Episode 2094 Scott Adams: RFK Jr. Gaining Energy, Epstein & CIA, Apple Lagging AI, Trump Nicknames
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Content:
RFK Jr. gaining energy
Epstein and the CIA
Apple behind in AI
Twitter Community Notes for the win
Biden's advantage with the old
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- Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. - Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of Civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
There's never been a finer moment in the entire world.
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That's a lot.
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It's the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called, that's right, the simultaneous sip.
Go.
Ah.
That's good.
Did I see somebody say that RFK Jr.
is anti-nuclear energy?
Is that a thing?
I just saw that in the comments.
I'm having trouble believing that's true.
I don't think that's true.
Alright, I'm gonna call that, yeah, I'm gonna call that not true.
But what is true?
What many interesting things are true?
Well, in Indiana, there's a An adult white male councilman, or running for councilman in Indiana, who's decided to identify as a woman of color.
So now he's an Indian-American woman.
And the news is giving him a hard time.
Because the news doesn't think he's serious.
No.
They think that he's just mocking the system.
What?
I don't believe that.
I believe that if he wants to identify as a woman of color, he has every right to do it, and the news better treat him with respect.
Embrace and amplify.
Ryan Webb, who may or may not be watching this, that's some good dad humor there.
I don't know if he's a dad, but Identifying as a woman of color while he runs for office in his local community is very much a dad joke.
It's very much a dad joke.
All right, here's a little story that was in Vice.
Actually, they reported it, but originally it was Rachel Neuer for PBS Nova.
So they did this study and found that I guess I didn't even know this was a stereotype.
But did you know that long ago there was a stereotype that Southerners were lazy?
And not in a racial way, but just Southerners in general.
I guess I wasn't even aware of that, that that was some kind of stereotype.
But it turns out that there's a scientific reason for it.
It turns out that 40% of the people right after slavery, they had hookworm.
And hookworm makes you exhausted.
So apparently hookworm was just all over the place in the South because the weather supports it.
So it wasn't a big problem in the North.
So the Northerners are just working up and they're just doing their own work.
But the Southerners apparently needed slaves because they're all so damn lazy and exhausted all the time.
It's like, ah, I can't pick any cotton myself.
Do you have any ideas?
No.
I'm too tired, too.
I can't pick any cotton.
I'm full of hookworms.
Well, think creatively.
What can we do in the South here when we've got this plantation and we're all too tired to pick the cotton ourselves?
Hey, I've got an idea.
And then everything went bad after that.
I blame the hookworm for all of our problems and, if I may, be the first to suggest this, I believe the hookworms should be paying reparations to all of us.
Because that's where it all started.
No, I'm just making that up.
Don't Don Lemon me.
I know I'm making that up.
It's just made up.
Alright.
So there's that.
Here's my favorite story of the day, but it's also the smallest story of the day.
Or is it?
Or is it?
Is it the biggest story of the day?
Or is it the smallest one?
You decide!
It turns out that the community notes feature on Twitter, where Twitter will allow other users to essentially fact check a tweet.
Twitter, if you don't know this story, I'm just going to say it slowly so that you can appreciate the beauty and pageantry of it all.
I'll just state it slowly.
Today, I think it was today, it might have been yesterday, Use community notes to fact-check an advertisement on its own platform.
Oh my God.
They fact-check an advertisement.
They fact-check their own advertisers.
They fact-check people who are paying them.
Not they, I mean it's the community that does it, not the Twitter employees.
But I saw somebody tweet about it.
And then Elon Musk tweeted back that the goal is to make this platform maximum truth-seeking, or said another way, the least untrue compared to everything else.
Now the first thing I love about that, love, love, love, is he's very consistent, Musk is, about not saying that he's going to have the truth.
I love that.
Because that's so honest.
Well, I'm not going to have the truth.
I'm just going to be less lying than the other platforms if I work at it really hard.
That seems so perfectly honest that I just love that framing.
And apparently that applies to advertisements.
So it was a regal theater advertisement.
And I don't think they were necessarily doing anything sketchy, the advertiser.
I think it was just there was something unclear.
You know, it made it look a little better than it was.
Let's call that marketing.
But they got called on, and they got fact-checked.
I love that.
And now it makes me wonder about Musk's AI, which he also talks about being maximum truth-seeking.
But now he's also talking about Twitter being maximum truth-seeking.
Does that mean that AI and Twitter will become one?
Or are they just coincidentally both described by their owners as maximum truth-seeking?
Maybe that's just a quality he wants in all of his work?
I don't know.
But it makes me think that, at least mentally, he imagines those two things.
Well, if I may, I love Venn Diagrams!
Have I told you how much I love Venn Diagrams?
Everybody laughs at me because I love them!
I love Venn Diagrams!
But if you can imagine, there's the circles, and then the Twitter is like in the circle of the AI, possibly.
I love the Venn Diagrams.
That looked completely natural and normal, didn't it?
