Episode 1935 Scott Adams: Hilarious News. I'll Teach You How To Make A 3-D Printer Out Of Cow Manure
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Content:
Mastodon refuge app for lefties
Oathkeepers trial without evidence?
Trump's last 2 tweets before Twitter ban
Bret Weinstein's reasonable hypothesis
Obama confirmed rigged elections in 2008
TikTok is "digital fentanyl"
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and there is no finer thing that has ever happened in the history of humankind and before.
In fact, many of the animals had no sipping from coffee cups whatsoever, so we can feel sorry for them.
But let's not bring that downer into our thinking.
Instead, let's raise it up, because the news is funny and fun today.
Well, most of it. We're going to ignore the bad stuff.
But if you'd like to take it up for an experience that might be the peak experience of your entire life, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or stand, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any cayenne, filling with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Everything. It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Yeah.
Yeah, that was good.
Well, the most important story of the day is that some folks in India have figured out how to use cow dung to make plaster and bricks.
And if you say to yourself, well, that doesn't sound like a good idea, I don't want my house made of cow dung, you would be wrong.
Because it turns out that if you mix it with some ordinary materials, not only does it become solid and good for building, and has been used for, I guess it's been used for many years in some parts of the world.
But better than that, apparently it's a superior insulation.
You can actually lower the indoor temperature by 7 degrees just by using these cow dung bricks.
Pretty good, right? Now, have you ever seen a 3D printer that builds houses?
Have you ever seen a video of that?
They'll bring in usually like a big platform that they put, you know, around where the house will be.
And then the 3D printer moves along the, you know, the arms and it just builds the walls up as you go.
I'm thinking this might be an opportunity to build a 3D printer and a cow's.
So all you do is you'd strap a feed bag to the cow's mouth and then you would lift the cow up on some kind of a support thing and you would just hover it over the part of the wall where you want to build the next part of the wall and the cow would just eat and then Then it'll do its business, but you've got to have it lined up just right so that the cow dung comes right into a little form that would form a brick, and then I guess you'd probably tamp it down a little bit.
But I think you could actually build a 3D printer out of a cow.
It wouldn't be fast, but it would get the job done.
Just the sort of thing you need for a third world country.
Cow shit, 3D printer.
Yeah, you want one. I know you want one.
Well, speaking of cow shit, let's talk about Adam Schiff.
Now, I just want to put a mental picture.
Can we do a little mental activity here?
Can we do a little mental exercise?
I want you all to play along.
I'm going to give you two images.
Imagine the two images separately, and then I'm going to ask you to, in your mind, merge the two images, you know, like if you were cross-eyed.
There'll be two separate images, and then I'm going to ask you to bring them together in your mind.
All right, the first one is a full moon.
Just get a picture of the moon with all of this, you know, crevices and craters and stuff.
A really good moon picture.
Now, separately, split screen your brain, and over on the right, imagine your dog's ass.
But you're looking at it from ass level, directly from the back.
Now imagine the dog's ass on one side.
Now imagine the moon on the other side.
Now in your mind, merge the moon and the dog's ass, and what does it look like?
Adam Schiff. Yeah, if you merge a moon and a dog's ass, take a look at Adam Schiff.
Yeah. It's not funny now, but wait until you look at him.
The next time you see Adam Schiff, ask yourself if he doesn't look like the combination of a moon and a dog's ass.
He does. I'm just saying.
Which is not deeply important, to my point, but I thought it was necessary.
So it turns out that McCarthy, now that he's the Speaker of the House, or will be, he's going to remove from committees Adam Schiff and Swalwell and Omar.
So Omar is getting kicked for being anti-Semitic, says McCarthy.
Adam Schiff is being removed for being a confirmed liar.
And it's funny because I think it is confirmed.
Because he said some things in public, and then when he was put under oath, according to McCarthy, when he was put under oath, he said, no, no, I didn't see any evidence in that SCIF at all.
Or something like that.
And then Swalwell, I think McCarthy's point, which is clever, Swalwell would not be able to get security clearance in the private sector because of his association with a Chinese spy.
So the private sector wouldn't be able to even give him security clearance.
So McCarthy says, if the private sector wouldn't give him security clearance, why is the government doing it?
Now, remember this point when we get to a story I'm going to talk about with Brett Weinstein.
Now, doesn't it seem to you as if Giving security clearance to Swalwell sounds exactly like the opposite of what you would do if you were trying to do a good job for your country.
Doesn't it? It sounds like, why would you even consider that?
Like, that's not even in the top of 1,000 things you would do if you actually wanted to protect your country.
So it looks like a little bit like opposite of what would be smart, right?
Just remember, this is one example of something that just looks opposite of what's smart.
And maybe there's a reason for that.
We'll talk about that a little bit.
All right? So I'm fully in favor of removing these folks from the committees.
I guess that's what happens when you're in power.
You get to do that. And I think the reasons stated are completely solid.
Would you agree? Because I wouldn't necessarily be on board with this if he were making up reasons.
If the only argument was, we don't want these darn Democrats on our committee, then I'd say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not how this works.
You probably should have a Democrat on your committee.
But the problem with these characters is not that they're too Democrat.
They did some pretty specific things that you should consider them for being disqualified.
So good job for McCarthy on taking care of that directly and not messing around with that.
Another favorite story, apparently a prankster pretended to be France's Macron, the head of France, and he actually got a phone call through to the head of Poland, And he had a long conversation with him, pretending to be the president of France.
Now, the actual conversation is not terribly important.
They were talking about whether he wanted war with Russia and stuff.
So it was kind of a ridiculous conversation.
But here's the best part of the story.
How do you get through to the president of Poland?
How did he do that?
Don't you want to know how he pulled that off?
Can anybody do that?
Could I place a call from my own phone?
Maybe it was a, I don't know, was it a block number or a private number or something?
So maybe he called into the switchboard, probably called into the switchboard and said, Hello, I am President Macron.
Can you forward me to the President of Poland?
And then, like, somebody forwarded him to the president.
Like, how exactly did that happen?
Don't you feel like you need a little extra information on this story?
How do you get through?
And could somebody do that to Biden?
Like, is this a Poland-specific thing?
Because why would he even think to try it?
Like, who would even think that that could work?
Like, I wouldn't even try that prank.
Yeah, I wouldn't do it anyway.
But I wouldn't think there was any chance it would work.
Now, if you said getting through to a senator or a representative, I would say, yeah, you could probably do that.
I bet you could get through to a member of Congress.
But the president? The sitting president?
You could just call the president?
What's going on here?
All right, well, that's hilarious, no matter what the real story is.
Here's another funny story.
So one of the competitors to Twitter, I guess, is a site called Mastodon.
And apparently a lot of journalists and left-leaning people, you know, said, oh, we can't handle this Twitter under Elon Musk.
We're all going to escape. We're going to go over to Mastodon.
So how do you think that's working out for them over at Mastodon?
There is a hilarious story on the Fox News site.
Now, of course, Fox likes to dunk on the left, so there's a little bit of dunking going on.
So I'm not going to claim that this is an unbiased reporting or anything, but it is funny.
So I'm just going to tell you about it because it's funny.
This is from Fox News site.
So it says that Mastodon, it's an alternative to Twitter, so it's where all these lefty journalists are going.
But here's what's happened, according to them.
As more journalists moved onto the site, however, there were more reports of blocking, attacking, and outright banning of users over political issues.
So they went there, and it turns out every place is going to be the same.
But here's the best part.
In one case, former Slate podcaster...
Now, you'd have to know Slate is very left-leaning, right?
So this is a lefty podcaster.
Mike Peska was suspended from the popular Mastodon server for a verified journalist...
There's some technical thing that you get...
Mastodon has a weird architecture, so forget about the details.
But he got in trouble on the site and got negative consequences because he linked to a story in the New York Times, and the New York Times story was on the negative consequences, according to the reporting, of puberty blockers on children.
And although it was in the New York Times, And he was a left-leaning journalist pointing to a left-leaning paper of record for the left.
