Episode 1934 Scott Adams: The News About Twitter, Trump, Alex Jones, Musk, Ye And More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Elon Musk makes me optimistic about America
A question for Tom Cotton about TikTok
Our unspoken fentanyl policy?
Declining birth rates
Bill Maher talking to Sam Harris
Twitter might put MSM out of business
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, if you didn't know that already.
And you probably come here to have your dopamine faucet turned on.
Came to the right place.
Do you feel your dopamine starting to get a little active?
You feel a little bit of it?
Yeah. Watch.
Watch what happens after the simultaneous sip.
You can almost feel the tingle.
And all you need to get that tingle is a cupper mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen sugar flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's going to give you a little tingle.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now. Go!
Zzzz! Yep.
Dopamine faucet on.
And we're going to leave that on for the entire live stream.
What you do afterwards? Well, that's your own decision.
All right. So I would like to begin with a one-act play.
This play I call a Twitter quitter who is looking for a new job.
Yeah, Twitter Quitter.
I just coined that.
The people who left because Musk told them that they had to work hard, they're the Twitter Quitters.
So now, my impression of a Twitter Quitter going for a new job.
I will need to do this visually, so I give you the return of Dale.
Uh... I'm applying for a job at your company and I have very good qualifications.
Well, I see from your resume that you had a job at Twitter.
Twitter. So can you tell me what was it about that job?
Why did you quit that job?
Something about President Trump?
Hmm, that doesn't seem terribly relevant.
Was there anything else?
Any other reason you left Twitter?
I'm not a huge fan of hard work.
And scene.
Isn't it going to be a little bit awkward? - I'm bored.
It's going to be a little bit awkward, isn't it?
Because they all quit for the same reason.
Not big fans of working hard.
How's that going to work?
How does that play out? I don't know.
I'm just curious. All right.
You may have already noticed that the Dilbert website has been down since Friday, I think.
And you might say to yourself, How is that even possible?
In 2022, how can anybody bring a website down for like three days?
Like a major professional commercial website.
Three days. I don't even think they're close to fixing it.
I don't think they're close.
Now, I don't know the details.
I don't know. Actually, I don't even know if it's confirmed that it's a hack.
But it looks like it. From the outside it looks like a hack.
Apparently the DNS pointer just disappeared.
So basically the website just doesn't exist on the internet anymore.
Somebody took down the DNS pointer or could have been maybe some weird...
There's a possibility that it happened naturally.
I don't know what the odds of that are.
But there was a weird chain of custody of the website that went from one company to another, and the old company disappeared, but it's still in their name, and God knows there might be some problem like that.
I don't know. But it also could have been targeted at me.
Could you rule that out?
Could you rule out that somebody targeted me?
Now, they did get all of the, you know, the entire comic infrastructure at United, I'm sorry, at Universal.
So they got all the comics.
It wasn't just me. But I'm the only one that you would target.
Right? The rest of them were not anybody making any trouble.
I don't know. Could be anything.
You never know.
But they'll get it fixed.
Um... So, as you know, I think this may have been reversed, but didn't CBS say they were going to suspend their Twitter activity due to the, quote, uncertainty under Elon Musk's leadership?
Did they reverse that already?
Yeah. It says, I'm the registrant, but that's just on paper.
I don't manage the site.
Well, anyway, regardless of what CBS has done recently, I only want to talk about how Musk made fun of them.
I used to think that you couldn't top Trump for funny tweeting, but I feel as though Musk is funnier.
And who saw that coming?
I mean, he claims he's on the spectrum, you know, Asperger's or something, but I'm not so sure.
I know. His facility with humor is so strong, and for that you would have to have an understanding of how other people's minds work.
So I'm just not sure about this Asperger's on the spectrum thing.
But here's what he said about CBS, and I laughed until I cried.
This morning, I laughed.
I had tears dripping out of my eyes.
This is the funniest frickin' set of tweets I've ever seen, all right?
There are three tweets, and they have to be seen, you know, as a whole.
So when CBS, you know, said it was going to suspend its Twitter activity, Musk first tweeted this.
Who made this decision?
Perfectly good thing to ask.
Who made this decision? But within a very short time, Musk tweeted a follow-up.
Ah, forget it.
Who cares? Because Musk owns Twitter, and CBS just isn't really relevant.
But it gets better.
His third follow-up, or second follow-up, he goes, they should bring Walter Cronkite back.
Oh, my God.
That is so fucking funny.
That is fucking hilarious.
Now, I don't know how you interpret that.
You know, you could interpret it different ways.
The way I interpret it is the funniest way.
The last time you didn't suck, Walter Cronkite was still alive.
So that's one way to interpret it.
The last time you didn't suck, Walter Cronkite was alive.
Here's the second way to interpret it.
And I don't know which way he meant.
The second way to interpret it is you could dig up his corpse and he would do a better job than whatever they're doing now.
Also good. Also perfectly good.
And then the third way is that CBS is so unimportant and irrelevant that acting like you didn't even know that Walter Cronkite wasn't an option anymore.
Which would be funny.
So this is funny any way you want to interpret it.
This is fucking hilarious.
I've never seen any corporation dismissed so effectively.
They should bring back Walter Cronkite.
Oh, come on.
Is there anybody who doesn't think that's hilarious?
Now, it's partly hilarious because of who says it, right?
Like, if I had tweeted that, it wouldn't be funny because the context would be different.
But just the fact that the guy who just bought Twitter, richest man in the world, he says they should bring Walter Cronkite back.
That's everything.
All right. Adam Schiff was on TV saying he's not too pleased that Trump is allowed back on Twitter.
Which brings us to...
A really, really interesting thing that's happening.
And don't let me forget to talk about Ye, because I'm going to skip him for a moment.
So Twitter has a, let's call it a fact-checking feature now, that used to be part of that bird watch, is what they called it.
But now it's renamed to Community Notes.
And here's what Community Notes on Twitter does.
If... If someone makes a claim that needs a fact check, somebody can add a note with context.
But other people will vote on whether they agree on that added note, so the ones that most people agree with would be surface to the top.
But I think I'm describing it a little bit wrong, and here's the part I'm going to need to I'm going to need a little bit of a tweaking on my understanding, okay?
