Episode 1824 Scott Adams: Trump Remains The Most Relevant Political Figure, J6 Hearings Backfired
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
CRT destroyed in the classroom...soon
What's wrong with Steven King?
J6 committee failures
Components of a viral Tweet
A George Soros narrative that makes sense
AI generated humor
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And welcome to the Golden Age, the highlight of civilization.
It begins here.
We're going to recognize it here and will it into existence.
Yes, are you tired of all the negativity, all the fighting on other outlets?
Well, today, it's going to be all unicorns and rainbows and whatever else you like, because the Golden Age is coming.
And it doesn't come by itself.
We've got to pull it a little bit.
Give it a little yank. That's what's going to happen today.
And if you'd like to enjoy the feeling of going to another level of awareness and realizing the golden age, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Boom. Did it right that time.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Oh, my God.
My God. Wait, wait.
I don't think I can resist a double sip.
Oh, God, did I need that?
Well, let's talk about Paul Pelosi's DUI. You know, Nancy Pelosi's husband got stopped for a DUI recently, and today we learned that he allegedly, and I guess we should highlight allegedly, because this does sound a little bit too on the nose.
I have to admit, it doesn't sound true.
But I'm going to tell you what is allegedly reported.
That he handed officers his driver's license and an $11.99 foundation card, which is a group that supports highway patrol and provides scholarships for their children.
Now, here's the thing.
Here's the thing. If one of you, some unfamous, less rich person, had tried this approach, I would have said, worth a try.
Worth a try.
If it's a normal person, I'd say, whatever.
Everybody's got an angle.
It's worth a try. But when somebody of Nancy Pelosi's husband's prominence If this is true, it just makes you want to slap him, doesn't it?
Now, regardless of whether this trick works, and I assume it doesn't, because he got arrested, right?
So it looks like it doesn't work.
But if it's true, you just want to slap him.
Am I right? There's just something about the combination of who it was, plus the technique, See, that technique should be the thing that's used by people who are not powerful.
I guess here's the thing that bothers me.
People who are not powerful have a set of strategies, and then people who are powerful have a different set of strategies.
And if he had to use a strategy that typically you'd associate with the less powerful people, I don't know, it just feels like he's taking something away.
Yeah. I don't know what it is about it.
There's just something about this story that goes, oh, oh.
Now, apparently there's some kind of drug that was discovered in him as well.
Who knows? Who knows what that is?
Maybe we'll find out.
Maybe we won't. But remember, everything you hear about this situation is alleged.
Alleged. He has not been proven guilty in a court of law.
And that has to mean something in our United States.
It has to mean something.
All right. How would you like to see critical race theory and things related to it destroyed in the classroom?
Well, I'm pretty close.
You don't see it coming yet because there's no signs of it yet.
Pretty close.
It goes like this.
What would be the opposite of critical race theory?
Because that's kind of missing, isn't it?
Have you noticed what's missing?
If you say, hey, I don't like this critical race theory, the alternative is just to be silent.
That doesn't feel like enough, does it?
So if you're noticing, hey, why do we keep, you know, it feels like we should be fighting against this thing if you're against critical race theory, you're fighting against it and it feels like you're not winning, it's because you don't have any tools.
You don't have anything to fight with.
You're basically saying...
Basically, somebody's shooting you in the head, and you're saying, I wish that weren't happening.
I sure wish you weren't shooting me in the head.
How often does that work?
It doesn't. You have to have something to fight back with.
Now, some people are threatening lawsuits, and that's all good, if it works.
But maybe you didn't see this coming, but there actually is a solution.
There is a solution.
It's strategy. The solution to CRT, which conservatives would characterize it...
Now, this is, of course, a right-leaning characterization.
Everybody's got a narrative, right?
So it doesn't mean it's true, but the way it's portrayed is that it's a victim mentality.
If you don't like the victim mentality, you'd better have something better...
Just saying I don't like the victimhood that CRT sort of implies, that doesn't buy you anything.
You've got to tell us what's better.
What would be better?
Strategy. Strategy would be better.
It's a high ground. Victimhood is the low ground.
Strategy is the high ground.
And the strategy is, how do you use your victimhood in the best possible way?
Now, the worst possible way is just to complain and say, give us stuff because we're victims.
That's the worst way.
It might work. I'm not saying it doesn't work.
It works a lot. But it's still the worst way.
The best way is to have a strategy for success and just make your strategies for success work.
Because if you're succeeding, you're basically fixing the current generation and the ones after that as well.
So how could you possibly fix it?
Well, what if there were a book that taught you how to succeed no matter how much of a victim you might be?
Wouldn't that be useful?
And suppose that book had been written for somebody 14 years and up so that they could get it at about the time that they're developing a little bit of critical thinking.
If only such a book existed.
It's called Had It Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big, and I wrote it in part for exactly this.
Now, more specifically, I was sort of thinking of my own stepkids as I wrote it, but it was written for the purpose...
Of battling this exact thing before it had a name.
You know, we always thought about people expressing their victimhood as their primary, let's say, philosophy or operating system of life.
And before it had any kind of a name, there was that book that said, how about a strategy instead of a complaint?
And the problem is that that book sort of exists outside the...
You know, the educational system.
But as of yesterday, I did offer, and I think it's been accepted, I haven't checked yet, for somebody who's a professional who makes curriculums and lesson plans out of books.
So my book can now be turned into, I'm working into a lesson plan.
And I'm not telling you that my book needs to be the one.
I can think of maybe, there might be five to ten books that just jump out as something that even a teenager should be exposed to.
Maybe in summary form.
Perhaps in summary form.
But definitely the material, right, should be made available to kids.
And if you could make homeschoolers learn strategies for success while the rest of the world is learning to just read and write and complain, you fixed everything.
Because the market competition will take care of the rest.
So right now you've got a situation where you've got public schools not doing so great, and then you've got homeschoolers that we don't understand.
If you're involved in homeschool, you probably do understand it.
