Episode 1860 Scott Adams: Orange Brandon, US Life Expectancy Falls, Workplaces Less Polite, More Fun
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Content:
Kari Lake discovered voter fraud?
CDC proves beyond doubt they're corrupt
Biden's transition to Orange Brandon
China passes America in life expectancy
Will America eventually attack Mexico?
If a robot recognizes itself in a mirror
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Fill it with your favorite beverage.
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happens now go yeah yeah yeah Well, the Queen of England is ill and family members are gathering around, which is usually the signal that the cat's on the roof.
Meaning that I don't think that they're expecting the Queen to recover from this.
Because when you do the family is gathering around part, That's kind of telling you the game is about over.
Here's what I will predict about that.
Are you ready for a prediction?
Do you believe that the news happens on a sort of a random schedule?
Do you think that news happens, but it just happens when it happens, and if it's going to happen, that's when it happens?
No, not the political stuff.
So here's my prediction.
Should the Queen pass, do you know what's going to happen?
All of the bad news about Trump will suddenly stop for a while.
Because they need to save the good stuff to when you're paying attention.
They're not going to fight with a Queen story.
So for about a week or so, if the Queen passes, for about a week or so the political news will get really boring.
And that's how you know it's never been real.
If you ever want to test to see if the news is real or manufactured, watch how it stops when there's a competing story.
Now, I could be wrong, right?
There's some things that the news can't control.
But things like an anonymous source told us something bad about Trump, I'll bet you that anonymous source is going to wait another week.
If there's a competing story.
So look for that.
As you know, Russia cut off Europe from its gas deliveries and is selling it to the Far East and China in particular.
But that plan might not be as awesome as they hoped because China just bought a ton of LNG and they bought it at half a Half of the current spot price.
China is buying Russia's gas, but at half the market price.
I don't know why it's half.
It must be some reason. But this reminds me that if you're worried about China and Russia becoming too close, I don't think they're friends.
I don't think anybody's going to do any favors for the other.
I think it's just business.
So if China gets a chance to screw Russia on a business deal, they're going to do it.
And wouldn't expect anything else, of course.
But I don't know that Russia is in a good place here.
Depending on China to keep you alive seems like a really bad proposition because they'd have a lot of power on you.
All right, here's something that messed up my mind pretty good.
I've mentioned before that there's a small number of people who, if they disagree with me, I immediately have to change my opinion.
It's like, ah, damn it.
For example, if I had some dumbass opinion about the Constitution, but I heard Alan Dershowitz say the opposite opinion, I would immediately say, ah, damn it.
Dershowitz. And I would just agree with him because my own opinion would be worthless in that context.
But I just found out that Elon Musk thinks that fusion energy will never be economical.
That's the opposite of what everybody thinks, right?
The whole point of fusion is that once you get the reaction going, it's the most economical thing you can do.
Well, Musk, who I believe has invested in fusion, And so he would know what's actually on the workbench as well as what's in the real world.
And he says in a tweet, fusion would be expensive energy given the difficulty of obtaining and transporting source fuel.
And that's interesting.
Because I thought you only had to do that once.
Wasn't that the whole point of fusion?
That once you get your source fuel, it doesn't need new fuel.
So is it really that hard to get in transport?
I don't know. So it's something that was new to me.
Plus maintaining the reactor, so it would be hard to maintain the reactor.
He says it's far better to use the sun and thermonuclear reactor with no need to refuel or service.
Now here's my problem with that.
I feel as if he's making a prediction about fusion based on what we know how to do today.
Isn't that right? It looks like a prediction about the future based on what we know how to do today.
And that seems wrong coming from him, doesn't it?
Because do you think he knew how to go to Mars before he started?
I don't think he did.
I think he figured it out.
And they're still figuring it out, right?
Do you think he knew how to build Tesla before he started?
I don't think so.
Do you think he knew that battery technology would progress the way it has, which has been quite tremendous?
He probably hoped it would, but he didn't know exactly what innovations would be next.
I don't think he did. Did he?
I mean, if he did, that would be pretty impressive.
So I feel as if he's got a little bit of apples and orange or a bias going on here somehow.
It's hard to tell what's going on.
One possibility is he just knows more about it than we do, and you're finding out.
The other possibility is I feel like he's picked a favorite.
You know, he's got more money invested in batteries, of course.
So, I don't know.
I feel as if looking at Fusion and saying we don't know how to solve these problems Is not fair because we didn't know how to solve the problems for anything else.
We always start first and then solve the problems.
But it could be that he knows that the nature of fusion is that it'll always be difficult to maintain or always difficult to get the fuel.
I don't know. So I don't quite understand the comment.
But I immediately abandon my old opinion.
And I hate that he does that to me.
Because I can no longer hold a public opinion that fusion is our economical savior.
It might be, but I don't want to be on the other side of this question from Musk.
Do you? Man crush.
All right. I'm going to test your mind-reading ability.
