Episode 1765 Scott Adams: The News Is Slow So Let's Talk About The Nature Of Reality And Fake News.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Biden admin "patching some holes" in border wall
Epstein, Ghislaine and the client list
Civilian casualties in Ukraine?
Tele-Working out, back to office trend
The leaked abortion draft paper
Putin's view of America and Europe's actions
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Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to The Highlight of Civilization.
And, if you've completed the logic here, it's the highlight of civilization and the highlight of your day.
Wow. That's a pretty good situation.
And you happen to be here for it.
What are the odds of that? Fifteen billion years of the universe evolving.
Most of it's just empty, cold, dark, lifeless space.
But where you are, oh, it's all happening.
It's happening big time.
So, pretty lucky?
Okay, 13.6 billion years if you want to be like that.
If you want to be like that.
But how would you like to be like this?
The kind of people who will never settle for an ordinary day when a great day can be had.
And all they need is...
That's right. That's all they need.
All they need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tanker, chaliser, steiner, cantine, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind.
They would fill it with their favorite beverage.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
Feel your serotonin getting a little boost too?
You might. You might.
Oxytocin coming online.
Tingle in the back of your neck.
Here it comes. Go!
Simultaneous sip. I have never felt better.
So, you want to talk about good news and stuff?
Let's just do funny stories and good news today.
I think all the people who report the bad news are on vacation or something.
All the bad news bears are on vacation.
So, it's a slow news week, and so the Biden administration has confessed that they're going to restart some border wall construction.
What? What?
Talk about a slow news day thing to slip in there.
And we're going to be what we call is just patching some holes.
So they're going to patch some holes, which is totally different, totally different than building a fence across a border to patch some holes.
So if you catch the difference, it's spelled the same.
P-A-T-C-H space S-O-M-E space H-O-L-E-S, right?
It's spelled the same, but it's pronounced different.
So, very different.
Trump was going to patch the holes, and Biden's going to patch some holes, patch some holes.
But that's completely different than patch the holes.
You see the difference?
No, patch the holes.
Same amount of budget, potentially.
But instead, you want to say, patch some holes.
What are you doing with the money now?
Passing some holes. What?
What did you say? Speak up.
I'm a hole. I'm patching them.
I'm patching them. Just little patches.
What? I'm patching the holes.
Shut up. Leave me alone.
All right. Here's a story that the longer it goes, the funnier it is.
And by funnier, I mean it's not funny, but it's funny.
How many people by now must know for sure what happened to Epstein?
Don't you think that number of people is probably growing over time?
Can you think of any other story that so many people would potentially Know the actual answer.
Like, they'd know the whole story.
What do you think?
And how about the whole story about why the client list hasn't come out yet?
I'm not sure I care if it does or not.
Frankly, it's...
Who knows? But...
What do you think?
Or let me ask you this.
What entity or entities...
Or a person could keep this whole Epstein thing so secret so long.
Who could do that?
Somebody says big money.
Do you think big money could do it?
Do you think money alone would be enough to plug every hole that would need to get plugged?
Because you wouldn't even know where to put the money.
Somebody says Hillary Clinton, but surely there would be Some Republicans who knew what happened, they were just close enough to it, right?
Is there any possibility it's anybody bought some intelligence agency or agencies?
There's not really any chance it's anything bought, right?
Oh, interesting hypothesis going by there.
But what's interesting about this is the audacity of it, isn't it?
We kind of know because we don't know.
We do know that there's no way this could be a...
We do know that nothing about this is normal.
And we do know that there are only a few ways that something this big could be kept this secret this long.
And there's only one entity that's big enough We're powerful enough to control the media on both the left and the right.
So just figure out who that is.
And maybe it's more than one organization.
Maybe more than one have to work together to get it done.
Who knows? Greg says he keeps tuning in because I appeal to his elitist sensibilities.
That's what we're trying to do here.
Because you are the elite.
I think somebody told you that recently.
You are the elite.
They're not the elite.
You are. I don't mean me.
I mean we. I mean we are the elite.
All right. If I knew the truth about Epstein, I would not tell you.
How many other people would say the same thing?
Because the usual suspects, the people who know what's happening in the real world, if they actually knew the answer to the question, they wouldn't tell you.
