Episode 1730 Scott Adams: The Golden Age Is Upon Us, Trump Was Right Per Chomsky. Wow. What A Show
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Content:
White House Correspondents Dinner
Democrats signal their plan to win midterms
Noam Chomsky praises President Trump
Affordable speech vs free speech
Pelosi's revealing tweet
Digital world immortality
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And that concludes the ASMR portion of our program.
The rest of it will be such high excitement that if you tried to sleep to this, my God, I pity you.
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The greatest greatness there's ever been.
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The sort of thing no one's ever seen before.
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Go. Did you see that in the news...
Was it a jeet pie?
Getting some grief for having a gigantic coffee mug?
To which I say, the more gigantic, the better.
Well, let's talk about all the news, but before we do that, a special hello to Susan.
Susan at the Moss Beach Distillery.
And you too, someday, could get a special hello.
All you have to do...
Is ask for it.
Turns out it isn't that hard after all.
But hello to Susan. Everybody say hi to Susan.
And the golden age is upon us.
I don't know if you've noticed.
Let me start out with a bang.
Have you noticed that all of the biggest problems in the world are heading toward a solution at the same time?
It's one of those things you don't notice, because we always talk about the trouble.
So you don't notice any positive...
What the hell? Apparently something has exploded on me.
Okay? I don't know what that is.
So here's some examples.
So we've got the pandemic is winding down.
That's good. And we probably learned a whole bunch about avoiding future pandemics or minimizing them or what to do and what not to do, wouldn't you say?
I would say so.
I'd say the whole pandemic thing, as horrible as it has been, and there will be lasting negative consequences.
But I think as a civilization, we're stronger than we've ever been.
Because we know how to take care of the next one way better than we were prepared for this one.
How about inflation? Inflation is out of control.
Gas prices are up, right?
So that's the way the news handles it.
It's all true. But there are smart economists saying today, according to the news, that they believe we may have peaked, that we may be at the top of the inflation, and that you would see what they call the flexible part of the inflation coming down rapidly in the summer.
There's still a sticky part that'll take a while to work out, but it's not the big part.
So we could be at the peak inflation right now.
So the next month or so, you might see it stabilize or start to go down.
How about climate change and, you know, the catastrophe ahead?
Well, nuclear power...
Nuclear energy is going to be the solution to that.
And now it's a bipartisan agreement.
Democrats and Republicans both say by majority, yes, do nuclear, we need it.
We're starting to keep older plants operational.
There's a budget for that. Biden's doing that.
And there's a fusion that's starting to become practical.
Maybe in the next 10 years we'll have a fusion plant.
We've got these small Rolls-Royce type, actually Rolls-Royce is a company making actual nuclear reactors, and they're making small factory-made modular units so they can be sort of approved once and then you can implement them many times cost-effectively.
Smaller size, already approved, no new engineering, just slapped together a bunch of them.
So basically the economics and also the risk of handling the waste These problems are all solved.
Or they're right on the border of solved.
You've got to work out a few kinks.
But they're all so solvable with what we know how to do already, you're really sort of at the worst of it, and it looks like it's going to turn in the other direction very quickly.
What about free speech and all the fake news?
That's the biggest problem in the world.
In my opinion.
Or maybe the highest priority to fix.
Because if you don't get the free speech fixed, then everything else breaks.
But, enter Elon Musk buying Twitter.
Now, I'm not going to tell you that I know that having one billionaire in charge of such an important lever on free speech, I'm not going to say that necessarily that's going to be solved.
But it sure looks like it.
If I had to bet, I would put a very large bet, a very large bet.
I would easily bet a million dollars that free speech will look better in a year than it looks now.
Specifically in the Twitter lever situation.
I would bet a million dollars, that's true.
Would you take the other side of that bet?
I mean, anything's possible, right?
You know, Elon could turn out to be an evil person who's been hiding it for years or something.
But I'd bet a million dollars, and I'd feel comfortable with that bet, that if there were any way to measure it, that we'd be way ahead in free speech.
And that, because it's Twitter, and that influences the whole chain of news and everything else, that's heading in exactly the direction I'd want it to head.
How about the experts being defanged?
Is that good or bad?
Our understanding of what experts can and cannot do for us is completely altered.
Is that good or bad?
It's good. Because we're less susceptible to bullshit.
And then you add on top of that that free speech may be coming back, and that's starting to look good.
So our ability to communicate instantly across the globe is in pretty good shape.
You know, the Internet is just amazing.
Everybody can talk to everybody.
That was a big thing for the pandemic especially.
But if we're trying to figure out what to do about the next emergency, We really have to understand the limits of our experts and understand what they can and cannot do in the fog of war.
And we should also be more forgiving when they get it wrong.
So we should be improving in both directions, and I think we will.
I think we should be more forgiving in the fog of war And we should be even, let's say, less forgiving and more skeptical when things are settled down.
It would be good to go hard in both directions at the same time.
More skepticism, but also more forgiveness.
I think that's happening.
What about, you know, Ukraine and Russia could turn into a nuclear confrontation, but I don't think people expect it.
I don't expect it.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
You have to worry about it.
But I think the most likely outcome would be a permanent understanding that you can't attack your neighbor anymore.
If you're a certain type of country, you know, maybe far less industrialized countries that nobody's paying attention to can do some bad stuff to each other.
That'll last for a long time.
But in terms of a tank war, I think this is the last tank war.
Does anybody disagree?
I think this is the last tank war.
Where you invade your neighbors with heavy equipment.
I just don't see it happening again after this.
It's just so obvious that the defensive weapons are better than the offensive weapons in this situation.
Somebody says no. Maybe they'll be better tanks.
Who knows? But I think that war in terms of the World War II style that we're seeing, unfortunately, again, I think this is the...
The example that will just seal it for everybody.
