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Content:
Rolls Royce Nuclear Division
Netflix wokeness woes
Systemic racism solution
Free speech solution for Twitter
Marc Benioff and Jack Dorsey exchange
Suggestions for a new Twitter board
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Good morning everybody and welcome to not only the highlight of civilization and the best day of your life, but today I'm going to solve some of civilization's most thorny problems.
Does that sound like hyperbole?
Well, interestingly, it's not.
Now, I'm not saying that I'm making up all these solutions myself.
In one case, I'm just going to tell you about a solution maybe you didn't know about.
But in a few other cases, I'm actually going to solve the biggest problems in the world.
You don't think I can do it?
Well, doubters, stay around.
But wouldn't you like to take it up a notch for this special holiday?
It's April 20th, and on April 20th do we do the simultaneous sip?
Well, optionally, you could.
But for this day only, in celebration of the specialness of it, we will be doing the simultaneous whatever.
Today only. So when we get to that part, whatever.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, or whatever, a tank or chalice, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Or whatever. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous whatever.
And it happens now.
Go! Oh, wow.
So good. Now, are you ready?
Are you ready for me to solve or tell you the solution?
I take no credit for this whatsoever.
This is just something that's in the news.
Climate change. We're going to knock that one out first.
You ready? Solution to climate change.
The company Rolls-Royce.
Does more than make cars.
They have a nuclear division.
And their nuclear division says that by 2024, they expect that, at least in the UK, they'll have a regulatory approval for factory-built mini-nuclear power plants.
And what this means is they will have solved the economics of safe nuclear power by 2024.
Now, of course, it would take a while for the United States to do something like it.
But what they will have done is proven the model.
Once they prove the model, then other companies presumably will follow the model.
And the model is this. The problem with building a nuclear power plant is that they're all one-off.
Every design uses stuff that exists, but the total design is sort of new every time because there's always an element added and that sort of thing.
But suppose every nuclear power plant were exactly the same And they were small enough so that the components of them could be built in the factory.
And every one would be the same.
So once you've approved this kit, if you will, these parts that one factory makes so they can be put together in the field, assembled and then transported, because they'd be small enough, You can get your economics of mass production down.
You can get your approval cycle, which is sometimes the biggest problem, way down.
You can move them to places that are underserved, because they're small.
You could probably put them in areas that would be, let's say, less of an exclusionary zone, just because people are still afraid of anything nuclear.
But if it's a small one, I don't know, I'm just guessing.
This is just speculation. But wouldn't that be less scary?
If you said to somebody, here's this giant domed building that looks dangerous just from a distance, with a big stack and there's some kind of steam coming out, you see one of those things and you think, if that baby blows, that's going to take out the whole state.
It's not true. But when you look at it, it looks like it is a bomb.
That big dome, doesn't it look like it...
Sort of looks like a bomb.
I mean, it doesn't look like a building, does it?
But when you make the small ones, you can actually make them architecturally cute.
They're actually fun to look at.
They don't look like anything.
You know, they're just their own little thing.
And imagine, if you will, the psychology of the people who have to, let's say, live with these dotted around the landscape.
If they see these cute little ones...
And you say to them, hey, this is the new technology.
It's a technology that has never melted down.
Which would be true of the current versions.
The current version of nuclear has never melted down.
It's only the earlier versions that have ever had an incident.
So, if you told the story as if it's new...
Hey, people, do you remember that old, dangerous nuclear stuff we had?
There were these big power plants.
They even looked like bombs.
Most of them, or a lot of them, not most of them, a lot of them were the old technology and some of them had some problems.
Well, did you know that the new technology that they're putting in these little cute ones has never had a problem?
I mean, I guess theoretically they could, but it never happened.
It hasn't happened yet. It hasn't happened in any country.
It hasn't happened for...
Michael Schellenberger, give me help here.
Decades? I don't know.
They've been around a long time, just not in these tiny forms.
So if you could solve the economics, which it looks like if they get approval, it's kind of solved, at least on the concept level, meaning that that model could be cloned.
And then if you get the regulatory thing, which is part of the economics, and then if you get the psychology right by making them smaller and say, oh, this is the new stuff.
You're thinking of the old stuff.
Man, we wouldn't put that anywhere.
Nobody wants to touch the old stuff.
But the new stuff in the little cute buildings, oh, you definitely want those.
Everybody wants those. It's good for climate change.
By the way, it's bipartisan. Oh, it's not even an issue of Democrat versus Republican, because it actually wouldn't be.
It wouldn't be. It would actually be bipartisan.
Even Congress is bipartisan on nuclear.
So, if they can really pull this off by 2024, and, you know, maybe they're off by a year or two, it's plenty in time to...
Get us out of a catastrophic situation.
And that's not even counting the fact that these could be hooked up to scrubbers.
Once you get the cost of nuclear down, let's say you take it down by a factor of 90%.
