Episode 1725 Scott Adams: The Best Take On Elon Musk And Twitter You'll Ever Hear. With Whiteboard
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
66% believe America more divided since 2020 election
Elon Musk buys Twitter
Jack Dorsey's "global consciousness" tweet
Whiteboard: Twitter
MSNBC Ari Melber's Twitter concern
Rep. Pramila Jayapal needs an economics lesson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
And I was checking the news to see if anything big has happened lately and...
I don't know.
Anything? Is there anything on your mind?
Are there any topics of great interest to you?
Is there anything that everybody's talking about?
Well, we might get to that, too.
But first...
Do you feel it yet? Is it starting to tingle?
That incredible feeling you get when you hear live, and even when you're watching it recorded, and you're imagining what it would have been like if you were watching this live right now, it starts as a small little good feeling, and you might feel it in your arms first, like a little tingle on your arms.
That's the beginning of an incredible day.
Because people who watch this live stream, you're not like regular people.
You're sexier. You're smarter.
You're learning machines.
My God, you're getting better every day.
Your skill stacks are growing.
Your systems are working.
I admire you.
Congratulations to you for being awesome.
Now, because you are so awesome, today will not just be...
I mean, normally, it's the best day you've ever had when you come here.
But I think we can take it up a level.
I think we can. And it's going to happen in a moment.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine to the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go. That was so good that even though I noted a little pushback from what I would call an anti-sipper, Yeah, don't grab the pitchforks.
No, let them go. Let them go.
That's not the kind of people we are.
People can be pro-sip.
They can be anti-sip.
We're a big tent kind of a thing.
So really, you should not be bigoted against the anti-sippers, even though we like sipping.
We like it. We're sort of on Team Sip.
The anti-sippers, we shouldn't hate them because they're worth less than us.
I'm not saying that.
And I'm not saying that you should feel any animus toward them at all.
The anti-sippers.
I hate the anti-sippers.
I hate them. I'm going to tweet about those idiots.
Anti-sippers. Ah!
Come on! All right.
Rasmussen has a poll.
It says that 66% of likely U.S. voters believe America is now more divided than it was before the 2020 election.
So good job, Joe Biden.
I believe there was one thing that Joe Biden promised us above all other things.
What was that? What was that one thing he said?
He said, man...
You know, there's one thing I'm going to give you.
Let me tell you. Let me tell you there's one thing you're definitely going to get.
The one thing you're absolutely going to get.
We're not going to be so divided.
Not with the Joe Biden presidents.
Nope. Only to discover that it doesn't really matter who the president is.
The country will get more divided.
Because... Why?
Why? Because it's probably not anything to do with the president.
I don't think it has anything to do with Trump.
Not really. And I don't think it has anything to do with Biden either.
I think that the media is such that all presidents will look worse and worse until we immediately elect them and then execute them without any gap in between.
Because, you know, everybody just looks like a worse and worse version of...
It looks like a photocopy of a photocopy.
Like every new president seems worse than the last in ways that we can't even imagine.
It's like, oh, my God, this one was so bad.
Well, you know, not as bad as that last one, but when do you see the next one?
So if the trend continues and each president is devalued by social media, eventually you'll get...
To a point where the only person who could be elected president is so bad that they just have to be immediately executed.
So that might make the primary season shorter, fewer people.
So there could be some good elements of that.
We're going to get to Elon Musk.
Of course we are. Of course we are.
I'm just waiting for some more people to get on here.
What do you think about governments picking winners and losers?
This whole Disney-Desantis thing was about that.
I'll just ask this one question.
I'll just leave it at this.
Just a general question.
And this has more to do with Disney having a special status that they had in Florida.
Because they'd made a deal to have this special status.
So... What do you think?
Should governments pick winners and losers?
Go. In the comments.
Should governments be in the business of choosing winners and losers?
Solid no's, I'm saying.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no.
Somebody says, I love it, but I think you're kidding.
A few people say yes.
I'm sort of surprised.
Sort of surprised. All right, second question.
Second question.
So I'll let some of your answers run through here so they're not overlapping because there's a little lag on the comments.
All right, second question. Are you aware that the current government is almost entirely designed to pick winners and losers?
It's like its main functions.
Its primary function is to pick winners and losers.
Are you aware that that is what the government does?
Most of you are. So, if you were to do away with that, what would be left?
