Episode 1766 Scott Adams: Everything Is Broken But I'll Tell you How To Fix It
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Top 10 Democrat HOAX list
Top 10 Republican HOAX list
Twitter wags the dog
Kim Dotcom on financial armageddon
Population collapse
Tom Cruise opinion on Psychiatry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
Coffee with Scott Adams, it never gets worse, it only gets better every single day.
In fact, you could probably feel the tingle.
Can you? Yeah.
You're starting to quiver a little bit, starting to feel better, and every moment that you are signed on to this, You're going to feel a little bit better.
And all you need to take it up to an unbelievable level is a cup or mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now. Go! Oh, so good.
So, so good.
All right. Well, Politico has an article that says that President Joe Biden is exasperated that his poll numbers are worse than Donald Trump's.
Could you imagine...
Doing this one last mission as a politician.
You're Joe Biden, it's several years ago, and you say, you know, only I can save the country from this orange menace.
And then he dedicates the closing years of his life, you know, the few that are left for him to enjoy his grandkids or whatever.
And he puts all of his energy into it, and when he gets there, finally, he saved the world from Donald Trump.
And then the poll numbers say, You know, we kind of prefer Trump, actually.
Compared to you. Compared to you?
I'm not saying anything bad about you.
I'm just saying we slightly compared him.
We preferred him.
Just slightly preferred him.
Can you imagine the failure that that would feel like?
You tried to save the world, and then when you were done and you thought you'd really accomplished something, the world says, you know, turns out we didn't need to be saved.
At least not by you.
So, Biden's solution to this is rather than make good decisions and lead the country in a productive way, what he really needs to do is travel more.
That's his solution.
He's going to travel more so that he can highlight his administration's wonderful accomplishments.
Now, what do you think of that?
Do you think the real problem is that the news has not been giving him a fair shake?
What? No, I don't think that's the problem.
Could you imagine if the news treated Biden the way they treated Trump?
Just imagine what the polls would look like if Biden had one week of what Trump put up with every day.
It would be insanely funny.
I mean, Biden's approval record would be basically zero.
Well, and the good news...
The New York Times had two stories about cancer cures.
Different kinds of cancers.
But there were small studies that would need to be reproduced.
But in one of them, everybody in the trial got better.
What? It was a small trial, but basically just everybody got better.
I mean, you know, that's pretty impressive.
I've never even heard of that.
Have you ever heard of that? I think it was maybe 18 people or something.
It was pretty small. But every one of them just got cured.
I've never heard of that.
I mean, that's certainly encouraging.
I don't want to get too happy about it too soon, but that's pretty encouraging.
So there's something with pancreatic cancer.
Somebody got cured of pancreatic cancer.
That's the first time ever, isn't it?
Am I wrong about that?
I always thought pancreatic was the one that you can't do anything about.
Yeah, these are specific cancers.
I'm not talking about cancer as a category.
Right? These are very specific.
There was an anal one and a pancreatic one.
Rectal one, I guess. It came back.
It will come back, somebody says.
Maybe. Could be.
Anyway, I like to think that maybe some of this is true.
So I've been having fun with my Democrat hoax list.
It's a list of top ten hoaxes.
I put it in the form of a quiz.
And have you noticed how handy it is if you follow me on Twitter?
That you just whip out the top ten list of hoaxes and just paste it for your troll.
And your troll will just start going crazy.
Because it's a crazy maker if you're on the left.
There are too many things on the list to deal with.
And you can tell that at least some of them have gotcha.
Probably, I assume.
And then other people will pour in to say, if you believe this list, it actually is pretty handy.
Now, I'm going to challenge your independent thought.
Are you ready for this?
Are you ready for this?
You are the smartest audience in all of politics.
That actually might be true, by the way.
Let me say that again, because it's sort of a shocking thing to say.
But I think it might actually literally be true that this is the smartest audience in politics.
I think so. Because it's the only audience who gets a continuous dose of, well, let's look at this the smart way.
Nobody else does that.
Do they?
I mean, nobody else is even trying to do it, as far as I know.
But there's one really big glaring thing that I haven't been able to do because I don't think I could get away with it with my own audience.
I don't think I could get away with it.
And that would be a top ten hoax list that people on the right believe.
I can't do that yet, can I? You know I can't.
Because I would lose my audience.
So what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to do that for me.
So I want you to...
You can do it here, but you can also do it on Twitter.
Tell me what you think are the top ten hoaxes that people on the right believe that make a difference.
Uranium One would be on my list, yes.
But that's kind of old news.
I think I'd keep it to...
Pizzagate, I don't know that anybody believes that now, do they?
Pizzagate was a temporary one that people did believe.
That's sort of part of Q, I think.
Maybe that's a subset of Q. Somebody says the drinking bleach hoax is almost true.
Is it? Some facts, yeah.
So if I were to say, okay, you got this wrong because the science says this, but you believe this, I can't get away with that.
Because the people on the right don't believe science.
Should they? Probably not.
Probably not. It's not irrational to not believe science anymore.
It used to be. But not anymore.
