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April 18, 2022 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:07
Episode 1717 Scott Adams: The News Is So Slow Today That I'm Trending On Twitter

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best experience of your life until tomorrow.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and if you got here by sheer luck, wow, that is a good omen for you.
But if you got here by skill, because you know I'm here every day at the same time, well then, that's something you can feel good about, isn't it?
Again, you have succeeded, and your day has barely begun.
So, it's pretty much all coasting from here on in.
Would you like to take it to another level?
Maybe even higher?
I know, it doesn't seem possible, does it?
But we can do it.
Watch this. All you need is a cupper mug or a glass of tank or chalice, 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.
Can you feel it?
You can feel it a little bit, can't you?
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's already starting to charge up.
It's a little bit of oxytocin on top.
It's the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now all over the world to make you all feel amazing.
Go. You know, I keep waiting for this to not work once.
It works every time.
I don't know. It's strange.
Talk about strange things.
We'll see what's trending today on Twitter.
Trending on Twitter?
Okay, it's me.
It's me. I'm trending on Twitter.
Have I ever mentioned how weird my life is?
So I did a Twitter thread about how weird my life is, and it's trending on Twitter today.
And weirdly, I guess it started trending last night, and I had no idea, so I guess I was one of the biggest news stories in the country, and it was the day I decided not to look at Twitter at night.
I always look at Twitter at night, but just one night.
I was like, ah, I'm going to take the night off.
I wake up this morning and I'm getting messages about how I was trending and I'm like, what?
It always reminds me that it would be impossible for you to understand what it's like to be a public figure.
Because your actual personal experience is so divorced from whatever anybody else is consuming.
So while many people around the country apparently were consuming something about me, I was completely oblivious.
I was just do-do-do-do-do, you know, sipping my coffee, petting my dog.
So we're going to talk about that tweet to Thread because it got me in a little trouble.
Do you want to do that first? You want to do that first, or do you want to do the news first?
Quick, vote. Tweet thread first, or news first?
Ah, you know you wanted the tweet thread.
Come on! All right, so here's what made me trend.
I tweeted, just before I logged off yesterday, a number of weird things that have happened to me.
And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to see people's lists of weird things that have happened?
So I started with mine.
And I didn't realize it would cause so much trouble.
I thought it would just be mildly interesting.
I did not know that it would trend nationally on Twitter.
But here's the thread, and it's just a number of things that are weird that have happened to me.
So it starts with the number of times a real gun has been pointed at my head.
Five. Now, it turns out that a lot of people thought that was a lie.
Has anybody else ever had a gun pointed at them?
Now, I'm going to confess to some hyperbole, okay?
There's a whole bunch of people in the local...
Look at you. Look at how many people have had a gun pointed at them.
Oh, my God. A lot of people have had a gun pointed at them.
Holy cow!
What kind of audience have I attracted?
I'm a little bit worried.
Should we just form a militia?
If I could just take you aside for a moment.
I didn't realize how many of you have been in active gunfights, one way or another.
And I feel as if, given that we've accidentally assembled this particular audience, and many of you have been in gunfights, I think we should form our own militia.
Is everybody in?
There won't be really any drilling.
I'm not really...
I'm just not much of a drill sergeant.
So I'll be the head of your militia if you'd like to join.
And the requirements are nothing.
Nothing. You just have to say you're part of my militia.
But if I ever call you to action, should we ever need to defend the country against foreign invaders or whatever, I will call you into action, and our militia will assemble, and God help whoever is against us.
All right, well, a number of times a real gun was pointed at my head was five, and all of these have sort of a story behind them.
I was a bank teller in San Francisco in 1979-80.
If you were a bank teller in San Francisco during those years, There's a pretty good chance you got robbed at gunpoint.
In fact, it was so common that there's a good chance that if you banked at all, like in person in San Francisco during those years, you were probably in a bank during a bank robbery but didn't know it.
Because the bank robberies happened silently.
You know, a bank robber will maybe put a note that says, give me all your money.
I have a gun. That happened to me once.
In that case, it was a gun in a pocket.
Was it a gun? I don't know.
I mean, if somebody says...
Give me all your money and they have a gun in their pocket and it looks like they're pointing it at you.
I didn't really ask to see it.
So there is some hyperbole in my five guns in the sense that two of them were guns sort of simulated behind clothing, but the people simulating them were real robbers.
So the part that was not simulated, I was really being robbed.
So were there guns?
I don't know. But it felt like it.
So the experience was similar to as if there were.
So two times it happened in the course of my job.
It is unusual to be robbed twice, but even within my bank there were people who had been robbed twice in their job as a teller.
So it wasn't that uncommon.
It happened within my own bank.
A few times. But the reason you don't hear about it is it's a silent alarm.
So all you know is that somebody went up to a teller window and they left.
Sometimes with a bag of something.
You wouldn't even know the bank had been robbed.
So, and those two, two of them was just mugged on the streets...
San Francisco was kind of dangerous then.
If you don't have much money, you end up in bad neighborhoods.
I lived in the Haight, which was kind of a rough neighborhood.
Probably still is. I don't know.
But at night, it wasn't a safe place.
And then one of them was a prank.
I've told you about this, at least on locals, I think.
I was walking down the street in the Mission District, and I heard somebody say, And there was an open window, you know, right close to the sidewalk.
It was one of those situations where the window and the sidewalk of a residential home were really close.
