Episode 1799 Scott Adams: Elon Musk Pulls Out Of Twitter Deal But Everything Is Trending Positive
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Is the Twitter deal really off?
Elon on the nature of reality and consciousness
Jenna Ellis vindicated and validated?
Abe's assassin, a China connection?
Border Patrol punished anyway?
Genetics vs good parenting
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Looking good. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
It gets better every time you see it.
Very unusual, because most things don't.
Most things, you get used to them, and you say, I've had some of that.
I don't need any more. But when you watch this show, every single time, it gets better.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes your oxytocin sing.
It's called a simultaneous sip.
Go. Richard's agreeing with me over here.
He likes coffee, too.
I think we can bond over that.
You and I, Richard, we're like one now.
We're bonding over our love of coffee.
Eating hot dogs? No, that's just you.
I'm not going to bond over eating hot dogs.
I'm out. I'm out.
All right, let's talk about the news.
I'm going to start with a news quiz.
So I want to see how many of you are paying attention to the news.
See if you can answer this quiz.
Who is the first human being to shit on a bird?
Normally the birds shit on people.
But who's the first human to shit on a bird?
First human to shit on a bird.
I will accept as acceptable answers Magic Johnson.
Magic Johnson is an acceptable answer.
But Elon Musk for cancelling the Twitter deal.
Now... We're all looking at this and saying to ourselves, hey, although we have not been to law school and we've never seen the actual agreement between Twitter and Musk, I don't think that should stop us from having a legal opinion, do you? Anybody?
Do you think we should be limited in our legal opinions just because we haven't seen the agreement and we're not lawyers?
No. No.
Is this your first day on social media?
That's not going to stop us.
And if you want some medical opinions later, you come to me.
I don't have any medical experience, but I can definitely give you some opinions because that's what we do here.
Well, apparently there's something in that deal with Musk and Twitter that said something like...
Elon Musk would not do due diligence, or he waived his right to due diligence.
And I hear people interpreting that as, well, the joke's on you, Elon.
You asked for more information to verify how many bots there are in the traffic, and they didn't give you what you wanted, but hey, too bad, because you signed a deal that said you weren't going to do due diligence.
To which I say, I'm no lawyer, but was that due diligence?
Does due diligence mean that Twitter can make a claim that's not true?
Lawyers? Lawyers?
Again, I'm not a lawyer.
I'm just looking at the story.
Can Twitter lie about the single most important part of their business?
Hypothetically. I'm not accusing them of anything.
But can they lie...
And then say, well, you didn't do your due diligence, wah, wah, wah, so I guess we can lie about the single most important part of the transaction.
Do you think that's okay?
Because Elon waived his right to due diligence?
No. I don't think that that's what due diligence is all about, is it?
Now correct me if I'm wrong.
Due diligence isn't about you checking to see if they're lying, is it?
Isn't it about checking to see if there's something that's been omitted or something that hasn't been mentioned?
Right? Am I right?
Yeah. So you're looking for things that nobody mentioned before.
It seems to me, again, not a lawyer, but do I need to be a lawyer?
Do I need to be a lawyer to say that Twitter can't legally lie about the single most important part of the transaction and say, well, you waive your right to look into it?
That's not a thing, is it?
Is that a thing? I can't believe that's a thing.
But I'm watching Twitter say that, you know, the people on Twitter, I'm watching the people on Twitter act as though he waived his right to get the truth.
I don't think you really waive that, do you?
So I'm seeing somebody say, I'm absolutely right.
Have you seen anybody say what I just said?
I haven't seen it yet.
Have you? Did anybody say what I just said?
That this has nothing to do with due diligence?
Right? Has anyone talked to Jack Dorsey about this development?
That's a really good question. I'd be curious what he thinks.
Now, number one, first point.
Not really, because I already made a point.
But how many of you think that this really means the deal is off?
Do you think it means the deal is off?
Because that's not how any of this works.
You know, if anybody's been involved in real business, of course you walk away from the car dealership when the price is too high.
Of course you do.
Do you think Trump would have gone through with this deal?
Let me ask you. If this had been Trump, do you think he would close this deal now?
Absolutely not. Do you think...
Name somebody who's a great negotiator.
You know, just pick your billionaire.
Somebody who's a great negotiator.
Do you think they would close this deal?
Absolutely not. Nobody would close this deal.
Cuban, yeah. Do you think Mark Cuban would close this deal?
I mean... I could ask him.
He always has a more interesting answer than a yes or no, so I don't know what he'd say, actually.
But here's what should happen.
I don't know if it will, but I'm going to say this is the most likely possibility.
The most likely possibility is that there'll be a new offer Based on the fact that they haven't provided the information, and then you have to discount that risk, right?
So if you were going to reprice Twitter, you'd first take into account that the stock price itself collapsed, right?
The stock price itself collapsed.
So if you were going to make a new offer, you'd have to make an offer that takes into account that you don't know if the traffic is real.
So you would have to make an estimate in your mind of how likely that is, and then say, okay, since I don't know if the traffic's real, I'm not going to pay full price, but I can't pay nothing, or else I'm not going to get a deal, so I'm going to pay something-ish, a little bit closer to the stock price, but maybe a little less. Actually, I guess you couldn't buy it for less than the stock price.
Nobody would make that deal. Should have got the shot.
Equals thinking past the sale.
Alright. Elon says 20% bots.
Twitter says 5%.
They'll negotiate to the middle.
No, Twitter can't do that.
Twitter can't negotiate the number of bots.
They can't do that.
They can negotiate the price.
But they can't negotiate the number of bots.
Now, the fact that they could not provide that information tells you they don't have a business model.
Am I right? I mean, that's the hyperbolic version of it.
If you can't tell us how many people are using the system and your business model depends on That number is the single most important number, you know, the amount of traffic.
If you can't validate that you even have that traffic with real people, you don't really have a business, do you?
It's like an artificial business, like a fake business.
Now it's, you know, there are enough real people that you can say it's a real business.
But what would Elon be buying exactly?
He wouldn't know what he was buying.
So whatever the price is for that, it's a lot less than the first offer.
And imagine how unhappy Elon was when he saw the price of Twitter drop in half after he'd offered billions and billions of dollars.
Because that was just wasted money, if he completes the transaction.
That's just purely wasted money.
Billions and billions of just wasted money.
But it's funny to make Twitter begging to be bought.
So we went from, Elon wants to buy you, and Twitter says, no, no, no, to making Twitter beg him to buy, oh, you've got to buy us now.
I'm biased now. Meanwhile, while this is the biggest story in the news, arguably, yesterday I'm sitting in my garage, which doubles as my man cave.
I'm just working on my laptop and I'm sitting there in my pajamas, a little bit stoned, and I decided to reply to one of Elon Musk's tweets.
The one that I replied to It started with Elon Musk saying something about repopulating the world and having lots of babies.
So that was how it began.
And then Nick Cannon, famous celebrity, Nick Cannon, you all know him.
He weighed in and he says, right there with you, my brother.
In other words, they were both in favor of having lots of children.
And then Musk tweeted, we must expand scope and scale of consciousness for civilization to flourish and understand the nature of the universe.