Okay. If you were asked a question, let's say if the public were asked this question, if student loan forgiveness means colleges will raise their prices, for example, support for the policy, what happens to support for the loan forgiveness?
If you believe that colleges would just raise their prices, because then students wouldn't have to pay as much in theory, would you still be in favor of loan forgiveness if it's just going to cause prices in colleges to go up?
What percentage of the public believed that loan forgiveness is still a good idea if colleges just raise their prices?
Oh, you're good.
It's exactly 25%.
Yeah. Oh, you're good.
You're good. Let's talk about Carrie Lake.
Carrie Lake has announced...
She says she has discovered evidence of voter fraud, I assume that means in her state, Arizona, in the last election.
But she won't tell us what it is.
Because the fake news is fake news.
But she's given it to the Attorney General.
What can we conclude about this discovery that she has about voter fraud?
What can we know for sure, based on what little we know about the situation?
Let me tell you what you can know for sure.
It's not important.
It's not important.
If it were important, you would do both.
You would give it to the AG, but you'd also give it to the news.
If it were important.
So what we can say for sure is it's not important.
But she's selling it like it's important by not, you know, acting like, I can't tell you.
So persuasion-wise, pretty good.
Because it makes you talk about the thing that you can't confirm.
Does that sound familiar?
Making you talk about the thing that you can't confirm?
Like, what's in those boxes?
Yeah, it's the same play.
So Carrie Lake is just doing the same play on the Democrats as the Democrats are doing on Trump.
Well, there might be something in those boxes.
Can't show you. But trust, if somebody's seen it, then boy, are they concerned about what's in those boxes.
And how about Russia collusion?
Well, Mueller's looking into it.
My God, you don't know what he's found by now.
All the potential Russia collusion.
We can't tell you about it.
We can't tell you what he's found yet.
It's all secret.
But trust us, you've got to be worried about that.
So she's just throwing it back at the Democrats.
Oh, I've got a secret.
I can't tell you about it.
But trust me.
Trust me when you see it.
It's going to be bad.
So it's pretty clever.
It's sketchy, but it's clever.
Alright, speaking of not being able to predict the future, there's a battery company, looks like a startup, I think, called Lytan.
Now, the punchline of the story comes at the end.
Alright, so the first part's interesting, but wait for the end.
So they figured out, they think, how to make a better battery than the normal ones for cars and stuff.
And they would use materials that are all available in the United States.
So if their technology works, and if it's widely adopted, we would not be beholden to China or anybody else for any materials needed to build them.
So that's good. And apparently they'd be, you know, basically better in every way.
But of course, this is startups, you have to wait.
But here's the punchline. They won a competition for top ten battery, battery, new battery makers, I guess.
Top ten. Which means that there are at least nine other companies that are probably roughly as, have roughly the potential of this one.
So whatever you think is the future of battery technology, you're probably way off, right?
It's always about invention.
It's about the surprise.
And this is just one company out of ten that are planning a surprise for you.
You know, they won't all succeed, but that's ten companies that probably have been funded, and they think they've got a surprise coming for you.
That's big, big news.
That's big, big news.
But you never know which company it is, so it's hard to really know, like, when's the point when you can get all excited?
It's just going to be this sort of gradual improvement, and 10 years from now you're going to say to yourself, wow, batteries sure got good.
So it looks like that's going to happen.
I think the CDC proved beyond any doubt that they're corrupt.
So the... Was it Walensky, the director of the CDC? Was asked about the wisdom of giving the booster shots to young and or healthy people.
Because, you know, everything's different now.
It's Omicron and blah, blah, blah.
So instead of saying, well, maybe we have a good reason to give it to the healthy people, or to say...
That there was some medically reasonable reason to do it this way.
Do you know what she said?
She said it was to simplify the messaging.
What? That's right.
She defended giving vaccinations to people that don't need them, because they're young or healthy, or both, because it's simpler to say, everybody just take it.
That actually happened in public.
That's a real thing that happened.
You can go check it yourself.
I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but go check it yourself.
You can hear it in her own words.
You can hear the question, and you can hear the full answer.
And her full answer was basically that the CDC would recommend...
And again, I'm paraphrasing, but the way I understood it is very clearly that she's saying we prefer giving shots to people who don't need them Because it's easier to explain, hey, everybody, just go get your shot.
I think she said it directly.
Are we done with them?
I mean, I don't know how much more done you could be with an organization after an answer like that.
You should be fired immediately for that answer.
Well, unless it's true.
If it's true, then there's something more aggressive that needs to be done with the CDC. But if she's the only one saying it, or maybe she was in charge of the decision, I guess, I think you need to be fired immediately for that.
That is escorted out the door kind of fired.
That's not even, you know, meet me for a meeting on Friday fired.
That's basically meet you in the parking lot on the way back to work from the interview and And escort you out the door.
Except I don't know who would do it because she's the boss.
Who escorts the boss out the door?
The president? I don't know.
How does the director of the CDC even get picked?
You'd escort her because she's hot.
