Episode 1783 Scott Adams: The News Is Weird But So Are We. Come Join Us
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 22 minutes
Words per Minute
146.34619
Summary
The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, can you feel your dopamine and oxytocin starting to spike? It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, where Scott Adams talks about a variety of topics including: CNN's ratings continue to plummet, a gas shortage in Germany, and why no one wants to watch CNN without the hyperbole.
Transcript
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I think it's time for the best thing that ever happened to you.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and if you went someplace else to watch it, you were in the wrong place.
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But those of you who are watching it now, wow, have you chosen correctly.
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And not only that, but it's going to another level.
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Yep, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tanker, Chelsea Stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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Can you feel your dopamine and oxytocin starting to spike?
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Well, I did a little thing last night that I don't know if you've ever done this.
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I'm really good a day or two without enough sleep.
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But how many emergencies can one person have after midnight?
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You know, never big ones, but there's always something that you have to get up for at midnight.
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There's always a lost dog or a smell or a leak or some damn thing.
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Yes, I did have another water leak problem, but that's another story.
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Do you know why their ratings continue to plunge?
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Because their new boss is trying to make them report real news without the sensationalism.
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You know, everybody's so smart, and they say, you know, why can't the news give us just the straight news like it did in the 60s?
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So CNN is embarking in an experiment to destroy their own business, apparently, in which they're going to try to be less sensational.
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If you had a choice between sensational news and less sensational news, meaning that the hyperbole would be added or not, which one would you watch?
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You say you'd watch the one without the hyperbole.
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If I did a survey, I bet a lot of people would say, you know, I don't need all that opinion and all that exaggeration and bigotry and one side is right and one side is wrong.
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But if you were given two choices, you would take that, as long as it was on your side.
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Who in the world wants to see neutral things when they can see victory?
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If you turn on Fox News, it is going to be one story after another telling you that you were right all along, meaning you as a Fox News regular viewer.
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When you warned that if this happens, bad things will happen, well, here it is.
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If you could watch news that's just, somebody did something, we don't know what it means, or we totally know what it means and it proves how smart you are.
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I'm going to watch the one that says I'm smart.
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All right, here's the perpetual news news, you know, the news that never changes every day.
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As Andres Beckhaus, I think I saw a tweet, in which he pointed out, the news is that this wasn't already news.
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Germany is getting more aggressive about preparing the public for upcoming gas shortages.
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Well, they're not upcoming, they're already there.
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Now, Russia says they had to reduce the amount of gas, not to punish Germany, but rather because they couldn't get equipment from the West that was needed to keep their facilities working.
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Do you think it's true that the one and only reason Putin cut gas production is to put pressure on the economies so that they would give him what he wants?
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Or do you think that he didn't have spare parts because that was exactly our strategy to deny him spare parts?
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Not yours, but, you know, so the United States says we're going to sanction Russia and they won't be able to get, you know,
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any modern spare parts, so there are industries that require Western technology will eventually crumble.
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And then it works and they can't get spare parts and so they can't deliver gas so Germany doesn't have enough gas.
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If we were preventing Russia from getting this replacement equipment and there was no exception for the energy industry, as far as I know,
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weren't we making sure that Germany had a shortage this year?
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If you were Putin, which would you prefer doing?
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Either reducing the gas to Germany and making them replace your sources maybe forever or selling as much gas to Germany as you possibly can,
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making as much profit as you can to keep the Russian economy as strong as you can.
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Which one of those would have been a better strategy?
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Because they're both sort of, you know, longer-term war strategy.
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You know, one says put a little pressure on the enemy and, you know, that'll be one part of the larger picture of why they fold.
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You know, maybe the pressure on Germany's public will make them fold.
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But it's also possible that having Russia make more money by selling more gas could be a good thing too.
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We've completely lost the ability to know that if something happens, whatever the something is,
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I just saw a Mike Cernovich tweet just before I came on.
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that if you think you know what's going to happen with real estate prices,
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And anybody who's sure they know what's going to happen with real estate prices.
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Because one of the things he points out is that, sure, you know, interest rates are going up,
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so mortgages are more expensive, so it's harder to buy a house.
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So if it's harder to buy a house, the prices of houses might go down.
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But as Mike points out, rents are probably going up
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because there are more people than places to live.
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I think that's the only reason rent goes up, right?
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There are more people than there are places to live.
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So as long as that's the case, people are either going to have to pay more for rent or more for a house.
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So you're always going to have all these, you know, counterbalancing forces.
