Episode 1919 Scott Adams: Two Days Before Elections And The News Is Delicious & Stimulating. Join Us
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
John Fetterman flags vs. wind
CNN Daniel Dale's fact-checks President Biden
NAACP President, Derrick Johnson
Twitter employees sold verification
Elon Musk vs. Mark Ruffalo and AOC
Ron Desanctimonious
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization the day before election day and our minds are I would say focused.
I would say that things are starting to move in the right direction, maybe.
Maybe. We'll see.
How would you like to take it up to a new level of awareness, to a higher dimension, a higher level of performance than you have ever experienced before?
Well, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine of the day, the pre-election sip that you've been waiting for, it's all going to happen now.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Yes, it is laundry day.
I'm sorry I'm not wearing my usual shirt.
Sometimes, you've got to do the laundry.
Well I had been working pretty hard, but I managed to take some of my workload off by hiring a part-time assistant.
So thankfully, a lot of the chores that one normally does, I managed to put off on my part-time assistant.
Who immediately had a sporting accident and is on vacation right now.
So that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, but it will.
It will. It's going to get on track any moment now.
Have you seen the video of the Iranian women knocking the headgear off of clerics in Iran?
It's really fun to watch.
So, you know, you're watching the...
I guess the government is cracking down on the women who are trying to not wear the traditional face coverings and stuff.
And it's becoming a really big deal.
The protests continue.
I thought they would be stamped out by now, but they continue.
So maybe this has some legs.
But apparently there's a number of videos.
You can see a compilation where the young women, it looks like, We'll run up behind a cleric who's got on the big hat.
What's the name of the headgear that a cleric wears?
It's not a hat, right?
Turban. Turban?
Is it really a turban?
Headpiece. All right, don't get all racist on me.
Let's call it a hat.
And here's the fun part.
The clerics tend to be not very athletic, but the young women are, you know, they can just knock the hats off the clerics and just run away.
Because there's nothing the cleric can do about it.
And I thought to myself, the mullahs or the clerics?
What would be the correct word?
Isn't a mullah a higher level cleric?
Is a cleric lower than a mullah?
I'm not sure how all that works.
Anyway, here's my suggestion.
I think they should do more of that, but here's what I would do.
If I were the women in Iran, I would start to all dress alike everywhere, all the same.
I would wear all black bottoms, all black tops of the same kind, and then I would have black headgear, and I would cover myself completely in public.
Do you know why I'd do that?
Because I'd be knocking the hat off of every fucking cleric within miles.
And they wouldn't be able to catch anybody because they'd all look the same.
Right? So I think that the Iranian women should embrace and amplify.
They should over-cover themselves and all look the same so they could be knocking hats off of clerics all day long and nobody could get caught.
Be like, oh shit, there's like 600 of them.
I have no idea which one did that.
Am I right? Just give them what they want.
Just all dress the same, wear masks, and once you cannot be identified, go nuts.
Once you can't be identified, go nuts.
That's what they're asking for.
They're asking for you to be completely unidentified.
Give them what they want.
Show them what happens when you're unidentified.
Give them exactly what they're asking for.
I've told you this before, but man is it true that remember when we were waiting for AI artwork to someday be as good as a human?
That day passed a while ago.
AI art is unambiguously better than human art.
I've seen enough examples now where One after another, AI art, I want to put on my wall.
Like, I'll see it and I'll go, I would put that on my wall.
That's actually beautiful. I don't really see human art that makes me do that.
I don't see human art that makes me want to put it on a wall.
I can't remember the last time.
Like, if I put up artwork, it's at protest.
I'd rather have nothing on my wall.
Brian Machiavelli did another piece of artwork in which he just asked it to do a Dilbert comic.
I'll show you which AI he was using here in a moment.
And the artwork, in my opinion, as a professional cartoonist, is equal to the best human cartoonist.
Just the art. But there's an interesting quality about it that blows my freaking mind.
Let me show you here in a minute.
So you won't be able to see it as clearly as I want it, but the request from Machiavelli's Underbelly was to make a Dilbert cartoon about a zebra.
And interestingly, it made Dilbert part zebra, not zebra, giraffe, I'm sorry, part giraffe.
And look at the quality of the cartoon at the bottom That is 100% as good as the best human cartoonist right there.
There's nothing missing in that.
It's beautiful, really.
And like this art, like that bottom cartoon, that is so well designed.
Like I would put that on my wall.
It's just cool to look at.
Now, but here's the weird thing.
Do you notice that the humans...
Have weird characteristics, like they don't quite look like they have the right features and stuff.
They look all interesting, but even from one panel to the next, the AI is making the person look different.
Like one has, you know, three lenses and blah, blah.
Now here, you want a freaky idea?
Do you want a really freaky idea?
Alright, I'm going to build into this.
This will just freak you the fuck out.
You ready for it? You know how the human brain gives you a perfect image of things that you don't see perfectly?
You know that, right?
So, for example, you'll have a memory of something that didn't even happen.
A false memory is pretty common.
We all have. You also, if you're watching, let's say, a tennis ball being hit hard and it bounces near a line, your brain says, I saw that tennis ball, I saw it hit the ground, and I know if it's in or out.
But did you know you don't see that tennis ball?
Your brain or your eyes can only pick up the tennis ball every, depending on the speed it's going, it can only pick up the tennis ball every five feet or something.
But all the stuff in between, your brain filled in and it wasn't there.
But your memory is you saw the ball the whole way.
You did not see the ball the whole way.
Your brain allowed you to imagine you saw it the whole way.
Now, do you accept that your brain is, in real time, translating things into things that are not true?
Do you agree with that?
Your brain is always translating your approximate environment into a specific picture which is not true.
Now, what happens when you take AI, you know, high intelligence, and you train it to look at human faces, and then you tell them to reproduce a human face in some artwork?
And then the AI makes the human face look different in each panel.
All the time.
All the time. It seems like it doesn't seem to matter which AI you're using.
And you can train the AI... To really know what a face looks like, right?
Because faces are approximately, you know, the same, they're approximately symmetrical, right?
It knows what a nose is, it knows what eyes are, it knows where they appear on the face.
Are you telling me that AI can't make a human face?
What should be the simplest thing, right?
Now I'm gonna blow your fucking mind.
You ready? You ready for this?
Get ready. It could be that human faces don't look the same from minute to minute and that we can't tell because our human brain is making your face look the same as it looked a minute ago to me.
What if our faces don't look the same from moment to moment?
And that it's actually like a, you know, it's more like a wave function, that your face is only a potential face.
And when somebody looks at it, they're picking up the potential, they're forming in their mind their own face, and then they lock it in.
And so every time they look at you, they see that face that they've locked in, but your actual face is never the same.
Okay, did I freak anybody out?
Because give me one other reason that AI can't make a face the same twice in a row.
There's no other reason.
Because the technology could easily do it.
The technology is telling you what is actually there.
The AI is telling you that our faces are not the same from minute to moment.
That's what it sees. But we don't see it.
Now, I'm not saying that's true.
I'm just saying it might be.
That is within the realm of something that could be true.
Which is freaky by itself, even if it's not true.
But I can't think of another reason that AI can't make a face.
I mean, there's just no other reason.
All right. Real clear politics at a poll, asking people if we thought the country was heading in the right direction or the wrong direction.
I want to test your intelligence.
