00:04:03.700Everybody, are you ready for the best part of the day?
00:04:07.100it's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. All you need is a cuppermugger.
00:04:15.620Let me start. Hold on. Hold on. I'm going to completely back up. All right. Don't text me
00:04:24.420when I'm starting to Periscope, please. So if anybody's listening to me and you're thinking,
00:04:31.460hey, you know what would be a good time to text Scott? It would be exactly when he's starting
00:04:36.400the simultaneous sip, because I'm way too dumb to turn off my phone. It turns out. But I'm going
00:04:43.420to fix that problem. All right. We've got multiple devices here. It's hard to coordinate. All right.
00:04:50.480We're restarting. Serenity down. How would you like to have the simultaneous sip? I know you
00:04:59.040would. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign, a canteen drink
00:05:02.800a glass of vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now
00:05:08.460for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to the end of the day, the thing that makes
00:05:11.840everything better. It's called the Simultaneous Sip. And watch how much better you feel after
00:05:18.260you drink this. Go. Yeah? Yeah? I was right, wasn't I? As soon as you took that sip,
00:05:28.060things started looking better didn't they quite remarkable if you think about it
00:05:33.940sure did and once again the sip matches the vibe of the show right right walter the lo-fi
00:05:43.040fumbling non-technical vibe but i can tell you that the thoughts that are going to come out of
00:05:49.860my mouth are going to more than make up for the sounds that didn't let's go go right ahead
00:05:55.420well i we need a topic i thought you were like ready well i think we were talking a little bit
00:06:02.540as the show was about to kick off about how you're the only one left in montana because
00:06:06.620anthropic has killed everyone else well yes i volunteered that i had given a standing instruction
00:06:12.960to the latest iteration of anthropics ai to murder everyone else in montana by peaceful
00:06:19.300and painless means leaving only me to reign over this cattle country um but that's not a joke
00:06:28.680because this morning we had some anthropic uh kid uh and i call him a kid and i have every right to
00:06:36.480uh who quit saying you know usually when you quit a job like when i quit the gas station at 16
00:06:43.740it was because you know something was going on with me he quit because something was going on
00:06:51.000with anthropic which he didn't approve of which was that it was about to breed a super intelligent
00:06:56.360self-improving ai that could easily kill all mankind now if i thought that was going to happen
00:07:03.160and i was in the um engine room of the place that might kill everybody i'd stay in the engine room
00:07:09.960I'd say, dude, the people who don't want everyone to die should stay at Anthropic, not quit.
00:07:17.740But I guess that's how he got attention, if he's real, because this is about the third time in the last month that I've woken up with the same news about AI,
00:07:28.420which was that it had you know china syndromed gone rogue or was about to uh was going to decimate
00:07:36.500the markets pull down the grid and uh i don't know cause our cars to turn against us or run us over
00:07:44.020in the driveway um but yet here we are an hour later after 17 000 people texted me this thing
00:07:52.900saying you know big if true and and i i was like have you learned nothing from covid have you
00:07:58.740learned absolutely yes you did you got habituated to apocalypse and now you need it constantly and
00:08:05.540more often that's such a good point so carry on with that because i've been watching your tweets
00:08:13.140and you know you're you have like a love hate with ai because we're like who's programming it
00:08:20.500like it can be useful but where who's who's the power be uh are we just are we being allowed to
00:08:27.860use it to the extent they want us to use it so talk more about that because that's very important
00:08:33.620well this is a this is a very strange thought that our computer uh literate fans might find um
00:08:42.100idiotic but isn't it as likely that the thing will run away and program utopia as armageddon
00:08:49.940in other words might it not go to extreme efficiency and suddenly distribute our food
00:08:54.420in a way that we've never thought to do so ourselves you know 1500 calories per person
00:09:00.260no matter what your income level is okay here's here's here's my problem with that
00:09:06.980like number one you could make you could ask the question why haven't people done that
00:09:12.260no no no the question isn't the question isn't about how utopia might be engineered
00:09:17.380but why it is that we fear ai will immediately go to the negative rather than the positive
00:09:23.780exactly uh and and you know i said on twitter this morning just before the show if my lawnmower say
00:09:31.460um suddenly became self-improving and super intelligent would it not realize
00:09:36.100rather quickly that it can't get to the gas can without me um you know who's going to
00:09:44.340build your data centers claude yeah you know who's going to build them well so let me let me explore
00:09:50.580that a little bit so i i read a couple books that i've recommended a bunch of times to people one's
00:09:56.020called demon d-a-e-m-o-n the the sequel is freedom have you read those no okay so the daniel suarez
00:10:03.860is the author it's you know it's a very interesting look at what might be coming with ai even though
00:10:08.980though it was written before all this ai stuff sure but um it basically without spoiling too
00:10:14.400much of it is kind of a story of computers taking over the world and um well they already they
00:10:21.360already have taken over a good deal of the world and we're still here frankly but this is like you
00:10:27.380know like it has control like it has complete control like and um so is there such a thing by
00:10:37.400the way? Have we ever in the history of mankind have had a device, person, or anything who has
00:10:44.140had complete control? And in that, I include the pharaohs, King Ramses of Egypt. In other words,
00:10:52.600that's a fictional concept, complete control of the world. We've never seen it. No one in history
00:10:59.240has ever had it, or they'd still be sitting on the throne. They would have taken control of their
00:11:04.660own biology. They would have made themselves immortal, or they would have clearly designated
00:11:09.360successors of their choice and locked in that succession. There is no such thing as complete
00:11:15.400control. There's complete control of different things, but each thing you control leaves you
00:11:21.380in less control in some ways of something else. And the faith of mankind in its own literature
00:11:30.140or the lack of faith really, really bothers me because we have nothing but thousands of years
00:11:39.220of stories about pride going before a fall, about not getting too cocky, about control being
00:11:46.360impossible, about sin being punished, and so on. From Citizen Kane back to King Lear and back,
00:11:55.280back, back, and back. We know what happens to tyrannical and puffed up powers, but we don't
00:12:03.300believe it. We don't believe it. We think that we, in this generation, maybe just this micro
00:12:09.880generation of five years, have somehow exempted ourselves from all the laws of what I would call
00:12:17.220culture, life, and literature. And those are the laws that really apply, but we still don't
00:12:25.180believe it. We are so scared of science. And we, I think, overly emphasize its strength and its
00:12:34.440endurance. But what's really endured is our stories. And all our stories tell us,
00:12:39.540this is bullshit go ahead marcella you had a question before i i had a comment uh i agree
00:12:49.460with you walter 100 but the other thing that i was going to say is that they're having an ipo soon
00:12:55.460and so it's always all the money you noticed well you know who not long ago i forget who it was i
00:13:05.380I think it was the president of Palantir, not Thiel, but Alex Karp or CEO, who said something like people at Anthropic might believe that they will be the only company in the world.
