Episode 2044 Scott Adams: Silicon Valley Bank Debacle, Free Jacob Chansley Or Close Congress, More
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Content:
Elon Musk building worker city
Free Jacob Chansley
Silicon Valley Bank & ESG
democrat imaginary problems
China's peace accomplishments
Equity vs. winning
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you.
It's a highlight of civilization.
And there's never been a finer thing that's ever happened, but if you'd like to take this experience up to, oh, I don't know, the heights of a Chinese spy balloon, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it's gonna happen now.
Coming at you.
Hard.
Savor it.
Savor it.
Okay, good.
Well, here's the most important question of the day.
I know there's a lot of big news.
You'll want to hear all of it.
We'll talk about it.
But I got to start with the most important one.
It was sort of a question I had yesterday.
So I tweeted it.
If Joe Biden is called POTUS, P-O-T-U-S, and Jill Biden, his wife, is called the FLOTUS, what is Hunter Biden?
Anybody have an answer?
If Joe Biden is POTUS and Jill Biden is FLOTUS, what is Hunter Biden?
I suggested SCROTUS.
SCROTUS?
But I thought that was pretty darn clever until Twitter user David, at David said what, suggested even better than SCROTUS would be SNORTUS.
So the POTUS, the FLOTUS, and the SNORTUS?
Come on, SNORTUS is pretty good.
I wish I'd said that.
Well, apparently Biden is going to approve some massive drilling project in Alaska.
I did not see that coming.
Did anybody see Biden approves a massive drilling in Alaska?
Is it possible that That he always would have.
Is it possible that he was always going to approve it and there's nothing unusual about it?
Or is he seeing that he destroyed the world with his energy policy and he's trying to adjust?
Or is it because an election is coming and he needs to be able to say, I approved all kinds of oil.
I approved more oil than Trump did.
I think that's the play, right?
He just needs to say he approved more oil than Trump did to run for president.
Now here's the question I have.
How was it ever possible that activists beat the big oil money lobbying machine?
Didn't you always assume that the oil and the energy companies completely controlled Congress, completely controlled the president?
But it turns out that Greta You know, using her as just a symbol of the activists.
They were more powerful than the money people for a long time.
But maybe that's reversed.
It could be that the money people, you know, upped their bid.
They may have increased their bid.
So you never know.
This is exactly the kind of story where you think you might know something about it because you read the news.
Do you think we understand this story because we read the news?
I feel like this is exactly the kind of story where there's You know, layers and variables that we don't know about.
Oh well.
I saw a clip from Realtime, Bill Maher, must have aired last night, in which Bill Maher mentions Elon Musk's plan to build a city in Austin that he's calling a utopia.
A utopia.
And what did his Democrat guests do when Bill Maher said that Musk wants to build a utopia?
See if this sounds familiar.
They immediately leapt to the idea that utopia was a literal word and not hyperbole.
Have you ever seen Democrats not understand the difference between hyperbole, when it's really obvious, like utopia?
It's sort of an obvious utopia.
It's like really, really obvious.
And they treated it like he meant it.
Like he meant it.
So instead of saying, oh, it's a city where costs might be low and it's very efficient, that's probably all Elon means.
It's just efficient.
It just works well.
It's well designed.
And they actually did the Democrat face.
Have you ever seen the Democrat face when they don't have an argument?
They go to mocking, that mocking.
You know that face?
So watching the panel go into Democrat face, and poor Bill Maher, who actually has some semblance of ability to see the whole field, unlike all of his guests, he's trying to explain to them without ruining their fun, that Elon Musk, he did build an electric car you weren't expecting, and he did
Build a rocket that can land by itself, and he is going to Mars.
Maybe the city idea isn't totally crazy?
Just putting that out there.
Maybe he has some good ideas to build the city?
But it's just amazing watching the, like, they have to use their face when they have no argument.
You can imagine the mental process.
Hearing things I don't like.
Must make logical argument to refute.
Searching.
Searching for logical argument to refute.
The concept that Elon Musk might know how to build some things that other people don't know how to build.
Don't know what to do.
must default to facial expressions.
Now, if you're listening on a podcast, I'm just kidding.
I'm cancelled on podcasts.
Did you know that?
Apparently, I think Apple dropped me from the podcast store.
It could be a technical problem.
It might be a technical problem.
But, as far as you know, this is not on podcasts anymore, as of a few days ago, right?
Can anybody confirm?
Yeah, I'm cancelled on the Apple store.
I think.
It could be a technical problem.
So don't assume until I look into it.
All right.
Elon Musk.
All the stories about Elon Musk today.
So Elon Musk tweeted, free Jacob Chansley, who you know as the QAnon shaman who's in jail for doing nothing dangerous on January 6th and telling people to go home because Trump tweeted it, and walking around in a friendly manner with the law enforcement people.
So, still in jail, and Elon Musk is calling it.
And of course, somebody immediately accused him of being a MAGA guy.
Like, that's all Democrats have now is, oh, well, I've got a good insult.
How about my insult?
I hear your good reasons in your data, but have you seen my ad hominems?
I'd call that a tie, with me a little bit ahead.
That's what I call a tie.
Can you remind me to say something about equity toward the end?
I've got this great equity point that I keep wanting to fit in somewhere, but remind me at the end.
And so then Elon tweeted, I'm not part of MAGA, but I do believe in fairness and justice.
Chancellor was falsely portrayed in the media as a violent criminal who tried to overthrow the state and who urged others to commit violence.
That was the exact opposite of who he was.
And Elon goes on, but here he is urging people to be peaceful and go home.
And the other video shows him calmly walking in the Capitol building, being escorted by officers and then thanking the officers.
This is yet another one of those situations where the, you know, internet dads are trying to help.
Again, dads is not necessarily just men.
But people who have a certain perspective on life.
Sort of a dad vibe.
And I think Elon has the greatest dad vibe of anybody at this point.
Because this is just a personal, this is a non-political opinion.
Wouldn't you say?
