Episode 1470 Scott Adams: Hidin' Biden's Botched War, China Badness, and Persuasion Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Biden didn't know, or lied about Afghanistan?
"Botched" Afghanistan withdrawal
China, Afghanistan partnership
Massive rare minerals in Afghanistan
NASA and rare mineral asteroids
Russia and China JOINT military exercises?
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I'm seeing a question on the Locals platform as I signed on.
It says, if Scott is a simplifier, why is it so complicated to do this live stream?
And the answer is, it avoids simplification like nothing I've ever seen.
I'm up to something like 17 steps on a checklist just to turn this on.
And do you think that I can ever do 17 steps on a checklist the same?
Nope. Nope.
So, sometimes this is the best you can get.
But you know, if you'd like to make everything better, and I think you would, what do you need?
Oh, well, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Everything except Afghanistan.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Oh.
Ah, that's so good.
Yes.
So, so good.
Well, let me summarize all of the news.
China sucks.
That's it. That's the whole news.
Now, there are details. I'll tell you all the ways that China sucks or is dangerous to us, but it's all just that.
China sucks. And there are lots of ways to express it.
Let's start first with Larry Elder running for governor of California, and I've been trying out some persuasive slogans that he could use.
So here are two I tested today.
Somebody, not me, came up with this.
It's on some signs in Southern California.
It says, we have a state to save.
So that's one choice for Larry Elder running for governor in the recall election.
We have a state to save.
Or, make California livable.
Make California livable.
So we have a state to save, 52%.
And make California livable, 48%.
So people like both of those.
But we have a state to save.
Got a little bit more.
And it's not bad.
It's not bad. Somebody says I vote neither.
Well, come up with a better one.
So A-B testing is all about if you have a better idea, let's test it.
All right, I feel as if I need a new category.
I'm going to call it non-surprising news.
Non-surprising news!
Things which are news, but since you knew they were going to happen, why are they news, really?
So, keep California alive.
I'm seeing some suggestions here.
Save our state.
About Time for Better.
Yeah, those are all pretty good, actually.
Our Golden Opportunity.
Free California. Got some good ideas here.
All right. So here in non-surprising news, the infrastructure bill's in trouble.
Is it just the same news every day?
Let me make a prediction.
For the news any day next week.
Pick a day next week. Tuesday.
Tuesday next week.
Prediction. The infrastructure bill will be in trouble.
Let's just see if I'm right.
I mean, wilder things have happened.
But this time, apparently, the Republicans are going to propose a bunch of amendments that are politically embarrassing for the Democrats.
Okay. Meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to decompose as Afghanistan falls apart.
Jake Sullivan is reporting that Biden didn't think it was, quote, inevitable that the Taliban would take control.
Joe Biden didn't think it was inevitable that the Taliban would take control.
Is that true?
You know, if I had seen this report and they'd said it about Trump, I would tell you it wasn't true.
Right? I mean, if you've watched me long enough, you know I'd say, I don't think that happened.
Unless you hear it with your own ears.
Do you think Trump would ever say that?
But do you think Biden would actually say that?
He said it in a video.
Oh, so we do have a record of it?
It's not a video from July.
Well, July, of course, was a little different.
I mean, things change quickly.
But it's almost unbelievable, except that he said it on a video, apparently, I'm being told.
If it had not been on a video, I don't know if I'd believe it.
It's so crazy.
I'll bet there's not one person here who didn't know it.
I mean, it was reported as inevitable, wasn't it?
Didn't the news sort of say it was inevitable?
I mean, I don't know anybody who said it wasn't.
Was he really the only person who thought that?
Well, here's the other possibility.
The other possibility is he was lying.
Remember, Biden ran for president so he'd be the honest one?
Do you think he was being honest when he said it's not inevitable that the Taliban would take over?
I doubt it. Because if he knew it was inevitable, he couldn't leave.
So I think he has to...
I think he had to lie.
And maybe Trump would have, too.
Maybe any president would have.
Because the only way to get from here to there was lying.
Suppose he had told the truth.
