Scott Adams argues "authoring yourself" over "finding yourself," linking red-state baby booms (11% growth in software engineering jobs) to optimism amid leftist media’s doom-mongering on AI, climate change, and societal collapse. The stalled SAVE Act—blocked by Senate Majority Leader John Thune and unnamed GOP senators—suggests election integrity betrayal, while Iran’s uranium enrichment risks escalate, with Israel possibly provoking conflict or Trump acting directly. NYC’s snowball assaults on NYPD officers (e.g., Guzmain Khulibali) and Alvin Bragg’s leniency reflect broader civic unrest, as half of New Yorkers report worsening quality of life. FBI wiretaps targeting Kash Patel and Susie Wiles’ legal calls expose systemic abuses, raising concerns about attorney-client privilege and one-sided prosecutions. All communications now face scrutiny, with Coast Guard vaccine resisters reinstated as a potential precedent for defiance against overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Tell me if you guys can hear how many of you have ever thought or maybe gagged when you heard somebody else say it that they were trying to find themselves.
I need to find myself.
You know, who I am, who I am, who I am.
Bad idea.
Can you guys hear them?
Here's a reframe.
Instead of being an explorer and trying to figure out who you are, how about authoring yourself to be where you want to be?
You don't have to discover who you are.
Crank the volume, they say.
Yeah, it's kind of low.
Bump it up.
Owen is dancing.
I can barely hear it.
Believe me, Owen's dancing.
I super 10.
You guys.
All right, I'll turn it off.
But how fun is that?
That's Akira's song, you guys, featuring Scott Adams.
Author yourself.
Instead of finding yourself, author yourself.
I love it.
Okay, let's get right to it.
Brie, take it away.
Hey, everybody.
Come on in here.
Happy Monday.
It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
And you're in luck because you came to the right place.
It's another wonderful day.
And the only thing that could make it better is a simultaneous sip.
I think you know that.
And all you need to participate is another cup of mugger glasses, thermos flash hand team failed coffee.
You're unmute.
You're going to mute yourself.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
The simultaneous sip.
Go.
Go.
I feel all of my pleasure circuits firing up.
The mute button wins.
Thank you, Marcella.
It's Friday.
I didn't know if you knew you were being listened to.
I felt like at that point we should all just chime in and chant it with Virgo.
Welcome, you guys.
It's Sergio versus the mute.
I know.
God bless Sergio, the mute, or not the mute.
We love you, Sergio.
We love all of you.
You guys, we made it to Friday.
Look at us.
So welcome to the Scott Adams School.
My name is Erica.
Just a reminder that all of Coffee with Scott Adams live streams are living on YouTube and locals, locals, y'all have the best stuff from Scott, scottadams.locals.com for micro lessons and pre-shows and post-shows and all sorts of juicy tidbits in between.
Even Scott drawing Dilbert Comics with us pitching in and giving our two cents, which we have more than two cents to give on everything, don't we?
So that being said, let's kick off the school today.
We have our fabulous news crew, the family.
We love it.
We love each other so much.
We have Sergio looking.
Look at you guys.
Look at the stuff on Sergio's shelves.
His cameras, his drones, his little S monogram.
Gorgeous.
Red States and Future Trends00:14:57
Marcella, our little Marcella.
Marty.
Multi-talented, beautiful Marcella.
And Owen, Gregorian, you are more stoic than ever.
Good morning, Owen.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Happy Friday.
Happy Friday, everyone.
So you guys, that was Akira's drop today.
That was author yourself.
And you can find it at AkiraTheDawn or meaningwave.com for download.
I've been singing it all morning.
Yeah.
So you guys, we're ready with some news today.
And we want you to chime in with us.
And Marcella and Owen.
I think Owen is going first, Marcela.
Owen's going first today.
Give it to us.
All right.
I need a minute to get ready just a second.
You guys.
So we have a story that red states are gaining babies in the post-COVID shuffle.
The Institute for Family Studies is talking about this.
Looks like red states are seeing population growth in young families and children post-COVID, while blue states are losing them due to high costs and migration.
It looks like compared to 2019, the 20 states that voted most for Kamal Harris saw declines in their people in their 20s and kids under 18.
Red states saw growth among millennials in their 30s.
So I guess my take on this is that, you know, we're all focused on the short term all the time, which is fine.
I mean, you know, we're kind of fighting the battles of today, like the midterms that are coming up.
And certainly we should be focused on that.
But I think longer term, the trend seems to be going positive.
It seems to be going in the Republican direction.
So don't lose sight of that.
You know, we all know that there's all sorts of rigging going on with the census.
And, you know, there was a story I saw recently about that where it looks like one person was responsible for kind of rigging the census to give a whole bunch of seats to Democrats they shouldn't have gotten based on illegal immigrants and things like that.
That he rigged the algorithm of the census to totally change the result in terms of the electoral counts and things.
But I think everything is moving in our direction longer term.
And there's another census coming up in 2030.
And all the projections are that it's going to shift way red at that point.
And it looks like the trend is even longer term than that with these babies that we're going to have a lot more kids coming up the ranks in Republican families and a lot less in blue families.
So seems like a real positive trend to me.
What do you guys think?
I've seen more babies coming.
Yeah.
Have you?
I've seen them.
I used to ask myself, where are the babies?
And I've seen like a couple on the last two days.
I went to a shoot the other day and we were like actually two ladies with babies together.
And I haven't seen that in a long time.
So Owen, I think that's the great news.
An uptick in babies.
Sergio is noticing, but have you found Mrs. Guthrie?
No, she's still, there's no signs of her.
I will look everywhere and we're never going to find her.