Could you get down to the point where you'd have your dedicated scrubber that would suck the CO2 out of the air, have it just connected to one tiny nuclear plant, and then suddenly the economics of scrubbing the air turned positive?
Because the biggest cost is the energy.
So if you solve the cost of producing the clean energy, tiny nuclear plant, you can suck the hell out of the CO2. You can suck it right out of the air.
So you could have tons of suckers, like you could build a whole desert full of suckers with one nuclear power plant and just suck the entire CO2 out of the country.
I don't know if it works that way.
If you sucked all the CO2 out of your zip code, Would it attract CO2 from other zip codes?
Because it's not like air.
It's not like a vacuum. Would that even work?
Or would you have to put all of your suckers in geographically dispersed places?
It would work a little bit, of course.
I mean, because the CO2 isn't going to know to stop at the border of the zip code.
But would it work well enough?
Or would you really have to spread them out?
I don't know. Maybe we don't know that.
Alright, so the first claim I believe I've delivered on, and by the way, the design for these little nuclear plants is based on military engines.
Military nuclear engines have existed for, you know, a long time.
It's such a well-known technology.
So, have I delivered on my first claim, and again, it's not me doing something, I didn't do anything, But is my first claim not persuasive?
That climate change looks a little bit solved, doesn't it?
Not as in solved in the past, but we now have a very clear, practical way to get everything we want.
We did it. Now, there's a lot more work, but there's nothing in the way.
Nothing. There's literally nothing in the way.
Because follow the money.
If they can make these economical, how many can they sell?
All of them? All of them, right?
Rolls-Royce is going to be like one of the biggest companies in the world if this works.
And it looks like it probably would.
Because there's nothing really that would stop it from working.
That's what's different about this.
Normally you can look at the situation and say, all right, I can see how they can do a lot of this, but how are they going to get past this big obstacle?
There aren't any. There aren't any big obstacles.
This is just a big truck driving right down the highway toward a solution.
That's what it looks like, unless there's something I'm missing here.
All right, let's talk about Netflix.
Netflix is actually losing subscribers, and the stock was down 40%, and one of the What they were talking about is maybe the problem is that people are sharing their subscription and so they would have more growth except for all the sharing.
And maybe it's because the pandemic is winding down and people don't need to be just indoors all the time.
But you know what I think it is?
I think it's because a whole bunch of people signed up to Netflix during the pandemic, consumed everything on Netflix that they wanted to watch, and then Nobody could create enough good content going forward to ever keep them satisfied.
So I don't think after you eat a whole bunch of it, there's not really something to keep you going.
So I guess Netflix understands that.
But it has more to do with the fact that the whole genre of movies and scripted TV just doesn't work anymore.
It's just the same movie over and over again.
If it's a drama, Or like an action film.
If it's an action film, there's going to be a car chase.
There's going to be somebody strapped to a chair and tortured.
There's going to be three acts.
And it's going to take two and a half hours.
And you don't have that kind of time.
So I think the problem with Netflix is what I've been saying for now for a while.
That movies are dead.
Or dying. They're like dead men.
I just can't imagine movies being a legitimate form of entertainment ten years from now.
I think movies as an art form are just going to slide into oblivion.
Now, one of the biggest problems is the wokeness.
Have I ever told you this story?
For a couple of years, I worked pretty hard on trying to write a script for a really good Dilbert movie.
And I got the whole thing, you know, storyboarded out and I just needed to put it on paper.
And when I looked at it, I threw away all my two years of work, and I never want to see it again.
Because I realized that I'd written a woke movie.
Let me tell you how bad it was.
Now, this was still several years ago, so it was before wokeness reached the level it is now.
So I could already see it coming pretty clearly, maybe, what, five years ago, whatever it was.
No longer than that.
Seven years ago? I can't remember.
So the script was going to be this.
So Dilber would have a number of big problems in the world that his company would be involved in and that he would be involved in.
You don't need to know that part.
But there would be some kind of master hacker Or there would be some kind of technological presence or entity that would be guiding things through the movie so that Dilbert would be suddenly saved from things.
And it would be a mystery throughout the movie who this unknown technical genius was.
Now... You would have a hint, though, early in the movie there would be some foreshadowing, because you would know that Dilbert's father had gone to the all-you-could-eat buffet and never returned, so that Dilbert grew up without knowing his father except for maybe the first few years or something.
So you would be led to believe that his father was probably some kind of a super genius.
You'd meet his mother, too, who raised Dilbert, but she was, you know, the stay-at-home mom.
And you would presume that whatever Dilbert got that makes him such a good engineer, they probably got it from his father.
And you're going to find that his father's been guiding him the whole time as sort of the secret entity who's like a super engineer.
And that Dilbert's like the son of the super engineer.
And that would be the big reveal at the end.
Except it wasn't.
Here was the actual big reveal.
It was going to be his mom.
And that his mom had to pretend not to be technically proficient all her life because of gender stereotypes.
