Episode 1905 Scott Adams: The News Is Slow Today But I Am Fast. I Think That Will Even It Out
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
People now listing both pronouns & racial profile
Professor Sachs agrees with David Sacks
China and Mexico's military alliance
Ben Shapiro interviews Bill Maher
Who's in a cult, republicans, democrats, both?
Ukraine war and Europe's winter worries
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Go! So, is it my experience alone, or has the Twitter filter just eliminated 90% of all the tweets?
Because I turned on Twitter this morning, and I think, I follow a lot of people.
And I'm seeing almost no tweets.
Did people stop tweeting yesterday?
It seems like the constraints are the strongest they've ever been.
Can you imagine if Elon Musk made the following point or change to Twitter so you could actually see what the other side was saying?
Imagine that? I have no idea what Democrats are thinking you're saying because I'm completely locked down.
All I see is really crazy stuff.
Maybe that's all there is.
So we're seeing at least one entity, maybe it's only one in the world, I don't know, the beginning of a trend, possibly, in which in addition to listing their pronouns, he and him, for example, they're listing their racial identification.
So now people are putting in their profile, she, them, part black, part white.
Now, one of the things that makes me not worry about stuff like this, but makes the rest of you worry more, is these things always go to the point of ridiculousness.
Like, things that feel a little ridiculous when they start, but you can see the point of it.
It's like, okay, I get why wokeness exists, so we can all be, you know, kind to each other.
That's good. But it always goes too far.
And when you think it's gone too far, it's going to go further.
But it is self-correcting.
In the long run, there isn't any way that this he, him, she, her stuff is going to be the long-term way we're going to be.
There's no way that lasts.
Because most things don't last.
Almost nothing lasts. So that'll change.
But it's in the hilarious range now.
Now, the thing that will change it is when everybody simply fluidly changes to whatever gives them an advantage.
Right? Now, if you tell me I'm not your leader, Well, I think you have to examine that claim.
I am your leader.
I have gone first by identifying as a black female, whenever that's helpful, and I will identify as whatever gives me the most social benefits, social or economic.
And I will do that shamelessly and as often as I need to.
And I will never apologize for it.
Because those are the rules.
If you give me a set of rules and then put me in the game, What am I going to do?
Am I going to say, no, I will play by my own rules?
No, I'll play by the rules of the game.
And the rules very clearly give me this option, so I take it.
You will too. Have I ever told you that analogies are not as useful as you think they should be?
Have I ever mentioned that?
I'm going to give you the best example I've seen in a long time.
So there's a professor, Jeffrey Sachs, S-A-C-H-S, who is tweeted by David Sachs, S-A-C-K-S, no relation, spelled differently.
And the professor is saying what David Sachs has been saying for a while, which is that the West, the U.S., and NATO pushed Putin into war By saying that NATO would be extended into the Ukraine, and Putin had clearly said that was crossing a line.
And so the good professor says, you know, he warned the administration, actually tried to talk to the administration to talk him out of putting NATO right on Russia's border, because that would be an aggressive act, and they would have to respond.
Now, the professor defended his opinion this way.
He said, you know, sure, NATO's opinion is that nobody can tell you who can join your organization.
By itself, that would sound pretty reasonable, right?
No third party can tell anybody who can or cannot join NATO. Especially your enemy.
Can your enemy tell you how to form your army that's an enemy against them?
And so, you know, you got that.
But here's the analogy.
So Professor Zack said, how would you feel in the United States if you found out that Mexico and China had formed a military alliance?
And my first reaction to that was, oh shoot, that's a good point.
If China and Mexico, right on our border, formed a military alliance, there's no way we'd let that happen, right?
Right? That would be impossible, right?
Right? I mean, that would be crazy.
It would be crazy for China and Mexico to form a military alliance, except they already fucking have, and they've killed about a quarter million fucking Americans with their military alliance that is right in front of us, completely transparent, and nobody has any fucking doubt about it.
So Professor Sachs, who's a smart guy, by the way, but...
If you're a smart guy, don't use analogies.
This analogy proved your own point.
Russia, I'm sorry, China and Mexico have a military alliance that is successfully killing 100,000 Americans a year, or we'll get up to that soon.
And we don't do anything about it.
Are we not completely okay with it?
I mean, we say things, but we don't do a fucking thing about it, do we?
No. No, we do a little defensive stuff, like a little minor border stuff, but we don't really try.
That's about it. So, I would say that there actually is an argument on both sides of this.
I actually, I totally understand the professor's argument, and David Sachs do.
I completely understand the argument.
That we caused the war.
By doing something that was so clearly a red line, they have to say, we're the ones who did it.
On the other hand, who gets to tell you who your friends are?
How does Russia get to tell us who our friends are?
Or who we have a military alliance with?
Why does Russia have anything to do with that?
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but both sides are completely right.
And they disagree.
But they're both right.
It's 100% true that we caused the war, and it's 100% true that we had a right to do whatever the fuck we wanted without them telling who we should have an alliance with.
Those could both be true.
Does anybody disagree with either of those?
I think those are both true.
Now, let me criticize both Professor Jeffrey Sachs and David Sachs a little bit.
Small criticism.
