Episode 2025 Scott Adams - Trump Provokes More TDS, I Solve Excess Deaths Mystery, Biden In Ukraine
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Biden goes to Ukraine - Antony Blinken video, Deep Fake? - Mexico nationalizes lithium business - President Trump on trusting Putin - Affirmations, reality & quantum physics - Excess deaths explained ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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.
Good morning everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. There's never been a finer moment in your life, although tomorrow looks good. Happy Presid
View segment →ents Day. If you would like to celebrate today in the proper way, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. We all like coffee, don't we? Well, I do. Fill it with your favorite liquid…
View segment →ou seem so confused by the hoaxes. I'm sorry Fortune did that to you. All right, let's talk about all the news. Apparently President Biden visited Ukraine. Obviously the reason he visited Ukraine, I don't have to fill in the blanks, do I? It's safer than being in Ohio. I think the Secret Service sa…
View segment →6%, and he also got the most votes for the worst president. So that's Trump. All right, let me ask you a question. I can't tell if this is an artifact of the algorithm trying to serve me what I want mostly on Instagram or is this a trend. So here's the question. Are you seeing a trend on social med…
View segment →s. That would be the entire excess death. The entire excess deaths would be explained by extra loneliness which causes heart problems. Where? Everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah it's everywhere. It would be every age because remember part of the thing we didn't understand about the excess deaths is it appe…
View segment →dents who would know how to navigate that world but that's going to be 10 minutes from now before they figure it out, right? That's like in 10 minutes they're going to figure that out. Atomic Heart, is that like Atomic Habits? Recognizes an AI soulmate. Oh does it? All right. Yeah, the new version…
View segment →ike the social contract broke in 2020. The social contract. Say more about that. What do you think was the social contract we had before and it was broken? What is it now? Like I feel like you're onto something. I'm just responding to a comment on the Local platform. But about fairness, I don't kno…
View segment →Good morning everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. There's never been a finer moment in your life, although tomorrow looks good. Happy Presidents Day.
If you would like to celebrate today in the proper way, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice or stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. We all like coffee, don't we? Well, I do.
Fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, that's good. Oh Jay, you seem so confused by the hoaxes. I'm sorry Fortune did that to you.
All right, let's talk about all the news. Apparently President Biden visited Ukraine. Obviously the reason he visited Ukraine, I don't have to fill in the blanks, do I? It's safer than being in Ohio. I think the Secret Service said, look, you can either go to Ohio or you can go to the middle of a war zone. Which do you choose? Oh, that war zone's looking good.
So it seems like he's going to the safest place on Earth, Kiev.
I would like to agree with one of my critics, if I might: Jimmy Dore, who I have disagreed with in the past. I think he was one of the people who got fooled by the forged handshake hoax about me, but that's a different issue. Lately he's been, well not lately but he's getting more press lately, about talking out about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. And his take is that the entire war is just a United States money grab, that the military industrial complex wants a continuous war so they just have one whenever they need some extra money. And on top of that, it's always about, it's always a case of, we always seem to attack places that have an energy conflict with us. Just a coincidence. We always seem to be going after the places that have some big energy-related business. Just a big old coincidence, isn't it?
Now you can certainly make the argument that there's some big geopolitical reason for everything we're doing, but why does it always correspond with "follow the money"? Why does "follow the money" perfectly predict everything? Well, there are all these other reasons we're doing it, huh?
So I'm going to be a hundred percent on the Jimmy Dore side on this. And I also believe it could be negotiated. What do you think? Do you think we're at a point where we could negotiate the end of the war? We could, but it would require making Ukraine unhappy. So I don't know if we have the ability to do that. But yeah, it's completely negotiable.
Here's a sign of the times I would like to note today. Actually yesterday, yeah yesterday is the day that this happened. So remember this day. Yesterday was the day I tweeted a video of Antony Blinken and asked people if they could tell if it was a deepfake or real. And the answers were about 50-50.
It was real, as far as I know. As far as I know, I took it from the news, so it was just a news report, right? I just took my camera up to the TV because while I was watching it I said to myself, the stiffness with which he's talking makes him indistinguishable from a deepfake. And so people were analyzing the video and saying, oh yeah it's definitely a deepfake, and they would give their reasons. For example, there was this weird thing where his shirt seemed to be tucking under his coat while he talked. That didn't look like it was real. And yeah, there were plenty of tells that it was fake. But it wasn't, as far as I know.
So yesterday was the day that the actual public couldn't tell the difference between a real person and a fake in the real world. Every other test, as far as I know, has been just a random thing: can you tell, blah blah. So you could always tell what was fake just by the context. But as soon as I took away the context, you couldn't tell. Not you specifically, but about half of the people just couldn't tell. Just remember that that happened yesterday. That changes everything. That's the last time you can believe a video. The last time you can believe a video. Although I would argue that the news has been distorting videos by editing them selectively forever, so maybe it's not that different after all.
Mexico's president is trying to nationalize Mexico's lithium mining business. What do you think of that? And why? Mexico's president is trying to nationalize their lithium business. Doesn't that mean giving it to the cartels? I mean, I hate to be cynical, but isn't the government of Mexico basically working for the cartels as far as we know? I mean, our current understanding of Mexico is that the cartels just took over a vital mineral that the United States needs for its economic survival. A little bit of hyperbole there, I know. The argument for going in militarily just keeps improving. Just keeps improving. So we got that going on.
And here's something else. I believe that Trump could negotiate with the cartels. He's the only person in the world who could do it. He could actually ask for a meeting with the heads of the cartels. Trump could do that. And then he could say, here's the deal: I'm going to kill all of you unless you want to figure some way to work your way into the productive part of the economy. Because remember, the United States had its own robber barons in our early days, right? You know, the people who built the railroads and stuff. They were basically just flat-out criminals. But once they get rich enough, sort of like the mafia in Las Vegas, you know the mafia settled Las Vegas but then they made a ton of money. It's kind of easier just to be a legitimate business after that. It's just easier. You don't have to hide anything.
So it seems to me that Trump is the only person in the world, if he were president and if he wanted to, he could actually call the heads of the cartel into a meeting. I mean it might have to be on Zoom, but he could actually have a meeting and he could say, here's the deal. You've got two choices. You work with us to turn your massive operation into something that's a legal business, or we kill all of you and it's going to happen by the end of the year.
Now I don't know that that would make any difference, but I know everything else we're doing is not working. I feel like they might take the offer because even if individuals are brave, all their family would be killed. Now the other way you could play it is this: here are the, I don't know, three biggest cartels, whatever is the number. If you don't agree to all simultaneously step down, I'm gonna arm one of you against the others and I'm going to make sure there's only one cartel in a year because I'll make sure that we help one of the cartels take over the others. And then I'll negotiate with the one that's left.
So that's your other path. I'll make sure there's only one left and then I'll just negotiate with that one. Or you could agree now. But there's only going to be one left and then we'll negotiate again. If I can't get a deal with one left, then it's going to go to zero. But those are your only options, right? You're either going to disappear or you get a deal.
I don't know if you imagine I'm thinking that it's likely to work. That would be incorrect. Everything's a long shot. But he's the only one who could try that shot, right? It's the one thing we haven't tried. There's only one person who could try it. So we'll see. I would be just as happy as if they were all killed. Happier, actually.
So Trump is provoking again. He truth a statement. I'll just paraphrase it. Basically Trump was complaining when some third-rate reporter, as he says, asked him a question about trusting Putin. And he had said in public that he trusted him. Now you shouldn't believe that. That's just what you say when Putin's standing next to you and you're trying to get a deal. That's just why you say it in public. Anybody who is dumb enough to think that Trump actually trusted Putin, that would be a pretty bad interpretation. He said it in public, but why would that be the one thing you believe? And of all the things he says that are clearly hyperbole or bending the truth, why would that be the one you believed?
But anyway, he pointed out that our own U.S. intelligence service, and he named James Clapper and Brennan and McCabe and his girlfriend Lisa, as Trump likes to say. And so Trump actually said that our own intel organizations are less trustworthy than Putin. Do you think that caused anybody to be triggered into TDS?
Now he's been sort of laying low relative to his usual for a few years. Have we already forgotten how he talks? Did we forget how he talks? All the time he's just driving a tremendous amount of energy to himself where people argue whether he genuinely means that we should trust our own intel organizations less than Putin. By the way, I would trust them less than Putin. I can say that because the ones he named are absolutely criminal. Well, not criminal. They did things which I wish were illegal enough for them to go to jail, but probably not. Probably not. I wish it were illegal. I guess it isn't.
But here's my take. Putin might lie 90% of the time. That still makes him competitive with our own intelligence agencies. If Putin lied 90% of the time I'd say, oh that looks about the same, similar. You know, maybe it's 80 versus 90. I don't know. I can't slice it that finely. But absolutely our own intelligence agencies are traitors and should be criminals, but probably are not. And that's just Trump being Trump.
And then a lot of people were like, oh false equivalency and all that. Like that's exactly what he wants you to do. He wants you to get all excited about how wrong it is and it's so wrong that you would say that. And then he draws all the energy to himself and gets all this free press. And then people start going, well yeah, you got a little bit of a point there.
Would you like to hear about me losing a debate on Twitter like a dog? I already teased the people on Locals that I would do this because I know you like it when I just get my ass kicked. All right, so here's me getting my ass kicked on Twitter.
So Twitter user Jeff, whose Twitter account is, damn it I wrote it down here somewhere. You don't want to give him credit. I wonder if my note-taking is terrible. All right, what the hell is wrong with me? I'm sure I wrote that down. All right, well Jeff, I'll give you credit later but I can't find your Twitter account. So Jeff, I think he's a DeSantis supporter. I'm not sure of his full background.
So Jeff tweeted the Trump injecting disinfectant slash bleach hoax, which apparently he believed was true. And so I spent a little time debunking the hoax. Now so far I'm doing well, right? Because if you've seen me debunk the drinking bleach hoax, you know that the debunk is 100% clean. It's a really good debunk. It was a real technology that was being tested. The quote from Trump was edited. If you see the full thing, he's talking about light. Light was really being tested inside the body, injected inside into the trachea. And so it's easy to debunk it.
So then I thought, well winner. I have debunked the heck out of that. So I was feeling good about myself. Then I noticed Jeff had a Spaces. He was doing a Spaces thing for Trump supporters to come in and try to make their case. And I turned it on just because I thought it might get mentioned because I just got done debating them online. And I hear Jeff say that if you have to explain what your leader said, do I have to finish? If you have to explain what your leader said, not just once, this isn't the one time. I just got done doing it a second time. I literally just got done doing it.
Now I get that the media distorts him, but why doesn't DeSantis have that problem? Why not? It's obviously Trump, right? He speaks in a way that is provocative. And I'm not sure he needs to at the moment. It definitely helped him in the first election. At the moment I'm not sure it's helping him.
And so Jeff, I accept my defeat. You're right. If I have to spend more of my time explaining what Trump said four years ago, that's on him. That's on Trump. Trump could have easily explained the injecting bleach thing by saying, oh is it real technology? If you look at the full quote I was talking about light. How easy would that have been? Pretty easy. Instead he tried to make it sound like he was doing sarcasm at the time, which was ridiculous. Nobody believed that. And so this is a complete shoot-yourself-in-the-foot kind of thing.
And so Jeff, you win. If I have to keep explaining what Trump meant, that's the, you win. There's nothing I can say to that. You win. That by the way was a sincere, sincere loss of a debate. Although I was right on the bleach stuff.
How many of you believe it's impossible that Biden could have gotten, what was it, 80 million or 81 million votes? How many of you believe that's a good skeptical thing to say? There's no way he could have gotten way more votes than Obama. Do you think that's a good point? Yeah, that's not really a good point.