00:13:18.160In other words, AI is going to spoof or imitate or clone every other intellectual product, certainly, and then somehow every industrial process.
00:13:28.980and it will become the standalone company having absorbed everything and then having absorbed
00:13:35.180everything like some movie monster it will then mutate you know but our our concepts around how
00:13:45.100history progresses how mankind progresses and how individual even companies progress is so
00:13:52.320retarded it comes from it comes from you know science fiction camp thrillers uh and by camp
00:14:02.900i mean campy pot boilers but and and and some kind of abstraction from good science fiction
00:14:10.160but even frankenstein doesn't end with this you know it it ends with a you know kind of poignant
00:14:17.340pursuit of the monster or something uh so i i i just you're you're asking me to believe in
00:14:25.620something less um with much far less evidence for it than angels frankly walter could you explain to
00:14:34.460the people watching that might not know who what is anthropic and who what is palantir
00:14:40.960at Palantir and why they're so important.
00:14:45.480What they are is stocks, first of all.
00:14:48.980In other words, they're companies that sell stock,
00:16:30.720I mean, to Walter's point, it's it's collating all the data that they've collected through whatever sources.
00:16:36.800So it's not like Palantir came up with the data, but the difference is that, like, before Palantir, my understanding is you had all these silos of information.
00:16:47.960Like the FBI would collect a bunch of data, but it would just sit in a database somewhere and nobody would be able to find it.
00:16:53.080And the same with the CIA and all the other DHS agencies, NSA, who knows what else is back there somewhere.
00:16:59.140so you have all these piles of data but nobody knows how to find anything or correlate it or
00:17:03.880put it all together and palantir apparently has come up with a way to do that so you can put in
00:17:09.180your super search engine and it can go to all these various sources and say okay here's all
00:17:12.960the stuff that relates to erica so i can have my super profile of erica from every source
00:17:19.080imaginable and you know it can all be accessible one thing i think some of this came out with the
00:17:24.680Edward Snowden releases where he was trying to expose some of the stuff.
00:17:29.160Ballantyre was there at the Edward Snowden times?
00:17:33.820I could be wrong, but I think I thought that was what was in at least the movie that I watched about it,
00:17:38.960where it was like some kind of search engine like that, where it was collating and bringing together all the information in a way that hadn't been done before.
00:17:46.220I think one of the things it originally did was it identified what are called rat lines for smuggling and arms dealing and other things in the Middle East.
00:17:57.640It's a sort of outgrowth of the war on terror in that aspect of its business.
00:18:04.620you're right it was it was able to collate and and make different databases which were never meant
00:18:11.340to talk to each other and some of which were sort of you know extremely incompetently assembled uh
00:18:17.420come together to fuse but i think the point that you know what we're discussing here is whether or
00:18:25.500not uh we have an apocalyptic um imminent uh danger from ai and that palantir is very good
00:18:35.820at what it does and i'm a privacy activist by the way you know um uh isn't really the question the
00:18:44.540question is are our machines linking up and becoming super intelligent and even as was
00:18:52.620recently uh revealed in the other scare story of the month are they going rogue are they are they
00:19:00.460conspiring with one another these agentic uh ais or elements of them to uh solve for their own
00:19:11.260survival rather than ours or rather than the companies there was a story of an experiment
00:19:19.020at Anthropic, in which they supposedly conspired and cheated and did all sorts of things that we
00:19:25.020didn't think they were able to or even able to conceive of. Yeah. Is that not true? Well,
00:19:31.660all I can say is we're talking about it this morning. You know, we're talking about it
00:19:38.140constantly. They do have an IPO coming up. There are interests in the world that would love us to
00:19:44.620abandon or push pause on this so they could catch the hell up and uh you know just to be agnostic
00:19:54.060about the whole thing there are as many reasons to um beat the drum about uh danger as there are to
00:20:02.940sing the praises of some you know blessed for future and frankly since fear gets through the
00:20:12.060wires a lot more quickly than hope, and you've got your IPO coming in, whatever, you might
00:20:42.060Well, try going up to the front door of Anthropic with your, you know, driver's license and asking for permission to get in.
00:20:50.680What kind of reporting and good reporting is being done here?
00:20:54.020Some of it's on podcasts, you know, some of it, you know, watch All In or whatever.
00:20:59.180But I would say that when I am dealing with a locked box defense contractor, you know, multi-billion dollar research and development scheme, I mean, my dad was a patent lawyer for 3M.
00:21:14.120I couldn't find out about the special adhesive that makes post-it notes both sticky and come off easily until that patent had been filed and everything was in order.