I think she's in Mexico now in a tourist destination, maybe.
Great news.
Different name.
But with the babies, that's a, I used to think that the only reason why people was not having babies right now was because they were not drinking enough anymore, right?
That that was something that was getting all these people loosened up, going to bars, and they will do it.
And because of Scott, you know, people stop drinking and you see, and everybody's staying home, you know, they just, and it wasn't happening.
So now I think that there's a big drive right now for to create more babies, especially when you see guys like that colonel, that the guy that got the medal yesterday.
I mean, on the day.
Yeah.
So that Superman, that kind of man like that is, you know, is going to be making a lot of babies and a lot of people is going to want to keep going along with us.
I don't know what you guys think.
This is very scientific.
I do think a big part of it is just, do you have a positive outlook about the future or do you have a negative outlook about the future?
And that can be financial in terms of, do I think I'm going to be able to have a good job going forward?
Do I think my income is going to go up?
Do I think I'm going to be able to afford things?
But it also is just, you know, do I feel good about the future?
And the leftist media is very negative all the time, just telling you the world's ending, everything's terrible.
It's just all getting worse.
The AI apocalypse is coming.
No one's going to have a job.
And they're just beating down their base constantly.
And it's just all negativity all the time.
Climate change, you know, it's just all end of the world, everything.
And it really does affect people.
I mean, young kids are dropping out of college because they think AI is going to take all the jobs or that there's no point.
And it just leads to all this depression and nihilistic thought.
And I think that really affects people when they think about having kids.
Whereas if you have religion and if you have, you know, faith and you have just a positive outlook, which if you just, you know, listen to Trump, like in the State of the Union, you get such a different picture, right?
Like just, it's the golden age is here and everything's great and we're running hot in the economy and we got all this investment coming in and we're making the world safe all over the world and we're just winning, winning, winning.
And that's just such a different vision.
And it inspires people to say, you know what?
I'm going to start a family.
I'm going to raise kids.
I'm going to be part of this and bring children into this great new world.
And so that's the way I look at it is that it's just the people who are positive and are optimistic about the future are much more likely to say, yeah, let's have some kids.
But have you also seen how women are depicted now in the media?
Right?
There's no more praising fatness anymore, right?
There's no more worshiping, you know, being overweight.
We're getting healthier, everybody, right?
The Maha, the MAHA movement, that creates a change.
Even if everybody was doing it for health, just everybody losing weight like that is going to create people wanting to have sex with them.
And that's maybe that's what's going on too.
It is so funny listening to two dudes talk about this, Marcella, isn't it?
It's just hysterical.
Tell us more.
Oh my God, I'm dead.
I mean, all the Ocempic, right?
All the Ocempic.
You guys should hear the stuff Sergio says.
It's so.
It wasn't in blue states, right, Owen?
That's where some red states.
Red states, which people, and the rest of the, they love Ocempic, right?
I mean, yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know if I've seen any mapping of where the Ozempic is, but I think definitely in LA.
I would argue against that.
I would argue that, I mean, sure, there's plenty of obese people and it's a problem, but I think if you, if I was honest about that, it's probably a much bigger problem in the red states in terms of obesity.
And, you know, maybe they are going to Ozempic more in the future, especially Trump RX and all the stuff, keeping the cost down.
But I think generally speaking, if you just looked on a population basis, I think you'd probably find that there's more attractive women in the big cities than there are in the rural areas and, you know, even just blue states versus red states.
But there's a lot more than looks.
I mean, you know, you can say, oh, that's a hot woman.
But when you're talking about starting a family and getting married, you know, you need to have a real connection.
You need to have a good relationship.
You need to have someone who's mentally healthy too.
I mean, I don't want to raise a family with a crazy woman.
And, you know, I'd much rather have someone with a little extra fat around her belly and, you know, childbearing hips and all the rest.
And if I have a choice between someone who looks really good, but has crazy liberal thoughts and thinks everything's going to crap, it's an easy choice for me.
If any of you were unsure where these guys stand, now you know this is I want to hear the female point of view.
I do.
What do you think, Erica?
I mean, I think feminism has a lot to do with it.
Women wanting careers, feeling pressured to have careers, people needing to have more than one income, societal pressure, all of that stuff.
And I think like you guys are more like, oh, is she crazy or not?
Is she fat or skinny?
I'm just generalizing.
I just think that, yeah, it's probably really like if you're someone based in reality, you're like, can we afford it?
We don't have a house.
Maybe we're renting.
We can't even afford our rent.
How are we going to afford a kid?
So I think it's society.
I think it's the economy.
And I think it's fear of the future.
And then also, I think in the blue states, this is just my opinion, but, you know, the men and the women who are dug in, like, let's say on the left, they're so miserable.
They don't believe in any kind of traditional values.
And, you know, kids are our future.
And we need families and we need to pump up family values.
And, you know, I think that's, I think when people went back years ago and they're like, oh, we lost family values and we lost eating dinner together and raising your kids and all of that stuff.
That's the problem.
There's too much TikTok, too much social media, too much like, I don't care what my dinner tastes like.
How does it look in a picture?
And am I at the right restaurant?
And it's like, you know what?
Put that shit down.
Focus on yourself.
You know, become a better person, literally for everybody.
Be useful and try to be happy.
And then maybe you'll attract the right partner through happiness and not misery.
And then maybe you'll want to have a family because you'll want the two of you to go on.
So I don't know.
I think it has nothing to do with looks or Ozempic.
And I get you guys were saying more than that, but I just think that's what it is.
I think it's connected.
I think it's connected to the rise of Christianity in the red states.