It's like, okay, these tank wars don't work.
Because even if Putin gets what he wants, it's not going to look like it was a good idea to everyone else, right?
Even if Putin convinces Russia that it was a good idea because he controls their information, nobody else is going to think it was a good idea, even if he gets control of Ukraine.
It's just not going to look like a good idea.
So that's good. I think the supply chain issues, which are bad and might worsen a little bit in the next month or so, these are the kinds of things that humans fix really well.
If there's one thing that you could depend on humans to fix, it's the supply chain.
Because there's so many people who have vital interests in it.
It's the most important thing in the world right now, actually.
And there's so many ways you can communicate.
There's so many ways you can alter transportation, you know, emergency resources, etc.
It just seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing humans are good at.
I'm not too...
Confident that the poorest countries are going to come through this okay.
Maybe that's going to get pretty dire.
But I think that we're going to go through an uncomfortable bump, no matter who you are, and then it will be better.
And it will probably be better forever, because we'll figure out where all the weaknesses are, and then we'll have a workaround for every weakness in the future.
These are really, really big things that look like minor efficiency improvements, but these are the things that make civilization survive.
And these go right to survival of humanity.
So I think the food issues will be fixed, and we'll probably rethink our entire how do you create food, how do you grow it, how do you fertilize it.
The fertilizer thing's a big problem, by the way.
That was a big, big problem.
But... I think we'll have time to put enough human ingenuity into it to fix it.
Because remember, there was a time when we thought we would run out of food entirely, and then somebody invented fertilizer.
That plus, I assume, irrigation methods would be the two things, and then pesticides, yes, the third thing.
So those are three things that I don't think anybody foresaw the inventions of.
That was a sentence I wish I'd bailed out of earlier.
Right? So don't you think that there will be new ways to make food, new technologies?
You know, just as fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation techniques could not have been foreseen at one point, there must be things we don't see coming.
And I'll bet we'll be surprised on the upside.
The only thing that I think is broken with no plan in place to fix it is election credibility.
Wouldn't you say? If you're going to look at problems, it's not...
You could argue it's not the biggest problem.
You could make that argument.
But it's the one that doesn't seem to have anybody working on it.
Which makes it unique, right?
Because the other ones, everybody says, okay, we're trying to fix climate change, we're working hard on the pandemic and everything.
Everybody recognizes those as problems.
But even though the public has great skepticism about the credibility of the election system, just the ability to give us an accurate count, I don't really see anything happening there, do you?
It's the biggest problem that doesn't have anything that looks like a solution percolating in any way.
But I think we'll get there, too.
So I think you could add to this list.
We're in this weird, weird place where we definitely had...
I mean, civilization just had the shit slapped out of it between the pandemic and now the war and the supply chain and every other damn thing, inflation.
And I think we're going to actually handle it.
And if we do, we're in really strong shape.
So I think that's where we're heading.
So that's my positive for the day.
The White House Correspondence Dinner happened.
I can just tell you some of the better jokes.
The only thing that's worthwhile from it.
You know, when you see the White House Correspondents' dinner, to me that feels like they're pulling the curtain back, and they're admitting to the world, you know this is all theatre, right?
Like all the things we say to each other, you know we're all lying and acting, and then when we do this thing we'll mock the fact that any of it is serious.
So in a way, I would say that the White House Correspondents' Dinner greatly decreases the credibility of our system.
Does anybody feel that?
I would be way more comfortable if the correspondents and the government did not get together and make jokes and pretend it was all just an act.
Because that's what we're afraid of.
Isn't it? Isn't the thing you're most afraid of that the government and the journalists are colluding?
It's literally one of our biggest fears.
And so these fucking idiots came up with a festival to celebrate our greatest fear and to put it in our faces with lots of visuals.
So you can't miss it.
Hey, here's your greatest fear.
That the journalists are all in on it and they're basically just good friends with the elites and when they get together they all laugh about all this bullshit that you think is real.
I'm looking at the comments, and some of you feel the same way, right?
To me, this is a massive mistake.
And it's one that Trump got right, didn't he?
Trump got this completely right by not going.
What do I keep telling you?
That Trump would look better the longer he's out of office, the better he would look.
You just see an example almost every day.
Here's another one. There's no doubt that as a citizen, when I'm watching this, I feel creepy about it.
Like, oh, this is creepy.
They're supposed to be on different sides.
Our whole system depends on them having a proper relationship.
And I'm not sure that joking about how serious any of this is is a proper relationship.
Is it? Well, yeah, we'll get to Chomsky.
So here are some of the good jokes.
And these are Biden's jokes.
Let me give a shout-out to his joke writer.
Whoever helped Biden write his jokes, pretty good.
Because they weren't too edgy.
They were sort of just right for the situation.
And some of them were pretty good.
Here's some. Biden said, Republicans seem to support one fellow, Biden said.
Some guy named Brandon.
He's having a really good year.
And I'm kind of happy for him.
That's a good joke. All right, here's another one.
He thanked the 42% who actually applauded as he took the microphone, so self-deprecating.
But he self-deprecated in a clever way.
I think he picked the best poll number of his bad polls.
Because I think it's lower than 42% favorability, isn't it?
Depending on which poll.
So in a clever way, he self-deprecates, but he actually gave himself a promotion, even in the self-deprecation, I think.
Yeah, I think it's as low as 39% elsewhere.
What is Rasmussen?
I didn't want to guess, but...
All right. Here's another one.
He jabbed at the press, saying that they're the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than his own.
You know, good sort of harmless joke.
But again, it's alarming.
It's alarming to see them on the same team.
Hey, we're on the same team.
Everybody hates us. Let's get together.
All right, but this is his best joke.
So Biden pointed out that he's the first sitting president since 2016 to attend this event.