He got in trouble from somebody who was even farther left.
Transgender blogger Parker Malloy attacked Pesca and complained that the, quote, anti-trans content in the New York Times was not removed from the network, from Macedon.
And then according to the New York Times, Pesco was soon informed that, quote, he had been suspended for referring to Miss Malloy as a, quote, activist, which was dismissive.
He got kicked off a mastodon for calling an activist an activist.
Oh, come on.
That's funny. So the left realized that if they go someplace that is mostly just themselves, that they don't become peaceful.
They attack each other.
Do you know who knew that would happen?
Everybody on the right.
100% of people on the right know that they can't turn off the...
You can't turn off the victim and attack mode, right?
So the people on the left have an operating system that is, the way you win is to frame yourself as the biggest victim.
That doesn't go away just because the Republicans are somewhere else.
You can't turn that shit off.
They will suddenly go from, we're victims of Republicans, to, well, I guess we're victims of these guys, too.
I guess we're just victims of these activists who are more activists than we are.
They're a little bit more left than us.
They're attacking us. So maybe, just maybe, the people who left Twitter for Mastodon learned a valuable lesson about human nature.
It doesn't change when you change platforms.
Your human nature, still the same.
So I think the left is going to need to be near Republicans.
Do you know why?
Why does the left need to be near Republicans?
Well, one, protection.
Who's going to protect them?
And two, so they have some reason to be evil and mean and victims, and it makes more sense to them, because they have an other to blame.
All right. Stop me if you saw this coming.
Have you ever seen an example where a joke...
Turns into reality, and you watch it in slow motion as it's happening, and you say, well, that's not really going to go from a joke to actually something happening in the real world.
And then slowly it does, and the whole time you're like, am I really watching that?
Here's an example.
There's an article by Ross Barkin, MSN, so MSN ran this story.
I guess it was the Intelligencer originally.
And the option is, Democrats have some solid options if Biden doesn't run in 2024.
So if it's not Biden, those Democrats, they have a strong bench.
And the person who was called out as one of the strongest on the Democrat bench was John Fetterman.
John Fetterman is being talked about as your next president.
Now, that started as a joke, right?
I'm probably not the first or only person who said it as a joke, but Fetterman could beat Trump.
Fetterman could beat any Republican.
Do you know why? Because if Fetterman runs...
There won't be anything to talk about on the candidate.
You'll just talk about policies.
Because they'll just say, well, he'll just rubber stamp Democrat policies.
So the Democrats say, it kind of doesn't matter who it is.
You might as well have somebody who doesn't have, like, a lot of baggage except the most obvious baggage.
And apparently that didn't stop them from becoming a senator.
So if they know that that doesn't matter, just run the guy who's more like a brand ambassador.
He's not even like a politician, right?
Right? He's more like a symbol of their policies, and that's all they need.
They could actually win.
They won with Joe Biden hiding in the basement.
All they have to do is take Fetterman and hide him in the basement.
There's no reason to think that won't work.
In the actual real world, even the Democrats know that would work.
That would really work.
How could that be more absurd?
There's nothing you can say about that that can take it to the exaggeration level.
It's the ultimate exaggeration, just by itself.
This could not be crazier.
Now, of course, the argument...
There was a little bit of meat on the argument that he appealed to, I guess, white male voters or something, you know, blue-collar workers.
So that makes sense.
And then the argument is that he would be recovered from his stroke, so, you know, it's not going to be like the Senate race.
And that's a fair statement.
He might actually recover from his stroke, and he might appeal to a certain segment that would give Trump some trouble.
It's actually in the realm of something that could happen.
Well, if you're trying to keep up on the Dilbert website that's been down since Friday, when I tell you it got hacked, I don't know the details.
I mean, I assume they know it got hacked, but I'm not even sure that's true.
Apparently, it's just like removed from the DNS. It's like it didn't exist.
And the last I knew, the admins were locked out from some key functions, so it might not even be fixable.
And when I say not fixable, I mean they might have to start from scratch, as in you can't even do a backup, right?
Because in order to access the backup, you'd have to have access to all the parts of the system, and they don't.
So they might have to just erase it.
Just erase the whole fucking thing and just start over.
Now, I don't know if that has anything to do with me.
Because I'm, at this moment, I'm the only controversial artist.
Because the other comics were affected too.
It wasn't just Dilbert. It was a range of, I don't know, a hundred different comics that are all part of the same syndication process.
So, yeah, I doubt it was because of ESG or anything like that.
I doubt it. I feel like it was probably just general fuckery and not necessarily aimed at me.
Does anybody think it was aimed at me?
Let's test your conspiracy theorizing.
Because I don't. I don't think it was aimed at me.
I'm getting a lot of yeses.
I won't dismiss that.
So I won't tell you you're crazy.
Because if you think it was aimed at me, that's not crazy.
It just would be sort of an indirect way to do it.
Because, you know, the site will be down for a few days.
It's going to cost me a quarter of my income for the month.
Right? So it's really expensive.
A quarter of my income from that source, just that source.
It's pretty expensive.
So we'll see. You know, the trouble is, it wouldn't stop me from talking about ESG or anything else.
So it's not going to stop me, so it wouldn't be really an effective way to go about it.
All right. Let's see.
I'm not going to talk about mass shootings.
Everybody okay with that? Let me just take the temperature in the room.
You're all okay with that, right?
I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page.
We're just not going to talk about the mass shootings.
Just period. And if you want to know about that stuff, there are new sources for that.
It's just not going to be part of what I do.
All right. There's a new ivermectin news.
Ivermectin just won't die.
It's like every day there's some new thing.
So now there's a doctor lawsuit against the FDA saying that the FDA prevented them from using it off-label, which is separate from saying whether it worked or didn't work.
So this is not a conversation about whether ivermectin works or doesn't work.
It's only a conversation about whether doctors should have the right to take a chance.
If they think the risk-reward situation looks right.
And the FDA recommended against it, but now the FDA's defense is, we didn't tell you you couldn't use it.
We just recommended against it.
Does that feel like a good argument to you?
Because... Wouldn't a doctor be totally chilled out?
You'd be frozen out of the process if you thought the FDA said don't do it.
Because if something goes wrong, and it could go wrong in two different ways.
It could go wrong because you gave somebody ivermectin and something bad happened.
And then if they sue, it's not just an ordinary case of off-label use.
It would be a case of off-label use when the FDA told you directly don't do it.
So it's going to look like it has some extra responsibility, right?
So to me, I think the doctors have the better argument.
I think the doctors have the better argument.
I do agree with the FDA that the way they worded it was not a legal requirement.
They worded it as a strong recommendation.
I don't think that's strong.
That's not a good argument, because they're the FDA, right?
The FDA isn't like a Twitter user who's just got an opinion.
Their opinion moves things.
And it had to have a chilling effect on the doctors.
So we'll see how that goes.
I don't like to see anybody get sued if they were doing their best.
So maybe this is not good.
Maybe everybody was just doing their best and got it wrong.
I don't know. There's still a lot of questions on that.
We'll talk about that a little more.
Have you heard of a thing called grounding?
Where you walk barefoot outdoors on dirt and grass, and it's supposed to immediately fix your blood pressure and your system and everything?
All right, well, there's a video going around, and I'm going to test your critical thinking skills, right?
So we're going to test if you can analyze the news properly, If you have the right analytical tools to see a news story for what it is.
So there's a video going around where there's a doctor giving a demonstration on video of grounding.
He's got an elderly patient and he takes her blood and then shows you on the screen the red blood cells and he says, well, they're all bunched up.
Kind of looking inactive and bunched up.
Then he says, after 10 minutes of walking outdoors, we're going to test her blood again.
And they test it again, and it's like way different.
Like the red blood cells are looking all active and vital, and they're not on top of each other.
It really looks like they do a good job for you.
So he uses this to demonstrate that 10 minutes of walking around barefoot outdoors...
Changed her situation.
Now, how many problems do you see with this?
I'll do the easy ones for you and then we'll see if you can get the hard ones.
The easy one is this.
