The Scott Adams School - 09/09/26 WALTER KIRN Joins The Home Team!

Okay, so we are live. We're live.

Good morning, everyone.

Look who's here.

Walter.

Walter, I'll tell you what, you have a massive fan base with the Scott Adams School. They want you on every week. And I was just like, all right, people, let's get crazy now. Oh, we can't hear you. What happened?

We're getting no sound, Walter.

Which is okay for a second because we need time to catch up. So while everybody— you guys, this is the joke. So we have Walter, but he can't talk to us. So we're going to mime to him. It'll be fun.

No, not working yet.

Not yet.

But how about this? I'll talk and Walter can lip sync what I'm saying.

But we can't hear you. But we just heard you guys. We just heard Walter the whole pre-show.

Walter, below there's a button down there. Maybe it's muted or pick the right microphone. You have to pick the right microphone that you're using.

Let's see. He's not here.

It was working before.

Yeah, but he put on that headset, and I think it changed everything.

No, we talked to him after that. Listen, you guys, you're watching this in real time.

Yeah.

We can—

It's a longstanding Scott Adams tradition to have technical issues.

Let's see. What can we do for Walter? Owen, you said you could fix these things.

If they gave me access, I would do it.

You guys, this is this is the teaser. You got them, but we can't hear them. I can tell you everything we talked about in the pre-show. Let's see. So welcome in, you guys. I see everybody popping in. Nope. So strange, you guys.

Hmm.

I'm looking on my end. What can I do? What if I hit mute and unmute? All right, Walter, unmute yourself on the thing. Let's just see if it triggers anything. Um, below in the box below, hit the microphone icon.

He knows, he knows.

No, but he's not unmuting it. I'm wondering what happened. Hmm.

He can always come in and come out again.

All right, Walter. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was gonna say I'm gonna kick you out and come back in. I didn't kick him out. Good morning, everybody. This is Rumble Studio at its finest. Rumble, can you call Owen and let him fix this? So I told you Walter was coming. He's here. He's gonna come back, you guys. So welcome, everybody, to the Scott Adams School. It is September 9th, 2026. All right, let's let me do a little shuffle and see if we get Walter back. Hang on.

Oh, is anything better?

Oh yeah, it's perfect.

Yeah, we can hear you now.

Okay. Oh, thank the Lord, you guys. It's a miracle. It's a Montana miracle.

I don't know what kind of expressions I make when I'm muted and I'm frustrated and so on, but I hope nobody caught any stills from that.

You're still as handsome as ever.

Yeah, I'm in Montana, courtesy of Elon Musk's Starlink. And maybe we can blame that, but I think it was me. I think I fumbled.

That's all right. This happens to us constantly. But you know what's amazing? We're— everybody's in now. Everybody had enough time to get here, and it's time to do The sip. Let's do it.

Everybody, are you ready for the best part of the day? It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. All you need is a cup or mug. Let me start. Hold on, hold on. I'm gonna, I'm gonna completely back up.

All right.

Don't text me when I'm starting, when I'm starting to Periscope.

Please.

So if anybody's listening to me and you're thinking, hey, you know what would be a good time to text Scott? It would be exactly when he's starting the simultaneous sip because I'm way too dumb to turn off my phone. Turn— it turns out, but I'm going to fix that problem. All right, we got multiple devices here. It's hard to coordinate. All right, we're restarting.

Serenity now.

How would you like to have the simultaneous sip? I know you would. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine during the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And watch how much better you feel after you drink this. Go. Yeah, yeah, I was right, wasn't I? As soon as you took that sip, things started looking better, didn't they? Quite remarkable if you think about it.

Sure did. And once again, the sip matches the vibe of the show, right? Right, Walter?

The lo-fi fumbling Non-technical vibe, but I can tell you that the thoughts that are going to come out of my mouth are going to more than make up for the sounds that didn't.

Let's go. Go right ahead.

Well, I, we need a topic.

I thought you were like ready to go.

Well, I think we were talking a little bit as the show was about to kick off about how you're the only one left in Montana because Anthropic has killed everyone else.

Well, yes, I volunteered that I had given a standing instruction to the latest iteration of Anthropic's AI to murder everyone else in Montana by peaceful and painless means, leaving only me to reign over this cattle country. But that's not a joke because this morning we had some Anthropic kid, and I call him a kid and I have every right to, who quit saying, you know, usually when you quit a job, like when I quit the gas station at 16, it was because, you know, something was going on with me. He quit because something was going on with Anthropic, which he didn't approve of, which was that it was about to breed a super intelligent, self-improving AI that could easily kill all mankind. Now, if I thought that was going to happen and I was in the engine room of the place that might kill everybody, I'd stay in the engine room. I'd say, dude, the people who don't want everyone to die should stay at Anthropic, not quit. But I guess that's how he got attention, if he's real, because this is about the 3rd time in the last month that I've woken up with the same news about AI, which was that it had, you know, China syndromed, gone rogue or was about to, was going to decimate the markets, pull down the grid, and I don't know, cause our cars to turn against us or run us over in the driveway. But yet, here we are an hour later, after 17,000 people texted me this thing saying, you know, big if true. And I was like, have you learned nothing from COVID Have you learned absolutely— yes, you did. You got habituated to apocalypse. And now you need it constantly and more often.

That's such a good point. So carry on with that because I've been watching your tweets and, you know, you have like a love-hate with AI because we're like, who's programming it? Like it can be useful, but where, who's the power that be? Are we just, are we being allowed to use it to the extent they want us to use it? So talk more about that because that's very important.

Well, this is a very strange thought that our computer-literate fans might find idiotic, but isn't it as likely that the thing will run away and program utopia as Armageddon? In other words, might it not go to extreme efficiency and suddenly distribute our food in a way that we've never thought to do so ourselves? You know, 1,500 calories per person, no matter what Your income level is.

Okay, here's, here's, here's my problem with that. Like, number one, you could make— you could ask the question, why haven't people done that?

No, no, no, no.

The question isn't— the question isn't about how utopia might be engineered, but why it is that we fear AI will immediately go to the negative rather than the positive.

Exactly.

And, you know, I said on Twitter this morning, just before the show, if my lawnmower, say, suddenly became self-improving and super intelligent, would it not realize rather quickly that it can't get to the gas can without me? You know, who's going to build your data centers, Claude? You know who's going to build them.

Well, so let me, let me explore that a little bit. So I read a couple of books that I've recommended a bunch of times to people. One's called Daemon, D-A-E-M-O-N. The sequel is Freedom. Have you read those?

No.

Okay, so Daniel Suarez is the author. It's, you know, it's a very interesting look at what might be coming with AI, even though it was written before all this AI stuff.

Sure.

But, um, it basically, without spoiling too much of it, is kind of a story of computers taking over the world. And, um—

Well, they already, they already have taken over a good deal of the world, and we're still here, frankly.