So he wants to expand the scope and scale of consciousness.
In other words, have more humans and have them go more places, such as space.
So more people going more places would expand the scope and scale of consciousness.
And then he went on to say in his tweet, Musk did, consciousness resides most strongly in humans, therefore we need more people.
Good stuff. So I read that and I thought, huh.
And I tweeted back, just a reply to Elon Musk.
I said, why is more consciousness good?
Clams seem happy.
Because my understanding of evolution is that we don't need to understand the actual nature of anything.
It just has to work.
You just have to reproduce.
So I was just sort of curious.
I said, why is more consciousness good?
Because I've heard Elon say it a number of times.
Now, interestingly, he deleted his tweet.
I don't know what that means. So I'm not going to put an opinion about why he did it.
But the tweet in which he said, we must expand scope and scale of consciousness for civilization to flourish and understand the nature of the universe.
Consciousness resides most strongly in humans.
So he deleted that after...
I don't think it's because of my comment necessarily, but he deleted it.
So I said, why is more consciousness good?
Clams seem happy. And to my surprise...
The richest man in the galaxy, as far as we know.
I think he's the richest human in the galaxy, anyway.
So the richest human in the galaxy, who's probably also the busiest human in the galaxy, running multiple businesses, worrying about this stuff, he's in the top of the headlines, and I'm sitting in my garage, stoned, in my pajamas, and I send him a message and I get a response.
Does that just blow your mind?
Imagine being me.
Now, I have an interesting life, so interesting things happen on a regular basis.
But there's something so...
I don't know.
I don't even know how to explain it.
It's completely mind-blowing that I could just be sitting there in my little mind-my-own-business garage, and the richest man in the galaxy is suddenly in a conversation with me, and it's in public.
And so I'm now in a public conversation with the richest man in the galaxy, Over the nature of reality.
Did not see that coming.
Didn't see it coming.
So, anyway, I went on, because I challenged, why is consciousness even valuable?
You know, clams seem happy.
And Musk replied to me by saying, consciousness can understand the nature of the universe.
Clams, not so much.
Now, people watching the exchange said, boom!
Mic drop. Gotcha!
Because that's what always happens on Twitter.
When somebody says any kind of response, there's always somebody who comes in, Gotcha!
Dude! Whoa!
Yeah, I'm reading your comments.
And I'm thinking, well, I didn't really feel that.
So after Elon Musk said, Consciousness can understand the nature of the universe, clams not so much, I tweeted back, To what benefit?
What's the benefit of consciousness?
I said, evolution never needed us to understand reality before.
Then later I thought about it.
And I thought about how he said that humans have more consciousness than a clan.
And I tweeted, I'd call it a tie.
So far. Now...
Do anybody...
Yeah, I got pooed.
Does anybody know the context of why I so confidently engaged with the richest and arguably one of the smartest people in the galaxy?
It's because Elon Musk himself, I believe, based on what he said, thinks we live in a simulation that Which would suggest that all of our consciousness so far has been a waste of time.
Am I right? Now, again, I don't want to put an opinion in somebody else's head.
So I'm going to be as careful as I can.
But that's why I was asking the question.
I'll just say that the appearance of it is that his main philosophy is that consciousness has been worthless so far.
Worthless. Because if we're really a simulation, everything we believed about reality is wrong.
Everything. If you had a religion and you picked wrong, totally wrong.
So, my understanding of his opinion, which is different than his opinion, I want to be really clear, I cannot...
Anytime you say to yourself, let me characterize the opinion of a genius...
Just know you're being an idiot at that point.
You can't really characterize the opinion of somebody smarter than you.
And be confident about it.
Because whatever it was that made them smarter than you is why you couldn't have had that opinion in the first place, probably.
So I'm trying to be real careful about assuming what he believed.
But the reason I was asking the questions, and I was engaging, is that I saw a conflict between thinking that consciousness is important...
And believing we're in a simulation which would suggest that all of our consciousness was a waste of time.
Or it was something.
Now, somebody else weighed in and made a comment which was amazing.
Which is that we know from physics...
And by the way, this is something we know.
If we can know anything, I suppose.
That you need to observe something for it to exist.
Or to measure it, which is similar.
Am I right? Those of you who have better science backing than I do, which is almost everybody, you have to observe it or measure it for the wave to collapse or whatever it is.
So reality doesn't become anything but a possibility until it's observed.
I see so many people saying no.
Really? Look at the other comments, though.
Those of you who are saying no, look at the other comments.
Now, I'm not saying what your opinion is.
I'm saying that physics opinion...
Like all of the...
Well, probably not all.
But the main physicists believe that reality forms because it's observed.
I can't believe how many no's I'm saying here.
Seriously? There are enough yes's coming in that no people need to have some pause, right?
I've got it all wrong.
All right. Well, it's according to the Copenhagen interpretation, right?
Oh, somebody says, I'm a physicist, and no.
Alright, so I'll listen to you.
I am a quantum physicist, and no.
There just has to be an observer?
Can you give me, is it possible to give me a quick counterpoint to that?
Because everything I've ever read said the same thing.
That you have to measure it or observe it for the probabilities or possibilities to collapse.
Observation just changes it.
Oh! Oh, okay.
Are you saying that the observation doesn't create reality, it changes it?
Is that what the physicists are saying?
Is that the change you're looking for in what I'm saying?
Somebody said, okay. All right.
So I think that may be just a language thing.
I don't think we're disagreeing.
So let me say it in better language.
All right. So this may be more appropriate language.
Observation changes the thing, and so in my opinion, that would be called creating reality.
If you don't want to call it that, that's fine, but we're still talking about the same thing.
So if you want to say it's a change, I will agree with that as opposed to creating something from nothing, because I wasn't indicating it was creating something from nothing, but it sounded like that, didn't it?
So, okay. So we'll go with that.
There's always something there, but when you observe it, it changes it, and then that change becomes your actual history.
All right. So, that was a long way to go to say that consciousness might be a 3D printer for reality.
So we have this assumption that consciousness is important, right?
It could be that that's why the conversation sort of went to a dead end kind of quickly.
Why is it that we think consciousness matters or that we should have more of it?
There was something in Elon Musk's assumption going in that I was testing because I didn't know what the assumption was.
Still don't. But why do we assume that consciousness is good?
It just is. And why do we assume that consciousness is that thing that makes us special and magic and spiritual and the most important creatures?
What if it's just one of the things we do?
Why is your consciousness important but not your eyesight or your ability to hear or your ability to do math or something?
Why is consciousness the one that's the magic one?
What if it's just another thing you do?
So it could be that reality requires consciousness, like a 3D printer requires the physical form of the printer, as well as the material going into it.
It seems as if reality is printing itself, but to the physicist's point, if I can make a terrible analogy, the 3D printer simply takes the raw materials and transforms them into a thing.
But the thing existed, in a sense, because there were always the raw materials.
So the 3D printer changes its form, just as consciousness can change the form of whatever was there before we got there.
How about that? So I see reality or consciousness as nothing but a 3D printer.
It's not magic.
It's not special.
It's not the thing we need to maximize.
It's not how we got here.
It's not what evolution even cares about.
It is simply a mechanical process that we notice.