The truth would have been, we're going to pull out of Afghanistan and leave our allies to be slaughtered.
Could he say that? Yeah, you know, it's really tragic.
Our allies will be slaughtered.
The country will go to hell. We've wasted 20 years and a trillion dollars.
But I'm going to pull out anyway because it's good for America.
That was the truth, right?
He just couldn't say it.
So the whole point of hiring an honest president, which is what the Democrats believed they were doing, well, that didn't work out.
He's obviously... I would say this is an obvious lie.
Because I don't believe that Joe Biden didn't know it was going to be inevitable.
Do you? How many of you believe that?
If you had to choose between those two hypotheses, he was lying because it was the only way to get it done.
Just the only way to get it done, politically.
Or he actually was the only person in America who didn't know it was inevitable.
Which one of those do you think is true?
I would go for the lie. Yeah.
But, weirdly, I don't criticize him.
Isn't that weird? I'm not criticizing him for lying.
You know, we hire leaders and we put them in these positions where sometimes they have to lie to give us what we want.
Sometimes they have to lie to give us what we're asking for.
And this was an example.
They had to lie to us To make us feel okay doing this.
Because it was going to be horrible to our allies.
Okay. I call that an acceptable lie.
CNN has turned on Biden and actually used the term botched about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Now, I feel like that's something we can all agree on.
This would be the one time that the country could completely come together.
This was botched.
It was botched. And I would say the same thing, no matter who the president was.
This is as botched as you can get.
And I don't know who's to blame, but it looks pretty bad.
Apparently Biden said ahead of time he wanted to avoid a Vietnam-like scene with helicopters taking people off a roof.
Well, he did not do that.
It's worse than that.
I don't know if you've seen it yet, but there's a video...
That's really bad.
There's a video of a U.S. plane taking off from Kabul.
The airport is swarming with people who are trying to escape the country.
And some people held on to the outside of the plane.
Let me say that again.
Some people held on to the outside of the plane.
And it took off.
And you could actually see one of the bodies falling.
I don't know how many there were.
I could see one clearly.
They wanted to get out of there so badly they held on to the plane after it took off.
Just think about that.
That's a level of desperation that's hard to comprehend.
It's hard to wrap your brain around that.
That's just so horrible.
But do you remember General Milley when he was talking about all the wokeness in the military that he likes?
He likes that wokeness.
And Do you remember what I said about him when he got a little TV time?
Does anybody remember me telling you that General Milley looked like the dumbest person in the world?
He looked like the dumbest person in the world.
And I was talking about a different topic.
I wasn't talking about Afghanistan.
But is this the guy who's responsible for that?
Is he the one responsible for this?
Because it looks like it.
It looks like the guy who looked like the dumbest person in the world actually was.
He is as dumb as he looked.
Right? I mean, you remember I called that out, that he just looked low IQ. Now, I don't say that about people I dislike politically, right?
Have you ever heard me say that?
I mean, Biden's a special case because of his age and stuff.
But you don't hear me saying that the people I disagree with are stupid.
Right? I don't do that.
Lots of times they're brilliant.
AOC, for example, I think is brilliant.
I just disagree with her on a lot of stuff.
But this General Milley, he just actually did look dumb.
I mean, he just oozed the dumbness.
And it looks like maybe he's responsible.
I don't know. Now, we've got a lot of blame to spread around.
Biden, of course, joint chiefs, our intelligence people, the politicians, a lot of blame.
But I feel like this guy might have most of it.
Well, China is already announcing that it wants to work with the Taliban and help them develop Afghanistan.
A question you might ask yourself is, hmm, has the Taliban heard about the Uyghurs?
Hmm. Or do they even care?
Hmm. You know, is the Taliban a genuine organization, meaning that it's really about their beliefs?
Or is it just another political group that wants power and they're just using their beliefs to get it?
Well, they're working with China, and China is putting people who believe what they believe in prison camps.
So they're not operating on principle, clearly.
They're operating on some kind of self-interest model.