See, if you count just the population increase in the country, everybody gets more votes. It's four years later. The country actually is a bigger country in four years. Secondly, it was the whole ballot voting at home thing. The voting at home thing could explain all of it. Now there's a secondary question of whether that was done legally and copacetically. That's a good separate question. But there's no conflict with the fact that he got that many votes. I'm not saying the election was clean or not clean. I'm not even talking about that. I'm just saying that if that's your reason for thinking it was rigged, I don't think that holds up. I just don't think that holds up.
I do think, and I'll think this to my death, that you can't tell if an election is rigged because we don't have a way to audit all of it. It's not all transparent, so you can't tell. Do you remember early in the questioning of the 2020 election, do you remember what I cautioned? I cautioned you that whether or not anything is ever discovered about the election being not right, I told you that no matter what you find out, 95% of all the election rigging claims will be BS. Do you remember that? I said even if they find 5% that's true, and even if that 5% actually changed the election, that 95% of everything you hear would just be BS.
How was that prediction? That was a pretty good prediction, wasn't it? Because we're sitting here in 2023. As far as I know, nothing conclusive has been found for voter fraud. Am I right? Now I would argue that it's unprovable, but it's also been not proven that there's fraud of any substance. Yeah, you could argue that nobody looked in the right places, etc. But everywhere they did look, and they looked at a lot of places, everywhere they did look they didn't find anything. Doesn't mean there's nothing there. That was just my prediction. Pretty close. But I wouldn't repeat the 80 million thing. I don't think that holds up. That doesn't seem like a strong point.
President's Day poll. Rasmussen did a poll to find out who was the best and worst presidents of the last five presidents. And you would not be surprised that Trump wins for best president and worst president. So we're just talking about Bill Clinton, Biden, Trump, George Bush, and Obama. So the last five. Of those, Trump is the most. He got the most votes, 36%, and he also got the most votes for the worst president. So that's Trump.
All right, let me ask you a question. I can't tell if this is an artifact of the algorithm trying to serve me what I want mostly on Instagram or is this a trend. So here's the question. Are you seeing a trend on social media or in life in general of mindset affirmations, law of attraction, and manifestations? Are you seeing like a whole bunch of new stuff? Like there's a whole bunch of new gurus. They're usually young people, not always.
So some of this is what I attempt to be following on social media, right? So I'm fed this all day long on Instagram. So it's probably because of my interest. All right, but I wanted to clarify something that I heard and I'm not sure I have a solid opinion on this yet, but I'll run it by you.
I saw one of these mindset gurus say that you should not be thinking in terms of what you want the typical way you do an affirmation. You know, a typical affirmation would be, you know, I will be rich, I will get it, I will have a good love life, I'll be happy, you know, I'll get that raise. Those sort of things, fairly specific. But one expert says that you should instead be telling the universe who you are, not what you want but who you are. And by that theory, once you know who you are, the universe starts delivering. Isn't that interesting?
And I tried to think, I wonder if, because I've talked about affirmations in my career and I have a string of insanely unlikely events in my life that were the subject of affirmations. Becoming a famous cartoonist, the odds against that were like a million to one. Being a number one best-selling author, would know, never wrote a book before, first book number one bestseller. I mean that's crazy stuff. That's just crazy. But those were actually the subjects of affirmations.
Now here's the part that I wonder about. Because while I was asking for specific things with my affirmations, to be a number one bestseller, it was a specific one, I was also thinking of myself as that person. So even though it wasn't part of my process to say I am this person, I was thinking of it that way. I had a strong impression of who I am and that was always present in my affirmations even though I didn't explicitly state it. And I wonder if that makes a difference. I wonder if any of it makes a difference.
Let me be clear. I don't know if any of this works. It seems like it does. It really does seem like it does. And so since I can't know one way or another, I treat it like it does until something falsifies that.
Now my belief of reality is that we're a simulation and it does not seem unlikely that we can create our own environment. Now I'm seeing a lot of people connecting quantum physics with this idea of the law of attraction. And the idea is that we know in physics that things don't become real until they're observed, which doesn't make any sense, does it? How do you understand your place in reality if one thing we know for sure is that something has to be observed or measured, which is similar to observed, that at the quantum level things literally don't exist until they're observed?
Now we're creating all these big telescopes to see further into space. I'm not sure all that stuff was always there. I think it might be created by the simulation because we need it there because our ability to see got better. So it doesn't seem crazy to me that we could be players in a game and that we can steer our impression of reality by what we think of it and what we focus on and what we want and who we are.
Now I don't know if any of that's real, but I also don't know if any is real. You know, I go pretty deep in the skepticism. I don't even know if I'm talking to you. I mean I don't know. I think I am but I don't know. So I just wanted to add that for those of you who are fans of the manifesting, law of attraction, affirmations. It might help you to think about who you are.
I'll give you some specific examples from my case. Before I became a cartoonist I was sure that I could do it better than the people who were already doing it. Now that clearly is not the case if you're looking at the best cartoonists of all time. You know, Calvin and Hobbes was better than anything I could do. Gary Larson, Far Side, I think he was just a better cartoonist than I am. Of course both of them were retired when I hit my peak so I wasn't competing against them. But I imagined myself as a creative person who could do those things.
When I did my affirmations that I'd be a best-selling author, I never thought that was impractical because I imagined myself as someone who could write interesting stuff and that it would be interesting enough that it could be a bestseller. And then it was. So I was never outside of my own impression of myself.
Now part of my advantage is I have an inflated opinion of my abilities, which I do intentionally. I've told you that 100 times. I always keep an inflated opinion of myself because it's useful. It's just utility. So I recommend that. Keep an inflated sense of yourself.
And here's what I would say. If you had to pick one thing as your identity, something that's maybe not who you are yet but somebody you could easily be and talk yourself into being, here's the most important thing you could be: a learner. A learner. That's my number one self-impression. I never really thought about it much until just recently as I was thinking about it. But my number one thing I think about myself is that I'm a learner. That I can learn anything and that if I need to compete with you on anything, I'm going to outlearn you and then good luck. Good luck. I don't know what your strategy is but my strategy is to outlearn you. I'm going to learn the thing you're learning then I'm going to learn three things on either side of it. So I'm going to know everything you know plus four other things, completely different fields that are related. You're not competing with me on one learning. I'm going to outlearn the hell out of you. You don't have a chance.
Now that's always been my opinion of myself and it works for every profession. So I've changed fields a number of times and it always works because I always say in a new field, well I have no idea how to do this but watch me learn it.
Here's a true story from the day I got my offer to be a cartoonist. So as I'm on the phone and the editor for United Media, the company that gave me my first break, the editor said blah blah, we'll offer you a contract. You know, this is my big break. And here's what I confessed. I said, honestly I don't know how to do a Sunday comic because I look at how the experts are doing and the coloring is sort of perfect. You ever noticed that? Have you ever looked at a Sunday cartoon and they never color outside the lines? It's like perfect. For context this was 1988. All right, if I said this today you'd just say, ah that's just Photoshop. You just click on it and it just fills it in. It does it perfectly every time.
So today I know that. In 1988 I didn't know how cartoonists colored it in. So I said to the editor, you know I'd like to accept your offer but I have to confess I don't even know how to do this work. I have no idea how they make a Sunday comic. How do they put the color in to do it so perfectly? Remember this is before Photoshop, etc. And then my editor said, the printer puts the color in. And I said, what? What?
It was the number one thing that was preventing me from becoming a cartoonist sooner is that I thought I didn't know how to do it. It turns out nobody did it. It was a thing that wasn't done. The printer added the color. The printer, now the cartoonist would put a little number and some lines to indicate what color to use but that's the easy part, right? Now at the moment it's just done in Photoshop. It's just click and fill. But I was not afraid of becoming a cartoonist simply because I didn't know how to do any of it. It didn't even stop me a little bit. I mean I admitted it so that I could work through a solution but I knew I could learn it. I just figured I'll learn it.
Same with writing a book. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a book? Have you ever thought about that? It's insanely hard. It's like really, really hard. Now it's not as hard maybe if it's like a historical story and you know the stories, you're just writing it down, or it's a biography or something. That's a little easier. But if you're writing a book from scratch that is mostly your own ideas and you're trying to fill an entire book and make it all make sense and not be repetitive and all that other stuff, it's crazy hard.
And do you know how much I knew about making a book the first time I tried writing one? Nothing. You should have seen the edits that came back. It was like more edits than there was text. It was just terrible. But I learned how. I learned by doing it wrong. But now I know how to make a book. So this latest one that I just submitted, I've got some more editing to do but basically done, was way easier because I'm a learner. So I learned all the things you need to do to make a book and now I can put together a book pretty easily.
I learned how to do live streaming, you know my own version of it, but I started out terrible and I learned. I didn't even have a voice that worked. I couldn't even speak well without sounding terrible. But I figured it out and I learned and blah blah blah.
So here's my bigger point. I have a theory that wherever education is a top priority, the people do well. That's it. That's it. End of story. Everywhere that people prioritize education, that population does great. And everywhere they don't, it doesn't matter what else they do. All the other things together means nothing.
Let me tell you what my mother taught the kids when I was a kid. You're going to college. But Mom, I'm in kindergarten. You're going to college. That's how you succeed. But can we talk about this later? Really, I'm five. You're going to college. You're going to college. You're going to college. But how could we afford that? Don't worry about it. You're going to college. You're going to college. You're going to college. Learn to read before you get into kindergarten or at least you know the alphabet and stuff. Why? Education is the most important thing. From the time I was a zygote my mother was just drilling that into me.
So what did I do? I thought education was my top priority and I can change to probably 15 different industries today and get a job. Probably there's probably 15 different jobs I could have in different industries just because I'm a learner. I just keep learning and you learn enough, you're just going to do a lot of different stuff.
So here's my problem with everybody who's complaining about their community is not doing so well. Make education the top priority or shut the up. It's not anybody else's problem. If you make education a top priority all the resources will come toward you. They will. It's the law of attraction. You become a learner. Let's say you're a black kid in America and you're in a poor area. You define yourself as a learner and you stick with it. You're going to do fine if you stay out of jail as well. That's it. That's all you need. You need to be a learner.
Now maybe your school is terrible. It's practically impossible. Well go learn something else that's legal and useful. You don't think you can find people to teach you stuff? You don't have access to the internet? You can't learn anything? All right, if you're a learner or a seeker I'll help you all you want. You just have to ask. Hey, I would like to learn this thing. Absolutely. Do you know how many people have contacted me to learn how to be a cartoonist? A lot. When I have time I usually help them. Just ask, right?
You want all the resources you need to be successful in life? It'll come to you. You just got to be a learner. As soon as people realize you're a learner they'll organize around you to make sure that you succeed. Very much like Good Will Hunting. I'll use the fictional story. I mean the hero in Good Will Hunting was a learner and his little town organized to make sure that he succeeded. That's the way it works everywhere. My little town organized to help me succeed as well. They put the fix in because they could see who I was.
And I think that that, getting back to should your affirmations be about what you want or should it be about who you are? Well I'll tell you, if you're a black kid in a poor area and all of the forces of your culture are pushing you toward playing in the NBA which isn't going to happen or being a drug dealer which is a bad idea, if you can define yourself as the one who's going to get out of there by being the learner, you will. You will.
Now my understanding, and of course is very limited because I'm looking from the outside, is if you're in some communities and you're too serious about school that you will be abused by the bullies. You know that's like being too white or something. But if you can't handle that you probably won't be successful anyway.
Do you know how much I got mocked in school for being a good student? Anybody? Does anybody experience that? Have any of you have been like the good student in the class and you get mocked forever for being the nerd? How did you respond to it when it happened to you? This might be just where I'm genetically different but every time somebody mocked me for being smart I felt good. I felt good, period. Every time. Every time. Do you know why? Because they were confirming my own view of myself.
Now they would say words like nerd and I would think, whatever you want to call it. If that's what you want to call someone who knows more than you do, okay. Apparently you're not very good at vocabulary either if that's your best vocabulary word. How about future success?
