Episode 1369 Scott Adams: Tesla Cybertruck, Prebunking of AZ Audit by CNN, Human Motivation and More

Da, da da. Hey, everybody, come on in. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. Best part of your day. Have you noticed that everything up until now seemed a little dull and uninteresting? But now the simultaneous sip is about to happen, and suddenly every part of your body is on. It's alive. It's alive. And if you'd like to enjoy this moment to its optimal sense, all you need is a cupboard mugger, a glass of tanker, Chelsea Dyna, canteen, juggernaut, flask, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, you know you need it. It's called the simultaneous sip. And the luckiest people in the world are about to enjoy it. Now go. Good morning, Patrick, from New York City. It's good to have you here. Well, did you ever have one of those days where you wish that a part of a Chinese rocket that is currently in our atmosphere, or outside the atmosphere, circling the Earth, and apparently big parts of this Chinese rocket are going to fall to Earth? And I was thinking this morning, God, wouldn't it be great if one of those fell on me and killed me? And I'm thinking, that's probably not a healthy thought, but I was thinking of all the ways that you have to go. You know, I'm at that age where I started thinking a little bit more and more about my end date, you know, my expiration date. You know, the older you get, the more you think, you know, that could be any day now. I was thinking to myself, of all the ways that I could die, my number one first choice would be to be killed by a falling Chinese rocket. Number one, you wouldn't know it was happening. You would just be walking, you know, having your day. Do, do, do, do, do, boom. And you're gone. That's how I want to go. I don't want to see it coming. I don't want to have a warning. I just want to be gone. Like I said, I've had a good run. I'd be ready. And you don't want your death to be wasted, right? Wouldn't you like to think, well, maybe you had a little meaning? Can you imagine what would happen if I got killed by a Chinese rocket? I mean, of all the people that could be killed by a Chinese rocket, I mean, it would be more impactful if it were someone more famous, but I'm kind of an anti China guy, you know, pretty. Pretty dedicated to the anti China world. And if I got. If I got killed by a falling Chinese rocket, it'd probably be good for the world. So bring it on. Bring on that rocket. Speaking of cool things, Elon Musk, the best marketer of all time, via the process of not doing any marketing. Can somebody fact check me on this? I believe Tesla doesn't do advertising, right? But you know, in a sense, they do marketing because I guess there's the new cybertruck. The Tesla cybertruck has been seen driving around Times Square. And tonight, Elon Musk will be on snl. Can you think of a better marketing campaign than hosting SNL and having your cool cybertruck driving around? And it's already trending on Twitter, so really good marketing. Something happened with Twitter recently, didn't it? Has anybody noticed that Twitter stopped showing you political tweets from people that you followed? Now, I don't know if it's happening to everybody, but what looks like what's happening is that people like me who are not so bad that I could easily be canceled. You know, I kind of walk right up to the edge of things that could get you canceled. But as far as I know, I've never crossed the line. Have you ever seen me cross the line into something that you could unambiguously say, oh, that's a violation of terms of service? I don't think so, because I try pretty hard not to do it. And I don't think it's hard. Right. Is it hard to not be banned? It's not hard. The things which get you banned are kind of obvious, right? Most of the time. But if you can't get somebody like me and shut me up, the next best thing is to just turn off my Twitter feed. And it looks like that happened, meaning that I'm still on Twitter. But can you imagine that? I just don't even see the tweets of the people I've interacted with and tweeted and followed the most. So, like, in the last several days, I haven't seen anything from. I think it lasts 24 hours. Nothing from Jack Basavic, who I would normally see a whole bunch of times a day. Nothing from Mike Cernovich, who I would normally see lots of times a day. Now, is it a coincidence that the first day it's just really noticeable because I would normally see so much Cernovich activity that it just went to zero the day after he was on a poll without running for governor of California. He's. He's polling a 3% he's not in the race, and he didn't know he would be part of the survey or the poll. And suddenly Breitbart is interviewing him and saying, are you serious about this? And he says, yes, he's serious about thinking about it now. And he. The way he framed it was that at least to push some, you know, push some ideas forward that wouldn't get pushed otherwise. And I'm thinking to myself, I can't even imagine what would be more fun than a Governor Cernovich. I mean, really, I just. I can't even imagine anything more fun than that or more useful, you know, or better for the state. I mean, it would just be a wild, wild, you know, shit show. The media, people