Many of you have not seen this news, but I want to see if you can use your powers of deduction What percentage of the population thinks that things are moving in the right direction go?
How are you doing that?
How are you doing that?
25.6%.
You guys, you guys and gals, you impress me.
I've never seen a group that could guess things better than you.
But once again, once again, with no help whatsoever, you got the right answer, almost all of you.
So congratulations to you.
About a quarter of the country thinks things are fine and in the right direction.
Now, I happen to be in the 25%.
Surprise!
I had a realization the other day.
That two things are true.
I tweeted this. Two things are true at the same time.
We'll see if you agree with the first one.
I think you'll agree with the first one, but not the second one.
The first one, everything appears to be broken.
Agree? Like, everything in the world.
All of our systems, all of the way we think about things, education, government, supply chains, military...
Correct? Right? Would you all agree?
Now, I say seems broken, right?
It appears broken. Now, that could be an impression, right?
When everything looks broken, you could be wrong.
You know, it could be like the faceling.
You see it as broken, but it's not so broken.
Because remember, the central fact of our human cognition is that we're looking for problems, right?
So we can fix them. So we can survive.
Your brain is a problem identifier.
It's not built to keep you happy and stupid.
Because if it keeps you happy and stupid, you're also going to be dead.
Right? Because you won't see a problem.
You need to see problems to stay alive.
So you're a problem identifier.
Now add to the world News.
A news model that gets more clicks for bad news, right?
There's a bad thing coming, you'd better get afraid.
So now people are automatic problem identifiers and solvers, and then the news model gives you nothing but problems.
What in the world would you think about your world?
You would think your world is falling apart.
Because that's all you see.
When was the last time you saw a big news story about good news?
Hey, here's a news story of something that's working great.
I try to give you those stories, but even when you see them in the press, they don't really frame them that way.
It's more like, well, a fact happened, but I'll tell you, hey, things are moving in the right direction.
All right, here's my take.
So number one, I think we all agree everything looks broken, and I would say that it is.
I would say it's not just that it looks broken, it's actually all broken.
All of it. Would you agree with that?
Would you take it further and say, it doesn't just look broken, it's fucking broken.
In the sense of it's not where we want it to be.
Not maybe 100% broken, but everything's not where we want it to be.
Which is a perfect situation for humans.
Humans love it when things are not where we want them to be.
That's like our perfect situation.
You're continually like, ah, got to build this thing, got to fix this thing.
That's where we're at our best, when everything's a little bit broken, and we're like working on fixing it.
It's the ideal human situation.
And we do it well.
The Adam's law of slow-moving disasters, we do fix things pretty well.
All right, here's my uber-optimistic take.
Are you ready? Everything's broken, and that's true.
And we live in a self-correcting system.
That our politics and our free markets and our flow of information, which isn't as free as it could be, but it's getting better, 100% of things are self-correcting.
All of it. Everything is self-correcting.
Now, I told you about Germany was going to freeze over the winter because they didn't have Russian gas, and then the latest report was, oh, somehow they figured out how to store enough gas so they could make it through the winter.
They solved it.
Now, here's what I see happening.
Because everything's broken, that gives you license to improve it.
Did you ever work in a company where something's working fine?
Do you think you could improve it?
Everybody would say, why are you focusing on that?
It's fine. But everything looks broken, which causes us to try to fix everything.
We're in this frenzy in society, in the world in general.
We're in a frenzy Of redesign.
Everything's getting redesigned, usually by the free market, right?
Absolutely everything's being redesigned from almost the bottom up.
We're in a reinvention phase that you won't recognize until it's, you know, toward the end.
But you don't recognize we're in a creative, inventive phase that will be one of the great ones of all human history.
Now, I would argue that after World War II, we had a creative explosion, wouldn't you say?
And then there was the Industrial Revolution, creative explosion, etc.
But I feel like we're in one, but you don't feel it.
When you're in it, it just feels like everything's broken, because you're just trying to fix everything.
But when it gets fixed, It will be better.
It will be fixed better than it was.
And I think that applies everything from our energy policy to the way we run elections to Twitter to you name it.
Literally everything is trending positive if you look at it as a system that's in the phase of correcting.
So that's my optimism.
It does not say we should not be vigilant about all of our problems.
We'll do that automatically because we're good at being vigilant.
How many of you saw the video of John Fetterman giving his speech outdoors?
He had a bunch of American flags behind him.
And the wind blew them all down while he was talking.
And Fox News had an article about how social media was mocking it.
It had some tweets there from some notable people saying funny things.
And I could not be more angry at Fox News today.
Fox News was saying that people were saying clever things about that Fetterman flag thing, and they did not include my tweet.
What? That oversight cannot be forgiven.
And so, since they only mentioned some lesser clever tweets, which were pretty good, but they were lesser clever than the one I did.
And my tweet was this.
Hypothetically, if God had been trying to warn us for months not to vote for a particular candidate, what would that look like?
Come on, I'm a professional joke writer, and I declare that was the best joke written on this topic.
Now, let me tell you why.
This is a joke writing lesson for you, so you can take this way.
I've told you this before, but every time you see an example it helps.
If you can do a punchline or a joke in which the audience has to fill in the details, That's your best joke.
Like, that's the one that really works.
If you over-specify, you know, what you want somebody to imagine, well, that could be a good joke, too.
But the great jokes are where it takes you a moment to fill it in.
And when you fill it in, you're filling it in with your own stuff.
So when I said God had been trying to warn you for months, You can fill it in with everything that happened to John Fetterman, which was a tragedy.
I don't mean to make fun of a medical problem.
But if in your head you're trying to fill it in, you're like, okay.
Yeah, that sounds very much like that old joke.
You've all heard the joke.
The floodwaters are rising and neighbor knocks on the elderly person's door and says, you know, hey, the water's rising.
Come with us. We're leaving right now.
And the woman says, no, no, you know, God will provide.
I'll be fine. And the water rises and, you know, the woman has to go up to the second floor of her house and then a boat comes up to the second floor window and says, get in the boat, get in the boat.
And she's like, no, God will provide.
I'm fine. Then she ends up on the roof of her house, because the water has risen.
And she's on the roof of the house, and a helicopter comes by and says, get on the helicopter, you know, puts a little rope down.
She goes, no, no, God will provide.
Helicopter goes away. Well, the water rises, she drowns, and she goes to heaven.
And she's talking to God in heaven.
And she goes, God, what's up?
I've been believing in you my whole life.
I was sure you would provide.
What happened? And God says, I sent you a car.
I sent you a boat.
I sent you a helicopter.
And, you know, that's the joke.
So, sometimes the signs are there.
Maybe you should just recognize them.
Anyway, it sounded so much like the joke, I couldn't resist.
There's a video on Getter, that's sort of a Twitter competitor, which I'm not going to tell you is credible.
So don't assume this is credible, because if I told you it's credible, I would be kicked off of social media.
Probably not Twitter at the moment.
But I'll just describe it to you.
So there's a woman who claims that she was doing construction on a home that she and her husband owns for a couple of years.
So it's a place that has been abandoned.
But you can reach the mailbox even though it's behind a chain link fence.
So you can sort of reach in and get to the mailbox, I guess.
And she found it was stuffed with address changes.
So a whole bunch of people, allegedly, had changed their address to her address, which is an abandoned building.
Now obviously the implication is that people are doing things to be able to vote by mail, Fraudulently.
Now, no squatters.