I wouldn't. I wouldn't tell you.
So, here's a story that is sad and disturbing, but maybe you can get some benefit from it.
There is a TV personality that I've always said to myself, well, there is some lucky TV personality.
Imagine being good-looking, being born at just the right time, tall, have all your hair, you're good on TV, and you've got the easiest job in the world, which is just talking to people on camera.
Can you imagine...
How awesome that would be.
Well, I'm talking about Carson Daly, who for years in his career has been talking to awesome people, famous people usually, on camera about music and then, well, I guess it's also music.
Because he's on that show, what is it, the singing show?
But it turns out that the 48-year-old we learned is suffering from generalized anxiety disorder.
Which is basically being super afraid of a whole bunch of different things.
The thing that makes it generalized is not some specific fear like a fear of flying.
It's some generalized thing that can just paralyze him anywhere.
And apparently one of the places that he has his biggest problems is actually just before the camera starts rolling on his job, which I imagined was the easiest job in the world for him.
Now, I would certainly understand if you said, man, that would be the scariest job in the world, yeah, because I'd be afraid of talking in public.
But I've seen him talk in public a lot of times.
Have you ever seen Carson Daly...
Look anything but completely in control when he was talking to other people.
Never. The reason he's been doing it for so long is because he's so good at it.
He always looks comfortable with everybody.
That's sort of the secret of making that job work.
But it turns out he must be a good actor because he's got this crippling anxiety.
And so the reason I bring this up is Happiness is sort of a relative thing.
Have you noticed? If you grew up relatively poor, but everybody you knew was poor, you'd probably feel better than if everybody else was doing well and you weren't.
So you end up judging your own actual happiness based on a comparison to a stranger or strangers.
And it's just natural.
There's nothing wrong with you if you're doing that.
So, I always find it really useful to apply what I call the basket case theory to anybody you think is having a better day than you are.
Do you know how many times you've thought to yourself, well, I wouldn't mind being that cartoonist guy.
Look at what he's got going for him.
Because on paper, on paper, it's pretty amazing, right?
If you were to do a little checklist of what things I've got working for me, you'd be like, whoa, okay, he's got the money, he's got the audience, blah, blah, blah.
Handsome, got that working for me, obviously.
Good looking. Two words that mean largely the same thing.
But... Humility, exactly.
And then there's my humility.
And you're saying to yourself, I wish I could have all those things and also as humility.
Wouldn't that be an amazing package?
But, what do you know about my problems?
Do you think you would?
I mean, really. If I had...
Somebody says anger.
I'm not sure that's my biggest problem.
Really? Do people think I have an anger problem?
I would probably know that if I had an anger problem.
I don't have an anger problem.
At all. I have anger solutions.
That's completely different.
An anger solution is when you say to yourself, I think I'm going to get really angry for about 60 seconds.
And then I'm going to break something that I didn't want anyway.
And it's going to feel really good when I'm done.
Just give me 60 seconds.
And then I'll just break something Or yell at something or swear at something.
And 60 seconds later, my pulse is completely baselined.
Now, if you work differently than that, I get it, because I'm not even sure that's normal.
I think it's a little bit unusual, but probably not so rare that other people here in the comments haven't experienced it.
Sometimes you just need to punch something, not a person, right?
No violence. But sometimes you just need to break your printer, or sometimes you just need to do something.
But my point is, think of Carson Daly, give him a good thought, and the next time you think somebody else is just killing it, be it Kanye West, or Ye, or whatever you want to call him today, or whoever, he probably got some issues.
Probably got some issues.
So that should make you happier, knowing that nobody's killing it much better than you are.
All right. Do you think that things in the world are better than ever or worse than ever?
Well, not ever.
But let's say, do you think that things are trending sharply negative or positive?
I'll give you those two choices.
Sharply negative.
Is the world trending negative or is it trending positive?
Somebody said both.
Okay, you probably...
You did well on your SATs.
Whoever said both.
Because the first thing you should do is recognize that it's not binary, for God's sakes.
Don't let me trap you into a stupid binary question.
Of course, it's all complicated, right?
Some things are better, some things are worse.
But here is another thing to keep in mind.
So the first thing to keep in mind is that even a Carson Daly can have some serious problems.
