Episode 1729 Scott Adams - Stories That Involve Elon Musk, Which Means Pretty Much Everything
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Grand Jury finds nothing, Trump cleared - AOC, Elon Musk Twitter banter - Sexual assault in virtual reality - Elon Musk story list - Michael Shellenberger, Diablo Canyon - Ukraine War musing ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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.
I think so, yes. I feel the golden age is upon us. It's a little bit disguised, I'll grant you that. But it's always the darkest before the dawn. And it's always the thirstiest before the sip. That's not a saying yet, but it will be. It will be, damn it, if I have anything to say about it. And so a…
View segment →omething amazing. All right. And all you need is a copper mug or a glass or a tanker, a Chelsea Steiner canteen, a jungle flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day. It's the tingle on the back of your neck. It's th…
View segment →was as good as the container of beverage I just ingested. And if that doesn't get you going, nothing will. Well, the walls are closing in on Trump. His legal woes continue to... oh, actually no, nothing's happening. So it turns out that the latest rumor, unconfirmed but it looks like all the Manhat…
View segment →was the closest they could get to making that stick, is talking about an unrelated topic. That's the closest they could get. So if Trump were to run for re-election, he would be the most vetted person of all time. I don't think I would ever worry again that he would be caught in some illegality or…
View segment →as to basically shift the argument and become the champion of election integrity, which nobody could disagree with. Basically it's a high ground maneuver. Have I told you that the high ground maneuver wins every argument? It's the one that always wins. And as soon as you hear it you're like, "Oh, o…
View segment →ou can talk to anybody about anything and they don't necessarily have to disclose it. But it's nice when they do. All right. Have you noticed that every story is about Elon Musk? I'll give you some examples. So AOC tweeted this sort of long ambiguous tweet to which Musk responded. So AOC tweets, "T…
View segment →e virtual reality just becomes your reality? Well just to make it more weird there's a new invention that allows you to feel things while you're in virtual reality, specifically on your mouth. And so Gizmodo had an article about this that I'm failing to find in my notes. But apparently there's a li…
View segment →ught Twitter so that gives you a lot of attention. But look at all the stories, the topics that he's directly involved in. Ukraine, right? You sent the Starlink stuff over there. The Amber Heard story because they were talking about his dating her. So the Johnny Depp story is even attached to it. An…
View segment →most likely possibility. I can't say for sure about that or anything else but I treat it like it's not real. And my experiences just don't, they just don't seem like they could possibly be coincidental. It just doesn't seem like it. I don't know what to think of that. But those people who have said…
View segment →and one poorly defended area. And if you take out the bridge which seems totally doable right, Ukraine can take out a bridge. They've got missiles, drones and whatnot. And then apparently the Ukraine military is actually pretty good. They have better equipment. They according to this expert they win…
View segment →es alive and it can see around itself and then it attaches to some brain so the house could see a leak in your wall before you knew it was there. But it could also tell if you'd assembled it correctly. So you put the new component on and it becomes alive because it's electrically connected to every…
View segment →I think so, yes. I feel the golden age is upon us. It's a little bit disguised, I'll grant you that. But it's always the darkest before the dawn. And it's always the thirstiest before the sip. That's not a saying yet, but it will be. It will be, damn it, if I have anything to say about it.
And so are you prepared? Are you ready for an experience which will connect all people, almost as if we are a global mind, almost as if we form a super intelligence collectively being channeled through me? So between coffee and this shared experience, let's do something amazing. All right.
And all you need is a copper mug or a glass or a tanker, a Chelsea Steiner canteen, a jungle flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day. It's the tingle on the back of your neck. It's the thing that makes you feel alive. That's right.
Simultaneously sip. Oh, that's a good container of beverage right there. I hope the container of beverage you just ingested was as good as the container of beverage I just ingested. And if that doesn't get you going, nothing will.
Well, the walls are closing in on Trump. His legal woes continue to... oh, actually no, nothing's happening. So it turns out that the latest rumor, unconfirmed but it looks like all the Manhattan charges or the grand jury that was going to look into all the Trump financial dealings, they've been looking and looking. They've been talking to people. They've been investigating. They've demanded and they've received documents. And after months and months of grand jury stuff, the foreshadowing, not yet confirmed, is that it seems increasingly unlikely there will be any indictments coming out of this.
Have we ever seen any President Trump witch hunts before? I feel as if it was nothing but witch hunts. You know, I'm not going to say that Trump was an angel all of his life. And the reason I'm not going to say that is because he told us that directly. He literally said in public, "I'm no angel." But then he would tell you why he could help you. And as president, so if you expected him to be an angel in however you wanted to find that, you shouldn't have been surprised if he talks about grabbing people by the whatever, because he kind of signaled that as directly as you possibly could.
And I always thought that immunized him. A good way to immunize people is to tell people that you have the flaw that you're worried they're going to blame you for. Because if you say it first, it just takes all the fun out of it. You know, if Trump had said, "You know, I say horrible things in private. You should know that." And then you find out he said a horrible thing in private, you're like, "Hey, you said a horrible thing." Okay, you did tell us that. And it just takes all the energy out of it.
And so may I admit to you right now, I'd like to confess. I say horrible things in private. Horrible things. Just terrible things. If any of it were presented to you out of context, you would say to yourself, "Well, that's the worst person I think I've ever heard of in the world." But here's the context. Do you have a friend like this? Now this won't apply to all of you, but some of you do. Do you have a friend who, if you're just alone, could be somebody you've known a long time, usually it is, that the funniest thing you can do is to say the most inappropriate things? Whatever is the most absolutely uncivilized thing you could say, something you would never say in front of someone else. And the fun is how awful it is. Am I right?
So I often think if somehow my digital devices are recording every word I say and somehow it all came back to me and you played these bits, they would sound worse than anything you've ever heard in your life. Like you think you've heard people say bad things on hidden audio? You should see mine. Well, I don't know. You should hear them if such things exist. But yeah, I'll make your head explode. But I wouldn't say it in public, right? The whole reason it's funny is because you wouldn't say it in public. That's the entire energy of it. It's inappropriate.
So it's tough to see stuff out of context is what I'm saying.
So here's another big gigantic story that has been haunting us forever. This whole Manhattan possible indictments of Trump for financial chicanery or whatever. That apparently none of it happened. None of it happened. What would happen if everybody saw Trump's tax returns and they were just clean? That would be the funniest thing, wouldn't it? After all this time. Like let's just say the entire tax returns became public and everybody was like, "Oh, this is going to be good. This is going to be good." And everybody's salivating over it. And they're like, "Huh, okay, there's nothing there."
Because apparently that's what happened with these Manhattan indictments. There was nothing there. It's what happened with Russia collusion. Russia collusion? Not there. The closest they could find is trying to confuse us after the fact that Russian interference in the election was the same as or somehow adjacent to Russia collusion with somebody running for president. Very different. Very different. But that was the closest they could get to making that stick, is talking about an unrelated topic. That's the closest they could get.
So if Trump were to run for re-election, he would be the most vetted person of all time. I don't think I would ever worry again that he would be caught in some illegality or blackmailed. He might be the least blackmailable president now of all time. Am I right?
I mean, then you add to that his age, right? At some age you stop worrying about getting blackmailed. I was thinking about this the other day. You know, at my current age I was saying, what if somebody blackmailed me? Like they really had the goods, whatever that was. And they said, "Okay, you're going to be so terribly embarrassed. Your career will be destroyed if I release this information." Well, if I were 30 that would be pretty scary, wouldn't it? Because you're like, "Oh, my whole life's ahead of me." You know, going to let this stuff out.
If it happened now, I feel like I think it was funny. I'm not positive. And I suppose it would depend on what it is, I guess. But I feel like I would just laugh because it's hard. Nobody's going to take my money away from me, or at least nobody but the government, I guess. So I'm not sure what I would have to lose. It would just make me seem more interesting even in a bad way. And say, "Well, okay, I'll take that trade-off if it makes me seem more interesting."
And by the way, if you ever hear bad things about me, I encourage you to believe all of them except the illegal ones. If I did anything illegal, totally did not do that. Because I actually do try pretty hard to avoid illegal stuff. But if you hear anything that's just like wildly provocative, I would encourage you to believe it even though it's very unlikely it's true. But if it's fun, you should believe it if you enjoy it.
So now there's a story about, I guess, Hannity was exchanging a whole bunch of messages, over 80 messages, with Mark Meadows about the January 6 situation. And the big scandal is that Hannity was giving advice to the administration and the president through Mark Meadows. And I'm watching this. I'm thinking, remind me why this is a story. What is it? What is the part that's news? Is the news that Hannity and Trump were friends? Because they both talked about that publicly all the time. Everybody knew that. Did anybody think that Trump doesn't listen to people who are exactly the right person to give you exactly the right kind of advice?
Who would you want advice from if you were a Republican president in a tight spot? Who could give you the best possible advice? Well, you know, Hannity would be near the top, I would think, right? You don't have to agree with Hannity's opinions on anything for me to make this point. I'm just saying Hannity's talent stack, as I've pointed out before, is just a perfect example of a talent stack. Somebody who if you looked at any individual thing he has a talent at, you know, speaking in public, knowing about politics or whatever, you say, "Oh, that's good." And sometimes really, really good. But there's not one of those things that stands out as the best anybody's been at that thing, right?
He's got a look. He talks right. He's got the energy. He just has everything. So his magic is there are no gaps. He just has everything. So it makes him very effective. So if you were going to give somebody advice in this exact topic, which is how to handle the public opinion of something, I would go to somebody who is one of the best people on the planet in managing public opinion. Hannity is exactly whose advice I'd want to hear.
And what kind of advice did he give? One of them is that he said that Trump should announce he will lead a nationwide effort to reform voting integrity. Go to Florida and watch Joe mess up daily. Stay engaged. When he speaks, people will listen. And I thought to myself, okay, that's really good advice, isn't it? That's about as good as if you were going to get advice, that's about as good as you could get.
Now Trump didn't take this advice, right? Trump decided to be Trump. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that because he's made it work so far. And so Trump decided to be fully competitive. But if I read between the lines, I think Hannity's approach was to basically shift the argument and become the champion of election integrity, which nobody could disagree with. Basically it's a high ground maneuver.
Have I told you that the high ground maneuver wins every argument? It's the one that always wins. And as soon as you hear it you're like, "Oh, okay, damn it. The argument's over." That's the high ground. The high ground is not whether the election was rigged or not rigged. That's the low ground. The high ground is what Hannity showed him. The high ground is I'm going to lead a national effort to make sure that the next time this happens we're all comfortable with the outcome. National hero, right?
Trump could have easily transformed this from maybe the biggest stain on his presidency. Not maybe the biggest stain on his presidency. He could have easily taken Hannity's advice and turned it into, "All right, well I guess we'll never know what happened in 2020. I have my suspicions." And people would say, "Okay, that's fair. You have your suspicions and it's fair that we'll never know. Yeah, okay. Not everything was audited. Can't get into the technology part of it especially." He would have been a national hero.
And probably when the next election rolled around, unless people thought he rigged the election, I suppose they'd spin it that way, people would say, "All right, let's run this movie again and we'll see if the election reform actually changes the outcome. Let's see who gets 81 million votes this time with election reform." Now even if he lost it would still be legendary because people wanted election reform as the basic most fundamental thing to protect the republic.
So the fact that there's a story that Hannity was giving advice to Mark Meadows to give to Trump, the story should have been why wasn't Trump listening to it? That would have been the better story. Because this is damn good advice in my opinion. It's damn good advice.
Maria Bartiromo was getting some similar kind of pushback because apparently she shared some of the questions that she was going to ask the president after January 6 with Mark Meadows, I guess. And here's the first thing you should know about that. That's not unusual. It's not unusual for an interview guest to get questions in advance because it's more about the topic and it's more about preparing somebody to have a good show.
I can tell you that in many cases when I'm interviewed on politics I get the questions in advance. And you know that there's nothing unusual about that. The reason you do it is to make the show snappy. What you don't want is a show where somebody asks a question and then the guest says, "Uh, you know, I hadn't really thought about that." You don't want that. So you want to say, "I'm going to ask you some tough questions," or not, but you tell them what they're going to be and then the person has thought about it and they give a good quick response as short as possible. It's good for the audience. It's good for the show. But it's also good for the interviewee. Everybody looks good.
Now here's the question in this case. Is Maria Bartiromo an opinion person like Hannity? Where I think Hannity is perfectly transparent that he's an opinion person. He's friends with the president. They talk a lot. Perfectly transparent. But do you see Maria Bartiromo as opinion or news? Just to see what your opinion of her is. Some say news, some say opinion. Okay, that's the problem. Both. Yeah, see that's the problem. Because now this one gets a little more murky.
But apparently she didn't use exactly the questions that she broadcast. Because I don't know if you're aware of this, but even when the person asking the question has a set of questions that are on their notes, that's mostly just so they don't forget a question or don't have any questions left. But they kind of ask what they think is a good question when they actually get there. So somebody like Maria Bartiromo isn't going to ask the exact question. It's just an indication she's going to be in that area basically. And that's what happened. She asked some versions of the questions.
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily. And I wouldn't be bothered. And I'm being consistent here. Because when Chris Cuomo was accused of softball treatment of his brother the governor, if you recall, I also defended Chris Cuomo because it's transparent. As long as it's transparent. I don't know if there's a higher standard. If you know it's his brother, are you going to be surprised if a brother gave a brother advice in any context? That should have been the least surprising news and shouldn't have affected anybody really.
So I just want to be consistent. People should be able to talk to anybody they want and get news, get advice from anybody they want. Like as soon as you make, "Oh this one can't talk to this one," unless you've told us. Now anybody can talk to anybody about anything. That's my standard. And they don't necessarily have to tell you. You can talk to anybody about anything and they don't necessarily have to disclose it. But it's nice when they do.
All right. Have you noticed that every story is about Elon Musk? I'll give you some examples. So AOC tweeted this sort of long ambiguous tweet to which Musk responded. So AOC tweets, "Tired of having to collectively stress out about what explosion of hate crimes is happening because some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because Tucker Carlson or Peter Thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special."
Now when I read that I thought she was talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter. Elon Musk must have thought the same because he tweeted back hilariously, quote, "Stop hitting on me, I'm really shy." Okay. Now if you see this outside of the realm of Twitter, which a lot of people will, they'll just see this reported in a news item or something, you don't really appreciate how perfectly Twitter-like his response is, right? His response would be maybe inappropriate in almost any other domain. In any other domain it would be a little weird. But in the specific one of Twitter it's exactly right on point. He's hitting the target right in the head. It's a Twitter response.
So I've told you before and keep watching for this because it's fun to watch that Elon Musk is very clear about what matters and what doesn't. And when things don't matter he mocks them. And when things do matter like saving the planet or going to Mars or something he somehow makes that happen. So I've never seen anybody who's more clear about what's silly and what's not. That's just one of his best qualities. And so he just makes fun of it.
And then apparently AOC tweeted but quickly deleted, "I was talking about Zuckerberg but okay." And then everybody had to debate whether she deleted it because it wasn't funny enough or didn't want to engage or was it because it really wasn't about Zuckerberg or who knows. But apparently there's a Zuckerberg version of meeting with at least Peter Thiel and there's a speculated Musk version in which he probably met with Peter Thiel or did or something as part of deciding about Twitter.