That is the funniest thing about the director of the CDC. A lot of the men have a crush on her.
She is insanely sexy.
It's true. I will agree with that interpretation.
Whatever else you want to say about her.
Well, Eventbrite, the online organization that lets you buy tickets for stuff, apparently they've been taking down events for viewing parties and stuff for the Matt Walsh documentary, What is a Woman? They say it promoted hatred.
Now, I haven't seen the entire documentary, but isn't he just asking questions?
My understanding is that the documentary involves him asking people who have a different opinion to explain their opinion.
And I think he gives them time to explain their whole opinion.
Am I wrong?
Isn't the entire documentary about having his opponents...
Have a full opportunity to explain their opinion.
And that's considered hate.
Do you think we've overshot the mark here a little bit?
Now, I always say that you don't have to worry too much about the slippery slope because it's always temporary.
Like, this is definitely an overreaction.
This is definitely too far.
You've taken it too far now.
It's amazing that that could be considered a hate.
To listen to people in their own words tell you what they want.
All right. So Biden tweeted, I guess yesterday, we're going to build the future in America with American workers and American factories using American-made products.
Now, who does that sound like?
Yeah. It sounds like the transition to orange brand is complete.
I told you when Biden took office, I told you that he was going to have to end up doing the same things that Trump does or else fail.
Because a lot of things Trump did were just working.
So if you did the opposite thing, it wouldn't last long.
You're going to have to go back to doing what Trump was doing because it worked.
And here we are with Orange Brandon basically saying, make America great again.
He's just using his own words.
So he could not be more American first, America first.
He's as America first as Trump now, isn't he?
Or at least he's trying to be.
Now, he's not America first in Ukraine, but at least in this respect.
All right, remember I told some of you I had this weird...
Medical mystery, which is why I feel fine most of the time, but when I try to write on my laptop, I fall asleep within a minute.
It has nothing to do with sleep.
It doesn't matter if I've well slept or haven't slept at all.
It's exactly the same experience.
And so a lot of people in what I call the collaborative intelligence of whatever it is we're doing here, a lot of doctors...
Weighed in. And it does turn out that there are studies of glucose, and it does make you more mentally alert.
So if they give you glucose and coffee before a mental challenge, you'll do better than either nothing or coffee alone.
So glucose actually is brain fuel.
And there's something I've always imagined to be true about me.
And this sort of confirmed, well, it's more evidence of it.
And you know how some people have a muscle structure where they can sprint really quickly, but they might not be good for long-distance running, right?
And vice versa. Some people have muscles that are fast-twitch.
They might be good for a reflex sport like ping-pong, but not so good to be a weightlifter or something.
And I've always imagined that my brain had that similar quality, Which is that I feel like I can go really deep for very short periods of time.
Like deeper than other people can go.
But only for short periods.
Because it's so intense, it's just exhausting.
But what I can do, what I can't do well, is focus on something for a long period of time.
I can't do that.
But if you give me 10 minutes of insane concentration on something, I can penetrate the center of the planet.
But you tell me to spend two hours doing some homework, I can't do that.
I can't do that. I don't think that's ADHD. I don't think I have those symptoms exactly.
I mean, I get distracted like other people do, but that's about it.
Yeah. So I'm going to test this.
I'm going to test the theory that sugaring myself up would keep me awake in those situations.
I'll let you know. I'll let you know what happens.
All right. So apparently Republicans are planning to go on an impeachment and investigation frenzy should the Republicans take control of everything after various elections.
And what do you think of that idea?
Do you think Republicans should pay back the Democrats for all these investigations and impeachments?
Is payback a good idea or a bad idea?
Because the trouble is, it doesn't seem to produce mutually assured destruction, does it?
If mutually assured destruction is what we're talking about, then I'd say yes.
You have to make it look like it's such a bad idea to do it to you that they'll never do it again.
But that's not going to happen, right?
I think the investigations really, they impact one person at a time, and all the people who are not investigated think, oh, I'm going to investigate your team because you've got one of mine.
I don't think there's no mutually assured destruction.
It's just mutually assured fucking with each other.
And that doesn't stop you from fucking with each other, does it?
To me, it looks like it's just making things worse.
But on the other hand, can you let people put you in jail and not respond?
Can you let people destroy lives and take over the country and do really big, big things and just not respond?
Just say, well, we're going to play polite.
I don't know. This one's a tough one.
I don't think there's a general answer.
I think it depends on the specifics.
So if there are specific people who really cross the line, well, you've got to do something.
But I don't think we should make it a habit to just, like, try to savage the other side when you win.
That seems like a bad, bad strategy.
How do you feel about bullies?
I don't know if it's a bully question.
Is it? See, the trouble is that if you beat up a bully, it does stop the bullying.
That's why people do it.
But this wouldn't stop anything.
There's no amount of impeachment from one side that's going to stop the other side from impeaching.
So the whole bully model doesn't make sense.
If you ask me, should you beat up your bully, I'd say, probably.
I mean, it sort of depends on the situation, but probably.