Do you think Elon's opinion looks political?
I don't see any politics in it whatsoever.
Somebody says Spotify was airing my podcast yesterday, so that's good news.
Yeah, this is not even political.
This is about a citizen and the legal system.
There's no politics in this whatsoever.
You know, the larger event was.
But not Jacob.
This is not a political question at all.
Now, I got two million views on a tweet where I said that the Republicans should close Congress until they free Jacob Chansley.
And I just don't have a better idea, do you?
It would be one thing if we had some doubt about, well, you know, maybe the legal system should work this out, because we don't know all the facts.
But we know enough.
I feel like we know enough.
And by the way, there's no counter-narrative that I'm aware of.
Have you seen any?
Is there any counter-narrative that says, oh yeah, that QAnon shaman, he actually stabbed a guy.
Nobody's saying that.
Nobody's saying that the video is fake.
We've now seen enough that reasonable doubt is just so all over this.
If not outright, the most innocent anybody could be.
At the very least, at the very least, he didn't hurt anybody.
There's a lot of doubt about whether any crime was committed that he was aware of.
I don't think he was aware of any crime.
It looked like he was allowed in.
That was my take on it.
It looked like they didn't mind him being in there.
Let him walk around, do your thing, then leave.
Do you have a better idea than Republicans just saying, you know, we're done?
We're done.
Just close Congress.
We're not going to take a meeting.
We're just going to cancel everything.
Just clear my schedule.
Congress is closed.
Now, in a perfect world, it would only take one day for that to work.
But I can't think of another idea, can you?
I know it won't work.
Forming a protest and going down to where he's being held?
Pretty sure a protest won't help.
Am I wrong?
There's no way a protest is going to make any difference.
They'll just arrest more protesters.
They'll say, oh, there's more of those MAGA insurrectionists.
Let's get them.
Round them up.
So that's not going to work.
So if you can't protest, and the legal system is just clearly broken, I mean, in my opinion, that is just a broken system.
We all see it.
I don't think there's any ambiguity about this one.
We all say it.
And I get the argument that most of the ones being held for nonviolent crime should be pardoned.
I get that.
But this one is so plain and so easy and so obvious.
How do Republicans let this stand?
Not because they're Republicans, mind you.
But because they want a justice system that works.
It's not even political.
Now I would say everybody in Congress should, you know, do something.
But you know the Democrats won't.
They just won't.
So, I don't know.
Do you have a better idea?
Do you think we can just let it slide?
Is this something we can just let go?
And let me answer one critic who said, Scott, do you think this is the most important thing happening?
Do you think this is the most injustice?
This is the injustice you decided to focus on?
This one person, this one guy?
And my response was, no, it's not the only injustice.
It's the easiest one to fix.
That's what's pissing us off.
It's the easiest one to fix, and they're not doing it.
Now, the fact that we're not fixing systemic justice or systemic racism overnight, I get that.
That's hard.
Yeah, that doesn't happen overnight.
But this really should happen in an hour.
There's no reason he should be in there for one more hour.
We all see it.
It's obvious.
The system is absolutely disrespecting us.
This is disrespect of the citizens.
Absolute disrespect.
And maybe our system needs to learn to respect us.
Now, I don't think that the protest would work.
I'd like our leaders to shut the government down.
Just shut the fucking government.
Because if the government can't fix this fucking thing, I don't want it.
I don't even want a government.
This is a special note to people who don't understand hyperbole in the wild.
Sometimes Scott says things which were intended to make a point.
That if it is taken in its literal sense, could be misleading to NPCs and Democrats.
This has been a notice for NPCs and people who don't understand hyperbole and context.
Except that I do mean shut the government.
I literally mean it.
I mean, just close the doors, walk away.
You need to fix this.
We're private.
Alright, here's a Persuasion lesson on spotting word salad.
Now, the way that word salad arises, usually, is from cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance arises from where somebody has a worldview that they're sure is right, and then there's really solid evidence that it was never right.
Usually people don't say, oh wow, I've been wrong for so long and now I have new information.
I completely revise my worldview to make it compatible with this new information which looks solid.
Nobody does that.
Nobody does that.
What they do instead is they try to argue their old point that's been debunked.
Except there are no arguments, because the new information obliterates the arguments.
So what people will do, typically, and not because they're dumb, this is very important, this happens to smart people just as easily as anybody else, they start talking in word salad.
So it's words that form sentences, but they're just complete nonsense.
I'm going to give you an example so you can better recognize it in the wild.
So this is from Ricky Flores on Twitter.
He's responding to my calls for Jacob Chansley to be freed, based on the new video that totally destroys the narrative of January 6th.
But we all know there were violence there, that's not the part that's destroyed, just that the general character of the people there was protest and not insurrection, even though some were violent.
But Ricky, now evidently, and I say evidently because he's exhibiting the tell for cognitive dissonance, it means that the videos have just messed up his worldview.
Watch this answer.
Now he's responding to me and he says, you don't get it and you never will.
What's that?
You don't get it and you never will.
That's an odd ad hominem.
Ad hominem.
Yeah.
If somebody starts with an ad hominem, usually there's a cognitive problem going on.
Because when people have reasons, they give the reason first.
It's not that people won't insult you.
Everybody insults everybody.
It's just sort of the way of the world.
But when people have a reason to really dunk on you, like, oh, apparently you're forgetting this data.
Boom.
And then they call you an idiot.
Or they might say, well, you're an idiot because of this data.
So it's not just the insult, right?
It's the insult without anything else.
So watch.
See if you think the insult gets backed up.
You don't get it and you never will.
Access to the Capitol was closed off.
The formal affirmation of the will of the people attacked.
Law enforcement didn't know how to respond.
Never happened in history.
There was no playbook.
It was still insurrection.
Do any of those sentences have anything to do with the other sentences?
That's obvious word salad, right?
Do you recognize it?
Let me break it down again.
So here are the parts.
You don't get it and you never will.
That's just ad hominem.
So we'll see if he backs it up with some kind of data or argument.