It's pretty obvious that a lot of the science is fake.
We just don't know which is fake and what's real.
So how would you come up with a Republican list?
Because a Republican list, I think, would have more disagree-with-science stuff on it.
But that doesn't mean you're wrong, does it?
Disagreeing with science doesn't mean you're wrong anymore.
It used to, sort of, usually.
Yeah, I don't know if I can do it.
They're not really apples and oranges.
But if you can do it, it would be really helpful.
Make me a list of hoaxes that Republicans believe.
All right. And by the way, if you can't do that, if you can't do that, ask yourself why.
It's probably a problem with you.
It's probably not because there aren't any hoaxes.
It's probably a problem with you.
Now, I'm telling you straight up, I can't make that list.
Because if I did, then I would lose my ability to have an audience, and then, you know, the cost would be higher than the benefit.
But you can. So make me a list of hoaxes.
We'll see what we can do with that.
All right. Well, here's some fake news, I think.
So on Fox News, they're reporting that the CDC met with representatives of the teachers' union several times as they were trying to decide what the CDC policy on masks would be.
Now, the implication is that the CDC got their so-called science from the teachers' unions instead of science itself.
So that's the nature of the story.
It doesn't say it as directly as I just said it, but the way it's presented is sort of as a question, you know?
Hey, were they using the teachers' unions and ignoring science?
To which I say, fake news, fake news.
Now, I think I can call fake news on this better than other people, because I'm literally the number one critic of teachers' unions in the United States.
Literally, nobody has a harder line against the teachers' unions than I do.
And a lot of people don't like them.
But nobody has a harder line as I do, because I say they're the source of systemic racism.
In addition to the source of other badness.
So I hate the teachers' unions for reasons that the right would like, but also reasons that the left should like.
The left should like to have better schools for people of color, better schools for low-income people, better schools for black Americans.
The left should like all that.
That's what I want. And I think the teachers' unions are the obstacle to that.
So nobody hates the teachers' unions more than I do.
But can we grow up a little bit?
Let's grow up a little bit.
You're the head of the CDC and you're going to make a decision about schools and masks.
You think you're not going to talk to the teachers' unions several times?
They're the main stakeholders.
Or, you know, there are some of them.
Of course you are. You should talk to them a lot.
Now, that doesn't mean that you take their advice over science, but there's no evidence of that.
There's no evidence that the CDC listened, at least in this story, there's no evidence that the CDC listened to the teachers' unions, listened to science, decided that they were not the same, and then decided to side with the teachers' unions.
That didn't really happen.
Or, let me say, it's not presented in any kind of evidence that was suggested.
The only thing this story tells us is that the CDC did exactly what you'd want them to do.
They talked to the stakeholders multiple times.
That's an A+. That's A+. You get promoted for that.
You don't get criticized for that.
I'm seeing tons of pushback here.
Nope, nope, nope. Alright, stop saying nope.
You have to add something besides N-O-P-E. That's nothing.
Alright? Don't make me get on you.
You know I don't like this.
You know I don't like it when you just say no.
Because you have room for a reason.
Tell me what your reason is.
Alright? Or just don't comment.
Alright? So, if I were going to rate this one, I would rate it fake news.
How comfortable would you be with that?
And by the way, keep in mind, I think probably the CDC did take too much guidance from the teachers' unions.
Probably. But there's not evidence of it.
Right? I can have a suspicion, but this story just feeds my suspicion.
It doesn't tell me whether it happened or not.
And I'm not sure that...
It's hard for me to believe that the head of the CDC would literally ignore science for what the teachers' unions wanted.
I actually just don't believe that's true.
I think they may have convinced themselves that science was different than what you think.
They may have had other political considerations, sure.
But I don't think they just went to the teachers' unions and said, hey, Randy Weingarten, tell me what to do with science.
I don't think that happened.
That feels like fake news.
Well, speaking of fake news, the new CEO of CNN has announced, or at least we know somehow, that he wants the network to have more nuance and less hype.
More nuance and less hype.
Because if I were to look at the problems with CNN over the last several years, what I'd say is, hey, you seem to have insufficient nuance and too much hype.
No, I would not say that.
Do you know what the problem with CNN has been over the last few years?
Literally making up news.
How about less of that?
I'm not really sure that nuance and hype are exactly the target zones here.
How about don't make up stories that are just made up?
How about stop saying that the president said you should drink bleach?
That's a made-up story.
That's not nuance.
There's no nuance there.
That's not hype.
That's just made-up.
So, CNN's trying to be more serious, but the only thing that's going to do is reduce their profits.
So, How many people do you think use Twitter as a percentage of Americans?
All right. Let's say just America.
I don't know how it shakes out for the rest of the world.
But how many Americans do you think use Twitter?
Just give me a guess.
You know, so I'm seeing 15%, et cetera.
Interestingly, because your guesses are very close to what you specifically...
Watch. So among Republicans, it's around 17%.
So those of you who are guessing 15%, for the people you know, pretty close.
Pretty good guess. That's good guessing, by the way.