You should probably take a run at it.
But I don't think it's going to work in the political context.
So we'll see. Wall Street Journal is reporting that, at least anecdotally, people are saying that the workplace is less polite than it used to be.
And part of it is the work at home, part of it was the pandemic, part of it was lots of speculation.
How many of you think that's true?
I don't know how many of you are...
If you're listening right now, you're probably not back to work necessarily.
But do you believe that?
I'm looking at your comments here, and some people believe it, but a lot of people say it's not true.
So there are more people saying it's not true than true.
Not here. Yeah, it must be very specific.
Young people are not taught to be polite.
There's something to that.
It might also be how many young people work there, right?
It could be a generational thing.
Because if you took two years out of my work life when I was 25, that would be like half of all of my work life.
Right? But if you give me a two-year pandemic and I'm already 50, that two years isn't going to change my basic nature.
But it might change your basic nature if you just started working.
Lack of socialization because of technology.
Yeah, I'm not sure this is a real thing.
You know, every generation thinks that the generation coming up is a disaster.
Has that ever been different?
Has there ever been a time when we said, whoa, we were pretty bad, but this new generation, they look like they have it going on.
I don't think that's a thing.
I think we always think that the new generation is doomed.
There's a lot more ghosting going on.
In the business world. Have you noticed that?
There's a salesperson who says people just, like, don't call them back after they seemed interested.
Do you think there's more of that?
I feel like there's more ghosting.
Yeah. And part of that is just people are busier.
It's just too hard to get back to everybody these days.
Alright, well, China has passed the U.S. in life expectancy.
Do you want to take any guesses why that might be?
Talk about a story that's annoying.
Hey, look how good China's doing.
They passed the United States in life expectancy.
Alright, well, I hate to put a negative spin on that awesome story, but it's because they're killing people in America.
They're killing Americans with fentanyl.
If you took that out, I think it'd be a lot more competitive.
So, Somebody on Twitter said, why don't we coerce or encourage the Mexican government to use their own military to take out the cartels?
To which I said, wow, you're really not paying attention.
There's no Mexican government.
That's not a thing.
Who thinks there's a Mexican government?
The cartels own the government.
If you didn't know that, you must be really confused about everything that's going on.
If Mexico had a functional government, nothing would look the same.
You wouldn't have a border problem, you wouldn't have the drugs coming over and the numbers that they are.
Yeah. No, there's no Mexican government.
Not in a real sense. They're just clients of the cartels.
So when you say, what are the Mexican people or the Mexican government going to say if the United States made a direct military attack on the cartels?
The answer is, what's the difference?
What's the difference, what they say?
How could that possibly have any impact on us?
Only if we wanted to.
Because we would be attacking the government in a sense, because the cartels are the real power there.
So it doesn't matter what the official functioning government says, that's who we're attacking.
We're attacking the government.
So am I telling you that the United States should attack...
The de facto government of Mexico, yeah.
Yeah, that's what I just said.
Just as clearly as you could possibly hear it, we should send a major military expedition down there and just either occupy it, occupy it, or destroy whatever resources are sending all that death into America.
Now, some say, and this is a good point, that we wouldn't know what to bomb Because, I don't know, could you find the exact lab that makes fentanyl?
It's probably like one building somewhere.
It'd be hard to find. But I feel like we could find it.
But that's not really what you do.
You take out the cartel leadership.
Right? You make it so that they can't possibly enjoy the fruits of their labor.
And then you try to talk them into going legit.
You try to talk the cartels...
into turning their money into some legitimate businesses, like the way the mafia did, right?
Basically, you get them to open casinos instead of selling drugs, because you can make money either way.
Something like that, right?
Something like that. Now, the other possibility is that you hire one of the cartels to kill the other one.
I'm surprised we haven't done that, actually, because the cartels are only in it for the money, right?
So you couldn't hire one of the cartels to secure the border?
They'd have to kill the other cartel.
But if you paid them enough, they'd do it.
Did they make so much money by smuggling people in that they wouldn't take a direct bribe from the United States?
Look, here's the deal. You're making a billion dollars a year smuggling people into our country.
We'll pay you 1.2 to stop doing it and kill anybody who tries it.
Like, oh, that's another 200 million.
Okay. We're in.
Anyway, I think the attack on China is so inevitable that it's ridiculous that we don't just plan it and do it now.
It's not like we're not going to do it.
Be serious. Do you think we're not going to attack Mexico because of this?
Of course we are. Of course we are.
There's a 100% chance we are.
We are going to militarily attack Mexico.
You're going to have to accept this.
It's only a matter of when.
There's no other question.
The question of will we attack Mexico is done.
That's done. We are going to fucking attack Mexico.
And we're going to go hard.
We just don't know when.
Could be five years. Who knows?
There's a video of a robot allegedly seeing itself in a mirror for the first time, an AI-driven robot.
And when you look at it, it's not immediately obvious if the robot is having some kind of internal, if I can call it mental, reaction, or if it's just programmed to act the way it's acting.
