Episode 1787 Scott Adams: Today I Will Rip The Cover Off Reality And Show You What's Really Going On
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Darwin and Einstein now believed wrong...as I predicted
J6 Committee distorted Ken Klukowski testimony?
Are words violence?
Rudy Giuliani assaulted
Time saving tips from Democrats
Prime Influencers and AI
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and you're lucky enough to be here for it.
Either live, wow, or recorded, still amazing, still amazing, and has some advantages too.
Such as you can put me on fast forward and listen to me at 1.25 to 1.75 speed, which I've been told optimizes for my sleepy presentation.
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Oh, you know who you are.
If you're using me that way, Then it doesn't matter what I say so much, it just matters that I'm chattering in your ear and keeping you company and I'm your invisible friend.
So whether I'm your invisible friend or the person who's telling you the most unusual takes on reality, either way, you're going to take it up a notch with a simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
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That's the kind of tips you come here for.
Well, I'd like to tell you my best worst idea.
Would you like to hear it?
My best worst idea.
This is something that I was pretty sure was one of my best ideas.
I mean, I felt pretty strongly about it.
I found out yesterday it's my worst idea.
And it goes like this.
I saw a map of abandoned railroad tracks in the United States.
Places that no longer have a railroad, but they still have their right-of-way exists.
And I said, and by the way, I'm not the first person to think of this.
There's an actual effort, an organization raising money to do this, called Rails to Trails.
And I said, hey, with all these e-bikes and other e-conveyances like scooters and carts and whatnot, why don't we build a network of interconnected paths that have no regular vehicles on, no cars, and you could come to America and for the price of practically nothing...
As long as you had time, travel around, and you'd build out tourist industries along the ways, and you'd be able to basically connect everything in America, or you'd get pretty close to it, in a way that would be way more fun than taking a bus or riding a plane or whatever.
And I thought, imagine all the people who would come to America just to see the natural beauty, And traverse it from one place to another.
And let's say you make sure that the most important monuments and tourist sites are all part of the network.
Now, tell me, isn't that the best idea you've heard in a long time?
It would be clean, clean industry.
It would attract the right kind of money and people.
It would make it look like it was a great place to live.
Come on. That's one of the best ideas you've ever heard.
That's actually one of the worst ideas you've ever heard.
I'm going to tell you in a minute. So here's why it's the worst idea in the world.
I didn't know this.
Turns out I'm not such a lawyer.
And I thought...
I thought. You could acquire the rights for these rail lines.
Somebody must own them that would be happy to sell them.
And that's almost true.
So it turns out you can go to the people who own the right-of-ways and you can say, can we buy this right-of-way that used to be a train track?
And they can sell it to you if they want to.
So that part works.
They're not doing anything with it at the moment.
It has no value. So they just sell you the right of way.
You use it for the bikes. Boom!
So far, so far, it's still the best idea you've ever heard.
It's actually the worst idea.
I'm going to get to that. Here's the part I didn't know.
The train tracks all go across, or mostly, private property.
At some point, the government said to the people who owned that private property, you know that private property of yours is right in the place that we'd like to put a train track.
So we're taking it.
We're stealing your private property, but it's for the greater good, so I'm not complaining about that.
It's eminent domain.
It's part of the system.
If it happens to you, you hate it.
But, you know, you could argue that it's for the greater good.
Now, it turns out that all those private owners who were forced to give away their property or sell it, I guess, for the greater good, the way the contracts are written is if the trains no longer need it, it would revert back to them because it's their property.
And now the bicycle people are trying to say, hey, instead of reverting back to the landowner, why don't you just give it to us and we'll use it for...
Why don't you sell it to us?
So the landowner doesn't get the money when somebody buys the right-of-way because they're only buying the right to it.
They're not buying the land. So basically, it's this huge, huge land grab, effectively, of private land.
In effect. So, I mean, it's the right of ways, you could argue.
But, so, I thought it was a great idea, but when you get down to what it does to private land ownership, it feels a little bit wrong to do it that way.
If it's voluntary, you know, if somebody can find a way to make enough money from it, then that would be different.
Well, the Dilbert comic was banned, for Sunday, was banned in the LA Times.
In a number of other papers.
Would you like to hear the comic that was banned in the L.A. Times?
Of course you would.
So it was a Sunday comic in which Wally was trying to take time off for his cramps.
And you'll see how that went as soon as I can find my own comic.
And here it comes.
All right, so you won't be able to see it, but I'll read it to you.
It's just Wally with a jacket on talking to the boss.
And Wally says, this is a Sunday comic, so it's a longer form.
Wally says, I need to go home sick today.
I have cramps. The boss says, in your legs?
Wally says, no.
The boss says, um.
Then the boss says, is this a woke thing?
Then Wally explains, he says, I identify as a birthing human.
To be honest, I'm only doing it for the benefits, but I believe my scheme is allowed under our current guidelines, is it not?