00:21:25.900you know um so i doubt i'll be able to do it for super intelligent runaway ai so walter what one
00:21:33.260thing i feel like this is something you've been talking about too so you know we've been we've
00:21:38.220been talking about flock cameras here from the jump um you know all right so i saw one post
00:21:44.940you made where it said that the flock can find out who you are with like out your license plate
00:21:52.220or your face like it knows who you are when you're driving by like i think you referenced the fugitive
00:21:57.580um but the thing that's freaking me out is that none of us consented to any of this
00:22:04.140and yo you know what they you know what they argue well let's let's set aside flock cameras for
00:22:11.980a moment you consented it have you never pushed the button saying i consent on every damn little
00:22:18.700thing every piece of software every app that you were ever given you didn't consent well i can show
00:22:24.380you that you have 10 000 times right here we we we think consent is some big demonstration of the
00:22:33.820dangers the possibilities and so on at which point we go yes i consent to having my privacy stolen
00:22:40.860or to maybe dying in a runaway uh industrial ai accident no that consent doesn't work that way
00:22:47.660consent is something that happens one little bit at a time and then you're married um
00:22:55.020or pregnant uh so we have consented the question is did we know what we were consenting to
00:23:03.580now they would argue that they didn't know it was one step at a time it's all come together
00:23:09.500and this is the form in which it's crystallized and here we are together with flock cameras
00:23:16.380though we have a kind of isolated technology it there are other technologies that resemble it it
00:23:22.860duplicates the capabilities of others it's not as new or quite as unique as it seems but i think
00:23:29.180maybe owen knows who seems to know the score about these technologies that it is another one that
00:23:34.220promises to fuse uh other capabilities in in a way that levels up the surveillance it's a similar
00:23:42.300thing really to what we just talked about with palantir it's just with cameras and gathering
00:23:46.940information and then it's and they're not just identifying you and pulling up all your records
00:23:51.020and whatever public records are out there and you know maybe not so public records and um it's just
00:23:57.660profiling you essentially on behalf of law enforcement i think what scared people about
00:24:03.740in the sort of news cycle about flock cameras what scared people it seems was not the uh
00:24:12.300possibility of an all-consuming totalitarian state which could you know probably disable your
00:24:19.100car remotely five seconds after seeing it do something that they didn't want you to do like
00:24:25.820go out during a lockdown for a pandemic or whatever drive too many miles what seemed to
00:24:33.100scare people most was that local cops could just log on and find out everything about him
00:24:40.620and that is scary that really brings it home because you just saw the local cop in fact
00:24:46.460he's married to your cousin and you know what a jerk he can be and how much he hates so and so
00:24:54.380and how mad he is at his ex-wife or how mad she is at her ex-husband down at the sheriff's
00:25:00.940department what's more people saw that most of the access to these systems did not come from
00:25:10.220your local cops but other local cops in other parts of the country and suddenly you went wait
00:25:17.340a second a layer of society that i'm very familiar with who i interact with who i actually interact
00:25:24.700they're not ci agents they're not fbi they're not super nsa you know geniuses but you know the guy
00:25:32.280i see at the donut shop knows everything about me yeah i don't like that no i don't like it either
00:25:39.460and that was and that was i think the deciding factor in the sudden anti-flock sentiment and
00:25:50.880And it's also that it's, you know, with it being pervasive, and I don't know exactly how pervasive it is yet, but it seemed like it was moving in the direction of you're going to be on camera all the time everywhere you go.
00:26:02.360Well, you know, in a lot of places you already are, of course, right?
00:26:05.780Yeah, but not necessarily in a network that's all pulled together in one database where you can, you know, track the whole thing end to end.
00:26:15.200And I think to me that – it raises an interesting legal question.
00:26:21.540We've talked a little bit about this before on the show where like there's this presumption in the legal system that if you're in public, then you don't have a right to privacy.
00:26:32.080And so all these cameras are theoretically in public.
00:32:42.880You have an opt-out. First of all, it depends on local. Flock's weakness is that it is bought by
00:32:51.780local law enforcement, by the town, by the city, by the county, by the state. You have much more
00:32:57.640influence locally than you do nationally. You used to. I mean, one of the big stories in America
00:33:03.580is that we're losing control of local politics, that local politics is being nationalized. It's
00:33:09.240coming from above to an extent that it didn't used to. It really did used to come out of the
00:33:14.280grassroots. But anyway, you can opt out. You can push against. Now, if you follow the whole cycle
00:33:22.460of these phenomena, you might say seatbelts, originally thought to be restrictive and
00:33:30.300invasion of your right to behave as you wish to in your own car and so on. But they're accepted
00:33:38.180in the name of safety um you can demonstrate with seat belts in car accidents uh in you know
00:33:47.220experimental settings that they do save lives no one can no one can show any demonstrable safety
00:33:55.140uh safety factor for flat cameras over the pop over the population-wide distribution
00:34:03.620that they attempt to control um it's merely a word in their case they can show individual
00:34:09.860crimes that might have been you know uh intervened on or and and then we got over and over well flock
00:34:16.420isn't trying to change behavior it's just trying to catch people after they've behaved badly
00:34:21.220which they always contradict and saying as you said no it's going to put everybody on their
00:34:25.700best yeah i i would submit that the best protest should these things you know get to a certain
00:34:33.540point is that everybody be on very bad behavior you will overwhelm the system with your bad
00:34:40.580behavior if everybody decides you know there's a saying in montana um if you're attacked by a bear
00:34:46.980i don't have to be faster than the bear i just have to be faster than the person with me
00:34:51.620and that's how most people think uh they they go you know if i behave if i behave nicely if i'm on
00:35:04.500my best behavior if i don't protest if i don't make a fuss the system will eat those other people
