Episode 1737 Scott Adams: Birthing Persons, Mother's Day, And The Battle For Reality
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
2000 Mules gets the Politifact and AP Treatment
Odds of being convicted on fake evidence
New Twitter option suggestions
Illegal protests at Supreme Court homes
The Battle For Reality
About 20 people hold our republic together
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To all of you mothers, and to the people who impregnated them, we'll get to you later.
But mothers, today is your day.
And if you'd like to take, and well, really it's going to be an amazing day for you anyway, but if you want to take it up another level, did you think it was even possible?
It is. All you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
And when I say a vessel of any kind, I don't mean a womb.
Every other kind. But fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better, especially Mother's Day.
It's called a simultaneous sip.
And it's going to connect mothers with their children all over the world.
Go! Ah, yeah.
Alright. So, now you mothers.
Let's talk about what else is going on.
Did you ever feel as though Mother's Day is the main attraction?
And Father's Day?
Father's Day feels like a consolation prize.
Am I the only one?
Sort of like there's a gold medal.
And then you just skip silver.
Go straight to bronze or copper.
But to be fair, to be fair, just because you had seven minutes of bliss and impregnated somebody, I'm not sure you get a holiday for that.
I'm not sure that that deserves too much.
But on top of that, there are also incredible fathers, and I guess they get a day too.
Well, President Biden had an interesting tweet.
He said, the unemployment rate now stands at 3.6%, which is amazing.
He says, the fastest decline in unemployment to start a president's term ever recorded.
Now, that's an interesting way to look at it.
Some would say...
Some would say, well, you know, that has more to do with the fact that you were the president when the pandemic started winding down and things reopened.
That's not exactly because of your keen economic policy.
But we have to look at this in context.
The way President Biden measures stuff...
This is an accurate way to measure it.
He gets credit for things which some would say were going to happen anyway or just sort of existed before he was president.
The situation, if you would.
But at least he's consistent because he analyzes everything with the same kind of approach.
For example, when Joe Biden measures his penis, he starts from the ass and then he includes the entire pelvic area Up to the freedom and then all the way to the tip.
And by his measurement, it's a foot long.
And, you know, on one hand, you'd say, well, that's not the way I would have done it.
I wouldn't count the ass part up through the pelvis.
I would have said that was already there.
I would have said, well, that's not really on point, really.
That's sort of slightly off topic.
But it's the Joe Biden measurement system, and as long as he's consistent, I'm fine with it.
Last night, there was a brutal fight, and somebody got hurt badly.
No, it's not about crime.
It's entertainment. It's sports.
So there was a big UFC competition in which one individual beat another one until the one they called the loser had something called brain damage.
I assume. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I think if your head gets pounded enough by somebody who's a professional head pounder, probably causes a little long COVID, if you know what I mean.
I think he got a little long over that night.
But, you know, if you're not someone who watches this sport, UFC, fighting, you don't really know how dangerous it was.
I was looking at some of the photos, and honestly, I was kind of shocked.
Like, I knew it was sort of a brutal sport, but I didn't know how dangerous it was.
I mean, here's what I saw when I just looked at the photos.
Number one, neither of them had a face mask.
Neither one. It seemed reckless to me.
Number two, I watched, or at least I looked at all of the photos and read stories about it, and still, still, I'm completely unaware of either their sexual orientations or their pronouns.
And I don't think that's a safe situation for either of them.
So between the lack of face masks, the confusion or lack of clarity over pronouns, as well as complete silence on their sexual orientation, which I feel is important.
I don't know how I can enjoy a sport without knowing exactly how everybody identifies.
So it's a dangerous situation.
And if that wasn't the end of the danger, the person that was named the winner of the event, the winner of the event, Got a big spike in testosterone.
Now, I don't know if you know that's a thing, but when the winners of competitions are measured, they actually have higher testosterone.
So being a winner jacks up your testosterone, and that can be dangerous.
There's a report that the winner went home to his, I don't know if it's a wife or a girlfriend, or some kind of birthing person, but reportedly he had quite an insurrection.
He had a raging insurrection, and we know those are dangerous to the country, to the republic.
Speaking of mules, the movie, Dinesh D'Souza's movie, 2,000 Mules, is getting the AP and PolitiFact treatment.
Do you know what the PolitiFact and AP fact-checking treatment is?
Well... I suppose that's a subjective question.
Some would say, this is how you know what's true.
You'd look at the fact-checkers, the AP and PolitiFact, and you'd say, well, if they say it's true, it's true.