would go nuts. They would just lose their shit. And. And I would like to see that so much. So I hope he runs well, you know, for his own benefit. I don't know if it's good for him. So I. I can't say it'd be good for him or his family, but I would say that it would entertain the hell out of me and I would be all in if he runs. So I feel that I have been algorithmically castrated. That should be a thing. Algorithmically castrated. So if you can't be banned outright, they can just remove all your connections. So my Twitter growth basically just stopped. It just stopped. At the same time, my Twitter. My YouTube traffic is growing. Do you think it's likely that my YouTube traffic would be growing nicely, but my Twitter followers would just flatline at exactly the same time? Does that sound like something that could happen naturally? Well, I suppose it could. It's possible, but it doesn't look like it doesn't feel like it. So I don't know if this is happening to any of you, but it looks to me as though Twitter is just dialing me down a little bit. And I don't know if there's any way to even know. Is there? There's no way to check, right? You can't ask them. Who would you talk to? That's the scary part. The scariest part about the algorithms and the social media platforms is there's nobody you can talk to. You can complain, but there's nobody to talk to. Right? Once again, I've told you to look for this pattern. It's a very consistent pattern, and it is how somebody like a Mike Cernovich could become governor or president easily just by knowing the thing I'm going to tell you next, which is that Democrats ignore human motivation when they design systems And Republicans don't. So if you're looking for a way to make Democrats and Republicans come together in some kind of policy way, this would be the way you just take the politics out of it and say, this is all I care about. Things that motivate people correctly and things that don't motivate people correctly. You can talk about politics all you want. You can talk about your Democrats and your liberals and all that. I'm not interested. This is how you would win. And this is something that only somebody as smart as a Cernovich, and I mean smart as in terms of not just iq, but having the right talent stack to. To understand, you know, that you could penetrate. It's a. It's a very thin membrane that seems like it's thick. The thin mem. The membrane being that you can't crack politics to get any message through to the other side. You know, Democrats can't really reach Republicans. Republicans can't reach Democrats. Cernovich could. Right. It's just a skill thing. He has the skill. He could do it. Name one other person really seriously, one other person who could do that. He's probably the only person I know who has the right skill set and the balls to do it. Right. You'd have to have gigantic balls as well as the skill set, and that just limits the number of people who would do it. So that could be interesting. And here's the other example of Democrats ignoring human motivation. The. The jobs report turned out to be disappointing because it turns out, big surprise, that if you pay people more to not work than you pay them to work, what will they do? Anybody? Anybody. What will happen when you pay people more to not work than to work? Use your great analytical minds to predict what could go wrong. What. What would be an outcome of that? Oh, unemployment, Right. Now, I told you yesterday that if you. One way to know you're in the golden age is if your problems look like this, because there's no world in which there are no problems. Right. That's not really an option. But when your problem is that people are making more money not working than working, and it looks like that'll be temporary, you've got a pretty solvable problem there. I guess Ron Desantis decided to solve it. So he's going to be cutting back on some of these payments to try to nudge people into taking some of the many open jobs because there's plenty of jobs. It's a weird situation. Plenty of jobs at the same time, plenty of unemployment. And I thought yesterday it must Be a training issue, but it's also an incentive issue. All right, Bill and Melinda Gates. So this story that won't die. And so there's a. So I don't know, I probably shouldn't get into this, but I'm going to, you know, because it's a personal issue. It's not really politics, but I can't resist it. Also, the news is so boring. I mean, I've got Biden boring syndrome. Biden is just boring the hell out of me. And it's starting to affect my mental health because I'm getting too bored. But anyway, the Bill and Melinda Gates story is interesting because apparently it sounds like they waited until their youngest was 18, so probably they had some problems for a while. But she wrote, how come this didn't come through? I must be missing a page of my notes. But I believe that Melinda Gates has said something along the lines of that she was an equal partner with Bill and she wanted everybody to know that she wasn't just a stay at home mom, which apparently she'd been at some point, that she was an equal partner with Bill Gates. To which I say, you know, it's none of my business because I'm not married to either one of them, but I feel as like I see the problem. Do you see the