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Nobody's really smart enough to know how any of this turns out.
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Do you remember when we were so smart that we had learned from the Carter administration
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what variables have to be in place to cause something called stagflation?
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So it's, you know, inflation at the same time you have low growth,
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And we thought, okay, now we've seen this situation.
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We know that when these variables are in place, you'll get that worst situation.
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And then the variables fell into place again, and then nothing like that happened.
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Because it turns out we're really bad at predicting the future.
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We think we know, okay, these variables produce this outcome.
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So what is pretty much every economist saying is going to happen next year?
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Is there any economist, even one, in public, who is saying,
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you know, I think we're not going to have a recession?
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Have you seen any professional economist say that next year,
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So I'm going to do, I guess this would be a public demonstration.
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I'm going to predict the opposite of what every smart person is predicting.
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So every smart person, and I admit they're smart, right?
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This is, I'm not, I'm not mocking them with sarcasm.
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They're people who have, you know, PhDs in economics, done it all their life.
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Well, why would I predict the opposite of every smart person?
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Because I didn't tweet it, nobody will ever remember.
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But if I'm right, I'll take this, you know, this clip and pass it around and say,
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So on a risk-reward basis, it makes sense for me to make this prediction.
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you predicted the opposite of every smart thing in the world,
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every smart person in the world, and he was wrong.
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It's probably something we missed about that story.
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If I get it right, you're never going to hear the end of it.
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Something like, I don't know, 20 years ago or something,
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I made a prediction that evolution would be debunked in scientific terms in my lifetime.
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Oh, and I also specified that it would not be debunked in religious terms,
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that it would be debunked within the realm of, you know, science and logic.
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If I'd been wrong, I would have just said, well, it hasn't happened yet, but it will.
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Yeah, well, it hasn't happened yet, but any moment now.
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Then, in my opinion, evolution has been completely debunked by the simulation theory.
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Now, I'm not saying the simulation theory is definitely the right one,
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but if you do the math and the logic, it is maybe a trillion times more likely than evolution.
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But one is, you know, a trillion times more likely.
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I could go through the math, but you've heard that too many times.
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So that's the weirdest, probably the weirdest, dumbest prediction anybody ever made,
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Because if we're a simulation, the past is only created when you need it.
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So, meaning that if we're a simulation, there's nothing below the ground until you see it.
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So if you dug a hole, the stuff that you were digging into would only start to exist as you got near it.
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It wouldn't exist until you were digging the hole and you were uncovering something nobody had seen before.
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So there's no evolution because there's no history.
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Because if I don't give you a why, then it's even sketchier.
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The why is there are too many variables and that we communicate too well these days.
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Meaning that whenever there's a problem, the Internet tells you there's a problem,
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and then people jump on it because problems need to be solved.
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And the problem solvers and the problems are connected almost immediately.
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And so, I'm going to say that because we communicate better than we've ever communicated before,
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that we will avoid a recession in the United States.
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And I'm going to take credit if we only have a slight recession.
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If it's maybe a technical recession, but it's just like we just touch it and then come out of it?
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And it's based on the fact that we can recover and adjust faster than we've ever done before.
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Now, if I'm wrong, I'll ask you to forget I ever said this as quickly as possible
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I can't remember the last time I was embarrassed.
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I can't even remember the last time I was embarrassed.
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If you can learn to be free of embarrassment, which somehow I've managed to do.
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I mean, it took me decades to get to this point.
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How many times do you say to yourself, oh, if I do this, I'm going to look stupid or somebody will mock me or, you know, forever there'll be that photograph or whatever?
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I go through my entire day never thinking about that.
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Well, here's a small story that might be a big story.
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I've often said that although our billionaire class is often maligned, what would we do without them?
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Sure, there are billionaires doing things you don't like.
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But what about the ones who are doing things you like?
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Mark Cuban has this online pharmacy, a startup.
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But they're selling them for, I don't know how, but they're selling them for way, way, way, way less than you normally could get them.
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I'm not sure exactly what method he's using to lower the cost.
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Now, they don't have all the drugs that you could have.
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They're starting with a set of popular ones, I guess.
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But he was responding today to a tweet from somebody who said that it saved his life because he could afford his anti...
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But he tweeted that basically the cost of some anti-spasm or something drug...
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But anyway, he basically said it saved his life.
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So Mark Cuban starts a company that, at least this gentleman said, saved his life.
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Now, who was going to do it if Mark Cuban didn't do it, right?