But do you understand that people not directly involved in homeschool don't exactly know what it is?
Because it feels like mom has to stay home and be the teacher, and she doesn't know how to do that.
I mean, that would be, like, the sexist way to look at it.
But don't you think that homeschool needs, like, more of a marketing kick?
Suppose I said to you, public school is where you learn to read, write, and complain, and homeschool is where you learn to read, write, and strategize or have a strategy for success.
Am I done? That's it.
That's the end of critical race theory.
You just need to offer an alternative, and it hasn't been offered.
But the alternative exists in the sense that all the pieces are there.
You just have to package it up and put it in a narrative, which I'm doing for you right now.
Let me say it again. Public school is where you learn to read, write, and complain about your victimhood, about anything.
Your gender, who knows, whatever.
Complain. Homeschool is where you learn to read, write, and have a strategy for life's success.
It's over. It's over.
You can't...
That contrast is, first of all, something that everybody would get right away, but not until you can prove it, right?
Right now, homeschool is not that.
Homeschool is not that.
Homeschool is just another place to learn to read and write with less complaining.
But there's a real big difference between less complaining and an active strategy for success that has been tried and works for countless people all over the place.
You can't compare those two things.
So the title of the book is called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
You can see the cover of it over my shoulder there.
It's been out for a number of years, and the reason that it's getting more attention now than it did when it first came out, and it was very successful when it first came out, but it continues to grow in, I would say, importance.
Because so far nobody has reproduced something that so directly gives you advice from teenager up on how to organize a life based on just plain, obvious statistical truths.
You know, nothing that's out there.
So anyway, in a few weeks, I will probably have a curriculum and class plan.
I will make that available to home schools.
And I don't think that necessarily my book needs to be the thing that solves everything.
But it's the narrative.
If the one thing I can do is consolidate the narrative around home school is reading and writing and strategy.
You tell me that you give that choice to a black single parent.
You say, I'll give you a choice.
You can go read, write, and complain, or you can go read, write, and have a strategy for success that's so well proven, it's almost guaranteed if you don't become an addict.
Every parent is going to say yes to that, if they have the option.
Right now, they don't have the option.
Yeah, yeah, I'll put the math in there, don't worry about it.
But you get the point. All right.
I'm going to tell you over and over again, until it becomes true, We're seeing advance signals of the golden age approaching.
And they're a little bit invisible until I call them out.
Now, one is a little bit more visible, so that's what reminded me.
But I'd like to congratulate Jon Stewart and all the people who worked on this burn pit pact bill, the major health care legislation for veterans.
Now, I don't know the details of the bill, But I know that Republicans and Democrats voted for it, so I'm guessing they did something right.
I still don't understand what took so long.
I'm a little confused.
Maybe it was incorrect information, something.
Maybe it was a strategy. I don't know.
I'm a little bit confused about why it did work, didn't work, and now it works.
I missed a little bit in the between, but it doesn't matter.
So here's the thing I'd like to call out.
Can we...
Can we...
The audience that's watching this, mostly right-leaning people, I suspect.
Can you give Jon Stewart a completely butt-free, no butts, congratulations and thank you?
Can you do that? Can we, without any reservations, just say, that was good?
Yeah, right.
And that's what the Golden Age looks like.
Now, How many of these examples are there?
How many examples are there?
Some people say no.
Really? So here's what I think.
I think the Democrats or the Republicans who voted for the bill must have been satisfied that it was clean enough.
I believe that your information about it being a dirty bill with pork in it turned out to be not as true as you think.
I think maybe that wasn't quite accurate information.
I think that there was some stuff that wasn't maybe on point, but it's still good for veterans and health care.
I feel like that's what was happening, something like that, but that's speculation.
The fact is, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. If both the Democrats and Republicans voted for it, that's good enough for me, for now.
Have I read it? Would it make a difference?
If I read it, would it make a difference?
No. Keep in mind that Scott doesn't read or do research.
You're correct. One of the things that I try to do for you is to take your point of view in some situations, and this is one of them.
In other words, as a consumer of the news, I'm also criticizing the news sources, because I haven't seen a news source that told me what's happening, have you?
Have you seen a right-leaning or left-leaning news source that accurately told you what was in the bill?
I haven't even seen one try.
I've read all the headlines every day, left and right.
I make sure I look left and right.
I've not seen anybody even say what was in the bill.
So... I feel like that's the most important thing to call out, is that we're not told what's in the bill.
And I believe there should be a law that says you should have those bills labeled so the public can understand them.
But anyway, I'm going to congratulate Jon Stewart, because I think he was on the side of good, and he got what he wanted, and the veterans got what they wanted, and maybe it's the golden age.
Maybe it is. Well, so yesterday, I think it was, I asked this provocative question.
What is wrong with Stephen King?
How is it that he can write all these best-selling books, and yet when he tweets, he looks like a moron?
Now, it could be.
The problem's on my end.
Can't rule that out. So one of the possibilities is it's just me.
But I know a lot of you see it too.
And if you have the same cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias I do, well, maybe you see it the same way.
But to me, it looked like there was a huge disconnect between the way he tweets and the quality of the commercial products he's creating.
Now, I don't have this feeling about everybody who disagrees with me, right?
Just taking the prior point, if Jon Stewart disagreed with me on something, I don't know if he does, but if he did, I would say, well, there's a smart person with a smart background saying things that I disagree with, but it's not because he's dumb or drunk or something, right? Like, you never say to yourself, huh, Jon Stewart must be drunk today.
At least it always sounds smart, even if you disagree with it.
But Stephen King's different.
He doesn't sound smart when he disagrees with me.
It sounds like there's something wrong.
So I asked Joshua Lysak for an opinion, and I retweeted his thread in which he goes into some detail, and I would recommend it to you on the following basis.
You could make an entire college class around Joshua Lysak's tweet thread.
There's so much in there.
There's so much technique put into the thread that you should read it for the technique.
Well, even more than, I think, the topic.