I really think religion, there's been a resurgence after Charlie was assassinated.
And even before that, there was a resurgence of young men going into religion and thinking of preparing a family early on.
Gen C is very different than Gen X and millennials.
They want to start a family early in their 20s instead of waiting.
That's my thoughts.
They're my hope, you know?
And I mean, listen, somebody's, who was it yesterday?
Someone, it might have been Megan Kelly.
And I was like totally spot on with the hockey team.
Okay.
Like if you're a woman and you're like that age of these hockey players and your thought is like, oh, they were sexist or they laughed at Trump or whatever.
You are, you are so out of your mind right now.
Your thought should be like, those guys are hot.
They're masculine.
They're fighters.
They're winners.
They're badasses.
Like, you know, like, I want to breed with them.
That should be your thought.
But if you- Wait, what are you wearing?
Oh, it's a Charlie Kirk shirt.
It says Kirk.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because you mentioned Charlie.
So that, that, if that wasn't your instinct, I mean, listen, I'm a married woman and I was like, damn, like, these guys are fired up.
I'm glad you mentioned that because that instinct, you mentioned the word instinct.
Yep.
And that's Scott's filter on this.
The mating instinct.
He always talk about the mating instinct being, by the way, everything I say does not represent my own views, you know, legally.
They are your opinions, you know.
Doing analysis.
Okay.
His ex-wife, maybe?
I don't know.
I mean, that's, I couldn't do this if I wasn't, you know, single.
So the thing with the mating instinct is so powerful that we always, it's always there and we rationalize it, right?
We can always come up with a reason to rationalize that part.
So all I'm saying is that if you see on TV a lot of women's parts, right?
Like or guys and everybody looking great, America is going to start feeling, you know, more excited to, you know, to be out there and to go out.
And that has an effect in its in is just always there and you don't think about it, but it's always affecting you.
What do you think, Owen?
You mean quiet a little?
Well, I mean, I think all of these things are true.
I think that affordability is a big part of it.
I think that feminism certainly has had a major detrimental impact for decades against, you know, starting families in your 20s when women are most fertile.
I saw an article or maybe, I don't know, it was the next post maybe by somebody, might have been Stefan Molyneux replying to it or something about how you maybe you can have it all, but you should basically have kids first and then the career.
And that works.
But if you try it the other way, it really doesn't work because if you wait till your late 30s or 40s, it's really not easy to have a kid.
And I think feminism and even scientists have kind of lied to women about that and said, oh, yeah, you can wait if you need to, you can freeze your eggs.
And that doesn't work.
You do get less fertile as you get into your 30s.
It gets worse as you go and even worse in your 40s.
And you reach the point where you just can't have kids anymore.
And, you know, if you do it the other way, you've got plenty of time to have a career.
I mean, my wife went back to work after she had kids.
You know, she had a nice college education.
She had some work experience before that.
She took a long break.
She actually mostly, you know, didn't work at all while the kids were little until they were really in like high school and college.
So she took a long break and she still was able to get a job with Harvard.
And you know, so I think if you come out of college and maybe work for a couple of years or something, that's fine.
But if you meet a guy and you want to have a family, I think it's a much better plan in general to just start the family right away.
Save Act Vote Security00:15:50
And let's start propping that up, you guys.
Let's make that normal and okay.
And, you know, let's take the pressure off of having a career first.
Because if you have a career first and your career is growing, are you then going to want to take a back seat to it or not?
So do the family first.
But can we move on to another subject?
Sure.
Thank you.
I have a story.
My first story is the Save Act.
And saving the Save Act is part of the story.
It's been stalled in the Senate.
The Congress passed it again on February 11th.
And John Toon doesn't want to keep make it to the floor.
So there is this, you know, going back and forth over the zombie filibuster or the talk filibuster.
But the main thing is that, you know, the question that everybody's asking is that 94% of Republican voters supported and a big number of Democrats, not in the Senate, but Democrats in general support the Save Act, which is, if you don't remember, it's basically needing an ID to vote.
And the question is, as James would ask, why, who owns John Toon and what's going on with him?
I think Erica posted some story on Tom Tillis having time for a dog parade instead of having time to pass the SAVE Act.
Because one of the things that were said in the Senate by the majority leader, John Zune, sorry, I'm mispronouncing his name, but he said that there was not enough time for this, you know?
So somehow, you know, we don't, we have time for dog parades, but we don't have time to pass this on.
So those of you that don't know, that's what they did yesterday.
They had a parade.
Bring your dog to the, you know, the Capitol and parade your dog around and we're going to take pictures and photos.
And James Woods, I have his tweet here.
He wrote, the SAVE Act is the single most important issue to 95% of Republican voters.
If you can't pass it with a majority in the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and a Republican president, then somebody owns your ass, buddy.
Who owns John Thune?
And that's all the money.
Yeah.
Why?
Like, to give his side of the story, I believe he said there's four Republicans in the Senate that aren't on board with the whole talk.
McConnell.
That's your idea about that.
And yeah, McConnell and Tillis, I think we're two of them.
I don't remember the other two, but I think, you know, Thune, I still hold accountable because he's the leader and he's obviously a very weak leader if he can't get everybody in line to say this is what we're all going to do.
But I do think, you know, it's also those other four people, those other four senators that, you know, supposedly we have the votes, right?
We have 50 or 51 votes and we have Vance for a tiebreaker if we needed it.
And so we should have everything we need that they've said that they'll vote for it.
And so the question would be, why would they not then say, yeah, I'll go along with the filibuster too, because that's the way we get to that 50-vote majority vote.
The only alternative that Thun seemed to be pushing was like just forcing a vote.