And in the last panel, Wally's walking away, and the boss is grimacing, and the boss says, jerk.
And Wally says, see you tomorrow, bigot.
He's got a smile on his face.
Now, so I got banned from newspapers for that joke.
Now, my editor, to his credit, anticipated this.
And this would have run earlier, but it would have been too close to some other things that got banned in newspapers recently.
Was it the Dave comic?
Oh, I think the other ones got banned where I introduced a new character named Dave, who appears to be black, But the joke is that he identifies as white because it ruins their diversity targets.
So he's just sort of playing with the system.
So again, is this an insult in any way to black people or anything?
No, it's literally the opposite.
The Dave character is kind of a cool character, should have been introduced long ago.
If anything, it took decades too long.
So, in both cases, I don't even come close to showing disrespect for anybody.
Would you agree?
Do you see any disrespect for the, let's say, the trans community in my Wally joke?
There's none. It's literally a joke about Wally.
I have a character who has nothing to do with trans.
Who uses every mechanism to find a way to not work.
That's what the character does.
So when there's a new trend or something that comes across the workplace, then I bash it against Wally, and I have Wally figure out how to use that new trend to get out of work.
Now, Wally did the same thing with COVID. And working at home, right?
So whenever there's a new thing, he finds the way to use it to work less.
So I get an impassioned, you know, very long message on Instagram from someone in the trans community, I think it was, and saying, you know, he'd been a fan of mine forever, but had gone too far and was insulting him.
And I think, have we gotten to the part where even mentioning somebody...
It has gone too far.
Here's the way this should have been interpreted.
The way the topic was identified in my comic is as the canvas.
So the topic was just the canvas.
And then I did something that was just about my characters.
So what's wrong with...
What's wrong with saying that the canvas now includes the trans topics?
Because what you're seeing actually is the opposite of something disrespectful.
You're seeing me incorporate it as normal.
That's what you want.
You want people like me who write about stuff and decide what is appropriate to write about and what isn't.
You want people like me to treat it as matter of fact.
The moment I treat it as that's the special part, well, then you've got a bone to pick with me.
But if I treat it like it's just the canvas, and then the joke is actually about Wally, that's exactly what you want.
You just want it to disappear into the background, and then everybody's happy.
So be careful what you wish for.
Here's the weirdest little story I wondered if I was going to say this, and I've said some version of this before, but I saw an interview with Lex Friedman and Donald Hoffman.
If you haven't seen it, look for it.
It's a podcast. Lex Friedman does a great job, by the way.
His podcast, highly recommend it.
He has great guests, and he asks some of the best questions.
Probably some of the best questions you'll ever see a podcaster ask.
Tim Ferriss is great, too.
There are a lot of great...
Jim Altusher.
There are some people who jump out as being the best question askers.
So you want to look for them.
Anyway, when I saw that interview, it sort of freshened in my mind something that I just...
I can't not tell you about.
So here's a little story from, you need some background.
23 years ago, I published, or I wrote a book, and it got published, that largely destroyed my career.
It was called The Dilbert Future.
Now, have any of you read it?
Now, let me tell you why it destroyed my career.
If you weren't there, you probably didn't know.
Now, it's a book that has some Dilbert comics in it, but it's mostly text.
And I make a bunch of humorous, but sometimes serious humorous predictions.
Some right, some wrong.
And a lot of it would be subjective, whether it was right or wrong.
But the weirdest part, and in many ways the reason I wrote the book, was to fit this in here.
I talked about affirmations and stuff.
But there was a chapter toward the end...
It's called A New View of the Future.
And I made some predictions in there that ruined my career the following way.
My diehard Dilbert Reader fans were almost, probably at least 80% of them were in the technical fields, some kind of STEM field.
And one of my predictions offended that group so much that it just destroyed licensing and book sales almost immediately.
And let me tell you what the prediction was.
And so I wrote it down so I could give it to you exactly, not from memory.
It was prediction number 63.
And I said, the theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked in your lifetime.
Now the key word here is scientifically.
So the prediction was that science itself, not me, not religion, not God, not Christians, not intelligent design people, but rather science itself, in my lifetime, I actually say your lifetime, but it's already here, that in your lifetime, the theory of evolution will be scientifically debunked.
Do you know what happened to me when I predicted that?
It almost ended my career, but it did probably cut my earnings potential by 75%, something like that.
Now, I didn't see that coming, honestly.
I thought it would just be interesting, some people would argue.
I didn't think it would actually just destroy my career.
But in terms of what Dilbert was doing, if you were to track it, you can see that that's the point where every time I was mentioned online, for at least a decade, The comments were filled with people saying, he doesn't believe in evolution.
He's an intelligent design creationist.
And then, because they hated me for that, they said I was also a Holocaust denier and that I was in favor of rape.
Those were the things said about me.
And there was a story about me being a sock puppet.
Which is also at a context.