And so I just love this little exchange. But so Elon Musk is in every part of the news. We'll keep going on this. But first, so this really happened. A reporter for The Guardian decided to do a story about virtual reality. And so went into one of the virtual reality worlds. And I'm not sure which one it was. I don't know if it was Meta or just a virtual reality world. It doesn't matter to the story. What matters to the story is that she was immediately assaulted with racism and actually was groped in the VR environment, basically sexually assaulted in virtual reality.
Now of course she was quick to point out that she never lost touch with the fact that it wasn't the real world. But the problem with, or the feature of virtual reality, is it makes you feel the same way as the real world. Knowing it's not the real world doesn't help you nearly as much as it should.
I've told you some of the story about my VR experience. I put on the glasses and I walked up to a cliff edge so that in the virtual world if I stepped off it looks like I would fall to my death. In reality I knew I was just in a room in my house and had no danger whatsoever. I couldn't make my legs move. I couldn't walk over the cliff in the virtual reality. Couldn't make my legs move. My brain would say, "Move your legs. You're perfectly safe." I would even take the glasses off to make sure I was still in the real room, put them back on and say, "All right now." Couldn't do it.
And so when she says she was actually assaulted and like I guess they cornered her and they were doing stuff with her hands and stuff that she felt actually assaulted. And I think that's real. That's completely real. And so what are you going to do about that? Do you end up having all the same laws in the virtual reality because the virtual reality just becomes your reality?
Well just to make it more weird there's a new invention that allows you to feel things while you're in virtual reality, specifically on your mouth. And so Gizmodo had an article about this that I'm failing to find in my notes. But apparently there's a little haptic response thing. And I saw a picture of it. You've got the VR goggles on and then there's some kind of sensors or I don't know if they blow air or what they do hanging from the bottom of the goggles. And so they're directed at your lips and your mouth. And the claim is that these little devices that are not touching your mouth but I think they might direct air or something at your mouth, they'll make you feel as if you're actually kissing somebody if you're kissing somebody in the VR world.
Now it did go on to say that you might be able to feel it even internal to your mouth such as if you had your mouth open. I'd imagine you'd feel something on your tongue or the inside of your mouth because that's where the haptic sensors would be sensing. You kind of know where this is going don't you? Yeah. You're only one step away. All you need to do is put those haptic sensors in your belt, you know, one on your goggles and one on your belt both shooting down if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean. If you could feel it just like it's in the real world, we're in big trouble. Big, big trouble. Big trouble.
So much so that I tweeted, and people didn't understand that sometimes when you think you know somebody who's socially awkward and they don't have much of a social life and they never seem to go out and that's your opinion of them. So this is somebody with a bad social life. They don't like to go out. But I would suggest to you there's one other possibility. That that is somebody who's really, really good at masturbating. Like so good they can do it for hours and it never gets old to them. Going out might be the least fun thing they could possibly do.
Imagine if you were bad at masturbating and somebody said, "Hey, there's a party or you can do this thing that's tons of fun. It's gonna last you two minutes. Two minutes of great fun or you could go to this party." Well the party sounds pretty good doesn't it relative to two minutes of a good time? You'd have fun all night. But suppose somebody was really good at it. They could keep themselves at a place for hours at a time. Does the party look as good to them? What happens when virtual reality makes staying home alone just way better than going to a party? And I think probably you're already at the point where for some people going out is the least fun thing they could possibly do. And where is that going to take us? Because we're already there. I mean we're knocking on that door.
I blocked Kathy Griffin today for being a racist because she called Elon Musk a white supremacist. And I thought, okay, you know, I'm certainly willing to put up with anything that she thinks is a joke. Like I supported her with the severed head of Trump under the rules of parody and free speech and blah blah blah. So I didn't think that she should lose anything because of that. I was very strongly supportive of that as a free speech thing and as a humorous take. They don't always work but you don't want them to not take chances.
But calling Elon Musk a white supremacist, I feel like that's just because the people on the right like him. I feel like that's a little too close to home because I like him too. And I have no indication of anything like that. That just feels so bigoted essentially against white guys basically that I can't pretend that somebody else is the bigot in this story. It just feels like she's the bigot in the story. Am I right? It just feels like it's just an anti-white male thing.
All right. Here are the other stories that Elon Musk is associated with. Just listen to the whole list and ask yourself how is this even possible. Okay, I get that he's the richest person and bought Twitter so that gives you a lot of attention. But look at all the stories, the topics that he's directly involved in. Ukraine, right? You sent the Starlink stuff over there. The Amber Heard story because they were talking about his dating her. So the Johnny Depp story is even attached to it. Anything about elections, fake news, Twitter because they're all sort of collectively one story now. Anything about income inequality and that. Anything about taxes of the rich and progressive taxes isn't that story. Anything about free speech because of Twitter. Now he's weighing in on mental health. We'll talk about that. Tweeting about it. So he's in a story about Adderall. He's in any story about space, climate change, how the country is getting more divided also because of the Twitter thing, self-driving cars.
I mean and he believes that the simulation is real. It's my theory that people who believe the simulation is real can author it. And the more sure you are that the simulation is actually just software the more clearly you can see the machinery and the more clearly you can tweak it. It sure looks to me like he knows he lives in the simulation and he's just playing it like a game. It looks like he's playing it like somebody who's just a good gamer. You know if you found out tomorrow that this is all a game and that we're just characters in it who temporarily don't know what we are and we think we're real and you woke up and found out that Elon Musk was only the best gamer in another dimension and he was just an avatar but he was an avatar of the best gamer for the game so he became the richest person and he became in every story. He had seven kids and God knows what kind of fun he has when he's alone. Does it look exactly like just a really good gamer playing the game really well? It's weird how much it looks like that.
You know I've looked at my own life because I believe I live in a simulation as well. I like literally, like actually literally no joke, it's the most likely possibility. I can't say for sure about that or anything else but I treat it like it's not real. And my experiences just don't, they just don't seem like they could possibly be coincidental. It just doesn't seem like it. I don't know what to think of that. But those people who have said to me, this is just anecdotal of course, that as soon as they feel they're in the simulation and they start using things like affirmations to author the simulation they report that they get good results. But of course that's anecdotal.
So Elon Musk weighed in on this thread. So somebody named Michael Kersey tweeted this. This is just the second part of his tweet. He said pharmacological dark matter. And he's talking about a phenomenon among important people. So he's just giving it a name: pharmacological dark matter. So basically the stuff we don't know is invisible. Heavy amphetamine and other drug use among people playing significant roles in our society.
Now you've heard me say that, right? The people who are doing the most moving and shaping of civilization mostly on drugs. It wouldn't happen otherwise. And I don't take drugs like, and I mean it, don't take drugs. I mean the only time you should is if you're under a doctor's care and even that is probably too much. So I'm not encouraging it. I'm just saying it's a fact. And ignoring it feels stupid. It just feels stupid to ignore it. The fact is there's some people, and here's the dangerous part, everybody responds to chemistry differently. So there might be a drug that simply makes one person rich because it just makes them perform better and they never have a side effect or one they care about. And then another person it just kills them. It just freaking kills them or makes them crazy or ruins their life one way or the other.
So don't take drugs because you don't know which one you are. You don't know if you're the one the drug is going to kill or the drug is going to help you. We're just not that smart because we're all different. So anyway, so Michael Kersey weighs in on this about the significant role. And then Mark Andreessen, one of the most important voices in the tech world, tweeted this. He said, "Everyone thinks our present society was caused by social media. I'm wondering whether Adderall plus ubiquitous Google searches have bigger effects."
Now I don't know about the Google search part but here's one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley and then the tech world who would personally know the most important people in society. So you know this is somebody who's been in the room and has the phone number to text pretty much anybody famous I think at this point. And he's telling you that he thinks Adderall may be shaping civilization or things like it. I'm not saying Adderall specifically but you should take that as things like it. You know, amphetamines.
And then Alex Cohen tweeted this. He said prescribed psychedelics will replace amphetamines and SSRIs over the next decade although I hope it's sooner than that he said. And then Musk gets into this tweet and he tweets, "I've talked to many people who were helped by psychedelics and ketamine. More people were helped by psychedelics and ketamine than SSRIs and amphetamines." And then he added related to this, and this is not me talking so I'm just reporting what he said, all right, so these are not my words. He said, "Adderall is an anger amplifier. Avoid at all costs."
Now here's the interesting thing. As Jeff Pilkington pointed out in some tweets, everybody's different. That's what I said earlier, right? I'm pretty sure that Adderall has saved lives but I'm pretty sure it's caused some problems. I think both of those can be true. So it's a little bit, let's say it's a really good example of free speech both its negatives and its positives. You don't want to be getting medical advice from Elon Musk. That might be his weakest category. I mean he is insanely smart on a whole variety of things that allow him to do what he does but I think the medical part might be the part where you go, "Yeah, you get a second opinion there." Yeah. Usually when Musk says something I'm usually done. It's like, "Okay, I agree with that. There's nothing else to say." But I think in the medical domain let's be glad that there is free speech because he can say this. If you looked at the comments there would be a whole bunch of people pushing back and I say okay that's a really good example of free speech working.
Somebody's asking if I'm on Adderall. I'm not. So I've never been on any kind of long-term stimulant except coffee or sativa I guess. But I will, I've said this before, but in college I had a few experiences with stimulants and I wrote my entire senior thesis in like I think it was like mostly over a weekend and then I was done with the semester and it was actually easy and I enjoyed it. Think about that. I did a semester of work in four days, got a reasonably good grade on it I think a B-plus or something. And I did it in four days and I liked it. It was completely pleasant. It was a horrible job like just the most boring. It was like in economics. So it was a senior thesis in economics. You know how boring that was? And I enjoyed the whole thing.
Now how many unicorn companies have been created by people who had a little stimulant going on? How many? Probably a lot, right? Probably a lot. And it is one of the great untold stories anyway.
Michael Shellenberger who is running for governor as an independent in California, I understand there was some issue in terms of the paperwork. I got to look into that a little bit. But how would you like to be running for governor and part of your accomplishments just happened, which is Shellenberger was I think the loudest most effective voice for trying to save the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. And the reasoning was it's already there. It's cost effective and we don't have any green way to replace it and we'll just run out of energy if we don't keep it open. A pretty straightforward argument.
And apparently the great weight of public opinion moved Shellenberger's way. Is that a coincidence or did he cause it? Because remember he was testifying to Congress. He was writing books and articles on it. He was the most famous voice on this topic. I think he caused it. I think he caused it. So he's running for governor while the current governor is saying that he's going to look to get some money from the federal funds that was allocated by Biden. And I'll give Biden credit for this for keeping nuclear power plants open longer than they would have been. So the governor is looking at implementing the plan that the governor didn't want to do but Shellenberger convinced the entire country that they need to do it. And now he kind of has to do it.
I would hate to be running against Shellenberger in this situation honestly. I know I've never seen a more capable politician in terms of competence about the actual topics that matter to the state. It's sort of breathtaking because we've never seen it before. I'm pretty sure we've never seen this before. We've had some presidents who were a little wonky you know like Jimmy Carter and stuff but not like this. Like Carter didn't have this kind of mastery over the exact topic that the state cared about. And several of them from homelessness to drug addiction to he's talked about forest management. Basically everything we care about he has the better solution for.
All right. Here's the most provocative thing that I've read lately. We all assume at this point that Russia will have its way with Ukraine. In the comments where are you feeling as of today? Like what do you feel today? Is Russia going to have its way? All right. So I'm seeing mostly yeses. Some people saying they'll just take the east of Ukraine.
All right. Now I will remind you that in war nothing is predictable. So among the unpredictable things that could happen I tweeted this and I feel terrible because I want to mention the author and the publication because I liked it so much but I can't find it in my own tweets for some reason. Maybe I imagined I tweeted it. Yeah maybe I imagined it. But if somebody sees it maybe you can tell me in the comments if I did tweet it and you see it.
It was an article by somebody who definitely looked like they knew what they're doing. There's somebody who had predicted in writing and could show the receipts that the Moskva, that ship, would be sunk by the Ukrainian anti-ship missiles. So that's a pretty good prediction. Somebody had that specific prediction that happened. And then when I read the article seemed to know quite a bit about the whole situation. So I don't know how to judge military experts because we've seen so many of them being so wrong about so many things. But I'll give you his argument and I'd love to see how wrong it is.
It goes like this. We're all focusing on the fact that the fighting is in Donbas and the other name starts with L that I can't remember. And we're taking for granted that Russia already owns Crimea because they got annexed in 2014 something like that. So yeah, so Luhansk is the other region. So we're ignoring Crimea right because that's a done deal. Russia already owns it.
Here's the part I didn't know about. They barely own it. They do own it. Their military is there. It's theirs. But apparently if you're looking at it from a military perspective their connection to Crimea is one bridge and one poorly defended area. And if you take out the bridge which seems totally doable right, Ukraine can take out a bridge. They've got missiles, drones and whatnot. And then apparently the Ukraine military is actually pretty good. They have better equipment. They according to this expert they win their firefights. So when it's something like a fair fight the Ukrainians almost always win because they're better trained and better equipped. It's only when they're overpowered by artillery or something that they get crushed.
So the thinking is that the Ukrainian military could take out not only the thin connection between the main Russian forces and Crimea. They could take out the bridge and then they can just take Crimea because it would probably be poorly defended because the strongest defenders are where the fighting is and the fighting is not happening in Crimea. And I'm thinking that would be a shocker. What if Ukraine just tried to hold the line and just keep the main Russian army pinned down and just take Crimea back? What would that do to the Russian psychology? It would look like Russia lost the war. I mean the war wouldn't be over. Russia could maybe just take it back. It wouldn't be easy. But what would that do to the whole balance of everything? I mean that would be a great at least a diversion. I mean at the very least it would be an interesting diversion.
And the idea is that Russia would have trouble equipping and resupplying Crimea because they could get cut off. But that Ukraine would because they have a border there and stuff they'd break out. The tactical nuke if that happens. Somebody says would they? Because it seems to me that a tactical nuke would guarantee that Putin is taken out of office. What do you think? I would say that right now it looks like he might be at great risk. Maybe 50-50 proposition. But if he used a tactical nuke I think that's the end. Am I wrong? There's no way he could survive it politically if not his life, right?
Because don't you think that there's somebody who's like number two or three in the potential takeover chain that the CIA has already said, "You know, I know you're only number fourth or fifth in the potential chain of command but if the other people disappeared and we made sure that you were well treated do you think you'd like to step up to the number one job?" I know. I think that if a tactical nuke got used it would be easy to turn people within Russia really close to Putin against him because they would say, "Okay this is a clean win if I take Putin out under these conditions. I'll even have internal support." Because I think you could overthrow Putin and still have public support in Russia if he used a nuke.
Or the other possibility is that Russia is now so pro-Putin that they'd say, "Oh that's strong. You know we like it that you were strong." Maybe. I don't know how to read the Russian mind but it would certainly turn enough people against Putin that he'd be in physical danger much more than he is now.