You know, it's a good thing that we don't have a major politician who talks like that.
Kamala Harris.
Alright.
I almost thought this was a joke, but apparently it's not.
The CDC is renewing its recommendation for travelers into the U.S.
to be vaccinated before they can get in.
That's, with COVID, that's a real thing that's happening in the actual world.
What?
What?
It's April 30th, 2023.
Is there some kind of like wormhole into the past that just opened?
What the hell?
At the same time as this story, Pfizer is going to ask the FDA to allow a third COVID shot for healthy 5 to 11-year-olds, based on the study of 140 kids.
What is going on?
What is going on?
Are we in some kind of a weird bubble where this makes sense and we don't know?
Is that happening?
We can't rule that out, right?
So one of the things you always have to think is, maybe everyone else is right.
Maybe the CDC is right, and I don't see it.
But at the very least, this deserves a little more explaining, doesn't it?
A little more explaining of why this is even possibly on the table.
Why is it even in the conversation?
Well obviously money, but how are we taking this seriously?
Even Musk said that the CDC decision about the vaccinations for coming into this country should be mocked.
He said it was worthy of mocking.
Now apparently the only way we can run the country now is by mocking stupid shit until it's too embarrassing for our leaders to do it.
That apparently is what's left, right?
You know, you used to think, oh, my Second Amendment.
I'll use my Second Amendment to keep the government in line.
Well, that's not working.
What else you got?
How about voting?
Oh, I'll vote.
Well, well.
So what do you got?
You're just mocking.
Mocking is the only thing we have left.
So let's mock the hell out of this.
I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal, I guess, that the U.S.
is trying to set up a crisis hotline with China, and China's, you know, not too interested.
And here's the part that made me go, what?
We don't already have a crisis hotline with China?
What?
How in the world do we not have a crisis hotline with China?
Or, to put it another way, Do we really not have President Xi's cell phone?
I mean, I assume he has one.
Probably an aide walks around with it or something.
But I feel like we should literally have his cell phone.
Like, you know, in his aide's pocket or whatever.
We should be able to get a hold of President Xi in five minutes.
And vice versa, don't you think?
Don't you think she should be able to reach Biden on the phone, like actually his actual voice, in five minutes or less, no matter what?
How in the world does that not already exist?
I mean, it's blowing my mind.
We've had it for Russia forever, has it ever been bad?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the crisis line to the Kremlin has actually been used, has it not?
Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
Have we not actually used?
Yeah, back in the Soviet days, right?
We've actually used the hotline, haven't we?
I'm not positive about that, but I think we have.
Beyond testing it?
Cuban Missile Crisis?
Yeah.
Or was it after that?
I don't know.
I don't know my history on that, but we need it.
All right, well, Trump has decided on his nickname for Biden.
I'm a little undecided on this one, but in his typical Trump fashion, he described it this way.
And every time I hear a Trump paragraph of something he actually said, I miss him.
Nobody talks like he does.
He's the only one in the world who talks like Trump.
And when he talks, you think you're hearing somebody talk for the first time.
It's like an alien came down and said stuff that you could understand, but you don't know why.
Here's what Trump says.
I guess he said this in Manchester yesterday.
I will be retiring the name Crooked from Hillary Clinton, Trump said.
I'm going to give her a new name.
I don't know, like maybe Lovely Hillary or Beautiful Hillary.
But I'm going to retire the name Crooked so that we can use the name for Joe, Joe Biden.
Because he'll be known from now on as Crooked Joe Biden.
Crooked Joe Biden.
What do you think?
Now, it feels a little recycled.
It feels recycled.
However, it does show that that's going to be his primary attack vector.
So it looks like Trump is announcing that his big push will be on Biden's potential illegalities.
Now, does that make sense, given that Trump himself is accused of big illegalities?
So he's got a lawsuit and some other legal jeopardy?
Do you like the fact that he's going at Biden for the thing that Trump is most accused of, which is having some criminal guilt?
It is projecting, but I would argue that it did work with Hillary.
Because remember, one of the big problems that people had with Trump was they thought he was just running for the money the first time.
The first election.
They thought he's, you know, just in it for the money and he's got all these crooked deals that they never found.
And he must have things on his taxes that are terrible that they never found.
So Trump was being accused of, you know, Russia collusion and all manner of things crooked for money.
And so he just took that attack and escalated it times ten for her.
So if you were going to vote on that dimension, You'd have some confusion.
You know, if you thought that voting for the honest one was what you wanted to do, well, he put a lot of confusion in there.
Well, maybe I am the honest one, relatively speaking.
So, I don't know.
I guess I'm disappointed that it's a recycled name, but I can't disagree that it might blunt one of the biggest attacks against Trump himself.
However, let's dig a little deeper.
As Politico noted, it turns out that Joe Biden has a big advantage with old people.
Do you know why old people like Joe Biden?
Because he's old?
Probably.
Probably because he's old.