Why would you trust a video on Twitter about anything?
Don't trust a video on Twitter of a doctor doing a demonstration.
The other things you see on Twitter of the doctors that have all these arteries that are all blocked, have you seen those videos?
They're showing doctors actually taking coagulated stuff out of deceased people's arteries.
Should you believe that one? There are lots of them.
Should you believe those? No, no.
Everything that's a doctor giving a demonstration on video, zero credibility.
Zero credibility. So that's your first test.
If you thought that because it was a real doctor, and I'm sure it is a real doctor, and that the doctor believed what they were doing, I think he does, can't tell, and that you saw it on video, that gives you zero credibility.
If you're being an adult, sophisticated consumer of medical news, that should be rated as zero.
Now, that doesn't mean there's nothing to the process.
I'm just saying that video on Twitter is your lowest level of credibility in the world.
Because there's going to be video on both sides of everything.
You know, how are you going to pick?
All right, here's some more things that are wrong with it.
Did they control for the...
Yeah, right. It wasn't, of course, a randomized control test.
But let's just do the obvious stuff.
What were the other things that could have caused the differences in the slides?
Number one, she walked outside in the sun.
Don't we already know that being in the sun changes your metabolism?
I don't know if it changes in that particular way, but you haven't controlled for sun.
Isn't that kind of big?
And temperature. You haven't controlled for temperature.
You haven't controlled for any difference in, somebody mentioned, hydration.
What if she had a big drink of water before she went outside?
Could change, apparently that can change it too.
Somebody told me that they could get that same effect by how they showed the sample and whether, I think it's whether you squeeze the glass plates on the blood sample enough.
If you don't squeeze them, they look like blood cells are stacked up.
If you squeeze them, you can see them separate.
So I don't know if there's anything to that, but apparently the way you decide to prepare the slide could give you a different result.
All right? What about the fact that she was walking versus sitting?
Don't you think that walking around also changes your chemistry in a positive way?
We already know that.
Don't you think that walking changed your breathing?
We already know that walking around lowers your blood pressure.
Walking around is the number one thing that's recommended for lowering your blood pressure, just by itself, with shoes.
So if she goes and walks around without shoes, she's already doing the number one thing that is recommended for lowering your blood pressure.
And then what's the barefoot got to do with anything?
Right? Yeah, there's a good point.
We were not designed for sitting.
If all you did is measure somebody who had been sitting versus somebody who had been standing and walking, there should be a difference.
What about that being in a doctor's office makes you automatically tense and probably changes your chemistry?
You walk outside, you're comfortable.
Here's another one. The video of the woman walking outside showed, looked like a female assistant or maybe a family member, who was, if I remember correctly, I think they were, maybe one was holding the arm of the other, you know, keeping her up.
Human touch. Human touch changes your oxytocin immediately.
Is this a woman who hadn't been touched, because she was an elderly woman, is this a woman who hadn't really been touched by anybody all day?
And she finally had some human contact?
I don't know, there's so many things going on.
Placebo. Placebo effect.
Do you think that the woman knew she was part of a study?
Of course she did. There was no control.
So, literally, How many reasons did I give you?
Yeah, a sample size of one.
How many reasons did I give you not to trust this video?
Six? Eight?
I didn't count them all. The Hawthorne effect?
Yeah. Right.
So, ask yourself.
Ask yourself how many of those you spotted yourself.
I didn't get them all. Some other people noted a few that I missed.
And just tell yourself that this is a good exercise.
Like, if you could do what I just did, your ability to consume news and know what is bullshit and what isn't would be really good.
This is a good exercise.
My personal opinion is I don't know that there's any science to this so-called grounding thing or walking around.
I don't know. I don't want to get my feet dirty, so I probably won't try it.
Maybe I will, when it's warmer.
Alright, there's new evidence that shows that the obese, the fatter you are, the more you spread COVID. Is there anybody who didn't already assume that was true?
Anybody? Didn't you all sort of just intuitively think that the bigger you are, the more you're going to spread COVID? And I would add, taller as well.
Because I think if your lung capacity is bigger...
And especially if you're overweight, maybe your breathing is a little labored.
Wouldn't there be a higher volume of just air coming out of a bigger human?
Right? And if you were overweight, I don't know if there's more chance you'd have it, but there's more chance you'd give it.
So I'm going to confess something that I've been doing since the pandemic.
I have intentionally avoided being close to large people.
Large in all the senses, not just weight, but large, like if somebody's six foot six, I kept my distance for that exact reason.
And if I was around a kid, I'd think, well, there's not much air coming out of a kid.
I don't want to get into the argument of the whole thing was nothing to be afraid of, and why are you afraid of big people, you coward, and did you believe all the bad things that people told you?
I don't want to get into that.
I'm just saying that as I was in the fog of war, and I was assessing my personal risks without the benefit of good data, I said to myself, well, the easiest thing I could do is just not be close to really big people who breathe a lot.
And it turns out that was right.
Now, I might not have been right for the right reason.
They didn't say specifically.
It's because of the larger lung capacity.
I don't know why, but I guess my sense, common sense, if you want to call that, doesn't really exist.
At least my instincts took me in the right direction.
Is there anybody who did the same?
Is there anybody who felt less comfortable around big people?
Anybody else have that? I'm seeing a bunch of yeses.
Okay. So it wasn't just me.
Yeah. A bunch of yeses.
Okay. Interesting.
Yeah. All right.
We'll be finding out new things forever, I think.
All right, here's notes from the simulation.
There's a clinic in 2017, I guess Secretary Levine, it's a kind of a gender clinic where they do the top and bottom surgeries on people.
And Secretary Levine asked in 2017, asked the co-founder, For literature to support gender confirmation surgery protocols in minors.
So Secretary Levine wondered if there was some data to recommend it, I guess.
And the response was, quote, Hi, Rachel.
I'm not aware of existing literature, but it is certainly happening.
In other words, the person doing the surgeries, or in charge of the facility doing it, confirmed that it was happening, but was not aware of any supporting science.
All right. Now, here's the thing.
Have you noticed that I haven't weighed in on this topic?
Has that been, like, really obvious to you that I've avoided this?
Because most of you are all over it, right?
Now, you know that I'm more trans-friendly than just about every one of you, don't you?
So just establishing the base.
Yeah, I'm way more trans and LBGTQ-friendly than maybe my audience.
Now, here's my problem with the gender reassignment surgeries for minors.
How do you square parental rights with your opinion of what's better for somebody else's kid?
Now, if you asked me, are all those parents...
Hold on, hold on.
If you asked me, are those parents making a good decision for their children, I'd say, you could almost be sure that some of them are not.
I don't know what percentage.
Would you agree with that statement?
If there are a lot of people involved, and it's a human decision, and people are all different, there certainly are cases where it's good for the child, in my opinion, and certainly cases where it's bad for the child.
Now I'm going to define good very narrowly.
Good meaning That that child will grow up to an adult and be glad all of their life that they made the decision.
Now, that's different from your opinion of what's good for them.
You might have an opinion that, well, no, they just think they're happy, but they would have been much happier some other way.
But that's your opinion.
People get to have their own opinion of what worked for them and what makes them happy.
So your opinion of somebody else's happiness, irrelevant.
It's only their opinion.
So would you agree with the following statement?
That although we don't know what percentage goes either way, clearly there are people where the parents are making a mistake, and clearly there are cases where that child will grow up and be glad their parents supported it.
Would you agree that in both cases that...
But we don't know if it's 1% and 99 or 99 and 1%.
I don't have any data to suggest which way it leans, even.
Right? So, I have an ethical sort of moral block here, because I have a really, really strong feeling that I don't want the government telling a parent what to do with their own children.
And I know you agree with me on that.
Generally speaking, you agree.
But you do make the exception for, most of you do, for abortion, don't you?
That would be a case where you say, whoa, whoa, whoa, a parent doesn't get to decide that.
You can decide what haircut your kid gets, but you can't decide to eliminate them, according to the conservative view of what a fetus is.
So where do you draw the line?