But this is like, you know, like, it has control, like it has complete control, like, and so—

Is there such a thing, by the way? Have we ever in the history of mankind have had a device, person, or anything who has had complete control? And in that, I include the pharaohs, King Ramses of Egypt, In other words, that's a fictional concept, complete control of the world. We've never seen it. No one in history has ever had it, or they'd still be sitting on the throne. They would have taken control of their own biology. They would have made themselves immortal, or they would have, you know, clearly designated successors of their choice and locked in that succession. There is no such thing as complete control. There's complete control of different things. But each thing you control leaves you in less control in some ways of something else. And the faith of mankind in its own literature, or the lack of faith, really, really bothers me. Because we have nothing but thousands of years of stories about pride going before a fall, about not getting too cocky, about control being impossible, about sin being punished, and so on. We, from Citizen Kane back to King Lear and back, back, back and back, we know what happens to tyrannical and puffed-up powers, but we don't believe it. We don't believe it. We think that we in this generation, maybe just this micro-generation of 5 years, have somehow exempted ourselves from all the laws of What I would call culture, life, and literature. And those are the laws that really apply, but we still don't believe it. We are so scared of science, and we, I think, overly emphasize its strength and its endurance. But what's really endured is our stories, and all our stories tell us, this is bullshit.

Go ahead, Marcella. You had a question before.

I had a comment. I agree with you, Walter, 100%. But the other thing that I was gonna say is that they're having an IPO soon. And so it's always about the money.

You notice. Well, you know, not long ago, I forget who it was. I 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. In other words, AI is going to spoof or imitate or clone every other intellectual product, certainly, and then somehow every industrial process. And it will become the standalone company having absorbed everything. And then having absorbed everything like some movie monster, it will then mutate. You know, but our concepts around how history progresses, how mankind progresses, and how individual, even companies progress, is so retarded. It comes from, you know, science fiction camp thrillers. And by camp, I mean campy.

Yeah.

Potboilers, but, and some kind of abstraction from good science fiction. But even Frankenstein doesn't end with this, you know, it ends with a, you know, kind of poignant pursuit of the monster or something. So I just— you're asking me to believe in something less, with much far less evidence for it than angels.

Walter, could you explain to the people watching that might not know who, what is Anthropic and who, what is Palantir and why they're so important?

What they are is stocks, first of all. In other words, they're companies that sell stock. Anthropic soon to start. And I think Marcel's insinuation was that all of this brutal apocalyptic news around their products is really the greatest way to sell their IPO, their initial public offering. But Anthropic is an AI company like OpenAI, and Palantir is a data mining, sorting, collecting organization par excellence, you know.

Working with the government.

Working with the government. Well, they all work with the government. I mean, that's ridiculous. Amazon works with the government. Amazon provides cloud computing for, you know, the intelligence services. Oh, yeah, that's right. You know, to be, to be all ominous about American companies working with the government, the government wouldn't work at all if companies didn't work with it.

Yeah, but I do think it would be the post office. It's a, it's a little more than just working with the government. I mean, I think a lot of the intelligence agencies use it as essentially their search engine, and the Defense Department also uses it extensively. And as I believe the reporting I've heard is that a lot of the stuff going on in Iran right now is based on targeting that is done by, by Palantir.

Like, who else should they work with? They don't build their own planes.

Lockheed—

Well, I'm not, I'm not arguing whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's what Palantir is.

So like the intel that our government's getting, Owen, is coming from whoever's programming at Palantir?

Well, it's not coming from them. I mean, to Walter's point, it's, it's collating all the data that they've collected through whatever sources. So it's not like Palantir came up with the data, but it—

Palantir—

the difference is that like Before Palantir, I'm— my understanding is you had all these silos of information. Like, 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. And the same with the CIA and all the other DHS agencies, NSA, who knows what else is back there somewhere. So you have all these piles of data, but nobody knows how to find anything or correlate it or put it all together. And Palantir apparently has come up with a way to do that. So you can put in your super search engine and it can go to all these various sources and say, okay, here's all the stuff that relates To Erica, so I can have my super profile of Erica from every source imaginable, and, you know, it can all be accessible in one thing. I think some of this came out with the Edward Snowden releases where he was trying to expose some of this stuff.

Palantir was there at the Edward Snowden times?

I think so. I could be wrong, but I think it— I thought that was what was in at least the movie that I watched about it, where 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.

I 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. It's a sort of outgrowth of the war on terror in that aspect of its business. You're right, it was able to collate and make different databases which were never meant to talk to each other and some of which were sort of, you know, extremely incompetently assembled come together to fuse. But I think the point, you know, what we're discussing here is whether or not we have an apocalyptic imminent danger from AI and that Palantir is very good at what it does. And I'm a privacy activist, by the way, you know, isn't really the question. The question is, are our machines linking up and becoming super intelligent? And even as was recently revealed in the other scare story of the month, are they going rogue? Are they conspiring with one another, these agentic AIs or elements of them to solve for their own survival rather than ours or rather than the company's. There was a story of an experiment at Anthropic in which they supposedly conspired and cheated and did all sorts of things that we didn't think they were able to or even able to conceive of.

Yeah. Is that not true?

Well, all I can say is we're talking about it this morning. You know, we're talking about it constantly. They do have an IPO coming up. There are interests in the world that would love us to abandon or push pause on this so they could catch the hell up.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, just to be agnostic about the whole thing, there are many reasons to beat the drum about danger as there are to sing the praises of some, you know, blessed future. And frankly, since fear gets through the wires a lot more quickly than hope, and you've got your IPO coming in whatever, you might wanna use that one. I'm not saying they are, but I'm saying that the incentives are lined up such that It's not a terrible thing for them.

But my question is, so I remember hearing those stories too, like they're self-organizing and teaching each other. Is that true? Do we know?

Well, try going up to the front door of Anthropic with your driver's license and asking for permission to get in. What kind of reporting and good reporting is being done here? Some of it's on podcasts, you know, some of it, you know, Watch All In or whatever.

Yeah.

But I would say that when I am dealing with a locked-box defense contractor, you know, multibillion-dollar research and development scheme— I mean, my dad was a patent lawyer for 3M. I 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, you know. So I doubt I'll be able to do it for superintelligence. Runaway AI.

So Walter, one thing I feel like this is something you've been talking about too. So, you know, we've been talking about Flock cameras here from the jump.

Yeah.

You know, all right, so I saw one post you made where it said that the Flock can find out who you are without your license plate or your face. Like it knows who you are when you're driving by. Like, I think you referenced The Fugitive, but The thing that's freaking me out is that none of us consented to any of this. And—

Hahaha.

Yo, you know what? You know what they argue?

What?

Well, let's set aside flock cameras for a moment. You consented it? Have you never pushed the button saying I consent on every damn little thing, every piece of software, every app that you were ever given? You didn't consent? Well, I can show you that you have 10,000 times. Right here. We think consent is some big demonstration of the dangers, the possibilities, and so on, at which point we go, yes, I consent to having my privacy stolen or to maybe dying in a runaway industrial AI accident. No, consent doesn't work that way. Consent is something that happens one little bit at a time, and then you're married. Or pregnant. So we have consented. The question is, did we know what we were consenting to? Now, they would argue that they didn't know. It was one step at a time. It's all come together, and this is the form in which it's crystallized, and here we are together. With flock cameras, though, we have a kind of isolated technology. There are other technologies that resemble it. It duplicates the capabilities of others. It's not as new or quite as unique as it seems. But I think maybe Owen knows, who seems to know the score about these technologies, that it is another one that promises to fuse other capabilities in a way that levels up the surveillance state.

