Episode 1714 Scott Adams: More Elon Musk Twitter Drama, Ukraine Updates, And More Stuff We Love
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Content:
Latest Elon Musk and Twitter drama
More free speech, or more censorship?
Craving and depending on censorship
Ukraine War musing
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How would you like to take this moment up a notch?
It's already the highlight of civilization.
That's why you're here. But we could do better, can't we?
Take it up a level. All you need is a copper mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Correction. Correction.
I have been saying a vessel of any kind, but apparently one vessel you do not want to put your beverage in would be a Russian missile cruiser.
So let me revise this.
A vessel of any kind except for a Russian missile cruiser.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure...
The dopamine of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better.
It's pretty good already, isn't it?
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It's going to happen now. Go! Well, let's take the Wayback Machine, shall we?
Dial it back one year ago today.
One year ago. Things we used to believe were true.
One year ago, the Russian military was highly capable.
One year ago, China is really good at handling pandemics.
Oh, what we have learned.
Suppose you had taken the opinion that everything we think is true is wrong.
How would your predictions have turned out?
Pretty darn good. Just assume everything's a lie.
Everybody's lying, everything's wrong, and every information that comes across your consciousness is probably false or out of context or somebody's trying to manipulate you.
On one hand, you would be quite mentally ill if you lived in a world that was like the actual world.
Imagine if you were conscious all the time of the fact that everything's wrong and everybody's trying to screw you.
You really couldn't go on, could you?
Like your brain would explode, you just couldn't handle it.
So we live in this lie where sometimes people are being unselfish and everything's fine.
So you have to have some kind of like a little fake movie running in your head just to keep yourself sane.
Well, here's the newest news on the Twitter and Elon Musk situation.
So the Vanguard funds, which own, I don't know, trillions of dollars of assets, they just upped their own ownership.
I think they would have been just behind Musk's ownership.
They bumped their own up ownership over 10%.
Excuse me.
And... They usually are a force for management stability.
Now, isn't that interesting?
You know, what are the odds that somebody like Vanguard would need to come in and even get involved?
And then you've also got this prince from Saudi Arabia, Waleed, whose name I can't remember, which I don't mean to be offensive.
I literally just can't remember his name.
He's a big, famous investor, and he owns a lot of Twitter as well, relative to other owners.
And he says, no, he rejects Elon's offer, but he's just one stockholder, however, a big one.
Now, why is it everybody's getting involved?
Max Boot is sort of the voice of Democrats in some ways.
He's against it because he wants more...
More, what do you call it?
More moderation in social media.
Not less, but more moderating of the unproductive content, I guess.
So, what do you think?
And wasn't there some kind of...
The government is sort of looking into it and...
We're going to be opening the hood and seeing what's going on with Elon's various enterprises.
So why did this become like a world war?
How did just a billionaire buying a company, which you'd think would be the most routine thing in the world, a billionaire bought a company?
Pretty ordinary stuff.
But this one's not ordinary.
Is it because everybody feels the stakes?
Do you think people have finally figured out that Twitter is not just another media platform?
Do you think everybody figured that out?
Twitter's not just another media platform.
Twitter is where opinions go to be formed.
Because the people who tell the public who isn't paying attention what to think They all get their thoughts from the collective beehive that is Twitter.
I don't think they're getting it from Facebook or Instagram.
I don't think any of the journalists are going to TikTok to get an opinion on the Ukraine situation.
But they're going to Twitter to do it.
So Twitter is where people learn to think.
And what to think. At least the thinking people.
The people who influence other people.
So Twitter is where you influence the influencers.
It's the most important platform.
In my opinion. I'm open to a counter-argument.
But to me, there's nothing even close.
To me, the reason that Trump conquered Twitter is because it's the one that matters.
Conquering Twitter is what makes you president.
Conquering Facebook...
Is what gets you more Instagram followers?
Right? I don't know.
