Episode 1755 Scott Adams: Social Media Should Be Banned For Minors, How Schools Are Bully Factories
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Elon Musk weighs in on guns
Andrew Follett on gun restrictions
Public schools are bully factories
Teachers Unions cause most social problems
Social media, the perfect bullying environment
Bullies are the problem
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Oh, I wish I had more documents in my hand, but that would be something for a person who had a printer that worked.
Not for me.
But we're going to forge ahead anyway.
And I do have my digital backups.
But for all of you, let me tell you, I'll bet that's better.
Thank you. That's better.
Do I feel a little bit off today?
Well, that's my printer's fault.
But to make it a perfect day, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jar, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine to the day.
The thing that makes everything better except all of my technology this morning.
None of it's working.
But somehow, we're still talking.
Go. So, so far just my printer and my local's software are not working today.
But my sound wasn't working.
But aside from that, everything's going well.
Let's see if my digital backup is working.
Ah, it is!
Yay! So here's an update on some very important things.
The sneeze suppression trick, more confirmations that it works.
And the trick, if you didn't hear it yesterday, was you imagine yourself sneezing, and it makes your need to actually sneeze instantly go away.
Now, you won't believe it until you try it.
As soon as you feel that sneeze coming on, you go, just imagine yourself already sneezing.
Boom, it's gone.
Try it. All right.
Update number two.
So yesterday I challenged my viewers by saying that I would demonstrate to them that diet is more about knowledge than willpower.
And of course people said, there's no way you're going to do that.
And I said, willpower is imaginary.
And they said, no, it's not.
And then I gave my And at the end, there was stunned silence because apparently, from what I hear, I demonstrated that willpower doesn't exist and that diet is really a knowledge problem.
And that people have enough knowledge, but they're probably not even close.
And so that was my argument.
I've been asked to take that segment of yesterday's livestream and turn it into its own clip, which I'm having done today.
So if you liked it and you wanted to show it to somebody else, it'll be its own clip by the end of today, I think.
The next update is I've told you about my technique of calling people Keith.
Now, I do it in one context only, which is if they attack my tweets or something I said with a personal attack instead of saying something about my argument or my facts.
If they're just arguing with my argument or my facts, eh, that's okay.
I'll argue back.
That's what it's for. If they argue by saying I'm a despicable person, and that's sort of the basis for their argument, I call them Keith while politely replying.
Now, it turns out that that completely changes the frame for people, partly because they don't know what I'm talking about.
They don't know that I'm talking about Keith Olbermann, who, at least in my case, likes to attack me personally.
So it throws them out of the frame.
But the other thing it does that I think is even more powerful is that once you have a name for something, such as a Karen, how we deal with such things changes.
So naming things has power.
Like allowing people to put all of their thoughts into this one thing, a Keith.
And so a Keith is somebody who ignores your argument and just talks about you.
And so when somebody talks about me and I just brand them a Keith, I've literally branded them out of my frame of caring.
Because I care about what people think of my arguments, and I care if I have the right facts, especially if I'm talking in person.
And... Anyway, so the Keith thing works really well to just reframe.
I saw a comment here, a paid comment, which was so interesting.
This is from PW Designs.
He says, or she, I don't know who it is.
20-plus years ago, when hot and sweating, I sweat a lot, I thought to send a fake shiver down my spine and got instantly cool.
In other words, he imagined, or she, imagined being cool a shiver, And it cooled down his or her body.
Would that work? I'm doing it right now.
It does work. As I was talking, I was doing it in my mind, sending a fake shiver down my back.
Totally worked. I can now confirm that that just worked.
And look at the comments.
How many people just got a shiver down their back and it cooled them off?
Yeah, some of you. All right, well, it definitely works for some of us.
I guess we can confirm that right away.
All right, the big story in the news is about another mass shooting.
I'm not going to talk about the obvious stuff, all right?
So I'll let the mainstream media talk about the police response.
You know, they waited outside, maybe.
Maybe it's fog of war.
I don't know. We'll let the news cover that.
We'll let the news cover the numbers and the hate and the protests and the politics and stuff like that.
Here's what I want to talk about.
I want to talk about some other stuff, like the persuasion and the argument.
As you've noticed, I often get in trouble for criticizing people on my side.
Because I don't like their arguments, and I don't like people who are on my side.
Let's say, in general, they agree with me.
But if they make poor arguments on my side, I don't like that.
I don't like that at all.
Because it makes my argument look dumb.
Because people are going to paint me with the same brush.
If there are any bad arguments on your side, you want to get rid of those first.