So maybe you're not so bad off yourself.
The next thing is that there's a reason things seem worse.
Well, in fact, the world is way better.
Alright, so let me say that as my starting bid.
The world is way better, and trending way better yet.
There are certainly problem areas, but do you know why you think everything's worse?
It's just the nature of the media.
The media needs to report what's going wrong.
Nobody really reports on what got 5% better, but if things that really, really matter get 5% better every year, Over the course of your lifetime, things are going to be really, really better, which is actually exactly what we see.
But it's not a story.
So since, you know, if it bleeds, it leads, and the horse race sort of competition of politics, you know, draws all of our attention.
So you are basically drawn to the flaw, not to the portrait.
And as long as that's the case, you will simultaneously feel like things are getting worse while they're getting way better.
You know, I always talk about the golden age, and then it's sort of the running joke, where's my flying car?
Where's my golden age?
It's like, uh, wasn't that supposed to kick in a few years ago?
And the answer is, it did.
It did. In fact, you couldn't even stop it.
The golden age is coming so fast...
A few years from now, you're going to look back and say, all that happened?
In five years, you're going to look back and you will be amazed how different things are in positive ways.
Examples? Sure.
In five years, we're going to be rolling out modular nuclear reactors.
Which will largely be a solution to climate change.
I told you about an invention that it's apparently some plentiful normal material you can put together that will absorb moisture out of a desert sky and create drinking water in plentiful supply.
It just sits there just sort of absorbing and sprinkling into your can, I guess.
So you can basically create water out of nothing.
Bill Gates is creating toilets that you don't even need sewage connections to, I think.
Housing will be completely revamped.
Transportation will be self-driving cars.
AI will change things in ways you can't even believe.
Think about how hard it is just to eat.
Like, we're having problems with our supply chain and stuff, but it'll be fine.
Supply chain will be fine.
Overall, it'll be fine.
And even stuff like California's drought, as devastating as it is, probably is something we could work out if we tried hard enough.
For example, running for governor is Michael Schellenberger.
Who would be far more, you know, I'm going to say progressive.
I'm not sure it's the right use of the word in this case.
But far more, let's say, forward-thinking in terms of investing in the infrastructure in the state.
Because he's not locked into some real political jail that other people are in.
So, well, you need somebody like a Michael Schellenberger To be solutions focused.
Because I think we're politically focused in California.
That's our problem. But basically everything's getting better.
It's just that there will be pockets of things that we'll focus on over and over again.
What about the Ukraine-Russia war?
Do you think that's going to escalate into a nuclear war?
Or do you think the worst risk is already over?
It's probably already over.
It was our biggest problem, and it just sort of, I don't know, fizzled.
Now, if you're in Ukraine, it's still the biggest problem in the world.
But it didn't boil into a world war.
Somebody says, next China.
Why are we focused on Taiwan and China?
Because we focus on whatever is the worst possible thing.
If I check back in 10 years...
Probably the world did not end because of anything that happened with China and Taiwan.
Probably. Probably somehow we figured out a way to get by.
Now, that doesn't mean that you won't have more devastations like Ukraine is being devastated.
But those, unfortunately, from an historical point of view, are smallish compared to the past.
When the news reports on the casualties in Ukraine, have you noticed this?
That when they talk about the civilian casualties in Ukraine, they're a little bit quiet about it.
Do you know why? Why is the news unusually quiet about the civilian casualties in Ukraine?
Because there are very few.
That's right. Does anybody even know the number?
I can tell you how many Russian soldiers allegedly were killed.
Can't you? Watch this.
How many Russian soldiers were allegedly killed, according to Ukraine and U.S. sources?
We don't know that it's true. How many?
Watch. Watch in the answers how many people know the answer to that question.
How many Russian soldiers were killed?
The answer is around 30,000.
Now, that's a number that people who follow the news probably have in the back of their head.
How many Americans died in Vietnam?
Just Americans.
It's around 50,000, right?
And how many Russian soldiers died in the entire Afghanistan war in Russia?
The Russian...
Yeah, or Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
That was somewhere in that neighborhood of 30,000 or so, right?
So, now here's the next question.
So that's the size of these wars.
