Episode 1756 Scott Adams: Another Day Pretending To Be Good People. Join Me For a Simultaneous Sip
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Bullies bullied me for tweeting about bullies
CNN reporting on Uvalde
Arming yourself based on perceived danger
Occupying a country in age of drones
Israel's school security techniques
One punk with a gun just changed US politics
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Today we'll reach new highs, new levels of dopamine and oxytocin, and darn it, we're going to have a good time.
No matter what craziness is happening in the world, and all you need to take it up to another level is the simultaneous sip, and for that all you need is...
A cup or a mug or a glass of tanker's yellow sustain?
A canteen jug or flask, a vessel of mankind, filled with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The perplexingly profound professor himself.
Somebody's calling me. I like it.
Wordplay. And now, the simultaneous sip.
Go. Yeah, you all look better now.
I've got my coffee goggles on.
I thought you were sexy before, but now?
So, let's talk about some of the things that have happened.
Elon Musk was complaining that the word billionaire is used as a pejorative.
Why is it an insult to be a billionaire?
Good question. And he asked this question on Twitter, a Twitter poll.
He said, who do you trust less?
Real question. Billionaires or politicians?
Politicians, 76% of them, of people who answered, said they trusted politicians less than billionaires.
But 24% said billionaires, they would trust even less than politicians.
24%. 24%.
That's roughly a quarter.
A quarter rounds off to about 25%, roughly.
And if you're new to my live stream, you have no idea what that inside joke was about.
Somebody will tell you. So I've told you before how my news consumption is weird because sometimes I'll be consuming the news and then the news is about me.
And I'll think, okay, that's weird.
Why am I consuming this news and it's about me?
So yesterday I'm reading Twitter and And I'm looking over at the trending terms, and there's my name.
And I'm like, oh, shit.
The last thing you want to do is trend on Twitter, really.
It doesn't mean something good.
It always means that something bad's happening.
So I was trending on Twitter because of a tweet or two I did on bullies.
And here's the weird thing that happened.
I tweeted about bullies being a problem, and it attracted all the bullies.
So all the people with no awareness, self-awareness whatsoever, came to seriously dump on me with obviously the intention of making me feel bad.
You could tell by the tweets it was clearly their intention to make me personally feel bad.
Who does that?
I mean, seriously. Who takes the time just to make somebody feel bad?
Bullies, right?
So I was noticing there were several distinct type of bullies.
And so I started to catalog them a little bit.
I thought you would enjoy it.
And then I thought I would...
It looks like I... Oh, here we go.
So the first type is the bullies.
So these are trolls who just drop by to be toxic.
They're not really disagreeing so much.
It's not really about what you said.
They just drop by to be toxic.
And an example would be...
This actually happened. Somebody tweeted, when I saw Scott Adams trending on Twitter, I was hoping it meant he died.
So somebody came to Twitter...
To say in my timeline that they wish I had died.
Now, what causes that to happen to a person?
Like, what damage did they have in their life that turned them into that?
Then the other type of trolls, one of my favorite groups, is the Soylent Greens.
I call them the Soylent Greens because they always say whatever is the most obvious thing one would say in whatever situation.
So if there's a tweet or a story about a new food source, what do the Soylent Greens say?
It's Soylent Green!
Because it reminds them of the movie.
It's the most obvious thing you would say in every situation.
When I do a tweet somebody doesn't like, The Soylent Greens come in and say, well, I guess we just found out who was the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.
Why do they say that?
Because it's the most obvious thing you could say.
Oh, he's a cartoonist.
He's saying something we don't like.
I get it. He's like a character in his cartoon!
Sometimes they come in and they refer to me as the creator of Garfield.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!
It's almost as good as the pointy-ear boss comment or Soylent Green.
Sometimes they talk about The Matrix, that movie, but usually it's Soylent Green.
Then you've got the bad reading comprehension trolls.
They need a better name for that.
The BRCTs, bad reading comprehensions.
They're the ones who misinterpret what you said, and then they act really indignant and insulting to their own hallucination of what you said.
So an example would be, so somebody's saying to me, so you're saying we should give babies hand grenades.
And then they will go off on what a bad idea it is to give babies hand grenades.