But I'm wondering if this isn't Biden's secret plan to destroy China because can somebody give me a history lesson here?
Is it true or just one of these fake news kinds of things when people say that the Soviet Union fell in part because of Afghanistan?
Is that true? Or is that just bad history?
Somebody give me a quick history lesson on this.
Only true for the army, as you're saying.
But did Afghanistan contribute to the fall of the Soviet Union in any significant way?
I'm seeing some truths, but I always wonder if that's like fake news.
Maybe it was exaggerated, how much impact that had.
How could it not?
Yeah, I mean, it was expensive, so that alone.
Yeah, so I'm seeing some no's.
I'm not entirely convinced that that was the biggest part of why the Soviet Union fell, but maybe it was part.
So here's the good news.
China, working with the Taliban, is not going to be easy.
And, of course, China is going to need to dominate them, because it tries to dominate everything.
And, of course, the Taliban is going to want to dominate, too.
So how in the world do they get...
How do they work together? How in the world could that work?
Maybe. But it looks like a secret plan to destroy China by letting them work with the Taliban.
Now, of course, as many of you know, China's interest is probably further cornering of the rare minerals market.
How many of you know that Afghanistan is probably about the rare minerals?
They seem to have a lot of them.
And China has cornered the market on a lot of the rare minerals that the United States needs.
So if we want to be a technology power in the future, we need those rare minerals, and China's going to control them.
In Afghanistan and everywhere else.
Yeah, there's one trillion estimated to be there in REM, whatever that is, REM. And their minerals are easily available.
Well, easily. Meaning in terms of mining it's easy.
In terms of bullets flying around, not so much.
So the rare mineral question is a big one.
Now here's Adam Dopamine tweeted this today.
That NASA is studying an asteroid that also has rare minerals in it.
So if we can get to the asteroid with all of its minerals, not all of them are rare, but Some of the good ones are.
Here's NASA's estimate of the value of this one asteroid, if we could get to it.
$700 quintillion.
That's the mineral value of one asteroid.
$700 quintillion.
Do you understand why billionaires are going to space?
Billionaires are going to space...
To become quintillionaires.
That's right. Probably somebody, and it may be the next generation of billionaires.
I don't know if we can get there in the next generation.
But at some point, some billionaire is going to land a mining expedition on an asteroid and become a quintillionaire.
A quintillionaire would run the world, wouldn't they?
If you had a quintillion dollars, and of course that's impossible because you couldn't add that much to the economy without everything changing, but there could be a real rich quintillionaire, maybe a trillionaire, So that's one of those black swan, you don't see it coming, could change everything situations, but it's not going to help us in the near term.
So we better figure out how to get some rare earth minerals.
Biden's approval is at its lowest point, I guess, according to Rasmussen, Rasmussen poll.
But I wonder if it could go lower, because I don't think it can.
Do you? I don't think there's anything that Biden could do that would get him below about what it is, give or take a point.
Because I feel like the country is so divided that every president has a lower limit and they just can't go lower than that.
Because that means their best supporters would change.
And you're really only getting a slice of the independence and that's about it.
So I don't think his approval will go lower than it is.
It's as low as anything he can get.
This is a Matt Walsh tweet that I thought summed up Afghanistan as well as I could have ever hoped to say it, but he said it better.
His tweet, he said, an Afghan army of 300,000, which had been equipped and trained by the U.S. for 20 years, fell in two days to a gang of medieval terrorists who they outnumbered three to one.
And then he said, we can't indefinitely sustain a country that has absolutely no will to exist in the first place.
Exactly.
You can't help Afghanistan if they don't have the will to fight for their own whatever.
Now apparently they have plenty of will to be Taliban.
Whatever the Taliban is doing is working.
Now, by the way, do you know, and I haven't seen any reporting on this, but are you aware that the bad guys, and ISIS was the famous one for this, they would take some kind of drug that would make them fearless in battle?
I think it was a narcotic?
But they commonly took some kind of drug that made them impervious to fear, which made them impossible to beat.
Because you couldn't make them afraid by killing a lot of them.