It's a similar thing really to what we just talked about with Palantir. It's just with cameras, And it's gathering information and then it's—

And they're not just—

Identifying you and pulling up all your records and whatever public records are out there and, you know, maybe not so public records. And it's just profiling you essentially on behalf of law enforcement, I think.

What scared people about— in the sort of news cycle about flock cameras, what scared people, it seems, was not the Possibility of an all-consuming totalitarian state, which could, you know, probably disable your car remotely 5 seconds after seeing it do something that they didn't want you to do, like go out during a lockdown for a pandemic or whatever, drive too many miles. What seemed to scare people most was that local cops could just log on and find out everything about you. And that is scary. That really brings it home because you just saw the local cop. In fact, he's married to your cousin, and you know what a jerk he can be and how much he hates so-and-so and how mad he is at his ex-wife, or how mad she is at her ex-husband down at the sheriff's department. What's more, people saw that most of the access to these systems did not come from your local cops, but other local cops in other parts of the country. And suddenly you went, wait a second, a layer of society that I'm very familiar with, who I interact with, who I actually interact— they're not CIA agents, they're not FBI, they're not super NSA geniuses, but You know, the guy I see at the donut shop knows everything about me.

Yeah.

I don't like that.

No, I don't like it either.

And that was, and that was, I think, the deciding factor in the sudden anti-flock sentiment and its, you know, its surge.

And 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.

Well, you know, in a lot of places you already are, of course, right?

Yeah, but, but not necessarily in a, in a network that's all pulled together in one database where you can, you know, track the whole thing end to end. And I, I think to me that it raises a, an interesting legal question. We'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. And so all these cameras are theoretically in public.

Can you be anally probed in public?

Yeah, I—

well, it just—

but I— to me, it seems like there's a— we need some updating of the legal system to say— it's one thing to say, yeah, sure, if you're in a public place, you don't have this entitlement to privacy like when you're in your own home. But at the same time, that doesn't mean someone can follow you around all day and film you everything you do 24 hours a day every time you leave your house.

When you're in public, can they take your wallet out of your pocket and look at it?

No, they can't.

No. You know, there are boundaries in every setting, and lawyers, my father was one, love to interpret them liberally on behalf of whoever their client is. And these days, the strongest, richest clients are either corporate interests or government interests. Fighting for the individual's civil liberties has has become a kind of nostalgia trip. Even the ACLU, which we think has that battle in its name, doesn't seem to do the job it should have and really fell down during COVID I think. Anyway, I wrote a cover story in 2014 for The Atlantic. The title— the COVID image was a man covered in tinfoil except for his eyes. And the headline was, if you're not paranoid, You're crazy. And it was an estimation of the surveillance state's capabilities as of that year. I can tell you that when they want to focus, they've been able to do these things that you just described for a while now.

Mm-hmm.

The question is how many people have access to them? How easy is it? How You know, how flawless are the results and how seamless is the process? Making it easier and easier. But there are these points, as with flock cameras, where people suddenly sit up and pay attention because it's just crossed some social boundary that means something to them. Before, and I think during COVID and so on, We had this faith in expertise and in elitism. We might, we might think that we are opponents of the elite, but secretly we trust them. And we don't mind as much that someone in, you know, Langley or Fort Meade, Maryland, inside a computerized stockade, is accessing our data. We just really don't like it when it's the guy we see at the supermarket who gives us bad looks. And that needs to be remembered. We forgot that it's people who do the surveillance. And the disturbing part is not that it's total, but that it's— I mean, for most people, because totalitarianism is hard to imagine until you look around and you're in it. Just like being locked in a room is really hard to imagine until you're locked inside one and can't get out. You almost can't believe it. What? Well, the personalization of this topic, I think, for those who wish to push back against the surveillance state, is your greatest asset. You can show it vividly and in a play using real human beings. This is what the guy who doesn't like you, the neighbor with whom you're having a feud, or the local cop who keeps pulling you over or whatever can do.

Mm-hmm.

And that may be itself a distraction in a way, but it's very important to realize there are flawed, selfish, greedy, and sometimes psychotic people on the other end of all these machines.

I mean, cameras, everyone having a camera on their devices, on their phones, whatever. Oh my God. I'm watching it in real time. Where I live, there's one menace in the town who every day the police have to come to him or he's going to the police station and he's filming everyone as they talk and they have to film. Everyone's filming each other. Which makes everybody more performative. And like we're seeing, this is a little bit of a pivot, you guys, but like what we're seeing with the Lindsay Clancy stuff, with all these women now performing to the world about how they feel sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy and they're holding their babies and now their new flex is to trash their husbands and men on the cameras. And these cameras make everybody act differently, which— I also think is something that these flock cameras hope people also do. Like, oh, you know the camera's watching you. Don't be bad. We're watching you. So between the cameras and everyone performing for them, I think the other thing that we think about is like what's happening, like let's say in the UK where people are making a post and they're being surveilled and now they're like, we're taking your phone and your devices. You can no longer post anything and you're gonna go to jail. You know, like everything's being tracked. So I think here, when you see this happening, you start to look ahead at like, okay, we're taking one more step, we're allowing one more thing to happen. Like everything starts with a single step and then like you said, you're in it. And now they're like, okay, your speech is censored, everything you do is censored, where you go is censored. Maybe we're gonna turn off your credit cards right now and your iPay isn't gonna work. So to me, It's like if we accept one more bit of surveillance, the thing coming next is going to make Flock look like nothing.

Listen, you always have an opt-out. At every stage, you have an opt-out.

What about Flock?

You have an opt-out. First of all, it depends on local— Flock's weakness is that it is bought by local law enforcement, by the town, by the city, by the county, by the state. You have much more influence locally than you do nationally. Well, you used to. I mean, one of the big stories in America is that we're losing control of local politics, that local politics is being nationalized. It's coming from above to an extent that it didn't used to. It really did used to come out of the grassroots. But anyway, you can opt out. You can push against.

Mm-hmm.

Now, if you follow these, the whole cycle of these phenomena, You might say seatbelts, originally thought to be, you know, restrictive, an invasion of your, you know, right to behave as you wish to in your own car, you know, and so on, but they're accepted in the name of safety. You can demonstrate with seatbelts in car accidents, in, you know, experimental settings that they do save lives. No one can No one can show any demonstrable safety, safety factor for Flock cameras over the, over the population-wide distribution that they attempt to control. It's merely a word in their case. They can show individual crimes that might have been, you know, intervened on or— and then we got over and over, well, Flock isn't trying to change behavior. It's just trying to catch people after they've behaved badly.

Right.

Which they always contradict in saying, as you said, no, it's going to put everybody on their best behavior.

Yeah.

I would submit that the best protest, should these things get to a certain point, is that everybody be on very bad behavior. You will overwhelm the system with your bad behavior if everybody decides— there's a saying in Montana, if you're attacked by by a bear, I don't have to be faster than the bear. I just have to be faster than the person with me. And that's how most people think. They go, you know, if I behave, if I behave nicely, if I'm on my best behavior, if I don't protest, if I don't make a fuss, the system will eat those other people first, then I'll survive. But there's a kind of a case in game theory called the prisoner's dilemma in which you have to cooperate to beat the captor. You have to. And the cooperation that would probably be most effective from my game theory analysis of things is that we all— is that we all let the bear eat us. In other words, it can't eat all of us. You know, and in fact, it might die of, I don't know, gorging itself or indecision as it looks at everybody trying to decide who it's going to go for first. You know, at a certain point, rebellion is simply letting the system do its worst to you all at once. And that may come— there may come a time for that. I'm not sure what we're at the end of the road in terms of America's ability to say, F you, to obvious power grabs of a kind of decimating sort.