If you're working on the bad arguments on the other side, that's not the place to start.
Fix the ones on your own team first, you know, and then you're much better prepared to look at somebody else's argument.
So this was true with everything from vaccinations to climate change.
I would often disagree with people who generally were on my team or generally agreed with my overall opinion, but I didn't like their bad arguments.
So I'll do that with gun control, okay?
So I'm pro-Second Amendment, pro-gun.
But I don't like it when I see bad arguments that are pro-Second Amendment.
So we'll talk about that.
First of all, there's some fake news about that incident.
The fake news, I guess somebody sent around a photoshopped image pretending it was an ABC quote or an ABC coverage, and it wasn't.
But the fake was that ABC had lightened the skin of the perpetrator to make it look like it wasn't a person of color who did this.
Now, I guess that was fake, so it's a photoshopped image and it was blamed on ABC. But wow, you can't really trust anything anymore, can you?
You cannot trust anything anymore.
So you can't trust photos.
Do you remember when people used to say pictures don't lie?
That is so wrong.
There's nothing that lies more than a picture, even one that's not trying.
Have you ever tried to take more than one picture of yourself and you look like a completely different person?
And one you look like a frog and the other one you look like, you know, a hero?
And you're the same person.
So do pictures lie?
Well, they lied at least once if you took two pictures.
You either look like a frog or you look like a, you know, a bodybuilder.
You can't both be right.
So they at least lied once in that case.
Maybe that's just me.
Alright, so don't believe anything you see on anything.
Don't believe anything. Elon Musk weighed in on guns, and he's so clever the way he does stuff.
So now he's said he's going to vote Republican, which gives him a little space to disagree a little bit with the Republicans.
Because it's easier to disagree with your own team a little bit.
You know, if in fact he is.
We'll see. But he was asked about gun control, and he sent in a tweet.
So this is Elon Musk's opinion.
Assault rifles should, at minimum, require a special permit where the recipient is extremely well vetted, in my opinion.
Now, what I like about his response is that it's so open to interpretation.
It kind of gives him a lot of room.
So when he says that a recipient should be extremely well-vetted, it's kind of subjective, isn't it?
What is extremely?
So, who knows?
Maybe he's part of the 80 or 90 percent, depending on whether you're a Democrat or Republican, that would like universal background checks.
Would that be extreme?
Suppose you had background checks no matter where you got a gun.
Private sale, gun sale, any kind of sale.
Would that be extreme?
Some would say so.
Some would say that's pretty extreme.
Because they like their guns untracked.
Because as soon as you track them, you're taking away at least something that is associated with the right toe and arms.
Which is the right to not be bothered for owning them, right?
So if they're tracking you, you're like, well, I don't know.
I can see how the tracking is not exactly the same thing as restricting my ownership, but it feels like it.
It's pretty related.
So anyway, we don't know what extreme is, but that's for Elon Musk to explain to you, I guess.
And here's what I say about Elon Musk's opinion about assault rifles.
Well, first of all, how do you define an assault rifle?
That would be the next part. But if you could test this idea, let's test it.
I don't think we have to know.
Whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to have...
Let's assume that he means additional vetting for assault rifles specifically.
What if you just find some place and test it?
Some state that wants to do it.
And then maybe we'd know something.
Maybe somebody takes their trend line of assault rifle problems and it goes down.
Maybe. Maybe.
But generally speaking, if something can be tested, and then you could say to yourself, well, did whatever we do really affect my Second Amendment rights?
And let's say the test was just far more restrictions on who can get a gun in the first place, but only if you've got a mental problem or something pretty specific.
I don't know. Do you think at the end of that test, if you ran that test for five years, and let's say it looked like it reduced murders, you weren't sure if it looked like it, that would still be worth doing,
don't you think? Would you feel that if that kind of policy worked out well enough in the data, that that would be a restriction on your Second Amendment if the test showed that it worked, And that everybody who didn't have mental problems could get all the guns they wanted.
Would that be a problem to you?
For people who are kind of extreme on the topic, that would be a problem, right?
Yeah. Because the Constitution is kind of...
It's close to absolute about what your freedom is there.
It doesn't allow you to have an attack helicopter, I don't think.
Or does it? I don't know.
But if you could test it, I'm in favor of testing it.
And then you can decide whether it impinges on your rights too much.
CNN, interestingly, has an opinion piece by Harry Enten.
And he says one of the reasons that Republicans don't need to vote for gun control is that there's no political pressure for them to do it.
And if you read the polls correctly, you can see that that's the case.