They just keep coming.
So I think that drug is a big part of the story of why a smaller force could beat a bigger force.
But yeah, why were we in a country that didn't have the will to sustain itself?
It really didn't. It didn't have any interest in being its own country, it looked like.
Max Abrams had a funny tweet about this.
He said, I think the CDC was supplying Biden with intel about Kabul.
Is there any large public organization that is not thoroughly discredited?
Is anybody left?
What would be a major American organization, let's say a public organization, that still has any credibility?
I would say the military still does.
Would you agree?
Our military leaders got some explaining to do, especially this week.
But the military itself, I would say, is still credible.
Supreme Court?
We don't like the decisions sometimes, but I would say it's still credible.
So I think the Supreme Court and the military...
Are holding the country together.
That's what I think.
That's what it feels like. Well, the police, yes.
I think the police are still credible, right?
Would you agree? I mean, you could march all you want about individual tragedies that happen that should never have happened.
But I think the police are still a credible organization.
You aren't credible if half the country doesn't trust you.
Well, who would that refer to?
Not the teachers' unions, not Intel, not the government, not Congress, not the CDC, not the World Health Organization.
Credibility is pretty hard to come by these days.
Speaking of credibility, White House Press Secretary...
I saw a Joel Pollack tweet on this.
So Jen Psaki is taking her vacation at the same time that Biden's on vacation, which makes sense.
Or does it? Does it make sense that the spokesperson would be on vacation at the same time as the president?
I guess it could go either way.
But... What could be a worse look than the worst botching of international anything we've ever had in a president who's on vacation?
That's the worst look.
Now, there's some reporting that it's Jill Biden who's the one who kept Joe Biden from talking in public sooner.
I wonder if that's true. Again, that's the kind of news I don't believe, you know, just on the surface.
But who knows?
So, have you ever felt more leaderless than this?
Isn't this the most leaderless you've ever felt?
Like, I don't really think anybody's in charge right now.
Do you? I mean, literally, who's in charge?
Because nobody really believes that Biden has full control of anything.
And when he's on vacation, it just sort of raises that question.
Literally, who's in charge?
I don't know who's running the country right now.
What would stop China from taking over Taiwan tomorrow?
Could you imagine a better time to do it?
Now, I don't think it's going to happen, because, I mean...
That would get pretty bloody pretty fast.
But if they were looking for an opportunity to do it, what's better than this week?
Now, I don't think it'll happen.
And it would be horrible if it did.
But we put ourselves in a bad situation here with our allies.
So we do have to worry about that.
Apparently, speaking of how bad China is, I guess they work with...
So in Dubai, there's some reporting that there's a black site that China uses to capture their dissidents and interrogate them and stuff in other countries.
So of course China has its own black sites within its country to interrogate people in the worst possible way.
But apparently they have one in Dubai.
Or at least in the country there.
But So, that's pretty bad.
And why is it that any Islamic country would deal with China?
What's up with that?
Why would any Islamic country deal with them?
They are literally trying to erase Islam, at least within China, and anything that they control.
Here's the weirdest story.
Russia and China did joint military exercises.
Did you know that Russia and China had any kind of military coordination?
Did you know about that?
Clueless, Scott, there's never any infighting.
I understand.
No. I'll tell you that there's nothing that annoys me more than somebody telling me I don't understand something that everybody understands.
A comment that I'll get is, Scott doesn't understand that rain clouds create rain.
And I think everybody understands that.
Scott doesn't understand that if you run over a squirrel with a car, it's going to hurt the squirrel.
Actually, I do understand that.
So whatever it is you think about my opinion, probably not because of that.
So don't tell me what I don't understand, especially when there are easy things to understand.
So Russia and China did this joint military exercise, which experts say was probably just a complete waste of time.
Because apparently if you're doing joint military exercises, if you do choreographed stuff, it's sort of just for politics and show and propaganda.
So you need what they call the free-range things where the military people can make decisions and then see what the other people do and then maybe you learn something.
So it wasn't that kind.