And because we notice it, because of the nature of consciousness, we think it's important.
How many times have I told you that the thing we think is important is the thing we think about the most?
And the reason we think it's important?
Because we think about it the most.
Why do we think about it the most?
Is it because it's important?
Sometimes. But not necessarily.
So whatever it is that you think about the most is going to be the most important.
Now, consciousness, by its nature, is the thing that makes you think about it.
So if you think about your own consciousness all the time because you're designed that way, you can't not think about your own consciousness, wouldn't that seem like the most important part of you?
It would. You would be fooled into thinking that your own consciousness was the most important part about you, but no reason.
There's no reason. It's just what you think about the most, because you can't not think about it the most.
So we've sort of talked ourselves into the idea that consciousness has to fill the universe and tell us the nature of the world.
And there's no backing for any of that.
There's no reason we need more consciousness that I can come up with.
Why is it we don't have enough?
I don't know. But the trouble is, if you're Elon Musk and you're trying to sell the idea of going into space, you have to talk to people the way they can hear it.
And when he says stuff like, we need to expand human consciousness, don't all of you say, that sounds right?
Isn't that your first impression?
Like, when you hear that, you go, yeah.
Yeah, we absolutely need to do that.
We need lots of consciousness out there.
The beauty of it is it feels right.
I'm going to make another terrible analogy just to get you going.
It's like when you ask billionaires...
What was the secret to their success?
What do they usually say in public?
What do billionaires usually say in public about why they were successful?
They say passion. Do you know why they say passion?
They say passion because it sounds cool.
And it sounds like something you could do too.
Well, if you would just follow your passion like I followed my passion, you'd be a billionaire too, maybe.
Maybe a little luck, you could be a billionaire too.
But here's what billionaires can't tell you.
Here's what they can't tell you.
I'm way smarter than you, I got lucky, and I had some special advantages.
But you don't have any of that stuff, so good luck.
Billionaires can't say that.
Can Mark Zuckerberg tell you that the reason he's successful is, by any objective measure, he's way smarter than you are.
You can't say that. But that's the truth.
Can Bill Gates say the reason I built Microsoft and you didn't is because I'm, well, objectively speaking, I'm way smarter than you and I worked really hard.
You can't. You can't say that.
You can't say it in public. So instead you say things that sound good to the people you're talking to.
I've got passion. I've worked hard.
Passion. It's all bullshit.
It's bullshit. My book behind me, How to Fail Almost Everything and Still Win Big, has a chapter on passion being bullshit.
But when I hear that we have to expand consciousness into the space...
I say, that sounds great.
Doesn't it? Sounds great.
I'm all for it.
And I'm genuinely all for it.
I absolutely, positively think that Musk taking us into space is one of the highest priorities of civilization.
But do you know why it's the highest priority of civilization, in my opinion?
Because we can't help it.
We can't help it. We don't have the option of not doing it.
Because we're survivor-designed.
We're designed to survive.
We're designed to take our consciousness somewhere.
Now, we talk about it like it's our consciousness that's the important part, but really it's just us.
It's our genes, it's us, right?
It's not the consciousness part so much.
We just want more of us, just like every animal, every plant.
We have this ability to want.
But it's still going to happen whether we want it or not.
That's just the way we talk about it after the fact.
We're just going to do it. And the fact that Elon Musk had the ability to build a company that could take us to the universe, he was sort of required to do it.
This is something that most of you will never understand, unfortunately, for you, not for me.
You'll never understand the obligation that you take on when you succeed.
You'll never understand that.
Because until you feel it, it's just like, it's hard to imagine.
And what I mean by that is, before I had any success to speak of, I feel like I was in a pretty selfish mode.
Meaning that I wanted to acquire for my own benefit.
And so I worked hard and I acquired for my own benefit.
But once I had acquired enough, Just some freaky thing happened, and I thought, oh crap, what's happening to my computer code in my head?
It's changing. And I suddenly realized that I needed some other reason to exist, because I had what I needed, and that was sort of my purpose for existing, was to, you know, protect myself.
And once I'd done that, I naturally felt some obligation to the rest of the world.
And so primarily the reason I do this, instead of, you know, ten other things I could do to make money, In fact, I could make a lot more money if I weren't spending my time on this.
A lot more. A lot more.
Probably ten to a hundred times more.
But when I do this, I feel a direct benefit to other people.
And people tell me every day, you changed my life.
I read your book. Everything changed.
You know, you reframed something.
You know, I gave up drugs.
I stopped drinking. I lost 80 pounds.
I hear these stories every day.
Now, if you don't think that's motivating, I mean, that is really motivating, you would give up a lot.
To have that feeling. You know, it's something you can't buy, except with your own suffering, basically.
So yesterday, this brings me to another point.
So let me just finish up on that.
I don't think that Elon Musk had a choice about building spaceships to take us off the planet.
Because he had the ability, and he had taken care of his own needs.
You didn't have a choice. You know, it probably felt like it.
It probably felt like decision making.
It probably felt like free will.
But we are designed so that if you have the capability to help the tribe, you practically can't help it.
You're just going to be called into service, basically.
And that's how I feel. I feel that what I do here, to the extent that it helps people, is I couldn't help it.
I feel like I was dragged here.
I enjoy it. I enjoy it a lot.
But I definitely don't feel like it was free will that got me here.
There's something else I was going to say about that, but I forgot.
Do you see that the Sri Lankans, they all protested and they attacked, I guess, the president's official residence and they occupied it.
And the president fled.
And I'm wondering how long it will take MSNBC to blame this on Trump.
Was there something Trump said that caused this?
Because this sort of thing doesn't happen on its own.
Was Trump maybe saying something about you should have a peaceful demonstration?
Because I understand when he asks for peaceful demonstrations, it often causes insurrections.
So did he say anything about that?
Yeah. Alright.
So anyway, there's not much to say about that.
There's a video of Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump's close advisors and attorneys, and she was talking about a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision today that she says, Vinley case invalidates what Team Trump argued back in 2020 in November, that election officials in Wisconsin had violated the state law in the administration of the election, and only Now we get a Supreme Court Wisconsin decision that says it was true.
But you know what is left out of this reporting so far?
What was that about?
I don't know. I saw the video.
Something got vindicated and validated, but if I were communicating this, I would have mentioned what it was.
I would have mentioned what it was that got vindicated and validated.
And so...
But wouldn't it be nice to know that?
It seems like that's the first thing you say in a story like that.
If I were doing this story, I would say the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided today X and X now validates and I wouldn't go right to the celebration because it makes it look like bullshit.
So, sorry.
It could be. I'm not going to rule it out.
It could be that this Wisconsin Supreme Court decision has some Some meat to it, and it means something, and it revises what we understood.
But I doubt it.
I doubt it. So you're saying the ballot boxes were illegal?
Do you think anybody cares about that?
Should we care that there are illegal ballot boxes?
Unless we know that that's what the problem was.
If we don't know that they caused a problem, do we care that they were illegal?
Because, you know, in something like a state election, don't you think they violate laws all the time?
There's probably a million little things they do wrong, and it doesn't make that much difference.
All right, well, so here's my skeptical take on this.