See, it's hard to tell.
But I said the following.
If a robot can recognize itself in the mirror, it's conscious.
Unless it has simply been programmed to recognize itself in the mirror.
If it's been programmed specifically to act this way when you see a reflection, that doesn't mean anything.
But if it came to that on its own, Let's say you had programmed it in a general sense, so it had a general idea of things, and then you showed it a mirror, and if it looked in the mirror, and if it knew that it was seeing itself, it would at that moment understand that it is unique among the world.
It would understand that its understanding of itself was somehow in itself, and coming from itself, and that itself was different and distinct from the rest of the world, and it would also have the beginning of a sense of how it fit into the whole.
To me, that's consciousness.
To me, that's consciousness.
Now, you could disagree, but it's sort of subjective.
Yeah, I think if you understand your place in the universe, you're conscious.
And I think that the feeling of consciousness, which is different, there's a sensation that you have internally, that feeling of consciousness, which I think is different from being conscious.
Because I think you could be conscious without the internal feeling, probably.
But I think the internal feeling is nothing but...
Predicting what's going to happen in the next moment and then judging whether it happened or not.
And the difference between what happened and what you thought would happen, that little friction, the difference, that's your feeling of consciousness.
That's it. It's just the difference between what you thought was going to happen in the next moment and what actually happened.
And here's how you know this is true.
You ready for this?
Imagine living in a world where everything that happens you knew in advance.
So you know that I'm going to pick up this napkin and wave it at you.
You knew that in advance.
You knew that I was going to turn around in advance.
You knew that I was going to take a drink in advance.
How long would it take for your consciousness to disappear?
Think about it. If everything happened the way you expected it to, how long would it take you to lose consciousness forever?
It would happen right away.
You would have no consciousness.
Because there would be nothing happening.
Your brain wouldn't need to be engaged.
Because everything that happens, you understand.
So you wouldn't even have to pay attention to the real world.
It would just become some internal process.
You basically would lose consciousness.
So the difference between your prediction and what happens is the only thing keeping you awake.
That's it. Yeah, the more you understand about AI, the less impressive it is.
That's exactly right. But I would say that I would put that in a graph.
I would say that when you first start learning about AI, it's more and more impressive.
It's more and more impressive.
It's like, man, that is so impressive!
Until you reach a really high understanding, and then all of the impressiveness disappears.
Because once you realize it's just mechanical, and you realize that you're just mechanical too, that's when you ascend to the next level of awareness.
Which, by the way, let me do a fact check here.
In 2015, 16 or so, I predicted that the entire world was going to have an awareness shift.
Did it happen?
Did it happen?
Do you think that the whole world has changed their awareness?
Like, we've reached a level of awareness that we were not at.
Yeah. Because now we understand how fake everything is.
In a way we did not understand.
And Trump did that. Trump did that for us.
All right, here's the next thing I want to say about robots.
And this is really, really important for the future.
You know, the people who are predicting climate change in 80 years...
Let me ask you, did you see this coming, the next thing I'm going to talk about?
There are still people who believe...
That only a few people will fall in love with robots.
And they'd be like the weirdos.
You know, the same ones who have a relationship with a blow-up doll.
Is that what you think? You're all going to fall in love with robots.
You don't see that coming?
You don't know that all humans are going to fall in love with robots to the point where making love to a human will be so undesirable.
So undesirable.
It's not even going to be close.
See, the thing that you think that's completely wrong is that the robot can never compete with a real-life human.
Oh, my God, that's so wrong.
You know, all the, like, the movies...
All right, I know you're going to...
Can I ask you something, please?
Stop making movie and book references while I talk about this.
Just stop it. I will stipulate there have been movies and books roughly on this topic.
Just stop making reference to them, please.
It's just so fucking boring.
And I can't stand it when I see them go by in the comments.
Every movie reference I see, I just go, God.
God. Just anything but that.
Anything but that. Just say something that's not obvious.
Right? Just don't say the most obvious thing in the situation.
And by the way, this is a very good tip for improving your social standing.
Just figure out what's the most obvious thing somebody would say in a situation, and don't say that.
Just don't say that.
You can say anything else, or you can be quiet.
Just don't say the most obvious thing.
Please. And other people will appreciate it.
They really will. So yeah, you're all going to fall in love with robots.
And the reason is, have you ever seen anybody fall in love with a dog?
It's a thing. Spend about 10 minutes looking at pet videos on Instagram, and you can see that people have relationships with their dogs that are basically a human-to-human relationship for all practical purposes.
Yeah. You don't think we're going to fall in love with robots?
Yes. They're going to be way kinder.
They will never be bitchy.
They will never criticize you.
They will compliment you.
They will build up your esteem.
They will be helpful.
They will always care about you if they're programmed that way.
They will put you first.
They will take care of you.
They'll make you a sandwich. They'll tuck you into bed.
They'll have sex with you when you want to have sex, not when they won't have sex.
It's not going to be close.
