Episode 1920 Scott Adams: Let's Use The News To Amuse. Hope You Have A Special Coffee Mug Like Some
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Content:
Twitter permanent bans
CNN trashing democrats
Voting system transparency, election integrity
Election cheating approved by both parties
Convicted for killing her rapist and escaping
Marriage and balance of power
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the most specialist coffee with Scott Adams of all time.
It's normally the highlight of civilization, but somehow, with the help of the amazing Erica, we've taken it to a new level.
That's right. Today's simultaneous sip has a little something special for some of us.
Now, these are already sold out, so I don't know when we're gonna make more, but you're gonna see the official Coffee with Scott Adams mug As part of the simultaneous sip.
Now, you don't all have them, but you're still going to be part of the greatness.
Either way. And all you have to do to be part of this amazing moment we've been waiting for so long is you need a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Ta-da! I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go. If you were watching instead of listening on the podcast and wishing we weren't making slobbering sounds on your audio, well, sorry about that.
But I had to show people that the bottom of the mug says, ah, every mug should have a little message on the bottom.
So yes, this is the simultaneous sip official Coffee with Scott Adams mug.
It's all here. It's beautiful.
It's exactly the right size and heft.
And I have to say, I have to say, it's actually the best physical mug I've ever had.
That's actually true.
It's really hard to find just the right shape and size and heft.
This is actually perfect.
So I'll probably get a few more.
All right. You have to make mic sounds to desensitize people.
Okay. Well, did you all see on Twitter that Kathy Griffin was suspended, I think, permanently from Twitter for impersonating another person?
And I don't know if impersonating another person is exactly what gets you kicked off, but if you're impersonating Elon Musk, you're definitely going to get kicked off.
So it took about five minutes for somebody to produce a meme of Elon Musk holding a severed Kathy Griffin head and going like this.
It was like five minutes from news to meme.
I think it's a new record.
Now, I don't think it's a joke that the right meme's better than the left.
That's actually true, right?
Or do I just see maybe my perception is sort of filtered wrong?
Is it true? Because it definitely feels true.
It feels very true.
Strange. But also, oh, this is sad.
Ethan Klein got suspended, too.
Ethan Klein.
He was one of my mascots.
Aww. I hate it when one of my mascots gets kicked off of Twitter.
So sad. So sad!
All right, well, honestly, I have mixed opinions about this.
Remember when Kathy Griffin did this severed head of Trump?
And I defended her.
I defended her.
And still do. Because, you know, joke's a joke.
You might want to warn somebody away from that kind of joke, but I'm a little bit more flexible on humor than most people are, probably because I do it for a living.
I don't know. This one's an edge case to me.
I feel like a warning would have been good enough.
What do you think? Do you think a warning would have been the better play?
Because here's why.
Hold on. Let me make my argument before you have your final opinion.
Elon Musk's biggest challenge right now is to prove that he's going to support free speech for both sides.
Am I right? That's his biggest challenge.
He has to show that he's creating a platform that works for both sides.
That's almost impossible.
Like I said, well, I think he can do it, actually, but it's going to be really hard.
I think that if you kick off two famous lefties for speech, now you could say it's for impersonating somebody, and that's part of the terms of service.
The terms of service very clearly say if you don't identify yourself as a parody, Very clearly that, you know, you could get kicked off.
But here's the thing. Were they really not identified as a parody?
I mean, really? Now, I get that they didn't have a, you know, an actual notice on them.
But you could see their actual Twitter account.
And probably within a minute, you probably saw comments saying it wasn't real.
And I don't know that it did that much damage.
As someone who has been impersonated a number of times, it happens to public figures, I've been impersonated quite a few times.
And it's not the thing I go the hardest on.
Like there are some things I'm, you know, like fentanyl, for example.
Like I'm a total hard ass on that.
But this is a little bit more in the area of fun.
So I'm really, really flexible when somebody's just having fun.
But this is sort of an edge case, isn't it?
Were they just having fun, or were they trying to hurt Elon Musk?
What do you think? Actually, let me ask you.
Do you think they were just having fun, both Kathy Griffin and...
Well, let me tell you what Ethan Klein did.
He changed his name on Twitter to Elon Musk, and then he tweeted a bunch of pro-Jeffrey Epstein stuff as if he were doing it in Musk's name.
Is that just having fun?
Is that having fun? It's really...
Here's why this is more of a gray area than you think.
If something like that happened to you, that's not cool.
So let me agree with you.
If any of you had that happen to you, get impersonated and defamed like that, that's not cool.
That's not cool at all.
But here's what most of you don't experience.
Being famous. Famous people just have to sort of get over it.
You know what I mean? Like, you can't do what I do and be super sensitive about what people are saying about you.
Right? You've got to be a little bit flexible when you're in this line of business.
But Elon Musk isn't exactly in my line of business.
He's a business person.
He's trying to run a legitimate business.
So, this challenges, honestly, this challenges every one of our Freedom versus badness, you know, borders.
And I have to say that I would slightly disagree with Musk on both of these suspensions.
And let me be clear, I don't like Ethan Klein.
He came after me on Twitter, and he rose to the level of mascot, which is the highest level of, you know, asshole.
But I'm going to defend him because I like free speech.
I'm going to defend him because I like free speech.
I don't disagree with it as a business decision necessarily.
Not necessarily.
But I'm a little bit more flexible than the rest of you because I am a target of this kind of attack.
And if you're a daily target of that kind of attack, you know, people impersonating you and starting rumors and stuff, I don't know.
I think you just got to Accept a little bit of that as part of the job.
A little bit of it. I would have preferred, here's what I'd prefer.
I would prefer that Musk suspended them permanently, like apparently happened, but then I would give them an amnesty with the group that he's putting together.
So remember, even though they're permanently suspended, they now join a group of people who have been permanently suspended for years for all kinds of different things.
Now, if Musk is putting together this advisory board or some kind of a content group, if they're going to look at all of them, then I'm okay with that.
Then the suspension makes perfect sense.
Because it's that group he's putting together who should decide if you're not really suspended.
It actually makes sense to me that the first thing you do is follow the terms of service exactly as they're written.
If you follow the terms of service exactly as they're written, they're suspended.
It's very clear. The terms of service say that unambiguously.
You're gone if you impersonate somebody.
But I feel like here's the difference, though.
If a famous comedian impersonates somebody on Twitter as an obvious prank, is that really the same?
Is it really? Like, I don't think it is.
I would like to see the content moderation board or whoever they are, I'd like to see them reverse these.
Because what would be more useful than making an example of them, but still in the unfavoring freedom?
That's the ultimate solution.
The ultimate solution is to completely ban them, as has happened, put them in the same process as all the other people banned for other reasons, but I would bring them back.
Because I think the example is more important than some technical terms of service thing that got violated.
What do you think of that? What do you think of bringing them back with some other people who maybe were vile for different reasons?
But just give everybody one grand amnesty.
You don't have to do it a second time, right?
At the same time you bring them back, you could also say, we're never going to do this again, right?
You could bring both Griffin and Klein back and just say, you know, we want to use this to publicize the fact that this is a zero, going forward, this is zero flexibility.