I'm interested that Jenna Ellis says that something important was found.
If you say it in the comments, people are saying there's something about ballot boxes.
If that's true, I'd like to hear that story.
But so far I haven't heard a so what that would change any of my thinking.
Is there a so what to it?
Is there an assumption that a certain number of votes would have gone a different way?
I haven't seen the so what, but if you have, that is a huge communication problem.
I want to hear the so what first, not the celebration.
So now people are speculating that China was behind the assassination of Abe Shinzo.
Have I been saying his name backwards the whole time?
Is Abe his first name?
I have been saying his name backwards, right, the whole time.
Why does everybody call him Abe if it's his first name?
That feels inappropriate if you're talking about a leader, right?
Or is it just because Japanese say the last name first?
Okay. Got it.
Got it. So Abe is his last name, but the way they write it would be first.
Somebody's saying. All right.
Let's say that's true. Apparently, he spent his last days before being murdered defending Taiwan from China and making a big deal about how Taiwan has to be defended against China.
And then he got murdered by somebody who...
There's some report on social media, kind of sketchy, that there is some connection between the shooter and the Chinese Communist Party.
But I don't think you should believe that yet.
And here's the question.
How many of you think China would do this?
Not that they did.
How many think they're capable?
Not capable. How many think that they would have done it if they wanted to?
Well, the why would they is to make sure that people don't talk about keeping Taiwan.
Of course, of course, of course.
Yeah. The answer is yes.
They're shipping fentanyl to the United States via the cartels every day.
We know they're doing that, and they don't stop.
They've got prison camps every day, and we all know it.
They don't stop it.
So there doesn't seem to be any correlation between knowing they're doing something bad and them stopping it.
So why wouldn't they kill them?
Because all it would do is make...
It would be a little chilling to people talking about it, right?
What's it do to me? Let me ask you this.
All right, so I talk about stuff in public.
I've never really made a big deal out of Taiwan because Taiwan, to me, doesn't seem like so much a philosophical right or wrong question.
It's just a power question.
If Taiwan has the power to remain free, it will.
If China has the power to take it over and decides to use it, it will, at some tremendous cost.
But there's not much to say about it.
It's just a power play.
Whoever has it is going to win.
So I don't weigh in too much on that, because there's not much to say about it.
But suppose I did.
Suppose I was the kind of person who talked in public and had some persuasion.
I would argue that I do have some persuasive impact on politics.
It might be small, but some.
How do you think that I would feel if I'd been talking about Taiwan a lot and I saw somebody who also talked about it a lot the same way I did, just get murdered?
And maybe it was the Chinese government that did it.
How would I feel, and would I still talk about Taiwan a lot, if I had been inclined to do that in the first place?
I don't think I would.
You know, maybe I'm a special case, because I'm kind of done.
Meaning, if I got assassinated tomorrow, I'd be like, eh, I had a good run.
Do I really want to be 80?
Seriously. Do I want to be 80?
I don't know. So, I don't have the same risk profile that others do.
If it's a clean kill...
That's a fine way to go, right?
In fact, I can't think of a better way to go than having China assassinate me, especially if the news got out.
I don't think I could do anything better for the country than get assassinated by the Chinese government for saying things about them.
I mean, that'd be a great way to go.
Please. Actually, as I think of all the ways that one could die, I can't think of a better one.
Can you? Because that would be useful.
Usually dying is just dying.
You don't usually get to save somebody's life in the act of dying.
Some people do. But if you had to die, being assassinated by China would be a pretty noble way to go.
And it would give attention to some of the things I care about.
So, I don't know. I'm going to say that China is capable of doing that.
And they're capable of doing it right in front of you.
You're painting a target on you.
Well, although I don't talk about Taiwan, I do talk about fentanyl and Uyghurs a lot, I don't think there's any chance I'm not on the Chinese Communist Party radar.
I mean, I do talk to their, you know, one of their main trolls, Chen.
I talk about Chen.
He's got a Twitter account. And I interact with him all the time.
He's clearly one of the main social media Chinese party people.
He denies it, by the way.
But Twitter labels him as a state media person.
Put a bounty on my own head.
Does Scott have suicidal ideations?
Not really. More than anybody else?
Probably not. I thought you said you got Chen killed a few months ago.
Apparently not.
He survived.
Oh, he would be fun to interview.
Interviewing Chen would be, that would be a hoot.
Alright, so here's the good news.
Tell me if any, this is actually reported, most of this in the In the news.
So we've got the pandemic is winding down, right?
And we still have lingering, you know, Omicron problems.
But I would say the pandemic problem is over.
Do you agree? Pandemic is basically over.
It's down to the annoyance level.
I would say, and as of today, apparently the supply chain issues are easing.
So the supply chain has already maxed out And it's improving.
Did you know that? How many of you knew that the supply chain problem is improving?
The time it takes to ship, actually, it's going down.
So, Adam's law of slow-moving disasters.
Lots of people adjusting in lots of different ways.
And we've peaked.
Inflation. May have peaked.
It's actually reversing for a lot of key things.
Gas is down. Wheat is down.
Some other commodities are down.
Not everything. But we're seeing some major changes in inflation.
So supply chain is easing.
The pandemic's wound down.
Inflation is starting to peak or reverse.
Nuclear power is rising.
Nuclear power is now favored.
Gigantic. Gigantic.
You know, a variable for a civilization.
And we're absolutely decoupling from China.
Right? Now, you say you don't see enough of it.
There are not enough companies leaving.
But no companies need to leave.
You just need to stop going there.
And it'll take care of itself over time.
That's it. Just stop going there.
Stop moving your manufacturing to China.
Have you heard of any major manufacturer moving production to China in the last two years?
Any? Any major manufacturer move to China in the last two years?
I don't think so.
You're saying because of the pandemic?
The pandemic in the first place, yes.
But how about now?
I don't think anybody's moving to China.
And we do see some people moving out.
So, just think about this.
And also, as I've said when Trump entered the picture, we are seeing reality in a whole new way, are we not?
And I think it's a productive way.
Because we now understand that the news is completely fake.
I'm not sure we knew that before, before Trump.
So now that we know that the news is completely a put-up job...
That's a completely different view of reality, and of course the simulation is a different view.
So we've got the pandemic winding down, supply chain issues easing, inflation reversing, nuclear power rising, decoupling from China, one of the most important things, and our view of reality itself is different.
To which I say, we did it.
We did it. Do you remember two years ago?
It just felt like we were in a deep hole and the only thing that was coming to save us was shit.
And the shit was going down the hole and every day was worse than every day before.
And every fucking thing was going wrong.
Do you remember? Do you remember when we thought we would run out of food and toilet paper?
We didn't know if the pandemic would wipe us out.
We thought we were maybe going into depression.
China was going to dominate us.
And we'd run out of energy and climate change would kill us.
It looks like none of that's going to happen.
It looks like none of that's going to happen.
And I've been trying to, you know, help you hold on for the last couple of years.
You know, try to convince you that this is something we can work through.
You know, the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters.
And sure enough, sure enough, humans...
I just want to give a standing ovation to humans.
We're never done.
There's always tons of stuff to do.
But I think even the over-correction of wokeness is probably over.