There was something that looked exactly like that if you didn't know the context.
So basically, I got destroyed because I made this prediction 23 years ago.
I was listening to Lex Friedman interview Don Hoffman, and Don Hoffman says...
That evolution is probably closer to a user interface for something that we don't understand that's happening beneath it.
Now, I made even weirder predictions in this same chapter.
I said that there were some assumptions that we make about reality that were going to be challenged in the next 100 years.
And I said specifically, prediction 64, I said the next 100 years will be a search for better perception instead of better vision.
And that's what Hoffman has said, that's where we are.
So here's what I meant by that.
And I'll use Hoffman's analogy Or is it metaphor?
I don't know what it is. About us seeing user interfaces.
Over the last, say, 20-some years, 30 years, most of us have been looking at screens.
And if you're looking at a screen, you're looking at a user interface that's hiding a bunch of complexity, like the zeros and ones.
But for 30 years, the quality of the screen keeps improving, right?
So now we have 4K TVs and the iPads I'm looking at are really good.
But that just improved our vision.
It didn't allow me to know anything about the zeros and ones that were underneath it.
I could just see the user interface better.
And so my prediction was That we were trapped in improving the user interface, but we weren't learning anything about the nature of reality, and that we would figure that out.
Donald Hoffman's book called...
Did I write it down?
It's called...
Oh, damn it.
Did I really not write that down?
I actually looked it up to write it down and didn't do it.
So, somebody in the comments, you know what I'm talking about.
Oh, the case against reality.
There it is. The case against reality.
So, he also says that space-time as a way of understanding things is dead.
Do you know who is space-time?
You know, sort of the father of space-time.
That was Einstein, right? So Hoffman is saying, he said in the Lex Friedman interview, and I guess he probably says this in his book, that just as Einstein supplanted What's his name?
Why am I? Newton.
Yeah. Just as Newton's ideas were replaced by Einstein's, because Newton's ideas only work in a certain range of situations, but Einstein's worked in a greater range of situations, so it sort of replaced it.
What Hoffman claims is that this, and I think he's presenting it as not just his opinion, but that the physicists themselves would agree with it, sort of that the mainstream is coming around to the idea that space-time doesn't exist, that space-time is just another interface.
All we did was get down to another user interface.
We're not anywhere close to reality.
And everything we knew about particles and just basically everything we know about science is probably just a user interface and we're not even close to understanding what's under it.
Now here's the thing.
Hoffman says that scientists now believe that and that they've done enough math and science to demonstrate that they know it's not real.
They haven't yet figured out what is.
Now here's what I said in the same book, that the assumptions that were going to come under challenge were the following.
Time goes forward, objects move, gravity exists, and that cause and effect require some kind of physical contact.
That's basically an idiot's description of space-time.
So I actually predicted that Einstein's Theory that involves space-time would be overturned in your lifetime.
And it was.
So... I'm going to make a claim that you should reject on its surface, except that I'm pretty sure it's true.
But you should object because it's so distasteful.
Here's my claim.
That 23 years ago, I publicly predicted...
That both Darwin and Einstein would be shown to be wrong, specifically because they would be shown to be working at a user interface level and not telling you what reality was.
And that once we understood that, we could go deeper below the user interface and maybe, and we haven't done it yet, figure out what's going on under there.
And both of those things happened.
So one of these predictions literally ruined my career.
Yeah, I mean, I did fine, but it could have been ten times bigger, I suppose.
You got quiet, didn't you?
All right, let's talk about some three ways.
There are three ways to adjust your user interface.
Let's say that everything you see is really just an icon or a representation of reality, and you really don't know what's going on down there.
How can you know what's going on?
There are three ways. If you don't follow the news, you don't know what's going on.
When do you agree? If you don't follow the news, or in any way, whether it's through Twitter or anything else.
But if you don't follow it, then you don't know what's going on.
I think you'd agree with that. If you do follow the news, you have been grotesquely misled about what is going on.
Now, you might think that's only other people, but it's not.
There's a very small chance that only the people who disagree with you have been misled about what the reality is.
It's very small.
Maybe. I mean, maybe.
Maybe you're the one who got all the right answers.
You can't rule it out, right?
You can't rule it out.
But think about it.
Is it more likely That only the other people get brainwashed and you don't.
Wow, everybody else looks brainwashed.
It's lucky that hasn't affected me.
Oh, okay. Maybe.
Maybe you're EO. You're Neo.
Maybe you've escaped the matrix.
It's possible. But probably not.
Probably watching the news just makes you more grotesquely misled.
So not watching the news doesn't work.
But if you watch the news, it makes it worse.
Well, how about doing your own research?
A lot of you are big fans of that.
And if you do that, you'll experience confirmation bias and an illusion of understanding.
So I did a survey of Unscientific survey on the internet.
I said, which way do you understand reality?
25% said they ignore the news, and that's the way they deal with reality.
