In this episode of the highlight of civilization, we discuss the Tesla robot that's coming soon, the Canadian government's plan to allow doctor-assisted suicide in the country, and why it's a good or bad thing that people with mental health problems can legally kill themselves.
00:05:31.800And it's not up to me to tell them what they can and cannot do with their own body.
00:05:35.880So I'm leaning toward it as long as they're really careful about not sliding into eugenics, obviously.
00:05:42.920I saw Jordan Peterson suggest that Twitter should have effectively two parts.
00:05:53.720One where you're seeing the comments and you can interact with the people who are verified, or at least their identity is known to Twitter.
00:06:01.580And then a second part of Twitter that you could call, like, Twitter hell, where it's all the unverified bots and trolls and, you know, all the sadists and stuff.
00:06:13.980And you could go there if you want, or you could avoid them easily.
00:06:18.440And I thought to myself, well, I'm not sure you could, you know, cleanly create those two groups, but suppose you could.
00:06:24.420If I had the option of only people who have used their real identity being sorted to the top of my comments, that's all I need.
00:06:35.200I just want the real people to be at the top.
00:06:38.580And then as I read down the list, I'll get to Twitter hell.
00:06:42.280You know, it might be 20 comments down.
00:06:44.220And then I'll just stop reading, because I don't want to go to Twitter hell.
00:07:12.980I think the traits were something like, you know, the people who use the most hours on Instagram were narcissists.
00:07:20.140And narcissists and sadists and sociopaths and stuff like that.
00:07:25.860And so the thinking is that the average person on social media, the average person who uses it a lot, right?
00:07:32.940The more you use it, the more likely it's signaling a personality or a character defect that's pretty deep.
00:07:40.560So I'm saying the first comment here, shocking.
00:07:42.960Have you ever noticed how many times Jordan Peterson says something that your first reaction is, my God, that is academically and scientifically interesting and new information.
00:07:54.480And then you think about it for like a minute and you go, oh, wait, I think we already knew that.
00:08:29.320But if you agree that, let's say, Trump and DeSantis might have similar Republican politics,
00:08:36.860would you prefer the one who does not raise the temperature to the point where the temperature itself becomes a problem independent of the politics?
00:08:46.820You know, it's a tough one because the reason that Trump raises the temperature is because that's what the Democrats do to him.
00:08:55.000So should Republicans be denied the president of their choice because he is more susceptible to the other side's dirty tricks?
00:09:08.100Yeah, you have to make a practical decision.
00:09:11.180Do you want to be a moral and ethical loser or, you know, the opposite?
00:09:16.960Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but would you say, let's say you imagine the subset of prior Trump supporters who were also in the public eye, right?
00:09:36.700So if I were to narrow the conversation to just people in the public eye, people like me, you know, like prominent pundits,
00:09:45.240what percentage of the people who were Trump supporters and are prominent pundits, what percentage are still backing him as of today?
00:15:36.120And I guess it was based on some rumor in the Daily Beast that completely quoted her out of context and made it look like she was insulting Trump when literally she didn't say it.
00:15:48.340And by the way, if Candace says, and she did, I didn't say those things, and the Daily Beast says you said those things, you don't have to wonder who to believe, do you?
00:18:27.200It didn't take long for somebody to find some smart people who know the crypto world, and they had some video podcast where the two smart people are saying, I don't understand this whole FTX thing.
00:18:40.540Like, there's no way he could be producing as much cash to use outside of the exchange with what the exchange is doing.
00:18:48.800Basically, people who understood it looked at it and said, this doesn't make sense.
00:18:54.340This couldn't possibly, the math doesn't work.
00:18:57.200And sure enough, we don't know the exact story of what was going on, but the math didn't work.
00:20:49.320So, BlackRock, the people behind what I would consider a scam, which is all the ESG stuff.
00:20:57.800Now, it's a fairly transparent scam in the sense that I don't think BlackRock is hiding anything.
00:21:04.440But, you know, everything looks legal.
00:21:06.400But, convincing people that, you know, these little environmentally friendly companies that have been raided by somebody are positive, it's kind of scammy looking.
00:21:50.300Now, it makes sense that they would have a high score, because if you were a digital company, and their problem, they weren't, I don't think they were heavy on server farms or anything like that, right?
00:22:04.720So, they weren't burning up a lot of electricity.
00:22:07.740So, you know, according to the ESG rules, that would be a good ESG investment.
00:22:12.880Not a good investment, but it would be strong on ESG.
00:22:16.640Anyway, you see BlackRock as an investor, that should be a red flag.
00:22:20.300There's an ex-BlackRock executive type who's writing in, I think it's in the Wall Street Journal, Terrence Keeley.
00:28:25.640So that's the way it would normally work.
00:28:27.820But that process doesn't work because the major pundits, as soon as a billionaire who backs them finds out what they're saying, they're going to stop saying it.
00:28:45.520I think Musk can make Twitter insanely profitable with just two things.
00:28:51.260One, and he plans to do at least one of these, probably both.
00:28:54.120One, adding payment options so I can directly pay through Twitter, you know, some kind of digital payment system.
00:29:04.780I want to pay through Twitter for anything advertised on Twitter.
00:29:08.420I mean, you do that and you serve me up advertisements of things I want, I'll give Twitter all kinds of money because I'm going to be buying that same stuff anyway.
00:29:19.540Might as well give them a little cut of the, you know, the transaction.
00:29:22.340The second thing, and Musk asked about this, which is bringing back Vines.
00:29:28.080Now, Vines was the short video thing that Twitter had.
00:29:31.440And I don't know if it wasn't technically up to what it needed to be, but it didn't succeed.
00:29:37.080But at this point, we know for sure that the most viral social media is video.
00:30:02.780Imagine just hitting one button and suddenly instead of seeing things that are in your feed, you see all the short videos and they're ranked by popularity.
00:30:13.520I'm already hooked, totally hooked on the Instagram videos.
00:30:36.600Might be able to just have a better product and make it go away on its own.
00:30:40.080But it would be hard to get kids to think that TikTok wasn't cool anymore and to get a kid to think that Twitter, which seems like your grandfather's service, it seems like an older male sort of thing.
00:30:55.740It'd be hard to get teens to go onto that platform.
00:30:59.120But not impossible if the product is better.
00:34:07.720So every time you see an article about the data security part of TikTok, I don't know what's intentional, but it is taking you away from the real problem.
00:34:17.320It's taking your mind in the wrong direction to something small, when in fact, it's really big.
00:34:31.600Well, it's not the most practical idea, but would it be hilarious if all of the American dads, mostly dads, decided to kill TikTok by making it uncool?
00:34:58.960Like, we all just sign up and make dance videos?
00:38:19.400Because the Democrats prefer the ballot method, which in some cases is not necessary, but in some cases they like to give a little cushion for counting it.
00:38:34.200So their system is actually just designed to make sure that they have time to verify all of the ballots coming in.
00:38:39.860So it would make sense that where Democrats like ballots, ballots take longer, and they don't have to take longer.
00:41:41.480So if you were an engineer and you designed a system that by its design would give you a days-long wait for the outcome in a key election battleground,
00:41:54.820if you designed it so that you knew, by design, that it would take days to count it properly,