The topic is really interesting, but the technique he puts into it, that's just a lesson.
And what you're seeing in particular from Joshua, I like to call this out whenever I see it, is somebody who has intentionally built a talent stack, which is a set of talents that work well together.
So he's a ghostwriter for a number of people.
So the first thing he gets for free is that he ghostwrites for people who are on opposite sides of things.
So he actually has the experience of writing arguments that are opposite of each other.
Do you know what that does for your brain?
Good stuff. If all you did is say, I'm going to be a ghostwriter for people on the political left or the political right, you would talk yourself into their point of view by writing it over and over.
That's scientifically demonstrated in studies, by the way.
If somebody is asked to just write down an opinion, physically write it, that is not their own opinion, they can actually talk themselves into the opposite of their opinion just by the process of writing down the other opinion.
It's a thing. Now, you could argue that, like most studies, they're not reproducible.
But I choose to believe that's probably true, because it agrees with everything I know about brains.
But Joshua takes business on both sides, and so he gets to see both sides of pretty big topics.
That's a talent. He also demonstrates probably the best marketing I've ever seen on Twitter.
I've never seen anybody market better on Twitter.
Case in point, the very thread I'm talking about, gets you all hooked on the topic, but then he embeds a little advertisement later down in the thread when you can easily accept it.
Because he's created enough value for you that when you get to something that's clearly a little promotional bit, you're like, ah, okay, I actually am interested in that.
Because everything else was so good, good to know that he's got a product, too.
And then, of course, he's learned persuasion, hypnosis, I think.
You can see reciprocity built in.
That's a persuasion technique.
So, for example, he mentioned something good about me in the thread.
What's that going to do? Well, first of all, it's going to make me retweet it.
If I hadn't already liked the content, I was going to retweet it anyway.
But that would have been a little extra kicker.
So you can see all the techniques of persuasion in it.
You can see all the writing technique, which is just the top-level commercial quality you could ever see.
Marketing, 100%.
And it's just a strong package.
So you should read it for that reason.
I'll give you just a preview.
He starts with three theories about why Stephen King could be tweeting so differently than the quality of work suggests.
One would be substance abuse.
That's in the public domain.
We know that he was a long-term substance abuser, Stephen King was.
We know he had a serious accident that presumably caused some head trauma.
Does that make you the same when you're done?
We don't know, but it's certainly an open question.
But the more interesting part which he develops is the fiction writers have overactive imaginations.
And if you write fiction, and in the first chapter, I think this is the example that Joshua uses, if there's a rifle hanging over the fireplace in the first chapter, it's going to be important later on.
Because that's how fiction is written.
But in the real world, you see all of these things that don't mean anything, and they never will mean anything.
They're just coincidences.
And all the coincidences could be interpreted by a fiction writer who has wired their brain to think everything matters.
It's just an automatic thing.
If you're in that mode, everything matters.
Every piece of evidence will have a role later on in the book.
And then you look at the real world, And you see all this stuff that really doesn't mean anything.
And suddenly your confirmation bias just kicks in and says, yeah, this means something.
Oh yeah, I'm picking up the hints.
Oh, a lot of people don't see this, but I'm seeing that gun over the fireplace in the first chapter.
It's an interesting theory.
And it's based on the fact that whatever you're doing often is the way you wire your brain.
If you have a brain that's looking for your victimhood, What do you do to your brand?
Hey, today I think I'll go out and look for some victimhood of myself.
And then tomorrow I'm going to go out and look for some victimhood.
And hey, there's some other people talking.
What's their victimhood?
You can talk yourself into that being your operating system.
Meaning your go-to reflexive way of thinking even without trying.
It's completely accidental.
So we've got an entire education system that doesn't understand some of the most basic things about how the human mind works and how to program.
Not even the basics.
I wonder if there are anybody else who doesn't understand the basics of how brains work.
Huh. I wonder if I might mention something later on in my presentation.
Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing.
Well, Arizona had some elections, or the primaries, I guess, yesterday.
Blake Masters looks like he's going to be the candidate on the Republican side for Senate.
He is a Trump-endorsed guy.
The last I checked, Carrie Lake was ahead, but it's getting close, right?
Isn't the...
Is it pretty close now?
Oh, the spelling for Joshua's last name is L-I-S-E-C. Pretty sure if you Google that, you'll get his Twitter account.
So Joshua Lysak.
I hope I'm pronouncing it right.
He never told me I wasn't, so I'll just go with that.
All right, so it does look like Trump is still the kingmaker.
Am I correctly reading the news from last night?
I don't know. Am I correctly reading that Trump endorsed candidates had a good day?
Are we all agreeing with that?
Or is that something that the left is not agreeing with yet?
I think that looks to be the narrative that everybody's sort of settling on, right?
Now, that's interesting, isn't it?
This disgraced politician, Trump, he's somehow the most important character...
And yet, and yet, he's been out of office and should be disgraced by now, shouldn't he?
I hear people saying Carrie Lake won, but I checked the Fox page just before I got on, and it looked like it was narrowing.
So, I don't know.
So let's talk about the January 6th hearings backfiring.
I tweeted this, and I'm going to give you a lesson on how to make a viral tweet.
So I'm going to talk about my tweet, and then I'm going to tell you that as I created it, I said, oh, here's a viral tweet.
Let me check on it.
Let me check to see if it actually went viral.
I'll bet it did. Are you checking on it?
Some of you are checking on it yourself.
All right, let's see how many... This only mounts there a little bit, and it's already got over 300 retweets.
Generally, 300 retweets of this quickly would suggest it's heading to over 1,000, which would be viral.
In my world, 1,000 retweets would be...
I would consider that a viral tweet.
Viral, you know, not within the world so much as within maybe my universe.
All right. First of all, we'll talk about the content of the tweet, but then secondly, I'll talk about what made it viral.
So here's five things no Democrat wanted, yet the January 6th hearing is delivered.
So it's what they didn't want, but they got.