25%. That's exactly a quarter.
25%. Interesting.
9% follow the news to get their understanding of reality.
I mean, only follow the news.
Whereas the largest group, they do their own research.
66%. So the largest group uses their own research to create a bubble of confirmation bias, which they call reality.
So those are three ways to understand reality.
Pick one. Joel Pollack wrote in Breitbart, I think it was today or yesterday, did you see the story?
There's this attorney, Ken Klukowski, who Who did hours of testimony to the January 6th committee.
It was videoed and recorded.
So there's no question about what he said, because I think he was probably, I don't know, under oath, but it was at least on video.
So there's no way to misunderstand what he said.
Hours of direct testimony right to the camera.
And the January 6th committee literally just made up a bunch of stuff and said that his opinions were the opposite of what he said.
And that he was, basically they painted him as one of the people who thought that the election could be delayed or, you know, you could have an alternate slate of electors.
He said clearly and many times, including on video, nope, nope, never thought that.
Now my reading of the Constitution is you can't do anything like that.
The vice president doesn't have those rights.
Nope. Was never on board for a fucking second.
Not a fucking second was he on board with any of it.
He did his job when he was asked to write some memo from his boss, right?
But that's different.
When asked his opinion, he said, nope.
Nope, this isn't right.
And then they presented in public.
In public, they painted this guy as being basically a primary insurrectionist planner when all the evidence that they had collected said the opposite.
That their own evidence has said the opposite.
Now, of course he's complaining, but what do you even say about a story like that?
I mean, it's hard to add any kind of, like, punditry to it, right?
It's just like watching a car wreck, where you just look at it and you go, God!
God! Is this really happening?
Like, do you actually live in a country where your elected leaders, your most respected leaders on one side of the party in power, most respected leaders on one side literally just made up a bunch of facts, the opposite of the facts they knew, and painted this guy as a monster?
You know, it's almost like they're hunting Republicans.
I don't know. Somebody who's really good at making predictions might have predicted that.
New York Times is reporting about China's surveillance and AI stuff.
And apparently they've got to the point where they think they can sort of detect in advance a crime.
They can find somebody who maybe looks like they're probably doing a crime by where they're going back and forth, or what phone numbers they call.
I guess they've got a variety of ways.
If you know enough about people, you can determine patterns that would make them look like they're either getting ready for a crime, or maybe they're involved in a crime that nobody's reported yet, because if it's drug dealing, nobody's reported it.
But maybe you could detect it just by the traffic patterns.
So, for example, a drug user, if he makes too many calls to the same number, that was one of the examples.
I mean, that's a weak example, but anyway.
And if a person with a history of mental illness gets near a school, So if you have security at the school, they would get an alert, oh, there's somebody with probably a specific kind of mental illness who's, you know, within a half mile of the school, so, you know, be alert.
Now, if we have that system to detect mass shooters, would you be happy with it?
Suppose it only did that.
First of all, do you think it could do it?
Do you think that an AI could detect a school shooter in advance?
I say yes.
Yes. I don't even think it would be necessarily a high level of difficulty.
Now, you might get too many, but there's no chance you wouldn't get them.
You'd get too many. That's the problem.
Like, you'd get the people who were sort of LARPing and, you know, pretending they were thinking about it.
You'd get all them. So that's the problem.
But I think you'd definitely get the ones who were really going to do it.
Because they always seem to leave such an obvious trail of, I'm going to do this thing before they do it.
So, yeah, I think it could be done, which is completely different from should you do it.
And here's a...
Yeah, I'm not going to say that.
There's some things I told the people and locals that I just can't tell you here in the main public.
Why? Because the locals, people pay a subscription to get extra stuff, but that's not why.
It's the fact that they pay for it that makes me trust they don't want to ruin the model.
So I tell them things and say, don't tell anybody else.
They actually don't.
Because they're paying for a model that they don't want to break.
I mean, if you're paying for it, why would you break it?
It wouldn't make sense. So it's this weird little situation where they actually sort of keep a secret.
It's weird. You wouldn't think it's possible.
So I retweeted AOC. I'm not so sure, you should not interpret, when I retweet AOC, it's not so that you assume that I agreed with what she said.
It has more to do with, it's interesting.
And she tweets that...
I love the way she puts it, of course.
That's the reason I like her most of all, is that she communicates in such a provocative way, and I always like anybody who does that.
So she tweeted, just a few months ago, I literally had to explain to Republican members of Congress how periods work.
Their complete and utter incompetence is now killing women and pregnant people across the U.S. There remains no legitimate grounding or basis to force birth in the United States.
Now, the example was, I think she had to explain to them that six weeks wasn't enough.
Because if you've missed your period by only two weeks, there could be so many other reasons for it that you wouldn't necessarily say, oh, I better get an abortion while it's still legal.
What do you think of that?
Now, again, if anybody's new to me, I'm not giving you my opinions on abortion because I have a penis.