There wouldn't be anything left.
That's all governments do.
That's literally all they do.
You know, they do it in a variety of ways.
Some of it involves taxes.
Some of it involves the legal system, which literally picks winners and losers.
And, you know, the IRS literally decides who gets benefits and what types of things they want to promote, what they want to discourage, literally.
About the military.
Well, if you don't join, if there are not enough people who join the military, the government will just decide to enlist you without your permission.
So they literally get to pick who wins and loses.
And then you go on the battlefield, and somebody who works for the government, your commanding officer, says, all right, you lot, you're going to run after that tank, literally picking winners and losers.
That's all they do! The laws, like every law makes somebody a winner and somebody a loser, with the exception of maybe some that are just so obvious that they should be a law.
But largely, some industry loses.
But maybe they should have.
Maybe they should have lost.
I'm not saying that they're picking the wrong winners or losers.
I'm just saying that if your objection to the Disney Florida thing is on principle, and the principle is the government should not be picking a specific company to win, I would say...
Well, that's all they do.
That's everything they do and everything we want them to do.
Like, that's peak performance for a government, is picking winners and losers.
They just have to do it well.
Now, the secret is, did Florida make a deal which was also good for Florida?
If they did, then everybody won.
And, of course, people say, but they have the power to change that deal.
Yeah, they do. They do have the power to change that deal.
Looks like they did. But I just want to make that minor point that that's all governments do is pick winners and losers.
All right, let's talk about Twitter.
As you know, Twitter has accepted Elon Musk's bid.
So Elon will, I don't know how long it takes the deal to close, but he'll be owning Twitter.
And so you might ask yourself, what did Jack Dorsey say about all of this?
And Jack tweeted, I think it was yesterday, after the news.
Jack Dorsey said, I love Twitter.
Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness.
Now, I'm not sure you saw that coming.
A global consciousness.
And then he followed up with that.
He said, Now, was that the take you were expecting?
It's not exactly the take you were expecting, is it?
But it's exactly my take.
So I would say that my take is exactly like this.
And if you would like to see more about what global consciousness means in this context, I would recommend you to my book, written in 2001.
Now... I'm not going to say anything else about it, but I'm going to let the people in the comments who have read it just say in the comments, if you've read it, would you think that this is the right book at the right time because of the news?
Just in the comments.
Just tell the other people if you think, oh my god, The timing of this is exactly right.
So watch as the comments go by.
On locals, it's solid yeses.
They've all read the book. And there are fewer people on YouTube as a percentage who have read it.
But they all say yes.
So I'm not going to tell you anything else because I don't want to be a spoiler.
But just know that if you're following the story and you wonder what it means if someone refers to Twitter as forming a global consciousness and what it means to extend the light of consciousness, that those are not crazy ideas.
They're not even slightly crazy.
Because Twitter is indeed that.
But it gets lost in the fact that it's a bunch of other things.
Whiteboard time!
Whiteboard. We got the whiteboard.
That needs some kind of a drum intro, doesn't it?
I'm going to have to record a drum intro for whiteboard.
All right. So when we're looking at Twitter, it's all of these different things.
It's like a cesspool of hate and fake news.
True. It's a job for some of us, such as myself.
For me, Twitter is a career.
It's how you reach people.
It's how you build an audience.
It's basically just how you connect.
So if you have a certain kind of job, it's part of your job.
It's also an addiction for other people.
You get a little dopamine hit every time you get one on the other team.
And as Jack has noted, you can think of it as a global consciousness.
Now the shortcut of that is that Twitter is like a meta-brain, or let's say that Twitter has a mind of its own that looks something like the majority opinion.
But there's always a minority opinion.
If you were to say to yourself, but Scott, how can it be like a global consciousness?
At the same time, it's like a cesspool of hate and fake news.
Well, let me ask you this.
What do you think your brain is?
Your brain is a cesspool of hate and fake news.
It just has other stuff too.
It's got some love in there, I hope, some empathy.
It's got some charity and some industry and some good intentions.
It's got a lot of stuff in there.
But your brain is a hot mess.
Do you have one clean thought every day?
No. It's like this boiling cesspool soup of awesomeness sometimes and such dark thoughts that you can't even express them to another human because you think you'll be burned as a monster.
That's what your brain is.
That's what your consciousness is.