So... I think the world has now figured out that this is sort of a civilization-altering situation, and they want their team to be on the right side of it, whatever team they're on.
But here's my take.
Could we all agree on the following generalization?
This is a generalization, so it won't be true in every case.
But don't you think that the group that is most afraid of the truth is generally the most in favor of censorship or some would call it moderation?
Is that fair to say?
The entity most afraid of the truth is also most in favor of suppressing the truth.
That almost just seems like It's not even reasoning, it's just a definition, really.
Nothing really to argue about there.
So, why is it that we've seen this, a lot of people have talked about it, this censorship flip, where it used to be the left was all about, hey, free speech, and the right was all about, hey, there's some things you shouldn't talk about, let's not talk about that, and then it seems to have flipped...
Where the conservatives are by far the ones talking about free speech, and the left is by far the ones looking to suppress it, their opinion would be that it's dangerous, that some kinds of speech are just dangerous.
Now, why the flip?
Now, first of all, do you believe that it flipped?
Because, you know, with the conservatives, we're talking about maybe music and art, But this is more about politics.
So it's not exactly the same thing that flipped.
But on the topic of...
Yeah, a lot of you say, yes, it flipped.
So why did it flip?
Here's my take. I just tweeted this, so I don't know how much people hate it yet.
If you go back, just go back as far as you feel like it, and would you say that the following is true?
That conservatives...
It used to be a God-told-me kind of a party, like, you know, God first, then God tells us how to act, and then from that, the Constitution and the country was formed, so really it's sort of flowing from God through the policies, right? So wouldn't you say that it wasn't too long ago that the conservatives were connected all the way from policy through the Bible, right?
What would you say today, though, Isn't it interesting how many people that are being identified as conservatives or conservative heroes, even if those people are not conservative, like Elon Musk?
It seems to me that conservatives went from a God-told-me model, which is hard to defend.
It's hard to defend.
Now, I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm not in that argument, so I'm not going to tell you what to believe or not to believe.
I'm saying that some arguments are simply hard to defend.
And if your argument is the policy should be X because God informed me, you kind of want to shut other people up a little bit.
It's like, well, let's not talk about this too much.
We don't need to delve.
We don't need too much depth on this.
Now, again, I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that point of view.
It's not a criticism. I'm just saying that you can't defend a belief, right?
Would you believe it? I mean, that's why it's a belief.
We wouldn't call it a belief if it were easy to describe it to other people and other people say, oh, yeah, I get that.
I see what you're saying.
I changed my religion immediately because of the logic you've presented.
So I would say that what Trump brought to the conservatives was do what works.
Do what works.
Trump still maintained the religion being important, but important because it works.
You know, the people who organize around a faith seem to do pretty well, and it seems to be healthy for the country, independent of whether anybody got the right faith.
So, to me, it looked like the conservatives went from a hard-to-defend, I'm not saying it's wrong, That's a different argument.
Just a hard to defend position to an easy one to defend.
Take nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy was sort of a conservative thing and it was always easy to defend.
In fact, the very reason that nuclear energy is now more popular than ever is partly because of climate change, of course.
But it's because...
The logic was there.
When you looked into it, as long as there was no censorship, if you looked into it, it was just a good idea.
So conservatives were on the side of something that was simply a good idea.
If you looked into it, the math just works.
The science works. So I would say that conservatives are no longer afraid of free speech because free speech...
is complementary to their worldview, which is, does it work?
If it works, let's do more of it.
Whereas I would say that liberals went from something really easy to defend, equal rights for all, Go back to the 60s, 70s.
A liberal would be like, let me sing and do art the way I want.
If somebody doesn't want to watch it, that's fine.
They have the right to not watch it.
But let me be free in my art and have equal rights for everybody.
Those are really easy to defend, aren't they?
So why would they need any censorship?
They don't need any censorship.
They're selling something that's really easy to defend.
Equal rights for everybody.
But what happens when equal rights for everybody turns into just batshit crazy stuff?