And people like anybody who's sort of like themselves.
If Biden has, let's say, the mindshare of the old people, it would be very tough for Trump to win because Trump used to be the one who got the old people.
So Trump's biggest, or one of his biggest, election advantages is that old people like him.
Older the better for Trump.
But that's also true for Biden.
The older the better, in terms of them liking him.
So what strategy would you use?
This will be a little persuasion test for you.
If you knew that you had to win the old people, and you weren't doing it, and you're Trump, and you've got to get the old people back on your side, how would you persuade old people?
Go.
Fear.
Got it on the first try.
Fear.
Yeah, fear is the number one lever when you're trying to scare old people.
Because the old people are just like, don't change anything too much.
You know, I'm still alive.
I got this far.
Just don't change anything too much.
Don't, don't do any big moves.
Don't do anything that would shake the boat because I'm not really able to recover at this point.
From this point on, You know, I'm already 80 years old.
I kind of need things just to go the way they are.
Don't rock that boat for me.
So I think that Trump's best argument for the old is that Biden is risky.
Have you heard me say that before?
So risky is what Bill Clinton used to defeat, what's his name?
Bob Dole.
So when Bob Dole was considered You know, pretty old.
Bill Clinton used risky as a way to get the old people to say, wait a minute, we like Bob Dole because he's old and he's that World War II greatest generation.
We like all that.
But what's this about risky?
And then suddenly, suddenly, if you think it's risky for Biden, then you don't like it at all.
So one of the things that Trump has going for him is that he is not wanting to cut social benefits for old people.
That's pretty big.
And that's not necessarily what every Republican would say.
Bankrupt Biden?
No, I think you want to say Biden is going to take your money.
See, I don't think old people are necessarily worried about street crime so much.
They probably just get used to it or they don't live around it.
And I don't think they're worried about the war in Ukraine because it looks like it's limited over there.
The one thing that old people worry about is if they lose their money, They can't make it back because they're old.
If you're young and you lose your money to inflation, at least you think, well, I've got time to adjust and I can figure something out.
But if you're old and all the money you have is all the money you'll ever have, let's just say this.
Imagine Trump saying, if you're above a certain age and you retired, all the money you have now is all the money you'll ever have.
Biden wants to take a third of it every year.
Or you make up some hyperbolic number.
Your net wealth is going to go down by 10% a year every year that Biden is in office, or something.
So, I believe that Trump needs to scare old people about their finances, which by the way would not be unethical in my opinion.
I believe it would be unethical.
To scare somebody about something that they should not be scared about.
Would you agree?
Using fear that's fake, like there's not really anything to worry about, but you make people afraid of it, that's pretty sketchy.
But if something is genuinely a problem, and you really should be afraid of it, that's completely ethical.
Because you have to tell people the truth.
This is a really big problem.
If you don't see it, you're going to get stuck in the back.
All right.
So here's something that I've said before, but I love this idea.
And if somebody, some Republican, could figure out how to execute this, it would be amazing.
And what it would be is a show, an ongoing show, in which they deprogram Democrats.
Now, to be fair, you're gonna say, but Scott, you could do the same thing with Republicans.
You could have a show where you're deprogramming them from the crazy Q-related stuff they believe, and that's true.
Absolutely true.
You could take any citizen, and they need to be deprogrammed.
Yeah, the number of citizens that don't need to be deprogrammed, it's a pretty small number.
But for purely political reasons, if you're a Republican and you wanted to win, you should start a series with some kind of a serious host and serious production values.
And about once a week, you produce a small video in which you show some Democrats who believe the news.
Do you feel me?
You feature a couple of Democrats, maybe just one or three or something, who believe the news.
And you put them in the room with whoever the host is, but here's the fun part.
You have a known Democrat fact-checker.
Somebody who is unquestionably totally a Democrat.
And they are the fact-checkers for their Democrat friend.
And so you say, look, it's perfectly reasonable to have a different opinion about what we should do.
And I'm not even going to be talking about the opinion of what we should do.
That will not even be our topic today.
We're simply going to figure out what's true and what isn't.
And then you can make up your own mind.
So you believe that this or that is true.
Here's your own Democrat fact checker who's going to show you the source right in front of you.
You can look at it right here.
And show you that what you've been told is not true.
And then just watch what happens.
Then you probably want to have somebody, it depends if it gets funny, Don Levin, that'd be funny.
Well, you need somebody who's genuinely an absolute Democrat.
But it'd be hard to get anybody willing to do that, right?
So, do you know the street interviews where there's a young man, I can't remember his name, I wish I did, where he asks people on the street simple questions about the United States?
And just simple questions about anything.
One of the questions is, how many hours in a 24-hour day?
It's questions like that.
And you watch the people like, hours?
How many hours in a 24-hour day?
And you watch them like thinking, it's like, And then they're thinking, it's a trick question.
Twelve.
Twelve.
And then whatever they say, no matter how wrong it is, the interviewer will go, right!