Don't you think the wokeness reached a point of obvious over-correction?
So that's over, I think.
It's reversing. I feel like almost everything is trending positive.
You just made Elon's point.
I need more about that.
Yeah. So, people, just take a pause.
It's easy to get lost in the minutia of your day.
It's easy to get lost in the torrent of bad news.
But just take a step.
Just for a moment, just pause.
And just think about the fact that civilization...
Just had some of the worst things thrown at it.
I mean, these are just some of the worst, worst, worst things that a civilization could deal with.
And we figured it out.
We figured it out.
We did it. Is anybody else on the same page here?
I feel like I'm all alone in this.
Does anybody else feel like we did it?
No? Not feeling it.
Now, I'll agree that things aren't, you know, where they need to be.
I'm not making that claim.
I'm saying that everything that was going wrong, we stopped.
We did. Everything that was going wrong, it looks like we stopped.
Now, inflation's a long way to go, and, you know, you're afraid of this and that, and, you know, food probably will be, you know, a bit of an obstacle more.
But I feel like we did it.
I really do. I mean...
You know, here's my thing on the border.
Until we can resolve the question of how do you deal with the fact that a declining population is bad, but so is bringing in new people, we need to figure that out.
Now, I get this. Those are not exactly the same topics.
And you want to bring in the most qualified people and all that.
Sure. I'm with you on that.
But I feel like we're not being consistent as a country.
Certainly the conservatives.
Conservatives are not consistent.
Conservatives know you need more people.
And you're not going to get there just by having more babies.
I mean, you can encourage it, and that would be fine as well.
But you're going to need more people.
And there's only one way to do it.
Right? Because the normal way of just having more babies is to stop working.
So I'm pretty sure we need more people and probably lots of them.
Now that doesn't mean our opening the borders is good.
I'm just saying that it may not be as bad as you think in the long run.
Short term, yeah. Tons of pressure on the system, extra crying.
All that stuff's real.
Every bad thing you say about it is real.
But it might be necessary.
It might be like going to the dentist.
Maybe having more people, especially, I say this all the time, the people who come here illegally are a special kind of people.
And if you don't live among it like I do, like I'm just saturated with recent immigrants all the time.
A lot of my day is talking to people who were born in another country.
So what I see...
Somebody says, my servants.
No. No.
They're often vendors, business owners, very successful people, own restaurants, all kinds of stuff.
I'm not talking about just the fellow mowing my grass.
And by the way, I just have to throw a little fuck you in your direction for saying that.
The guy who Came from God knows where and mows my grass.
He once asked me if I had a suggestion for where he could get a cheaper apartment.
He thought maybe I had some property or something that I could rent.
I don't. But he asked me if I knew where he could get cheaper rent because he and his wife, they had, I guess, a second small child, and they were struggling.
So I said, I didn't really know where he could do that, but I asked him, could he use more business?
And he said, yeah, because he wasn't working at a capacity.
And if he did work at capacity, he could easily hire new people to take on more business.
So I said, well, how about I just get you some new customers?
And he said, okay.
So you know that next door app?
It goes to all your neighbors.
It turns out that everybody in my neighborhood was looking for a new gardener.
Or just a huge number of people wished they knew the name of somebody who could be recommended as a good gardener.
So I sent out one message.
Just one message.
I think he got 15 clients.
Now, that's a lot if you're in that business.
He's got two trucks.
He's got a crew. He's doing great.
Now, when I tell you that the people who come across the border are a special kind of people, you don't know how big a deal that is.
They are a special class of people.
Absolutely. Because they're self-selected.
They're self-selected to put themselves in an entrepreneurial, high-risk situation, and they're people who will do anything to make it work.
They will do anything.
They will chew through concrete to make this damn thing work.
I want more of them, not fewer of them.
I want more of them. You give me them all day long.
It's a wonderful community.
And far and away, and by the way, this would be locally, so where I live, so this doesn't apply to where you live, this is only where I live, right?
It's a higher-end neighborhood.
But the reputation of the Hispanic and recent immigrants is way better than the reputation of the people born here.
Do you know that? Now, I don't know if that's a surprise to you, but do you know in Northern California, where I am, so we don't have as much of the border-related crime and stuff, so we have a little bit of an advantage of distance.
But where we are, it is a well-known fact that the Hispanic working community is the lowest crime, most honest, most hard-working community, period.
Period. As soon as I said that, I thought, okay, you can think of some other communities that you would put in that category, and I'll give you that.
So I don't want to say they're the best of all, but they're among the best.
They would be in the top category.
If you were going to rank groups of people, which you should never do, don't do that.
Don't rank people. But if you did, they would be top 20% with whoever you think is awesome.
Legally and illegally, yes.
Now, I'm not blind to the fact that we should have only legal immigrants.
I'm very strongly in favor of only legal immigrants.
We just don't have a system to do that.
So I'd like to have a system to do that.
So I'm not praising any illegality.
I'm just saying if you think it's all bad, it might just depend on where you live.
If you live where I did, it just all looks good.
I'm being asked, Scott, can you talk about race versus IQ? Do you think I should get on that third rail?
There's somebody trying to get me cancelled here.
Should I talk about race and IQ and just get cancelled forever?
I'm going to talk about it anyway.
Because I have a philosophy that you can talk about anything if you don't do obvious mistakes.
So here it goes. Let's say there's a big difference.
I don't know. But let's say there is.
What are you going to do with it? That's my opinion right there.
Let's say there is a difference.
I don't know if there is. What are you going to do with it?
Nothing. Nothing.
It might be interesting. There's just nothing you can do with it.
So are you going to say to yourself, oh, I don't know much about this job candidate, so I'll just be bigoted against this person because I think they're in some group.
Is that good for you?
Would it be good for you as an employer to discriminate against somebody because they happen to be in a group that you believe has some kind of general disadvantage?
That's not good for you.
Why would you do something that's bad for you?
What's good for you as an employer is to really dig in and find out if this is the right person.
So it doesn't help you in an individual decision, does it?
If you're going to marry somebody or fall in love or date, do you care that people who share something in common with them have some other issue that doesn't matter to you?
Because it doesn't matter to your situation.
So So what if it's true?
Does it matter? Now, here's a point I'd like to make that's really going to fuck you up.
Let's say you're a white racist.
You're a white supremacist.
And you say to yourself, but white people have been inventing all the good stuff.
Therefore, we should only let white people in the country, because white people invented all the good stuff.
Right? A white supremacist might say that.
Here's what I say. What the fuck did you invent?
White guy? White supremacist?
What did you invent? Tell me I need more of you.
Why do I need more of you?
I don't need more of you.
I definitely need more smart people.
But I don't need you.
You didn't do anything for me except cause trouble.
So as soon as you start taking credit for the accomplishments of complete strangers who just share some genetic commonality which has nothing to do with you or your work or your smarts or anything, you're in such irrational territory that I can't help you.
Now, suppose you wanted to use IQ as a decision-making thing.
Well, why don't you do it the smart way?
Socioeconomic class.
If you forgot about everybody's color and gender and all that, and you just said, all right, did you have enough family resources to get into a good school?
And if the answer is yes...