And somebody pointed out the window with a very real gun.
Now, I say it was real because I got to see it really close.
I mean, way closer than you want to see a gun pointed at your head.
And he pulled the trigger.
I got to watch the, you know, the rotation of the chamber.
But there was not a round in the chamber.
And then he laughed.
It was pretty funny for the people in the room.
He may even tell that story about my reaction.
It was priceless. Priceless, I tell you.
Yes, it was a revolver. Sorry, I don't have all my gun terms.
You know, the interesting thing is that with both the...
Well, actually, all of the robberies, You don't really get scared in the moment.
All of the adrenaline has sort of a time delay.
So since all of the actual dangerous parts really happen quickly, there's this moment where you're sort of...
you're more surprised than anything else.
And you're like, wait, is this real?
So there's a moment of figuring out if it's real and what's really happening.
And then, once you realize that it is real and it's really happening, It's almost over.
By the time it's over, your body goes to DEFCON 50.
It stays there for a while.
But the danger has already passed by then.
But when it's in it, you actually are just sort of cool and weirdly calm.
So I've looked down two gun barrels directly...
And the other ones...
I say there's some hyperbole here, because I don't know if the other ones were real guns.
They were simulated guns behind clothing.
And I don't know if they were pointing at my head.
They might have been pointing at my torso.
So there's a little hyperbole in there.
Let's see. Here's the next one.
Number of times my car stereo has been stolen.
Four. I think it's more...
But I could remember distinctly at least four.
I think it's five. There was a time when I had the kind of cars that had the kind of stereos that were aftermarket.
They were real easy to take out.
So you just break the window and rip it out.
Again, this was San Francisco.
Actually, no. Two of these were in the East Bay, where I live now, in the parking lot of a health club.
A number of times my home or garage have been burgled.
Five. So once I came home and the door was open to my apartment and it had been burgled.
The others were garages.
So it's fairly common where I live that somebody will rummage through your garage and steal whatever they can carry out.
So the other four were the garage.
Is that hyperbole? A little bit.
You know, is it garage burglary?
Because usually it means you left the door open and you went to sleep.
But it does mean somebody was in your home, you know, in the interior.
Sometimes they were in your car.
You know, you can see that they rummaged around in your car, that sort of thing.
Number of times I've been assaulted at knife point.
Twice. Twice.
Not stabbed. You know, nobody stabbed me.
But twice I've been in a conflict where somebody had a knife and was threatening to use it.
Once was a mugging, again, on the street of San Francisco.
That was a pretty big knife.
It was sort of the, like, kitchen knife, bowie knife.
I don't know what the hell it was, but it was a big damn knife.
And then the other one was a...
Amateur sporting competition that went bad.
Sometimes in soccer games, a little violence breaks out.
But only once did somebody brandish a knife in my direction.
But that was de-escalated.
Number of times someone stole more than $50,000 from me.
I estimated five to seven times.
Now, of course, a lot of people say, well, that can't be true, or what the hell are you doing, or what kind of an idiot are you that so many people could steal so much money?
And I don't know what the experience is of other people who have substantial money and also have been involved in a number of businesses, but let me tell you this.
If you own a small business and you don't manage it yourself, Sooner or later, there's going to be a manager or somebody who's hired to be like the assistant manager or somebody associated with it who's going to figure out how to start trickling things out the door.
So in that kind of a business, nobody's going to steal $50,000 in one go.
It's going to be, you know, $4,000 a year for several years, that sort of thing.
Very common, and I can confirm that those things happened.
So one was a bookkeeper from an old business.
Does anybody know the Dill Burrito?
The Dill Burrito was...
I tried to make a frozen Dill Burrito, a burrito, that had all your vitamins and minerals.
It didn't work as a company, because we couldn't quite nail it, and I didn't believe the science after a while.
Because I don't think the nutrition science really suggests you should have that much in terms of minerals and vitamins.
I think it's a lot of guessing.
Anyway, the bookkeeper forged a check, stole $50,000.
Got caught, was prosecuted.
So I'm not saying that they all got away with it and I lost the money.
In some cases, I got it back.
I won't mention the other examples because in only some cases were people prosecuted.
In other cases, there were, let's say, extenuating circumstances where somebody got away with it for one reason or another.
Unfortunately, it's just the cost of having money and being involved in a lot of businesses.
If you said, how many times has Elon Musk lost $50,000 or more?
I'll bet it's a lot.
Some of them he may have detected.
Some of them maybe he didn't.
I don't know. Or maybe he just does a better job of watching his shop.
Homes in my neighborhood, all right, and as you might have guessed, I live in a very low-crime area.
It's a high-end, average house in my neighborhood, probably...
And $2.5 million, something like that.
In California, that's not as big as you'd imagine.
So it's a high-end-ish neighborhood.
And it's a high-end neighborhood.
I'll take out the ish.
I know how awful that sounded as soon as I said it.
But two of them have been targeted by smash and steal gangs.
You know, the South American gangs.
That break into your back door usually.
They usually come over a fence or something, get in the back, break through a window, go directly for any jewelry upstairs, and then leave before anybody can come.
So my next-door neighbor, my literal next-door neighbor, was taken down by a smash-and-steel gang, and one a little bit further away, but just walking distance, just down the street. So when you ask yourself how safe are things, there's no such thing as a safe neighborhood anymore.