And that's the end of it.
And he does them, you know, one after another.
And every time you see somebody say the dumbest thing you've ever seen in your life, and you see the interviewer go, right!
It just makes you laugh every time.
So the Republicans should have a show like that, where, let me give you one example.
You bring somebody on, you say, do you think the 2022 election was rigged?
They would, of course, say no.
Or the 2020 election.
They would, of course, say no.
Then you say, do you know that that's a fact?
They would, of course, say yes.
Then you say, what would be your basis for that fact?
They'd probably say, well, the courts looked at it, and everybody looked at it, and they found nothing of substance.
And then, you have a Democrat explain to them, this would be good, Dershowitz would be perfect.
Oh my god, Alan Dershowitz.
I doubt he would do it, but he'd be perfect for it.
To just explain to them, well you know, the absence of looking for something is completely different from knowing it's not there.
And just watch what happens.
Is somebody going to argue that that's wrong?
Is anybody going to say, no, you're wrong, Alan Dershowitz.
By not looking for something, and therefore not finding it, I can know that it doesn't exist.
And you wouldn't even have to correct it.
It would just be so funny to watch.
The hard part would be you could never find anybody to host the show and be that fact checker.
But what would be awesome about that is if you got people to concentrate on the fact-checking, they would have uncritically by then have sort of accidentally accepted that fact-checking needs to happen.
So it's really a trick.
You would think the focus would be on the show itself and the specific facts getting checked.
That's what people would talk about.
But if you can get them to talk about whether the fact-check was correct, They've already accepted uncritically that Democrats have to be deprogrammed.
Do you get that?
The real win is just putting in people's mind that there's some deprogramming that has to happen because the news has been such a failure.
Well, it is true I am a Democrat, but I don't think I would have that credibility needed.
All right.
Here's something interesting.
So, Robert, RFK Jr., running for president, and how many people made news this weekend?
Because RFK Jr.
made news three or four times in one weekend.
You can feel the energy shift.
Here are all the things that, first of all, RFK Jr.
was on ABC News, and ABC News said, when they were done, they said we edited out some things he said about vaccinations.
And then RFK Jr.
comes back and he says, there's some law, 47 U.S.C.
315, makes it illegal, it's actually illegal for TV networks to censor presidential candidates.
But ABC not only did it, but they bragged about it.
They bragged about it.
They said, yes, we censored him because he said some stuff we don't want you to see.
They actually said it.
They said it right out loud.
It's against the law for exactly this reason.
This is the reason it's against the law.
Oh yeah, Disney owns ABC, thank you for that.
Yes, so Disney's fighting with the Republicans and DeSantis, and then a Disney-owned property, ABC, tells you, tells the viewers that they've censored part of a presidential candidate, because they didn't like that part of what he said.
Amazing.
So that's the first time, so that's one time that RFK Jr.
made news this weekend.
He also announced he opposes biological males competing in women's sports.
Now that's a pretty gutsy take for a Democrat, isn't it?
So he's very clearly saying I'm, let's say, a classic Democrat.
As opposed to the super progressive wokesters.
Now I don't know all of RFK Jr.' 's opinions on stuff.
So I want to be as clear as possible.
If I'm saying positive things about him, the context is his ability as a persuader.
Alright, you got that?
So I'm not agreeing with policies or disagreeing with them.
I'm just saying that like Trump, he's got something extra going on, super persuasive, and you can see it right away.
So the other thing that made news is Bill Maher said he was impressed that RFK Jr.
was already polling at 19%.
Do you realize that that's just about what DeSantis is polling against Trump?
How many of you are thinking that DeSantis is a totally legitimate, valid challenger to Trump, but he has almost the same bite on Trump as RFK Jr.
does on Biden?
But everybody's talking like RFK Jr.
doesn't have that much of a chance.
But DeSantis does.
But they're polling about the same.
21 versus 19 or something.
So there's definitely an energy shift.
I saw David Sachs saying some good things about RFK Jr.
RFK Jr.
took as an endorsement.
I'm not sure.
I didn't see the endorsement, but that's what he said.
So that's huge.
If you don't know who David Sachs is, you would be one of the handful of what I call the internet dads.
And I'll say the internet dad is somebody who's not driven by political party team play.
Somebody who is just going to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's too far.
Oh, actually, that would be a good way to say it.
The internet dads are the ones who are telling you when things went too far.
Okay, that's too far.
That is too far, right?
So that's what David Sachs being among the, I don't know, top five people who are good at that sort of thing.
So he's not going to take a side.
He's just going to look at what seems to make sense and go that way.
So the few people who can do that are like the most valuable assets at the moment in the country.
All right, so who else made news three times this weekend?
You can feel it, can't you?
You can feel it.
Now what I expect is there's going to be some really tough opposition research about RFK Jr.
So in all likelihood, you're going to hear some horrible things about him.
Don't assume they're true.