Probably everybody's about the same.
Probably everybody who went to a certain school and got a certain grade point average, pretty similar.
So as soon as you started thinking that way, so there's a little bit of making me think past the sale, which is what made me bristle.
When somebody said on here, obviously somebody's got a...
it's a topic for them.
When somebody said, talk about race and IQ... I feel as if you were trying to make me think past the sale.
What's the sale? The sale is that that would be useful, right?
Why would you ask the question unless you thought the answer was useful?
And I don't buy the answer.
I don't buy the answer that that would be useful.
In fact, I think it would be opposite of useful.
As long as you can look at individuals, that will always be more useful.
It will never be useful to know that they belong to a group that has some kind of average.
Now, some of you are saying, but Scott, if we could blame all the problems of a group on low IQ, then we don't have to work on it anymore.
We can just say it's your own damn problem, not my problem, right?
Oh, well, it must be the IQ. But how does that help?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just have policies that help everybody who's in a tough spot?
It wouldn't change what you do, would it?
You'd still want policies that would help everybody of every color and gender who's in a tough spot, because that's good for everybody.
I don't want to live in a country where if I walk out my rich guy door, like everybody's killing each other and raping and living in misery, That's not going to make me happy.
So I want the poor people to do well.
I can't have a good life without that.
All right.
Did you buy that?
Did you buy that?
Do you buy my framing that even if you knew the answer to that, it would be counterproductive.
It would be the opposite of useful.
Some of you do not. Okay.
One of my favorite topics is drunk Hunter Biden.
Apparently his laptop from hell just keeps providing.
I don't know why it's taking so long for all this laptop stuff to come out.
How much data did he have on that thing?
But now we have some messages that probably when he was drinking and probably related to his family wanting to get him into rehab and he wasn't liking that at all.
And while we do have evidence that Hunter Biden refers to his father as the big guy, the so-called big guy, we also know that he had sort of a clever little name for his stepmom, Jill. So where Joe Biden, his father, was the big guy, he would refer to his stepmom as Jill the Entitled Cunt.
Now, to me...
That is inappropriate.
It's the same name you have for her.
Okay. Now, I'm probably going to get demonetized or something for using the word.
But it's funny, the word is in the news.
Do you remember when Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did their thing?
And the thing I loved best about that era...
Is it made blowjob a word you could say on television.
You could just be in the news and say, yeah, and he got a blowjob in the White House.
And I'm thinking, I feel like this is a big step forward for civilization.
We can finally say blowjobs in public.
But maybe Hunter Biden has done that for the C word.
Too early to say.
Too early to say. I hate that word, actually.
Yeah, DW was saying the same thing.
I'm a guy, and I hate that word.
Does anybody else have the same...
Like, I hate it, but privately I use it in joke form all the time.
So let me do full disclosure.
I hate it in public.
I hate it in public.
I love it in private.
Are you okay with that?
Like, joke-wise, if I'm with somebody who also is on the same wavelength, I love it in private.
Publicly, I don't want to hear the word.
I don't want to hear it. It's an ugly word.
It doesn't sound good.
It's got bad letters in it.
Did you see the...
So on the same day, apparently, Joe Biden read on the teleprompter the notes to himself, read last sentence again.
And he got to the last sentence and he said, read last sentence again.
And when he realized what he'd done, he tried to sell it as like he meant it or something.
And it was very embarrassing.
And then we get to Vice President Harris, who was also being accused of word salad.
So here's Lee...
Here's what she said when talking to somebody in an interview.
She said, no, that's right.
And that's why I do believe that we're living, sadly, in real unsettled times.
And I'm thinking, everything she says has no real meaning, does it?
We're living in unsettled times compared to those times when everything was settled.
Do you remember that time?
Can somebody give me a date for that?
What was the year everything was settled until now?
I mean, the things she says not only are generic, they're not even true.
It'd be one thing to say generic things, but to say something generic that's clearly meaningless as well, yes, it's unsettled times.
Look at all that unsettledness.
Um... But here's the thing.
Although Joe Biden does...
You're making a mistake now and then.
Are you not glad that finally we have a president that the other world leaders do not laugh about behind his back?
Well, that's true, right?
Right.
I can't believe anybody would say anything bad about Joe Biden behind his back.
Now, have we gotten to the point where everybody can say that Biden was a mistake?
I don't think we are. I think if you talk to Democrats, especially if anybody was watching, they'd say, yeah, we got what we wanted because at least he wasn't Trump.
But here's where I say, yeah, you're ahead of me, James.
Really? Yeah, that's the only thing you'd do.
Yeah, you know, I'll give you that Joe Biden is not performing as well as we'd hoped, especially the progressives hoped for more.
But, you know, overall, I'd say we did a pretty good job, and he's not Trump.
So, yeah, I'm pretty happy that we got Joe Biden.
Really? Really.
Really? All right.
So you've probably already heard this story, but the Border Patrol agents who were accused of whipping the migrants coming across, turns out they weren't doing anything like that.
100% false. There was no whipping whatsoever.
But because the Democrats' leadership are fucking awful people, Certainly not American in any sense that I would like to enjoy that term.
And are hunting Republicans.
This is more of the hunting Republicans.
They decided that even though the charges against these Border Patrol people who are just trying to do their job and protect the country, that even though the charges against them were 100% false, 100% false, and nobody disagrees, There's nobody who says, yes, they were really true after all.
Nobody disagrees.
The charges were 100% false.
So what did they do? Release them and apologize.
Finally. I'm glad we live in a country where you can just drop all the accusations and the charges, say you're sorry, apologize, and let these people get back to work.
Oh, no, that didn't happen.
No, that didn't happen.
No, instead, they decided to fuck these guys by coming up with some more bullshit to charge them with.
Bad language and threats of force.
Do you know what bad language and threats of force are called if you're a border patrol person trying to stop people literally trying to come across the border right there in front of you?
Do you know what it's called when you use...
Threat of force and derogatory language?
It's called doing your fucking job that we paid you to do.
Thank you very much.
And for the Biden administration to decide that they're going to make examples of these people because the Biden administration was wrong.
They are being punished for Biden's fucking mistake.
You're punishing people who are less powerful than you for your mistake.
You're doing it right in front of the fucking public and getting away with it.
And getting away with it. Our outrage is just broken.
It seems to me there would have been a time when we would have been collectively outraged about this enough that something would happen.
But now we're outraged about so many things that we're just blinded to outrage.
I'm not going to work on it after today.
I'm really upset by this.
I think this is a clear injustice.
It's clearly not what it means to be an American.
That's my problem with it.
Forget about the fucking law.
Forget about the politics.
Forget about all the drama, the who said what, who said what.
Forget about all of that.
These Border Patrol agents are Americans...
Doing an American thing for Americans to protect Americans.
And if you're attacking them, I'm not too happy about that.
Because you're not on my side.
Because you know who's on my side?
The border agents. The border agents are on my side.
So if you're against them, I'm not on your side anymore.
So if you want a fucking insurrection, just attack Americans.
Just keep it up. If you keep attacking American citizens for no fucking reason, then we're going to have an insurrection.
And this time, we're not going to leave the weapons home.
Let me put it out there.