There were no people in there. They were just using the mailbox as a change of address place.
Now, anecdotally, I heard other reports of this being a ballot fraud thing that people do, etc.
Now, question number one.
You have seen one real person, apparently, describing what looks like a pretty credible claim Use your critical thinking to answer this question.
What are the odds it's true?
Go. Put the odds on it.
Odds it's true. I'm seeing 25.
25. Low.
1%. Low.
0. 10%. Very good.
Very good. Very good.
So, do you remember what I predicted would be true after the 2020 election?
If you remember, I said a whole bunch of times, I said this over and over again, I said, every claim you hear about election fraud is at least 95% chance likely to be false.
95%. Now, what was the final outcome of all the 2020 claims?
How close was I? I told you that even if something is true, and I didn't have an opinion at that time, I didn't know if there was some true stuff, but I told you that 95% of what people surface will definitely not be true.
So when you see this new claim, just keep the 95% thing in your mind.
Now, it looked very credible to me.
If you put a gun to my head and said, alright, you're going to have to bet whether this particular story was true, I want to think it is.
But then I have to retreat to my rational mind and say, okay, the fact that it looks true means what?
How much credibility do you put on, it's on video, it's a real person, and it looks true.
What's that mean to you?
Nothing. Nothing.
In 2022, it doesn't have any value.
Absolutely no value.
And the first thing you ask yourself is, why is it only on Getter?
Right? Is there some reason that would be not on other platforms?
So it could be, you know, from a different year.
Could be an operative who's just, you know, doing an op.
It could be anything.
It could be absolutely just anything.
You don't know. Alright, CNN, I'm going to give yet another compliment.
Compliment to CNN, you know?
Being one of its biggest critics for years, I feel like I have some kind of social obligation to tell you when they do something right.
And not only today do they have Daniel Dale doing a hard fact check on Biden.
And when I say a hard fact check, he just goes right at him.
Daniel Dale went at Biden the way you saw him go after Trump.
I never thought I'd say it.
Never thought I'd say it.
But he just went right at it.
He said, lie, lie, lie, not true, lie.
Big stuff. I'm not talking little stuff.
I'm talking about the major claims of the president.
Lie. Just lie.
Amazing. So congratulations to CNN for what looks like a successful business pivot.
You want more? This will blow your mind.
The day before elections, CNN's website, The following headline.
Opinion. Democrats are out of touch with American voters.
That's a headline on CNN the day before the election.
Democrats are out of touch with American voters.
And then it goes on in the article to say that Republicans are running for office on the actual issues that people care about.
Can you believe that?
Oh, two days. I'm sorry.
Two days before election. I forgot what day it was.
Today feels like a Monday to me for some reason.
Must be that time change.
But does that just blow your mind?
My mind is completely blown by the fact that something's going right.
Now, remember I told you everything's broken.
Everything's broken. But it's all being redesigned right.
You tell me. Was CNN broken a year ago?
And do you see that they're redesigning in a way that's useful to the country?
Yes or no? Would you agree that you see it?
It's not just me, right?
You can see it. Is Twitter better off than it was a year ago?
I think so. I mean, it's a big mystery where things will go, but...
So you've got CNN being...
Being a responsible citizen.
Congratulations, CNN. Completely successful.
I don't know about their ratings.
I actually hope their ratings improve.
So I'm going to root for CNN's ratings to improve because I think they're acting like patriots.
Is that too far? In my opinion, CNN is taking a patriot perspective on their business, which is to try to give you the actual news.
Which is different. All right, too far, maybe.
But that's another example of something that's going right.
Biden, of course, gaffed again and said he wanted to close all the coal plants.
And then somebody from his own party, two days before elections, Joe Manchin, is asking the president to apologize.
You know, if members of your own party are asking you to apologize two days before the midterms, that's not a good look.
That's not good. Now, a year ago, do you think that Democrats were willing to admit that Biden is brain-damaged and useless?
Not so much, right?
A year ago, even the Democrats would have said, oh, stop making fun of his speech defect.
He's fine. They don't say that now, do they?
Am I right? There is a completely different tone from the Democrats about their own president.
And that tone is, oh...
Look what we did.
Maybe we should undo this.
Now, you're going to get people who are still supportive because it's a political world, but let me give you a little story of something that happened to me.
I want to see if any of you have had a similar experience.
So, last night I went to a large-ish social gathering.
Of people in my town.
So I don't want to be any more specific than that.
So there's a large social gathering in my town.
And I live in Northern California, an hour outside of San Francisco.
So what do you assume is the political nature of my town?
It's just what you think, right?
It's exactly what you think.
Or is it? I spent an entire night at an event and heard a number of pro-Republican statements from people privately.
I heard zero Democrat supportive statements.
Zero. I don't think there was anybody there who was favorable to the Democrat platform at the moment.
Which is not to say they weren't Democrats.
If you could, you know, put on goggles and see everybody's voting party, I'll bet you they're mostly Democrats.
I'll bet they were at least 60% Democrats.
But you don't see anybody talking up Biden.
It's just not a thing.
It's just not a thing.
And you don't even see people agreeing with wokeness.
At least within, let's say, the suburban family kind of people.
Just nobody. I used to feel like I was in a little bit of danger when I just went out in public.
You know what I mean? If you're notable as a Trump supporter, there was a time when it would have been dangerous for me just...
I was a little wary even just going to the grocery store.
Because I thought I'd be confronted with somebody.
Not necessarily physically, but I thought somebody would get in my face, you know, throw a milkshake on me or some bullshit like that.
But I don't get any pushback anywhere where I live.
Just think about that.
I mean, people recognize me at this point, and they've got a good idea what I'm up to.
I get no pushback.
Zero. There is not a single instance of somebody in my own community who's told me I've, you know, gone too far, or I'm a Nazi, or I'm on the wrong side.
Nothing. So, are you seeing this?
Are you seeing that in mixed gatherings, there is no Biden support?
Or even Democrats' support, really.
People will talk about abortion, but that's sort of all they have.
Am I right? That's all they have.
And a lot of people don't care about that as much as you imagine they do.
Yeah, there was a little talk of Trump, but even he's not the important thing these days.
We'll talk about Trump.
MSNBC, there's a clip on Twitter of MSNBC interviewing Democrat Go.
Governor candidate, or Governor, Kathy Hochul.
Now, imagine MSNBC interviewing a Democrat governor two days before an election.
Now, how do you think that went?
You think that would be really just a friendly, right?
They'd be trying to get Hochul over the finish line.
Nope, that didn't happen.
MSNBC just slapped the shit out of her.
I didn't know what I was looking at there for a moment.
I didn't catch the name of the host, but credit to the host.
The host said, you know, I guess the context was crime.
And the host says, here's the problem.
We don't feel safe.
I walk into my pharmacy and everything is on lockdown because of shoplifters.
I'm not going in the subway.
People don't feel safe in this town.
That is the end of her, isn't it?
Did MSNBC just drive a stake through her fucking heart?
It looked like it.
It looked like even NBC is like, we can't even do this anymore.
We just can't do this anymore.
We have to kill you now.
I mean, politically, not actually.
I think they just drove a stake right through her heart on live TV. Because, and again, if somebody knows, if you saw the clip, I'd like to give a shout out to the host.
Because that was good work.
That was good work. And not just on a team play kind of basis.
But it was good journalism.
This is somebody who really got to it, really got under the hood there.