Now here let me throw something into the mix that feels different. So you know the Biden administration is asking for, correct me if I'm wrong, 33 billion more for Ukraine which is a gigantic step up in military support. Do you know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like the administration is planning to win. As in win the war. It doesn't look like they're playing for a stalemate. It doesn't even look like they're playing to just push them out of the east or something. I feel as if the Biden administration feels like they could win. Because every day that the Russians don't have some crushing victory on the east is a day that you say to yourself, "Huh, maybe that Ukrainian defense is better than we thought." And the Ukrainian defense isn't going to quit now because the good equipment is just coming in and apparently they don't have any manpower shortage. They had more volunteers to fight than they had equipment to give them.
So if Ukraine doesn't run out of people to fight and they're getting more equipment not less, does the 33 billion signal that the Biden administration thinks they can win outright? Because I feel like it does. Now I don't think that means that they think it's a sure thing or anything like that but I feel like they went from, "Let's see how we can make this painful for Putin" to "Let's finish off the Russian army." I think they want to finish the Russian army or at least take it down by 50 percent because Putin's down 25, right? I never understood that if that's his entire military 25 degraded or that was just what's in that area. I've not heard that clarified.
So about 20 billion to replace the weapons we gave them from the army. Okay I see. So we'd be replacing our own weapons with a 33 billion. Okay that does look a little different. Those numbers are wrong. Which numbers are wrong? They're 33 billion. If all it is is replacing our own equipment then it doesn't look like a step up does it? So give me a fact check on that. That replacing our own military equipment would not look like a step up. So he says not true. Are we giving it directly to Ukraine? All right. Well I guess we'll look into this. But the point is if it's a major escalation if that's what that budget is telling us then I think the Biden administration actually feels they could win. Define win: put Putin out of power and or get the Russian military to completely get out of Ukraine completely.
Now of course nobody wins because everybody lost in this situation but that would look like a win to me.
All right. I was asked to tell you about how we're entering the golden age. Well someone's asked me why I didn't have kids and do I regret it. Let me ask you that one first. I don't regret it. But the reason was I just didn't want to bring somebody into the world because there are plenty of people in the world and I never felt a need to propagate my DNA. Now does that make me weird? Because I feel like there's some kind of basic human impulse that people have to propagate their DNA but I don't have that. Because I didn't enjoy my childhood enough that I would take any chance that I could put anybody through that again.
But if there's somebody who's already having a tough childhood and I could help them have a better one that feels like that's an easy win. Like to me that would be satisfying. But to bring somebody into the world and then have them have a bad life I couldn't handle that. Like I'm just not built that I could ever handle that. So I take the sure thing of definitely helping humanity extend the light of consciousness I guess.
So he says what a load. There's somebody who thinks that I'm either lying. Do you think I'm lying to you or lying to myself? It could be the one right. I guess there's no way for you to know is there? But the thing I thought about the most is that I'd rather support the people who are already here. That's how I thought of it. It could be that that's a rationalization of some sort. That would be pretty normal. But your child wouldn't have a tough life. Yeah no I don't think we're not talking about tough life in terms of economics. If it were just economics I wouldn't have worried. But in terms of mental health and that sort of thing I'm not so worried about climate change ruining the world. I just look around. I don't see a lot of happy people.
Now here's the golden age part. I'm pretty sure that we're about to wake up or we are waking up now to this whole what drugs to put in your body and whatnot. And maybe the pandemic helped with that because it sort of changed how we see the medical community. Changed our opinion about maybe having to make our own decisions and not depend on the experts so much. Which could be good or bad I guess. That could go both ways. But yeah I think a big, I would go with Elon Musk's thing that the ketamine maybe. And of course don't take any recommendations from me. I'm just saying that these are things that are being talked about. I'm not recommending them at all.
And the psychedelics I do think have the potential to be civilization changing absolutely. And because they don't cost much it's, yeah. Let me ask you this. Imagine everything that we do now to make the world a safer place right. We've got the United Nations and we've got the hotline to the Kremlin. So we've got all these systems and things to make things safer and avoid war. But we still have the damn wars right? So I guess those systems are better than not having them but they're not really getting it done.
But imagine this. This is purely speculative and it's just a mental experiment. Imagine that if instead of all that stuff whenever there was a dispute or even before there was one the heads of state would get together and do mushrooms together. That's it. And then replace everything else with just that. Now of course that will never happen. Of course it will never happen. I'm not suggesting that's even remotely possible. I'm just saying if it did it would probably end war. Do you think? I mean honestly if you just imagine, it doesn't work if your leader is 100 years old so forget about Trump he won't take a drug and forget about Biden he's too old. But imagine DeSantis who I imagine is anti-drug so again this wouldn't happen but it's at least he's young enough.
So imagine a President DeSantis someday doing mushrooms with a President Putin who's 70 or so and not that old. And they just bond and see the world differently. And the next thing you know just war is a lot harder. Like it doesn't make sense suddenly. Because it would be so much easier to say, "You know wait a minute are you saying that if Russia and the United States simply had to just make friends that the same way that Germany benefited by being friends with and Japan benefited and basically everybody every country that said hey can we be your friend has benefited substantially."
Can you imagine sitting in a room and having the right kind of chemical incentive and you just look at Putin and say, "Why are we even doing this? Do you want to be the greatest leader that Russia ever had?" And Putin would be, "Well I thought I already was." They say, "Okay okay but you want to continue being the greatest leader that there ever was?" And Putin would say, "How do you do that?" He said, "End war and war would go to space with us. How about that? How about end war and help us go to space and we'll get some good asteroids. We'll mine some stuff. We'll free your economy to do what it can do. We'll share our technology with you. It'll be awesome. You'll be the best leader that Russia ever had. You'll quadruple your GDP. There'll be statues of you everywhere and you will have ended war."
It, I'm telling you, the golden age. You just have to accept it. It's right there. It's right there. The hard part is getting people to just pick it up. It's like here it is. Here's all of your solutions. All of your solutions. We have all the answers now. Here they are. And people are like, "I don't know. I don't trust those solutions."
So here's where the golden age I think is going to happen. I think that the energy shock will cause us to be pro-nuclear in a way that we had to be. So our energy thing is now on a course for full correction. It's going to be slow but it's now on a very definite course towards full correction. It's going to be nuclear. Energy will go nuclear and through Tesla-like activities it will be also electric. I'm seeing solar. So it's going to be solar and pretty much just solar and nuclear. So I would say those two things solve climate change or at least they're likely to be enough to mitigate the worst problems as long as we're also mitigating things as we go. It's not the only stuff. So that's better.
What about the pandemic? Horrible, horrible thing right? But don't you think we got a lot better at handling the next pandemic? Like a lot better. And I feel like even though you think these new vaccinations are killing people, some of you think that, I feel like what we learned from that could create a platform for everything from vaccinations for cancer to vaccinations for all kinds of stuff. Or we'll find out there was some problem with it. Can't rule that out. I'm giving you the optimist view that look at the Ukraine Russia war. Does it forever end the idea that it's a good idea to attack your neighbor with tanks? Fairly not. Well I mean up till now I guess Putin still thought it was a good idea to attack his neighbor with tanks. And at this point don't you think this will always be the cautionary tale? It's like okay all right it doesn't work.
I think Afghanistan is as bad a situation as it was at least it will always remind us of what kinds of things not to do again. But Ukraine didn't look like Afghanistan. They looked like such different places that maybe the lesson didn't transfer. But now you've got an industrial country. You've got a backwards country. And neither of them could be conquered by the Soviet Union or Russia. That should mean something. If you couldn't conquer either kind of country and they're so different maybe the whole country conquering thing isn't for you.
All right. What else is good? So we're going to solve energy. I think we're safer from pandemics. And I think war looks less likely. I think the biggest problem is inflation.
All right let me give you the ultimate economic safety thought. Are you ready? Yeah most of you have some concern I would think about inflation and GDP going down and maybe food shortages and everything else. Most of you starting to have a little anxiety about that right? And gas prices. Not a little, maybe a lot. So some of you having a lot of anxiety. I'm having anxiety about it and I'm rich you know relatively speaking. I can't even imagine how this would feel if I was just squeaking by. This would feel like insanely bad.
But let me give you the one positive thing that I can give you. I've told you before that economics is really complicated stuff. I have a degree in economics and I'm confused half the time. But there was one rule that I always look to that tells me where things are headed. There's just one metric. If you get that one metric right all the other things can work themselves out. But if you get the one thing wrong nothing can work itself out. Do you know what the one thing is? Employment. Employment rate. Not even raises. Not even cost of living adjustments. Not unions. Just the pure number of people who have jobs compared to the numbers who want them.
And the fact that we have labor shortages now so we could actually use more workers. Even immigrants are in demand apparently. With all the immigration we have it's still hard to get the harvest picked I think. So we're actually understaffed. I don't know of any situation where you had close to full employment where you couldn't work out the other stuff. You know what I mean?
And here here's the math of why that is so important. The difference between an unemployed person and an employed person is a gigantic drag on the rest of the people right? If somebody is employed and they're taking care of themselves and maybe adding something to the taxes then that's taken care of. But if they're unemployed not only are they not adding but they're subtracting. You have to pay them to live or they die. So one unemployed person is really really expensive compared to almost any other problem.
So if you get that one thing right the other stuff can be really painful for a while but the odds of it working out in the long run are real good right? So when you're seeing people who seem to be the most knowledgeable and experienced about economics and they see all the things you see, you know they're seeing the inflation, they're seeing they might get worse, they're saying everything, supply chain problems, China problems, blah blah. They see all that but they don't look like they're panicking do they? Have you noticed that there's no tone of panic even though all the metrics are sort of awful? Because that one thing is right. The jobs. And I think the people who know the most are sort of just looking at that one and saying, you know, probably much like I do, say okay as long as that one thing's okay at least our foundation is in good shape right? The foundation is strong then you can work out the rest.
Mushrooms is tulips? Yeah I see what you're saying. Labor participation yes that's a big one as well. Total employment is still below pre-pandemic but it's still good. How do we fix BlackRock buying all the single family homes? The solution for housing is better housing. Not building the same kind of homes and reselling them over and over again. There is definitely a way to build a home for 10 percent of what it costs to build a home. So I think that's going to be another part of the golden age.
I think that if you got rid of fees, you got rid of zoning and you turned it into a kit. Just I've talked about this before but imagine designing homes in which all the parts are an even amount. In other words a room in this house of the future could be 10 by 12 but it could never be 10 by 12 feet and two inches. And the reason is so you'd never have to cut anything. So if you're putting in the floor you buy one foot squares and you put in as many as you need for the squares and nothing gets cut. And maybe it's a kit form so everything snaps together so you could unsnap it and move a wall if you needed to etc.
Now I think that's where it has to go. It's just that nobody has a business model to make money from making that. The old Sears kits. So I know there's some historical examples but those kits I believe you still have to cut didn't you or not? I think those were if you imagine what we could do now compared to what they could do in those days I imagine that we could make a kit that would be way better. Just way better.
And then if you make the homes with you say here's how I do it. I design perfect rooms and then you could design a house that used as many of those preset rooms in whatever configuration they fit and then you can build almost any kind of a house but you never have to cut anything. You just get a kit and snap it together. So I think that's where it needs to go. The tough part would be I mean I think you could even do the plumbing. In fact I'll bet you can make a house that's self-aware. Imagine a house that comes as a kit and then each part has a camera in it so every part you put becomes alive and it can see around itself and then it attaches to some brain so the house could see a leak in your wall before you knew it was there. But it could also tell if you'd assembled it correctly.
So you put the new component on and it becomes alive because it's electrically connected to everything else and it can see around and suddenly the house knows if you put the thing in the right place. So you put the new piece on and the house goes beep beep beep it doesn't belong there. You're like, "Oh darn it's backwards." Put it on it goes beep it knows you did it right. So if you made all the components alive the house would help you assemble itself and it would always watch. You'd be watching for any defects and it would warn you every time.
All right. Just an idea.
That ladies and gentlemen is the best show ever I think. I delighted and entertained you. Probably some of you are about to start one of the best days ever. And I think that you would agree that today is the beginning of the rest of your life. No it's true. I read it in a greeting card once so I know it's true.