Here's my small criticism.
It doesn't matter how we got here.
How we got to this place is 100% irrelevant to what we do now.
And I'm not even sure it's useful.
I mean, it's interesting.
I would like to know the background to it.
But the decision-making should be as if you woke up today into this situation.
So the decisions we make would be you just woke up into this world.
There's no history.
History doesn't exist. What do you do now?
If we're still talking about who did what in the past, We're just not being useful yet, right?
I mean, I like that we have some context to it.
That does help. But it doesn't help you do what's next.
Now, Russia continues to target the Ukrainian power grid, and apparently there's some suggestion...
That engineers are advising the military because apparently they're hitting exactly the right parts of the energy structure to get the hardest to replace parts.
So what should we do at this point?
Well, not talking to them seems like a mistake, doesn't it?
Am I wrong? The fact that we're not even in a conversation about what peace would look like, that feels like a mistake.
Especially when nuclear weapons are being casually discussed.
If you're casually discussing nuclear war and you're not having a conversation, it's not like he won't pick up the phone, right?
Does anybody think Yeltsin won't pick up the phone?
Of course he will. Right?
He's got a problem. And the fact that we're not making any kind of a grand offer to work together and figure out a way past it, it really suggests that this is all about getting rid of Putin, and that's all there is.
Now, let me ask you this.
If follow the money always works, Follow the money always works.
What happens with the Ukraine-Russia situation?
Where does it go?
Well, here's what I think.
I think that the energy companies are driving the ship, and the energy companies don't want to compete with Russia, and so the energy companies will cause us to continue the pressure on Russia until something breaks.
Something more breaks.
So I don't see any way that this stops, as long as the energy companies could benefit from a degraded Russia.
There's just not enough emphasis to stop it.
Not emphasis by energy.
Did I say Yeltsin, not Putin?
Oh, did I say Yeltsin?
I was thinking of Yeltsin while I was talking about Putin.
So correct that, I was talking about Putin.
The Yeltsin reference is, I'm still wondering if Yeltsin really was sort of in the bag for the United States.
It makes me wonder how much we've been messing with Russia and how much they've been messing with us.
Knowing, as we all know now, that our government can completely lie to us and do it for years, do you think that Russia has always been the bad guy here?
Or do you think the United States has always been the bad guy?
Because the more that I look into this, the history, it looks to me like America has always been the bad guy.
Now, if you think...
I know where this is going.
I'm not even going to look at the comments.
Within five seconds, somebody will blame me for being a Russian spy.
And in Russian, and it will be in all caps, I'm not even looking, but I know it's happening.
Somebody in all caps is blaming me of only looking at the Russian side.
How'd I do? I don't give a fuck about Russia.
Why would I be on their side?
I'm not on their side.
Because I know some of you are thinking right now, why is he doing it?
You know, the other dumbest thing I saw recently...
I keep waiting for the world to wake up to why Trump was treating Putin in public after whichever big summit they had, where he was treating Putin with respect, and he said that Putin said X, and he had no reason to doubt him.
And then people said, my God, you're siding with Russia.
I didn't see that.
I didn't see it at all. All I saw is that he didn't want to embarrass him in public because he wanted to work with him.
That's all I saw.
Yeah. And it's funny because the same people who believe that Trump lied about everything You know, from the moment he was born.
They believed that that was the one moment he stood in front of the public and said the truth when the situation was such that nobody would say the truth in that situation.
That was a situation in which the truth was really not called for.
What was called for is not embarrassing Putin.
Maybe you can work with him.
That's all. And the fact that I have to explain that to the news media, like nobody got that.
Nobody picked that up.
I haven't even seen anybody, I don't even think, correct me if I'm wrong, but even the right-leaning media got on Trump for what was obviously the right play.
Treating him with respect in public.
That was the right play.
How many of you saw the, it looked like it was Ben Shapiro interviewing Bill Maher.
Did you see that interview?
And as was pointed out to me on Twitter, Ben Shapiro did a perfect implementation of the really strategy.
Now, I've told you the really strategy.
It's when somebody makes a statement that is so ridiculous that you can't use logic or reason to debunk it.
You just look at it and go, really?
Really? Really? Really?
And usually, if the person's saying something ridiculous, that's enough to get them back off.
And so, Bill Maher and And Ben Shapiro were talking about Trump and that Trump says crazy things.
And Ben Shapiro's point was, why would you take as literal truth everything that Trump says when it's so obvious that there's a disconnect between the way he managed the country and the things he said out loud?
And Bill Maher was sort of suggesting that he did take all of that seriously.
And that's when Ben Shapiro hit him with a, really?
Really? Everything he said?
Really? Really?
Everything he said, everything Trump said, you took seriously?
Really? And it was a wonderful moment, because you don't see that much of a knockout punch, but that was just such a knockout punch.
And I don't remember how Bill responded to it, but that was the moment Where the cognitive dissonance was not just obvious, but was laid out on the table so you could see it.
Like, really? We're all looking at this too.
I'm looking at it, you're looking at it, and you're going to claim that you took all of that seriously.
All of it. Really, all of it.
That's like the joke I was saying about the comedian whose name you'll remind me of that I can't remember.