It says, access to the Capitol was closed off.
Check.
I know that.
The formal affirmation of the will of the people was attacked.
Meaning the verification or the validation of the vote.
Now, is that the way real people talk?
Yeah, those people that day, they were attacking the formal affirmation of the will of the people.
Do you remember the part of the Constitution that specifies, whatever you do, don't attack the formal affirmation of the will of the people?
Well, stay away from the formal affirmation of the will of the people.
So that's what they were there for.
They were there to stop the process.
Yes, everybody knows that.
So far he's insulted me and told me two things that everybody knows.
Capital was closed off and they were there to stop that process.
Then he says law enforcement didn't know how to respond.
Yes.
Never happened in history.
Yes.
There was no playbook.
Yes.
It was still an insurrection.
What?
What?
What did any of those sentences have to do with supporting that it was an insurrection?
He just started out by saying that they were there to attack the affirmation of the will of the people.
Well, they were there to delay the day, which is exactly what they said, to make sure everything got done right, if there was a way to check it.
So, have I made my case?
This is somebody who can put together sentences that are complex.
So we would assume that Ricky is smart.
I assume Ricky is smart because he can put together complex sentences.
But am I wrong that this is word salad?
It's actually just nonsense put together.
And that's what you look for.
You look for the nonsense sentences that are still perfectly well-constructed in terms of grammar.
They're just weird.
All right.
Let's talk about this Silicon Valley bank.
So as most of you know by now, a big bank in Silicon Valley, a really big bank, has been taken over by regulators because it's insolvent.
And a lot of people are going to lose their money.
Up to $250,000 per account.
That's guaranteed by the government.
So that's the basic idea.
Now the big question is whether this is part of some larger bank run that's going to happen, or if it's a one-off.
The quick answer is it's probably a one-off, unless the public imagines it's not.
If the public imagines there's a problem, it does become a bank run.
If the public doesn't, then it probably won't.
Now, let me be very clear.
I do not give you financial advice.
Do not take my advice on what you should do with your money.
I will tell you what I'm doing.
Nothing.
Except I'm making sure that my accounts, to the degree that I can manage it, I make sure that I don't have too many that are over that limit.
So I might balance two accounts just to get them under that limit.
But that's all I would do.
Now here's why.
Where would you put your money?
Where would you put it?
Where's the good place to put it?
I can't think of one.
Now, some people are saying gold and buy shorts and stuff like that.
But you know, that's all just a different kind of risk.
So what happens if I buy a bunch of gold and it's probably already running up and then the banks don't fail?
Well I got a bunch of gold that's gonna start running back down because the banks didn't fail.
So that's just another risk.
Now you could say, but the bank risk is I'll lose everything.
Now, if the big banks fail, it's not a bank problem.
I hate to tell you, but if the big banks all fail, or even just most of them or something, that's the end of the game.
That's just sort of the end of the game.
We're all dead, sort of thing.
So I don't think it's going to happen.
So I think the odds are the banks will take a hit, and then people will do what I did, which is, what's Warren Buffett doing?
What's Warren Buffett doing?
Did Warren Buffett sell his Wells Fargo stock?
He has a ton of Wells Fargo stock, like a lot.
Did he sell his Wells Fargo stock?
If he doesn't, I'll probably trust Wells Fargo.
Because I don't know what's going on, but I think he does.
I really don't know what's going on.
But I think, you know, Berkshire Hathaway has a better take on it than I do.
So, this is a case of the media will be trying to scare people, because they get, you know, the extra clicks.
I watched Tucker last night.
I had to turn it off.
He was just scaring me.
But he was scaring me without a basis of facts.
You know, it was more like, it could be bad.
I get that.
Right?
Everything could be bad.
Everything could turn into a disaster.
But the more you talk about it, the more you cause it to happen.
And so this is going to be sort of a battle for the minds of Americans.
And others, I guess.
It's a battle for minds.
And I'm going to be battling on the side of calm down.
And I hope that the so-called internet dads The people who are, you know, at least can see the field and are just in it for making the country better.
I'm hoping that the internet dads are on the same side.
Like, calm down, everything will be fine.
It was a one-off.
There was something about that bank that wasn't like other banks.
I don't need to get into the details.
But the people who are closest to it see that as something that shouldn't affect other banks, unless you think it does.
If you think it affects the other banks, then it will.
Because people will act upon that belief and start taking the money out.
But where are you going to put it?
Mattress?
I can't think of anything safe.
No idea?
I mean, I don't even know if buying stocks is a good idea.
Is it?
I don't know.
So don't take my advice about anything.
I'm going to be persuading toward calm, but that's not financial advice.
Do you get the difference?
That's not financial advice.
I'm just saying don't buy the degree of the scare.
Put it in context.
The context is that the media and social media will try to get you scared.
So everything looks scarier when the media talks about it.
That doesn't mean it won't go bad.
I gotta say that a hundred times.
I don't know which way things are gonna go.
If I had to bet on it?
Well, I am betting on it.
I guess I am betting on it.
So yeah, I'm basically betting my entire fortune that we'll be okay.
I guess I am doing that.
I mean, we're all doing that, right?
But some people are betting their fortune that it won't be okay, and they're taking their money out.
Now, the reason I think it'll be okay is because it has to be.
Does that make sense?
It has to be.
Whatever we have to do, this is one of those situations where the government will do whatever it has to do.
If they have to send in the military to stand in front of the bank, they'll do that.
I don't think they'll do that, but there's probably nothing they won't do.
They'll create money out of nothing, they'll put people in jail for saying it's bad, which I don't approve of.
When you get to the point where people will do whatever it takes, that's probably a safer place than you think, because everybody's going to be on the side of trying to keep the bank solvent.
There's nobody on the other side, like maybe a few weird investors or something.
But basically, everybody wants the banks to survive, so we'll do whatever it takes, and people will jump through as many hoops as they need to make that work.
So I'm going to bet on humans.
This time.
Don't always.