Now, how many Ukrainian civilians have died so far in the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
And do you know those numbers, or are you guessing?
I see a few guesses here.
Somebody says hundreds.
Somebody said 200. 1,000.
All right, but here's the thing.
You don't know, do you?
You don't know. Now, compare that.
So it's probably in the low thousands, if you had to guess.
Or is it even hundreds?
I don't know. I mean, maybe more people will starve, ultimately, unfortunately, than got killed directly.
But... But think about the fact that you don't know that.
The reason that you don't know that is that whoever is controlling how you think about it doesn't want you to know that this is a very civilian...
I'm not going to say friendly, because they destroyed their entire country.
They have nothing to go back to.
But it's unusually low number of civilian casualties, isn't it?
Or maybe we just don't know.
It's possible. Alright, now, how many people died in World War II? Alright, so now we know that this war was in that 30,000 Russians, a few thousand Ukrainian civilians, probably 15,000 or so Ukrainian military.
Yeah, World War II was about 60 million.
That was World War II. So in my father's lifetime, in my father's lifetime, it was...
And who knows how well they can even count it.
60 million in one war.
Now compare that to Ukraine, and Ukraine looks like we've figured out war, doesn't it?
If you were to look at it from the largest perspective of history, dispassionately, you'd say, whoa, these human beings...
Their wars were getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
And then they realized, oh shoot, this isn't working.
And then after that, their wars started trending smaller.
And now each war seems, even our biggest war now, seems smaller than our smallest wars used to be.
So it looks like a long-term trend toward less war.
At least less war at scale.
There may be more skirmishes, but fewer wars.
Well, now we do have fentanyl, yes.
Fentil is definitely trending the wrong direction.
Somebody says, let's solve the man-woman relationship fail.
Well, I'll tell you one thing that's going to have to change is that we're locked into a certain way that relationships should be.
You know, one man, one woman, have a family.
And I think that's the best solution for lots and lots of people.
But... There are going to be hundreds of millions of people for whom that doesn't work at all.
So, yeah, there's going to have to be some other kind of solution for social life and sex and all that.
I don't know what it's going to be, but there's no way that the current system is sustainable, which doesn't mean that we'll all die.
It just means we'll evolve to some better system.
Elon Musk...
Tweeted, he said, often when we announce something, we hear simultaneous criticism that it's already been done, but also that it's impossible.
Have you ever heard me say that?
I'm just wondering if you've ever heard me say that.
Yeah, I can't remember if I ever made a Dilbert comic about it.
Maybe somebody remembers.
Because I know I've talked about it a number of times in public.
Yeah, so some of you were saying you've heard me say it.
And I wonder if this is just the general experience of everybody who creates stuff.
Like anybody who has ideas in public.
This pattern is just so consistent.
It can't be done, and also somebody already did it.
Every time.
So, I guess he has the same experience.
Axios is reporting that teleworking is moving back to the office.
So, you know that big permanent shift we imagined?
Turns out that's not happening.
For all the reasons you'd imagine.
So only 7.4% of American workers are teleworking because of COVID at this point, down from a pandemic-era high of around 35%.
Now that's only the ones teleworking because of COVID. It's not all the teleworkers.
And one University of Chicago study, and this is all in Axios today, found that remote workers put in longer hours but were less productive.
What do you think of that? Do you think that people working at home, and remember that kids and animals are at home, and spouses, do you think that working at home people put in more hours but they're less productive?
Yes. I'm going to say that's a big yes.
Now, it definitely depends on your specific situation and specific job.
If you didn't have any distractions at home and you're the kind of person who can really concentrate, then home would be better.
But for most of us, I find it almost impossible to work at home.
The reason I have to get up four hours before my dog and the rest of anybody else who lives in my house, and I always have, is because otherwise I would never get anything done.
Do you know that all day long people create emergencies that only I can fix?
Does anybody else have that experience?
All day long people are generating emergencies that only I can fix.
And they all have some kind of weird time element to them.
That doesn't seem to be true for any problem I ever have.
I rarely am forcing other people to, you know, solve my problem.
Although I have to admit, I did do that a number of times this past week.
Because I had more problems than usual.
And I did get help.
But typically...
Oh, examples?
Examples would be...
I'll just make one up, right?
