A judge dismisses the FTC's case against social media giant Meta, and Scott Adams explains why he thinks the company has cornered the market on social media. Plus, a new kind of music, and a whole lot more.
00:03:28.300Well, all we know for sure is what Joshua pointed out, that for reasons that are hard to understand, I seem to get about 25,000 viewers every day, no matter what I'm doing.
00:03:40.000What are the odds of that every day, 25,000, roughly?
00:03:46.380No, it doesn't look real, but stranger things have happened.
00:03:51.020So I wouldn't accuse them of anything, but it would be pretty weird if I had the same number of viewers for 10 years at the same time that my number of subscribers went up by 100.
00:04:07.980So the people who voluntarily said, hey, I'll click that because I want to see more of your stuff, that's like over 100,000.
00:04:17.500And yet the total traffic numbers, about the same.
00:04:27.880Speaking of numbers, there's some new employment numbers that people are liking.
00:04:33.660So we'll see what that does to the stock market today.
00:04:37.600I guess unemployment edged up a little bit, which means that there's a slightly greater chance that the Fed will lower interest rates, which is good for the stock market too.
00:04:59.540If your government tells you that they got some brand new numbers and it sure makes the current administration look like they're doing a great job, well, you probably should ask some questions about that, I say.
00:05:15.680A judge has dismissed an FTC antitrust case against Meta, claiming, according to Reclaim the Net, that the social media company had plenty of competition, or at least enough.
00:07:13.040So, Grok, as the AI, will be adopted by Saudi Arabia.
00:07:19.240And I always thought, you know, it wouldn't make sense for a country like Saudi Arabia to build their own AI if they can just lease one and have the best one you can have, but they're just leasing it.
00:07:36.240You don't like Vindman at all, do you?
00:07:38.580According to the comments, you're very anti-Vindman.
00:07:41.040You know how China and the United States try to influence all these third-world countries by giving them loans that they have trouble paying back and, you know, weaseling into their structures so that they depend on this one way or another?
00:08:30.940And how in the world do the Saudis get AI, or any AI, how do they get ex-AI to not do things that would be inappropriate in their particular country and culture?
00:08:46.400I bet those conversations are interesting.
00:09:02.660Well, I got a little bit of a list of things you might want to look at.
00:09:06.900Or, or, and this is possible, does Musk say to Saudi Arabia, you know what, this whole thing would be useless unless you let it be completely free.
00:09:24.740And could it be that even Saudi Arabia would say, you know what, this is not historically how we operated, but it's the AI, it's the age of AI, it's the golden age.
00:09:41.380Maybe they'll embrace free speech and accurate information.
00:09:46.500One of the things I love about listening to Elon Musk explain stuff is that he could explain technical things that you always wondered about, but he could explain them in a way you actually understand them.
00:10:02.040And he did that again with creating electricity, energy in particular, in space.
00:10:10.160Now, you've heard of this before, right, that you could put a solar panel in space and it would automatically have a few advantages.
00:10:20.320One is that you would not need to pay to cool it because the, you know, the temperature of space is nothing.
00:10:31.860Secondly, you don't have to worry about a cloudy day because it's in space and it's above the clouds.
00:10:37.120And then thirdly, you don't have to worry about it being nighttime and there being no sun.
00:10:43.420You can just put your satellite slash solar panel where the sun is always has access to it.
00:10:50.440So, the potential energy, as Elon explains, potential energy of space is phenomenally more than all you could do on Earth if you did everything right as fast as you could.
00:11:05.360Now, those are my words, but I think that's pretty close.
00:11:12.020And if you look at the next five years, this is Elon again, the odds of our energy coming mostly from the land, the Earth, is actually really small.
00:11:23.340And the odds that we'll get not only the vast majority of their electricity from space by then, but that forevermore that will be where it comes from, like it'll never be from anywhere else because the economics will be so compelling that nobody would do it any other way.
00:11:45.720Now, a big part of this, as you know, is that it costs a lot to put a satellite into space.
00:11:52.800But that's what Elon's been working on for the last, what, 10 years, 20 years.
00:11:58.340So, he's got the reusable rockets now.
