Episode 2511 CWSA 06⧸20⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 19 minutes
Words per Minute
153.31697
Summary
In this episode, Scott Adams talks about a bizarre college basketball game featuring a 7'9" freshman and a 5'8" freshman, and tries to figure out if that's a good or bad thing. He also talks about some new research showing that acts of kindness can predict 7 different types of well-being.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I'm pretty sure there's never been a finer time
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And if you'd like to take this up to levels that nobody can understand with their tiny,
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smooth human brains, all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tankard shells or stein,
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a kentine jug or flask of a vessel of any kind.
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Hey, and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
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It's the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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It's called the simultaneous sipping happens now.
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Well, you might be aware that there was yet another whistleblower that came forward for
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Boeing, with more complaints about cutting corners to increase profits and retaliating
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against employees who spoke up and that sort of thing.
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And if you're wondering, Scott, how could you watch these events in the news about Boeing
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without creating a biting and sarcastic comic strip about it?
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So, in fact, Dilbert's company will be making airplanes and it's not going to go well.
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But you'd have to be subscribing to the new Dilbert comic either on the X platform, see
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my profile or on Locals at scottadams.locals.com in order to see it.
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Well, there's an incoming Florida freshman, he's a freshman in college basketball, who looks
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to be about 7'9", Olivier Roux, and he can basically dunk by standing on his tiptoes.
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So, I saw a clip of the game, and if you'd like to see my impression of the entire basketball
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Tall guy stands under his basket, teammates throw him the ball, he catches it two feet
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above the highest leaping ability of his competitors, and then he turns around and he drops it directly
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Now, I remember when sports would include at least a little element of, I wonder who's
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But he seems to have removed the whole, I wonder who's going to win element from the game.
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Now, I know your brain is automatically thinking of trans-related stories, because it's sort of
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just reminding you in a weird way of mismatches.
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The males who are playing against the 7'9 monster, it's like they're a different species.
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Why is it okay for a 5'8 player to play against a 7'9 player in a basketball game, where being
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If you want to impress me with your basketball, show me the people under six feet playing their
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own league and the people over six feet having their own league, you know, called the NBA.
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But don't put a 7'9 person on a college basketball court with a bunch of 6'2 people and tell me
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That's just watching that guy ruin the entire evening for an entire gymnasium full of people.
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This is part that reminds you of some of the trans-athletes where the man who's transitioned
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Imagine an entire stadium, or not a stadium, but, you know, the entire gym is full of spectators
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And all it is is tossing it to this big guy who puts it in a hole.
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There's some new psychology research that shows that acts of kindness can predict seven
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Did you know that being good to each other can make you feel good, too?
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I only tell you about this every, I don't know, every few weeks I mention it.
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So, I think this has been known for about 10 years, but we've got some new research to tell
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Being nice to people and being kind makes you feel good, too.
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And if you eat a lot of nuts, apparently you not only don't lose weight, but they're good
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That's a new study that also was an old study, because I literally wrote about it in my book
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Had it failed almost everything and still went big.
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We knew then that eating peanuts caused you to lose weight.
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So, it's another study that, well, is sort of a duh.
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And the nutrition that we learned about 15 years ago, still true, at least for nuts.
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And this will amaze you, but one hour a week of aerobics, this is another study, can make
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Another study that says your diet might be associated with changes in your brain chemistry
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You know, if you put all of this brand new science together, I'm starting to see a pattern
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It's almost as if eating right and exercising could be good for your health.
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I mean, you know, I'm not putting all the pieces together until just now with all this
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brand new science that's so useful, but it turns out, and this is amazing, the things
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you put into your body, the food, can actually have an effect on your body.
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And did you know that your brain is actually part of your body?
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And if you put things that are bad for your body into your body, and then your brain is
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part of your body, I don't know, I'm trying to figure it out.
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So, okay, I think the logic means it'd be bad for your brain.
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So how about we pay for some more science to teach us some shit every one of you already
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I'm glad we have the experts to tell us this stuff.