So it wasn't the useful kind of military exercise.
It was more for show. But why in the world are Russia and China coordinating?
On what? On what exactly?
Now, there was some thinking that it was about terrorism.
But do they really need to coordinate military for terrorism?
I mean, how much terrorism is going to happen in either one of those countries?
Seems like they would just handle it with their own militaries no matter what.
So it's probably just good politics that Russia and China, because they're neighbors, that they work together on as many things as they can figure out to work together.
It's probably good for both of them.
But here's my take on all of this.
Russia should have been our ally.
Russia should be our ally against China.
Now, that's probably too hard for them to do because they're right, you know, they have a border.
But we need to find some way that Russia's on our side militarily.
And it's hard for me to believe that there's so many things that Putin wants that we don't want that we couldn't find some way that we're both better off.
Because I feel like Russia, they're dealmakers.
Now, maybe you can't trust them.
That's a separate issue, right?
Maybe they make a deal and you think they'll break it.
But they're dealmakers.
And I can't see any scenario in which we're not better off working with Russia instead of against them.
Now, China is a different story.
If we worked with China for the long run, they would be trying to dominate us.
And it would probably be dumb to even try.
But I think Russia just has interests that are common with ours, or could.
I mean, right now we're spending all our time with these cyber attacks against each other.
Why? Why?
It's because we're trying to suppress Russia.
Why? Because we think that they're trying to do bad stuff to us because they are.
Why? Why? Basically, any dispute between Russia and the United States is completely about what the other one did yesterday.
It has nothing to do with our strategic interests, I don't think.
I don't think. Because I don't see Russia wanting to conquer Europe, right?
I mean, there are some disputes about Russian-speaking territories and You know, we have to deal with that.
But the bigger picture, I just think we don't have enough not in common.
So that's just my take on that.
And then on election fraud.
Let's talk about election fraud.
As I keep telling you, every day that goes by without...
Every day that goes by without confirmation of any kind of election fraud probably means there's less likelihood we'll ever find it.
Do you agree with that general statement?
That the longer we go without finding any fraud, the less likely it is there.
Would you agree? Now, I know there's some things that they can't look into.
There's some stuff that can't be audited, etc.
Or let me put it a different way.
Because, yeah, you don't know what you don't know.
So I guess you could never know that there's something hiding in there because you can't audit it all.
But certainly they haven't found it yet.
How many would disagree with this statement?
We would know by now if the audit found the goods.
We would know by now, even though they haven't officially announced it.
How many agree with that? We would know by now, because of a leak, if they had the goods.
Almost all of you are disagreeing.
Oh, I like this.
This is fun. I saw probably, but almost all of you are disagreeing.
Interesting. Well, I like that.
That's fun. Because then you can see how good my predicting is.
So can we say that we have opposing predictions?
So my prediction is that no election fraud has been found, massive election fraud, has been found yet.
So I'm not talking about whether something is found still in the future.
I'm saying that as of right now, my prediction is that nothing will come to the surface that has been found already as of this date.
Anybody want to take the other side of that?
Who would take the other side of that bet?
So my bet is that nothing has been found that's massive fraud that can be proven so far.
Let's see in your comments.
It will never be enough.
Correct. Probably right.
Agree. Not taking that bet.
Agreed. I'm seeing a little bit of capitulation here.
Have you ever heard that word capitulation in terms of the stock market?
Yeah, that's what it looks like.
It looks like capitulation.
I feel as if the people who were, let's say, optimistic, if you could call it that, That the audit would find massive fraud.
I feel like you're losing your optimism now, right?
Now keep in mind, this was my prediction.
Yeah. You reframed it.
Yeah, I did change the question, right?
Is he reading Locos comments or YouTube?
Both. I can see them both.
So I was getting more comments on Locos agreeing with me.
There's a timing difference.
If you do a comment on locals, I see it almost immediately.
If you do a comment on YouTube, I think there's maybe a 20-second delay or something.
They have found fraud, but they need the routers to prove it.
Somebody says no. That would be they haven't found fraud.