If you read the polls incorrectly, it looks like there's overwhelming support for at least background checks and that the Republican Congress or Republican Senate is not letting it happen.
So, and then in another opinion piece the same day on CNN, there's somebody using that exact statistic saying, At the same time, the other opinion piece is saying, that's a misleading statistic.
You shouldn't use that. And I'm going to give CNN credit here.
Here are two opinion pieces, and one of them seems to be debunking the other opinion piece.
And both of them are very much CNN opinions, right?
I don't know. I kind of appreciated that.
Let me tell you what Harry Enten said.
I think he's pretty much consistently anti-Trump in his other opinions.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's consistently left.
But he goes and he says this, that if you ask people the question correctly, and I guess that's subjective too, but if you ask it correctly, are you satisfied with gun laws that already exist?
The large majority of Americans have always said, yeah, I'm happy with the gun laws the way they are.
So his argument is, if you ask the question right, are you basically happy with gun laws, everybody says, not everybody, but so many people say yes, that it doesn't look like it even translates into votes.
That people are just sort of happy with where things are.
But, let's say you get specific.
Instead of saying, are you generally happy with gun laws the way they are, if you said, would you be in favor of more background checks?
And then you get these 80 or 90% of people say yes.
So they're both happy with where things are, but would be overwhelmingly happier if things changed.
It makes polling look ridiculous at some level, doesn't it?
It's like you can't believe it, even the polls.
Because the way you ask the question completely changes how you interpret what you're looking at.
That's the reason that people like you and I should not make poll questions.
Because it turns out that asking the question is a real skill in science, I guess.
And that it seems like it'd be easy.
Well, I'll just ask the question the way an ordinary person would ask a question, and then I'll get my answer, and then I'll have information.
No, you won't. If you're a normal person and you ask a poll question, no matter how well you choose the poll people, no matter how scientifically you've selected your polling group, if you're an ordinary person, you don't know how to ask the question right.
Without priming, or accidentally, priming for an answer.
So that's where the magic is.
You have to ask a question in a way that doesn't force the answer to be a certain way.
You can see that so eloquent, you know, well, perfectly here.
If you say, are you happy with gun laws, people mostly say, yeah, I'm happy with them.
Republicans and Democrats.
They're pretty happy with things.
But if you ask them about a specific gun law, almost all of them want to change it.
80 to 90%.
So be careful about what you see in polls.
Here's another factoid from Andrew Follett, or maybe Follett.
I don't know how to pronounce his last name.
F-O-L-L-E-T-T. But he's a senior analyst of something.
So it looks like he's got some credentials for looking at data.
And he points out that out of 97 countries with data...
The U.S. is 64th in frequency of mass shootings and 65th in murder rate.
And rates of mass shootings elsewhere are rising faster.
And then he says, if stricter gun laws reduced gun violence rates, you'd expect jurisdictions with those laws to have lower rates of gun violence.
Instead, we find quite the opposite.
So his argument is that the United States is actually doing reasonably well with mass shootings, if you compare it to other places, and that where there are the most gun restrictions, there are also the most gun violence on average.
So he concludes that the gun restrictions don't work because that's where there is the most violence.
Do you find that logic compelling?
That if gun restrictions worked, wherever you saw gun restrictions on average, on average, you'd see that they had lower gun crime, right?
Can anybody help him with this logic?
It's backwards.
It's backwards. Who puts gun controls where there's no crime?
That would be the place you would have no gun control, because you never even thought about it.
Nobody shot anybody.
Do you know why Wyoming doesn't have restrictive gun control?
Because there's not a lot of murder, right?
How often do we see the cause and effect completely reversed in a way that's obvious?
To me, it's kind of obvious you've got the cause and effect reversed.
Because a human being doesn't respond to a non-problem with a solution.
They respond to problems with solutions, do they not?
Do we say, hey, this place has no gun violence whatsoever.
Let's enact some tough gun violence laws here or gun use laws here?
No. They say, where is the most gun violence?
Let's say Chicago. So I guess we'd better try something by tightening up our gun laws here.
And then people say, well, if you tighten the gun laws in a place that has a lot of gun violence, and yet there's more gun violence when you're done, can you conclude that the gun restrictions did not work?
Yes or no? There's lots of gun violence.
They put in severe gun restrictions.
Violence keeps going up.
Did the restrictions work?
You don't know. No, the answer is you don't know.
The answer is there's no way to know.
The answer is that I gave you data that couldn't possibly tell you the answer to that question.
If the only thing you know is that you put in some controls and the rate continued to go up, even though you hoped that the controls would stop it, that doesn't tell you anything about the controls.
