Episode 1785 Scott Adams: All Of The Best Jokes About Roe v Wade Decision From The Supreme Court
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
AOC's talent for surfing the wave
Why neither side can say their real argument
Keith Olbermann labels SCOTUS domestic terrorists
School choice solves systemic racism
Maggie Haberman's Pulitzer Prize for propaganda
The crippling impact of loneliness
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Well, they were flip-flops, but they were some kind of footwear.
May I give you this advice?
If you're working at home and you're wearing footwear, What's wrong with you?
You can't work like that.
Let your feet be free. Then you can be creative, then you can be productive, and it won't even hurt that much.
However, if you'd like to take it up a notch, and I know you do, all you need today is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a steiner canteen, sugar or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And I'm rushing through because it's such a glorious, interesting news day.
But will you join me now In the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
For just one moment, I want all of you to focus all of your attention away from any distractions and problems of your day.
And for just a moment, think only about this delicious beverage you're about to have.
Put all of your thoughts just into the beverage in front of you.
And there. You just rebooted.
And now, the simultaneous sip.
I heard the best advice, maybe like life-changing advice, in a partial commercial for something.
I don't even know what the product was.
But the advice was this.
Somebody was saying they couldn't imagine meditating.
Because how could you sit there for 20 minutes and try to clear your mind?
It just seems impossible. You can't fit it in your schedule.
You can't imagine clearing your mind.
It's just sort of impossible.
Well, the first thing you need to know is clearing your mind isn't necessary.
It's not even useful. It's not even possible.
So when people tell you that meditation is clearing your mind, they're just wrong.
It's not a thing. But there is such a thing as calming your mind.
And maybe concentrating on something that's right there in the room with you, such as your breathing.
And it allows your brain, which really is not a multi-processing device.
Your brain does not multitask.
It feels like it, because you can rapidly switch between thoughts.
So it feels like you're multitasking, but you're not.
You're a one-thing-at-a-time device.
So if you can make yourself think of just one non-stressful thing, your breathing, how your muscles feel, the tension in parts of your body, Just calm it down.
Now, here's the advice.
When I said to you, imagine taking 20 minutes and just sort of sitting quietly, a lot of you said, I could never do that.
I could never do that.
Here's the life-changing advice.
Do it for 10 seconds.
That's it. For some of you, that just completely changed your life.
I wouldn't have to say any other thing.
I just changed completely the lives of a whole bunch of you.
Here's why. Because you all know you could do it for 10 seconds.
Right? You just did it.
I just did the simultaneous sip.
Some of you did. Some of you actually went along with it.
And you said, oh yeah, I could just concentrate on what's directly in front of me for 10 seconds.
Because if you could do it for 10 seconds, maybe you liked it.
And some people will say, 10 seconds, I could do that for a minute.
Next thing you know, you're doing it for 20 minutes.
But it doesn't have to be 20 minutes.
There's no magic about 20 minutes.
More is better. If you could do a little bit more, do a little bit more.
Sort of just chew on it over time.
Nobody said you have to be the meditator tomorrow.
And when you look at the amount of anxiety and Mental health problems there are in the world.
How many of those do you think could be helped by people just learning to slow down at least once per day?
Just to reboot.
Probably a lot. Meditation is one of those things that has stood the test of time.
You know, there are tons of things you hear about.
It's like, oh, yeah, should I really suspend upside down and eat broccoli at the same time?
It sounds like that might not last the test of time.
And then it doesn't. But I think meditation has been here, I don't know, 100 years.
And pretty much 100% of the people who do it say, yeah, that helped.
That was good. I wish I did more of it.
Well, there you go. That's part of the reason you watch this live stream, because every now and then I'll change some of your lives completely with just one live stream.
And there you go. Well, today's theme is that Democrats have a consistency problem.
You'll see that come alive in a little bit.
All right, now, according to Republicans, and let me preface my comments today by saying, if you believe you're going to see my opinion on abortion, you are incorrect, because I abstain, because I am not a chest-feeding, reproductive, birthing person, if I may be so woke.
And so I would leave this decision to people who actually have skin in the game, so to speak.
So everything that I'm talking about is sort of an angle to look at it.
It's not necessarily my opinion.
Is everybody good with that? Because as soon as you think it's my opinion, it's no fun anymore.
And then we're just, you're agreeing with me or fighting with me or something.
So it's not my opinion.
We're just going to talk about stuff.
Here's one point of view that I thought was funny.
Every now and then, a pattern will emerge from some topic.
It might be an accidental pattern and it might be meaningful, but people are built to recognize patterns.
So here's a pattern that I picked up on today.
It doesn't mean it means anything.
It just sort of tweaked my interest.
It was that according to Republicans, the list of things that Democrats can't recognize is growing.
So here's the list of things that Democrats can't recognize, according to Republicans.
Democrats can't recognize a woman.
They can't recognize a baby.
They can't recognize a brain-dead president.
And they've never seen an economic system.
They can't recognize an economic system that actually works.
Now, as soon as I thought of this, and I had to stop at four, because I'm pretty sure I could have grown that list to ten if I wanted to spend a little extra time on it.
But is that a coincidence?
And could I come up with the same list and phrase it the same way and just make it about Republicans?
No. Or is it really something that's limited to one side?
Because I haven't figured that part out yet.
I still have enough neutrality left in me that I'm aware of the fact that just because I saw the pattern on one side, it doesn't mean it's not on the other side.