So maybe you can help me with this.
I don't believe that the notes go to the top, you know, the correction notes.
I didn't skip the sip.
What are you talking about? Why do you think I skipped the simultaneous sip?
Did I? Yeah, there's some kind of weird thing happening over on Locals.
There's a bunch of them who think they didn't see the SIP. You saw it, right?
Yeah. Oh, weird.
There's a whole hallucination thing happening in real time.
There's a whole bunch of people on Locals who believe that it didn't happen.
Oh, and over here there's a bunch of people who say it didn't happen as well.
So YouTube sees the same thing?
Really?
Now, it's not because of a time lag, right?
Thank you.
Now, did you see me do the wind-up but not the actual sip?
You saw the introduction to the sip, right?
You saw the song, you know, the poem or whatever.
This is the weirdest thing.
Wow. So, you're watching reality fork.
Reality is forking right now, right in front of you.
I don't think I've ever seen this before.
This is in real time.
You're watching reality fork.
There are some people who just are leaving your reality.
Some people didn't see it and some people saw it.
It either did or did not happen, and it was right here.
Wow. So interesting.
I wonder what triggered it.
Was there a delay in the feed?
This is now the most interesting thing that's happening today.
Is it because of a glitch?
Yeah, it might have been a glitch in the stream.
So anyway, back to my point.
So the Twitter fact-checking, which is really a context addition, not a fact-check so much, but I believe it's not based on just popularity.
I believe it's going to be based on a system called POLIS, or POLIS, that got rolled out in Taiwan.
So Taiwan will ask its citizens a question such as, how would you regulate Uber?
By the way, what I'm telling you now comes from an excellent article in Wired, so let me recommend Wired for the full detail of this.
Very good, very good reporting in Wired on this topic.
So this polis system in Taiwan, they can ask the public, how would you regulate Uber, would be one example.
But instead of just taking the most popular suggestion, they find the suggestion that has popularity across demographics.
So they're finding the thing that has the most widespread agreement, As opposed to the thing that got the most trolls to vote for it.
Does that make sense? So they can handle the troll problem by not looking at the most votes, but rather looking at the votes that come from the most places, the most types of people.
Which is, frankly, brilliant.
I'd never even thought of that.
Had you? Yeah, I mean, that's just brilliant.
So if you start with things that people on all sides can agree with, and then you start narrowing it down from that point, apparently you get a better outcome.
Now, it looks like Twitter might follow that model.
How amazing would that be?
I mean, seriously. This is the first time I've heard an actual system plan that, in my opinion, could totally work.
Am I wrong? Doesn't that look like that could totally work?
I think it could.
I think it could totally work.
So imagine that.
It's not a coincidence that CBS is wondering whether they can participate.
Because here's the thing.
How can the mainstream news survive this?
Literally. Literally.
How can any news organization, left or right, how could they survive this?
I don't know. I don't think they could survive it.
Left or right.
Unless they start doing real news and correcting and stuff.
But I don't know.
So, I'll give you a make-up simultaneous sip as soon as I'm done with this topic, because I know a number of people are addicted to the sip, so even if it happened, if they missed it, as a citizen of Earth, I feel I need to accommodate them, so we'll do that in a minute.
I know I sipped, but some people missed it, so we'll accommodate them.
But here's my point. If Twitter actually pulls this off and does actual, honest-to-God, useful context, and I like calling it context better than fact-checking, who would agree with me on that?
I love context.
Fact-checking gets a little too into opinion, doesn't it?
Like, as soon as you say fact-check, hmm, but context is good every time.
Then you make up your own mind.
All right. I don't know if I have a way to express how important this is.
This would actually fix our government.
It would fix the news.
It might even get rid of, like, divisiveness.
It might actually make things work.
Like, I know that's a lot.
I don't want to get ahead of it with my optimism, but I don't think I've ever been more optimistic about the country than right now.
Honest to God, I've never felt more optimistic about America, at least, than right now.
I think Musk did that.
I think Musk did that.
Because this is so important.
It's, like, huge.
Anyway. So imagine that happens.
All right? But there's more.
We might have a contest for the presidency that would involve Trump, probably.
We don't know for sure, but probably Trump running against a Democrat.
You know what's interesting?
If that happens, we would have the most vetted candidate of all time.
Trump is the most examined, researched, vetted candidate of all time.
So let me pull the story together here.
So we could have a Twitter that works to keep everybody else honest.
We could. Don't know that yet, but it's possible.
We could have a president who doesn't have any secrets left.
How much would you like that?
Because my biggest problem with Biden is that I don't know what's up with him in Ukraine and what's up with him in China.
But if he had been investigated as thoroughly as Trump had been investigated for Russia, I feel like I would trust him on that issue anyway.
Don't you? If Biden had ever gone through the scrutiny that Trump has already gone through, I wouldn't probably be asking any questions about China or Ukraine.
I'd say, okay, we looked into it.
Good enough. So we might have radical transparency of one candidate who could actually become president again, while we have radical, you know, context-checking on Twitter, which would make everybody else have to be honest, because it would be too embarrassing to be out of step with Twitter fact-checking.
And then we have the GOP taking over the House, so they're going to start investigating, you know, all the bad behavior of the Democrats.
Do you know how much transparency we're about to get whacked with?
We've never had anything like this.
Usually you're just guessing.
You're just guessing. If I vote for this candidate, I have no idea what's in that closet, right?
That closet might open up halfway through the presidency.
But we wouldn't have to worry about, at least in my opinion, others will disagree.
But in my opinion, you wouldn't have to worry about the president having any hidden secrets, if it were Trump.
The GOP is going to unravel any bad behavior the Democrats did.
Maybe. At least they'll try.
And then Twitter will give us some kind of actual context for the first time.
This is all amazing stuff.
But can we have all of this optimism...
Without a second simultaneous sip?
No. No.
I believe that we deserve another sip.
And so for anybody who didn't see it the first time, for whatever reason, reality forked.
You're going to get it this time.
Everybody, get ready for the simultaneous sip.
Make up. Go.
Good stuff.
I said fact-checking instead of context.