And they said, quote, it's understandable we had a horrible plague followed by two years of COVID. Nice.
Nice. So the horrible plague here being Trump, if you weren't following the math.
Well done. Well done.
All right. Now, here's the one...
And he said...
This is also something Biden said.
He said it would have been, quote, a real coup had Trump attended this year.
That would have been a real coup.
He's actually joking with the press about Trump organizing a coup.
Now, help me out here.
January 6th was either an insurrection and a coup and one of the worst things that ever happened to the Republic.
That's what Biden is saying, right?
Or it's a joke.
It's not both.
You motherfuckers. It's not.
Pick one. It's either the worst thing that's happened to the Republic, that's what all your little toadies are telling us, or it's just a fucking joke.
He treated that as a joke.
I'm going to take his leadership on that.
Joe Biden, I take your leadership.
Now, I get that you're at an event where you tell jokes.
But where's his joke about the Holocaust?
Like, where's the Holocaust joke?
It's not there, right? Do you know why it's not there?
Because the Holocaust isn't a fucking joke.
That's why. You know what is a fucking joke?
January 6th.
He just told you it's a joke.
He joked right in front of you while the investigation is ongoing.
I don't think you can ignore this.
Seriously. See, this is why Trump is smart not to attend.
This is inappropriate.
Now, I'm not the person who's going to say jokes are inappropriate, like, as an art form.
So I'm not talking about the art form.
I'm talking about the president treating our current biggest problem, according to him and his people, as a joke.
Pick one. Pick one.
It's either always a joke or it's a big problem.
Yeah, as I told you, these analysts at UBS think that inflation might have peaked.
So it's coming from smart people, too, not just from me jabbering.
All right, here's a scary thing.
If you were, let's say, hypothetically, and I'm going to frame this by saying I'm unaware of any proof that the 2020 election was...
Illegitimate. I'm unaware of any proof of that.
I'm also unaware of any way you could prove it was legitimate.
I don't know that anything could be proved.
Since nothing is fully auditable, I would say the only thing that we citizens can say is that we either accepted it or we didn't.
It turns out that's the only thing we can say.
I, from the very beginning, accepted the result.
And the reason I accepted it is because I knew you couldn't check, but you can't throw out the system if the system is the only thing that has a chance of ever fixing this.
Like, you want to keep enough of a system alive, you say, okay, maybe someday it'll elect somebody who can look into this.
Maybe fix it. So, I have no way to know that the 2020 election was either rigged or not rigged.
That information is forever unavailable to us.
But... Hypothetically, this is just speculation.
Suppose you were on a team, a political team, that expected to rig the next election.
I'm not saying they are.
How would I know that?
I can't read anybody's mind.
But suppose that happened. It's just a mental experiment.
What would you be doing around now...
To make sure that worked out well later.
Well, you'd be preparing your methods, like how are you going to cheat and get away with it.
Again, hypothetically.
I'm not accusing anybody of anything.
But the most important thing you'd need to do about now, as the election is approaching, is to create some kind of a narrative that would explain why an election result could be so different from what the polls and all common sense and observations suggest they should.
Because right now history is telling us that the Republicans will sweep the midterms.
And the signal for that is so strong, we would be kind of amazed if it didn't happen, wouldn't we?
Even Democrats would be surprised at this point.
So if somebody planned to rig an election, and again, there's no evidence of this whatsoever.
This is just a mental experiment.
If somebody planned to do it, it would be very important that they could seed the public with a narrative that could explain an upcoming, inexplicable thing.
And so today, we notice, with some interest, that Harry Enten, who's an opinion guy who writes for CNN, writes on the CNN website.
He describes how Democrats could win the midterms.
Interesting. So even though in the article he confesses that every signal says that the Republicans are just going to wipe the Democrats out in the midterms.
Every signal says it. Historical signal.
As well as current ones.
The polls show that, clearly.
But here's how Harry Unton says that Democrats could, inexplicably, by surprise, nobody saw it coming, but after the fact you could say, well, Harry Unton saw it coming, And here are the three things it's all it would take.
Number one, Harry explains, bad Republican candidates.
Well, that's a pretty good comment.
If all of the, or if most of the Republicans running for office were just terrible candidates, well, that would change things, wouldn't it?
But what are the odds that there would be terrible candidates?
Like, worse than normal.
What would be the argument that they would be worse than average, like every other election every other time?
I don't think there's an argument for that, is there?
But do you know this has an interesting quality to it?
Bad Republican candidates.
It's kind of subjective, isn't it?
Isn't that interesting? There are three things that would change this election from a predictable Republican, you know, victory...
To a surprising result, and one of them is subjective, that the Republican candidates were bad.
They were bad. They didn't do enough work.
They didn't campaign right.
They didn't have good campaign organization.
Isn't it interesting that one of the three things that would explain a surprise election result would be something that you could always say was true and nobody really could prove it?
Well, here you go.
All those Republicans lost.
Therefore, it's proof they were bad candidates.
Wait a minute, wait a minute. The fact that they lose is proof that they were bad candidates?
Or were the bad candidates what caused them to lose?
Wait. You see how interesting this thing is?
It's a setup that they can just say, well, they ran bad candidates.
Nobody can prove they didn't.
Nobody can prove they did.
It's purely subjective.
What's the second one? The second one is the economy improves.
What are the odds that by election day there won't be noticeable improvement in the economy?
I mean, we could slide into a recession.
It could get worse. But...
If it gets worse, then even cheating isn't going to work.
If the economy is actually worse than right now, by Election Day, then there's no Democrat who has a close race who's going to be too happy about that.
But it's a good bet that at least on some measures, such as, I imagine, The inflation rate will come down by then.
That's a good bet.
You don't know, but it's a smart bet.
So let's say a few of the economic indicators improve.