If they say it's not true, it's probably not true.
That's what they're for, right?
So you should not be surprised.
To learn that the AP and PolitiFact have decided that the allegations that there might have been some impropriety in the 2020 election, they're saying that the methodology was flawed and that the cell phone data, which I guess I haven't seen it yet, but apparently that's an important part of the movie, that the location data is not accurate enough to know who did what So the analysis is flawed.
Now, I would probably want a little more detail than that, because one imagines there might be a counterpoint to their point, as in the experts who came up with this in the first place might say, no, it was.
It was actually good enough for this, because there's no other way to explain what happened.
Maybe. I mean, I don't know.
But one assumes that there's almost always a counterargument, right?
But the PolitiFact people have said that that's...
They've debunked it, according to them.
Which makes me want to watch it even more.
Apparently it's on the Locals platform, if you're a subscriber.
Dinesh D'Souza. And it's on Rumble.
Is that right?
In the comments, somebody will tell you where to see it.
Probably a variety of places by now.
So here's...
Here's the statement on, I think it was on the Twitter page that summarized the fact-checkers.
It said, the election was secure and there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
That's an interesting sentence, isn't it?
The election was secure and there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
Wait a minute. So those are two thoughts.
Are they related? Number one, the election was secure.
Let's take that as an independent statement.
And the second part of the sentence, there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
Are they trying to sell us the lack of evidence as proof that nothing happened?
Is this sentence really trying to tell us they proved a negative?
That by not finding something, they proved it doesn't exist?
Is that the fact check that you would rely on?
This is a fact check which has embedded in it proof that they're not really serious about anything.
Because you can't prove something didn't happen by not finding it.
I can prove there's not a penny in my drawer.
Watch me prove it.
You don't think I can do it?
I'm going to prove that that drawer behind me has no penny in it.
Actually, I'll go further than that.
I'll prove that it has no coins or dollar bills or any kind of currency whatsoever.
Watch me prove it right now.
Done.
Done.
I just proved that there's no coins or any kind of money in that drawer back there.
Did you see me do it?
Well, I showed you clearly that I did not provide any evidence that there were coins in the drawer.
Did you see any evidence of coins?
No. Therefore, logically, logically, logically, if I can make this connection, logically, Because I didn't look in the drawer, I believe that's proof of the non-existence of the coins.
And that's how it's done.
And scene.
Here's an interesting timing for a story.
I think I mentioned this before, but it's the timing that makes it interesting.
You all know about the Keith Ranieri situation.
He was the head of NXIVM, a self-improvement organization that some called a cult, especially the subcategory of people who had formed a separate organization.
In which there were sexual things, of all things.
Part of what he went to jail for, he's in jail right now, is an alleged encounter with an underaged girl.
But there are counter-allegations.
A former FBI forensic examiner says, hey, these photos, or at least some of the evidence, was clearly faked.
So there's a possibility that law enforcement, Faked some evidence and put somebody in jail.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
Suppose... Yeah, he was convicted.
He's in jail right now. Suppose this had been 20 years ago.
And you heard that law enforcement had this evidence and it looked like good evidence.
You'd probably say to yourself something like, Wow, that guy is guilty.
But what do you say in 2022?
Because the timing of this, the questioning of whether law enforcement of some type, I don't know who it was, allegedly planted evidence, it's a lot easier to believe today, isn't it?
Think of the timing of this.
It's sort of the perfect timing for this claim.
It just fits perfectly into what you're all waking up to, which is, wait a minute, It seems as though our intelligence agencies have quite obviously lied to us.
The FBI is sketchy.
You're not trusting anything anymore, right?
Any form of authority.
So there was a time when I would have said, ah, what are the odds that this is fake evidence?
And he was convicted on fake evidence.
But now I'd say, I don't know, 50-50, right?
Because we don't really have any way of knowing.
There's nothing that we know that would confirm it or disconfirm it.
So I feel like this is a jump ball at this point because the odds of the law enforcement being the ones who are guilty seems at least equal to the odds that Keith Raniere is guilty.
Wouldn't you use that? Is there any objective or logical reason to believe that the people accusing him of the crime are more, let's say, honest than the person they accused of the crime?
There's no reason to believe it.
Unfortunately, unfortunately, these are two entities of which you couldn't really believe either one of them.
That's sort of a tie.
Anyway. Keep an eye on that.
Here's some Twitter features I'd like to see.
I'd like to see an off-topic button.
So right now you can retweet things and you can like things.