If you didn't know the answer and you guessed 15% and you're a Republican, that was a pretty good guess.
Pretty good guess. It's around 23% for America in general because there are way more Democrat-leaning and independents.
So between the Democrats and the Democrat-leaning independents, 32% of them are using...
So basically twice as many Democrats as Republicans using Twitter.
I think we found the problem.
This might be the whole problem.
It might be.
Just game this out.
In my opinion, Twitter is the tail that wags the dog.
In other words, the mainstream media, they could do something different than what's happening on Twitter, but not for long.
Because Twitter basically forms the opinion of the public.
There's usually two.
There's a left opinion and a right opinion.
But that sort of gets formed on social media, which is primarily Twitter, because that's where the media people hang out.
And once the truth is defined on Twitter, The regular media outlets, over time, will start to conform to it.
Now, on day one of a story, it's a two-way thing.
On day one of a new story, the news might be breaking it on TV, and Twitter's reacting, and then the reactions are getting back on TV, and then that reaction becomes a story, and then Twitter reacts.
So in the beginning, it's all this back and forth.
But stories eventually settle into a narrative.
And I think the narrative is created on Twitter.
And then the rest of the country sees how it tested.
Because Twitter's like this big testing site where every tweet gets tested.
Ooh, if I said it this way, how many retweets do I get?
But if I worded it this way...
So Twitter's this massive A-B testing for narratives.
And once the narrative is settled, you know, enough new information is coming in, or stopped, and the fog of war is calming down a little bit.
Twitter decides what we think.
And there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans using it.
In theory, this explains everything you see.
The number of people who use Twitter is twice as many people leaning in one direction, which in theory should cause the stronger narrative to be wherever they are leaning, and that that should bleed over into the mainstream media, and that the truth would be ignored in that process.
Because when Twitter is testing a narrative, you know, what works on the right, what works on the left, when it's testing those narratives, you know what it's not doing?
Fact checking. It's not fact checking.
It's just looking for what is most popular.
And the one that's most popular, typically, is the one with the least factual basis.
Because what makes something so sticky and exciting and causes your head to explode is that it doesn't make sense.
Those are the ones that get you going.
Like, my God, did they really do that?
How dumb could they be to have done that, right?
The outrageous stuff that isn't even real didn't really even happen.
Those are the things that get us excited.
So because there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans on Twitter, everything else is explained by that.
Isn't it? Because I feel like if the numbers were at least similar, then the competing narratives would get more challenged from the other side.
And right now, the people on the left don't even see the arguments on the right.
Have any of you used my hoax quiz, my top ten hoaxes?
Has anybody used it to see what kind of reaction you get?
It's quite a reaction, isn't it?
I'm hearing from people who have.
And I just saw somebody say it ruined somebody's day yesterday.
But when you see the reaction, it's really the flailing and the desperation when they see the list.
Because it is a moment when you realize that you've been fooled.
On some level, you realize it.
And then your brain has to, like, unrealize it to keep yourself sane.
So you can't really just say, oh, man, I really got fooled for five years in a row.
So you don't do that.
Like, brains don't do that.
Oh, I guess I've been wrong for five years.
I guess I'll just admit everything I thought was wrong.
Nope. Instead, you will redefine it until you're right again.
Right? Your brain will just make you right.
All right. But anyway, Twitter is wagging the dog and now everything has been explained.
And maybe Elon Musk can really make a difference.
It wouldn't take much in terms of tweaking how Twitter works to make a difference.
So this is not a joke.
This is like a real thing that's happening in my head.
When I see people who have been duped by CNN and MSNBC and the rest, I no longer think of them as news consumers or people who disagree with me or people on the opposite side of some political issue.
I used to. I used to think we were talking about the issue.
But now it's so obvious that they're just victims.
And I'm starting to feel this empathy.
Like I'll see them flailing around thinking that the president once called neo-Nazis fine people.
They actually believe that happened in the real world, that that actually happened.
That's what they think. If you're new to me, that didn't happen.
It's the most famous example of fake news, but at least a third of the country thinks it actually happened.
They think they saw the video, which doesn't exist.
They see a fake video, but the real one doesn't exist.
All right. So is anybody else having that same shift where...
Where they're starting to believe that the people consuming a certain kind of news are just victims.
What do you think? Does it feel like that?
It does. I mean, I'm actually starting to feel sorry for them in a genuine way.
Not a funny, ironic, political way.
But an actual, like literally, I have empathy for them.
Like, oh God, what happened to you?
I'm so sorry. Like actually, literally.
And I saw a hashtag that probably you've seen before, but I hadn't seen it until now.
Long Haul TDS. Hashtag Long Haul TDS. And I thought, oh my god, that's exactly what it is.
It is Long Haul TDS. That's exactly what it is.
And it's funny that it has a name.
All right. Jeffrey Miller says that CNN and MSNBC are ideological Stockholm Syndrome, monetized.
And I thought, ouch!
Now, if you don't know what Stockholm Syndrome is, but most of you do, because, again, smartest audience in all of politics, right here.