I don't think that I add any credibility to the conversation, and I'm not going to have a baby.
So therefore, my opinion, I would hope, would have no value to any of you.
That should be your opinion of my opinion.
It should have no value, just as I would not want your opinion if it were about a male-only perspective if you were not a male.
If it were a male-only question, I would only want to hear from them.
If it's a female-only or birthing people, if you'd like to, you want to throw that in there?
I say, let them figure it out.
Now, I get that for many of you it's murder, and that's not for other people to work out, right?
You're like, wait, if I think it's murder, in my opinion, my honest opinion, shouldn't I get involved with that?
And the answer is, not if it's already handled.
Not if it's already handled.
Do you think women can't figure it out?
I feel like they have this, right?
No matter what your opinion is, whatever sexist opinion you have of women and decision-making, because I'm sure some of you are operating on that level, still, don't you want the people who are closest to the thing making the decisions?
And why would you think women would make the wrong decision?
There's no reason to believe that.
That's why I stand it.
Anyway, but I like AOC's point.
Is it wrong? Let me ask just from a scientific biological question because I'm not going to claim any expertise in this area.
So definitely she knows more than I do on this.
So would it be true that you wouldn't necessarily know you were pregnant by the time the deadline passed?
Is that true? Do you think six weeks is too short To be sure.
And would that be a good point?
Now, I know many of you are absolutists.
You know, it's a point of conception.
But if you are not an absolutist, isn't that a good counterpoint?
Again, this is not my opinion.
I'm asking you of your opinion.
I'm not giving you mine.
I'm asking you. I don't know.
So I'm seeing a lot of yes.
So why is it we can't even agree on something like that?
Because if the state of Texas intends to make some kind of legal period, and maybe now that's old news, so they don't have to do that.
But if somebody intended to have a legal but short, you know, window, shouldn't it at least be one that makes sense?
That's a good question.
If you're an absolute...
Um...
Never mind. Here's a question I asked.
If you were raped and impregnated, you personally, and you had the options without legal consequence, so I'm going to give you three options, and you have to imagine that you could never be legally prosecuted.
In the real world, you could, but imagine you couldn't.
Imagine you could be free of all risk.
You had been raped and you had been impregnated.
Who would you kill? And I gave the following options.
The rapist only, the baby slash fetus, whatever you'd like to label it, only.
Both of them, the rapist and the fetus slash baby, or neither.
And here were the results for my followers who chose to answer, so not scientific.
44% would want to kill the rapist only, again, if there were no legal risks of doing so.
Only 3% would want to kill the fetus or the baby only.
But 29% would kill both the rapist and whatever the rapist had issued into their bodies.
And 23% would say neither.
23%? 23%?
Anyway... And how about you, my livestream audience?
Who would you kill?
Rapist only?
The fetus slash baby only?
Both of them? Or neither?
I see some neither's.
Neither's. Neither is the rapist.
Rapist only. So the pro-life people are being...
Okay, some of you are both.
So we've got some. A lot of boths.
Oh, you know, there's quite a difference here, actually.
And now I'm seeing a lot of both.
Both and neither. Interesting.
This is the sort of reason that I don't weigh in on abortion.
Because I know that what I would decide personally shouldn't be relevant because I would have to do it in the hypothetical.
So the only kind of decision I can make is hypothetical ones.
Let's see. If hypothetically, in the imaginary world, I were a woman and then this happened to me, what would I do?
So having opinions about my hypothetical non-existent future isn't useful to you.
But... Would you like to know what I would do?
Anybody care? You shouldn't care, because it shouldn't affect you in any way.
I'll just tell you what I would do.
I would kill them both.
And I don't think it has anything to do with my opinion of abortion.
Let me be clear about that.
Independent of any opinion I would ever hold about abortion, in that narrow case, if I were a woman who had been raped and impregnated, I would kill both of them, if I could, without legal consequence.
But that's just me. Now, isn't that a good reason I should not be involved in this decision?
Shameful, exactly, Andy.
Thank you. Shameful.
By the way, I'm not defending it.
If it sounded like I was defending it or recommending it, no.
My God. Killing people is the worst thing you can do.
Do we all agree on that?
I'm saying that I would do the most horrible thing.
But I'm not defending it.
I'm not saying you should.
I'm not saying I would be a good person if I did it.
God, no. No, I would be a monster.
I would be a monster just like the person who...
I'd raped and impregnated me.
But I'm just telling you that I would turn into a monster.
I would. Under those situations, I know myself well enough, I would just snap.
I would frickin' snap.
And I'd be willing to kill anything, probably.
So I'm just talking about myself.
And should my opinion have any influence on you?
I hope not. My God!
I don't want you to turn into monsters like me.
Well, the Morning Joe, Joe says that the opinion written on the Roe v.
Wade, that the court wrote it in an aggressive tone, and he said, quote, there's a violence to the reasoning.