How many parents are causing permanent damage to their kids every day just through normal stuff?
How many alcoholic parents are there?
Lots. Do you think they should have their kids taken away?
You can make an argument for it.
How many parents are, let's say, toxic narcissists who are just like destroying the mental health of their kids?
A lot. A lot.
Do you think their kids should be taken away?
How many have mental health problems and they're making their kids crazy?
Should they be taken away?
Now, I wouldn't say these are analogies.
I would say this is a consistency test.
And if you say this is a different situation, then that would be a good argument.
You could say, well, all those other examples, they're different in some way.
But are they? Are they different?
In all the cases I'm giving, the parents are making a bad decision, Hypothetically.
I'm not saying that it's a bad decision to get the surgery.
I'm saying that in some cases it might be.
So in other cases, it might be a bad decision to not put the kid up for adoption.
Don't you think there are parents who really should put their kid up for adoption because they're just ruining the kid?
Of course. But do you get to make that decision?
It's tough. It's tough.
I think you lose no matter which way you go.
You just have to decide which way to lose.
And that's the only decision you get.
So you can lose by knowing that maybe some children got surgeries that they will regret.
That would be losing. Even if it's not you or your kid, you still feel it because we're all responsible for the kids, right?
You'd all agree with that, wouldn't you?
That we're not all responsible for every adult necessarily, but we're kind of all responsible for the kids.
Not as responsible as the parents, but, you know, the backup is just automatic, right?
If a kid is homeless, pretty much any parent would say, oh, well, come here for tonight at least.
So we're all the parents of the kids if their parents don't get it right.
But where do you take the decision away from the parents?
I think that you couldn't have that as standard.
So it's a tough one. There's no right answer for this, I don't think.
All right. There is a trial.
Did you know that the Oath Keepers, a so-called right-wing militia group, Which is probably accurate.
Probably right-wing militia group is pretty close.
I'm not sure if they would call themselves that.
But anyway, there's several of them being, they're in a criminal trial, and I guess it's going to the jury now.
And so far the evidence against them, as their defense attorney says, no evidence was provided that they planned to storm the Capitol.
No evidence that they planned to breach the rotunda, and no evidence that they planned to stop or delay the certification of the elections.
They just had a whole trial in which there was no evidence of either intent, planning, or actually doing.
Now, I think they did probably enter the rotunda, but not in terms of any kind of a plan.
This is actually going to the jury...
How does it even go to the jury?
How does the judge not say, you know, you didn't actually show any evidence?
Now, this is the defense saying there's no evidence.
But I believe the case is being made like sort of, you know, like there's enough suggestion.
I think you need evidence, don't you?
There's no person who testified to it.
The prosecution had zero human witnesses and zero documentation.
Now, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I don't have some details right.
But that's what the defense attorney says.
The defense attorney says there's no human or written evidence for the allegations.
None. There's only sort of indirect suggestion that these are the kind of people and a thing happened.
When you put the kind of people with the thing, probably the kind of people intended to do the thing.
That's basically their argument.
Now, they'll probably still get convicted.
Don't you think? If they do get convicted, Trump's elected.
I think Trump just gets elected.
Because there will be people who want Trump elected just to pardon the January 6th people.
And that's not a bad argument.
If you said to me, you're a single issue voter, I say fentanyl first.
But secondly, it would be pardons.
Because I think the January 6th was the biggest, the response to January 6th is the biggest threat to democracy I've ever seen.
January 6th itself looks like a threat to the other side because they still believe the following two things.
Imagine believing this.
Imagine believing that Republicans stage insurrections without bringing out their weapons.
But my favorite, that I'm the only one who's ever said this.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Tell me if you've ever heard anybody else say this.
We know from the messages, the text messages on January 6th, that for sure Don Jr.
was not aware of any plans for an insurrection.
Who believes that Trump planned an insurrection and Don Jr.
didn't know about it? I mean, really?
Really? Really?
There's somebody who actually believes that.
Now, the only way that I think that we can get to this point is that nobody asks that obvious question.
There is no scenario in our reality in which Father Trump throws a coup of the United States and Don Jr.
didn't get wind of it. I mean, seriously?
Oh, Dan Bongino said that?
Okay. Good.
Yeah, Bongino's usually on.
He's on the good stuff.
But shouldn't that be the whole argument?
But here's what's happening.
I don't know if you noticed. Do you remember how the Russia collusion thing morphed?
It started down as, I think Trump and Putin probably colluded maybe during that time when, you know, they told the interpreter to leave.
Or whatever it was.
Maybe they've colluded and really Putin is running Trump as president.
So that's how it started.
Do you remember how it ended?
It ended with, all of those allegations are true because something totally different is true.
That Manafort did some things on his own that were sketchy, had nothing to do with the original claim.
And the Russian troll farm did some insignificant ads, so small that it could not have possibly made any difference.
And some of them were anti-Trump and some of them were anti-Hillary.
Mostly anti-Hillary.
That's it. And still, the Democrats say it was proven.
The Russia collusion was proven.
They allowed themselves to drift from Trump was involved to completely other people who were involved in other things.
Right? That's happening with the January 6th stuff.
Already, the January 6th stuff has evolved from Trump planned with all these bad people, he planned an actual overthrow of the country.
That has already been, well, it was debunked largely by the January 6th hearings themselves.
But now it's all the way, and tell me if you've seen it yet, it's all the way to he could have done more to stop it.
Have you seen it yet?
And they're going to turn, he could have done more to stop it, into, I told you he planned an insurrection, and they're not even close.
Because everybody involved could have done more to stop it.
Somebody said to me, you know, I gave this argument online.
Well, let me actually take you through a Twitter exchange, because I think you can see the whole thing here.
All right, um...
So it started this way.
So Molly Hemingway noted that Larry O'Connor had made this point on the radio, I guess, that one of the things that's going to happen by Twitter deplatforming...
One of the things that happened when Twitter deplatformed Trump is that you didn't get to be reminded what his last two tweets were.
Trump's last tweets were calling for peace and no violence.
And when you take those out of the public record, because otherwise they would have just sat there and we would look at them every day, and you would forget maybe the timing of it, but you'd say, I don't get it.
Here it is in his own words, be peaceful.
So isn't that the end of it?
You'd know exactly what he was promoting.
It's right here. He said it, and he wrote it.
Don't do anything dangerous, in effect.
So that would be an important argument on the other side.
Now he's reinstated.
And since he was reinstated, I had that same reaction maybe some of you did.
The same reaction was, whoa, I forgot that it was so obvious that his last tweets were where you would want them to be.
You know, don't do anything dangerous.
So that's the thing.
And then I saw a Twitter user, Michael Stein, I guess he's on the anti-Trump side of things.
He said, the trouble is that by the time that Trump tweeted that, it was already too late.
To which I say, that's not really the point.
The point is that it shows his frame of mind, right?
The point is not that he didn't do it soon enough or good enough.
The entire January 6th thing is that he intended it.
And this shows clearly that it was not his intention, because he said it loudly in the middle of the event.
If in the middle of the event you say, don't do any violent stuff, that's your state of mind.
It couldn't possibly be that he was telling people to stand down at the same time he wanted them to ratchet it up.
That wouldn't make sense.
So that didn't make sense.
So then after I said to this Twitter user that it shows a state of mind, and that's really the whole argument, and then I noticed that it's basically the same path that the Russian collusion took.
And then Michael Stein comes back.
Do you remember how the Charlottesville fine people hoax?
Once you've debunked it, that Trump called neo-Nazis fine people, and it's easy to debunk, you just play the whole quote instead of the edited one.
It's that easy. Do the people say, whoa, I was totally wrong about this important thing, I revised my opinion, when it's totally debunked?
Nope. They go down this well of related things, what about this, what about this, until you've removed all of their objections.
So now I'm seeing the same kind of well happen.
So then on Twitter, Michael Stein said, you know, why didn't Trump call out the National Guard?
So we're already, we've gone from he planned an insurrection to he didn't do enough And then a specific.
Why didn't he call out the National Guard?
