was a Democrat. Nope, nope. They actually told the story straight. They told the story about an individual who did something bad, and then later in the body of the story they identified him as Republican. Perfect. Perfect.

What did the other publications do? "Republican accused of stealing money." Right? That's what the other publications did. Republican who, once I think he was also behind the Don't Say Gay thing. Now, correcting the record, is that not worth a compliment? Was that not worth a compliment? You tell me. No? Somebody says no. Well, I would like to encourage what I would like to see more of. And I like that they told me what his party was, but I like that that wasn't the lead because that made it a human interest story about a crook. And I think that's what it was. I don't believe that his Republican credentials are what caused him to do a crime. It was actually the lesser important part.

All right. Nobody likes it when I compliment CNN. Noted.

All right, let's talk about Dr. Jordan Peterson, who's talking about the downside of anonymous Twitter users. Now, here's what I learned. Whenever you introduce a new topic — let's say new-ish, yeah, because it's not brand new, but one that has not been completely struggled over for years, because on most topics everybody has a hardened opinion and it's not going to change. But when you have some kind of a new-ish kind of a thing and the question is, should we have anonymous... should anonymous accounts be on Twitter and should you be able to block them, etc. And the quality of people's comments when I tweeted about it was insanely bad. It's amazing to watch if people have not been assigned their opinions yet. So watch them try to come up with an opinion independently. It was like a sad and awful thing.

Number one, a lot of people said — I asked the question. So I tweeted and I asked the question: What did anonymous Twitter users... have they ever solved a problem? So my tweet was, have any anonymous Twitter users ever solved a problem that maybe would not have been solved otherwise? And what did people say? They said, well, it's a good thing we had anonymous people doing XYZ, which had nothing to do with Twitter. Now, do you all get that being anonymous in a completely different context has nothing to do with this, right? There's no argument that says in a completely different domain anonymity is either good or bad. You get that that has nothing to do with the Twitter conversation. It just reminds you of it. So be careful of things that just remind you of the topic, right? The fact that other people talk about anonymity in a completely different context is just something you're reminded of. That's not part of your argument. Your argument is about Twitter specifically and that's it. If you can't make the argument about Twitter specifically, it doesn't matter what somebody else did. That's telling you nothing.

And now if your example about something else brought up an important point that would also be valid in this domain of Twitter anonymity, then that's good. But I didn't see anybody do that. I just... people said, well, it's good in a completely different way, so therefore it's good on Twitter. That's not an argument. That's actually a nothing. That's like noise. There's no logical thread there at all. And to see how many people went that route was just distressing. Like, you really can't tell that arguing a completely different topic doesn't help? Like, there are a lot of people who can't tell the difference between staying on the topic and arguing a completely different one. Like, that would help. I know it's weird, but don't do that. Don't do that.

The second thing that happened is if you ask a question on Twitter, people assume that they have heard your opinion. That didn't happen. I asked a question because I don't have a fully formed opinion. I would like to see some examples of where anonymity helped Twitter. I'm not saying they don't exist. I didn't say that. I said, can you give me some examples? Because if I had some examples, I could say, oh yeah, that's a good example where anonymity helped the world. And then I would weigh that against whatever cost it is. And they'll have the costs and the benefits. But people said, you bastard, why do you hate anonymity? To which I say, where did that come from?

And then there were other people who had to explain to me why anonymity is good for the anonymous people. Did you think I was confused about that? Did anybody need to mansplain to me why anonymity is sometimes chosen by people? Isn't that literally known by 100% of all people? I believe babies are born with that knowledge. Like, why are you explaining that to me? And people thought that that helped. Let me explain why people would not like to lose their jobs over their opinion. Now I get that. I get that. That's why I put it in my tweet. I literally said I understand why people want anonymity. And what did people tweet to me? Scott, let me explain to you why people want anonymity. That's my usual experience on social media.