There's a violence to the reasoning.
So the words have a violence to them.
Now, I don't want to be an alarmist, but doesn't that sound like Somebody softening up the room to rationalize physical violence as a response.
I feel as if that's setting the tone to make physical violence a reasonable response to all this word violence.
You know, violence to violence.
Fire, fight, fire. Now, I'm not going to say that that was his intention.
That would be mind-reading.
That would be crazy. But I feel it's maybe the outcome.
So I would say it's careless.
At the very least, it's careless.
It's a careless way to frame it.
I think he should correct that, actually.
And if he did, by the way, I'd say A+. Because that's exactly the sort of thing you'd love to see somebody say, you know, I used...
I was just talking off the top of my head.
I said there's a violence to the reasoning.
I didn't mean to imply, you know, any correlation with actual violence.
So, you know, don't take it to violence.
Now, if he were to say that, I'd say, oh, clarification accepted.
That's exactly what I hope he would say.
You know, A+. But I don't know.
We'll see what happens. Do you see the weird story about Rudy Giuliani?
He was in the grocery store and he got slapped on the back aggressively and it's being, you know, considered an attack, an assault.
Now, it was assault.
I saw the video. But the video is...
It asks an interesting question.
Because the fellow who, quote, hit him, slapped him on the back.
And if you watch the video, you don't hear the sound, so maybe there's a little missing in terms of how much kinetic energy there was.
But it didn't look like he was cast forward.
It didn't look like he had to wince or anything.
It looked like it barely affected him.
But it must have been a hard enough hit because his assistant immediately reached up to the point where he was hit and like, you know, she and, you know, sort of making sure he was okay or something.
But, so I would say unambiguously it was an assault.
Do you know why? Because I'm a public figure.
If somebody came up and slapped me hard on the back and...
And then he followed up with some words that made it clear that the hard back slap was exactly what you thought it was.
That would be an assault.
I mean, I would consider a response.
I mean, I'd probably avoid it, but I'd consider it.
I would consider a violent response.
I just probably wouldn't do it in that case, because it wouldn't be worth it.
Democrats have some time-saving tips, and Maggie Haberman is a good source for those.
And sometimes we get caught up in all the, you know, you're wrong, I'm right, and we get into this team kind of conflict, and we can miss some of the good that comes out of it.
Because often there'll be nuggets of real value that come from the other side, and if you're blind to it because you're in your team mode, you're going to miss some good stuff.
So Maggie Haberman, she tweeted this.
She said that officials with security clearances were sending, talking about the Trump administration in the closing days, officials with security clearances were sending internet conspiracy theories to senior officials across the government, asking them to investigate.
So I guess during the January 6th workup, there were a lot of people sending these conspiracy theories to people saying that the election was rigged and, you know, their satellites were involved and all kinds of stuff, asking them to investigate.
And, you know, this is exactly the kind of thing that's helpful because now this gives us two time-saving tips from Democrats.
And if you think about it, think about how much time this saves, really.
Number one, you can know an election was fair without auditing it.
I didn't know that until all the Democrats told me.
Now, if one Democrat said it, I'd say, well, that's like an idiot.
I mean, if you don't audit it, how could you possibly know?
And then they might say something like, well, we audited part of it, and I'd say, you can't really know if you audited part of it.
Auditing part of it doesn't get you all the way, I mean, to certainty.
But Democrats have taught us, and they all agree.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I've never found any Democrat to disagree with the following statement, that you can know an election was fair without fully auditing it.
To my understanding, every Democrat believes that.
And it's a big time-saver, because do you know how much time and energy it would take to audit an election?
Do you have any idea how hard that is?
That's like a lot of work.
A lot of money. But Democrats tell us that you don't need to.
Because you can know an election is fair without actually doing a full audit.
Great time saver.
But now, even better, and Maggie Heberman is giving this great tip, the essence of it is that these internet conspiracy theories could be known to be conspiracy theories without investigating them.
So that's the second time saver.
You can know which theories are true without investigating them.
For example, the Steele dossier.
I mean, it sounded crazy, right?
But you don't have to investigate it.
Do you? I mean, why would you investigate anything?
That's wasting time.
So these wild internet conspiracies that the Trump senior officials were looking into in some cases, or at least were interested in.
We don't know how much work they put into it.
But apparently they should not have because you can know what theories are true without investigating them.
So you don't have to do an audit to know an election is fair, and you don't have to investigate something To know that a theory is either true or false, because you can know that just because it's a conspiracy theory.
Let me add furthermore to Maggie's point, which I think is a strong one.
If somebody says to you, hey, I've got this conspiracy theory that the election was influenced by aliens using our satellites, do you know how you can tell that's not real?
And watch, you're going to be diverted and you're going to say, it's because of the alien part, right?
Nope. Nope.
That's not how you know it's failing.
Because, you know, maybe, maybe they're aliens.
