Episode 966 Scott Adams: I Mock the Kids Table, Talk About Musk, Update You on Stuff

Date: 2020-05-10 | Duration: 29:01

Topics

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Elon Musk’s Neuralink company Fake news and enemy of the people news Business model of the news is evolving

If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.

> [!note] Rough Transcript
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## Transcript

[0:14]

hey everybody come on in happy Mother's Day to all you mothers have you ever noticed that mothers is one of those words that either sounds really nice or really bad hey it's my mother sounds good hey you Mother's get in here sounds bad same word what's up with that well it's good to see you all and I can't think of a better way to start off Mother's Day then with the simultaneous EPS that's right you're way ahead of me and all you need for the simultaneous it on Mother's Day is a mother would be good if there's a mother they're optional but otherwise all you need is a cover bar there a glass the tanker chalice or Stein a canteen juggler flask out that's all of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid I like coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine head of the day the thing makes everything better including the damn pandemic it's called

[1:16]

including the damn pandemic it's called the simultaneous lip and it happens now go ah yes it's getting better all the time alright for those of you who did not watch and somebody the comment says you blew my mind last night that's what I wanted to bring up so last night I did I revealed the user interface for reality now if that sounds like I'm over claiming just look at the comments that'll probably go by in a moment here so I realized that a lot of things that I've been mentioning in my books etc it finally reached the point where I could put them all in one clean package and and boost the value so in many ways it's things you've heard from me before but you've never seen them collected this way and it's the way they're collected and presented that gives them the new power

[2:17]

presented that gives them the new power so I pinned I pinned the tweet that has that video I would recommend that everybody who finds any value from anything I do that's the one you want to watch so there's just one thing you ever watch for me that would be the one so I'll give it that boost also if those of you who have not found to be yet on the locals platform locals with an s calm I'm moving I'm moving all the content that you could still see here sorry my cats causing trouble here I'll move all the content that you are you see here you'll still be able to see here but in addition I'm putting extra stuff on locals for subscribers just an update my normal business pretty much is a pretty much added business as a cartoonist I'm getting the early indications from my syndication well the newspapers they're

[3:20]

syndication well the newspapers they're trying to negotiate and they might close down so my old business model doesn't work I'm gonna see if in the long run it won't work it's sort of advertiser based because newspapers or advertiser based online everything's advertiser based so I'm moving at least some of my stuff to a subscriber model to be part of the future alright enough about that I watched everybody told me to watch Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan show I didn't get through all of it yet but I was fascinated by his talk about neural link so one of you on must companies is neural link and what they're gonna do is literally implant little electronics in your skull they'll actually remove a piece of your skull the bone and insert their little piece of electronics they'll have wiring that goes into your brain where the wiring goes into your brain depending depends on what problem you're trying to solve but Elon actually

[4:20]

you're trying to solve but Elon actually has made the claim that this device could be usefully useful for abroad range of anything that's wrong with your brain now I don't know how big anything is but the examples he used were you know baby you know L Xavier's or Parkinson's or maybe maybe even people who are a quadriplegics if you can believe it you might even be able to to get people to walk and use their limbs that they couldn't use before that seems like that seems like quite a big let's see goal but I don't know it's the Elan musk I don't think he'd be involved unless there was some science behind it it might actually see this the first one implanted for whatever the first purpose is within a year so how weird is that but will it cure TDS that's funny it's funny how many of you spontaneously said will it cure Trump derangement syndrome

[5:21]

will it cure Trump derangement syndrome you know what the funny thing is it could they could you don't I'm sure it will not be used to change opinion but you can definitely change people's opinions by stimulating their brain or changing the chemical balance and that's well-established right if you just took somebody and you know said write down all your opinions and then you started butyou know shooting them up with either male or female hormones and then you just wait a few months and then test them on their opinions again I think they'd be a little different so you we know we can change people's opinions by changing their chemical State alright so yeah I wouldn't call it shock therapy but it seems like has a lot of potential the other Gilad musk story is that you know you're the story about he was getting rid of all those properties and he had a bunch of houses and he was getting rid of them and I

[6:21]

and he was getting rid of them and I thought to myself wow you know he probably has houses all over the world and doesn't use them enough so he's gonna get rid of him but it turns out the story is a little different than that so he had this one house somewhere in Southern California across the street was I guess Gene Wilder's house and that somebody was gonna buy it probably and do construction for this for years so he bought the house across the street just so there wouldn't be construction there and then he started buying other houses and out in in the neighborhood just so he'd have more privacy and stuff so it turns out he was basically just buying up his neighborhood and so yeah I guess he's decided not to do that so it wasn't quite exactly the way you thought of it but he does seem to be serious about getting rid of physical possessions for we'll see we'll see if it's all the right reasons I think it is because he's he's more about focusing his energy on his businesses than his his house I