All right. Let me offer one useful suggestion. Maybe because I feel as though we're limiting ourselves in the prison of two ideas, to quote a Greg Gutfeld point. The prison of two ideas. I don't think anonymous or not anonymous is the right question because there might be another category. And here's what I mean. If I see somebody who's completely anonymous and their profile has no picture of anything and no bio profile information, that's what I call totally anonymous. Those anonymous people, I'd like to get rid of from my experience.

There are other anonymous people who identify as medical doctors, and but I don't know who they are in real life. Very useful. I love hearing an anonymous medical doctor give especially contrarian views. Very useful. An anonymous engineer, very useful. Love it. An anonymous lawyer, love it. Yeah, when somebody says I'm a lawyer and here's my opinion, yes please. Please give me anonymous legal opinions from people who are actually lawyers. Now of course there's some question about whether they're really lawyers, right? But usually you can tell, right? I don't see imposters doing it really. So I would like some kind of a middle ground between anonymous and not anonymous. Because if you say you're a doctor, you have given a little bit of a clue to your identity, right? And some people could piece together enough clues and maybe figure out that you are this person they suspected. So it's not risk-free to say what your job is or to say what your education level is.

But here's the main point, and I won't back down from the following statement because it's universally understood to be true. All communication depends on an assumption that the listener makes about the speaker's intentions. Correct? I need all of you to agree with this before we go on. All communication depends — for you to hear it correctly, you have to have an assumption about the speaker, right? If you assume the speaker is your enemy, you're probably going to say it's a lie. If you think the speaker is a salesperson, you're probably going to think it's at least hyperbole. If the person is your best friend that you know has what's best for you in mind, then you think it might be wrong or it might be right, but at least it's well-intentioned, right?

A hundred percent of how you process something goes through the filter of who is talking. Now what happens when the speaker is anonymous? Here's what people get wrong. You think you can evaluate an anonymous comment. You can't. You can't. It's just blah blah blah. An anonymous comment is blah blah blah because if you don't know who it's coming from, you can't assume any intention. And therefore there's nothing but noise. It's literally pollution. Okay? It's just pollution. So that's that.

And have you heard anybody make that point? That if you don't know who's speaking, you can't understand what they said? Has anybody said that? I've not heard anybody say that. And to me that's probably the most important point.

So here's what I'd like to say. I'd like to see an option that I could mass limit completely anonymous accounts, or if I wanted to limit people who are semi-anonymous, meaning they've told you something about their credentials but that's all you know. You just know their credentials. So I'd like to know if I'm talking to a student and I'd like to know if I'm talking to a professional because I would react completely differently depending who I'm talking to. Right now it would have to be optional, so you would have to be able to choose whether you gave up any credential information or not. But I would like to be able to choose whether I have access — I'm exposed to those people.

Now that still leaves one gigantic kind of benefit that anonymous people bring that's unaddressed, and we wouldn't want to lose it. And that is there are some completely anonymous people who really need to stay that way because maybe some of the things they say, if they told you their job you might know who they were, right? Because there's some anonymous things that only some people know about. So if you do the job that kind of would narrow it down too much. So there is a value. There's a real value for completely anonymous accounts. So how do you maintain that value? Because they do have something to say. How do you maintain that value?

Now nobody has a great answer for that. But some people say, Scott, you can just block the people you don't want to see. So stop imposing your will upon us. I'm not doing that, by the way. You haven't even heard my opinion. I'm not imposing it on anybody. So and the reason you haven't heard my opinion is that I'm not fully informed. I don't have quite a final opinion on this. I have maybe 75% of an opinion.

And people say to me, Scott, why don't you just block the people you don't like and leave us alone? Like the rest of us are okay with it and just block the people you don't want to see and done. You know why that doesn't work, right? Do you all know why that doesn't work? Yeah, for the larger accounts it would be endless. And the motivated trolls literally just take their other account and come back. Now if you don't have a big account you've never seen that before. But I block people and they come back in five minutes. Blocking doesn't make any difference. The motivated trolls just use their other troll account or start another one in five minutes or something. But they come right back, right? Is that... you can't hire somebody to block people based on your opinion. That's not a job.

