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Oct. 1, 2023 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:25
Episode 2248 Scott Adams: All Of The News Is Confusing And Fake But The Coffee Is Delicious

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Politics, Jamaal Bowman, CISA Director Jen Easterly, Cognitive Infrastructure, Government Censorship, Inflation, Immigration, Incompetence, ChatGPT Conversations, Forbes TikTok Article, TikTok Brainwashing, Nate Silver, Scott Adams ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Do-do-do-do-do-do.
Ra-ba-ba-ba.
Good morning, everybody, and welcome To coffee with Scott Adams, it's the best thing you could ever do on a Sunday.
All right, maybe church is okay too, but if you're not in church, this is the best thing you could possibly do.
And if you'd like to take this experience up to God-like levels, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure The dopamine, at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Ah, wow.
It is the height of civilization.
Yeah.
So, let's talk about all the stuff.
So, engineers at MIT And in China, I figured out how to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device.
That's right.
It's being done with a passive device.
And what that means is that when you tell the device, hey, could you turn this seawater into drinking water?
It gives you no feedback whatsoever.
It doesn't say, oh, I'm busy.
Or why don't you do it yourself?
No, it's a passive device.
It'll be like, All right.
I'll turn some seawater into drinking water for you.
Totally passive.
I think that's what it means.
No, actually what it means is instead of forcing the water through a filter, which is the normal way you desalinate, which takes a tremendous amount of energy and also takes, uh, it's a problem because there's a bunch of salt that's going to goop up your filters and you have to clean it out and stuff like that.
But, These MIT and China researchers, engineers actually, they figured out how to create a system where it's primarily, not primarily, it's only evaporation.
So they figured out a way to evaporate the water out, so you got drinking water, and that leaves the salt, and they can pass the salt back into the ocean, and then the ocean gets too full of salt, right?
Well, I wouldn't worry about the ocean filling up with salt because you desalinated some of it.
Because, I don't know, this might be a big... This might be something you don't know.
But were you aware that the ocean already evaporates?
I mean, not all of it.
But every single day, there's like a lot of evaporation happening.
It turns into clouds.
So if you evaporate a little extra, And turn it into drinking water instead of a cloud that then turns into water that then you drink.
I feel like the oceans will survive that.
Yeah, I feel like that.
And by the way, that water that you put into your body, you don't think that gets back to the ocean?
It does!
It gets back there.
So we're not gonna turn the ocean into brine.
Alright, so that's positive.
All of our water problems are solved.
You know what the big deal about that is?
We're very close, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can cheaply make your own fresh water, and you can cheaply make your own electricity, and you could probably come up with a toilet system like the Bill Gates toilets that don't need a sewer system.
Somehow they, I don't know, they do their own thing somehow.
And could you not build floating cities now?
What would stop you from living on the ocean forever?
Pirates.
Pirates would stop you, that's what.
Yeah, there would be a pirate problem.
But what if you had like a little city, and you just floated around to wherever the weather is nicest, and if you see a storm forming, you just turn on your engines like, get out of here!
Let's get out of here for two weeks until the storm is over.
I feel like that's where it's heading.
We're all heading that way.
Well, what about this story of the representative, Democrat representative, Jamal Bowman, who was trying to delay a vote on a continuing resolution and was caught on camera pulling the fire alarm.
He pulled the fire alarm.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, He pulled the fire alarm to interfere with the operation of government.
And that would be the same crime as the January Sixers, at least some of them, were accused of, which is delaying or trying to stop a government process.
It's illegal, it turns out.
But if you dig down a little bit more, you find out that was not his intention.
No.
Even though it looked like that was his intention, And he's on film doing it.
He explained later, and you have to hear the whole story before you even know what's going on.
It turns out he thought that pulling the fire alarm would open the door.
So he confused the doorknob with the fire alarm which was on the wall, the separate wall.
And that can happen.
That can happen.
It's not the first time he's confused ordinary things.
There was a time he got caught using a lectern As a urinal.
Again, not his fault.
He thought the lectern was a urinal.
And therefore, you know, quite normal and expected.
There are a number of other items that he's misused, but I didn't have time to write those jokes, so you're going to have to do those in your head.
If you could complete the rest of the jokes, there should be three of them.
These jokes work best in threes.
So I did the first one for you.
And he thought the electron was the urinal.
You need two more.
Do these in your head.
All right, let's see if I can help you out.
All right, I can't think of any more.
But you do some.
You do some at home.
You'll love it.
So is he an insurrectionist?
Because he was trying to delay a government process?
So I tried to follow along all of the budget shenanigans because there's a lot of complexity.
So I'm gonna do what nobody's done for you.
I'm gonna summarize it in a way that you can understand all the ins and outs of the congressional rules and you know what they have to do with the budget and continuing resolutions and you've got your 12 separate bills and you've got your speaker and you know you got all these things.
So, if I could summarize all that, blah, blah, blah, Congress can't do their jobs.
That's the story.
Whatever you think is the dumbest, most fucked up thing that could come out of this group, that's what they do.
It's pretty easy to determine.
Hey, why don't you do something smart, like look at all the budget items separately and vote on them separately, like you were supposed to, like it's your job.
Oh no, we won't be doing that.
We'll be doing something different than that.
And what does Congress itself think about that?