Number one, it kept Trump the most relevant figure in politics.
Is that what they wanted?
Don't feed the energy monster.
If there's one thing, one fucking thing you have to get right, Here, let me give you a visual for this.
Imagine there's a monster from space.
It's behind a cage.
And there's a big sign on it that says, energy monster.
And then below that it says, do not feed energy to the energy monster.
It's the only thing you can't do.
No matter what you do, don't give it energy.
And so they gave it energy.
How'd that work out?
Exactly the way you'd imagine.
It worked out exactly the way you'd think it would.
He became the most important person in politics when he should have been heading in the other direction.
If they had completely shut him out and ignored the entire January 6th thing completely, he might have been less important.
But instead, they made us think, this is number two on my tweet, number two, made us think about election rigging until it seemed true.
If there's one thing I can teach you about persuasion, it's this.
Don't think about an elephant.
Stop it. No, stop thinking about the elephant because there's no elephants.
There's no elephants. No, there's no elephants.
Stop it. Stop thinking about elephants.
The most basic mistake in persuasion is to tell you to stop thinking about something because it's making you think about it, right?
That's what they did. They made you think about election rigging until more people were convinced it was true.
They actually talked people into Trump's point of view by just talking about election rigging over and over and over again.
Even saying it wasn't true didn't help.
Basic rule of persuasion.
Number three, by showing people who looked like Republicans being hunted and jailed and demonized for things that other Republicans we now know Republicans generally believed, as did the people who were protesting, that they were trying to save the Republic.
And so the January 6 hearings made the people who believed they were trying to save the Republic look like they were being rounded up and jailed.
They made all Republicans feel hunted.
Possibly, possibly the biggest mistake in politics of all time.
You know, history might record this as just the biggest gaffe.
I don't know if you could ever top this one.
But fourth, because nothing is really coming of it, and it looks like Congress looks more useless than usual, how would you like to be in charge of Congress and the thing that's getting the most attention for Congress is the thing that is the least useful?
The hearings. It's the least useful thing they could be doing, And also getting the most attention.
Now, lately, some of the other bills have gotten attention, and that's much better for them.
All right, number five, they debunk their own narrative.
Basically, they cleared the way for Trump to return to power, and I don't know if that could have happened without them.
In my opinion...
In my opinion, the zeitgeist will soon change on both the left and the right to realizing that the hearings guaranteed Trump's return to power because they didn't find anything that would damn him and put him in jail, and so it cleared him.
How many Republicans thought to themselves, you know, I supported Trump, but once they dig into this shit, they're going to find some bad stuff and I'm going to hold back.
And then they dug in, and they didn't find any bad stuff.
In fact, the only thing they found is a Harvard study that says that the protesters believed they were there to help to fix a problem, not create one.
They thought they were saving the republic, and now that's in evidence.
This could not have been better for Trump.
Every part of this worked for Trump.
Every part of it. Alright, so it's already up to 350 retweets.
As I'm reading it, the retweets are climbing.
1,300 hearts.
Alright, so what made this viral?
Yesterday I was asked on the live stream, I think yesterday, how to write a viral tweet.
Here's how to do it. Now, it's not like there's a formula that if you follow the formula, it's always viral.
But if you don't use these elements, you probably couldn't get there.
And the elements are, number one, is it something everybody's thinking about and already has energy?
So your viral tweet should start with energy that already exists.
That's rule number one. It's very hard to make something that nobody's thinking about turn viral.
Unless they're all sort of thinking about it, but nobody's said it yet.
That's your best situation.
If everybody's thinking about it, and everybody has emotion about it, but nobody's really put it in words yet, that's the perfect situation.
If everybody's thinking about it, but also everybody has already put it in words, Then you're just one more tweet that's saying the same thing as everybody else.
So you need to stand out.
So you need to be different.
That's important. But you need to be different in a way that agrees with what people's energy and enthusiasm is already prepared for.
So certainly people are looking at January 6th.
This is on people's minds. So it had a high level of energy, so I got that right.
So number one, I caught the energy and the relevance correctly.
Next, I did a list.
Lists tend to be a little bit more viral.
Because they're really easy to consume.
People don't like paragraphs.
And then they can also pick out one of the elements and say, oh, I like that one, and I'll use this.
If you can give people something they can use themselves, it becomes a little tool.
They can use themselves for their own arguments.
Then it's viral because they want to spread their own arguments.
So here I've given five different...
I think, compelling reasons, so people could pick any one of the five and say, I like that one, so I'm going to retweet this.
Next, I did not put any curse words in this.
Do you see how often I put curse words in tweets?
A curse word, even a little bit of naughtiness, will remove 75% of the energy from a tweet.
About 75%.
In other words, it's really hard to make a viral tweet with a curse word in it unless the public is also so mad that they will tweet a curse word.
It's very unusual.
So you have to look for really special cases.
Now, it might sound like I'm contradicting myself because I'm teaching you how to be viral and also saying that I often tweet things that couldn't be viral.
If I put the F word in a tweet, it's not going anywhere.
Unless it's a real special case.
Why do I do it?
Why do I put the F word in tweets when I know it will suppress their tweet?
And the reason is because it's how I really feel.
Sometimes I tweet for effect.
And sometimes I tweet because that's just what I feel.
And Twitter is also a place you can say how you feel.
So if I say how I feel, I don't necessarily need you to retweet it.
Like, that's not the game.
Sometimes I just need to get it off my chest.
So I'll put enough word there because that's how I feel.
I'd rather be genuine and give up a few retweets in those cases.
All right, what else makes this...
So, viral. It's going to be probably 400 retweets before I'm done talking about it.
One is that each of the points is easy.
You know, it's just a simple declarative sentence.
And that's all.
Basically, I took away any reason not to retweet it.
I gave you lots of reasons to retweet it.
I connected it to something that's in the headlines.
And I have a provocative point.
Being provocative is important.
And it's also useful if it looks like it puts you in danger.