Yeah, I'm going to still use them interchangeably when I'm talking in public.
So let me tell you, I will use them interchangeably when I'm casually talking in public.
But I do prefer context.
They work similarly.
All right. I'm also fascinated by the Alex Jones Edge case.
Now, I believe that Twitter was solidly in the right.
Like, no doubt about it.
Bringing back, you know, the Babylon Bee and bringing back Trump.
Totally, totally on board with those decisions.
Alex Jones, however, is not like the others.
He's not like the other situations.
And I believe this is a problem for Musk.
Because Musk answered why he wasn't bringing Alex Jones back, and if he didn't see it, it's one of the most powerful tweets you'll ever see in your life.
I'm going to read it to you, and it might take you out of your happy moment for a bit, but we'll get you back, okay?
So, Kim.com, if you know him.
He's a famous internet user and famous for some other stuff in his past.
We won't get into that. But anyway, he's a well-known character, and he was suggesting that free speech suggests that Alex Jones should come back.
Now, nobody is defending Alex Jones.
As far as I know, I've never heard anybody say, yeah, what Alex Jones did with that Sandy Hook thing was pretty good.
Nobody. Nobody defends him.
So we are strictly talking about free speech here, right?
Can we agree that if you talk about Alex Jones on Twitter, it's not about defending him.
It's very much not about defending him.
It's about the best edge case we have.
For free speech. So here's what Elon said in a tweet.
Musk said, my firstborn child died in my arms.
I felt his last heartbeat.
I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics, or fame.
Is that case closed?
He owns the company.
He says that's his line in the sand.
No way. Here's the problem.
That's a personal opinion, isn't it?
It's a personal opinion, right?
If Musk can ban somebody because of how he personally feels, then he's not the right person to own Twitter.
End of story.
If he can ban Alex Jones only because of his personal feeling...
Which he may have other reasons, right?
So he led with that, but he might have other valid reasons.
I think there are other valid reasons, by the way.
So we can talk about whether he should come back.
But if that's his reason, that's not good enough.
That's not good enough.
Free speech is a little bit bigger than that.
Now, as strong as this is, I mean, I can't even imagine this.
I mean, I almost lost it just reading the fucking tweet.
I can't even imagine it.
I mean, it's literally, literally unimaginable.
Now, I got to see my dead stepson in person.
Got to actually see him dead.
And, you know, I'm not a biological parent.
You know, I raised him since he was little.
But I can't even imagine a newborn.
That's beyond my ability to imagine.
So do I blame Musk for taking this stance?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
I have no criticism against him personally for taking this stand.
I can imagine I might have done it myself.
But free speech is bigger.
It's bigger. You know?
As big as, and we all feel it, right?
You know, this is the most visual, it's almost tactile.
I mean, you can almost feel.
You almost feel the situation when he describes it.
Like, it puts you right in the scene.
This is one of the most emotionally powerful statements I've ever heard.
The most emotionally powerful reason I've ever heard.
And it's not good enough.
It's not good enough.
It really isn't good enough.
Free speech is bigger than this.
But at the same time, I completely support him as a human.
As a father, I'm on his side.
As a citizen, I'm not.
So it's a tough one. This is the best, I say best in maybe an ironic way, but it's the best edge case I've ever seen.
I mean, this is the best edge case I've ever seen.
And I will also tell you that I don't think Musk will change his mind for other reasons.
I think Twitter, the value of Twitter would go down if Alex Jones was allowed back on.
So there's a business decision that can't be ignored.
Because as soon as you let Alex Jones on, everybody on the left says, that's it.
That's it. You know, I can kind of understand why a national politician has to be on Twitter.
I can kind of get that.
But you're not going to change anybody's mind about Sandy Hook.
Nobody's changing their mind about that.
So if you take that side, or it looks like you're taking Alex Jones' side, even if your point is free speech, I don't think it's good enough.
Because there are so many other parents out there, right?
Unfortunately, Alex Jones is not about free speech.
It's not about commerce.
It's about parents, isn't it?
This is a parent-to-parent problem.
And maybe Musk got it right.
Maybe Musk got it right.
This isn't about politics.
It's not about Twitter. It's just parent-to-parent.
And as a parent, he just said, fuck you forever.
I just talked myself into Musk's opinion.
Yeah. I just talked myself into it.
While I still say, free speech says bring Alex Jones back, As horrible as that sounds.
I'm going to say that maybe parent to parent is just too strong.
Maybe parent to parent is all that matters.
I don't know. I think I'm going to revise my opinion as I talk about it.
And I'm going to say that free speech feels like the most important thing, but just one person isn't really going to affect free speech.
This might be just the special case of all special cases.
It could be the case where you just say, dad is more important than all of that other stuff.
And dad to dad, we're just going to squash the shit out of this.
Maybe. I wouldn't complain about that.
All right. I watched, I think it was Shannon Breen's show last night on Fox, and she interviewed a top Republican and a top Democrat.
Senator Tom Cotton was the Republican, and he was saying about TikTok that TikTok should be banned.
So he was anti-TikTok, thought it was dangerous for TikTok to be operating in this country.
So then she had a prominent Democrat on, Maybe you can tell me which one, whose name I can't remember.
Prominent, the one I don't see that often.
Anyway, somebody, a senator, I believe, a senator, right?
Somebody saw it. You'll tell me the name.
Anyway, it doesn't matter. But he agreed.
Mark Warner, thank you.
So Mark Warner, prominent Democrat, said exactly the same thing.
So now you've got a prominent Republican saying, get rid of TikTok.
You've got a prominent Democrat who says, get rid of TikTok.
Do you think you could find anybody who would disagree?
I've never seen one.
I've never seen one.
Is there even one person who disagrees?
Swalwell? I don't think so.
I don't think anybody disagrees.
So, if you have bipartisan support to get rid of TikTok, why is it still here?
Give me any hypothesis why it's still here when everybody wants to get rid of it.
Bipartisan. Now, yeah, you might have some free marketer people who disagree.
I can only think of one reason.
I can only think of one reason.
By default, there's only one reason.
It has to do with something about Hunter and China.
China must have some blackmail against Biden, because there isn't any other reason.