problem? Is it just me? So Melinda Gates says that she wants to be an equal partner, like in decision making and running the, probably running the non profit, etc. Do you see the problem yet? One of them is one of the smartest people in the world. One of them created Microsoft from nothing. The other one is Melinda Gates. Now Melinda Gates is a pretty serious person, right? If you were to compare her to the average human being, she would be high functioning, you know, successful on every level. But what if you compare her to Bill Gates and I wonder, Einstein was married, right? Am I right about it? Einstein was married to, I don't know, cousin or something. Don't you imagine that Einstein's wife would have arguments with, literally Einstein, in which she would say, look, you know, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this. And then Einstein would say, I don't want to be a jerk about this, but I'm Einstein and you're somebody I'm having sex with, happened to be my cousin. That's a different story. But you get the difference, right? I'm Einstein and you're whatever. Not that you're like somebody who married Einstein. So when we're having an argument and we disagree about what is true or right or Logical, I'm feeling you should just go with my opinion because I'm Einstein. I think we should be done here. Did I mention I'm Einstein? If you're tuning in late, I'm not Einstein. That was a skit. So I have a feeling it would be really hard to be Bill Gates and try to pretend that Melinda was his intellectual equal, because she isn't. Not even close. They're not even in the same ballpark. And I feel sorry because how is he going to find somebody who is really? Which probably has a lot to do with why he was. Apparently they had some arrangement in which he could see his ex girlfriend for a weekend or something a month or per year. And one imagines that that was a source of tension because I think that he liked his prior girlfriend because of her intellectual capacity. So yes, I know Einstein married his cousin, so she was probably also named Einstein. That what you're telling me? Because I was thinking about that when I told the story. I'm like, damn it, I hope the cousin's name wasn't Einstein, because that's ruining my whole skit. All right, well, I'm sure that. I'm sure that the cases will be fine. All right. Why are my notes in no particular order? Something going on here? Oh, my printer printed on the back. That's not. That's just wrong. All right, so here's a question for you. In the beginning of the pandemic, we were all dumb, including the experts. Not for any bad reason, but it was a novel virus, right? So nobody really understood the coronavirus. And. And so I give everybody a pass for anything they said that was wrong, be they experts or not, because we were all kind of guessing in the beginning. Now imagine, if you will, that the coronavirus were to hit today and had never hit before, but we had all the knowledge that we have today. Let's say we don't have any vaccines yet, but we just have the understanding of the virus. How much better would we have done? Because it seems to me that we, meaning science, is starting to land on the following proposition. That the chance of getting coronavirus if you stay six feet away from people, forget about masks. If you stay six feet away from people and you don't stay in a closed area for more than 15 minutes. But let's. Let's lower that to five minutes or six minutes because that's safer. So you need about 15 minutes inside a closed space, in which case that six feet wouldn't help you at all. So let me see if I can say this clear, if you're outdoors, six feet is all you need. But if you're indoors, six feet won't help you if you stay there too long. So there are two variables, how long you stay there, if it's indoors and how close you are. And I was wondering if you could come up with a like clever slogan that would make this easy, which is 6ft or 6 seconds, something like that. Now the 6 seconds would be just an arbitrary short period of time designated to tell you that you can be within six feet of somebody and you can be in a room with them, but just make it brief. So I've been sort of monitoring my own activities and you know, social distancing, etc. And I'm finding that it's really easy to stay six feet away from people as long as you don't have to be absolute about it. You know, if, if you're sometimes getting within six feet and then, you know, out, no problem. We know that now. Right. Just somebody being near you isn't enough that you have to have some concentrated, you know, you really got to be marinating in the room before you get it. So we know we don't get it from surfaces much or at least enough to worry about at this point. And we know that's the super spreaders and we know what they look like because the people who are going to get the worst case of the, the disease are going to be the ones who are the most super spready in general. Could be exceptions. But imagine if we started with our current knowledge. So just imagine on day one we said, here's the deal, six feet outdoors, boom. Forget about masks because I don't even know if you need them outdoors if you're indoors. Well, use a mask if you're going to be within 6ft for more than, or even just indoors