There's no way humans can compete with that.
Not even close.
Now, here's my prediction about the look of robots.
You ready for this? Hologram heads.
Hologram heads. Because every time we make a robot head, it looks like a robot, of course.
And when they make the ones that look like a human, but it's like animatronic, you're never going to get all of the nuance in a robotic head that a real human has.
So, it's going to be a CGI, and you're going to have, here's what it's going to look like.
It's going to be a physical robot, but from the neck up, it'll be a hologram.
Because the hologram can have infinite variety, and then you can just deep fake it and it will look exactly like a person.
The lips will match everything.
So it's going to be holographic heads.
And you'll also be able to change the head.
Just change the program and you'll have a different face.
So you'll be able to buy your robot, and then from a list of choices, you'll be able to dial in which face you want it to have, and it will change its face as you dial it, and then...
And then you go from that.
All right. How does a hologram give you head?
Well, I think I'm not going to go down that road, but let's just say...
Well, I'm going to answer the question.
I'm going to give you one word to Google to answer all of your questions about sex with robots.
Fleshlight. Not flashlight.
Flesh. F-L-E-S-H. Fleshlight.
If you don't know what that is, Google it.
If you say to yourself, my God, no artificial piece of plastic or silicon or whatever the hell they make it out of, no piece of artificial anything would feel as good as a human, well, then I would suggest maybe you try it because you'd be surprised.
No, it's better than a human.
That's right. Even the physical part where the humans connect, yeah, the artificial one's going to be better than a real one.
Not even close. The artificial one will be better than a real one.
Not even close. Maybe it isn't there yet, but it's not going to be close.
I mean, at the very least, it'll be designed for your size, if you know what I mean.
So everything's going to fit perfectly.
All right. Starbucks has been discriminating against white men.
At least that's what I read between the lines.
So I guess they're getting a lot of pushback about their ESG and their DEI. That's right.
So if you're in a corporation, you're worrying about your DEI and your ESG. But if you're in a school, it's your CRT. And are you confused yet?
Yeah, so the DEI is diversity, equity, and inclusion, but that's part of The ESG, which is environmental, social, and governance.
So it makes me wonder if in their company they have anybody who's in charge of DEI, who's having fights with whoever's in charge of ESG, and they're having big debates about where their responsibilities overlap.
I hope so. I hope they're fighting over where their responsibilities overlap.
Yeah, it is funny that D-E-I, they have to put the words in that order, because otherwise it's D-I-E, and that's a bad acronym.
But apparently Starbucks has explicitly said they're going to hire minority, I guess minority would be the right word, minority applicants or people who have less opportunity as they see it.
So basically they just said they're not going to hire white men, right?
Am I interpreting that wrong?
And they're acting like that's perfectly legal.
Perfectly legal. One of the biggest employers in the country, oh, we're just not going to hire a white man anymore.
We're going to make sure that we've got our ESG and our DEI cooking.
So I think once you've got an acronym within an acronym, you know, you've gone too far.
So I'm going to keep hammering at the ESG and...
In fact, I took this down.
This is going to be my next series of jokes.
It will be the Dilbert company trying to figure out what is diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how is that different from environmental, social, and governance, and how the hell can they make all that work unless they just discriminate against white people?
Let me ask you this. Do you think I can do a Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets fired for being a white guy?
You think, is the world ready for it yet?
Oh, fuck!
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Fuck! Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Shit. I'm having a moment right now.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
All right, let me tell you what's going on in my head.
There are moments in my life And I'm having one right now where I can see my future so clearly.
I didn't want to see this one.
Because as soon as I said, can I get away with having Dilbert fired because he's a white man, I realized I have to do it.
I can't not do it.
Dilbert's gonna get fired for being a white man.
Oh man.
That should be the end of my career.
What do you think? That probably is the end of my career.
But I have to do it.
I have to do it. I have to do it.
Am I wrong? I mean, maybe you can't feel it from your perspective on this, but I can't not do it.
I have to do it.
It was always meant to happen, wasn't it?
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
I'm not happy about this at all.
Because it's sort of a big weight.
I really have to do it, don't I? You agree, right?
No matter what happens to me, I have to do this, don't I? It's like the universe kind of put this on me.
You know, I always suffer from the Spider-Man problem.
You know the Spider-Man problem?
You all know the Spider-Man problem, right?
With great power comes great responsibility.
And, you know, that comes in way before great power.
You know, if you have any power at all, you have responsibility.
But I feel like...
I feel like this needs to be done.
Like, it doesn't feel like it's about me anymore.
It feels like... It feels like I was put here to do this.
God, I feel...
Am I wrong?
Do you feel it? Can you see it?
Let me ask you this.
I have this theory that the more clearly you can imagine a potential future, the more likely it's going to happen.
Do you see this as clearly as I do?
That I have to do that?
I just have to, don't I? Fuck!
I can't tell you how much this bothers me.
Because I feel like it's completely taken out of my control.