I mean they might be.
I don't know.
I have no idea one way or the other.
But don't assume they're true.
You're just going to hear some really bad stuff.
Just assume you won't.
you will.
All right.
Here's something that answered all of my questions about Epstein.
So there's new reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
I saw this on an Owen Gregorian tweet.
Thank you, Owen, for sending me good stuff in the mornings.
And so we know that Jeffrey Epstein's private calendar showed meetings with CIA Director William Burns, Goldman Sachs top lawyer, Noam Chomsky, some other people.
Can you tell me why CIA Director William Burns would have a private meeting, actually more than one, private meeting with Jeffrey Epstein?
Can you think of any reason that that would make sense?
Well, unfortunately we can.
We can think of a few reasons.
Now it wouldn't make sense for the CIA Director To be working a source.
I don't think the director of the CIA works with an agent on the field or anything like that.
But Epstein wasn't like that.
He was more like a high-end operator, so it probably does make sense.
In my opinion, that's as close as you can get to a confirmation that Epstein was working with the CIA.
Which would explain everything.
Would it not?
It would literally explain Everything.
Now, my guess is that he was working with more than the CIA.
Meaning that the CIA might have been concerned that he was working for somebody else.
And maybe he was at the same time.
And maybe he wasn't working with anybody except himself.
But working for himself meant having connections and blackmail and networking with all kinds of sketchy intel people.
Yeah.
I'm willing to say that I now know what happened, in a broad sense.
How many of you would agree that whatever Epstein was, he was also an Intel asset for somebody?
Do you think that that's fair?
I feel like we can just conclude that as the working assumption.
Because, you know, if the head of the CIA visits you personally, keep in mind the head of the CIA visited him after he had been convicted the first time.
This is after conviction.
People knew exactly what they were dealing with at that point.
So, there you go.
All right, here's a little quiz for you.
See how good you are at analyzing the news.
Mehdi Hassan of MSNBC, Was complaining about, who was he complaining about?
Complaining about somebody else complaining that black people were killing each other at a higher rate than white people were killing each other.
And that, oh, it was on Bill Maher.
Yeah, it was Bill Maher.
So Bill Maher said, why aren't we talking more about the high murder rate within the black community of black-on-black crime because it's so high?
Manny Hassan tried to fact check Bill Maher by pointing to a USA Today article and he essentially quoted them and said, quote, white people kill other white people at almost the same rate that black people kill other black people.
And yet you never hear anyone complaining about White-on-white crime.
These aren't points of sage wisdom from Maher, who was talking about black-on-black crime.
He said they are classic racist dog whistles.
You know, it's not my job to defend Bill Maher, but I'm going to have to do it. - Gonna have to do it.
Number one, can somebody give me a fact check?
Didn't Bill Maher famously date a black woman for a fairly extended period of time?
Is that true or not?
That's true, right?
I mean, I saw pictures.
And even though I do agree with the people who say, when you say, I have a black friend, that doesn't mean you're not a racist, right?
If you have a black friend, that's sort of the joke.
But if you've actually had a serious relationship Across ethnic lines?
I feel like that's all you have to say.
I feel like if you're in a romantic relationship with somebody, you don't have to explain anything ever again.
Now, I'm talking about myself.
I'm defending Bill Maher.
I think if you've had one long-term relationship With a black woman and you're a white guy, people should just leave you the fuck alone after that.
Now, again, it doesn't prove anything, right?
I get it.
I mean, it could be a one-off, but it doesn't prove anything.
But it's as close as you can get to leave me alone, right?
It's as close as you could get to, well, what have you done?
I've got a show where I'm always highlighting, you know, black leaders.
I have lots of black guests.
I've actually, my personal life, this would be Bill Maher, you know, substantially with black friends and black women.
Does he really need to explain anything?
I don't think he needs to explain his feelings about things.
And even the fact that Bill Maher was bringing it up.
Do you think he was bringing it up to make a racist point about black people?
Or do you think he was bringing it up because it's like a horrible thing happening within the black community and he wants to make sure it's not ignored?
Like everything that Mehdi Hassan said made no sense.
But the weirdest part is this thing where he said that white people kill other white people at almost the same rate That black people kill other black people.
Fact check me, true or false?
Is that true or false?
That black people kill black people at the same rate as white people kill white people.
It's false and true.
It's 100% false and it's 100% true.
It is.
It's 100% true and 100% false.
How can it be at the same time?
Here's how.
It depends what you mean by rate.
The article that he pointed out showed that the raw number of blacks killing blacks and whites killing whites per year is about the same.
2,500-ish.
So about 2,500 blacks killed by blacks, about 2,500 whites killed by whites every year.
Same rate, right?
So, the number of killed per year, which is what rate is, right?
When you talk about rate, you're not talking about absolute number, you're talking about per year, or per capita.
If you talk about it per year, the rate is similar.
That's what Mehdi said.