But I think that method would mean you need 60 votes to pass it.
And so it was almost like a show vote to just say, oh, we're going to make the Democrats show that they don't like this thing.
But in reality, they were just going to sacrifice the bill.
They were just going to let it fail.
And so everyone was upset about that, of course.
And so Thun then was responding, well, I don't have enough support from these other four people.
And so I can't make this happen because it's just not going to work.
And I do think we should be holding all these people accountable, including them.
Markowski, what is the name somebody was saying in the chat?
Cornyn is one.
Cornyn and Markowski.
Well, she's always opposing.
They're being weasels.
I mean, they're being weasels to just say that they won't support it.
Because if we have enough votes to pass it, then we should also have enough votes to do the filibuster.
Don't you just think that these people are just trying to wait out Trump's term and then they think they're going to go back to being, you know, establishment rhinos again?
But it's not going to happen.
No one's going back to the way it was.
Yeah.
They're being snakes.
I mean, they're just being deep state snakes.
They want the only explanation is that they want the cheating to continue.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Cheating is the only reason why you will stop this, right?
And that's the only reason why you have a mailing ballot.
That's the only reason why no IDs.
That's the only reason why you won't purge the role, the border rolls, right?
They're all a mess right now, right?
So they have to be cleaned up.
And that's a big part of it too.
And they don't want that.
They don't want a clean system and using those four people as an excuse.
That's a fake because the real reason is, yeah, most likely is corruption, like Scott will say, right?
But we shouldn't call him snakes.
We shouldn't call them rhinos anymore.
I'm really loving, I saw this, somebody called it rat, you know, Republican against Trump.
Okay.
So I made it.
This is Republican against integrity and against election, against America.
Trump is for America.
Trump is for America.
Trump is pushing for this, right?
So if anybody's against Trump, they're against America right now.
That's the way I see it.
Right.
So if you're against Trump, you're against America at this point, right?
If Trump goes crazy and starts doing things that, I mean, if he goes crazy someday, I will stop.
You know, we will stop him.
We will try to stop him.
Right.
But right now, who's stopping us right now is this guy, Tom Thun.
And he's not a rhino.
That's too cool.
He's a rat, right?
He could be a rat.
He's acting like a rat.
A rat person is somebody that is going to stab you in the back, you know, when you're not looking.
And they're acting like, oh, everything is fine, but it's not.
So I'm just saying that if we want to reframe this in a way that has any effect on people to get motivated to go out and vote, we need to do something like that, you know, to show them that evil, you know?
I don't know.
I love that.
I want to show them.
Somebody post the meme that Sergio made.
Also, just so you know, in Somalia, I believe you need two forms of ID to vote in Somalia, just FYI.
Oh, I thought you were going to say we needed two rats to nope, but you need two forms of ID to vote in Somalia.
You know, and remember the story about the dogs voting?
You know, there were dogs that were not voting or voting.
And now we have this dog parade.
Again, the simulation is always giving us these wings all the time, right?
Ah.
All right.
Let's keep an eye on that and we'll move on.
All right.
Well, there's more going on with the whole AI apocalypse narrative and on both sides, I would say.
One of the big stories is that Jack Dorsey, he has this fintech called Block and he announced 40% staff cuts.
He's getting rid of 4,000 people.
And he said it's all because of AI that, you know, we can use these AI intelligence tools to work better.
And he didn't want to do it gradually.
He thought a lot of companies were sort of making, you know, making it bad for morale to like do all these riffs over time and just gradually get rid of people.
And so he said, I'm just going to cut it all at once and grow from this lower base.
And the stock market rewarded him big time, that it's his stock jumped like 23%.
So a lot of people are speculating that other companies are going to do it.
Jack Dorsey said a lot of other companies are probably going to come to the same conclusion.
And so there's a lot of fear, I think, that there's going to suddenly be this massive wave of layoffs.
We've certainly seen some layoffs recently that have been blamed on AI.
I think a lot of them probably weren't really because of AI.
But, you know, it's an easy excuse for CEOs to make it seem like the company's doing fine, but, you know, I just need to get rid of these people because I don't need them anymore.
But, you know, there's a lot of fear now, I think, that there's going to be another wave coming of a lot of layoffs, especially in the tech sector, because I think that's where AI is making the biggest impact.
Sero Hedge posted a graph in regards to Block, and he indicated that, you know, he made it, he doesn't say a statement, Zero Hedge, but Zero Hedge on X.
And he indicates that the company Block spent $68 million for a party.
And 200 days later, Jack Dorsey fires 40% of the workers, and then three blames AI.
So like Owen was saying, and Scott has said before, you know, the AI fake because sometimes it's not due to AI.
You know, it's a good excuse.
I mean, I think certainly you could have a skeptical lens on it like that and say, you know, that it's not really because of AI.
But I think I don't see Jack Dorsey as the type of person who would just make up a story like that, especially when he made such a big splash like this and said, we're going to get rid of basically almost half our workforce.
And I think, you know, because the stock was rewarded by it significantly, like this massive pop in value.
And Jack, by the way, also explained along the way, hey, we were already profitable.
We were growing.
We're profitable.
We were profitable and growing before these layoffs.
So it wasn't, you know, a survival move.
It wasn't like we have to do this.
It was that this is better and this is going to be, you know, the better path.
And so he's kind of recognizing the trend of saying, okay, this is the direction we're going.
And we're already at the point where one person on my staff can use a whole team of AI agents to get a lot of stuff done really well and really quickly.
And so I don't need all these thousands of extra people.
And so he certainly seemed credible to me in terms of telling the truth about why he was doing what he was doing.