I wish somebody would say her name, just so we could give her credit.
Alright, well maybe you'll see it in the comments.
Jack Dorsey has apologized.
For growing Twitter too quickly, and therefore, you know, being a participant, I guess he would say, for how many people had to get laid off.
Because he thinks it grew a little too quickly.
And, you know, I appreciate that.
That's sort of a...
It's kind of the context you wanted to hear, right?
Didn't you wonder why there were so many people?
And could you actually get rid of a lot of people and still run the company?
And probably yes.
If grew too fast is a true statement, and it certainly looks that way, then probably there's a little bit of, or maybe a lot, of cushion, stuff they can cut.
So that's happening.
I was trying to imagine what it would be like To be Jack Dorsey and know that all these layoffs are happening.
Like, that's gotta be, it's just gotta be crushing.
I once had to close a restaurant.
Two restaurants, actually.
But I had to close a restaurant that wasn't working out.
And, you know, I had to tell the staff that they were all fired.
You know, with severance and stuff like that.
So they were treated well.
But that's a really bad day.
It's twice a bad day because as I was telling them that I would treat them right and everything, some others were actually robbing the storeroom of all the electronics.
As I was talking to the staff, they were actually robbing the restaurant.
Well, that showed me.
Anyway, that was pretty expensive.
Musk met with some civil rights leaders, the Anti-Defamation League and NAACP. And I saw an interview by the head of the NAACP, Derek Johnson.
Now, interestingly, the head of the NAACP appears to be, and I don't want to make an assumption here, but appears to be a black man.
I don't know. It's a weird thing about 2022 when I find out that the head of the NAACP is at least apparently black.
So good job there.
Seems like a good fit.
But I would like to give him a shout-out because you know how you get an immediate reaction to some public figures?
Do you remember when, maybe you don't remember it, but when Barack Obama burst on the scene, the first time you saw him give a speech, even if you were a Republican, you probably said to yourself, ooh, there's something special there, right? Didn't you see that?
You see it immediately.
And the special thing was, he wasn't doing the thing you expect.
Obama did not run as a black guy.
And every time he didn't run as a black guy, which he did better than anybody ever did, right?
Obama was just the master of using race without using it.
Oh my God, he did that well.
Because it was there, you could see it, you could make your own decision, but if he'd even said once, you should vote for me because I'm black, he would be done.
It's like, that's, no, no.
That's absolutely, you're off the list if you say that.
But he never did, because he's very good at this stuff.
So I want to give a similar shout-out to this Derek Johnson.
I'd never seen him before, but he was talking about the meeting, and he first said that he thought Musk agreed with the people who were there.
That's good. So no confrontational anything.
It looks like he agreed.
But there was a question of whether Musk would be able to execute, which is exactly the best question you could ever have.
Do you think Musk can execute?
That's like what he does better than anybody who's ever done anything.
Musk can execute, yeah, better than anybody.
Maybe in the whole world who's ever done anything.
That's the one thing he can do.
But here's why I want to give Derek a shout out.
He went through the whole interview and he talked about how he wanted to make sure that Twitter was protecting communities that were marginalized.
And I watched the whole interview and not once Did he frame things racially?
Now I think it's completely fair to say don't have groups targeted for hate speech.
That's not really a racial statement.
That's something everybody would say.
But somehow he got through the whole thing without me hating him for saying I'm bad or something.
Like I didn't get blamed for anything.
And he didn't even talk about it like in the normal team play Somehow he did an Obama on this thing.
And I've got to say, I want to see more from him, Derek Johnson.
Because one of the things I've been saying forever is that the black American population doesn't have a good leader.
You know, somebody who would appeal to whoever they're trying to persuade at the same time as appeal to the black community.
And he may be the guy.
He's got a strong, strong game.
So just keep an eye on him.
This is another thing that, in my opinion, is going right.
In my opinion, and this will be really controversial, racial, what would you say, harmony is actually improving.
What do you think of that?
In my opinion...
Racial harmony is improving, and I'll tell you why.
Because we're wising up to why it happened in the first place.
We're wising up that it was the media that was causing it.
Right? And I think people are wising up that everybody wants everybody to do well.
If there's one thing that you can say about Republicans that you could just take to the bank, they want everybody to do well.
Right? There are no Republicans who want black people not to do well.
They all want them to do well.
As well as everybody who's struggling.
They don't want to necessarily be the ones that pay for it.
That's a different question. But they want everybody to do well and would even jump in and help quite a bit if there was something that made sense to help on.
And I think that the education question is where everybody's going to meet.
Because, you know, a black parent and a white parent When they're talking about educating their kids, same page.
I mean, small differences, but same page, right?
Everybody's got individual differences.
Somebody says, I don't think about race unless I'm in social media.
Isn't that true? When was the last time you had a real-world racial anything?
I can't even think of one.
Now, I live in a pretty harmonious place in the country.
But when was the last time you had a racial confrontation?
Or even a racial issue?
I don't even remember the last time.
It's literally not on my consciousness any time except social media.
You're right. Yeah, there's a social media thing.
So this is weird and wonderful and mind-blowing.
That there was an accusation on Twitter that Twitter had sold somebody a blue check for $15,000 and that there was a system, sort of an underground system, where people could get to some Twitter employee who would illegally, I don't know if it's illegal, but would offer to sell them blue check outside of the normal system.
And apparently a number of people took advantage of it.
I don't know what that number is.
But here's the funny part.
Elon Musk confirmed it.
He goes, yup.
He said, yup. Absolutely confirmed that Twitter had been selling blue checks.
Does that just blow your mind?
Because, and it blows my mind on several levels.
Watching Elon Musk fact-check the world in real time is something we've never seen before.
Like, even if a politician gets fact-checked, you have to wait until they give a speech, right?
Or wait until the statement comes out or something.
But Musk will be on Twitter, there'll be something that's just like a complete lie, or in this case, something that's weird but true, and he just fact-checks it.
You got like a five-minute fact-check that you could actually believe.
If Musk says that happened, I believe it.
I mean, why would he say that?
Of all things you could say, nobody's going to lie about that.
For $15,000, you will cook dinner.
Well, okay. Would be a good dinner.
Let's talk about some more Twitter stuff, the most important thing that's happening lately.
Mark Ruffalo.
One of the smartest Democrats.
No, I'm just joking.
He's one of the dumbest. If you tried to list the dumbest celebrities who are political, you know, you'd put at least politically dumb.
I'm not saying they're dumb, like low IQ. But Mark Ruffalo, while I love his passion...
And I love that he apparently cares about the country and people and wants good things for all of us.
So character-wise, I'm a big fan.
Right? Yeah, I think you have to appreciate when somebody's on the other side from you, if they're trying to make things better but they have a different opinion on it, you can't really hate them for that.
Right? You just want a different thing.
But Mark Ruffalo tweeted at Musk, and he says, Elon, period.
Please, for the love of decency, get off Twitter.
Get off Twitter. Hand the keys over to someone who does this as an actual job.
And get on with running Tesla and SpaceX.
You are destroying your credibility.
It's just not a good look.
Is that the worst take you've ever seen in your life?
Have you ever seen a worst take?
This is an actor who's giving the most successful entrepreneur of all time business advice.
Yeah. And he does it in public like, that should look good.
And he's worried that Elon, he's saying that it's not a good look for Elon.
Do you know it's not a good look?