So if your consciousness is a royal cesspool of badness, but weirdly, you put all of that awfulness together, and it can produce...
A human who does some good stuff, who contributes to the economy, takes care of a family, does all kinds of good stuff.
So Twitter's like that.
It's like this insane extreme of everything that you can barely tolerate sometimes.
Do you know what else is like that?
Do you know what else is like an extreme, like, you know, thoughts in every direction and you can barely tolerate it?
Your own mind.
Most of us can barely tolerate our own minds half the time.
Right? Because it's just a mess in there.
And by the way, this is part of what I call the basket case theory.
If you're not old enough to have learned this yet, I can save you some time.
Everybody's a basket case once you get to know them.
Until you do, and you don't know much about their inner thoughts or their actual life, you think, well, there's somebody who's got it together.
If only I could have the clarity of thought and the happiness that I'm observing in this complete stranger.
If only I could have that.
And then you live a little bit, and you start noticing this pattern, you're thinking, I've met a lot of people Why are all the people that I've met really messed up on the inside?
Because once they get to know you, they'll vomit out their inner thoughts, and you're like, whoa, that's as bad as my inner thoughts.
I thought I was the only one who had thoughts like that.
So, anyway. I wouldn't worry about the fact that there's a lot of awfulness within the Twitter global consciousness, because that's just like you, and you have some good points, too.
And if you want to know more about that on a concept level, God's Debris is the book you want to read.
It only takes about an hour and a half, and it's written...
With hypnosis technique, which I disclose in the beginning of the book.
So if that makes you uncomfortable, you should not read it.
But the technique is used to give you a, let's say, an experience when you read the book that goes beyond the story.
So it's how to make it an experience and not just a story.
All right. So here are all the angles that people are taking on Elon Musk buying Twitter.
One angle is that Elon or Tesla has too many connections to China.
So they've got a China factory and want to sell cars in China and it's the biggest market.
And would that not cause Elon Musk to be biased?
And would it not cause him to do things that are a little bit pro-China?
Because he might have a trillion dollars riding on it.
What do you think? Remember, I said follow the money.
So if you follow the money, and he might have a trillion dollars riding on making China happy, would you expect a trillion dollars would influence him?
Well, if anybody...
If anybody were not to be influenced by a trillion dollars, it might be him.
But you have to start with the baseline assumption that all humans are influenced by a trillion dollars.
Even if you ranked who could resist it the most, and even if you said, all right, of all the people in the world, he could resist it the most because he's already the richest person.
I mean, you'd imagine that would be the person who could resist it best.
But even if you were the best at it, it's a trillion dollars.
Nobody's going to be... No one is immune to a trillion dollars.
It's not imaginable.
Even if you justified it as, you know, I'll use it to feed the poor or something.
Like, you would always have a reason why that trillion dollars should actually make a difference to you.
But, that said...
What has both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk said about what should be done with Twitter?
Well, it turns out that it looks like they're on exactly the same page.
That as long as the algorithm is transparent, what can China do?
To which I think, oh yeah, what can they do?
The entire point is to make it transparent.
That's the entire point.
If Elon Musk doesn't make it transparent, well, then the whole thing's a waste of money.
And, you know, it's a step backwards, probably.
But it's everything he says he's going to do.
When was the last time he said he was going to do something, and then it turned out that he was kidding?
Like, not something on this scale, right?
He's very clear what he's going to do.
Jack Dorsey is very clear that it should be done, and I think he even mentioned that the current CEO of Twitter is also on that same page.
So one wonders who was not on that page.
Well, the hints that we have are possibly the board, And possibly other owners of Twitter who had corporate interests.
So if you read what Jack Dorsey is tweeting, it would seem that there's some kind of Wall Street corporate influence that was on Twitter that might have even been more than the influence of Jack Dorsey.
Like, that's the only way I could read it, is that if Jack Dorsey wanted things to be one way, he couldn't get it done.
So he couldn't get the very thing he kept saying in public a lot, right?
Because it's not like this is a new thing.
Jack Dorsey's been saying this for a long time.
Ever since it became an issue, he's been saying it should be, you should have a choice of algorithms, it should be transparent and stuff, and shouldn't have corporate ownership.
He said for a long time that he sort of regrets, not sort of, that he regrets the business model that Twitter became.