But wouldn't it be nice if you had the option of marking a comment, not the original tweet, but just a comment to the tweet, as off-topic.
Now the off-topic stuff is often useful and good to see.
But I would love to be able to sort the off-topic stuff to the bottom because often, let me give you an example.
The other day I asked a question and maybe 95% of the responses were not on point to the question.
But it would have been really useful to me if they had been.
Now what I'd love to do is say, okay, I don't mind that there are responses that are off topic, because those are often very good.
They inform you of something you didn't know about.
It gives you some context or whatever, but it might be a little off-topic.
So I still want to see the off-topic stuff.
I just want an option to sort the on-topic stuff at the top.
So if you have an ability to mark things as off-topic, you wouldn't necessarily be criticizing them.
It's not a criticism.
It's just a clarification.
This is an off-topic comment.
Doesn't mean it's a bad comment.
So I'd like to see that.
I'd also like to see some kind of a context button.
Now, I call them buttons, but I'm completely aware that the simpler the interface, the more successful it's going to be.
So I know that you can't just add buttons every time you have an idea.
It'll clutter things up.
So I'm aware of that. So this is more of a brainstorming exercise of what sort of things you might want.
The other is a context button.
Because we've got this problem of fake news and trolls, etc.
But wouldn't you love it if somebody added some context that was good, and then other users could say, hey, that's good context.
Doesn't mean it's true.
Doesn't mean that it's the final word or anything.
It's just good context.
So people could click it and flag it, and then you could say, okay, here's the tweet.
And then maybe sort to the top of the comments any context that would give you some better understanding.
Because the context ends up being the fact check, right?
Probably 80% of the time, just adding context completely changes the story.
Like the Joe Biden measurement of how quickly the jobs came back after the pandemic.
Well, the context is it was coming back from a pandemic.
So every story has that kind of thing.
Add the context.
All right. Speaking of Twitter, apparently Elon Musk has announced he plans to get rid of a thousand Twitter staff...
Quintuple the revenue and get 69 million users paying $3 a month.
I guess those would be business users.
I think he said casual users will remain free.
So let's take me as an example.
I assume...
I don't know. Am I a business user?
I would call myself a business user, right?
Because what I do is, it's monetized, so I guess I'd be a business user.
If you ask me to pay $3 a month, of which, you know, half of it gets written off on my taxes, so it's $1.50 a month out of my pocket, to do what I do to support my entire business model?
Yeah, of course, of course.
First of all, I literally wouldn't notice I was paying it.
And then he'd have 69 million people paying $3 a month.
So 69 million times 3 times 12 is...
Give me the result of that.
69 million people times $3 a month times 12 months is how much a year?
208 million? So he would add $200 million a year to the revenue with these changes, get rid of 1,000 Twitter staff, which is...
Do me the math.
What would one Twitter staff person cost these days?
After benefits, $200,000 a year?
So what's 1,000 times $200,000?
So already he's identifying, you know, So fairly substantial places he can cost and also make money.
So the context here is, I think somebody said, but I don't have a confirmation of this, they have 7,500 employees.
So 1,000 out of 7,500 would be a substantial chunk.
But I have to think the marketing department is a big part of that.
Right? All right.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
This Amber Heard trial is just getting more and more weird, but there's also a simulation alert here.
So you just have to listen to some of the audios of not only their private conversations, but the testimony in court, and listen to Amber Heard try to act as though she was the victim, as though she were the victim, and It is shocking.
And I don't know how much of this is confirmation bias on my part, but she sounds to me exactly like a really bad actor who is lying.
It's not even good acting, which is the weird part.
You'd expect at least some professional acting there.
But she seems more and more like a monster if we are to believe what's coming out of the trial, allegedly.
And I'm not saying that Johnny Depp necessarily has no character flaws or never did anything wrong.
I don't know. But she's definitely a monster.
And I'll say again that what Johnny Depp is doing for the rest of the world is a serious benefit.
And she's even debunked the...
Not debunked, but...
Think of what she's done to the Me Too movement.
By such a high-profile fake thing.
This just sets it back.
Whatever was good from the Me Too movement, the original idea and whatever that led to, this certainly takes a big chunk out of that.
So Amber Turd has got to be one of the worst human beings that we've seen in a long time.
But here's the part that caught my attention.
If this is true, I don't know.
I'm not sure I saw a good source for this.
I did not see a good source for this.
But apparently they had a couple of dogs together, and Amber got custody of both dogs, and one of the dogs was actually Johnny Depp's dog.
So she got custody of his dog?