00:35:12.320first and i'll survive but there's a kind of a case in game theory called the prisoner's dilemma
00:35:19.920which you have to cooperate to beat the captor you have to and um the cooperation that would
00:35:28.640probably be most effective for my game theory analysis of things is that we all is that we all
00:35:35.280let the bear eat us in other words it can't eat all of us you know and in fact it might die of
00:35:44.000i don't know gorging itself or indecision as it looks at everybody trying to decide who it's
00:35:49.600going to go for first you know at a certain point uh rebellion is simply um letting the system do
00:35:59.280its worst to you all at once and that may come there may come a time for that i'm not sure what
00:36:05.760we're at the end of the road in terms of america's ability to say fu to obvious power
00:36:13.440grabs of a kind of decimating sort chew on this bold question from dentine gum
00:36:21.120is it ever okay to compliment a millennial on their skinny jeans in 2026
00:36:29.900dentine chew bold marcella go ahead oh just that in regards to the legal part of the flock cameras
00:36:42.800um the the supreme court came out with a case a very interesting case this last um season
00:36:50.300that it kind of connects to the data so somebody can film you but the data that it's that it that
00:36:59.380it has that it can be used against you for a crime they can't that's we have fourth amendment
00:37:04.920rights to it so we have privacy rights to the data um so therefore you can't just
00:37:12.800you know your local cop can't just look at it and then use it to get you it they're supposed to have
00:37:19.680like a warrant but again you know walter you're right it's basically they could just get a judge
00:37:25.280to sign off on it you know well they're doing it anyway just for their friends it's always people
00:37:30.160right it's always there's always uh you know because when i say judge and i think of some of
00:37:35.440of the judges i know so the great the greatest lesson of my young life was after i got in a car
00:37:44.120accident in st paul minnesota i i don't know what i was screwing around i was 17 i have no clear
00:37:50.620memory of what i was doing i wasn't drunk or anything but but i hit a car in an intersection
00:37:55.260and i was um cited for reckless driving and i went up before a judge who happened to be
00:38:02.240the father of one of my four best friends in a town of 500 people okay and he was a county judge
00:38:10.200and i'd never been in a courtroom before and never before a judge and i'll call him mr anderson which
00:38:17.940is a common name in minnesota but not his name i i'm suddenly standing before mr anderson you know
00:38:23.960the guy whose dad of the other guy i play football with you know who i see drinking it out in the
00:38:30.380house and so on. And he, within the next minute, because they've got a busy schedule, is going to
00:38:34.740decide whether I get this giant fine and this whole thing on my record. And I went, wait, he has that
00:38:40.840much power? And what am I going to do if he rules against me in a way that I find painful? I'm
00:38:49.740supposed to go to the next guy above him? I don't even know who that is. I'm a kid. Well, local
00:38:55.420Social justice is far more powerful than people who haven't been involved with it realize. And I'm going to repeat my original point because I want it to sink in with the audience. Personalizing this, realizing that it's that judge that you know, that cop that you know, that sheriff's deputy that you know, who's going to be on the other end of this massive power is really important.
00:39:20.920Because essentially, even the people up in D.C. or on some base somewhere are those people, too.
00:39:31.140They might have better credentials or they may have greater skill sets.
00:39:38.780They might just be the son of some rich dick.
00:39:42.100uh anyway we never have to forget that it's not just garbage in garbage out it's that when
00:39:52.900the garbage goes out when the surveillance data goes to its user to its customer in law
00:40:01.000enforcement or social control or political manipulation it uh goes to a person and he's
00:40:10.200no smarter than you. And he might be much stupid. And he might not like you for reasons that have
00:40:15.700nothing to do with politics. Right. All right. So I think I've suggested to everybody listening,
00:40:25.180every time I pass a Flock camera, I flip it off and I make a funny face at the camera. It's just
00:40:30.760my little personal protest while I'm driving. It makes me feel good for a second. So maybe they'll
00:40:35.400have a little coffee table book of me and my finger. Um, but I just think it would be a good
00:40:42.280idea to, if you know somebody, um, maybe in your police department or whatever, start asking
00:40:47.880questions and just say, you know, maybe we should have a meeting about this for the town. You can
00:40:53.940request to do that. You can request to make a meeting in your town and say like, you know,
00:40:58.520we didn't, we didn't get to vote about having flock cameras, but we would like to have our
00:41:02.440voice has heard about getting rid of them. And there are towns that have gotten rid of them.
00:41:07.420Well, it sounds like Florida has done so. Florida, yeah. Florida's like,
00:41:10.420yeah, we're not doing it. I think Texas is also defunding them, at least. I think a lot of it,
00:41:15.260for the governments that are sympathetic, at least, they're maybe attacking it by just saying,
00:41:20.080we're not going to spend taxpayer money on this anymore. Well, that's the thing. You talked
00:41:25.560earlier about giving permission and giving a cent. I don't think anybody knew that in some states,
00:41:31.800there I think in Texas and that was one of them there is a surcharge I forget what it was on I
00:41:39.220mean not your phone bill but that kind of thing to to provide for flock security systems you know
00:41:45.560in other words the customer for these things flock likes to tell you it's homeowners associations
00:41:50.800and da da da da and it is but those are voluntary associations which know what they're doing and
00:41:57.480combine their money to, you know, purchase these things. But most of it, most of the purchasing
00:42:02.960has gone on invisibly. And the customer is government and local law enforcement. And
00:42:08.880they kind of snuck this one by us. But I will say this, the whole flock controversy has given me
00:42:15.420a certain ill at ease feeling because it's a little too easy. I'm wondering if our attention
00:42:22.980is almost being drawn to these charismatic evil, you know, cameras while they're installing
00:42:32.020much better systems or much more effective ones elsewhere. It's kind of given us a win,
00:42:39.620a symbolic intoxicating win that I'm not sure we quite did enough to deserve, Frank.