[7:23]

his businesses than his his house I guess he's also threatened to move his headquarters from California to Texas because the the lockdown and I don't know how California can keep any business it's hard for me to imagine that there's just any good reason to for a business to stay in California I hate to say that because my state but I imagine he's going to move to Texas and long run so we're starting to see the worst kind of fake news now it's probably when you talk about fake news being the enemy of the people there are times when it really really is the enemy of the people for example if somebody is trying to overthrow the government with bad information that's how they're doing it trying to overthrow the president you would think that if the media was aiding

[8:24]

would think that if the media was aiding and abetting the coup that the media would be certainly the enemy of the people and most in the most direct way I mean you can't be more enemy of the people than supporting a coup against the president elected by at least you know the electoral college and the system and the people so that's pretty dangerous but here's a new dangerous thing that the media is doing the press anyway we're going to see lots of stories there's one today about the Trump administration and anybody who wants us to go back to to work sooner having a certain callousness about life a callousness now here's the thing in the real world with the the possible exception of a few actual sociopaths and you know in Psychopaths throughout that many of them but once you get past that little group of people everybody cares about human life to

[9:26]

everybody cares about human life to pretend that there's some entire class of people who care about life let's call them Democrats and yet there's some other class of people who don't care about life let's call them Republicans is such a childlike view of the world that it you know it should just be dismissed without comment even though I'm gonna comment on it because in the real world these are just tough decisions whatever you choose to go you know whatever direction you go with with the coronavirus people are gonna die if you had a choice of nobody dying we would look at that pretty seriously but we don't have that choice and so it's it's like news from the kids table and I you know I like I like that frame you saw Greg Gutfeld uses that a lot as well because I really think he captures it you know the adults have to make decisions back who lives and dies and there's just no way around it but for the kids table to to claim that the

[10:26]

the kids table to to claim that the adults are being callous it's anything but that and in it's way more ridiculous when Democrats accused Republicans of callousness about life do I even need to finish the sentence I mean think of the ridiculousness all right all right my cat's really started to be a problem now she only wants to stand between me and the iPad so you'll see it a little a little bit but as long as the the issue of abortion is still a gigantic national issue
it's hard to say that it's the Republicans who are callous about life now I'm not giving you an opinion I'm not giving you my opinion on an abortion you already know that my opinion is women should work it out and they can tell me what they want the law to be and I will just support whatever this whatever women want I just think women should decide on abortion laws that's just my personal opinion you can vote you can do anything you want I'm not telling you that you

[11:27]

you want I'm not telling you that you shouldn't I'm just saying that personally I don't have anything to add to the conversation I would rather keep my opinion out of it and if women collectively want the abortion law to be one way or the other I don't have anything to add to that but I'll support their decision all right so that's just gonna bother me the whole callousness argument that's really the enemy of the people situation because to the extent that it handicaps the leaders who have to make the adult decision they don't have an option it's not like the leaders have an option they got to make a tough decision and lots of them all right some Canadian doctors have did a little write-up in which in their opinion the spread of covered 19 is entirely from droplets meaning comes out of your mouth and falls on a surface so in their opinion there's so little chance it's just completely unrealistic that it's

[12:28]

just completely unrealistic that it's going to travel through the air for much of anything that's not really air assault unless you're in a very unique situation like a medical situation where it's actually gets air assault but in the normal life these Canadian doctors say that you could almost ignore the risk of it traveling through the air in other words if you were super super careful about not touching objects and super care you know about and also careful about disinfecting and you were super careful about not touching your face that you'd probably be fine which is interesting because what it what it suggests is that there might be some better thing than a mask I've actually considered the thought time's something to my oh here's an idea to have a wristband have a little wristband that can tell when you are your arm is as high as your neck because during the day you've probably seen me touch my face 15 times something on

[13:30]

touch my face 15 times something on periscope already this morning it's sort of automatic but what if every time you raise your hand your your arm buzz and you'd be like oh oh oh I think I think that very quickly you would train yourself not to do it now my problem of course is I get issues especially when I'm on camera whenever I'm on camera my face itches especially what I think I'm not supposed to be touching it so that's why I use my my back scratcher to take care of that
I'm starting to think that the the business model or the nature of news and how you get it is going through an interesting transformation right now so the old news was you got your news networks your news organizations but it seems to be now that we're sort of especially with this coronavirus stuff it feels like there are individuals on