Well, I mean, I guess it raises the question of what makes it his dog versus their dog.
So there might be some ambiguity there, but here's the part that caught my attention.
Johnny Depp's dog is named...
Do you know the answer to this?
Boo. B-O-O, as in a ghost goes boo.
What? My whole week has been filled with, you know, as most of you probably heard, my cat named Boo passed away this week.
And I've never heard of any other animal named Boo.
I've told you that one of the evidences of, you know, obviously not a proof of any kind, but one of the things that feels like evidence we live in a simulation is that we keep seeing all this code reuse.
Like, what are the odds that there would be two major stories about a pet losing a pet, actually, in two different ways, losing a pet named Boo?
Really? What were the odds on that?
It feels low.
Anyway, let me tell you another story of why I think the simulation is revealing itself.
So the other day, I bought some solar-powered lights that do some accents for your yard.
So they collect the light during the day, and they're just little disks, and you can stick them in the ground or just set them on something.
And so I was real curious to see how they worked.
So I put them on a low sitting wall, you know, on part of my property, and I waited until the sun went down, and I was kind of excited because I thought, oh, if this works, I might, you know, the backyard's going to look kind of cool.
So I wait until it's dark and I go out, and all of the lights had been collected up and put in a pile.
Now, it turns out that the one time in my entire life, and I actually calculated how many days I've lived in this home, it was something like 4,400 days.
There was one day out of 4,400 days that I wanted to use the top of that little wall, which was exactly the one and only one day, though it turned out to be two, in which my gardener needed to do something that required him access to the top of that little wall.
Never before, as far as I know, never before have they done any work that affected the top of the wall.
The top of the wall.
And the wall wasn't even part of anything that was happening.
It's just they needed access to the entire top of that little wall.
One chance out of 2,000 to 4,000, depending on whether you count the second day that they needed access.
Now, I said to myself, Why are these coincidences streaming at me at such what seems to be higher frequency?
Well, the most obvious reason would be confirmation bias, selective memory, all the normal things.
But it certainly is a mind-blower when you see stuff like this, like two animals named Boo that people lost, and they're both big stories in my life in the same week.
Weird. So the protesters are at the Supreme Court justices' houses, the right-leading ones who are presumed to be voting to end Roe v.
Wade or overturn it.
And I guess Antifa has been spun up again.
So now Antifa went from protesting to save black lives to protesting to end as many as possible.
And apparently, as long as they're paid, they'll go either way.
Now, if you think that was my personal opinion on what abortion is, it's not.
I try to keep my personal opinion of abortion completely to myself.
If you think you're seeing it in my jokes or my context or my references, you're not going to find it.
Because I'm very serious about keeping myself out of that conversation.
I think other people should have a greater voice, and I'm not one of them.
So, if women work it out, I'm okay with what women decide on abortion.
And if you want to be part of that, that's fine with me, too.
But keep me out of it.
Please. So, I'm watching this, and Jack Posobiec was mentioning this on Twitter, that apparently it's illegal in every state to protest at a judge's house.
Because it would potentially influence the case.
But yet it's happening.
And every single person there is subject to arrest, I would think.
But there won't be any arrests, I don't think.
I think they will simply be allowed to violate the law in a substantial way, publicly, transparently.
And the people in charge are going to say, well, we sort of like them violating the law because we're on the same side as...
The lawbreakers in this case.
And it's just going to make you crazy.
Now again, I'm not giving you my opinion on abortion.
That's not even the topic here, for me.
The topic is, how in the world do you let people break the law in the most...
And this is not even...
I'm not even talking about technically breaking the law.
This is right exactly in the heart of what the law was trying to stop from happening.
It's not like a weird corner of the law or something that you could interpret as being against the law.
It's exactly against the law.
It's exactly, specifically, exactly what the law says don't do.
Don't stand in front of the judge's house and protest.
Just don't do that. It's totally illegal.
How much is your head going to explode when none of that is prosecuted?
And the January 6th people, ones who were not accused of violent stuff, are in jail.
Still, right?
It's just going to feel weird.
And not in a good way.
But that's what's happening.
One wonders if this would be effective.
I can't imagine it being effective.
Can you? Do you imagine that any of those people who have the stones to be judges...
Don't you have to be pretty damn brave to even go through the lower level of judging to become a Supreme Court judge?
I feel as if you're talking about some of the bravest citizens.
So I don't see them changing their vote, do you?
What do you think? Now, I do imagine that they could be influenced by the larger public opinion.
But I don't think they're going to be influenced by the people in their lawn.