The rate per year is similar, and the use of the word rate is actually correct.
So what Mehdi Hassan is saying is 100% correct, that the rate is about the same.
But he's using rate as per year, which is very misleading.
If you use rate to mean per person or per capita, then it's something like four to five times higher rate of black-on-black crime.
Now, which one is the racist dog whistle?
It seems to me that Bill Maher pointing out an underserved, gigantic problem in the black community is the opposite of a dog whistle.
That seems to me exactly trying to help.
I don't see any even whiff of self-interest or self-dealing or money-making.
There's no follow the money.
There's no nothing.
It's just an observation That there's an underserved cause.
So, I'm going to say that Mehdi Hassan's tweet is technically true, but I'm not going to say that he intends it to be misleading.
Because that would be mind-reading, and I'm trying not to do that.
I can just say it is misleading.
We don't know why.
We can observe his history and maybe come up with some, oops, sorry.
We might be able to look at the pattern and come up with some guesses, but right now, can't read his mind.
All right.
Let's talk about the Ukraine War a little bit.
So here's where we're at.
Russia is using Iranian drones that just are targeted to blow up on certain places.
And I guess they're attacking Kiev and energy structures and stuff like that.
Now, here's what else we know.
Russia has more soldiers, troops, has more troops in the war than when they started.
So although many Russians have been killed, maybe 50,000-ish, they have more fighting today than when they started.
So that looks good for Russia.
They also have lost almost nothing in terms of assets.
After all this fighting, they still have plenty of ships and aircraft.
So you have plenty of ships, plenty of aircraft, plenty of people.
But, The Wagner Group is still complaining bitterly that they don't have ammo and shells, so they don't have enough weapons.
So, you know, I've been saying for a while that Ukraine, the war there, could depend on, you know, any one of a number of variables, and there might be just one of them, just any one of them, could be the thing that determines who wins.
And it looks like at this point, What might be, and this could be misinformation by the way, it could be that the Wagner Group is maybe pretending that they don't have shells when they do.
I'm not sure if there's a military advantage to lying about this or not.
But the Wagner Group is saying they're running out of ammo.
So it's not going to really help them to have ships and aircraft And soldiers, poorly trained in many cases, if they don't have bullets and shells.
Now, is there anybody going to yell at me?
I'm waiting for the yelling.
There you go.
M. Lansing, thank you.
I was waiting for the NPC comment.
The NPC comment is, you said Ukraine would win the war.
The war is not over.
The war's not over.
I'm just telling you where it's at at the moment.
And I don't know what when would look like.
I've never said that Ukraine would give back all their territory.
Have I?
Have I?
Do a fact check on me.
Have I ever said that Ukraine would give back all of its captured territory?
I don't think I have.
I just said that they would not be vanquished as easily as people thought.
And I still think they won't be vanquished entirely as a country, at least not right away.
But I guess the only thing I'm adding to this is that Ukraine says it's planning for this big counter-offensive, but maybe ammo will be the main thing.
And it could be that the Ukrainians don't have enough ammo either.
What if both sides ran out of bullets?
Well, that's actually possible, isn't it?
You can actually have both sides run out of ammo.
I wonder if that's how it'll end.
Maybe so.
All right.
Let's talk about the biggest story in AI is that Apple is bad at it.
And there's some reporting now about why Apple is lagging.
For full disclosure, Apple was a big part of my portfolio.
It started as a small part of my portfolio.
I didn't realize how fast it went up like 600% since I owned it.
But I got rid of it because I don't trust Apple In the age of AI.
Because I couldn't understand why Siri remained so bad, I mean really bad, when all these other countries are doing amazing things with AI and stuff like that.
And it didn't even sound like Apple had any announcements or any cool demos or anything like that.
Right.
So here's some inside reporting.
Apparently the Siri platform, the way it's architected, and I don't know the details, is very limited in its ability to just move to AI.
So in my simplistic mind, I was saying to myself, hey, If you've already got this thing in your hand called a phone, and it already knows how to talk to you, why can't you just update its software so it's smarter?
Well, the trouble is that Apple likes a little bit more control on their product.
And the control they want is to keep you out of trouble.
So I don't mind the instinct so much.
But privacy is a big thing.
And one of the problems with AI is that AI lives in the network.
Which means you'd be talking with the network when you're doing any searching, and Apple's not comfortable with that.
If you're just talking with your device, you've got a little more, at least an opportunity for more privacy.
So, however, we know from Brian Romelli's work that people are already putting the entire, at least GPT 3.5, they've put on one device.
So you can run AI on your local device.
So I don't know if that might be a thing that happens with Apple.
But people are leaving and they're unhappy and they think the company is way behind.
And Apple's also worried because AI is known to be a liar.
So Apple wants to carefully script anything that Siri is going to say.
Because it only wants you to get answers that humans have really scrubbed to make sure they're not doing anything too controversial or sexual or anything like that.
And I have to say that Impulse has worked really well for them.
