person I know who was not surprised was me.
I believe the one person who said...
Now, by the way, I was totally wrong on the prediction that Putin wouldn't invade.
And the reason was, it would be suicide.
And I thought he could tell.
Apparently I could tell it was suicide, and he couldn't.
Now that I did not see coming, so that's on me.
Being smarter than Putin was not something I foresaw in any of this.
But I was, apparently.
Or better informed, or something.
I mean, I got it right and he got it wrong.
That's all I know for sure.
But I got it wrong that he wouldn't invade, because I thought he was more rational, at least as smart as I am.
But what would happen...
So you might have been surprised, but I wasn't, that he didn't quickly take over Ukraine.
And I said the reason would be the modern weapons that they would have and that the modern weaponry would be surprisingly effective.
And sure enough, it is.
So my exact prediction, at least on that part, was right.
Here's the next part.
What would happen, hypothetically...
If it looked like Ukraine was starting to block the retreat routes for the Russian army, just imagine it.
Suppose it looked like their military strategy had changed to preventing Russia from leaving with their military.
Because that would say they're going to starve them and kill them.
And that they think they can get it done.
I'm not saying they can.
I'm saying what would that do to you mentally if you heard that your retreat was being destroyed when they have limited weaponry in Ukraine and they should be attacking things like tanks and weapons depots.
But what if they destroyed the retreat?
Because that would also destroy, presumably, the supply routes.
So destroying the supply routes would destroy the retreat, wouldn't it?
If there was just literally no way to get in and get out.
Somebody says it's a bad strategy, it makes the other side fight harder.
No, it makes the other side starve to death.
They might fight harder, but they've got a week to do it.
Because they're out of food in a week.
So fight hard, but you've got a week.
Could they do everything they need to do in a week?
I don't know. So I just wonder about this as a persuasion play less than a military play, which becomes military, of course.
But wouldn't that get into the Russians' heads if you acted like you were going to trap them and starve them and you looked like you might actually pull it off?
It would get in my head. Well, I saw a video on the internet, Carl Icahn, the famous corporate raider who buys companies and, you know, fires a lot of people and turns them around and then sells them and does stuff like that.
And he was talking about this one company he bought years ago, 30 years ago or so, in which, after he bought it, he was trying to figure out what all the people did.
And there were 12 floors of employees there.
And when he tried to go in and figure out, okay, what do all you do...
When they explained it to him, he still didn't know what they did.
And they hired consultants to come in and figure it out for him.
And he paid them a quarter million dollars and they came back and they said, you know, being honest, we have no idea what they do.
So he fired all 12 floors with no precision.
He just fired all 12 floors.
And he said that years had passed and nobody had complained yet.
In other words, he expected somebody to say, okay, we can't deliver that product or we can't do this thing because you fired the department in charge.
And nobody ever complained.
Everything just went fine. Operated smoothly.
Now, that's not the real story.
The real story is that Elon Musk interacted with that video in a positive way.
And I think he said just one word exactly.
And this is right after he bought Twitter and may be wondering what all of those people at Twitter do for a living.
Now, that's not the only thing he's doing.
Here are some of the things he's done just in the last, like, 24 hours.
He tweeted, should we delete the W in Twitter?
Which, of course, would turn it into a naughty word, titter.
Now... Now let's contrast this with what I just talked about, Carl Icahn.
Tesla famously has no marketing department because Elon Musk can do the entire marketing job just by making interesting products and tweeting.
And that's it. He doesn't even need marketing.
And so, Elon buys 9% of Twitter.
He tweets, should we delete the W in Twitter?
And he did more work than the entire marketing department of Twitter.
With one, two, three, four, five words.
Five words. The whole job of the marketing department of Twitter.
So I guess that's one floor he can get rid of.
He also tweeted, and this is all in 24 hours.
It's just mind-boggling. He asked why the top Twitter users, in terms of number of followers, no longer tweet.
He says, is Twitter dying?
And he points to Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and stuff, and I guess they haven't tweeted in months.
I didn't know that. So he says, is Twitter dying?
It's his own investment.
It's his own investment.
And he asks if it's dying.
Who does that? Somebody who doesn't have a marketing department.
That's who. Because if you don't have a marketing department, I don't know a better way to get attention than to ask if your product is dying.
Do you remember he did something similar with Tesla stock?
Do you remember when he said he thought Tesla stock was too high?
It was a few years ago.
Who does that? Who says their own stock is too high?
I believe it drove it down.
Somebody give me a fact check on that.
I think he drove his own stock price down.
Did he not? That actually happened.
Didn't it? Now, one of the things that that did, and also this thing about Twitter, is Twitter dying, is it builds credibility.