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Meanwhile, there was going to be a London premiere of a movie that was totally AI generated
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script, so I guess the actors were not AI, but the script was, and it got canceled because
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there were hundreds of people complaining, how can you have a robot write a play when
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So the anti-AI people have risen, and you'd be surprised to find out that they're artists
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They don't have a lot of skill that can be translated to other domains, apparently, and
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But the creator of the movie tried to complain, to no avail, that the point of the movie was
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not pro-AI, but the point of it might be to show that it doesn't work.
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So people were complaining and protesting, even though they were on the same side of the
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person they complained and protested about, I think.
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So the person who came up with the idea here and executed the movie says, basically, you're
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The point of it might have been their point, which is, watch out, this is coming.
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Here's more proof that being a Democrat can make you mentally insane.
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Does that sound like an exaggeration, that being a Democrat can make you insane?
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Well, because apparently more than half of adults, 53%, according to some news poll in
00:09:08.620
the American Psychiatric Association's Healthy Minds monthly poll, which sounds very unscientific.
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But more than half of adults report that climate change is affecting their mental health.
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And that's up from 2022, where it was only 48%.
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So who is it that believes climate change is going to kill them?
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I've literally never met a Republican who thought climate change was a big problem.
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The Republicans who are like, no, no, no, no, no.
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You know, I'm not taking any side about whether the climate is warming or not, or who's causing
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I'm just pointing out that if you're a Democrat, you hear that your planet is burning up and
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there's really basically nothing you can do about it.
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It is literally true that being a Democrat and buying into a certain set of narratives
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It's the same group that think Trump is going to steal their democracy.
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If I thought I lived in a country where the presumptive next president, if, you know, if there's no
00:10:26.800
cheating, wanted to be a dictator, I think my mental health would be going to hell too.
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So being a Democrat is literally, no joke, no hyperbole, really bad for your mental health.
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And if I make a claim like that, can I back it up with statistics?
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Because the statistics do in fact show a real strong correlation between Democrats and mental
00:11:04.080
So the fake news is great in narratives to frighten their people into doing what they
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But the side effect of frightening people into doing that stuff is that it frightens them.
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And there does seem to be a difference because the Republicans are also getting frightened by
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things, you know, frightened by crime coming into the country and things.
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It looks like you can do something about that problem.
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But the Democrats are telling you, basically, there's nothing you can do about climate change.
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That's really different than a problem you think you can solve if you just work hard.
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You know, you don't go crazy if you think you have a solvable problem.
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I believe there is a trend that can be seen in a number of ways, which is the smartest
00:12:04.820
people waking up to how brainwashed they've been if they've been Democrats.
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Now, you've seen famously the Silicon Valley types moving in the direction of Trump.
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You know, the all-in pod people, the Bill Lachman's, Elon Musk, you could throw in that mix, and
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a bunch of other venture capitalists, et cetera.
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Mark and Andreessen, I think, is moving in that direction.
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And they're, in my opinion, the least brainwashed, best predictors of the future.
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If you're an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist, it's literally your job to say, if I do this,
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And the people who are best at predicting outcomes, the most successful venture capitalists for
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decades, are kind of all starting to move to the same side.
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Now, I saw a study that if you look at the funding, the funding hasn't changed.
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The Democrats still get 95% of the money from Silicon Valley.
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But I would submit to you that the smartest people in Silicon Valley do not put themselves
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If they supported Trump, they would certainly be too smart to put themselves on a list of
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people who donated to Trump, because that's not good for business.
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I would believe the reputations of which people specifically are moving toward Trump.
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You may be familiar with comedian actor Michael Ian Black.
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Now, he's often on social media being an anti-Trumper.
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But he asked me a question today on social media that suggests an opening that suggests maybe
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there's a potential, just a small crack, for some kind of a unbrainwashing.
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Now, I don't personally know Michael Ian Black, but just for full disclosure, he had been friends
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So although I never met him, Michael Ian Black and I have, we shared a close friend at one point.
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So that means that he probably is aware of me because we shared a close friend.
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So when he responded to me, it was maybe a little bit more respectfully than he would have been if I'd been a stranger.
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So I responded to him respectfully because I think he's got real questions.
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It's actually really, it's a really good question.
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I did a post in which I said something along the lines of,
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it's impossible to have a conversation with somebody who thinks the news is real.