But we'll give you one grand amnesty just to communicate, just to communicate our priorities.
I think that would be a smart move.
You know what's really dumb?
Giving Elon Musk business advice.
It's like the dumbest thing you can do in public, isn't it?
It's sort of like teaching Taylor Swift how to sing or something.
Let me tell Taylor Swift how she should sing, because I'm basing this on my listening skills.
Based on my listening skills, Taylor Swift should make her music a little bit different.
It would just sound ridiculous.
But yet we all feel like we can run Twitter better than somebody who created Tesla and SpaceX.
So a little bit of humility goes a long way in these situations.
I try as hard as I can to muster any humility I can muster.
It's a lot of work for me.
I would like to, yet again, praise CNN for successfully finding the middle ground.
And this is a way bigger deal than you think.
I've been tracking the trend to see if it's real.
It's real. I now declare that CNN's leadership meant what they said.
They literally meant they're going to try to find the reasonable middle, and they've done it.
They've absolutely done it.
Because here we are the day before the midterms, and you look at their site, and they're thrashing Democrats.
The Democrats are totally being taken out to the woodshed by CNN the day before the midterms.
That's actually happening.
And how good is that for the country?
It's really good.
It's really good for the country.
So the things that CNN is saying is that...
Oh, well, and just a perfect example.
During the Trump administration, how many times did I tell you, well, Stephen Collinson has written another anti-Trump article opinion piece for CNN? And that I would mock...
How ridiculously over-the-top his criticism was, because it was just no attempt at fairness whatsoever.
Well, today, again, the day before the midterms, Stephen Collinson writes an opinion piece, except instead of being the chief Trump basher, and you could always throw Trump into this, right?
It'd be really easy to make Trump the story the day before the midterms.
You could do that easily. But he didn't.
Stephen Collison has said, quote, in his piece, here's where the Democrats are.
He's quoting a Republican.
He's quoting Rona McDaniel.
And I guess Rona McDaniel said, quote, here's where the Democrats are.
They're inflation deniers, they're crime deniers, and they're education deniers.
Okay, now it's one thing, It's one thing if you show that the other side is trashing you.
That's fair. But it's not really as fair as you could be, right?
It goes further. And then quotes Hillary Rosen, a longtime Democrat supporter.
So now you're going to have a Republican opinion as well as a Democrat opinion.
Now that's fair. Said on the same show that her party had misjudged the mood of the electorate.
And says, quote, I'm a loyal Democrat, but I'm not happy.
I just think that we are, we did not listen to voters in this election, and I think we're going to have a bad night.
No, McDaniel.
It's ruining McDaniel. Isn't that interesting?
Stephen Collinson, the main Trump basher, quotes a prominent Republican and a prominent Democrat saying that the Democrats just totally screwed the pooch.
And it's actually too late.
Isn't that amazing?
Does that, like, blow your mind a little bit?
It does. Now, here's something that blew my mind, like, really hard last night.
So I'm going through the channels.
Just going through the channels, I hit CNN, and I say to myself, I think I'll see how long it takes before I feel a sickness in my stomach.
Because you know what it feels like when you watch CNN in the old days?
You'd turn it on, and you'd wait for somebody to say something that just made you sick.
Because it was just a lie, and it was just propaganda.
And it was just bad for the country.
And you'd sit there, and you're like, God!
God! God!
And you'd have to turn it off.
You couldn't even watch it for a minute, because it was so not news.
So yesterday, in the evening, one of the primetime shows, it's a group discussion of a bunch of people you'd recognize from CNN, and they're talking about Trump.
And I turn it on, like, oh, here it is.
Oh, God, it's going to be fine people hoax and drinking bleach and, you know, the racist this and the things he said.
And I watched it for about 10 minutes.
And they talked about how skilled Trump was without any hedging.
What? Several of them talked about how skilled he was, that his persuasion, his ability to clear a field, his ability to put a hurt on a competitor, his ability to take out DeSantis, you know, should not be underestimated.
They basically just went skill plus.
Now, they did not agree with his politics, like his policies.
Not one way or the other.
But that's what the news is supposed to be.
That's exactly what I want in my news.
Now, they didn't give him a free pass.
They didn't give Trump a free pass.
But the few things they said that were a little bit negative, you would have agreed with.
You probably would have said, yeah, that's fair.
Like just basic, ordinary stuff.
They actually pulled it off with a group panel.
I can't tell you how big this is.
Here's why.
As long as CNN supported the Democrats no matter what they did, the Democrats could gaslight the country on absolutely anything.
Anything.
But as long as it's only MSNBC and some still crazy sites that are going on about things, as long as CNN exists and actually gives you the actual news, and it appears that they can do it, it looks like they can actually pull that off.
I was very skeptical.
But congratulations, they did it.
They've changed everything.
Everything about two movies on one screen doesn't work anymore.
CNN was the key that unlocked the whole two-movie problem.
They just unlocked it.
You now have a place you can go to, and I hate that I'm giving a commercial for CNN, but I feel like I owe it to them, because I've been shitting on them for five years.
Have I not? Have you not seen me just absolutely just defecate on them every day for six years or five years or whatever?
And they deserved it. Yeah.
They deserved every bit of that.
And now that they're performing in a way that I think is a service to the country, thank you.
I'm actually grateful for it.
So you get my full support if they keep going the way they're going.
By the way, they're still not as fun to watch as Fox News, if I can be balanced here for a moment.
Fox News is just better produced and has better on-air personalities.
I won't say talent, because Fox News goes for a little more entertainment slash news, which is a real good balance, I think.
I get the balance pretty well.
Yeah. All right, enough about that.
Rasmussen has some last-minute polling before the midterms.
And it says, interesting that more Democrats than Republicans or unaffiliated voters have voted early.
I was wondering if that would matter.
Does it matter?
The more Democrats have voted early.
Because I don't think that will change the fact that the overnight voting or the next day voting could, you know, change the results.
So we're sort of back in that situation, aren't we?
All right, here's my take on election rigging.
Now, I tweeted this, but I've never said it this clearly before.
You ready? Both sides, presumably.
Now, this is speculation and assumption, just being a smart person who lives in the world and knows how the world works.
Okay? So, I can't prove anything I'm about to say.
But I think it's just obvious.
It's just obvious. And it goes like this.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to fix the transparency of the voting system.
Would anybody disagree with that?
Do you disagree? No.
Anybody disagree? Because there are states that the Republicans control, and there are places where Democrats control.
Neither of them have done fuck all to make the election absolutely bulletproof.
Because they know how to do it.
They know how to do it. Just do it, paper ballots, keep them in one room, count them immediately in the same room, have multiple witnesses.
It's really that easy.
You know, Israel does it. You could do it easily.
Now, don't you think that if one party could do it, it would be like a real competitive, like, advantage?
You'd say, hey, why can't you fix your elections in your state?
You see that we've done it.
Wouldn't you suspect that the Democrats were all cheating?
If the Republicans could make all their elections bulletproof, and you could tell, you'd just look at them and go, okay, there's no way you could cheat in that system, just like Israel.
You look at the Israel system and you go, ah, yeah, there really isn't a way to cheat.