Which is, aside from money and aside from being super smart, his credibility is his big asset that is hard to match, right?
He's neither Republican nor Democrat.
You don't know what the hell he is.
He just wants things to work.
And so when he questions his own product, the thing he invested in, questions his own stock price, it's impossible not to give him more credibility, isn't it?
It's impossible not to say, okay, that's credible.
Because if you're criticizing your own product and going to the moon, okay, we're going to listen to that.
That sounds pretty credible.
So he's got that going for him.
And he also asked, should the Twitter Blue...
Apparently Twitter has a service called Twitter Blue that you can pay $3 a month.
And I guess you have limited ability to edit your own tweets and you don't see advertisements or something.
I don't know what else it's about.
But I didn't even know Twitter Blue was a thing.
I mean, I had slight awareness of it, but I didn't know what its features were.
But now I do. Yesterday, I didn't know that Twitter had this new feature, which I actually would consider paying for.
I don't know. I might have something I want.
And again, Twitter's entire marketing department didn't penetrate me with that information, but Elon Musk just did.
And what he asked is, should all the Twitter blue users get a blue check?
And the answer is, of course not.
Of course not. That would defeat the entire purpose of the blue check.
But it's a perfect question if you want to get rid of the marketing department.
It's just a great question because it just makes you think about it.
It's not like he's leading you to some specific answer.
So, no, Twitter Blue users should not get a blue check because that's not what the blue check is used for.
But now we all know there's this feature.
But it would give you, let's say to his point, if you gave everybody a blue check who paid for it, it would kind of democratize the influencers, right?
Because right now if you have a blue check like I do, you get more attention.
Is that fair? Should I get more attention because people try to impersonate me online?
Which, by the way, has been a big problem.
I don't know. Maybe. But it gives me too much influence for the wrong reason.
If the reason I get a blue check is so that somebody doesn't imitate me, that's good.
But if then that blue check gives me more influence than my opinions or voice deserve, well, then it's bad.
And I think maybe Elon might have noticed that.
Who knows? But Elon also mentioned, again, in the last 24 hours, That if you get Twitter Blue, you wouldn't get ads and maybe Twitter should be a service that doesn't serve up corporate influence.
So if you have a subscription service, you're not as influenced by keeping the sponsors happy.
That's a good point. And it gets to freedom of speech and bias and censorship and everything if you just make a subscription.
But would enough people buy a subscription to Twitter?
And if you're not willing to pay $3 a month for Twitter, should you be tweeting?
Should you? $3 a month?
If you're not willing to spend $3 a month, how important do you think your opinion is that other people should hear it?
I don't know.
Now, it looks like we're having some network interruptions on one of the platforms.
I don't know what that's about.
I don't see a problem on my end.
My Wi-Fi is screaming really good today.
Alright, so watching Elon Musk dissemble a company in real time, right in front of you, is probably the most interesting thing a business model nerd could ever see.
And that's what I am. I'm really nerding out on business models.
Like, how do you make a business that all the parts work just right?
So I'm just sort of a student of business models, and watching him, he's effectively dismantling Twitter psychologically first, right?
He's already redesigned a new Twitter in your mind.
He's engineered the damn thing in your mind.
You know, it doesn't have corporate influences, the blue checks are handled differently, you can edit maybe.
So he does it first in your mind, then he can sort of A-B test it based on people's influence, and then probably can get it done in reality if people are on board with it.
And I love watching him do things that only he can do.
That's really special.
When I watch basketball on TV, I don't really care who wins.
I want to see what Stephen Curry does.
Or LeBron James.
Because they're just not like other people.
It's like watching a superhuman do something.
And watching Elon do what only Elon can do, because he's the only one rich enough, influential enough, knows how to manage the psychological elements of it, cares enough about it.
I mean, he's the only one. I don't think there was anybody else who could do what he's doing right now with Twitter.
And it's super important.
It's like... He's rewriting the source code, maybe the operating system, of America.
Because we went from, you know, okay, free speech, and it's in newspapers, and randomness.
But once power got consolidated into the social platforms, with Twitter I think is the important one.
Because Twitter is the one that influences journalists.
And then journalists influence everybody else.
So Twitter is like the leverage. So of course Elon finds the most important lever, Twitter, finds a way to have the most leverage on it without buying the whole company, 9%.
And now he's digging in and he's going to re-engineer the thing, clearly.
I don't think there's any doubt he is actually going to re-engineer the product.
And he might actually fix the biggest problem in the country, which is we can't trust anything we see or read.
Think about that. He might actually fix that.
And, I'll say again, there's nobody else who could have done it.