Is it because it's technically unlikely the aliens could control the satellite and there's no mechanism from that to control the elections?
Nope. That's not how you know.
That's not how you know it's a conspiracy theory.
Do you know how? I just told you it was a conspiracy theory.
I said, if somebody comes to you with a conspiracy theory that says aliens did this to satellites, how do you know if it's a conspiracy theory?
Well, it's right in the name.
It's right in the name. And I think that's what Maggie is teaching us.
In her tweet, she says, officials with security clearances were sending Internet conspiracy theories to senior officials.
Well, if they're conspiracy theories...
Why would you look into them?
Because they were sending them conspiracy theories.
Now, I know you think maybe they were sending them just theories.
Is that what you're thinking?
Or maybe it was just reports.
No, no.
If they were just reports, you would look into them, wouldn't you?
If there was a theory, and it was important, you'd probably look into it.
But if somebody sends you a conspiracy theory, You don't have to look into that.
That'd be crazy. That'd be crazy.
So that's something you can learn from Democrats.
All right. Rasmussen says, Voters trust the U.S. Supreme Court less than they did two years ago.
And they did that survey before the Roe v.
Wade decision. So even before Roe v.
Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was at its lowest credibility, I guess.
Or less, not the lowest, but less than they did two years ago.
So 52% of likely U.S. voters have less trust in the Supreme Court than they had two years ago.
And only 17% have more trust.
While 29% say their trust in the Supreme Court has not changed much in the past two years.
Interesting. Alright, so I'm watching CNN doing its tortured...
Turn toward the middle.
Now, in theory, we've all heard that the new head of CNN wants them to be less sensational and more straight-down-the-middle news.
And that would be awkward because wouldn't you notice?
Wouldn't you notice that they're saying reasonable things when they used to not be reasonable?
So how do you go from crazy stuff to reasonable stuff without it being obvious to the audience?
Well, maybe we're seeing small little signals.
For example, this was the headline on CNN today, on their website.
Analysis, colon, tide turns in the Ukraine war as Russia makes progress in the east.
The tide turns?
Doesn't that suggest that the tide had one time been in favor of Ukraine?
Was the tide ever in favor of Ukraine?
Because I think CNN was sort of suggesting that Ukraine was maybe getting the best of things.
But the tide turns suggested it was going one way and now it's going the other way.
When was the point that the Ukrainians were in charge of the tide?
All I remember is a slow flooding from Russia.
Has there ever been a week where Russia didn't own more at the end of the week since the beginning of the war?
Is there? Now, there were certainly attacks that they abandoned, like Kiev, but we don't even know if that was a real attack.
I mean, that could have been just to keep part of the military, you know, nailed down in that part of the country so they could, you know, control things in the east.
Maybe. Who knows? I think when you see headlines like, the tide has turned, they're trying to find a way to make sure that the old story that didn't really track with reality is somehow connected to the new way they're reporting it.
So you might see some interesting word torture happening here as that happens.
But still, I'd rather that they get closer to reality, whatever that is.
All right. So Jake Tapper asked the Secretary of State, Blinken, is it, about who is winning?
You know, he was saying, is Ukraine losing the war or what?
And basically, Secretary of State says that Russia did lose because Russia wanted to wipe Ukraine off the map as a sovereign country and that it's clear that's not going to happen, according to him.
And so, therefore, Russia lost.
What do you think? Did Russia lose?
Isn't this great that everybody gets to win this war?
Do you remember the old days when you'd have a winner and a loser and you called it a war?
Or two losers? I feel like in the old days you either both sides lost because they destroyed each other to the point where they couldn't survive.
Or maybe you had one winner and one loser.
Or maybe you had a Pyrrhic victory, which is where it seems like you won, but you hurt yourself in the process so much you wish you hadn't.
But now we have a whole new category.
Both sides winning all the time.
Am I right? The Ukraine war is the first one I've ever seen where both sides were winning all the time at the same time.
So according to the United States, Ukraine's totally winning by being a free and sovereign country.
And according to Russia, they're totally winning because they're taking control of Ukraine one bite at a time, and they've already got the good stuff.
So everybody's happy.
No reason to stop that war.
And the question that this brings up is, and I tweeted this earlier, Maybe you could give me some advice.
I don't give financial advice to you, but I will take financial advice if you have any.
Should I... And is it too soon?
It's really a timely question.
Is it too soon to ask my publishers to pay me in rubles?
Too soon? Because I feel like I want to get in on the bottom, and it's already made a run.
I mean, the ruble's made a good run, and I missed the Bitcoin run when Bitcoin made its big advance, and I've always regretted that.
But I'm thinking, I'm not going to miss this one.
I feel like the ruble is the place to be.
Am I right? I just need some advice from you.
Put it in rubles or no.
All right. Again, if you are new to this live stream, don't listen to any financial advice that you hear.
None. You should listen to no financial advice except diversify.
You should listen to that.