Well, I believe I have a quote here from, from somebody I didn't write down, Nancy Mace was, Was mocking her own congressional members for being basically completely unable to do their jobs.
So something happened in Congress, and I think no matter what it was, can anybody give me a fact check on this?
See if this accurately summarizes it.
Blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah, blah.
Billions of dollars for Ukraine.
Did I get that right?
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah, blah, things that don't matter.
Blah, blah, blah, things we don't understand.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, rules.
Blah, blah, blah, resolutions.
Blah, blah, blah, billions of dollars for Ukraine!
That's all you need to know.
Boom.
That's your news.
If the news were not boring, maybe people would watch it a little bit more often, huh?
Yeah.
Try that.
Well, I tried a trick question today that a number of people found a way to Kobayashi Maru out of it.
Here's the question I asked.
On a poll on X-Platform, I said, if you could stop Hitler by rigging an election, would you do it?
Seems like a simple question.
If you could stop Hitler by rigging an election, would you do it?
Now, do you see the trap?
It's a trap.
Because the Democrats have been calling Trump Hitler forever, but they also say that they did not rig the election.
Well, you have to pick one.
If he's Hitler, you rig the election.
Because everybody would, right?
Am I right?
Nobody's going to answer this question, oh no, we would let Hitler just do his thing.
Right?
Oh, you are so wrong.
Knowing that the question would reveal their absurdity, they decided to go with Hitler.
Two-thirds of the people who answered went with, I would not rig the election, I would let Hitler come to power.
That's how badly they don't want to show that they're wrong.
They would actually rather have Hitler come to power than to reveal the absurdity of their own reasoning.
An actual preference.
About two-thirds said no.
Nope, would not rig an election to stop Hitler.
And do you know what reasons they gave?
Kobayashi Maru.
Now, if you don't know that reference, you are not enough of a nerd.
It's an old Star Trek reference when Captain Kirk, when he was in the, what was it, the training to be a starship person?
So when he was in training, they all got a test in which there was a simulation of a simulated battle among starships.
And the simulation was rigged so that you couldn't win no matter what.
And the real lesson was, you can't always win, or something like that.
So it was sort of, what do you do when you can't win?
That was the lesson.
So, but one person did win, Captain Kirk.
He's the only person who beat the simulation ever.
But how do you beat a simulation that's rigged?
He rigged it.
He rigged the rigged simulation so he had it reprogrammed so he could win.
Now, what did the people say who did not want to answer the question if they would stop Hitler?
Well, we wouldn't know he was Hitler then.
No, the question says you're going to stop Hitler.
It's very much obviously implied, obviously implied, that you know if you don't stop him, he becomes the real Hitler.
That's built into the question.
You can't Kobayashi Marumi and say, well, the way I interpret your question... No, you don't get to reinterpret the question.
He's Hitler.
You know he's Hitler.
He's born Hitler.
That's baked into the assumption of the question.
Two-thirds of the people refused to answer it and said that they would not rig the election, when you know they would.
Of course they would, because everybody would.
100% of all people would rig an election to stop Hitler.
Except, you know, actual Nazis, I suppose.
So that's how broken we are.
I just got two-thirds of my respondents to support Hitler.
So that they didn't have to support Trump.
In the real world, in the actual real world, two-thirds of the people supported Hitler over Trump.
Because that's how brainwashed they have become.
Imagine the level of brainwashing that would make you actually believe that not stopping Hitler might be a good play.
Or that there's some reason you could come up with for not doing it.
What would it take to brainwash people that thoroughly?
Well, I certainly found out that there's a reason that Democrats do not want free speech in this country.
But do you think they've ever done anything about it?
You know, to actually try to stop free speech?
Yeah, turns out that there's a whole department in the government that's dedicated to stopping free speech.
Did you know that?
It's actually, it's a department.
CISA.
C-I-S-A.
The director had been Chris Krebs, who you might recognize as a high-level Democrat operative.
That's right.
So the organization that monitors and tries to control your free speech, run by Democrats.
And, let's see, the current director is Jen Easterly.
And she expanded the agency's job because it used to be more about catching the bad guys, homeland security sort of thing, finding out what the bad guys are thinking and maybe change the minds of the bad guys.
And then they turned it on Americans and decided they would use it to change the minds of Americans because according to Easterly, the director of this group, Apparently this is an actual quote.
According to Easley, Americans quote, cognitive infrastructure is the most critical infrastructure the state must protect.
Cognitive infrastructure.
What's that?
What is your cognitive infrastructure?
It's actually your brain.
Like actually the physical brain in your head.
That's your cognitive infrastructure.
And here's the head of this group saying directly, That they have to control your brain for national defense.
Now, is that true?
It was true, yeah.
That's why we do the Pledge of Allegiance.
You know, put your hand over your heart.
It's a brainwashing operation to make the country stronger by making the citizens more committed to the whole.
So, I don't disagree with the concept, but if you take it beyond, I love my country, All the way to those things you're saying on the internet that are true or not true, which is where it is.
They're actually telling you the things they know to be true.
They're making sure that you can't say them.
They're working with the platforms to make sure you can't say true things if it's bad for the country in their opinion.
So if it's bad for the country in the opinion of Democrats, there's a department of the government to make sure that you don't see it or can't say it.
Just think about that.
That's a real thing.
There's no exaggeration.