Not with that much transparency.
So, clearly, both sides want to cheat in their own areas that they control.
Does anybody disagree with that?
It's clear that both want to game the rules...
They want to game the rules, the legal rules, within the legal system.
Democrats did it best in 2020, legally.
They gamed the system, but all legally.
Democrats are trying to do the same thing, I suppose, all legally.
You know, and then you've got all this weird gerrymandering.
It's all legal. The gerrymandering is the most fucked up thing in the whole world, and it's completely legal, right?
So you have an election in which rigging and fuckery are accepted parts by both parties.
I'll call it the fuckery because some of it is completely legal and just clever.
But some of it clearly is illegal activity.
Clearly. But I just don't know that any of it has risen to a level of changing any elections.
I don't know. That's the part I don't know.
So here's my take.
Whatever the result is, I will accept them as quickly as I accepted the Biden presidency, which is the moment it was called.
As soon as Biden was called the winner, I congratulated the other team.
And I never changed my mind.
Which is independent from the question of whether any rigging happened.
But do you know what my opinion is about Biden's legitimacy under the unproven speculative assumption that the election was rigged?
In my opinion, he's an absolutely, completely legitimate president.
That's my view. Because we built a system in which both sides are okay with cheating.
Am I wrong? Both sides are okay with cheating.
Clearly. Because one side could easily just make it cheat-proof.
If neither does it, if neither makes it cheat-proof, it's obvious that they both think they have an advantage in their own little domain that they control.
Now, Is this a...
There's an Elon Musk tweet.
To independent-minded voters...
Here, I'm just going to interrupt because I just saw this.
Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties.
Therefore, I recommend voting for a Republican Congress given that the president is...
Good Lord, did he actually say that?
Okay, that's not cool.
You know, honestly, that's not cool.
Is that fake? Is that real?
Can somebody tell me if that's real?
Does that look real? Read it again?
So basically, he's promoting mixed government, right?
He's just promoting a mixed government.
Now, a lot of people say that.
I just don't think he should.
I feel like his job as chief Twitter boss, I don't feel like he should say that the day before the election, do you?
He has free speech, so of course he can.
I just feel like it wasn't the right play for his business model.
And the reason is that it says, vote Republican, but it doesn't favor Republicans.
But nobody's going to get that nuance, right?
If you read specifically what he said, He's in favor of a mixed government.
But to get there, if you have to vote Republican to get there, nobody's going to take that as being balanced.
That will not look balanced to anybody on the left.
I don't know. No, it was really...
Okay.
So let me finish my point.
Okay. I assume that this election, like all of our prior elections, will have some fuckery in it.
Some legal, maybe some not.
I don't know how big, I don't know if it would change the result, but I'm going to accept the election when it's called.
And I won't ask you to do it, so I'm not trying to persuade you.
I'm just telling you my thinking so that when you see it, you'll understand.
Because cheating is just built into the system now, and both sides have accepted it.
That's my opinion. Cheating is built into the system.
It's probably in the 2% level, probably just in a few places.
Maybe those change the election.
It might change the result.
I don't know if we'll ever know.
If we never know, and elections are always close, oh, you want to hear a really good conspiracy theory?
I don't know if you've ever heard this one before, because I just made it up.
So maybe somebody had this one already.
So this is just totally fun speculation.
Just total conspiracy theory stuff, okay?
Just for fun. If you were the powers behind the curtain, just imagine that they exist, and you wanted to control the presidency, the best way you would do it Would you make sure that your candidate had a landslide win?
Well, if you could, you'd probably do that.
But suppose you couldn't guarantee that your team would have a landslide win and you wanted to do it by cheating.
The first thing you'd have to do is manipulate the country until the election was so close that the 2% or so you could manipulate by cheating would actually make a difference.
Do you find it suspicious that our elections are always so close?
Does that coincidence some...
Does that seem weird to you?
How in the world could they always be so close?
Really? Let me toss you a really on this one.
Every year, our highly divided country is split right down the middle.
Basically right down the middle to a statistical tie, right?
If it were poll numbers instead of an actual election, wouldn't it be a statistical tie or very close, right?
Now, what are the odds that that happens year after year just for the presidency?
This doesn't happen for the lower races, right?
All of the lower races are a mixed bag, or they follow the population, right?
If it's a Democrat area, the Democrat wins, of course.
But why is it that no matter what happens, the presidency is within that margin of error, few points situation.
Doesn't that feel like the powers that be have to manipulate things to look like a tie so that no matter which way it goes, the public isn't surprised?
Right? No matter which way this election goes, let's say the next election for president, no matter which way the presidency goes, You won't be surprised.
You know, people are going to claim fraud if their team doesn't win.
But you won't be surprised no matter which way it goes, right?
Am I right? Nothing would surprise you because it's always manipulated to be even.
Now, do you think that any powers that be, do you think that's possible?
Do you think it's possible to control enough of the media and enough of the argument, enough of the press, and enough of the polling?
You'd have to control the polling as well.
Do you think they could control enough of that to guarantee that the elections are always neck and neck?
Well, let me ask you this.
What would be one way to test the theory?
Here's how you could test it.
You could find an election in which you had one strong candidate and one that was obviously just a fucking moron.
And that's what the Biden versus Trump election was.
That was it. That was your test case.
They ran a successful, strong, sitting president against a fucking moron.
If that's not telling you that the system is rigged, what's it take?
Let me test your...
Here's just a little mental test for you.
Do you think that you could run John Fetterman...
Let's say Fetterman loses the Senate.
I don't know if he will. Let's say he does.
You don't think that the Democrats could run John Fetterman in his current health against a perfectly healthy Trump, and it would be neck and neck?
Okay, that's not a pun.
When I said neck and neck, fill in your own jokes.
You jerks!
You jerks! Am I right?
I'll bet you they could run Fetterman and it would be, on election day, you wouldn't know who was going to win.
Right? Do you need any more evidence that there's no democracy going on here or not?
I don't know exactly what's going on, but it's nothing like a democracy where people are voting and paying their best person and any of that.
What it looks like is a system where we're manipulated into a tie, and then somebody behind the curtain decides who wins, and then we go, damn, we were so close this time.
So close. Now, I'm not saying that's what's happening.
I'm saying it looks exactly like it.
And I don't have another explanation for why we could have this coincidence time after time.
And that even Biden could get elected.
Even Biden. I mean, really?
Really? You know, in hindsight, it will just look ridiculous.
I think we got used to any level of craziness because you're living in it.
You know, you can get used to anything.
But as soon as there's a little distance...
And we look back and we see that Biden was elected when we knew exactly what we were getting.
Everybody knew. There was no mystery there.
All right. So Musk said that he's going to monetize all the content, not tweets themselves, but he'll monetize content on Twitter.
And there were some amazing exchanges of somebody informing him how much they made on YouTube.
And somebody made the claim, I don't know if this is true, but I just saw it on Twitter, that YouTube gives creators 55% of ad revenue.
Is that right? Is that right?
Does anybody know? I actually get revenue from YouTube, and I don't know.
You think so?