And that, in the end, you would see her back cave and that she was the one running the whole show all the time.
And then I threw it away.
Do you know why? You see it, right?
You see it, don't you?
You see why I had to throw the whole fucking thing away?
Because it wasn't art.
It wasn't even close to art.
All I did was take society's expectations and put them in a forum and then give it back to them.
I basically took what people wanted to see, put a bow on it, and handed it back to them.
It was so creatively empty that I hated myself for it.
Like, I actually felt dirty.
I felt I'd become the enemy, in a way.
Now, let me be clear.
If we had not already entered the wokeness era, I think it would have been a great movie.
Am I right? Can you imagine that movie in 1950?
It would have killed. It would have been amazing in 1950, right?
Because it would have been a surprise, and you wouldn't see it coming at all, and then that's why it would be good.
And it would, you know, break gender stereotypes and stuff.
But now it would just be too much.
It would just be too much piling on.
So if I... And I don't think you could get any other kind of a movie funded.
I think your movie would have to have some woke element to it or climate change element or something just to even get funded.
So movies, I think, are a dead art.
And I'm glad I bailed out.
Although I think it would have made a lot of money.
But I'm glad I bailed out.
Um... So, I'm not going to make a big deal about this because you hate it, but CNN is now saying there's a study That I don't believe that says that regular masks protect the wearer.
I thought we went through the whole pandemic thinking that the masks were for the benefit of the other people.
It was going to stop the infected from pluming.
But now we're seeing that, of course, the N95s, we always imagined, might be useful.
So nobody's going to argue about the N95s.
I think everybody says, oh, if you had a well-fitted N95, You know, that you could change out regularly.
That'd probably help you. So everybody agrees with that.
It's just these regular, like, weak surgical masks.
And CNN is saying that there was some tiny little study that said there was a big difference, and the people who wore the surgical masks were way less likely to get infected.
Would you believe a study like that?
Would you believe that just comparing people who chose to wear masks to people who chose not to Is going to get you some kind of a useful result?
Because don't you think that the person who chooses to wear a mask is also choosing a whole range of behaviours that would be compatible with that mindset?
Such as, do they shake hands?
Don't you think that people who don't wear masks are more likely to actually, like, shake hands, get up close to you, talk to another person up close who doesn't have a mask on?
I mean, basically, their entire lifestyle would be different.
So to imagine that this has been proven in some little study looks to me like, well, I'm not sure if it's intentional disinformation.
But it's bullshit. I mean, it's fake news for sure.
It's fake news in the sense that you shouldn't rely on this study to tell you anything useful.
It might be true. That part I don't know.
But I wouldn't rely on it.
And the fact that they're selling this as a fact, yuck.
I wouldn't buy that.
Alright, I'm now going to...
So, we've taken care of climate change.
To keep my promise, I will now handle systemic racism.
Systemic racism.
With a story. Recently, someone asked, someone in my social circle, asked me for some business advice.
Now, it turns out that because I was a banker for a long time, I made loans to small businesses.
I've got an MBA. I've started some small businesses of my own.
They didn't do well, but I learned a lot.
I'm sort of a good person to ask for general advice about what to do first if you're starting a business.
And so I gave my advice, and I got a nice thank you for it.
I thought to myself...
It wasn't like a specific piece of advice.
It was like a range of advice.
So it wasn't one topic.
And I thought to myself, why did this one person get my advice?
And why does anybody get anybody's advice?
Because I'm pretty sure that my success was dependent on other people's advice.
You know, I literally asked somebody who knew how to be a cartoonist, how do you get started being a cartoonist?
And I followed that advice.
And here I am. So, how did I get that advice that changed the entire course of my life?
And I got the advice from somebody I don't know.
A complete stranger. Well, I got the advice by just approaching the person by a letter and asking for advice.
And I offered nothing in return.
There was no quid pro quo.
I didn't say, I'll buy your advice.
I didn't say, I'll make you feel good if you give me some...
I offered nothing. I literally just asked for something for nothing.
And I got it.
Not only did I get the advice, but I got a follow-up advice I didn't even ask for.
And it was the follow-up advice that I followed that got me to...
To here, where I'm talking to you.
And so, whenever I get a chance and somebody asks me for advice, I give it.
Have you ever heard of a comic called Pearls Before Swine?
It's one of the biggest comics out there.
Now, if you've read the creator's story, you'll know that his origin story involves me.
So I gave him a good recommendation early on.
But he also met with me, and we're friends at this point.
And he basically just reached out and said, can you spend some time with me?
Because he lived locally. And give me some advice.
And I liked his comic so far, what I'd seen.
So I did. And he did something weird.
He followed my advice.
Which is weird, because I'm actually not used to it.
I've given a lot of people, especially artists, advice.
They almost never follow it.
Usually they say something like, oh, thank you, but, you know, I have a reason to go a different direction.
Okay. But the people who followed my advice...
Do pretty well. And I would say that the only reason I'm where I am is that I followed somebody else's advice.