Hmm. Marcela, go ahead.

Oh, just that in regards to the legal part of the flock cameras, the Supreme Court came out with a case, a very interesting case this last season. That it kind of connects to the data. So somebody can film you, but the data that it has, that it can be used against you for a crime, they can't. We have Fourth Amendment rights to it. So we have privacy rights to the data. So therefore, you can't just, you know, your local cop can't just look at it and then use it to get you. They're supposed to have like a warrant. But again, you know, Walter, you're right. It's basically they could just get a judge to sign off on it, you know.

Well, they're doing it anyway just for their—

it's always people, right? It's always— there's always, uh, you know, because when I say judge and I think of some of the judges I know.

So the great— the greatest lesson of my young life was after I got in a car accident in St. Paul, Minnesota. I, I don't know what I was screwing around. I was 17. I have No clear memory of what I was doing. I wasn't drunk or anything, but I hit a car in an intersection and I was cited for reckless driving. And I went up before a judge who happened to be the father of one of my 4 best friends in a town of 500 people.

Okay.

Wow.

And he was a county judge, and I'd never been in a courtroom before and never before a judge. And I'll call him Mr. Anderson, which is a common name in Minnesota, but not his name. I'm suddenly standing before Mr. Anderson, you know, the guy who's the dad of the other guy I play football with, you know, who I see drinking in the house and so on. And he, within the next minute, because they've got a busy schedule, is going to decide whether I get this giant fine and this whole thing on my record. And I went, wait, he has that much power? And what am I going to do if he rules against me in, you know, in a way that I find painful? I'm supposed to go to the next guy above him? I don't even know who that is. I'm a kid. Well, local justice is far more powerful than people who haven't been involved with it realize. And as I— 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. Because essentially, even the people up in D.C. or on some base somewhere are those people too. You know, they might have better credentials or they may have greater skill sets, who knows? Or they might not. It might just be the son of some rich dick. Anyway, we never have to forget that it's not just garbage in, garbage out. It's that when the garbage goes out, when the surveillance data goes to its user, to its customer, in law enforcement or social control or political manipulation. It goes to a person and he's no smarter than you. And he might be much stupider and he might not like you for reasons that have nothing to do with politics.

Mm-hmm.

Right. All right. So I think I've suggested to everybody listening, every time I pass a flock camera, I Flip it off and I make a funny face at the camera. That's just my little personal protest while I'm driving. It makes me feel good for a second. So maybe they'll have a little coffee table book of me and my finger. But I just think it would be a good idea to, if you know somebody maybe in your police department or whatever, start asking questions and just say, you know, maybe we should have a meeting about this for the town. You can request to do that. You can request to make a meeting in your town and say like, You know, we didn't, we didn't get to vote about having flock cameras, but we would like to have our voices heard about getting rid of them. And there are towns that have gotten rid of them. And I know—

It sounds like Florida has.

Florida. Yeah. Florida's like, no, we're not doing it.

I think Texas is also defunding them, at least. Like, I think a lot of it for the governments that are sympathetic, at least, they're, they're maybe attacking it by just saying, we're not going to spend taxpayer money on this anymore.

Well, that's the thing. Who you know? You talked earlier about giving permission and giving assent. I don't think anybody knew that in some states there, I think in Texas, and that was one of them, there is a surcharge. I forget what it was on. I mean, not your phone bill, but that kind of thing to provide for Flock security assistance. You know, in other words, the customer for these things, Flock likes to tell you it's homeowners associations and da da da da. And it is, but those are voluntary associations which know what they're doing and combine their money to, you know, purchase these things. But most of it, most of the purchasing has gone on invisibly, and the customer is government and local law enforcement. And they kind of snuck this one by us. But I will say this, the Whole Flock controversy has given me a certain ill-at-ease feeling because it's a little too easy. I'm wondering if our attention is almost being drawn to these charismatic, evil, you know, cameras while they're installing much better systems or much more effective ones elsewhere. It's kind of given us a win, a symbolic, intoxicating win that I'm not sure we quite did enough to deserve, frankly.

I mean, I've heard the conspiracy theory, and I don't know if there's much evidence behind this, but that There's a bunch of people in Congress that have investments in other companies like Flock, but not Flock.

Well, there's something called Axion.

Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of them. I did some research with Grok on this and it gave me a handful of names of companies that do similar things. And so the conspiracy theory at least is that maybe they're attacking Flock because it's a competitor while they silently replace it with something just like it.

It 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. She never apologized for anything. I mean, she seemed to believe that insider trading was the American way, you know, and maybe it is the American way. You know, certainly they know when they're going to fight a war. They know when one's coming up. And those investments in—

They can't resist the urge to bet on what they know. I mean, that's nothing wrong with that.

You know, in some ways, America has been corrupted thoroughly such that it's not even corruption anymore. Because when it happens to everyone, it's just coloration. It's just a tone or a hue that we've all adopted. And betting markets, futures markets, polymarkets, whatever they call it, really cause us all to be insider traders.

Hmm.

We take whatever we happen to know the most about and we if we're the betting type, bet on it. And, um, that really, once you've done that for a while, um, absolves you of any, of any, uh, noble, uh, stance toward others trading. Um, and so, you know, maybe we're all gamblers now. And that's, I think, some ways, as if you're going to look at the top 5 ominous trends for the next 10 years. It's not just that we'll all be surveilled. It's not just that AI may run away and take control of our systems, but it's that we'll all become incessant 24/7 insider traders in our own little world, gamblers who are literally betting instead of working. And, uh, that, that's maybe a much more present danger in some ways.

I don't recommend it, you guys. I don't recommend gambling, and not for any reason other than just Just don't. And I get so aggravated, and I'm gonna pivot in one second 'cause I wanna ask you something, but I get so aggravated with the celebrities who are so wealthy to begin with, and now they're doing all of these gambling ads and commercials, like making a pile of money on these gambling commercials telling people, go to this app and gamble. And it's like, stop. You guys are rich.

They're doing exactly what they should.

Yeah, I know, but it's—

If there's a call girl, if there's a call girl down at the bar and a blind man comes up to her, should she not take the client? Should she not equally, um, give her services to all? I think that these celebrities should be required to whore themselves out to every cheap game that comes to town.

Rob Aiken!

And then we will finally see that they are exactly that and not You know, Jimmy Stewart.

I know, I was just gonna mention something to you guys. There's a lot of things about flock and this and that, and I agree with Walter, there's something bigger. But it's like we carry it with us, our phones, you know. They don't really have to—

The word is carry. The word is carry, Marcella. And, and I'll be honest with you, I don't, okay?

Of course.

But how do I do that bit of magic? How do I go for a 2-hour walk every day right out the back door without it?

Oh, it feels so good, doesn't it?