He says it directly. So all the people who seem to be having the biggest influence on where Elon Musk would go with this seem to think that he could get to transparency and that it's doable.
What do you think? Doable or not?
Because otherwise the China thing is completely valid.
If it's not completely transparent...
That trillion dollars is certainly going to make a difference, I would say.
Here's what... Here's what Elon Musk is good at.
He's a product guy.
Now, when you look at Twitter, isn't the thing that just screams and needs a feature?
Right? Like, why can't I have the feature of the edits or why can't I have the feature that...
Maybe it gives me more information about if I'm shadow banned or I can't have a feature that gives me everything unfiltered.
So you think of Twitter, you say, give me a bunch of features and then I'll be happy.
And who's better at that?
Elon Musk is sort of the ultimate figure out what features make sense and build it and give it to you kind of a guy.
So that all looks good.
Who should be the most worried people in the universe right now?
Crystal Ball.
I'm going to go with the marketing department at Twitter.
I feel like the marketing department at Twitter probably putting their resumes together because, famously, Elon Musk doesn't need marketing for Tesla because he just tweets.
Do you think he needs a marketing department for Twitter?
He's literally doing that while he does his other job.
I joked, and I think he liked that tweet, that I joked that he does the entire marketing department for Tesla while he's on the toilet.
I think there might have been a joke about him tweeting from the toilet or something.
And now he could add the running Twitter's marketing Two and two.
I mean, you can just do both of them before he's done with his business there.
Literally, I'm not joking, what possible good does the Twitter marketing department do to anybody?
You know, if you know that Elon Musk is just going to be doing what they do times a thousand with just a few tweets.
Can Elon make the business model profitable?
Well, it's already profitable, right?
Wait, are you suggesting that Twitter's not profitable?
I think the question is how profitable.
Right? All right.
Now, here's a question.
Have you seen a bunch of people say that their number of followers is way up and that it's people who are, let's say, conservative-leaning and their number is up?
Well, I'll tell you that my number of people who follow me on Twitter is typically, on average, and this is just really gross numbers, on average, 300 a day.
So I would get, and you could look back pretty far, and you'll see I get 300 a day.
Yesterday, when Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, I got 10 times that.
I got over 3,000.
So I went from 300 to 3,000.
But... But...
If you think that's because Twitter is burning the old algorithms and hiding the shadow banning so they can't get caught or anything like that, maybe...
Maybe. I don't know what's going on.
But I think it's equally likely that I hear a lot of people are just coming back to Twitter.
So a lot of conservatives who might have followed me in the past but had stopped following me may just be coming back to see what's going on.
Something like that. So I would say it's too early to know that this is because Twitter changed anything as opposed to Musk changing how people thought of Twitter, which might have just brought people back.
Or maybe just to see what's going on, because it's the biggest story.
But some people are, like, I think Mike Cernovich just went through the roof, his numbers.
Like, just a crazy number of people followed him in one day.
And the funny thing is that ivermectin is trending now.
Everybody's tried to say all the things that got them banned before.
And indeed, they're not getting banned.
But it's so obvious that they're saying it for humor purposes that I'm not sure that they would get banned for that anyway.
So... I don't know.
I'm not going to talk about ivermectin.
It's just funny that it's trending.
There's a clip of Ari Melber on MSNBC. Who is talking about Musk buying Twitter.
And he's concerned about it.
And he's concerned that Musk could have too much influence on something like an election.
So here's what he said. He said, quote,"...you could secretly ban one party's candidate, secretly turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election." Well, yes, Ari Melber.
That is a risk.
It's only the thing we've been talking about for five fucking years.
Like, obsessing about it.
Like the number one thing that something like 50% of the country has been just frantically flailing about.
And suddenly he's like, hey!
Hey! What if somebody used Twitter to affect an election?
What would happen then?
Oh my God! I think Tucker Carlson is already back on Twitter.
I don't know if that was because he was unbanned or he just wanted to get back on.
I swear, I think Brian Stelter only exists for our entertainment and not in the way that he's hoping.
You know, I don't have a bad feeling about him personally, but from the perspective of someone who watches not just CNN, he is a wonderfully...
I don't know...
What is it that makes him so interesting?
Is it because you can't tell if he believes what he's saying?
Is that what it is? It might be that.
That you're not entirely sure if he believes it or he knows he's supposed to be saying it, right?