Do I even need to...
I'm not even going to give you the examples.
Because when I say that the left has turned, at least part of the left, has turned batshit crazy, I don't like to say the whole left, right?
It's part of it. You know what I'm talking about, right?
So if your views went from the easiest thing to defend, equal rights for all, to stuff that's just obviously batshit crazy, you need a little censorship, don't you?
So I don't think there's any mystery at all to why conservatives are in favor of more free speech and the left wants less of it.
It's because the people who have reasonable worldviews can stand the extra light.
And the others can't. Am I wrong?
Now, does that feel right?
That what happened was that the actual worldviews changed from practical to impractical, and that was the switch.
From practical to impractical.
Now, I think that conservatives were always practical, but when they explained it in religious terms, which was the dominant way of doing it, It didn't really feel sensible to people who were not already in that camp.
But what would be a typical conservative argument today?
If you don't control the border, too many people might come over and put pressure on your social systems, which we would like to save for our citizens.
That's not hard to defend.
If you're a conservative, you want to say, let's see all of it.
Bring your cameras down to the border.
You show the border.
Just show us all of it.
Let's talk about everything.
All the data. Right?
The conservatives can stand that light.
But let's say you did the same thing with the school curriculum.
What's being taught to kids in school.
The pandemic showed...
That our school system couldn't stand sunlight.
Because when kids were home Zooming, the parents got to figure out what was going on.
And that's when the trouble started.
So I don't think anything really changed in terms of how people saw censorship.
It's just that their actual opinions went from, you know, good but hard to explain to just good and easy to explain.
Do the stuff that works.
And liberals did the opposite.
I'm looking at your comments to see if I'm getting any agreement on this, because I wasn't sure I was.
Am I off by myself, or does that sound like it actually explains what happened?
All right, a little bit of agreement.
All right. So the Washington Post, hilariously, and this is something Twitter's good at, because I wouldn't have known this except I saw it on Twitter.
So a Washington Post must have been an opinion piece.
Now remember, the Washington Post is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
And there's an opinion piece in Jeff Bezos' publication about Musk's potential appointment to the board, so he didn't get appointed.
But Musk's appointment to Twitter's board shows that we need regulation of social media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.
So, the Washington Post knows that the public is so dumb that they won't realize that this is being written in a publication, one of the arguably two most important Classic publications, you know, mainstream publications, the Washington Post, that's owned by a billionaire, probably for the purpose of controlling the narrative.
I would think that's at least a little bit in his mind, don't you think?
So, it's not as if the person who wrote this is not aware of it.
Because, of course, everybody who writes for the Washington Post, I think, knows who owns it.
So I think this depends on the reader not knowing who owns the Washington Post.
Now let me ask you this.
In our little bubble that all of us are in, because if you're watching me right now talk about this stuff, you're in a little bubble.
What percentage of the public would even know that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos?
What do you think? 5%?
I think it's closer to 5%.
I don't think it's anywhere. I'm seeing estimates like 30%.
It's nowhere close to 30%.
Nowhere near that.
Most people don't even know what the Washington Post is.
If you want a real wake-up call, just ask them, what is the Washington Post?
Literally, what is the Washington Post?
And only 80% of the people will even be able to answer the question.
I think it's a newspaper or something.
We are completely, we meaning all of us involved right now, we are so blind to how little the average person cares about any of this and is aware of who owns what and what media conglomerates are doing what.
Very few people.
Now, the truth is that we very few people actually become the influential ones, not just the people watching this, but the people paying attention.
Or largely the ones who are moving the needle, so you don't need to convince everybody.
But it's really a wake-up call when you realize that almost nobody pays attention to this stuff.
So you can get away with saying anything, because people aren't going to check.
Glenn Greenwald summed it up well in a tweet.
He said,"...yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media.
It was a day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear.