But here's what I detected. Every one of those people who mocked me for doing well in school, they were all jealous because they knew, they could see it. They knew it was going to make a difference. They knew it. Oh they knew it. And they watched it from the seed stage. People stopped me when I was nine years old and they could predict I was going to be successful. And did you know when I was a little kid people would tell me, well you're going to be rich. And it was always because I was just a learning machine and I was serious about making something work.
So I'm a little bit, I don't know what to do with this exactly, but here's what I would teach any person in a tough situation. So I'm going to use a black American kid in a poor situation as my example but it would apply to everybody, right? It applied to me as a low-income white guy. The system is rigged. The system is totally rigged against you. But there is a cheat code and the cheat code is learning. You can learn your way across past any system. It's the only way. Well maybe crime if you get away with it I suppose. But you can beat every rigged system.
Is there systemic racism? I say yes. I know some of you don't want to accept that but I say yes. I say there's a lot of it and it matters. It's a big, big deal. And you can slice through it like a hot poker through butter by just learning more than the people around you, period. That's it. Straightforward. Learn more than the people around you. You get more stuff. Learn more, win more. Learn more, win more. That's it. It's there for everybody.
How did I get out of my small town? I outlearned the people who didn't. That's it. It's available for everybody.
Now I think just the emphasis on education is what's needed. And if anybody complains about their systemic racism etc. I would say, what's your top priority? And then they'll say something like getting rid of the patriarchy. And then I say, oh you don't understand how success works. Your actual problem is you don't understand how anything works. Let me explain it to you. Education and learning is how you beat every system.
So if your top priority is racism, you lose. If your top priority is equity, you lose. If your top priority is the unfairness, you lose. If your top priority is getting a transfer from other people to you, probably you'll lose. Or you might win in the short term but you lose in the long term. They're all losing paths. There's one winning path: stay out of jail and outlearn the people you want to get away from. Just outlearn them. It's all available. Every bit of that is available to everybody.
So I just don't want to hear anybody who doesn't prioritize school or education. I don't want to say just school. Anybody who doesn't prioritize education first, don't even want to hear about their complaints. Not even interested. Because they need to fix that first. It's a mindset problem which they've decided is our problem or your problem or somebody else's problem.
And I think that we, those who like a system that works better, I think we're always attacking the wrong targets. I feel like there's so many variables swimming around and some people say it's this variable and if you just fix this and what about the school systems and blah blah blah. And I think all of those are maybe areas that need to be improved. But if education isn't your top priority, you're not really a serious person. So I wouldn't even listen to your complaints really.
All right, I solved the excess death problem. It'll take you a while to catch up to me because you won't believe me but it goes like this. Were you aware that loneliness causes heart disease? How many of you knew that loneliness causes heart disease? Yeah, and pretty big difference. The difference between lonely and not lonely is like 11 to 16 percent more cardiac issues.
So I did a little poll, a scientific poll on Twitter, and I asked people if they're more or less lonely since the pandemic. About a quarter of the people, now this is not the 25% like other 25%. This 25% is people just describing their own situation so this is not the 25% who gets every question wrong because when people are describing their own situation they get that right. But imagine if the pandemic and all that comes with it and our screens and our technology and stuff, let's say that's true for the general public. I don't know that it is. Could be more, could be less. But let's say it's a quarter of the people are lonelier and being lonelier gives you a 16% at the high end more cardiac issues. That would be the entire excess death. The entire excess deaths would be explained by extra loneliness which causes heart problems. Where? Everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah it's everywhere. It would be every age because remember part of the thing we didn't understand about the excess deaths is it appears to be everywhere and it's the everywhere part that's weird. Which also makes you think it's COVID or vaccinations because those are two things that are so widespread. But there is one other thing that's pretty widespread and the thing that's pretty widespread and definitely worse is loneliness.
And I'm seeing lots of it with my Locals subscribers because a lot of what I do on Locals is a solution to loneliness. I'm basically a virtual friend. And what I do, my evening podcasts or live streams, that's when you see it the most. So when I do my live streams from my man cave where it's more casual, we're not talking about the news, it's more like spending time with a friend. And I see from my audience on Locals, not all of them of course but many of them, are really lonely. And it really does make a big difference that I do this every morning. I never miss a morning. That's why I do it. That's part of the reason that I don't miss a morning because I realize that a lot of people use it as part of a social asset I guess. And so I don't want you to lose that.
So that's your whole solution right there. Because these are things that nobody would argue with. All right, I don't believe there's any scientific argument that extra loneliness would cause extra heart disease. Does anybody doubt that? Does anybody doubt the basic concept? Loneliness equals heart disease. Are we good with that?
Then the only other, if that's true then the only question is, is the extra loneliness enough to explain all of the excess deaths? And also is the loneliness worse than when we were locked up? Because it might be. Might be worse. Because here's what the weird thing that happened. When the lockdowns ended, a lot of telecommuting remained. And I got a feeling that there were a lot of houses where the man and the woman and the kids were all in the house at the same time and maybe you drove each other crazy but you weren't lonely. You're all in this house all day. Now you take, okay the wife is off doing something or the husband, make it non-sexist, kids are in school and you're just sitting home telecommuting and you're just all by yourself. It's pretty horrible actually.
You know, since the pandemic there are days when I don't talk to anybody all day. Now that's probably unusual but I actually have days where I don't talk to any human being in person. Maybe I communicate by digital means but I have no human contact some days. Not even unusual. Maybe once a week I have no human contact. I don't plan it. It just sort of happens. It usually means that I had something planned that fell through because I try to fill my schedule with a little bit of human contact but sometimes something gets canceled or whatever. And then you're like, oh well I guess I didn't talk to any people for 24 hours.
Please seek professional help. What, does anybody think I'm not happy? I swear to God I haven't had a bad day in months. Like I don't even have a bad day. When I said that I didn't see people all day, did it sound like I was sad? It's usually fine. But like if it were three or four days in a row I'd probably go insane. But one day without human contact, that's fine. It's a good day. Yeah. So yesterday I had almost no human contact. Almost none. I talked to one person at the gym for three minutes. That was it. That was it. But I had a really good day. Yeah, yesterday was a good day. So I practiced my guitar and my drums and I exercised. I took the dog out. It was sunny. Weather was perfect. Got a bunch of stuff done. Went to Starbucks. I guess I talked to the cashier, told her my order. That's about it.
All right, so that's the solution for the excess deaths as far as I know.
We have this question about whether students using AI and the ChatGPT thing for school homework, whether there was some way to identify when the student didn't do the work and AI wrote it. So I saw a real, and I can't guarantee this is all true but I think it's true, that there is a piece of AI that can spot things made by AI. So if you use ChatGPT the teacher can use another AI that I won't mention, I forgot to write it down, that will spot it. But the student can use ChatGPT but know that they'll get caught. So there's another AI, a separate one, that rewrites the first one to make it undiscoverable. Now at the moment I don't think there are too many students who would know how to navigate that world but that's going to be 10 minutes from now before they figure it out, right? That's like in 10 minutes they're going to figure that out.
Atomic Heart, is that like Atomic Habits? Recognizes an AI soulmate. Oh does it? All right. Yeah, the new version is going to be like 500 times smarter, right? That's coming out anytime. Ben Garrison uses chatbots, is that true? Yeah. So I really don't know what's going to happen in our future which is I guess the big takeaway. We have no idea what's going to happen in the future.
All right, loneliness is a broken heart sort of. Will make us 500 dumber maybe. I feel like the bridge generation where I was born and grew up before the internet but also before AI, there will be very few people who knew what that world looked like eventually. Like we'll be like the last World War II survivors and stuff. I'll be like, ah let me tell you. We used to leave the house in the morning and we were completely out of communication all day long. Our only requirement was to be home for dinner at five o'clock. That's it. That's the only communication we had. Be home at five o'clock. If your car broke down you were in trouble. Like my car broke down on the highway with no traffic and no homes around in the middle of the winter. I almost died. I almost died because cell phones were not invented. Yeah I didn't have a jacket and it was zero degrees and my car died in the middle of outside of Syracuse, upstate New York in February. And I ran for it. I've told you this story before but I basically ran for it to see if I could get to warmth before I froze to death. And I barely made it. A car picked me up finally. There was only one car that went by the entire time.
So I'll tell stories like that too. You know, the youngsters who have their AI and their virtual reality and their internets and stuff and they'll have no idea what that was like. No idea.
Broken feels like the social contract broke in 2020. The social contract. Say more about that. What do you think was the social contract we had before and it was broken? What is it now? Like I feel like you're onto something. I'm just responding to a comment on the Local platform.
But about fairness, I don't know. You know we always think everything's broken and we find a way to muddle through. Oh you think that work hard is what makes you successful? You think that's broken? I don't think that's broken. That's very, very much intact. Hard work still works. That's still a good formula. I don't know.
Yeah I always keep, I try to always keep a jacket in the car now for that reason.
All right, just looking at your comments here for a moment. All right, is there a story I missed? Anything I missed? Always keep a coat in your truck. That's good advice.
All right ladies and gentlemen on YouTube, I'm going to say bye for now and I will see you again soon. Oh Biden in Ukraine, yeah I talked about that at the start. It's just safer than Ohio. How often is the man cave? Just when I feel like it. Epstein list, there's nothing new on that. All right I think we've done it. Bye for now on YouTube. I'll talk to you.
foreign good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization it's called coffee with Scott Adams there's never been a fighter moment in your life although tomorrow looks good happy Presidents Day if you would like to celebrate today in the proper way all you need is a cup of mug or a glass a tank or chalice or style the canteen jug of flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid we all like coffee don't we well I do fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip go yeah that's good oh Jay you seem so confused by the hoaxes I'm sorry Fortune did that to you all right let's talk about uh all the news apparently President Biden visited Ukraine uh obviously the reason he visited Ukraine I don't have to fill in the blanks do I it's safer than being in Ohio I think the Secret Service said look you can either go to Ohio or you can go to the middle of a war zone which do you choose oh that war Zone's looking good so uh seems like he's going to the safest place on Earth Kiev I would like to agree with one of my critics if I might Jimmy Dore who I have uh I've disagreed with in the past uh he I think he was one of the people got fooled by the forge hand hoax about me but that's a different issue lately he's been taught well not lately but he's getting more pressed lately about talking out about the Ukraine Russia conflict and his take is that uh it's the entire war is just uh United States money grab that the military industrial complex wants a continuous War so they just have one whenever they need some extra money and um on top of that it's always about it's always a case of we always seem to attack places that have an energy conflict with us just a coincidence we always seem to be going after the places that have some big energy related business just a big old coincidence isn't it now you can certainly make the argument that there's you know big geopolitical reason for everything we're doing but why does it always correspond with follow the money why just follow the money perfectly predict everything well there are all these other reasons we're doing it huh huh so I'm going to be a hundred percent on the Jimmy Dore side on this and I also believe it could be negotiated what do you think do you think we're at a point where we could negotiate the end of the war we could but it would require making Ukraine unhappy so I don't know if we're we have the the ability to do that but yeah it's completely negotiable um here's a sign of the times I would like to note today actually yesterday uh yeah yesterday is the day that this happened so remember this day yesterday was the day I tweeted a video of Anthony Anthony blinken and ask people if they could tell if it were if it was a deep fake or real and the answers were about 50 50.