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But I really think that we underestimate how much impact the billionaire class is having on our well-being.
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You know, you just get mad because they've got their billions of dollars.
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Now, I'm going to give you one more defense for the billionaires.
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Billionaires don't spend much of their own money.
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Like, how much does Elon Musk consume personally just to, you know, get by?
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Probably spends a lot traveling because he's got businesses.
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I don't know that Elon Musk even spends much money on himself
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because, you know, his health care is the same as everybody else's.
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Maybe there's one in the company name and he drives it or something.
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But if you think about how much a billionaire consumes of their own money,
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It's a venishly small money amount that they use on themselves.
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I look at all the money I've ever made in my life.
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And then I say, what percentage of all the money I've made am I going to spend personally?
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I've never calculated it, but just off the top of my head, I think maybe 5%, something like that.
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The rest would go to family members, you know, donations, trying to invest in companies that work or don't work.
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But basically it's being put to use, right, for other people.
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So basically a billionaire has made a billion dollars for you.
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I mean, you think of it the way things are organized.
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But the billionaire who makes a billion dollars is not making it to spend it.
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You don't make a billion dollars to spend a billion dollars.
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So when I see stuff like this, like Mark Cuban literally saving some guy's life, probably lots of people,
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by having lower-cost pharmaceuticals, one of the biggest problems in the country.
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And so he goes right after it and he solves it.
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Now, do you think that he would have gone into this business if he were not already a billionaire?
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So maybe he would have if he had been, you know, if he had to borrow money to do it.
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But this has the feeling of something that only a billionaire would do.
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Because I feel like somebody would have done it already if you could do it without being a billionaire.
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Because it must be a high enough risk that you'd have to be a billionaire to even bother taking a run at this.
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I don't know how stupid the news business thinks the public is, but I think it's reached a new level in lack of appreciation for the public mind.
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Having a low opinion of the public's ability to think is not wrong.
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And there's no better example than this story that says that, I think this was in CNN probably,
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that privately Rupert Murdoch, quote, knew Trump lost the election.
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But because Rupert Murdoch apparently allowed or encouraged, it's not clear, Fox News to talk about the election in an opinion way,
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there's some thought that there's some kind of smoking gun here that Rupert Murdoch was pushing lies.
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How could Rupert Murdoch or Fox News opinion people push a lie about the election when it's unaudited?
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How could you call it a lie when you simply don't know?
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They're selling to the public that if an election doesn't have an obvious problem that the courts have verified is a real problem,
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then you can conclude that the election was completely fair without knowing anything about it.
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Because, you know, if you didn't know this, we don't have a way to audit elections.
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You can audit elements of the election, like certain things.
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But you don't know what happens when your digits get into the computer systems.
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So if you don't know what the software is doing,
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it doesn't really help you to count the pieces of paper.
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And if you can't audit the data after the pieces of paper have turned into data,
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So, you see, major stories by serious people who will tell you that Rupert Murdoch privately knew Trump lost the election.
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Because, at the time of the election, there were no audits that had been completed.
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And there are still no audits that have been completed.
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You can audit elements of an election, but not the entire thing.
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So, and this is sold to us like legitimate news.
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Can you imagine somebody saying that if we have no way to know if something is true or false,
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and therefore the people who said maybe it's false, just maybe, maybe it's false,
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that those people are definitely wrong and should be condemned.
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The assholes in this story are the ones who are sure.
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If you can tell me, if you can look me in the face and say,
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Like, I don't even want to be in the same room with you.
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Like, nothing good could come from this conversation.
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in a way that's big enough that it changed the outcome,
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I wish this system were improved so that we could know for sure,
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like there could be a certainty in either direction
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So I tweeted that, just so I don't get canceled,
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I publicly declared that I know the unknowable,
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Did you notice anything weird about the stories,
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normally, let's say there are 25 stories in the news.
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Because normally what I expect would be all 25 stories
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And today, I think there had to be at least five or six out of 25
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Is there a reason to leave it out of those stories?
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There's one of Elon Musk's children who's trans.
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from climate change to space to everything else.
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I don't see any trans element of the Ukraine war.
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started out to be, like, it's all the headlines.
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but the plucky Ukrainians are holding out strong.
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But there's nothing about trans in that whole story.
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Looks like Russia's going to take a run for it.
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Imagine if there had been only one city in Ukraine
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where a lot of people in the trans community went to live.
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Well, this would be a different war, wouldn't it?