The best thing you can do to make something viral, and I'm not sure I can recommend it, I'm telling you what works, I'm not recommending it, because I would never recommend you get yourself in trouble.
But if your tweet looks like somebody is going to have a bad day because of it, or somebody might get in trouble, or somebody's in danger, Danger really makes things viral.
And the danger in this case is to me.
You can feel my danger in this tweet, can you not?
Because look what happened in my career just saying good things about Trump.
And here I'm not even really...
I mean, Trump is barely the subject of this because it's really more about January 6th making gigantic persuasion mistakes.
He just happens to be the topic.
But every time I associate myself with Trump, I put myself in danger.
Do you feel that, by the way?
You probably feel it for yourself, but if you're a public figure and you say anything that's pro-Trump, even indirectly, this is pretty indirect, right?
You feel my danger.
When people project danger and it's real, they have to believe it's real, I guess, but But if it's real, it's a little higher energy situation, and energy is what makes you retweet stuff.
I think you hit most of the points, and I think that putting these five things together creates a full narrative, which I think makes it strong as well.
If I had made only one of these five points in a tweet, you might have said to yourself, oh, that's one good point.
There's one good point I agree with.
Might not retweet it.
But if I put five points in the same tweet, you say to yourself, that's a whole narrative.
That's like a whole zeitgeist explained in five points.
So that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes a tweet viral.
You're welcome. All right.
How many people do you think believe that the US economy is in a recession?
And what percentage of the country would you think thinks we're not in a recession?
Just take a guess. You don't have to be a professional pollster.
Just take a guess. How many people, what percentage?
How did you do that?
What? How are you all guessing correctly?
How are you doing this?
You're not professional pollsters.
How? How?
How are you doing it?
Yes, according to Rasmussen, 62% of likely U.S. voters believe the U.S. economy is in a recession, but 23% think it's not.
And you're guessing 25% that rounds up.
How did you do that?
I think Rasmussen may be replaced by your tweets.
Because do we need Rasmussen to do this anymore?
You already knew the answer before they even did the poll.
How? How?
How did you do that? Oh, we know how.
25% of the public will get every question wrong.
Now, that's not every time.
I say it as an absolute because it's more provocative that way.
It's not an absolute.
But the number of times you see it, Try to unsee it.
Try to unsee the 25% for the rest of your life.
Sorry. I just changed your brain for the rest of your life.
You will never not be able to see that.
Here's another theme I keep telling you is predictive.
It's a sub-theme of follow the money.
Remember, follow the money is your best guide to what is true, even when it doesn't make sense why it would be.
It works. And the corollary to that is that the insurance industry is the only one who's going to tell you the truth.
Which is weird. Because there are not many entities that I trust less than insurance companies.
But there's one thing I do trust.
They like to make money.
They do. They like to make money.
And so they are really, really serious about getting the risks and data correct.
And they have something that you don't have.
Their internal data.
So they can look at their internal data and match it to whatever the CDC or the government is saying, and they can say, huh, there's something wrong with that CDC data, and then they can make a wiser decision because they're going to have two choices.
You might have only one.
So if you see the insurance industry sort of move in one direction as a whole, I wouldn't necessarily listen to one insurance company.
But if you see the entire industry say, uh-huh, We're going this way because that's where the risk was.
Sorry. I'm sorry, popular narrative, but we're here to make money.
We're not here to support the narrative.
And unfortunately, our data is moving the narrative over here.
Sorry about that. And we're seeing the beginning of what that might look like.
I'm going to call bullshit unheard mentality for insurance companies.
Herd mentality is very much a thing.
So herd mentality very much affects things.
In my opinion, Insurance companies are as close to immune to that as you could be.
Because if you're the actuarial, you need to get it right.
You need to get it right.
Your money depends on it.
And I think that you would become very unwoke the moment your bonus directly depends on getting it right.
Now, if one insurance company gets it wrong, I might say there's somebody who's too woke.
But if the entire group of them, if all of the insurance companies as a group start moving in the same direction I'm going to listen to that, because that's follow the money business.
And the question that they're working on is the excess deaths.
I suppose one part of the country thinks it's because people are unvaccinated.
Another part of the country thinks the excess deaths are because they're vaccinated.
I will not get into that debate today.
I'll just say that the insurance company is going to settle that question for you.
They have not done that.
They have not yet done it.
But I guarantee you, the insurance industry is going to settle this fucking question.
Maybe in a year, maybe in two years, but they will settle this question.
I'm pretty sure of it. I'm confident they can do that as a whole.
Alright, now I'd like to totally screw up a narrative that you've been enjoying for a long time.
It has to do with George Soros and I finally figured out a narrative that explains all the observations.
My problem with the Soros criticisms is that it didn't match all the data that I could see that was, you know, right available to everybody did not match the narrative.
And I was looking for some kind of explanation that would make sense for why Soros is in fact, so this is part that I'm now on board with, it is in fact true that Soros is giving money to groups that, let's say, are getting your liberal prosecutors in office and creating more crime and all kinds of problems.
And when Soros was asked about that, he didn't have a coherent answer.
And that was my first flag that said, wait a minute, he doesn't even have a coherent answer?
Because the worst person in the world has a reason.
Am I wrong? If you talk to Adolf fucking Hitler, he had a reason.
He could at least explain it.
It was a terrible reason, but he could explain it.
Soros can't even explain it.
What does that tell you?
I'm going to eliminate evil genius from the options that I'm considering.
I don't think evil genius is what's going on.
The other explanations of he wants power.
Here's my personal take on that.
People who are that rich, that rich, and that old are not looking for power.
That's a dumb narrative.
I would, let's see.
Imagine yourself, I'll do this in terms of allowing you to imagine it.
Imagine you have so many billions that you'll never lose them and you can do anything you want.
Money is no longer any object to you.
You have all the money you want, so much money that you're trying to give it away as fast as you can.
You have only a few years to live.
A few years to live and you know it.
Do you think that George Soros, with a few years to live, is looking for personal power?