They not only favor censorship, but desperately crave and depend on it." And he says,"...even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed." To which my thought was,"...that is a really smart tweet." And Glenn Greenwald, you should definitely follow him.
I mean, his material is always fresh and smart, even if you disagree with it.
You'll still get something out of it.
But here's one where I say to myself, yeah, I love what he's saying, and so I agree with it, but...
99% of the world is completely unaware of any of this.
So I don't think the world is going to long remember how the corporate media embarrassed itself yesterday.
I don't think 99% of the world was even paying attention.
I think 1% of us noticed, and we kind of knew how things worked anyway.
The 1% who already were pretty cynical.
Well, here's another example of how the Second Amendment works.
If Shanghai had gun ownership, like the United States has legal gun ownership, do you think that Shanghai would be in a lockdown?
Now, I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be.
I'm no medical expert.
But it wouldn't happen.
I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen here.
Now, I've heard horrific stories, and who knows what's true, right?
But that the pets are being executed.
Because they don't have any way to care for the pets.
So if you had a pet, you have to be, you know, maybe you have to go to quarantine or something, but they execute the pets.
Can you imagine executing pets in the United States where there's gun ownership?
Do you know what wouldn't happen in the United States?
You wouldn't execute my pet in front of me.
That's what you wouldn't do.
Because if you execute my pet in front of me, that's going to be a murder situation, one way or the other.
I mean, somebody's going to get murdered.
So, I don't think we can underestimate how powerful that Second Amendment is.
I mean, it really does work.
And I think this is a clear example.
Now, have you ever seen...
A thing called karma really do its thing?
And we've seen it in politics a lot, right?
The people you think, oh, my God, that's a terrible person.
Next thing you know, they're being disgraced in public.
It feels like karma's real, doesn't it?
Have you ever noticed that? I mean, I see no reason it should be.
Like, I can't see any mechanism that would make karma actually work.
But the number of times it feels like it works...
Oh, you're a little bit ahead of me.
So, I'm not going to give you the whole background of the story, but there was an individual who, let's say, had made it his job to make my life unpleasant.
And was spending serious time coming after me.
For, I don't know, didn't matter.
I guess I had said some critical things about his cult.
If you make fun of somebody's cult, I guess they come after you.
So it's somebody who came after me with a weak attack, and I was mostly ignoring it, but there was a little news item that he's...
He's going to jail for sex trafficking.
And I say to myself, I don't...
Sometimes karma.
Sometimes karma.
Yeah, his last name was Taint, I believe.
T-A-I-N-T. Andrew Taint.
Anyway, that happened.
That kind of made me happy yesterday.
Did you see the story about the Moskva?
That's Russia's cruiser.
And they tried to tow it back and it sunk.
It sunk on the way back.
And that's not really, really cool if you're Russia.
Now, That's the way the story is reported.
But, you know, the story is always propaganda any time there's war.
So don't really believe anything, right?
The official story, the official misinformation story, is that there was a missile, maybe Ukraine fired it, it hit their biggest flagship in the Black Sea, and maybe it wounded it critically, and when they tried to take it back, it sank.
But we've been fooled before, right?
Remember when you thought that Putin was really trying to take Kyiv?
But we found out really his play was to not take Kyiv, but rather to...
That's just a head fake, and he's really going to take the Donbass.
So really, sometimes it looks like they're trying for something big, but the real goal might be something more limited.
It's a standard military thing.
And I think that's what's happening with the Moskva.
Because some of the people who are really better at this military analysis have noted that it's not so much that the missile cruiser sunk, it's more that it's staging itself for an attack on SpongeBob SquarePants, his pineapple.
And some could say that that would be Putin scaling back his ambitions from taking all of Ukraine to maybe seriously wounding SpongeBob SquarePants and possibly even damaging his pineapple.
So that's happening now.
But in the other world, in the other world, I saw a...
Tweet from some expert who has a contrarian view of Ukraine.
And it is really fascinating when you read the opposite propaganda, because I don't think there's anything that's really true.