To which I'll say, no, I don't think I recommended hand grenades to babies, but you go do you.
So those are the bad reading comprehension trolls.
Then there are the Keiths.
This is based on the Keith Olbermann personality.
The Keiths are the trolls who ignore the content of the tweet entirely, and they're just there to insult you.
That's it. They just came to insult you.
They have no interest in the actual content of the tweet, no pushback, no context, no argument.
So those are the Keiths.
And then there are the holier-than-thous.
You've seen them, right?
The holier-than-thous aren't going to comment about the quality of your tweet.
They're going to comment about the fact that you would even mention such a topic at such a time.
Oh my God, I'm holier than you, and I certainly wouldn't bring up this topic now.
I'm holier than you, and I certainly wouldn't be talking about this in public, because I'm holier than thou.
So, those are the types.
And part of the reason that I'm mentioning the types is because I created a little guide that I'm just going to cut and paste when the trolls come by.
Because I want my trolls to spend a little time figuring out which one they are.
Make them think past the sale a little bit.
Because the sale is that you're a troll and therefore should be ignored.
But if I give them a list of what kind of troll they are but don't specify which one they are on the list, I'll make them do homework to figure out what kind of troll they are.
It's a pretty good technique.
It's worked so far.
Some of the bullies on Twitter are actually reporting me to Twitter safety Fake reports.
So the trolls are actually literally trying to get me kicked off of Twitter by reporting me multiple times for something that basically didn't happen.
And the tweet shows it didn't happen.
So... How did they throw you into talking about trolls all morning?
Well, I think the trolls are the only thing that's interesting that's happening today.
Because the news, unfortunately, is just repeat news.
Another horrible tragedy involving a gun.
There's not much else new to say, is there?
Like, we've sort of run out of things to say.
If Matthew McConaughey becomes a major part of a story, Because of something he said about it, there's nothing left to say about the story.
We should call that the Matthew McConaughey rule.
It says if you have to bring him into the story, there's just nothing left to say.
It's still important.
I'm not saying you minimize the story.
I'm just saying there's nothing new to say at all.
So let's get some Matthew McConaughey quotes in there.
Here's how CNN, in an opinion piece, referred to this situation.
Talked about the shooting, of course.
And it talked about the fact that there were several people speaking out forcefully against...
Against the tragedy, I guess.
And so here's how this was framed in an opinion piece on CNN's site.
And yet, Steve Kerr, Matthew McConaughey, and Beto O'Rourke all serve as courageous models for a progressive, capital W, white male identity that challenges systems of oppression, Speaks truth to power and confronts the division of our current moment by publicly highlighting the gap between the nation's professed values and a more bitter reality that allows 19 children to be killed in such grotesque fashion.
Now, if I'm looking at a story about an Hispanic kid who, at least that's his background I guess, who killed a bunch of other kids I'm not sure that the first place I would have gone to understand it, as a framework for understanding it, is the fact that three progressive white males had weighed in against the oppression of our systems.
I feel as if that had nothing to do with anything.
What exactly did the ethnicity and gender of these three people have to do with anything?
There were just three people who made a little noise.
They just happened to be three adult white males.
But I don't think that's the important part of the story, is it?
The important part of the story is that three adult white males have the same opinion on it.
There's nothing here.
But to try to torture this story into some kind of a racial story, you really have to push on that to make it racial, don't you?
You really got to push on it.
But they did. They pushed hard.
Here's some context also from CNN. And I'm not sure how misleading this is.
But it was something I didn't know.
So I'm going to tell you this...
From CNN, I feel like there's some context missing, and maybe you can fill it in.
But here's their claim.
That there are more gun deaths in Texas by far than in any other state, according to the CDC. And that where there are the most guns, ownership, there is the most gun deaths.
And apparently it's really clearly delineated.
The more guns in the state...
The more gun deaths.
Now, do you believe that's, first of all, true?
Now, we're talking only about percentages.
So we're not talking about absolute numbers.
Absolute numbers are just based on the size of the state, basically.
So not absolute numbers, but the percentage of gun deaths as a percentage of, say, 100,000.
So here's what they say.
And again, maybe the data's all wrong, because...