And that is all I have to say to you on YouTube. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
i think so yes i feel the golden ages is upon us it's a little bit disguised i'll i'll grant you that but it's always the darkest before the that's right the dawn and it's always the thirstiest before the sip that's not a saying yet but it will be it will be damn it if if i have anything to say about it and so are you prepared are you ready for an experience which will connect all people almost as if we are a global mind almost as if we form a super intelligence collectively being channeled through me so between coffee and this is shared experience let's do something amazing all right and all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea steiner canteen jungle flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the dopamine hit of the day it's the tingle on the back your neck it's the thing that makes you feel alive that's right simultaneously go oh that's a good container of beverage right there i hope the container of beverage you just ingested was as good as the container of beverage i just ingested and if that doesn't get you going nothing will well the walls are closing in on trump his legal woes continue to oh actually no nothing's happening so it turns out that the latest uh rumor so unconfirmed but it looks like all the uh the manhattan charges or the grand jury that was going to look into all the trump financial dealings they've been looking and looking they've been talking to people they've been investigating they've demanded and they've received documents and after months and months of grand jury stuff the foreshadowing not yet confirmed is that it seems increasingly unlikely there will be any indictments coming out of this have we ever seen any president trump uh witch-hunts before i feel as if it was nothing but witch hunts you know i'm not going to say that trump was an angel all of his life and the reason i'm not going to say is because he told us that directly he literally said in public i'm you know i'm no angel but then he would tell you why you know he could help you and as president so if you expected him to be an angel in however you wanted to find that uh you should you shouldn't have been surprised if you if he talks about grabbing people by the whatever because he kind of signaled that as directly as you possibly could and i always thought that immunized them a good way to immunize people is to tell people that you have the flaw that you're worried they're going to blame you of because if you say it first it just takes all the fun out of it you know if trump had said you know i say horrible things in private you should know that and then you find out you said a horrible thing in private you're like hey you said a horrible thing okay you did tell us that and it just takes all the energy out of it and so may i uh admit to you right now i'd like to confess i i say horrible things in private horrible things just terrible things if any of it were presented to you out of context you would say to yourself well that's the worst person i think i've ever heard of in the world but here's the context do you have a friend like this now this won't apply to all of you but some of you do do you have a friend who if you're just alone could be somebody you've known a long time usually it is that the funniest thing you can do is to say the most inappropriate things whatever is the most absolutely uncivilized thing you could say something you would never say in front of someone else and the fun is how awful it is am i right so i i often think if somehow you know my digital devices are recording every word i say and you know somehow it all came back to me and you played these these bits they would sound worse than anything you've ever heard in your life like you you think you've heard people say bad things on hidden audio you should see mine well i don't know you should hear them if such things exist but yeah i i'll uh i'll make your head explode but i wouldn't say it in public right the the whole reason it's funny is because you wouldn't say it in public that's the entire energy of it is it's inappropriate so it's tough to see stuff out of context is what i'm saying so here's another big gigantic story that has been haunting us forever this whole uh manhattan possible indictments of trump for financial cannery or whatever that apparently none of it happened none of it happened what would happen if everybody saw trump's tax returns and they were just clean that would be the funniest thing wouldn't it after all this time like let's just say the entire tax returns became public and everybody was like oh this is going to be good this is going to be good and everybody's like salivating over it and they're like huh okay there's nothing there because apparently that's what happened with these manhattan indictments there was nothing there it's what happened with russia collusion russia collusion not there the closest they could find is trying to confuse us after the fact that russian interference in the election was the same as or somehow adjacent to russia collusion with somebody running for president very different very different but but that was the closest they could get to making that stick is talking about an unrelated topic that's the closest they could get so if trump were to run for re-election he would be the most vetted person of all time i i don't think i would ever worry again that he would be caught in some illegality or blackmailed he might be the least blackmailable president now of all time am i right i mean then you then you add to that his age right at some age you stop worrying about getting blackmailed i was thinking about this the other day you know at my current age i was saying what if somebody blackmailed me like they really had the goods whatever that was and they said okay you're going to be so terribly embarrassed your career will be destroyed if i release this information well if i were 30 that would be pretty scary wouldn't it because you're like oh my whole life's ahead of me you know going to let this stuff out if it happened now i feel like i think it was funny i'm not positive and i suppose i would depend on what it is i guess but i feel like i would just laugh because it's hard nobody's going to take my money away from me or at least and nobody but the government i guess so i'm not sure what i would have to lose it would just make me seem more interesting even in a bad way and say well okay i'll take that trade off if it makes me seem more interesting and by the way if you ever hear bad things about me i encourage you to believe all of them except the illegal ones if you're any if here i did anything illegal totally did not do that because i actually i do try pretty hard to avoid illegal stuff um but if you hear anything that's just like wildly provocative i would encourage you to believe it even though there's a very unlike it's very unlikely it's true but if it's fun you should believe it if you enjoy it uh so now there's a story about uh guess hannity was exchanging a whole bunch of messages over 80 messages with mark meadows about the january 6 situation and the big scandal is that hannity was giving advice to the administration and the president through mark meadows and i'm watching this i'm thinking remind me why this is a story what is it what is the part that's news is the news that hannity and trump were friends because they both talked about that publicly all the time everybody knew that was did anybody think that trump doesn't listen to people who are exactly the right person to give you exactly the right kind of advice who would you want advice from if you were a republican president in a tight spot who could give you the best possible advice well you know hannity would be near the top i would think right you don't have to agree with hannity's opinions on anything to for me to make this point i'm just saying the handy's talent stack as i've pointed out before henry is just a perfect example of a talent snack somebody who if you looked at any individual thing he has a talent at you know speaking in public knowing about politics or whatever you say oh that's that's good and sometimes really really good but there's not one of those things that stands out as the best anybody's been at that thing right he's got a look he talks right he's got the energy he just has everything so his magic is there are no gaps he just has everything so it makes him you know very effective so if you were going to give somebody's advice in this exact topic which is how to handle the public opinion of something i would go to somebody who is one of the best people on the planet in managing public opinions hannity is exactly whose advice i'd want to hear and how what kind of advice did he give um one of them is that he said that trump should uh announce he will lead he said after the six this is what hannity said that trump should announce he will lead a nationwide effort to reform voting integrity go to florida and watch joe mess up daily stay engaged when he speaks people will listen and i thought to myself okay that's really good advice isn't it that's about as good as if you were going to get advice that's about as good as you could get now trump didn't take this advice right trump trump decided to be trump and and maybe there's nothing wrong with that because he's made it work so far and so trump decided to be you know fully competitive but i i if i read between the lines i think hannity's approach was to basically shift the argument and become the champion of election integrity which nobody could disagree with basically it's a high ground maneuver have i told you that the high ground maneuver wins every argument it's the one that always wins and as soon as you hear it you're like oh okay damn it the argument's over that's the high ground the high ground is not whether the election was rigged or not rigged that's the low ground the high ground is what hannity showed him the high ground is i'm going to lead a national effort to make sure that the next time this happens we're all comfortable with the outcome national hero right trump could have easily transformed this from maybe the biggest stain on his presidency not maybe the biggest stain on his presidency he could have easily done taken hannity's advice and turned it into all right well i guess we'll never know what happened in 2020 i have my suspicions and people would say okay that's fair you have your suspicions and it's fair that we'll never know yeah okay not everything was audited can't get into the you know the technology part of it especially he would have been a national hero and probably when the next election rolled around unless people thought he rigged the election i suppose they'd spin it that way um people would say all right let's let's run this movie again and we'll see if the election reform actually changes the outcome let's see who gets 81 million votes this time with election reform now even if he lost it would still be legendary because people wanted election reform as like you know the basic most fundamental thing to protect the republic so the fact that there's a story that uh hannity was giving advice to mark meadows to give to trump the story should have been why wasn't trump listening to it that would have been the better story because this is damn good advice in my opinion it's damn good advice um maria barbaroma was getting some similar kind of pushback because apparently she shared some of the questions that she was going to ask the president after january 6 with mark meadows i guess and here's the first thing you should know about that that's not unusual it's not unusual for an interview guest to get questions in advance because it's more about the topic and it's more about preparing somebody to have a good show i can tell you that in many cases when i'm interviewed on politics i get the questions in advance and you know that there's nothing unusual about that the reason you do it is to make the show uh snappy what you don't want is a show where somebody asks a question and then the guest says uh you know i hadn't really thought about that you don't want that so you want to say i'm going to ask you some tough questions or or not but you tell them what they're going to be and then the person has thought about it and they give a good quick response as short as possible it's good for the audience it's good for the show but it's also good for the interviewee everybody looks good now here's the question in this case is maria brought to roma an opinion person like hannity where i think hannity is perfectly transparent that he's an opinion person he's friends with the president they talk a lot perfectly transparent but is do you see maria brought roma as opinion or news just to see what your opinion of her is some say news some say opinion okay that's the problem both yeah see that's the problem because now this one gets a little a little more murky but apparently apparently she she didn't use exactly the questions that she broadcast because i don't know if you're aware of this but even when the person asking the question has a set of questions that are on their notes that's mostly just so they don't forget a question or you know don't have any questions left but they kind of ask what they think is a good question when they actually get there so somebody like maria bartiroma isn't going to ask the exact question she is just an indication she's going to be in that in that area basically and that's what happened she asked you know some some versions of the questions so i don't think there's anything wrong with that necessarily and i wouldn't i wouldn't be bothered and i'm being consistent here because when chris cuomo was accused of softball treatment of his brother the governor if you recall i also defended chris cuomo because it's transparent as long as it's transparent i don't know if there's a higher standard if you know it's his brother are you gonna be surprised if a brother gave a brother advice in any context that should have been the least surprising news and shouldn't have affected anybody really so i just want to be consistent people should be able to talk to anybody they want and get news get advice from anybody they want like as soon as you make oh this one can't talk to this one unless you've told us now now anybody can talk to anybody about anything that's by standard and they don't necessarily have to tell you you can talk to anybody about anything and they don't necessarily have to disclose it but it's nice when they do all right have you noticed that every story is about elon musk i'll give you some examples so aoc tweeted this sort of long ambiguous tweet to which musk responded so aoc tweets tired of having to collectively stress out about what explosion of hate crimes is happening because some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it because tucker carlson or peter thiel took him to dinner and made him feel special now when i read that i thought she was talking about elon musk buying twitter elon musk must have thought the same because he tweeted back hilariously quote stop hitting on me i'm really shy okay now if you see this outside of the realm of twitter which a lot of people will they'll just see this say reported in a news item or something you don't really appreciate how perfectly twitter like his responses right his response would be maybe inappropriate in almost any other domain in any other domain it wouldn't be a little weird but in a specific one of twitter it's exactly right on point he's he's hitting the target right in the head point it's a twitter response so i've told you before and keep watching for this because it's fun to watch that elon musk is very clear about what matters and what doesn't and when things don't matter he mocks them and when things do matter like you know saving the planet or going to mars or something he somehow makes that happen so i've never seen anybody who's more clear about what's silly and what's not that's just one of his best qualities and so you know he just makes fun of it and then apparently aoc uh tweeted but quickly deleted i was talking about zuckerberg but okay and then everybody had to debate whether she deleted it because it wasn't funny enough or didn't want to gauge or was it because it really wasn't about zuckerberg or who knows but apparently there's a zuckerberg version of meeting with at least peter thiel and there's a a speculated musk version in which he probably met with peter thiel or did or something as as part of you know deciding about twitter and uh so i just love this little exchange but so elon musk is in every part of the news we'll we'll keep going on this uh but first so uh this really happened a reporter for the guardian decided to do a story about virtual reality and so went into one of the virtually reality worlds and i'm not sure which one it was i don't know if it was meta or just a virtual reality world uh it doesn't matter to the story what matters to the story is that she was immediately assaulted with racism and actually was groped in the vr environment basically sexually assaulted in virtual reality now of course she was quick to point out that she never lost touch with the fact that it wasn't the real world but the problem with or the or the feature a virtual reality is it makes you feel the same way as the real world knowing it's not the real world doesn't help you nearly as much as it should i've told you some of the story about my vr experience i put on the glasses and i walked up to a cliff edge so that in the virtual world if i if i stepped off it looks like i would fall to my death in reality i knew i was just in a room in my house and had no danger whatsoever i couldn't make my legs move i i couldn't walk over the cliff in the virtual reality couldn't make my legs move my my brain would say move your legs you're perfectly safe i would even take the glasses off to make sure i was still in the real room put them back in and say all right now couldn't do it and so when she says she was actually assaulted um and like i guess they cornered her and they were doing stuff with her hands and stuff that she felt actually assaulted and i think that's real that's completely real and so what are you going to do about that do you end up having all the same laws in the virtual reality because the virtual reality just becomes your reality well just to make it more weird there's a new invention that allows you to feel things while you're in virtual reality specifically on your mouth and uh so give gizmodo had a article about this that i'm failing to find in my notes but um apparently there's a little haptic response thing and i saw a picture of it you've got the viera goggles on and then there's some kind of sensors or i don't know if they blow air or what they do uh hanging from the bottom of the goggles and so they're directed at your lips and your mouth and the claim is that these little devices that are not touching your mouth but i think they might direct air or something at your mouth they'll make you feel as if you're actually kissing somebody if you're kissing somebody in the vr world now it did go on to say that you might be able to feel it even internal to your mouth such as if you had your mouth open i'd imagine you'd feel something on your tongue or the inside of your mouth because that's where the haptic sensors would be sensing you kind of know where this is going don't you yeah you're you're only one all you need to do is put those haptic sensors in your in your belt you know one on your goggles and one on your belt both shooting down if you know what i mean if you know what i mean if you could feel it just like it's in the real world we're in big trouble big big trouble big trouble so much so that i tweeted uh and people didn't understand that sometimes when you think you know somebody who's socially awkward and they don't have much of a social life and they never seem to go out and that's how that's your opinion of them so this is somebody with a bad social life they don't like to go out but i would suggest to you there's one other possibility that that is somebody who's really really good at masturbating like so good they can do it for hours and it never gets old to them going out might be the last the least fun thing they could possibly do imagine if you were bad at masturbating and somebody said hey there's a party or you can do this thing that's tons of fun it's gonna last you two minutes two minutes of great fun or you could go to this party well the party sounds pretty good doesn't it relative to two two minutes of a good time you'd have fun all night but suppose somebody was really good at it they could keep themselves at a at a place for hours at a time does the party look as good to them what happens when virtual reality makes the staying home alone just way better than going to a party and i think probably you're already at the point where for some people going out is the least fun thing they could possibly do and where is that gonna take us because we're already there i mean we're knocking on that door uh i blocked kathy griffin today for being a racist because she called elon musk a white supremacist and i thought okay you know i i'm certainly willing to put up with anything that she thinks is a joke like you know i supported her with the severed head of trump under you know under the rules of parity and free speech and blah blah blah so i didn't