I don't know. I know locals is a much higher percentage to the creators, but that's a subscription model, so that makes sense.
So Musk says we can beat that.
So Musk could compete with YouTube on percentage to the content creators, to which I say to myself, you have my interest.
Is there any reason that you couldn't imagine 100% of all digital content being released on Twitter alone?
That's easy to imagine, isn't it?
Can't you imagine that even a streaming movie would just be released on Twitter?
You know, maybe you don't even need your own streaming service.
Do you? Now, I don't think they have the back end to do that yet, but it's all doable.
I mean, they would know how.
They've got the financial backing to do it.
They can do it. Yeah.
So the competition now for content on social media just got interesting because YouTube was close to the only game in town, even though Rumble is a serious competitor now.
But still, you had to do YouTube at the same time, didn't you?
I've seen a few people who are using YouTube just as the advertisement for Rumble.
You know, they'll do a teaser.
I think a few people do that now, right?
All right. So that would be interesting.
It's easy to imagine that Twitter could be the place that you get all digital content.
Everything from books to comics.
All right, let me ask you this.
Suppose I said I will take Dilbert out of all newspapers, and the only place you could ever read it would be on Twitter.
But, you know, I'd have to get some kind of, you know, content revenue sharing deal with Twitter to do that.
What about that? Because I would actually be open to that.
That's a possibility. It's just take it completely out of newspapers and only put it in one place.
Because here's the thing.
Newspapers, even though my income is unusually high for the job I have, newspapers individually don't pay very much.
So one newspaper might pay...
$15 a week for Dilbert, so it's basically nothing.
So you need lots and thousands of newspapers.
But if you had just one entity, like Twitter, you wouldn't need...
I've got three quarters of a million followers on Twitter.
If 100,000 of them wanted to pay a dollar a month for whatever I'm doing...
Suddenly that adds up pretty quickly.
I mean, it's over a million pretty quickly.
So I think he's got something here.
I think that the content, the revenue from content, if Twitter becomes competitive with the other places you can release content, and it could, there's nothing that would stop it.
I don't know. It's a real strong play.
The thing that caught my eye was when Musk talked about the potential for Twitter, he actually said his odds of making it work were low.
Did you hear that? He actually said it was pretty low, the odds of making it successful.
He meaning financially successful.
But he also said it has the potential to be one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
Do you buy both of those statements?
I do. It definitely has the potential to be one of the most valuable products on the planet, or companies.
And I also think the odds are against him.
But do you remember what he said about both Tesla and SpaceX?
He started both Tesla and SpaceX with the assumption that the odds were a way against him and he wouldn't work.
And he put everything in.
He went all in on Tesla, assuming it wouldn't work.
And then it did. And then it did the same thing with SpaceX.
It went all in, assuming it probably wouldn't work, but it did.
And now he's saying the same thing about Twitter.
There's literally nothing more optimistic you could ever hear about Twitter than Elon Musk saying, I don't think it's going to work, but I'm all in.
What would make you happier than that?
The odds are way against me, but I'm all in.
That's what gave you Tesla and SpaceX.
You know? That's what gave you those things.
So I just love everything he's doing over there.
Even when I don't like it, I love it.
You know what I mean? Like the whole show is just magic.
It's just a great time to be alive, especially if you're a business model nerd like I am.
I just love watching him try to develop a business model that works.
All right. Twitter even fact-checked Biden's lie about gas prices.
So Twitter added to Biden's tweet a context note automatically.
Well, there's probably some person involved.
But it's connected now.
So Biden said that when he got elected, the most common gas price was...
No, Biden said the most common gas price now is $3-something.
And then people said, you liar.
But apparently it's more of a weasel trick than a lie.
Because by saying most common, he wasn't saying average.
If he had said average, it would have been fact-checked as completely wrong.
But apparently most common is actually true.
And that's actually not a bad claim, is it?
If he were a little more clear about it, yeah, it's the mode, not the average.
If he had been a little more clear about it, say, yeah, the average is still high, but the most common price is in this $3, that would have been a strong point.
That would have been a strong point.
But instead, he had to make it sound weaselly and lied, and then Twitter called him in on it.
So I like that part.
Let's talk one more thing about politics, and then I'll make you all mad later.
I'm not sure.
Bill Maher was saying that...
He was sort of shocked and amazed that the Republicans...
By his version of things...
Bill Maher says that Trump insulted Hispanics and then got elected and got more Hispanic votes than Republicans had, and then four more years of insulting Hispanics, according to Bill Maher.
And his Hispanic vote went up to, like, you know, unexpected levels.
And here's what...
Bill Maher characterizes that as, he goes, he's saying that immigration isn't working the way Democrats wanted it.
And he said, Maher continued and said that immigrants are, quote, sort of natural conservatives.
That immigrants are sort of natural conservatives.
Who's the first person you heard tell you that?
Who's the first person you ever heard tell you that they're natural conservatives?
Now, I assume other people have noticed it.
But the first time I ever heard it, it came out of my mouth.
I never heard it from...
Did Rush Limbaugh say that?
Now, if somebody else said it...
Oh, if Krautheimer said it, he said it before I did.
So I was trying to figure out how many people said it before I did.
And if Krautheimer said it, then he beat me by a lot.
But you can't live in the community.
All right, let me show you proof.
I'm going to show you a video, if I can find it.
And it's going to...
All right, I think you can see this.
Well, let's see.
Can you see this?
Do you see this crew of workers?
Now, one assumes that they probably had an Hispanic...
That they're Hispanic. Came from somewhere south of the border probably not that long ago.
Let me show it to you again. All right, here's what you need to know.
Number one, this is Saturday.
This is Saturday. So the immigrant population almost all work six or seven days a week.
That's the first thing you need to know.
Secondly, watch them happily tossing these concrete bricks in this line.
The part you can't see is that they're laughing and having a good time.
Working on a Saturday.
The guys in the middle don't even have work gloves on.
They're using their bare hands to throw concrete.
And laughing and having a good time.
On a Saturday. Now, here's my question to you.
Do you want more of these people in your country?
I'm saying these people who are doing this specific thing.
Do you want more of them or fewer of them?
Let me tell you the answer.
You want more of them.
You want more of these.
Do they look like Democrats to you?
No. They're not.
No. And when they're done, you know, they go pray and they go to church and they take care of their family, and family's the most important thing.
They call about work.
It's basically work, family, God.
You don't want more of them?
All right. So that was just something I noticed as I was walking through the neighborhood.
And I thought, you know, people need to see the other side of this.
Because, you know, all of the...
And by the way, let me be clear.
I'm a maniac about border control.
I want complete border control.
I just think we should be smart about when we open the door and how much.
Right? Separate question. All right.
Question. Do you think that Moscow is going to lose power this winter?
Now, you're probably going to say no.
And there might be some physical limitation for Ukraine being able to launch an attack on Moscow.
But I checked into Moscow's energy situation, and they get 46% of their energy from gas.
Now, how many gas plants...
Do you think that means?
Like actual physical facilities?
Several? Because Moscow's pretty big.
So maybe three? Yeah.
If you had to guess without knowing anything about anything, I'd say maybe three.