But at least anything we're saying, I wouldn't know what was true if I saw it.
But the propaganda is so opposite, it's really a head spinner because you can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions.
All right, here's one movie.
In one movie, Russia never meant to take Kiev, and you can tell that because they brought so few forces.
They were just trying to bog down that part of the army, the Ukraine military, and then when they'd done that, they would...
Do what they did now and circle most of the Ukrainian military that had been amassed near Donbass, and they'll circle them.
They're already in the process of eliminating all the fuel sources, fuel depots, and food sources and stuff for the Ukrainian military.
And at this point, there's no question That Russia, who does have better supply lines, will be able to outlast the Ukraine military.
They'll encircle them, they'll starve them, and they'll destroy them.
Now, mostly, they're looking for these bad characters, we're told, the so-called neo-Nazis paramilitary forces that are in that region that Putin keeps calling Nazis that he's trying to get rid of.
So that's one story.
Now, in that version...
Putin is basically already in the endgame and he's definitely going to get what he wants, which is he's going to destroy the Ukrainian military capability and then kind of do anything he wants.
Or at least Ukraine is going to be really, really flexible because he might want to keep Zelensky in power, but let Zelensky know that he can mow down Ukraine again if he doesn't do what he wants.
And some say that Putin really wants to just totally eliminate the Azov people and the sketchier elements.
So that's one view.
The other view is that the naval battle has been won by Ukraine.
Because the biggest ship is sunk and the rest of their fleet apparently pulled back from the coast.
So I don't know how effective the Navy is at this point.
Is the Navy even in the battle?
Is the Navy important?
I don't even know if it doesn't matter.
Somebody says the Moskva is being retrofitted as a submarine.
All right. So one view would be that Zelensky saved the capital and beat back the Russians with their clever attacks, and that now the Ukraine can focus on the battle in the south, and now they've taken out Russia's seafaring capabilities.
They still have some...
Russia still doesn't command the skies.
So you could actually tell the story.
In which heavy equipment is coming into the Ukrainian military, etc.
But I think I would agree with this one military expert, or lots of them actually, who say that it's really just a supply chain war, right?
Because it doesn't look like anybody can wipe down anybody except squeeze their supply chains.
So doesn't it only come down to that now?
It's a supply chain war, and if you could understand who's going to win that, well, you know how it's going to go, I think.
Yeah, I know the Navy sits offshore and shells interior targets, but I don't hear that happening a lot.
I'm not hearing reports that they are shelling from the Navy, or from the sea.
And I'm not sure they have the right...
They don't even have the right assets there for that, do they?
Because the missile cruiser is gone.
The rest of them were not missile cruisers, were they?
Or were they? I don't know.
Oh, is somebody saying that Russia stockpiled tons of supplies for seven years?
Well, we did see reports that their operations in the north of Ukraine were running low on supplies.
But we don't know if that's true.
Because I'm not sure that anything...
Anything makes sense at this point, or anything's believable at this point.
All right, Rasmussen has a poll, says if the elections for Congress were held today, a generic Republican would give 47% of the vote and a generic Democrat would get 39%.
Now, that's a pretty big spread.
It's a nine-point spread, so that would certainly indicate that the Republicans are going to sweep everything.
But it's down from 11%.
And 11 is down from 15.
At the start of the year, there was a 15-point spread between the generic Republican and Democrat.
Now it's already down to 9.
What exactly happened that made the Democrats look better in the last few months?
Quick. Name their successes in the last few months.
How in the world could that even happen?
How does Ukraine...
Ukraine? You think Ukraine is helping the Democrats somehow?
I don't know. Maybe.
Putin-Brace. Well, most of the shift is coming in independence.
So almost all of it is independence.
Why are independents moving?
Now, it makes sense they're the only ones that can move, like nobody else is going to move.
But why are they moving now?
Oh, Supreme Court?
Supreme Court, maybe, huh?