Giving business advice to Elon Musk.
My God, man!
My God!
Let me give you the Hollywood analogy.
That even Mark Ruffalo, this would hit him hard.
Alright, you might not know this, but in the acting world, I made this mistake once when I was working on the Dilbert TV show.
Well, I'll tell you what mistake I made.
One of the voice actors was running through some lines for the Dilbert animated TV show that ran years ago.
And I didn't like what one of the actors, how they played a line.
I'd written the line, so I knew how I wanted it read.
So I stopped and said, oh, you know, I want it done this way.
And I did an impression of the actor or actress doing the line.
And I said, do it like this, and then gave an impression.
My co-executive producer turned off the mic...
And invited me into the hallway.
Where I learned that I just committed the greatest sin.
The greatest sin.
Let me tell you, if you're ever in this situation, don't tell an actor how to act.
Don't do that. Here's what you do do.
Can you give me a different look?
Can you give me a different take?
You could say, can you combine a little, like, let's say, more concern?
You could say, do that, but like you're more concerned as well.
You can describe it, but do not do the imitation.
Do not do that.
That's like the big thing you don't fucking do.
Now, To the credit of the actor or actress who will remain nameless, they didn't give me a hard time about it.
But it's because they also saw the co-executive producer drag me into the hallway.
So they knew exactly what happened.
And I'm sure that they were fine with it.
Which, by the way, was good co-executive producing.
So let me give my compliments to my co-executive producer, Larry Charles.
Yeah, Larry just dragged me into the hallway and said, nope, nope, don't do that again.
So that was a good lesson.
That feels to me exactly like an actor giving Elon Musk business advice.
Am I right? That's the same thing.
You don't do that.
You don't do that.
Well, if you do it, at least add a little bit of humility.
Right? Because I think we're all giving Elon Musk some business advice, but usually it's in the form of our own preferences.
You know, it's not in the form of what's good business.
Now, what about the advice that He's got these two other CEO jobs, or three or four, however many businesses, and you should stick to those.
If you tell Elon Musk, of all people in the world, seven point whatever billion people in the world, there's exactly one person who's the wrong person to stay in your lane.
He's the most wrong person out of all seven billion of us that you should advise not to leave his lane.
Leaving his lane is what he does best.
It's what he does best.
Better than anybody's ever done it.
Probably. More consistently.
So everything about that take was bad.
What did Musk...
Ruffalo's comment was because Elon was responding to AOC. Then AOC had made some claims about Musk messing with her Twitter feed, which didn't happen, of course.
And then Musk replies, hot take.
Not everything AOC says is 100% accurate.
I love the understatement.
Hot take. Not everything AOC says is 100% accurate.
Alright, here's the most exciting part or dangerous part or something.
Musk is continuing to design Twitter, or redesign it, in public.
This is great.
You're getting a total business education in watching him do this in public.
You see it all.
So here's a tweet today.
He was talking about how he wants Twitter to be able to monetize all creator content.
All creator content.
So Twitter would monetize much the way YouTube would, I imagine.
Any content, you know, you could share the revenue with Twitter.
So I think that's where he's heading.
And that includes video.
Now, Twitter has some video limitations, you know, resource limitations.
But apparently, according to Musk, we can do, he says we, Twitter, can do 42-minute chunks at 1080 resolution.
Now, if you're in the blue, the blue program within Twitter.
So you can break that up into longer videos.
The 42-minute limit could be fixed by next month.
So he's telling you that they're removing the 42-minute limit Within a month, which is super fast for something of that magnitude.
And then he finishes with this question.
He says to the public, how does YouTube monetization work and what could Twitter do better?
Talk about the transparency.
The transparency there is insane.
So he's telling you that he doesn't have a sufficient user-level understanding of what YouTube does for creators.
Which is quite an admission in public, especially for somebody who's running this company.
And that he's asking for your input.
And it's legitimate.
He's actually asking for your input.
It's real. Like, it's not for appearance.
Your actual input will determine, at least it could, what Twitter becomes.
And Twitter could be one of the most important parts of society.
And you get to be part of it.
So look at all the things you're learning.
Number one, did he prove that you don't need a marketing department all the time?
Yes, he did. Yes, he did.
So that's like a whole lesson in itself.
You just replaced the marketing department.
He's also showing you the new CEO move I talk about all the time, which is immediately establishing what you're about, like on day one, because that first impression becomes really sticky.
That's who you are forever.
He did that perfectly. Now you're seeing him collecting input from the customers in a very direct way, and he's doing two things here.
You might see one, but he's doing two.
The first thing he's doing is making sure he gets input.
So he's got input.
And the second thing he's doing is making you feel buy-in.
How much do you feel like you're legitimately part of the process, or better, people that you trust on Twitter, you see them making suggestions, right?
And they're smart people in many cases.
When you see smart people on Twitter making smart suggestions to Musk...
Even though it's not your suggestion, you feel like you're part of the process, right?
Because you could have. You could have made that suggestion.
So knowing that he has this huge public relations problem, because half of the world is going to hate him no matter what he does, now the news is reporting he's meeting with the NAACP and the ADL, and that apparently they like him.
Imagine that. That's the news.
He managed the news.
The news is telling you that the groups that would be most concerned got a good response from him.
He's doing everything right.
So you're learning publicity, marketing, you're learning how to take user requirements, you're learning how to get buy-in.
You're learning how to communicate.
You're learning how to tweet.
You're learning social media as it relates to a company.
You're seeing his business model being created in real time.
So he's struggling between subscription and advertiser and what balance and what features.
Oh my God!
Oh my God!
Is this useful? You don't realize how much smarter we're all getting just by getting to see the transparency of this process.
So the brilliance that is coming out of all of this is just stunning.
Mike Cernovich had an interesting note on a tweet.
He said that it's not being treated as newsworthy, that Twitter had entire teams that coordinated messaging with the UN says it all.
And he goes on.
And he says, how is that not a big deal?
And he speculates.
He goes, exactly. New York Times, Washington Post probably has the same internals team doing propaganda.
So Cernovich is speculating that the major media might not be hitting this story hard because they might also have deep connections at Twitter, which was, you know, managing the news, if you will.
And I don't know if that's true.
It's reasonable speculation.
But I'm more interested in the fact of why we decide some things are news and some are not.
Have I told you before that the New York Times and the Washington Post and really not much else, a few others, they make news.
And by make news, I mean they look into all the things that are happening and then they tell you what things are important.
But is it because they are important?
That's what I used to think.
I used to think that if it's on the news, it's because it's important.
And everybody notices it, and then everybody puts it on the news.
Nothing like that is happening.
When it comes to politics, they decide what the news is.
It's literally just a decision by people who want to manage the public.
And they've decided that this is not a big story.
That Twitter was...
You know, being influenced directly and personally and in an ongoing way by the United Nations to make sure their messaging was compatible with what the UN wanted, which is the scariest thing you could ever hear.
Now, why is that not a big story?
Because the media decided it wasn't.
I suppose Fox News could decide, and they're big enough that they could make that a story, but it would never cross over from Fox News, would it?
Except that other people would, you know, mock them for having the only stories about it or something.
So this is one of those cases where you can tell yourself you really see that the media assigns your opinion.
Because whatever you're worked up about today, I guarantee it was on the news.
And the things you're not worked up about, they were not on the news.
The news decided what to run, and they could pick or ignore whatever they wanted.