Now, if Biden were to offer a reason, I would take that under consideration.
But if he doesn't offer a fucking reason, and I've never heard one, have you?
There are a lot of people who watch the news here.
Tell me, have any of you heard a reason for keeping TikTok?
Anybody? It doesn't exist, right?
It literally doesn't exist.
Right?
It doesn't exist.
Now, if you think it's because of Generation Z voters, I disagree, because it's bipartisan.
It's bipartisan.
Everybody agrees.
So, I think we...
Here's what I think.
If the news industry doesn't ask the right questions, and our government doesn't give us reasons, you should, by default, make the worst assumption about them.
Because that's where the evidence points.
Doesn't mean you'd be right, but everything that we do with politics is operating assumptions, right?
You have to take an operating assumption on every topic until you find out you're wrong, that there's something wrong with the data or your analysis.
But you have to take an operating assumption to move forward.
My operating assumption, which my government has given me, is that they're not going to give me a reason why we're keeping TikTok.
Therefore, it must be a reason that the public should not see.
Give me one other example of what the public should not know about TikTok.
Well, it's got to be, yeah, it's either something nefarious or something else nefarious, right?
But it's within the nefarious category.
We don't know exactly what nefarious thing is happening, but it's definitely nefarious.
Definitely nefarious.
So, and I also noticed that neither Senator Cotton nor Warner mentioned the risk of persuasion from TikTok.
They both mentioned the data privacy element, which has its own risks.
But why didn't either of them mention the persuasion risk?
What do you think?
Tell me why you don't think either of them mentioned the persuasion risk.
They don't understand it?
Well, they certainly understand that social media influences opinions.
Everybody understands that.
You're okay with it, somebody says?
Alright, well, I don't know the answer to that.
So, you want to hear something amazing?
Alright, I want you to just feel this next story for how amazing it is.
In a good way.
So this is going to be the good, amazing thing.
So because Twitter exists, people like me can contact people I normally would not be able to contact.
And the reason that I have lots of reach on Twitter is...
Why? Why do I have lots of followers on Twitter?
Is it because of Dilbert?
I think Dilbert gives me 50 to 100,000 users.
And I'm pushing 800,000 now.
I think most of it...
Most of it is based on, I say things that people want to hear.
I think. You know, I say things that people want to hear.
Now, this allowed me to have a sort of a voice, where normally if you went back, you know, 50 years or whatever, the only people who would influence politics would be people they knew personally.
So in order to influence politics, you had to be in politics, or an advisor, or physically nearby.
You know, maybe the news a little bit.
But an ordinary person couldn't just do good work and then have an influence.
You know, maybe an expert in some cases.
So I'm going to use my universal analogy person.
You know who I always use for my universal analogies?
I don't know why this is true, but Mike Cernovich works as an example of so many things.
I use him all the time.
It's amazing how often it works.
Mike Cernovich has never been in politics, or never been elected to office, and he wasn't famous before Twitter.
But now he's got a big influence, big audience.
Why? Because he does a really good job of tweeting and, you know, related stuff, you know, Epstein stuff, a lot of, you know, genuine accomplishments.
So somebody like Cernovich has a voice in politics entirely based on competence, right?
It was just that he did good work that allowed his voice to have meaning.
Now, here's where I'm going to pull it all together.
Because of this Twitter effect where ordinary people's voices can be elevated...
Now, who elevated my voice?
Did I do that myself? I did not.
I did not do it myself.
I didn't have that power. You did, right?
The people who follow me decided that by following or retweeting me, they would boost my voice.
So there's this weird kind of group phenomena in which the same way that Twitter...
Twitter context will be sort of voted up, but across demographics.
When I do anything good on Twitter, or useful, let's say useful, then it gets boosted.
So you have allowed me to do the thing that I did today.
So this is what you allowed me to do.
Send a direct message to Tom Cotton and ask him why he doesn't mention the influence part of TikTok and he concentrates on the privacy part.
Now, I got to ask him the direct question because he follows me on Twitter and vice versa.
Now, doesn't that just blow you away?
Well, just think about that.
I asked him directly.
Like, he gets off of Fox News talking about one of the biggest issues, in my opinion, in the country, and I can just ask him directly the exact question that I want to ask.
But why did I have to ask him that question?
There's nobody in the whole news business who would ask him that question.
And the answer is there wasn't.
There was nobody in the news question to ask that question.
Now, I don't think he'd mind if I tell you what I said.
I'm not sure I'll tell you. If he responds, that would be a private response, and I wouldn't tell you what he said necessarily.
So he hasn't responded, but let me tell you what I said, all right?
So this is what I sent to Senator Cotton.
I said, about TikTok, I see you explain the data security risk, but not the greater risk of Chinese weaponized persuasion via content delivery.
There's a reason Chinese users don't have access to the same TikTok we do.
Now, I assume he knew that, because he's well-informed, but maybe not.
I just wanted to cover that, that he knows that China doesn't get the same version we do.
And I said, do you have a different view of the persuasion risk?
And then I said, parenthetically, I'm a trained hypnotist, and I see the risk as WMD level.
So then I went on. I said, if you haven't used TikTok, because I think this might be the problem.
This might be the problem.
I said, if you haven't used TikTok or the similar feature on Instagram, you might not realize how powerful they have become.
It isn't just content now.
They can turn on your dopamine faucet and just keep it there.
I'm 65 and it zombifies me instantly now that I learned my content preferences.
True story. If I were 12, it would own my brain completely.
And it does, for 12-year-olds.
And then I said to the senator, you might have a serious education issue in Congress on the current power of content persuasion.
I don't yet see a sign that China weaponized TikTok persuasion.
I haven't seen it yet. But if they do, it will not be obvious, and it will be profound and nearly instant.
Now, how was that?
How did I do? Did I make my case?
I think I made my case.
So it could be that there's actually a really good reason for why things are where they are.
And because I have a lot of respect for Senator Cotton, I suppose he'll tell me.
I know. He's responded before to a compliment I sent by DM. So, he might see it, he might respond, and if he does, I'll decide whether I can tell you.
It'll be a private message, so don't assume that I'll tell you.
All right.