He's a black stand-up comedian.
See, this is one of the times when using somebody's race is useful.
Am I wrong? If you're describing somebody, And you're trying to get somebody to tell you who their name is.
Isn't it useful to say their ethnicity?
Right? Gender, ethnicity.
So I think that's fair.
So, no, it wasn't Chappelle.
So it was a lesser famous comedian, not one of the name brands.
It was somebody I hadn't heard of before.
And he was saying...
You don't want to believe in conspiracy theories, right?
Nobody wants to believe in conspiracy theories.
But are you telling me that the government of the United States has got a perfect record?
You're telling me you think that they're batting 1,000% on no conspiracy theories?
And when he says it that way, it's just so hilarious because you realize it would be ridiculous to imagine that they don't try to Play one on a regular basis.
All right, enough about that.
You know, one of the great things about problems in this country is sometimes we can word them away.
We can just use words to make problems go away.
You've seen it, right? You think you have a real problem, but then you use words, and it just goes away with words.
And I don't think there's anything that's luckier Than the fact that most of the crime in the United States, which normally you would consider this a problem, wouldn't you?
Crime, right?
Normally, that'd be a big problem.
But it turns out that high crime is most associated with Democrat mayors but Republican governors.
Problem solved. Everybody's getting what they wanted.
If high crime is associated with both Democrat mayors and Republican governors, and I know that to be true because my television told me, everybody's getting what they want.
I don't think we have a problem anymore, do we?
Problem solved. All right.
Funniest story of the day might not be true.
This might not be true.
But can we all agree to treat it like it is because it'll be funny?
Agree? We're going to suspend our skepticism about stories that sound exactly like this.
Not usually true.
But this time, this time you're going to pretend this is true.
Here's the story. There's a Georgia TikTok user who could be more credible.
Am I right? If you were going to say, I want somebody who I can really believe, It would be a Georgia TikTok user.
So, credible source.
Says, two men discovered they were both fathers to a young girl when they came to pick her up from school where she works.
I don't know how that makes sense.
So anyway, both men came in to sign out their daughter from school, and when one saw the other one signing out what he thought was his daughter, he said, what the hell are you doing?
You can't sign out my daughter from school.
You'd have to be on the list.
So the school showed him the list, and they were both on it.
The mother Who apparently didn't live with either one.
Or maybe she lived with one, I don't know.
But the mother somehow had run for years the idea that they were both the father of the same girl.
Now, that's pretty good.
Would you like to hear a story in my own life that mirrored this, or at least I was suggested by it?
Anybody? One day in my 20s, early 20s, there was a co-worker of mine who was a very attractive young woman, and I said to myself, I would sure like to get with that attractive young woman.
And it turned out she was a tennis player, and I was a tennis player, and so I used that as my in.
I said, hey, do you want to play tennis on the weekend?
And she said, yes. And we made a date.
So I show up to the tennis court at the appointed time, pretty excited, because she was really attractive.
She doesn't show up.
And I'm looking at my watch, and I'm like, oh, crap.
Too good to be true?
You know those things that are too good to be true?
Because it's like, you know, she was like a little bit out of my buying power, if you know what I mean.
Like, clearly she should have been dating somebody better than me.
If I could be humble for a moment.
And so she doesn't show up.
So of course I'm not surprised, right?
But I'm in my tennis clothes.
I was ready to get some exercise.
And there was another guy there who was hanging out waiting for his tennis partner.
So I said, and I wanted to keep my claim on one of the courts.
So I said, hey, you know, my partner didn't show up.
Looks like yours didn't show up.
You want a hit? So he's like, sure.
So we started playing, and it turns out our games were sort of well-matched, so it was really fun.
You know, not everybody is fun to play tennis with, but he kept the ball in play, and he was a good guy, and he was funny, and, you know, we were hitting it off, and we were having a good time.
And then my date shows up.
And I'm like, oh, phew!
I got a little warm-up in, I got some tennis, and then my date shows up.
This is going to be a great night for me.
And I'm thinking... And then the date looks at the two of us and she goes, oh, I see you met each other.
Well, it was sort of downhill from that point.
Downhill from that point.
Yes, she literally made a date with both of us.
She made a date with both of us at the same place to do the same thing.
So it gets weirder from here.
So we started playing tennis, and we realized it was really fun, even though it was three of us who were playing Canadian doubles.
It was really fun, because she was actually a really good tennis player, too.
And we had a great time, went out to dinner, the three of us.
At this point, I think...
I'm not sure if the other gentleman still thought he had a shot, but I don't know.
And we ended up being friends.
So we ended up playing tennis, I don't know, maybe a few dozen times.
And we'd always do the same thing.
We'd eat some Chinese food and stuff.
Now, there's a punchline.
Because otherwise, I'd feel really bad about this story.
She finally came out as a lesbian and married a woman that she loved and lived a happy life.
So... So I got the last laugh.
It was a happy ending.
If you think about it, it was a happy ending.
This is one of my favorite stories.
I love this story.
Alright, today's vibe is, I'm not in a cult, you're in a cult.
You're in the Trump cult, or you're in the Democrat cult.
But dammit, if there's one thing I know for sure, you're in a cult.