And then you get worked up over it and you think, oh, I'm worked up over that important thing.
No. You're not worked up over the important thing.
You're worked up over what the news wanted you to be worked up over.
You're completely manipulated.
As am I, right?
I'm not outside that system.
I'm just as manipulated as you are.
Just be aware of it.
So that was a two-level excellent tweet by Sertovich, because it really gets to something deeper than just the news.
All right. Tim Ryan, running for Ohio Senate, had...
He had this statement to say in public.
He said, imagine...
This is his competitor.
He says, imagine if J.D. Vance was your teenage kid and you caught him hanging around with people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, and Alex Jones.
To which I tweeted, imagine being a Democrat candidate...
I said it one day before Election Day because I didn't know what day it was.
And the best argument you have is that your opponent values diversity.
That's his argument.
My opponent values diverse people.
Because here's what he didn't say.
He didn't say, J.D. Vance refuses to meet with black people.
He didn't say that.
Because I assume that J.D. Vance has met with all of his constituents.
But he's also meeting with some people who have opinions that Tim Ryan does not share.
So he's actually criticizing.
I mean, this is how empty their entire approach is, the Democrats.
They are so empty that this close to election, a strong approach, is that J.D. Vance values diverse opinions.
Because that's what I heard.
I didn't hear J.D. Vance agrees with Marjorie Taylor Greene on all things.
Did you hear that?
Nobody's even claiming that.
What I didn't hear is J.D. Vance agrees with all the things that Alex Jones has said.
I never heard that, because I'm sure he doesn't.
If you're interacting with people who have different opinions but not adopting them, you're doing what we want you to do, aren't you?
Do you want a politician who doesn't interact with people who have different opinions?
I mean, this is the craziest, weakest, emptiest attack I've ever seen.
But even more than that, I'm going a little hard on it because about once a year, or maybe twice a year, I have to say this in public.
And so I'm going to say it again.
I assert my complete right to associate with anybody I want.
And when you don't like it, fuck you.
And that's the end of the conversation.
I'm not going to adopt the views of any bad people, necessarily.
I might. But that's not why that happens.
I interact with people you don't like.
And if you don't like that, fuck you.
And there's nothing else to say.
Would you agree there's nothing else to the conversation?
This is one of those conversations where fuck you, that's the whole argument.
It's the whole argument. There's nothing else.
I have no nuance to add to that.
Just fuck you. That's it.
Fuck you. I'm gonna associate with whoever I want, whenever I want, right in front of you.
Don't care. To make my point, Watch me prove my point with a segue that was probably created in heaven.
It's so amazing. Adam Kinzinger is right about this.
So there you go.
Adam Kinzinger, somebody that I would not agree with normally, but I associate with his following comments because if you don't like me associating and agreeing with Adam Kinzinger on a specific policy, fuck you.
Fuck you. But I know you don't.
None of you have that problem, I'm sure.
But here he is being right about something.
Apparently there's some aircraft that the National Guard uses to track the drug shipments, and fentanyl in particular, and it's going to be retired, and I guess Kinzinger is one of the few people who actually can fly that plane.
I didn't realize he was in the National Guard.
Kinzinger is still in the National Guard?
He is? All right, credit him.
So can we say that without...
Can we give a full-throated patriot?
Now, I hate what he did with January 6th, right?
But he's a member of the National Guard.
And he's calling out a huge problem that this aircraft will be retired and then they won't be able to easily interdict fentanyl.
So, good job, Adam Kinzinger, on this particular issue, which also suggests that the administration is not that serious about fentanyl, because this plan is critical to their success of capturing stuff, and Kinzinger's fighting to keep this funded.
So, good for you. Hope that works.
Let's talk about Trump.
Trump labeled Governor DeSantis with a nickname.
He called him Ron de Sanctimonious.
How many of you had to look up the word sanctimonious?
I did. I did.
Yeah, I did. So if it makes it any easier for you to admit it, I am a professional writer.
I do it for a living.
I never use that word.
So I had to look it up.
So in case you don't know what it means, like me, basically somebody who's showing a big show of religion or piety, you know, being the right person, but being somewhat hypocritical.
So somebody who's trying to be holier than you, but they're sort of a hypocrite.
Does any of that seem to fit Ron DeSantis?
Does that feel like a kill shot?
It does not. Now, how many of you were happy that he said that?
How many of you said, oh, I'm glad he did that?
None, right? Zero.
So, given that none of you were happy with that, almost none of you, let's say 95%, if you were not happy with it, was it a mistake?
You weren't happy with it, but was it a mistake?
Go. It gets a little more complicated now.
Let me hark back to my Mark Ruffalo comment.
Mark Ruffalo is not the one who should be commenting on business stuff, right?
That's not his domain. And so we should all be humble when we're commenting on somebody else's expertise, which we don't share.
Now, I always have a little concern when I criticize Trump for any of his persuasion-related stuff, because he became president, right?
I didn't. Whatever he does seems to work, even when you think it won't.
That's probably the most remarkable thing about his method, is that even people who support him think that's not going to work.
Well, that's not going to work. And then, weirdly, it works, for reasons that you don't imagine.
He sucks all the energy out, you know, whatever.
Here's what I thought. My first impression was, oh, that's a mistake.
That's a mistake. He just went after one of the most popular Republicans who's 100% successful, according to Republicans.
So on the surface, it's a mistake, wasn't it?
But did you notice it was the worst kill shot he's ever issued?
Is that an accident?
Is it an accident that the kill shot he used against DeSantis seemed to be designed not to wound him?
Right? It looked like a warning shot.
Shot over the bow, exactly.
That was a brushback pitch.
The brushback pitch, he just told the world, you can run against me in the primary, but it's not going to be pretty.
Once you think about it a little bit, you realize it was just a brushback pitch.
It wasn't really about DeSantis at all.
I'd be surprised if he thinks DeSantis does a poor job.
I think he probably thinks DeSantis does a good job.
He's also quite aware that people are saying, hey, why shouldn't DeSantis have the top job?
So Trump knows he has to knock DeSantis down a notch, but I think he was just telling the world he's willing to do it.
Which is actually useful.
He was basically saying, yeah, I'm not going to leave him alone.
I'm going to go after him.
But he went after him so softly that it's easy to pull back.
It was such a soft brushback that makes it look like it was an intentional, just a warning shot, just to let you know that he's the big shark, and if you go swimming with the big shark, you're going to get bit.
So I started hating it.
And then the more I thought about it, it's like, oh, God, he did it again.
He did it again. He did something that I immediately disliked, but the more I thought about it, it's like, shoot, that does move the energy in his direction in just a slight way.
Anyway, so always be humble when you're looking at Trump's persuasion because you never know exactly what he's up to.
Sometimes it's smarter than you think.
All right. As we head into the midterms...
How's everybody feeling? How's everybody feeling?
What do you think about the economy?
Think the economy will be right?
Be alright? Yeah, a lot of you are feeling good, but also nervous.
I don't know what's going to happen.
But I'll tell you one thing that might happen.
One thing that might happen is there's tons of scrutiny, and maybe we got way better at watching things.
So we might have the cleanest election we've ever had.
Like, that's possible, right?
Could be the cleanest one we've ever had, just because of so much extra energy watching things.
And there have been some changes.
There have been some changes that should reduce the amount of cheating, potentially.
But the other possibility...