I just happen to notice it on one side.
The Grand Wizard of Pleasanton.
I'm not sure which way you mean that, but it's funny.
Alright, you missed the comment on YouTube, but it doesn't matter.
So, I don't know.
It's just funny that Republicans think the problem with Democrats is that they're looking right at something and they can't see it.
Does it ever feel like that to you?
Most of you are probably right-leaning, if I know my audience, even though I'm not.
Anyway, let's talk about AOC, because when there's a big topic like this, you know AOC is going to be the big topic on the big topic.
Now, if there's one thing that I consistently credit AOC for, and by the way, she's not flawless, I think today was, you know, this isn't her best week.
But one thing she does well is surf the wave of some energy that was happening anyway.
So because of the Supreme Court decision on Roe v.
Wade overturning it, AOC is in the news because we care what the, let's say, the photogenic and charismatic people are saying on both sides.
So all the photogenic, charismatic people are saying You know, they emerge during these periods.
And here's something she said in a tweet.
She said, universal health care and child care, gun safety, combating climate change.
She says, the GOP opposes it all.
If they refuse to support life after birth, how can they claim to believe in it before?
And she says, the truth is, this is not about life and never has been.
It's about seizing power and control.
What? It's about seizing power and control?
I don't know how this could be more opposite of that.
Is it? Now, again, I have to ask myself if I'm being neutral.
I mean, I feel like probably not.
But it's hard to see it in yourself, right?
So maybe you could spot it better than I can.
But what I see is Republicans giving up political power for what they see as saving lives or ending an ongoing Holocaust.
What do you see?
Do you see Republicans trying to gain power by doing something that riles up the other side?
And how does that work?
Like, just connect the dots for me.
I don't even understand the line of reasoning.
Like, I'm not even at the point where I can disagree with it, because I don't know what it is I'm disagreeing with.
It doesn't make sense, right?
Does anybody see how it connects?
Am I missing some obvious connection?
Because to me, it looks exactly like the Republicans are in a little bit of danger.
And that they traded risk, their own risk, their living adult risk, they traded that to help what they believe is life.
And do you believe that AOC actually sees it that way?
Or is that just the best she could do?
Because here's the other meta point I'm going to make.
And it goes like this.
Neither side of this debate can use their true argument.
And that's why it looks like nonsense when you see the arguments in public.
Because nobody can say the real argument.
They can't. And it's not because the real argument isn't good.
It's not because the real argument isn't right.
It's because it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
Not that it's wrong, it just doesn't work.
For example, here would be an honest argument from the right.
Now, this is not a criticism, because I'm going to do the same for the left.
I'm going to play it fair. The right would say something like, my religious faith, or God, tells me that life begins at conception.
Now, that's not everybody on the right, so we're talking some generalities here.
But suppose you sincerely believe that, and that's where your abortion feelings come from, come from God.
If you know that the people that you're trying to debate are either non-believers or straight-up atheists, or at the very least, they're more spiritual than specifically believing God gave them directions.
So why would you use the real argument when you know it can't work?
It can't work.
If the right just said, look, God says so, so why aren't you listening to God?
The left would say, what?
We don't listen to your nonsense.
We have our own spiritual beliefs that don't have anything to do with that.
So the real argument, one of them, it's not the only one, but the real argument on the right, you can't sell it.
Am I wrong about that? That that is an unsellable argument, even if you sincerely hold it, and even if it's true.
Like, even if God really did say it, he was very specific, he or she, or they.
And even if you accepted all of that, you couldn't sell that argument to people who don't believe in God.
So you can't use the argument that you believe.
You have to frame it differently.
Now, how about the left? Can the left tell you their real argument?
Like the honest to God, strip out all the politics and persuasion and manipulation?
Let me just tell you what I really think.
Because here's what I think it would sound like.
I value my own adult life over that of something which smart people could argue is either alive or not.
It's a convenience.
It's a convenience. It's a convenience that specifically puts the priority of the living adult above the value of an entity which smart people can argue is either alive or not, but we're all talking about the same thing.
We're all looking at the same thing.
The word we put on it is...
You know, you shouldn't make your argument based on the word you use.
The argument should be the argument.
You should be able to do it in any language and any word.
But if you need a word to win the argument, that means you didn't have an argument.
So, the real argument on the left is so cold that you can't sell it in public.
Am I right? Do you think I characterized the genuine argument fairly?
That people would, adult women, and lots of men who support them, they prefer or they prioritize the value of their own life and the quality of it and the freedom of it above the value of Of something that smart people can argue when it's life or not, but we're all talking about the same thing.
We're all talking about the same thing, no matter what word you put on it.
So the trouble is you can't sell that.
It just sounds like you're a monster or something, right?
I don't think so.
And let me be clear.
That's not my opinion.
I don't consider them monsters.
Nor do I consider the people on the right deluded or anything else.
Like, I just don't have those bad opinions about people on either side.
I just think that it's absurd to watch people on both sides use fake arguments and try to think past the sale.
Try to make you think past the sale.
We'll talk about that some more.
All right. Here was an interesting thought from a Twitter user, Ryan Vertanen.
He said that the Supreme Court wouldn't...
I'll paraphrase here.
Wouldn't have struck in...
Why can't I make a sentence that uses the correct forms here?
I'll just read what he said.
And then if it's wrong, you can blame him.