You're in a cult. And so I thought, well, what is the definition of a cult?
I've looked at this before, but I never really noticed that nobody has the same definition of a cult.
Try looking up the definition of a cult.
They're all over the place.
It's almost like they're not even talking about exactly the same thing.
It's almost like the word doesn't have one...
It's like it doesn't have one definition that we can all agree on.
But let's figure out who's in the cult, Democrats or the GOP. So I'll read you some of these definitions.
They're different ones.
And see which one you'd say sounds more like a cult.
A group that is focused on a living leader...
To whom the members seem to display excessive, jealous, unquestioned commitment.
The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members, and the group is preoccupied with making money.
Now, would that describe the Trump MAGA people?
Well, they do have a zealous commitment, I wouldn't call unquestioned, that's kind of extreme, commitment to Trump.
So that's pretty close. At least the commitment to a living leader.
And the group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Not really. Not really.
I don't really see Republicans recruiting, do you?
Not really. They just say their own opinions.
And the group is preoccupied with making money.
Not really. Not really.
So I don't think the Trump cult fits on two under three.
They just have a living leader that people like, but that's not unusual.
How about this? Here's another definition from the Internet, which knows all things.
The common characteristics of a cult that emerge between members is a higher level of education.
So does that sound like Democrats or Republicans?
A higher level of education.
A little more like Democrats, doesn't it?
A weaker spiritual background.
Who has a weaker spiritual background?
Democrats or Republicans?
Democrats. Higher financial success.
Who has higher financial success?
Democrats or Republicans?
I don't know the answer to that, actually.
Because I think it depends.
Kind of depends.
Yeah. That one, I don't know.
Younger age.
So cults are generally associated with the young.
Who's younger, Republicans or Democrats?
Democrats. And something about time constraints that doesn't make sense.
So, question number one.
If we compare the Democrats and the Republicans...
Which ones believe more things that are not true?
Go. Who believes more things that are not true?
Republicans or Democrats?
Now, what do you think the Democrats would say if I asked them?
So most of my audience probably leans right.
What do you think they would say?
Pretty sure they'd say Republicans.
Pretty sure they would.
Are they wrong? I don't know.
If you added up the number of things that are not true that both sides believe in, I don't know.
To me, it looks like a toss-up.
So here's one of the advantages of not voting.
Since I don't vote, I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
So I have less chance of being biased by team play, because I don't identify with those.
When I look at it, my somewhat less biased is that it looks like both groups believe a whole bunch of things that are not true.
Now, I'm not going to argue what those things are.
Because I will stipulate that both sides think that they're right.
So that's not my argument today.
I'm just saying that from my perspective, it looks like both sides believe things, a lot of things, that are not true.
But we'd have to fight over it if I get into any details.
So I think both sides fit the cult definition in that way, that they believe things that are not true.
The Democrats don't have a leader.
Do they? Who do you say is the Democrat leader?
Because it's not really Biden, is it?
Not really. It's not AOC. It's not Biden.
It's not really Obama.
Not anymore. Satan?
Good guess. Pelosi?
Schumer? I guess Pelosi.
Yeah, I guess so.
But Pelosi doesn't have nearly as, let's say, an enthusiastic following as Trump does, right?
He's got that going for him.
So somehow the Democrats have managed to make enthusiastic followers a bad thing.
So they've actually made it look like a bad thing.
I saw a funny meme go by.
Stop making me laugh when I'm trying to hold the thought.
On the Locals platform, they can send images through the comments.
They're sending memes through every now and then that just throw me.
All right. All right, I don't know who's in the cult.
Doesn't matter. Could you tell that there wasn't much news happening today?
Did anything happen today?
So the...
I saw some polls that say the race is tightening.
So at this point, we can't tell who's going to win the Senate, right?
Is the worst personnel...
Let's say you had a choice of these two things.
You had a choice of Republicans sweeping everything, let's say by the time Trump or a Republican becomes president.
Let's say that there was a possibility that we could have Republican Senate and House and presidency.
Is that better than a split government?
Would you be happier if both the Houses were Republican?
Or would you be happier if they were split?
You know, I think that unless one side has a filibuster-proof majority, it's still split, right?
Aren't we still split as long as you can't get a two-thirds majority for anything important?
For all practical purposes, it's still split even if there's a majority all the way through, right?
So I guess we'll have split government no matter what.
I took two long plane rides, Somebody's questioning me when I said I traveled more during the pandemic than any time in my life.
The two longest trips of my life were Greece and Bora Bora.
Yeah, I think they were, the two longest trips.
And they were both during the pandemic.
So if you were to add all of the miles traveled on just those two trips, I think they would add up to more than the miles I've ever traveled in any non-pandemic era.
Because I don't do long trips.
I've done one long Europe trip before that.
That was about it. Why are people so obsessed with proving me wrong?
It feels like people have almost like...
Like some kind of a rage, thirst to show that I was wrong on a fact or that I said something that wasn't exactly true.
What drives that?
Because watching it happen, I feel like it's a cry for help of some kind.
I don't know what it is. Because it feels like maybe I said something in another domain that you thought hurt your worldview.
So you've got to damage my worldview or my credibility to keep your worldview intact?