That I don't discount at all is that the extra attention will end up finding some real serious fraud.
It could be on either side.
I'm not going to say it's going to be all Democrat.
Because here's my opinion.
The reason that we don't have elections that can be finished the same day is because we don't want it.
There's no other reason.
We obviously, we meaning both Democrats and Republicans, Each of them having control over individual states, it's very obvious that they want the option of cheating.
It's very obvious.
Because if either side didn't want the option of cheating, they would just make the option go away in their state.
Because there are places where the Republicans can design the system any way they want.
Right? Right?
Give me a fact check. There are states where the Republicans could have an Israeli type of system where it's all on paper, and it all happens in one room, the ballots never leave the room, you count them in the room with lots of witnesses, and then there's basically close to zero chance of fraud.
You don't think that one Republican state would have implemented something that's just fraud-free.
No. It's because everybody who controls elections in their own state wants the option of gaming the system.
What else could it be?
What else could it be?
If either side wanted the elections to be transparent and done on the first day, we have models to follow that are simple.
They're simple. Just what does Israel do?
And what do some other countries do?
Just do that. It works.
So you can eliminate the possibility that either side wants to fix this.
Does anybody disagree with that?
I'm not saying Republicans do anything except, you know, dick around the edges, you know, with voter ID and stuff, which is important.
But that's just dicking around the edges.
Yeah.
All right.
Let me make a case that everything's getting better even though we're low on diesel fuel.
Let me make a diesel fuel prediction.
Are you ready? So, apparently, if diesel fuel is limited, trucking will fall off and, you know, the supply chain will die.
And we don't have an obvious way to make enough to fix that.
I think we know about this problem far enough in advance that we'll get through it, like our other problems.
So if we know far enough in advance, trains and everything else, we're going to need to...
we'll probably make the adjustments.
Now, imagine, if you will, that...
The country just couldn't get products where it wanted because there's not enough diesel.
What would be the fallback?
Somebody builds an app where you can all be Uber for packages.
All it would take is an app that says, well, just take your van down to this dock.
We'll load you up with stuff, and you deliver it to the air, and you'll be covered with some temporary insurance or something like that.
If it were a national emergency where people were starving and stuff, we would just use regular cars and regular trucks.
Just people would bring their pickup truck and say, well, I can deliver some of this.
So it's one of those emergencies where if you had to, like you're actually starving and shit, we have other vehicles.
We don't have a shortage of vehicles that can transport stuff.
It would be an organizational Dunkirk-sized thing, but we can do it.
We'll get through it.
All right.
Is there anything that's going wrong?
I'm not even entirely sure that Ukraine is going wrong.
Are you?
Thank you.
And I don't even know what wrong looks like.
Because we don't know how it ends, but one potential ending is that Putin is weakened and Russia is no longer a thorn in our side and Ukraine is creating energy and food for everybody.
It's possible. We're going to have a huge bill to pay in terms of our borrowing to fund that war.
But Yeah, if you were going to guess, it does look like things are pretty bad over there and will stay that way and could turn into a nuclear war.
But I don't see it happening.
I feel like the signals of a potential nuclear war would be much stronger than they are.
So now it just looks like people bluffing each other.
So I don't spend really any time worrying about nuclear war.
I mean, that could change, but at the moment, it just looks like bluffing.
Alright, and then I hear other people say the real problem is that Russia and China and other countries will have their own currency, and then America's currency dominance will fall away, the dollar won't be worth something.
But I feel like we've been talking about that forever, haven't we?
Yeah, it just feels like we've been talking about that forever.
I don't know if that means it's about ready to happen, but I feel like that's another one of those Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters.
There's probably a way around it.
Can we get reparations from China for COVID? Well, have you heard the story that Russia has put together a case that the virus escaped from a Ukrainian lab That America backed?
And they've asked the UN to investigate it and they've given them a bunch of information?
Have you heard of that? Now, how many of you would say there's no chance that America was behind the virus?
In the comments. How many of you think there's no chance?
There's no chance that America was behind the virus?
Yeah, you're a little uncertain, aren't you?
Yep. In my opinion, it's entirely possible.
Entirely possible. I'm not even sure how I would put the odds on it.
I would say the odds that we have accurate information about the source of the virus are probably low.
Probably low. Now, obviously, the Wuhan lab looks like the obvious place.
But I'd like to hear what the Russians say.
Because if America released that virus and knew it, what would they do?
If America knew it released the virus, and it was already out there, and it knew, you know, nobody noticed it yet, but it's percolating, and they know it's going to percolate up, the first thing you do is you go infect some people next to the Wuhan lab.
That's what you do. You go infect some people in Wuhan.
Because then when it breaks out in Wuhan, everybody's going to say, oh, Wuhan!
So, if you tell me that the odds are, like, all pointing toward Wuhan being the source, I would say, not so much.
There are definitely strong signals.
But we live in a world in which that's the sort of thing that gets faked.
Like, it's in the category of things that people do lie about every time.
Like, every time. Whoever's country it was that released that virus, or whoever was responsible, don't you think you could rely on them lying?
So you know somebody's lying.
You just don't know who.
Yeah, Russia's been saying it since February, right?
Do prices return to previous levels when inflation comes back down?
That's not exactly how that works.
No. The answer is no.
What should happen is your paycheck should rise at some point, if you're working for the right company.
Your paycheck should rise to meet that, but I don't know if that's going to happen.
Yeah, pangolins have been maligned.
Do you remember when we were hearing the early theories about the virus and people were so confident about it?
The theories that turned out to be wrong?
Oh, definitely came from that wet market.
Oh, definitely. Oh, wet market.
Nope. Your coffee cup, somebody got their coffee with Scott Adams coffee cup while I'm live streaming.
Amazing. Somebody asked me at an event yesterday.
Actually, lots of people asked me this.
They asked me if I'm retired.
Because I guess I'm at that age where people just look at you and say, how's retirement?
Like, shit, do I look that old?
Well, that's the first question you're going to ask me is if I'm retired.
I don't like that. But I decided that I am retired.
But I'm modern and retired.
By modern retired, I mean I've simply stopped doing the things I found unpleasant that I did for money, and I do the things that I find pleasant.
It's still work. I was adding up how many hours per week I work now in my retirement.
It's about 40 hours a week.
So my retirement is 40 hours a week of work.
Which feels like retirement, because, you know, 60 to 70 would be more normal.
But 40 feels like vacation.
I'm usually done by, you know, if I start at 4 a.m., and I work seven days a week, right?
I'm done by 10 a.m., and I've done 40 hours a week, 42.
And that's just on the live stream, right?
Because I do a lot of prep for that.
So I'm still doing the cartoon, but my assistant is doing all of the drawing now.
So if you see any differences in the drawing, it's because a better artist is doing it.
So my assistant, who does the art now, is authorized to change the look of it a little bit, like the background, add a little background, and maybe some angles that I don't do, just because she's a better artist than I am.
All right. I need a time clock, because I've run too long.
Got an interesting message here.
All right.
I got a funny message, but I can't share it with you.
Sharon says, Scott, with all caps, do you feel guilty for falling for the fear hysteria of COVID? Would anybody like to answer Sharon for me?
This is an all caps.
Scott, do you feel guilty for falling for the fear hysteria of COVID? Huh.
I wonder what's going to happen to poor Sharon.
This is the sort of situation where in the past...
People have seen me have a reaction.