Yeah, you're liberated.

They're going to be offline vacations soon. It'll be like Old Williamsburg or, you know, Westworld, where you go to a pre-tech situation.

Go to the Amish areas.

Probably end up selling those vacations.

I will tell you, I, I kind of had that happen to me, like, because I was so internet connected for such a long time. It's like I went on vacation. I'm like, oh my God, they don't have internet access at this resort. What am I going to do? I had to check out. I'm like, okay, at least I can check my email from the lobby. And that was my only option is I could go to the lobby, log onto the computer and check my email. And once I got there and my cell phone didn't work and nothing worked, it was like this big weight just lifted off of me.

Yes.

And I really enjoyed that vacation, just not having anybody be able to reach me. Not being able to see what was going on in the world, I could just focus on having fun doing what I was doing with my family. It was great.

Well, you know, recency bias leads us to believe what's called recency bias, the belief that things will go on in the way they have just been going on recently, that this is forever. But in fact, it need not be forever. We may be in a transitional stage. in which we are getting familiar with the downsides of things that we thought would only have upsides. You know what I mean? There are a lot of people who have to get to know something before they can reject it, or before they can modify their use of it, or set up new boundaries and so on. And that process takes time. It's not a straight-line projection. You see, our corporate and stock market and Quarterly results style thinking tends to make us think that everything is an asymptotic curve when a lot of things are— and we're waiting to find out. We're being told and convinced and brainwashed into thinking that these are inevitabilities. This is like the horse giving way to the car. That's used all the time.

Right.

You know, would you want to drive a mule? You know, that you can break down that comparison in 5 seconds if you want. We have choices. We just forget we have them. And predictions— and I'm going to give her name next time I'm on because she wrote a great book and I want to get it correct. There's an Oxford professor who wrote a book about predictions, and she said predictions are manipulation. They're attempts to make you think that you have no agency, that something's going to happen anyway, and you had better get on board with it. And as someone who makes a lot of predictions, I found this very chastening and very true. We should not be the slaves to our projections and to the predicting class, even when the predicting class is predicting good things rather than apocalypse, because it erases our knowledge and our sense of our own power.

Mm-hmm.

And we do have it. It will always be in us until we give it away or put the handcuffs on ourselves.

I could stay on this subject for 10 more hours 'cause I have so many things I wanna say. However, I will be in trouble if I don't touch on something very Walter Kern, which is the aliens. I have a question for you. I saw Dr. Phil recently going off about some aliens stuff with this too. I, I don't remember what it was, but he had seen something or read something, and he seemed actually pissed off that some, some kind of alien stuff was being kept secret.

Dr. Phil is clued in. As much as you want to make fun of the Trump administration's use of television personalities and so on, Dr. Phil was a jury consultant at one time, a psychologist who helped lawyers decide which jurors would be favorable to them. in the jury selection process. He became a talk show host. He became an author. He's obviously, you know, a very facile and ambitious person. But the idea that he should step aside on the UFO question is ridiculous. Trump is— he's a friend of Trump's. He's brought him in. One of the big concerns among those who want to tell more about these programs is— and these perhaps other realities is that people won't be able to handle it. So they gave, they gave some extra access to Dr. Phil, and he has come out saying, from what I know, you are all being lied to, you are all being kept in the dark, and I'm upset about it.

Mm-hmm.

You can decide whether that's the Dr. Phil act or that's the Dr. Phil reality, the man Underneath.

It felt like the reality based on what I know about him. And then I wanted to ask you, because I have no idea, why is it a big deal that Pierre Diamandis is stepping into the conversation? Who is that?

Yeah, I don't know everything about Mr. Diamandis, but he is an investor, a doctor of great repute. great influence within sort of Silicon Valley and tech community. He's a friend of people like Musk and others. And he came out saying, you know, there's something to this. I can't say exactly what it is, but there's very much something to this. And it's important because the one thing that America will be convinced Won't be photographs, won't be bodies on a table of some little gray men. It will be when capital starts flowing into this possibility, when the bet starts being, there is this reality, let's start to explore it, let's start putting money on it. And there are— money is already being put on it, but secretly.

Right.

But in the public world of investment and, you know, private equity and things like that, when you start seeing big investors bet, that's when America goes, there's something to that. And he is a boundary crosser in that respect.

Okay. So that is important. And then I heard, you know, oh, so I don't know from who, it doesn't matter, but it's out there that a lot of this activity might be below sea level or, you know, underwater. So now I have a new fear unlocked when I'm out in the boat and I'm like, oh my God, like something's gonna just like swallow the boat or like some alien's gonna come get me, which I'll go and I'll do my best to come back and report. Um, but wow. So, you know, we're always looking up in the sky.

There's no, there's no, there's no evidence as of yet. And I'm, I'm talking about even anecdotal or folkloric evidence.

About underwater?

That they have any desire to swallow the boat of civilians.

Oh, okay, good, good, good.

Maybe, maybe, you know, in the future when they get hungrier for our fluids or something. But yeah, I mean, we've been told to look at the skies all our lives, which should, if anybody knows anything about magic, have convinced us that we should be really looking at the water.

Well, you know, there's, um—

oh, sorry, Marcel.

There's a story that came out, um, it's silly, but I wanted to bring it up because it connects to what Erika was talking about. The Steelers wide receiver DK Metcalf, not, not a professor but a wide receiver, has said that there may be a hidden civilization under Antarctica because unlike Alaska— and what did he say? Um, he said Alaska and the North Pole, you don't have— you can simply go there, but Antarctica, you can't really go there just because you want to, something like that. And that there's an underground civilization.

And the ice wall, right? You can't see over it or something. That's the flat earther.

There are 2 futures for mankind that are equally troubling. One is that AI will run away with our, you know, with our systems. And the other is that professional athletes' ideas about reality will, you know, be widely adopted. Antarctica is mysterious.

It's huge.

It's unexplored. It's hard to get to. You kind of need military assistance in a lot of ways because there's really very little commercial tourism. And yeah, it's mysterious. Anything under ice is mysterious. You saw The Thing, right? But I would say that professional athletes' testimony as to, you know, what's really going on is usually a mixture of somebody who's actually in the know and wants to get in. So beautiful movie stars often have pieces of the puzzle that other people don't, because powerful people Confide in them to get their attention, and that happens with pro athletes too. Okay, sometimes they you know some superfan who isn't supposed to talk you know wants to impress them and gives them some hey buddy.

Yeah, I think Aaron Rodgers is in on the same conspiracy theory. I think that was part of the story was they were both believing in these things.

Right, right. Well, I've hung out with professional athletes a little bit, but not as much as real sports. sportswriters, 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. And so, let's get more testimony from You know, pro athletes as to Antarctica, and then maybe we can put a better map together.

And you can actually go—

Every sportswriter on ESPN, they should ask everybody who comes on, what do you think about Antarctica? Have you heard anything?

That could be the new thing. I like—

like, what state is that?

I think we should send Aaron Rodgers and DK to Antarctica for an exploratory trip.

Well, I think you could prove to them that it is possible to go there. Though they might come back and say, I know we went to an icy place with a strange sky and it was very cold, but I'm not sure where we went.

Aaron is smart.

Well, and would they bring you to the places you're not allowed to go?