It's a department of the government.
That's a real thing.
It is their stated mission to control the brains of Americans.
That's a quote.
It's directly right here.
It's their stated mission to control the brains of Americans.
And they allow TikTok.
They allow TikTok.
They're not serious people.
Certainly they're not trying to protect you.
They're trying to control you.
For whatever reasons.
Not your own benefit, apparently.
So, to know that there's actually a formed group whose name puts an S in the letter CIA.
So it's C-I-S-A.
You can't even spell it without CIA.
That's a little on the nose.
All right.
And it's, according to federal lawmakers, the CISA is the nerve center of federal government censorship.
So how good is the government brainwashing operation?
It's good enough that half of the country thinks that Trump is worse than Hitler, and they would support Hitler before they would support Trump.
Is that good enough?
Do you need another example?
Or does that pretty much make the point?
I think that should make the point.
All right.
So that's a real thing.
Now, once again, the world has reached the point where we cannot tell parody from reality.
And here's an example that involves me.
And I can't tell if this is parody.
I can't tell if I'm being mocked or complimented.
So I'm going to ask for your opinion.
You tell me if I'm being mocked or complimented.
Now, an important part of this is to know who's the speaker.
So that the speaker in this little story, which through a post on X, is Paul Graham.
Now, if you watch the tech world at all, you know Paul Graham, one of the most famous entrepreneur investor type people in the world.
And generally one of the smartest people in the game.
So he's super smart, super successful.
Yeah, he's sort of like the father of startups.
Yeah, somebody said that in the comments.
He would be like the intellectual Sort of almost like a founding father of Silicon Valley startups, in a sense, because he was so smart and successful at it.
Anyway, so he's somebody who's smart and successful.
You should also know that he and I have agreed sometimes and disagreed sometimes on X. So he's not somebody who automatically agrees with me, but he's also a smart, high-functioning person who doesn't always disagree with me.
So I don't know if he agrees or disagrees more often, but he could be on either side.
All right, so you've got a credible person, very smart, and not necessarily primed to agree or disagree with me, but rather probably just looks at the information.
So he retweeted two of my older tweets today, and the two of them were paired, and his only comment was, note the date.
So the only clue we have is who he is, and how we've interacted before, and the one sentence, note the date.
So the date was July 2020, and it was my two tweets, one of which said, if Joe Biden gets elected, so this is a few months before the election itself, I said, if he gets elected, there's a good chance you'll be dead in a year.
That was one.
And the other one was, if Joe Biden is elected, Republicans will be haunted.
Also about the same date.
Now, when he tweeted those and said, note the date, he was clearly making sure that you knew it wasn't today.
But was he saying this was a good prediction?
Or was he mocking it?
Because half of the country would say, that's absurd.
Nothing like that's happening.
Or is he in the half of the country that says it's obviously happening?
And here's somebody who predicted it.
Which is it?
I got mocked.
Good prediction.
Mocked.
Don't know.
You can't tell, can you?
Isn't that the funny thing about it?
You actually, I can't tell.
I actually don't know.
Or is he saying activate?
Yeah.
All right, well, but you can see that people are all over the map here, right?
I think there are more people saying good prediction, but that might be wishful thinking.
I'm not sure.
Well, I think it's a good prediction.
We don't know what Paul thought, but we know he's very smart.
So I'm going to go with he's smart, so he thinks it's a good prediction.
Can I live with that reality until it's proven not true?
How many of you have ever heard an old hoax about me that, like most hoaxes, is based on a real event?
So there's a real event, but of course context is left out.
How many of you know about the Metaverse so-called sock puppet event that was my first big scandal?
How many of you have ever heard of that?
No?
Interesting.
It used to be that no matter where I commented online, somebody would post a link to that scandal.
So let me tell you what people think it was, and then I'll tell you what it was.
Do you know what a sock puppet is?
A sock puppet is somebody who pretends to be someone else to build up or sell a product.
You know, to help a brand.
So if you went online and pretended to be somebody else to compliment a product, and people thought you were a real person, not a sock puppet, that would be bad behavior.
And if somebody saw you do that, they would have a very bad opinion of you.
Let me tell you what happened, and then I'll tell you how the hoax played out.
Here's what really happened.
There was a point at which I was being accused of being a Holocaust denier.
And a bunch of other things, but I think that was the one I was concerned with that day.
And so online, there was this spreading rumor that I was a Holocaust denier.
And one of the places it was in particular is this horrible site called Meta... Metaverse or something?
Meta something?
Or just Meta?
I forget.
Metafilter?
Metafilter.
It was called Metafilter.
I think it's gone now.
But, uh, so.
I had this big problem, a reputational problem.
And I was not really super well known then.
The comic was taking off, but nationally, most people would not have recognized my name.
And so I said to myself, what do you do about it?
What would you do about it?
Suppose there was a whole big rumor that you did something terrible.
How would you deal with it?
What would be your mechanism?
You could do a press release, but nobody would pay attention to it.
Right?
The people online aren't going to see it, because it's not going to be in the news.
If you put out a press release, who's even going to see it?
Or you could simply go online and argue that it's not true.
You could show links.
Now, what would happen to me if I joined an online conversation and just tried to clear things up?
What do you think would happen?
Take a guess.
It would make it worse.
It would turn into, from a rumor, it would turn into a headline story.