If you keep attacking American citizens right in front of us, right in front of us, you're not even fucking hiding it.
We're going to bring the weapons next time.
Now, we're not anywhere close to that, and I don't recommend it.
Don't do anything violent. But this is not cool.
This is the stuff that creates violence.
If you accuse somebody of a crime and you're wrong, and then you find a reason to prosecute them anyway, right in front of us.
Right in front of us.
Do you feel insulted that they're doing it right in front of you?
Because they don't respect you.
The Biden administration does not respect you.
Because they're doing it right in front of you.
They don't think you have any power.
They don't think your opinion is going to matter.
They don't think it's going to affect them.
Fuck them. Yeah, fuck them.
But don't do anything violent.
I'm just saying that this is the sort of thing that can lead to something violent.
So the Biden administration doesn't want that.
Neither do I. So nobody do anything violent.
All right. And if I never see you again, that's probably why.
So, how many of you are aware of the little dust-up I had with the internet and the world talking about the options that anybody would have for a troubled teen, a male teen in particular?
And I said basically there's no options.
There's nothing you can do.
That's the short version of it.
A lot of people pushed back and said that good parenting would make the difference, etc.
But the LA Times, interestingly...
And by the way, the LA Times is a client newspaper.
They run Dilbert. So I have a client relationship with them.
But they typically have been a little bit derogatory toward me.
So they've run some articles that were less than flattering, let's say, in the past.
But this one actually...
Although they showed both sides, and I don't like the other side of it, but they showed both sides.
That's all I ask.
So I'm good with that.
And I think that they actually did what I needed done.
Did what I needed done.
Now, if you've watched me operate for the last several years, you know that I do pick topics that I think I can influence.
And then I try to, you know, for the good.
And I think this is a topic that I really, really felt I needed to influence because I had some special knowledge about it, unfortunately.
And it's too important.
And it is, if we can't lose the myth of parenting being the, you know, the thing that fixes everything, if we can't lose that myth, we'll never fix anything.
And so I've said that you have to think about your reality very differently to get solutions now.
You have to think of reality differently.
And our reality is that free will has always been an illusion.
It's an illusion. Your genetic makeup plus whatever forces you experience are just going to cause you to do what you do.
And to imagine the superstition that a little bit of extra parenting technique would make the difference, you have to lose that illusion or we can't do anything.
And the LA Times helped me promote that idea by talking about the story.
And some other publications, I think Yahoo News and some others.
And Sam Harris agrees, you said.
I imagine he would.
By the way, everybody smart agrees.
This is one of those topics where 100% of the people above a certain level of education agree with me.
And it's education, not intelligence in this case.
You'd have to have a certain exposure to a certain kind of material.
So just being smart wouldn't get you there.
All right. So I would say that I had a really good week.
Now, I've talked about this before.
I feel like I could be a valuable asset To civilization, mostly America, by being able to take risks that other people can't take.
You know, I can go into the radioactive place and, you know, turn off the reactor, because I don't care about the radioactivity, but you might.
You know, I've reached a certain level, and I've got a few money, so I can just do some things.
So I knew that this was going to be...
Like bruising. I knew that when I entered this argument about genetics versus parenting, I knew I was going to get chewed up.
You knew that too, right?
I mean, it wasn't a surprise.
But I thought I needed to get chewed up on this one.
Because the process of getting chewed up is what attracts your attention.
If people were not chewing me up, you wouldn't have noticed.
It just would have been an opinion that would have come in and gone.
But it was the fight that brought the energy.
And I think I've told you I'm an energy monster.
So, in the process of my critics trying to demolish me, they brought me energy instead.
And when they brought me all that energy to try to destroy me, it became a news item, exactly as I hoped it would.
And then when it became a news item...
The news showed my opinion, and it got much more play.
And so I had a really good day, persuasion-wise, or a week.
So it was all trouble, but it's trouble I can handle.
It's nothing outside my comfort zone.
All right. That, ladies and gentlemen, is probably everything I wanted to talk about.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. Alright, so there's some people...
Let me get to this point.
I don't know what it was about the parenting question that turned people into binaries.
But the binaries you can't have an argument with.
And the binary would be, parenting is all the difference, or parenting doesn't make any difference.
Is there anybody who thinks that my opinion is that parenting doesn't make any difference?
Because you think I actually said that, right?
No, I did not.
No. I didn't say it clearly enough, but let me say it clearly now.
Depending on the person.
So if you looked at all the young men, I'd say, just for conversation, half of those young men are going to turn out fine.
It's some percentage, I'm just saying half.
Let's say half of the young men were going to turn out fine.
Should they get better parenting?
The ones that were going to turn out fine, no matter what, should they get the benefit of better parenting, and would that make them even better?
Yes, of course. Yes.
Do you think I disagree with that?
That if you gave good parenting to kids who probably were going to be fine, that they'd be even better.
They might have some more character.
They might learn some things.
All kinds of things. All right, so that's the good kids, but we're not talking about those, right?
Now let's look at the bad kids.
Within the range of what I'll call the bad kids, the ones who might become shooters, At the farthest range, there's the mass shooters, but then at the beginning of that range are the people who may have some bad behaviors, maybe not.
They're sort of in that gray area.
What do you think is my opinion of whether you should put lots of good parenting and that would make a difference for the gray area, the ones that are sort of on the bubble?
Do you think that I think that helps?
Yes, of course.
Yeah, yeah, I do. Now, I don't think it helps every time.
I don't think everybody can do it.
But of course, these are your kids.
Do you think that I disagree that you should try to help your kids?
All right, now let's get to the hardest core.
Let's get to the ones that, in my opinion, nothing can help.
In my opinion, nothing can help.
Should you not try to use every bit of parenting you can to help anyway?
What do you think is my opinion?
Is my opinion that you should ignore them or put resources into helping them?
Now remember, I'm talking about the ones that can't be helped.
They can't be helped.
But do you think, I think, you should try as hard as you can anyway?
Yes. Yes.
Do you know why? Why do I think you should try as hard as you can when the kids can't be helped?
Why do you think I say that?
See, here's your problem.
You think that because I say they can't be helped that you shouldn't try.
Nope. Not even close.
You should try like hell.
You should try harder. You should try twice as hard.
Do you know why? It's your fucking kid.
Did I need to explain that to you?
It's your kid. Of course you're going to fight for him.
Of course. Even if you think it's doomed.
You're not going to stop.
Do you think I would talk you out of that?
Now, here's the main reason.
You're not so smart, you're not so smart that you know who's doomed.
Right? If you could know who was doomed, I actually would say, well, Might as well not waste your time.
But you don't know. There are plenty of examples of people who looked doomed and made it out.
I think of my friend Bob.
And I wonder if he's watching, because I know I have a high school friend, school friend, actually from kindergarten through high school, His name was Bob, and Bob had a tough upbringing.
You know, no father. And Bob got into every trouble you could get into.
I don't even have to list it.
If you can think of it, Bob probably did it.
Now, Bob was also muscular.
He was bigger than most of us.
And he was a bit of a bully sometimes.
Because he was big and muscular and came from a bad home.
I was good friends with him, or I like to think I was.
And he didn't bully me.