it was real as far as I know as far as I know I took it from the news so it was just a news report right I just took my camera up to the TV because while I was watching it I said to myself the the stiffness with which he's talking makes him indistinguishable from a deep fake and so people were analyzing the video and saying oh yeah it's definitely a deep fake and they would give their reasons for example there was this weird thing where his shirt seemed to be tucking under his his coat while he talked that didn't look like it was real and um yeah there were plenty of tells that it was fake but it wasn't as far as I know so yesterday was the day that the actual public couldn't tell the difference between a real person and a fake in the real world every other as far as I know every other test has been you know just a random thing can you tell blah blah so you could always tell what was fake just by the context but as soon as I took away the context you couldn't tell not you specifically but but about half of the people just couldn't tell couldn't tell you just remember that that happened yesterday that changes everything that's the last time you can believe a video the last time you can believe a video although I would argue that you know the news has been distorting videos by editing them selectively forever so maybe it's not that different after all Mexico is president is trying to nationalize Mexico's lithium mining business what do you think of that and why Mexico's president is trying to nationalize their lithium business doesn't that mean giving it to the cartels I mean I hate to be cynical but isn't the government of Mexico Mexico basically working for the cartels as far as We Know I mean our our current understanding of Mexico is that the cartels just took over a vital mineral that the United States needs for its economic survival a little bit of hyperbole there I know the argument for going in militarily just keeps improving just keeps improving so we got that going on um yeah and here's something else I believe that Trump could negotiate with the cartels he's the only person in the world who could do it he could actually ask for a meeting with the heads of the cartels Trump could do that and then he could say here's the deal I'm going to kill all of you unless you want to figure some way to work your way into the productive part of the economy because remember the United States had its own robber barons in our early days right you know the people who built the railroads and stuff they were basically just flat out criminals but once they get rich enough sort of like uh sort of like the mafia in Las Vegas you know the mafia settles Las Vegas but then they make a ton of money it's kind of easier just to be a legitimate business after that it's just easier you don't have to hide anything so it seems to me that Trump is the only person in the world if you were president and if you wanted to he could actually call the heads of the cartel into a meeting I mean it might have to be on Zoom but he could actually have a meeting and he could say here's the deal you've got two choices you work with us to turn your massive operation into something that's a legal business or we kill all of you and it's going to happen by the end of the year now I don't know that that would make any difference but I know everything else we're doing is not working I feel like they might take the offer because you know even if individuals are brave all their family would be killed now the other way you could play it is this uh here here are the I don't know three biggest cartels whatever is the number um if you don't agree to all simultaneous step down I'm gonna arm one of you against the others and I'm going to make sure there's only one cartel in a year because I'll make sure that we help one of the cartels take over the others and then I'll negotiate with the one that's left so so that's your other path I'll I'll make sure there's only one left and then I'll just negotiate with that one or you could agree now but there's only going to be one left and then we'll negotiate again if I can't get a deal with one left then it's going to go to zero but those are your only options right you're either going to disappear or you get a deal I don't know if you imagine I'm thinking that it's likely to work that would be incorrect everything's a long shot but he's the only one who could try that shot right it's the one thing we haven't tried there's only one person who could try it so we'll see I would be just as happy as if they were all killed happier actually um so uh Trump is provoking again so he he truth a statement I'll just paraphrase it basically Trump was complaining when some third third-rate reporter as he says asked him a question about trusting Putin and he had said in public that he trusted him now you shouldn't believe that that's just what you say when Putin's standing next to you and you're trying to get a deal that's that's just why you say in public anybody who is dumb enough to think that Trump actually trusted Putin that would be a pretty bad interpretation he said it you said it in public but why would that be the one thing you believe and of all the things he says that are clearly hyperbole or you know bending the truth why would that be the one you believed but anyway he pointed out that our own uh the U.S intelligence service and he named Ames from Clapper and Brennan and Mc.
Cabe and his girlfriend Lisa As Trump likes to say uh and so Trump actually said that our own our own Intel organizations are less trustworthy than Putin do you think that caused anybody to to be triggered into TDS now he's Trump has been sort of you know leg low relative to his usual for a few years have we already forgotten how he talks did we did we forget how he talks all the time he's just driving a tremendous amount of energy to himself where people argue whether he genuinely means that we should trust our own Intel organizations less than Putin by the way I would trust them less than Putin I can say that because the ones he named are absolutely criminal well not criminal they they did things which I wish were illegal enough for them to go to jail but probably not probably not I wish it were illegal I guess it isn't but here's my take Putin might lie 90 of the time that still makes him competitive with our own intelligence agencies if Putin lied 90 of the time I'd say oh that looks about the same similar you know maybe it's maybe it's 80 versus 90.
I don't know I can't cut it that I can't slice it that finally but absolutely our own intelligence agencies are Traders and and should be criminals but probably or not and that's just Trump being Trump so and then a lot of people were like oh false equivalency and all that like that's exactly what he wants you to do he wants you to get all excited about how wrong it is and it's so wrong that you would say that and then he draws all the energy to himself and gets all this free press and then people start going well yeah you got a little bit of a point there Sue um would you like to hear about me losing a debate on Twitter like a dog I already teased the uh the people on locals that I would do this because I know you like it when I just get my ass kicked all right so here's me getting my ass kicked on Twitter so Twitter user uh uh Jeff whose Twitter account is uh damn it I wrote it down here somewhere you don't want to give him credit I wonder if my my note-taking is terrible all right what the hell is wrong with me I'm sure I wrote that down all right well Jeff I'll give you credit later but I can't find your Twitter account so Jeff um I think he's uh by the way I think he's a De.
Santis supporter I'm not sure his full background uh so Jeff tweeted the Trump uh and injecting disinfectant slash bleach hoax which apparently he believed was true and so I spent a little time you know debunking the hoax now so far I'm doing well right because if you've seen me debunk the drinking bleach hoax you know that the debunk is 100 clean right it's a really good debunk it was a real technology that was being tested the the quote from Trump was edited if you see the full thing he's talking about light light was really being tested inside the body injected inside with a into the trachea and so it's easy to debunk it so then I thought well winner I have I have debunked the heck out of that so I was feeling good about myself then I noticed uh Jeff had a spaces he was doing a spaces thing for Trump supporters to come in and try to make their case and I turned it on just because I thought it might get mentioned because I just got done debating them on online and I hear Jeff say that if you have to explain what your leader said do I have to finish if you have to explain what your leader said not just once this isn't the one dive I just got done doing it a second time I literally just got done doing it now I get I get that the the media distorts him but why doesn't De.
Santis have that problem why not it's obviously Trump right he speaks in a way that is provocative and I'm not sure he needs to at the moment it definitely helped him in the first election at the moment I'm not sure it's helping him and so Jeff I accept my defeat you're right if I have to spend more of my time explaining what Trump said four years ago that's on him that's on Trump trump could have easily explained the way the uh injecting bleach Thing by saying oh is it real technology if you look at the full quote I was talking about light how easy would that have been pretty easy instead he tried to make it sound like he was doing sarcasm at the time which was ridiculous nobody believed that and so this is a complete you know shoot yourself in the foot kind of thing and so Jeff you win if I if I have to keep explaining what Trump meant that's that's the you win that that there's nothing I can say to that you win all right that by the way was a sincere sincere loss of a debate although I was right on the bleach stuff um how many of you believe it's impossible that Biden could have gotten what was it 80 million or 81 million votes how many of you you believe that's a good like skeptical thing to say there's no way he could have gotten way more votes than Obama do you think that's a good point yeah that's not really a good point see if you count the just the population increase in the country everybody is gets gets more votes like it's four years later the country actually is a bigger country in four years secondly it was you know the whole uh ballot voting at home thing the voting at home thing could explain all of it now there's a secondary question of whether that was done legally and copacetically that's a good separate question but there's no conflict with the fact that he got that many votes I'm not saying the election was clean or not clean I'm not even talking about that I'm just saying that if that's your reason for thinking it was rigged I don't think that holds up I just don't think that holds up I do think and I'll I'll think this to my death that you can't tell if an election is rigged because we don't have a way to order all of it it's not all transparent so you can't tell no I don't do you remember early in the um the questioning of the 2020 election do you remember what I cautioned I cautioned you that whether or not anything is ever discovered about the election being you know not right I told you that no matter what you find out 95 of all the election rigging claims will be BS do you remember that said even if they find five five percent that's true and even if that five percent actually changed the election that 95 of everything you hear would just be BS how was that prediction that was a pretty good prediction wasn't it because we're sitting here in 2023 as far as I know nothing conclusive has been found for voter voter fraud am I right now I would argue that it's unprovable but it's also been not proven that there's fraud of any substance yeah you could argue that nobody looked in the right places Etc but everywhere they did look and they looked at a lot of places everywhere they did look they didn't find anything doesn't mean there's nothing there that was just my prediction pretty close but I wouldn't repeat the 80 million thing that I don't think that holds up that doesn't seem like a strong point um President's Day poll Rasmussen did polls find out who was the the best and worst Presidents of the last five presidents and you would not be surprised that Trump wins for best president and worse president so we're just talking about Bill Clinton Biden Trump George Bush and Obama so the last five so of those uh Trump is the most uh he got the most votes 36 percent and he also got the most votes for the worst president so that's Trump all right let me ask you a question I can't tell if this is an artifact of the algorithm trying to serve me what I want mostly on Instagram or is this a trend so here's the question are you seeing a trend on social media or in life in general of mindset affirmations Law of Attraction and manifestations are you seeing like a whole bunch of new stuff like there's a whole bunch of new gurus they're usually young people not always so so some of this is what I attempt to be following on social media right so I'm I'm fed this all day long on on Instagram so it's probably because of my interest all right but I wanted to clarify something that I heard and I I'm not sure I have a solid opinion on this yet but I'll run it by you I saw one of these mindset gurus say that you should not be thinking in terms of what you want the typical way you do an affirmation you know a typical affirmation would be you know I will be rich I will get it I will have a good love life I'll be happy you know I'll get that raise those sort of things fairly specific um but one expert says that you should instead be telling the universe Who You Are not what you want but who you are and by that theory once you know who you are the universe starts delivering isn't that interesting and I tried to think I wonder if you know because I've talked about affirmations in my my career and I have a string of insanely unlikely events in my life that were the subject of affirmations becoming a famous Cartoonist the odds against that were like a million to one being a number one best-selling author would know never wrote a book before first book number one bestseller I mean that's crazy stuff that's just crazy but those were actually the subjects of affirmations now here's the part that I wonder about because while I was asking for specific things with my affirmations to be a number one bestseller it was a specific one I was also thinking of myself as that person so even though it wasn't part of my process to say I am this person I was thinking of it that way I was thinking of that I had I had a strong impression of who I am and that was always present in my affirmations even though I didn't explicitly state it and I wonder if that makes a difference I wonder if any of it makes a difference let me be clear I don't know if any of this works it seems like it does it really does seem like it does and so uh since I can't know one way or another I treat it like it does until something falsifies that now my my belief of reality is that we're a simulation and it does not seem unlikely that we can create our own environment now I'm seeing a lot of people connecting quantum physics with this idea of the law of attraction and the idea is that we know in physics that things don't become real until they're observed which doesn't make any sense does it how do you understand your place in reality if one thing we know for sure is that something has to be observed or measured which is similar to observed that that at the quantum level things literally don't exist until they're observed now we're creating all these big you know telescopes to see further into space I'm not sure all that stuff was always there I think it might be created by the simulation because we need it there because our our ability to see got better so it doesn't seem crazy to me that we could be players in a game and that we can steer our impression of reality by what we think of it and what we focus on and what we want and Who We Are now I don't know if any of that's real but I also don't know if any is real you know I go pretty deep in the skepticism I don't even know if I'm talking to you I mean I don't know I think I am but I don't know so uh I just wanted to add that for those of you who are fans of the manifesting Law of Attraction affirmations it might help you to think about who you are I'll give you some specific examples from my case before I became a cartoonist I was sure that I could do it better than the people who were already doing it now that clearly is not the case if you're looking at the best cartoonists of all time uh you know Calvin Hobbs was better than anything I could do Gary Larson Far Side I think he was just a better cartoonist than I am of course both of them were retired when I hit my Peak so I wasn't competing against them but um I imagined myself as a creative person who could do those things when I did my affirmations that I'd be a best-selling author I never thought that was Impractical because I imagined myself as someone who could write interesting stuff and that it would be interesting enough that it could be a bestseller and then it was so I was never on side of my own impression of myself now part of my advantage is I have a an inflated opinion of my abilities which I do intentionally I've told you that 100 times I always keep it inflated opinion of myself because it's useful it's just utility so I recommend that keep a keep an inflated sense of yourself and here's what I would say if you had to pick one thing as your identity something that's maybe not who you are yet but somebody you could easily be and and talk yourself into being here's the most important thing you could be a learner a learner that that's my number one self-impression I never really thought about it much until just recently as I was thinking about it but my number one thing I think about myself is that I'm a learner that can learn anything and that if I need to compete with you on anything I'm going to out learn you and then good luck good luck I don't know what your strategy is but my strategy is to out learn you I'm going to learn the thing you're learning then I'm going to learn three things on either side of it so I'm going to know everything you know plus four other things completely different fields that are related you're not competing with me on one one learning I'm going to out learn the hell out of you you don't have a chance now that's always been my opinion of myself and it works for every profession so I've you know changed change Fields a number of times and it always works because I always say in a