Is there something like that? I saw a theory that the belief in trolls in the olden days might be memory of Neanderthals, and that there might have been a time when there were humanoid-looking things that thought the Neanderthals were trolls, or like monsters or something.
I always wondered what that was like, being around when there were Neanderthals and non-Neanderthals.
All right, well, ladies and gentlemen, I heard a statistic yesterday that I saw once and never saw repeated.
So give me a fact check on this.
I saw an estimate that Europe has already...
Got 90% of what it needs for the gas to get through the winter.
In other words, they've done a really good job of, you know, panic hoarding.
Because......reference to that.
You know, reference to any other number.
Have you ever seen a reference like that?
Because if the answer is that they have half as much as they need, that's big trouble.
If they have 90% of what they need, then there's a good chance that they can get closer to 100.
Just there, and it's not true, and it's not close.
You're just in the UK and Germany.
How would you know, though? But being there, how would being there tell you the answer to that question?
You still need a source.
What was your source?
Just talking to people? Government data?
People know? Huh.
So I'm wondering why our news source is so quiet about that.
Is the news quiet about it because they are just bad at their jobs?
Can you think of a more important statistic?
The most important statistics for the future would be how much are we spending on the Ukraine war, right?
It's going to be the expense, you know, death and casualties, of course, obviously.
And that is going to be how much energy Europe has to get through the winter.
Are those not the important things?
And where's the reporting?
So usually you have reporting that says you don't have the numbers, right?
The most important thing is how much energy Europe has.
If you're trying to game out what the next year looks like, it's like the most important thing.
And there's no reporting on it.
The reporting is, oh, it could be a big problem.
But shouldn't there be reporting like, you know, we're halfway there, or 90%, or maybe we don't know.
There should be reporting even if we don't know.
Right? That would be the reporting.
The reporting would be, we don't know what it is.
If it's 50%, we're dead.
If it's 90%, we can make it work.
But we don't know which one it is.
Where is that? Isn't this one of the...
See, your instinct is that it's just terrible reporting, but it feels like more than that, doesn't it?
It feels like the, let's say, the CIA or intelligence agencies or the government have asked the news people not to report on it.
That's what it feels like.
It feels like they're under some kind of a lid, maybe for national security.
For example, if Russia knew that Europe could beat 90% of its needs, if Russia knew that, they might try harder to make it worse.
If they don't know, they might think that they've done enough and then they don't have to do more.
And if we reported that things are fine and there's enough storage, well maybe they would know where the storage is and how it's getting there and maybe that's a problem.
But It doesn't look like we have anything like honest reporting.
Now, along those same lines, as my doctors on Twitter remind me, that if you've got a lot of student loans and debt, and the only way you can make a living after all those years of medical school is to have your medical license, you don't really have an option of speaking out against the consensus.
So when I've been asking the question, you know, how could no doctors speak out if they were seeing something that they needed to speak out about?
How could it be that no doctors are speaking out?
And I still take that position, by the way.
It is still my position that even with extreme financial penalties, The types of people in this country are so varied, there would be somebody who would do it.
And lots of them.
Lots of them. Not as a percentage, but lots of them as a number.
Because remember, if 1% of doctors turned, just 1%, that would be like 100,000 doctors.
You don't think we'd notice 100,000 doctors saying something is true that we thought wasn't true?
So there's no world that I live in where you can get 100% of anybody to do anything.
I don't live in any world like that.
So if you tell me that you got 100% of doctors because they're afraid in this very specific way, which I do agree, I do agree that you could get to 99%.
If you said, Scott, don't you think 99% of people would just shut up?
Yes. Yes.
Yes, I do. But 1% is 100,000 doctors.
We wouldn't not notice 100,000 doctors, would we?
I suppose if they didn't go on social media, we wouldn't notice.
So, that doesn't mean I'm right, by the way.
So this is one of those opinions where, if it turns out that 100% of doctors didn't want to talk about it, and somehow we could prove that, I would be willing to say...
Yeah, I would be willing to say I was wrong.
But I don't live in a world where 100% of people do anything.
What if you found out the number is increasing now?
I would expect that.
I would expect the number to increase now.
Because we're past the biggest, censorious part.
So we're entering a part where our freedom of speech is going to be trickling back a little bit.
So I would expect more doctors to speak out just naturally.
The news is not talking about protests in Paris.
That's true. I don't know about the protests in Paris.
I don't know about that.
The rogue doctors are speaking out on alternative media, but only a few of them.
There's like a handful. It's the same doctors all the time.
You know, I'd expect 10,000 to 100,000 if the problem were...
See, remember, the claim here, the claim is not that doctors have a suspicion, right?
The claim is they're looking at the same data that everybody else is looking at and saying, hey, this data clearly says opposite of what you've been told.
Isn't that the claim?
That everybody's looking at the same data, but some people are not willing to say what they see with the data, right?
Now, I don't believe that, but that's the claim.
We spent $270 million a year for...
Yeah, why is Afghanistan cheap compared to Ukraine?
A whole different level of fighting.
The entire force that we had in Afghanistan was kind of tiny.
They would lose their lives.
Lose their lives.
I don't know about that. What about the Trump tapes with Bob Woodward?