If you still need something to prove it, you haven't found it.
We always had suspicions.
You know, there were plenty of things that looked sketchy.
But if you still need something to prove it, you haven't found it.
That's my point.
Now, does that mean it's not there?
Let me say again my overall opinion of the election.
The election is designed to hide fraud.
The election is designed to hide fraud because you can't audit parts of it with the digital part.
That's a design choice.
It's not an accident.
So if you design something to hide fraud...
And it's a high-value target, and lots of people are going to try because it's a high-value target.
The one thing you can say with certainty is that at some point, it will be subject to fraud.
You just don't know if it happened already.
The only thing you don't know is if it happened already.
Now, that's a mystery we need to solve, and it looks like we're not going to solve it, at least in terms of not going to find any evidence.
Scott apparently doesn't realize his YouTube show has an inherent delay.
Now, you may have missed my mocking from just a moment ago, in which I said, why do people tell me what I don't know?
Scott doesn't know that YouTube has an inherent delay.
Yeah, I do know that.
I do know that.
Now, you could call it inherent or any other word, but I know that the system has a delay.
Let's see.
I'm going to have to run it a little bit.
I've got something I've got to do.
But is there any news that doesn't involve China being bad?
Do you notice that?
How much of our news has to do with China?
A lot, right?
China is either directly or indirectly, either by, you know, we have to compete with them, or something about climate change is changing our energy policy, and our fentanyl, you know, our homeless and fentanyl, and deaths is about China, the COVID is about China, the Afghanistan is about China.
It's all about China.
Stop Asian hate.
Stop Asian hate?
Where did you see Asian hate?
Did you imagine that you saw some of that there?
You know the United States has tons of Asian Americans, all patriots.
And you know it has nothing to do with that, right?
You know, one of the things about...
You might not be American, whoever said that.
Yeah, that could be a China troll.
You're right. But let me explain America.
We're not really about that.
In terms of our, you know, our, let's say, our point of view about the outside world.
It's not anti-Asian.
The United States is a bunch of mutts.
We're just a bunch of stuff thrown together.
Like, that's not our deal here.
It's about the government.
The Chinese people? Tremendous people.
How many Chinese-American friends do you have?
I've got lots. Family members?
Family members as well.
So it's definitely not about Chinese people.
Chinese people are awesome.
Chinese government? Well, Chinese government?
Not so awesome. And I think the Chinese people would agree with most of that.
So definitely not about any anti-Asian anything.
We don't do that here. This is not the live stream where you're going to see anti-anything like that.
Somebody says, same with the Iranians.
Love them, but cannot stand the Ayatollah.
Yeah. If you spend...
I don't know why you state each of you are in, of course, but in California, you meet tons of Iranian-Americans.
And what do they mostly have in common?
They're awesome. They're awesome.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems like every time I meet somebody who has some Iranian background, you know, Persian, if you prefer, they're pretty awesome.
I don't know. It seems like a pattern that I recognize.
So it's definitely not about that.
All right. Yeah, I'm talking about...
Our government is pretty crappy these days.
You know, I wonder. Do you think our government is actually crappier?
Oh, look at this rapid test device.
Or do you think that we just know it now?
Because I wonder if anything's ever been better.
I'm seeing on the locals' platform where they can paste pictures into the comments.
There's a COVID-19 rapid test device.
It looks like Chinese lettering on it.
Where is that from? I'd like to know where that comes from.
All right. Okay.
I don't know what some of these comments are about.
But I'm going to go get ready to do something else.
And I'm still working on a micro lesson that I'll post on Locals about managing your ego and embarrassment.
Now, I've done this topic before, but there seems to be a hunger for it.
Because, in my opinion, it's the biggest...
The biggest problem that bothers you is your ego.
You just don't know it. So I'm going to do that fairly soon.
And by the way, part of the reason that my micro lessons have slowed down is I'm having house construction.
And it's noisy here most of the day after I finish this.
So it's just not good for filming during the day.
Or live streaming. Any micro lesson on the imposter syndrome?