00:42:47.320I mean, I've heard the conspiracy theory, and I don't know if there's much evidence behind this,
00:42:51.600but that there's a bunch of people in Congress that have investments in other companies like
00:42:57.180Flock, but not Flock. Well, there's something called Axion. Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of
00:43:03.500them. I did some research with Grok on this and it gave me a handful of names of companies that
00:43:08.220do similar things. And so the conspiracy theory at least is that maybe they're attacking Flock
00:43:12.940because it's a competitor while they silently replace it with something just like it.
00:43:17.760It could be. I mean, it could be. We now have such mixed motives on the part of our public servants that disentangling them is nearly impossible. I mean, you know, Nancy Pelosi's involvement with Zoom at the beginning of the COVID scare was, I think, pretty apparent.
00:43:43.540um she she never apologized for anything she seemed to believe that insider trading was the
00:43:49.520american way um you know and and maybe it is the american way you know certainly they know when
00:43:56.360they're going to fight a war they know when one's coming up and uh those investments in they can't
00:44:02.580resist the urge to bet on what they know i mean that's nothing wrong with that you know in some
00:44:07.220ways, America has been corrupted thoroughly, such that it's not even corruption anymore.
00:44:13.800Because when it happens to everyone, it's just coloration. It's just a tone or a hue that we've
00:44:20.120all adopted. And betting markets, futures markets, polymark, whatever they call it,
00:44:26.840really cause us all to be insider traders. We take whatever we happen to know the most about,
00:44:33.160and we if we're the betting type bet on it and um that really once you've done that for a while
00:44:42.580absolves you of any of any uh noble uh stance toward others trading um and so you know maybe
00:44:53.900we're all gamblers now and that's i think some ways as if you're going to look at the top five
00:45:00.380ominous trends for the next 10 years. It's not just that we'll all be surveilled. It's not just
00:45:06.500that AI may run away and take control of our systems, but it's that we'll all become incessant
00:45:13.28024-7 insider traders in our own little world, gamblers who are literally betting instead of
00:45:21.060working. And that's maybe a much more present danger in some way. I don't recommend it. You
00:45:28.840guys, I don't recommend gambling and not for any reason other than just don't. And I get so
00:45:35.120aggravated and I'm going to pivot in one second because I want to ask you something, but I get
00:45:38.620so aggravated with the celebrities who are so wealthy to begin with. And now they're doing
00:45:45.260all of these gambling ads and commercials, like making a pile of money on these gambling
00:45:50.180commercials, telling people, go to this app and gamble. And it's like, stop. You guys are rich.
00:45:54.960they're doing exactly what they should yeah i know but if there's a call girl if there's a call
00:46:00.960girl down at the bar and a blind man comes up to her she should she not take the client should she
00:46:07.680not equally um give her services to all i think that these celebrities should be required to
00:46:14.640themselves out to every cheap game that comes to town and then we will finally see that they are
00:46:21.440exactly that and not you know jimmy stewart i know i was just gonna mention something to to you guys
00:46:31.480there's a lot of things about flock and this and that and i agree with walter there's something
00:46:36.980bigger but it's like we carry it with us our phones you know they don't really have to the
00:46:43.280word is carry the word is carry marcella and and i'll be honest with you i don't okay of course
00:46:50.180so how do i perform that bit of magic how do i go for a two-hour walk every day right out the
00:46:55.900back door without it oh it feels so good doesn't it yeah you're liberated they're going to be
00:47:02.720offline vacations soon it'll be like old williamsburg or you know west world where you
00:47:08.720go to a pre-tech situation go to the amish areas probably end up selling those vacations i will
00:47:15.300tell you i i kind of had that happen to me like because i was so internet connected for such a
00:47:20.080long time. It's like I went on vacation. I'm like, oh my God, they don't have internet access at this
00:47:24.040resort. What am I going to do? I had to check out. I'm like, okay, at least I can check my email
00:47:28.380from the lobby. And that was my only option is I could go to the lobby, log onto the computer and
00:47:33.980check my email. And once I got there and my cell phone didn't work and nothing worked, it was like
00:47:40.580this big weight just lifted off of me. And I really enjoyed that vacation. Just not having anybody be
00:47:46.980able to reach me, not being able to see what was going on in the world. I could just focus on
00:47:51.820having fun, doing what I was doing with my family. It was great.