Yeah, so it's a per capita thing, right?
So here's what they claim. That California, by comparison to Texas, has only 8.5 gun deaths per 100,000, where Texas has over 14.
So percentage-wise, that's a really big difference.
And Texas has far more guns than California and less strict gun laws.
But they're not talking about the gun laws in this case.
This context is only about number of guns.
So forget about the laws.
Just look like the number of guns.
So according to CNN, and again, this is not a credible source.
Can we agree on that? I think you'll be less...
Your hair will be less on fire if I agree with you that CNN is not a credible source.
Unfortunately, it's not.
So I don't know if they're leaving out any context or not.
Fewer gun laws. Okay, thank you for that correction.
So they give the list of the...
Here are the states with the most guns...
They also have the most gun deaths.
So at the top is Mississippi, number two, Louisiana, and going down the list, Wyoming, Missouri, Alabama, and Alaska.
So they have by far the most gun deaths and by far the most gun ownership, which is actually lower than I thought.
If you were going to guess what percentage of adults live in a household with a gun, so only one person would have to have the gun...
And the other adults don't even have to own the gun personally, but it's in the house.
What percentage of people live in a house with a gun in it?
What did you think? The answer is around half.
So it doesn't mean half of the people have guns.
It means that half of the people live in a house where at least one person has a gun.
Which means that way fewer than half of the people own a gun.
Right, probably 25% on a gun, something like that.
Is that about right? So, does that track with what you thought it would be?
I thought it would be higher, actually.
I would have guessed, probably would have guessed, I don't know, maybe not much higher.
I probably would have guessed 60%, so I would have been pretty off, but not terribly, I guess.
So, What do you think of that?
So the correlation, according to this article, is very strong.
So they're not talking about gun laws, right?
We're not talking about the laws, just the raw number of guns per 100,000 people.
Do you believe that the more guns, the more gun deaths?
Do you believe that?
So forget about why.
We're not talking about why that's true.
But just do you believe the raw data...
That where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.
A lot of you say no. A lot of you say no.
Here's why I think it might be true.
Because let me ask you this question.
If you knew you were moving someplace where a lot of people got shot, would you be more or less likely to buy a gun for yourself?
If you live in a place where people are likely to be shot, do you buy more guns for yourself?
Yes, right? Don't you arm yourself more based on how much danger there is?
I would. Is there somebody who would say, there are so many people getting shot here, I should get rid of my gun?
Does anybody do that?
The gun danger is here so much, I should get rid of my gun.
Some do. I mean, there are people all over the board on everything, right?
But I think more often people are going to say, I think I need a gun if I'm going to live in this place.
Don't you think? And then what happens?
And then they also don't distinguish what they mean by gun deaths.
Does a gun death include the police?
You don't know, do you?
Do gun deaths include the police shooting people in the midst of a crime?
Probably. Probably, because they don't break it out.
I mean, the article doesn't say we don't count that.
What about suicides?
Yeah. Do you think that there are more guns in places where people are more likely to commit suicide?
Probably. Probably.
Whatever it is that makes you have a lot of guns in a place probably makes it not a good place to live.
So I live in a neighborhood that probably has, well, that's not true.
My neighborhood has a lot of hidden Republicans.
A lot of people who talk to me silently, you know, they'll whisper to me at the gym.
I'll go to the gym and people will say, I love your show.
I watch it every day.
They actually can't say it out loud where I live.
People cannot say out loud that they watch my live stream where I live.
They literally whisper it.
But there are a lot of them. There are a lot of hidden Republicans where I live.
And I think we have low gun ownership relative to other places.
And I think the reason we have low gun ownership is not a lot of people get shot in my neighborhood.
I've never heard of one.
I've never heard of anybody getting shot in my neighborhood.
My town, yes.
But not my neighborhood.
I don't know. Maybe it's happened.
So I don't really...
I think a lot of my neighbors would say, well, we don't need a gun.
I live where nobody gets shot.
Why would you need one? But if I moved to Oakland...
Or somebody moved to Oakland who did not own a gun?
Do you think they might consider getting one?
I think so. So I don't put too much credibility in these numbers, but they're definitely a red flag, meaning that if this is true, I think you'd have to take it seriously.