This is not real. This is the sort of thing that happens all day long.
I hear water leaking somewhere.
Well, what are you going to do?
You're not going to say, I'll get to it later.
I hear water leaking in your house.
Do you know how many times somebody's come into my work environment to tell me there's a gas leak, a fire, smoke, a water leak?
It's just all day long.
It's just one fucking thing after another.
My phone rings.
People are knocking on my door to tell me about my water leaks.
All the time.
Just that one little problem.
Just water leaks. It's just all day long.
Did you know there's water running into the street?
Yeah, I'll look into it.
Did you know that your tree fell down in your front yard?
I'll look into it. Did you know that there's somebody looking suspicious in front of your house?
I didn't know that.
But now I know that.
And now I've got to stop anything and look into it.
And almost all of these things are you have to look immediately.
Or there's a king snake by the front door.
What do you do? You say, oh, that'll take care of itself.
They did. But still, you don't really just ignore that stuff.
So if you work at home, you're losing flow all day long.
And if you have any kind of a creative or programming job where you need to get into a zone and stay there, I could probably do that better at work in a cubicle.
Because the cubicle has so much boringness, you might as well work.
But home is just nothing but distraction.
All right. CNN has a little bit of a cats on the roof element to it here.
And once again, I would like to point out that, and I'll ask you if you think this is true, am I the first person you heard say this?
So now this is now part of CNN's site where CNN is saying about the leaked opinion on abortion that we expect to be law or an opinion from the court.
So CNN says that supporters of abortion rights are clinging to the fact that Alito's opinion was a draft and hope it only reflects an opening salvo written after the justice cast initial votes at conference.
And that votes can change during deliberations.
Sometimes majority opinions fizzle into concurrences or even dissents.
Other justices could be...
Here's the part, specifically.
Other justices could be simultaneously working on separate opinions, hoping to pick off votes from Alito's draft or to weaken the thrust of his opinion.
Now, I think the smart money still says that the opinion will be just what you think it will be.
You know, the leak.
But I am the first person you probably heard say...
A draft isn't what you think it is.
That the nature of drafts is that it's part of a process of figuring out what you think.
It's not always the result of what you think.
And that at their level of operation, by the time you get to the Supreme Court, and you've got clerks who can write stuff for you, etc., writing it down is just part of the thinking it through part.
Because you don't want to have an opinion, and then when you go to write it down, it doesn't work on paper.
Because that's a thing. And anybody who's done any complicated opinions knows it's a thing.
If you can't write it down in a way that it makes sense on paper, you didn't have it figured out yet.
So it's part of the process.
So what do you think?
Is there any possibility whatsoever that the court will either pull back or it was never really a finalized decision?
you think there's any chance that it won't be what do you think yeah opinions are not law That's true. This is how the court works.
Your take is not unique.
Now, I'm not going to say my take was unique.
But as a public figure, I think I'm the first person who warned you, don't take a draft seriously.
Now, I will admit that the news did report...
A draft is not the same thing as an opinion, so it could change.
But I think I put a little more weight into that opinion that a draft should not be trusted.
Anyway, I only tell you these things because the nature of this live stream is I try to make predictions.
So if I get one right or if I get one wrong, I try to pause and tell you about it.
Your job is to make sure I don't forget if I get one wrong.
So that's where you have to remind me.
It'll be too embarrassing if it's going by in the comments and I don't mention it.
All right. There's an interesting story about what Putin thinks about the United States, which doesn't mean that he's right.
Everybody's got their version of events.
But Putin's version of events is that from the first moment he was coming to power, and really from the fall of the Soviet Union, that the United States was working hard to destroy Russia, or to degrade it.
Do you think that's true?
First of all, do you think Putin's characterization that the United States and probably Europe were actively trying to just grind Russia into the dirt?
I would say yes.
And it seems to have continued at least through the Clinton administration and at least through the Obama administration.
It does look like the United States was trying to grind Russia into oblivion.
Now, Suppose, instead of doing these weird resets, where in public you say, like Obama and Hillary tried to do, hey, let's be friends instead of being enemies.
I feel like one of the things you would have to do before you could do that is to give Putin a complete stage to let him complain about what the United States has done to Russia so far.