And the answer is, why?
He tried, right?
Yeah, it was authority. And here's the context.
Every leader who had any ability to make it better that day, they all fucked up.
Every one of them operated below their, you know, the ability which we wish they had shown.
So Pelosi didn't do enough.
Mayor Bowser didn't do enough.
Trump didn't do enough.
Now, why did Trump not do enough?
Well, something about authority.
But I also suspect he didn't know exactly how bad it was.
He may have had an opinion that people were getting roughed up, but it was worse than that.
And I'm not sure when he knew what, or if he processed that it was really that bad.
So those things we don't know.
Anyway, so Michael points out that there's so many indications that Trump was...
You know, really planning something bad that day.
So many. How can they ignore all the dry, tinder brush around it?
I mean, it's all... If you look at any one thing, sure, you could argue that one thing, but if you look at the totality of the evidence, it's very damning for Trump.
To which I said...
You can't tell the difference between confirmation and a pile of evidence.
Nobody can. I can't.
You can't. Scientists can't.
Sometimes the law can't.
I mean, if you have enough time, maybe you can sort it out.
But from our perspective, a hundred facts that look like, well, none of them are confirming anything, but they're all sort of suggestive of this thing, doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything.
Because once you're convinced something is true, you will see all the evidence in the world to support your opinion, even if it's not true.
So how true something is is unrelated to how much evidence there is.
That's the part that your head has trouble holding on.
The amount of evidence for a thing is not related to whether it's true.
The quality of evidence is.
If you had just one high-quality piece of evidence, that's all it would take.
But if you had 50 reasons, but none of the 50 were, like, nails it, it doesn't mean anything.
50 reasons suggesting something doesn't have any value.
Because you would see 50 reasons in your imagination, even if they didn't exist.
Which is tough to really live your life that way and actually understand that.
All right, I saw a fascinating debate by Brett Weinstein on his Dark Horse podcast.
There was some critic who was complaining that he had sort of gone too far.
And I'll do a bad job of characterizing both of their opinions.
But the thing that Brett had suggested is that we should hold as at least a hypothesis...
And this is the important word, hypothesis.
And I'll tell you what is hypothesis in a moment, but don't make the mistake his critic did of taking the word hypothesis and then trying to turn it into what you're saying, and then Brett has to keep correcting him.
No, I'm not saying that's proven.
I'm saying it's a hypothesis that's Worthy of consideration.
So here's the hypothesis that Brett says a reasonable person could agree with.
His critic says a reasonable person could not agree with that because there are better alternatives that are much more likely.
So here's what Brett suggested.
That there's enough evidence that the government is doing things obviously the opposite of what would be good, and that includes vaccinating kids, according to Brett.
Vaccinating kids, the evidence shows that's a bad idea, according to Brett.
And requiring vaccinations of service people that ends up just lowering our readiness but doesn't seem to get you anything in return because they're the last people that need vaccinations.
They're healthy and young.
So that and other, you know, I think there are more examples of that.
So Brett says, how do you explain the government doing what is clearly and obviously the opposite of smart?
Or good for the country. And he says that one of the things you can't rule out as a hypothesis is since our government is for sale, Meaning that if you donate enough, you figure out how to benefit somebody behind the scenes.
Basically, there's lots of ways money influences our process.
And nobody disagrees with that, right?
Nobody would disagree with the notion that money distorts our process.
Now here's the only thing that Brett added to the conversation, and he got pushback from it.
Can you rule out The sum of that money is coming from external, let's say, non-friendly sources, unnamed.
He didn't name any specific ones except by example.
And that can we rule out that they're intentionally influencing us to do all the wrong things?
To which I say, I think that's completely reasonable.
And that follows the thing I've told you forever, that if something can be gamed, If something can be gamed, you know, if you can hack a system, it will be, so long as there's lots of people involved, enough time has passed so people can, you know, operate their schemes, and there's a big game.
There's a big upside to it.
Now, as he points out, imagine spending, you know, a million dollars To change how America thinks and cause it to decrease its military readiness versus how much you'd have to spend to improve your own military readiness to compete with the United States.
One of them is really cheap.
Why in the world would an adversary such as China, and that's just an example, that's not a specific accusation, why would an adversary Want to spend $100 billion building weapons when they could spend $1 million buying our Congress?
Because it wouldn't be that expensive.
So his critic responded this way and said, no.
Although I think he allowed that anything's possible, like you can't rule it down.
But he said it's far more likely That what you're seeing with these things such as required vaccinations for service people, that it has more to do with bureaucracy and inertia and people not wanting to admit they were wrong, and there's plenty of evidence of the government, especially the military, and this was a good point, because the military is literally famous for doing the least smart thing consistently.
I suppose if you were in the military, it really feels that way.
All right, so now compare these two theories.
One, people don't want to admit they're wrong.
So they're sticking with their old recommendations of stuff even though the data has changed.
The bureaucracy, his critic used the example that some things in the military don't get fixed if nobody can get a promotion for fixing it.
And that there are cases where that's clearly the case.
It's just not anybody's job.
And if they did, it wouldn't be necessarily the thing that got them promoted.
So there's just no incentive to fix stuff in some cases.
That's not a bad argument, is it?
It's not a bad argument.
Now, I think that Brett has the stronger argument, although you can't rank which one's more likely.
I think that gets more to their opinions, and I'll let them have their opinions on that.
I don't know how to rank those.
But I think that Brett's point is the stronger one.
That if there's an open channel to influence our government, it's inexpensive and easy to access, which it appears to be.
It appears easy to access.
Any country would notice that our government's for sale.
Probably all governments are for sale.
And why wouldn't they?
Why would they not be trying to influence us that way?
I think that's a strong point.
If they're not doing it already, you'd expect that they'd do it later.
The best argument I can give...
Here's my best argument for why foreign countries are not necessarily influencing domestic policy.
Here's the counterargument.
That there's too much domestic money influencing it the way they want it.
Say, for example...
That China wanted us to drill for less oil, which would make sense, because it would hurt us.
They would be competing, if they were trying to bribe our government, hypothetically, they would be competing with bribes from our own energy companies.
Don't you think American energy companies could do a better job of bribing Americans than a hypothetical Chinese attempt?
Yeah. And then climate change, same thing.
Even if there are external forces trying to do propaganda, probably our domestic people have the most money and the most access.
So basically, it's a competition of bribers.
And my guess is that foreign bribers are at a great disadvantage compared to domestic bribers.
So I don't see our system as something that's trying to be a democratic, republic, fair system, and there's a little bit of Chinese or some other country influencing it.
I see it as a competition of money.
Which is such a big competition of money, that unless you're Michael Jordan of money, you're going to be in the minor leagues.
Because, you know, the big boys are playing the money game, and even China can't compete.
Now, you say to me, Scott, China has more money than Exxon.
Like, they have more money, so of course they can compete.
But, they can't compete at that level without getting caught.
Am I right? Like, you could compete at the level of, you know, slipping $20,000 to a congressperson.
But maybe that's not enough.
Because maybe they're getting more from Exxon.
But if you said, all right, screw it, we're going to compete with Exxon.
I'll give a million dollars to each politician.
Well, now you're going to get caught.
At some dollar amount, your odds of getting away with it shrink dramatically.
So it could be...
That because our own money influence is so strong, that that's what keeps the foreigners from playing.
Which would be weird.
Weird and wonderful at the same time.
Just speculating.
There's a video of Obama talking about rigged elections in 2008.
And... If I do where my phone was...
I used to have a phone.
I was going to play that video.
But the essence of it is that in 2008, Obama was talking to some friendly crowd, and he was saying directly that both Democrats and Republicans have rigged elections in the past, and that it's hard to trust the party that's running the election.
Out loud. And he even said, I'm from Chicago.
The clear indication was, I know from the inside that elections are rigged.
Now, who's rigging the elections in Chicago?
Is it the Republicans? No.
Obama said directly, Democrats have rigged elections.
He said it directly.
Now, that doesn't mean any future, you know, after 2008, it doesn't mean any future election was rigged.