I don't know if this number is telling us anything useful, but if it's useful...
I wouldn't ignore it. Now, that doesn't mean you should give up your gun rights.
That's a different question.
But you should know how much they cost, right?
Don't you want to know how much your rights cost?
Give me a price tag.
I want this right, but here's the price.
Now, I'm willing to say out loud...
That I think the Second Amendment is worth the number of deaths that gun ownership probably creates.
I think it's worth it.
Because if you're only looking at the number of people who are dying every year, you're looking at the wrong thing.
Gun ownership also keeps Russia from attacking you and trying to conquer you, right?
I mean, imagine anybody trying to conquer and hold territory in the United States with this level of gun ownership.
I feel like it's just impossible.
So you have to look at what is the expected value of future reduction and risk.
And then you'd have to bring that forward to today and look at how many people are dying today.
And then you'd have to include the today plus the future risk and make it one decision.
If the only thing you did is say, how can we stop gun deaths today?
I think I would agree.
I'd still need more information.
But I would agree with the idea that if you took away people's guns, there'd probably be fewer gun deaths.
I don't think that's crazy.
Anyway, do you? And by the way, let me be clear.
I'm pro-Second Amendment, so don't take anybody's guns away.
But do you think if they did, there would be fewer gun deaths?
I think so. I think so.
I don't know. I mean, it's something you could test.
You could test it in one area and see if it worked.
It might be too hard to do now because there's so many guns, so nothing that you do now makes any difference, maybe.
There's just too many guns. So I think we've passed some point of no return.
I don't think you could reduce them at this point in any practical way.
All right, well, anyway, let's talk about Russian sanctions.
So apparently the Russian transportation minister...
Said recently that the Western sanctions on Russia have, quote, practically broken all logistic corridors used by the country for trade.
So in other words, essentially there's just no way for Russia to trade with the outside world at the moment.
Using their normal process.
It's completely broken.
Which was the point of the sanctions.
But they are looking at workarounds, so it doesn't mean that they're dead.
It just means that they're trying harder to do workarounds.
But it does look like the sanctions have teeth.
Wouldn't you say? It looks like the sanctions have teeth.
Maybe not enough, but they seem pretty toothy.
There's a report that Russia is taking out of mothballs tanks that are 50 years old and moving them into Ukraine to try to hold the territory that they've already conquered.
Now, what does it tell you that they have to take out of mothballs 50-year-old tanks?
Because you know they don't want to use a 50-year-old tank because they're very exploity.
They're easy to destroy.
It's sort of like basically a death box for the person in it during war.
So is that telling you that Russia is stretched thin and will have trouble holding the captured territory?
Because I always thought that the hard part was keeping it.
The hard part isn't conquering it because they had enough bullets and guns and bombs to essentially level the entire place, which is what they do.
So there's no doubt that they could take it.
But I was asking the other day, in the age of drones, Ukrainians will have, you know, bigger and better and smarter and more drones every day.
They'll have more, better drones.
At what point does it become impossible for Russia to hold territory?
Because if you need a tank, the tank is just going to go boom.
Because the tank is the easiest thing to find.
Because you're going to have plenty of people on the ground who just pick up the phone and say, I'm standing right next to a Russian tank.
Can you send a drone over here and take care of this thing?
And then it will happen.
Right? And if they don't have tanks and they don't have armored transports, how do they get their troops back and forth from anywhere?
I feel as if the troops would be so vulnerable during an occupation That in the age of drones, you can't occupy anymore.
So this will be the test.
So let me put that out there as a statement of prediction.
That you can't occupy a modern country that has access to unlimited drones.
They can't be done.
So let's test it. I say it can't be done.
Others would say, oh, but the anti-drone technology is also getting better.
They can just shoot their anti-drone thing in the air and knock it down.
Yeah, but isn't there a number?
Isn't there a number of drones that will conquer any drone defense?
And can't we quite certainly get past the number of drones, and Ukraine can, past the number of drones that can be stopped?
Drones are not unlimited, of course, but can we get to the number that makes them a dominant force?
I think it's just a matter of time.
Not in a year. But in three years, could Ukraine have so many drones that are just blackening the sky over Crimea?