I would call that a really low likelihood.
I think what he cares about is the world he leaves to his children.
I think the most realistic assumption...
Remember, we can't read his mind, so everything I say about what he's thinking is speculation, just like you.
If you think you know what he's thinking or what his motives are, that's speculation.
Everything I say is also equal to that.
So would you agree with me, first of all, that anything I say about what his motives might be, I can't know.
I'm speculating. So I'm saying that all of our speculation should be treated as equal.
Would you give me that?
Would you give me that we can't know what he's thinking so that all of our speculations start out being equally sketchy?
The only thing I'm going to offer you is that the explanation I'm going to fill out here when I'm done will fit all of the data and that all of the other narratives don't fit the data.
That's all I'm going to say. I'm not saying that's what he's really thinking.
And this is an important point.
If I told you I knew what he's thinking, that would be crazy.
And that would be bad form.
But if I tell you there's one explanation that fits what we observe and all the rest do not, I think that that moves the ball.
So that's what I'm doing. Here's my hypothesis.
You ready for this? The only thing that fits all the data...
Is that whoever it is who makes the detailed recommendations of where his money goes, it's not Psoros himself.
Psoros is not investigating organizations and looking at grants.
He's just sort of, you know, blessing them when they happen.
The only explanation that makes sense is that whoever is doing the grants is getting a kickback from the organizations they're funding.
Do you know why that fits all the data?
Because it would give you a reason why Soros is funding so many disreputable groups.
Because what kind of a group could give you a kickback?
Now, what I mean by kickback is this.
If you imagine that Soros owns the money, but he's authorized some group to decide how to distribute it.
The group that decides how to distribute it could either do it honestly and just get their paycheck, or they could look for groups that will give them money back personally, like a bribe, and they'll say, if you give us $10 million of Soros' money, we'll make sure that an entity that you're involved with will somehow coincidentally get a million-dollar contract that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
You see how easy this is?
If you're the group in charge of who gets the money, you would go for the ones that are the most sketchy, the most corrupt.
You would intentionally seek out the most corrupt people to give the money to.
Not all of it. Not all of it.
Because you want to cover your tracks by giving money to some groups that are unambiguously good.
So you'd have, you know, let's say 30 groups or whatever.
You know, 28 of them are unambiguously good, but you find a few sketchy ones that will give you a million dollars back in ways that can't be traced.
Right? Would Soros himself be aware of that?
No, he would not, because he's not on the ball.
The one thing I can tell you for sure is he's not quite all there yet in the way he used to be.
I don't know how smart he used to be, I imagine he was quite brilliant.
I think that's what we all understand.
But he doesn't look at it at the moment.
And to me, it looks like anybody could tell him anything and he'd probably believe it because he's that old.
So if the people giving out the money would say to him, hey, people are saying that we're just creating more crime by getting all these prosecutors their jobs, what do you think those people tell Soros?
I think those people tell Soros it isn't so bad, or it's temporary, or mostly it works, but yeah, in this one case it didn't.
Don't you think he's getting a completely different story about how bad it is?
And if he looked at the headlines, the headlines on the people he doesn't trust, if you're George Soros, most of the news about you is fake, in my opinion.
In my opinion, most of the news about Soros is fake.
So he probably doesn't even look at the news to get any information, because it's all fake.
Who is he going to trust?
Well, the people he hired.
The people he hired are going to say, everything's fine, don't believe the news.
You know, we're giving it to really good organizations.
We checked them really carefully.
We audit them every day.
Don't worry about it. We got this under control.
It's just the fake news.
It's just Fox News.
It's just rumors on the Internet.
So... Here is my proposition.
My explanation, which I can't confirm in any way, it's just an allegation, my explanation fits all the data.
Because the part I did not understand is why Soros could not explain why he's doing something clearly bad, let's say the prosecutors who are letting people out of jail and making crime spike.
There's no way he's in favor of that.
No way he's in favor of that.
He either doesn't understand it, doesn't know it's happening, Somebody is gaslighting him locally.
Something like that. If you tell me he's in it for the power, you have to explain to me why there are zero 90-plus-year-old billionaires fighting for power while giving away most of their fortune at the same time.
That's the Bill Gates problem.
If you think Bill Gates is fighting for power while giving away most of his fortune...
I just don't see it.
It just doesn't look even logical to me.
And part of that is because my perspective is as someone who used to not have money and then was lucky enough to get relatively rich.
Not as rich as those guys.
Nowhere near it. But I know what it's like to get rich.
And I know that it doesn't make you evil.
If you were evil when you started, maybe.
But... It does make you want to do things for the rest of the world.
I actually think that both Soros and Bill Gates are completely interested in what's best for the world, but also would be good for them, wouldn't it?
But I don't think they're in it for the money, and I don't think they're in it for the power.
I think they're in it for the credit that you get when you make the world a better place.
Has anybody figured out what I'm in it for?
What do you think I'm in it for?
I spend all this time preparing and doing work in public.
It costs me a great deal of money.
What do you think I'm in it for?
I would love for people to say, you did a good job, Scott.
Good job. You helped the public.
Now, somebody's saying it's for ego.
Maybe. Here's how I internally understand it.
I believe that once you've taken care of your own needs, you naturally take care of your family, the people closest.
Once you've taken care of yourself and your family, and you still have stuff left over, I believe there's an instinct to help the larger group, the tribe.
So what you say is ego, I say is instinct.
And I think that Gates and Soros are also working on instinct, but it looks exactly like ego to you.
Here's why I say that.
Because I've experienced it.
And if there's anybody here who's experienced getting rich when they didn't start that way, ask yourself, did you help other people, if you did, because of ego or because of instinct?
It feels like instinct, right?
Because I could tell you I had a very profound experience when I had more money than I needed.
Because it happened kind of instantly.
It was like winning a lottery. Because for me, it was a very big check from a publisher early in my career where I said, this check is so big, I might not have to work again if I don't want to.