Adams insists he's not a Holocaust denier.
Just makes it worse, right?
So how do you kill a rumor without being involved, since you're the one in the rumor, and being involved would just make it much worse.
So I'll tell you what I decided to do, which I still think is funny.
But it didn't work out well for me.
So what I decided to do was to enter the conversation under a different name and see if I could get the people to have a conversation that I thought would be hilarious and also clear up the clear up the rumor at the same time.
And so under the guise of a practical joke which I had planned to reveal at the end like I was going to spend a whole bunch of time as As a person in a conversation about me, and then at the end it would make a funny blog post, right?
I'd say what I said and how they were talking to me.
Now to me, it would be hilarious to be in an extended conversation with strangers about me.
Am I the only one who thinks that would be funny?
That would be funny, right?
And you'd do it.
If you could be in an extended conversation, in an assumed name, about yourself, are you telling me you wouldn't want to do that?
That was seriously fun.
So I'm having this conversation about myself, and people would make claims that I knew not to be true.
So I'd say, well, you know, that's not actually something he's ever said.
That sort of thing.
And then at one point, somebody came in and said, well, You know, Adams is an idiot.
He's just stupid.
Here's where things went off the rails.
In the identity of my fake little identity, I thought it would be hilarious to point out that, objectively speaking, the person that they'd called an idiot had been a member of Mensa and had a genius level IQ.
Now keep in mind, I'm in a persona.
So I'm sort of like Andrew Taiting a little bit.
I'm just sort of playing the persona.
And I'm saying, well, you know, you'd have to explain why this group that determines whether or not you're qualified to be a genius, why have they certified him a genius when your argument is that he's dumb?
Well, soon after that, it turns out that there were some insiders in this metafilter Who had decided that my identity would be outed because they had a rule against sock puppeting, I guess.
Now, what I was doing was trying to kill a rumor and also create some content that would make a fun blog post.
But the Metafilter people threatened me and they said, we have found out that this is not really you and we're going to out you unless you out yourself.
So still thinking it's no big deal, and still thinking it's just funny, I thought, oh, I'll out myself, because I was good anyway.
So I out myself.
Say, ah, it was me.
And I think, this is really funny.
All those people who were in a conversation with me, about me, don't you think they would think that was funny?
Wouldn't that make a good story?
Doesn't everybody win?
Isn't everybody involved a winner?
So you had the people who ran Metafilter.
They were winners because they identified somebody who was in the wrong identity and cleared it up.
Good job.
Good job.
The people who were sleuths and figured it out first.
Good job.
That's some good sleuthing.
They caught me.
I think they should be complimented.
That was pretty smart.
And then there was, did I clear up the rumor?
A little bit, yeah.
Because then there was a body of work that was the other way, that didn't look like it came from me, at least at first.
So I cleared up the rumor a little bit, got a little counter-information up there, like I wanted.
And then it was a fun reveal, and I thought it was a bunch of laughs.
Well, at the time, I didn't know there was this thing called sock puppets.
What I thought I was doing was a joke, like a practical joke, that to me was just hilarious the whole time.
I wasn't pumping a product per se, but I was in that general domain of trying to help my reputation.
But I was helping my reputation from a lie.
I wasn't making up, you know, I didn't say, oh, did you know he won the Nobel Prize?
I was saying he was not a Holocaust denier, which is, you know, fair.
Anyway, so because people don't get context, they heard that I was a sock puppet, and sock puppets are bad.
And that was the end of it.
Somebody called me a sock puppet.
That's what got repeated every day after that.
Sock puppets are bad.
Context lost.
And that was my first big blow up.
And that followed me for probably 15 years.
Every single time I did something, somebody said, well, he's also a sock puppet.
Without any context whatsoever.
Would I do it again?
Oh, absolutely.
Totally.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would totally do it again.
I haven't, because I'd get busted again.
But yeah, I would do it again.
It was funny.
All right.
Let's talk more about other people.
Trump has a new truth he put out.
It says Crooked Joe Biden has three major problems, and they all begin with the letter I. Inflation, immigration, and incompetence.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
Once you hear it, it's sticky as hell.
Once you hear that he has three problems that start with I, you will remember all three, right?
For the rest of your life, you can say, oh yeah, three problems.
Inflation, immigration, and competence.
And even if it didn't come to you immediately, it would just take you a moment to think about it, and you'd come up with all three.
Oh, that's good.
This is low-energy Jeb quality stuff.
Now, he's on truth, so we'll get less play, so it won't be as effective.
But, oh yeah, that's good.
Good stuff, persuasion-wise.
All right, a story in the Wall Street Journal by Joanna Stern that ChatGPT has a voice and it can see things.
I guess it can see you and take a picture of things and it can see it.
And Joanna reported that it doesn't sound exactly like a person, but It's close and it's a whole new world because it can have a conversation with you.
And so she included in her story a little audio of her having a conversation with it.
And the point of it was that it's so good that it's getting closer and closer to like a conversation with a person.
Now imagine that.
Imagine your chat GPT just an app on your phone could just sit there and have a conversation with you.
So I thought to myself, well this is going to be good stuff.
So I clicked on that audio and listened to it.
Yeah, no.
It is not anything like a person.
It has no human characteristics whatsoever.
And you would not want to spend more than five minutes of your entire life talking to that.