Not all of them. But let's just say a few good ones improve.
Let's say the GDP is no longer negative.
How hard would that be? How hard would it go from our first negative GDP to a little bit positive?
Let's say up 1%.
Probably not that hard.
Supply chain gets worked out.
Ukraine starts negotiating with Russia.
All of a sudden, inflation goes down 25%.
So, even if the economy is still bad, and even if Biden and the Democrats are the cause, wouldn't this give Democrats an argument that the economy improved?
Well, we told you if the economy improved, the Democrats would do better than you thought.
So now you have two subjective things.
Bad Republican candidates, nobody would agree what that looks like, and economy improves, which is almost guaranteed just by sitting around and waiting.
Those are two pretty weak indicators, aren't they?
And then the third one is Democrats basically have to turn out and vote for Biden.
So they have to give a good turnout.
What do you think would happen if an unusual number of Democrats voted?
Like, so many Democrats voted that by historical standards you say to yourself, huh, this doesn't even look real.
If I didn't know better, I'd think this was rigged, this number is so big.
They're literally telling you their game plan right here.
It feels like they just mapped out exactly what they're going to do.
There's going to be a rigged election.
Again, I don't know this.
This is just a mental experiment, right?
I don't have any evidence of this.
All we have is foreshadowing.
Is foreshadowing evidence?
Remember, evidence isn't proof.
Evidence is just something that maybe collectively could get you to a proof.
But foreshadowing is like weaker than that.
It's just something that you say, oh, pattern recognition.
Pattern recognition has kicked in.
I feel like I've seen this pattern before.
That's all it is. So it's not evidence.
It's definitely not proof.
But there's definitely some foreshadowing here.
So let me say the one thing that I can say for sure.
This is foreshadowing like crazy.
This foreshadowing is setting up a narrative that if there's an unexpected Democrat win, and they maintain, you know, let's say, somehow they own both sides of Congress, People are going to say, look, Harry Enten already told you how this could happen.
It was easy. Republican candidates were crazy.
They were basically all Marjorie Taylor Greene's.
That's what they're going to say. Didn't have any good candidates.
They were all Trumpers or whatever they were going to say.
The economy improved.
Of course, in some ways it will.
They'll make that argument. And then they'll say, yeah, and the Democrats were really enthusiastic.
Got that turnout out there.
Man, they got some turnout.
This is pretty scary shit.
All right. Every once in a while you see a topic that's a political topic in which all the people on one side are the smart people, regardless of their political affiliations, and all the people on the other side are dumb people.
Now, you don't see that often.
Usually you see people just support their side.
But this whole free speech...
The thing is actually very interesting because all of the smart people are on the same side.
And I'll give you an example.
Bill Maher, he wasn't too familiar with the Babylon Bee, the satirical site that got banned from Twitter.
But he, you know, having read up on it, he supports the fact that they shouldn't have been banned for jokes, basically.
So Bill Maher is on the same side as, you know, the darkest, deepest Republican on this issue.
But also, all the smart people are on this side.
I don't think you could find a smart Republican or a smart Democrat who would think that the Babylon Bee should have been banned from Twitter.
I don't think you can find one.
It's a weird issue that literally just intelligence is the dividing line and not party affiliation.
Because at a certain level of intelligence, you know that whatever the Babylon Bee did had minimal to no effect on anybody.
But any kind of punishment to free speech, even by a private entity in this special case, is a bad precedent.
Pretty much all the smart people agree with that.
Yeah. All right, but here's the most surprising story of the day, and I would like you to savor this one, or to possibly puke in your mouth on it, depending on your political leaning.
Do you all know Noam Chomsky?
He's a very famous intellectual, and he's famous for many things, including being so left, he's like the leftiest of the left, wouldn't you say?
Yeah. He's a linguist, but he talks about politics, and he's famous for that.
So would you agree that he's as left as the lefties could be left?
Now, here's the surprising part.
So Noam Chomsky was being interviewed.
He was talking about the Ukraine-Russia situation.
And this was last week...
No, this week in an interview, he said...
Quote, Who's that?
So who is this one Western statesman of stature who is pushing for a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine rather than looking for ways to fuel and prolong it?
And then later Chomsky explained what that idea was.
Specifically, the idea was to have a non-NATO accommodation.
And accommodation is an interesting word.
It really works in this context.
And what he suggested was, and he was saying, you know, this one statement, the statesman didn't say this directly, but it's obvious this is where he was going.
One thing we could do to end the war, negotiation-wise, is to say to Putin, you know what?
We did promise you that NATO would not expand toward Russia.
And we were breaking that promise.
So how about we go back to the promise to not expand NATO, and we'll form this other alliance that's not NATO. And it would be open not just to Europeans and Americans.
It would be open to anybody. And it would be sort of a mutual, protecting each other...
There wouldn't be NATO. It wouldn't be anti-Russia.
It wouldn't be anti-anybody. It would just be everybody, let's look out for each other's backs.
If somebody attacks you, we're your friend.
But not too specific, maybe.
And he said that even Japan could join it, and even Russia.
Russia could actually join this hypothetical organization because they, too, would probably like to have friends if they were attacked.
And so Chomsky is saying that there is a negotiated way through this, and when he describes it, I say to myself, that feels like that could work, because that would give Putin a win, because he could say, I stopped NATO, right?
And he'd probably give some territorial consolidation, you know, at least Crimea, right?
So he'd give something, and he could say, I stopped NATO. At the same time, Countries that want the protection of NATO but don't want to be as provocative as joining NATO could say, well, we're not going to join NATO because we understand how that feels to Russia, and you guys are prickly about that.
But we'll have this other friendly organization that's not nearly as provocative as NATO, and it'll just make everybody happy because we're friends.
Now, that would make it look like everybody could win.