Is that it? Well, some of you are making unkind comments about his physicality, but I don't think it's that, because he could look like anything if you agreed with him, and suddenly he'd be handsome to you.
I don't know. But here's what he said, talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter.
He said, if you get invited to something where there are no rules, where there is total freedom for everybody, do you actually want to go to that party?
Or are you going to decide to stay home?
To which many people said before I could cleverly chime in, and they'd taken all the good jokes, and I believe I didn't.
But... Yeah, that's the party we do want to go to.
Yeah, yeah.
You mean the good party?
Yeah, we want to go to the good party.
Definitely, definitely take me to the good party.
But it's just hilarious to have him use this explanation, especially when you talk about freedom of speech.
Yeah, I do want to go to the place where they have freedom of speech.
As a matter of fact, I do.
I wouldn't mind that at all.
Now, I wouldn't mind also having better tools for filtering out people whose opinions aren't adding value to me for whatever reason.
But it is hilarious to see people, let's say, associated with the propaganda on the left How concerned they are that their main propaganda lever just disappeared.
Can you imagine?
Because, you know, I've been saying for a while that Twitter isn't like other media properties.
It's the lever that moves the other properties.
So whoever controls Twitter, and ideally having a transparent system means that the public controls it just by having a lot of sunlight on it, ideally...
I don't know how you could get away with fake news as easily.
I mean, it seems like there'd be much better checking ballots on that stuff.
Both ways. Like, not just the left, but the right, of course.
All right. You know, I was actually thinking I should be more of an activist on this whole thing.
And I wanted to protest all the billionaire ownership of social media.
You know, you've got Facebook, billionaires, Washington Post, New York Times, billionaires, all the media.
It seems owned by billionaires, and then you've got another billionaire buying Twitter.
All these billionaires.
And I thought, I'm just going to quit all of social media.
Yeah, I'm just going to quit all social media.
Sort of as a protest against the billionaire ownership.
But then I didn't know how to tell anybody.
So I got kind of stymied there.
It's like, well, I want to protest.
I want to quit all that stuff and kind of make a statement.
Who am I going to tell?
How would I tell them?
So I was thinking I might write letters, possibly sort of a letter-writing campaign, something like that.
Now let's do my new segment called People Who Are Bad at Economics.
People who are bad at economics.
Bad at economics.
And today's candidate will be Representative Pramila Jayapal.
I believe one of the squad.
Is she one of the squad?
Or she is, right?
No or yes? I can't remember if she's in the squad or she's like squad adjacent.
Okay. She's close enough.
She's squad adjacent.
Anyway, so she tweeted this because of the news.
She said, just a reminder that from 2014 to 2018, Elon Musk paid an effective tax rate of 3.27%, whereas the average working family pays an average tax rate of 13%.
And she says it's time for a wealth tax in this country.
No, Representative Jayapal.
It's time for an economics lesson for representatives.
People who are elected to represent this country should know a little bit more about economics.
Because, do you know why tax rules are the way that they are?
It's because the government picks winners and losers.
And the government wants people who invest in things that create jobs and Make the climate better, in their view.
They want those people to get big tax breaks, to allow an Elon Musk to survive and thrive.
It's exactly what the government wants.
Do you know why the government wants people like, well, entrepreneurs in general, but do you know why the government wants entrepreneurs to pay low taxes?
It's so that they'll build trillion dollar companies.
Did I have to explain that?
Like, it's not random.
Does she think that these things are randomly handed out?
They're not random. It's because people do things for their own benefit.
If the government decided that somebody should have a tax benefit, it's because the government said, that's probably good for the government too.
It's good for everybody.
There's a reason for every tax rate, everybody who gets a break.
It's not random.
It's based on economics.
And if you found something that was clearly just bad economics, like it didn't create the right incentives, well, then, yeah, you should change that.
And we do when we discover that that's the case.
But to imagine there's something that is designed...
And working exactly like you wanted it to, creating incentives for exactly the right people.
I don't know. I feel as if we deserve better representatives.
And, you know, we always talk about how the low-income people in this country should get something like financial investment advice, you know, how to manage money, basic lessons on money management, which I think would be an amazing addition to school.
But seriously, we should not have people in Congress whose understanding of economics is so low that they don't understand that the tax system is set up for a reason.
It's not random.
All right. I saw a little thing going around the Internet.