for more than six seconds or something. Now the six seconds, might you maybe you make that six minutes or something. But the point is probably we could have simplified this to the point where the only thing we had to do is stay six feet away or don't stay in the room too long and then maybe we'd be done. That could be the whole thing. I wonder if that'd be enough. Axios is reporting that the UK is going to launch a study to see if they do these cheap daily Covid tests. Plus of course they have vaccinations, if that's enough to really make a difference in slowing the spread. And of course I've been talking about this since nine months ago. Maybe Michael Mina is the one who I think is the most, the most useful vocal proponent of this method. And he's been talking about it. That's where I heard it first. Why does it take you so long? Yeah, yeah, I'm watching. In the, in the comments, somebody says, a bit late. Why did it take so long? I feel like the only reason we're allowed to do this, the UK or anybody, is there must be some big corporate entity that decided. It doesn't matter now, but I feel like somebody was just stopping it. I just don't know who. Because it made sense from day one. The math made sense, the logic made sense and nobody ever disagreed. That's the weird thing about it. In most issues you've got some disagreement, but with this rapid testing thing, nobody who understood it disagreed with it that I'm aware of. There were lots of people who misunderstood it to be a little different than what it really was. And they, they were disagreeing with a misunderstanding. But nobody who understood it, expert or non expert, nobody who understood it disagreed with it. And it took nine months before they even put a trial together. There's something deeply mysterious about why this didn't happen sooner, because it was just so obvious. I don't know, maybe it's a communication thing, but that's good news. Anyway, here's the news that may get me kicked off of all social media. We'll see. Let's see how close we can fly to the sun. You ready? If this is the last time you ever see me, it's been nice. So I saw a bunch of social media stories that there was violence in Israel, there was some kind of protests, Palestinian protests in some holy area story you've heard a million times. The Israeli military or whoever, the air forces responded and people got hurt. And I think there were some deaths. So the story sounds like, you know, Groundhog Day, there's more protests, blah, blah, blah, people got hurt, blah, blah. And so I said to myself, what are they protesting? It wasn't in the story or the headline. And I thought, well, isn't that like the main story? It's like, why are you protesting? And then what happened in the protest? How do you leave out the why are you protesting? Check? Today, the major media, the way they're tweeting and talking about it, I'm not sure that they're really even covering the reason. So I had to go to follow the hashtag on Twitter and find some anti Israel people just to find out what the context was. Just the context. That's it. I had to go to anti Israel sources. And the protest is allegedly, and given the quality of the reporting and where I'm getting it from, I don't even know if this is true, but allegedly there's some kind of ethnic cleansing going on over there, Jerusalem, in which people who are not, not Jewish or is it not Israeli citizens, I'm not sure which it is, are being forcibly relocated to which I say, is that true? And you know, I saw somebody on Twitter push back and say, well, you don't understand, you know, that's how it is over there, basically. To which I say I'm not even, I'm not even arguing the point. What I'm, I'm only amazed that I couldn't get at the context from our regular news. The regular news just didn't even put the context in there. I would think ethnic cleansing should have been the headline. Now I'm going to say alleged because I'm sure if you ask Israel, they wouldn't say they're doing any ethnic cleansing, would they? So whatever they think they're doing, it's probably a security thing or I don't know, who knows what it is. I'm sure they have a good reason or at least it would sound good if you heard it. But why is that not the headline, people protesting ethnic cleansing? Well, you can, you can answer that question yourself over on cnn. It looks like Chris Cilliza's job is to pre bunk the Arizona audit, meaning to put enough doubt into the people doing the Arizona election audit that no matter what they come up with, you're going to say to yourself, well, that was already pre bunked. We don't even need to wait for the outcome because we already know it's not credible. And so they're going pretty hard at it. And except that here's the way they handled it. This is Crystal is an opinion piece on cnn. It says the headline says the most absurd conspiracy theory yet in the ongoing Arizona recount. Now what would you think with this headline, the most absurd conspiracy theory yet? Well, the first thing you'd hear is there are lots of conspiracy theories. So. So if you're wondering if the Arizona audit is being reported as maybe credible or not credible, CNN's decided to paint them with the multiple conspiracy theory brush. So right away they're mired in multiple conspiracy