Somebody says 53? It wouldn't be a lot.
I think it would be close to three choke points.
Do you think that Ukraine has the physical ability, not talking about the strategy or the will, do they have the physical ability to take out three gas plants that serve Moscow?
What do you think? I think yes, but it would probably have to be suicide attacks.
Right? Right? I say yes, probably suicide attacks.
So if you look at a map, Moscow is not so far from Ukraine that you can't imagine it.
If Moscow had been on the other side of Russia, then yeah, it's just maybe too hard.
But it looks like they're within attack distance for a drone or a missile or a suicide jet.
Suicide bombing. Now, I don't believe Moscow will be necessarily attacked.
But here's what I would do if I were Zelensky.
If I were Zelensky, I would say to Russia, if you continue to turn off our lights, and we don't have power this winter, we're going to turn off the lights in Moscow.
Now, just game it through.
We're going to turn off the lights in Moscow.
Now, you live in Moscow.
What are you going to do? You might leave.
You might leave. If you can get Moscow to mobilize, to leave, you don't have to bomb them.
Because all you want to do is get the message to Moscow that they don't have security of electricity anymore.
Just the message. You don't actually have to bomb anybody.
If I were Zelensky, I would say, in January, the lights are going off in Moscow.
If you keep it up.
Now, they don't have to do it.
But I would sure make sure that Putin knew that the lights might go out in Moscow in January.
Because I think they could get that done.
Now, it might be a terrible idea, because maybe that would trigger a nuclear response or something.
So the actual, the doing of it is a separate decision.
But the threatening of it, I can't see that as a bad decision.
Do you? Don't you think you should threaten it?
Because I think you need to put the Russian citizens on notice that this isn't free.
You know, they can win their war, they can do what they want, but it's not going to be free.
You know, you're going to have to put some skin in the game, Muscovites.
All right, now I don't want to see Moscow attacked, I don't want to see any civilians killed.
But if I were running the war in Ukraine, I would definitely put that thought in their head.
Do you think Trump would?
I think Trump would. Trump would definitely put the thought in Russia's head.
I don't think he would attack Russia, but he'd be smart enough to make them think about it.
Don't you think that's the right play?
Make them think about it? Because remember, the war is being fought physically, but it's also being fought inside the brain of every person involved.
And you could win the brain fight, but you've got to put some risk on the Russian people that they can feel.
It has an actual visual, visceral feel to them.
And turning out the lights in Moscow in the winter sounds like a pretty scary thing.
Apparently, Ukraine got some air defense stuff delivered finally, some NASAMs, some kind of surface-to-air missile kind of thing.
How good do you think they are?
Because I don't know. I know in Israel, they don't get them all, right?
Israel would probably have the world's best air defense, I think, for small rocket attacks.
But what percentage of rockets does Israel take down?
What percent? Of the ones fired into Israel, what percent do they get?
Now, it could be that they don't try to get them all.
I don't think it's more than 50%, is it?
Somebody says 95%, that doesn't sound right.
I think it's somewhere between 50 and 65, something like that.
But they also don't need to...
They also don't need to...
Sorry, I was just looking at a comment about my town.
All right. It's pretty high.
This will be the first time we ever get to see what our best weapons can do against serious weapons.
Now, let me ask this with pure ignorance.
There might be somebody who can answer this.
The missiles that the Palestinians are lobbing into Israel are closer to, like, smaller, you know, almost homemade kind of stuff, right?
It's not like high-end drones or anything.
Am I right? Whereas Ukraine is being attacked by high-end drones and high-end missiles.
Is the anti-aircraft...
Oh, is it Scuds they're sending in from the Palestinian regions?
I don't know. So here's my question.
Can the anti-aircraft have a better record against high-end equipment than low-end equipment?
Go. Because the low-end bombs, they might not even try to shoot them all down because they're so inaccurate, maybe you're better off just letting them land in the desert.
One base in Iraq, our defense was greater than 90%.
Yeah, it really is the ultimate testbed, isn't it?
So where I was going with this is this will be the first time, maybe, it might be the first time we find out how good our anti-aircraft is against modern weapons.
Because if they can only take out the modern stuff, you know, the high-end drones and the high-end missiles, if that's all they take out...
Hmm.
So, interesting.
So both sides try to hide their good stuff.
So that's part of the story.
It could be that Russia is not showing its best weapons for strategic reasons.
And it could be that we didn't send our best anti-aircraft weapons.
So both of those could be true.
But we'll find out. All right.
CNN had a story about an Iowa teen who killed her alleged rapist and then she got sentenced to probation and she escaped from probation.
So that's the update.
She escaped. She got her ankle bracelet off and somehow she escaped from probation.
So she wasn't in jail jail, but she had an ankle bracelet on.
Now, the story, when you look into the story, apparently this girl had been abused by a number of adults when she was a teenager in the worst possible ways.
Whatever you think is the worst thing that could happen, it was that.
And then the one she killed, which she admits killing with a knife, allegedly would drug her into unconsciousness and rape her repeatedly.
And she wouldn't know until she woke up and found out she was in the middle of getting raped.
Now, one of those days, the rapist himself fell asleep.
And she noticed the rapist was asleep and his knife, which presumably he used to scare her when he raped her, or whatever.
But there was a knife in the room.
And so she took the knife and she stabbed to death the sleeping rapist.
And she got convicted.
And then she escaped.
Is there any way we could give her some kind of national award?
Because I feel like this is...
I'd like to vote for her for Senator of Pennsylvania.
Can we find this woman and give her the credit she deserves?
This is the toughest fucking woman I've ever heard in my life.
She just went through hell, murdered a guy, and then escaped from the system.
I love her.
I love her.
And let me offer this as well.
If you can't murder your sleeping rapist, I don't want to live in this country.
Murdering your sleeping rapist should be an award, not a jail sentence.
I don't care how premeditated it is.
I don't care if he raped you five years ago.
If you can find that motherfucker asleep and put a knife through his throat, I'm with you.
You have my full support.
Murder that motherfucker. Murder him in his sleep.
I'm all good with that.
But the system doesn't like murder.
Our system doesn't like to encourage premeditated murder.
But still, if ever there was anybody who deserved to get a full pardon, it's this woman.
This woman needs a full pardon.
So please, give her a full pardon.
You know, I didn't mention this in the story, but I wonder if the fact that she's a black woman has anything to do with the story.
Do you think a white woman would have been treated the same?
You have to ask the question, right?
You kind of have to ask the question.
I don't know.
This one's so sketchy that I have to ask that question.
So let's talk about marriage.
Thank you.
Did anybody see my tweets about marriage?
All right. Now, the NPC comment, I'd like to do it for you.
For the NPCs, for you to participate in this conversation, I would like you to note that I've been divorced twice.
That would be the NPC comment.
Now, what you don't know is that agrees with my point.
Right? Had I been happily married, the point wouldn't make sense.
So, I found the only way I can make my critics agree with me, enthusiastically, is by saying that marriage has issues, and then they say, well, you got divorced twice, why are we listening to you?
To which I say, I'm experienced.
Why would you listen to someone who is inexperienced?
No. So NPCs, feel free to jump in and criticize me for my marriage choices.