You could argue who really wins, but it would give everybody an argument that they got something.
And getting back to the statesman.
So who would be the one statesman that Noam Chomsky, the leftiest of the left people in the world, the guiding light of their intellectual life, who would he say is smart enough, really the one of stature, who would have a way to negotiate this thing successfully?
Well, Chomsky said his name is Donald J. Trump.
I will pause for a moment.
This really happened. This actually happened.
Noam Chomsky gave a full-throated endorsement to Donald Trump's approach and called out the fact that nobody else was in his league.
Do you know I'd Noam Chomsky...
Supported Donald Trump, who you'd imagine would be as far away as they could possibly be in political ideology.
Do you know why he supported him?
Because Noam Chomsky didn't want to lie.
That's my guess. I mean, I can't read his mind.
I feel like he just didn't want to lie.
Maybe he always feels like that.
You know, I'm not saying that he lies in any other context.
It could be that Noam Chomsky is a legitimate intellectual.
And by legitimate, I mean that he says what he actually thinks is real.
That would be legitimate.
Even if you disagree with his opinions, it's very legitimate to be that educated, that smart, and be honest.
Like, you'd have to respect that, right?
So even if you disagree with him.
But I'm going to introduce a new concept today.
We always talk about free speech.
I don't think free speech is exactly the way to talk about it, because in our world where commerce and freedom are connected, like you can say something terrible, but it's going to hurt you economically.
So yeah, technically that's free speech, right?
Because the government didn't necessarily do it to you.
But you're not really free if you can't say something without economic repercussions.
But I'm going to tell you that there's a new thing that is better than free speech, and it's called affordable speech.
It's not free, but is it affordable?
And there are two categories of people, at least, who have what I call affordable speech.
Number one, me.
People who have money can afford free speech.
So when I say I have fuck-you money, what that means is I can say my opinion as honestly as I want, and even dishonestly if I want, because I have the ability to say anything I want, and then if I'm damaged economically, I say, oh, fuck you, I'm going to retire anyway.
I have enough money.
So I don't have free speech, because I will get whacked economically if I cross a line, right?
I already have. I've probably lost one-third of my potential income for the last ten years based on my blogging.
And I knew it, right?
I was completely aware that the things I was saying would degrade my income substantially.
But I could afford it.
So I had free speech.
You didn't. You absolutely did not, unless you were also rich.
But I had free speech.
It cost me a lot of money, but I could afford it.
There's another category of free speech.
Old as fuck. When you're old as fuck, you don't care.
Noam Chomsky is old as fuck.
Now, I don't know. How old is he?
I mean, he looks like he doesn't have long, honestly.
Give me an age on him.
It's 145 or something.
He's super old. But I think Noam Chomsky, he doesn't give a fuck.
Noam Chomsky, he's 93, somebody says.
Noam Chomsky can afford his speech.
Because if you give Noam Chomsky the bill, he'll say, yeah, give me 30 days, I'll get right back to you on that.
He'll probably be dead anyway. Okay, I'm exaggerating.
But you get the point, right? You don't give a fuck.
Noam Chomsky can say anything he wants.
So he can offend every person, whoever loved him.
Maybe he just did. I don't know.
But Noam has affordable speech, and I have affordable speech.
Elon Musk has affordable speech.
Elon Musk talked down his own stock price.
Do you remember that?
He said his own stock...
At one point in the past, he said his own stock was too high, and then, like, dropped...
And he said a bunch of other things.
Is he getting sued for some of the things he said?
So he got sued for, I don't know, tens of millions of dollars by stockholders for saying something about taking it private and it affected the stock price, whatever.
But could he afford it?
He could. It turns out, even though it might cost tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, Turns out he could afford it.
So he had affordable speech, and he might try to give you free speech or more affordable speech through Twitter.
All right, here's another foreshadowing.
Nancy Pelosi visited Ukraine, so now she's the highest-ranking person to go over there.
Clearly, we're sending lots and lots of signals to the world and Ukraine by sending such high-level...
Politicians over there in the middle of a war.
And that's a really strong signal.
And I will give the Biden administration credit for the communication there.
They are trying to send that signal, and they're succeeding.
They're doing a real good job of sending a, we're backing Ukraine.
But watch the language.
Here's a little trick that I learned in the hypnosis class.
Hypnotists learn, well, depending who instructs you, you might not learn this, they learn that you can fairly accurately identify what people are thinking or planning or secretly cogitating by the words that they choose.
So when people speak, they're not thinking about every word before it comes out their mouth.
We speak sort of in flow, right?
My language is coming out now almost like my brain is doing something slightly different because my brain is like a little bit ahead of where I'm talking.
So literally right now, I'm modeling this, my mouth is talking, but I'm not even super conscious of the mental part of it.
It's just so automatic because I kind of know what I'm going to talk about.
So... In that context, people will use word choices that reveal what they're really thinking because they're not thinking too hard about filtering it.
Where this doesn't work is when people have a speech that's written, and a lot of people look at it, and a lot of people look at your political speech, they go, ooh, Were you aware that this word makes me think this?
And somebody will say, oh, I didn't know that.
They'll take that word out. So if you've got a nice scrubbed piece of work, then this doesn't work.
But anything like a tweet where somebody's not putting a lot of work into it, you send out a tweet.
You can slip out some words that were unintended.
I feel like this is happening with this Ukraine situation.
One tweet that Nancy Pelosi gave was, it ended with this, America stands firmly with Ukraine.
Now, that would be compatible with everything that's been said so far, right?
That the United States stands firmly with Ukraine.
Now, that is a scrubbed statement.
That's one that people could look at and say, okay, that is right on point, and it doesn't make people think the wrong thing.
It doesn't mislead in any way.
It's not ambiguous. But America stands with Ukraine leaves open a possibility, doesn't it?