new field well I have no idea how to do this but watch me learn it here's a true story from the day I got my offer to be a a cartoonist so as I'm on the phone and the editor for United media the company that gave me my first break the editor said blah blah will offer you a contract you know this is my big break and here's what I confessed I said honestly I don't know how to do a Sunday comic because I look at how the experts are doing and the coloring is sort of perfect you ever noticed that have you ever looked at a Sunday cartoon and they never call around side the lines it's like perfect for context this was 1988 all right if I said this today you just say Ah that's just Photoshop you just you just click on it and it just fills it in it it does it perfectly every time so today I know that in 1988 I didn't know how a card I didn't know how cartoonists colored it in so I said to the editor you know I'd like to accept your offer but I have to confess I don't even know how to do this work I have no idea how they make a Sunday comic how do they put the color in to do it so perfectly remember this is before Photoshop Etc and then my editor said the printer puts the color in and I said what what it was the number one thing that was preventing me from becoming probably a cartoonist sooner is that I thought I didn't know how to do it it turns out nobody did it it was a thing that wasn't done the printer added the color the printer now the cartoonist would put a little number and some lines to indicate what color to use but that's the easy part right now at the moment it's just done in Photoshop it's just you know click and fill but uh I was not afraid of becoming a cartoonist simply because I didn't know how to do any of it it didn't even stop me a little bit I mean I admitted it so that I could work work through a solution but I knew I could learn it I just figured I'll learn it same with writing a book do you have any idea how hard it is to write a book I've ever thought about that it's insanely hard it's like really really hard now the it's not as hard maybe if it's like a historical story and you know the stories you're just writing it down or it's a biography or something that's a little easier but if you're writing a book from scratch that is mostly your own ideas and you're trying to fill an entire book and make it all make sense and not be repetitive and all that other stuff it's crazy hard and do you know how much I knew about making a book the first time I tried writing one nothing you should have seen the edits that came back it was like more edits than they were text it was just terrible but I learned how I learned by doing it wrong but now I know how to make a book so this this latest one that I just submitted I've got some more editing to do but basically done um was way easier because I'm a learner so I learned all the things you need to do to make a book and now I can put together a book pretty easily I learned how to do live streaming you know my own version of it but I started out terrible and I learned I didn't even have a voice that worked I couldn't even speak well without sounding terrible but I figured out and I learned and blah blah blah so here's my bigger point um I have a theory that wherever education is a top priority the people do well that's it that's it end of story everywhere that people prioritize education that population does great and everywhere they don't it doesn't matter what else they do all the other things together means nothing let me tell you what my mother taught the kids when I was a kid you're going to college but Mom I'm in kindergarten you're going to college that's how you succeed but can we talk about this later really I'm five you're going to college you're going to college you're going to college but how could we afford that don't worry about it we're you're going to college you're going to college you're going to college learn to read before you get into kindergarten or at least you know the alphabet and stuff why education is the most important thing from the time I was a zygote my mother was just drilling that into me so what did I do I thought education was my top priority and I can change to probably 15 different Industries today and get a job probably there's probably 15 different jobs I could have different Industries just because I'm a learner I just keep learning and you learn enough you're just going to do a lot of different stuff so here's my problem with uh everybody who's complaining about their Community is not doing so well make education the top priority or shut the up it's not anybody else's problem if you make education a top priority all the resources will come toward you they will is the it's the Law of Attraction you become a learner let's say you're a black kid in America and you're in a poor area you define yourself as a learner and you stick with it you're going to do fine if you stay out of jail as well that's it that's all you need you need to be a learner now maybe your school is terrible as practically impossible well go learn something else that's legal and useful you don't think you can find people to teach you stuff you don't have access to the internet you can't learn anything all right if you're a learner or a Seeker I'll help you all you want you just have to ask hey I would like to learn this thing absolutely do you know how many people have contacted me to learn how to be a cartoonist a lot when I have time I usually help them just ask right you want you want all the resources you need to be successful in life it'll come to you you just got to be a learner as soon as people realize you're a learner they'll organize around you to make sure that you succeed very much like Good Will Hunting I'll use the the fictional the fictional story I mean the the hero in Goodwill Hunting was a learner and his little town organized to make sure that he succeeded that's the way it works everywhere my My Little Town organized to help me succeed as well they put the fix in because they can see who I was and I think that that getting back to should your affirmations be about what you want or should it be about who you are well I'll tell you if you're a black kid in a poor area and all of the the forces of your culture or you know pushing you toward playing in the NBA which isn't going to happen or being a drug dealer which is a bad idea um if you can if you can Define yourself as the one who's going to get out of there by being the learner you will you will now my understanding and of course is very limited because I'm looking from the outside is if you're in some communities and you're too serious about school that you will be abused by the bullies you know that's like being too white or something but if you can't handle that you probably won't be successful anyway do you do you know how much I got mocked in school for being a good student anybody does anybody experience that have any of you have been like the good student in the class and you get mocked forever for being the nerd how did you respond to it when it happened to you this might be just where I'm genetically different but every time somebody mocked me for being smart I felt good I felt good period every time every time do you know why because they were confirming my own view of myself now they would say you know words like nerd and and I would think whatever you want to call it if that's what you want to call someone who knows more than you do okay okay apparently you're not very good at vocabulary either if that's your best vocabulary word how about future success but I I but here's what I detected every one of those people who mocked me for doing well in school they were all jealous because they knew they could see it they knew it was going to make a difference they knew it oh they knew it and they watched it from the these you know the seed stage they people stopped me when I was nine years old and they could predict I was going to be successful and did you know when I was a little kid people would tell me well you're going to be rich and it was always because I was just a learning machine and I was serious about you know making something work so I'm a little bit I um I don't know what to do with this exactly but here's what I would teach um any any person in a tough situation so I'm going to use a black American kid in a in a poor situation as my example but it would apply it to everybody right it applied to me as a as a low-income white guy the system is rigged the system is totally rigged against you against you but there is a cheat code and the cheat code is learning you can learn your way Acro past any system it's the only way well maybe crime if you get away with it I suppose but you can beat every rigged system is there systemic racism I say yes I know some of you don't want to accept that but I say yes I say there's a lot of it and it matters it's a big big deal and you can slice through it like a hot poker through butter by just learning more than the people around you period that's it straightforward learn more than the people around you you get more stuff learn more win more learn more win more that's it it's there for everybody how did I get out of my small town I out learned the people who didn't that's it it's available for everybody now I think just the emphasis on education is is what's needed and um if anybody complains about their systemic racism Etc I would say what's your top priority and then they'll say something like getting rid of the patriarchy and then I say oh you don't understand how success works your actual problem is you don't understand how anything works let me explain it to you education and learning is how you beat every system so if you're if your top priority is racism you lose if your top priority is equity you lose if your top priority is the unfairness you lose if your top priority is you know getting a transfer from other people to you probably you'll lose or you might win in the short term but you lose in the long term it they're all losing paths there's one winning path stay out of jail and out learn the people you want to get away from just out learn them it's all available every every bit of that is available to everybody so I just don't want to hear anybody who doesn't prioritize school or education I don't want to say just School anybody who doesn't priorities prioritize Education First don't even want to hear about their complaints not even interested because they they need to fix that first it's a mindset problem which they've decided is our problem or your problem or somebody else's problem and I think that we we're always we that those who like a system that works better um I think we're always attacking the wrong targets I I feel like there's so many variables swimming around and some people say it's this variable and if you just fix this and what about the school systems and blah blah blah blah and I think all of those are maybe areas that need to be improved but if if education isn't your top priority you're not really a serious person so I wouldn't even listen to your complaints really all right um I solved the excess death problem it'll take you a while to catch up to me because you won't believe me but it goes like this were you aware that loneliness causes heart disease how many of you knew that loneliness causes heart disease yeah and pretty big difference the difference between lonely and not lonely is like 11 to 16 percent more cardiac issues so I did a little poll on scientific poll on Twitter and I asked people if they're more or less lonely um since the pandemic about about a quarter of the people now this is not the 25 like other 25 this 25 is people just describing their own situation so this is not the 25 who gets every question wrong because when people are describing their own situation they get that right um but imagine if uh the pandemic and all that comes with it in our our screens and our technology and stuff um let's say that's true for the general public I don't know that it is could be more could be less but let's say it's a quarter of the people are lonelier and being lonelier gives you a 16 at the high end more cardiac issues that would be the entire excess death the entire excess deaths would be explained by extra loneliness which causes heart problems where everywhere everywhere yeah it's everywhere it would be every age because remember part of the part of the thing we didn't understand about the excess deaths is it appears to be everywhere and it's the everywhere part that's weird which also makes you think it's coven or vaccinations because those are two things that are so widespread but there is one other thing that's pretty widespread and the thing that's pretty widespread and definitely worse is loneliness and I'm seeing lots of it with my locals local subscribers because a lot of what a lot of what I do on locals is a solution to loneliness I'm a basically a virtual friend and what I do my evening um podcasts or live streams that's when you see it the most so when I do my live streams from my man cave where it's more casual we're not talking about the news it's more like spending time with a friend and I see from you know my audience on locals not all of them of course but many of them um are really lonely and it really does make a big difference that I do this every morning I never miss a morning that's why I do it that's part of the reason that I don't miss a morning because I realize that a lot of people use it as part of a social um asset I guess and so I don't want you to lose that so that's your whole solution right there because these are things that nobody would argue with all right I don't believe there's any scientific argument that extra loneliness would cause extra heart disease does anybody doubt that does anybody doubt the basic concept loneliness equals heart disease are we good with that then the only other if that's true then the only question is is the extra loneliness enough to explain all of the excess deaths and and also is the loneliness worse than when we were locked up because it might be might be worse because here's what the weird thing that happened when the lockdowns ended when the lockdowns ended a lot of telecommuting remained and I got a feeling that there were a lot of houses where you know the man and the woman and the kids were all in the house at the same time and maybe you drove each other crazy but you were lonely you're all in this house all day now now you take okay the the wife is off doing something or the husband you know make it non non-sexist uh kids are in school and you're just sitting home telecommuting and you're just all by yourself it's pretty horrible actually you know there since the pandemic there are days when I don't talk to anybody all day now that's probably unusual but I actually have days where I don't talk to any human being in person maybe by communicate by you know digital means but none I I have no human contact some days not even unusual maybe once a week I have no human contact I don't plan it it just sort of happens it usually means that I had something planned that fell through because you know I I try to fill my schedule with a little bit of human contact but sometimes something gets canceled or whatever and then you're like oh well I guess I didn't talk to any people for 24 hours please seek professional help what does does anybody think I'm not happy I swear to God I haven't had a bad day in months like I don't even have a bad day when I said that I didn't see people all day did it sound like I was sad it's usually fine but like if it were you know three or four days in a row I'd probably go and save but one day without human contact that's fine it's a good day yeah so yesterday I had almost no human content almost none I talked to one person at the gym for three minutes that was it that was it uh but I had a really good day yeah yesterday was a good day so I practiced my guitar and my drums and I exercised I took the dog out it was sunny weather was perfect got a bunch of stuff done went to Starbucks I guess I talked to the cashier told told her my order that's about it all right so that's the solution for the excess deaths as far as I know um we have this question about whether students using Ai and the chat GPT thing for school homework whether there was some way to identify when the student didn't do the work and AI wrote it so I saw I saw a real and I can't guarantee this is all true but I think it's true um that there is a piece of AI that can spot things made by AI so so if you use chat GPT the teacher can use another AI that I won't mention I forgot to write it down that will Spot It but the student can use chat GPT but know that they'll get caught so there's another AI a separate one that rewrites the first one to make it undiscoverable now at the moment I don't think there are too many students who would know how to navigate that world but that's going to be 10 minutes from now before they figure it out right that's like in 10 minutes they're going to figure that out so atomic heart is that like Atomic habits um recognizes an AI soulmate oh does it all right yeah the new version is going to be like 500 times smarter right that's coming out anytime Ben Garrison uses chat Bots is that true yeah so um I really don't know what's going to happen in our future which is I guess the big takeaway we have no idea what's going to happen in the future all right um loneliness is a broken heart sort of will make us 500 Dumber Maybe I feel like um the bridge generation where I was born and grew up before the internet but also before AI there will be very few people who knew what that world looked like eventually like we'll we'll be like the the last World War II survivors and stuff I'll be like ah let me tell you we used to leave the house in the morning and we were completely out of communication all day long our only requirement was to be home for dinner five o'clock that's it that's the only communication we had be home at five o'clock if your car broke down you were in trouble like my car broke down on the highway with no traffic and no no homes around in the middle of the winter I almost died I almost died because cell phones were not invented yeah I didn't have a jacket and it was zero degrees and my car died in the middle of you know outside of Syracuse Upstate New York in February and I ran for it I've told you this story before but I basically ran for it to see if I could get to uh warmth before I froze to death and I barely made it a car picked me up finally there was only one car that went by the entire time so I'll tell stories like that too you know the youngsters who have their Ai and their virtual reality and their internets and stuff and they'll have no idea what that was like no idea broken feels like the social contract broke in 2020.