So Apple's preference for privacy, I appreciate.
It actually made them look like a stronger company in my opinion.
Although I don't know privacy can ever be protected.
The full disclosure is I sold all of my Apple stock last week, I think.
So I sold all of my Apple stock.
And the reason is that I think AI is too much of a disruptor for the smartphone industry.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, are my prepared comments.
Is there anything else?
Yeah, I don't give financial advice, so I'm not telling you to buy or not buy Apple.
I should point out that my track record of guessing individual companies is really bad.
Just like everybody else's.
Really bad.
So don't believe anything I say about individual companies.
When am I going to have Scott Ritter on the show?
Well, I don't have a guest on the show.
Scott Ritter would tell me that Russia is totally winning, they will win, and Ukraine is toast.
Do I need to have him on the show?
I just told you what he's going to say.
And then you're going to say, but he's a Russian agent.
He literally works for Russia Today, the publication that's a Russian government-owned, government-directed publication.
This is the best show you experienced all week?
Thank you, George.
I think you're right.
How will Dilbert deal with AI?
Well, he'll probably be dating it.
So if you're not subscribed to scottadams.locals.com, you don't get to see the new Dilberts that are a little bit edgier than what you're used to, if you know what I mean.
To back up my point that I'm terrible at picking stocks, when the pandemic happened and Wynn Resorts, the Wynn Hotels, went down to practically nothing, I bought it and held it because I thought, well, there's no way this isn't going to come back and be screaming.
Because it's like one of the best, or maybe the best, of the hotel chains.
And I thought, as soon as we can travel again, this thing's going to go right back.
And then China, Had its COVID problem, and everybody said, uh-oh, Wynn Resort has resorts in China.
They're going to get taken down by that.
But China worked through it, apparently.
It looks like things are going well.
So the Wynn Resort, the moment I sold it, after holding it for two years or so, the moment I sold it, it went to the moon.
And by the way, that's my pattern.
The minute I sell something, it goes to the moon.
So I saw a comment there that looked interesting.
Trouble is I can't... Yeah.
So when a comment goes by in the locals, I can drag it back to look at it, but I can't keep it there.
It'll keep moving even if my finger's on it.
So I can't actually read the end of your sentence.
You know, anything longer Anything longer than maybe six or seven words, I can't read.
So if you're doing long comments on locals, like this one, so the one that says, Scott, comma, black complaints about, there's no way I can read that sentence.
And you should not have started with Scott, comma, because that used up a lot of the real estate that I could look at.
So you want to put that into five words or it's not going to work as a comment.
Do you think Hunter will be indicted?
I would... Oh yeah, we need to go private.
Go in private.
I would bet that Hunter will never be prosecuted.
What do you bet?
I don't know if he'll be indicted.
but I don't think he'll be prosecuted.
And so that's my only prediction about Hunter.
There'll be lots more revelations and lots more of this or that.
But I think that there's too much government power protecting him at the moment.
So I think he'll be fine.
Because I don't see a scenario in which Hunter could be prosecuted while Joe Biden's running for president.
That's not going to happen.
Well, it might.
I'm going to bet against it, but nothing's 100%.
All right.
I saw a number of comments about Tate.
There's nothing new about Tate, is there?
He's just still under house arrest?
Unless he becomes a true liability, maybe.
Correspondent dinner, I didn't pay attention to it.
Yeah, there's some reporting that Andrew Tait is being poisoned because he's getting sick from whatever he's eating.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
See, the trouble is, for the same reason I say you shouldn't believe anything the Romanian government says about the Taits, I don't think you can believe anything the Taits say about the Romanian government.
Those would be two entities that are not exactly Trustworthy.
So it could be.
It could be that he's getting poisoned.
It's possible.
I just don't think you can know for sure anything that's happening.
All right.
Most food is poison.
Yeah.
All right.
Black complaints about police are... So now, six times or five times I've seen the comment that starts with, black complaints about police are... I have no idea what comes after that.
And I have no way to find out what comes after that.
I'm assuming you're going to say they went down.
Are really about everyday interactions, not shootings.
All right, well, I don't know what to do with that comment.
It's about interactions, not shootings.
Okay.
Is that a national issue or something?
I don't know how to connect that to anything.
All right.
Mental work will be valueless with AI.
I'm finding the opposite.
So here's what I'm discovering so far.
There's one thing that AI doesn't seem to be able to do at all, and I don't know if it ever will.
Now, the smart people say, Scott, you don't understand.
It's just beginning.
It's just beginning, Scott.
It will do these things you say it can't do.
They might be right.
But that's the NPC thing to say about AI.
So you can identify the NPCs by they're the ones who say, I know it can't do it yet, but it totally will.
We all understand that point.
It need not be said.
We all get that.
All right.
But here's my observation.
AI is worthless without a human telling it what to do.
And then telling it whether it did it correctly.
Unless that ever changes, and I don't think it will, I think that can't change by its nature.