Maybe. I think a swarm defense, or a swarm offense especially, would be pretty powerful.
Now, I imagine that there will be the invention of something called drone hunter-killer drones.
Probably already exist.
They must already exist, right?
Wouldn't the best drone defense be your own drones?
No, that's not good, because then you can't use your anti-drone technology.
If you were jamming drones, you'd be jamming your own drones.
So, I guess you can't use drones against drones too much, because you can't use the jamming then.
Drone catchers?
Yeah. They have all that technology.
All right. CNN is saying that that school shooter was a bullied loner.
And then I saw one interview with a classmate who said, oh, they're getting it wrong.
He's not a bullied loner.
He is actually, he was a psychopath.
And he was the bully.
He was the one who hurt animals, said his classmate.
And that he was clearly just the deranged bully, bad seed.
But CNN's reporting it differently, calling him a bullied loner.
I would say that that is fog-of-war reporting.
We don't really know about this guy yet.
But, don't you think that bullied people become bullies?
Pretty much always. If you get bullied, it kind of turns you into one, right?
Do you think this kid might have been bullied or abused when he was a child in some context?
We don't hear about his father, so we don't know what the deal is there.
But do you think he was ever bullied or abused?
I'm going to say probably.
Probably. Not an excuse.
Probably. Not an excuse, but probably.
Now, apparently Israel has much better experience guarding their schools.
What is it that Israel does to guard their schools that we don't?
Does anybody know?
They have armed guards, they have locked doors.
So the first part is they have physical security.
But the claim from an article by, I guess, David Hosni was saying that their success is not so much that they have armed guards.
I think they do.
But it's their intelligence, meaning the information that they have about their public.
So apparently they can identify the shooters before they shoot.
You don't think we can do that too?
You don't think that artificial intelligence could identify a loner who had no friends and was interested in firearms?
Do you think you could find a teenage male who didn't have friends, said violent things on social media, and had an unusual interest in firearms of a certain type?
Of course it could.
Of course it could.
There's no way...
You could convince me that we can't identify these people ahead of time.
Because they all post on social media.
Every one of them. I don't know if you'll ever see a mass shooter who doesn't have a social media account.
I'll bet you won't.
There's a prediction for you.
There won't be another mass killer...
Who doesn't have social media?
Unless it's for political purposes.
If it's politics or real terrorism, that's different.
But what are these standard school shooter situations where they're trying to be famous?
Christchurch.
Somebody says the Christchurch...
Did he not have social media?
Is that what you're saying? He did.
I thought he did. All right.
If you ever lived in Texas, you would understand that physical security will not work.
I agree with that.
Physical security will have a limit because, let's say you have one guard at a door, and there are lots of things behind that door.
Don't you just shoot the guard first?
Because the guard doesn't see it coming, right?
You just walk up to the guard like every other kid, take your weapon out, bam, the guard is dead first.
I'm not sure the guard would make any difference.
Now, if you had multiple guards, maybe the other ones could get there faster, etc.
But there's a real limit to what you can do with armed guards.
It's better than nothing.
And I don't think there had been a school shooter where there was an armed guard at the very door that they went through.
I don't know that that's happened.
So I would say that probably the future, whether you like it or not, is profiling.
So if it works in Israel and we can't do nothing, we're going to do that.
AI can detect a breach to the perimeter.
Maybe. Then, apparently, the school children are taught to stay in place.
Do you think that staying in place is the best strategy if there's an active shooter?
What do you think? I'm no expert on this, but it seems...
Because you can imagine...
I think it depends entirely upon how quickly help is coming, doesn't it?
If there's no help coming, like right away, I'd run.
But if there's help coming in five minutes, I might try to last behind the locked door, wouldn't you say?
So I don't know. I think every situation is different, so you'd have to know the specifics.
So we still have this question of the police allegedly forming a perimeter and not going in to stop the shooter.
I would warn you that we're still in fog of war on this situation.
I suspect that we're going to find out something about what the police knew or didn't know that will change your analysis of whether they were all incompetent, horrible people who should have gone in but didn't.
Now maybe we'll find out it's exactly what it looks like.
They didn't want to risk their own lives.