Let me tell you, literally the name of it, I won't say that, but I do live in just about the safest place that also has a population.
And you can see that it's not safe here.
I mean, this is one of the places where I've been robbed.
I've lost all of my tools in my garage twice.
I hate that, because I'm a tool collector.
I like having tools that I don't even need.
It's just sort of one of those male fetishes.
You just like having a lot of tools.
Sometimes I have two of things that I really didn't need two of.
I mean, men, you understand this.
Sometimes you just need...
Lots and lots of pliers.
There's no such thing as too many pliers of different types for different things, right?
But I've had my whole collection wiped down twice, including all the electric drills and everything.
So those were two of the robberies.
A number of major auto accidents I've been in, three.
Wasn't injured in any of them, but they were major, major damage of the automobile or completely off the road in one case.
Number of incurable health issues I cured in myself.
Now, again, it kind of depends how you read it, right?
If you think I cured it like Jesus, oh, you're cured!
Well, then, that didn't happen.
But if you think that I had three conditions, let's say, that were considered incurable, but I got a good result by...
Hard work and, you know, just pressing on it.
Then it's true. And you all know the story.
Once I lost my ability to speak, but long, long story, I hunted down the one surgeon who had a still experimental surgery and got it fixed.
But it was considered incurable.
It just happened that I found the one doctor who didn't think so.
The other was a focal dystonia, Both the first one and this one are actually brain misfires in a similar region that causes a muscle to do something it's not supposed to.
They often operate in pairs.
So the other one was I lost my ability to draw with my left hand.
It would spasm when I tried to draw.
The hand was fine because it's a brain misfire.
There's nothing wrong with the muscles, right?
And I was incurable.
And the advice was quit your job because you're not going to be drawing with that hand.
You can do everything else with it.
You can play an instrument, anything you want.
It just will never be used for that.
But I joined an experimental group to see if we could figure out some way to fix it with, you know, massage or biofeedback.
We tried a bunch of stuff just to see if anybody could come up with anything.
But one of the things I tried was...
I guess you'd say it...
There's a word for it where you sort of sneak up on the behavior you're trying to get to.
So since I knew that my hand would spasm if I tried to draw, instead I would just put the pen in my hand and put the pen to paper and then lift it up immediately.
So that my brain would see me putting pen to paper without spasming.
And I'd just do it a lot.
And then, after a while, I could hold it there for a second before taking it off, before a spasm.
And then a second turned into five seconds.
And I wouldn't even try to draw.
I would just rest it on the piece of paper.
Because just being there was the trigger.
It wasn't even moving.
And then eventually it got to about ten seconds.
When it hit about thirty seconds, one day, my brain rewired.
And I actually recovered my ability to draw for over a decade.
I forget how long it was.
But for about a decade, I had cured an incurable problem.
Now, more recently, I re-injured it.
And so it's back.
But at the moment, I'm sure I could do the same thing and probably recover it again, but it takes a long time.
So instead, I thought, wouldn't it make more sense to just draw left-handed, because I have an art assistant now who can do the finished stuff?
If mine is a little bit off now, it gets fixed by my assistant.
So I just trained myself to draw left-handed, and now I'll have the backup, because I always wanted a backup anyway.
So... That's two incurable conditions that I worked my way through.
And the third one was pyresis, or shy bladder.
They're the same thing. The inability to use a public restroom for reasons that, again, are sort of mysterious.
Something like, I don't know, 2% to 5% of the public have it.
But people tend to think they're the only ones who have it.
And it turns out that learning you're not the only one who has it It's kind of a cure.
Now, not for everybody and not in every situation, but simply putting it out in public and telling everybody you know that you can't urinate in those situations, and it turns out to be the cure.
So when I found out that, first of all, it was genetic, ran in the family, And secondly, I wasn't the only one who had it.
My brother actually is active in helping other people understand it.
And he actually cured me.
He cured me simply by telling me what it was and that other people have it.
And it's completely, you know, just sort of a normal statistical thing like a lot of other things.
And that if you do graduated exposure...
Meaning you put yourself in increasingly difficult situations, meaning let's say there's somebody outside the door but nearby, which would have been impossible at one point for me.
I would have to be behind a closed door, but also know that there was nobody around.
But once you get to the point where you can do that, You can, you know, ratchet it up.
So at this point, I don't have problems traveling.
Can you imagine what traveling or just going to work were like if you didn't have access to a restroom and you didn't know when you ever would?
It was hell.
It was like the worst thing in the world.
But it was a private hell that nobody would know I was having.
It was an internal one.
As soon as I found out it was a thing and that other people have it, 30% of it was solved.
And then I started chunking away.
I would say it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% solved at this point, which is good enough to pretty much do anything I want.
So it doesn't have any limitation on my life at this point.
So in the old days, if I wanted to use a restroom, let's say I was with a group at dinner, I'd have to sneak away because if you said you were going to use the restroom, sometimes another guy would get up and say, oh yeah, I've got to use it too.
And, you know, as if we're going to stand shoulder to shoulder doing our business, because that wasn't going to work.
But once I learned that I could do this, I'd say, oh, I'm going to use the restroom, and some other guy would say, oh, I'm going to use it too, then I'd just announce to everybody at the table, oh, I can't use the restroom when you're in there too.
You know, I have a shy bladder.
So why don't you go and, you know, I'll go after you.
Just tell the whole table.
Because remember I told you it's like a superpower when you get past your embarrassment?