So let's talk about fentanyl.
My opinion on fentanyl might be drifting a little bit, which will surprise you.
So here's the thing.
There's a question that if we had a free press, they would be asking every politician this question.
You ready for this?
And when I tell you what the question is, don't hate the current press too much.
Because you're going to start hating.
You're going to hate your journalists as soon as you hear the question.
Because it's so obvious and nobody's asked it.
Here's the question. Hey politician, why do you rank the safety of the Mexican cartels above the safety of Americans?
There it is. That question needs to be asked of every politician every time they go in public.
Because they are. And I don't know the answer to it.
There might be a good reason.
What if they have a good reason?
Maybe they say, oh, you don't know, Scott.
If we went against the cartels, they might kill even more people than they're killing now.
I'm not saying that would be a good argument, but maybe it exists.
Maybe there's some kind of argument like that.
Or they might say, oh, we can't set a precedent.
Maybe. Maybe that's the argument.
It wouldn't convince me.
But I'd like to hear the argument.
Now, how much do you hate the fact that that's never been asked?
You've never seen that asked, have you?
Right? No one has ever asked that question.
And that's exactly what's happening.
They are putting the well-being of the cartels, and presumably there would be, you know, non-cartel collateral damage that nobody wants.
But let me tell you how I would do it.
If I were going to attack the cartels, I would do it this way.
I would give them warning so that the innocents can get away.
Give them plenty of time.
Say, this facility will disappear in 24 hours.
Make sure you're not standing there.
Now, what would they do?
Well, they'd have a day to collect all their valuable fentanyl-making stuff and quickly move it to another site.
Excellent. As soon as they set up that new site, you say, you've got 24 hours.
This new site is going to disappear.
Then you've got to collect it all up and move again.
Fine. I'm okay with that.
Let's just keep doing that.
Because, you know, you don't mow the lawn once.
You've got to mow it every week.
That's what a lawn does.
Fentanyl is the same thing.
Cartels. You don't mow them once.
You just got to go back every day and keep mowing them, mowing them, mowing them, and that's just your full-time job, mowing the lawn.
Now, anyway, so if the problem is collateral damage, I feel like that could be handled.
Like, you could minimize that.
But I'm also feeling that the fact that fentanyl is not being dealt with, there could be like an unspoken strategy here.
And I think that's a thing.
And I think that there's an unspoken strategy in Israel on birthrate.
We'll talk about that pretty soon.
But sometimes there are unspoken strategies.
And here's the unspoken strategy of American politicians.
I think they want a better ratio of non-addicts to addicts.
And the more addicts, or people who could become addicts, the more of them that die, the healthier the country is.
And that nobody's thinking maybe in that exact way, but that at a subconscious level, at a subconscious level, we all know the country's better off if these addicts die.
Now let me say the harshest thing you'll ever hear.
My stepson died of an overdose that included fentanyl.
And in my opinion, the world is better off without him, like a lot better.
And I've said this before, it's horrible, because I love that kid like crazy.
I loved him, but there wasn't any doubt that he was bad for the world.
Like, he was really bad for the world.
I think he could have killed somebody, like, accidentally.
Maybe with, like, sharing a drug or driving unsafely or something.
He was terribly, terribly dangerous.
And the world is better off without him.
Now, his family, maybe not.
Who knows? But I believe that that attitude is behind the lack of fentanyl action.
I believe that everybody who thinks, yeah, on a public and logical level, we can't let China and the cartels be killing our young people.
On the other hand, subconsciously, do I care if those people die?
I actually believe that we have a subconscious strategy of reducing the addicts to non-addicts ratio.
Because it makes the country healthier.
Yeah, I don't want to say cull the herd, because that's just too fucked up.
But we do need fewer addicts to non-addicts.
Would you agree? The ratio of addicts to non-addicts could reach a tipping point.
And I don't know, we could be close.
We might be close.
Am I wrong? Because one addict destroys maybe an entire family.
So the ratio of addict to destruction is like one to five, something like that.
Like every addict will destroy five other lives indirectly.
So at what point do you have enough addicts where basically everybody's life is destroyed?
Like nobody is free from their destruction.
You know, if you look at the streets, you see this zombie apocalypse.
People walk around like that.
How many of them is too many?
Now, as harsh as this sounds, I'm starting to realize that the country doesn't want it to stop, or else it would have already happened.
I believe that subconsciously we want these people to die.
Not consciously. If you ask somebody, they would say, honestly, no, I don't want this to happen.
We try to get them in treatment.
But I don't believe that subconsciously they believe that.
What do you think? Do you think I'm onto anything or no?
Because people say it directly, but it's usually trolls and assholes on social media.
But in theory, I would be the last person to adopt that point of view because I lost a family member.
But even I have some sympathy for it.
We actually don't have any way to stop addiction.
Nothing. I don't know of any way.
And at the same time, we can't have this many addicts.
It might be solving itself.
As awful as that sounds, it might be solving itself.
This might be a self-correcting problem.
I hate to say it.
Now, which doesn't say that there will be plenty of people who weren't going to become addicts, got a bad pill, died when they would have actually turned it around and become productive citizens.
And we all understand that.
But I think overall, Overall, I think the country has taken a Darwinian opinion to this because there's no other explanation.
There's no other explanation.
I think people at a base level want the addicts to be dead because they don't want them in their neighborhood.
They don't want to deal with them. They don't want to pay for them.
They don't want to go through the frustration of trying to clean them up because it doesn't work very often.
So, but I think we just have to understand who we are.
If that's who we are, maybe that's who we are.
All right. Let's talk about the declining birth rate, which seems to be like the biggest problem in the world, some would say, and I would agree.
It's up there with the biggest problems in the world.
Why is it that birth rates are declining everywhere, it seems, except Israel?
Anybody have a theory for that?
I had a fascinating exchange today with David Boxenhorn, who lives in Israel, and we're speculating why Israel has good population growth.
Not enough, by the way.
Even in Israel, I don't think it's enough.
But it's better than even...
But think about this.
It's even better than the Arab birthrate within Israel.
So, here's my hypothesis.
You ready? Follow the money.
That's it. It works every time.