Which doesn't mean we excuse everything he's done, because we should put that out there too.
But I feel as if we ever wanted to get on the other side of this, as in ever find a way to work with Putin, and maybe he's just the devil and there's no way to do it.
I don't rule that out. I'm a reasonable person who knows there are just some people who keep pushing as long as they can push, and that's really all there is to it.
But... If you thought that any of this has to do with how he feels mistreated or that he feels continuously attacked by the West, wouldn't it be interesting to let him tell us what our country has been doing to Russia for the last 30 years?
Wouldn't you want to know that?
Because he has some pretty interesting theories, some of it's probably true, about what the US has done to him.
Now, it wouldn't mean anything out of context, because we would also need to know what he did to us, blah, blah, blah.
So, if it sounds like I'm taking Putin's side, nothing like that's happening.
Just to hear that clearly, I'm not taking Putin's side about anything.
I'm saying that if you wanted to get past whatever this is that causes us not to be able to work with him, and at the moment it's Ukraine, but in the long, long term, I think you'd want to hear what he has to say.
And if you can't listen to it, well, then maybe you shouldn't trust your own government as much as they'd like you to.
So now there's another report about the Ukrainian forces counterattacking and taking back some town I never heard of from Russian forces.
Have we reached the point in the Ukraine-Russia conflict where everybody can be everybody?
Because it looks like that's what the status quo will look like.
Let me say it again. It will be the side where, when you talk about Russia versus Ukraine, both sides can beat both sides anywhere.
But it's only because everything will be too lightly defended.
Russia will not have enough forces to defend every kind of offense or counteroffensive that the Ukrainians will do, right?
So in theory, shouldn't you see Ukraine putting extra forces in one place, they retake a town that Russia held, Then Russia says, hey, we don't like that.
And then they amass some forces, and they take back that town.
But in the meantime, Ukraine has found another lightly defended town, and they retook it.
And then Russia says, hey, I guess we'd better move some forces from this one.
So have they not achieved permanent whack-a-mole status?
Meaning that both sides can beat both sides everywhere.
At least in that, you know, that, let's say that The eastern region is taking...
I see somebody say no, but give me...
Why?
You don't think that Ukraine could retake any smallish place it wanted if it wanted to put its resources there?
It just couldn't hold it.
And Russia could take it back and wouldn't be able to hold it.
So I see a lot of people say no, and I don't think that you're wrong.
Don't think you're wrong. But I do think that I'm going to stick with my prediction that there's going to be a whole lot of taking towns and losing towns and taking towns back because nobody's going to put enough forces in there to keep it permanently.
And nobody's going to stop fighting, it looks like.
So I guess they're just going to whack-a-mole for a while.
All right. Well, it was a very light news day.
And so the best I could do is tell you that other people have worse problems than you do sometimes.
The world is actually trending in the right direction.
The odds of a nuclear war with Russia, I think, are at the lowest point they've been in a while.
I mean, at least in the last several weeks.
I'm not really seeing North Korea complain too much.
I do see the economy of the United States still has strong employment.
When we have our predicted recession in the first quarter, have you noticed all the smart people are saying there's going to be a recession in the first quarter?
Now, recessions are painful for people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, of course.
But they're also, unfortunately, necessary.
They're cruel but necessary.
The recessions are just resets.
It's sort of cleaning out the system and gets rid of some inefficiencies.
Yeah, it's literally necessary.
It's like forest fires. Yeah, we don't like a forest fire, but you have to have them.
You know, it cleans out the forest and stuff like that.
So, I think we're in this weird situation Where we're in the maintenance part of a long-term cycle, and the maintenance part's no fun, because we like the bubble part.
But the bubble part will be back.
We just have to do, I don't know, four to five years of maintenance.
So I wouldn't be, well, I'm not going to give you any financial advice, but I'll tell you what I'm doing.
I'm not going to sell any stocks for four or five years.
Now, let me ask you this.
Is crypto here to stay, now that it had such a meltdown?
I see yeses and nos.
People saying yes are probably the people who own some crypto.
Let me ask you this.
What would happen if a government, let's say our government, decided to do a...
Government guarantee of your balance like the FDIC does for banks.
So how much does the bank insure, the government insure of your bank?
$250,000?