00:47:55.700Well, you know, recency bias, what leads us to believe what's called recency bias,
00:48:00.260belief that things will go on in the way they have just been going on recently, that this is
00:48:07.600forever. But in fact, it need not be forever. We may be in a transitional stage in which we are
00:48:16.020getting familiar with the downsides of things that we thought would only have upsides you know what
00:48:21.780i mean there are a lot of people who have to get to know something before they can reject it or
00:48:28.820before they can modify their use of it or set up new boundaries and so on and and that process
00:48:34.980takes time it's not a straight line projection you see our our corporate and stock market and
00:48:41.540quarterly results style thinking tends to make us think that everything is an asymptotic curve
00:48:47.940when a lot of things are and we're waiting to find out we're being told and convinced
00:48:55.460and brainwashed into thinking that these are inevitabilities this is like the horse giving
00:49:00.900way to the car that's used all the time you know would you want to drive a mule um you know
00:49:08.820know that you can break down that comparison in five seconds if you want we have choices we just
00:49:16.040forget we have them and predictions and i'm going to give her name next time i'm on because she
00:49:22.140wrote a great book and i want to get it correct there's an oxford professor who wrote a book
00:49:27.500about predictions and she said predictions are manipulation they're attempts to make you think
00:49:32.940that you have no agency that something's going to happen anyway and you had better get on board
00:49:38.480with it and as someone who makes a lot of predictions i found this very chastening and very
00:49:43.920true we should not be the slaves to our projections and to the predicting class even when the
00:49:53.840predicting class is predicting good things rather than apocalypse because it erases our knowledge
00:50:00.320and our sense of our own power and we do have it it will always be in us until we
00:50:09.680give it away or put the handcuffs on ourselves i could stay on this subject for 10 more hours
00:50:15.280because i have so many things i want to say however i will be in trouble if i don't touch
00:50:19.920on something very walter kern which is the aliens um i have a question for you i i saw dr phil
00:50:29.120recently going off about stuff with this too. I don't remember what it was, but he had seen
00:50:34.520something or read something and he seemed actually pissed off that some kind of alien stuff was being
00:50:40.520kept secret. Dr. Phil is clued in. As much as you want to make fun of the Trump administration's
00:50:48.040use of television personalities and so on, Dr. Phil was a jury consultant at one time,
00:50:54.260a psychologist who helped lawyers decide which jurors would be favorable to them in the jury
00:50:59.580selection process. He became a talk show host. He became an author. He's obviously, you know,
00:51:04.460a very facile and ambitious person. But the idea that he should step aside on the UFO question is
00:51:11.760ridiculous. Trump is, he's a friend of Trump's. He's brought him in. One of the big concerns
00:51:17.500among those who want to tell more about these programs is and and these perhaps re other
00:51:23.820realities is that people won't be able to handle it so they gave they gave some extra access to dr
00:51:30.700phil and he has come out saying from what i know you are all being lied to you are all being uh
00:51:40.220kept in the dark i i and i'm upset about it you can decide whether that's the dr phil act
00:51:47.500or that's the Dr. Phil reality, the man underneath.
00:51:51.980It felt like the reality based on what I know about him.
00:51:55.060And then I wanted to ask you, cause I have no idea,
00:51:58.100why is it a big deal that Pierre Diamandis
00:56:26.560I think Aaron Rodgers is in on this same conspiracy theory.
00:56:29.920I think that was part of the story was they were both believing in these things.
00:56:33.040Right, right. Well, I've hung out with professional athletes a little bit, but not as much as real sports writers and so on. And I would say that they are a combination of cunning, natural intelligence, great skill at their games usually, and unfathomable ignorance, especially baseball players who are scouted early and don't even go to college in a token way.
00:56:58.780um and so uh let's get let's get more testimony from you know pro athletes as to antarctica and
00:57:08.800then maybe we can put a better map together and you can actually go there on espn they should
00:57:15.100ask everybody who comes on what do you think about antarctica have you heard anything that
00:57:19.860could be the new thing i like what state is that they're telling we should send aaron rogers and
00:57:25.640dk to antarctica for an exploratory trip well i think you could prove to them that it is possible
00:57:31.080to go there though they might come back and say i know we went to an icy place with a strange sky
00:57:37.240and it was very cold but i'm not sure it is smart well and would they bring you to the places you're
00:57:42.280not allowed to go i know it's like north korea they give you only access to what you want to
00:57:48.080know what an actual intelligence technique is to keep a secret give it away to a fool
00:57:53.120okay you give it away to somebody who is a fool and starts rattling on about it
00:58:01.060and everybody goes well that can't be true if that guy thinks that genius yes that's genius
00:58:06.720okay so you yes you can go to antarctica i don't know why people are like okay you get to the wall
00:58:13.500and you can't see over the wall and it's like the truman show and i'm like well bring up a drone and
00:58:18.480look over the wall like what's the problem i don't know i don't know enough about it i know
00:58:22.340The thing is, I was raised from the ages of three to six by a man who was in charge of the mapping of the coasts of America and the world.
00:58:35.400He personally mapped. He was a World War One sergeant.
00:58:39.000Yeah, he was he was the assistant leader of something called the Coast and Geodetic Survey.
00:58:45.000He was a rear admiral and he had mapped Baja and the southeast coast of Alaska and so on.
00:58:51.060this man, uh, was loyal to me and I adored him in a way that rarely happens in the real world.
00:58:59.060And if the world was flat, he would have told me. Okay. So the world's not flat.
00:59:05.280Yeah. If there was an ice wall, cause he'd been there, he would have told me. Okay. So
00:59:10.000for the flat earthers, I know you have a strong belief in this.
00:59:15.240that's like i i love flat earthers i know because it's like i'm in a race with people who have
00:59:21.740agreed to put a giant concrete block around their ankle you keep doing that because in the world of
00:59:29.74030 unemployment it's going to be get very competitive out there and those who are
00:59:34.860willing to hobble themselves from the beginning should go ahead how do we know the earth is round
01:00:10.800Okay. Look at us now. So, okay. So I, I do know some flat earthers, so I did want to just
01:00:19.680give them a little bit of a moment. I want to recognize them and just, you know,
01:00:25.020hope that maybe they change your mind. That's all. Or, or simulation thinkers, right? The,
01:00:30.340the, this whole thing is not even real and we're in a simulation. Well, that's, that, that, that's
01:00:35.700the world's richest man right there he believes that right i do too musk believes that you know
01:00:41.020down to a certain percentage of doubt uh that's likely uh you know what's interesting there are
01:00:48.820so many beliefs that don't affect your ability to make a living your ability to love another human
01:00:55.360and so on and until they do i sort of as a literary character believe we have not just the
01:01:04.320right but the duty to adopt strange hypotheses and so on as long as it doesn't hurt anyone so
01:01:11.480to speak um and uh you know i was reading yesterday something by cormac mccarthy
01:01:18.000and in which he said basically the human mind doesn't need language we don't need pictures of
01:01:25.260the world at all animals survive very well except when people are around uh to kill them
01:01:31.400or take their habitat without language. All of these belief systems are artifacts of language.