Alright, in the beginning of Israel, the birth rate was lower.
In modern Israel, the birth rate is higher.
Follow the money. Follow the money.
When you're a new, scrappy, barely-can-survive family, having an extra kid might be a burden, because you don't know if any of this is going to work.
Once you're prosperous, as Israel is, and you have this special case in Israel that doesn't exist anywhere else, You have the narrative of the Holocaust saying that there are people in this world who would like to reduce the number of Jews to zero.
Who else has that?
The Uyghurs? That's totally unique.
Nobody else has an operating system for their whole life that says there are plenty of people out there who want to reduce the number of you guys to zero.
So on top of that, they live in this little sand island in the middle of enemies, and some of those enemies are lobbing missiles into Israel every day.
If you were under attack, and the main thing you could do to defend yourself was...
more people.
What would make Israel more safe?
Well, economics, right?
How do you get good economics?
More people. Military defense?
How do you get a good military defense?
More people. Right?
And military defense and economics are basically inseparable.
You know, a good economy gets you a good defense.
They're just inseparable.
So I would say that the birth rate in Israel makes sense on at least three levels.
And David Boxenhorn suggested the first one.
The first one is that the...
What's the right word?
The most observant...
What's the word?
Traditional Orthodox.
The most Orthodox Jews have had a high birth rate for a while.
So there's one group in Israel that has a high birth rate and that maybe some of that, you know, cultural influence slopped over.
So some of it could be that there's a group of Jews having a lot of babies and maybe that just looked popular to other people.
But I would go further and say I think it's because they're a unique situation where they need more humans to make sure that there are Jews in 100 years.
How did I do? How's my theory?
Because nobody else has that.
Nobody else has an operating system that says people want to drive your numbers to zero.
I think that would trigger you subconsciously to feel safer if there were just more Jews in the world.
And I don't believe anybody else feels like that.
Like, I don't think Americans wake up and say, ah, I better have some babies because that'll keep America safe.
Now, as it turns out, you should have some babies to keep America safe, but you're not thinking about it.
Because in America, we don't have this operating system that says, Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust, it's going to happen to you any minute now, right?
But if I did have that, I would think, have some damn babies.
I'm going to need some soldiers.
Male and female.
Because in Israel, the women joined the military, so every baby you have is a soldier.
Like literally, they all have to become soldiers.
Yeah, some of you need to start having some babies.
All right. That's what I think is happening.
Now, the question is, if I'm right, can any of that be generalized to other populations that need more babies?
And the answer is, if I'm right, nope.
Because there's nothing about Israel that can be generalized to anybody else.
How many times have I told you that if you compare the Holocaust to anything, you're wrong?
Like, just automatically.
You know, that's like the Holocaust.
No, it isn't. No, it isn't.
Stop it. There's nothing like it.
So, all right, I said I'd talk about Ye.
Thanks for reminding me. Good job.
So, Ye is developing his city or community idea where it would be, you know, a Ye design city.
Now, if the reporting is right, and it's too early to know this is true, the design that he seems to be settling on are these igloo-looking, concrete-looking homes that are sort of like Star Wars, you know, the planet of Tatooie or whatever it is.
And I've seen a number of them.
It looks like he is sort of settling on this dome-like design.
But here's the problem.
They're without windows.
They're basically windowless.
I don't know how that ever could be a good idea.
I feel like you should be going exactly in the opposite direction.
In my opinion, you should look for the best insulated glass, make as many glass walls as you can, and then have a curtain system.
By the way, do any of you have 3-day blinds, you know, the automatic curtains?
They're awesome! They're great!
If you don't have automatic curtains, or blinds, blinds, not curtains.
If you don't have automatic blinds, go get some!
They're freaking amazing!
Because you can instantly change the environment, the temperature, block the sun, let it in.
It gives you all kinds of control over your room.
In fact, I have mine on right now where I couldn't light this room properly.
Yeah, I mean, it does cost money, right?
But I think, here's what I think.
I think EA may be designing to design.
Let me say that clear.
I think he's trying to create something that looks good when you look at it, design-wise, and different.
But I don't know that he's got the user requirement right.
It's sort of looking like maybe he should back up.
To really check on what makes a human healthy and happy.
And I don't know that the igloo is the answer to that.
Now, keep in mind, I don't know exactly what he's up to.
He did talk about having some kind of light access.
So I think the current ones maybe are not built the way the final one would be.
So he probably will add more light.
So I don't want to assume that he hasn't got that figured out.
I'm just saying that so far, I don't see light as being a focus.
It looks like it's the opposite. He might be talking about Earthships.
I think he's probably, I believe he's probably influenced by Earthships.
That's a green building concept.
All right, let's talk about Sam Harris talking to Bill Maher.
I guess Bill Maher had him on his little side show that he does where he talks to one person.
And this is the cleanest example of cognitive dissonance, in my opinion.
Can't know for sure, that you might ever see.
So even if I'm misinterpreting this example, it's the best lesson you'll ever see of a clean-looking, again, I can't read minds, but it looks like a clean case of cognitive dissonance.
And here's the setup. The thing that caused cognitive dissonance is, for example, you think you're one kind of person, let's say a smart person.
And then life proves that you were wrong.
So your very belief about who you are and what you're capable of is challenged by the facts.
There are two ways to go.
You can either say, oh, I guess I'm not very good.
I guess the facts prove that that's who I am.
Or, more likely, cognitive dissonance clicks in and you hallucinate, literally hallucinate, a reason why you were really right all along.
You've seen it, right? You've seen it in your own...
If you trap somebody and you prove that they were wrong for years, their brain can't say, oh, wow, that's interesting.
Turns out I was totally wrong for years.
Almost nobody can do that.
A normal human will hallucinate a reason that they were really right all along.
Now, let's see if it looks like Sam Harris did that.
If you don't know who Sam Harris is, you should know that he's one of the most rational people in the world.
That's what he writes about, how to be rational.
And you should know that he is very well-informed, right?
So he's not somebody who's paying no attention to the political news.
He's a well-informed, very, very smart person, way above average, okay?
He's talking to Bill Maher, and...
Bill Maher notes that the New York Times and the Washington Post did not talk about the Hunter laptop properly.