But for those two people who dropped in today who don't know what Stockholm Syndrome is, it has to do with the fact that if you're captured by bad people, And they hold you long enough, you'll start to identify with them and become a bad person.
So instead of being the good person who is captured by bad people, you just become one of the bad people, because you're hanging around them, listening to their propaganda, and eventually you're like, you know, you've got a pretty good worldview, I'll just join them.
So it does feel like...
The poor victims of the news are, instead of seeing themselves as victims, they've come to identify with their abusers, literally.
Literally identifying with their abusers and adopting the point of view of the abuser.
And I thought, usually when you hear an analogy like this, like the analogy is too far from the actual thing and it's just a distraction, but this is actually, it's not even an analogy.
It's actually an actual description of what's happening.
They are captive victims who have come to identify with their captives and their abusers.
Like, literally. Right?
It started out like an analogy, but when I was done, I was like, no, it's not an analogy.
I just described literally what's happening.
So we've got all of our psychological explanations lined up.
Too many Democrats, Twitter is wagging the dog, and Stockholm Syndrome is locking those people into some kind of long-haul TDS. So long-haul TDS and Stockholm Syndrome, very similar.
Two good explanations of what's happening.
And then Ron Frey, how would you pronounce F-R-E-Y? Let's crowdsource this.
F-R-E-Y. You pronounce it as Frey or Frey?
You're not helping at all.
All your suggestions are both directions.
All right. We're going to call him Ron.
Well, Ron says Twitter is essentially a political video game.
He tweets, it's a virtual political world.
It has real people and plenty to keep the engagement moving.
Right? And I thought to myself, yeah, and then it keeps your rating high to avoid the ratios, so you're basically playing for retreats and subscribers.
And he says it's a time vampire.
That's the way I play it.
Do you feel the same thing? Now, of course, I use Twitter for professional reasons as well as entertainment, so it's different for me.
But when I'm on Twitter, I'm playing it like a game, like a video game, and I'm conscious of it.
Do you do that? Now, it could be because I have more followers, so whenever I do something, I get more of an instant feedback.
If you don't have many followers, you probably don't have anything like this happening.
But once you reach a certain number of followers, the number of likes and retweets become a little dopamine source.
And I do check my tweets to see how they did.
And when they did well, I go, ooh!
Here's another thing I do.
I mean, it's just so diabolically disgusting, and yet, like all entertainment, it's fun.
I also check to see how many blue-check people liked or retweeted my content.
And mentally, I give them greater weight.
Should I? Well, not really.
Usually it's people who got famous for something unrelated to the quality of their tweeting.
They usually got famous and for no reason had anything to do with how clever they were.
So why should I care if a blue check person retweets me or likes something?
I shouldn't, but I guess I'm a little dopamine hit.
And I see that sometimes if I like or retweet something, People will talk about it, because you can see they're getting a little dopamine hit as well, because I have a big account.
Anyway, I do play it like a game, so I'm very aware of it as a gamified political thing.
Let's see, what else is going on?
Do you know Kim.com, all of you?
Do you know who he is?
Kim.com, I think he is living in New Zealand.
Somebody give me an update on that.
And the U.S. government went hard at him for his...
He had a site where you could steal copyrighted materials and stuff, I guess.
Is that true? Mega Upload was his company, right?
And it got taken down for alleged piracy reasons.
Now, he's also big in crypto, am I right?
He's big in crypto.
Well, he had a tweet thread today that is the scariest thing I've read in a long time.
And here's the problem.
I can't figure out where he's wrong.
I think he is wrong.
But it might be just my wishful thinking.
Now, I don't usually go this dark Because I don't want to leave you with this sort of thought.
But it's the darkest thought I've ever seen.
And so, for a while, I thought I was going to ignore it.
But then I thought, I don't know that I can.
And it goes like this.
I'll summarize his argument.
If you took all of the assets of all the The only reason we've gotten away with it is because the US dollar is the reserve currency.
How many of you know what that even means?
Do you know what it means that the US dollar is the reserve currency?
Because we talk about it all the time, or it's in the news all the time.
I'll bet no more than 10 to 20% of the public knows what that even means.
10%, I would say. All right, here's the quick and dirty explanation.
It's a reserve currency because it's the one that everybody will agree to take.
So if you're buying or selling something with other countries, you can be sure that they would be willing to buy and sell in dollars.
So you'd better have some of those dollars there so you can buy stuff in dollars and they can pay you in dollars.
So basically, no matter what currency you have, you also have to deal in dollars because it's the one that everybody will take.
Now what happens if that changes?
What happens if people say, you know, this dollar is getting kind of sketchy.
We'll take other stuff.
Well, the whole thing can fall apart pretty quickly.
And we're running as fast as we can in the direction of making all money worthless.
And there's nothing that looks like it's going to stop it.
Now, that's the nature of all problems, though, right?
Climate change? A few years ago, it looked like nothing was going to stop it.
Today? Yeah, it looks like we'll get a good handle on it.
But that changed only in the last year or so when we got real serious about nuclear and we got real serious about scrubbers taking CO2 out and got serious about how to remediate things so that we can survive the damage better.