But this time I'm going to bet on the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters.
And I'm going to believe that this is slow enough.
It's not very slow.
But it might be slow enough that we can figure out how to crawl through it.
So I think we'll be okay.
But do not take my advice.
OK?
All right.
So, it's of course turned totally political.
So here's what the Democrats are saying.
They're saying that Peter Thiel, who once backed Trump, caused the whole thing.
It's all Peter Thiel's fault, according to some Democrats.
Because his founders fund apparently told its members to get their money out because the bank was Not solvent.
Or soon would not be.
So, I hate to say it, but this is one of the greatest calls Peter Thiel ever made, and he at least got his own people's money out, but the net effect of that might be crashing all banks.
Now, it's not... What he did is not immoral or unethical.
It's not.
It's a free market and smart people do what they need to do to protect themselves.
It's supposed to work that way.
But Democrats are using that as, you know, some, some ex, I think he's ex-MAGA, some ex-MAGA looking guy caused it all because rich people are evil or something.
But the GOP has a different story, that it's all caused by Biden's inflationary spending, ESG, and Maybe more.
So here's the argument for Biden inflation.
So most of you are not economists, so it's a little hard to understand the story.
But let's see if I can simplify it.
Banks make money by holding your deposits and paying you less interest rate than they make by using your money to make loans.
That's the simplest explanation.
But instead of making loans, which might be a good return for their money and that would be more than they're paying and then they'd be fine.
They took the government's advice and bought these low interest rate long-term federal instruments.
So they locked themselves into a low interest rate for their income while the price that they would have to pay for money was moving around and was obviously going to go up.
So in other words, the most basic thing a bank does, which is make sure that the money they're paying to people is less than the money they're charging people, they got that wrong.
They got that wrong.
Now part of it was they predicted wrong, right?
They predicted wrong that the interest rates would go up, and then they would be locked in.
But who didn't know interest rates were going to go up?
Like, who in the world didn't know that?
Everybody knew that.
We've been saying for years, and it's just math.
If you have enough spending, interest rates are going to go up, inflation, blah, blah, blah.
So, I think Biden causes inflation, and then the bank did not manage their portfolio correctly in that environment.
Is maybe a problem that other banks are not going to have.
My guess is Wells Fargo didn't do that.
Right?
My guess is Chase did not do that.
I'm pretty sure they didn't.
So they should be fine unless everybody panics.
Here's the argument for ESG.
So we know that the company was like big on signaling their awesome social stuff.
You think Yellen didn't know?
Well, that's another problem.
And if they were focusing on their ESG stuff, were they looking backwards and looking all the wrong places when they should have been focusing on their banking?
Vivek Ramaswamy is making this case.
Now the case is we don't know.
We don't know if the ESG policies had an impact.
But we do know they were super focused on the ESG, which does not keep your bank solvent.
And the implication is, maybe they should have focused a little bit more on quality.
For example, ESG says you want more diversity in your management and everywhere else.
So, one thing to look at is, did they hire unqualified people because they needed diversity and they gave up some competence?
That's a really serious question that I'm not allowed to ask.
In theory, no matter what you think of anybody's qualities in any group, even if everybody had the same training and competence, like every person in the United States, if you're working toward diversity, you might run out of people because everybody's trying to be diverse.
You would run out of the best diverse hires.
And then you would naturally have to move down to the second tier to manage your diversity.
It's like, oh, you know, Pepsi got all the good diversity hires, but we still need some.
So we can't get the A-plus students, and now we're getting the A-minus students.
Still good.
A-minus is fine.
And then you run out of A-minus students, and you're still not diverse.
You gotta go to B-plus.
You get some B-plus students, right?
Just talking generically here, not really students.
But you get the B-pluses.
Here's my question.
Do you want your money managed by a B-plus?
And again, it has nothing to do with the individuals.
I'm saying that math alone, supply and demand, there's an undersupply of people that are in high demand.
So in theory, the only way they can solve ESG and look good is to go down to some B-plus competence.
And B-plus probably is not enough to keep your bank alive.
If you've got B-plus competence at the teller window, you're probably fine.
But if your B-plus competence is managing the entire existence of your bank, maybe you need an A-minus.
Maybe you need an A-plus.
And again, it has nothing to do with any particular race.
It's just supply and demand.
If you run out of supply, you got to go where you can get it, and you're going to go down lower in the competence area.
There's no way around that.
That's just math.
It has nothing to do with race.
Or it has nothing to do with racial differences.
You would get the same result if you reversed all the races.
All right.
In the long run, that should work itself out.
But in the short run, All right.
So I guess I hope the Internet dads win and convince people to not go nuts today.
Yeah.
So, So Jim Cramer had a bad month.
You know, people like to dump on Jim Cramer.
He always recommends stocks.
And one of the things I always was amazed about him is you could name any stock, you know, people could call in and say, what about AMB?
And Jim Cramer will say with total confidence, AMB has good assets and balance sheet.
And then it'll tell you whether to buy them or hold them.
And I always thought, how does he do that?
There are like 10,000 stocks, and people will just call with any stock, and he can tell you the pros and cons of that stock.
Well, it turns out, maybe he had some blind spots, because he recommended people invest in Silicon Valley Bank a few weeks before it went under.
Now, to be fair to Jim Cramer, to be fair, People who pick stocks and advise on stocks, they usually don't know what's happening in a company.
Did you know that?
The experts, they usually don't know.
They really don't.
How would they know?
How would they know?
Like even if they talk to the company, do you think the company tells them the truth?
If Kramer has lunch with the CEO of a company, is the CEO gonna lean over and say, you know, I gotta be honest.
Our balance sheet looks good on paper, but wait, in a month from now, it's going to go right to the toilet.
Who do you talk to?
How could Jim Cramer possibly know anything about a company?
He only knows what they tell him.
And that's usually a lie.
Because they're, you know, spinning things.
So his business model has a flaw that people imagine that anybody can pick stocks accurately.
It's not actually even a thing.