think that she should lose anything because of that i was very strongly supportive of that as a free speech thing and as you know humor humorous take chances they don't always work but you don't want them to not take chances uh but calling uh calling elon musk a white supremacist i feel like that's just because the people on the right like him i feel like that's a little too close to home because i like him too and i have no no indication of anything like that that just feels so bigoted essentially against white guys basically that uh i i can't i can't pretend that somebody else is the bigot in this story it just feels like she's the bigot in the story am i right it just feels like it's just an anti-white male thing all right here are the other stories that elon musk is associated with right just just listen to the whole list and ask yourself how is this even possible okay i get that he's you know a richest person and bought twitter so that gives you a lot of attention but look at all the stories that these topics that he's directly involved in ukraine right you sent sent the starling stuff over there the amber turd story because they were talking about you know his is dating her so the johnny depp stories even that he's attached to uh anything about elections fake news twitter because they're all sort of collectively one story now anything about income inequalities and that anything about taxes of the rich and progressive taxes isn't that story anything about free speech because of twitter now he's weighing in on mental health we'll talk about that tweeting about it so he's in he's in a story about adderall he's in any story about space climate change uh how the country is getting more divided also because of the twitter thing self-driving cars i mean and he believes that the simulation is real it's my theory that people who believe the simulation is real can author it and the more sure you are that the simulation is actually just software the more clearly you can see the machinery and the more clearly you can tweak it it sure looks to me like he knows he lives in the simulation and he's just playing it like a game it looks like he's playing it like somebody's just a good gamer you know if you found out tomorrow that this is all a game and that we're just characters in it who temporarily don't know what we are and we think we're real and you woke up and found out that elon musk was only only the best gamer in another dimension and he was just an avatar but he was an avatar of the best gamer for the game so he became the richest person and he became in every story he had seven kids and god knows what kind of fun he has when he's alone does it look exactly like just a really good gamer playing the game really well it's weird how much it looks like that you know i've looked at my own life because i believe i live in a simulation as well i like literally like actually literally no joke it's the most likely possibility i can't say for sure about that or anything else but i treat it like it's not real and my experiences just don't they just don't seem like they could possibly be coincidental it just doesn't seem like it i don't i don't know what to think of that but those people who have said to me this is just anecdotal of course that as soon as they feel they're in the simulation and they start using things like affirmations to author the simulation they report that they get good results but of course that's anecdotal so elon musk weighed in on this thread so somebody named michael kersey tweeted this um this is just the second part of his tweet he said pharmacological dark matter uh and he's talking about a phenomenon in among uh important people so he's just giving it a name pharmacological dark matter so basically the stuff we don't know is invisible heavy amphetamine and other drug use among people playing significant roles in our society now you've heard me say that right the the people who are doing the most moving and shaping of civilization mostly on drugs it wouldn't happen otherwise and i you know don't take drugs like and i mean it don't take drugs i mean and you know the only only time you should is if you're under a doctor's care and even that is probably too much so i'm not encouraging it i'm just saying it's a fact and i and ignoring it feels stupid it just feels stupid to ignore it the fact is there's some people and and here's the dangerous part everybody responds to chemistry differently so there might be a drug that simply makes one person rich because it just makes them perform better and they never have a side effect or one they care about and then another person it just kills them it just freaking kills them or makes them crazy or ruins their life one way or the other so don't take drugs because you don't know which which one you are you don't know if you're the one the drug is going to kill or the drug is going to help you we're just not that smart because it you know we're all different so anyway so michael kersey weighs in on this about the significant role and then uh then mark andreessen one of the most important voices in the tech world um tweeted this he said everyone thinks our pr our present society was caused by social media i'm wondering whether adderall plus ubiquitous google searches have bigger effects now i don't know about the google search part but here's one of the most connected people in silicon valley and then the tech world who would personally know the most important people in society so you know this is somebody who's been in the room and has the the phone number to text pretty much anybody famous i think at this point and he's telling you that he thinks adderall may be shaping civilization or things like it i'm not saying adderall specifically but you should take that as things like it you know amphetamines um and then alex cohen tweeted this he said prescribed psychedelics will replace amphetamines and ss our eyes over the next decade although i hope is sooner than that he said and then musk gets into this tweet and he tweets i've talked to many people who were helped by psychedelics and ketamine more people were helped by psychedelics and ketamine than ssris and amphetamines and then he added related to this he said and this is not me talking so i'm just reporting what he said all right so these are not my words he said adderall is an anger amplifier avoided all costs now here's the interesting thing as jeff pilkington pointed out in some tweets everybody's different that's what i said earlier right i'm pretty sure that adderall has saved lives but i'm pretty sure it's it's caused some problems i think both of those can be true so it's a it's a little bit um let's say it's a a really good example of free speech both its negatives and his positives you don't want to be getting medical advice from elon musk that might be his weakest category i mean he is insanely smart on a whole variety of things that allow him to do what he does but i think the medical part might be the part where you go yeah you get a second opinion there yeah usually when when musk says something i'm usually done it's like okay i agree with that there's nothing else to say but i think in this in the medical domain uh let's let's be glad that there is free speech because he can say this if you looked at the comments there would be a whole bunch of people pushing back and i say okay that's a really good example of free speech working somebody's asking if i'm on adderall i'm not so i've never been on any kind of long-term stimulant except coffee or sativa i guess but i will i've said this before so but in college i had a few experiences with stimulants and i wrote my entire senior thesis in like i think it was like mostly over a weekend and then i was done with the semester and it was actually easy and i enjoyed it think about that i did a semester of work in four days got a reasonably good grade on it i think a b-plus or something and i did it in four days and i liked it it was it was completely pleasant it was a horrible job like just the most boring it was like in economics so it was a senior thesis in economics you know how boring that was and i enjoyed the whole thing now how many um how many unicorn companies have been created by people who had a little stimulant going on how many probably a lot right probably a lot and uh it is one of the great untold stories anyway um michael schellenberger who is running for governor as an independent in california i understand there was some issue in it in terms of the paperwork uh i got to look into that a little bit but um how would you like to be running for governor and part of your accomplishments just happened which is schellenberger was i think the loudest most effective voice for trying to save um the diablo canyon nuclear power plant in california and the reasoning was it's already there it's cost effective and we don't have any green way to replace it and we'll just run out of energy if we don't keep it open a pretty straightforward argument and apparently he um the great weight of public opinion moved shelling berger's way is that a coincidence or did he cause it because remember he was testifying to congress he was he was writing books and articles on it he was the most famous voice on this topic i think he caused it i think he caused it so he's running for governor while the current governor is saying that he's going to look to get some money from the federal funds that was allocated by biden and i'll give biden credit for this for keeping nuclear power plants open longer than they would have been so the governor is looking at implementing the plan that the governor didn't want to do but shellenberger convinced the entire country that they need to do it and now he kind of has to do it i would hate to be running against schallenberger in this situation honestly i know i've never seen a more capable politician in terms of you know competence about the actual topics that matter to the state it's sort of breathtaking because we've never seen it before i'm pretty sure we've never seen this before we've we've had some presidents who were a little wonky you know like jimmy carter and stuff but not like this like carter wasn't didn't have this kind of mastery over the exact topic that the state cared about and several of them from homelessness to drug addiction to he's talked about forest management basically everything we care about he has he has the better solution for all right here's the most provocative thing that i've read lately we all assume at this point that russia will have its way with ukraine in the comments where are you feeling as of today like what do you feel today is russia going to have its way all right so i'm seeing mostly yeses some people saying they'll just take the east of ukraine all right now i will remind you that in war nothing is predictable so among the unpredictable unpredictable things that could happen i tweeted this and i feel terrible because i want to mention the author and the publication because i liked it so much but i can't find it in my own tweets for some reason maybe i imagined i tweeted it yeah maybe i imagined it but uh if somebody sees it maybe you can tell me in the comments if i did tweet it and you see it um it was an article by somebody who definitely looked like they knew what they're doing there's somebody who had predicted in writing and could show the receipts that the uh the moskva that ship would be sunk by the ukrainian anti-ship missiles so that's a pretty good prediction somebody had that specific prediction that happened and then when i read the article seemed to know quite a bit about the whole situation so i don't know how to judge military experts because we've seen so many of them being so wrong about so many things but i'll give you his argument and i'd love to see how wrong it is it goes like this we're all focusing on the fact that the fighting is in don bass and the other name starts with l that i can't remember and we're taking for granted that russia already owns crimea because they got annexed in 2014 something like that so yeah so so luhansk is the other region so we're ignoring crimea right because that's that's a done deal russia already owns it here's the part i didn't know about they barely own it they do own it their military is there it's theirs but apparently if you're looking at it from a military perspective their connection to crimea is one bridge and one poorly defended area and and you if you take out the bridge which seems totally doable right ukraine can take out a bridge they've got missiles um drones and whatnot and then apparently the ukraine military is actually pretty good they have better equipment they according to this expert they win their fire fights so when it's when it's something like a a fair fight the ukrainians almost always win because they're better trained and better equipped it's only when they're you know overpowered by artillery or something that they get crushed so um the thinking is that the ukrainian military could take out not only the the thin connection between the main russian forces and crimea they could take out the bridge and then they can just take crimea because it would probably be poorly defended because the most the strongest defenders are where the fighting is and the fighting is not happening in crimea and i'm thinking that would be a shocker what if ukraine just tried to hold the line and just keep the main russian army pinned down and just take crimea back what would that do to the russian psychology it would look like russia lost the war i mean the war wouldn't be over they'd i mean russia could maybe just take it back not i mean wouldn't be easy but what would that do to the whole balance of everything i mean that would be a great at least a diversion i mean at the very least it would be an interesting diversion and the idea is that russia would have trouble equipping and resupplying crimea because they could get cut off but that ukraine would you know because they have a border there and stuff they'd break out the tactical nuke if that happens somebody says would they because it seems to me that a tactical nuke would guarantee that putin is taken out of office what do you think i would say that right now it looks like he might be you know at great risk maybe 50 50 proposition but if he used a tactical nuke i think that's the end am i wrong there's no way he could survive it politically if not his life right because don't you think that there there's somebody who's like number two or three in the potential takeover chain that the cia has already said you know i know you're only number fourth or fifth in the potential chain of command but if the other people disappeared and we made sure that you were well treated do you think you'd like to step up to the number one job i know i think that if a tactical nuke got used it would be easy to turn people within russia really close to putin against him because they would say okay this is a clean win if i take putin out under these conditions i'll even have internal support because i think i think you could overthrow putin and still have public sport in russia if he used a nuke or the other possibility is that russia is now so so pro-putin that they'd say oh that's strong you know we like it that you were strong maybe i don't know how to read the russian mind but it was certainly it would certainly turn enough people against uh putin that he'd be in physical danger much more than he is now now here let me throw something into the mix that feels different so you know the biden administration is asking for correct me if i'm wrong 33 billion more for ukraine which is a gigantic step up in in military sport do you know what that sounds like to me it sounds like the administration is planning to win as in win the war it doesn't look like they're playing for a stalemate it doesn't even look like they're playing to just you know push them out of the east or something i feel as if the biden administration feels like they could win because every day that the russians don't you know have some crushing victory on the east is a day that you say to yourself huh maybe that ukrainian defense is better than we thought and they're not gonna the ukrainian defense isn't gonna quit now because the good equipment is just coming in and apparently they don't have any manpower shortage they had they had more volunteers to fight than they had equipment to give them so if ukraine doesn't run out of people to fight and they're getting more equipment not less does the 33 billion signal that the biden administrations thinks they can win outright because i feel like it does now i don't think that means that they think it's a sure thing or anything like that but i feel like they went from you know let's see how we can make this painful for putin to let's finish off the russian army i i think they want to finish the russian army or at least you know take it down by 50 percent because putin's down 25 right i never understood that if that's his entire military 25 degraded or that was just what's in that area i've not i've not heard that clarified so um about 20 billion to replace the weapons we gave them from the army okay oh i see so we'd be replacing our own weapons with a 33 billion okay that does look a little different those numbers are wrong which numbers are wrong they're 33 billion if all it is is replacing our own equipment then it doesn't look like a step up does it so give me a give me a fact check on that that replacing our own military equipment would not look like a step up so he says not true are we giving it directly to ukraine all right well i guess we'll look into this but the point is if it's a major escalation if that's what that budget is telling us then i think the binding administration actually feels they could win define win put putin out of power um and get org or and or get the russian military to completely get out of ukraine completely now of course nobody wins because everybody's everybody lost in this situation but that would look like a win to me all right i was asked to tell you about how we're entering the golden age well um someone's asked me why i didn't have kids and do i regret it uh let me ask you that one first um i don't regret it but um and the reason was i just didn't want to bring somebody into the world because there are plenty of people in the world and i never felt a need to propagate my dna now does that make me weird because i feel like there's some kind of basic human impulse that people have to propagate their their dna but i don't have that because i didn't enjoy my my childhood enough that i would take any chance that i could put anybody through that again but if there's somebody who's already having a tough childhood and i could help them have a better one that feels like that's an easy win like to me that would be satisfying but to bring somebody into the world and then have them have a bad life i couldn't handle that like my i'm just not built that i could ever handle that so i so i take the sure thing of you know definitely helping humanity uh extend the light of consciousness i guess so he says what a load there's somebody who thinks that uh i'm either lying do you think i'm lying to you or lying to myself it could be the one right i guess there's no way for you to know is there but but the thing i thought about the most is that um i'd rather support the people who are already here that's how i thought of it it could be that that's a rationalization of some sort that would be pretty pretty normal uh but your child wouldn't have a tough life yeah no i don't think we're not talking about uh tough life in terms of economics if it were just economics i wouldn't have worried but in terms of you know mental health and that sort of thing i'm not so worried about climate change ruining the world um i just look around i don't see a lot of happy people now here's the golden age part i'm pretty sure that we're about to wake up or we are waking up now to this whole um what drugs to put in your body and whatnot and maybe the pandemic helped with that because it sort of changed how we see the medical community you know change change our opinion about maybe having to make our own decisions and not depend on the experts so much which could be good or bad i guess that could go both ways but uh yeah i think a big the uh i would go with elon musk's thing that the ketamine maybe and and of course don't take any recommendations from me i'm just saying that these are things that are being talked about i'm not recommending them at all and the psychedelics i do think have the potential to be civilization changing absolutely and because they don't cost much it's yeah let me ask you this imagine everything that we do now to make the world a safer place right we've got the united nations and and you know we've got the the hotline to the kremlin so we've got all these systems and things to make things safer and avoid war but we still have the damn wars right so i guess those systems are better than not having them but they're not they're not really getting it done but imagine this this is purely speculative and it's just it's just a mental experiment imagine that if instead of all that stuff whenever there was a dispute or even before there was one the heads of state would get together and do mushrooms together that's it and then replace everything else with just that now of course that will never happen of course it will never happen i'm not suggesting that's