Well, CNN has a story about Russia defaulting on some major loans.
Of course, they didn't, but that's what the headline says.
What they did was they paid it into some entity...
That isn't allowed to give that money to the lender because the lender says you can't give us the money because they're sanctions.
So the way we're looking at it is Russia defaulted because they didn't pay.
The way Russia explains it is we did pay.
We paid exactly who we're supposed to pay.
They chose not to give it to you because you said don't give us the money because they're under sanctions.
That's really different than defaulting.
That's really, really different.
Now, I'm not sure if it's an escrow entity exactly.
They might do more than that.
I wasn't clear on what that entity is.
So, anyway, they're either defaulting or totally not defaulting.
It's one of those things. Now, let me ask you a question.
In my book, The Religion War, It was written many years ago.
It was a fictional book, but it imagined that one day AI would be able to figure out who was what I called the prime influencer.
The one person who would just be an ordinary person, not a famous person, not a pundit, but there would be one person in the world who had the capability, just by a weird connection to the right people, to make any trend happen.
And so the character is, you know, trying to find the prime influencer.
And here's my question.
While I doubt that there's anything like one prime influencer, there's probably a variety of them, could you not use AI and all the data that we have now to figure out who are the most powerful influencers of other people in their peer group?
And could you not Then make anything popular.
Because you'd really only have to convince one person.
And the one person would convince enough people who would convince enough people who would convince enough people that you'd be a hit.
And then once it's a hit, all the other people who are outside the influence say, hey, that's a hit.
It's a new trend.
Let's get going on this. So I think...
You could find literally one person who just has charisma and a good local following, and that person could say, you know, I like wearing my shoe on my head.
And it's the kind of person where the first time you see them wearing their shoe on their head, you're like, oh, God, what is going on?
Is that crazy? And then the next time you see him, you go, I've got to admit, he's pulling it off.
Or she. I've got to admit, she's pulling it off.
I never would have worn a shoe on my head like a hat, but I can't lie.
I can't lie. She's pulling it off.
It's sort of like sagging.
If somebody had described to you wearing your pants below your ass, you would have said, no, that's not going to be a thing.
But you would have been wrong.
You would have been wrong. Apparently, there was probably one person I'll bet sagging started with one person.
What's it called? Is it sagging?
Yeah. It's where you wear your pants below your ass.
And it probably started in prison, somebody says, but I'll bet it was one person.
I'll bet literally one person, and I'll bet it wasn't a famous person.
Now, it might have been a famous person who then spread it, but I'll bet one person did it in one prison once, and it just caught him.
It says I'm available?
Is that what it says? All right.
Oh, it's because they don't have belts.
All right, no belts in prison, that's why?
So you're saying it's a prison fashion thing.
Belts equals suicide.
All right, that makes sense. Correct me if I'm wrong, but prison knows what elastic is, right?
They know what elastic is.
I feel like they could figure that out.
So... Do you think the AI is close to figuring out who influences everything, and if they could find that people, since you could bribe one person quite easily?
I mean, if you found it, you could say, look, I'll give you a million dollars to wear a shoe on your head for a week and tweet about it.
You don't think you could get, like, an average person?
Because it could be just some popular person who just has a normal job, but they're very charismatic.
Could be. So I think that's what you should worry about in terms of AI influencing us.
Because AI can figure out who the influencers are and then influence the influencers.
And then through that, the rest of humanity.
So that's what I'd worry about.
And that brings us to the conclusion.
Of the best show that's ever been done.
On locals, was there anything that I said I was going to talk about that I didn't talk about?
UFOs? Somebody said there's something new about UFOs, but I couldn't find that story.
I just did a search for it.
I didn't see anything new. Copper prices?
Eh. Descent?
Don't care. A 50-yard line prayer, a coach lesson.
I usually don't do the individual person got fired stuff.
I'm not too much into the individual person had a situation and things.
Ammo they're going to restrict.
Let me ask you this.
Does the Second Amendment give you a right to ammo?
That's probably been...
Decided all right, right? So did somebody say yes because that would be part of the device?
Because you couldn't use the device without it?
Makes sense.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah, you know, there's also the question...
This is a good philosophical question.
If a company is offering to pay for their employees to go wherever they need to to get an abortion, aren't they doing it for their own benefit?
Is that for the benefit of the employee or the employer?
Because the employer would much rather get them back to work.
Right? So do we not have a situation where employers are in this weird situation Ethical dilemma, where if they pay for you to get an abortion, it feels like they're paying you to kill your baby so they can get more productivity out of you.
That's how some will interpret it, right?
I'm not saying that's my interpretation, because again, I'm trying to stay out of the opinion part.
But that's a bad look.
If you're a corporation, that's a bad look.
For at least a third of the people looking at you.
So we'll see how that all plays out.
Alright, that's all for now.
I believe I've delivered the best show you've ever seen in the history of the universe.