It's not something that Kramer is doing poorly.
It's actually not a thing.
Does that make sense?
He's in the job of picking stocks.
And picking individual stocks and winning at it is not even a thing.
Ask Warren Buffett.
Hey, Warren Buffett, do you think it's a good idea for individual investors to pick individual stocks based on their own research and maybe the advice of experts?
He would laugh at you.
Warren Buffett would laugh at you for taking anybody's advice, including your own, on buying individual stocks.
He says that's a loser's game, basically.
That's what fools do.
So, did Jim Cramer have a bad month?
Or is what he does impossible by definition?
Well, not definition, but it's impossible in the real world.
So it's just sort of guessing in the end.
Yeah.
So I'm not sure he had a bad month.
I think he was doing something that isn't even possible and we should not be surprised he didn't succeed this one time.
Yeah, I'm sure he's got lots of others wrong, but of course, of course.
Somebody asked Elon Musk on Twitter about buying the failed bank and making it a digital bank.
Now, that's too big of a question for me to know whether that's a good or bad idea.
Digital sounds crypto.
Crypto sounds risky.
So, you know, my bias is, I don't see how that's going to work.
But Elon Musk replies, I'm open to the idea.
Now, I don't think it was a joke.
I think he was actually open to the idea.
So that would be interesting.
Imagine if he could buy, let's say, the intellectual property of Silicon Valley Bank.
You know, the name and the corporation structure, but not the debts.
Or not the assets or something.
I think he could do that, couldn't he?
I don't know.
But I wonder if there's anything there.
Maybe he has an idea for making a digital bank work.
Seems like it's all going to be digital money eventually.
Let me ask you this.
You don't believe we'll be using paper money and checks 10 years from now, do you?
Do you think in 10 years we'll be using paper money and writing paper checks?
It seems to me that digital money is not a question, it's just a guarantee.
You do.
So the only reason for keeping digital money is for crime.
Am I wrong?
I guess you could say privacy.
But why do you need privacy if you're not committing a crime?
Because it's not like your neighbors are looking at your checking account.
It's only the government.
The government only cares if you're committing a crime, as far as I know.
Yeah, let me say this.
I'm not unambiguously in favor of digital currency because all the tracking and privacy.
I get that.
Like, it's creepy and it probably will hurt us.
But it is also inevitable.
There's no way in the world we're going to keep paper money in the long term.
And there's no way in the world we're going to be writing checks in the long term.
That's just not going to happen.
So it's one of these arguments where if you're arguing the pros and the cons, you're just talking.
Because it's not like you're going to stop it.
You're not going to stop it.
It's just going to happen.
There's no way around it.
Some of you actually think we'll have paper money in 10 years.
If I said 20 years, do you think you'll still have paper money?
I don't think there's a chance.
You do?
Okay.
Well, I mean, I can't see the future, so maybe you're right.
But I'd be super surprised.
All right.
Speaking of Elon Musk's future city plans, somebody on Twitter said that his brother, Kimball, is investing in vertical farms, which would be an indoor farm, I guess.
Is that true?
Kimball Musk is investing in vertical farming?
Indoor farming?
Because I think he follows me on, I think Kimball follows me on Twitter.
He tweeted at me the other day.
So I'm going to ask him about that, because that's one of my personal interests.
I also have a small investment in indoor gardening, but smaller scale, obviously.
Democrats appear more lost than usual, but maybe it's just because of the anecdotal stuff.
Representative Sylvia Garcia You remember she was grilling Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger.
And the ridiculousness of her lack of preparation.
She believed that those two guys were MAGA.
Like, that's not doing any homework at all.
She didn't know they were, like, legitimate... She didn't know they were journalists.
Now, if you've been paying attention, For the past few years.
Can you name anybody who's a better journalist than either one of them?
Like, who's beating them?
Glenn Greenwald, maybe?
Barry Weiss?
Yeah, Barry Weiss, Glenn Greenwald.
But there's a very... There are only maybe 10 journalists in the country who are not absolute garbage.
Am I wrong?
There are probably 10 good journalists in the whole fucking country.
And they're right at the top of the best journalists in the whole country.
It's just crazy.
And Democrats don't even know it.
Like, they didn't even know their names.
Crazy.
I mean, I'm not wrong.
There are only 10, like, really useful journalists in the country.
And they're definitely in the top 10.
So that's crazy.
All right.
I'm going to show you a couple of comics that I did for the Locals subscription group.
By the way, the only place you'll be able to see Dilbert on Monday of this coming week will be on the Locals subscription site.
Five bucks a month if you buy an annual membership.
And for that, you would see not only the only new Dilberts, which will be called Dilbert Reborn, And it will be edgier and spicier because it's not subject to the editorial control of newspapers.
Finally, I'm free!
And it also includes my side comic of Robots Read News that I do once in a while.
And also my micro-lessons, which I'll be adding two.
I think I'll be adding one today.
Over 200 micro-lessons, two to four minutes.
Each one will give you a life skill that will change you forever.
Change you forever.
But, and there's a lot more on there, commentary, etc.
So it's all the good stuff.
But here's some Robarts Read News jokes that I read that I wrote about Silicon Valley Bank before I realized how bad it was.
I'm not sure I would have written these jokes when the news first broke, but when you actually think of the real-life impact on real citizens of the country, some of them lost everything.
It's not funny.
So just to be clear, It's not funny what happened to the people who lost their money.
It's easy to say, oh, you rich investors lost the money, blah, blah, blah.
But it's not all rich investors.
There are real people who just got killed in that.
It doesn't mean that there aren't funny things to be said.
So here on Robots Read News, where the robot is always the same, he never moves, he just reads the news.
The first one I tried was, and I wrote these in concert with the people and locals who subscribe.
So I was in my man cave last night, just turned it on, and I had them help me write these.
So this is a combination of my writing plus suggestions and input from them.
Alright, so the robot says, Silicon Valley Bank has been shut down by regulators.
Their big mistake was investing all of their money in saucer-shaped weather balloons, Nord Stream 2, and Dilber NFTs.