Somebody knew a hell of a lot more than I did, so I just followed their advice.
So here's the problem with systemic racism.
We keep solving the wrong problem, or to say it better, one part of the problem's already solved.
Here's the problem that's already solved for systemic racism.
If you're... I'll just pick an example.
A young black man with an education, do you think you'll do okay?
Yeah, because every corporation is trying to fix their...
or improve their diversity.
I mean, it's a very stated, important goal.
I mean, you could argue about the wokeness of it and whether...
You know, I'm not going to argue whether they should do it.
I think they should.
But that's not the argument.
The argument is, do they have opportunities?
The answer is, yeah, better than white people.
That's just the truth.
It's just the truth. I'm sorry if it offends you.
If you're a black-educated young man, you have a way better chance of getting a job than the identical white man in the same situation, with the same education.
It's not even close. It's not even close.
And likewise for getting a college scholarship or even being accepted in a good college.
Two equally qualified young black man, young white man, same grades, same SAT scores.
It's not even close.
The young black man wins that contest every time.
So if that's so good for the people who are starting in the hole, aren't we done?
Because I used to kind of think that.
That was my point of view.
My point of view is if all these opportunities exist and you just have to take advantage of them, exactly as I did.
I went to work for a big corporation because when I went there, I was still in demand.
They were hiring people like me.
So I went there and they trained me and I was better off for it.
So I keep telling myself, well, I started with basically nothing, and I went exactly where they can go.
I worked in school exactly like anybody else can.
Why can't everybody else just do what I did?
And one of the reasons is that some people get advice.
Some people have mentors.
Now, I sought out mentors, but I don't think that's normal.
And I can tell you that people have sought me out a number of times.
Do you know who I say yes to almost every time?
Guess. What demographic groups do I say yes to almost every time?
Black? Female?
Hispanic? Every time.
And would I more likely give them advice than somebody I knew to be white and male?
I don't know. Probably not.
Probably not. I'd probably give anybody advice if they were local and they had a good reason and I could help them.
The local part's the important part.
Now, I realize I'm opening myself up here to be attacked by people who want advice, and I have to tell you, I just don't have the time to do most of it.
You know, I do it as I can.
But there is people who succeed, and if there's anybody on here who wants to confirm this, if you have succeeded, Let's say financially.
If you succeeded, aren't you really happy to give advice?
Like you give it for free.
You're happy to do it.
Look at all the yeses on the locals platform.
People are just yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
You want advice? You want to get mentored?
Absolutely. So here's my solution to systemic racism.
Black people, and anybody, any person of color, anybody who's, you know, starting in a hole for whatever reason, there are plenty of people who will give you advice, and it will change your life if you follow it.
You just got to reach out, you just got to ask, and then follow the advice.
Now, I do get that that's harder...
Culturally, across some boundaries.
It's also harder across gender boundaries.
It's easier for a woman to ask a woman.
But let me tell you, you're really missing out because men will give you all the advice you want.
They'll mansplain you to death.
They'll give you more advice than you ever wanted.
It's all free.
It's all free. So I think the mentoring and advice connection...
It's the only thing that needs to be fixed.
Because if you catch young black families, and I'm going to say the parents and especially the mother, if you catch them early with the right kind of advice, just connect them to some kind of mentoring situation, then they can get to the second part, which is the corporations really want to hire them.
And other people too, not just corporations.
So the second part of the plan for giving everybody equal opportunity is done.
The second part's done.
It's the first part that doesn't exist.
Connecting you to people who can just nudge you in the right direction.
It's the only thing that made me successful.
If you take away the advice that I got at key points along the way, I'm not here.
Now, what I had going for me is I was going to go get that advice.
If I had to steal it, I probably would have gone and gotten it.
Because I wasn't going to not succeed.
I sort of had a mindset that there wasn't any obstacle that was going to stop me.
But that's also not normal, and I don't think you can teach it.
I think it's like a genetic flaw that has some weird advantages to it.
My genetic flaw is that I can't be satisfied with what I have.
I have to push through the next thing.
So it's almost like an illness.
And a lot of successful people will tell you the same thing.
You don't become successful and then quit.
Say, oh, I got successful.
I guess I'm done.
I'm done working now.
I wish it worked like that.
But whatever it was that got you there doesn't turn off.
You're like, ah, damn it.
So, what about everybody who doesn't have that flaw that they just have to keep going?
I think you have to find a way that the mentors find that to make it easy to get that advice.
I don't think you can count on a young black person To go find some successful white adult, or any successful adult of any kind, and go ask for advice.
That's a lot to ask for a young person.
I was willing to do it, but it's rare.
Let's fix free speech.
So let's see. Systemic racism fixed.
Climate change fixed.
We're doing pretty well so far.
We're on target.
I'm going to tell you a little very interesting story that's happening right now, and then I'll tell you how to solve all of fake news and disinformation.