the social contract say more about that what do you think was the social contract we had before and they were broken what is it now like I feel like you're onto something I'm just responding to a comment on the local platform but about fairness I don't know you know we always think everything's broken and we find a way to muddle through oh you think that work hard is this makes you successful you think that's broken I don't think that's broken that's very very much intact hard work still works that's still a good formula I don't know um yeah I always keep a I try to always keep a jacket in the car now for that reason all right um just looking at your comments here for a moment all right is there a story I missed anything I missed always keep a coat in your truck that's that's good advice all right ladies and gentlemen on You.
Tube I'm going to say bye for now and I will see you see you again soon oh Biden in Ukraine yeah I talked about that at the start it's just safer than Ohio how often is the man cave um just when I feel like it Epstein list there's nothing new on that all right I think we've done it bye for now on You.
Tube I'll talk to you
foreign
good morning everybody and welcome
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go
yeah that's good
oh Jay you seem so confused by the
hoaxes
I'm sorry Fortune did that to you
all right let's talk about uh all the
news apparently President Biden visited
Ukraine
uh
obviously the reason he visited Ukraine
I don't have to fill in the blanks do I
it's safer than being in Ohio
I think the Secret Service said look you
can either go to Ohio
or you can go to the middle of a war
zone which do you choose
oh that war Zone's looking good
so uh seems like he's going to the
safest place on Earth
Kiev
I would like to agree with one of my
critics if I might
Jimmy Dore
who I have uh I've disagreed with in the
past uh he I think he was one of the
people got fooled by the forge hand hoax
about me
but that's a different issue lately he's
been taught well not lately but he's
getting more pressed lately
about talking out about the Ukraine
Russia conflict
and his take is that uh
it's the entire war is just uh United
States money grab
that the military industrial complex
wants a continuous War so they just have
one whenever they need some extra money
and
um on top of that it's always about
it's always a case of
we always seem to attack places that
have an energy conflict with us
just a coincidence we always seem to be
going after the places that have some
big energy related business
just a big old coincidence isn't it
now you can certainly make the argument
that there's you know big geopolitical
reason for everything we're doing but
why does it always correspond with
follow the money
why just follow the money perfectly
predict everything
well there are all these other reasons
we're doing it
huh huh
so I'm going to be a hundred percent on
the Jimmy Dore side on this
and I also believe it could be
negotiated
what do you think
do you think we're at a point where we
could negotiate the end of the war we
could
but it would require making Ukraine
unhappy
so I don't know if we're we have the the
ability to do that but yeah it's
completely negotiable
um here's a sign of the times I would
like to note today
actually yesterday uh yeah yesterday is
the day that this happened
so remember this day
yesterday was the day I tweeted a video
of Anthony Anthony blinken
and ask people if they could tell if it
were if it was a deep fake or real
and the answers were about 50 50.
it was real
as far as I know as far as I know I took
it from the news so it was just a news
report right I just took my camera up to
the TV because while I was watching it I
said to myself
the the stiffness with which he's
talking makes him indistinguishable from
a deep fake
and so people were analyzing the video
and saying oh yeah it's definitely a
deep fake and they would give their
reasons
for example there was this weird thing
where his shirt seemed to be tucking
under his his coat while he talked
that didn't look like it was real and
um yeah there were plenty of tells that
it was fake but it wasn't as far as I
know so yesterday was the day
that the actual public
couldn't tell the difference between a
real person and a fake in the real world
every other as far as I know
every other test has been you know just
a random thing
can you tell blah blah so you could
always tell what was fake just by the
context
but as soon as I took away the context
you couldn't tell
not you specifically but but about half
of the people just couldn't tell
couldn't tell you just remember that
that happened
yesterday
that changes everything
that's the last time you can believe a
video
the last time you can believe a video
although I would argue that you know the
news has been distorting videos by
editing them selectively forever
so maybe it's not that different after
all
Mexico is president is trying to
nationalize Mexico's lithium mining
business
what do you think of that and why
Mexico's president is trying to
nationalize
their lithium business
doesn't that mean giving it to the
cartels
I mean I hate to be cynical but isn't
the government of Mexico Mexico
basically working for the cartels as far
as We Know
I mean our our current understanding of
Mexico is that the cartels just took
over a vital mineral
that the United States needs
for its economic survival
a little bit of hyperbole there
I know the argument for going in
militarily just keeps improving
just keeps improving so we got that
going on
um
yeah and here's something else I believe
that Trump could negotiate with the
cartels
he's the only person in the world who
could do it
he could actually ask for a meeting
with the heads of the cartels
Trump could do that and then he could
say here's the deal
I'm going to kill all of you
unless
you want to figure some way to work your
way into the productive part of the
economy because remember the United
States had its own robber barons in our
early days
right
you know the people who built the
railroads and stuff they were basically
just flat out criminals
but once they get rich enough
sort of like uh sort of like the mafia
in Las Vegas you know the mafia settles
Las Vegas
but then they make a ton of money
it's kind of easier just to be a
legitimate business after that it's just
easier you don't have to hide anything
so
it seems to me that Trump is the only
person in the world if you were
president and if you wanted to he could
actually call the heads of the cartel
into a meeting I mean it might have to
be on Zoom but he could actually have a
meeting
and he could say here's the deal you've
got two choices you work with us
to turn your massive operation into
something that's a legal business
or we kill all of you
and it's going to happen by the end of
the year
now I don't know that that would make
any difference but I know everything
else we're doing is not working
I feel like they might take the offer
because you know even if individuals are
brave
all their family would be killed
now the other way you could play it is
this
uh here here are the I don't know three
biggest cartels whatever is the number
um
if you don't agree to all simultaneous
step down
I'm gonna arm one of you
against the others
and I'm going to make sure there's only
one cartel in a year because I'll make
sure that we help one of the cartels
take over the others and then I'll
negotiate with the one that's left
so so that's your other path
I'll I'll make sure there's only one
left and then I'll just negotiate with
that one or you could agree now
but there's only going to be one left
and then we'll negotiate again if I
can't get a deal with one left then it's
going to go to zero
but those are your only options right
you're either going to disappear or you
get a deal
I don't know
if you imagine I'm thinking that it's
likely to work that would be incorrect
everything's a long shot
but he's the only one who could try that
shot
right it's the one thing we haven't
tried
there's only one person who could try it
so we'll see I would be just as happy as
if they were all killed
happier actually
um
so uh Trump is provoking again so he he
truth a statement I'll just paraphrase
it basically Trump was complaining
when some third third-rate reporter as
he says asked him a question about
trusting Putin
and he had said in public that he
trusted him now you shouldn't believe
that
that's just what you say when Putin's
standing next to you and you're trying
to get a deal
that's that's just why you say in public
anybody who is dumb enough to think that
Trump actually trusted Putin
that would be a pretty bad
interpretation
he said it you said it in public but why
would that be the one thing you believe
and of all the things he says that are
clearly hyperbole or you know bending
the truth why would that be the one you
believed
but anyway he pointed out that our own
uh the U.S intelligence service and he
named Ames from Clapper and Brennan and
McCabe and his girlfriend Lisa As Trump
likes to say uh
and so Trump actually said that our own
our own Intel organizations are less
trustworthy than Putin
do you think that caused anybody to
to be triggered into TDS
now he's Trump has been sort of you know
leg low relative to his usual for a few
years have we already forgotten how he
talks
did we did we forget how he talks all
the time
he's just driving a tremendous amount of
energy to himself where people argue
whether he genuinely means that we
should trust our own Intel organizations
less than Putin by the way
I would trust them less than Putin
I can say that
because the ones he named are absolutely
criminal well not criminal they they did
things which I wish were illegal enough
for them to go to jail but probably not
probably not I wish it were illegal I
guess it isn't
but
here's my take
Putin might lie 90 of the time
that still makes him competitive with
our own intelligence agencies
if Putin lied 90 of the time I'd say oh
that looks about the same
similar
you know maybe it's maybe it's 80 versus
90. I don't know I can't cut it that I
can't slice it that finally
but absolutely our own intelligence
agencies are Traders
and and should be criminals but probably
or not
and
that's just Trump being Trump so and
then a lot of people were like oh false
equivalency and all that like that's
exactly what he wants you to do he wants
you to get all excited about how wrong
it is and it's so wrong that you would
say that and then he draws all the
energy to himself and gets all this free
press and then people start going well
yeah you got a little bit of a point
there
Sue
um
would you like to hear about me losing a
debate on Twitter like a dog
I already teased the uh the people on
locals
that I would do this because I know you
like it when I just get my ass kicked
all right so here's me getting my ass
kicked on Twitter
so Twitter user uh uh Jeff
whose Twitter account is
uh damn it
I wrote it down here somewhere you don't
want to give him credit I wonder if my
[Applause]
my note-taking is terrible
all right what the hell is wrong with me
I'm sure I wrote that down all right
well Jeff I'll give you credit later but
I can't find your Twitter account
so Jeff
um I think he's uh by the way I think
he's a DeSantis supporter I'm not sure
his full background
uh so Jeff tweeted the Trump uh and
injecting disinfectant slash bleach hoax
which apparently he believed was true
and so I spent a little time you know
debunking the hoax now so far I'm doing
well right because if you've seen me
debunk the drinking bleach hoax you know
that the debunk is 100 clean right it's
a really good debunk it was a real
technology that was being tested the the
quote from Trump was edited if you see
the full thing he's talking about light
light was really being tested inside the
body injected inside with a into the
trachea and so it's easy to debunk it
so then I thought well winner
I have I have debunked the heck out of
that so I was feeling good about myself
then I noticed uh Jeff had a spaces he
was doing a spaces thing for Trump
supporters to come in and try to make
their case
and I turned it on just because I
thought it might get mentioned
because I just got done debating them on
online
and I hear Jeff say that if you have to
explain what your leader said
do I have to finish
if you have to explain what your leader
said not just once this isn't the one
dive I just got done doing it a second
time I literally just got done doing it
now I get I get that the the media
distorts him
but why doesn't DeSantis have that
problem
why not
it's obviously Trump right he speaks in
a way that is provocative and I'm not
sure he needs to at the moment it
definitely helped him in the first
election at the moment I'm not sure it's
helping him
and so Jeff I accept my defeat you're
right if I have to spend more of my time
explaining what Trump said
four years ago
that's on him
that's on Trump trump could have easily
explained the way the uh injecting
bleach Thing by saying oh is it real
technology if you look at the full quote
I was talking about light
how easy would that have been
pretty easy
instead he tried to make it sound like
he was doing sarcasm at the time which
was ridiculous
nobody believed that
and so this is a complete you know shoot
yourself in the foot kind of thing and
so Jeff you win if I if I have to keep
explaining what Trump meant
that's that's the you win
that that there's nothing I can say to
that you win
all right
that by the way was a sincere
sincere loss of a debate although I was
right on the bleach stuff
um
how many of you believe it's impossible
that Biden could have gotten what was it
80 million or 81 million votes how many
of you you believe that's a good
like skeptical thing to say there's no
way he could have gotten way more votes
than Obama
do you think that's a good point
yeah that's not really a good point
see if you count the just the population
increase in the country
everybody is gets gets more votes like
it's four years later the country
actually is a bigger country in four
years
secondly it was you know the whole uh
ballot voting at home thing
the voting at home thing could explain
all of it