So here's the other thing that people get wrong. When Jordan Peterson is talking about it, I think he's stopping short of giving you his preferred final solution. I won't say final solution. I think he's not giving you his preferred solution. I think he's sort of raising the topic because it's a good topic. So I would not give him trouble on that. But I will add my own global Dr. Jordan Peterson criticism because apparently that's a popular thing to do now. Does everybody notice that criticizing Jordan Peterson is like a really popular thing now? A lot of people who had maybe been more pro-Peterson, he's starting to wear thin. And I wonder why. I wonder why. And I've got some hypotheses.

Number one, there are a lot of people such as myself who could accurately be called the poor man's Jordan Peterson, meaning that I talk about a lot of overlapping topics with him but I don't have his credentials or his success or fame. So I'm completely aware of the fact that there's a jealousy component, right? It's really hard to look at him like just cleaning up. I mean he's really making a big impression on reality. It's hard to watch that if you wish you could be doing the same thing but you're like an ant compared to an elephant, right? The ant doesn't feel real good about the elephant. So as a member of the ant class I get that because I have to fight it myself. Like I feel myself getting into that petty jealousy kind of mode in my mind. But I'm also aware of it so I try to be bigger than that. But it's hard. So some of it is just... as successful... now I get the same thing, right? People who are less successful than I am are really angry at me.

So you've watched me on Twitter probably that 75% of my most vocal critics actually identified themselves as professional writers who are all less successful than I am. Coincidence? Is it a coincidence that the people who are professionally in the same field but less successful are all really mad at me? Boy, are they mad at what I said yesterday. Boy, they need to take me down a rung. And of course they always say, I used to like him. Can I make a little aside? When you're criticizing famous people — I'll put myself in that category for this conversation — when you start out your criticism with "I used to like them but," your credibility just goes right through the floor. It just goes right through the floor. Because usually the person hasn't changed that much. Usually it's something about you, you know. So anyway, that's just a personal thing.

But I would say that in my opinion Jordan Peterson has one flaw according to me, right? And it's not like I'm the arbiter of flaws and people who are smarter than I am. So I'm always a little cautious. He's definitely smarter than me. Would you all agree? Can I get a yes? Jordan Peterson is smarter than I am, right? So when you criticize people who are smarter than you and also way better informed, way better informed, you should have a little bit of humility, right? A little bit of humility when you do that.

I do have one criticism and I don't even know if he would disagree with it. You know, actually if I said it to him in person I suspect he would take it as a semi-valid comment even if he didn't agree with it. It goes like this. Especially on his relationship and marriage advice and then some other categories, I think he designs advice for people like him. Do you know what I mean? So when he talks about marriage being the best model, etc., I think he's right for people like him. And when he talks about the anonymous users on Twitter, I feel like he's talking about what the experience is like for people like him.

And now I'm a lesser version of people like him because I have a lot of followers and I can. So therefore I get that. Like what he says, I'd like to be free from the anonymous people or have the choice to turn them off. I get that because they're a gigantic pain in the ass. But I can also imagine that a small account wouldn't have any problem with them at all because the trolls don't really visit the smaller accounts as much. So they might say, well I like having the anonymous people. They don't bother me. Let's just keep it the way it is. And I don't know if Peterson is quite incorporating in his opinion how unique his position is, that the trolls are only coming after people with big accounts. So it's a whole different problem. So whatever is the right solution for people like him, it would be a stretch to say that's the right solution for people who are not like him in the important ways.

All right. So it's impossible for me to block things here. Are some examples that people said where maybe Twitter did help. Do you think that Twitter's anonymous users helped make Bitcoin succeed? Yes or no? Twitter's anonymous users, did they make Bitcoin succeed? This is an argument that I heard today. I thin