$200,000. I think it's $250,000.
Yeah, $250,000.
So imagine if the United States government said, if you use a certain kind of wallet...
Maybe they'd have to limit it to what kind of wallet you use.
But if you used a certain kind of wallet, they would guarantee your losses in crypto, just like they do for banks.
But maybe the only thing they guarantee is not that somebody steals it from you.
Maybe that's still your problem.
But that crypto, I don't know, the blockchain doesn't fall apart or have some kind of systemic failure, I guess.
I don't know. Would that make any difference?
Somebody says, get out of here, Satan, with your government regulations.
You're probably right about that.
It would ruin it.
Could be. But I'll tell you what keeps me from having more crypto.
I don't trust myself holding too much crypto.
Do you? I feel like I trust myself to put money in the stock market.
Or even a bank.
But I don't trust myself...
To navigate a crypto wallet sufficiently accurately enough that somebody wouldn't steal all of it.
So I would say that I'm personally way under-invested compared to what I would be because I don't trust the technology.
Or let me say it a different way.
I don't trust myself using that technology.
It's beyond my risk level for just the interface.
Yeah. Hard wallet, cold storage.
I mean, by the time you get into the good technology and you actually know how to do it, you've got to learn a lot to get to that point.
You're with Charlie Munger on crypto, it's all just crap.
Young people do trust themselves, but I think young people also don't have much to lose.
I keep hearing the stories about the person who made a million dollars in crypto and then wrote it and mortgaged some houses to buy some more, only to find out it crashed.
But that makes sense if you're young, you can recover from it.
I mean, up to a point. Would you ever move to another country?
Yes. I wouldn't move to a country with a smaller military.
Yet. So it's no at the moment.
But the thing I worry the most is not being protected.
Yeah, Australia seems a little exposed out there.
I hate to say it in Australia, but I just look at the map, and I'm like...
You know, in the short run, Australia's fine.
Five, ten years. In a hundred years...
Australia's going to look like an island destination of China, I'm afraid.
Alright. Australia's the worst for freedom, somebody says.
Maybe so. Alright, I've got nothing else to say today, and I don't want to take your time, because you've got a great day coming up.
How many of you feel better because you attended coffee with Scott Adams?
How many of you feel a little bit better now than you did right at the beginning?
Yeah, yeah, you do.
A lot of you do. Is there another Elon tweet, or do you want me to talk about the one I already talked about?
Oh, Mark, you have a birthday coming up?
All right. Show rocks.
What's that mean?
Show rocks.
Always impressed by your ability to talk.
Thank you.
How many of you know that I once lost the ability to talk and my greatest goal in life was to be able to do exactly what I'm doing right now?
Which is to talk to you with a perfect voice.
According to me.
So that was one of several incurable conditions that I cured.
By the way, I keep hearing from people that I have, in fact, cured the sneeze.
And in at least one case, cured hiccups.
I did. And the technique, if you haven't heard, is that if you're about to have a real sneeze, you just imagine that you had the real sneeze first.
And the imagining the sneeze can erase the actual one.
Because it's just a mental reflex to sneeze.
There's nothing in your nose that really needs to come out.
So of all the things that I've ever done in my life...
I don't think anything is more weird or wonderful than the fact that I cured the common sneeze.
Not everyone, right?
I think some sneezes, you can't stop like that.
But that would be the weirdest thing that should be in my Wikipedia, but won't be.
Yeah. So I cured shy bladder, cured spasmonic dysphonia, cured a focal dystonia once.
I got it back, but I still have to get rid of that.
And now the common sneeze.
That's a lot of cures. I've cured obesity.
I've cured over-drinking.
I've cured high blood pressure.
I've cured pre-diabetes.
That's all true, by the way.
You know, when I jokingly say I have more cures than Jesus, it's not that lots of people don't.
I mean, there are probably lots of people who wrote a book about how to do something smarter and probably saved a lot of lives, too.
Probably every doctor has saved more lives than Jesus, if you just add up the numbers.
So it's not that amazing.
But I have cured a number of incurable diseases for myself and for other people.
That's just true. It's the weirdest thing.
Cure anxiety and you will be God.
I have cured anxiety.
So... You have not heard of my anxiety cure?
You want to try it right now?