Their only remaining assets are Hunter Biden paintings he made with his penis.
So that was with the help of the locals people.
But then we thought of another one that seemed even funnier.
So I just wrote another one.
And that's the beauty of robots reading news.
I can crank one out in 10 minutes and have it published.
So the robot says, Silicon Valley Bank has been shut down by regulators.
In related news, the Silicon Valley Sperm Bank is also insolvent because of a lack of donor liquidity.
Lack of donor liquidity.
Well, if I had all of my money in Silicon Valley Bank, I don't think I could... I don't even think I could jerk off.
And I could do that when I've got the flu.
I could masturbate when I have the flu.
But if I had all my money in the Silicon Valley Bank, I think I'd be... I think my liquidity would be drying up pretty quickly.
So...
Anyway, so here's a lesson on writing a joke.
Here's a joke writing lesson.
I taught this to the locals people last night.
The punchline here about the lack of donor liquidity requires you to do an extra bit of thinking on your own.
So instead of just giving you the punchline, here it is, haha, I give you the punchline, you go, what's he mean by that?
Oh, I get it.
And it's that little bit of, what's he mean?
Yeah, like the people are so upset, they're dehydrated and they can't function and stuff.
So it takes you just a little bit of time.
A little bit of time to, like, connect the dots, and that's what makes it funny.
It's that little time that connected the dots.
So that's your lesson.
Now, I promised you I'd give you another lesson.
So you learned about word salad and how to write a joke, and now you're going to learn how to spot an NPC.
The NPCs are so consistent that I started making a list of the things they say so you can spot them too.
Here are things that NPCs say, they identify them as NPCs, and you can just ignore them from that point on.
It makes them funny.
So this is kind of a reframe.
If you think your critics are well-meaning citizens who have a bad feeling about you, that's going to make you feel bad.
I hate it when citizens have a bad feeling about me.
I don't like it at all.
But if I knew that the person who was criticizing me was an NPC and not a player, I'd say, oh, OK, that's just background scenery.
So here are some things to recognize the background scenery of an NPC.
You're just an apologist.
Okay, well maybe I just have an opinion.
Maybe I just have a different opinion.
How about that?
How about I think differently than you do?
Maybe that's the entire story.
Maybe I'm not an apologist.
Or how about you're a fence-sitter, you're a racist, keep digging, walking it back, flip-flopping, and then my two favorites, you're afraid of, whatever, the mind reading, you're afraid of, Okay.
Or, what you really think is, no, I said what I really think.
Or, I saw the video, there is no other way to interpret it.
Yeah, there's another way to interpret it.
It's edited to reverse the meaning.
That's the other way.
Pretty easy.
It didn't take any work at all.
Or how about, you said all of the people in that group.
When you said black people like hip-hop music, you were saying all of them, and that's racist.
No, no.
Nobody means all of them.
No matter what they say, they never mean all of them.
Doesn't mean just black people.
Doesn't mean just MAGA people.
It's never all of them.
It's never ever all of them.
Only NPCs say that.
And you're only doing this for clicks.
This is what I'm getting now.
So I'm saying some more provocative thing in the minds of other people.
And they're saying, you're just doing it for clicks.
That's a little lacking all the variables.
There are more variables than clicks.
But the NPCs can handle one variable at a time.
So that's how you spot them.
All right.
Here's some of the imaginary problems that Democrats are working about.
The Democrats are very worked up about two imaginary MAGA guys, Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger.
They're imaginary.
Now, the people exist, but they've never been associated with MAGA.
But the Democrats want to get rid of those MAGA guys that don't exist.
Biden is talking out against the imaginary GOP plan to defund the police, which as you know, not only doesn't exist, it's the literal opposite of the GOP opinion, which is, let's fund those police some more.
But the Democrats have an imaginary task there to beat, and then they're working on the imaginary insurrection led by the imaginary bad guy QAnon shaman.
Republicans work on that many imaginary problems.
Like, does it work both ways?
It might.
It might.
It might work both ways.
But I'm only noticing it on one side.
I feel like when Republicans complain about something, they might be exaggerating it.
Would that be fair?
Because in politics, everybody exaggerates everything.
So, probably some exaggeration.
But do the Republicans fight imaginary problems?
Is that a thing?
Well, I guess they do.
Yeah, I guess they do.
If it's based on a conspiracy theory.
But if it's not based on a conspiracy theory, like it's just the news, do Republicans hallucinate just ordinary news?
Oh, it feels like there's a difference.
All right, here's another story.
Oh, I like this quote by H.L.
Mencken.
I saw Nathaniel Eliason tweeted this.
This is a quote.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
That feels like politics, right?
That all of our problems that are surfaced, it's not all of our problems, but the ones that are surfaced in politics are imaginary.
It's an imaginary threat from over there and we better attack them.
Probably true.
Pretty imaginary.
All right, this is a surprise in the news.
China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to reopen diplomatic connections.
But that's not the big part.
The big part is they brokered an end to the Yemen civil war.
Or not an end to it, but that Iran would stop backing the Houthi rebels that were attacking Saudi Arabia.
That's like a big deal, isn't it?
That Saudi Arabia and Iran can talk again.
And the reason they can talk is that China helped them solve a war.
I mean, I hate to say good job China, but that was a good job.
And I think that China probably used their economic clout on both countries, right?
Because Iran needs to sell to China, I assume the Saudis do, right?
So that was just good work.
It's weird.
I mean, I want to say something bad about it, but it looks like good work to me.
And I don't know if Iran is more or less dangerous if they get along with Saudi Arabia, but maybe less.
Maybe.
Now, I suppose we could argue, oh, we need Saudi Arabia to be tough on Iran with us.
But it's also possible that Iran has decided that, you know, being adventurous is not working for them.
It's possible.
So I guess it's too early in the story to know if this is good or bad, but I'm gonna give China credit.
Gotta give China credit.
Nobody's a bigger critic, but that looked like a smart and just a business thing to do.