As soon as you live an embarrassment-free life, everything's easy.
You just announce to the table, well, let me tell you, I got this thing.
I can't quite urinate like you can.
So you got two options.
Either I go first and you wait, or you go first and then I'll go.
And problem solved.
And you know what also happened often?
Often somebody else at the table would just say, you know, I have the same problem.
And then it becomes a conversation.
And then you end up curing somebody at the table, literally.
You end up curing somebody else just because it's the first time they learned they're not the only one.
It's just the weirdest thing.
All right, so those are three medically presumed incurable conditions, at one point, at this point there's better understanding, that I work through.
Now, is there some hyperbole involved there?
I don't know. Number of full days of vacation that had no work in them whatsoever that I have taken in the past 33 years.
Now, that would be the period since I started doing the cartoon.
And I said five or so.
But I don't remember five.
I don't actually remember five of them.
I don't know if there was even one, actually.
I just put five because I didn't think it could be zero.
And the trick here is that I like to work when I first wake up.
So if I'm on vacation...
I'm almost certainly going to at least be doing my email or my something while I'm drinking my coffee and it's three hours before anybody else wakes up.
It's just sort of a perfect time to get some stuff done.
So I don't feel comfortable taking 24 hours without doing anything productive at all.
And because most of my stuff is thinking or writing or drawing, I can almost always do some of it while I'm having my coffee, enjoying waking up, just thinking about life, just totally enjoying it.
Even on my honeymoon?
Correct. Yes, even on my honeymoon.
Because do you know how many hours I'm awake in the morning before anybody who would marry me?
Right. It's the same.
I mean, I would have, like, two to three hours of alone time every morning.
So that's not as...
It sounds like I'm an overworker or something, but it really has more to do with the fact that I enjoy using the first hour to do something useful.
Number of times I was disciplined by my parents or teachers during my childhood.
Zero. It just never came up.
I mean, maybe.
I'm thinking that maybe when I was six years old or something, probably my mother yelled at me or something.
I don't know. Maybe.
But from, let's say, the age of, I don't know, probably eight years old, I'm pretty sure nothing like a punishment ever happened.
Or even a scolding that I can remember.
Now, it wasn't because my parents were hands-off.
It's because I just never had any desire to be a pain in the ass.
For example, one of the things that's hard to get a kid to do is to show up on time.
You know, to wake up on time, to just do stuff on time.
But I don't think I was ever a kid.
Because probably the first time it was ever explained to me, you know, five years old or something, you know, you should be on time.
Because that's good for everybody, and then they'll do it for you.
And if everybody just shows up on time, everything works better.
And then you have something to depend on, and, you know, everybody will think better of you.
I was probably five years old the first time I understood why people are on time.
And then after that, I never really saw a reason to be late.
What was in it for me?
It just didn't seem like a good strategy.
So there were just all these behaviors that I just never really got into.
I just didn't see the reason. And it was a small town, so there wasn't much, you know, there weren't as many ways to get in trouble.
And then in school, I don't know, just never happened.
And it wasn't that I didn't do anything wrong in terms of things that you could punish somebody for.
I either didn't get caught or something.
Talked my way out of it. I don't know.
Here's one. I just added this this morning.
Because when I saw that it was trending, I... When I saw that it was trending, I immediately added some more red meat.
So I added this one.
The number of people I have cured of their various health problems via public advice.
Thousands. I've probably helped thousands of people just on pyresis alone.
Because again, just telling them about it is 30% of the cure.
I've probably helped...
Dozens to possibly hundreds of people cure their voice problems because they found out through me, because I worked to make sure they found out, that there was a surgical solution.
So just telling people that the solution existed presumably led some number of people to get the solution.
How many people have told me on live streams, and other ways, that my books, especially how to fill almost everything that still would make, got them to quit drinking, quit smoking, or lose a lot of weight?
Or exercise? A lot!
Hundreds, thousands, hundreds have told me.
I don't know how many people have actually done those things.
But if you consider, let's say, obesity as a...
A medical problem, and I think that would be a fair statement, then I've actually cured thousands of people of a pretty serious medical problem, obesity.
At least that's what they tell me.
I mean, it's not like I'm studying it myself, but people are telling me they've lost massive weight, stopped drinking, and it's because they're creating systems based on how I taught people to create systems in my book, how to fail almost everything, and still win big. So, here's the funniest part about this, is how many people believe that some or all of these were lies.
And it really tells you something about, I don't know, either my reputation or something about people or something.
Because even the...
What was his name?
What's his frickin' name?
Who's the most insane guy that used to be on MSNBC? Keith Olbermann.
Yeah. So even Keith Olbermann took a run at me.
Every few years he comes down from his rock or wherever he lives to insult me in public.
I don't know. Keith Olbermann has just some kind of problem with me that I've never quite understood.
And basically he called bullshit on me.
Now, you just heard the detailed explanation.
Do you think my claims...
Assuming that the story I told you is true, and they all are true.
Now, do you think the claims are overstated?
See, the whole point of it was probably everybody could make a list that is unique to them.
I think. Now, do you think that mine is unusual?
Because I think there are a lot of people who have, like, escaped death twice...
They could have their own amazing stories of they had to kill somebody.
Something like that.
Exactly. So that's exactly what I was looking for.
So over on YouTube, somebody said that I'm nearly 65 years old.
Shit happens. That's the point.