There are some things, I'll give you this, there are some things that AI will know we want before we know we want it.
Would you agree?
There'll be lots of things that AI figures out you want.
It might figure out that you're thirsty before you know you're thirsty.
Because it might look at your watch or something, your health monitor, and say, ooh, you're starting to get dehydrated.
So I could see lots of applications where the AI would make a decision for a person before they even knew they needed a decision.
It would just proactively tell them, you need this, I'm going to take care of it.
However, the overwhelmingly big use of AI will be a human who wants something, And then has to make the AI do it, and then has to judge whether it did it correctly, and then has to make any final edits.
Maybe has to find three to five different AI apps to all work in tandem to do the thing.
Now again, at some point, the AI might on its own Might on its own be able to organize other apps and API to them and use whatever other AI services it needs and just buy them on the fly.
You just give it a credit card and say, look, if you need to attach to some other AI to get a function going, go ahead and do it up to $25 per year.
So I'll give you a budget.
But if you need an app that's $9.95 a month, just here's my credit card.
Just sign up for it.
And we're good to go.
So, yeah.
I think that most thinking jobs, the kind you think will be replaced by AI, will be replaced with AI wranglers.
So it'll be humans who need to control the AI.
It'll be like the dog herding the sheep.
The AI will be the sheep, but the sheep will never learn where the dog wants them to go.
And when, right?
The reason you need a dog to go get the sheep is that you can't just open the gate at 5 o'clock and say, it's 5 o'clock, sheep.
Come on, sheep.
It's 5 o'clock.
We do this every single day.
You guys know that when I'm the owner of the sheep opens this gate, you're all supposed to line up and go through it.
But they don't.
You need a dog for that.
So I think we're going to be the dog.
We'll always be wrangling the AI to give us what we ask for and then make sure it's what we ask for.
Let's learn to be the dogs, yes.
You know, I'm very close to the point, but I'm not sure yet it makes sense, that I feel like, well, let me tell you what I would do.
If I were in my 20s, and I happen to be in my 20s at the dawn of the AI revolution, I would be spending every weekend and every night after work playing with AI so that nobody at my company knew more about it than I did.
I'm not talking about an AI company, but if you're just like a regular company, I would stop everything.
I would stop everything.
I would stop my social life if I had one when I was in my 20s.
I would stop everything.
And every weekend I'd come home and I'd open up my laptop and I would learn as much as I could about how to use AI.
Then at my company, When the company is panicking about how to use it, you're going to say, well, I've been researching this every night for weeks, and I should be on that committee that decides how we use AI.
And then your boss says, OK, does anybody else know anything about AI?
And a few people say, well, I read some articles.
I saw some stuff on Twitter.
But I would say, I've spent every weekend for three months on a deep dive, and I wrote this white paper that I'm gonna give around the company to tell them the highlights to keep you informed.
In other words, I would make sure that my job was the smartest guy who knows about AI in my company.
And believe me, that's the best advice you'll ever get.
Now that assumes that you're a certain kind of personality, right?
Somebody who can really dig in and has a little bit of technical comprehension.
But it would be easy to become the expert in AI at your company.
Don't leave that opportunity.
That's free money, right?
Given that you know AI will be important to your company, if you're not the one who gets there first and best and strongest, You're going to regret it your whole life.
Your whole life, you're going to regret it.
This is once ever.
I've told you this story before.
When personal computers were brand new, I worked at Crocker Bank, and my little group of five people, we were the first ones at the bank to have a personal computer at work.
The first ones!
I spent every weekend And after work, on my own, learning how these computer things work.
Learning to program, learning what they can and cannot do.
And so, my career options were greatly magnified by that.
Greatly magnified.
Because the leaders in the company knew I was one of five people who understood this new technology that was going to change everything and did.
So that was once ever.
There was only one time that personal computers were new to corporate America.
And I saw that and I said, shit.
There's free money all over the floor here and nobody's sweeping it up.
So I just got the biggest broom I could and swept that shit up and had all kinds of job opportunities after that.
The AI introduction will never happen again.
It only gets introduced once.
And the money, the free money, is just laying all over the ground everywhere.
Because you know what your boss is not doing?
Your boss is not taking all weekend to learn about AI.
Nobody is.
Well, not many people.
So you've just got to get the biggest brood you can and start sweeping that free money up.
That's what I'd do.
Now, if you're in your 50s, maybe it's a different game.
But if you're in your 20s, I wouldn't be doing anything else at night.
Yeah, you bought your own IBM PC at the beginning.
The same thing I did, yeah.
I scraped together whatever money I could to get the first versions of the home computer.
Had a little screen like this, about, what is that, like six inches by six inches?
And it was monochrome, and it was orange.
It wasn't even green and white, it was orange and white.
Do you remember those?
Yeah, I spent hours and hours on them.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is all I wanted to say publicly.
I'm going to talk to the locals, people, privately.