even remotely possible i'm just saying if it did it would probably end war do you think i mean honestly if you uh just imagine um you know it doesn't work if if your leader is 100 years old so forget about trump he won't take a drug and forget about biden he's too old but imagine desantis who i imagine is anti-drug so again this wouldn't happen but it's at least he's young enough so imagine a president desantis someday doing mushrooms with a president putin who's you know 70 or so and you know not that old and and they just like bond and see the world differently and the next thing you know just war is a lot harder like it doesn't make sense suddenly because it would be so much easier to say you know wait a minute are you saying that if russia and the united states simply had to just make friends that the same way that germany benefited by being friends with the and japan benefited and basically everybody every country that said hey can we be your friend has benefited substantially can you imagine sitting in a room and having the right kind of you know right kind of let's say chemical incentive and you just look at putin and say why are we even doing this do you do you want to be the greatest leader that russia ever had and putin would be well i thought i already was they say okay okay but you want to continue being the greatest leader that there ever was and putin would say how do you do that he said end war and war would go to space with us how about that how about end war and help and help us go to space and we'll get some good asteroids we'll mine some stuff we'll we'll free your economy to do what it can do we'll share our technology with you it'll be awesome you'll be the best leader that russia ever had you'll quadruple your gdp there'll be statues of you everywhere and you will have ended war it i'm telling you the golden age you just have to accept it it's right there it's right there the hard part is getting people to just pick it up it's like here it is here's all of your solutions all of your solutions we have all the answers now here they are and people like i don't know i don't trust those solutions um so here's where the golden age i think is gonna happen i think that the energy shock will cause us to be pro-nuclear in a way that we had to be so our energy thing is now on a course for full correction it's gonna be slow but it's now on a very definite course towards full correction it's gonna be nuclear you know energy will go nuclear and and through tesla-like activities it will be also electric i'm seeing solar so it's going to be solar and pretty much just solar and nuclear so i would say those two things solve climate change or at least you know they're likely to be enough to mitigate the worst problems as long as we're also mitigating things as we go it's not the only stuff so that's better what about the pandemic horrible horrible thing right but don't you think we got a lot better at handling the next pandemic like a lot better and i and i feel like even though you think these uh new vaccinations are killing people some of you think that um i feel like what we learned from that could create a platform for everything from vaccinations for cancer to vaccinations for all kinds of stuff or or we'll find out there was some problem with it can't rule that out i'm giving you the optimist feel that look at the ukraine russia war does it forever end the idea that it's a good idea to attack your neighbor with tanks fairly not well i mean you know up till now i guess putin still thought it was a good idea to attack his neighborhood tanks and at this point don't you think this will always be the cautionary tale it's like okay all right it doesn't work i i think afghanistan is bad of a situation as it was at least it will always remind us of what kinds of things not to do again but ukraine didn't look like afghanistan they looked like so such different places that maybe the lesson didn't transfer but now you've got you've got an industrial country you've got you know backwards country and and neither of them could be over it could be conquered by the soviet union or russia that should mean something if you couldn't conquer either kind of country and they're so different maybe the whole country conquering thing isn't for you all right uh what else is good so we're gonna solve energy um i think we're safer from pandemics uh and i think war looks less likely i think the biggest problem is inflation all right let me give you um the ultimate economic safety thought are you ready yeah most of you have some concern i would think about inflation and gdp going down and maybe food shortages and everything else most of you starting to have a little anxiety about that right in gas prices not a little maybe a lot so some of you having a lot of anxiety i'm having anxiety about it and i'm rich you know relatively speaking i can't even imagine how this would feel if i was just squeaking by this would feel like insanely bad but let me give you the one positive thing that i can give you i've told you before that economics is real complicated stuff i have a degree in economics and i'm confused half the time but there was one rule that i always look to that tells me where things are headed there's just one metric if you get that one metric right all the other things can work themselves out but if you get the one thing wrong nothing can work itself out do you know what the one thing is employment employment rate not even not even raises not even cost of living adjustments not unions just the pure number of people who have jobs compared to the numbers who want them and the fact that we have labor shortages now so we we could actually use more workers even immigrants are in demand apparently with all the immigration we have it's still hard to get the harvest picked i think so we're actually understaffed i don't know of any situation where you had close to full employment where you couldn't work out the other stuff you know what i mean and here here's the math of why that is so important the difference between an unemployed person and an employed person is a gigantic drag on the rest of the people right if somebody is employed and they're taking care of themselves and maybe adding something you know to to the taxes then that's taken care of but if they're unemployed not only are they not adding but they're subtracting you you have to pay them to live or they die so one unemployed person is really really expensive compared to almost any other problem so if you get that one thing right the other stuff can be really painful for a while but the odds of it working out in the long run are real good right so when you're seeing people who seem to be the most knowledgeable and experienced about economics and they see all the things you see you know they're seeing the inflation they're seeing they might get worse they're they're saying everything supply chain problems you know china problems blah blah they see all that but they don't look like they're panicking do they have you noticed that there's no tone of panic even though all the metrics are sort of awful because that one thing is right the jobs and i think the people who know the most are sort of just looking at that one and saying you know probably much like i do say okay as long as that one thing's okay at least our foundation is in good shape right the foundation is strong then you can work out the rest uh mushrooms is tulips yeah i see what you're saying labor participation yes that's a big one as well um total employment is still below pre-pandemic but it's still good how do you how do we fix blackrock buying all the single-family homes the the solution for housing is better housing not building the same kind of homes and reselling them over and over again there is definitely a way to build a home for 10 percent of what it costs to build a home so i that's i think that's going to be another part of the the golden age i i think that if you got rid of f you got rid of zoning and you turned it into a kit just i've talked about this before but imagine designing homes in which all the parts are an even an even amount in other words a room in this house house of the future could be it could be 10 by 12 but it could never be 10 by 12 feet and two inches and the reason is so you'd never have to cut anything so if you're putting in the floor you buy one foot squares and you put in as many as you need for the squares and nothing gets cut and maybe it's a kit form so everything snaps together so you could unsnap it and move a wall if you needed to etc now i think that's where it has to go it's just that nobody has a business model to make money from making that the the old sears kits so i know there's some there's some historical examples but those kits i believe you still have to cut didn't you or not i think those were if you imagine what we could do now compared to what they could do in those days i imagine that we could make a kit that would be way better just way better and then if you make the uh if you make the homes with you say here's how i do it i designed perfect rooms and then you could design a house that used as many of those preset rooms in in whatever configuration they fit and then you can build almost any kind of a house but you never have to cut anything you just get a kit and snap it together so i think that's where it needs to go the tough part would be uh i mean i think you could even do the plumbing in fact i'll bet you can make a house that's self-aware imagine a house that comes as a kit and then the and each part has a camera in it so every part you put becomes alive and it can see around itself and then and then it attaches to some brain so the house could see a leak in your wall before you knew it was there but it could also tell if you'd assembled it correctly so you put the new component on and it becomes alive because it's like electrically connected to everything else and it can see around and suddenly the house knows if you put the thing in the right place so you put the new piece on and the house goes beep beep beep it doesn't belong there you're like oh darn it's backwards put it on it goes beep it knows you did it right so if you made all the components alive the house would help you assemble itself and it would always watch you'd be watching for any defects and it would warn you every time all right just an idea that ladies and gentlemen is the best show ever i think i delighted and entertained you probably some of you are about to start one of the best days ever and i think that you would agree that today is the beginning of the rest of your life no it's true i read it in a greeting card once so i know it's true and that is all i have to say to you on youtube i'll talk to you tomorrow
i think so yes i feel the golden ages
is upon us
it's a little bit disguised
i'll i'll grant you that
but it's always the darkest before the
that's right the dawn
and it's always the thirstiest before
the sip
that's not a saying yet but it will be
it will be damn it if if i have anything
to say about it and so
are you prepared are you ready for an
experience which will connect all people
almost as if we are a global mind almost
as if we form a super intelligence
collectively
being channeled through me
so between
coffee
and this is shared experience let's do
something amazing
all right and all you need is a copper
mug or a glass of tanker chelsea steiner
canteen jungle flask a vessel of any
kind
fill it with your favorite liquid
i like coffee
and join me now for the
dopamine hit of the day
it's the tingle on the back your neck
it's the thing that makes you feel alive
that's right simultaneously go
oh that's a good container of beverage
right there
i hope the container of beverage you
just ingested was as good as the
container of beverage i just ingested
and if that doesn't get you going
nothing will
well the walls are closing in on trump
his legal woes continue to oh actually
no nothing's happening
so it turns out that the latest uh rumor
so unconfirmed but it looks like all the
uh
the manhattan charges or the grand jury
that was going to look into all the
trump financial dealings
they've been looking and looking they've
been talking to people they've been
investigating they've demanded and
they've received documents
and after months and months of grand
jury stuff
the
foreshadowing not yet confirmed
is that it seems increasingly unlikely
there will be any
indictments coming out of this
have we ever seen any
president trump uh
witch-hunts before
i feel as if it was nothing but witch
hunts
you know
i'm not going to say
that trump was an angel all of his life
and the reason i'm not going to say is
because he told us that directly
he literally said in public
i'm you know i'm no angel
but then he would tell you why you know
he could help you and as president
so if you expected him to be an angel
in however you wanted to find that
uh
you should you shouldn't have been
surprised
if you if he talks about grabbing people
by the whatever because he kind of
signaled that as directly as you
possibly could and i always thought that
immunized them
a good way to immunize people is to tell
people that you have the flaw that
you're worried they're going to blame
you of
because if you say it first it just
takes all the fun out of it
you know if trump had said you know i
say horrible things in private
you should know that
and then you find out you said a
horrible thing in private you're like
hey you said a horrible thing okay you
did tell us that
and it just takes all the energy out of
it
and so may i uh admit to you right now
i'd like to confess
i i say horrible things in private
horrible things
just terrible things if any of it were
presented to you out of context you
would say to yourself well that's the
worst person i think i've ever heard of
in the world
but here's the context
do you have a friend like this
now this won't apply to all of you but
some of you do do you have a friend
who if you're just alone
could be somebody you've known a long
time usually it is
that the funniest thing you can do is to
say the most inappropriate things
whatever is the most absolutely
uncivilized thing you could say
something you would never say in front
of someone else
and the fun
is how awful it is
am i right
so i i often think
if somehow you know my digital devices
are recording every word i say
and you know somehow it all came back to
me and you played these these bits
they would sound worse than anything
you've ever heard in your life like you
you think you've heard people say bad
things
on hidden audio
you should see mine well i don't know
you should hear them
if such things exist
but yeah i i'll uh i'll make your head
explode
but i wouldn't say it in public
right the the whole reason it's funny is
because you wouldn't say it in public
that's the entire energy of it is it's
inappropriate
so it's tough to see stuff out of
context is what i'm saying
so here's another big gigantic story
that has been haunting us forever this
whole uh
manhattan
possible indictments of trump for
financial
cannery or whatever that apparently none
of it happened
none of it happened what would happen if
everybody saw
trump's tax returns
and they were just clean
that would be the funniest thing
wouldn't it after all this time
like let's just say the entire tax
returns became public and everybody was
like oh
this is going to be good
this is going to be good and everybody's
like salivating over it and they're like
huh okay there's nothing there
because apparently that's what happened
with these manhattan indictments there
was nothing there it's what happened
with russia collusion
russia collusion
not there the closest they could find is
trying to confuse us after the fact that
russian interference in the election
was the same as or somehow adjacent to
russia collusion with somebody running
for president very different very
different
but but that was the closest they could
get to making that stick is talking
about an unrelated topic
that's the closest they could get
so
if trump were to run for re-election he
would be the most vetted
person of all time
i i don't think i would ever worry again
that he would be
caught in some illegality or blackmailed
he might be the least blackmailable
president now of all time
am i right i mean then you then you add
to that his age
right at some age
you stop worrying about getting
blackmailed
i was thinking about this the other day
you know at my current age i was saying
what if somebody blackmailed me like
they really had the goods whatever that
was
and they said okay you're going to be so
terribly embarrassed your career will be
destroyed if i release this information
well if i were 30
that would be pretty scary wouldn't it
because you're like oh my whole life's
ahead of me
you know going to let this stuff out if
it happened now
i feel like i think it was funny
i'm not positive
and i suppose i would depend on what it
is i guess
but
i feel like i would just laugh
because
it's hard nobody's going to take my
money away from me
or at least and nobody but the
government i guess
so i'm not sure what i would have to
lose it would just make me seem more
interesting even in a bad way and say
well okay i'll take that trade off if it
makes me seem more interesting
and by the way if you ever hear bad
things about me i encourage you to
believe all of them except the illegal
ones if you're any if here i did
anything illegal
totally did not do that because i
actually
i do try pretty hard to avoid illegal
stuff
um
but if you hear anything that's just
like wildly
provocative
i would encourage you to believe it even
though there's a very unlike it's very
unlikely it's true
but if it's fun
you should believe it
if you enjoy it
uh so now there's a story about uh guess
hannity
was exchanging a whole bunch of messages
over 80 messages with mark meadows about
the january 6 situation
and the big scandal is that
hannity was giving advice
to the administration and the president
through
mark meadows
and
i'm watching this i'm thinking
remind me why this is a story
what is it what is the part that's news
is the news that hannity and trump
were friends
because
they both talked about that publicly all
the time
everybody knew that
was did anybody think that
trump doesn't listen to people who are
exactly the right person to give you
exactly the right kind of advice
who would you want advice
from
if you were a republican president in a
tight spot
who could give you the best possible
advice
well
you know hannity would be near the top
i would think right you don't have to
agree with hannity's opinions on
anything
to for me to make this point i'm just
saying the handy's talent stack as i've
pointed out before
henry is just a perfect example of a
talent snack
somebody who if you looked at any
individual thing he has a talent at
you know speaking in public knowing
about politics or whatever you say oh
that's that's good
and sometimes really really good
but there's not one of those things that
stands out as the best anybody's been at
that thing
right he's got a look he talks right
he's got the energy
he just has everything
so his magic is there are no gaps he
just has everything
so it makes him you know very effective
so if you were going to give somebody's
advice
in this exact topic which is how to
handle
the public opinion of something i would
go to somebody who is one of the best
people on the planet
in managing public opinions
hannity
is exactly whose advice i'd want to hear
and how what kind of advice did he give
um
one of them is that he said that
trump should uh announce he will lead he
said after the six this is what hannity
said that trump should announce he will
lead a nationwide effort to reform
voting integrity
go to florida and watch joe mess up
daily
stay engaged
when he speaks people will listen and i
thought to myself
okay that's
really good advice
isn't
it that's about as good as
if you were going to get advice
that's about as good as you could get
now trump didn't take this advice
right
trump trump decided to be
trump
and and maybe there's nothing wrong with
that because he's made it work so far
and so trump decided to be you know
fully competitive
but
i i if i read between the lines i think
hannity's
approach was to basically shift the
argument and become the champion of
election integrity which nobody could
disagree with basically it's a high
ground maneuver
have i told you that the high ground
maneuver wins every argument it's the
one that always wins
and as soon as you hear it you're like
oh okay damn it the argument's over
that's the high ground
the high ground is not whether the
election was rigged or not rigged that's
the low ground
the high ground is what hannity showed
him
the high ground is i'm going to lead a
national effort
to make sure that the next time this
happens we're all comfortable with the
outcome
national hero
right trump could have
easily transformed this from maybe the
biggest stain on his presidency not
maybe
the biggest stain on his presidency
he could have easily done taken
hannity's advice and turned it into all
right
well i guess we'll never know what
happened in 2020
i have my suspicions
and people would say okay that's fair
you have your suspicions
and it's fair that we'll never know
yeah okay not everything was audited
can't get into the you know the
technology part of it especially
he would have been a national hero
and probably
when the next election rolled around
unless people thought he rigged the
election i suppose they'd spin it that