In other words, they reported that it might be disinformation all the way through the election.
Now, how does Sam Harris, how would he explain in his own understanding of himself and the world, Don't you think that Sam Harris gets his beliefs from the New York Times and the Washington Post and publications of that sort?
I'll bet he does.
I'll bet, again, here we're speculating, nobody can read anybody's mind, right?
So I can't actually know what Sam Harris is thinking or his motivations or anything.
But I'm giving you, like, from the outside, This is a perfect example of what it would look like if cognitive dissonance were involved.
So the setup is Sam Harris, very smart, very knowledgeable, and believes that his sources are generally, let's say, could be wrong, because the news sometimes is wrong, but not intentionally wrong.
I guess that's the key.
Does Sam Harris believe...
That the sources he uses for his own understanding of the world are intentionally wrong.
And I don't think he would believe that.
I think he believes they could make mistakes like everybody does.
Again, I can't read his mind, so if tomorrow he says, Scott, you got it all wrong, listen to him, not me.
Because it's very unfair to characterize somebody's inner thoughts.
So I'm trying to parse that a little bit so I can make my point about cognitive dissonance and give you a little lesson here without saying too much about somebody's inner thoughts.
So this is a perfect setup.
He's got a situation where this laptop example, and as Bill Maher pointed out, and so Sam's explanation was that there wasn't enough time for the New York Times and the other major media to vet the laptop before the election.
Well, there just wasn't enough time.
Then Bill Maher says, well, why did the New York Post have time?
Right? So there were entities that had plenty of time.
And all they did was say, here, take a look at this.
And they brought an expert in.
And the expert looked at it and said, yeah, that looks legit.
And then they reported it.
And then after the election, the other places reported it too.
Now, Sam was under the impression that there was actually a reason that the New York Times didn't report it before the election.
I think Bill Maher proved to him that that reason was not valid, which should have, in a rational world, led Sam to say, oh, I was not aware that the sources that I use for my understanding of the world could, in a situation so blatantly, literally prefer disinformation over news.
Now, do you believe...
Somebody says he lied, and I'm going to disagree with you.
There is no indication that Sam Harris is a liar.
There's no indication of that.
And if you say you see it here, I call bullshit hard on that.
I believe he saw the world that way.
This is cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance hits very smart people exactly the same as everybody else.
And that's the part that you need to learn.
If there's one thing I could teach you, that Sam Harris being one of the smartest, most rational people in the entire public doesn't help you at all to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Do you get that? As soon as you tell yourself, well, a smart person isn't going to fall for that, nope, you don't understand what it is.
Cognitive dissonance does not care how smart or well-informed you are.
It's completely independent of that.
It's an illusion. It's just like an optical illusion.
You know, no matter how smart you are, an optical illusion still works, right?
Like you still see it that way, even if you know it's an illusion.
So that's the important thing that is really hard to communicate.
When you see dumb people who seem to be having a bad opinion, then you say to yourself, well, the explanation is that they're dumb.
Right? Don't you do that?
Don't you say, the reason we disagree is that I'm smart and well-informed, and you're either not smart or not well-informed.
Always. We always think that.
But this doesn't work with Sam Harris.
That's why I use him for my example.
You can't doubt that he's smart, you can't doubt that he's rational, and more rational than you are.
I would say he's more rational than I am, probably better informed than I am on most things.
He's a level of intellectual above me, and I recognize that on most things.
So I think this is a clean, clean case of cognitive dissonance.
But I could be wrong. Because remember, I can't read his mind.
Don't know what's going on in there.
But it's the cleanest case, allegedly, I've ever seen.
I only saw the transcript, so I didn't see if he had the reset phase.
So somebody asked me if Sam had the reset phase.
I've described that before as a tell for cognitive dissonance.
The reset phase is where you're struck dumb for a moment, and you can't say anything.
And your face looks like your brain just took a vacation.
And when you trigger people into cognitive dissonance, and I do it intentionally fairly often, in person, You see the reset face, and it goes like this.
So did you know that the other publications had plenty of time to vet it?
Why couldn't the New York Times?
Yeah, if you're on Spotify, you don't know what I just did.
Yeah, it's like Vaporlock.
You look like you're going to talk, but nothing can come out.
That's how you tell.
So I will watch it and see if I see that.
That'd be interesting. Alright, ladies and gentlemen.
Years ago, I heard...
I just noticed I had, like, chocolate on my face.
I always eat these protein bars before I go live.
Like, I always got chocolate, like, halfway over my mug.
It's a good thing I don't feel embarrassment anymore.
No problem at all.
So, years ago, Mark Cuban said something that sounded crazy to me at the time.
He said that he doesn't look at regular news sites because Twitter is faster and it's complete.
So you can always check the news on Twitter and you don't have to wait for the news to come on when it comes on.
And I thought to myself, that doesn't work.
There's always going to be something on the news that's not on Twitter.
But today, I did a news-related livestream.
In which I spent hours collecting news-related stuff, and I never looked at a news site.
It was just all on Twitter.
I think Twitter is just going to eat the news.
Musk might put the entire news business out of business.
Because here's something that could happen on Twitter.
In just the same way that Mike Cernovich went from unknown to a highly useful account, more rational than vibrate through the union, I don't care about funding.
We'll get a paid comment here.
Oh, some people say that what Trump did with Trump University was worse than anything that Biden can do.
All right. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute.
If you remind me to talk about that.
So my point was that just the way people become prominent voices on Twitter, just by being useful and people like what they say, Musk is talking about citizen journalism, where anybody who's close to a story can just report it on Twitter.
And then other people say, hey, that was a good job, and then that becomes the news.
Couldn't that happen? Then how about this?
I told you there's a question that all politicians should be asked.
Why do you favor the cartels' lives over American lives?
And imagine if Twitter...
Could surface the questions that Twitter users most want asked, because other people vote on it across categories, etc.
And then when there's a press conference, one of the steps is they say, all right, thank you for the media has asked the following questions.
Or maybe Twitter needs somebody in...
Oh, this is even better.
Maybe Twitter needs a human being at the press conference, you know, the presidential press conferences, And then Twitter just has press credentials.