I don't think they will.
Now, what's the best news about that?
I just basically described the strongest part of our republic with complete confidence.
The part that supports all the rest.
The Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is still the one thing that even when the shade goes down, and this is pretty serious stuff, that there are dangerous-looking people surrounding their...
There's always danger when there's a crowd.
Let's just say that.
And my confidence that the justices will not be influenced by it is somewhat absolute.
Somewhat absolute. I don't think they'll be influenced at all.
Now, if they are, if the vote doesn't come out the way we think, or the way the first draft indicated, then you're going to wonder if they got influenced.
And that would be a really good question.
But I'm not expecting it to happen.
And I do think that as long as the Supreme Court has the credibility...
That it still has. The Republic's going to hold together.
And even with all the assaults of their credibility in every way, I think they're still holding.
I feel like the Supreme Court is still, with all of the things that you could say about them, even after an unpopular vote, whichever way it goes, I feel as if they're going to still hold on.
And that they'll not just hold on, they'll be solid.
I think the Supreme Court will stay solid.
That's the feeling. I don't think that these assaults on its integrity are anything but a glancing blow.
So that's the good news.
All right. I got a tweet today from Marwan El-Khabib, and he's reading a book that came out that I wrote.
That came out in 1997.
He said, I'm reading your Dilbert Future book, published in 1997.
And then he complimented me on it.
And then he said, I'm not really sure if you're really good at predicting the future, a time traveler from the future, or freakishly good at programming the simulation.
So just be aware that there's a book I wrote in 1997 that was full of predictions and that there's somebody reading it now who's kind of blown away at how accurate they are.
I don't know which ones he was responding to exactly.
Now, they're not all accurate.
Some of them were more humorous and some of them just didn't happen.
But you might want to take a look at that if you're interested in predictions.
Now, what do you think?
For those of you who agree with the statement that I'm good at predicting, some of you would disagree with that, but for those of you who do think so, do you think it's because I'm good at predicting, am I a time traveler from the future, or am I programming the simulation?
Go. Or is it just an illusion and I'm not good at predicting, which is the one I'd vote for?
All of the above.
Good at predicting. Where's the evidence?
Good question. Some say I'm influencing it.
Good at predicting. Yeah, I'm not sure it's one thing.
It's a few things.
One is that if you predict enough things, if you predict that some things will be debunked, you're almost always right.
You just have to wait long enough.
So here's one of the tricks I use.
It's totally a trick. This is just a trick.
When I wrote the book, I said to myself, you know what?
I'll bet I could throw a dart at any topic and say that it will be debunked in my lifetime.
And if I just live long enough, it will be.
And you'd be amazed.
How many things that you think are true now did you not think were true 30 years ago, 20 years ago, depending on how old you were?
A lot, right? So you can randomly pick things and say, oh, that will be debunked.
So that was one of the tricks I used.
I randomly picked a few things and said, this will be debunked.
Now, there's some things that were more like 50-50 bets.
And if you remember the ones I got right, and you probably would, especially if they're weird, you might forget the ones I got wrong, and that would give you the impression I had a better track record.
Right. So it's not one thing.
It's probably a variety of things.
Some said that I influence things so they're not really predictions.
It's something I caused to happen.
I can tell you with a fair amount of confidence, but I can't prove it, but a fair amount of confidence that there are some things that fit into that frame.
There are a few things that I probably had some influence on while predicting them at the same time.
And I'm not sure. I mean, there's no way to confirm that that made a difference.
The other thing is studying economics.
Since my background is, you know, degree in economics and MBA, and I worked in business for a long time, if you have that filter on things, or that's part of your talent stack, then that gives you an ability to predict Because the future generally follows the money.
So if you know how business models work and business works, if you know how...
Especially if you understand the insurance market.
If you understand the insurance market, you can really predict things.
Because all the political people will be yakking about this or that or what should be or what should not be.
And then the insurance people are saying, well, you can talk all day, but I'm not going to insure that.
And then it's done.
So if you understand the insurance and business and follow the money and how business models work and how competition works and how companies need to cannibalize themselves and a dozen other things that you learn in the study of economics, it does allow you to predict.
Now I'll tell you what you can't predict.
Well, in a way you can.
You can't predict individual company success.
Usually. I feel as if Apple might be an exception.
That's a strange exception.
And some of those social media companies might be exceptions.
But generally, you can't pick stocks.
But you can predict that the average, you know, the index will go up in any 20-year period.
You can be fairly confident that that's going to happen.