All right, SCOTUS doesn't strike down abortion if Trump is in office.
He said the climate would be too tense.
Can't drop a bomb like this one when everyone's on edge.
The climate under Biden is less tense, which allowed the Supreme Court to do this.
What do you think?
I love opinions that...
That I don't agree with, but I can't immediately figure out why, which makes me pause and go, okay, I think if I really were disagreeing with this, I'd probably know why, so maybe it's a good point.
What do you think? Do you think that if Trump were still in office, the Supreme Court would not have handed down this decision?
It'd be too hot. Here's the alternative theory.
By the way, maybe.
Maybe. Yeah.
I mean, it's at least a good point, right?
Would you all say that?
It's at least a good point, but you don't know.
Here's the alternative theory.
The Supreme Court has gigantic balls, and they're not afraid of anything, and they just proved it.
That's the alternative theory.
The Supreme Court has gigantic balls, including the ladies, and they just proved it.
Because they just said, you can march in front of our houses.
Fuck you. Here it is.
That's what I saw.
I saw you can put scary people in front of our houses, in front of our families.
And we're still going to put this right in your face.
No hesitation.
No equivocation.
No nothing. Every now and then, the Supreme Court does something that I think bolsters their credibility, and I think that should be noted.
In my opinion, the fact that they didn't hold back until after the midterms, because I think that's when the ideal time probably would have been after the midterms, and they could have.
I mean, they could have held off, right?
They have that option. I think that tells me that they're not going to be intimidated.
Because imagine if they had not released this.
If they had not released it, it would look like intimidation worked, right?
So when whoever was on the left released the draft decision, Which in the beginning I said, don't assume that it's the actual decision, but I guess it was, right?
So my speculation was completely incorrect.
So it was correct.
But do you realize that the leaker guaranteed that they would release it?
The leaker, by leaking an actual real document, now that we know it's real, We can also connect the dots, because we didn't know it was real before, but now we can connect the dots.
The leaker guaranteed this would be released.
Do you know why? I think I mentioned it earlier.
Because the Supreme Court apparently has gigantic balls, including the ladies, and they're not going to be intimidated.
So, good for them.
At least in that narrow sense, I like the fact that the intimidation had no impact, as far as we could tell.
I'm sure it had an impact on them personally, which is why you give them credit.
Keith Olbermann helpfully tweeted this.
He said, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts and Clarence Thomas are domestic terrorists.
And should be approached and prosecuted as such.
Keith Olbermann.
Well, you can always count on Keith Olbermann to take the sane path.
Which I retweeted with hashtag haunted.
Because every time somebody refers to people on the right as domestic terrorists and should be approached and prosecuted as such, it does feel like they're promoting the...
Something bad here.
Alright, my question to you.
Do you think it's fair that people are calling the Supreme Court justices who were most recently put on the court, is it fair to call them liars because they misled the Senate about their likelihood to overturn Roe?
What would you say?
Are they liars?
Now, first of all, do you think that they misled?
Do you think they intentionally misled and they knew all along that they would have done this?
And do you think that...
Most of you are saying no.
And I'm going to take the other side.
I'm going to take the other side of this.
I would call them liars.
Again, doesn't mean you don't like their decision.
So let's separate whether you like the decision or not.
We're not talking about that now.
We're talking about whether they lied to the Senate.
I'm going to say yes. I'm going to say yes.
But they lied the way politicians lie.
Meaning that you knew they were lying, so did it matter?
Right? When politicians lie to you and you know they're lying, it's not exactly the same thing, is it?
Now let me ask you this.
When somebody selects a conservative Supreme Court justice, what do you think they were going to do?
I even saw...
Who is the comedian Al Franken?
Even Al Franken was tweeting.
We all knew what they were going to do.
It didn't matter that it was settled law.
Everybody knew that you didn't have to be a lawyer to know that they were going to take a run at it.
So is it lying if you know exactly what's going to happen and there's no real ambiguity about it?
It's a weird kind of lying.
I would call it like political lying.
But I'm going to save my...
Most criticism for the question askers.
Are you telling me that when they were interviewed, you couldn't ask the right question to find out exactly what they were going to do and have them essentially tell the public to?
Now, of course you can't ask them how they would rule on a hypothetical case.
We're all smart enough to know that, right?
It's like, you don't do that.
They're not going to answer that question and shouldn't.
They shouldn't answer it. But you could get there easily.
How about this question?
Mr. Gorsuch, I'm not going to ask you how you would rule on any hypothetical kind of case, but I want to ask you how you...
to explain the...
sort of the field, the situation for us.
Do you believe that there would be a path to overturn Roe v.
Wade and that there could be a compelling argument made, or do you believe that because it's subtle law...
It could never be overturned.
Which of those sort of general positions do you hold?
That it's settled law and cannot be overturned, or that if somebody made a compelling argument, the court would have that right and even responsibility to overturn it.
Which one would you go with?
Now, I'm pretty sure Gorsuch would either have to avoid the question, which is an answer, or he'd have to say, well, hypothetically, the court could overturn that under...
You know, a certain set of variables.
And that would be your answer.
They're conservatives, and they just told you it could be done.
Would you need anything else?
I mean, that's about as clear as you can be.
So, I think there was terrible question asking, and I would call them liars.
I would call them liars.
Because they knew.
I mean, I'm not a mind reader, right?