So here's the thing.
We have a financial Armageddon Which is forming and has formed and is just getting bigger.
And it's sort of an end of civilization problem.
And nobody has any solution for it.
Because you can't just keep spending money you don't have.
Forever. Like at some point it all falls apart.
And Kim.com is basically saying everybody's lying to you and they know it's going to all fall apart.
Because there's no way it can't.
That's the scariest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Scariest thing I've ever...
And then, you know, people are suggesting, oh, that's what the Great Reset is all about, driving the system into failure so that it can be redone in some socialist way, I guess.
All right, here's my take.
Number one, if you don't own a little bit of Bitcoin, you might want to rethink that.
I'm never going to be the one who tells you to own a lot of Bitcoin.
Because I don't think that would be a good idea.
It could turn out for some people, but it's not like a good risk-reward kind of thing.
But if you don't have any crypto, there is some chance that you will not have money someday.
Because it might be the only money at some point.
I don't know that. I'd say the odds of it are not that high.
But Yeah, don't trust gold necessarily.
Because all these things are things that can change based on the psychology.
They can change too quickly. But I think you want to have a little bit of crypto.
You should have a little bit.
It might be the only way to buy food at some point.
And I do think there's a very good chance that I've worked all of my life to reach a certain level of Financial comfort.
And I think there's a pretty good chance I will lose all of it.
I think there's a pretty good chance.
Maybe 20, 25% chance that I'll lose all of it.
Not because of me specifically, but because we'll all lose all of it.
That's a very distinct possibility.
Now, would we all die?
Probably not. Probably not.
We'd probably adjust. Now, I've been saying for some time that the...
Yeah, but you're old.
You're right. I do have the advantage that at least I got old before we ran out of money.
I don't know if it's going to happen. Here's what I think will probably happen.
Like everything else in the world that looks like the end-of-the-world problems, if we have enough time to fix it, we figure it out.
So I think this will be the same.
What's different is I'm not sure the whole world realizes how big the problem is.
I think the whole world is like, ah, somebody has this.
Somebody will figure it out. But it's like climate change.
You have to get the entire mind of the world on this problem or nothing's going to happen.
And here's what I think is going to happen.
I believe that a second economy will emerge.
That we're going to have two economies.
You could argue we already do.
But the second economy will be how to live the least expensive lifestyle that's still actually pretty awesome.
And I think that will have to do with completely changing how we create food, completely changing how we insure each other and do healthcare, completely changing what it costs to live, cost of housing, all of that.
And I think that we will create parallel cities that will just, you know, work in a way that people have very little money, but they don't need any.
And they're perfectly happy.
And the other people will get to, you know, pursue growth and riches through the other system, which would have to operate at the same time.
And you can get what you want to.
So you can live in a big house with all the problems.
Let me give you just a preview of what it's like to have too much money.
And if anybody is in the same situation, you can jump in here.
I spend most...
Well, not most...
A huge part of every day I spend trying to repair something I own that broke.
Every day. And it's just monstrously burdensome.
Like, you know, on any given day my car makes all kinds of noises and I need to spend a full day to get my car fixed.
But, I could also just make the warning light go off, because it's not an important one, and drive it.
So for several months, every time I get in my car, it goes bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and I have to turn off the warning light, and then every few minutes it comes back on, I have to turn it off.
I will drive that fucking car for probably another year until something breaks that's bad enough that I can't drive it anymore.
But everything I use is broken.
Everything. Like, I tried to just plug in something into an outlet yesterday.
The outlet doesn't work.
It needs to be replaced.
It's a GFI. And all day long, I'm turning something on that doesn't work, getting in my car that's broken, walking through a door that needs to be fixed because there's a squeak.
Everything in my environment is broken.
All of it. You've seen me debate with my printer every day.
That's just one thing in my house.
Do you know how many things are broken in my life right now?
A lot. I missed my deadline for the first time ever in comics in 33 years.
I missed it on Friday.
Because equipment failure, right?
So having money becomes this gigantic time sink of things you wish you weren't working on.
Do you know why I like going on vacation?
Do you know why I like going on vacation?
Now keep in mind that my home is like a resort, right?
I built my house so it would have all the toys I need and stuff.
But I like going on vacation because...
To get away from my stuff.
I go on vacation to get away from my possessions.
True. To get away from my possessions.
And I go someplace where I don't have anything but a suitcase.
And then my mind is clear.
And I wake up and I don't have to fix anything.
There's nothing to be fixed.
And my dog isn't begging at me.
Nobody's telling me I've got to go fix something.
Nobody's bringing me an emergency of the day.
I take vacations to get away from my normal life of having too much money.
That's a real thing.
I have to get away from my own money to relax.
That's actually true.
I'm not complaining compared to not having money, right?
So just to be clear, I would much rather have these problems than other problems.
There's a trade-off. But if you think it's easy, just because you've got all the stuff you want, it's really not.
It's not even close to easy.
There's a reason I only have one car.
Because two cars would just break me.