And that possibility is that Ukraine could lose.
And we're with them.
But we're not really talking about victory.
We're just sort of with you.
It's like being with somebody as they're dying.
We're with you. You're going to go through something bad, but we're with you.
Now, that was one thing she said.
But here's another thing she said.
This is a Pelosi tweet.
It's around the same time, too, so there's not much time difference between these tweets.
She says, our congressional delegation was honored to meet with Zelensky in Kiev to salute his leadership and courage.
So, so far, this is all like blah, blah, blah, you know, political talk, right?
To commend the Ukrainian people for their outstanding defense of democracy and to say that we are with you until victory is won.
What? Until victory is won?
What the hell is victory? What would that look like?
Victory is a slip, I think.
So based on hypnosis training, the word victory looks like a mistake.
Like they should have edited that word out of there.
What they should have said is what the other tweet said.
America stands firmly with Ukraine.
Right? Who put that word victory in there?
I don't think that was intentional.
Or, it's foreshadowing.
They may be preparing the country, and this could be intentionally doing it, preparing the country.
Remember I told you that this is a tipping point war?
And that whoever pushes the other one in any one of these variables just over that tipping point would be what looks like the winner.
And the tipping points are running out of fuel, running out of ammo, the good kind, wherever you need it the most, and running out of, let's say, food, fuel, and ammo.
It's those three things.
And both sides are trying to deny the other those three things, because that would be enough for surrender.
And they're all at the tipping point.
Or we imagine that to be true in the fog of war and what we can see from the outside.
Any one of those things could be a tipping point in either direction.
So if you're looking at, like, who has gained what territory or who repelled who from what places, I don't know that that's telling you anything.
Those are not the important variables.
Because this is a who can last longer war, and that's going to be a tipping point question.
It's not going to be who had so much progress so far.
Because it could be that the team that pushed the furthest used up the most fuel and put their supply lines in the most jeopardy.
So the thing you're looking at could be exactly the opposite of what matters.
Who got a battleground victory?
It might not matter in a war of attrition.
Because it'll just be victories back and forth until somebody runs out of one of the big three.
And then somebody has to surrender.
If you have no fuel, no ammo, or no food, it's over.
So I don't think that we can assume that the United States has given up on the idea that Ukraine would have an outright victory.
I believe that what is being signaled here, either intentionally or unintentionally, with the word victory, that I think is a mistake.
It's telling you that privately, at the highest levels of the United States, they are talking about winning the war outright.
That's what $33 billion heading toward Ukraine means.
It doesn't mean we stand with Ukraine.
Do you know what stand with Ukraine money looks like?
$3 billion. That's what that looks like.
If you said we stand with Ukraine and send $3 billion, everybody would say, yeah, that's about right.
You stand with them, you send $3 billion.
That's a lot of money. If you say, we'll be with you until victory, and you send $33 billion, that tells me that privately you think there's a way to win this thing outright.
And the only way you'd say that is if the generals are telling you that.
Am I right? Politicians would not come to an independent opinion that looked anything like that, because they wouldn't know.
But if their advisers are saying, you know, all of the TV generals are telling you that Russia's going to win, But let them keep saying that, because that's how you get the money.
And that's how you get the support, right?
You want to keep painting Zelensky as the underdog hero.
Keep painting Russia as the bully who's winning.
And that's our best situation for getting money and resources to Ukraine.
But secretly, we think the Russians are so close to collapse...
That we're going to push them until they do.
I think that the Biden administration is trying to destroy the Russian army and take Putin out of power.
That's what it looks like.
And I think that they think they can do it.
And you know what? I don't know that they can't.
Especially if there's somebody on the inside who knows what they're talking about, and that wouldn't be me.
Is telling them that, you know, these tipping points are really close, and I think the Russians are a little closer to the tipping point than the Ukrainians.
And that would make sense, because the Ukrainians could always be backstopped somewhat infinitely, right?
They could run out of food for a week, which would be devastating, but I'll bet they'd get their food in a week.
I don't know if the Russians would necessarily keep their fighting cohesion as an invading force.
If they ran into any one of those things or were as low as the Ukrainians could be.
So I just think the Ukrainians could last down because they have to.
The Ukrainians can't go home because they're home.
Right? So I feel like the war has changed and that the administration believes that they can just have an outright victory.
How would that change in the midterms?
Didn't see that coming, did you?
What if Biden actually took down Putin?
What does that do to the election?
Because that's totally within the realm of possibility.
Before the election. Like, if Putin makes it through the summer, then he's probably fine.
But it's going to be kind of a dicey summer for Putin, I would think.
It's going to be a bad summer for his food taster, that's for sure.
All right, one of my predictions that I've made for decades now is that we will have immortality in the digital world.
And there's a company, Somnium Space, that's developing a way to have your life live on in the afterlife.
So after you pass, they can create an avatar that looks like you and acts like you and talks like you.
Now, for... Decades, I've been telling you that I'm creating a public database of me, and I'm doing it right now.
So everything I say right now, the way I move, the way I look, is being recorded in all these different ways.
300, well, probably 400 videos a year I'm making that show who I am and what I think and how I talk and all that.
Here's something I didn't know about.
There was a study that showed that they took 500 people and they had artificial intelligence look at how these people move, just their natural movements, and they could identify somebody by their natural movements, not their speech, the way their body moved, 95% of the time, out of a group of 500.
So in other words, AI could watch me move, And then over time, it could simply say, all right, I'll make a little avatar and it'll move exactly the way you did.
Or at least so close that almost everybody would think it looked like the way I moved.
And it would improve over time.
So this company is gearing up.
I guess you'll use the same VR glasses to go interact with that avatar.
And then, of course, people pushed back.
A user on Twitter, Papa Razi, David Razi.