Because you don't know what the rate would have been Without the controls.
If the rate would have been twice as high without controls, that would be invisible to you.
You would just see that the rate continued and maybe got a little worse.
You wouldn't know that it would have been even worse, hypothetically.
Right? So, those are the bad arguments.
Now, can I pause again and say that I'm pro-gun ownership?
I want to say that as clearly as possible.
And all I'm talking about is the bad arguments in favor of gun ownership or against gun control.
There are good arguments.
Use the good ones.
Why would you use the bad arguments when there are good ones?
Here's the good argument.
Guns are good for some people, on average, and bad for others.
So how in the world are you going to legislate that?
The only way you can legislate it is the majority gets what they want, which is sort of what's happening, right?
So the majority in Wyoming says, you know, I don't think we've got a lot of gun violence problems here, but guns sure come in handy if you're in a very spread out territory.
And so they get to vote and have more guns and less control.
And people in Chicago...
Might feel that they're safer with gun controls, and so they locally get to put on a bunch of gun controls.
What's wrong with that?
See, the problem is, here's the other problem we make.
Guns are not safe and guns are not unsafe.
They're neither. And as soon as you're arguing that guns make you less safe or that guns make you more safe, you're into nonsense territory.
The reality, which we all know, is that guns in some situations make you safer, and guns in other situations make you less safe.
Nobody's argued with that.
So if you're in the category of people who largely would be more safe with guns, and I'm probably in that category, I'm in the category of people who have a very legitimate use for a defensive firearm.
Am I right? If you're looking at the demographic of Scott, people who talk in public about controversial things and who can be found, right?
So I could be found if somebody wanted to stalk me hard enough.
And I say things that make people really, really mad at me.
And there are a lot of crazy people in the world.
Don't you think that if you only looked at my specific case as if nobody else existed, just my case, don't you think it would be reasonable for me to say, just for me, that owning a firearm in my specific case makes me safer?
Because, you know, hypothetically, one does not give away one's defensive situation at home.
Am I right? Can we agree on that?
Can we agree that if anybody is talking about their exact defensive situation in their house and they're talking about it in public, that's a really bad idea.
I'm just going to tell you that my house is safe for me, but you don't want to come in if you're not me, right?
So that's all you need to know is that I take care of my own safety.
Can I argue that someone else should not have gun control in their specific situation?
I really can't.
Because I can imagine lots of situations where a person would be more safe if there were more gun controls in their little unique situation.
I think they'd be special cases.
And also, you know, of course, if you made them illegal, there'd be plenty of illegal guns.
That argument still stands.
But here's my point.
Do you buy the basic idea that some people reasonably would feel safer with guns being widely accessible, and that other people would reasonably feel less safe?
Can you accept that argument?
We'll talk about constitutional rights and all that, but do you accept that it's quite reasonable that we don't have the same risk profiles?
So everybody who's arguing that guns should be legal because X would be safer, or they should be illegal because X would be safer, those are not good arguments.
Those are not good arguments at all.
Because it just ignores the obvious that some people would definitely be safer with firearms.
Let's take a more obvious case.
Let's take a retired police officer, say 60 years old, maybe retired early enough to have another career, still has a firearm, keeps it completely locked and safe, lives in a neighborhood in which that person might be called upon to protect themselves or maybe a neighbor.
Should that person have a firearm?
I feel like that makes the world safer, on average.
Every additional firearm causes an additional downside risk.
But on average, I think that would be a plus.
So we should just stop arguing that there's some safer or less safer state we can get to.
You can only change the mix.
You could make it less safe for me to make it more safe for somebody in another state.
You could do that.
But I would resist it.
So we should just talk about self-interest and let the public vote with their votes and vote with their feet.
And mostly, over time, it should work out.
And maybe that's the best you can do in a democracy.
All right. No, no, no.
Let's see. Let me see some other bad arguments here.
Here's my other problem with the gun debate.
It's misdirection.
Don't you think? Now, there's obvious misdirection, meaning that when there's a...
Any kind of political season, and we're in one.
In a political season, everything turns into politics, so you see that.
So that's misdirection in the sense that we're focusing away from the mental health and the tragedy of that toward politics.
But there's another misdirection here that maybe is less intentional, which is that our public schools are like factories to pump out bullies.
So we pump out bullies, and then somebody gets a gun and goes and reacts exactly the way you'd expect in a bully factory.
If somebody is creating a system to crank out bullying, which is what the public schools do, they don't choose to do it.
But let me ask you this.
Have you ever talked to a teenager in the last five years?