I couldn't handle two cars.
All right. Here's another cataclysmic event coming.
So China's population is set to shrink for the first time in 60 years, even though they have a three-child policy now instead of their old one-child policy.
So it turns out that making money and being prosperous, we've known this for a while, reduces your birth rate quite a bit.
Because as soon as people get a little prosperity, they say, you know...
Maybe one child is fine, because I'm going to need all of my time to handle all of my possessions.
I don't have time for kids.
And so China is going to shrink, and Elon Musk, who's been warning about this for a while, He tweeted this.
He said, most people still think China has a one-child policy.
China had its lowest birthday ever last year, despite having a three-child policy.
At current birth rates, China will lose 40% of its people every generation.
Population collapse.
And I looked at that number and I was like, well, surely, surely that number can't be right.
You're not going to lose 40% of your people every generation.
And then I thought, well, wait a minute, it's Elon Musk saying this, and he knows how to do math.
Probably he did the math right, you know, in a general sense.
And I looked at it a little more and I thought, oh, yeah, over a generation?
Because every generation has to replace about 40% of itself, right?
If you wait two generations, you're pretty much all gone.
Everybody's dead. Everybody is grandfathered out.
So if you don't replace 40% of your people every generation, you run out of people really quickly.
And I thought to myself, holy shit, this is a big problem.
Now, Elon Musk personally is having multiple kids, because he can afford them, and he thinks the world needs more children, not fewer.
And I think he's right.
So population collapse is a much bigger problem than overpopulation.
Now, how does this tie into immigration?
Here's where it gets dicey.
So do you know what I've been saying about immigration policy forever?
I've always said the same.
You should separate the question of whether you can control your border from the question of how many people to let in.
We treat them like it's the same thing.
And that's just stupid time.
It's not. You should have full control of who you let in and then decide when to dial it up and when to dial it down.
And we should be driven by economics.
More than other things.
You know, you have to look at crime and pandemics and stuff, too.
But the main thing should be economics.
And when Elon Musk says, and this is a warning you should all take seriously, that you could have a population collapse if we don't have enough replacement people, that's a big, big problem.
That's an end-of-your-country problem.
But how big a problem is immigration itself from the southern border the way it's happening?
I don't know. But I would love to have some people who know more than I do, some actually economists, do the work and say, look, we've got two worlds.
We'll game one forward in which we don't have enough extra people, and then we'll do one where we have more extra people than we wanted, but they're also driving the economic engine.
Which of those is the bigger problem?
Do you think you know? Because I don't think I know.
If you had a choice of these two things, stopping immigration completely at the southern border, or letting it run exactly the way it's running, which is sort of out of control, which one makes you more money in the long run?
You don't know.
You think you do.
You think you do, but you don't.
Because more people is more money.
More people is more money.
So if you say to me, Scott, we need to close this border because of all these people getting through, I say to you, you have confused two topics.
Get them straight. Number one topic is, can you control the border?
I say, control the hell out of it.
You should control that border as much as anything can be controlled.
In fact, it should be one of the main things we control.
Because we can. If it's possible to control it, and it's important, control the hell out of it.
It's the way you should run your life as well.
If there's something in your life that you can control, such as your fitness, your diet, your fashion, you should control the hell out of those.
Like, those should be controlled like nothing's ever been controlled.
Because you can. And they have a really big payoff.
Immigration is like that, too.
It could be our greatest economic asset that we're treating it as just like an open wound or something.
So I don't think that we've ever been smart on either side of the debate.
The smart way to approach it is to separate the ability to close the border from the actual doing of it and let your economist tell you if you need more people or fewer.
And then just follow the economics.
In fact, one of the biggest things we have going compared to China is that people want to come here.
That might be all that matters.
In the long run, it might be the only thing that matters is how many people would rather live here.
So to me, it seems like keeping our freedom alive...
And keeping our environment clean so that we've got all the tourism and people want to live here and it's just a nice place to live is going to be the economic engine for everything in the future.
I also think it's less likely that you have a big war among superpowers if you've merged populations a little bit.
There'd be too many people who say no.
All right. So, those are the big scary things that are happening.
If I had to guess, we'll be fine.
I just don't know how.
There are a lot of problems in this world that will probably be fixed by people who do know how to solve them.
The fact that I don't know how to solve it bothers me, but it does mean it's unsolvable.
Does the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters always work?
And the answer is, we're here.
If it didn't always work, civilization would have been destroyed by now by starvation or lack of oil or any one of those many things, you know, the hole in the ozone layer.
Those things were all supposed to end us by now.
So it's always worked so far.
Always worked so far.
And I would guess that we'll have some kind of huge economic, let's say, evolution.
That is going to make rich people poor, and poor people less poor, and a whole bunch of things are going to change, and it will probably be worse before it's better.
But I think we can figure it out, somehow.
Yeah. I think we should take control of the Great Reset instead of let it happen.
So I'm not sure what other people mean by the replacement theory or the great reset or whatever.
But I think that we just need to acknowledge that we need two separate economic systems running simultaneously.