So technically, you could say to yourself, well, they didn't know, no, because anything could happen, and maybe somebody would have made a strong argument that changed their preconceived ideas, but no, you knew.
They knew what they were going to do, you knew what they were going to do, and then they did.
I think the only ambiguity was whether they thought they could get away with it.
And apparently they thought so.
Here's another little tip for you.
When I was tweeting about this, Twitter user Robin DeLong said to me, and I quote his tweet.
He said, quote, So, it's fair game to ask nominees how they will rule during confirmation hearings?
And I thought, this is a useful lesson to the rest of us.
And so I want to remind you that the most important word in the English language is...
What's the most important word in the English language?
That's correct. The word so, at the beginning of a sentence.
So. Do you know why?
Because if you see the word so at the beginning of a sentence in the context of any kind of debate about something, as soon as you see that little word so, you don't have to read the rest of the sentence.
Because whatever follows that is going to be nonsense.
You can look for an exception.
Good luck. You're not going to find one.
So, is actually how the person tells you that what is going to follow is going to be nonsense, but it's the best they could do.
So let me read it again. This was his comment to me.
So, it's fair game to ask nominees how they will rule during confirmation hearings?
No, and I didn't imply that.
It's just, you know it's somebody's strongman argument that's going to fall.
Very useful to know that word is useful.
Well, is it my imagination, or is the Babylon Bee really on fire lately?
I guess you have to see them on Instagram or other platforms.
They're not on Twitter right now.
But if you're not following the Babylon Bee on Instagram, they are really operating at full...
You know how the left used to say the right wasn't funny?
And then Goffheld came along and showed that wasn't true.
They're actually writing articles now about how funny and successful Goffheld is, and maybe they were wrong about this, conservatives aren't funny stuff.
And then the Babylon Bee comes along, and they're like, okay, I guess they can be funny.
So here's something that the...
Babylon B had on Instagram and other places.
It said, January 6th hearings postponed until after the Democrat insurrection.
And the headlines are great.
Because the Democrats are having a consistency problem this week.
Because apparently the Democrats stormed the Capitol building in Arizona, and there was some rioting and stuff in D.C. And I'm thinking, it's got to be really awkward when you're the January 6th people, and you say, all right, look, and maybe this was months ago, and all the top Republican strategists got together and they said, we don't have anything.
We've got nothing. We're literally going to have to make some shit up just to have a reason to get re-elected.
What do we got? They're like, well, we could turn the protest against our, well, what we allegedly did.
We can turn the protests into insurrections, and we'll just hammer that, and then we'll nail it on Trump, and then people will have a reason to elect us because all of our policies are shit, but they won't want insurrectionists.
And so they're working on that, and then this plan is working pretty well.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Rasmussen poll actually narrowed the gap between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat in the midterms, meaning that Republicans became less popular In a general way, as the January 6 hearings were going on, and I'd call that a victory.
Maybe not enough to win the midterms, but definitely shows their strategy worked, I mean, if those numbers held.
But there were a couple problems with the strategy.
A week after the hearings, the Rasmussen numbers went right back to almost where they were, meaning that here's my interpretation.
You can't be sure this is true.
This is an interpretation of their results.
This is my interpretation. My interpretation is that a certain number of Republicans We're convinced that when they saw the January 6th evidence, it really would connect Trump and a bunch of insurrectionists to the protesters, and you would see something pretty bad there.
And people were sort of getting ahead of it and, you know, preemptively saying, you know, I can barely be a Republican anymore because I don't want to be on the same team as these people.
Except when the January 6th hearings were held, even without a defense, This is important.
The Republicans don't even get to talk, basically.
There's no defense. It's just prosecution.
And even with just prosecution, it looks like what they proved is that President Trump couldn't even get Don Jr.
on board. And we're done.
If I could explain the entire situation, the entire January 6th summary, just the whole thing, the whole thing, I'm just going to boil it into, and I can do this because I'm a trained cartoonist.
Don't try this at home.
You won't do it right. But I'm a professional.
I can take complicated situations and boil them into their simplest form.
What we learned primarily We learned a lot, but there's one thing that captures all the rest.
What we learned is that President Trump couldn't even get Don Jr.
on board. Not even close.
The only people he could get on board were some lawyers who are trained to agree with you for money and support your point, whatever it is.
After all of this talk, and all of this talk of insurrection, and he's going to hold office, we know now for sure, we now know for sure, he couldn't get Ivanka on board.
He couldn't get Jared on board.
He couldn't get Don Jr.
on board. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any non-lawyer in the White House inner circle Bill Barr wasn't on board.
Giuliani is an attorney.
Giuliani is an attorney.
He couldn't get a non-lawyer on board.
How about, I don't know, maybe Sidney Powell or something?
I don't know what she was saying at the time.
But that's what you learned.
So the January 6th trial, I think, is the biggest failure in politics that we'll ever see.
Because it sounded really good on paper, and I have to admit, it worked for a week.
It narrowed the gap.
But even without a defense...
I mean, that's so important.
Without a defense, they just lined themselves up and shot themselves in front of the public.
So anybody who watched it just thought, well, yeah, he didn't convince his chief of staff...
Any of his children, his son-in-law, he didn't get anybody!
Nobody! And, you know, the Democrats were worried about how close we were to an insurrection.
Do you know how close we were?
Zero! And I didn't know that, right?
I mean, it looked to me like there was no insurrection.
But I thought, you know, maybe.