At my age, the number of things that should blow your mind, just that are normal because I lived a long life, It should be a lot if you're, say, 30 years old.
It should just blow your mind how many just interesting things happened.
But I believe that would be true of almost all of you by the same age.
I think everybody would have some weird stories.
All right, let's talk about some other things.
So that's how slow a news day it was that I was trending.
Alright, in Ukraine, this will surprise you a lot, but there are more reports of atrocities.
Why? Because it's another day, and it's a war zone, and there's propaganda, and there probably are atrocities.
But we don't really believe all of them to be exactly accurate, do we?
So what do you do with this? It's like news that isn't news.
It's just permanent news now.
If you wake up tomorrow, let me predict the headline tomorrow.
I predict that if I go to CNN tomorrow, there will be news about a possible war crime atrocity happening in Ukraine.
Maybe it was the one that happened last time.
Maybe they found a new one.
But if you know it's going to be the story, I don't know what to make of it.
It's either propaganda or real, but we'll never know.
And, of course, Mariupol, who is completely surrounded and getting beaten to submission by the Russians, have not surrendered.
What is going on there?
You know? And the two movies are now firmly entrenched.
One is that the Russians are obviously winning, have been obviously winning since the beginning, and will obviously win, whatever it is they want.
And I would say the evidence clearly supports that point of view.
But at the same time, there are plenty of people, and I've been in this camp, who are looking at it and saying, you know, there's one thing that's really weird about predicting the future, and that is we're never really aware of tipping points.
And that as long as Ukraine holds on, and I did predict that they'd have enough modern technology to slow the Russian advance, as long as they hold on, there's always some chance That something in this weird give and take of each side pushing the other off balance and trying to get their support systems and their supply routes and stuff, and the Ukrainians are taking out the generals and they're working on the morale.
But all of these things on both sides are very near a tipping point, wouldn't you say?
Wouldn't you say that the Russian fighting morale...
It's probably somewhere close to a tipping point, right?
But I don't know how close.
Some people are saying no.
And I would respect that.
Because my point is that we're not good at knowing when a tipping point is coming.
So if I say to you, we might be reaching a tipping point, and the vast majority of you scream, no, we're not, in terms of the Russian fighting morale, that's nowhere near a tipping point, it doesn't refute my point, it actually supports it.
Because my point is, you can't see tipping points coming.
They happen sort of suddenly.
And then in retrospect, you go, you know, I guess we should have seen it coming.
All those examples.
So the supply chain situation looks like it's at a tipping point for both sides.
The naval superiority might be at a tipping point.
We might be bringing in enough anti-aircraft weapons.
There might be some change in the air cover.
There could be something about just availability of parts.
There could be something about the weather changing to be, let's say, rainier.
If it gets too rainy, what does that change?
What kinds of weapons are getting in and how quickly to Ukraine?
I have a feeling that there's just no way to know which of these many things are near tipping points.
And if any one of these things tips, it looks like the house of cards comes down.
Because the supply chain...
It's not like a small thing, right?
If either side's supply chain breaks, well, it's over.
If something changed with Russia's control of the air, and they don't have full control, I guess, but let's say they went to no control, well, that would change things quite a bit.
What if the number of switchblade drones and people who know how to operate them goes from dozens to a thousand?
And maybe a thousand operators With multiple drones each.
Could that happen? Could they have 30,000 switchblade drones?
And if they could, how long would it take?
And what happened if they came in some big deliveries and suddenly Ukraine just started going wild with the switchblade drones?
Those are the ones that can hover over a target.
They're small ones. They can hover over a target, make sure they know what they're aiming at, and then dive down and kill it.
Because it seems to me if you had enough switchblade drones, You could, with 100% certainty, take out the supply chains of the other side.
Couldn't you? I mean, I feel like you could be...
It just is a question...
More no's. All right, I'm going to say it's only a question of the number of them.
If you're saying there's no number of switchblade drones that could change the direction of the war, it may be impossible to get that many.
Especially if possible to train people, and maybe it's impossible to get close enough to the stuff you want to kill, but I don't think so.
I think you could get within a few kilometers of almost anything in a war.
So, I don't know.
I'm not going to bet against Ukraine, but I think if you had to look at the odds, you'd say it just is whether or not Putin wants to get what he wants.
If he wants to pay for it, And it's pretty expensive.
But yeah, you'll get it.
Philadelphia is talking about masks coming back.
Ah! That's my only comment.
Border Patrol says at least 23 people coming across the southern border in 2021 were on the terror watch list.
What? Missing from the story?
Their nationalities.
Were there really that many people from Central and South America or from Mexico that were on the terror watch list?
Shouldn't we know where they came from?
Like what countries they came from?
I feel like the most important part of the story is left out.
Because if there were, and I don't think this is the case, but if there were 23 Mexican nationals who were on the terrorist watch list and they got across the border, What's happening in Mexico that we don't know about?
Like, did they turn into ISIS or something?
And if they're not Mexican, well, where the hell are they coming from?
Like, what countries? Is it Middle East?
I mean, how do you even get on that watch list?
I don't know. Here's the dumbest tweet I saw today.
Adam Kinzinger was tweeting at Tucker Carlson.
He tweeted a video that was in a tweet by some group called Canadian Ukrainian Volunteers.
So in other words, it's a pro-Ukrainian video that alleges to show mass desertion of Russian troops.