I think the problem is that, again, a lot of companies might copy him or might be forced to copy him, even if they don't want to, because for public companies, you have this responsibility to shareholders to maximize shareholder value.
And now that you've seen what happened to Block, pretty much anybody who wants to be an active investor could just say, you need to do the same thing to this other tech company.
And it would be hard for them to fight it.
You know, they would have to say, well, if you can get a 23% jump in your stock price and still be able to grow and be profitable and have a much lower expense, then of course you need to do that.
And so I am expecting there probably will be more companies following suit.
I think so.
And also when you think of all the money that frees up now, so people can get big fat raises.
they could put money back into the company.
And this ties into where, you know, I keep trying to drive home, you know, learn a trade, become, you know, someone who's always essential because here's the thing.
AI, you know, it's not taking maternity leave.
It's not complaining.
It's not going to sue you.
It's not going to, you know, whine about, you know, needing a vacation and everything else.
AI is just going to work.
So I think this is going to be a big wake-up call for the generations of people that are like, you know, things aren't fair and I need a safe space and I'm working eight hours a day as a barista.
I'm exhausted.
It's like, listen, AI will do it.
And they won't say a word.
So it's going to be hard because you're going to have to really, if you're, if you're trying to stay at your corporate job, you're going to have to be so freaking valuable.
You're going to have to work so hard and so smart.
And my advice to you is to really, really become an expert in how to use AI and how to prompt it.
So you're like the best AI prompter in the world.
And if that's not you and you don't have a good work ethic or you're lazy or you're trying to skate by, you'll be found out quick and you'll be out the door.
So start now looking for a trade, work on your talent stack, get some other skills behind you and become valuable as part of the whole wheel of this country that keeps the country moving forward by learning how to build, how to weld, how to, you know, be a nurse, be a whatever, but not everybody's going to fit into that corporate box.
And AI is going to save a lot of companies a lot of money and a lot of headaches.
And like, yeah, I mean, yeah, if you're pregnant and you want maternity leave, you can have your maternity leave, but AI and another employee is going to take your job and someone else's.
I'm just saying.
So if you're worried about it, start finding a backup plan now and then find a backup plan to that backup plan.
It's just the way it's going to be moving forward.
But the lazy, safe space days are over if you want to be employed in this country.
And there are a lot of companies that are racing to implement AI now and they're often they don't know how to do it.
But I think it's almost becoming a competition internally in a lot of companies to say who can do it fastest.
And if you can be guiding them along the way or seen as the expert, then you're going to do much better and be much less likely to get laid off if these things do happen because they're going to say, oh, yeah, you know, this guy's really good at it.
I've tried to do that in my company.
I mean, I've, you know, just did a project that was doing Agentic AI and I am trying to leverage that as much as I can reputationally to say, oh, you know, he really understands this stuff.
He knows this better than anybody.
And so I'm looking to do more of that.
I'm looking for more projects in that space.
And I'm also kind of setting the narrative even in other projects I've done where there have been elements of AI involved to just say, I did this AI thing.
I did this other AI thing.
And now I have this whole track record of being an AI expert.
And I think that gives me a lot more job security.
And I can, I've already noticed that I've been successful with several people that are higher up than me recognizing that I have technical expertise with AI that they don't have.
And so I think, you know, they would be the first to jump in and protect me just because they're like, oh, yeah, he's, he's, he's one of our best people with that.
And so I think there's a lot of companies that don't know at all what they're doing with AI.
And if you can develop some expertise, now is the time because you can get ahead of everybody else and become that expert that can help your company do it.
Cognitive Dissonance in AI00:09:18
And hopefully that means you'll survive whatever cuts are coming.
I will present the other side, though.
Like the David Sachs made a post recently that said, here's a narrative violation, and it showed that there was a huge number of job listings for software engineers.
I think it was, you know, indeed, I think this is the same, probably the same graph where it said software jobs are up 11% year over year, and it's much more than other jobs.
Like it looked to me like the trend for overall job listings was going down, but there was a sudden spike over the last few months for software jobs, like software engineering, programming jobs.
And that makes sense to me because when you have AI able to, you know, make you, let's say, 50% more productive or 100% more productive or 500% more productive, then a lot of things that used to not be worth doing are suddenly worth doing or they're just much cheaper.
And so you can get a better return on what you're doing.
Or you might want to do more things internally that you might have outsourced to some other software company or some other outside thing before, or even a contract with another company to do some service for you where you're like, well, now we can do that ourselves for much cheaper.
And so I think this is all also creating the opposite opportunity that for a lot of companies where they said, well, I'm not going to hire another programmer because I'm not going to get enough of a return on my investment.
Now they're saying, well, you know, now I can get five times as much return on that investment.
And so I'm going to hire lots of programmers.
And I also want people who can help me implement AI throughout my business.
So now I need more programmers to be able to do that.
And so I think it is a double-edged sword where tech companies may have a lot of more layoffs coming because, you know, if they already have armies of people and they have lots and lots of expertise, then they can leverage the expertise of their most senior people.
And they might not need all the junior programmers.
I would go back to when I was at a startup and I had one really super programmer that worked for me.
And he understood the whole system and he could do everything.
And if I had five of them, I would have obviously much preferred that.
But there was a lot of the work that I wouldn't give to him, even if he did have time for it, because I knew he would get bored by it.
Like it was like really easy stuff.
He would just be like, oh, this is stupid.
Why do I have to, you know, it takes time to do it, but it's just not stimulating me mentally.
And for other people that I would call average programmers, they were smart people, but they just weren't these exceptional programmers, right?