Maybe there were, you know, some people in the White House who kind of were thinking, well, let's see if we can hold power anyway.
Turns out, no. Just lawyers.
And that's a special case.
All right, anyway. So, I told you that you come here for the best jokes about Roe v.
Wade. It's a serious situation.
But I'd like to call out three blue-checked verified entities on Twitter because they were the only ones willing to retweet this joke of mine.
So it turns out that Dick's Sporting Goods, and I learned this in a tweet from Lauren Chen, But she noted that Dick's Sporting Goods is going to pay their employees a certain amount if they want to go somewhere to get an abortion.
And so I helpfully added a headline, a breaking news headline to the story, Dick's Cause Abortions.
Dick's Cause Abortions.
And... Only Greg Gutfeld and the Rasmussen poll and Lauren Chen retweeted that.
At least of the blue checks.
So, congratulations to those with a sense of humor.
But, okay, this is a true story.
I'm not making this up.
In the mall that's pretty near me, maybe the closest one, There are two businesses that are next to each other in the same little parking lot.
One is Dick's, and the other is a restaurant called BJ's.
Now, whoever decided that the two anchor tenants should be Dicks and BJs, I think it's time for a slow clap.
Now, maybe it happened by accident.
Maybe. Maybe.
And maybe Elon Musk's car models spell sexy completely by accident.
S-E-X-Y. Maybe.
So maybe dicks and BJs are just in the same place for no reason whatsoever.
But it happened.
All right. If you could buy stock in states...
And I don't think there's any way to do that, right?
There's no indirect way to invest in a state, is there?
Probably is. I can't think of one.
But if you could invest in states, which ones would you buy and which ones would you sell now?
Go. Based on the Roe vs.
Wade, just based on that.
Roe vs. Wade, well, you could throw everything else in too.
Throw everything in there. Throw in school boards, right?
Good one. Throw in school boards, gun rights, throw in abortion situation.
Throw it all in there.
Throw in gas prices, energy, wokeness.
Throw it all in there. Which states would you buy and which would you sell?
Talk to me, people. Talk to me.
All right? Got lots of opinions.
So I see most of you are playing for the team and saying that the conservative states are going to be the beneficiaries.
I would have said that until the Roe vs.
Wade situation.
Because that is going to really, really stop any kind of high-talent young people from...
I mean, obviously, conservatives don't care, people who are not going to have kids maybe don't care, etc.
But I would buy California.
You know, you can hate a lot of stuff about California, and we've got some issues.
A lot. A lot.
But we may have bottomed out.
I think we may have bottomed out.
California isn't going to go down forever.
That's my prediction. I guess it's not guaranteed.
It could go down forever, but I don't think so.
There are too many strong advantages here.
Even our budget looks good.
The California budget looks strong.
Who saw that coming? So yeah, California, when it comes back, it will.
It's going to rage. If I were an investor in states, I would buy California, even if you hate everything about it, just as an investor, right?
It's sort of like, to some of you, that would be like investing in a tobacco company.
It might be distasteful to you, but I'm just saying it's likely to make money.
I think California's badness is all, how they say, baked in, like it's all part of the cake already.
So you've already discounted that in your head, and this is new news.
I think it's going to make a difference.
But in a larger sense, I think California is going to come raging back maybe three to five years.
It's going to take us a while to figure out how to keep the lights on.
If we can keep the lights on, this is a pretty awesome place.
As Corey DeAngelis helpfully informs us, There's a huge victory in school choice.
The Arizona State Senate just passed a bill to fund students instead of systems.
But this is the most expansive one, as Corey tells us, the most expansive school choice initiative in the nation.
So, basically, families take their education dollars and they can apply them to a variety of places.
So there would be a free market competition in that state.
Now, how much do I love...
That some places will become the laboratories, and we will find out if this approach to schooling is better.
Now, you probably think that because I retweet school choice stuff practically every day, you probably think, well, there's a guy who knows that school choice is the best thing and we should do it.
Nope. Nope.
Nope. I'm completely open to the fact that maybe there's some flaw that's not obvious.
Generally speaking, any time you can test a free market solution, you want to do that.
You want to do that. And there are plenty of people who want that option, and they want it for more than one reason, which is a perfect situation.
One of the reasons might be they don't want the wokeness indoctrination.
So we just have two reasons instead of one.
The other reason is just better schools.
But it's great that Arizona's gonna now Be the, I guess, the premier national test laboratory for finding out what works and what doesn't.
I don't know how long it will take.
I mean, it might be a five-year situation.
So it's not like we're going to wait for the results of the test.
But I do like it.
I do like it when places are acting differently and we can just measure it and we'll find out.
I'm open to it. I'm open to this being...
Actually, I'm open to this...
Being a solution to systemic racism.
Because no matter how true, and I think a lot of it's true, the legacy of slavery, you know, rippling through to the present, no matter what you want to argue about the details of where you see it and where you don't and whose fault it is and blah, blah, blah, blah. You can argue that all day long.
But here's one thing I don't think anybody would argue.
If every kid...
had exactly the same educational options, you know, with no crime, and, you know, they can make it to school, and they've got enough support to do their homework and stuff.
If everybody had that, in a generation or so, you'd stop talking about systemic racism, right?
It wouldn't be one generation.
But, you know, you should at least get a head start on it.
So, to me, The more things you can experiment with, the more improvement, and the faster you can get it in the educational field, especially to the low-income people, that's the biggest lever for everything.