What about them? What about them?
Anyway, I'm tired of talking about pandemic stuff.
Let's talk about anything else.
All right.
Reframes.
How am I feeling? Here's a question for you.
We always talk about whether people are happy or not, and that somehow you should be happy even if things are going wrong.
Is there not a legitimate point in a person's life Oh, 79,000 nurses got fired for not getting the jab?
No, that doesn't. No, I would not count nurses and doctors in the same category at all.
The doctors, I would want to be looking at the data.
The nurses, I don't know if they were looking at the data.
I think the nurses were probably doing the same thing the public was doing, which was saying, we're not confident enough for this big of a risk.
You don't need any data for that.
You could just say, I don't know, this situation looks sketchy to me.
And I think that that was a reasonable take.
Have I ever said that?
Have I ever said that directly?
Would that surprise you?
Let me say it directly.
Those who did not get vaccinated, I'm not going to say I agree with you, but I'm not going to say you're wrong.
Are you okay with that?
Because I wouldn't know. I think it's...
You implied it?
No. I never...
Well, here's what I tried to do.
I tried to imply that people were not using reason to make the decision, which I still believe.
So I don't believe that the decisions were made on reason, so I stand by that.
Because people don't make decisions based on reasons.
I don't, you don't, people don't.
So everybody was dealing with their feelings, basically.
What scares you the most?
What makes you feel comfortable?
In my case, it was based on my feelings about wanting to take a trip.
That basically is what pushed me over the line.
And was I afraid that the vaccination itself might have side effects?
Well, not afraid.
But it was, you know, on the list of things to think about.
The needed data had not been collected, that's true.
Thank you.
Will Trump choose MTG as VP now?
Yeah, I was more afraid of not having a great time than Bora Bora.
of.
Or was it...
No, actually it was...
Well, I take it back.
I think the first...
I got it to go to Greece.
Yeah, Greece was the first trip.
That's why I got the vaccinations, I think.
Am I remembering that backwards?
I think Greece was the first trip.
Shake the box.
All right.
Well, I would say that I would still rank myself as depressed. - Yes.
Now that I have a better idea what that feels like.
But don't you think some people should not be happy?
Am I wrong about that?
Aren't some people legitimately in a bad situation and there's no reason to be happy about it?
I mean, if you're in an iron lung and you're depressed about it, should you seek help?
Or are you just being realistic?
I'll tell you what it was that got me.
You know how we all live in a bubble of subjective reality, right?
We walk around in a little bubble because we would go insane if we didn't.
So you put a little protective bubble around here and you tell yourself a bunch of bullshit that isn't true.
Some of the bullshit that you tell yourself is that you can trust everybody that you think you can trust.
If you didn't tell yourself that, you couldn't live in the world.
You couldn't live in a world where you trusted nobody.
But what is closer to the truth?
You can trust everybody that you think you can trust, or that you can trust nobody.
Which of those is closer to actual reality?
The one that's closer to actual reality, usually once you get out of family connections, as soon as you're out of the family blood connection, because I do trust my family members completely, 100%.
Because my family members would do the right thing if nobody was watching.
Are you lucky enough to have family members like that?
I can say with 100% certainty...
That my siblings would do the right thing in almost any situation when nobody was watching.
I can say that with certainty.
But I can't say that about just about anybody else.
There are people I suspect would.
I have a friend who, if you asked me to bet on it, I would bet he would do the right thing every time if nobody was watching.
But I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, I'm pretty sure.
So here's what happened to me in the past year or so.
That matrix-like mask kind of fell off, and I lost my illusion for a while.
So being depressed is not about being in the wrong state of mind, which is the problem.
In my case, being depressed was being in the right state of mind.
That's the fucked up part.
The part that made me depressed is when I saw things clearly.
And I worked since then to rebuild my illusions.
So when you ask me if I'm feeling better or depressed, I'm sort of in the process of rebuilding an illusion that I can live in without pain.
And I'm not quite there yet.
Because I can still see too much ugly.
And I can't live happily in a world with this much ugly around me.
I don't mean physically ugly.
I mean ugly ideas and thoughts and stuff.
And I'm trying as hard as I can to rebuild a protective imaginary shield of everything's fine.
When it isn't.
It definitely isn't.
But you have to build up a little wall of imaginary protection.
So I'm building up a little wall of imaginary protection as efficiently as I can.
But it's hard work.
All right. But then physically, I haven't figured out how to Fix my physical problems.
So exercise, I don't know if I'll ever be able to exercise again.
So let me give you, let me just give you an idea.
It's possible that I'll never have another personal relationship for the rest of my life.
It's possible that I'll never exercise again for the rest of my life.
Because that's my current physical situation.
Now, it could be that I can work through those things and everything will be fine.
I mean, I could be better by next week.
But the length of time it's been, and the fact that I don't even have a clue of what's wrong, and I'm at that certain age where things will fall apart, suggest that I could be at the end of my life.
And on top of that, feeling physically that I'm literally at the end of my life, The responsibility that one has at a certain level in life is that all of my daily decisions have to do with my lifespan now.
Like, if I thought I would get another dog, I'd think, ah, shit, dog lives 15 years.