So watching Jack Dorsey, I'm going to say off the leash, meaning he's going full free speech, About free speech.
It's so meta, like it's making my brain hurt.
So Jack Dorsey, founder and ex-CEO of Twitter, until now I think he's said things that a CEO can say for the most part.
Things that are sort of as non-controversial as a CEO should be.
But now he's not CEO anymore.
And I've told you his other opinions, and he's very free speech.
And that's going to be important to something I'm getting to in a bit.
But he had this little exchange with Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.
So Benioff is...
He's a pretty awesome guy, actually.
I've talked about him before.
So I spent some time with Mark Benioff before giving a talk at Salesforce.
So we got to chat for a little while.
And I got sort of a feel for his vibe.
And I came away thinking that he's the real deal.
Meaning that he's somehow plugged into some extra dimension in a way that's hard to explain.
That he's just not operating like normal people.
What you feel is that he's operating at a higher level of awareness in which he has found that capitalism and being good for people seems to be compatible.
And it's sort of the Holy Grail.
How can you be a soulless capitalist at the same time you're trying to take care of people?
And somehow... Somehow, he's kind of making it work, at least within his world.
Because Salesforce has this...
I may be mischaracterizing this, but it's like a 1%, 1%, 1% rule about everybody should do something for charity.
And he's really serious about it.
And I watched him be serious about it in person.
Like I watched him chastise...
That's too strong a word, but let's say continuously correct...
One of his lieutenants for not featuring the people part of it before the business part of it.
So I know that he's serious about it, or I feel that he's serious about it, so I don't think he's cynical at all.
I think he really wants to help the world and get rich, and it's working.
But, so he tweeted this...
So he tweeted a picture, so Mark Benioff tweets a picture of himself on the cover of CEO magazine, right?
Which is interesting that you tweet a cover of himself on CEO magazine.
But I guess he's quoting himself saying, Capitalism as we have known it is dead and the obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency.
When we serve all stakeholders, business is the greatest platform for change.
So there's Benioff making a call to helping people, but also having a business be robust and part of the solution.
And then Jack tweeted in reply, you bought this magazine too?
Now, I didn't realize until I looked it up, That Benioff had recently, in 2018, I guess, purchased Time magazine.
So did you know that Benioff owned Time magazine?
I didn't know that. So there he is on the cover of CEO magazine.
So Jack says, you bought this magazine too?
Now what I love about this is you have to know about the context and sort of read between the lines to know what this is about.
And I think this is Jack, I think...
I can't read his mind, so this is always dangerous.
But the way I interpret it is that Jack's new...
Not new, but let's say his outspokenness about freedom of speech is really what this is about.
That here's Benioff...
Saying the good things he's doing and showing himself on a magazine.
But at the same time, he does own a magazine.
And when the rich people own the communication channels, then you've got something you need to look at.
But they weren't done with this exchange.
So Benioff, having a good sense of humor too, he responds on Twitter.
He goes, nope, but Jack, I can get you a subscription to Time.
And then he shows a cover of Elon Musk on the cover of Time, because Elon Musk is about to buy Twitter.
So you have to know all these stories and how everything connects to know how interesting this exchange is.
And then it gets better.
So, you know, you'd think that it would be done.
And then...
Jack tweets back, nah, I'm good, man, with a photo of, it's a meme, of a photo that looks like Obama putting a Medal of Honor around Obama himself.
And now my brain is starting to split, and I'm like, okay, I have to decipher that.
What does that mean? Obama putting a Medal of Freedom or something, whatever it is, on himself would be like people congratulating themselves.
So it's sort of, which is just wonderfully subtle.
And then some other user tweeted in, you know, got in the middle, some mushroom and mar, and tweets, this took 10 hours, because it took 10 hours for Jack to respond with his Obama, giving Obama a medal thing.
And then Jack responds to that by saying, sleep and touching grass took 10 hours.
And I think, okay, I understand the sleep part.
Touching grass?
I don't know. It was 419.
I don't know what he meant by touching grass.
But I assume he meant going outdoors and enjoying nature.
But... So...
Here's my take on solving disinformation and fake news.
And it's going to dovetail from this story.
So this is just an interesting exchange between two super interesting people on a super interesting topic, in my opinion, which is freedom of speech and, you know, who controls it.
But here's my solution to solve disinformation.
Elon Musk buys Twitter.
Let's say that if he gets rejected, there's some way for him to power Ranger up and just get enough money and super rich people to say, okay, we're done playing around.
Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter with help or without help or one way or another.
So let's say he gets it done.
Now, this is the big if, and it depends on this.
The next part is the board of directors.
Now, even as a private company, you need a board of directors.
Who could you have as a board of directors at Twitter that would make you feel that Twitter had become the first legitimate platform in terms of getting rid of bias, and therefore as a lever that controls the other platforms?
Because if things are correct on Twitter, It's hard to do your fake news somewhere else, because Twitter is going to call you out and all the journalists are there, all the politicians are on Twitter.