00:12:00.680So, at this point, the cost of putting a solar panel in space goes from, you know, a thousand times more than it was to whatever it is now and dropping.
00:12:13.540So, it's going to be relatively easy and cheap to put stuff in space.
00:12:19.020It will have all these advantages over terrestrial stuff.
00:12:22.780And what happens if there's only one AI company that can access that energy?
00:12:31.120Now, obviously, Tesla and SpaceX, I guess SpaceX, would be at least open to, you know, leasing or selling some of their process to other companies.
00:12:45.640But they don't have to, they can just say, all right, we'll sell you our rocket access so you can put your own panels in space and then you can have infinite energy like we do.
00:13:01.240But we're going to charge you way more than we charge our own companies.
00:13:05.600So, it's still going to cost you way more to do AI than it does us.
00:13:08.500So, it feels to me like while the FTC is chasing meta and losing, meta actually won, that the company that has the greatest chance of completely capturing the only industry that matters, AI and robots, is just one company, Tesla.
00:13:30.800Because if you have a great technology but you don't have access to infinite energy, you don't really have anything.
00:13:38.500So, Tesla might be the only ones who have the right technology, theoretically, and infinite access to energy.
00:13:48.900There might only be one company that can do that.
00:13:52.260So, would you say that they would have a monopoly?
00:13:59.780Well, obviously, Musk would be completely aware of that risk.
00:14:05.340So, if he's smart, la, la, la, of course he's smart, you will organize this company in a way that competing AIs have a genuine chance of getting into the infinite energy business, even if they don't own their own rocket companies.
00:16:00.360Because I feel like the least important statistics in politics would be, uh, the public's opinion of Trump's economic policies between now and the end of his second term.
00:16:18.280Because he's sort of going to just do what he needs to do, isn't he?
00:16:22.140He has the freedom to do what he thinks will be the right thing.
00:16:26.280And maybe three years is long enough to find out if he was right or wrong, and probably will be right.
00:16:34.440I mean, that would be his track record so far.
00:16:39.020So, I think I wouldn't worry too much about public opinion polls of Trump on economics.
00:16:45.900I would expect them to be historically low, even if he did better, better than anybody's ever done.
00:16:57.080I'm seeing you trying to get my attention in the comments, but I'm going to, I'm going to stay on track.
00:17:03.040Well, Mike Johnson explained one reason why it was incredibly dangerous to, to release those Epstein files.
00:17:12.040And, uh, part of the argument is that the only ones who should declassify something is the same entity that classified it in the first place.
00:17:22.220Do you, do you understand why that's important?
00:17:24.300Um, let's say the CIA said, oh yeah, this has to be classified, but then some, some other entity was in charge of declassifying it.
00:17:33.920Would the other entity necessarily have a full appreciation of why the other entity, let's say the CIA, wanted it to be secret?
00:17:44.800So, it is a good process to make sure that the one who classified in the first place is the only one that declassifies it, but that also guarantees that things stay classified.
00:17:57.040Because if you're, if you're in control of your own little domain, you just say, eh, keep it classified.
00:18:24.020And then there's also the question about if there's an ongoing investigation, that would be yet another reason why we can't see the good stuff, if there's any good stuff.
00:18:36.920And, of course, there will be ongoing investigations, as there might be, into at least three Democrats.
00:18:50.200And I wonder, makes me wonder, how many of the people who voted to release the Epstein files, here I'm talking about Congress, how many of the Congress critters believe that even if they had all voted to release it, and even if the president signed it, how many of them believe that they really would have secrets coming out?
00:19:13.160Because if I were in Congress, I'll tell you what I would think by now.
00:19:16.760By now, I would think that all the good stuff's been removed.
00:19:21.140So, you're not going to see anything big and surprising.
00:19:24.460So, I'd say to myself, well, I might as well look as if, I might as well appear as if, I want more full disclosure than anybody else.
00:19:34.440Because there's nothing that's going to happen.
00:19:36.540It'll either be state secrets, or it'll be some damn thing.
00:19:47.060But what I would not expect is that I would vote to release it, and then a bunch of stuff would get released, and then it would have significance.