One of them that's closer to communism for people who want to live like that.
But it shouldn't have any impact on the rest of us.
You know, if somebody wants to create a city...
In which they're experimenting with low-price everything.
Let me just give you one example of how much we could change the cost of living.
Number one, you could build a home that needs practically no energy.
So you could eliminate energy, practically.
Imagine how many times food changes hands and packaging and containers from the farm to your table.
I complain about this all the time.
You know, the farmer picks it, puts it in a barn, that gets taken to a processing place, that gets taken somewhere else, that gets put in a package, that gets put on the shelf, you know, a truck, and then the shelf, and then the shelf goes into your basket, your basket goes on the cart, the cart goes on the payment thing, and then the payment thing back in the bag, and then back in your car, and then back in your house.
Almost everything we do is impossibly inefficient.
It's just we've evolved to the point where we can make it work anyway.
Scott, it sounds like you're grooming us to accept the Great Reset.
No. I'm not.
I'm telling you to control it because it's coming.
If you control it, you'll be fine.
But what I mean by controlling it is saying, hey...
There are a whole bunch of ideas that people want to test.
For example, do you think you could build a community that didn't need police?
I do. I do.
If you built it from scratch, you could build a community that actually didn't need any police.
Now, if something super bad happened, you'd have to call somebody in or something.
So there's some case where you need something like that.
But you could almost completely eliminate the police.
Here's how. Build your new community to operate on facial recognition and maybe fingerprints as a backup or something.
But basically, get rid of all money, all physical money.
That eliminates half of all crime.
If the only way you can pay for something is with your actual identity, and nothing else works.
There's no car, there's no money, nothing else works.
It's just your identity. Half of all crime just went away.
Now put functional cameras in all your public spaces.
That's pretty close to what it's like now.
But really make sure there are no empty spots.
What would that do to your crime?
Most of it would go away.
Most of it would go away.
Would you need a weapon for self-defense in such a place?
Probably not. I mean, you still have your Second Amendment right.
But you could imagine a place...
Let's see if you can.
Can you imagine a situation that is so naturally safe that introducing a gun of your own gun, let's say, for self-defense, would make you feel less safe?
Could you imagine it?
I can. That's easy to imagine.
Someplace so safe that the introduction of a firearm unambiguously makes you less safe.
Even if it's your own weapon.
Okay, now some of you, maybe you have military training and stuff.
That's a special case.
You're probably completely safe with a weapon.
But even, you know, people taking their own lives on a bad day, you don't really want that gun lying around, right?
So here's my point.
When I describe this town of no privacy and no gun ownership, it's still legal, you just wouldn't want one.
You say to yourself, my God, I would never live there.
It's the end of civilization. You know, they would control us in every way.
To which I say, that's right.
So don't live there. If I told you it was mandatory, I'd be the worst person in the world.
If I told you, look, your two options are you can be poor and struggling the old way, or you can live in this awesome place that doesn't have any privacy, but anytime you want to leave, you can leave.
Anytime you want to leave, you can leave.
Just go get a job in the regular other economy and do what everybody else does.
But if you want to give up your privacy, not all of it, right?
Still the things you do in your own home are private.
But if you want to give up some of your privacy to live a life that would be insanely well designed socially and economically and everything else, Why not have that option?
Now, I'm triggering all the NPCs here.
If anything that I ever say causes you to refer to Soylent Green, 1984, or The Matrix, you're at the wrong livestream.
Because that just means you're being reminded of other things.
They have no role in this conversation.
Nothing I said should make you think of any of those things.
Or the Stafford wives, yeah.
So the moment you're making a movie or book reference, you're just not part of the conversation anymore.
Walking Dead. Oh, Escape from New York, yeah.
And Escape from New York.
You can reference my books, and that is genius.
Scott, you're Maverick.
Speaking of Maverick, Mike Serovich was retweeting Tom Cruise, an old interview we did with Matt Lauer, in which Tom Cruise was mocking modern psychiatry and the drugs that they give you for depression.
I guess he got in trouble with it years ago, something about Brooke Shields and Maybe mention she shouldn't have been taking meds or something.
So I forget the exact story.
But as Mike Surdovich was noting, it aged well.
Do you remember originally when Tom Cruise was yelling that psychiatry was a fake science and that they were just masking the problem with drugs and they weren't dealing with anything underlying?
Now, I don't get my medical advice from Tom Cruise.
Nor would he want you to, I imagine.
But I think he overdid it.
I think he overdid his skepticism.
I do think that there are some people whose brains are just on fire, and if you have to drug them to put out the fire, maybe you just have to.
But... His main topic was Ritalin, yeah.
So he was talking about giving dangerous street drugs to kids, Adderall and Ritalin.
And I'm not going to say that I agreed with everything that Tom Cruise says, because I feel like he threw out a little bit of baby with the bathwater there.
But it is very instructive to see how close to being right he was.
And he got there early.
And Scientology helped him get there, which is interesting.