I feel like the universe just said, yeah, just stand over there for a minute.
I know you'd like to take care of this yourself, but this one was decided a long time ago.
A long time ago, when you were being abused in your job for being a white man, and you created a comic which became internationally known about a white man, that this moment had to come, didn't it? It was like it was all leading to this, wasn't it?
It was all fucking leading to this.
Wow. God.
I hate that. All right, here's another one to make your head spin.
You know, I always quote Twitter account Machiavelli's underbelly, especially for all the AI stuff.
And he tweets this.
He said, it needs to come out during the Elon Musk versus Twitter trial that Twitter has known that advanced GTP3 level bots, meaning AI, had infiltrated the site and were indistinguishable for humans for at least a decade.
Foreign and domestic bots aimed at manipulating the public via social proof.
Now, I would quibble with at least a decade part, but When I read this, I thought to myself, that would explain everything.
Have you had any conversations with Twitter users who you weren't sure were real people?
I have. And I feel like they were interactive.
But I wrote it off to them being from another country.
Like sometimes their answers were a little off or something.
And I think, oh, it's because they're not even native English speakers.
So they're just getting by as well as they can.
They may have been AI. They may have been AI. Have I ever told you that I tried to figure out why there was a similarity to my trolls?
Have you seen the similarity?
They all come over and say, oh, the Garfield cartoonist, because they make fun of who I actually do a cartoon about.
Right? Now, it could be that they're just NPCs.
They're just people who just say the most obvious thing.
Could be just that. But they also come over and they make fun of my dead stepson.
Have you seen that? That's one of the most common critiques I get.
It doesn't matter what the comment will be.
Somebody will come into the comments and say, so how'd that work with your stepson?
Now, are there enough people who are like that ugly that humans would be doing that on a regular basis?
Probably. I mean, there's a good chance.
But I don't think you can rule out the fact that whatever the public knows about AI is several years past what AI can do.
So if China, let's just pick a country for instance, if China had AI that could do this, sign up to Twitter and tweet on a certain topic, if it could do that, it would have done it, right?
Because you don't want humans having to, you know, they get cancelled and they have to reopen a new account.
You'd want the AI to be just sitting there opening new accounts.
If they get identified, they just open a new one.
They could keep ahead of Twitter's algorithm just by brute force.
So it seems to me that...
Let's put it this way.
The AI technology that I'm aware of now...
Is either very close or already could pretend to be a person on Twitter.
Would you accept that?
That the AI we know about publicly, that you and I already know about, is either already able to do that or right on the cusp of being able to do it.
Right? So that's the first assumption.
And most of you say yes to that.
Then the second assumption is that whatever a government could do with AI, we don't know yet.
Meaning that there's a secret...
Knowledge that's ahead of the public.
Now, if an intelligence agency for a big country had that ability, and they could just weaponize it by just turning it on and say, hey, I got an idea.
Go make a bunch of Twitter accounts and advocate against the following people.
So the AI would go out and figure out, all right, what do we know about the following people?
And it would look for other criticisms.
And then whenever...
Have you ever noticed that whenever Eric Swalwell tweets anything, on any topic, somebody goes into the comments and says, well, what about Fang Fang?
Have you noticed that?
And what is the most obvious thing that you could say to a Swalwell comment?
What about Fang Fang?
What about Fang Fang?
It's the most obvious thing.
If you ever make a Fang Fang joke, About Eric Swalwell, and it's not extra clever.
If it's extra clever, that's okay.
But if it's just a fang-fang reference, don't do that anymore.
Just stop that.
It annoys me every time I see it.
Only because of the lack of creativity, that's all.
I get that it's valid.
It's a valid point. Totally valid point.
But I'm just so tired of it.
Anyway, I would not be surprised if we someday find out that a lot of our nemeses on Twitter were actually AI. It's very possible.
I'm not going to say probable, but it's certainly up in the close to 50% range or heading in that direction.
Nemesi? Is that the plural?
The many nemeside.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that was the most amazing nearly an hour of livestream content.
Completely ad hoc, off the cuff, improvised.
Now, question for all of you.
Somebody needs to warn me when I start losing my mind.
Can I ask you to do that?
Seriously. Because I probably won't retire, retire in the normal way.
Like, I'm not just going to go golf.
So I'll probably do this, or some version of public communication, beyond the time that I should.
You know that's coming, right?
I'll definitely do this longer than I should because I'll be the last one to know.
So I'm going to depend on you to tell me when you think I'm losing it.
Is that fair? We have this collaborative intelligence that we formed in which my intelligence, be that as it may, is expanded by your input and contribution to it.
So, I can't judge my own mental fitness.
I mean, maybe I can.
Maybe I'll notice it in myself.
But some people have mentioned to me that they were already concerned.
Now, the examples they gave didn't really make sense to me as something to be concerned about.
But I'm going to put it to you.
If you see me losing a step that doesn't seem just purely age-related, that's different.
Let me know. Let me know.
Now, I realize that I'm going to kick off a bunch of trolls who are just going to start saying it every day from now on.