Every lever of civilization comes from getting this stuff right.
So if you're not planning a generation ahead, and this is good planning, and maybe it's accidental, but knowing which works, the public method or the more flexible school choice method, we'll actually know which one of those is better.
Not only that, but within the school choice field, there'll be lots of competition within that, and then we'll know which of those is better.
This is amazing.
We've finally done, or we're on the cusp, or at least let's say we're setting the field for the biggest golden age improvement of all time.
How many of you are parents who have kids in school?
Would you agree that the thing we call school is completely broken?
I mean, it just destroys the parents' life at the same time as the kids'.
There's nothing about it that's done right.
I mean, in fact, every part of school would be different if you started today and built it from scratch.
It'd all be different.
It's just bullying and low self-esteem, and it's just a horror fest for most kids.
When I see kids go to school, I feel sorry for them.
And not in the way that I did when I was going to school.
I never felt sorry for myself.
Did you? I don't know.
I mean, maybe it was a generation thing.
You could like school or not like school, but I never really felt sorry for myself.
But when I see a modern child go to school, I think they're just going into the grinder.
It's like a mental health destruction grinder, and the state makes you send them there.
We're going to take your child and we're going to put them every day into a situation that is really, really fucked up.
And they will be mentally scarred, probably for life.
Probably for life. Their self-esteem will be in the toilet.
They'll have no value in themselves.
And that's what we'll do for you.
And then we'll give them back.
You see what you can do with them.
And So that's what it feels like.
It feels like that.
I think we could do better. All right.
Here's something that I forgot or didn't know.
I can't remember. But Maggie Haberman tweeted, this is not the part I forgot.
I'll get to that. That officials with security clearances were sending Internet conspiracy theories to senior officials asking them to investigate.
I think she's talking about the Trump...
And then Molly Hemingway retweeted that with her own comment and said that Maggie Haberman won a Pulitzer for her role successfully propagating the Russia collusion hoax, in which officials with security clearances sent the Democrat manufactured hoax to senior officials across the government in an attempt to orchestrate a coup.
So, yeah.
And how many of you knew that Maggie Haberman won a Pulitzer for writing about something that wasn't even slightly true?
Thank you.
Did you all know that?
Somehow, I feel like I missed that story when it happened because I think I would have remembered it.
Did I ever tell you what it takes to win a Pulitzer?
You know, I always thought it's a very prestigious thing to win.
And cartoonists can win them.
There are several cartoonists, lots of them actually, who have won Pulitzers.
So I always thought, you know, that would be like the, that would be the pinnacle of my career.
If I could win a Pulitzer, I would suddenly go from, you know, idiot making jokes to some kind of a credible person, you know, sort of a Gary Trudeau situation, Burke Brethard.
They're one Pulitzers.
Like, they never take that away from you, right?
It's very prestigious.
Or I thought it was, until I talked to somebody who knew how it works.
Do you know what it takes?
Do you know what the process is?
There's a small group of people who are selected as judges.
And then if people submit books, so it's not everything that gets created that year, you have to actually apply.
Most people don't.
So a few people will apply, you know, a small percentage.
And then a group of people will read the books and tell you which ones they like.
It's basically a book club.
It's just a book club of some people who like reading books.
And then they pick one that they liked better.
It literally has no more meaning or depth than your neighborhood book club who read several books that year as a club, and then at the end they pick one they liked.
That's it. There's nothing to the Pulitzer Prize except that.
That's it. And how many book clubs would have picked the same books?
Not many, because each book club would read a different group of books, just like the Pulitzer group.
The Pulitzer group isn't reading all the books.
They're reading a little subset of books.
They can't read every book and then compare it to every other book.
So it's just a ridiculous prize.
I mean, it's really ridiculous.
It's just somebody liked the book.
That's it. And once I learned that, then you understand stuff like, you know, how do you get a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on something that didn't happen?
Well, some people probably didn't like Trump.
That's why. That's why.
Probably some people who were involved with the Pulitzer that year just didn't like Trump.
And then they saw Maggie Heberman says lots of bad things about Trump and wrote about things that were bad for Trump.
And they thought, well, that's excellent writing right there.
That's some high-class writing, said the book club that happened to be called the Pulitzer Committee.
All right. And it's pretty...
Anyway. Here's a question I would like to see being asked.
And it's not because I care about the answer.
I only care about how they would answer it.
All right? So people on the right were often bedeviled, I say, bedeviled, by Black Lives Matter because they had such a clever slogan.
And they would say, Do Black Lives Matter?
And then the people on the right would fall into the trap.
Well, I think all lives matter, thinking that they're agreeing, but in fact, it gets framed as racist.
Racist! So it was kind of a really good trap.
And so I like a good trap, and so I wondered if you could use it this way.
What would happen if you asked a Democrat on air if unborn lives matter?
Now, I know the real answer.
They'll say, well, you know, we're talking about a fetus, blah, blah, blah.
It's not a life. But the entire argument is, you know, the whole Roe versus Wade thing is just thinking past the sail and then arguing after you've thought past the sail.
So this is no different than that.
I mean, it's Weasley. But what would they say?
Because if all lives matter was ever inappropriate, Well, maybe we know why.
Maybe the reason that the left could not agree that all lives matter is a good slogan is because there's some ambiguity about when life begins.
So the moment they say all lives matter, they've kind of agreed that abortion is murder.