So, the other skill that helps you predict Is persuasion.
So if you understand persuasion, you can watch two teams, it could be two candidates or whatever, going up against each other, and you could say, oh, one is using good technique, that's likely to work, and the other one doesn't have any technique.
But people who don't study persuasion might think it's a tie.
They might say, oh, it's two people just making claims that the other one disagrees with.
But if you can see the persuasion, because you've studied it, you know the techniques, then suddenly you can say, oh, I predict that one's going to win, because that's where the persuasion is pointing.
So, it's a whole bunch of different things.
Some of it's guessing, some of it's knowing everything changes, some of it is a 50-50 stuff that you get lucky on, some of it's probably causing it.
Or I'm reprogramming the simulation while you're watching.
It's one of those things.
Well, the war for reality is heating up, and it seems like that's going to be the big battle for the next, I don't know, rest of reality, or the rest of humankind.
We will be arguing about what is literally real, and it's gone beyond just what is fake news and what is not fake news.
So here's where we are.
We finally understand as a species, and I'm talking about this year, things that we thought were true for hundreds of years, this year we've decided those things weren't ever true.
Number one, you can't predict anything too far in advance.
We finally understand that, right?
That life is not predictable.
And so if there's some expert telling you what's going to happen, we used to say, well, that's going to happen.
Better worry about it. You should still worry about it if it's a prediction of doom.
I'd take that pretty seriously and make sure you don't have the doom.
But we do understand in a way we never understood before that you can't predict things in a complicated world.
That's a higher level of awareness.
We understand now that experts are not reliable in a way we really didn't understand 20 years ago.
Right? That's a higher level of awareness.
That the experts could be bought off or just wrong, or they could have their own cognitive dissonance, etc.
We also know money distorts everything.
We always knew it, but we just see more examples of it so it's more clear.
Some of us know that free will is an illusion.
Some of you are not there yet.
And, of course, the simulation theory makes you think that everything could be subjective and not real.
The growth of psychedelics, like mushrooms, for example, it's allowing people to see reality as subjective in a way that we never did before, like at a higher rate than before.
And I think we went from thinking that the fake news is only on the other team to understanding that fake news is the only kind.
That's a big difference.
Because we had the comfort of thinking your opponents, whoever they were politically, were lying, but your team pretty much not.
And now you have a better understanding of that, don't you?
Now you've got a little bit better understanding that the lie can come from anywhere, including your side.
And that's a whole higher level of awareness.
And most of us are getting there.
It's probably good, but it's a battle for reality that's like nothing we've ever seen.
And I made a provocative claim that I'm going to back up now.
That the republic, America's system, the republic, is held together by approximately 20 people.
And that's it.
And that if those 20 people were not well-intentioned and very much wanted to hold the republic together...
That there would be trouble.
And it's not 20 people who are necessarily the ones you've ever heard of or would know about.
It's 20 people who just are really influential.
So, let me ask you this.
If I were to say, name people you think are on the list, you'd probably name some billionaires, right?
You'd probably name Elon Musk.
He'd be the obvious one. But here's a question that you might not ask yourself.
Who influences Elon Musk?
I bet you don't know that, do you?
It's not one person, of course.
I imagine he gets his influence from a variety of people.
How many of the variety of people who influence Elon Musk do you think are in my list of 20 people who are holding the whole republic together?
You know too much.
About quite a few of the top 20 have advised or at least are okay with what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter, let's say.
So sometimes you say to yourself, oh, I know who the influential person is, but you don't.
You don't. Because there are probably people influencing the influencers.
And it's this whole web of people being influenced.
Right now, if there were a major, like, let's say, a War of the Worlds kind of hoax, let's say there were a major hoax that came onto the scene, and it was just the kind that could really just destroy the Republic, and, you know, if people believed it, it would just rip everything apart.
Would it work? Well, before the internet, it might have.
Prior to the internet, you could probably sell anything to the public because the people who could deprogram you didn't have any access.
So as long as you could control the major media, you controlled everything.
So there was no way to debunk something.
But I would argue that today, if there was a story that hit the news that was really dangerous and really fake...
That there would be about 20 people who would squash that story and you wouldn't know their names.
Now, they're not 20 people who necessarily work for the networks or work for the social media companies.
I mean, 20 people who influence enough people...
Yeah.
So one of you is a little bit ahead of you.
If you don't understand Mike Cernovich's influence on the world...
Then this point will be completely lost on you.
He would be an obvious one.
Now, who influences Mike Cernovich?
I don't know. Maybe nobody.