Or just heard them talk.
Maybe they're in the backseat of the car.
You just heard them talk. What is the one and only thing they talk about?
There's only one thing.
They only have one topic.
What everybody thinks about them and what they think about other people.
That's it. There's not any other topic.
Now, I don't know if that was always the case.
Was that always the case or was that a social media thing?
I think it's at least accelerated by social media.
So, in my opinion, this gun violence is a natural outgrowth of having all of our children put into bullying factories, so they're guaranteed to be put next to bullies who will bully them, and some of them will break, some of them will get stronger.
Some people will get stronger from adversity, but others will break.
And you should expect that, because you built a system that produces bullies.
Bullies produce mass shooters.
We know that, right?
Does that sound like I'm speculating too much?
Or does that sound like so commonsensical there's nothing to discuss, right?
The schools produce bullies by their design.
And then, you know, not intentionally, but the design guarantees it.
And then bullying creates these loners who feel like they need to be important at least once before they die.
I feel like that's pretty straightforward.
And the reasons that schools are the way they are is largely there's no competition.
So that comes back to teachers' unions.
Teachers' unions are the cause of most of society's problems.
Because if you could teach kids critical thinking skills...
Imagine how they would respond to the fake news if they had critical thinking skills.
Because you don't see it even in most adults.
Let me ask you this.
Compare the people who have been watching me talking about fake news and how to spot it and how to do persuasion and how to spot BS and stuff like that.
Compare this group who sort of, I guess, internally were educating each other.
I host it, but you're also educating me at the same time.
We're sort of getting smarter about what fake news is and how to spot it.
Wouldn't you say that my consistent audience is way ahead of an untrained person in spotting fake news and knowing what to do about it?
Wouldn't you say? Give yourself a compliment if you think that's warranted.
Because I think so.
I think partly I attract that kind of viewer.
And then partly our collective attention to fake news has made us smarter, I think.
I feel like I'm a little better at it.
With your help, I would hope that it's working both ways.
Yeah. I mean, most of you are saying yes.
Right. So imagine if that same skill had been just part of the school curriculum and something that they, you know, gave five minutes to every day.
Imagine five minutes to say, all right, here's some fake news in the headlines.
You know, here's another example of it.
Let's see if you could have spotted this.
And how would you have spotted it?
Imagine that. Imagine creating citizens who could do that.
It wouldn't be that hard.
It's not like these are tough skills.
Alright, so I think that the design of the school system, which is largely caused by teachers' unions preventing any kind of competition, so that they can't evolve to their best state.
Added to that, social media is basically a bullying platform if you give it to kids.
Social media is a tool.
If you give a hammer to a carpenter, they build you a house.
If you give a hammer to a wild, crazy person, they hit you on the head and kill you.
But it's not the hammer's fault.
It's the hammer being applied in the wrong situation.
So if you take social media, which is designed to be the perfect bullying vehicle, and you give it to teenagers, what would you expect...
When they come out of a bullying system, which is school.
So you throw them into a 100% bullying situation, then you give them extra tools to bully, and then you wonder why one of them picks up a gun and slays his classmates, or some other class, I don't know.
And it shouldn't be much of a mystery.
And if you think that the answer is because he has access to guns, I would say that's a supporting variable.
I don't think it's the cause.
Like, the gun didn't cause it.
It made it easier.
You can be pro-gun and still say, oh, yeah, the gun laws did make it easy for this killer to get a gun.
There's no inconsistency there.
If you're going to be pro-gun, you're going to have to accept that this is the cost of it.
If you're not willing to say it out loud, yes, this is the price of it, I'm still willing to be pro-gun.
You need to be able to say it directly.
Otherwise, I don't think you should be in the conversation.
You need to be at least that honest about it.
And I'll say it. I'm saying it directly.
As tragic as these events are, and they're, I mean, on a scale of 1 to 10, children being massacred is 25.
I mean, it's off the scale.
It's off everybody's scale.
It's not even subjective anymore.
I mean, that's so, like, basic biological truth.
So we can't say enough about how horrible it is, but I still favor the Second Amendment and private gun ownership, and that is part of the price.
Now, do I think that you could make some tweaks around the edges that would make things less likely for this to happen?
Yes. Yes, I do.
Do I think we should?
I'm not sure you should listen to my opinion on that.
Because my opinion is 100% driven by my personal safety profile.
That's it. If it doesn't affect me, and I don't think it'll ever affect me, then I don't really care too much.
If I think it would make me less safe...