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Now, how many of you would agree with that statement?
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It's impossible to have a political conversation with someone who thinks the news is real.
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And Michael Ian Black says, I see this sentiment a lot from MAGA folks.
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So his first problem is he thinks I'm a MAGA folk.
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He didn't say, I hear this batshit crazy opinion from MAGA people.
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Now, that's exactly the way to respectfully ask a question.
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If they don't believe, quote, the news, how do they get their information?
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If everybody is lying to you, how is it that you know the truth?
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So I'm going to spend a few minutes answering it.
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So I answered, you know, on the X platform, I answered in detail.
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But I'll tell you the answer and we'll add a little bit more.
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Knowing what's true is not a function of watching the news and then saying, oh, I watched the right news.
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It's a skill of knowing what bullshit looks like.
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And I would submit to you that knowing what bullshit is and recognizing it is a developable skill.
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It's something you could be bad at and then learn to be good at.
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So I contend that I don't learn what's true by picking one of the news to be the right one.
00:17:00.580
But rather, I have a toolbox which allows me to look at the news and pick out from it what is true in terms of the facts and what is untrue in terms of the narrative.
00:17:12.000
So I tend to accept facts if they're presented by both sides.
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So both sides say, this person did say this thing and there's no video editing.
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But if both sides say the fact is there and there's video and there's witnesses, I believe that.
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So that's not the kind of thing that I don't believe.
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If the news says there's going to be a hurricane, probably true.
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It's only the political stuff that has the spin to it.
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As to why I think I know what's true in many cases.
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As I said, the skill is in detecting what's not true.
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It's not so much knowing which side is telling you the truth.
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So I'm going to read to you what I said to him.
00:18:13.320
Because it shows that I'm not a team branded person.
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But at least I had, you know, the minimal amount of, let's say, awareness of my own bias that I knew it was a good thing to brand myself the other way.
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So that I'd have a little bit more credibility.
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The news told you that Trump called neo-Nazis fine people.
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I watched the whole video and could see he condemned them.
00:19:07.420
And you can see that they lied about what was there.
00:19:10.040
Now, when I said this, a whole bunch of people weighed in.
00:19:15.660
He said there were fine people with them, marching with them.
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He said the people who were with them and marching were fine people.
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And there were townies there who just said, oh, I like statues.
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They just liked the historical nature of the statues.
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And then somebody said, but Scott, did you see the flyer?
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The flyer is clearly a racist flyer, the flyer for the event.
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How do you explain that anybody saw that flyer and went there and was not pro-Nazi?
00:20:02.960
To which I say, I interviewed somebody who was Jewish, who saw the flyer and went.
00:20:16.900
And he said, I didn't recognize any of the names of the speakers, which is actually very
00:20:22.880
I recognize them because, you know, I'm kind of deep in the weeds, but they're not household
00:20:34.400
But most people in America have never heard his name.
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You know, 95% of the country wouldn't know who he was.
00:20:44.720
The imagery was definitely evocative of some Nazi stuff.
00:20:52.100
I recognized it just because, again, I'm in the weeds and I watch certain stuff.
00:20:58.840
But I do legitimately think you could look at it and say, oh, it's just right wing stuff.
00:21:04.260
You wouldn't recognize it as having some, you know, some kind of historical connection
00:21:09.620
So, yes, it was very easy that or more generally, let's say this, if you get a whole bunch of
00:21:17.000
Americans to attend anything for any reason, you'll have every opinion there, right?
00:21:23.920
If you get a whole bunch of Americans to attend any publicized event, there will be every viewpoint
00:21:31.340
there because there are lots of people and we all have slightly different viewpoints.
00:21:34.560
So to imagine that everybody there had one viewpoint would be dumb beyond belief.
00:21:45.540
So you don't have to be an expert on the news to know that that was a lie.
00:21:53.460
You just have to watch it and watch the full video.
00:21:56.740
The news says Republicans stage insurrections without guns.
00:22:00.920
I don't need to watch the news to know that Republicans don't do insurrections without
00:22:06.620
I don't have to watch the news to know that stealing a lectern is not part of your insurrection.
00:22:12.680
I don't have to watch the news to know, although I heard this in the news, that if Don Jr.