And the video shows all of their gear, boots, and And stuff just laying on the ground.
So the purported video, well, the video is real, but their interpretation of what's on the video is that you're seeing that the Russian soldiers were so ready to desert that they ripped off all their gear and their clothing and found some civilian clothes and melted into the population.
And the video shows a patch of the ground with this gear that's about the size of one room in a house.
And it never shows more than, like, this little patch of dirt.
And Adam Kinzinger took that one video of that little patch of dirt with nothing in it except Russian-looking materials, and...
Accepted the interpretation that there might be mass desertion of Russian troops.
Really? Really?
Let me suggest at least one other hypothesis.
This is not something I believe to be true.
This is just something that could be true based on the same video.
Well, actually, two things.
Number one... The Ukrainians are making lots of propaganda video.
They got a bunch of Russian stuff from soldiers that they had already killed.
They put it in a pile.
They took a little video of the little pile of stuff from the dead Russian soldiers, and then they made it look like there was a mass desertion.
Which is more likely?
That the Russian soldiers are literally throwing off their clothing and running for it, Or that it's a propaganda video, just like everyone we see every day, that looks exactly like it's a propaganda video, and you can't even hardly imagine it's not a propaganda video.
But there's a third possibility.
And this is the one I want to be very careful, because I'll be kicked off of every platform.
So I don't want to make the mistake of saying that my speculation is based on proof for that it's true.
So what I say next would be an alternative explanation for the same video that has no evidence for it whatsoever, okay?
I hope I've set the stage.
Do you remember the videos of the massacres in, was it Bukha?
Where the adult men had their hands tied behind their backs, they were wearing civilian clothes, and they sure looked like Ukrainians, and they had been obviously executed.
Bukha, yeah. Now, if, and again, this is speculation, and I'm not alleging this to be true, If you wanted to create a bunch of corpses that looked like Ukrainians, wouldn't you take a bunch of Russians who had already been dead or you were about to kill them, say, take off your Russian clothes, drop your gear right there, put on these Ukrainian clothes, and turn your back?
Pow. Now we're going to pose you in the streets and we're going to say that the Russians did this and that these are Ukrainian dead because you can't tell the difference when you look at them.
And then we'll take a picture of all their gear, and then secondarily we'll get a second propaganda hit by saying that the Russians are doing a mass desertion by showing all the gear that we told them to take off.
Now, I'm not saying that happened, and I think it's unlikely that happened, actually.
So that's no...
You know, it's just a speculation about alternative explanations.
I don't believe that that's actually literally what happened in this case.
But I also don't think you should tweet a video like this around as if there's one explanation for it.
Because there are three.
And I don't know which one is better, frankly.
Yeah, there's a non-zero possibility for all of those things, that's true.
But actually, far bigger than non-zero, I think, which would be more to the point.
That, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the conclusion of the prepared portion of our program.
I don't think you've ever had a better time, honestly, except listening to me yammer about myself.
Okay, maybe I should have saved that for the man cave episodes I do just for the local subscribers.
I know. I know.
But remember I told you that it was such a slow news day that I actually was in the news today.
So that's not my fault.
I did not do that intentionally.
I wanted the news to be about other people because that's more comfortable for me too.
But at least this one I knew how to talk about it.
I didn't have to do a lot of preparation to talk about myself.
Can we see the Mustang?
I don't like to post stuff like that.
It's bad enough talking about it.
Yeah, I don't think I want to post that.
Stephens or Stefan says, I'm your biggest fan of...
Can I get a fact check on that?
True. That's true.
There are a lot of people who say to me, I'm your biggest fan.
But it's never been true.
It's always been Stefan. Or Stephen.
Or Step Hand.
I don't know how to pronounce that.
I'm going to call you Step Hand.
Oh, there was a video that I would imagine might be another fake video.
So there's a video of Zelensky sniffing and, you know, somebody's indicating it looks like he's on cocaine or something.
Now, I have... Two comments on that.
Number one, most likely fake news propaganda.
You know, he might have had allergies, could have been anything.
Could have been crying about something.
He has lots to cry about, I guess.
So could have been anything. He's always an actor, yeah.
But let me ask you this.
If you were in his position, could you get through it without taking drugs?
Now, assume he has access to pretty much anything he wants, right?
He's still the leader of the country.
The capital is still sort of up and sort of running a little bit.
So he must have a doctor, and he must know that sleeping's a bad idea in this situation.
You know, you've got to be at your best.
Is there any chance he's not on something?
I mean... I feel that's one of those situations where even the doctor is going to bend a rule and say, you know, I wouldn't normally give you this stimulant, but we also need to win the war, so maybe temporarily we'll bend the rules a little bit here.
Yeah, so I'm not sure that I care.
I'm not sure it's a story that a war leader may or may not be taking some, let's say, performance-enhancing chemistry.
Now, some people are saying it's Koch because he was sniffling.
I'm not even sure I would care about that.
I mean, he's doing a job that nobody wants, right?
Nobody wants to be the war leader.
So, I mean, if he's got to do If he's going to do dangerous drugs just to get through it, I don't know.
I'm not even sure I would judge it.
I'm not even sure we've ever had a leader during a war that wasn't on drugs.
I'm not sure you can get through it.
I mean, you're either going to need an upper to handle it, or you're going to need something to put you to sleep.
But if you tell me that our war presidents were not taking some kind of drug, at least, you know, say in the last 50 years or so, I'd be pretty surprised.