Then I'm against it. So why should my opinion about what makes me, in my specific little situation, why should my self-interest about that have any impact on you?
So I want to say as clearly as possible I'm not trying to persuade you.
Because I would find that unethical.
Do you agree? Would you agree with my assessment that it would be unethical for me to persuade you on guns in either direction, either pro or for, because my personal safety profile is not yours?
I would be promoting my own personal safety over yours, perhaps.
I'd be basically putting myself above you on safety if I tried to persuade you.
So I can say what I'm happy about, but that's different than you should be happy about it, right?
I'm happy I have the right to own a firearm, although California's kind of tough, but I still have the right.
I would not criticize you if you said, you know, in my specific situation, I think I'd be worse off.
That's an entirely rational thing for you to think.
Might be wrong, but it's rational.
I'm not going to argue with a rational opinion.
So I say bullies are the problem.
Here's a thought experiment, not a recommendation.
Not a recommendation.
Just a thought experiment coming here.
Don't get too panicked.
It goes like this. If we made it legal for kids to kill their bullies, a lot of problems would go away.
That's it. If you just made it legal to kill a bully.
Now here would be the, and again, it's a thought experiment.
I'm not recommending that you make it legal for anybody to kill a bully, especially kids.
I'm hoping we can all understand that.
Here's the thing. We treat bullying like it's a temporary problem.
Am I right? It's like, oh, you got bullied today, so that bully went to do something else, so now you're fine.
It doesn't really work that way.
It's pretty much permanent damage.
Would you agree that bullying can create permanent damage?
I do think some people get tougher from it.
But also, it seems obvious it makes permanent damage to people.
So if somebody is in the process of creating permanent damage to you, what is your legal...
Recourse. What are you allowed to do legally?
Well, I think if somebody's doing any kind of permanent damage to any part of my body, it doesn't matter if it's my brain area or the non-brain area, I believe I have every right to kill them.
Am I right? If somebody was stabbing you in the arm, but you knew that that wasn't going to kill you, you would just bleed and put a Band-Aid on it and, you know, maybe get stitches.
But you would have a legal...
You would legally be able to kill somebody who was trying to stab you, but, like, non-lethally.
You know, they were trying to stab you into your leg and your arm or something.
Right. So he says, why am I listening to this today?
I knew somebody was going to get triggered.
That's the worst pun of the day.
So again, it's not a recommendation because there's no practical way to recommend violence, especially within the children domain.
So I don't recommend any additional violence.
But if we act as if bullying is not permanent damage, you're going to get this.
You're going to get kids who say, well, If you're not going to solve my problem, if you're going to put me in a system where you're going to let somebody permanently damage me every day, even when I tell you, hey, somebody's permanently damaging me.
When I go back to school, somebody's going to permanently damage me again.
And then you're just going to let that happen?
Honestly, I understand the shooters.
Maybe that's the most controversial thing I'll ever say.
Honestly, I totally understand the shooters.
There are lots of crimes that I don't understand that do seem actually random, but the school shooters, I completely understand that.
You put people in a system that guarantees they will be created, and then they get created, and then we act, oh, it's a big surprise.
No, it's not a big surprise.
You created a system that's a factory for this.
Factory creates bullies, bullies create mass shooters.
You got exactly what you designed.
If you design a system that gives you exactly the output you designed it to do, whose problem is that?
Is that the shooter's problem?
Well, it has to be, in terms of legal responsibility.
But it's not.
Let me say that again.
In terms of legal responsibility, it's only the shooter's fault.
Because that's the only way the system works.
But it's not what caused it.
Shooters don't cause themselves.
They do not. It's caused by a system that guarantees we create them.
And then when the news talks about them, they talk about how horrible it is, they're part of the system of creating the next one.
This is clearly a copycat situation.
How do copycats get created?
By the news, right?
Now... This is why I don't...
I'm not even telling you what state this happened.
I'm not giving you numbers of how many died.
I'm not giving you the name of the shooter.
I'm never going to do that.
I'm completely done with that stuff.
Because it obviously is part of a system of making more of it.
I could... Do you think...
Don't you think I could get more clicks if I did the most obvious content?
The most obvious content is, oh, why didn't those police officers go in earlier?
I mean, it's a perfectly good question.
But it's also being handled by everybody, right?
So there are lots of ways that I could get more clicks, but it is so, so immoral, so unethical.
Like... It's one thing to bend the rules a little bit.
Maybe your ethical boundary is a little different than mine.
You can see a little sloppage.
But this was so unethical that the news is talking about this to make more of it.
Because they're getting good coverage.
As long as the coverage is good, they would sell your fucking baby.