But that was exactly the right task to give to those people.
And when I look back on what they were doing, if I had AI, AI could have automated almost all of that normal average stuff.
Like it was basically just copy this code, make these changes, you know, add this new feature.
It's really simple.
It's just adding a new button to a form or adding a new document type or whatever it would be.
But it's not like rocket science.
You know, it's not like I need super expertise for that.
I just need somebody to be the hands on the keyboard that will type in all the code.
But now I don't need that anymore.
Like if I was doing it again today, I could probably have done the whole thing with just that one guy.
Right.
And again, just one.
Yes, go ahead, Sergei.
Then we'll just one last thing that I wanted to, you know, we're talking about cognitive dissonance, might get time to it.
This self-assessment that is important to do right now is to look at all your work, right?
You said it, Erica.
We need to look at our work.
And if your work can be done by sitting on a desk in front of a computer, that job is in jeopardy of being lost, right?
And Owen is right.
If you are the one that knows how to do the AI, your job is the last one to go, right?
It's still going to go.
You're still going to, you're going to lose it at some point, but it's going to be one of the last ones, right?
So you always want to be there.
And that's all I wanted to say.
Don't let cognitive dissonance lie to you and start rationalizing, like, oh, no, I'm safe.
That's all I'm saying.
Or author yourself, you guys, right?
So don't let it happen to you.
Author yourself.
All right, let's move on to another story.
So, my, my, I guess my next story, um, if Owen allows, uh, the seven tells for cognitive dissonance from Scott Adams.
I posted a picture in my ex, and it got a lot of uh likes.
Um, and I was excited that everybody was excited about the post.
I, you know, I love everything Scott ever made, uh, so I don't discern which one is which, but listening to Scott talk about the seven tells of cognitive dissonance as the greatest accomplishment of his to civilization makes me think about it more and more.
And there are seven, and we can go over them.
But one of the things that happened yesterday when I posted this is that Owen made a brilliant post using all seven.
Uh, I would have to say, coming from a brilliant mind as Owen, it was very at first I was like, Did he get hacked?
Oh, no, wait, that's what he's doing because he goes, Oh, you fool, or so, or so, or something.
I forget.
I'm sorry, I should uh bring it up, uh, um, or you have it there, Owen.
I'm not sure.
I got it if you want me to go through it first.
Yeah, if you want to read it, yeah, break it down because this is the visual thing, and no one's seeing it.
So, if you could actually, yeah, do you want to put um, let me see, do you want to help me put the uh wait?
Well, I mean, yeah, okay.
So, the seven tells are change if you change the if someone changes the topic or if they make an ad hominem attack, and ad hominem means you're attacking the person rather than the argument.
And basically, when they do that, right, Owen, you already won.
Yeah, well, that's certainly what Scott was saying is that, you know, probably most of these would fall under that category of if they do these things, you can just declare victory and walk away.
But, um, the third one is mind reading.
Um, mind reading is where you imagine that you know what the other person's thinking and you act like you know what's in their head, um, which is really never true.
And you're often very wrong when you think you know what someone else is thinking.
And um, the fourth is word salad, which Scott explained is where you say a bunch of words, but it really doesn't mean anything.
Um, again, that's this is these are all tells of cognitive dissonance.
Like, if you trigger someone at a cognitive dissonance, it typically means you've said something that doesn't agree with their worldview, doesn't agree with what they thought was true, and they really can't accept what you're saying.
So, they go into this thinking mode of like almost like a brain reboot, um, where they do these really irrational things.
But someone who's in cognitive dissonance can't tell that they're in cognitive dissonance, but other people certainly can tell.
Sir, Joe, who comes to mind when you when we say word salad?
Kamala, uh, Kamala, A.
Okay, go on.
Sorry, that's word salad.
And then the next one is using an analogy instead of reason.
Um, so again, it's kind of avoiding actually directly addressing an argument, it's more just trying to use an analogy, like saying, Oh, it's like this.
And really, all analogies are wrong.
You know, there's always something different about them, otherwise, it wouldn't be an analogy.
And it really is an ineffective argument.
It's not persuasive.
And so, it's another tell for when someone's in cognitive dissonance, they'd be like, Well, it's just like this.
It really doesn't make any impact, but people often do it.
And then the sixth one is insisting something's complicated and can't be summarized.
Scott has often talked about the most persuasive arguments are simple.
Trump is probably the poster child here where he can say, build the wall or something very simple and visual that gets right to the point.
I think Scott was certainly huge on this himself.
With Dilbert, he honed the skill of distilling something down to its essence with just a few words every single day because that's what he had to do for his comic.
You know, he has to make a joke, but he has to do it very briefly, very concisely.
And I think it's kind of the essence of humor too, is just getting to the very core of something and saying, here's the essence of it.
That's true, but it's also funny when you can do it.
But when someone says, oh, it's complicated, you know, and it's, it's complicated, Orlando.
There's no way to do it.
And I mean, even scientists, like I think Richard Feynman and others have said, if you can't explain it, then you don't understand it yourself.
Yeah.
And so that's a sign that this makes some kind of business.
Iran And Israel Talks00:03:29
Let's wait.
Number seven.
Well, number seven is the so-tell.
And that's where you start what you're saying.
So you want to be racist?
Yeah.
And it's always a straw man argument.
It's like you're setting, you're using that as a way of framing what the other person said in something as something that they didn't say at all.
We do need a whiteboard, you guys.
I need to.
This is more of like a locals topic.
So I don't want to spend too much time on it because I think we're actually going to do something on locals with this.
It's very hard to do a visual story without visuals, but I love that.
And it's important.