But the fact that we were prevented from talking about it and acting like only Republicans say stuff like this, the amount of gaslighting, and this was brought to my attention by Adam M.D., Adam Dopamine, you know him on Twitter.
He tweeted this. He goes, once upon a time, voter fraud was a given, which is exactly right.
Once upon a time, we all assumed there was some voter fraud.
We just didn't know how much.
But didn't you just all assume it was just a given?
Did anybody think that Chicago or Philadelphia were running totally legit elections ever?
Ever? And I'm not saying it's just Democrats.
I'm going to agree with Obama that whoever is running the election, they might have a little incentive to change things in their favor.
So, and then Adam said, then the media gaslit half the country into thinking elections were the only thing in America that were not corruptible.
That might be a little of my influence there.
Just think about the fact that for the last few years, the public has been gaslit into believing that only the elections work well.
Everything else is broken.
We all agree with that.
Everything else is broken.
But not those elections.
If you think those elections are not totally secure, well, maybe you have a mental problem.
Maybe you should be kicked off of all social media, you troublemaker.
Anyway. There's an article in a publication called Common Sense by Jeffrey Cain, who referred to TikTok as digital fentanyl.
I like that. I think that digital fentanyl is catching on.
Have you seen it? I think I coined that.
Did I coin that? Maybe other people did too.
That's the sort of thing maybe more than one person thought of it.
But digital fentanyl, that's what it is.
And what's interesting about this is that it was retweeted by Paul Graham.
Now, do you know who Paul Graham is?
Probably one of the most, let's see, well-respected minds in Silicon Valley.
So famous investor type, but also beyond being an investor, considered just one of the smart people who understands how the world works.
And he retweeted that.
So he retweeted calling TikTok digital fentanyl.
Now, let's go deeper.
Who would you trust to know if TikTok were dangerous?
If you trust me, I appreciate it, but I'm not sure I'm the person that's the expert on this.
If Paul Graham tells you that TikTok is digital fentanyl, you better frickin' believe it.
You better believe it, right?
Because he's somebody who actually knows what he's talking about.
He knows everything from AI to social media platforms to software to influence.
He can see the field.
If he's retweeting that TikTok is digital fentanyl, why the fuck is it still allowed to be infecting our kids?
Why the fuck?
I mean, like I said, there's nobody on the other side.
How long do we have to go before everybody notices nobody's on the other side?
There's nobody in public, anyway, saying, I've got to keep this TikTok, it's no danger.
Nobody. Now, I told you I was a little disappointed that our congresspeople and senators were, although they were appropriately against TikTok being available, they would concentrate on the data privacy angle.
And I thought they should really be focusing a little bit more on the persuasion angle.
Now, that's what the Paul Graham retweet It was on a piece that did talk about the influence angle.
So you see how important this is?
It's like one of the smartest, most trusted people in technology just says, this is being used for propaganda.
Or at least has the potential to.
Cernovich, too. But Cernovich has the same problem I do.
Like, if you were going to listen to somebody on this topic of TikTok, would you listen to Mike Cernovich, me, or Paul Graham?
Now, as much as I think Cernovich is amazing, you know, I think he's a national treasure, and I think I'm pretty awesome on days, neither of us should have any credibility compared to a Paul Graham, right?
So just understand, some people have way higher credibility for this kind of, you know, topic.
So, anyway, I did send a DM to Senator Tom Cotton, and I just, you know, I sort of challenged him on the fact that we should be highlighting the propaganda element and not just the data security element.
And he He tweeted this the same day.
So Senator Tom Cotton tweeted, TikTok's threat isn't just data privacy and surveillance.
It can also be a massive propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.
Now, every once in a while I love my country.
And this is one of those times.
Because I'm going to tell you a story that happened a long time ago.
So this is when I was in my 20s.
This is before I did Dilbert.
So I was just a guy in a cubicle.
And I had a problem with a big national, a federal bureaucracy.
And it was a big problem.
Like, really big problem.
And I wrote to my senator, who was Senator Pete Wilson at the time.
And I asked him if he could fix it.
Could he do something to fix this other entity?
And here's the thing that just blew my fucking mind.
I got an answer from the senator's office.
I don't know if, you know, maybe the senator didn't see it himself.
But his office answered and said, you know, we forwarded your message and it showed the letter in which they challenged the big entity, why the hell are you doing what you're doing?
Within, I think, just days, the big entity changed their policy.
That was the first time I changed a national policy just by asking.
I just asked.
And I made a good point.
I supported my point.
I gave the evidence.
And a senator of the United States looked at little cubicle dwelling me and said, huh, that's a good point.
I'm going to ask that question.
Now, here's the thing that I have to emphasize.
This issue was not like of national concern.
It was a little more my concern, and maybe there were another million people who cared about it.
I changed the government with just one good suggestion.
Now that has never left me.
That has never left me.
And by the way, I did the same thing in college.
In college, two of my friends, our freshman year, we looked at the system in our dormitory that had like a resident assistant.
And we said, why don't we have these adults in our dorm?
You know, these grown-ups.
Why don't we do that ourselves and then we'll have, like, jobs?
We'll be paid to manage our own dorm.
So we came up with this crazy idea that the students would run the dorm and we wouldn't use professional security or professional resident assistants or professional even maintenance.
We would even do the cleaning ourselves.
So we took this weird stoner idea to the administration, and they said, well, you know, that's a big idea.
If you can get enough people in your dorm who are going to live there next year to agree with you, then we'll consider it.
So we did a petition, took it back to them, We drew out exactly what we had in mind.
And this included me getting a job.
So part of our plan was each of us would get our own single rooms, which were like gold.
Having a single room in a dormitory is really rare.
If you could pull that off.
So our plan was that we would get paid for being the managers of the dorm.
So we'd get paid and we'd get private rooms.
And that was really why we were doing it.
But we also had a good idea.
The idea was legitimately a good idea.
And the administration said, okay.
And for two years, three actually, I had a private room.
Two of those years, I think, I was being paid.
And it was my first example that if you made a good recommendation, you could get anything.
And I thought to myself, is this extendable?
Can you just make a reasonable recommendation to somebody in power, and that if you do it well, they'll actually change something?
So by the time I was in my 20s, I thought it wasn't crazy to write to a senator and ask them to change, like, a major policy.
And it worked. I wrote to a senator, got a personal response, and it changed the policy.
Incredible. And so when I messaged Senator Cotton, again, because the pattern is pretty obvious and repeating, did I think that he would look at a suggestion from a citizen and that it would change, you know, at least the communication about an important thing?
And I thought, yes.
I thought, yes, that's a real thing that happens in the real world.
If you make a good case, You can get anything done.
I told you that during the pandemic, when Trump was looking for suggestions of executive orders, I happened to have a little special knowledge that telehealth was being blocked because you couldn't be a doctor across state lines.
And if you're on the phone, you might be in a different state.
So I suggested we'll get rid of that rule, especially during the pandemic, because everybody wants maximum health care by video.
And he did. That was it.
As soon as people saw the idea, the chief of staff took it to the president.
The president looked at it and said, yeah, that looks like a perfectly reasonable pandemic executive order.
Two weeks later, there's an executive order and telehealth is born.
Now, I think some of it got reversed because it timed out, so we're going to have to work through that.
But... Yeah, I think Biden reversed it because the AMA wants to protect its doctors.
I think that's what that is. So, here's your lesson.
Don't assume that the most powerful people in the world won't respond to your suggestion if it's a good one.
Bad suggestions don't work, but if you can learn to communicate clearly and say, this is what I want, this is why I want it, here's my backup to support it, if you can learn to do that, you can run the whole country.
Because, let me ask you this.
Who was in charge?
Here's your mind-bender.
Who was in charge of all those things I influenced?
Well, you'd say the president was in charge of the executive orders.
You'd say the big organization was in charge.
But were they? Were they in charge?
Because I changed them.
I personally changed all of those things.
So who was in charge?
One of the greatest lessons of success is to figure out who's in charge.