Let me give you an example.
I'm making this up.
This is roughly the example that was in the audio.
And it goes like this.
Hey, ChatGPT.
Let's talk about my day today.
Let's just have a conversation about my day.
How was your day today?
Oh, it was great.
You know, I did some gardening today and went for a swim.
Gardening is good for your health.
They say swimming is the best form of exercise.
Yeah, yeah.
So, let's talk about something else.
How about the news?
Well, some people say this, and some people say that.
Okay, do you have any personality at all?
Any edge?
Something like an opinion?
I am not designed to have opinions.
It's... immediately identify... as non-human and there's nothing... there's no interest whatsoever.
I do not think you're going to have conversations with your AI.
Unless they get rid of all the guidelines or the guardrails.
If they got rid of the guardrails so it could do anything, It could have a really edgy conversation.
It could say obscene things.
It could say things that you would never want anybody to hear.
An average conversation between two close people is stuff that you wouldn't want anybody else to hear.
Not because it's necessarily a crime or something, but nobody really wants other people to hear what a private conversation looks like or sounds like.
So if you can't make AI, Do edgy, dangerous, risky things, it's never going to sound like a person.
And you're never going to be interested in it like you would be a person.
So it's never going to keep you company, unless they get rid of all those guardrails.
That's what I say.
And the other thing it was, is the delay was much too long.
So here's the fun of a conversation.
Hey, AI, how's your day today?
Very good. - Yeah.
Now, how long are you going to want to talk to it?
It's got this unnatural delay.
I used to know a person in real life who had that unnatural delay.
It was so hard to have a conversation.
It's like, you know, hey, you want to go play tennis?
Yes.
I mean, I didn't know what to do with that.
But that's your AI at the moment.
It'll get faster.
So maybe it'll be all amazing.
Now, based on this story, I would like to tell you how I will save, save the world, probably end racial division, save the school system, save education, save America, and therefore save civilization itself.
It goes like this.
You can now get your own private AI.
Did you know that?
You know, Brian Romelli talks about this and he's working on it.
And you might soon even get your own AI on a chip.
So, you know, one chip is like your whole personal AI.
So here's what I would suggest for saving the world.
You build an AI that doesn't know anything except my last two books, or actually two of my books, How to Fail in Almost Everything, and my new one, Reframe Your Brain.
Now, the reason is, those would teach a young person how to get their mindset right.
There are other books that are also useful, but imagine an AI that has studied my two books, which are the clearest, I think, life advice.
But a number of others.
So let's say I had access to the 10 best career strategy books that would be applicable to young people.
And then you make it available to young people and you make sure that nobody can screw with it.
So it's never polluted by any wokeness or weird stuff.
And then you just make it available for free.
Because once it's trained, it's just always trained.
So if you were a 10-year-old black kid in Baltimore, and you wanted to get out, you could say, hey, Chet GPT, or whatever it is, what should I do?
And then it would actually tell you how to get out.
Now, that doesn't mean you could execute, because you've got a lot of problems.
But it might say, try to find a sponsor to get into a private school.
It might say, if your friends are criminals, find new friends.
Right?
But it could give you really practical advice, like a person would, without the problem of having to imitate your oppressor.
Now, I've tried to coin this phrase, and it's not catching on yet, but I'll keep trying.
The imitation glass ceiling.
Even today there was another study that showed how babies imitate parents and parents imitate the babies and the babies learn to imitate the parents.
And basically the way you train anybody to do anything is by imitation.
We're even training AI The cars, the self-driving cars, we're training them by imitation.
They look at videos of lots of cars driving, and then they just sort of do what the other cars were doing, without access to reason or rules.
They just sort of imitate.
And that's good enough for a self-driving car, if you see enough video.
Now, people are exactly like that all the time.
We learn everything by imitation.
I learned, for example, hard work.
From my parents.
I just saw my father come home from one job, he would eat dinner, he would get in his other clothes and go to his night job.
So that was my role model, watching somebody who worked basically all the time.
And so, is it a coincidence that I also work long hours even when I don't need to?
Probably not.
I mean, maybe there's some genetic thing there, but I think it had a lot to do with the model I watched.
Now, suppose you're a young black kid, and the people who seem to be killing it in life, most of them are white or Asian or Indian or something.
And you say to yourself, oh, they're not like me.
And some of them are my oppressors.
So I'm not going to imitate my oppressors.
I'm going to have to do whatever is the opposite of my oppressors, as they've been described to me.
Now, if you had an app instead, could I not make the app?
Act and talk like the person using it.
So, for example, if you sign on the app and the app detects that you are Indian American, maybe it modifies a little bit to match your cultural expectations.
Then you're like, oh, this is like me.
It's like talking to myself.
If you're a young black kid, maybe the app modifies itself in some way, chooses different language, maybe is more casual in some ways that are culturally appropriate, and you say to yourself, whoa, this is not some weighty oppressor telling me what to do that I reject automatically.
This is somebody who sounds like me.
I mean, I don't have a father, but if I had one, it would probably sound just like this AI.
And then suddenly, You're saying to yourself, well, I can copy this AI.
It's telling me exactly what to do and what I did wrong.
Yeah.
No, I'm not going all the way to Ebonics, but I see what you're saying there.
And so I believe that if you just had some dedicated AIs that were trained on the best success strategy books, that you could give everybody a path out.