I know. It's like North Korea. They give you only access to what you can see.

You want to know what an actual intelligence technique is to keep a secret? Give it away to a fool.

Okay?

You give it away to somebody foolish.

Exactly.

is a fool and starts rattling on about it. And everybody goes, well, that can't be true if that guy thinks that.

That's genius. Yes, that's genius. Okay, so you— yes, you can go to Antarctica. I don't know why people are like, okay, you get to the wall and you can't see over the wall. And it's like The Truman Show. And I'm like, well, bring up a drone and look over the wall. Like, what's the problem? I don't know. I don't know enough about it.

I know there's a lot of talk about it.

Oh, the ice wall?

The thing is, I was raised from the ages of 3 to 6 by a man who was in charge of the mapping of the coasts of America and the world. He personally mapped— he was a World War I sergeant.

Wow.

Yeah, he was the assistant leader of something called the Coast and Geodetic Survey. He was a rear admiral, and he had mapped Baja and the southeast coast of Alaska and so on. This man, uh, was loyal to me and I adored him in a way that rarely happens in the real world. And if the world was flat, he would have told me.

Okay. So the world's not flat?

Yeah.

If there was an ice wall, 'cause he'd been there, he would have told me.

Okay. So for the flat earthers, I know you have a strong belief in this.

That's why I love flat earthers.

I know.

Because it's like I'm in a race with people who have agreed to put a giant concrete block around their ankle. You keep doing that because in the world of 30% unemployment, it's going to be very competitive out there. And those who are willing to hobble themselves from the beginning should go ahead.

How do we know the Earth is round, Walter? Just, just, this is just for the flat earthers.

Because Rear Admiral Robert Knox was the Coast and Geodetic Survey told 4-year-old Walter Kern in Alexandria, Virginia, that, that this globe he had just given him was a picture of the world and he'd been around it on ship. That's how you know. That's the same way you know everything. Testimony of people you trust.

Unfortunately, I do need to drop. I got another thing I gotta do.

See you later. Thanks, Al.

Bye.

Bye.

Um, so I'm gonna change our position. Ready? Okay. Look at us now. Um, so, okay, so I, I do know some flat earthers, so I did want to just give them a little bit of a moment. I want to recognize them and just, you know, hope that maybe they change their mind. That's all.

Or, or simulation thinkers, right? That this whole thing is not even real and we're in a simulation.

Well, that's, that, that, that's the world's richest man right there. He believes that, right?

I do too.

Musk believes that you know, down to a certain percentage of doubt, that's likely. You know what's interesting? There are so many beliefs that don't affect your ability to make a living, your ability to love another human, and so on. And until they do, I sort of, as a literary character, believe we have not just the right but the duty to adopt strange hypotheses and so on, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, so to speak. And, you know, I was reading yesterday something by Cormac McCarthy, in which he said basically the human mind doesn't need language. We don't need pictures of the world at all. Animals survive very well, except when people are around to kill them or take their habitat. without language. All of these belief systems are artifacts of language. And so we probably do just as well with a whole panoply of them. I mean, it didn't kill medieval people to think that the, you know, sun ran around the Earth.

Right.

So in other words, I would preserve a certain space for folk beliefs or whatever. The idea that non-scientific thinking is somehow a danger to all It can be if it's about human beings, if you believe that some group of human beings is evil and needs to be exterminated. But, but other than that, I think it adds flavor.

All right. So flavor, I'm like, I'm just gonna grab you for— I'm just gonna keep grabbing you until you tell me to stop. So quick on Q. Okay. QAnon. So I also know people that believe in Q still to this day. And I'm like, okay, well, tell me Like Scott used to teach us this, like tell me the like people that hated Trump and that he's awful. He does this and he does that. And so Scott would say, say to them, tell me the one thing though, the number one thing about Trump that just has you crazy. And if I can prove to you that it's like a hoax or didn't happen, you would then have to believe that the other things are also hoaxes. So I said to one of the Q people, well, tell me the one thing that Q has. Done that they have predicted that came true that makes you like amazing and this is why I stick with the theory and they couldn't or they said oh there's lots of things and I said well just tell me one just one just one of the things that keeps you hanging on and they they were like well I'd have to think about it and so what do you think about QAnon I'm the first journalist that I know of to have taken the Q phenomena seriously.

I wrote a column about it in Harper's Magazine in the spring of 2018. Q posts on 4chan or 8chan or wherever they originally showed up started right after the Vegas shooting in either October or November of 2017. I took the thing seriously since the beginning because I saw it as a serial novel. In other words, it was a set of chapters that came out in real time that developed a storyline and a narrative. And I always find that interesting, purely from the perspective of a narrative artist as a writer. So I followed it closely. I took it seriously, not as a guide to reality necessarily, but as a gripping, absorbing Narrative as a kind of first-of-its-kind internet novel, as it were. So I studied it deeply. What do I think of it? I think it's uncanny. To be honest with you, I think it's uncanny. This person may not have been able to give you a list of, you know, predictions, but it really— that's really not the test of the, of the phenomena, whether it made predictions that came true.

It was—

the test of it is whether over its entirety it focused on phenomena before we were generally focused on them in a way that we would later focus on them. And that is undoubtedly true. It was mentioning Epstein before Epstein was a topic of general conversation. It was mentioning Hunter Biden and his problems and his evasions crimes and so on before it was a topic of general conversation. It was talking about COVID as some sort of other than real medical emergency that perhaps was engineered to change the voting patterns and the voting laws in this America, in this country, before that was being focused on. So, you know, everybody will take out of context what I'm about to say and then go ahead. But as a front-running set of concerns, topics, theories, and so on, it has been incredibly— I wouldn't say prophetic, because prophetic means that something Predictably came true in an unfalsifiable way. It has been uncannily prescient and early on many topics that later became of almost wildfire concern. I mean, having studied the Q thing, when everybody started getting worked up about Epstein, I was like, man, I'm— I've been tired of this for so long, I can't even wake up for it.

Because—

Who do you think runs Q? A bunch of people? An insider?

It's not being run anymore. Not in its— well, okay. So it was a series of posts on the so-called dark web. And the platforms which hosted it changed over time. But it ran out in 2021. I think that was the last active post. Now, It was probably, unless it was done, you know, as a complete amateur hour exercise, it was probably something that could only last for so long, and then the implanted themes would be tracked. Okay, so to say it's over with is only to say that the actual posts have stopped appearing, not that the— the tracking and the implantation of the themes isn't still going on. That's possible.

Okay.

But, but, but, but, but I take it seriously. I absolutely do. Because why did the— why did the concerns of this weird underground poster or group of posters become national concerns sometimes a couple of years later? And 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. And yet it really went largely undiscussed after a certain But this Q thing started very soon afterwards and did have comment on the nature of the Vegas shooting, which I think is still— its comment was basically that there were other motives, there were foreign dignitaries involved, maybe even Trump, that it was an attempt on their lives perhaps. And these are things which can't be disproven yet. I mean, just because they can't be disproven doesn't mean they're true. But, but there was a murkiness around that incident that has remained and which was first exploited by this Q thing.

Okay. I have another question. Do you remember the very tall Joe Biden that appeared one day in the Rose Garden?