Maybe. But maybe there's more to the story.
I saw a post from somebody who was a lead SWAT team officer.
Now, this is somebody who can speak to this situation with some experience, which I can't.
And the SWAT team officer said that all the people commenting on Twitter about the police who didn't go in have never had anybody shoot at them before.
And the SWAT team guy says, until you've had people shooting at you, you really shouldn't be the one to judge them about going in.
To which I say, you know what?
If that didn't come from a SWAT team lead, I might not take it so seriously.
But I'm taking it seriously.
And I'm going to say this.
Do you think that the SWAT teams have the same training as a general police officer who would be guarding a school?
Or let me ask you, in a less kind way, do you think that the school guards are the best and the brightest of the police or law enforcement organizations?
Do you think they take their good people, and good is, you know, in quotes, do you think they take their best performers and have them guard schools?
Or do they say, hey, you'd be good for the SWAT team?
Now remember that even the guy who was the lead of the SWAT team is very aware that once the bullets are flying, it's hard to get anybody to go into a room.
Do you think that the people who were guarding schools had the right training and were the right type of people to blaze into a gunfight?
The SWAT team people are trained to do it.
They're selected based on their presumed ability to do it.
So I would guess that a SWAT team person, somebody with that training, would have gone in or would have known not to.
I suppose there are two possibilities.
Would have known better or would have gone in.
But I don't think there were any SWAT team trained police officers, were there?
And, you know, it's easy for us to all say, oh, we would have gone in...
If you put me in that situation, I would have gone in.
And I actually think that.
I think that exactly.
I think that if I thought kids were being slaughtered, I would risk my life to stop it.
Except I've never been shot at.
I don't know what that feels like.
To the point of the head of the SWAT team, I don't know what that feels like.
What does my body do when a bullet zings past my head and I know that if I open that door there's going to be a lot more of them?
What does your body do?
Because I don't know if my body can move.
Do you? I mean, you don't know until you do it, right?
Until you're in that situation, do you really know?
Because I feel like, you know, when I imagine it, I'm all brave.
Like, oh, I'm not going to let them kill the kids on my watch.
I'll run in there with my gun blazing and do what has to be done.
But would I? Would I? Would I? I'd like to think I would.
But you don't know.
You don't know until you're in the situation.
Right. I like to think that if I'd been trained...
Probably yes. If I'm not trained for that kind of situation, I don't know, honestly.
Somebody said a parent would, and I'm going to give you that as a stipulated truth.
Somebody who was a parent, or not even a parent of those kids, but they were just actively a parent of the same age, probably would go in.
Because they would just see their own kid, and they would just go in.
I mean, in their mind, they would see their kid, even if their kid wasn't there.
So I would agree with you.
If you were actually a parent of kids that age, your brain would just say, go.
Probably. All right.
But I'm just saying, have a little bit of understanding that humans still are humans.
They don't do supernatural things.
So when we judge these people, keep that in mind.
I don't mind that you have a harsh judgment of them because they do have those jobs.
I mean, if that's literally your job, you've got a lot of explaining to do if you're not doing it.
There's some polls from Rasmussen.
Yesterday there was a poll that said there's a huge gap in voter excitement.
So Republicans are far more excited about voting in the congressional midterms, like a lot.
So there's an eight-point excitement gap.
Which should suggest that Republicans will do well.
But, as of today, also from Rasmussen, it turns out that that generic ballot thing where they say, how would a generic Republican do in the midterms against a generic Democrat?
And then they say, well, it looks like the generic Republican would beat them by nine points or whatever.
So that's what it was. It was a nine-point difference that the Republican had an advantage in a hypothetical match.
That went down to six, almost entirely because of independents, who were plus 18 for Republicans, and now they're only plus 11.
So basically the news about the shooting, I think, just stripped off a bunch of independents.
So here we were, coasting into the election season with Republicans just going to win everything.
One guy with an AR... Has completely changed the polling numbers.
One idiot with a gun changed the entire structure of the United States.
That just happened.
One guy with a gun just changed politics in the United States in a substantial way.
In a way that could change how we act for years.
So that's kind of scary.
It does show you that anything can happen.