00:22:18.480
was not aware of the January 6th being a planned insurrection and was not in favor of it because
00:22:25.600
It wasn't an insurrection if the president didn't tell his son and closest advisor.
00:22:33.760
You know, there are a hundred ways to know that wasn't an insurrection, starting with
00:22:37.840
Republicans don't leave their guns home if they're trying to conquer a country.
00:22:45.100
In the unlikely event the Republicans ever stage an actual insurrection, you wouldn't be
00:22:51.460
asking the question about whether it was an insurrection.
00:22:57.380
And the fact that there's any doubt at all should be all you need to know.
00:23:01.900
So your bullshit detector should be able to catch all of those.
00:23:05.440
The news told us that we should know that elections were fair.
00:23:10.120
The only thing we know is that we didn't discover enough of problems in a legally approved way.
00:23:16.660
You know, in other words, the legal system didn't validate any concerns.
00:23:25.220
The only thing we know is that we didn't find anything that the court said was real.
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For news that has one anonymous source that says something bad about Trump, that no human
00:24:39.660
including Trump would ever say, those are obvious lies.
00:24:42.920
You don't need to be like a news expert to know that if it's one source during an election
00:24:48.720
year that says Trump said something that literally nobody would say, including Trump, yeah, that's
00:24:57.200
If you didn't know that, you might think that was the news.
00:25:01.880
But once you know that it's the most ordinary thing that they do this one source made up something
00:25:06.780
that nobody would ever say, like calling the military losers, the moment you heard that,
00:25:14.500
you should have known that literally nobody would say that, including Trump as president.
00:25:25.880
He would make fun of a powerful person that he's running against, or that's a critic.
00:25:36.240
He's not going to make fun of people in the military.
00:25:38.380
That's literally the opposite of who he is, and always has been.
00:25:41.700
So to imagine that that was true, that's a problem in discerning bullshit.
00:25:54.700
How about the story that Trump tried to choke out the driver of his own car on January 6th?
00:26:00.780
He didn't really need to be a news expert to know that didn't happen.
00:26:07.580
And sure enough, the driver himself says it didn't happen.
00:26:17.420
Everybody who understands models with lots of variables knows they're not real.
00:26:30.600
I know how that scam works, where you replace the ones that don't work, and you keep updating
00:26:34.960
them, so that you can always say, well, these all would have worked in the past.
00:26:42.800
It's not actually any prediction going on at all.
00:26:45.760
Now, you would only know that if you had a specific skill set and experience.
00:26:50.300
Other people would say, hmm, looks like these models are telling me the future, you know,
00:26:57.700
So that's not a case of, you know, trusting Fox News over CNN.
00:27:02.560
It's just obvious to people who have that experience.
00:27:06.240
The news is telling you that Biden is cognitively fine.
00:27:13.880
How much of a news expert do I need to be to know that he's not cognitively fine?
00:27:23.540
How about the news tells you that the government has UFOs in a warehouse?
00:27:27.200
Now, some of you might believe that the government has UFOs in the warehouse.
00:27:31.840
I'm here to tell you the government doesn't have any UFOs in a warehouse.
00:27:37.060
It's really, really obvious if you're good at spotting bullshit.
00:27:49.700
How long did it take you from the beginning of the hoax to know that that wasn't true?
00:27:56.240
I mean, the news couldn't tell you if it was true or not, because there was an allegation
00:27:59.800
for a long time without the results of an investigation.
00:28:08.560
I knew, you knew, and sure enough, it was made up.
00:28:13.980
And I said, I could do that test on all of the news.
00:28:17.160
You could pick any topic, and I can tell you how the bullshit could be easily spotted.
00:28:22.560
Now, that still does require that you're watching the news, but you're watching both sides.
00:28:28.520
And another trick I tell you all the time is if both sides report a fact the same, it's
00:28:36.600
If one side said it happened and the other side says it didn't, far, far less likely to
00:28:45.400
So there are a lot of rules of thumbs, and there are a lot of, you know, tools in the
00:28:52.600
But more generally, well, let me give you another example from the news.
00:29:01.600
So the Biden campaign has a cheap fake task force.