Now the one thing that I'm always impressed about Saudi Arabia, especially with their new leader, when he's not cutting up people with a bone saw, He seems to be a real practical business person.
You know, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
It seems like he's a negotiator, a deal maker.
You know, you could criticize him for all the other things that you don't like.
That's fine.
But he does seem to be a deal maker.
So that's a positive thing.
All right.
Well, that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I needed to say today, but I said, to remind me something about equity.
Here it is.
You ready for this?
When black Americans focused on sports, Let's say when it was finally allowed that black athletes could fully complete, would you agree that they ended up dominating sports?
Maybe not every sport, but some of our major sports.
I would say so.
As a percentage of the population, I would say they dominated.
When black Americans invented hip-hop, wouldn't you agree that, at least for young people, It's the dominant form of music.
So they focus on music and they dominate it.
Would you agree that black people are more fashionable than white people?
I'm not even going to listen to your answer.
The answer is yes.
Yes.
You play this game, go out in public, if you're a generic white guy in khakis, right?
Like, play this game.
Walk around in public, where there's a mix of people, and find any black guy who is dressed less fashionably than you are.
Good luck.
Good luck.
I mean, it might be a tie in some cases, but, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the big problem is that you don't see black America making as much money, right?
And some of that is lack of access to education, etc.
Systemic racism, blah, blah, blah.
But here's what I also... I can't help but notice.
It's also not a focus.
Am I wrong?
Am I wrong to say that Black America, I lost the connection on Locals.
Locals feed just died.
Huh.
I might have to quit it and restart it?
Looks like it's dead.
See what happens if I do this.
I don't know.
Let's see if I can fix a little technical problem here.
There's probably so much traffic on locals.
I'm driving a lot of traffic to locals.
All right, I don't know if they can see me.
I can't see their comments.
So it might be just a comment problem.
All right, so to finish my point.
Black America focused on sports when they were allowed to fully participate.
They dominate.
Focus on music?
Dominate.
Focus on fashion?
Dominate.
Do they focus on making money in the normal economy way and going to college?
I don't see it.
Do you?
So here's my question.
Why don't black Americans understand that every time they focused on something, they dominated it?
If black America took my advice, which it won't, on how to succeed, and basically just a normal toolkit that everybody uses when they succeed.
Nothing special for black or white people.
It's just the basics of how anybody succeeds.
If black America focused on the basics of how to succeed, they would dominate business.
They would dominate.
And the reason is that the white people aren't doing that.
Now white people get like more accidental exposure to the techniques because they're more successful people in their community, statistically.
But there's some kind of weird assumption That systemic racism is holding black America back.
And of course it is.
That's a fact.
But how much?
How much?
Because wasn't there systemic racism in all the things I mentioned?
Was there not systemic racism in sports even when it was legal for everybody to participate?
There must have been a ton.
Must have been a ton of it.
And they dominated.
Fashion, music, still dominated.
So why do you imagine that focusing on something else, tools for success, would not make them dominate the economy as well?
Now here's the thing, that if you want to go racist, you could say, oh, Steve Jobs was white, and Bill Gates was white, and so the big billionaire successful people, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you're not one of those.
You're not one of those.
Most people are just normal people with jobs.
In the real world of normal people with jobs, you know, 99% of the world, and job would be small business as well, people aren't that different, right?
I know I'm different from Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Like, I see them operating on a level that I can barely understand.
But normal people with normal educations And normal access to skills.
Some will do better if they're trained to do the right things than the people who weren't trained.
Black America is shooting low.
If you say, do you know any white family that says, go out there and try to be equitable?
Scott, I'd like you to work hard.
And if you do a good job, you could be average.
My mother literally told me, I don't care what you do, just do it better than other people.
Like literally, all the time.
Doesn't matter what you do, you have to follow your own dreams, so I don't care what you do, but you have to do it better than other people.
That's the whole game.
Now, who tells that to black young kids?
You're going to be in an economy, I don't care what you do.
It should be legal.
I don't care what you do, but you've got to do it better than other people.
And now, black America is being taught to try to be average.
When every time they focus, they've dominated.
I'm not wrong.
Nobody's disagreeing with me.
People who focus get what they want.
You can see it within one person's job.
Forget about a population of people.
Any one person.
If they focus on one area, they exceed.
They will do better than the people who didn't focus on that area.
At the same time, they'll do less good in the areas they're not focusing on.
Very normal Now, let me talk to Zephyr.
So Zephyr says you're delusional, Scott.
Are you disagreeing that focus is important to success?
Is that the point you're disagreeing with?
Or do you believe that it's not enough?
You think it's reaching?
See, I think you have to live with this idea for a little bit.
Because it's so far outside the box.
It's a reframe.
So the reframe is that that which you focused on, you succeeded.
Do you think there were any black people who went into sports, again thinking about the time when the rights were just being equalized, do you think there were any black people who went into sports and said, I'm going to practice hard and try to be an average player?
Or did they all say, I think if I practice hard, I could be one of the best?
And then they were.
And do you think when Ye got into fashion, just to pick a specific, do you think Ye got into fashion because he wanted to be just average?
I think I could be the average of other designers.
Clearly not.
Clearly, he got into the business to dominate.
And except for his other issues, he would have.
So focus works everywhere.
As soon as you say, yes, yes, but what about those weird, you know, geniuses?
We're not them.
They're just not part of our equation.
The weird geniuses are always going to be here and doing their weird genius thing.
But normal people, it's all about what you focus on.
It's all about what you focus on.
And I don't see any focus in black America on training the next generation to be good in business and to learn the tools of success.
So what do you predict about the future?
Well, I would predict it would be exactly what you think.
They'll dominate in sports, dominate in fashion, dominate in music, and lose in economics every time.
They're going to lose in economics every time because there's no focus.
Now, if you asked anybody, I'm sure they'd say, yes, yes, making money is very important.
We talk about it all the time.
Not really.
Not really.