Now, one of the things that I've been saying watching this Tom Cruise stuff happening, especially with the Top Gun movie, and now he's got another movie come out, and you've heard me say that Tom Cruise is deeply underrated because you think of him as, you know, crazy actor guy, which he is.
But I kept looking at what he accomplished in terms of how he managed his projects through the pandemic and how he managed to create a movie that really is just brilliant.
It's just brilliant.
And I thought to myself, he is way underrated as just a thinker and as an effective entrepreneur.
If you look at the things he does and can do, he's got a talent stack that's crazy.
And so his movie success is somewhat secondary to his business success, in my opinion.
I think his business success is crazy.
He's just a really good business person.
And when you hear his opinions on psychiatry, which, again, I don't agree with him completely, but he was so close to being ahead of the curve on that You have to give them credit for that.
So I'm going to give him credit for being far righter than most people were on that topic.
Can the law of slow-moving disasters get someone off of Prisoner Island?
It's too many concepts you're connecting there.
Jennifer Connelly said she flew with him because he's an expert.
Yeah, apparently he has a real estate license, and he can fly a number of different planes and jets.
He has a commercial license.
Those are all really hard to get, by the way, which probably means you can fly by instruments, which is really hard.
All right, Scott, lots of people think that about the psychiatrists.
Yes, they do.
Now they do. But I think it was gutsy for him to say it publicly when he did.
It would be less gutsy now.
Yeah, John Travolta is also expert pilot...
Interesting that they all enjoyed flying.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have for today.
Okay.
And I think it's a perfect day.
I think, once again, that Coffee with Scott Adams was the highlight of your day.
Probably going to get better from here.
But so far, best ever.
And today is my...
I see. Ninth day of COVID quarantine.
Tomorrow, tenth day, freedom!
Freedom! Almost free.
How am I feeling?
Well, let's talk about long COVID. So I've been told that one might experience good days and bad days.
Yesterday, for most of the day, I didn't feel that bone-tired stuff.
In fact, I got a new e-bike and took that for a ride.
But I have to admit, even though it was an e-bike so it was easy to ride, I made it a little challenging by turning down the power and doing some hills and stuff.
But it wasn't the hardest workout I've ever had, but I couldn't move for the rest of the day.
So by noon, I've been up for eight hours and I've worked and exercised and showered and done everything.
So by noon, when a lot of you were starting your day, I'm almost done with my day.
And just that little bit of exercise essentially just took me out for the rest of the night.
By noon, I didn't really want to do anything after that.
I couldn't work. It wasn't even possible.
So, I don't know.
Is that long, COVID? Because it's not a feeling I'm familiar with.
But yet, I definitely don't have the brain fog.
So I had the brain fog for the first few days, and it was very distinct.
I mean, you can't miss it.
Really distinct. I don't have any of that.
And indeed, I've been watching the quality of my work, my writing.
It looks the same. Unless my brain fog is preventing me from seeing that it's worse.
But it looks the same.
So I think mentally I'm about the same.
Testing negative is problematic because apparently you can test positive for months long after you don't have any symptoms or you can't spread it.
Even regular flu makes you feel weak for several days afterwards.
That's true. Now, I've also had the experience of having a normal illness, you know, let's say a minor surgery.
So I had a minor sinus surgery a few years ago.
And it took me months to recover from just a minor surgery where they knocked you out.
Anybody have that experience?
It's probably something that happens after a certain age.
And years before that, I'd had another very minor surgery on some nerves in my neck for my voice problem.
And that took months, months, to get my strength back from just a one-day minor operation, really.
Was it a sinus lift?
I don't even know what that is.
By the way, has there ever been a medical problem with a more awesome-sounding name?
Because when I tell people I have long COVID, I feel a little bit like I'm bragging, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I got long COVID. Really long.
It's like, so long.
Yeah, it's the best-sounding medical problem you've ever heard in your life.
Long COVID. All right, no puns.
I know you wanted to join in there.
All right, I'll keep you informed.
So if you ask me right now at this moment, I'd say I don't have any lingering feelings whatsoever.
But ask me again at 2 o'clock this afternoon, and I'm going to be staring at the wall.
And it's that staring at the wall thing that's completely different.
Because I know what it's like to be exhausted.
Just, you know, normal tired.
It doesn't feel like that at all.
No matter how tired I am normally, I don't want to sit there doing nothing.
But this long COVID, if that's what it is, I'm actually happy just sitting in a chair.
And I don't know what that's about.
So it's almost like it made me better.
Like it cured my ADHD or something.
But we'll see. Alright.
What kind of e-bike?
It's more of a trail bike.
So the first e-bike I got was really just one of the few that was in stock.
And it looked kind of...
It's a Trek. T-R-E-K. And it looked kind of boring and stayed.
And I got mocked for it.
For not looking cool.
And so I got one that looks cool, but it's a monster.
It's amazing. All right.
Yeah, it's off-road.
But it just looks better.
All right, that's...
Yeah, so much for my ego death.
That's true. Now, I don't mind spending money on...
Things that work better.
So it wasn't...
If my old bike had functioned as well as this one did, I wouldn't have replaced it.