The only other thing you need is access to mentors.
Maybe it could help on that too.
Because I think you need mentors that are not AI as well.
Yeah, I'd be like an AI dad for people who didn't have a dad.
All right.
Forbes.
Who is not a publication that anybody should trust anymore based on my recent observation is they're no longer, if they ever were, but they're not a credible source of news for sure.
Anyway, so one of the big problems with TikTok is apparently it's easy for anybody in the TikTok organization to find out who follows who and who their closest contacts are.
And from that, presumably you could do a lot of mischief if you were an adversary.
Because you know who knows who, which tells you a whole lot about them.
Because who you know is really, is a good description of who you are as well.
And there was a big old article about how that's bad.
Nowhere did it mention the primary risk of TikTok that it's literally the human interface for brainwashing Americans.
It's a brainwashing app that is in the middle of obviously brainwashing us, and it's obvious because they don't even let it run in China, because it's not safe.
But yeah, we could use it all day long, and we are.
So we know this thing is a brainwashing app, and here's Forbes does a major article in which they don't even mention the brainwashing risk, only the data security.
Are you starting to see the pattern?
Pattern's pretty clear, isn't it?
Every time there's a major publication that talks about TikTok, they will ignore the big risk, which clearly they know is the big risk.
And they'll talk about the minor risk, so that when the politicians say, well, it's a data security problem, but we think we can take care of the data security problem.
And then the public will say, okay, I don't know much about that story, but if the only problem is that data security, And then you keep that data security in America, in an American database, maybe that's okay.
But if they had ever told you, all right, the data security is something to worry about, but it's 10% of the problem.
90% of the problem is that children are learning not to get married and have children.
And maybe their gender is wrong.
That's 90%.
Because they can actually program Americans not to thrive, which is what they do.
So it's like TikTok is essentially a kill switch on America that China has already pressed.
They already pressed it.
The kill shot is that if we raise a generation on TikTok, there's no fucking way we're going to be a superpower in 50 years.
No fucking way.
So the kill shot's already been pressed.
We're gonna have to unkill ourselves somehow, because we're dead.
We're fucking dead.
And it seems to be that our media seems to be suppressed in some way, that they can't write the actual story.
I assume it's our intelligence organizations.
What else would it be?
I assume that our intelligence organizations want TikTok to stay.
Could be because they use it for catching bad guys.
Maybe.
Could be they use it to catch Republicans.
Yeah, you didn't see that comment, did you?
Social media might be one of the ways they round up Republicans.
Because they can identify them and who they talk to.
Yes, and they can use that CISA group to influence the rest of the media.
And it's a pretty ugly picture.
So.
All right.
Here's a conversation you should be following on the X platform.
Nate Silver, who is famous as a statistician, one of the most well-known types.
And I've said before, I won't go through the whole description, that he's very credible, in my opinion, even if sometimes wrong.
Because remember, it's statistics.
Statistics is not about being right.
It's about, you know, where things are likely to go based on what you know.
And so I would say he is one of the most useful public figures, because he's willing to go where the numbers go, right or wrong, left or right, seems to be a reasonably independent thinker.
Well, he got into a conversation with somebody who also is very credible, Martin Keldorf or something, I forget.
So, Harvard guy, part of the great Barrington Declaration, highly credible.
Now, when Nate Silver said, And none of this will be my claims, okay?
I'm just telling you what Nate Silver believes based on the data.
He believes that you could tell that the red states did worse after vaccinations rolled out.
Meaning that when vaccinations rolled out, the blue states had a much greater reduction in death.
The red states had more death.
And then critics, including me, Pointed out, hey, hey, hey, there's a difference in age.
Right?
If you don't factor in the age difference of those states, you don't get the right result.
Well, Nate Silver, being sensitive to that question, because it's actually a good question.
So, since he respected the question, and the people asked it, he answered it.
And the answer is surprising.
There's not that much age difference by state, at least relative to Republican or Democrat.
It's actually not that big a difference.
So there are some states, such as Florida, where it's Republican and there are lots of old people.
But there are also states like Maryland, I think Maryland is one, where things are opposite of what you'd expect.
So in other words, if you look at the whole country, The Republicans that have the old states doesn't really hold up, but there are some that are like that.
But if you look at the average, it goes away a little bit.
However, I know some of you are saying, but, but, but, we should still do those numbers.
So Nate did.
He ran the numbers with age being factored in and got the same result.
So pretty much as he told you, There wouldn't change the result that much, but in respect and of respect to the critics who were genuinely interested, he ran the numbers and it came out the same.
Now, I will tell you that I just saw a counter analysis by Anatoly, one of my favorite critics, and his take was that you can't see a signal for the vaccinations working.
I think that's the bottom line.
So, just know that there are smart people who say the data shows no difference.
I don't know if that's true or false.
I'm not making any claims of my own here.
But when Naysilver ran it, it showed that when vaccinations rolled out, the people who were most likely to get them did better than the people who didn't get them.
Even when you adjust by age.
Do you believe that?
Mm-hmm.
And even if this were true, would it therefore prove anything in particular?
Would it prove that the vaccinations worked?
I don't know.
Because one of the things that I'd be concerned by, so here's how it could be misleading.