And I'm going to play the clip on locals, you guys, for you of Scott giving this presentation, which obviously will be more effective with his whiteboard.
But I love that.
I love the post.
I just, I replied to Marcelo's post with some sentence.
You want to read your post?
I want you to read your post.
Sure, I can do that.
So I replied with, so you're obviously that moronic fool thinking we should switch to discussing pineapples now, since it's all like comparing apples to quantum entanglement gibberish nonsense, which is way too complicated to ever summarize properly.
So I tried to work in all seven.
And I'm glad you picked up on it, Marcelo.
At first, I was like, did he get act?
Oh, my gosh.
All right.
Let's keep moving because there's some other big news going on in the world today.
And I want everybody to feel a little bit informed as they go out the door.
So do we have anything that they need to know about?
Well, there's, of course, Iran is on the verge of war.
We are on the verge of war with them.
I think the talks have pretty much broken down in Geneva.
And I think that might be the last one.
And there's some speculation that maybe we want Israel to attack Iran first so that then Iran will retaliate.
And then we can say, oh, look, they attacked us or they attacked Israel.
But either way, I don't know that that really matters.
I don't really put a lot of stock into that.
That's like one of those gossip things where they're claiming that's what the U.S. is thinking, but I don't put any stock in that.
I think if Trump wanted to attack, he would just attack.
But definitely all signs are pointing in that direction, as I've been predicting for a while, that the statements you hear coming out of the government are basically saying Iran's very close to having uranium enriched and being able to have nukes again.
And, you know, there are other people saying that's not really true.
And it would take them a long time to get the ICBMs to be able to reach the United States.
I don't even know if that matters because I think we probably would be wanting to defend Israel and people a lot closer to Iran anyway, that they probably already have the capability to strike if they had a nuke.
And certainly if anybody, I think, was asked the question, would we just allow Iran to nuke Israel?
I think even the people who aren't behind our support of Israel would probably still say, no, we can't allow that to happen.
And so, you know, whether or not all that's true, how close they are to having enriched uranium or being able to have nuclear weapons, I don't know.
I don't know that there's, it's possible to know, but that's the narrative that's coming out, which to me is the justification for attacking.
And so I think we're going to see that relatively.
Yeah, we're in a wait and see pattern right now.
There's really not much to add to this right now, but that's what's happening with Iran.
Client-Attorney Privilege00:10:53
And I think Jared Kushner and, oh my God, what's his name?
Witkoff were just in talks and negotiations.
So we have to wait to hear what happens.
But I just want to say, Kev, ETF, I just want to shout out to the NYPD because this really crushed me was that snowball fight by kids, just some kids having a snowball fight in the park.
If you don't know, the NYPD were literally attacked by like a gang of what Mamdani called kids having a snowball fight.
These were like people, these were grown adults pelting them with like snowballs, icy snowballs, whatever.
They caught one guy who, what he had been arrested like three times for other criminal things.
And Alvin Bragg let this guy go, even though he basically attacked and injured one of the many people that injured the NYPD.
And I just want to say, leave, like come across the river to New Jersey.
It's not too far for you and you'll be treated much better.
The NYPD deserves so much respect and they don't have it.
And I'm so sorry to them because they're, they're just the best group of people.
So leave that city.
You are not going to be protected or backed up.
Okay, I know there's another story in there.
The criminal we're talking about is Guzmain Khulibali.
He was charged with assault on the NYPD officers, but it was downgraded to harassment and obstruction.
He has other charges pending.
I think there was what they called a strap hanger shakedown, which I assume means he was robbing people on a subway or a bus or something.
And, you know, these officers were injured, by the way, and they were saying that these snowballs were packed with ice and rocks.
So, you know, it is dangerous.
I mean, this isn't just, you know, hey, let's have some fun.
And, you know, it's not the elf sort of snowball fight.
Yeah.
Or maybe it is if you go to the end of that, where they were just totally pummeling people and, you know, it went way overboard.
But this is dangerous.
It was assault.
I don't know why the DA is doing this.
I mean, I do know why, but it's horrible that they're letting these people off.
And it's just getting bad there.
And I would add another story to that.
Yeah.
But I'm just saying, like, that's just how it starts.
Oh, they, they're literally attacking NYPD.
Like, I don't even know.
There's probably like 75, 100 people there.
And everyone's laughing and recording it and like point blank range, like throwing these like icy snowballs in their faces, right over their heads.
They were like completely outnumbered and trying to stay stoic as best that they could.
And so what's next?
You know, so Alvin Bragg lets that guy get off.
What's next, right?
So go ahead, Alvin.
Well, I mean, I think it's a signal that it's okay to do that.
Yeah.
And that he probably wants more of it.
And the other statistic I would add to that is apparently a third of New Yorkers want to get out of New York.
Yeah.
They're citing things like cost of living and quality of life, but over half the people in the survey that this is based on say that the quality is worsening, that things are getting worse in New York.
So it's well over half the people think that.
Very few people are saying it's getting better.
There's some that say it's the same.
But, you know, there's a lot of people talking about the costs going way up and the quality of life going way down and the taxes going up.
And I think 86% said it's unaffordable for families.
So it's just, you know, very bad sentiment across the board.
And I think up to a third of them are saying they're planning to leave within the next five years.
So might want to get ahead of the curve there to hold on to whatever property value you're selling or whatever it is.
But it does seem like there's going to be more of an exodus coming out of New York.
They're going to go to a Red State.
I see you.
I'm not Bob.
They're going to go to a Red State and they're going to come here with their blue voting, not here, because I'm not in a Red State, but then they're going to go there with like a blue voting track record that they always do.