00:29:06.260
So they've created a task force to try to convince you that the things you see with your
00:29:11.080
own eyes are not happening because they're slightly edited videos.
00:29:18.500
Yeah, the one in Normandy kind of cuts off the fact that he was interacting with some people
00:29:23.940
But you still see Biden being Biden, which is bad enough no matter what he's doing at the
00:29:29.080
So they created this cheap fake task force to gaslight the public into thinking that what
00:29:36.840
you see is not what you see, because in some cases, it's actually not what you see.
00:29:43.000
So because 5% of the time there's something like off screen that might be misleading, that
00:29:48.940
the other 95% of the time that you could clearly see he's fried, that that's not happening either.
00:29:54.300
Now, how much of an expert in in health do I need to be to know that the cheap fake task
00:30:01.760
force is for diversion purposes and is not telling you the truth?
00:30:05.940
It doesn't take a whole lot of skill to spot that one.
00:30:15.080
I was talking to the man cave audience last night that it's probably not a it's probably
00:30:21.100
not a coincidence that I've predicted things better than other public figures.
00:30:26.700
Now, I'm going to make this claim and then back it up.
00:30:31.820
But it's necessary for me to say that I'm better at predicting than most people in the
00:30:44.140
So if you have some examples of things I got wrong, you're probably right.
00:30:49.040
But I have by far maybe the best public prediction record of any public figure who does predictions.
00:30:57.060
So here's why I realized there's actually a reason for it that for some reason was never
00:31:05.820
And if you didn't know, economics is a forecasting skill.
00:31:10.740
The whole point of learning economics is not to understand what happened yesterday, although
00:31:19.040
You're looking at all these different variables in the world, mostly economic, but it could
00:31:25.880
And then you say, given all these variables and how cause and effect works, what is the
00:31:33.260
If I increase the money supply, I get inflation.
00:31:36.060
If I get inflation, what's that going to do to employment?
00:31:38.680
So if you study economics, you've literally got a degree in forecasting the future.
00:31:47.580
It's forecasting the future in complex environments.
00:31:51.360
Now, on top of that, I have an MBA, which teaches you to predict businesses.
00:31:57.380
So the whole skill of an MBA is if I do this, I predict I'll get a better outcome than if
00:32:08.420
And indeed, we spend a lot of time doing financial predictions.
00:32:11.800
If I buy this company under these conditions, this will be the outcome.
00:32:16.720
Now, I took those skills and I became a banker.
00:32:20.060
And while I was a banker for a while, I was a lender.
00:32:23.720
So I got to look at and approve vast numbers of loans because I was an approver.
00:32:32.380
So I got to see a vast number of predictions in the form of I will pay the loan back with
00:32:38.440
this financial set of things happening in the future.
00:32:40.620
And I got to understand when these predictions are reliable and when they're not.
00:32:46.600
A whole set of skills for understanding when people are lying about the predictions and
00:32:56.860
Three, if you count the real life experience as a lender, which are literally directly involved
00:33:02.740
with predicting the future based on lots of variables that are swilling around or swirling
00:33:10.280
On top of that, my other jobs were finance and budgeting.
00:33:16.100
So finance and budgeting is also a predictive skill.
00:33:22.920
And then you learn a whole other toolbox of how to predict money related things that involve
00:33:35.600
So although it said engineer on my business card for a while and I did engineering things,
00:33:49.500
And the way they do it is they look at the whole system and they say, all right, you got
00:33:54.200
this well-designed thing, except there's this one week part.
00:33:56.980
Well, I predict that that week part will be the first thing to fail.
00:34:04.620
You say, if I do this, this will stay together and work.
00:34:10.580
So I'm not an engineer, but I was immersed in that environment for 16 years.
00:34:18.940
You pick up a style of thinking and it's the engineering style.
00:34:26.420
So I understand how the brain is structured in a functional way.
00:34:33.480
Without all the imagination that we're thinking humans, it was just the irrational motivation
00:34:40.740
And of course, to be a hypnotist, you end up mastering a lot of psychology.
00:34:52.460
Under these conditions, you're likely to have this outcome.
00:34:56.540
If I do this for you, this kind of treatment, you're likely to have this kind of benefit.