theories. Okay. And then this one, whatever they're going to talk about next is the most absurd one yet. So wouldn't you think that the story is about the people doing the audit believing conspiracy theories? Right. That's what the headline suggests, that the people doing the audit believe that in these conspiracy theories. And then they quote one of the persons who's, you know, organizing it, somebody in charge, and he says, why are you checking the specifics? Was they're looking to see if there's any bamboo fiber in any of the ballots. Because if there is, that would suggest that the paper was made in China because we don't use bamboo as any part of our paper products. Okay, now how likely is it that they're going to find bamboo in the paper of the ballots? Well, I'm going to say unlikely. Anything's possible. I'm not going to rule it out, but I would say that one's in the unlikely category. However, how did the person running the audit who was interviewed say? He said that they were, quote, trying to ungaslight people about Chinese paper on ballots. I'm paraphrasing, but he actually said ungaslight. In other words, the person running the audit doesn't believe there's going to be any bamboo in the paper. But it would be helpful to get rid of this conspiracy theory. In other words, CNN was on the same side as the guy they interviewed and then wrote a headline to make it look like he was on the opposite side. Neither of them think that this is going to come out with anything true, but both of them would like to see it debunked. This guy's doing it. He's actually debunking it by looking for it and not finding it. So this is just completely unethical reporting or at least the headline is unethical. But we've come to expect that. So the pre bunking is underway. It does indicate that there is some fear. The the way they're saying it, the CNN folks are saying the fear is that that the audit will come up with new BS that everybody will have to explain away. And it's just work or not. But I think they might be afraid that something might be found as well. They might be. We can't read their minds, but they might be. All right, There we go. There was all the missing pages. So how important would it be to society to have a credible source of news or a credible source of fact checking? Don't you think society would be greatly benefited by credible fact checking? Well, here's an example. PolitiFact, damn it. Never print on two sides. So politifact is. Jesus Christ. Sorry, forget it. I have a flaw in my mental makeup which is that if things are unorganized, they drive me crazy. And my printer decided to print on the back of one of my sheets, but not the rest. It's making me a little bit crazy because you think your printer would either print front and back or print only front. You don't expect your printer to print three pages, but one of them has something on the back. Now, I don't think that's even a setting. And the odds of that printer going over my balcony to be smashed into pieces after I'm done with this broadcast are very high right now. Here's another fake news from cnn. So the headline was, school district apologizes. No, actually this was on Twitter, various headlines. The school district apologizes for offering support circles to white students following the Chauvin trial. All right, so there's a school district. Look at. Watch how misleading this is. There's a school district that allegedly, but it's not true, allegedly offered support circles to white students following the Chauvin trial. So the first thing you need to know is that it didn't happen. So that didn't happen. What it was was that white students were invited to become allies with people of color and to basically just be allied. So it wasn't anything about comforting white students. However, people who thought that's what it was about and it wasn't protested, so they had to walk it back. Do you see how crazy this is? So the thing they said was something that wasn't happening. It was actually a completely woke thing to do. But because the headline or the way it was presented made it look like it was unwoke, they had to walk it back even though it was woke. So you can't even do a woke thing. If you explain it in a way that other people criticize it as being unwoke. You have to pull back your wokeness. I mean, that is. We're in pretty absurd territory. But here's the part that bothered me. Why can't white students have a support circle after the Chauvin verdict? Because I'm pretty sure a lot of white people believe that Chauvin was not the subject of justice. Because he wasn't. I mean, whatever that trial was, and whether or not Chauvin did something that makes him go to jail or should make him go to jail is a separate question. But the trial was unfair. If you're a white person and you watched a white person be railroaded in public by your justice system, maybe you do need a support group. Maybe you should have a white person support group. You just watched a white person being taken down by a political. By a Political, politically motivated jury, you know, even. Even if Chauvin deserves to be punished is a whole separate question. But the trial wasn't fair. I mean, not even a little bit. So, anyway, that bothers me on every level, that story and. All right, I got some