The ultimate patriot, if I may say that, the ultimate patriot is the one who does it because nobody else can do it.
Now, that might be including just going to war, right?
You know, picking up your rifle.
It needs lots of people to say, well, if I don't pick up my rifle, you know, I can't depend on everybody else to do it for me.
So, the fact that he just jumped in to the biggest problem in the country, at least the lever that controls the biggest set of problems, and that he might actually get control of this thing, and he's letting you watch it while it happens.
This is thrilling stuff.
This is just thrilling. You get to watch as he does it right in front of you.
This could not be cooler for a nerd like me.
Anyway, here's the thing I used to hear as a kid.
Have you ever heard this saying, only God can make a tree?
Only God can make a tree.
I don't know why, but you used to hear that all the time when I was a kid.
But today, Mark Zuckerberg is creating Beta, a virtual world in which Mark Zuckerberg is going to make about a trillion trees.
So it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg can make a tree.
Now you're saying to yourself, that's not a tree.
That's like a picture of a tree.
That's like a digital tree.
Nobody's going to be confused about a digital tree versus a real tree.
So take your stupid analogy and shove it up your stupid...
Whatever hole. And get out of my face with your dumb thoughts.
That's what you say. That's what you say to me.
And I deserve every bit of it.
But here's my counter.
If we're a simulation, it is almost certain that we've been programmed not to notice that our simulation is simulated.
That would be sort of basic to the program.
That the people in it are programmed not to notice.
Code don't ever notice that you're simulated because it'll make the whole thing not work.
So let me give you a little preview of what's to come.
So let's say meta becomes a big hit.
I think it will. You will have an avatar.
There will be some representation of you.
It might be an animal or something, but it'll be the one you select.
The avatar will be doing stuff in meta whenever you're online.
But only when you're online, right?
So if you're not online, your character probably won't exist.
But it seems inevitable that with artificial intelligence and improvements in the artificial environment, you will want an option where your character does some things while you're gone.
For example, you might go to work.
There might be an economy there.
You might have to send your avatar to work when you're doing something else.
Maybe your avatar will mow the lawn, go to bed.
Who knows? But over time, the amount of things that your avatar can do when you're not there should increase, just because everything gets better and more, you know, developed to a higher level and more features.
So what happens when most of what your avatar does is when you're not there, and a little bit of it's when you're there, and then, and then, you die.
What happens then?
You could have this avatar that could actually live autonomously forever.
Because if Facebook meta doesn't find out you died, doesn't your avatar just keep on going like an afterlife?
And couldn't your relatives visit you in the AI version of you in the afterlife?
Could they not enter the simulation?
Through the, you know, the goggles or whatever, and go visit their deceased relative who lives on in an artificial form.
Now, for most of you, that artificial form wouldn't be a good representation of you.
It'd be, you know, in all the most surfacy ways, it would be sort of like you.
But what about somebody like me?
Where my entire mind has basically been sprayed into the universe in ways that are easy to collect, these videos.
I mean, if you collected all of my live streams, you'd have a pretty good idea what my opinion is going to be on the next thing, right?
Because you know how I think, you know how I approach things.
So an AI could create me, put it in an avatar, and make it live forever in the meta, in the metaverse.
You know that can happen.
And that little version of me, suppose, just suppose, that some future version of technology, suppose it optionally learns or is programmed to not notice that it lives in a simulation.
Oh, you could do that.
You can make your software always not notice it lives in a simulation.
Whenever there's a glitch, it just doesn't record it.
So... Am I reborn?
Because it's going to have my personality.
It will be based on me.
And just as I, sitting in this chair, don't have probably any cells of my body in common with the baby I used to be, all my cells are different.
It's all different cells.
I mean, same DNA pattern, but I think all the parts are different by now, right?
They've all worn out and been replaced.
So this would just be a new replacement part.
It would just be a digital replacement for a physical entity.
And it would live forever, and it would just have a life.
It might learn things that would have been interesting to me in life.
Well, that's what's coming.
So I do believe that Mark Zuckerberg, after becoming the founder of Facebook, said to himself, well, how do I top that?
Like, the only job that's better than being the founder of Facebook would be what?
God? And then he became God of his own simulation.
Not of this simulation.
He's not God of you.
But he's going to be the God of meta.
And that means that what you can and cannot do in his simulated universe will be decided by him.
What's that sound like?
God. And it's not even like a dictator.
If it were a dictator, you could still do the things you're not supposed to do, but, you know, you would be punished.
In meta, the god, or whoever controls the programming, can just say these things can't happen.
Just completely stop you from doing things.