00:35:03.400
And of course, knowing how people think is by far the most important thing to predict
00:35:11.640
And can I discern what they will think from their reasoning part of their brain, which
00:35:17.620
And can I discern what their irrational brain will do?
00:35:20.980
The way I predicted that Trump would win in 2016 is my hypnosis prediction skills.
00:35:28.020
That, oh no, he's more persuasive than other people.
00:35:34.440
Wait till you get to, I'm going to get to, there's kind of a, like a crescendo here that
00:35:44.180
So although I'm a cartoonist, I'm also a writer and author, and I worked in the news
00:35:53.940
If you're in it, you get to see behind the curtain.
00:35:57.240
And if you see behind the curtain, you see how the media really works.
00:36:00.520
You see, it's basically money driving the whole thing and selfishness and all that.
00:36:04.360
So if you didn't have media experience, there's a whole bunch of things that are really obvious
00:36:10.080
to everybody who's in the media that would be invisible to normies.
00:36:21.340
Being a public figure allows you to meet other public figures far more often than if you
00:36:29.020
When you meet other public figures and you are a public figure, you quite often hear the
00:36:39.560
So by luck and coincidence, I just happen to have access to people who go, you know,
00:36:45.640
the story in the news, nothing like that happened.
00:36:53.140
I get to hear that stuff from the people who were there.
00:36:57.280
So I'm talking about the person who made the news will tell me that it's fake.
00:37:01.620
I actually get to talk to the people who ran an op to create fake news.
00:37:07.740
The news reported is real and you think is real.
00:37:11.600
Oh, yeah, we made that up and people believe that.
00:37:14.880
Now, if you've never had that experience of meeting people who literally make up the news,
00:37:26.040
The other thing is being good at pattern recognition, which I would argue that's what
00:37:33.340
A humorist and a cartoonist tend to simplify big, complicated situations.
00:37:40.480
And that's a good skill for just understanding what's what.
00:37:43.440
If you can summarize and know what's important, then you can make jokes about it.
00:37:48.920
But it's the same skill of summarizing and understanding the key point that allows you
00:37:54.300
to see any topic with a little bit of extra clarity.
00:38:02.740
So I've had jobs and everything from marketing to sales to strategy to service to engineering
00:38:12.520
And all of them are a different window into the house.
00:38:15.820
So if the only thing you'd ever learned is one of those things, marketing, let's say,
00:38:20.340
you'd be looking into the house from in the marketing window and you would just see the living room.
00:38:25.600
You'd say the inside of this house is a living room, but it's only because you only had one window.
00:38:30.900
If you had all those skills, you'd see the house from all the windows and you'd know all the contents of the house.
00:38:37.360
So I've actually had probably 20 different jobs that had different windows.
00:38:44.380
And they all give you a little bit of a peek into what's real.
00:38:53.880
If you're in your 60s, you have this vast experience of patterns that you've seen.
00:39:02.480
But you're not so old that your brain is deteriorating in the, you know, dementia Joe kind of way.
00:39:10.820
So if you're in your 60s, you just have this gigantic advantage over somebody in their 30s or 40s.
00:39:18.020
And believe me, when I was in my 30s and 40s, I did not believe that people in their 60s had a gigantic experiential advantage.
00:39:26.580
I often thought they would be, you know, yeah, they're a little out of sync.
00:39:35.080
But they certainly know what the old stuff was.
00:39:38.740
So when somebody tells me that X or Y is going to destroy the world, I say, do you know how many times I've heard that?
00:39:45.740
If it's the first time you're hearing this or that will destroy the world, you're panicked.
00:39:51.820
The news just said the world's going to be destroyed.
00:40:04.020
And the other thing is that being a public figure, I get to see that the news about me isn't real.
00:40:10.980
Now, if you're a public figure that the news likes to write about, which I am, I get to see how they write it and I get to see it's not real.
00:40:19.320
So then when I see stories about other public figures, I start with the assumption it's not real.
00:40:25.540
If I see a story about, say, Kanye, yay, or any other politician, I start with the assumption it's not real because that's the norm.
00:40:37.960
You wouldn't know that unless you've been the subject of lots of stories and you keep wondering why, coincidentally, they're wrong.