And I was thinking today all about this about how many people have to leave New York.
They have to, it's, it's unbearable already.
But I'm like, oh, wouldn't it be so great if you could just have some kind of way of saying like, oh, well, you know, I'm not sure if we can sell you this house here.
We need to like look at who you voted for when you left New York because I just, you voted for it.
Like stay there and deal with it.
Try to be a changed maker, but you know, you can't.
Ugh, I can't.
I just can't with these people.
Sorry.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, if we're ready for the next story, I think last story.
Yeah.
There's more coming out about the FBI spying scandal that they were spying on Kash Patel and Susie Wiles.
Apparently it's gotten worse that now they found out that they were actually listening to Susie Wiles' phone calls with her attorney, which I think Marcelo could tell us is a no-no.
Obviously, Susan Wiles knew nothing about this, never consented to it.
And they were recording her phone calls with her attorney.
The lawyer denies that he knew anything about it or ever gave permission for it.
I think that's the story on the other side is that supposedly the lawyer said it was okay to record these phone calls.
But he denies that.
And as a result, I think they've fired 10 FBI agents that were involved with this.
So they're continuing the purge of the FBI for the people who have abused this thing and weaponized the government against Republicans.
But it's, you know, more and more is coming out all the time.
And it seems like it's gotten really bad or it did get really bad.
And my only question with that is like, okay, what have they done against ordinary citizens?
I mean, if they're doing this to people like Kash Patel and Susie Wiles, which I think they were private citizens at the time, but obviously they were high-profile, you know, people that in theory, you would think they might give a little bit more or be a little more careful about.
You know, how many hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of ordinary Americans are having the same abuse done on them?
And we just don't know about it.
Your relationship with your attorney should be sacred.
And they did this to Trump, too, by, you know, going through and making them release all the conversations he had with his attorney.
I just think like, oh my God, the justice system's so broken and just these activist judges and then listening to attorney-client conversations and emails.
I don't know.
How do you have a, Marcella, how do you have confidence?
You know, like, how would I have confidence in this system with all these things being infringed upon?
I mean, do you feel like it's secure?
Well, like Scott would tell you, nothing's secured, even signal and telegram, anything that, you know, our ex chats and all that, you know, the government usually has a back door.
But in regards to the privilege of confidentiality between client and attorney, the attorney, even if the attorney wanted to cooperate with the authorities, let's just say that he or she wanted to do that.
The privilege cannot be broken unless it's the client that breaks it.
So if Susie Weil says, okay, now everybody can understand and hear everything and use it in court as evidence, then she or any other client can say that.
In law school, we're, and even while practicing, the key is always to keep a client's privacy is number one and the privilege that they carry.
However, there's been cases where you're in the courthouse, in the, you know, in the hallway of a courthouse, and you're speaking to your client.
Anybody that's standing next to you basically can hear your conversation.
Yeah.
They can be the post or let's just say me and Erica and I talk to her about my privileged conversation with my attorney.
Erica can be the post.
Just like they deposed Hillary, Hillary and Bill, whatever Hillary.
Now, there is, in regards to that, there is what I call what is called spousal privilege.
Spousal privileges.
The same with your priest or pastor.
There is that privilege between you and them.
But again, it's the person in the client attorney client privilege.
It's the client that needs to break it.
Right.
And so the FBI just bombards its way in and just is like, yeah, we're going to listen and we're going to lie and nothing's going to happen.
But what do they do with it?
They can't use it in court.
You cannot use these statements in court.
But what they do is they bootstrap it to find, investigate you in that way.
Meaning that if they hear something while they're listening to you, they go and look for this.
They look for other ways to bring it in, to bring in the evidence.
Now, if your attorney can can like, if your defense can actually connect the new evidence to the old illegal, you know, wiretap or listening to you, then it can be basically thrown out of court, the whole thing, even the new evidence.
You need to know about the wiretapping and that means the FBI agent would need to disclose that.
I know they're supposed to with Brady and everything, but they, you know, if someone's willing to break the law that way, they're probably also willing to just lie and not tell what they're supposed to to the defense, just like we saw with General Flynn, where they just didn't disclose eons, you know, like just piles of information that would have exonerated him.
They just didn't say any of that.
They did the same thing with all the JSXers.
They just presented a very one-sided case.
They didn't let the defense have all the information.
They wouldn't let them have the videos.
They wouldn't let him, you know, it was just all horrible.
Can I add one thing that Scad will give us as an advice on privacy?
He always said that consider everything you type, everything you talk to, like it's going to be up there in the, you know, in trial, right?
Advice On Privacy00:01:16
It's going to be shown.
So that's it.
You're always considered crazy.
Don't write anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to see.
So it's time, you guys.
It's time.
It goes by so fast, but you know, we'll be back next week too.
But I just also want to say I love this.
Great news.
56 members of the U.S. Coast Guard have been reinstated after they were kicked out of service for refusing the COVID jab under Biden.
They'll also be receiving full back pay.
I just think that there's going to be more of that coming.
And I'm happy for these guys for standing their ground.
So, Owen, do you want to tell us about tomorrow, what you have going on?
Well, tomorrow will be the after party spaces on X.
So if you want to talk about the news, we can talk about some of these stories or other ones from the week.
But I'll be having that at the normal time.
So 7 a.m. Pacific and 10 a.m. Eastern.
Perfect.
So you can see Owen there tomorrow with Sergio and SJV.
I love you guys.
I love you guys.
And we will be back on Monday with a fresh new week.
Be useful, you guys.
Thank you so, so much for being here with us.
And please, a closing sip to Scott, who we love and honor every day.