It said there was some study, who knows how reliable studies are, but it was funny.
So it said that men who help the most with housework, so that wherever the man is most close to doing an equal amount of housework to the woman, they also have the highest likelihood of divorce.
And people were expressing some confusion and surprise that that would be the case.
So I tweeted that, of course, I know the answer to this, but I'm certainly not going to say it in public.
But I'll give you some things that people are saying about it.
Number one, there are lots of other correlations, are there not?
That where you have a situation where two people are doing nearly the same amount of housework, there are probably other things going on, are there not?
Like, one of them is not a billionaire working 14 hours a day.
Well, that's a bad example, because in that case they'd have housekeepers.
But, clearly there are a lot of other things going on.
I would like to offer absolutely no opinion whatsoever about why this is sort of obvious what's going on here.
But I'm not going to say it out loud.
You can. You all risk-takers, you?
I'm not even going to read your comments because they're so inappropriate.
The anti-wokeness that I'm seeing is disgusting.
All right. So you can fill in your own jokes on that one.
Former D&I John Ratcliffe I guess he was on Charlie Kirk's show, and he said that to expect more indictments coming from the Durham thing and the whole fake Russian collusion thing.
Now, apparently, Ratcliffe must have seen documents that the rest of us have not, because he says that when more classified documents come out, we're going to be kind of shocked.
He said it will appal the public if they're declassified.
So how much do you want to see the things that would appal us?
I'd really like to see those.
And I don't imagine there's any reason they couldn't be declassified.
So I feel like one of the strategies that bad people use in politics is to just make sure that the investigation lasts long enough that we don't care about the issue anymore.
Because imagine how hot the issue was at one point.
But every year that goes by, even I, who talked about it a lot, I start to lose interest in it over time.
It's like, yeah, Russia collusion.
How many more times are we going to mention that?
So by the time you find out exactly what the plot was and exactly who was behind it, you've already moved on to a new outrage.
So your attention doesn't get the same hit.
Here is the weirdest thing that's happening.
Now, if you study cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias and all that, you know what they mean.
But when you see an example that's really clear, it's still shocking.
Because cognitive dissonance is one of those things that you can see if you don't have it, but the person who's in it can't see it.
And you think, my God, how do you not see this?
So here's an example. I tweeted this if you want to go look for yourself, but there's a Yahoo.com article, and it's a recent one, which is interesting, which they're talking to Dr.
Birx, one of Trump's pandemic experts.
And they talked about how she felt when Trump allegedly suggested drinking bleach.
Now, here's the weird part.
You've seen lots and lots of reports about this story that's not true.
Trump never suggested drinking or injecting bleach or any kind of liquid disinfectant.
He did talk about shooting UV light into the lungs, which was being tested at that time at Cedars-Sinai.
And he was very careful to say it was UV light, both before he talked about it and then after he was done talking about it, he bookended it by saying, yeah, but UV light.
So he made sure that UV light is what he was talking about as a disinfectant injected into the body.
So here's what's weird about the Yahoo article.
They showed his actual quote, including the part about the light, Which completely debunks the hoax.
I mean, just clearly.
There's the quote. There's him talking about light as the disinfectant.
So you can see exactly what he meant.
And then the rest of the article acts as if that didn't happen.
It's so weird.
It just goes on as if they hadn't just debunked one of the biggest hoaxes in the nation.
Just acted like it didn't happen.
They just printed it and then just went on like, sorry, this lady had to endure this horrible hoax or this horrible thing that they just said didn't happen.
I don't know what to think about it.
It's just like so mind-blowing.
Now, I can explain it.
It's easily explained.
It's cognitive dissonance.
I mean, it's easy.
But to watch an example that is that clean is just weird.
Now, I think I've delivered on the best livestream you've ever seen in your life.
We are, in fact, forming a global consciousness with Twitter and with what we're doing here, which is sort of an adjunct to all that stuff.
As I've said before, I believe that there's an emerging thing called the Internet Dads, meaning people who generally have figured out how to meet their own needs and are just trying to be useful.
And I try to be one of those.
I'm very intentionally trying to be useful.
Because I'm at that stage of life.
A number of other people just like it.
Mike Cernovich, probably the best example of someone who literally just wakes up every day and is just trying to be useful on Twitter.
You know, 25 tweets a day that are pretty much all great.