00:40:50.780
Now, having said that, your brain might be doing something like this.
00:40:56.340
But, Scott, really all the professions, they all have this predictive thing to them.
00:41:02.940
Like, if you're a plumber, you have to predict that if you fix this pipe, it won't leak.
00:41:07.760
So basically, all the professions have this predictive thing to them, kind of.
00:41:15.880
But they only predict little things within their domain.
00:41:20.300
Yes, it's true, the plumber can predict a leak.
00:41:28.880
A schoolteacher can be very smart and well-informed about the past.
00:41:33.900
But they're not really in the business of predicting the future beyond, if I do this with my class, I should get a good result with my class.
00:41:45.360
If you were a, I don't know, you're in the sales.
00:41:51.640
You have to predict that if you do this, somebody will buy your stuff.
00:42:01.220
If you're Robert De Niro, he's learned to conflate reality and fiction.
00:42:14.000
His skill is conflating reality and fiction in a way that entertains people.
00:42:18.880
Is that a good skill for understanding reality?
00:42:25.560
And it might fool you into thinking that fiction and fact aren't that different or that you could treat them the same or that it's not a big deal if you do.
00:42:35.100
So my answer to Ian Michael Black is that it seems to be that the respectful way with which he asked the question suggests that he has a genuine curiosity.
00:42:49.340
Because it didn't come across exactly as you're stupid for saying that watching the news isn't helping.
00:42:57.180
It was more like it looked like he was genuinely curious how somebody.
00:43:01.300
Now, here's the part where knowing that he knows somebody that was close with me.
00:43:06.040
He probably understands I'm not stupid, which is important.
00:43:11.680
Because if he looks at my opinion and says, OK, according to our mutual friend, this one's not stupid.
00:43:17.940
But why is he saying something that in my worldview looks like it could be stupid?
00:43:24.120
And so he respectfully asked, how do you explain this?
00:43:34.440
Reciprocity is a really important factor in the world because he was respectful.
00:43:40.260
I'm happy to respectfully give him a complete answer that I think is really useful for him and for other people.
00:43:51.860
You really need to know why people say the news isn't real, real, real important.
00:44:00.700
I would like to echo something that Greg Gutfeld said on The Five yesterday that I just thought was brilliant.
00:44:07.880
And I'm mad at myself for not putting this together.
00:44:18.560
You could argue that was the most divisive thing that ever happened in your lifetime almost.
00:44:26.420
So we know that the hoax was just bad for human relations.
00:44:42.680
So you wouldn't have had Biden without the fine people hoax.
00:44:47.920
I mean, you could argue he might have tried something else.
00:44:54.120
So the fine people hoax gave you Biden a dementia riddled president.
00:44:58.960
who then opened your borders, started a war with Ukraine, kind of.
00:45:03.980
I mean, you could argue that he started it or didn't stop it.
00:45:10.340
You got, you know, your price of eggs through the roof and all that stuff.
00:45:16.620
So, in effect, you could argue that the intentional hoax of the fine people hoax
00:45:22.880
destroyed civil society in the country, got you Biden a brain-dead puppet,
00:45:32.700
and destroyed our country through the open borders, inflation, debt, and Ukraine war.
00:45:45.860
Now, I'm going to bet against that, because I think we're pretty spunky,
00:45:49.800
and we're good at correcting, and we're good at destroying things before we rebuild them.
00:46:08.320
If you just showed me the news, and you just say,
00:46:13.980
I would look at the news and say, you know what?
00:46:24.000
Because it would be like the 25th time I was doomed,
00:46:26.620
and then somebody just said, oh, it turns out that this year 2000 bug,
00:46:31.400
we'll just write a program that automatically finds the places we need to fix and fixes them.
00:46:44.860
How about all the freezing that we were supposed to have in the 70s?
00:47:00.600
What about the Russia was definitely going to nuke us in the 60s?
00:47:10.760
My father was not good at building bomb shelters.
00:47:13.440
But we had some canned food and some extra thick walls just in case.
00:47:24.340
But it is still demonstrably obviously true that that one hoax is coming really close to destroying the United States.