I mean, if you're talking about it and you're not researching all the ways to do it, you're not, you know, it's not like your main thing, that's just talk.
Talking about it is not focus.
That's not focus.
And when you do talk about it, do you talk about winning or equity?
If you talk about equity, that's not, that's nothing.
If you talk about winning, I could help you do it.
it.
All right.
What?
Who runs the media?
How's that matter?
All right.
So, so somebody, whenever I bring up this conversation, somebody wants to bring up the bell curve.
The trouble is that's your, That feels like your little safe zone.
Like if you want to retreat to a safe space.
If you want to talk about it with any kind of depth, the weirdos that are skewing the IQ stuff, they're just not part of the conversation.
The fact that Bill Gates is also white doesn't help your IQ at all.
Bill Gates having a high IQ didn't help you at all.
There's no connection.
He's a different person from you.
The fact that he's also white doesn't help you.
You're not connected.
So if in fact it's true, I don't know if it is, but if some group has a bunch of weirdos that are skewing the curve, there's not enough of them that they need to be part of the conversation.
The average person does great if they do the normal things that people do to succeed.
They have a good life.
We're not all becoming billionaires.
So as soon as you think that that average, whatever average you think is in the bell curve, you're going to get a whole bunch of You know, unfortunately, black citizens who are just getting destroyed by the culture that they were born into, right?
Systemic racism, et cetera, poverty.
So you can have people who are, you know, not eating as well, that affects your performance.
Not caring as much, that affects your performance.
You know, so you're gonna get weirdos on the extreme lefts.
Who probably has more to do with society.
And then you get the weirdos on the far, let's say the high end of the curve.
But just ignore both of them.
Just ignore both of them.
Just take out of the equation the weird geniuses.
They're not you.
And then just take into consideration that if there's more poverty in one group, they should score less.
That's the most predictable thing you could imagine.
Poverty equals Lower grades.
No matter what your native IQ is, you're gonna get a lower IQ score.
So, you need to rise up to that level of complexity before you have a ticket to the conversation, right?
If you're stuck on the bell curve, you're just hiding in a safe space.
You're just sort of ignoring the question.
The real question is most people are normal and average and about the same.
And if they use good technique, they do well.
And you should treat the low end of everything as a separate idea.
And it's not about race.
And the high end are just, we're lucky that we have some freaks.
I mean, how lucky is it that there are geniuses?
But if it's not you, it's not relevant to you.
My mother was valedictorian, my sister was valedictorian, and we were always low income.
Well, that's not too far from my family situation.
And I grew up in a small town.
Was it a small town?
I'll bet it was.
I'll bet it wasn't an inner city.
Just guessing.
All right.
I've got some old stale bagels I have to go eat.
And I think this was the most useful live stream that anybody will do today.
Booker says, Scott denies the existence of black geniuses.
No, actually, opposite Booker.
I consider Kanye a genius.
I consider Michael Jordan a genius.
And there are plenty of STEM people, et cetera.
So there are plenty of brilliant people and everything.
But I don't limit IQ to math and reading.
I take the bigger picture, that there is an artistic genius.
There's a physical genius, a musical genius.
If somebody can do fashion better than you and I can, and they can consistently do it, that's genius.
Prince.
Prince is a genius.
Yeah.
Yep.
The point, Booker, was, and I'm glad you called me on that, because I was unclear.
The point was not that only white people are high on Q. I wasn't making that point.
I was saying that if it's true, that there's a higher concentration of them, that doesn't tell you anything.
It's just not useful.
It might be true.
But it's not a useful thing.
It's just a thing that exists.
Now, I also wondered, do you get more geniuses when you have more mixture of ethnicities?
Does that happen?
Has anybody ever studied that?
Don't you ever wonder?
Like if you just took two random anti-ethnicities and mixed them, and let's say you did that a number of times, and compared to any group that's been the same for a longer period of time.
Well, here's what I'm saying.
I think you would get more variability, wouldn't you?
Is that true or not true?
Would you get more variability, both on the high end and the low end, if you mated two people who were more different than alike?
True or no?
No, just a question.
Obviously it doesn't explain everything.
Everybody's an individual.
Every group has exceptions.
There's no thing about the average that's true for any person.
So I'm hoping everybody watching this knows all the obvious stuff, right?
You all know that averages don't talk about any person.
And by the way, here's a frame I put on, do you discriminate against people individually?
Here's the best frame on that.
If somebody says, do you discriminate about one specific person because of their ethnicity?
The correct answer is this.
This isn't a race question.
It's not a race question.
It's a success question.
If you close yourself off from 90% of the world because they don't look like you, You're going to have fewer network contacts.
You're going to meet fewer awesome people.
You'll be denying yourself the beauty and the talents of 90% of the world.
From a success perspective, which is the better frame, it doesn't make sense.
It does not make sense to judge people by immutable characteristics, like skin color, because you're cutting yourself off from the potential of valuable resources.
Somebody who could do you a favor someday.
Somebody who knows somebody they can introduce you to.
Somebody who can hire you someday.
Somebody you can hire someday.
As soon as you think that's a race question, I question your Your understanding of success.
You should always look at the statistics, which is what got me in trouble, by the way.
But that's a case where the statistics say, don't discriminate.
That's not in your best interest.
You're reducing your numerical chances of success.
So I could never be in favor of that.
Lots of times we think things are about race when it's really about stupidity.
That would just be stupid.
In 2023, if you deny your relationship with somebody because of their race or religion or gender or whatever it is, all you did is reduce the number of options you had for a better life.
Is there anybody left in the world who is such a racist that they would say, I cannot possibly judge, let's say, some gay individual on anything other than they're gay.
Like, is that a thing?
Still?
In 2023?
I'm pretty sure that even people who you would consider, like, you know, the most bigoted people, still sort of judge people individually.
Because it's in their best interest.
I've never met an exception to that.
Yeah.
No, not the gay race.
Yeah.
All right, so that's your reframe for the day, YouTube.
I'm going to say see you later, and thanks for joining.