Except I don't believe she's real.
I think she's just goading me.
So I'm not going to respond to that.
But Sharon, I'm sure there's somebody in the comments who will share with you the word that you have identified yourself as, and I don't need to use it.
So Sharon, you dug your own situation.
I don't want to say grave, that sounded violent.
Yeah, I think she's just kidding around.
I don't think that's real. I've blocked her.
I didn't block her. All right, is there anything I missed?
Any stories I missed that you need a reaction to?
Wake up, Scott. Check out this jingle for the simultaneous sip.
Send that to me somewhere else so I can see it.
I won't be able to go back in the comments easily.
Baby troll, what's that mean?
You still feeling better?
Yes. So let me continue with my update.
I have had nothing but excellent days all day long From the day that I stopped taking my blood pressure meds.
Nothing but excellent days.
Mentally, 100%.
100%.
Physically, my knees are hurting a little bit from overuse.
But otherwise, my body is, you know, it's like 20 years younger.
Yeah. I mean, I could exercise for hours.
It's just, everything's fixed.
And it was just that.
Yeah, I forget what kind.
I don't think I had a beta blocker.
I think I said it was a beta blocker and then somebody corrected me.
So I'm not going to name the specific med because I don't want to get sued for making claims that they can debunk or something.
Alright. It was a steroid?
I don't think it was. It wasn't a steroid.
Your coffee mugs will be arriving soon.
Thank you, Henry. High BP will jack your cognition.
Jack your cognition as in improve it?
So did I tell you my reframe for blood pressure?
Now, I don't think this has scientific backing.
So this is like just a fun speculative thing, right?
Is it a coincidence that all the things that are good for blood pressure...
Are things that manage your energy, right?
But basically, if you can lower your energy or expend your energy, so you can expend it by exercise or you can lower it by meditation, for example.
So it seems to be, and this is just a hypothesis, that as you age, your body does not naturally off-gas your energy.
Meaning that if you're a child and you have high energy, nothing will stop you from moving.
You'll just get real active until you burn off your energy and fall asleep into a dead sleep.
If you're an adult, just because a normal adult lifestyle doesn't involve moving much, depending on your job, but you sit in the chair a lot.
And I miss my workout or something like that.
So I feel as if high blood pressure is really energy That doesn't have a way to get out.
Does that reframe make sense to you?
Because it also tells you what to do.
It tells you if you keep your body healthy enough that you can exercise, then you've got a good chance of managing your blood pressure.
Yeah, follow the energy.
Exactly. Follow the energy.
Dr. Oz has entered the room.
Yeah, so I'm not going to say that you should take that reframe and ignore your doctors.
I'm just saying that it so clearly explains everything that you need to do and not do just by energy.
And there are a whole bunch of things in which if you reframe it as energy, you start understanding it.
Remember when I first reframed Trump as energy?
Like you were thinking in terms of fact-checking and policies.
But when I reframed it in terms of he's an energy monster and he moves the energy where you want it, then suddenly everything makes sense, right?
All the things are a little confusing.
It suddenly comes into focus when energy is the frame.
I feel like this might be another one of those.
We'll see. Oh, I just realized I did something clever.
If I have a stroke, because everybody's teasing me because, you know, I got vaccinated originally, people saying I'm going to get a stroke.
But now that I've publicly gone off my blood pressure meds, if I have a stroke, you're not going to know why.
I've ruined your fun.
I'm sorry. Now if I have a stroke, it's because I'm off my blood pressure meds.
So I've ruined your anecdotal happiness, should I have a tragic event.
Your anecdotal happiness will be way down.
Claude Adams will not be as funny.
It won't be funny. People won't laugh at it.
So that was accidental, but it was a stroke of genius.
A stroke of genius, exactly.
Okay. No one here wants you to be harmed?
Probably no one here. But there are definitely some people who would have mocked me, my dead bones, if I died.
Definitely. And I don't begrudge them.
They're fun. You know, if I'm dead, what's the difference?
All right. Could you have lowered the dose?
Yes. And the lower dose did not affect my blood pressure.
So it didn't help.
It was actually raised recently because it wasn't changing the blood pressure.
And by the way, I'm not the person telling you you shouldn't take blood pressure meds because apparently there are a bunch of them I tried one of them, two of them actually, and the two of them I tried didn't give me a good result.
That's all I know. I don't know about the other five or six or whatever.
Do I eat grapefruit? No.
It's weird. What is your BP? It ranges now without blood pressure the week after.
It ranges between perfect 120 over 80 and 140 over 90 something in the afternoon usually.
And as I said to my doctor, I'm not aware of any studies that say somebody with even the high end of my blood pressure should be on blood pressure meds.
Which is not to say I shouldn't be.
I was simply challenging whether there's any medical, scientific backing for it.
And my doctor was not willing to say there was.
Because I did enough research to know there isn't.
There isn't. It's another one of those big pharma things.
Now, I have to be really careful.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't take blood pressure meds.
I'm saying, let me be very careful about that.
That's between you and your doctor.
All right. What time do you suggest I take my first bong rip today?
Well, I think you've wasted a few minutes asking the question, so no time like now.
140 isn't necessarily high.
140 isn't necessarily high.
Yeah, I think that...
So here's the question.
If you have a stroke, it's not just because of your blood pressure, correct?
A number of factors have to be also true at the same time.
Like your...
Yeah, you need some kind of a thing going on.
Now, in my case, I'm a vegetarian for, you know, 40 years.
More recently, a pescatarian.
My body mass index is exactly where it should be.
I'm like right in the middle of the good range.
I exercise daily.
I don't drink alcohol or smoke tobacco.
And there are no strokes in my family background.
No strokes in my family background.
Now, can somebody tell me that my blood pressure at 140 is dangerous?
It might be. I'm not saying it isn't, just being real clear.
I just don't think there's any evidence to show that me as a specific individual with a specific lifestyle I just don't know.
Here's what I think. I've always believed that my body runs hot.
Runs hot. And what I mean by that is that when I go to sleep, I wake up sweating.
Right? Like, my natural body just runs hot.
I'd rather be in a cool room than a warm room.
I can't do work over 76 degrees if the room is over 76.
You know, my body just runs hot.
Now, you've also noticed that when you do a lot of thinking, You notice you can break a sweat just thinking hard?
Has anybody ever done that?
Yeah. Your brain actually uses a lot of energy.
So I have a theory that my brain draws more from my body than other people.
It could have to do with something about my physical size compared to my brain size.
Because I think, I'm not sure about this, but I think my brain size Is this about the same as any adult male, right?
Even if I'm 5'8", isn't my brain about the same as a 6'4 guy?
Is that true?
Somebody says no. And maybe it's the wrinkles, not the weight, right?
All right, well, whatever. So forget about that point, because I don't have any backing for that point.
But I feel as though my brain draws more from my body than most people.
I just feel like I run hot.
And I don't know that that's bad for me.
Right? I don't think it's bad for me that I run hot as long as my body is, you know, I'm taking care of all the other lifestyle things.
I feel like I could run hot and be optimized.
I don't know. Just a theory.
Somebody says that's not how it works, and I agree.
That is definitely not how it works.
But it's more of a metaphorical sense that I say I run hot.
The safer way to say it is, do I have the same risk at 140 blood pressure as somebody else?
And I don't think so.
I just don't know. My suspicion is I don't, but that could get me killed, of course.