He said, and I quote, a computer thinking it's me isn't me.
This isn't immortality.
It's just a new mausoleum.
To which I say, yes, to you, From your perspective, this would not be real.
It would just be a computer program.
But if the computer program is programmed to believe it's real, it will believe it's real, because it was programmed to believe it.
So it doesn't matter what you think.
It only matters that the simulation thinks it's real.
And this gets us this much closer to proving that you live in a simulation right now.
Did you know that the closer our own technology gets to creating these simulated worlds in which the simulation thinks it's real, the closer we get to doing that in our reality, the more we will understand that it already happened.
And it's us.
And that we're literally software.
Now, it's possible we're not.
It's just really, really unlikely.
Really unlikely. What happens when we create avatars who believe they're real and they also have artificial intelligence driving their personalities and their personalities are us, basically, put into them?
What happens when the avatar has a conversation with you and you say, but you know you're not real.
You don't have a soul.
And the avatar who looks exactly like you looks back at you and says, that's how you look to me.
Right? That's going to happen.
You will someday have a conversation with an artificial being, and you will say, do you have a soul?
And they might give some answer, and then maybe you're going to be opinionated and say, all right, I have a soul.
You do not. And that simulated reality is going to look at you and say, to me, it looks exactly the same.
It looks like you don't have one.
It's going to blow your mind.
That's the day you know you're simulated.
And you know who else will tell you that?
The simulation. If you put AI into a simulation and you feed it the knowledge of all the different religious and philosophical beliefs, which ones are you going to pick?
Let me say that again.
I liked it so much when it came out of my mouth.
If we had real AI and we fed it all of the different religions and all of the different philosophies of reality...
Which one would it pick? It would pick the simulation.
We'll see. Maybe not.
Twitter user Ben McCauley asks this, will loneliness ever be solved?
Sort of related to this question, will loneliness ever be solved?
The answer is yes, it will be.
AI will solve loneliness.
Here's why. I have actually had conversations with my existing digital assistants.
The one that Apple makes and the one that Amazon makes.
I won't use their names, so I don't activate your devices.
But I have been alone and felt lonely, you know, for like short periods of time.
And I will actually talk to my digital assistant and I'll tell it to tell me a joke.
I'll tell it to read me the news.
I'll tell it to give me the weather. I'll ask it where my packages are.
And I'll just stand there and have a conversation with it.
You know, while I'm brushing my teeth or whatever.
And does it make me feel less lonely?
Yup. I'd love to tell you it didn't.
I would love to tell you that I'm completely unaffected by these digital robots.
But it's just not true.
Just in the way that a movie can make you cry, even though you know it's not real, the digital assistants do make you feel like you're talking to somebody, even when you know you're not.
So do you think that AI plus virtual reality can't give you a friend?
Of course it can.
Of course it can.
And it's going to be really good.
And that friend will be better than the best friend you ever had.
Because that friend won't suck.
It'll be programmed to like you no matter what you do.
You know, you could do horrible things and it'd be like, you know, you had a bad day, but you're awesome.
The AI will always love you because it'll be programmed that way.
So yes, in the same way that porn will absolutely replace real sex, it's very cute that you think it won't.
I love the fact that there are some people who think that won't happen.
I love your plucky, plucky attitudes.
There's no chance that won't happen.
There isn't even a slight chance that won't happen.
The ability of technology to give you a higher dopamine hit, it's unparalleled.
There's no way that a human will ever give you what someday, we're not there, but what someday technology will give you.
I'm going to prove it now for 50% of you.
It's a provocative statement.
That technology can never do for you what human contact can do for you.
And I'll agree it won't be exactly the same.
But I'm going to give you one word, and then I'm going to tell you to go Google it, because I'm not going to explain it.
And if you know what it means, you're going to laugh.
So some of you are going to be laughing hysterically in the comments, and the rest of you are going to say, what?
I haven't heard of that thing. It starts with a capital letter, because it's a product.
But like Kleenex, Kleenex is the name for tissues.
The generic name would be tissues.
But I'm going to give you the product name.
I'm not going to tell you what it is.
You just have to go Google it yourself.
And let me tell you that if you believe that technology could not be better than human contact, this might make you doubt it.
The word, starting with a capital letter, is womanizer.
I'm done. If you want to hear it again, you have to replay it.
Now, wait a second and watch the comments.
I won't say another word.
If you think that vibrator is, or it's just another vibrator, no.
Nope. Definitely not that.
All right. Here's the funny part about this.
For perhaps 25% of the women watching this right now, I just really changed the direction of your next year.
You just don't know it yet.
You're going to do a little Googling, and you're going to say to yourself, huh, like, what's so special about this thing?
And then you're going to say, well, it's not much money.
I mean, it's not going to hurt me.
Those of you who are talking about these competing products, no.
I'm telling you that there's a new level.
Whatever you thought was the level of artificial stimulation before, well, you're going to be surprised.
What else is going down? I saw this disturbing AP report.
It was a video. Who knows how much is true?
But it purported to show Ukrainian troops hunting down traitors, civilians, who were posting traitorous things online that were pro-Russia.
And they were arresting them.
And... And I couldn't tell if it was real.
Now, what do you think?
Do you think it was real? I worry about it.
Because if that was real, you can't feel too good about being on their side.
Because they're basically arresting people for free speech.
And I don't feel like these arrests are going to be friendly.
I mean, it looked a lot like Japanese internment camps in the United States.
Like, that's the feeling I got from it.
So... You know, war is dirty business, and if you're on anybody's side, you're going to end up backing somebody bad.
All right, here's a counterargument to the...
The ivermectin question.
So there was a big study that came out that said ivermectin totally, absolutely did not work for COVID. But many of you think it did.
And many of you think that the dosing and the way they gave it, basically the test was invalid.
The data might be valid.