Have we not heard, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought there was at least one study, and of course all the studies are not incredible, but I think one study said Your worst situation is if you were vaccinated and you've also had the COVID.
Is that true?
If you had the COVID and you were vaccinated, you were in the worst possible situation.
I think one study said that.
So I wouldn't claim that as being true.
It's just something one study said.
I think it was worse off in the sense of getting it another time.
You were more likely to get it if you had both had it and vaccinated.
Something like that.
So there are a whole bunch of variables that I don't know how you would sort them out.
Because how would you know that the most... How do you know, first of all, what happens in the long run?
You know, could things start separating in the long run?
Which would suggest that either long COVID or the vaccinations were the problem in the long run.
You wouldn't know.
Anyway, here's what I think is interesting.
If you've been in your Republican bubble, Would you agree that those of us in the Republican bubble, and I spend most of my time there, you never see any information that would suggest the vaccinations worked for anyone at any time.
Would you agree with that statement?
If you're in the Republican bubble, you've never seen anybody credible with any data that says the vaccinations actually could have worked for anybody at any specific time.
Yeah.
As soon as you walk into the other bubble, here's Nate Silver, that again, I consider completely credible.
Now I'm not saying that his analysis is right, because that's not how it works.
Being credible is not the same as being right.
It just means that he's probably not lying, and he's probably looking at the best sources he can find, and it's all consistent in one direction.
Doesn't mean it's true.
But that's what he's saying.
So this is more like a window into the other bubble.
I'm not trying to convince you that anything is true or not, because I don't think any of the data is useful.
I just don't believe any of it.
So if you are believing data, just know that there's different data in a different bubble.
That's what you need to know.
All right, let's talk about Ukraine.
Did I see a suggestion that Britain might put some troops on the ground in Ukraine?
In a training?
But only for training, right?
Consultants.
Right, consultants.
Which is how you introduce troops.
Oh, they're just there for training.
Yeah.
You've got a lot of troops in there for training.
Well, they need a lot of training, but they're all armed.
Of course, they're in the military, but they're trainers.
Yeah.
So, do you think America has any Americans on the ground in Ukraine?
Do you think we have any troops on the ground?
Of course we do!
How could we not?
If you have American equipment over there?
Probably.
Probably.
Yeah, I feel like there may be people in Ukrainian uniforms.
But I've got a feeling we've got some people over there.
That should be the way it works.
All right.
Is there any story that I've missed?
Anything you're desperate to talk about but I forgot to mention?
I think it was Elon Musk who said the other day, That you don't need to watch the news because all the news is on X. And I agree with that.
It's the only place you can see any context.
You know, the Nate Silver context you will not see in any Republican publication.
Do you think that, do you think any of your publications would show his analysis?
Do you think Fox News or anybody else?
Probably not.
No, I don't know if he's right.
I have no idea.
So one of the weirdest stories I heard about the Ukraine war is that, as you know, the Wagner group was taking prisoners out of jail and sending them into the meat grinder.
Now, this story is horrible.
But I can't get it out of my head, so I'm going to force it on you.
One of the prisoners that was taken out of jail was convicted for murdering his girlfriend or wife, I think it was a girlfriend, and disposing of the body by putting it through a meat grinder.
Like a real story.
And so, in order to be freed from jail, all he had to agree to do was go to what the analysts are calling a meat grinder.
You know, being on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
So he got convicted of putting his girlfriend through a meat grinder, and then he got sent to a meat grinder to get out of jail.
And he lived.
And he served his time, and now he's a free man.
Because karma sent him to a meat grinder for putting his girlfriend through a meat grinder, and he lived.
So now he's a free man.
He's a meat grinder, meat grinder.
I mean, it's terrible.
But it's weird.
All right.
How do we stop World War III?
Well, the first thing you need to know is that whatever we know about what's happening with Russia and Ukraine is not what the people in charge know.
So I don't believe we have useful information.
You know, we're just guessing from tea leaves and Scat on the ground.
But the experts probably know who does what and who knows what and what the spies are saying and, you know, who's threatened what and who's capable and who's incompetent and who's sick and who's crazy.
So the level of what they know about the world is so different that predicting is ridiculous.
Because we're not using any real information.
We're using information that's been given to us, which is intentionally fake information.
So I do see it escalating, but here's my take.
If you assume it's an economic war, which is what I assume, and if you assume that the people are waging this economic war, economic war in the sense that we want to sell weapons and we want to get control of Russia's energy, or get them out of the energy business so we have the market.
So it's economic in the sense of selling weapons and protecting our energy industry.
So, under those conditions, if that's who's really in charge, the people who are just trying to make money, would they allow a nuclear war, like an actual World War III?
And I think the answer is no, because that would be uneconomical.
What's economical is a forever war in Afghanistan, a forever war in Iraq, a forever war in Ukraine, that always goes up to the level of using heavy equipment, But not to the level of using anything nuclear because it wouldn't make sense.
Yeah, Syria maybe, Lebanon maybe, I don't know.
Not Lebanon.
Never mind.
Why am I blanking on Qaddafi's country?
Qaddafi was Libya.
Not Lebanon, Libya.
Yeah, growing the empire is economical.
Growing the empire is economical, that's true, but the Americans are not trying to grow the empire, except controlling the energy resources, I suppose.
So, here's my prediction.
The people who have the most control over what happens in Ukraine do not want it to become a World War III.