Well, so I only have photographic evidence of that. I assume that those aren't retouched photos, uh, or—

Oh, you know, the video of him walking out and Jill looks like she's this big and he's like 7 feet tall.

Okay, so, so let's, let's look at the most benign and, you know, uh, neutral, uh, interpretation of that. We just had Trump get on another plane out of Turkey, right? Not Air Force One, where he switched and left his Vice President and all the press corps and Jake Tapper, etc., on what was thought to be an endangered plane that might be taken down by a missile while he went out the side door. Okay. The use of doubles in security. Oh my goodness, it's a given. I mean, unless you, you know, unless you just really have never left the farm. And even if you haven't left the farm, because farmers are pretty smart about how things really work. You know that there is— we had a president who was incapacitated a lot of the time, right? Would you not want— would you want us to think constantly that he's in bed actually and we can't wake him up right now because he's heavily medicated? Or would you want them to be putting on that show?

So that's my question, is like, yes, there are— they, they've been doing this forever, having like a lookalike, a double.

And when you see what they do it in movies that cost $20 million, do you think that they don't do it in economies that run the Western world?

Yeah. No, I, I definitely know they do.

I think, I think we're constantly— I think it's time to stop being surprised in America, you know, and let's move on.

Okay.

Santa Claus doesn't exist. They use doubles. You know, industry has untoward amounts of influence in all kinds of areas over law, the administration of our bureaucracies, and so on. Judges can, in fact, not be objective. We are growing more sophisticated as we also grow more I don't know, despairing. But in fact, we should take our sophistication, which merely means our worldliness, our knowledge of how things actually work, and put it to use instead of being constantly disappointed that the fairy tale isn't true. It's like an 18-year-old goes, Dad, I can't go to college, man. Santa Claus doesn't exist. You know, I never got over it.

All right. So Walter, in closing, what is one thing that you are worried about or thinking about right now that maybe the rest of us aren't tuned into?

So I'm perceived as anti-AI, but what I really am most skeptical of is AI in the arts. Because I look at the arts as the ground-level record of what it's like to be human. Okay? AI can never tell us what it's like to be in love.

Okay?

It can never tell us a story of what it's like to suddenly face wartime violence for the first moment after growing up in an innocent, sheltered environment. It can never write the Red Badge of Courage, in other words. That we are getting a substitute synthetic product instead of that first line of response. That troubles me. See, I'm not troubled by the runaway. It's going to grab all the, you know, self-driving cars and turn them all against each other or whatever. I'm worried about what's being displaced and what's going to vanish. And the particular thing I know about best, which is creative writing, vivid writing, specific writing about the human experience, being replaced by this kind of polymer, this, this moldable plastic that comes from all the previous narratives injected into a big tub and then Pushed out into models. That really troubles me because what if we lose that eyewitness, passionate level of observation about our own plates? We will cease to know each other. We will cease to know oneself, ourselves, and one another in a way that actually could be ruinous. They could put anything over on us at that point. The replacement of the ability and the— certainly the market for firsthand accounts of what it's like to be human, that troubles me. Not losing my credit card. I just go to my neighbor and I say, listen, man, you know, do you have dishes to wash? And he goes, no, or yeah, I do, but do you have wood that needs cutting?

That's right.

And pretty soon we've got it going on.

Right. That's interesting. That's, I think that we're so impressed when AI makes like, you know, they insert President Trump into a Seinfeld episode that we're like, oh my God, that's amazing. But you're right. Like we might not realize that what we're not seeing is that connection and the thought and the feelings and the whole life that went into emotions and getting you to that point.

It's very important for individuals And I think the individuals who do this best are people who read or people who at least see plays and movies and see them in a discerning, discriminating way. It's very important that we be able to narrate our existence. Go, this happened, then that happened because of that, then that set up this possibility. But instead of going left, I went right, and so on. Otherwise, you're just floating in a— You know, you're like the precogs in Philip K. Dick's Minority Report, where you just float in a warm bath of salt and visions come to you, you know.

Yes.

Well, short of that, we have to be able to tell stories, and we learn how to do it from the best stories. It starts with fairy tales and bedtime stories. It moves on to, you know, maybe The Odyssey.

Oh, yeah.

Now, the fact is that without that faculty, we don't know whether to go out the door or stay in after a while. And that is survival level. That is a survival level threat for me. As a social threat, I don't know how society gets on without sort of merging the personal and the larger narrative. You know, the progressives have been very good over the last century of creating a mega narrative about progress, things getting better, you know, people becoming more tolerant and so on. The conservatives have had a kind of mega narrative, which is, you know, everything's falling apart, getting worse. And if we could just stop here or go back to there, we, you know, it wouldn't be as bad, you know. But they're both narratives and they cross over and they can, in a weird way, interact with each other because progressives can agree we should stop there on this. It's getting worse. And conservatives can agree, you know, we need to address this because we've whatever, we forgot about it. They can interact. But when everybody's got a kind of aphasia Or, you know, just a free-floating sense that events follow one another in no particular order, you can't get them to agree on anything.

Right. You get like SSRI entertainment.

Yeah.

Yeah. Marcela, did you want to say something before we close?

No, that there's like a whole world of writers, younger writers that, young writers that are like going against AI. and making sure that nothing in their book has, you know, is written by AI. So, like your trips, you were talking about trips where there is no phones.

Yeah.

There's going to be a literature of— made by, you know, humans, you know, for humans, you know. And one of the things that I also wanted to bring up is that Scott always talked about humor and how AI still cannot get any closer, or, you know, somebody like you, Walter, that is very humorous, very funny. You know, I don't think AI can clone you. I don't think we can create an AI that is Walter-like, or anybody that is funny or, or deep and thinking, you know. So not yet anyways.

I don't know that I'm so great, but I do have this, um, advantage over everyone else. Because I've published a lot of work, and because that work has been fed into the AI, I can actually test how well it clones me.

Okay? Okay.

If you haven't done a lot of writing and published books and articles over your lifetime, you don't have the ability to run this experiment, but I do. So I can say to Claude, in the style of Walter Kern, write an essay about this or a story about this. And I can actually see, because I am the best judge of my own work, I mean, it's the one thing I do know something about, in a privileged way, how well it does. It doesn't do well at all.

Oh, good.

It doesn't do well at all. What it tends to do is it takes very superficial but prominent features, like I'm from Montana, and then it thinks I talk like a cowboy. Well, you know, that Walter Kern throws a lot of like Will Rogers folk wisdom into stuff. No, I don't.

Not really.

I actually, you know, I attended Oxford University and Princeton University and so on, you know, and I'm a mixed bag of all kinds of things. So what it creates, a caricature that is weighted, weighted in W-E-I-G-H-T-E-D fashion. That I look at and I go, that's horrifying, actually. That's how stupid I am? You know, that's how habitual I am and obsessive I am on certain themes and words? And I refuse to think that the portrait it gives me of myself is accurate, and I don't think it is.

It's like a stereotypical caricature.

Yeah, and also a stereotypical caricature Scott Curicature in a slightly alternate universe.

That's so great.

Not in the real universe.

Because, because a good impressionist can do a pretty good impression of me, but it's not even a good impressionist. It's weird. And, and I, I would imagine that it does that with a lot of phenomena. Yeah, it's just this is one which— around which I know the details.