They don't care. I mean, that's obvious.
It's obvious in this coverage.
Alright. So, bullies are the problem.
So, here's how I'd fix it.
I got a few ideas.
Seems to me, number one, that children should not be allowed to have social media.
And I don't even want to have a conversation about gun control until you do the obvious stuff.
Do the obvious stuff.
Get the fucking kids off of social media.
All of it. It should be illegal.
Because that's where the bullying happens.
If you think that this murder was the big violence of the week, it's not.
It's a distraction. As horrible as this latest shooting and the other shootings have been, I won't take anything away from the horror of them.
It's also the smaller story.
The bigger story is how many kids are getting bullied every day.
They're being physically, meaning their brains are getting PTSD, they're being physically destroyed by bullies every fucking day.
And we don't even talk about it.
We don't care about it.
Like, unless it's your kid, you don't care.
So, I'm not even going to listen to any gun arguments.
Because these are not serious people.
Serious people would fix the bullying problem, because that's clearly the root cause.
The root cause is not, you know, gun culture.
That makes it easier.
And I'm open to any conversation that would, you know, keep our Second Amendment rights, but there's some easy win.
I'm open to the conversation.
But I would require you to test it first.
You know, show me that it works in some state without making it a slippery slope.
Just show it to me. I'm open to the argument.
There's some state that wants to test anything.
Let them test it. But forget about the bad arguments.
Deal with the root cause, the school systems, the teachers' unions that cause really most of the problems in society, and social media.
If you deal with those, at least you're doing something.
At least you're doing something.
Now, I think the Republicans are missing a move by they should throw the social media argument and the teachers' union argument right back to the Democrats, and they should say, why are we only talking about it after it's too late?
By the time that kid bought a gun, that was too late, right?
I mean, maybe you could have found some way that he would have limited his damage.
But it was too late to save him.
That kid was already destroyed before he picked up that weapon.
And why are we ignoring that?
Why do we ignore that?
Why don't conservatives say, how about we stop creating these people?
If you didn't create them, I wouldn't worry about them finding a gun.
Stop creating them.
But at the very minimum, I would say, here's the deal.
Make it illegal for kids to be on social media, and then we'll have a conversation about gun control.
But until that other conversation is taken seriously, and the bullying in general, how about we treat the bigger problem first, and then we'll treat the smaller problem?
The fact that guns and children and mass shootings are brains on fire...
But as much fire as your brain is experiencing, it's minor compared to how much bullying is happening right now, right now, like right now, with every kid who's in school.
They're all experiencing some kind of horrible situation, it seems like.
Surprised you're not blaming video games?
Well, let me blame video games.
Anybody who has studied hypnosis or persuasion Knows that we do what we think of to do.
If you didn't think of it, you wouldn't do it.
And what you think of the most is what you're most likely to do.
Not because it's a good idea, but because you thought about it the most.
We are that simple.
We are that programmable.
Now, if you take a kid who's never been bullied, And doesn't have any genetic propensity to violence.
And you show him a first-person shooter game, he can play all day long and it doesn't have any impact.
In fact, you probably have children who can play a violent video game all day long and then turn into vegetarians.
Or whatever. So, I would certainly not make the case that entertainment changes everybody to a bad thing.
I would definitely make the case that if first-person shooter games were not popular, that kids wouldn't think of it first.
It wouldn't be top of mind.
So in that way, the entertainment is absolutely a contributing factor.
Now, does that mean that you should change it?
I'm open to the conversation that it shouldn't be changed even if it is causing the problem.
Because freedom of speech.
Because, you know, the Second Amendment is a right.
So I generally favor rights unless there's a really, really, really compelling reason that you need some kind of restriction.
And there are. There are lots of cases where there are compelling reasons.
So... Yes.
But if you think I'm not going to blame video games, then you don't know much about me.
Video games absolutely put it top of mind.
It just doesn't activate 99% of people.
It activates 1%.
But it definitely activates them.
If they had never seen a first-person shooter game, it just wouldn't even occur to them to go find a gun and do that.
Now, the same goes for movies and TV, right?
So I'm not saying that video games are the one thing.
It applies to the whole genre.
But I think that video games logically would prime you more because you're the one actually doing it.
Whereas watching it seems like more of a passive thing probably would prime you less.
Somebody says it activates the same people as movies.
It might, except that, in theory, the video game would activate you more because you're putting more of your body into the process of consuming it.
You're actually moving and changing and controlling things.
So that should, in theory, that would prime you to be more of a shooter.
But again, only that 1%.