Pretty surprised. My thoughts on mushrooms.
We've talked about mushrooms a lot, so I don't think I'll do that one again right now.
By the way, mushrooms are not going away.
If there's one thing I think you could predict with complete certainty is that the direction of mushroom use is going to skyrocket, and for medically valid reasons.
So also recreationally, But I think the recreational users will discover enough life benefits that will actually change their mind about it being a recreational drug.
You know, this is the weirdest thing.
I'll bet most of the people who experience mushrooms, most, let's say 60% or something.
I'll just put an opinion out there with no backing whatsoever.
I'll bet most of the people do it for fun.
And then after they do it, they're like, did I get some kind of lasting benefit from that?
I think I might have.
So I think they come for the fun and they stay for the benefit.
But you don't have to stay forever.
That's the wonderful thing about at least what we know about mushrooms.
We could be surprised in the future.
But from a strictly medical perspective, I don't know anybody who's ever been addicted.
In fact, it might work the opposite way.
I've heard of people microdosing on LSD, and I've heard of people...
They'll take a few years where they're really doing a lot of LSD, but it's kind of rare for somebody to just do it all the time, for years, like alcohol.
I feel as if what those drugs do is they make you not need them anymore.
In other words, it...
It puts your mind in a way that you're more...
I think the word was flexible.
People studying what happens when you're on psychedelics is your brain gets more flexible.
So it can get out of a loop.
So if you're in a little loop about feeling bad about yourself, oh, I feel worthless, I feel bad, it's like a little loop.
When you take the psychedelics, your brain just is willing to think about more things.
So the loop doesn't go away.
It's just you're not paying attention to it.
You're just... You're just more interested in different things.
So all your little loops atrophy.
And you take with you, or at least some people do, take with you the ability to reframe things.
Have you noticed a couple of things coming together?
When I talk about reframing...
It's something you'll hear a lot more about.
It's about simply a different way of looking at the same situation that can make it go from bad news to good news or important to unimportant, just by the way you choose to put a mental frame on it.
Well, your ability to reframe things is pretty directly affected by your experience of accidentally saying things in different frames.
Because you can't believe that the brain can just say, all right, I choose to look at it in a different way.
And then you just do.
If you've never experienced it, that doesn't seem like a thing.
Like, how do you just, oh, I'll just think of it differently, and then I'll go from unhappy to happy.
Sounds ridiculous. But you do mushrooms, or some of the other hallucinogens I've heard, and it automatically makes you look at ordinary things in completely different ways.
And then you say to yourself, you actually can look at exactly the same stuff and know how to use it.
Even if you're using mushrooms, you still know how to use your phone.
Everything is the same.
But you still see it differently.
You process it differently.
It feels differently to you.
You no longer have the same association with it you did.
You now have flexibility to think of it in a different way.
And you take that with you.
You take with you the understanding that you can simply look at things a different way and it changes your whole impression of life.
It's the great reset, exactly.
Oh, the great reset is coming.
It just happens to be mushrooms.
Now, for this conversation, let me say, to be a good citizen, and I like to throw this in all the time, I'm not a doctor and I don't recommend mushrooms.
I can tell you what my experience with them was, but I'm one person.
I can't tell you the danger of them, so this is a medical decision only.
And they are medically approved in some limited contexts already, so that's the part that is important.
So don't do drugs, kids, unless you're in a medically supervised situation.
Glad I'm not going to talk about it today.
I couldn't help it. I'm sorry.
The curiosity about this topic is just through the roof.
And that's also how you know it's going somewhere.
Nicotine for productivity.
You know, I hate the fact that that's true.
Have you ever thought of fixing your own plumbing while stoned?
I know my limits, and plumbing is beyond them.
I've told you before that I'm in a simulation in which I have continuous water-related problems.
So I live in a drought area.
My house has every kind of leak.
And today, again, another plumbing-related problem.
So it's my...
In this case, it's my hot water dispenser.
It's dispensing some debris along with the water.
So, once again, get the plumber.
It's pretty much every two weeks.
Thoughts on the degradation of American culture.
Okay.
Oh, you know, here's the thing.
Is there a degradation of American culture?
Or is it just changing?
And are we afraid of change?
Because that's natural.
Or is it really worse?
Or is it better in some ways?
And worse in some, but we don't notice the better part and we're focusing on the worse.
Let me ask you this.
Would you want to go back to the culture 40 years ago if you had to take all of it?
So here's a question for all of you.
Would you want to go back...
To the American culture of 40 years ago, but you have to take all of it.
All the discrimination.
All the ignorance.
Some people say yes.
Well, if you say yes, you're probably white and male, aren't you?
Is there anybody who isn't white and male who wants to go back to 40 years ago?
So here's my point.
I definitely understand that for some people it was better.
It just wasn't better for everybody.
There's a reason stuff changes, right?
Not everything's changing for the worse.
To me it seems that if you could trade, if you could trade what we've gained in understanding each other's worth for, I don't know, what we lost in Going to church on Sunday, which is valuable.
I'm pro going to church on Sunday if it works for you.
I feel like we gained more than we lost.
It's just that we are by nature, we focus on what's wrong, which is why we do so well as a species.
The good thing about humans is we can't stop looking at what's wrong.
We're just so focused on what we're doing wrong.
And Take a look at the world just coordinated for COVID. The entire world, the entire world just coordinated to keep each other alive.