way um people would say all right
let's let's run this movie again
and we'll see if the election reform
actually changes the outcome let's see
who gets 81 million votes this time with
election reform
now even if he lost
it would still be legendary because
people wanted election reform as
like you know the basic
most fundamental thing to protect the
republic
so
the fact that there's a story that uh
hannity was giving
advice to mark meadows to give to trump
the story should have been why wasn't
trump listening to it
that would have been the better story
because this is damn good advice
in my opinion it's damn good advice
um maria barbaroma was getting some
similar kind of pushback
because apparently she shared some of
the questions
that she was going to ask the president
after january 6 with mark meadows i
guess
and
here's the first thing you should know
about that
that's not unusual
it's not unusual for an interview
guest to get questions in advance
because it's more about the topic
and it's more about
preparing somebody to have a good show
i can tell you that in many cases when
i'm interviewed on politics
i get the questions in advance
and you know that there's nothing
unusual about that the reason you do it
is to make the show uh snappy
what you don't want is a show where
somebody asks a question and then the
guest says uh
you know i hadn't really thought about
that
you don't want that so you want to say
i'm going to ask you some tough
questions
or or not but you tell them what they're
going to be
and then the person has thought about it
and they give a good quick response as
short as possible it's good for the
audience it's good for the show but it's
also good for the interviewee everybody
looks good
now
here's the question
in this case
is maria brought to roma an
opinion person like hannity
where i think hannity is perfectly
transparent
that he's an opinion person
he's friends with the president they
talk a lot
perfectly transparent
but is do you see maria brought roma as
opinion or news
just to see what your opinion of her is
some say news some say opinion okay
that's the problem both
yeah see that's the problem
because now this one gets a little a
little more murky
but apparently
apparently she
she didn't use exactly the questions
that she broadcast because i don't know
if you're aware of this
but even when the person asking the
question has a set of questions that are
on their notes
that's mostly
just so they don't forget a question or
you know
don't have any questions left
but they kind of ask what they think is
a good question when they actually get
there so somebody like maria bartiroma
isn't going to ask the exact question
she is just an indication she's going to
be in that in that area basically
and that's what happened she asked you
know some some versions of the questions
so i don't think there's anything wrong
with that necessarily
and i wouldn't
i wouldn't be bothered and i'm being
consistent here
because when
chris cuomo was accused of
softball treatment of his brother
the governor
if you recall
i also defended chris cuomo because it's
transparent
as long as it's transparent
i don't know if there's a higher
standard
if you know it's his brother
are you gonna be surprised if a brother
gave a brother advice
in any context
that should have been the least
surprising
news and shouldn't have affected anybody
really
so i just want to be consistent people
should be able to talk to anybody they
want and get news get advice from
anybody they want like as soon as you
make oh this one can't talk to this one
unless you've told us now now anybody
can talk to anybody about anything
that's by standard
and they don't necessarily have to tell
you
you can talk to anybody about anything
and they don't necessarily have to
disclose it but it's nice when they do
all right
have you noticed that every story is
about elon musk
i'll give you some examples
so
aoc tweeted this
sort of long ambiguous tweet to which
musk responded so aoc tweets
tired of having to collectively stress
out about what explosion of hate crimes
is happening because some billionaire
with an ego problem unilaterally
controls a massive communication
platform and skews it because tucker
carlson or peter thiel took him to
dinner and made him feel special
now
when i read that i thought she was
talking about elon musk buying twitter
elon musk must have thought the same
because he tweeted back hilariously
quote stop hitting on me i'm really shy
okay
now
if you see this outside of the realm of
twitter which a lot of people will
they'll just see this say reported in a
news item or something
you don't really appreciate how
perfectly twitter like his responses
right his response would be maybe
inappropriate in
almost any other domain
in any other domain it wouldn't be a
little weird
but in a specific one
of twitter
it's exactly right on point
he's
he's hitting the target right in the
head point
it's a twitter response
so
i've told you before and keep watching
for this because it's fun to watch
that elon musk is very clear about what
matters and what doesn't and when things
don't matter he mocks them
and when things do matter like you know
saving the planet or going to mars or
something he somehow makes that happen
so i've never seen anybody who's more
clear about what's silly
and what's not
that's just one of his best qualities
and so you know he just makes fun of it
and then apparently aoc
uh tweeted but quickly deleted
i was talking about zuckerberg but okay
and then everybody had to debate
whether she deleted it because
it wasn't funny enough or didn't want to
gauge or was it because it really wasn't
about zuckerberg or
who knows
but apparently
there's a zuckerberg version of meeting
with at least peter thiel and there's a
a speculated musk version in which he
probably met with peter thiel or did or
something as as part of
you know deciding about twitter
and uh
so i just love this little exchange but
so
elon musk is in every part of the news
we'll we'll keep going on this
uh but first
so
uh this really happened
a reporter for the guardian decided to
do a story about virtual reality
and so went into one of the virtually
reality worlds and i'm not sure which
one it was i don't know if it was meta
or just a virtual reality world
uh it doesn't matter to the story
what matters to the story is that she
was immediately
assaulted
with
racism and actually was groped in the vr
environment basically sexually assaulted
in virtual reality
now of course she was quick to point out
that she never lost touch with the fact
that it wasn't the real world
but the problem with or the or the
feature a virtual reality is it makes
you feel the same way as the real world
knowing it's not the real world doesn't
help you nearly as much as it should
i've told you some of the story about my
vr experience i put on the glasses and i
walked up to a cliff edge
so that in the virtual world if i if i
stepped off it looks like i would fall
to my death
in reality i knew i was just in a room
in my house and had no danger whatsoever
i couldn't make my legs move
i i couldn't walk over the cliff in the
virtual reality
couldn't make my legs move
my my brain would say move your legs
you're perfectly safe i would even take
the glasses off to make sure i was still
in the real room put them back in and
say all right now
couldn't do it
and so when she says she was actually
assaulted
um
and like i guess they cornered her and
they were
doing stuff with her hands and stuff
that she felt actually assaulted
and i think that's real
that's completely real
and so
what are you going to do about that
do you end up having all the same laws
in the virtual reality because the
virtual reality just becomes your
reality
well just to make it more
weird there's a new invention that
allows you to feel things
while you're in virtual reality
specifically on your mouth
and uh so give
gizmodo had a article about this that
i'm failing to find in my notes
but
um
apparently there's a little haptic
response thing
and i saw a picture of it you've got the
viera goggles on and then there's some
kind of sensors or i don't know if they
blow air or what they do
uh hanging from the bottom of the
goggles
and so they're directed at your lips and
your mouth
and the claim is
that these little
devices that are not touching your mouth
but i think they might direct air or
something at your mouth
they'll make you feel as if you're
actually kissing somebody
if you're kissing somebody in the vr
world
now
it did go on to say that you might be
able to feel it even internal to your
mouth
such as if you had your mouth open
i'd imagine you'd feel something on your
tongue or the inside of your mouth
because
that's where the haptic
sensors would be sensing
you kind of know where this is going
don't you
yeah you're you're only one
all you need to do is put those haptic
sensors in your in your belt
you know one on your goggles and one on
your belt both shooting down if you know
what i mean if you know what i mean
if you could feel it just like it's in
the real world
we're in big trouble
big big trouble
big trouble
so much so that i tweeted uh and people
didn't understand
that sometimes when
you think you know somebody who's
socially awkward and they don't have
much of a social life
and they never seem to go out
and that's how that's your opinion of
them so
this is somebody with a bad social life
they don't like to go out
but i would suggest to you there's one
other possibility
that that is somebody who's really
really good at masturbating
like so good they can do it for hours
and it never gets old
to them going out might be the last the
least fun thing they could possibly do
imagine if you were bad at masturbating
and somebody said hey there's a party
or you can do this thing that's tons of
fun it's gonna last you two minutes
two minutes of great fun or you could go
to this party well the party sounds
pretty good
doesn't it
relative to two two minutes of a good
time you'd have fun all night
but suppose
somebody was really good at it
they could keep themselves at a at a
place for hours at a time
does the party look as good to them
what happens when virtual reality
makes the
staying home alone just way better than
going to a party
and i think
probably you're already at the point
where for some people
going out is the least fun thing they
could possibly do
and where is that gonna take us
because we're already there i mean we're
knocking on that door
uh i blocked kathy griffin today for
being a racist
because she called elon musk a white
supremacist
and i thought
okay
you know i i'm certainly willing to put
up with anything that she thinks is a
joke
like you know i supported her with the
severed head of
trump
under you know under the rules of parity
and free speech and blah blah blah
so i didn't think that she should lose
anything because of that i was very
strongly supportive of that as a free
speech thing and as you know
humor humorous take chances
they don't always work but you don't
want them to not take chances
uh but calling uh
calling elon musk a white supremacist
i feel like that's just because the
people on the right like him
i feel like that's a little too close to
home
because i like him too and i have no no
indication of anything like that
that just feels so bigoted
essentially against white guys basically
that uh
i i can't
i can't pretend that somebody else is
the bigot in this story
it just feels like she's the bigot in
the story am i right
it just feels like
it's just an anti-white male
thing
all right
here are the other stories that elon
musk is associated with right just
just listen to the whole list
and ask yourself how is this even
possible okay i get that he's you know
a richest person and bought twitter so
that gives you a lot of attention
but look at all the stories that these
topics that he's directly involved in
ukraine
right you sent sent
the starling stuff over there
the amber turd story
because they were talking about you know
his
is dating her
so the johnny depp stories even that
he's attached to uh anything about
elections fake news twitter because
they're all sort of collectively one
story now anything about income
inequalities and that anything about
taxes of the rich and progressive taxes
isn't that story anything about free
speech because of twitter now he's
weighing in on mental health we'll talk
about that tweeting about it so he's in
he's in a story about adderall he's in
any story about space climate change uh
how the country is getting more divided
also because of the twitter thing
self-driving cars
i mean
and he believes that the simulation is
real
it's my theory that people who believe
the simulation is real can author it
and the more sure you are that the
simulation is actually just software
the more clearly you can see the
machinery
and the more clearly you can tweak it
it sure looks to me
like he knows he lives in the simulation
and he's just playing it like a game
it looks like he's playing it like
somebody's just a good gamer
you know if you found out tomorrow that
this is all a game and that we're just
characters in it who temporarily don't
know what we are and we think we're real
and you woke up and found out that elon
musk was only
only
the best gamer in another dimension
and he was just an avatar
but he was an avatar of the best
gamer for the game so he became the
richest person
and he became in every story
he had seven kids and
god knows what kind of fun he has when
he's alone
[Laughter]
does it look exactly like just a really
good gamer playing the game really well
it's weird how much it looks like that
you know i've looked at my own life
because i believe i live in a simulation
as well
i like literally
like actually literally no joke
it's the most likely possibility i can't
say for sure
about that or anything else
but i treat it like it's not real
and my experiences just don't
they just don't seem
like they could possibly be coincidental
it just doesn't seem like it i don't i
don't know what to think of that
but
those people who have said to me
this is just anecdotal of course
that as soon as they feel they're in the
simulation and they start using things
like affirmations to
author the simulation
they report that they get good results
but of course
that's anecdotal
so elon musk
weighed in on this thread
so somebody named michael kersey
tweeted this um this is just the second
part of his tweet
he said pharmacological dark matter
uh and he's talking about
a phenomenon in
among uh important people
so he's just giving it a name
pharmacological dark matter so basically
the stuff we don't know
is invisible heavy amphetamine and other
drug use among people playing
significant roles in our society
now you've heard me say that right
the the people who are doing the most
moving and shaping of civilization
mostly on drugs
it wouldn't happen otherwise
and
i
you know don't take drugs
like and i mean it
don't take drugs
i mean and you know the only only time
you should is if you're under a doctor's
care and even that is probably too much
so i'm not encouraging it i'm just
saying it's a fact and i and ignoring it
feels stupid
it just feels stupid to ignore it
the fact is
there's some people and and here's the
dangerous part everybody responds to
chemistry differently
so there might be a drug that simply
makes one person rich
because it just makes them perform
better and they never have a side effect
or one they care about
and then another person it just kills
them
it just freaking kills them or makes
them crazy or ruins their life one way
or the other so don't take drugs because
you don't know which which one you are
you don't know if you're the one the
drug is going to kill or the drug is
going to help you
we're just not that smart
because it you know we're all different
so
anyway so michael kersey weighs in on
this about the significant role and then
uh
then mark andreessen
one of the most important voices in the
tech world
um tweeted this he said everyone thinks
our pr our present society was caused by
social media
i'm wondering whether adderall plus
ubiquitous google searches have bigger
effects now i don't know about the
google search part
but
here's one of the most connected people
in silicon valley
and then the tech world who would
personally know
the most important people in society so
you know this is somebody who's been in
the room and
has the the phone number to text pretty
much anybody famous
i think at this point
and he's telling you that he thinks
adderall
may be shaping civilization
or
things like it i'm not saying adderall
specifically
but
you should take that as things like it
you know amphetamines
um and then alex cohen tweeted this he
said prescribed psychedelics will
replace amphetamines and ss our eyes
over the next decade although i hope is
sooner than that he said
and then musk
gets into this
tweet and he tweets
i've talked to many people who were
helped by psychedelics and ketamine
more people were helped by psychedelics
and ketamine than ssris and amphetamines
and then he added related to this
he said and this is not me talking
so i'm just reporting what he said all
right so these are not my words he said
adderall is an anger amplifier avoided
all costs
now here's the interesting thing
as jeff pilkington pointed out
in some tweets everybody's different
that's what i said earlier right
i'm pretty sure that adderall has saved
lives
but i'm pretty sure it's
it's caused some problems
i think both of those can be true
so it's a it's a little bit um
let's say it's a
a really good example of free speech
both its negatives and his positives you
don't want to be getting medical advice
from elon musk
that might be his weakest category
i mean he
is insanely smart on a whole variety of
things that allow him to do what he does
but i think the medical part might be
the part where you go yeah you get a
second opinion there
yeah usually when when musk says
something i'm usually done it's like
okay i agree with that there's nothing
else to say
but i think in this in the medical
domain
uh let's let's be glad that there is
free speech because he can say this
if you looked at the comments there
would be a whole bunch of people pushing
back
and i say
okay
that's a really good example of free
speech working
somebody's asking if i'm on adderall i'm
not
so i've never been on any kind of
long-term
stimulant except coffee
or sativa i guess
but
i will i've said this before so but in
college
i had a few experiences with
stimulants
and i wrote my entire senior thesis in
like
i think it was like mostly over a
weekend
and then i was done with the semester
and
it was actually easy
and i enjoyed it
think about that
i did a semester of work in four days
got a reasonably good grade on it i
think a b-plus or something
and
i did it in four days and i liked it it
was it was completely pleasant
it was a horrible job like just the most
boring
it was like in economics
so it was a senior thesis in economics
you know how boring that was
and i enjoyed the whole thing
now
how many um
how many unicorn companies have been
created by people who had a little
stimulant going on
how many
probably a lot
right
probably a lot
and uh it is one of the great untold
stories
anyway
um
michael schellenberger who is running
for governor as an independent in
california i understand there was some
issue in it in terms of the paperwork
uh i got to look into that a little bit
but um
how would you like to be running for
governor
and part of your accomplishments just
happened
which is schellenberger was i think the
loudest most effective voice
for trying to save um the diablo canyon
nuclear power plant in california and
the reasoning was it's already there
it's cost effective and we don't have
any green way to replace it
and we'll just run out of energy if we
don't keep it open
a pretty straightforward argument
and apparently
he
um
the great weight of public opinion
moved shelling berger's way
is that a coincidence or did he cause it
because remember he was testifying to
congress he was he was writing books and
articles on it
he was the most famous voice on this
topic
i think he caused it
i think he caused it
so he's running for governor while the
current governor is saying that he's
going to look to get some money from the
federal funds
that was allocated by biden and i'll
give biden credit for this
for keeping nuclear power plants open
longer than they would have been
so the governor is looking at
implementing the plan that the governor
didn't want to do
but shellenberger convinced the entire
country that they need to do it
and now he kind of has to do it
i would hate to be running against
schallenberger in this situation
honestly i know i've never seen a more
capable
politician
in terms of you know competence about
the actual topics that matter to the
state
it's sort of breathtaking because we've
never seen it before i'm pretty sure
we've never seen this before
we've we've had some presidents who were
a little wonky you know like jimmy
carter and stuff but not like this
like carter wasn't
didn't have this kind of mastery over
the exact topic that the state cared
about
and several of them from homelessness to
drug addiction to he's talked about
forest management
basically everything we care about he
has he has the better solution for
all right here's the most provocative
thing that i've read lately
we all assume at this point that russia
will have its way with ukraine
in the comments where are you feeling as
of today
like what do you feel today
is russia going to have its way
all right
so i'm seeing mostly yeses
some people saying they'll just take the