[14:31]

it feels like there are individuals on social media who are becoming news channels themselves so you've seen this with the coronavirus where people will become sort of a prominent Twitter account for doing a good job of surfacing you know information and arguments and I feel like that in some way I kind of fell into that because it's the topic of the day so I do a lot of tweeting on it but I realized that if I do a good job of taking other people's suggestions of yeah this is a good article or this is a good tweet and if I do a good job of just curating the information that people are sending to me that I become like a little news channel so reading my my twitter feed would give you an angle on the news that I've curated to be reliable or provocative or you know just something that I'm looking for some experts to weigh in on and I think we're heading toward a model where the the major news organizations largely just tell you what

[15:33]

organizations largely just tell you what the topic is and then once they've said okay what we're talking about is this story I think social media is going to become sort of the the detailed news channels where you say okay it's a story about that who's who on social media is going to be good at curating that stuff and then you go find them and say all right I'll do a deep dive on this you know if it's that let's say it's a story about some military thing there's probably a retired general with a good Twitter account so you say oh it's one of those stories go to the Twitter account then that's your news channel this is whoever curates that news so remember I keep telling you that you should forget about testing to save us now it's not that we want to someday have enough testing to do anything we want because it is increasing in ability all the time but it won't happen too fast enough that we can wait for it so that was the main point is that it's way

[16:35]

that was the main point is that it's way slower than you think it's way worse than you think testing isn't gonna save you so see you then have some good points on that to reiterate that point you've heard about the highly touted Abbott system that can rapidly you know it's like a laboratory in a box and it can rapidly give you a result in minutes so when you heard that you set yourself whoa there are these devices that are already in lots of places so you don't even have to you know buy them they're already in lots of places and you can do a test with those existing devices and in minutes that's like a big deal all right but you can have up to a 15% to 1/5 false negative rate and one test showed up to a 25% false negative rate meaning that you could you could miss a diagnosis up to one and four times that's not so good secondly it can take

[17:36]

that's not so good secondly it can take most of the tests the other kind of tests that are not the you do in a few minutes there might be a little more accurate but it takes days to get your results back days meanwhile you might be wandering around infecting everybody you know so those are really big problems and I just wanted to give you that update because I just don't think we should it it's the kids table who keeps saying well why don't we do more testing and it's the adult table saying you know we'd be doing that if we could it's hard we don't we can't instantly scale up I mean there are a lot of companies working really hard and a lot of money a lot of attention it's probably a top national priority everything that can be done probably is being done I doubt there's anything being left on the table when it comes to getting testing up and running but the kids table is I've got an idea has anybody thought of doing more

[18:38]

has anybody thought of doing more testing because I read that somewhere that's good so if we're not doing that we must be all idiots so that's the news from the kids tables that nobody thought of testing have you wondered as I have what was the problem that Obama had with general Flynn have you somebody says you are mistaken you can give a reason just don't say you are mistaken I blocked people for that you might be new so I saw for the first time a little bit of a teaser for what problem Obama had with Flynn how many of you know why Obama specifically warned Trump not to hire Flynn I think he was the only person that Obama call that was specifically just one person it's only one person and somebody says the Iran

[19:40]

one person and somebody says the Iran deal maybe that's what Flynn was fired for so here are the things in the CNRS CNN article there is one reference to crazy ideas the Flint had quote crazy ideas I don't know what they were there is a reference to Flint having aggressive stance on combating Islamic terrorism now is his aggressive stance on combating Islamic terrorism is that the category in which he had the quote crazy ideas and what about and there was also a reference to insubordination in the in the Obama administration was Flynn insubordinate because he disagreed was an insubordinate and specifically the Islamic extremism is you know exactly what does that mean insubordination and then I guess he also was criticizing you know Obama policy so so obviously somebody that Trump would say he's

[20:40]

somebody that Trump would say he's perfect for my team it seems unlikely that he would also be perfect for Obama's team somebody say he was against the Iran deal now isn't that interesting that you think I'm not saying you're wrong because that sounds quite reasonable isn't it interesting that those of you who follow the dude was probably more conservatives on this this audience than other that you knew that and I think you're probably right I'd have to fact-check that but you knew that it was about the Iran deal but yet when I read CNN and I was looking for details I didn't see a rat mentioned it was just a llama extremism all right so I'm still curious what the exact point of concern was Obama could not count on Flynn's loyalty but that wouldn't be a reason for him to warning Warren Trump not to use Flynn yeah then