I don't know, I don't like those odds, because I wouldn't want to get a dog that, you know, outlived me.
So it's really...
Until you get to a certain age, if you're younger and you're listening to this, there are some real psychological challenges you have to get past.
I think it's probably easier if you've got a big family situation, because then your family is your whole situation.
That's probably a whole different deal.
But let me also tell you that I have sort of at least a one-year minimum Minimum optimism buffer.
So my one-year optimism buffer works like this.
If it looks impossible, I still give myself a year.
That's like a rule.
That's like a system rule.
Doesn't matter what the problem is.
Doesn't matter how much it hurts.
Doesn't matter how much I want it to stop.
I'll give myself one year to just fix that thing.
So, you know, don't worry, I'm going to check out early, because I've got a year to fix this.
But I can tell you, if I felt like this in a year, I would look to kill myself.
So let me say it directly.
If I feel like this next year, I'm going to look to kill myself.
Because I don't want to live like this.
Like, I'm not going to do this two years.
I'll do this one year.
I'll give you one year with this amount of pain, and then next year, I'm not going to do two years.
Promise you I won't do two.
Now, that doesn't mean I'll kill myself.
It could just mean I'll go on different drugs, right?
But, you know, legal, illegal, whatever I have to do.
Heroin, I would definitely do heroin.
End it now. Somebody's suggesting that I kill myself right away.
Thank you. Appreciate it.
No, nothing's going to happen in the next year.
So don't worry about me waking up tomorrow.
Nothing's going to happen in the next year.
For sure. Fentanyl.
That'd be one way to go.
Yeah. But by the way, if I do it, don't feel bad for me, okay?
Thank you. Because it'll be me getting what I want.
It shouldn't happen. Although I always thought I'd get murdered before then.
Honestly. You know, I have seen my death.
And it does involve murder.
Now, that one I might be wrong about.
Because it doesn't feel like my other visions of my future.
But it's the only one I've ever seen.
The only death I've ever seen in my future is me getting murdered.
For doing something that I wasn't responsible for.
By rando, usually not by somebody I know.
Like, for political reasons.
I don't mean for crime reasons, I mean for political reasons.
But I don't think that's likely.
Alright. Scott, can a news bubble be defined as propaganda?
Yes, I would say so.
Because the news bubbles are created for the purpose of persuading one group.
So, yeah. Is there anything happening in the news that's happier than this?
About... Yeah, the other thing that...
move to a small town and associate with people...
Well, see, here's the problem.
When the Matrix mask fell off, associating with other people just turned out to be really unpleasant.
I think I could get over that.
It seems temporary, but it just seems really unpleasant at the moment.
So I've been avoiding just people in general.
I will challenge your assumption of what you said about who I trust.
I would never trust a spouse.
That's just me. Would any of you trust a spouse?
Because it's 2022.
No, you know, it wasn't...
What caused the mask to fall off was not related specifically to the marriage.
It was bigger than that.
You know, how many of you could say the following thing?
I've been curious about this.
I'm convinced that nobody knows me.
Like, actually nobody.
Because there's nobody who knows the whole story.
Everybody gets a slice.
And the slice that they don't see, it's not necessarily because I'm hiding it.
Maybe it's just never been exposed or whatever.
But I don't think anybody knows me.
How many of you can say that about yourselves?
Is there anybody who doesn't have anybody who knows them?
So that's a common feeling, isn't it?
Yeah, so a lot of people are saying the same thing.
Sort of weird. Oh, you have a twin.
That helps. Does your twin know you?
I guess. Maybe better than anybody else.
Mark Twain said we never know someone.
That's true. I agree with Mark Twain.
By the way, Mark Twain is always who I was gunning for.
Here's a little tip from my book.
You know, they tell people you shouldn't be competitive, you should compete with yourself.
You ever heard that?
No, you don't compete with other people.
You, you know, compete with yourself to be like the better version of yourself.
Terrible advice. Terrible advice.
Never compete with yourself.
Because beating yourself is the lowest bar in the world.
Being 1% better than you were.
Wow! You should always be competing with somebody else.
But here's the part I add.
They don't have to know it.
You should always be competing, but the person you're competing with doesn't have to know you're competing with them.
So it could be just someone you know.
It could be a family member.
Don't be a jerk about it.
Like, don't sabotage them or, you know, don't talk shit about them, but just have them in your mind, you know, the one to beat.
And I've never said this before, but my one to beat is Mark Twain.
He's my one to beat.
Because how do you beat that, right?
Now, if I were trying to beat myself, just think about the difference, right?
It's like, here's me, here's Mark Twain.
If I beat myself, yay!
Yay, 1%.
Yay, beat myself.
But if I beat Mark Twain, I've done something.
And if I don't beat Mark Twain, and all I do is I take a good run at it, I close the distance, well, that's better than just beating myself.
So you're always competing with somebody.
So Mark Twain was my target.
It's not a silly comparison.
Mark Twain is actually a quite accurate comparison.
Because Mark Twain would be considered an American writer of humor who was also saying some things that were relevant to the society.
And that's what I do.
That's my job. Now, I'm not saying that I'm in his class.
I'm saying that, you know, that's my target.