Maybe he's a singular kind of personality.
But he definitely influences the real world in ways that I don't think the public understands.
And there are other people in that category as well.
And here's what those people, the hypothetical 20, do...
Here's how they influence everything.
With better arguments.
More persuasive.
Because if you were...
Let's say you had some idea or plan or proposal and you rolled it out and people of, let's say, Mike Cernovich's influence just said, this is terrible, you've got to stop it, you know, kill this thing. How many of them would it take...
To kill a national idea.
Fewer than 20. Fewer than 20.
Because if the 20 people who influence lots of other people, who then influence lots of other people, who influence lots of other people, if those people don't like it, whatever it is, whatever it is, and they say it's illogical and it won't work, it just won't happen.
I believe there are about 20 people who could stop any bad idea Not right away, but they can get it to stop.
The one that's interesting is nuclear energy.
In my opinion, what had happened is that the people who didn't understand a variety of forces were killing the nuclear energy business, but that there were probably 20 people who decided that we needed nuclear energy.
And you might never know their names, But they sort of made it happen.
Now you know the famous ones.
You know Michael Schellenberger. You know Mark Schneider.
You know people who are visible.
But who influenced them?
Right? And how many people who were, let's say, riding cover for them?
How many people were laying down suppressive fire to make it easier for them to do what they were doing, which is get their message out?
Quite a few. Quite a few.
I was one, right?
So I'm a prominent person who is laying down just continuous suppressive fire.
You know, just making sure that the arguments were tight, that the non-essential parts of the argument were dismissed.
And then there's this sort of iterative process where, as all of us talk about it, the argument improves, right?
So you can see that there are people who are just good at persuasion, especially the ones who have studied it, have an outsized influence because they're the ones who are equipping other people with arguments.
So once other people are equipped with a better argument, then that argument lives on its own and can go off and do its thing.
But I feel like there are about 20 argument tuners.
And maybe it's a different 20 for every topic.
That would be a fair interpretation.
But there are about 20 people who look at every topic and say, you know, the way to look at this topic is X. And the ones who are really good at tweaking topics and framing things, you don't know how much influence they have.
You just know that a lot of people are saying the same stuff.
That's all you know. It might be a rolling band of 20.
I'm not suggesting it's some kind of permanent Illuminati.
It's more like a fluid group.
That's correct. People adding in, people leaving.
Depending on the topic, somebody might be in or out.
All right, I'm just looking at your...
The tipping point applied.
Yes. Yeah, the tipping point is one of those things that it's very invisible.
And by the way, that's another way to make predictions.
If people see things as straight-line predictions as opposed to tipping points, then they're really going to be lost predicting.
So I'm seeing some names that people are suggesting as the influencers.
But remember by standard.
So if you say, oh, there's a TV personality or whatever, are they the ones who are the original thoughts or are they being influenced as well?
So I think there are some topics where you can always predict how somebody's going to act.
But there are some newer topics in which there are a small number of people who frame them.
Let me give you an example of how the better framing could win.
So right now you get kicked off of social media if you say there was something wrong with the election, right, 2020 election, because there's no evidence of widespread fraud.
But here's the high-level or high-ground maneuver, which you can say.
And here's a persuasion trick I talk about a lot, in which you embrace the other person's argument, but you embrace it too hard.
You don't change it, because that's unfair.
That would be a straw man.
You embrace it exactly as it is.
And one of the arguments that you can do that with is the election integrity.
So the election integrity argument is that there was no evidence found, and there were people looking for evidence.
So there was no evidence found, and therefore you don't have to worry about the elections.
Here's another frame for that.
This is the high ground.
You've heard this before. Here's what I say.
You know, it's kind of amazing...
That 100% of our institutions that we thought were reliable, except for the election systems, 100% of everything else has been shown to be untrustworthy.
We don't trust our law enforcement.
We don't trust intel. We don't trust Democrats.
We don't trust Republicans. We don't trust experts.
We don't trust science in a way we used to.
We don't trust anything.
But isn't it lucky, and aren't we fortunate, That there could be 50 separate elections, fairly substantial operations.
Well, they're substantial operations, not fairly.
Substantial operations run by partisans, which is interesting.
Elections are always run by partisans, right?
It's people who belong to a political party.
So it's run by partisans, the people who have an incentive to cheat.
It's not fully audited.
Ever. There are parts you can audit, but you can't fully audit it.
Especially the electronic parts.
Or at least we don't.
So, in a context where every other institution, organization, and leader is clearly lying to you.