That's fair game today.
All right. What's driving me crazy is that I've been spending too much time on Instagram, and I think because of the algorithm, it's feeding me more of stuff I've paid attention to.
And I'm being inundated with bad relationship advice people.
It seems to me people in a certain age who are giving the worst fucking advice I've ever heard, and they all have that smart sounding approach.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
How many times have you seen the video, the little video pops up, and you'll see it's usually a man, sometimes a woman, and they'll have that authoritative voice And you're like, yeah, this person knows what works and what doesn't.
But then you think about it later, and the only thing they had was the authoritative voice.
It was just bad shit, bad advice.
Let me give you the worst advice anybody ever gave.
And most of you have given me this advice.
Marriage works if you wait for the right person.
Do I have to say anything about that?
Marriage works great if you wait for the right person.
Number one, who the fuck says you're the right person?
You need two right people.
One right person doesn't get it done.
You need two. And what makes the other person right?
Well, being right just means they fit with you.
There's no such thing as just being right.
There's being right for another person.
That's the thing. You could be right for the person, but you're not right.
If you wait for the right person, that's the end of civilization.
You couldn't even have humanity.
You couldn't have reproduction.
It would all be over. Our entire system depends on stupidity.
It's an evolved stupidity.
So that because your dick is hard, you can't think anymore.
And you're like, ooh, I think it'll be love.
Yeah, I'm simplifying, but that's the basic idea.
So people have to be hypnotized, hypnotized usually by sex, into thinking this will last forever, and then that lasts long enough to make children, and then evolution doesn't care what happens to you after that.
After you reproduce, evolution is done with you.
Your motherfucking life is useless after that point.
Useless. After you reproduce, you have no use whatsoever to the long-term civilization.
Now, in a perfect world, the elders support everybody, and I try to do that as well.
But evolution isn't your friend here.
Here's the basic problem with marriage.
Before marriage...
Correct me if I'm wrong. You are in enticement mode.
You're enticing the other person.
And you're generally both in that mode, or else it would already be over.
Because it's so easy to walk away from somebody who's not enticing you.
So you're in enticement mode, so, you know, the dating and the pre-marriage go great.
As soon as you get married, it's hard to get unmarried.
Like, there's a lot of friction, and that's intentional.
We build the friction in because we think it's better.
Now, once that happens, what happens to the balance of power?
When it's two people enticing each other, the balance of power is, I'd say, pretty even, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you generally say the balance of power is even?
Because both have to bring their game, and if they don't, it falls apart.
So once you're married, what happens to the balance of power?
Completely changes. Right?
Because the man doesn't want to get divorced.
Right? Just because the woman is a bitch that day.
Do you know why? Because the man says, well, it'll be better tomorrow.
This is like a temporary thing.
This little thing that made my spouse mad at me, this isn't going to last.
This is just today. So next day, it's a new thing.
Next day, it's a new thing.
And eventually you learn that the woman is responding to incentives.
There's nothing wrong with the woman in this example.
The woman is acting exactly like anybody would.
Once you're out of enticement mode, your incentive system says, show your best side and entice.
As soon as you're married, that incentive system disappears.
Because you're going to stay together just because it's hard to leave.
You're committed. So now, the woman changes her strategy.
But she changes it wisely.
And rationally.
And the most rational thing for a woman to do in marriage is to make the husband perpetually unhappy, but also under the illusion that if he wastes a little bit or he does something different, it could be better.
So the woman realizes she can completely manipulate the man by being unhappy.
And she just continues to say what she's unhappy about, and the husband keeps saying, okay, that's not a big deal.
What you're asking for is reasonable.
I will do that. And then I've solved my problems forever.
Until tomorrow. And then it's a new problem.
Huh? What a coincidence. Well, just bad luck.
Two problems in two days.
Third day? Well, that's weird.
Three problems in three days.
I didn't see that coming.
Fourth day, fifth day, sixth day?
No. The wife has to put pain into the husband's life, or he won't do a fucking thing that you want.
Do you know why? Because he doesn't have the incentive.
So the woman is going to withdraw sex, withdraw attention, withdraw everything she has to, until the man is suffering enough that he'll do whatever the fuck she wants.
Because he doesn't want to leave.
Here's another truth for you.
Who keeps agreements better, men or women?
Go. Who keeps agreements better, men or women?
In general. This doesn't mean every person, right?
None of this means every person.
It's men. It's men.
Why? Why do men keep agreements and women don't?
Now again, that's a generalization.
There are plenty of women who keep agreements.
Why? No, it's not character.
That's such an asshole answer.
It's not character. It's incentive.
It's incentive. Everybody acts on incentive.
You know, whoever said, like, men are awesome or something, I'm not saying men are better than women.
Character-wise, no, there's no evidence of that.
I'm saying that they have different incentives.
That's all. All right.
Um... I also think that the system is ruined by the 20% of people who get married and it totally works for them.
That's my own estimate.
But in my opinion, about 20% of marriages, really, they kind of nailed it.
They might have got lucky. Maybe it was two functional people who were just in the right place and had, you know, the same goals in life.
Maybe got married early because that could help.
You know, had kids, shared a thing.
So, in my opinion, something like 20% of marriages work perfectly.
And then what do the 20% tell you?
What do the 20% tell you about your marriages, your marriage potential?
Do you know what the 20% tell you?
It's easy. Just do what we did.
We treat each other well, we respect each other, we have different roles, right?
Is that good advice? Is it good advice that you should try acting like the 20% who made it work?
No, that's the most fucked up advice anybody ever gave you.
It's purely corrosive.
That is toxic advice.
You need a system that works.
The system is what doesn't work.
It's marriage. It's like imagining that you can live with another person in a world in which all the incentives are maybe you shouldn't.
The incentives are moving further and further away from marriage making sense.
And so you get exactly what the incentives are giving you.
Follow the money. If a woman couldn't get divorced because she couldn't live any other, you know, not being married, then it probably wouldn't happen.
Now, I don't think you should make it harder to get divorced.
I'm just saying that's what would happen.
If you make it easy to get divorced and women have jobs that make as much money as men, you know, getting closer and closer to that...
There's not really a strong thing keeping you married if you're a woman.
Because you can get the kids and some money and a new guy.
It's not a bad deal.
And if you get a new guy, you get to share your kids, and now the new guy gets to have you 50% of the time without kids in the house.
Here's something that was a mystery to me when I was married.
I wondered why I never felt in the mood for sex when kids were in the house.
And then I found out it's actually a thing.
Did you know that? If you spend time around kids, your testosterone just drops to the floor.
That's a real thing. So if you're the second marriage, at least the kids are going half of the time, if they're half the time with the other.
So at least half of the time, you have some chance of like a normal relationship-y thing.
Then the other half not.
And then the other factor, which cannot be discounted, I'm seeing a lot of noise on social media about porn destroying people.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
But what is definitely true is that the quality of porn has gone, you know, has improved every year.
I'll talk more about that.
Whereas the quality of people has decreased.
The quality of people has decreased because we all have such different preferences now.
Finding another person who wants to do what you want to do at the same time is practically impossible.