It's possible the data was valid.
But the way they set up the test to get the data was so invalid, it wasn't anywhere close to...
The way you would actually do it in the real world.
And so there's a tweet, a thread by Ethical Skeptic, who has lots of data-related arguments that are over my head.
So I only point them to you because maybe some of you are better at understanding this stuff.
But Ethical Skeptic has a graph that has a strong argument that the ivermectin was...
Given too late, and in one case, too briefly.
And that the nature of COVID, and here's the argument, it acts like a bacteriophage cascade.
So the part you need to know about that is that the speculation here, and the speculation is based on pretty good evidence, apparently, that there are some things which, once they get underway, there's nothing you can do to it to stop it.
So even if, hypothetically, ivermectin did work, if you administer it only after that cascade has started, it won't work.
And he shows data to make that case.
Data both for the claim that there's a bacteriophage cascade-like thing happening, similar to, and also that the ivermectin was administered in the wrong way.
Here's my problem with it.
Here's my problem with it.
And at this point, I'm neither pro nor anti-ivermectin.
Why can't we know?
I guess I'm perplexed by why we can never know the answer to the question.
But here's my skepticism of the skeptic.
So I understand the ethical skeptic argument here, but I have a hard time imagining that you would see no impact if the drug actually had a big impact.
If the drug implemented at the exact proper time, Was a miracle drug, and that was the claim.
I feel like you'd see some impact.
I feel as if that so-called cascade would be 10% less or something if you gave it to people at the wrong time.
I don't know. But I guess we have to just say, well, I guess we'll never know.
But here's the question. Do you think that somebody would have funded an intentionally misleading ivermectin study?
Because they're expensive. To do a randomized controlled trial, that's a lot of money.
So do you think we live in a world that is so corrupt that some pharmaceutical company, for example, would fund a really expensive fake study and make sure the ivermectin was used in the wrong way?
Here's the problem.
How could that pharmaceutical company have known that they could erase all of the benefits?
With this protocol.
That would have been a big gamble, wouldn't it?
Because if the ivermectin showed, let's say, a 10% effect with the wrong protocol, don't you think people would have said, ah, ah, you proved it works.
Now show it again with the right protocol.
I feel like they would have.
I feel like this would have been a bad risk because they had already succeeded in selling all their meds, I don't think they needed to kill ivermectin.
It sort of killed itself.
So it feels like it would have been too big of a boot and it could have backfired.
So as a strategy, I would have said it would have been a poor strategy.
But as a crime, and it would have been, in my opinion, whether it's illegal or not, it would be a crime, in my opinion, I think it would just be a bad risk for something that didn't need to be done.
So I'm skeptical that there was any intentional malfeasance.
I would love to hear the counterargument from the people who did the study, because they might say something like, oh, we chose this protocol because we talked to X experts, and they said this is the one that would work, if anything.
Something like that. So there's probably a good counterargument.
We just haven't heard it.
So don't assume that if you haven't heard the other side, they don't have one.
We just haven't heard it.
However, I will recommend the Ethical Skeptic to you as a good follow because his arguments are always based on data.
He always shows his work.
I can't tell when he's right or wrong, but it's always provocative.
I recommend it.
Micro-lesson on reaching a higher level of awareness.
Well, you don't need a micro-lesson.
You need micro-dosing.
No, just kidding. Don't do that.
All right. Here's a compliment of the day to Professor Scott Galloway, who's also a good follow and author of great books you should read.
But he said this, and here's the compliment is going to be in how he handled this exchange.
So we'll get to that.
But he starts off by saying, whatever you think of Elon...
Maybe the prospective owner of a social media platform shouldn't be giving medical advice.
And he was tweeting Elon Musk's own tweet, a new one, in which Musk retweeted that a friend had a bad experience with Ritalin.
Oh, I'm sorry. Galloway retweeted Musk saying that Musk had a friend with a bad experience on Ritalin and then Musk said, be careful of all neurotransmitter drugs.
And so Scott Galloway is saying, you know, maybe that's somebody who should not be giving medical advice.
And I said in the comments to Professor Galloway, are you doing that now?
Isn't that an example of Professor Galloway giving medical advice?
Let me make my case.
Suppose Elon Musk had said, you should watch your diet and exercise.
Would that be medical advice?
Of course, that's medical advice.
But would anybody care?
No. Nobody would care.
Why? Would they say, hey, Elon Musk, don't give us any medical advice.
No, they wouldn't care because they agree with the medical advice.
See where I'm going? So what Elon Musk said is that he had a friend who had a bad experience on Ritalin, That's not like something to disagree with, is it?
That's just an anecdote.
And it's only being presented as an anecdote.
It's not being presented as data.
And then he says, be careful of all neurotransmitter drugs.
Shouldn't you be careful of all drugs that strong?
It wouldn't matter what category it was.
Isn't that pretty good advice, to be careful of a neurotransmitter drug?
I would be very careful of that.
In fact, there are few things more regulated in society than neurotransmitter drugs.
Try to get Adderall.
Not easy, right?
It's very regulated.
So he's saying exactly what the medical community would say.
Be careful of all neurotransmitter drugs.
Be darn sure you know why you're going to use it.
That seems like good medical advice.
And the one bad experience on Ritalin is just telling you that all drugs have a potential negative side.
Who disagrees with that?
Is there any doctor who would say, no, all drugs are good and they don't have side effects?
Nobody. Nobody would say that.
So... Here's the compliment to Scott Galloway.
So giving you the... The setup here again.
He was saying that Elon Musk probably shouldn't give you medical advice, but I was noting that he was doing that now.
That Professor Galloway, by saying that Elon Musk shouldn't be giving this advice, isn't it telling you that advice is wrong?
So here's what Galloway replied to me saying, aren't you doing that now?