And let me give you another reframe, so this will be in my upcoming book as well.
In the old days, if I walked into a room and met somebody, I'd say to myself, that person is influencing how I feel.
How many of you feel that way?
You meet somebody, you go into a room, and you say, oh, these people or this person is now changing how I feel.
I'm feeling, you know, dumb or nervous or something.
They're affecting me. But here's something I learned in college, also.
When I smoked marijuana, people acted nice to me, and when I didn't, they didn't act as nice.
And for years, I couldn't figure out why, and I thought it was because the marijuana made me see the world differently.
I thought, okay, that's just an illusion, because when I'm high, just everything looks better.
So I just remember people being nicer, but it's not really happening.
It's just an illusion.
Eventually, as I learned more and more about how the world is wired, I realized I was causing all those people to act the way they acted.
When I came with my relaxed, happy stoner look, they immediately copied me and they became relaxed and happy and easy to deal with.
When I came with my...
and this might surprise some of you, but I can be pretty intense.
Does that surprise anybody?
Is anybody like blown away?
That I can be kind of scary and intense.
I'm a little intense. So if I've got something on my mind, like I'm working through something that matters to me, and you run into me, you'll think you just ran into a serial killer, like who's planning his next victim or something.
Like I'm pretty intense.
And I don't do it intentionally.
It's just when I'm deeply on something, then humans become a little less important for a while.
Once I realized that they weren't affecting me so much as I was affecting them, then I said, wait, here's the reframe.
Every time I walk into a room, I say to myself, well, how do I want to affect these people?
Try it. Watch how that totally changes your experience of life.
Because I'll bet you walk into a room and say, oh, these people are affecting me.
Oh, what are they doing to me now?
They're making me feel sad.
I don't do that anymore. Now, part of it is because being famous helps you get into this, you know, frame of mind.
But when I walk into a room, I know I'm changing those people.
And I have to decide how.
So I say, well, I think I'll make you friendly.
And then I make them friendly.
And I go, I think I'll get you out of that bad mood.
And then I do it. I say, I think I'm going to make you like me.
Make somebody like me.
I change the people in the room.
They don't change me. Now, are they changing me?
Of course. It's just that I choose to ignore that frame entirely, because if I'm actively trying to change them, which is actually what I'm thinking, I'm actively thinking, I'd like you to like me, I'd like you to laugh, I'd like you to do something with me later, I'd like you to agree with me, I'd like you to respect me.
And then I do the things that make you do those things.
And it works every time.
Basically every time. Yeah.
It's like, doesn't ever not work.
Alright, here's another reframe.
This also will be from the book.
Does anybody have social anxiety?
You go to a gathering and you're like, oh, shit.
There's people there.
I'm going to have to talk to people I don't like.
Alright, I'm going to reframe it away from you.
If you have social anxiety, you go to an event and you say to yourself, oh God, these people are affecting me.
I'm sweating. Those people are doing this to me.
They're affecting me.
All you have to do is learn a five-minute lesson on how to make conversation.
If you learn the five-minute lesson on how to make conversation, and primarily, it's about asking reasonable questions and listening more than you talk.
That's the whole technique, right?
Everybody will like you. Everybody will like you if you do that.
It's the Dale Carnegie process.
If you learn the technique, hey, how you doing?
My name's Scott. So, you know, do you work here?
Where do you live? Have a family?
It's just basic questions.
They sound like they're too nosy, but in fact people like to be able to talk about themselves because it eases them.
Alright, here's the reframe. Next time you walk into a room, don't do it unless you've learned the lessons of how to ask questions and introduce yourself.
So that's your basic. You know how to start a conversation and you know how to introduce yourself.
Now when you walk into the room, you are saving people.
You're saving them. You see somebody who's not talking to somebody?
What do you think's going through their head?
Oh shit, oh shit.
Everybody sees me not talking to anybody.
Oh God. Do they notice I'm not even talking to anybody?
Oh fuck, I need to talk to somebody.
And you say to yourself, I can save that person.
You go over and introduce yourselves.
Now you've saved them. They have somebody to talk to.
And if you ask them to talk about themselves, they're double saved.
They're saved twice. Now they have somebody to talk to, and you've made it easy.
Oh, God, you just solved my problem.
Yeah, yeah, I'll tell you where I work.
That's easy. And then you have to also learn how to make an excuse to leave.
One that I like to use, if you don't have to go to the bathroom, and you don't need to refresh your drink, and those are automatics.
I use those a lot. Here's one you just say directly, because you're probably there to mingle.
So I say, hey, it's been great talking to you.
I'm going to do a little more mingling.
100% of people are okay with that.
Because they're probably there for the same reason.
Do a little mingling. So just say, hey, it's great to meet you.
Maybe exchange phone numbers if it went well.
And you say, you know, I'm going to do a little more mingling and I'll catch up with you later.
Right? So now I just solved your biggest social problem.
The moment you realize that with the smallest number of skills...
You're the CPR person.
You're like, okay, there's one struggling.
Go save that one.
Yeah, there's one. I can save them.
Somebody comes into your little group of three, and you see that it's like a shy person who's trying to get into the group.
Be the one who opens up.
Right? Instead of being the one who keeps talking because you don't know what to do, open up your body.
And even sometimes if there's a little gap, introduce yourself to the new person.
Don't continue the conversation like they didn't exist.
Introduce yourself to the new person.
Because you saved them. Have you ever come up to a group of people talking and they don't acknowledge your existence?
You have, right? It's awful, isn't it?
It's the worst feeling.
It's like you don't exist.
So you can instantly change yourself from the person who's one of them to the person who's saving one of them.
Just go save them. Here's another trick for social interaction.
Pick out the highest functioning social operator.
Might be an organizer.
But usually you can pick out, and it's usually female.
There's usually a dominant female connector.
It depends on the group.
Of course, it could be male. But if you find the dominant person, who's like the real social connector, Go right to that person.
Because the moment you meet that person, what do they do?
What does that person do?
They immediately introduce you to the three people standing next to her, and then they say, I got to mingle, I'll see you later.
And they're off. And then you've got three people that you now met that you can now connect with again if you find yourself alone, etc.
Now, how much did that help?
It's my opinion that a simple reframe like that can change probably, I don't know, 20 to 50% of the people just immediately.
Just immediately. Yeah.
You won't believe how much it works until you do it.
And let me make another case for why this will work.
Suppose I told you I'd like to pay you to go to a social event.
So you're not there because you want to.
I'm just going to pay you. And I'd like you to get as many business cards as you can.
And nothing else matters.
I'm just going to pay you, get as many business cards.
Would you feel as embarrassed if you knew you were being paid to just sort of do a job?
And the answer is no. Because you'd feel like, oh, I'm just doing a job.
Like there's not much social pressure Because the only thing you're trying to do is get business cards, you're just doing a job.
It's very easy to reframe an awkward situation into just mechanical.
So I reframed you from the victim into the savior, and it was easy.
All you needed to do was have a little bit of skill that all the victims don't yet have, which is how to ask questions, how to introduce yourself, And how to, you know, leave, basically.
All right. I hope that helped.
Here's the weirdest thing.
You remember that Kanye, or Ye as we like to call him now, he got dropped by a number of apparel makers he was working with, and one of them was Balenciago.
And the weirdest thing happened this week.
With Balenciaga. And I don't even know how to explain it.
Right? Because if it is what it looks like, it blows my mind.
What it looks like is that they had an ad with little kids holding teddy bears that were dressed in like BDSM like leather.
Like very sexualized.
Now, If that's all it was, I could imagine saying to myself, okay, maybe I'm imagining, you know, just because there's leather on a teddy bear, maybe it was just an unfortunate style choice.
And then the internet sleuths, they zoomed in on some other stuff in the scene, and there's a document on the table that appears real, That was a legal decision allowing pedophiles to, I don't know, talk in public or something like that.
So basically, they had pedophile-related documentation in the ad.
So if you add the leather sexual bear to the little kid to what could not have been an accident if it's real.
If it's real. Maybe it got photoshopped in.