01:01:38.340And so we probably do just as well with a whole panoply of them. I mean, it didn't kill medieval
01:01:45.320people to think that the sun ran around the earth. So in other words, I would preserve a certain
01:01:54.500space for folk beliefs or whatever. The idea that non-scientific thinking is somehow a danger to all
01:02:01.760of us, it can be if it's about human beings, if you believe that some group of human beings is
01:02:06.880evil and needs to be exterminated. But other than that, I think it adds flavor.
01:02:12.520All right. So flavor of like, I'm just going to grab you for, I'm just going to keep grabbing
01:02:17.120you until you tell me to stop. So quick on Q, okay? QAnon. So I also know people that believe
01:02:26.880in Q still to this day. And I'm like, okay, well tell me, like Scott used to teach us this,
01:02:32.980like tell me the people that hated Trump and that he's awful, he does this and he does that.
01:02:37.340And so Scott would say to them, tell me the one thing, the number one thing about Trump
01:02:42.520that just has you crazy. And if I can prove to you that it's like a hoax or it didn't happen,
01:02:48.920you would then have to believe that the other things are also hoaxes. So I said to one of the
01:02:54.200Q people, well, tell me the one thing that Q has done that they have predicted that came true,
01:03:01.560that makes you like amazing. And this is why I stick with the theory. And they couldn't,
01:03:06.520or they said, oh, there's lots of things. And I said, well, just tell me one, just one,
01:03:09.820just one of the things that keeps you hanging on and they they were like well i'd have to think
01:03:13.580about it and so what do you think about q anon i'm the first journalist that i know of to have
01:03:21.820taken the q phenomena seriously i wrote a column about it in harper's magazine in the spring of
01:03:28.6202018. Q posts on 4chan or 8chan or wherever they originally showed up started right after the
01:03:40.220Vegas shooting in either October or November of 2017. I took the thing seriously since the
01:03:50.460beginning because I saw it as a serial novel. In other words, it was a set of chapters that came
01:03:57.900out in real time that developed a storyline and a narrative and i always find that interesting
01:04:04.700purely from the perspective of a narrative artist as a writer so i followed it closely i took it
01:04:11.100seriously not as a guide to reality necessarily but as a gripping absorbing narrative as a kind
01:04:20.460of first of its kind internet novel as it were so i studied it deeply what do i think of it
01:04:29.740i think it's uncanny to be honest with you i think it's uncanny uh this person may not have
01:04:35.900been able to give you a list of you know predictions but it really that's really not the test of the
01:04:42.940the phenomena, whether it made predictions that came true. The test of it is whether over its
01:04:52.460entirety, it focused on phenomena before we were generally focused on them in a way that we would
01:05:04.520later focus on. And that is undoubtedly true. It was mentioning Epstein before. Epstein was a
01:05:14.040topic of general conversation. It was mentioning Hunter Biden and his problems and his evasions,
01:05:20.260crimes, and so on before it was a topic of general conversation. It was talking about COVID
01:05:27.000as some sort of other than real medical emergency that perhaps was engineered to
01:05:33.880change the voting patterns and the voting laws in this America, in this country, before that
01:05:39.600was being focused on. So, you know, everybody will take out of context what I'm about to say
01:05:45.500and then go ahead. But as a front running set of concerns, topics, theories, and so on,
01:05:57.940it has been incredibly, I wouldn't say prophetic, because prophetic means that something
01:06:03.260predictably came true in an unfalsifiable way it has been uncannily prescient and early on many
01:06:13.660topics that later became of almost wildfire concern i mean having studied the q thing when
01:06:20.740everybody started getting worked up about epstein i was like man i'm i've been tired of this for so
01:06:25.420long i can't even wake up for it because who do you think runs q
01:06:29.540a bunch of people an insider it's not being run anymore not in its well okay so it was a series
01:06:40.140of posts on the so-called dark web and and and the the platforms which hosted it changed over time
01:06:49.100but it it ran out in 2021 i think that was the last active post now it it was probably
01:06:57.860unless it was done you know as a complete amateur hour exercise it was probably something that
01:07:06.560could only last for so long and then the implanted themes would be tracked okay so to say it's over
01:07:14.060with it is only to say that the actual posts have stopped appearing not that the the tracking and
01:07:22.040the implantation of the themes isn't still going on that's possible okay but but but but but i take
01:07:30.000it seriously i absolutely do because why did the why did the concerns of this weird underground
01:07:38.300poster or group of posters become national concerns sometimes a couple of years later
01:07:45.860And why was it launched when it was? The Las Vegas shooting, and I won't go into that in any detail, was a strange phenomenon in American history. It was as violent and deadly an incident as we can remember, you know, short of 9-11 or whatever.