now there's a secondary question of
whether that was done legally and
copacetically that's a good separate
question
but
there's no conflict with the fact that
he got that many votes
I'm not saying the election was clean or
not clean I'm not even talking about
that I'm just saying that if that's your
reason for thinking it was rigged
I don't think that holds up
I just don't think that holds up
I do think and I'll I'll think this to
my death that you can't tell
if an election is rigged because we
don't have a way to order all of it it's
not all transparent so you can't tell no
I don't do you remember early in the
um the questioning of the 2020 election
do you remember what I cautioned I
cautioned you that whether or not
anything is ever discovered
about the election being you know not
right I told you that no matter what you
find out 95 of all the election rigging
claims will be BS
do you remember that
said even if they find five five percent
that's true and even if that five
percent
actually changed the election
that 95 of everything you hear would
just be BS
how was that prediction
that was a pretty good prediction wasn't
it because we're sitting here in 2023
as far as I know nothing conclusive has
been found
for voter voter fraud
am I right
now I would argue that it's unprovable
but it's also been not proven that
there's fraud of any substance
yeah you could argue that nobody looked
in the right places
Etc but everywhere they did look and
they looked at a lot of places
everywhere they did look they didn't
find anything doesn't mean there's
nothing there
that was just my prediction
pretty close
but I wouldn't repeat the 80 million
thing that I don't think that holds up
that doesn't seem like a strong point
um
President's Day poll Rasmussen did polls
find out who was the the best and worst
Presidents of the last five presidents
and you would not be surprised that
Trump wins for best president and worse
president
so we're just talking about Bill Clinton
Biden Trump George Bush and Obama so the
last five so of those uh
Trump is the most uh he got the most
votes 36 percent
and he also got the most votes for the
worst president
so
that's Trump
all right
let me ask you a question I can't tell
if this is an artifact of the algorithm
trying to serve me what I want mostly on
Instagram or is this a trend
so here's the question are you seeing a
trend
on social media or in life in general of
mindset affirmations
Law of Attraction and manifestations
are you seeing like a whole bunch of new
stuff like there's a whole bunch of new
gurus they're usually young people not
always
so so some of this is what I attempt to
be following on social media right so
I'm I'm fed this all day long on on
Instagram so it's probably because of my
interest
all right but I wanted to clarify
something that I heard
and I I'm not sure I have a solid
opinion on this yet but I'll run it by
you
I saw one of these mindset gurus say
that you should not be thinking in terms
of what you want the typical way you do
an affirmation you know a typical
affirmation would be you know I will be
rich I will get it I will have a good
love life I'll be happy
you know I'll get that raise those sort
of things fairly specific
um
but one expert says that you should
instead be
telling the universe Who You Are
not what you want
but who you are
and by that theory once you know who you
are
the universe starts delivering
isn't that interesting
and I tried to think I wonder if you
know because I've talked about
affirmations in my my career and I have
a string of insanely unlikely
events in my life that were the subject
of affirmations becoming a famous
Cartoonist the odds against that were
like a million to one being a number one
best-selling author
would know never wrote a book before
first book
number one bestseller
I mean that's crazy stuff that's just
crazy but those were actually the
subjects of affirmations now here's the
part that I wonder about
because while I was asking for specific
things with my affirmations to be a
number one bestseller it was a specific
one
I was also thinking of myself as that
person
so even though it wasn't part of my
process to say I am this person I was
thinking of it that way I was thinking
of that I had I had a strong impression
of who I am
and that was always present in my
affirmations even though I didn't
explicitly state it
and I wonder if that makes a difference
I wonder if any of it makes a difference
let me be clear I don't know if any of
this works
it seems like it does
it really does seem like it does and so
uh since I can't know one way or another
I treat it like it does until something
falsifies that now my my belief of
reality is that we're a simulation
and it does not seem unlikely
that we can create our own environment
now I'm seeing a lot of people
connecting quantum physics with this
idea of the law of attraction
and the idea is that we know in physics
that things don't become real until
they're observed
which doesn't make any sense does it
how do you understand your place in
reality
if one thing we know for sure
is that something has to be observed or
measured which is similar to observed
that that at the quantum level things
literally don't exist until they're
observed
now we're creating all these big
you know telescopes to see further into
space
I'm not sure all that stuff was always
there
I think it might be created by the
simulation because we need it there
because our our ability to see got
better
so it doesn't seem crazy to me
that we could be players in a game
and that we can steer
our impression of reality
by what we think of it and what we focus
on and what we want and Who We Are
now I don't know if any of that's real
but I also don't know if
any is real
you know I go pretty deep in the
skepticism I don't even know if I'm
talking to you I mean I don't know I
think I am but I don't know
so uh I just wanted to add that for
those of you who are fans of the
manifesting Law of Attraction
affirmations it might help you to think
about who you are I'll give you some
specific examples from my case
before I became a cartoonist
I was sure that I could do it better
than the people who were already doing
it
now that clearly is not the case if
you're looking at the best cartoonists
of all time
uh you know Calvin Hobbs was better than
anything I could do Gary Larson Far Side
I think he was just a better cartoonist
than I am of course both of them were
retired when I hit my Peak so I wasn't
competing against them
but
um I imagined myself
as a creative person who could do those
things
when I did my affirmations that I'd be a
best-selling author
I never thought that was Impractical
because I imagined myself as someone who
could write interesting stuff
and that it would be interesting enough
that it could be a bestseller and then
it was
so I was never on side of my own
impression of myself
now part of my advantage is I have a
an inflated opinion of my abilities
which I do intentionally I've told you
that 100 times I always keep it inflated
opinion of myself because it's useful
it's just utility
so I recommend that keep a keep an
inflated sense of yourself
and here's what I would say if you had
to pick one thing as your identity
something that's maybe not who you are
yet
but somebody you could easily be and and
talk yourself into being here's the most
important thing you could be
a learner
a learner
that that's my number one
self-impression
I never really thought about it much
until just recently as I was thinking
about it but my number one thing I think
about myself is that I'm a learner
that can learn anything
and that if I need to compete with you
on anything I'm going to out learn you
and then good luck
good luck I don't know what your
strategy is but my strategy is to out
learn you I'm going to learn the thing
you're learning then I'm going to learn
three things on either side of it so I'm
going to know everything you know plus
four other things completely different
fields that are related
you're not competing with me on one one
learning I'm going to out learn the hell
out of you you don't have a chance
now that's always been my opinion of
myself
and it works for every profession so
I've you know changed
change Fields a number of times and it
always works because I always say in a
new field well I have no idea how to do
this
but watch me learn it
here's a true story from the day I got
my offer to be a a cartoonist
so as I'm on the phone
and the editor for United media the
company that gave me my first break the
editor said
blah blah will offer you a contract you
know this is my big break
and here's what I confessed
I said
honestly
I don't know how to do a Sunday comic
because I look at how the experts are
doing and the coloring
is sort of perfect
you ever noticed that have you ever
looked at a Sunday cartoon and they
never call around side the lines
it's like perfect
for context this was 1988 all right
if I said this today you just say Ah
that's just Photoshop you just you just
click on it and it just fills it in it
it does it perfectly every time
so today I know that in 1988 I didn't
know how a card I didn't know how
cartoonists
colored it in so I said to the editor
you know I'd like to accept your offer
but I have to confess I don't even know
how to do this work
I have no idea how they make a Sunday
comic how do they put the color in to do
it so perfectly remember this is before
Photoshop
Etc
and then my editor said
the printer puts the color in
and I said
what
what
it was the number one thing that was
preventing me from becoming probably a
cartoonist sooner is that I thought I
didn't know how to do it it turns out
nobody did it it was a thing that wasn't
done the printer added the color
the printer
now the cartoonist would put a little
number and some lines to indicate what
color to use but that's the easy part
right now at the moment it's just done
in Photoshop it's just you know click
and fill
but uh
I was not afraid of becoming a
cartoonist
simply because I didn't know how to do
any of it
it didn't even stop me a little bit
I mean I admitted it so that I could
work work through a solution but I knew
I could learn it
I just figured I'll learn it same with
writing a book
do you have any idea how hard it is to
write a book
I've ever thought about that
it's insanely hard it's like really
really hard now the it's not as hard
maybe if it's like a historical story
and you know the stories you're just
writing it down or it's a biography or
something that's a little easier but if
you're writing a book from scratch
that is mostly your own ideas and you're
trying to fill an entire book and make
it all make sense and not be repetitive
and all that other stuff it's crazy hard
and do you know how much I knew about
making a book the first time I tried
writing one
nothing
you should have seen the edits that came
back it was like more edits than they
were text it was just terrible
but
I learned how
I learned by doing it wrong but now I
know how to make a book so this this
latest one that I just submitted I've
got some more editing to do but
basically done
um was way easier because I'm a learner
so I learned all the things you need to
do to make a book and now I can put
together a book pretty easily
I learned how to do live streaming you
know my own version of it
but I started out terrible
and I learned I didn't even have a voice
that worked
I couldn't even speak well without
sounding terrible
but I figured out and I learned and blah
blah blah
so here's my bigger point
um
I have a theory that wherever education
is a top priority the people do well
that's it
that's it end of story
everywhere that people prioritize
education
that population does great
and everywhere they don't
it doesn't matter what else they do
all the other things together
means nothing
let me tell you what my mother taught
the kids when I was a kid
you're going to college
but Mom I'm in kindergarten
you're going to college
that's how you succeed
but can we talk about this later really
I'm five
you're going to college
you're going to college you're going to
college
but how could we afford that
don't worry about it we're you're going
to college you're going to college
you're going to college
learn to read before you get into
kindergarten or at least you know the
alphabet and stuff why education is the
most important thing
from the time I was a zygote
my mother was just drilling that into me
so what did I do I thought education was
my top priority
and I can change to probably 15
different Industries today and get a job
probably there's probably 15 different
jobs I could have different Industries
just because I'm a learner I just keep
learning
and you learn enough you're just going
to do a lot of different stuff
[Applause]
so here's my problem with uh everybody
who's complaining about their Community
is not doing so well
make education the top priority
or shut the up
it's not anybody else's problem if you
make education a top priority all the
resources will come toward you
they will
is the it's the Law of Attraction you
become a learner
let's say you're a black kid in America
and you're in a poor area
you define yourself as a learner
and you stick with it you're going to do
fine if you stay out of jail
as well
that's it that's all you need
you need to be a learner now maybe your
school is terrible as practically
impossible well go learn something else
that's legal and useful you don't think
you can find people to teach you stuff
you don't have access to the internet
you can't learn anything
all right if you're a learner or a
Seeker
I'll help you all you want
you just have to ask hey I would like to
learn this thing absolutely
do you know how many people have
contacted me to learn how to be a
cartoonist
a lot
when I have time I usually help them
just ask
right you want you want all the
resources you need to be successful in
life
it'll come to you you just got to be a
learner as soon as people realize you're
a learner
they'll organize around you to make sure
that you succeed
very much like Good Will Hunting I'll
use the the fictional the fictional
story I mean the the hero in Goodwill
Hunting was a learner
and his little town organized to make