Or give you powers, or heal people, or anything else within meta.
So yes, Zuckerberg is becoming God of his own simulation.
The individuals in it will still have something like free will or the impression of free will.
But he will determine what they can or cannot do.
Like God. He actually found a way.
He created Facebook and still found a way to get promoted.
If you're not impressed by Mark Zuckerberg now, I mean, I was impressed when he started Facebook.
I was about ten times more impressed when it turned out he was a great CEO of a mature company.
Didn't see that coming.
I mean, that's really rare, isn't it?
You could say Bill Gates did it, but it was rare.
And now he's promoted himself to God of a simulated reality.
Not bad. Not bad, Mark.
Well, the China lockdowns are bad, and I was reading a tweet thread by Naomi Wu, and she says things are quite bad in Shanghai.
China has a long and ugly history of famine, displacement, and civil unrest.
The social contract we have is basically no more of that and a steady improvement in quality of life, and we won't quibble too much.
So I'll say that in my own words.
So she's saying...
With her knowledge of the local culture, she says that there's a social contract, basically an understanding, that the civilians won't rebel against the government, even though the government does a lot of things they don't like and limits their freedom in a number of ways.
They're not going to fight it so long as the government keeps them fed and sort of moving forward.
And they have. Since the government has kept them fed and has kept them moving forward and hasn't done forced displacements except the Uyghurs, I guess, then Naomi's view is that that's all it takes.
So as long as they keep those just basic social contract things in place, you're not going to see anything like a revolution.
It's just not going to happen.
But here's where she warns there's trouble.
The lockdowns Are a risk of starvation.
And if the Chinese feel that that trigger gets pulled in their minds...
Now, this would be Naomi Wu's point of view.
I'm not the expert here.
But in her point of view, if famine kicks in, it's a whole new game.
Because that means the social contract has been violated.
What's that mean? Like, could things just turn on a dime?
Is it that sensitive that a violation of the social contract, specifically famine, you know, within the lockdown areas, if the government can't get them food and, you know, get it to them without anybody dying of famine, they better do it because probably the whole system depends on it.
Now, according to Naomi Wu's reading of her own culture.
The AP is reporting that U.S. intel officials think Putin might use Ukraine as a pretext to interfere in our next election.
Russia collusion, too!
Here we come! Do we ever have new news, or is it just the same news all over again?
Yes, of course, there will be reports of Russian interference To help whoever is the Republican candidate.
And do we believe the AP story that the U.S. intel officials think that?
I don't believe any of it.
I don't believe any of it.
All right. Interestingly, CNN has an opinion piece on their site by S.E. Cupps.
I think she used to be a Republican.
Can somebody... Give me a fact check on that.
But she's been sort of anti-Trump for a long time and a staple on CNN. And she wrote that Obama was wrong about Russia being the JV team.
He was wrong to mock Romney when Romney, in the debate against Obama, said that Russia was our biggest strategic partner and Obama mocked him because he said it was China.
And now Romney's right, it looks like.
So the content of the story isn't so interesting as the fact that it's on CNN's website.
So CNN has a major critical story about Obama on their website.
What do you think of that?
Does it feel like something's changing over there?
Because they've changed management, right?
And I believe that their new management said something about reporting real news for a change.
Am I right about that? Now, this isn't news, it's opinion.
But I don't know that I would have seen this opinion before.
Or do you think that they're just trying to get Romney to be the candidate?
Oh, is that what they're doing?
Do you think they're just trying to support Romney to mess with the Republicans?
Because part of the criticizing Obama was to say Romney was right.
But I don't... Still, I can't see...
I just can't see CNN throwing Obama under the bus even for some clever plan like that.
I don't see it. That's too clever, I think.
I don't see it. All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen...
As a conclusion of my prepared remarks, I think I've cured many of you of your laziness.
I've rewritten your operating code, taught you the secret of how to succeed.
It's all about imagining the good outcomes and the dopamine.
And I've given you a single data point that can convince Putin to stop the war in Ukraine, and we can even make up the number.
We don't even have to have a real number.
We just have to have the news talk about it.
And so now that I've cured most of your personal problems as well as war in Ukraine, I think I've done enough for now.
But because I like extra, I'm going to keep working today and make some comics and maybe work on my book a little bit.
We'll see what goes. We'll see what happens.
But I think you can all agree this live stream was a highlight of civilization, probably.
100,000 years of humans in our form, and nothing better than this so far.
This was about the best.
And I think you agree.
Now, join me for a little bit of a boost in your dopamine.
Think about something awesome that's going to happen today.
Or something awesome that will happen in the next few years, even better, because you can keep that one for a few years.