And in that moment, I lost all of my incentive that I'd always had all my life.
Because everything I'd done up to the point was to make myself successful.
And then I succeeded.
And then what the hell do you do?
What do you do if your life mission is to become successful?
What happens if it works?
If it works, suddenly I had this transformation.
My brain just went from, oh, you took care of yourself and now you can take care of your family easily...
How about the tribe? How about other people?
So you can see the arc of my career followed that pattern.
And I'm way less rich than those other guys.
Like, way less. Not even close.
So, I think it's instinct.
You say it's gratitude?
I don't think so.
I think it's instinct.
So that's my take. So here's the full model, and you compare it to yours.
There's either these people who got super rich and still want power, even though they have practically unlimited power for anything they want.
Bill Gates can make pretty much anything happen.
Does he need more power?
I don't know. I think it's people working on instinct.
In the Soros case, I think he's maybe poorly served by somebody down the line.
Now, let me test you.
Let me test you.
Does my assumption, and this is just an assumption, it's not an allegation, just an assumption, or a speculation.
I'll weaken it from assumption.
Assumption is even higher than speculation.
I'm going to take it all the way down to speculation.
So all of our speculations are evil, or not evil, equal.
Maybe they're evil.
All of our speculations about what Osoros is thinking are equal, because we can't read his mind.
We can only see what he does.
And I would put my fortunes, I would bet them, because there's corruption below him.
And that explains everything.
What do you think? Did I sell it?
Disagree wholeheartedly, I see people say.
I see no, way off.
I saw some people say yes.
Now, I would argue that those of you who have been so deeply in the Soros is evil camp are unable to hear what I'm saying.
Those of you who didn't really have a strong opinion one way or the other probably heard my explanation and some of them said, oh, that looks better than the other explanation.
I think if you can't make the leap on this one, you have to check your thinking.
Just step back. I'm not even going to say you're wrong, because that part we don't know, right?
So hear me carefully.
I'm not saying you're wrong.
Do you get that? Do you get really clearly that I'm not saying you're wrong?
Whatever your interpretation is, you could be totally right.
Totally right. It just doesn't fit the facts as well as mine.
That's all. All right.
Here's an interesting thing.
You know, I told you that AI, especially with the help of Machiavelli's underbelly on Twitter, have been testing whether AI can write a Dilbert comic strip.
And so far, it's shockingly close, but not there.
I made the mistake...
Somebody's telling me that I have a strong opinion and that, therefore, I am biased...
That is correct. That is correct.
That's why I tell you to check my work the same as you should check your own.
But here's what you should look for.
What would be the source of my bias?
If I had had a strong opinion one way or the other before this started, then that would be a good speculation.
But I think you can say that my bias from the start is I just didn't understand.
Would you agree? Would you agree with my characterization of my own public statements of Soros that from the beginning I've said I'm just puzzled, I just don't understand?
If you approach a topic from I'm confused, and then you form a point of view, it's less likely to be confirmation bias.
Do you get that? Confirmation bias is when you're just agreeing with what you already said.
Oh, all the evidence supports what I already said.
That's not what I did. It was literally yesterday when I realized that corruption could explain all the elements.
So I didn't have anything like a firm opinion, and still don't.
That's why I'm so adamant about saying that this is speculation, but so is yours.
We're all on the same level of credibility, which is none, basically.
So back to humor. So AI did a good job of coming up with things that sounded funny, and I cleverly but incorrectly suggested that if AI were fed the six dimensions of humor, a formula that I came up with years ago for what makes something funny, the formula is that if any two of six dimensions are used in a joke, it could be funny, but not necessarily.
But it's a minimum requirement.
The minimum requirement is two of six dimensions.
If you haven't heard it, the six dimensions are...
Is it recognizable?
You know, something that happens in your life.
Is it naughty, cute, clever, bizarre?
And there's another one I forget.
But if you use two of six, you get it.
So I said, hey, if you were to feed this formula into AI, then it beat me.
Because I believed it had not been done.
But it turns out that Machiavelli's underbelly had done exactly that and fed my entire explanation of the six dimensions of humor into it.
He still did not create a joke that I think was great.
It was missing one thing.
But this is really going to blow your mind now.
There's only one thing that it couldn't do.
It knew how to write.
It knew what a joke was.
It knew the formula for writing a joke.
It had the right topic, but it didn't quite hit.
There's one thing I say all the time that it needs to have to write jokes that's missing.
A-B testing. Do you know how I know if something is funny?
I'm A-B testing it in my own brain.
Because there's still one thing I can do that AI can't do.
Well, that's a lie.
It's one thing that AI hasn't done yet, but could really easily do.
That's the problem. The problem is, it can't A-B test on its own, because it doesn't have a sense of humor.
But a human has a sense of humor that's developed in whatever weird way we develop.
So when I'm going through all the options, I'm saying, if he says this is funny, if he says this is a bit funny, if he says this, I actually laugh.
I A-B test instantly if it makes me laugh.
That's the requirement. It has to make me laugh.
The computer doesn't have that.
It'll put down its best shot, it'll try one thing, its best shot, and then it's done.
If I did that, I couldn't write humor either.
If all I did is put down my first draft, you would never read my comic.
It doesn't do second drafts.
It doesn't edit.
And it doesn't test it with the audience.
Now, here's what's going to put me out of business.
All you need is a Twitter account that the AI has access to, that it can tweet.
And then you say, AI, write me a joke about George Soros or critical race theory.
And then the AI gives a first draft.
Here's my first draft.
And then it tweets it and says, what do you think about this?
And then humans, somewhat instantly, because jokes are easy to read, might be three sentences, within five minutes, the AI has hundreds of responses.
It only needs ten.
Ten responses would be perfectly adequate to say if something is funny or not, because people are similar enough that if three out of ten thought it was hilarious, that would be a hit.
Right? You know, you can't get 10 out of 10.
But if you got 3 out of 10, people say, that is just really funny.
You would have a best-selling book, number one comic.