east of ukraine
all right
now i will remind you that in war
nothing is
predictable so
among the unpredictable unpredictable
things that could happen
i tweeted this
and i feel terrible because i want to
mention the author and the publication
because i liked it so much but i can't
find it in my own tweets for some reason
maybe i imagined i tweeted it
yeah maybe i imagined it
but uh if somebody sees it maybe you can
tell me in the comments if i did tweet
it and you see it
um it was an article by somebody who
definitely looked like they knew what
they're doing there's somebody who had
predicted in writing and could show the
receipts
that the
uh
the moskva that ship would be sunk by
the ukrainian anti-ship missiles so
that's a pretty good prediction somebody
had that specific prediction that
happened
and then when i read the article seemed
to know quite a bit about the whole
situation so
i don't know how to judge
military experts because we've seen so
many of them being so wrong about so
many things
but i'll give you his argument
and i'd love to see
how wrong it is it goes like this
we're all focusing on the fact that the
fighting is in
don bass and the other name starts with
l that i can't remember
and
we're taking for granted that russia
already owns crimea
because they got annexed in
2014 something like that
so yeah so so luhansk is the other
region
so we're ignoring crimea right because
that's that's a done deal russia already
owns it
here's the part i didn't know about
they barely own it
they do own it
their military is there it's theirs
but apparently if you're looking at it
from a military perspective
their connection to crimea is one bridge
and one poorly defended area
and and you if you take out the bridge
which seems totally doable right ukraine
can take out a bridge they've got
missiles
um drones and whatnot
and then
apparently the ukraine military is
actually pretty good they have better
equipment they
according to this expert they win their
fire fights
so when it's
when it's something like a a fair fight
the ukrainians almost always win because
they're better trained and better
equipped it's only when they're you know
overpowered by artillery or something
that they get crushed
so
um
the thinking is that the ukrainian
military could
take out not only the
the thin
connection between the main russian
forces and crimea
they could take out the bridge
and then
they can just take crimea
because it would probably be poorly
defended
because the most the strongest defenders
are where the fighting is and the
fighting is not happening in crimea
and i'm thinking
that would be a shocker
what if ukraine just tried to hold the
line
and just keep the main russian army
pinned down and just take crimea back
what would that do to the russian
psychology
it would look like russia lost the war
i mean the war wouldn't be over they'd i
mean russia could maybe just take it
back
not i mean wouldn't be easy
but what would that do to the whole
balance of everything i mean that would
be a great
at least a diversion
i mean at the very least it would be an
interesting diversion
and the idea is that russia would have
trouble equipping and resupplying crimea
because they could get cut off
but that ukraine would
you know because they have a border
there and stuff
they'd break out the tactical nuke if
that happens somebody says
would they
because it seems to me that a tactical
nuke would guarantee that putin is taken
out of office
what do you think
i would say that right now
it looks like he might be
you know at great risk maybe 50 50
proposition but if he used a tactical
nuke
i think that's the end
am i wrong
there's no way he could survive it
politically if not
his life
right because don't you think that there
there's somebody who's like number two
or three
in the
potential takeover chain
that the cia has already said you know
i know you're only number fourth or
fifth in the potential chain of command
but if the other people disappeared
and we made sure that you were well
treated
do you think you'd like to step up to
the number one job
i know i think that if a tactical nuke
got used it would be easy to turn people
within russia
really close to putin against him
because they would say okay this is a
clean win if i take putin out
under these conditions i'll even have
internal support
because i think i think you could
overthrow putin and still have public
sport in russia
if he used a nuke
or the other possibility is that russia
is now so
so pro-putin that they'd say oh that's
strong
you know we like it that you were strong
maybe
i don't know how to read the russian
mind
but it was certainly it would certainly
turn enough people against uh putin that
he'd be in physical danger much more
than he is now
now here let me throw something into the
mix
that
feels different so you know the biden
administration is asking for correct me
if i'm wrong 33 billion
more for ukraine
which is a gigantic step up in
in military sport
do you know what that sounds like to me
it sounds like the administration is
planning to win
as in win the war
it doesn't look like they're playing for
a stalemate
it doesn't even look like they're
playing
to just you know push them out of the
east or something
i feel as if the biden administration
feels like they could win
because
every day that the russians don't
you know have some crushing victory on
the east
is a day that you say to yourself
huh
maybe that ukrainian defense is better
than we thought and they're not gonna
the ukrainian defense isn't gonna quit
now
because the good equipment is just
coming in and apparently they don't have
any manpower shortage
they had they had more volunteers to
fight than they had equipment to give
them
so if ukraine doesn't run out of people
to fight
and they're getting more equipment not
less
does the 33 billion signal that the
biden administrations thinks they can
win outright
because i feel like it does
now i don't think that means that they
think it's a sure thing or anything like
that but i feel like they went from you
know let's see how we can make this
painful for putin
to let's finish off the russian army
i i think they want to finish the
russian army
or at least you know
take it down by 50 percent because
putin's down 25 right
i never understood that if that's his
entire military 25 degraded or that was
just what's in that area
i've not i've not heard that clarified
so
um
about 20 billion to replace the weapons
we gave them from the army
okay
oh i see so we'd be replacing our own
weapons with a 33 billion
okay that does look a little different
those numbers are wrong which numbers
are wrong they're 33 billion if all it
is is replacing our own equipment then
it doesn't look like a step up does it
so give me a give me a fact check on
that
that
replacing our own military equipment
would not look
like a step up
so he says not true
are we giving it directly to ukraine
all right well i guess we'll look into
this
but the point is
if it's a major escalation
if that's what that budget is telling us
then i think the binding administration
actually feels they could win
define win
put putin out of power
um and get org or and or
get the russian military to
completely get out of ukraine completely
now of course nobody wins because
everybody's everybody lost in this
situation
but
that would look like a win to me
all right
i was asked to tell you about how we're
entering the golden age
well
um
someone's asked me why i didn't have
kids and do i regret it
uh let me ask you that one first
um
i don't regret it
but um
and the reason was
i just didn't want to bring somebody
into the world
because there
are plenty of people in the world and i
never felt a need to propagate my
dna
now does that make me weird
because i feel like there's some kind of
basic human impulse that people have to
propagate their
their dna
but i don't have that
because i didn't enjoy my
my childhood enough
that i would take any chance that i
could put anybody through that again
but if there's somebody who's already
having a tough childhood
and i could help them have a better one
that feels like that's an easy win like
to me that would be satisfying
but to bring somebody into the world and
then have them have a bad life
i couldn't handle that
like my i'm just not built that i could
ever handle that
so i so i take the sure thing
of you know definitely helping humanity
uh extend the light of consciousness i
guess
so he says what a load
there's somebody who thinks that uh i'm
either lying
do you think i'm lying to you or lying
to myself
it could be the one right
i guess there's no way for you to know
is there
but but the thing i thought about the
most is that um
i'd rather
support the people who are already here
that's how i thought of it it could be
that that's a rationalization of some
sort that would be
pretty pretty normal
uh but your child wouldn't have a tough
life yeah no i don't think we're not
talking about uh tough life in terms of
economics
if it were just economics i wouldn't
have worried
but
in terms of you know mental health and
that sort of thing
i'm not so worried about climate change
ruining the world
um i just look around i don't see a lot
of happy people
now here's the golden age part
i'm pretty sure that we're about to wake
up or we are waking up now
to this whole um
what drugs to put in your body and
whatnot and maybe the pandemic helped
with that
because it sort of changed how we see
the medical community you know change
change our opinion about maybe having to
make our own decisions and not depend on
the experts so much which could be good
or bad i guess that could go both ways
but uh yeah i think a big the uh
i would go with elon musk's
thing
that the ketamine maybe
and and of course don't take any
recommendations from me i'm just saying
that these are things that are being
talked about i'm not recommending them
at all
and the psychedelics i do think have the
potential to be civilization changing
absolutely
and because they don't cost much
it's
yeah
let me ask you this
imagine everything that we do now to
make the world a safer place
right we've got the united nations and
and you know we've got the
the hotline to the kremlin so we've got
all these systems and things to make
things safer and avoid war but we still
have the damn wars
right
so i guess those systems are better than
not having them but they're not they're
not really getting it done
but imagine this
this is purely speculative and it's just
it's just a
mental experiment
imagine that if instead of all that
stuff
whenever there was a dispute or even
before there was one
the heads of state would get together
and do mushrooms together
that's it
and then replace everything else with
just that
now of course that will never happen of
course it will never happen i'm not
suggesting that's even
remotely possible i'm just saying if it
did
it would probably end war
do you think
i mean honestly
if you uh just imagine
um
you know it doesn't work if if your
leader is 100 years old so forget about
trump he won't take a drug and forget
about biden he's too old but imagine
desantis
who i imagine is anti-drug so again this
wouldn't happen but it's at least he's
young enough so imagine a president
desantis someday
doing mushrooms with a president putin
who's you know 70 or so and
you know not that old
and and they just like bond and see the
world differently
and
the next thing you know
just war is a lot harder
like it doesn't make sense suddenly
because it would be so much easier to
say you know wait a minute
are you saying that if russia and the
united states simply had to just make
friends
that the same way that germany benefited
by being friends with the and japan
benefited
and
basically everybody every country that
said hey can we be your friend
has benefited substantially
can you imagine sitting in a room and
having the right kind of
you know right kind of let's say
chemical incentive and you just look at
putin and say why are we even doing this
do you do you want to be the greatest
leader that russia ever had
and putin would be well i thought i
already was they say okay okay but you
want to continue being the greatest
leader that there ever was
and putin would say how do you do that
he said
end war
and war would go to space with us
how about that
how about end war
and help and help us go to space and
we'll get some good
asteroids we'll mine some stuff we'll
we'll free your economy to do what it
can do we'll share our technology with
you it'll be awesome you'll be the best
leader that russia ever had you'll
quadruple your gdp
there'll be statues of you everywhere
and you will have ended war
it
i'm telling you the golden age
you just have to accept it
it's right there
it's right there the hard part is
getting people to just pick it up it's
like here it is
here's all of your solutions
all of your solutions we have all the
answers now here they are
and people like i don't know i don't
trust those solutions
um
so here's where the golden age i think
is gonna happen
i think that the energy shock
will cause us to be pro-nuclear in a way
that we had to be
so our energy thing is now on a course
for full correction
it's gonna be slow
but it's now on a very definite course
towards full correction it's gonna be
nuclear
you know energy will go nuclear and
and
through
tesla-like activities it will be also
electric i'm seeing solar so it's going
to be solar and
pretty much just solar and nuclear so i
would say those two things solve climate
change or at least
you know they're likely to be enough to
mitigate the worst problems as long as
we're also mitigating things as we go
it's not the only stuff
so that's better what about the pandemic
horrible horrible thing right
but don't you think we got a lot better
at handling the next pandemic like a lot
better and i and i feel like even though
you think these uh new vaccinations are
killing people some of you think that
um i feel like what we learned from that
could create a platform for everything
from
vaccinations for cancer to vaccinations
for all kinds of stuff
or or we'll find out there was some
problem with it can't rule that out
i'm giving you the optimist feel
that look at the ukraine russia war
does it forever
end the idea that it's a good idea to
attack your neighbor with tanks
fairly not
well i mean
you know up till now
i guess putin still thought it was a
good idea to attack his neighborhood
tanks
and at this point don't you think this
will always be the cautionary tale it's
like okay
all right it doesn't work
i i think afghanistan is bad of a
situation as it was at least it will
always remind us of what kinds of things
not to do again
but ukraine didn't look like afghanistan
they looked like so such different
places that maybe the lesson didn't
transfer
but now you've got you've got an
industrial country you've got you know
backwards country and and neither of
them could be over it could be conquered
by the soviet union or russia
that should mean something
if you couldn't conquer either kind of
country and they're so different
maybe the whole country conquering thing
isn't for you
all right uh what else is good so we're
gonna solve energy
um i think we're safer from
pandemics uh
and i think war looks less likely
i think the biggest problem is inflation
all right let me give you
um the ultimate economic safety
thought are you ready
yeah most of you have some concern i
would think
about inflation and gdp going down and
maybe food shortages and everything else
most of you starting to have a little
anxiety about that right in gas prices
not a little
maybe a lot
so some of you having a lot of anxiety
i'm having anxiety about it
and i'm rich
you know relatively speaking i can't
even imagine how this would feel if i
was just squeaking by
this would feel
like
insanely bad
but let me give you the one positive
thing that i can give you i've told you
before that economics is real
complicated stuff
i have a degree in economics and i'm
confused half the time
but there was one rule that i always
look to that tells me where things are
headed there's just one metric if you
get that one metric right
all the other things can work themselves
out
but if you get the one thing wrong
nothing can work itself out
do you know what the one thing is
employment
employment rate
not even not even raises not even cost
of living adjustments
not unions just the pure number of
people who have jobs compared to the
numbers who want them
and the fact that we have labor
shortages now
so we we could actually use more workers
even immigrants are in demand apparently
with all the immigration we have
it's still hard to get the harvest
picked i think so we're actually
understaffed
i don't know of any situation where you
had close to full employment
where you couldn't work out the other
stuff
you know what i mean
and here here's the math of why that is
so important
the difference between an unemployed
person and an employed person is a
gigantic drag on the rest of the people
right
if somebody is employed and they're
taking care of themselves and maybe
adding something you know to to the
taxes
then that's taken care of but if they're
unemployed
not only are they not adding but they're
subtracting you you have to pay them to
live
or they die
so one unemployed person is really
really expensive compared to almost any
other problem
so if you get that one thing right
the other stuff can be really painful
for a while but
the odds of it working out in the long
run are real good
right so when you're seeing people who
seem to be the most knowledgeable and
experienced about economics and they see
all the things you see you know they're
seeing the inflation they're seeing they
might get worse
they're they're saying everything supply
chain problems you know
china problems blah blah
they see all that but they don't look
like they're panicking do they
have you noticed that
there's no tone of panic even though all
the metrics are sort of awful
because that one thing is right
the jobs
and i think the people who know the most
are sort of just looking at that one and
saying
you know probably much like i do
say okay
as long as that one thing's okay
at least our foundation
is in good shape right the foundation is
strong
then you can work out the rest
uh
mushrooms is tulips yeah
i see what you're saying
labor participation
yes that's a big one as well
um
total employment is still below
pre-pandemic but it's still good
how do you how do we fix blackrock
buying all the single-family homes
the the solution for housing is better
housing
not building the same kind of homes and
reselling them over and over again
there is definitely a way to build a
home for 10 percent of what it costs to
build a home so i
that's i think that's going to be
another part of the
the golden age
i i think that if you got rid of f you
got rid of zoning and you turned it into
a kit
just i've talked about this before but
imagine designing homes
in which all the parts are an even
an even
amount in other words a room in this
house
house of the future
could be it could be 10 by 12
but it could never be
10 by 12 feet and two inches
and the reason is so you'd never have to
cut anything
so if you're putting in the floor you
buy
one foot squares
and you put in as many as you need for
the squares and nothing gets cut
and maybe it's a kit form so everything
snaps together so you could unsnap it
and move a wall if you needed to etc
now
i think that's where it has to go
it's just that nobody has a business
model to make money from making that
the
the old sears kits so i know there's
some there's some historical examples
but those kits i believe you still have
to cut didn't you
or not
i think those were if you imagine what
we could do now compared to what they
could do in those days
i imagine that we could make a kit that
would be way better just way better
and then if you make the uh
if you make the homes with you say
here's how i do it i designed perfect
rooms
and then you could design a house that
used as many of those
preset rooms
in in whatever configuration they fit
and then you can build almost any kind
of a house but you never have to cut
anything you just get a kit and snap it
together
so i think that's where it needs to go
the tough part would be uh i mean i
think you could even do the plumbing
in fact i'll bet you can make a house
that's self-aware
imagine a house that comes as a kit
and then the and each part has a camera
in it
so every part you put becomes alive and
it can see around itself
and then and then it attaches to some
brain so the house could see a leak in
your wall
before you knew it was there
but it could also tell if you'd
assembled it correctly
so you put the new component on and it
becomes alive because it's like
electrically connected to everything
else and it can see around and suddenly
the house knows if you put the thing in
the right place so you put the new piece
on and the house goes beep beep beep
it doesn't belong there you're like oh
darn it's backwards
put it on it goes beep
it knows you did it right
so if you made all the components alive
the house would help you assemble itself
and it would always watch you'd be
watching for any defects and it would
warn you
every time all right just an idea that
ladies and gentlemen is the best show
ever i think i
delighted and entertained you
probably some of you are about to start
one of the best days ever
and i think
that you would agree
that
today
is the beginning of the rest of your
life
no it's true
i read it in a greeting card once so i
know it's true and that is all i have to
say to you on youtube i'll talk to you
tomorrow