Does anybody have any anxiety right now that you'd like to be cured of?
Because I could do that.
A number of you do.
So a number of you are feeling some general anxiety right now, right?
Listen to my voice.
And as I'm talking...
Watch how your anxiety will start to take care of itself.
It might happen quickly, or it might happen gradually, or it might happen in steps where it looks like it's less than more than way less than a little bit more than way less.
It could go any of those directions.
But here's all you have to do.
Visualize yourself in a simulated environment.
That you're literally made of digits, just zeros and ones, and just look at your actual environment, your walls, the furniture, the screen, and just imagine that they're simulated and that you're in a game.
And the moment you can imagine yourself in the game, you can also imagine yourself as not being very important because you're just software.
So what happens to you in this game doesn't really matter, because if something bad happens, you're reborn, because that's how games work, and you're just software.
You're just zeros and ones.
Now just live in this imagined world.
It doesn't have to be real, and you don't have to believe in the simulation.
It doesn't change your religion.
This is just a mental exercise.
The mental exercise is just imagine none of it's real.
You can do the same thing by imagining that you're a tiny robot inside, or you're a tiny person inside a huge robot, and you're actually behind your eyes looking out.
And you picture yourself as this tiny little creature inside a robot, and then you tell the robot to move itself, and then you watch it.
So you're telling yourself to move your hand, and then you observe that it's moving.
Have you ever thought about how weird that is?
Do it. Tell your brain to move your hand and then watch it happen.
How is this even happening?
How is it that my thought...
I mean, I know there's a nervous system and a brain and all that, but there's sort of a miracle to it that I'm thinking and it's happening in front of me.
And if you simply go through this exercise of making your hand do something and then watch it happen...
It takes all the other thoughts in the world and compresses them into just this moment.
And all you're doing is just looking at your hand move.
What I'm doing is just taking each digit and touching it to my thumb, which is a little exercise I did once when I lost my ability to draw.
And all those just keep you focused.
And keep telling yourself it's not happening on its own.
You're actually ordering each of these fingers to do that.
Now you're taking back complete control of your mind-body connection.
And as you're doing it, it doesn't matter what you're looking at, just observe yourself.
Just watch yourself moving.
Know that you're telling yourself to do it.
And that you're a programmable object in a programmable simulation.
And once you put yourself in that mind, in the comments, how many of you are already feeling...
More relaxed. How many of you already feel that something has been lifted from your chest?
Now you see in the comments a number of people are feeling it already.
Now the reason that I have people tell you that they're feeling it is that there is a social contagion element to it.
In the same way that other people can make you happier or sadder or whatever, just by entering the room, knowing that these other comments are going by, and the people just like you are feeling it work, will have an effect on you.
Because you're like them, and the fact that it works on other people probably means that it's going to work on you, if not at the same rate or in the same pace, but over time.
And by tonight, when you're laying in bed, you're going to imagine my voice again.
You're going to remember it just like you hear it now.
And when you remember my voice, it's going to remind you that when you listened to me in the morning, it relaxed you.
And you felt that you were taking back control of your mind and body connection and letting all those other things that don't matter Those generalized concerns, they don't matter.
They don't touch you.
They're not there.
They're not with you in the room.
They're not even there.
They don't exist.
History doesn't exist.
All those things in your past, they don't exist.
They're gone. All those things in the future that you worry about, the future isn't here.
And you're usually battered Knowing what's going to happen.
It'll be fine. It's been fine up to this point.
It'll probably be fine tomorrow.
And if you have a rough patch, you'll get past it.
You are well on your way to having less anxiety.
And already, you can feel the improvement.
Many of you can. And on this note, I'm going to sign off on the YouTube stream.
I'll keep just for a minute on locals.
And those of you who are smart enough to stay around are already feeling a change.
And if you come back tomorrow, it'll be reinforced.
And every time you hear my voice, it's going to make you feel more relaxed, happier, and you're going to feel that that little dopamine faucet in your head, the one that, if you think just right, The dopamine turns on.
And your whole body feels better.
And then your mind. But you're going to find that little knob by just pushing around in there.
And when you push around long enough and you hit that knob, just remember where it was so you can find it again.
And now, you're going to go forth and have an amazing day.