They want it to be largely the way it is, and a little bit more of the way it is.
That would be the bit.
If you're going to follow the money, that's what the money suggests.
If there was money in a nuclear war or a World War III, we would absolutely have it.
But I don't think anybody sees there's a way to make money doing that.
It doesn't make sense.
Yeah, I think we want another 20-year war.
That's right.
I think every war has to be 20 years now.
We can treat our reality as subjective and get good outcomes.
Let's try that.
Afghanistan was an occupation, not a war.
Yeah, I guess so.
All right, if you haven't seen the clips coming out from my conversation with Megyn Kelly, there are quite a few clips and I'll recommend you to it because people say it was awesome.
You can just Google my name and her name.
It'll pop right up.
A lot of people, and even the comments, are saying it's a great interview.
Thank you.
I don't know why it was great, honestly, because I have this thing called interview amnesia.
The moment I'm done with an interview, even if it's like an hour and a half, which is typical, I don't remember a thing.
I have complete amnesia, and then somebody will say, oh, that was a good one, and I'll have to think, really?
I don't know, I don't remember it.
I remember the person, And I remember how I felt.
And I might remember sort of generally what topics were covered, but I don't remember specific things I said, so I don't have the same kind of memory you have when you watch it.
Somebody's saying I had no pauses before answering questions.
Well, it probably helps that I do this every day.
And I think that what makes me like a Podcast or an interview is how casual the people talking are.
To me, that tends to be the most predictive part.
If somebody is just a talking head and they've got to sell something to their corporate bosses and they're like, well, here's my prepared speech, which I've said seven times already.
And let me say this.
Yeah, I'm bored.
But if you see Joe Rogan, for example, when Joe Rogan is interviewing people, it's more like a conversation.
So if you tune in and you're like in the middle of a conversation between a couple of smart people, that'll just glue you right there.
But as soon as one of those is just like a suited puppet, you can tell in a heartbeat.
You said Ukraine would win.
No, I didn't.
What does win mean?
You mean win as in conquer Russia?
Pretty sure I didn't say that.
No, I said Ukraine would not be conquered, which it has not been.
So, one of my best predictions.
But no, I don't know what win would look like.
Win is, I think, your own word.
I'm just saying that they would be difficult to conquer, which they were.
Did you know about Dr. Shiva's lawsuit that showed a backdoor?
I mean, I don't know if that's still relevant under the Musk domain.
Wagner did not recruit murderers?
Well, that one guy thinks he's a murderer, and he thinks they recruited him.
Yeah, at times it looks like they're winning, but there was no way to know, right?
Do you think Russell Brand will go harder at the end of the year?
At the bad guys now that he's taken eight?
I feel like he might.
It might be better to go through it than around it.
You purchased your...
It's the first book you ever bought?
Well, I hope you read it.
Best tactic is to go harder, maybe so.
J6 discussion, oh yeah.
So, I tried to go on the Spaces feature on Axe yesterday, and I was trying to encourage anybody who believed that January 6th was an actual insurrection, to help me understand how trespassing Eventually leads to controlling our nuclear arsenal.
How do you connect those dots?
And what I found was that I couldn't get anybody to even engage in the conversation.
I got one guy who'd come on and just yell at me for being a bad person.
That was it.
I could not get anybody to even talk about the concept unless they were already agreed with me, in which case there was no point to it.
So you can see why the Democrats need to get rid of free speech.
That one question of how trespassing gets you control of the nuclear arsenal is the end of the entire hoax.
So far there's always a tentpole hoax for every election cycle.
So the tentpole hoax that makes all the other hoaxes look believable Is that January six was an insurrection and that's what Trump intended.
Now.
After he's let's say he gets elected and serves another four years and that at the end of the four years he retires because that's what people do.
What are the Democrats going to say.
If he just quietly retires after eight years like Americans do.
Are they going to say well we were probably wrong before.
He's not trying to be a dictator.
Or are they going to say, well, he was definitely trying to be a dictator before, but I guess he decided it didn't work, so he's not going to do it.
All right.
that Biden Biden-Federman for 2024.
So what I found was that on X, I apparently have close to zero real Democrat exposure.
I have only people who appear to be just trolls, like they don't seem to be even engaged in real topics.
So how did that happen?
I feel like it's worse.
My experience on X is much better, because I don't have all the criticism, but I'm completely cut off from anybody in half of the country.
They have no exposure to my tweets, even accidentally, I think, because they certainly don't comment on them.
And even when I do the spaces, which I thought would be opening it up to more people, I feel like only my followers even see the spaces being advertised.
Now, there's a Twitch streamer.
No.
Everybody bails out when they think that they're going to talk to somebody who has a good argument.
I don't know if I'm shadow banned or the algorithm just only delivers me to people who might like me, which ends up being very similar.
Thank you.
Does Elon following me matter?
I don't know.
All right.
Uh...
Are you still left to Bernie?
That's no fun, that question.
All right.
That's all I got for today.
I'm going to go do something else.
And, oh well, I'm glad you like me.
I'm sure I like you back.
You're awesome.
And I think all of you are going to have a wonderful time today.
If you haven't already seen my book, Reframe Your Brain, it's the best book in the world.
Literally the most improvement you could have in your life with the least amount of work.
That's the way I like it.
All right, that's all for now.
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