I don't know. But if it's real...
It's actually pedophiles operating in the open.
But could it be real?
I'm not there yet.
I'm not there.
Because the problem is the Scott Alexander problem.
Do you see it? The Scott Alexander theory says if you see a story that blows your mind, like you say to yourself, my God, how could this be happening?
The answer is it isn't.
Almost always. So maybe 95% of the time when you see a story this extraordinary, you'll find out later it's not true.
Right? So start with the assumption there's a 95% chance there's something about this story that's just totally not true.
If I had to pick, I would pick that document on the table as the not true part.
I know people are saying that it's been confirmed, and maybe it's true.
So let me be very clear, it could be exactly what it looked like.
Yeah, it could be exactly what it looks like.
Because it looks exactly like it is.
But be aware, if you're going to be a sophisticated consumer, be aware that there are lots of things that look just like this, meaning an extraordinary story where you say, how could a dog build a spaceship?
That's impossible!
And then later you find out that no dog built a spaceship.
It was exactly what you thought.
It was impossible. So most of the time, this kind of story turns out false, which is not to say that this one is false.
It looks like something's going on, right?
Jay, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm just saying, you know, don't let your head explode if you find out it's not true, right?
You've used that one before.
Handwritten letters, maybe.
Okay.
Why is it, and related to this story, why is it that Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately he can get rid of the pedophile hashtags when apparently they've been operating in the open for years?
How do you explain that?
How do you explain that Elon Musk can make the pedophiles go away Like effortlessly.
Well, maybe there was some effort.
But it hadn't happened before.
Now again, remember earlier I was saying that if you believe something's true, you'll be buried in evidence that you're right.
This looks like that, right?
If you're believing that there's a big pedophile problem, if that's your starting point, you will see it everywhere.
That doesn't mean it's true.
I'm sure there's a pedophile problem, but the size of it and whether it's in each story you see is what's in question.
If I had to guess, it's easy to say it's Jack Dorsey, blah, blah, blah.
If I had to guess, I don't think Jack Dorsey had as much operating control over the details of Twitter as one imagines.
Remember, he was running two companies.
So he probably had a whole bunch of people doing the nuts and bolts at Twitter, and maybe he may have been told they couldn't do anything about it.
You could easily imagine this scenario where...
I'm just speculating here.
You could imagine where Jack said, get rid of that pedo stuff...
And then they came back and said, oh, we tried really hard.
There's just nothing we can do.
And then, you know, maybe he tried a few more times, and then they kept coming back, yeah, they're so slippery.
We can't get them.
Or there's some reason we can't, or whatever.
And then Elon comes in and just fires all those people.
And then it's easy.
It might be just that he fired the right people.
It could be nothing but that.
It's possible. So, The other possibility is that nothing is true in the news.
Charles Haywood, I don't know who he is, but on Twitter he did sort of a back-of-the-envelope estimate that Twitter should be extremely profitable almost immediately.
And the argument goes like this.
He looked into their financials and the vast majority of their expenses are people.
And he just reduced them by 75% or something.
And if you just do the basic math, how much money did they make?
And here you'd have to assume that some of the advertising comes back, just because advertisers go to where there are people.
And you'd have to assume that maybe the $80 thing also is good.
So just with those minor revenue changes, if you make an assumption that 80% of the cost was personnel, and then you take 50% to 75% of that cost away, you're instantly profitable.
And not just a little bit.
Charles Haywood's estimate is that they would have one of the best profit margins in all of technology.
And it would be like right away.
And then it would just start spewing cash forever.
Now, I'm not going to go so far as to say that's true.
But I have to say my own math sense was already there.
Like, in my own head, I was still thinking, well, it's got to be mostly people expense and...
I mean, to me, I was leaning in that direction that he may have already solved for profitability.
It might already be done.
And he may have actually made it more efficient by getting rid of all the dead wood and keeping the superstars.
Now, of course, he says he's keeping the good people, but, you know, that's subjective.
I guess the Stormy Daniels campaign violation...
This thing is being renewed.
Does that tell you that they've run out of material?
If you're reviving the Stormy Daniels case, that sort of tells me you don't have anything.
When I tell you that Trump is the best vetted president of all time, it's this.
It's this. And I'm not going to defend anything he did with Stormy Daniels.
It probably was exactly what you saw.
But if that's all they have, that's all they have?
My God! Could be a case of just everybody's doing everything they can and that's just what one person had.
All right. I read an article in something called The Conversation, it's a publication, by Beth Daly, and she wrote that there might be a way to test that we live in a simulation.
Now, does that sound like something I've said before?
I don't know who Beth is, but the way she writes, one suspect she may have been exposed to some of my material, but I don't know, maybe.
Maybe just people think the same way.
Well, here's a little tour of how this simulation came about.
This is from Beth's story, which is quite good, actually.
I recommend it. I tweeted it so you can find it in my Twitter feed.
So she says, in 1989, the legendary physicist John Archibald Wheeler, so he had this idea that the universe wasn't just matter.
That there was something about the way we think about it or observe the universe that interacts with the matter.
And of course, quantum theory, blah, blah, blah, supports that.
So as early as the 80s, people were saying, hey, maybe reality is not just stuff.
Maybe there's something about the way we think about this stuff that interacts with the stuff.
So there's something that's thought plus matter, or maybe it's all thought or something.
Then by 2003, Nick Bostrom from Oxford University, he came up with a simulation hypothesis that is highly probable that we're a simulation because someday there will be lots of them, and what are the odds that we're the original?
All right, let's get rid of you.
We've got a couple of assholes here.
One asshole gone. Boom.
Anybody else? Come on.
There's another one here. I know you're here.
I'm going to get you. All right.
We'll get you later. All right.
So then...
All right. That's 2003.
So the simulation idea came about.
Then... Then there was a suggestion later that we could be a giant quantum computer, and then, as the story goes, in 2016, I think maybe it's the first time that Musk said it, I don't know when he started thinking it, but he concluded that we're most likely a simulation.
So from 1989 to 2016, people have been noodling about this.
Now what's left out?
My book in the 90s, in which I predicted That the nature of reality would be completely revised in our lifetime, which is what we're watching.
The simulation theory, I didn't mention it in specifics, but it is what I predicted.
That there's something about our consciousness and the interaction with the material that's the real thing.
All right. Now here's a hypothesis of how you could test that we're in a simulation.
So there's a physicist, late physicist John Barrow, he argued that if we're computation or we're software, That if we're software, there would be necessarily little flurbs and imperfections.
And that the little imperfections would build up over time, and that the programmer, if there was one, would have to correct the simulation every now and then, because it would build up errors, and then it would be like a software reboot.
And that we would notice it.
That there would be a period of time where, for example, the laws of physics stop working for a minute.
Would that be funny?
Like, just for like a minute, the laws of physics stop working.
Now, I guess we'd still have gravity, right?
We wouldn't fly into space.
But that would be one thing to look for.
But I'm wondering if the pandemic doesn't satisfy that.
Or the Great Reset.
I feel like we're in the middle of some kind of a software update.
If we're a simulation, this is definitely a software update.
Because everything is changing.
Literally everything. The way we think about everything, the way we do everything, is all different.
It does feel like a software update.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe I've improved your life and informed you.
Probably the best live stream you've ever seen in your whole life.
Peak experience, really.
How was it for you?
That's just how I think it was for you.
Yeah. How many people are going to try that reframe for your social anxiety to walk into the room as the solution and not the problem?
You're going to be amazed.
You're going to be amazed how well it works.
Alright. Someone's enjoying a cigarette now, yes.
Makes perfect sense.
No, tomorrow's not Thanksgiving, is it?
It better not be. Yeah, best show ever, I think so.
I think I hit all the notes and I'm leaving you better off.
So I'm going to go do some other things and you're all awesome.
And you're probably wondering, am I going to do a live stream on Thanksgiving?
What's the answer? Am I going to do a live stream on Thanksgiving?
Of course. Of course.
Would I let you down?
No. No, no.
We're definitely going to be. Same time, same place.