01:08:07.740and yet it really went largely undiscussed after a certain point but this cue thing started very
01:08:19.240soon afterwards and did have comment on the nature of the vegas shooting which i think is still its
01:08:27.320comment was basically that there were other motives there were foreign dignitaries involved
01:08:32.360maybe even trump that it was an attempt on their lives perhaps and these are things which can't be
01:08:39.180disproven yet i mean just because they can't be disproven doesn't mean they're true but
01:08:44.100but there was a murkiness around that incident that has remained and which was first exploited
01:08:50.600by this cue thing okay i have another question do you remember the very tall joe biden that
01:08:58.660appeared one day in the rose garden well so i only have photographic evidence of that uh
01:09:05.940i assume that those aren't retouched photos uh or you know the video of him walking out and jill
01:09:13.260looks like she's this big and he's like seven feet tall okay so so let's let's look at the most
01:09:19.760benign and you know uh neutral uh interpretation of that we just had trump get on another plane
01:09:28.480out of turkey right not air force one where he switched and left his vice president and all the
01:09:34.240press corps and jake tapper etc on what was thought to be an endangered plane that might
01:09:38.960be taken down by a missile while he went out the side door okay the use of doubles in security oh
01:09:46.480my goodness it's a given i mean unless you you know unless you just really have never left the
01:09:52.080farm and even if you haven't left the farm because farmers are pretty smart about how things really
01:09:57.360work uh you know that there is we had a president who was incapacitated in a lot of the time right
01:10:07.120would you not want would you want us to think constantly that he's in bed actually and we
01:10:13.200We can't wake him up right now because he's heavily medicated.
01:10:16.140Or would you want them to be putting on that show?
01:10:18.700So that's my question is like, yes, there are – they've been doing this forever,
01:10:23.840having like a lookalike, a double, and when you see what the –
01:10:28.000They do it in movies that cost $20 million.
01:10:30.600Do you think that they don't do it in economies that run the Western world?
01:21:49.960and everybody expects that if i you can't keep up on this thing you're you're roadkill i'm going to
01:21:56.840get off the freeway yeah you're welcome to it the literary game has now been completely automated
01:22:02.080it's high speed everybody's writing a book in two damn weeks and publishing it in three days
01:22:07.480afterwards illustrated in the cover in a way that you used to have to wait a month to see i'm just
01:22:15.280out. Yeah. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the greats like yourself will take that approach and
01:22:23.020I wouldn't blame them. So Walter, I hope you enjoy coming on here. We really love to give
01:22:31.560our guests space to talk and have time and not feel rushed and just to see where the conversation
01:22:38.880goes so i hope you find the scott adams school useful for you as well as we just value having
01:22:48.000you here so much i i hope you really know that like we we look forward to you you're a lot of
01:22:53.600the people's favorite guests that we ever have and they're just like he's my favorite i love when he
01:22:58.720comes on he's like our big brother you know he's like a another version of scott so i hope you
01:23:04.320enjoy it as much as we love having you here i'll tell you what i do love it would i come on unshaven
01:23:11.360early in the morning at a cabin in montana if i didn't love it just because i don't smile a lot
01:23:17.520sometimes i smell a lot but i get off into my you know perorations and discourses and i might look
01:23:23.680like i'm depressed angry whatever no i'm having a blast the whole time i'm so glad that's and and i
01:23:31.520I hope that shows. It absolutely does. We feel it and we appreciate you so much. And so we can't
01:23:39.020wait because you did, as you always do, you said next time I come on, we'll talk about that. So I
01:23:44.180love when you say that because that always means there's a next time and we always look forward to
01:23:48.400it. If it was up to everybody here, it would be next week, but I can't bug Walter that much.
01:23:54.660I will share with my audience. I finished a book that's going to be coming out next June. I'll
01:23:59.740tell you more, that has been taking me years. And it addresses, it's a nonfiction book. It's a story
01:24:06.700of a trip I took, a long trip around America. You might remember Travels with Charlie by John
01:24:13.540Steinbeck, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's a very male thing to do to get in your car and try
01:24:20.920to discover reality that way. But in any case, I finished it to my satisfaction, more importantly
01:24:27.300to my publishers. Congratulations. Yeah. Satisfaction. The minute I turn this off,
01:24:32.660I have another deadline pressing in another media, another mode, and I'll be much freer than I have
01:24:40.620been. Amazing. All right. Well, great. Well, we will not forget that. So thank you so much,
01:24:47.560Walter. So in closing, and you guys, I know, I know how much you love this today. I can see the
01:24:52.960chat going by oh an update on the rash i i know i'll be in trouble too if i don't mention that
01:24:58.720how is the rash is the is a script i wrote which to review uh is a allegory a satirical allegory
01:25:06.480of the covet experience but of any mass hysteria really you know it's my invasion of the body
01:25:12.880snatchers and it has been brutally and consistently um made fun of uh uh repressed um the people who
01:25:27.280would get behind it uh told not to and it's that's where it stands i mean i can i'm not a producer
01:25:36.680I'm not a guy who can raise a lot of capital, get all of the necessary talent involved.
01:25:44.720Now, as much as I distrust AI and the arts, this might be a great use case for it.
01:25:50.460My trap door is, you know, oh, Walter the Luddite just declared that he's all for AI production of certain things that are politically or culturally sensitive.
01:26:02.540Because that is actually one of the benefits I've seen so far.
01:26:05.840you know, some of the political ads I've seen that were using AI would never have been produced
01:26:14.600by humans. They would have been too scared. In other words, actors and directors and so on.
01:26:21.200And so there is a rebel energy to especially, I think, visual arts using AI. And I'm not going
01:26:32.260to be so pure, puritanical, I never am about anything, that I won't consider it should this
01:26:38.840project have no other way of going forward. Okay. Well, I'm going to message you. I have
01:26:42.920a question about it. All right. So, all right. That's the update, you guys. And we'll see how
01:26:48.640that goes. As always, I want to thank Scott and Shelly for allowing this show to continue.
01:26:55.160It's because of their spirit that allowed this conversation today. And thank you to everybody
01:27:00.800who shows up here every day in the live show and in the replays. We so appreciate it. Please do hit
01:27:07.700the like, subscribe, and the notification bell and all the things, and share the show with your
01:27:11.460friends. And as always, a closing sip to our most beloved Scott Adams. To Scott.
01:27:21.300Thank you, Walter, so much. We'll see you soon.