Most people won't be affected at all.
Yeah, now add VR, as I'm saying.
Comment on locals.
If you add VR to the mix, the priming might be even more powerful.
Or it might solve it.
That's the other problem. Maybe you make VR that is so gross that if somebody did it a few times, they couldn't handle it.
Imagine shooting somebody in VR. And seeing an actual wound.
I don't know if most people could handle an actual wound of a real person that was so well simulated it was like a virtual world situation.
Eh, could go either way.
Could make somebody more violent.
They might say, I kind of like this.
But I think most people would say, I don't ever want to see this in real life.
Something like that. There was an argument that violent movies...
You know, the Sam Peckinpah kind of movies made violence in the real world less likely.
Because people got grossed out by the fake violence, so when they thought of doing it in the real world, they already had a negative association because they were grossed out about it already.
I don't know. I can imagine it working both ways.
I can imagine some people saying, ooh, I love that violence, I want to do some.
And some people say, ugh, and they're less likely to do it.
Teach people how to get revenge on bullies by being successful.
Well, the problem is not everybody finds success even by their own definition of whatever that is.
So it would be great if you could train people to say, just go be successful and your bully won't bother you mentally anymore.
But it's not as available as it should be.
And I would argue that the people who have the greatest ability to be successful may not be the ones who are getting bullied the most.
I mean, clearly everybody gets bullied, but it's a matter of degree.
All right. Yeah, I would agree.
All right. The last several days I've been experiencing something weird by my standards.
Which is people starting out disagreeing with me and then getting really quiet when I'm done.
I don't know if it's just the topics.
But it was real shocking with the willpower thing that I did yesterday about diet.
I really expected at the end of it I would have just as much pushback as when I started.
And it just got quiet.
And I'm seeing a little bit of that today.
Because the gun topic usually just...
It has people attacking me like crazy, even if they're fans, even if they like what I do.
And I'm not seeing that today.
Today it looks like people are sort of going with it, and just a little bit of pushback.
Jason says, because it was boring.
That could be it. That could be it.
All right. Well, is there any topic I missed?
The Johnny Depp trial continues.
The Ukraine war continues.
Sussman continues.
These are all sort of things just continuing.
The NRA convention.
Let the regular news talk about the hypocrisy.
I don't like to do the hypocrisy stories.
They're too boring. They're just too ordinary, I guess.
China. Yeah, China.
What about China? There's so much to say about China at the moment.
All right, so I continue to be confused about the global supply chain problem and the food shortage problem.
I don't understand why it looks like these are both civilization-ending problems, but we're not really acting like that.
Is it because they aren't?
Is it because the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters is doing what it normally does?
Well, every time so far, which is that...
When we see a problem with enough time to respond, maybe we're just doing workarounds.
Are we just responding well?
Is that all that's happening?
Because I'm sitting in my house in 2022, theoretically in the middle of a gigantic supply chain shortage, and at the moment, I'm unaware of anything I have a shortage of or that would...
I guess there's some electronics that's going to take a month or so to get here, but I don't really care if electronics take a month.
I mean, it's optional electronics.
My phone gets here right away.
Buying a car is hard, but if you're not buying a car...
Even Dot's pretzels are back.
Yeah, even the shampoo I used is back, although that is actually a little bit of shortage.
There were a host of things that disappeared during the pandemic that are all back.
Are any of you having any kind of...
Eggs?
Eggs should not be a shortage because they're local, right?
Are eggs almost always local, or am I saying something dumb?
I just assumed eggs were local-ish.
But maybe that's just a dumb statement.
Pet food, maybe specific brands, but there's plenty of pet food.
Yeah, shampoo for what?
It's a good question.
Shampoo for what? I'm going to answer that because there's a medical answer.
I use a medicated shampoo.
But I use it on other parts of my body as well.
So it's basically a skin treatment.
It's not really...
I don't shampoo my hair, obviously.
Sorry. Sorry.
Didn't mean to give you that information.
Low T. What?
All right. What if you figured out the magic formula for success but it's too late to apply it?
Well, it's never too late.
Just your odds probably go down as you reach a certain age.
Alright, diesel shortages are here.
So are there trucks that actually are abandoned because of that?
I guess the thing I don't know is are we turning the corner on these shortages or are they at the breaking point where everything's going to fall apart?
My guess is that we're so good at logistics and transportation, and our communication now is so good, that we probably can adjust pretty quickly to a lot of things.
I would think. For example, how long does it take somebody to invent a smaller boat that can unload larger boats at sea?
Is that a thing? You take a container or two at a time...