Whereas it used to be easy.
In the old days, you'd be like, what do you want to do?
Well, there's three channels on TV. There's only one good show.
Let's watch it. Boom.
You're both happy. But now you can't get two people to watch the same show, do the same thing at the same time.
Nobody wants to do anything at the same time.
So people, by improving individually, being more complete people individually, are less needy of each other and they don't need the other's money.
A woman can hire somebody to lift heavy objects.
You just don't need each other in the way we used to.
So relationships are getting worse.
But porn can find out exactly what you like.
It's no longer generic.
I mean, a lot of it is generic.
But if you wanted to watch porn, you could find left-handed redheads, Who like beach balls.
And that's your exact thing.
And you can find it.
Not that, actually, but things.
So the difference between what porn used to be, sort of a generic thing that everybody liked a bit, to something that hits your exact button, it's a 10 times difference in effectiveness.
I'm not talking about, you know, it's 20% better because I got the exact thing I wanted.
No, it's not 20% better.
It's 10 times better.
It's not even close. Now, this is before VR. Imagine virtual reality and AI thrown into this mix, because it will be.
Human relationships are really in trouble.
Really in trouble. And so is, actually, reproduction.
It's really in trouble. Now, that doesn't mean we won't fix it, because we're good at fixing long-term problems.
We'll work it out. I just don't know where it'll go.
It's going to go somewhere weird.
But here are the things...
I spent ten minutes looking at porn, and I learned a lot.
I've told you that. I've admitted I've looked at porn for, you know, ten minutes that one time.
So much you can learn in ten minutes.
It's true. Now, here's the second question.
Does porn ruin your brain?
I'm seeing that on social media.
Does it make you, you know, less valuable to women?
Yeah, it does, of course. Of course it does.
How could it not?
Because if women have competition, yeah, I mean, that's a problem.
And the competition is getting better and better every day, so that is a problem.
But do you think it gives you brain damage?
Suppose it's true that what women are noticing...
Is that men are different if they're watching a lot of porn and that the way they're different is that they don't show as much attraction to the women.
Suppose that's how they're brain damaged.
The brain damage is the man is less attracted to the women and therefore doesn't date and stuff like that.
Is that brain damage? Is that brain damage or is that just somebody who found an alternative and liked it?
I don't know. Kind of, it's a brain difference.
I guess you'd have to ask what is damage and what is just different.
It's different. Yeah, and porn is definitely ruining our expectations, isn't it?
I don't know how many of you are young enough to have experienced the partner who learned how to have sex from watching porn.
If you've experienced that, it's different.
Yeah, it's different. Definitely different.
All right, so here's what I think.
I think if porn is ruining your life, maybe you're not good at it.
Doesn't every skill have a normal curve where some people are just average at it, some people are bad at it, and some people are great at it?
This is what nobody wants to say out loud, right?
Do you think that everybody masturbates with the same skill?
That's not even slightly possible.
It is not possible.
Whoever is the best at it is not having the same experience as somebody who is just trying it out for the first time.
It's like every other thing.
The people who are good at it are probably really good at it, and you have no idea what that looks like.
Like, if you're not good at it, you're imagining that your experience is like theirs.
Yeah. So I would say that masturbation is like firearms.
Firearms are not good or bad.
It just depends what you're doing with it.
Right? It just depends what you're doing with it.
If your spouse is away on a business trip for a week, are you going to get brain damage for taking care of yourself during the week?
I don't think so.
I think that would be a perfectly legitimate use of a tool, so to speak.
Yeah, I don't think I could turn this into a micro-lesson, but...
So, waiting for the right person is definitely a strategy that can't work for humanity.
And those people who tell us that they waited for the right person and did it, just ignore them.
So here's my overall point of view.
My overall point of view is you can't listen to the 20% of married people who made it work.
Do you know what? Here, I really fuck with you.
If you took those two people who made their marriage work, and you took one of them, it doesn't matter which one, it could be the husband or the wife, Just pick one of them, and then you marry that person.
Do you think it would work?
Probably. Because it's the person.
If you marry somebody who's just a great person, you probably become a better person, unless you're an awful person yourself.
I believe that when a marriage works, it's because one of them is awesome.
That's what I think. That one of them is unusually awesome.
I think that's why a marriage works.
And that's maybe 20% of the population.
Now, if you get two awesome people to marry each other, ideal.
I just don't think the odds are very good for that happening.
I think one awesome person can bring another one along.
You know, maybe up the average of the other person because they try to raise to the level.
Let me give you an actual example.
I won't say who told me this, but years ago, somebody said they were becoming a vegetarian, and the reason was that his wife had become a vegetarian, but had also done a number of other high-character things, and he felt like he wasn't competing with her, because her character was so impressive that That he felt like he wasn't doing his share.
And I actually watched a man change his behavior to try to lift it explicitly, like explicitly, to lift his character to the level of his spouse.
That's the thing. That's a thing.
Now, I don't know if there's any gender difference.
I think it probably works both ways.
But I think that one awesome person can make a marriage work if they get somebody who they can work with.
It's not every person. But I think it's something like that.
That's what's happening. Now, everybody who thinks that if all you did was the two of you learned a better technique, you could stay married.
What do you think of that? If you learn better technique, like how to be a good partner, that would fix the two of you up.
No. That is 80% illusion.
I do think that some people, maybe 20%, they can find something to tweak and make it work.
But by far, that's an exception.
People don't change that much.
They can try. They don't change that much.
All right. So Jack Dorsey was just fact-checked on Twitter.
Did that happen? He's tracking additions to a tweet Oh, so I don't see Jack's tweet.
But somebody said, Jack Dorsey actually got a fact-check done.
The fact-check is just that the changes were added a while ago, so I don't know what the actual claim was.
And I don't know if the fact-check is right or if Jack was right.
I just know what happened.
All right. Then I also saw a number of people on Twitter when I complain about marriage.
I'll see one person say, well, Scott, I feel sorry for you, but my marriage has worked great for 30 years.
Do you think they're having sex?
I feel like there are lots of situations where one of the people will say, my marriage is great.
And the other will say, no, I've just decided to live with it.
But I'll tell you it's great because I want to live with it.
I think in some cases they might be lying and in some cases the spouse hasn't been laid in 20 years and has just learned not to complain or is having an affair.
So I might be a little cynical.
Maybe. Maybe.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we're getting ready for the midterms.
Enough about that. Your comments were very interesting to me on this topic.
Somebody says it beats loneliness.
Here's my approach to relationships and marriage.
This will be my final word.
They pretty much all go wrong.
80%. Do it anyway.
Do it anyway. I don't regret either of my marriages.
I don't regret them a bit.
Could anybody else say that?
That they got married, it didn't work out, they got divorced, but they don't regret it.
Does anybody else agree with that?
See, we live in a world where everything ends badly.
I always like to keep that frame in my mind.
Everything ends badly.
Every company eventually goes out of business.
Every human eventually dies.
It all ends badly.
You get sick.
It's going to happen. Nobody has no health problems.
So there's a little bit of the Buddhist in me that says that the pain is part of the life.
If what you're trying to do is avoid all your pain, do not get married.