Abortion? I don't know.
The LGBTQ stuff?
It's hard to say. I don't see a reason for it, really.
But maybe it's something that Republicans are doing that's turning off the independents.
Instead of saying, what are the Democrats succeeding at, what did the Republicans do in the last few months that made them look especially bad?
bad.
Is it the January 6th stuff?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I wouldn't get too cocky if I were Republicans, because the one thing that's the most predictable thing is that this will narrow until Election Day, don't you think?
Don't you think that gap will just keep narrowing?
Because there aren't really that many undecided people.
People will gravitate to their teams just like they always do.
I think saying you're independent is just a luxury that you have so people don't ask you too many questions and you don't have to make a decision or at least tell people your decision until the last minute.
Alright. That, ladies and gentlemen, is my content for today.
Is there anything I missed? How many of you think Elon is, let's see, I think Mark Cuban was saying that Elon Musk is just playing a game and he's going to sort of pump up his price and maybe screw with the FEC or somebody and that it's really sort of just a game and he's going to make some money and sell his shares?
I don't think it's a game.
Yeah. I don't think it's a game at all.
I think that he does everything with a twinkle in his eye, but that's just his style.
So we're used to that.
Yeah, and does it seem to you that the only thing the left is really afraid of is Trump coming back on Twitter?
It's really that, isn't it?
Because nobody else really matters that much.
To the left, do they really care if the characters who got banned come back?
They don't really care if the people with 100,000 followers get banned or come back.
That doesn't make any difference. Project Veritas, maybe.
Yeah. I think it's all about Trump.
All right. And what do you think is going to happen with the Truth Network?
Nobody's ever solved the problem.
That conservatives will come to a platform used by the left, but the left won't go to a platform used by the right.
How do you solve that?
That doesn't seem solvable, does it?
Yeah. So it feels like trying to solve the unsolvable.
Somebody was getting mad at me on Twitter today.
I finally had to block them. It was somebody who was complaining that I wasn't doing enough, me personally, enough to promote their cause.
And their cause was, I'm going to use very general language, because there's some topics I don't even like to talk about.
But let's just say that there's an issue that on Twitter, there is content involving underage people that you wouldn't want to Anywhere.
And so somebody who was active in that area trying to get it off there was saying, hey, can you help us get Elon Musk on board with getting rid of this material?
And to which I thought, okay, I'm not going to get involved in this at all.
Because number one, I don't believe that Twitter doesn't take down that material when you report it.
Do you? Do you believe that if you report Inappropriate underage material on Twitter.
You think they're not going to take it down?
Now, somebody said there have to be enough complaints.
I'm not sure that's true.
I mean, I think that maybe it puts a higher in the rank or something.
But the fact is, as long as people are willing to get caught and taken down, They're always going to do it.
So what exactly would be the solution?
So I was arguing that I'm not going to get involved in something that can't be solved.
And what can't be solved is somebody with a fake account posting something inappropriate that takes a little while to come down.
There's nothing you can do about that.
And the person arguing with me said, no, you can write an algorithm.
To which I said, there's no algorithm that knows what you're going to do before you do it.
And I don't know if there's an algorithm that can understand a video.
Because the people who would have that content would learn in, well, they already know not to use the standard words, right?
So they wouldn't post anything that used keywords that would attract attention.
So, you know, I found myself in this awkward situation where it would look like I'm in favor of something that, of course, nobody is in favor of, except the people doing it, I guess.
Just because I wasn't willing to help on something that seemed logically impossible.
It seems logically impossible.
Now, I get that you might be able to shave off some minutes between the time it's posted and the time that it gets taken down, but I'm not really going to spend a lot of time trying to save a few minutes on that.
That doesn't feel like where the value is.
Um... Yes, name that movie.
All right, that's all I got for now.
And I think... Oh, here we go.
What is it? You could review content before it's posted to public.
What, for everybody? See, you'd have to do it for everybody.