Except Twitter's press credentials, under this scenario, would be on behalf of its public.
So that the Twitter representative would ask the question that the Twitter users had surfaced as the ones they cared about.
So it wouldn't be a reporter or journalist so much as somebody representing the collective curiosity of Twitter.
How awesome would that be?
Imagine the questions that come from NBC News, how boring and stupid those are, and then imagine the questions that would come from Twitter users, like mine.
So my question, why do you favor Mexican cartel lives over American lives, that would probably bubble up to the top, if I do say so myself.
I'll just say that directly, since I'm putting my ego out there.
I believe that question is solid enough that it would bubble to the top, and it would actually get asked in public.
Now, if not, somebody else's better question would be asked, and that's fine, too.
I don't think that America has quite processed how big the Musk takeover of Twitter can be, because it's not going to be just Twitter anymore.
Twitter 2.0 is not going to be Twitter 1.0.
Like, its effect on everything is incalculably large, and the only thing they have to do to make all that happen...
What's the only thing Twitter has to do to make all of that happen?
Everything they're doing right now.
Exactly what they're doing right now.
And that all will happen.
Like, you couldn't stop it as long as they're doing the things they're doing now.
Now, this assumes that, you know, Musk can afford to keep it in business, and I like his odds.
Even if he says the odds are low, I like his odds.
All right. Demons talk about leaving?
Yeah. I don't know if they can.
Yeah, the Dilbert website has some problems for days, and I don't even know if we're close.
When I say we, I don't directly manage that.
But I don't even know if we're close to fixing it.
Whatever the problem was, it's catastrophic.
I mean, it's comics on a website, so it's not catastrophic for the country.
It's just catastrophic in terms of one website.
Alright. Who are my top three follows?
You know, I don't want to say three because there are too many and then I leave somebody out.
But I think I do owe you my best follow list, don't I? I feel like that would be really useful.
Because if you think that I say anything useful, you should know that I'm deeply influenced by...
20 people every day.
You know, just 20 power users.
And when I say power users, I just mean they're good at it.
That doesn't mean they have a lot of followers.
There are a number of people who influence me basically every day who don't have a lot of followers.
Yeah, I'm checking my feed.
I've got no response from Senator Cotton.
And again, I don't know if I'll tell you.
I might tell you if he responds.
I don't know if I'm going to tell you what he says, because I would treat that as a private conversation.
All right. Oh, Trump University.
Thank you. Here's my take on Trump University.
That was bad management, but probably that's all it was.
Meaning that it's very unlikely that Trump knew the details of what the The content was of the course, or even exactly why that didn't match people's expectation of why it wasn't working.
Remember, he was a licensee, I believe.
He was either a licensee, meaning not directly involved with the business, or he was sort of a silent partner.
It was one of those. I don't know what it was.
But whether he was sort of the non-operating partner or the licensee, whichever it was, There's no evidence that he knew what was going on.
Am I wrong? Fact check me on this.
I don't believe there's any evidence that Trump personally had a good understanding of how bad things were.
I don't think that's ever been demonstrated, has it?
Now, it has been demonstrated that the students did not get what they thought they were paying for.
And then, you know, financial restitution was made.
And that's the way the system works.
Somebody did a bad job, it was legally actionable, they acted, they got a refund.
I don't know. I mean, there's certainly super sketchy behavior of the people running Trump Organization, but if you extend that to the person who had 400 companies and probably spent one day thinking about it, that's kind of a stretch.
Now, if it ever turned out that Trump himself knew exactly what they were doing and how sketchy it was, well, then I'd change my opinion.
I don't need any cognitive dissonance for that.
I would just say, oh, well, I guess I got that totally wrong.
It wouldn't offend my sense of who I am.
It would just be new information.
All right. Uh...
Why is Sam Harris fixated on that?
I never say anybody's fixated on things.
That's sort of a dickish thing to say about anybody.
I hate it when people say it about me.
There's one thing he uses as an example.
I do think, and by the way, I agreed with him.
I think I did. When Trump University was mentioned as a dark mark against Trump, I agree with that.
I agree with that. That's part of what I factor into my overall decision.
And at the time, I said it was the thing that bothered me the most.
But I'd also have to know how much he knew about it, and that's never been presented to me.
I've never seen the news report how much Trump knew about what was happening.
Sam Harris says it's worse than the laptop?
Maybe. Maybe.
But we've had time to look into it, and nobody's ever told me what he knew and what he didn't.
So... I mean...
But if he says it's worse, okay.
Maybe. But you also have to look at the entire package.
All right. Which I do.
All right. I'm pretty sure this was the best livestream of all time.
I feel like I hit the mark here.
Do you all agree? You learned more today and had more optimism and more happiness than anything else you could have been doing at the same time.
It's true. All right.
Two sniffs and an exhale.
I'm still doing that, by the way.
Have any of you gotten hooked on that Andrew Huberman breathing technique that I've mentioned a few times, where you sniff two inhales and then you do one deep exhale?
I'm totally addicted to it.
Because the feeling you get is immediate.
The payoff is immediate.
It's not like...
I've been doing this for a week, and I do think I feel a little better.
It's nothing like that. You actually feel immediately better.
So, like, I do it all day.
All day long. Every time I'm bored, I walk the dog, I breathe.
I'm waiting in line, I breathe.
I just do it all day.
Feels good every time.
How do you do it? Belinda says.
I'll give you one more lesson for those who have missed it.
This is the Andrew Huberman method.
Nothing I invented at all.
And apparently there's some science behind it.
And it's based on the, I guess, the best ratio of, you know, O2 to CO2 or whatever the hell.
I don't know. But there's some science to it.
But you do two deep nose inhales.
Followed by one long, deep exhale.
There's something about the sniffing in and getting almost a full inhale, and then another sniff so you go beyond a full inhale to, like, extra inhale.
There's something about that that gives you the right balance of body chemistry.
I don't know. Yeah.
All right, I'm going to lock off the locals' feed from the public.
Thanks for reminding me.
I'm going to go talk to the locals' people about all the good stuff.
And then I will talk to you later.
If you were on the locals' subscription platform, you could hear this too.