And a number of other people.
One of those people, I think, is Elon Musk.
I see Elon Musk as...
He's sort of the super dad, but I see him as an internet dad.
Like, I don't even see him...
It doesn't feel exactly like, you know, a patriot.
It doesn't sound exactly like politics.
It doesn't. It's not like politics.
It's not exactly just, you know, rah-rah, America first.
It's literally just dad.
Am I wrong? Now, again, of course I'm being sexist here, so let me acknowledge that in this context, dad means men or women who have a certain sensibility at a certain place in life.
I could have called it mom in a different context.
But it just feels like that dad vibe.
It's like, okay, okay. I'm just going to buy the company.
If you kids won't stop arguing...
I'm just going to buy the company.
Doesn't that sound like Dad?
It doesn't sound like Mom, does it?
Because Mom doesn't buy the company to make you stop arguing.
That's just Dad.
Just Dad. And who makes a bunch of off-color jokes while he's doing it?
Does mom make a bunch of off-color sexual, scatological jokes when he's buying a major company that's the lever of civilization?
No. Dad does.
Oh yeah, dad does.
That's why they're called...
That's why they're called...
Dad jokes.
Exactly. So...
Now...
You could mention probably another dozen or so dads, couldn't you?
But I'm quite serious in saying that this phenomenon of internet dads who only get involved when dad has to get involved is probably a really good thing.
Like, it just creates this one extra positive force.
Because I don't think that the dads get involved unless there's sort of a log jam.
You know what I mean? Because dad's going to let you fight.
That's like the cool thing about the dad vibe.
Mom is going to try to stop you from fighting right away.
Dad might let you duke it down a little bit.
Let you fight a little bit.
But, you know, when it's time, when it's dad time, well, then you get involved.
And again... I'm not trying to be sexist, so you can switch the genders.
Any gender preference you want to put on that would be LGBTQ, fine with me.
It's just an easy way to explain it in classic sexist terms.
All right.
So it could be...
Ashley says, can hypnosis increase sex drive?
Would you like me to answer that question, anybody else?
Can hypnosis increase sex drive?
Well, let me ask you this.
Have you noticed that your sex drive seems to be a mental process?
And that if you, let's say...
Spend some time in the same room with, or you're exposed to someone who's unusually sexy, that your brain says, oh, there's something unusually sexy, and then your body just responds.
So can you imagine that hypnosis would not help?
It seems almost impossible it wouldn't.
Am I right? And the answer is yes.
Yes, definitely.
Now, I'm not talking about somebody who's got an actual medical problem.
So if you have an actual medical problem, no.
It's not going to help with that.
But if the problem is entirely about how you think about yourself, or it's entirely how you think about the topic, let's say it's because you're shy, let's say it's because you haven't found that one thought that really You know, lights up your brain.
There are a whole bunch of ways that simply re-engineering your thought process, which hypnosis is good at doing, if you wanted to, right?
So it's the willingness to participate in it that makes it work.
If short of that, no.
But if you're willing to participate, A hypnotist who knew what they were doing, and be careful about unscrupulous hypnotists, because I'm not even sure how you'd protect against that, honestly.
So it's a risky business.
But in theory, it's not only doable, but it's actually among the easiest things to do.
It's one thing that you could be quite reliably sure you could do.
Whereas quitting cigarettes, for example, you wouldn't bet that hypnosis could do it.
It works about one time out of three.
Same with losing weight.
If you use hypnosis to lose weight or quit smoking, it works about one time out of three.
So does every other method.
In other words, hypnosis doesn't add something.
What really happens is people decide to quit those things.
So somebody decides to quit smoking, and then they pick a method.
And it almost doesn't matter what method they pick, because they decide it.
They don't want to smoke.
I'm sorry. They don't want to quit.
They decide it. So about one in three people literally just decide.
And then it doesn't matter what method they use, including hypnosis.
Same with eating.
About one in three people are just going to have that ability to just stop and eat differently for the rest of their lives.
The rest can't.
So did the hypnosis help?
Well, it didn't matter what method they used.
As long as they had decided, the method became somewhat irrelevant.
It probably helped to have a method.
Because it gave them something that they thought was working and made them feel more confident that they could get through it.
So maybe it helped them psychologically in some way.
But so would it anything else.
All right. And that.