Clearly. Easy to prove.
All 50 partisan-run major operations, which are not even continuous operations where you improve over time, but rather they're only every two years or so.
So you have to retrain everybody and new people.
And with all of that complication and all of that difficulty, isn't it great that all 50 of those partisan operations with great incentive to cheat And no full audits.
Isn't it lucky that that all worked down fine?
Now that's the high ground in maneuver.
So I'm literally agreeing with their argument.
Because that is the argument. The argument is that everything's corrupt and you can see it.
Except that. Got lucky.
Wow. And what would be the reason that the one thing that you would imagine would be the single thing most susceptible to cheating?
Because people would want to do it so badly.
And yet, with all the assaults that you could imagine, hackers, partisans, dirty tricksters, and yet with all of that, with all that, it was all clean.
I mean, minor problems, of course, but nothing that would change the result.
So, imagine this.
Imagine if Republicans and Trump, now this will never happen, by the way, but imagine if it did.
Imagine if Republicans took the completely different approach and said, you know, you're right.
Every single thing in the world is messed up except those elections.
Good job on the elections, all 50 of them, the only organizations that did their job this year.
You should just mock it.
Mock it by agreeing with it.
Literally agree with everything they say.
Just put it in context.
It's just the only thing that has worked.
How about that? Surprise!
Nobody saw it coming. But aren't we lucky?
Like George Carlin said, is that a George Carlin thing?
All right. It looks like we've done our job today.
I believe that we have successfully filled more than 45 minutes.
Now, the 45 minute mark is important because it's just about the amount of time that you can get ready and put on your makeup or get ready in the morning.
And it's just about the right amount of time to exercise.
Now, those are two activities that you don't want to be going back to your device and fast-forwarding it through the commercials.
And this content, if you didn't know it, there are two different ways to watch it with no commercial breaks.
Number one, I think watching it live on YouTube is no commercials, right?
Can somebody confirm that?
Is that how it works? The recorded version has commercials, but not if you belong to the Red subscription service on YouTube.
Or, if you become a subscriber on Locals, I simulcast it on both platforms, and Locals never has commercials because it's a subscription service.
So, If you're looking to improve your morning process, either your exercise or getting ready, and you don't want to continually stop to go and change your source or change the channel, this is the content for you.
Did I sell it? I'll bet a lot of you use it because there's no commercial breaks, right?
It just matches well with what you're doing.
Am I right? Yeah.
I'm seeing yeses coming through.
All right. Why did you almost skip commenting on 2,000...
I've commented on 2,000 mules every day for four days.
Have you noticed that most of the criticisms I get are from people who only know one little speck of my opinions or what I've ever done in my life?
All right. I will watch it.
Yes, of course I will watch it.
I promise you I'll watch it.
It might be later this week, but I'll definitely watch it.
You don't interact with the locals community?
What do you mean?
I do every day, literally.
Oh, here's something exciting.
Okay.
This is the weirdest thing.
For, let's see, since the early 80s, I've been talking to friends about a business idea I had that needs to happen.
I called it the cat peteria.
And it's for people who can't have their own cat for whatever reason.
Maybe somebody in the household is allergic.
But they want to go to a place that's just a room full of cats.
Just sit in a room with a bunch of cats.
Which, to me, would be, like, awesome.
You know, to just relax.
I'm just going to sit in a room with a bunch of cats.
And that business actually is in my local mall.
I took pictures of it.
And... You know, I know there's already, like, cat cafes in Japan and stuff, so it's already been done.
But this one doesn't even have a cafe.
Why is my interface not working?
There we go. And it's, what's it called?
It's the Mini Cat Town.
So see if you can see this.
So it's just a mall store called Mini Cat Town.
And I think it's $5 for 15 minutes.
And you can go sit on the floor in there and then a bunch of cats who are up for adoption.
The cats are up for adoption.
So I don't know if this is only going to be a spring thing when there's lots of kittens.
But that's awesome.
But I'm going to show you something that's the most awesome thing you've ever seen.
It's a walking dog.
Yes, it's a walking dog.
You ready for this?
Wait. Okay.
Why would a video suddenly not play because I'm on a live stream?
What would cause my phone to not play a video that's local on my phone?
There's no connection. This is actually...
What would cause that?
There are only two buttons, play and pause, and neither of them work.
Is that just because you're watching?
What the hell is going on? All right, here it is.
It's a dog that walks on two feet.
That's all. It's just so cute, you can't stand it.
That's all there is. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the completion of the YouTube portion of my presentation.