If that's your weird idea of life, is avoiding all pain, don't get married.
That's not going to work out for you.
But if you can embrace, embrace the end as well as you can embrace the beginning, The beginning's awesome, the end is terrible.
If you can embrace them as a package, go ahead.
Try it out. It's going to be tough.
Marriage is tough even if it works, right?
There's no easy ones. But if you get a kid out of it, you know, you get an experience out of it, you learn something out of it, I think it's worthwhile.
I think there's a lot that should be changed in terms of, you know, The structure of it, but I think it's still a crazy thing that's recommendable.
It's a crazy, irrational thing you should do anyway to be a human being.
And continuing children probably is the thing that will feel the best to you in the long run.
I haven't done it myself.
Now, have you noticed that people like me who don't have biological children...
Sometimes tend to think everybody is your children.
I think it could go either direction.
You'd either go total hermit and self-interest.
Or you could go... See, I believe I have an evolutionary instinct to help the species.
It's just that my calling and my timing didn't involve natural children.
Um... And so when I do things which are designed to help the species, which is mostly what I do here, I'm trying to help the species, I feel connected to the entire humanity cycle, even though I don't have biological children.
Sue says, Scott sounds like a controlling type.
True. I don't know where that came from, but let me ask you.
How many of you think I'm a controlling type?
I say true.
Do you know why? Because everybody is.
Everybody is. There are no non-controlling types.
People just do it differently.
Some people are more effective.
Some people are more overt.
Some people are more transparent about it.
But we're all trying to get what we want.
If you're not, you're doing it wrong.
Like, yeah, sometimes you might do it by acting like a victim, but you're still trying to guess something.
So, who's controlling?
Everybody. Everybody's controlling all the time.
It's a sort of an empty comment.
It's like, air. Air exists.
Have I sent my DNA to Ancestry?
No, but I've sent it 23andMe has it.
Let me just look at your comments for a moment.
Somebody says, Jesus remained single, but he also knew why he was here.
Earth.
So, what would Jesus do?
Same thing as me.
Apparently. Until I get crucified.
I think that's going to happen any day.
Um... No, somebody's saying that Elon Musk might have heard something from me.
I guess Elon said, quote, Hardcore Democrats or Republicans never vote for the other side, so independent voters are the only ones who actually decide who's in charge.
That didn't come from me.
That's a pretty generic political comment.
I've also said it, but maybe you heard it from me, but that's a general common knowledge.
Yeah. I would love to take credit for that.
You know what's weird? People give me credit...
For things I never did, like all day long, I get credit for saying things or doing things that I didn't do, as far as I know.
But I also get blamed for things I didn't do.
It's the strangest thing about, you know, being in the public eye, is that all day long, I'm fending off rumors about things that I did that were bad that I didn't do.
At the same time, people will give me credit for things I totally didn't do.
Totally didn't. But, I don't know, if it all works out, that's fine.
Just like being married.
In the positive sense, you have wingmen.
Yes, I guess I do. I think we all do.
I would like to add to a comment that...
Balaji Srinivasan said in an interview on a podcast lately.
I think it was Lex Friedman's podcast.
But Balaji was talking about the internet forming, let's say, interest groups of various types and that that would be a bigger thing going forward.
And I think that's what we've done.
Mostly the people who subscribe on Locals.
But we've created an organization Without being an organization, it's sort of a common interest group.
But I think because my emphasis, at least on locals, is teaching useful things that could improve your life, But the locals crowd has returned to me a whole bunch of things, including, like, healthcare.
I've had health problems diagnosed by my locals community, successfully.
Recommendations on this or that.
Corrections on facts.
They knew things that I didn't even know how to research.
And so if you look at the mutual interest group that has been created by the locals community, I think this is the future.
It is the future. I'm going to credit the Locos community for almost keeping me alive.
Because, you know, I talk about it too much.
But when I was on some meds that were making me suicidal, I feel like the only thing that kept me alive is the live streaming.
Because I would get this positive interaction with humanity every day.
And it's probably the only thing I enjoyed for months.
So, when I look at the mutual benefit of just having a group of people who simply decided they wanted to be on the same team, you know, they just said, oh, I like being on this team, I'll give them some benefits as well.
So, I think this could be extended.
You know, I've actually considered this.
I don't think I have enough subscribers to do this.
I've got about 6,000 or so.
But suppose I had 100,000 subscribers.
If I had 100,000 subscribers, I could go to the phone companies and say, whoever gives us all a discount, you can have all 100,000.
Or at least I'll recommend it.
Right? Imagine how much economic clout you could have.
You could buy insurance as a group discount.
Right? You could actually coordinate, and not even officially.
You could just have any member of the group, any member of the group could just say, hey, I just contacted this company, and if we recommend it within the group, and get so many, we'll get this discount or something.
Right? So you could create a whole bunch of just benefits within a group simply because you wanted to.
It's a whole new model, because prior to this, You sort of were on the team of your, let's say, politics or the team of your country, maybe your town.
Those are all good things.
But you never really created an organization just dedicated to improving each other.
And that's somewhat accidentally.
Well, on YouTube I have over 100,000 subscribers, but on locals, 6,000 or so.
Now, if the locals group was bigger, the subscribers on YouTube, that doesn't mean much.
It just means they get an alert.
It doesn't really have much meaning. And you can imagine an informal group of people who are just dedicated to their mutual benefit.
You can imagine them having a political clout after a while.
You don't think that if I got to a million people, In a mutual interest group who really literally just existed to get smarter and happier and more effective.
That's the only reason they were together.
Nothing else. They just wanted some entertainment and to become better people.
If I got to a million of those, you don't think we could decide to move politics any way we wanted?
I bet we could. Yeah.
Now, I sometimes get accused of starting a cult.
But I would like to embrace and amplify that.
Denying it is a waste of time.
I'm going to embrace and amplify it.
It is a cult.
It is a cult. But it's a cult in which your total costs are expressed as $5 a month if you buy an annual subscription.
I have the most cost-effective cult of all cults.
So no, I'm not going to deny I'm a cult.
I'm going to say, it's the best cult you've ever been in.
Five dollars a month, and I absolutely will give you more than five dollars a benefit.
What live streaming gives you, let's see, probably 45 hours of commercial-free content a month.
Is that right? Yeah.
Because I'm like an hour to an hour and a half per day of free content which is designed to make you smarter and more effective.
Every day. That's not worth $5 a month.
It's $7 if you don't have the annual subscription.
Yeah. So if I'm a cult, I'm a cult in which you can wear whatever you want, say whatever you want, do whatever you want, talk to anybody you want, You'll never be discouraged from talking to other people.
That's like the worst thing a cult does.
They try to get you not to talk to other people.
No, I'm the opposite.
Talk to everybody. Look at the other news.
So yes, I'm a cult dedicated to all of us having a better time.
Whatever that looks like.
You do not have to end your life to follow a comment.
I'll never ask you that.
I'll never ask you to drink poison Kool-Aid.
I promise. Alright, yeah, lucky.
Alright, that's all for now.
The midterms will be exciting.
Do you think I should live stream during the evening tomorrow?