That actually happened.
So would you want to go back to 40 years ago?
I don't know. Could we have done that?
We didn't really have the internet, so maybe it would have been harder.
Somebody says yes. Yeah, I don't know.
It seems to me that on almost every dimension, maybe 95% of things that we're better off, and then we just incorporate them into, well, that's just how things are.
It's not really improvement.
Of course, you know, so here's the problem.
Since you can't really put yourself in the mindset of 40 years ago, you know, not really.
Even if you were there, you can't really do it.
You accept that treating everybody as having equal worth is something that was just always natural and normal and of course.
But that wasn't really the case 40 years ago, was it?
Not so much.
So, I don't know.
I'm not sure I would go back.
But if what you're talking about is the...
Let's say the benefit of the traditional family, you know, more religiosity, stuff like that.
Maybe the schools were a little less propagandish and more basic.
Yeah, all those things are good.
All those things are good.
And it would be awesome if we had more of it.
But I do think that the nuclear family just doesn't work for everybody.
My best guess is that a standard parents stay married forever nuclear family is great for 30% of the country.
Great. And I wish that they could have all of that and enjoy it fully.
In fact, you could argue that's the best part of the country because they're going to be creating the functional children.
They're the ones who are going to be creating children who are more likely To do something that creates the next unicorn startup.
So I have great respect for a system that I also acknowledge just doesn't work for everybody.
You just need to give everybody a chance for the same level of happiness.
They have to work for it, but everybody needs a shot at it.
I just don't think a standard family works for just a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons.
If you're an alcoholic, for example, 10% of the population, what's better?
You're an alcoholic and you become a parent?
Is that better than you're an alcoholic and you decide, okay, I'll be in some other situation where my situation doesn't damage any children?
Well... I don't know.
It's a free world, so you can go either way.
And because we value freedom, I'm not sure I would judge you.
Because I'm sure I make decisions you don't like either.
That's how it works, right?
Why are we getting this dumb commercial on here?
Go away. Put user in time now.
All right. Can we get a micro-lesson on reframing work into play?
That's a tough one because it really depends on what kind of work you're doing.
You just can't do that with everything.
Oh. Oh.
The most fun story of the day.
Did you see a tweet by Naval Ravikant?
I want to see his exact words.
See, because I retweeted it.
And... So here's why it's interesting.
So Naval...
Here it is.
So if you don't know, Naval Ravikant is generally considered, and this would be my opinion, one of the smartest people...
Certainly in the tech world, in Silicon Valley, in the startup world.
But maybe just in the world.
He's just one of the smartest people in the world.
And he would be like what Mark Twain would be if Mark Twain had been a lot smarter.
So he tweets a lot about, you know, how to live a happy life and be successful and stuff.
It's all like gold.
But he's also famously non-political.
Right? Like, you don't...
He doesn't fall into any category, which is also why he's credible.
And so he weighed in on this Twitter Elon Musk thing, and this is what he tweeted.
And listen to every word in it.
Just listen to every word.
And really, just pay attention to the exact way he says this.
Twitter is the simplest open message broadcasting protocol.
Like all protocols, it converges toward a winner-take-all monopoly.
A monopoly that can dictate who gets heard and who gets silenced.
A monopoly that can overthrow governments.
Of course we're going to fight over it.
Now, here's what's interesting.
So you got Elon Musk on one side of this, and then there's some other people on the other side.
Sort of Max Boot, famously.
Might be against this.
But have you noticed the correlation between the people who are on Elon Musk's side and the people who are not?
All of the smartest people in the tech world are on Elon Musk's side.
All of them. The smartest people in the fucking world.
They're all on his side.
Now, if it were just Elon Musk...
Against, I guess, the Biden administration and against Twitter's board and against all the critics, he'd still have a good shot, wouldn't you say?
Based on his history, you'd say, Elon Musk versus the whole government?
I like his chances.
But now, what happens if you add in Mark Andreessen, one of the most influential, successful venture people?
What does Peter Thiel think?
I don't know. But if I had to take a guess, probably on the same side.
Now, Bezos is a special case, right, because he's a competitor.
That doesn't count. So I've got a feeling that when you see Naval say, of course we're going to fight over it, that sounds like a non-aligned statement, doesn't it?
Of course we're going to fight over it.
So it's just a statement of the condition.
But that's not exactly how I read it.
Now, I can't read his mind, and if I could, then that would be magic.
So I don't know exactly what he meant by this, but I'll tell you the way I interpret it.
That there are going to be a lot of people on Elon Musk's side.
Let's just say it that way.
And that a lot of those people are insanely capable.
And if you think that Elon Musk won't succeed because he hasn't thought of all the strategic ways to go, or that there's not enough firepower behind him, you better rethink that.
Because the most powerful people in the world whose names you haven't heard are all lighting up behind him.
Right? Now, if you're sort of, you know, live closer to this world, some of these names, when you hear them, you go, that person too?
And it's starting to get obvious that there is an alignment of like-minded people who are just the most powerful people on the planet who don't have an elected position.
And they're about to express their will.
And again, I don't want to over-interpret it at all.
That wouldn't be fair.
But the way I read it, so this is just on me, is he just joined the fight.
So if you were going to predict how this goes, just know that there's a lot of power on one side.
A lot. So that's all.
So I'll leave you with that. And I'll talk to you tomorrow.
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