So you have to get Twitter right, and then you can be fake news and all the rest.
But if Twitter is calling out fake news everywhere, left and right, That you just can't get away with it.
It's like the lever that controls everything.
So the board of directors, in theory, under a Musk ownership, also in theory, would include a board of directors that anybody would look at and say, eh, okay, that's a pretty good board of directors.
So I'm going to suggest some names, but I don't mean it.
The names I'm going to suggest are just to get you thinking.
They're not necessarily the greatest ideas.
Now, yes, I thought about putting myself on the board and rejected it.
Because? Why did I reject myself?
Because I'm not credible to a big part of the country.
So you don't want a board of directors that isn't credible.
That's just recreating the problem.
And as much as I think I'd be awesome, in my own head, I'd be, oh, I'd be awesome for that job.
Like, actually, I think I could be useful.
But the public would not see it that way.
I'm a little too controversial.
So I'm not a good choice.
Here's something that might be.
And before you react, keep in mind that the only thing I'm looking for is credibility for free speech.
So these are people you don't have to like in any other context.
The only thing you have to say is true about this group of people is that, oh yeah, they do like free speech.
Like, that's the part you don't doubt.
Okay? First one, Bill Maher.
Bill Maher. Say what you will.
Say what you will about his politics, if you don't like him.
Can you say for sure that he likes...
He's ride or die on free speech.
Okay? I know, you hate it, don't you?
Wait for the full list.
Bill Maher is ride or die on free speech, I think.
Glenn Greenwald lives in a different country, so his credibility is hurt because of that.
I thought of him. Here's another one.
And again, don't get hung up on the specific names.
Get hung up on the concept of finding people that would fit this description, even if you don't like these names.
Second one, Naval Ravikant.
Why? Nobody knows his politics.
I don't know. But he's one of the most credible people in all of, you know, high-tech world.
And other people see him as credible.
And anybody on the board would see him that way too.
But there's a better reason.
You know what the better reason is?
He'd be the canary in the coal mine.
All you'd have to do is wait to see if he'd quit.
If he doesn't quit, nobody's getting away with anything.
Because he'd see it. Nobody's getting away with anything if he's still on the board.
If he quits, all bets are off.
The canary is dead.
So you need one canary.
Now, I'm not saying it's him.
I'm not saying he'd be the right one.
I'm not saying he'd do it. I imagine he wouldn't, actually.
I can't imagine him doing it, actually.
But you need somebody to be the canary.
Somebody who's rich enough and strong-willed enough and independent enough that if that person quits the board, you've got to say, all right, we have to see what's going on now.
We have to reopen the hood, right?
Now, we don't trust anybody anymore because that one, our canary died.
Who's the canary? Somebody said Joe Rogan.
I thought of him. He'd be excellent except he's not considered credible by a lot of people.
Unfortunately. Tulsi Gabbard is on my list.
Is she the perfect one?
I don't know. Because you can find reasons to disagree with her.
But has she ever been against freedom of speech?
No. Oh, there's a suggestion I like.
Chris Rock. Chris Rock.
Say what you will about Chris Rock.
Do you like his humor? Don't like his humor?
I love it. But...
Do you think Chris Rock would ever be against free speech?
Doubt it. And then you've got some, you know, add some diversity.
I think that'd be good.
Here's the one that's going to fool you.
I would add to the board Jack Dorsey.
You didn't see that one coming, did you?
He's perfect. Nobody knows more about the company.
And coming in as a board member would just scare the shit out of him.
He's already criticized the board.
He's the last person the current board would want on the board.
And do you know who I'd want on the board of a new board if, let's say, Musk owned it?
I'd want somebody that the old board definitely didn't want on there.
I mean, that would seem like a feature to me.
I don't know if they would want him or not.
Yeah, so Jack Dorsey is unambiguously...
In favor of free speech.
He's just able to say it now because he's not a CEO. He can say it in a more clear...
You can tell that he's emotionally attached to it.
It's not just talk.
The way he's reacting to it shows that he's in the fight.
He's not a bystander.
I will throw in Mark Andreessen.
If you're not familiar with his name, you should Google him.
I don't need to explain to everybody.
Mark Cuban. That's interesting.
Mark Cuban. Yeah, I could see that.
Because Mark Cuban has that same...
I mean, I would imagine he's a free speech absolutist.
I haven't asked him.
I haven't seen him talk about it.
But I would imagine. And he would be a canary, too.
I think he would be a canary, because I think he would quit the board if they did something that was unambiguously anti-free speech.
You don't think he would quit the board?
Or if he couldn't see what he was on the board of, if he didn't have visibility that made him feel comfortable that things were okay.
Yeah, I think he would quit the board.
Good name, right?
Molly Hemingway, too controversial, too political.
I mean, people would see her as political, although she would be great.
Yeah. So you have to separate who would be great in terms of qualified with who would be great and qualified but also would look like it from the outside.