00:47:41.580
I may have told you this before, but somebody did a study of the donations to political parties in Silicon Valley.
00:47:54.820
So, even though you've heard some notable stories of big venture capitalists and stuff moving toward Trump, you might say to yourself, oh, those are just the exceptions.
00:48:08.300
And that's why they're in the news, because they're so, you know, man bites dog exception.
00:48:13.860
But I would argue that donations are not telling the story because people don't want to tell you exactly who they donated if it's Trump.
00:48:22.620
It'd be bad for business if you're in Silicon Valley.
00:48:26.980
And what is more important is that there is a certain set of, let's say, investors and entrepreneurs and VC people, I guess they're investors, who are more respected for their opinions than others.
00:48:44.520
There are some that are just considered the wisest people in the industry.
00:48:53.760
Everybody who is good at predicting the future, that's what VCs do.
00:49:01.660
A venture capitalist literally predicts the future of the company and probably the economy at the same time.
00:49:10.180
Now, they don't do it right all the time, but they're the best at it.
00:49:14.660
So, the reason that, you know, the reason that you hear of, you know, some of these famous venture capitalists is they didn't have one hit.
00:49:26.540
And especially if you're starting the company yourself, to start more than one company that succeeds.
00:49:30.900
Who does better at predicting, Elon Musk or everybody else in the whole fucking world?
00:49:42.200
He predicted he could make an electric car company.
00:49:47.680
He predicted he could get a rocket to land and be reused.
00:49:51.460
I don't think anybody was thinking that was true, except some engineers, maybe.
00:49:57.040
So, he's probably the most clearly and obviously best predictor of anything we've ever seen.
00:50:13.040
Louisiana public schools now are going to be required to display the Ten Commandments.
00:50:27.120
As you know, if you've been with me for a while, I love my Christians.
00:50:35.040
I'm not a believer personally, but I'm a real big fan.
00:50:40.200
Meaning that the Christians have a good way of life.
00:50:50.400
It does make people happier and healthier and economically more stable.
00:50:54.600
So, they do have a way of life which is absolutely superior.
00:50:58.440
Now, not maybe superior than every other thing you could do,
00:51:12.900
But part of that system is that you keep the religion out of politics.
00:51:19.260
I get it that it's the foundation of why we have certain laws and stuff in the Constitution.
00:51:24.980
But still, it's our thing that we keep it separate.
00:51:33.100
I think that there will be movements against it.
00:51:36.340
But I think you can be 100% pro-Christians and Christianity
00:51:40.420
and think it's a mistake to put it in the school.
00:51:44.820
Because it does beg the question, what about the other religions?
00:51:52.320
Pretty soon, Satan's going to be in the school.
00:51:58.300
As soon as you say one religion can be in the school,
00:52:13.460
To me, it just looks like an impractical and bad idea
00:52:26.340
One of the people who is fighting against that is the ACLU,
00:52:33.980
A Rasmussen has a poll that says if Newsom were to replace Trump
00:52:40.540
that Trump would just destroy him by 12 points.
00:52:50.440
Because I think the minute that Newsom replaced Biden,
00:52:54.340
the Democrat support would just firm up behind Newsom 100%.
00:52:58.680
So it could be that there's some number of independents
00:53:09.720
And they would see maybe Newsom as more of a greasy,
00:53:14.700
less trustworthy, unsuccessful in California politician.
00:53:20.960
But I would think that whoever the Democrat candidate is
00:53:26.260
So there must be just some people who think Biden is a better deal
00:53:33.100
There are very few people who would be less happy
00:53:58.640
And I say that just because Newsom's brain is fully functional.
00:54:07.720
and you worry that he's connected to corrupt things,
00:54:19.840
I'd have to hear what he said about immigration
00:54:21.500
before I knew if it's an upgrade or a downgrade.
00:54:25.300
Because you might expect that Newsom would change
00:54:27.420
some of his policies as a president compared to governor,
00:54:56.640
was saying that Trump should run through all the hoaxes
00:55:06.160
it's kind of a tough way to go run through the hoaxes
00:55:18.100
So I don't know that debunking a bunch of hoaxes
00:55:53.120
Now, they didn't see the marketing for the event.