So they really don't mean all lives matter.
Literally, they don't.
And, you know, you could say, well, technically they don't think that's life, so you're lying, Scott.
I get that. But you can see why they would want to avoid accepting the idea that all lives matter, because it opens up an argument there.
So I would just love to see what somebody would say if they were really in the fight and they were pro-abortion rights.
And you said, do unborn lives matter?
What do you think? I think the honest answer...
The honest answer...
And by the way, it's very clever to put unborn in front of life.
Because that's not the same as life.
Right? It's kind of clever.
An unborn life is not alive.
Or it could be. I mean, you could argue that it's life.
But the phrase doesn't say it's life.
Because as soon as you put unborn in front of it, you've allowed some ambiguity.
So I think that's a good way to ask the question, just to see the quality of the answer.
Because the Democrats have a super consistency problem.
They're staging insurrections at the same time they're doing hearings about insurrections.
Am I right? I mean, it looks like that.
In both cases, they're not insurrections.
But since they decided to call a vigorous protest in which violence is either implied or actually happens, since they're calling that an insurrection, It's hard to explain the fact that you're doing it at the moment.
You're disavowing it.
It's very, very awkward and inconvenient.
They have that consistency problem with their message right now.
That's a problem. Then they also have the...
Well, let's stop with that one.
All right. How many of you think that the world is getting worse...
Because, well, I won't say because.
How many of you think that, let's just say America, how many of you think America is getting worse?
And that we're on some kind of a long-term, you know, drop.
Now, let me ask you this.
If I did a survey, and oh, this would be interesting.
I don't know if Rasmus in Poland is watching this, but here's my suggestion.
Ask people, is America improving or going downhill?
But sort them by people who watch the news and people who don't.
I'll bet you the people who watch the news think we're going to hell.
And the people who are oblivious to the news and they're just sort of looking around, they may have a different opinion.
But I'll bet it doesn't work during this current weird recession pandemic stuff.
At the moment, it does look like things are getting worse.
I mean, you go shopping, you can't get stuff.
You buy something, it's more expensive.
So in many ways, it seems like things are getting worse.
But I don't think so.
I think if you were to look at the macro picture, I'll bet almost everything is getting better.
Do you know why? Because it always does.
Most things. 98% of things are just getting better all the time.
Airline travel is just always getting worse.
I don't know. It's an exception.
I mean, the reason we pointed out is that it's rare.
Yeah. And I think that we're feeling some serious growth pains right now.
I think that the stress on society that you see is the stress that you get when you lift weights and you push yourself to that third set.
I feel like that's what we're experiencing.
It definitely hurts.
It definitely hurts.
But it feels like this is the stress on the system that you get when you're going to the next level.
I feel like we're ascending.
Somebody used that word. I'll borrow your word.
I feel like civilization is ascending.
It doesn't feel like it if you watch the news, because the news is designed to look at the bad stuff, which is useful, because then you focus on fixing that stuff.
But if you're actually trying to understand the bigger picture, you could be blinded by the fact that talking about the bad stuff is more fun than talking about the good stuff.
Yeah, and somebody's mentioning Steven Pinker on YouTube.
I think the context of that is there are a number of people, including him, who like to point out how we see doom and gloom, but that's not really what's happening.
Airports using bioscanning.
Well, have you tried the CLEAR system yet?
Has anybody done that? I'm going to give a little commercial for it.
If you fly a lot, there's a system, at least in the West Coast and some other places.
So I don't know how many airports they're in.
Maybe just half of the big ones or something like that.
You use a retinal scan.
They take it once, and then once you're in the system, you can bypass the security line by scanning your biometrics.
Now, it's really awkward because they don't really have the regular system and the clear system integrated in a non-awkward way.
So here's what happens.
I walk up to the clear system where there's no line, because people, it's like, you know, the first days of ATMs.
You know, grandma didn't want to use the ATM on day one.
So the clear line has nobody there.
So you walk up to the clear line, they say, hello, and there's always somebody to help you right there.
And you just put your eyes in it and scan it, and then they do this.
They mark your ticket, your boarding pass that you've scanned, that you've been approved, and then they walk you to the beginning of the line.
Yeah, you do pay for it.
It's an annual payment.
I forget how much, but it wasn't crazy if you're flying.
And they walk you to the front of the line.
And they do it officially.
So they're doing it with all the TSA people.
But all the people who have to wait in line, they don't know why you're going to the front of the line.
They just know what's happening.
So you end up looking like the celebrity.
So if you want to have a celebrity experience for a very reasonable price, do the clear system, and then you'll be walked up to the front of the line right in front of everybody, and nobody will know why.
They'll just think, are you famous or something?
Now, in my case, it's weird because I am famous.
So I'm being treated like a celebrity, but not because I'm a celebrity.
But people will wonder if I am, but it's irrelevant that I am, because that's not why they're treating me.
It's just sort of a weird situation.
All right. Now...
Thank you. Thank you.
I told the people on Locals, because I talked to them before I go live on YouTube, I asked them to remind me because I had an idea for solving the world's biggest problem.
And it's based on a conversation I had recently with someone who is having some happiness problems.
And then I walked through a number of situations and I said, okay, are you happy in this situation?
Yes. Are you happy in this situation?
No. And then I looked for the pattern.
And you know what the pattern was?
That when this person was with other people, this person was happy.