We were just friends. I would have predicted he would have had the worst outcome of the people I grew up with.
Because he had every disadvantage.
He just had them all. Really, he had every disadvantage.
But Bob was smart and Bob didn't give up for anything.
He just had that character.
He was born with it. He just didn't give up and he was pretty smart.
Bob took his absolutely nothing starting place, like no advantages whatsoever, and joined the Marines.
He lived That's the good news.
He didn't go anywhere. They got him killed.
They trained him in IT, and he became a technical manager, and then took those skills into the private sector.
Huge success. Huge success.
Now here's the thing. Would you have known...
Would you have known when Bob was 16 and it looked like nothing was going to happen except jail for Bob?
Bob was heading to jail, basically.
And Bob was heading to drug addiction, something.
But it didn't happen.
It didn't happen.
Literally the opposite happened.
And how many of you have heard stories just like that?
Somebody says Bob was white.
Yeah, and that's a factor.
But you've heard this, right? You've all heard these stories.
The person who was doomed and somehow made it out.
So as long as there are people who can make it out, and it's your kid, yeah, maximum effort all the time.
Maximum effort for those who are doomed, maximum effort for those who might be doomed, and maximum effort for those who are just fine the way they are.
Maximum effort all the time.
If you heard me say, you should just pull yourself out and watch them die, that's the opposite of what I'm saying.
I'm just saying that if you don't understand that there's a class of young men who can't be helped, you're really going to be disadvantaged in trying to make a difference.
You just have to understand what you're dealing with.
And the big shift that I would offer to the world is what I'll call the hypnotist shift.
And by the way, we're heading toward it.
Since 2015, when I warned you that Trump would change how we see reality itself, I can see this coming.
And we're not going to get to the golden age until we accept it.
And it goes...
Well, it goes like this.
Basically, you can't change genetics.
It's primarily what is driving us.
And instead of thinking that 80% is, you know, our, let's say, parenting and our free will and all that stuff, it's more like 10% or 20% or maybe even zero.
We're actually irrational creatures who rationalize after the fact.
Once you realize that...
you might be able to make it out.
Maximum effort isn't magic.
No, that's true. Scott, do you believe that psychedelics could be the cure for the fentanyl crisis?
Cure is a strong word, but it could make a big, big dent in it.
Now, Fentanyl tends to be hidden in a lot of other products.
So we're not just talking about taking straight fentanyl, which some people do.
You're talking about addiction in general.
And so psychedelics for addiction does have lots of problems.
Don says, Scott loves drugs.
Who doesn't, Don? Who doesn't?
Do you drink coffee?
Do you try to eat right because it makes you feel better?
Do you take an Advil if you've got a headache?
You know, as I've often said, we like to think that the people who are winners in life are the ones who stayed away from drugs.
The losers in life are the ones who got addicted.
It isn't that clean.
Here's the way I see it, because I live near Silicon Valley.
You see a whole different look. The people who made it are on drugs.
The people who failed are on drugs.
The difference is which drug.
That's it. The difference is which drugs.
There's no such thing as the people not on drugs.
It's just not even a thing.
I don't even know...
You might know two or three people not on drugs, right?
Probably not.
They're at least drinking on the weekends or smoking or they're taking nicotine...
They're managing their sugar.
Everybody's drugging themselves.
You can either do it poorly or well, and that's it.
Those are your two choices.
You can drug yourself poorly, or you can drug yourself well.
The biggest secret of civilization is how many accomplishments happened under the influence, specifically of speed or meth or Adderall or anything that gives you a lift.
If you knew how much of civilization was built on the back of drugs, you would be shocked.
If you knew how many inventions happened because somebody got really high and it came to them, you would be shocked.
If you know how many ideas that I've come up with that actually have moved the needle, actually changed things, if you knew how many of them were under the influence of marijuana, you would be shocked.
You would be shocked. You see those books behind you?
That's all marijuana-driven.
And some people would say the one in the middle, not the one in the middle, actually the one in the end.
A lot of people would say it's the most influential book written in the last 20 years.
And without marijuana, it probably wouldn't have happened.
In fact, I wrote every page of that when I was high.
So ideas such as systems versus goals and talent stacks and passion being bullshit, these were transformational ideas.
These are ideas which embedded themselves into the thinking of pretty much all business people at this point.
And that all happened because I wasn't thinking in my normal way.
All right. Best substance for cognitive augmentation.
Well, I haven't tried them all, and I don't want to recommend a drug, I guess.
So I'm not going to answer that. I don't think that you should listen to me about any kind of drug.
Yeah, liquor is probably the one that has the least utility, but it has some social and sales utility.
Yeah, I wouldn't do Ambien.
Somebody says Tom Cruise is on a heavy dose of performance-enhancing hypnosis, Do you think that Tom Cruise is not on Adderall?
What do you think? He acts like somebody who either has the most amazing natural biology or he's got a little extra going on there.
I mean, it looks like it. So, if you were to take, you know, randomly pick ten people who seem high energy and really high productivity and operating at the highest level, if you just pick ten of those people randomly and say, okay, there's ten famous people who did really well.
So I'll pick this billionaire, that entrepreneur.
You got your ten, and then I'll take your ten, whoever they are, and then I'll see how many of them are on Adderall.
What do you think it's going to be out of ten?
What would you guess out of 10 highly successful people that you picked yourself, just randomly, how many of them do you think are on Adderall?
Probably eight. Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know the answer.
But it's not zero.
Yeah, it could be eight.
Like, if it turned down it was three, I wouldn't be super surprised.
But I feel like it's eight.
I feel like it's eight. And again, I don't recommend it because I think the downside is substantial.
And it's hard to get, and it's a controlled drug, and there's every reason in the world not to do it.
But when you do it, it does make a difference.
No doubt about it. How do you get it?
It's hard. Somebody says Russell Brand must be obviously...
When I watch Russell Brand, do you have the same feeling?
It's like watching a tightrope walker.
Because he speaks so quickly that you're positive he's going to have to stop to think of the next word, as you see me often do.
I'll pause to think of the word.
He never pauses to think of the right word.
And then the words that come out are better than anything you've ever written.
It's like, okay, you're just talking off the top of your head, and I just heard a beautiful sentence.
Wait, there's another one. Oh, there's another one.
Oh, there's another one. And he can just do beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence with high vocabulary and keep it coming.
I'm not going to say that he's on drugs, but I don't know anybody who could do that without them.
That's all. There have to be people who can do this naturally, I would think.
But I don't personally know anybody who could do that without an enhancement.
I'm hearing somebody saying he's sober.
If you're sober, you can still be on Adderall.
It's doctor prescribed.
Now, I'm not saying he is, so let me be really careful.
I'm a big fan of his, and he seems to be a brilliant person, so maybe that's the whole story.
I'm just saying, forget about him for a second.
It's probably the whole story.
He's probably just brilliant, and that's all there is.
But other people I've seen, I've never seen an other person who could do that sort of thing without an enhancement.
All right, that's all for now.
No, I'm not an Adderall.
I wish I were. I'll tell you my brief experience with an Adderall-like drug in college.
And if I could feel like that all the time, yeah, I'd do it.