Dave Chappelle. Good suggestion.
You know, Chris Rock has the same quality, which is you want a comedian in there because they like free speech and the left likes comedians.
And the right does as well.
Chappelle is a really good name.
Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin.
Dave Rubin, unambiguously free speech.
Unambiguously, you can see both sides of the left and the right.
Good name. How about...
All right. I'm going to end with the most controversial one.
I want one that just makes your head explode, okay?
You ready? You ready for this one?
AOC. Go on.
Go on, let your heads explode.
Now, is it because I agree with AOC's policies?
Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
Is it because I think she is a keen observer and knows how to get things done?
No. But, has she ever spoken out against free speech?
Do you know what is interesting about AOC? She's like a huge victim of free speech, but I'll bet she backs it.
Now, I don't know this.
Now, remember, you don't have to agree with any of the names because they're not real.
They're not real suggestions.
They're not my suggestion.
I'm just throwing out controversial ideas.
The positive way to have AOC... Would be to say, you know, if AOC is okay with this and the other people are okay with it, it must be okay.
Because you'd want at least one person on there who's just going to shake the box every now and then.
So it doesn't have to be her.
Somebody said, Geraldo.
Geraldo. I would take Geraldo.
Yes, I would trust Geraldo to be an honest broker of what makes sense on the left or the right.
Again, I don't agree with Geraldo on every one of his opinions, but that's not the issue.
I think he's an absolutist on free speech and would seem like it to a lot of people.
Alright, so that is my solution to free speech.
Fix Twitter, you fixed everything.
If Musk buys Twitter, he could put together a board that the public would respect.
That fixes everything.
Am I right? Or at least it's worth trying.
If you're going to A-B test a solution to disinformation, this is the way I'd do it.
Compare that to Obama's foundation that he's created to battle disinformation.
Would you trust Barack Obama's disinformation-battling foundation?
It's the Obama Foundation.
We're working to empower and equip emerging leaders to tackle issues like the spread of disinformation.
No, they're not.
He's literally the most political person in the world.
He's the last person who should be touching disinformation.
He's literally the provider of it, or he's the most famous symbol of the people who provide it.
Now, I'm not saying the right doesn't have any disinformation, but nobody is more associated with it than this guy.
And that's not even a criticism of Obama as a president.
It's just, talk about the wrong guy for the job, right?
You know, just as I was saying that these people for the imaginary board of Twitter would be the right people, sometimes that's really the wrong person.
All right. There's a story that Russians are making Ukrainians in Ukrainian conquered territory fight other Ukrainians.
In other words, they're forcing the Ukrainians under their control to join the military and go fight other Ukrainians.
I'm not so sure that's exactly correct.
That sounds a little propaganda-ish, but it does seem true.
That there are examples in which Russia has, in the past, used Ukrainians and their military force fighting Ukrainians, but it was in territory that they'd held a while, meaning that they probably had a better handle on who they could trust and who they couldn't.
Well, I don't know about giving a gun to somebody you conquered yesterday, Alright, yesterday we were shooting at you.
Really tried hard to kill you.
Killed a lot of people in your entity.
But I'll tell you what. We're going to give you a gun.
It's going to have real ammo.
And you're going to be on our side now.
And if you don't, we'll shoot you.
And you're like, click, click.
And you're like holding this gun.
And you're like, okay, you're the guys who murdered all the people in my troop.
And we're going to go out in that firefight where nobody knows where any bullet is coming from.
And you think I'm going to be shooting at my team?
Explain to me how that works.
Because you were shooting at me yesterday.
One of those bullets went right by my head.
I don't think I'm going to be shooting in that direction.
I mean, I might point my gun there until the shooting starts.
But as soon as the shooting starts, I'm going to be like...
Now, to me, it looks like fake news.
Fake news that's close enough to real news that places where they've controlled it long enough, maybe they can get people that they trust to be in the military.
It just feels propaganda-ish to me.
I wouldn't buy that on face value.
All right. Rasmussen has a poll asking people if women should fight on the front lines and perform all combat duties.
59% now say yes, that women should fight on the front lines.
Now, some of you will interpret this as men becoming more woke, or maybe women too, and that there's much more equality...
And this is, you know, we're not there yet.
Not to 100% people saying it would be fine, no matter what your gender.
But you can see that there's a big push toward much more wokeness and open-mindedness.
No, that's not what's happening.
I think people just hate women.
And I think there are just more people who you say to them in a poll, do you think women should go to the front lines and be torn to pieces by shrapnel?
I think just more people are willing to say, yeah, fuck them.
I don't know. I just don't know.
I just don't know that this survey is picking up exactly what you think.
I'm not saying that's my opinion.
I'm just saying we're living in such a contentious world that I don't know that equality is what's driving this number.
I think it's kind of, yeah, I don't care.
What about all the incels?
All the men who have given up women forever because they can't get a date and it's only the top 2% of men on Tinder who are getting all the action?