3 out of 10 is huge for humor.
So the only thing AI doesn't do to write jokes It could do tomorrow.
It just had to know what I just told you.
All it needs to do is add the one thing that I have that it doesn't have, and it could do it better than I could do it.
Because if I could test all of my jokes instantly on Twitter with other people, I wouldn't use my own brain to do it.
Because the limitation of my own brain is that I'm only getting the things I think are funny.
And cartoonists become a little weird over time.
We need edgier stuff to laugh because we deal with humor all the time.
So you just need more.
And so sometimes there are things I don't think are funny that the audience would.
And actually some of the most popular Dilbert comics of all time I thought were some of my weaker efforts.
But the public thought it was my best work.
So I can't tell.
But AI could tell.
AI would know what the best one is because it would have data.
It tested it. So you add the first draft A-B testing, second draft A-B testing.
You add that to the humor formula...
An AI already can do my job.
Did you see the pictures the AI drew of my comic strip?
And you noticed that the heads of the characters were, like, misshapen?
How hard would it be to teach the AI, hey, we see your first draft of these comics, but we should remind you that on humans as well as comics, the ears on both sides are symmetrical.
The eyes are symmetrical.
So you want symmetry.
Whatever's on the left should look like the right.
Believe it or not, AI doesn't seem to know that yet in the context of creating Dilbert comics.
But how hard would it be for AI to learn that the ear on the left needs to look like the ear on the right or is not right?
Pretty easy. Pretty easy.
All right. That should scare you.
You know, a lot of us thought that art would be last.
That art would be the last thing that the AI could do.
And for probably 20 years, I've been saying, you are so wrong.
Art is going to be the first thing.
Art isn't going to be the last thing.
It's going to be the first thing.
And the reason I can say that is because of my talent stack.
I do creative stuff for a living in a lot of different realms, you know, visual art and writing, etc., tweeting, speaking.
So I have the, you know, the creative experience down, but my background is more economics and rational business and, you know, even engineering type of thinking.
So I bring sort of an engineering approach into the creative world, and what I can see, what I can see is my own method.
I can see my own system.
I'm not sure other artists see it as clearly if they don't have sort of an engineering mindset going into it.
And so what I can see is that all art is just a formula.
Art is just a formula.
And then you add the first draft and the A-B testing part of it and you're done.
I knew that from the jump.
I knew the art would be first.
And in my opinion, the art that the AI is doing right now is better than human art.
So let me call it.
And by the way, it doesn't matter what you say, it matters what artists say.
This is one of those situations where it takes an artist to tell you when the AI is better.
And I'm telling you that right now.
I've seen a lot of AI art in the last month.
It's better. If you told me, what do you want to put on your wall?
I would put the AI art on my wall right now.
It's not even close. In my opinion, the AI art has already lapped human art and it will never return.
It's over. People might buy human art because it came from humans.
They're always going to see things they like.
But the AI art is just better.
It's just better. Calling it better is silly?
No, it's not.
Better in this context means that it lights up the parts of the brain that art is supposed to light up, and it does it more thoroughly than other art.
That's pretty objective.
I know art is, you know it when you see it, blah, blah, blah, but that's just not true.
It's just not true.
What's true is art that's done well.
Is very objectively done well.
And you could find the formula to it.
You know, how many of you know that if you were to do a portrait, there's a, let's say, a design element or several that you pretty much have to use.
If you go outside that, you know, those design expectations, you don't have art.
So art has always been formula.
It's just that the artist didn't necessarily know they were following one.
And you thought it was maybe magic and art because you didn't know the formula either.
But if you do create art and you have some background and rational thinking, you can see instantly that it's just craft.
Art is mostly craft plus luck.
There are some people who make things and it's just magic on the first draft and that's just luck.
If you tried to make artistic things all day long and you had some skill at it, you're going to nail it once in a while.
It's just luck. You're not talking about the same art that you're talking about?
I think I am, but I don't know.
There's a priceless plexiglass box called art.
Well, I think that's more about marketing than anything else.
Is luck really genius?
Well, let me give you one of the reframes that's in my How to Fail book.
That's weird. About luck.
The old frame is that you can't control luck.
The reframe, the one that I offer, is that you can totally control luck.
You just have to go where luck exists.
So go where there's more energy, more things happening, more connections, more networking, more jobs, faster-growing industry, a growing industry, not a shrinking industry.
You just go where the action is.
And then, you know, put yourself into it, and you're going to have all kinds of opportunities.
But if you sit on your couch at home, luck isn't going to find you at home.
So... You would say that's not luck?
No, it is luck. Because you still need the accidental, you know, opportunity.
You still need to notice when somebody said something.
Somebody named their couch Lucky.
Yeah, okay, that's one way to play it.
Jeff says, you do realize the engineer-artist thing works both ways.
Excellent point. The engineer-science thing works both ways, too.
Yeah, there is a hypothesis that I found stronger than I thought it would be.
That artists anticipate science, and therefore engineering.
Right? Do you believe that?
Do you believe that art anticipates science?
I'm going to go further.
You can't make anything you can't imagine.
There's your reframe. You can't do anything you can't imagine.
I've often been asked, you know, have I ever been tempted to do this or that illegal thing?
To which I say, well, I can't imagine it working out for me.
So no, there's nothing that would cause me to do something where I can't even imagine it could work out.
At the very least, you have to imagine it before it activates you.
You don't even stand up.
You don't even get off the couch.
Unless you can imagine that that pays off.
If you can't even imagine it's good to get off the couch, you're not going to do it.
So your imagination is the only thing that activates you plus dopamine.
It's basically imagination plus dopamine plus a functioning body, you know, health.
That's it. Imagination plus preference, I guess.
Imagination plus preferences, you know, personal preferences, plus dopamine.
There you go. All right.
Well, some of you need to go start your day, and that means it must be close to 8 o'clock.
My time, not your time.
And may I say that I had the most excellent writing trip, I felt I was totally, totally inspired.