And when this person was not with other people in any kind of a social situation, be it family, be it friends, be it boyfriends, girlfriends, whatever, then not happy.
That's it. That's all it was.
It was that period.
And how many people have that same situation?
How many people are lonely in 2022?
It's probably the biggest crippling problem people have.
Here's a little eye-opener.
Ask yourself when you've had a good social day if it was a good day.
The answer is usually yes, even if your other problems were about the same.
Now take away that good social part For whatever reason.
Now, all of your other problems seem pretty big, don't they?
Because it's your social life that allows you to, like, live and enjoy things and not think about your problems for a little while.
As soon as that social life is gone, everything's the biggest problem in the world.
So, could you solve the social life problem?
And the answer is yes.
Yes, you could. All you need is an app that's scheduled you to have dinners.
It could be a potluck at your house, but it also could be eating out at a restaurant.
And you do six people at a table, because that's the right number.
At a restaurant recently, I took to be three married couples about the same age and had a lot in common, and I've never seen six happier people at a table.
Now, they were having some drinks and some good food, but they were laughing so hard and having such a good time I just couldn't stand it.
It was like I just wanted to be them.
Like you just wished you were one of those six people.
You really did. And it looked like they probably just had known each other a long time and had a lot in common.
And that's all it was.
You should try this.
Just have an app that sets you up with people that you don't ever have to see again.
But you could. You meet, six of you have dinner with drinks, and maybe this is what the app does.
It says, do you like drinking?
Because if you say yes, you're going to want to be with some other people who like to have a drink, like to have a cocktail.
Now, imagine that every weekend you could do this.
Every weekend, or every night, as much as you wanted.
You just take out the app, you just look for somebody else, Who's looking for somebody else to add to a table, and then you make sure that it's equal men and women, or because it's an app and you can filter it better, you make sure it's a table full of LGBTQ, if that's what you want, or whatever.
But you're filtering high-level stuff instead of compatibility.
In other words, you're not filtering for a date, You're filtering for, okay, high level, are you, let's say, I'll just take an example, I'd like some people who lean right and like to have a cocktail.
Right? If you happen to be in that category, you lean right, And you like to go to dinner and have a cocktail.
And I paired you up.
Let's say you and your partner.
I'll say you have a mate.
But even if you're single, it could be just five other single people.
And that's the only thing you know.
The only thing you know is that you lean right and you like to have a cocktail over a good meal.
You don't think you'd have fun?
You would. You would.
Now, if you didn't have a great time the first day, well, maybe the second day.
Now, suppose you did it every day for a month.
You don't think you would meet one person that you'd want to have lunch with on your own later.
Of course you would. That's how it works.
All you really need is contact with other people.
The rest works out.
You'll always find a friend if you have enough contacts.
So the biggest problem in the world is loneliness and poor social networking.
100% of that could be solved by...
Diversification. Same as investment.
You need to be exposed to an ongoing flow of different people, such that some of that flow will match up with what you need and what you want, and then those people become your lasting situations.
So you need an app that recognizes that people need flow.
Maybe that's the name of the app.
Flow. It's not about finding your one person to marry.
It's not about sex. It's about finding a continuous flow of people who have enough in common with you, or even better, one of your options could be, put me in a table that are totally different from me.
Like, it's a grab bag.
I want to be at the weirdest table I could get.
I want a rabbi and a punk rocker and a murderer.
And I want a couple of drinks with that crowd.
I would love that, actually.
You put me with the weirdest table, and I'd have the best time.
So, you could call it meetups.
Yeah, there's like a meetup thing, but I don't think that's quite there.
I think there's an interface, business model upgrade, because the meetups are usually around an interest.
And I think that narrows it too much.
I think it should be...
And also the meetups end up being ossified, like you're meeting the same group or so each time.
I think you want a flow.
You want the most number of people that you can spend a little bit of quality time with.
And then good things will happen after that.
All right? Did I deliver?
See, the problem with loneliness is that there's nobody's job to fix it.
There's no cabinet position for social life.
And yet it's your biggest problem.
Is that weird? It's your biggest problem for probably 75% of you.
It's your biggest problem. And nobody's job is to help you with it.
There's no funding you can get.
I mean, I'm not even aware of any kind of training class to improve your...
There's not an app, right?
Yeah, there's a difference between solitude and loneliness, right?
But remember, loneliness isn't the only thing we're trying to solve.
There are lots of people who have plenty of people around them that's just not a good mix for them.
So it's not working out.
So sometimes you just need more.
Just more people. More diversification.
Do you know why I think diversifying your social life would definitely work?
It's because diversification works everywhere.
It's like the one thing you can pretty much depend on.
You know, in finance, diversifying is the thing you need to get right.
It's the thing you need to get right.
And... I also recommend diversifying your boss.
Can you be happy if you have one boss?
Yes, if your boss is awesome.
But how often does that happen?
If you have only one boss, your whole life depends on one person who could be a little bit nuts, often is.
So you want to diversify your bosses.
That's what I've done. Because in my model, my business model, you're my boss, right?
Like I have hundreds of bosses watching me right now.
So if one of you fires me, which happens every day, one of you decides I'm never watching that again or I'm not going to subscribe anymore.
So every day I get fired.
Every day. But I'm diversified.
I have so many bosses that a hundred can fire me a day and it doesn't affect my happiness.
So diversify your friends, diversify your social life, diversify your bosses, and diversify your investments.