sure that he succeeded
that's the way it works everywhere my My
Little Town organized to help me succeed
as well
they put the fix in because they can see
who I was and I think that that getting
back to should your affirmations be
about what you want or should it be
about who you are well I'll tell you if
you're a black kid in a poor area and
all of the the forces of your culture or
you know pushing you toward playing in
the NBA which isn't going to happen or
being a drug dealer which is a bad idea
um if you can if you can Define yourself
as the one who's going to get out of
there
by being the learner
you will
you will
now
my understanding and of course is very
limited because I'm looking from the
outside is if you're in some communities
and you're too serious about school
that you will be abused by the bullies
you know that's like being too white or
something
but if you can't handle that you
probably won't be successful anyway
do you do you know how much I got mocked
in school
for being a good student
anybody does anybody experience that
have any of you have been like the good
student in the class and you get mocked
forever for being the nerd
how did you respond to it when it
happened to you
this might be just where I'm genetically
different
but every time somebody mocked me for
being smart
I felt good
I felt good
period
every time every time do you know why
because they were confirming my own view
of myself
now they would say you know words like
nerd
and and I would think whatever you want
to call it
if that's what you want to call someone
who knows more than you do
okay okay
apparently you're not very good at
vocabulary either if that's your best
vocabulary word
how about future success
but I I but here's what I detected
every one of those people who mocked me
for
doing well in school
they were all jealous
because they knew
they could see it
they knew it was going to make a
difference
they knew it
oh they knew it
and they watched it from the these you
know the seed stage
they
people stopped me when I was nine years
old
and they could predict I was going to be
successful and did you know when I was a
little kid people would tell me well
you're going to be rich
and it was always because I was just a
learning machine and I was serious about
you know making something work
so I'm a little bit I
um
I don't know what to do with this
exactly
but
here's what I would teach
um
any any person in a tough situation so
I'm going to use a black American kid in
a in a poor situation as my example but
it would apply it to everybody right it
applied to me as a as a low-income white
guy
the system is rigged
the system is totally rigged against you
against you
but there is a cheat code
and the cheat code is learning
you can learn your way Acro past any
system
it's the only way
well maybe crime if you get away with it
I suppose but you can beat every rigged
system
is there systemic racism I say yes I
know some of you don't want to accept
that but I say yes I say there's a lot
of it and it matters it's a big big deal
and you can slice through it like a hot
poker through butter
by just learning more than the people
around you period that's it
straightforward learn more than the
people around you you get more stuff
learn more win more learn more win more
that's it
it's there for everybody
how did I get out of my small town
I out learned the people who didn't
that's it
it's available for everybody now I think
just the emphasis on education is is
what's needed and
um if anybody complains about their
systemic racism Etc I would say what's
your top priority
and then they'll say something like
getting rid of the patriarchy
and then I say oh you don't understand
how success works
your actual problem is you don't
understand how anything works let me
explain it to you
education and learning
is how you beat every system
so if you're if your top priority is
racism
you lose
if your top priority is equity
you lose
if your top priority is the unfairness
you lose if your top priority is you
know getting a transfer from other
people to you probably you'll lose or
you might win in the short term but you
lose in the long term
it they're all losing paths there's one
winning path stay out of jail and out
learn the people you want to get away
from
just out learn them it's all available
every every bit of that is available to
everybody so I just don't want to hear
anybody who doesn't prioritize school or
education I don't want to say just
School anybody who doesn't priorities
prioritize Education First
don't even want to hear about their
complaints
not even interested
because
they they need to fix that first it's a
mindset problem
which they've decided is our problem or
your problem or somebody else's problem
and I think that we we're always
we that those who like a system that
works better
um I think we're always attacking the
wrong targets
I I feel like there's so many variables
swimming around and some people say it's
this variable and if you just fix this
and what about the school systems and
blah blah blah blah and I think all of
those are maybe areas that need to be
improved
but
if if education isn't your top priority
you're not really a serious person
so I wouldn't even listen to your
complaints really
all right
um I solved the excess death problem
it'll take you a while to catch up to me
because you won't believe me
but it goes like this were you aware
that loneliness causes heart disease
how many of you knew that
loneliness causes heart disease
yeah and
pretty big difference the difference
between lonely and not lonely is like 11
to 16 percent more cardiac issues
so I did a little poll on scientific
poll on Twitter and I asked people if
they're more or less lonely
um since the pandemic about about a
quarter of the people
now this is not the 25 like other 25
this 25 is people just describing their
own situation so this is not the 25 who
gets every question wrong because when
people are describing their own
situation
they get that right
um but imagine if uh the pandemic and
all that comes with it in our our
screens and our technology and stuff
um
let's say that's true for the general
public I don't know that it is could be
more could be less
but let's say it's a quarter of the
people are lonelier
and being lonelier gives you a 16 at the
high end more cardiac issues
that would be the entire excess death
the entire excess deaths would be
explained
by extra loneliness which causes heart
problems
where everywhere everywhere
yeah it's everywhere it would be every
age
because remember part of the part of the
thing we didn't understand
about the excess deaths is it appears to
be everywhere
and it's the everywhere part that's
weird which also makes you think it's
coven or vaccinations because those are
two things that are so widespread
but there is one other thing that's
pretty widespread
and the thing that's pretty widespread
and definitely worse
is loneliness
and
I'm seeing lots of it with my locals
local subscribers because a lot of what
a lot of what I do on locals is a
solution to loneliness I'm a basically a
virtual friend and what I do my evening
um
podcasts or live streams that's when you
see it the most
so when I do my live streams from my man
cave where it's more casual we're not
talking about the news it's more like
spending time with a friend
and I see
from you know my audience on locals not
all of them of course but many of them
um
are really lonely and it really does
make a big difference that I do this
every morning I never miss a morning
that's why I do it that's part of the
reason that I don't miss a morning
because I realize that a lot of people
use it as part of a social
um
asset I guess
and so I don't want you to lose that
so
that's your whole solution right there
because these are things that nobody
would argue with all right I don't
believe there's any scientific argument
that extra loneliness would cause extra
heart disease does anybody doubt that
does anybody doubt the basic concept
loneliness equals heart disease
are we good with that
then the only other if that's true then
the only question is is the extra
loneliness enough
to explain all of the excess deaths
and and also is the loneliness worse
than when we were locked up
because it might be might be worse
because here's what the weird thing that
happened when the lockdowns ended
when the lockdowns ended
a lot of telecommuting remained
and I got a feeling that there were a
lot of houses where you know the man and
the woman and the kids were all in the
house at the same time and maybe you
drove each other crazy but you were
lonely you're all in this house all day
now now you take okay the the wife is
off doing something or the husband you
know make it non non-sexist uh kids are
in school
and you're just sitting home
telecommuting and you're just all by
yourself
it's pretty horrible actually
you know there since the pandemic
there are days when I don't talk to
anybody all day
now that's probably unusual but I
actually have days where I don't talk to
any human being in person maybe by
communicate by you know digital means
but none
I I have no human contact some days not
even unusual maybe once a week I have no
human contact
I don't plan it it just sort of happens
it usually means that I had something
planned that fell through because you
know I I try to fill my schedule with a
little bit of human contact but
sometimes something gets canceled or
whatever and then you're like oh well
I guess I didn't talk to any people for
24 hours
please seek professional help
what
does does anybody think I'm not happy
I swear to God I haven't had a bad day
in months
like I don't even have a bad day
when I said that I didn't see people all
day did it sound like I was sad
it's usually fine
but like if it were you know three or
four days in a row I'd probably go and
save but one day without human contact
that's fine it's a good day yeah so
yesterday I had almost no human content
almost none I talked to one person at
the gym for
three minutes
that was it that was it
uh but I had a really good day
yeah yesterday was a good day
so I practiced my guitar and my drums
and I exercised I took the dog out it
was sunny weather was perfect
got a bunch of stuff done
went to Starbucks I guess I talked to
the cashier
told told her my order
that's about it
all right so that's the solution for the
excess deaths as far as I know
um we have this question about whether
students using Ai and the chat GPT thing
for school homework whether there was
some way to identify
when the student didn't do the work and
AI wrote it
so I saw I saw a real and I can't
guarantee this is all true but I think
it's true
um that there is a piece of AI that can
spot
things made by AI
so so if you use chat GPT
the teacher can use another AI that I
won't mention I forgot to write it down
that will Spot It
but the student
can use chat GPT but know that they'll
get caught so there's another AI a
separate one
that rewrites the first one
to make it undiscoverable
now at the moment I don't think there
are too many students who would know how
to navigate that world
but that's going to be 10 minutes from
now before they figure it out right
that's like in 10 minutes they're going
to figure that out
so
atomic heart
is that like Atomic habits
um recognizes an AI soulmate oh does it
all right
yeah the new version is going to be like
500 times smarter right that's coming
out anytime
Ben Garrison uses chat Bots is that true
yeah so
um
[Applause]
I really don't know what's going to
happen in our future which is I guess
the big takeaway
we have no idea what's going to happen
in the future
all right um
loneliness is a broken heart sort of
will make us 500 Dumber
Maybe
I feel like um
the bridge generation
where I was born and grew up before the
internet
but also before AI
there will be very few people who knew
what that world looked like eventually
like we'll we'll be like the the last
World War II survivors and stuff I'll be
like ah let me tell you
we used to leave the house in the
morning
and we were completely out of
communication
all day long our only requirement was to
be home for dinner
five o'clock
that's it
that's the only communication we had be
home at five o'clock if your car broke
down
you were in trouble
like my car broke down on the highway
with no traffic and no no homes around
in the middle of the winter
I almost died
I almost died because cell phones were
not invented
yeah I didn't have a jacket and it was
zero degrees and my car died in the
middle of you know outside of Syracuse
Upstate New York in February
and I ran for it I've told you this
story before but I basically ran for it
to see if I could get to uh warmth
before I froze to death
and I barely made it a car picked me up
finally there was only one car that went
by the entire time
so I'll tell stories like that too you
know the youngsters who have their Ai
and their virtual reality and their
internets and stuff and they'll have no
idea what that was like
no idea
broken
feels like the social contract broke in
2020.
the social contract
say more about that
what do you think was the social
contract we had before
and they were broken what is it now
like I feel like you're onto something
I'm just responding to a comment on the
local platform but
about fairness
I don't know you know we always think
everything's broken and we find a way to
muddle through
oh you think that work hard is this
makes you successful you think that's
broken I don't think that's broken
that's very very much intact
hard work still works that's still a
good formula
I don't know
um
yeah I always keep a I try to always
keep a jacket in the car now for that
reason
all right
um
just looking at your comments here for a
moment all right is there a story I
missed
anything I missed
always keep a coat in your truck that's
that's good advice
all right
ladies and gentlemen on YouTube I'm
going to say bye for now
and I will see you see you again soon oh
Biden in Ukraine yeah I talked about
that at the start it's just safer than
Ohio
how often is the man cave
um just when I feel like it
Epstein list there's nothing new on that
all right I think we've done it bye for
now on YouTube I'll talk to you