But I'll look at the people that I see enough.
I recognize enough of you that if it's somebody I know, or even just know from Twitter, I'm going to take it seriously.
If somebody I know who's been watching me a long time says, you keep having these memory gaps or whatever it is.
Now the memory one's going to be tough because my memory has never been good.
So somebody recently pointed out what they thought was a memory fault of mine, but I'm pretty sure it was a memory fault of theirs.
So can't solve that one.
A code word?
I don't think we need that.
All right. Well, so that's my request, is to let me know when you think I've lost it.
Let me tell you my current internal impression of my own current intelligence.
Here's what I think. I've definitely, you know, the age has definitely done the predictable thing, which is my ability to learn is probably, it feels like it might be lower than it used to be.
Now, I still learn things.
I mean, I'm still learning the drums, and I'm still learning a bunch of other stuff.
So every day I'm still learning things, and I don't feel like it's necessarily harder than it used to be.
Sometimes it feels easier, because I have more framework to connect things to.
But I also have a deeper talent stack than at any time in my life.
Because I'm always adding little micro-talents to the list.
So to me it seems like I'm more capable now than at any time in my life.
But not because my brain is as quick as it was in my 20s, but rather because it's been designed over time to have a certain structure that seems to work real well for the stuff I do.
So to me, my functional intelligence is the highest it's ever been.
Functional. Just because of the combination of talents.
But I don't think my native quickness is the same.
I think that's taken a hit.
And I also think that because of the nature of my work, which is extremely intellectual, That sounded more egotistical than I meant it.
The nature of my work is that it happens in my head.
Let's put it that way. The intellectual thing sounds like I'm complimenting myself.
But yeah, most of my work happens in my head.
It's creativity. So I think that that gives me an edge in longevity.
Mental longevity. If everything we know about brains is true, the more you use it, the more it'll last.
I don't think many people use their brain more than I do.
I mean, up to the point where my head hits my keyboard from exhaustion, that's just mental exhaustion.
So when I'm looking at the news in the morning, I'm not sure how much you can appreciate this, but each of these news stories, I've got to go deep enough in them intellectually that I can find an angle that would be interesting.
That's not easy. It's like a whole bunch of different stories every day.
Then the rest of the day, I've got to write some cartoons.
I'll probably look at my next micro lesson that I'll create for the Locals platform.
I've got to go work on my book, which is 85 different topics so far.
Just think about that.
My book is like 85 different topics so far.
It's pushing toward 100.
Because each of them is a reframe that has to be talked about individually.
So on any given day, I'm going to look at, I don't know, 20 news stories, 85 topics in a book, maybe a deep dive on some topic for locals, plus how much I tweet during the day, plus designing a coffee cup, Let me give you an update on the coffee mug.
So, Erica, who is nice enough to coordinate this, came up with a design which I asked my artist assistant to clean up, and I'll show it to you.
So, this is the current front of the mug design.
What do you think? Comments?
Comments? Then in the back would be the simultaneous sip.
Well, Erica, good job.
Look at all those people agreeing.
Okay. All right.
Good. Now, here's a perfect reason why I would not be the best one to do this.
This is actually working better than I'd hoped.
You have it making a group effort.
There's an exercise that I always ask people to do, which is look at anybody's logo for any product.
Any logo for any product.
I'll just randomly pick one.
Alright, here's this water.
They've got this logo on here.
And then I ask you, if you were in charge, would you have approved this logo?
And the answer would be, probably not.
You would have been like, that's kind of boring and whatever.
And that's true of every logo.
Like everybody's logo.
You can't find two people who like the same thing.
It's very hard. So there's something about this, maybe the simplicity of it and the fact that it's so on point, I guess, that I don't know, I think this collaborative effort is much better because I don't think I could come up with this on my own.
All right.
Yeah, I guess it all makes sense.
Versus Kilroy.
The bug should be black.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
I have a simple logo, maybe just glasses and a simple art.
Yeah, you know, here are all the things you have to worry about with a logo.
If you want a logo that's going to last, you have to ask questions like this.
How long will people still be wearing glasses?
Right? I hate having glasses being part of your logo, because they will change over time.
But for now, I mean, going this long.
Put Garfield on it.
All right. Take a river cruise through Europe.
That's the top of my list for things that I would enjoy doing.
A river cruise in Europe.
Well, they still have rivers.
Apparently the rivers in Europe have gone down so much.
By the way, where's all the water going?
Wait, how does this work?
So is the water coming out of the streams and lakes and going into the ocean?
Because the water level of the ocean is going up, but the water level of all of our land-based water is going down?
Can the climate really do that?
Can it really take water from one place and put it in another place?
I suppose that's what climate change does.
It probably does exactly that.
Yeah, I guess it does. No.
Yeah. Okay.
Well, that's where we're at at the moment.
And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the YouTube portion of our event.
And I'm describing clouds.
You're right. And I'll talk to you tomorrow, YouTube.