You don't think some of those men who have been completely abandoned by women in the sense that it's useless to even try to get one for them, you don't think that they're saying, yeah, I don't care.
You can send them all to the front line.
I don't care. It wouldn't affect my life one way or the other.
All I'm saying is you have to be careful about how you interpret these things.
There's a story about Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the Washington Post, and I don't care.
So I'm going to skip that one.
But I want you to know I heard about it.
It just isn't interesting.
Once again, I seem to be in every story.
There's a story in the Evening Standard, a British publication, about MPs that are going to vote on whether Boris Johnson should be investigated for misleading Parliament, about I don't know what.
And the story leads out with a story about me.
But what the hell?
What the hell? How do I get in this story about Boris Johnson and some damn thing?
But they were quoting some past thing that I talked about.
Student debt. 52% of likely U.S. voters support Biden's plan to cancel student debt.
So that makes it a good idea, right?
Politically, this would be good for Biden because the majority of people agree with it, right?
Is that right? Because the majority agree.
So therefore, it would be a good thing to do.
Because that's how politics works.
If the majority like it, you want to do it, right?
No, not in this case.
Do you know why? Because there are too many people who will really, really be mad about this.
You don't want to do something that's good for people if it makes even the minority of people so mad that they'll change their vote.
I don't think too many people are going to vote for this just to save money.
I don't think too many people are going to say, well, if I get Biden, I'll save some money.
But I'll bet there'll be a lot of people who vote against him if he does it.
I would be kind of mad...
Yeah. I've paid off somebody else's student loans, actually.
So I helped a, let's say, a loved one pay off student loans.
And I'd be pretty pissed if I wasted my money.
Pretty pissed. All right.
I've got to imagine that there are some Democrats who have paid their own student loans.
We're not going to like this at all.
I feel like there was something I missed.
Now, have I solved all the problems?
Let's see. What did I promise you?
I promised you...
That I would solve climate change.
Okay. Fake news I solved with a Twitter board, if Musk buys them.
Systemic racism through mentoring.
Oh, and then poverty. Well, poverty will be solved by the small nuclear making energy costs go down.
If you fix the fake news, then you can get real solutions instead of fake ones.
And if you fix systemic racism with the mentoring, That eventually fixes poverty.
So I believe I got all four.
Climate change, fake news, poverty, systemic racism, in one live stream.
And I did that on 420.
And let me tell you, I couldn't have done it without the simultaneous whatever.
So how many people think I delivered?
Did I deliver?
Have I delivered four solutions, not that I made up myself, but four solutions that actually would work?
That's right. Nailed it.
Now, that doesn't mean these will all be implemented just the way I said, but we do have the solutions.
Isn't it fun to know that even if they don't get solved, we do know how.
We do know how to solve all this stuff now.
We just have to do it.
All right. No doubt this is the highlight of all live streams ever.
The best thing that anybody's ever done anywhere.
And probably you would like to close with one more simultaneous whatever.
And those of you watching asynchronously, as in recorded, you want to go with this one.
You want to join us.
It's going to make you feel better. You ready?
Let's do the simultaneous.
Whatever. I'm being criticized for not curing wokeness.
I think wokeness is curing itself.
Wokeness seems self-curing.
Wokeness simply has to go too far.
Can you count on wokeness to go too far?
Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, you can.
And when it goes too far, and it has, then it will bounce back.
The thing that will kill wokeness is this realization.
That the wokeness is hurting the people it's meant to help.
Let me give you a general concept that is really important.
In the early days of greatest discrimination, you wanted to use the harshest tool, like a civil war to end slavery, for example.
And then the civil rights were a pretty big tool.
You could put people in jail for violating people's civil rights and sue people for stuff.
That's a pretty big tool. That was important because the problem was that size.
But as you get down to more subtle things like who has a mentor and systemic racism and stuff, at that point, when you're talking about a strategy difference, because that's really what we're down to, we're down to a strategy difference.
Can you find a mentor?
Because if you can, everything else is in place.
Just a strategy. Just get that mentor.
So once you've got it down to a strategy place, the wokeness is anti-productive.
Do you want to be a young black man and you get a good job and everybody around you thinks that it was affirmative action?
Messed up, right?
That's messed up. That works against you.
That works against you.
So at what point do you get to the point where the discrimination part, although discrimination and bigotry will always exist, right?
There's going to be a baseline to that.
But the actual problem part, economically, just economically, it's all just down to a strategy now.
A really simple one.
Connect mentors to people who need it and then take their advice.
That's it. So I would say that this is the time when wokeness will overshoot because the thing it's trying to solve is just making a mockery of things that now have solutions that are more like strategy and less like, oh, there's a gigantic injustice that somebody is perpetrating, specifically and consciously.
It's not that anymore. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the show for YouTube.
You're all wonderful. And man, I can't help but mention this.
You're sexier than I've ever seen you before.
My goodness, you look good.
You must have gotten a good night's sleep last night.