So there's nothing about the midterm elections that's predictable, except that you can't predict it.
All right. I believe that's all I had to say.
So... The bullies are after me today.
You might see that I pasted a little statement of the troll types.
So if you run into any of the types of trolls, you can paste that in and let them think about which kind they are.
Thank you. All right.
What is it? Some local police officers entered the school to rescue their own children.
God, the story just gets uglier and uglier, doesn't it?
All right.
So I wouldn't think that the generic vote thing tells you as much as you think it does, because people still end up voting for their party for the most part.
Pardon?
Response was ugly, yeah.
Not claiming about current...
What number of innocent lives lost in a large enough population should be ignored?
No.
I don't know. Yeah, stop publishing their names and the problem will stop.
I don't think so. I used to think that if you didn't publish their names, you would get less of it.
But I think that's simplistic.
Because I think the people doing it know that they'll be famous even for the event.
So I don't think it's the actual remember your name part that matters to them.
I think it's just doing something.
That's my guess. So I don't think changing the name makes a difference.
I personally am not going to mention their names because I don't like giving them any presumed benefit at all.
But I think that's the smallest part of it.
That's interesting.
Over our locals, somebody's saying we should show their faces, because usually their face has a bullet in it.
So if you show the shooter shot to death, maybe that would make a difference.
The suicidal will not care if they die.
Yeah, once they're suicidal, I guess that's by definition.
Did the Buffalo coverage trigger the other guy?
Certainly. Certainly.
Do you think there's any chance that the news coverage about the other Buffalo shooter, you don't think that that encouraged this shooter?
Of course it did. Of course it did.
You only do the things you can imagine.
That's all you have to know.
People only do things they imagine.
If the only news had been about stabbings, probably there'd be more stabbings.
Because that's what you can imagine.
You imagine what you've heard of.
All right.
Former FBI agent was chatting online with a Buffalo shooter.
Okay.
There's not much more to say about these shootings, so I feel like I'm not going to.
Although, probably, it seems like every day there's a new reason to talk about it.
All right, is there anything I forgot that you need to hear about?
No I think that all shooters are influenced by all shooters.
I don't think it has to do with who's a white supremacist and who's not.
I think just the action is enough to trigger people.
Oh, yeah. So Jack Dorsey left the board of Twitter, and Elon Musk's tweet about it was, Jack off the board.
Jack off the board.
Achimptomatic. Okay, that's pretty good.
Somebody got monkeypox, but they're achimptomatic.
Wordplay. Feels like we never got the real story about the Vegas shooter.
Yeah. But I think the real story had to do with something in the Vegas shooter's head.
I don't think there's anything beyond that.
Keep talking, Scott. Kids have to wait until you're done.
All right. Well, I do think we're done here.
And... Oh, do you think that Beto interrupting the press conference was a win for Democrats?
Yes, I do. I do.
I think that...
It was actually probably a successful political stunt.
Because he was playing to the base, right?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that...
How did I forget to mention that?
That was definitely in my notes.
That Saudi Arabia has figured out how to get a rare...
Earth mineral out of the ocean at an economical rate.
I thought I wrote that one down.
So I think it's the lithium for batteries.
So the rare earth minerals are not rare in the sense that they're only in some places.
They're actually spread all over everything.
It's just that it's such trace amounts that it's hard to collect at all economically.
So they figured out somehow how to get it out of the ocean.
And to get it economically, they say.
Now, yeah, so they're not rare.
They're just hard to harvest.
And when you do harvest them, it's bad for the environment often, if you use the older techniques.
And so that's part of the reason that China can do it.
We can't. They don't have the same environmental restrictions.
So I do think that modern technology will probably find us ways to get these rare earth minerals better and cheaper wherever they are.
So I don't think we're going to have to depend on other countries after a while.
Oh yes, and then also Japan has decided to reopen all of their closed nuclear reactors.
All of them. So you could not have a stronger statement in favor of nuclear energy than Japan opening all of their closed nuclear plants.
That should be the beginning and the end of the entire conversation.
If you knew that, now we do, then I think that means something.
All right. You know about Diablo.
Diablo is coming back online, right?
Yeah. Lithium is not a rare earth mineral, I'm being told.