Also trying to get that, still trying to get that Nobel Prize.
But I'm not fuzzy.
I could take science, economics, which is, you know, the fake Nobel, or peace.
So any one of those I'm good for.
I think I've got a good argument for all of them.
So here's how I can win the Nobel Prize for science.
You ready? Come up with a proof that we live in a simulation.
And I'm already developing an angle on that, so I'm closing in on it.
And the angle is that it will be something like a rule.
And the rule will be there will be nothing that we see in our so-called reality that would not be the same constraint that a computer would have.
That those two will never be out of sync.
That's not proof we're in the simulation, but it would be certainly evidence pushing you in that direction.
And there might even be some way to prove it directly.
I would argue that it's already been proven.
It goes like this.
Spooky action at a distance, you know, and things that appear to change the past or move faster than the speed of light.
Those are examples of history being created on demand.
Once you realize that reality is created on demand, including history, not just what just happened, but the history, the trail that would go all the way back, it's all created on demand.
Once we realize that reality is created on demand, and I think we already have, it's just we haven't interpreted it that way, then it's obvious that we're a simulation.
The only tense that will exist is the present tense and everything else.
And I think there's some other obvious proofs of that.
One is that if you keep going smaller and smaller into the atomic world and the quantum world, and you keep asking, well, what's that made of?
What's a proton made of?
Then maybe there's an answer to that.
And then you get that answer, you say, what's that made of?
So once you realize that matter is irrational, then you can do away with it.
Yeah, the physical matter is completely irrational, because you would have to assume that everything about it is made of something else, or if you got to the bottom level and everything is the same, it wouldn't move.
If you put everything the same in one place and put no external force on it, it would just sit there.
It would just all be the same.
You'd have to have something that was some kind of difference that would cause any movement.
So it can't be true that everything is different all the way down.
Well, that's made of something, that's made of something else, that's made of something else to infinity.
And it can't be true that if you got to the bottom of it, it's all the same.
So the only two possibilities that it's different forever and that it's all the same are irrational.
So reality can't exist.
It's illogical that it exists.
All right.
So I think there might be some simple rule, and this was in my book, God's Debrief, long ago.
Now, I don't think this rule fits everything, but watch how cleverly, in sort of an author way, it sounds like it might.
What if there's only one rule in the whole reality, and the rule is this.
Like things attract.
And that's it. Things that are alike attract.
Now, it's one of those things where you say, well, how could I explain everything?
And then you go through all the examples.
How about gravity? Imagine two objects in space, and they would be attracted, right, by gravity.
But the two objects are more like each other than the empty space around them.
So the things that are two most alike would be drawn together.
Now, it wouldn't matter if one was a hunk of metal and the other was a piece of wood.
The metal and the wood are more like each other than the empty space.
Boop. And so...
And so watch how many times you see things that are the same are attracted to each other and things that are different are not.
Now, you could say, but what about, you know...
What about magnets that repel?
I would say, well, you know, I'm pretty sure those are things that actually attracted.
You just turned them around. I mean, if you put the...
If you took two magnets in space and they were facing each other in a way that would repel, if they were in space, they would flip around immediately and come together.
Because magnets are just like magnets, right?
So every time you find an example where you think, well, that's not going to work...
You can kind of find a way it does.
You can talk yourself into it.
Now, I'm not going to claim that that is the rule, the one rule, that regulates all of physics.
But it might be.
It might be. In other words, I do believe that there might be one rule that simple at the bottom of everything.
So that's my bid for the Nobel Prize in science.
Yeah, magnets are just like magnets.
and You'd rather have a mug than a Nobel Prize.
I want to be like, who was it who didn't bother to go get his Nobel Prize?
The singer, old rock singer, what's his name?
Bob Dylan. Yeah, Bob Dylan, he wins the Nobel Prize for, what, literature or something?
He's like, eh, mail it to me.
I want to reach that, you know, that certain confidence and age where you could just say, Nobel Prize?
That's cool. Why don't you mail that to me?
That'll look good over my mantle.
Have Dilbert win him a Nobel Prize?
Done. I will do that.
I will have Dilbert win a Nobel Prize.
Alright. We got a Medal of Freedom, too.
Alright. Everybody, is there anything I forgot to talk about today?
Any topics that you need to get out of your system?
It's a pretty slow news day today.
All right. The Mar-a-Lago crimes could result in a sentence barring Trump.
Well, I think that's the whole game, is they're trying to get Trump in an unelectable situation using the legal system.
But I don't know.
I feel like if they infinitely try to get him, something's going to get him.
Don't you think? Like, I'd love to say that there's no way they can get them on anything, but if you just keep pressing, you're going to get them on something that didn't even happen.
Like, sooner or later, somebody will believe something that literally didn't happen, and then they got them.
So... What Mark Twain books have I read?
The main three or four.
But a long time ago.
All right. And we still haven't heard anything about China walking out the prior leader.
How did you interpret that?
You know, if China had been trying to tell us that the prior leader was ill and they were doing him a favor, don't you think they would have used a cover story by now?
Don't you think China would have said, oh, you've totally misinterpreted that.
He was feeling bad and we just wanted to And we wanted to...