[21:44]

Warren Trump not to use Flynn yeah then there's there's also the theory I think this is just unconservative news the theory that Flynn Flynn would have seen all the secrets so if Flynn had gotten the top job he would have access to all the you know top secret information and he would uncover all this bad stuff here's what's wrong with that theory whoever got the job would be in able to do that how does that make sense do we think that Flynn would be the one person who would look into it deeply once he had all that access I don't think so wouldn't literally anybody who got that job looking look into everything it seems to be there whoever had the job was gonna look into the whole Russia collusion origin it was going to happen know about it in fact it did so we didn't have Flynn there and the exact thing that some of you think they were worried about was the Flynn would research what was happening that's exactly what happened there was no Flynn but you get your attorney general bar

[22:46]

but you get your attorney general bar you get you know basically it happened anyway so I'm not really buying the argument that the Obama administration wanted to get rid of Flynn just for that reason right because that doesn't make sense all right um
that's about all I had to talk about today she didn't have much going on just making sure yes that's true
Flynn knew everything wasn't Flynn undercover I don't know if he was undercover talking point the Flynn was an agent of Turkey yeah what's up with that that feels like another case of fake news right because the turkey situation I believe we know that Flynn was getting paid by somebody in Turkey to do some kind of advising but if you don't know the real details of that do you know anything because that's not the

[23:47]

you know anything because that's not the kind of sort it's not the sort of story that if you know most of it then you know anything because first of all Turkey is a you know NATO ally so is there is there necessarily anything wrong with a retired general you know working for or advising or even lobbying for a NATO ally well as long as we know what's happening I suppose it's okay so if there's some issue there that would be separately I guess
lots of evidence coming out on Obama now somebody says so he says Scott it was because he needed the DRG and I see were corrupted but my point is no matter who went into that job would have looked into it it just it doesn't seem like the FBI could have reasonably thought the Flynn was the only risk and that you have to take him out it seemed like a big play to take out a guy who would

[24:48]

big play to take out a guy who would probably just be replaced by somebody else would do the same thing
clapper sworn testimony and transcripts contradicts his sworn live congressional testimony somebody says I'll bet not I'll bet not I'll bet if you looked at what clapper said it in public and then compared it really word for word closely with what he said under oath I don't think you're gonna find the difference that you hope because when he's talking on TV he can say his things such as well you know Don junior went to a meeting and Trump did say in public hey Russia help us out so he can say I was talking about those things and you know those things happened you're watching the same news I am so yeah I thought there was some evidence I saw you saw the same thing so I think all he has to do is say that and I doubt I doubt there's much there that would

[25:50]

I doubt there's much there that would really he probably hedged himself just about right is my guess so I'd be surprised if he's in legal trouble if you take out the Logan Act you have nothing yeah that whole Logan Act thing was so lame the thought that the incoming administration couldn't have a brief conversation with the people they'll be negotiating within a few months that's that's as that is as big a flag as you could have for it's as big if I guess you could have for somebody anyway
the pom-pom but nobody did until a bar Trump was almost taken down yeah I suppose you could argue that Trump was almost taken down so somebody says no he was replaced by McMaster who's something that says as a deep state er all right good point so by how did that happen how

[26:53]

good point so by how did that happen how did that happen that somebody who was not going to be helpful got that job I guess Trump had a lot of jobs to fill about that time
Scott is woefully behind on Obama gate well I don't know if I'm behind or if I'm not making the same leaps of assumption that other people were making I mean I know what the transcript says I know that Obama I know Obama was aware of the Flint wiretapping but that's all we know what was the name of the book you suggested about colonial America I can't remember the name of it right now and I can't see my bookshelf it wasn't under oath in public so it doesn't matter that is correct it doesn't matter what he said in public if you're not under oath

[27:58]

all right oh they were all claiming access to secret evidence on TV well that's the point though it doesn't matter what he said on TV I would like to see a clip of the things that clapper said on TV that we know to be false now I haven't seen that of you it seems like somebody's probably working on a compilation did post a picture of the whiteboard from last night I did yes you could see that on YouTube so if you go to youtube or I think mm I'm not sure if the podcast has that it might but if you got a YouTube you should be able to see the photos
all right I don't have much else yet I will talk to you tonight tonight I'll

[28:58]

will talk to you tonight tonight I'll talk to you tonight see that