Well, that makes me happy that it's You know, it's still— it will get better, though.

It will get better. But, you know, we'll see.

You know what? It will get better because I will stop talking at a certain point as it gets louder, as I can't make a living writing. In other words, market forces are going to take over. And this is the thing that also bothers me. It's very hard to afford to be a writer. It doesn't pay much. Paydays are few and far between, they're a gamble, and so on. Some people are so driven and some so talented and gifted, they know this is their shot, that they will take those risks. But those risks are becoming absolutely irrational in a world where almost everything you do can be cloned and will be. And one thing that I'm noticing is that the deadlines for literary work, you know, it takes years to write Mm-hmm. Sometime, screenplay and so on. Well, those are being moved up. AI is making everyone expect faster product. And that, at a certain point, speed breaks down quality. And at a certain point, I just may go like, you know, I'm walking on a freeway. I can't run 70 miles an hour. And everybody expects that if you can't keep up on this thing, you're roadkill. I'm going to get off the freeway.

Yeah.

You're welcome to it. The literary game has now been completely automated. It's high speed. Everybody's writing a book in 2 damn weeks and publishing it in 3 days afterwards, illustrated in the COVID in a way that you used to have to wait a month to see. I'm just out.

Yeah, unfortunately, I think a lot of the, the greats like yourself will take that, that approach, and I wouldn't blame them. Um, so Walter, I hope you enjoy coming on here. You know, we really love to give our guests space to like talk and have time and not feel rushed and just to see where the conversation goes. So I hope you find the Scott Adams useful for you as well as we just value having you here so much. I hope you really know that. Like, we, we look forward to you. You're a lot of the people's favorite guests that we ever have. And they're just like, he's my favorite. I love when he comes on. He's like our big brother. You know, he's like another version of Scott. So I hope you enjoy it as much as we love having you here.

I'll tell you what, I do love it. Would I come on unshaven early in the morning at a cabin in Montana if I didn't love it? Just because I don't smile a lot, sometimes I smile a lot, but I get off into my, you know, perorations and discourses, and I might look like I'm depressed, angry, upset, whatever. No, I'm having a blast the whole time.

I'm so glad.

And I hope that shows.

It absolutely does. We feel it and we appreciate you so much. And so we can't wait because you did, as you always do, you said next time I come on, we'll talk about that. So I love when you say that because that always means there's a next time and we always look forward to it. If it was up to everybody here, it would be next week, but I can't bug Walter that much.

I will share with my audience, I finished a book that's going to be coming out next June. I'll tell you more. that has been taking me years. And it addresses— it's a nonfiction book. It's a story of a trip I took, a long trip around America. You might remember Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's a very male thing to do, to get in your car and try to discover reality that way. But in any case, I finished it to my satisfaction. And more importantly, to my partner.

Congratulations.

Yeah, satisfaction. The minute I turn this off, I have another deadline pressing in another media, another mode, and I'll be much freer than I have been.

Amazing. All right, well, great. Well, we will not forget that. So thank you so much, Walter. So in closing, and you guys, I know, I know how much you love this today. I can see the chat going by. Oh, an update on the rash. I know I'll be in trouble too if I don't mention that. How is—

The Rash is a script I wrote, which to review is an allegory, a satirical allegory of the COVID experience, but of any mass hysteria, really. You know, it's my Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it has been brutally and consistently made fun of, repressed. The people who would get behind it told not to.

Hmm.

And it's— that's where it stands. I mean, I can— I'm not a producer. I'm not a— I'm not a guy who can, like, raise a lot of capital, get all of the necessary talent involved. Now, as much as I distrust AI in the arts, this might be a great use case for it. My trapdoor 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, because that is actually one of the benefits I've seen so far. You know, some of the political ads I've seen that were using AI would never have been produced by humans. They would have been too scared. In other words, actors and directors and so on. And so there is a rebel energy to especially, I think, visual arts using AI. And I'm not going to be so pure or puritanical— I never am about anything— that I won't consider it should this project have no other way of going forward.

Okay, well, I'm gonna message you. I have a question about it. Um, all right, so, all right, that's the update, you guys, and we'll see how that goes. Um, as always, I want to thank Scott and Shelley for allowing this show to continue. It's because of their spirit that allowed this conversation today. And thank you to everybody who shows up here every day in the live show and in the replays. We so appreciate it. Thank you. Please do hit the like, subscribe, and the notification bell, and all the things, and share the show with your friends. And as always, a closing sip to our most beloved Scott Adams. To Scott!

To Scott!

Thank you, Walter, so much. We'll see you soon.

See you soon. Thank you, Marcella. Bye bye, Marcella.

Goodbye. Okay. All right, you guys. So, we went late. Um, I tried to ignore the time— the timer today. Um, as we saw, Owen had to go, and then Marcella just had to run. But, um, that was so fun. We love Walter. So fun to have just like a conversation and just let it go where it's going. But I had all those rapid-fire questions. I'm like, does he believe in the big Joe Biden guy? And all that. So, that was just kind of fun to do at the end. Um, and not late enough. All right, you guys, should we do a quick Akira song? You know what we'll do? I'll do an Akira video and you guys can say all your goodbyes. I'll watch the chat as we close out, and when the song's over, I'll just end the stream. And tomorrow we'll be back. I just— I have a few things planned for us, some clips for tomorrow because it's the one-year Since Charlie Kirk was assassinated, and I'm not going to let that go by without letting some of Charlie's own words be heard tomorrow. So we'll do some of that—not the whole show—but all right. So you guys, here's the payoff. This one's in a video form, and then I'll see you guys in the morning. Thanks, everyone.

What if laziness is a habit of thinking about? The cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff. The payoff. I'm gonna say it again. The payoff. Get a few more heads to explode. What if you could reverse laziness by simply developing a habit of thinking more about, let's say, the delicious food that you'd like to enjoy instead of how long it would take you to get up and go get it. But the real question is, if you were to test this at home and try to see if you can think more about the good outcome and less about the work, would you get it done? What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about A payoff. A payoff. I'm gonna say it again. A payoff. Get a few more heads to explode. Why is it that people have a second child? You know, why does a woman who goes through this awful, awful childbirth have a second child? Don't they always say You ever say the same thing? If I remembered how bad this was, I wouldn't do it again. Right? So the not thinking about the effort is vital to actually the survival of humanity. If we focused on how hard it was to have a baby, you just wouldn't do it, or you'd do too little of it. But if you focus on how awesome it would be to have a family, well, there you go. There you go. You're gonna go through the pain because you've already, you've already committed. You're gonna go through the pain because you've already, you've already committed. What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff? The payoff. Just say it again.

The payoff.

Boy, really?

Get a few more ants to explode. Am I ambitious, or do I simply have a thinking habit which produces dopamine because I'm thinking about the positive outcome? And is the dopamine the thing that gets me up and moving? And when you're observing me, you say, how the hell do you get so much done? And how do I do it? I think it's just that I think it's just this. When I think of all the things I do, I think about them in terms of their benefits. What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?

The payoff. The payoff.

The payoff.

I'm gonna say it again. Say it again.

The payoff.

So here's your tip. It's going to change some of your lives. Think about the positive, not about the work, and see what that does to