Can hypnosis cure disease such as mental illness?
Oh, here's something that could get me kicked off of YouTube.
That's a dangerous question.
That's a dangerous question, so naturally I'm going to answer it.
So could hypnosis cure mental illness?
Number one, it depends how you define mental illness, because there might be some categories of things that's sort of a gray area.
The hypnosis would help in, but maybe I would say it's mental illness, but you might say, well, that's more of a personality or a situational thing.
That doesn't count.
It definitely can't cure schizophrenia.
It definitely can't cure anything that's like a physical brain damage.
So there are lots of things you can be sure it doesn't help with.
So I would say if you took the basket of all mental illness, the odds that it would cure any one thing in there would be low.
But is there anything in the basket that it could cure?
And the answer is yes, with a caveat.
Yes, with a caveat.
That reframing itself can be enough to help some people.
Like simply thinking of something in a new way and then, you know, practicing the thinking in a new way.
The practice is important, too.
That feels like hypnosis.
And can work without hypnosis.
I mean, it's literally just something somebody can suggest to you, and then you just practice it, and it can make a big difference.
In your mood, for example.
I mention it too often, but it just fits every situation, it seems like.
The Dale Carnegie course teaches you to have less social anxiety.
And I would argue that it's a form of persuasion, brainwashing, hypnosis, that they don't brand that way, and they don't use any of those specific tools.
But their method is so persuasive that the design of the class ends up being almost like you've been hypnotized or rewired.
It's such a strong thing.
And most of the technique is just giving you compliments instead of any criticism.
They just make it safe to basically rewire your own brain.
So there's nothing that looks even slightly dangerous about it, and yet your brain is literally rewired, but in such a positive way that you end up just recommending it.
Like, you don't worry about it.
You're like, oh, that was good. You should rewire your brain, too.
The answer is, if the hypnotist knew how to reframe, and then used the hypnosis to, let's say, reinforce the reframe, to cause you to think about the reframe more than the other thing, that could be done.
But it would require a certain level of skill, a pretty high level of skill.
But in theory, yes.
In theory, for...
Some of the most, I'd say for the most treatable forms of mental illness, you know, lower on the severity scale, you almost certainly could get the same benefit that, say, therapy would give you.
And for some people, nothing is universal.
For some people, it might be almost instant, like a day or two.
But also, there are people with therapy who can fix you in a day or two.
So there isn't really any science that I can rely on for this stuff.
And the way therapy would fix you in a day or two is with a reframe that just made you say, whoa.
Let me give you an example.
Here's a reframe. Somebody thinks that they don't have any worth.
They just have low self-esteem.
Here's a reframe. They say, do you feel other people are worthless?
No. Like, why not?
Because, you know, some have all kinds of flaws and stuff.
And people will say, well, everybody's got flaws.
Like, I'm not going to judge them for, you know, their anything.
Like, you know, they're good at some things, I'm good at some things.
And then you say, well, do you think they're judging you?
Why do you think they're thinking anything different?
Then you say, how much do you actually think about people other than your immediate group that you deal with?
Do you ever think about them?
And they'll say, not really.
Do you care that much?
Not strangers. And that's just a couple of reframes to get you to understand that your feeling of low self-esteem doesn't fit any mental model.
So it doesn't immediately make you feel better.
But if you just keep telling yourself, wait a minute, other people really don't judge me, and I'm not judging other people, so what does it even mean to feel like you have low value?
It actually starts losing its meaning.
And if you just say, well, isn't everybody good at something and bad at other things?
You think, yeah, I can't even think of an exception.
Like, everybody's better at some things and worse than others.
If you were to judge people by their mistakes, you'd hate everybody, so that doesn't work.
If you judge people by what they're good at and bad at, again, you'd hate everybody, except some small number of people, I guess.
So there's no standard by which you can measure anybody's worth.
So these are just reframes.
I'm just talking. So this isn't hypnosis, but imagine that these same ideas...
Could be reinforced through a hypnotic process so that somebody is just more likely to think in the positive frames than the less positive ones.
Totally doable. But, you know, would it work for everybody?
No, because hypnosis doesn't work for everybody.
Not every hypnotist is good, etc.
All right. And that, ladies and gentlemen...
Is your amazing, amazing live stream for today.
Best that's ever happened?
Can you confirm the best thing you've ever listened to in your whole life?