other things to talk about, but they're too boring. All right, are any of you having Biden boredom problems? Because there's something going on, and I don't know if it's the golden age that I didn't know the golden age would be so boring, but I feel as if the news has just stopped reporting bad news because Biden's in charge and there isn't enough going on in the Trump world. They're doing, like, repeats and stuff. It's like, oh, remember the time Trump did this? Or remember the time he said that there's just nothing happening? Boring, but radical. Yeah, that's a good strategy that the Democrats have. The more boring they make it, the more they can slip through their radical agenda. But. But have you noticed that there's a whole bunch of states that are passing school choice now, or at least letting the money follow the student, which turns out to be similar? So there's some really good things happening in the world right now. But, yeah. So apparently Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene have teamed up for some kind of a tour. And I think it's interesting that the two most canceled people decided to team up. I like the fact that neither of them went on defense. They both went on offense, and they teamed together on offense. It's a better strategy because if they apologized, then it'd just be over. But if they go on offense, they have a chance of making a dentist, especially if they're interesting. All right, many conservative women are emerging for the gop. Somebody said, I don't know what that means. Weren't they always there? Somebody said, I'm not going to read that comment. That's funny. All right. Studies show that politicians who apologize face more criticisms. Yeah, you would expect that, wouldn't you? Tim Burns says, how do you use your hands in persuading? That's a good question. I'll answer that question because I'm out of political stuff. So you could certainly be persuasive without using your hands. It's not a requirement, but if you're trying to keep people's attention, your hands can really do it. Here's how I do it. I do practically memeing. Mime. Not meming, miming. Have you ever seen me mime? Here I am walking up to a Glass wall. See? Pretty impressive. Anyway, the point is that I try to draw physical objects with my hands. If you haven't seen me do that. So if I'm describing something that there's a big thing and a small thing, you'll often see me do with my hands forming the big thing and then separately talk about the small thing. And part of that is to make visual what I'm talking about. And because it's movement and it's big, see how big this movement is. If you looked at 100 people on stage, how many of them would have their hands up here? Not many. This is really big. And one of the things you have to learn when you're a presenter is how to go bigger than you feel comfortable with. If you're talking to the public, your natural inclination is to go small with your hands. You'd be like sort of this thing, you know, and, you know, hope everybody's, you know, feeling good a little bit, because you're gonna. You're gonna have an illusion that the audience would think you look funny if you go bigger, but in fact, it's the opposite. So once you get past the illusion, then you can really, you know, make a difference on stage or in public. So the illusion is, if I were to go like this, you would like me less or respect me less because I'm so wacky and I'm going big. But it's actually the only reason anybody wants to watch. If you don't. If you don't exceed some expectations, nobody's going to be interested. So you have to either be more dangerous than they thought you would be. See what I'm doing with my hands? More dangerous on this. It's almost physical. You can see my almost grabbing something and moving it. So more dangerous. I've got a little ball of danger in my hand right now. So if you're not dangerous, nobody cares. That's why Trump is so interesting. That's why Cernovich is so interesting. He's dangerous. It's why you watch me, because I'm dangerous, right? So part of being dangerous is also doing things that other people say, I couldn't do that because I would be too embarrassed. So when you watch somebody who's doing something that you couldn't do or wouldn't do because you would be embarrassed to do it, they're doing exactly the right thing for a public presentation. So go big. Big. This is big. This is big. This is small. That's small. Go big. All right. You'll never regret it. When you see a deaf person do this. He's done with you. Okay. We learned a little sign language there. Some signing. How can I be embarrassed when so many are so foolish? I like that point of view. You know, if you can learn to not be embarrassed by, you know, fear of failure and anything else. It's like a superpower. All right? Shows age. What shows age? Hands. I mean, they do, but I don't know if that's your point. Christine says Cernovich is repulsive. You know, that's why he is also successful. If you didn't have strong feelings for him, both positive and negative, he wouldn't be who he is. So there's nobody who evokes strong positive feelings who doesn't evoke strong negative ones. I doubt you'd find many exceptions. All right, that's all I got for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow.