Episode 1481 Scott Adams: Talking About Disgraced President Biden's Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal and Lots More
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Content:
Disgraced and botched
Embarrassing Presidential press conferences
Who's making White House decisions?
Secret Afghanistan agreement?
Defending President Biden's withdrawal
The Generals who strategized Afghanistan withdrawal
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So, here's something we all know to be true.
Inflation is going to be a big problem.
Why is...
I'm just seeing some cutting comments about me there on YouTube.
Why is inflation going to be a big problem in the long run?
Well, we're all good economists.
And we know it's because the government has borrowed so much money.
Which essentially creates money in the marketplace, which means that for the same amount of goods and services, there's more money chasing it, which drives up prices.
And that's inflation, right?
Well, apparently not.
Apparently not. So I learned something today.
I read that inflation indicators are way up today as some kind of 30-year record inflation indicator.
And here are the reasons in this article given for why inflation seems to be up.
Number one, supply chain disruptions from the pandemic.
So you can't get enough stuff.
That means there's less stuff for the same amount of money.
Increased labor costs.
Makes sense. And material shortages, probably also from the pandemic.
And that's caused the number of companies to increase prices, and therefore, there you go.
You've got your inflation. Do you know what's missing from this?
This is what's missing.
That we borrowed a lot of money.
So the three reasons given for why inflation just spiked are temporary.
Right? Because supply chain disruptions are based on the pandemic, and it's easy to assume that those will take care of themselves.
Carpe, I think you're right.
I think you're right. It is not your imagination.
So here's my curiosity.
As I say too often in public, I have a degree in economics, which is important to know if you're new to this content.
But having a degree of economics doesn't help you nearly as much as you think.
Because I look at this and say, why is this story about inflation going up not including the one thing we all seem to think we know is the thing that makes inflation go up?
Instead, it's three somewhat temporary things.
Because we'll get our supply chain back.
Cost of materials will probably go down once the pandemic's over.
And the cost of labor...
Probably is going to go down, too, because there are a lot of people who are out of the workplace because they're getting the free money.
What happens when people don't get free money and they have to go back to work?
Well, then you have more employees competing for jobs, and that should lower the, or at least put a lid on, increases like that.
So, weirdly, it looks like inflation is maybe not a big problem, or at least it's not showing itself to be a problem yet.
We still assume in the long run it will be.
One of the things that Kamala Harris brings to the White House, and I don't think she gets enough credit for this.
You see a lot of criticism of the Vice President, Kamala Harris.
But I don't think that one of her values is being appreciated enough.
And that is that as long as Kamala Harris is the Vice President, it's nearly impossible to impeach Joe Biden.
Because if you impeach Joe Biden, all you got was Kamala Harris.
And if you're a Republican...
Do you want more Kamala Harris compared to Joe Biden?
And as big a disaster as Joe Biden is being, Kamala Harris might be worse.
So, believe it or not, Kamala Harris' greatest contribution, and I have to admit I didn't see this coming, is to be so incompetent and terrible as a leader that you'd rather keep...
A brain-dead pile of organic matter who has just fucked up the most important thing we were doing.
And you'd still rather keep that guy.
That's how good the vice president is by being bad.
So if you want to be a good vice president, be a really bad one.
Because that's what your boss needs.
Keeps you in office. That's one of the mistakes that I think Trump made.
He had a capable vice president...
So you could actually talk reasonably about impeaching somebody like Trump because your backup is a solid, solid performer with a solid record, right?
You might not like his politics, but he's a totally solid guy.
Weirdly, I've been probably one of the biggest supporters of Mike Pence, and I'm not even a fan.
I'm not a fan at all.
But you can't deny...
Well, you could deny it.
We can deny everything.
But in my opinion, Mike Pence is one of the most underrated vice presidents of all time.
He could have walked into the top job.
I think we all agree on that.
He could have walked into the job easily.
And he never caused trouble.
I mean, you know, the stuff at the end was an anomaly, but I think he was a great vice president in terms of doing what a vice president is supposed to do.
I thought Al Gore was good, too, but don't hate me for that.
Here are my two favorite political words, disgraced and botched.
And we can use them both these days.
Because disgraced President Biden botched the Afghan withdrawal.
Yes. Disgraced and botched.
And I'm going to use them whenever I refer to Biden from now on.
I'm going to refer to him as disgraced President Biden who botched the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Okay. As someone pointed out on Twitter this morning when I said that, that we don't use the word disgraced for all politicians.
Sometimes if it's a Democrat, such as Governor Cuomo, he's not called disgraced, he's called embattled.
He's embattled.
He's not disgraced.
He's embattled.
And that would be a CNN, MSNBC kind of a framing.
I don't know which of those use that word.
And how about somebody who's doing a lot of crazy, stupid, incompetent things?
Sometimes it's just controversial.
Yeah. It's not botched.
It's controversial. So there you go.
I'm going to report on this, but I feel like I don't know all the details.
but Sam Harris seemed to be tweeting that he was eating his own tweet, in other words, eating his own words, from January of 20, in which he was expressing some satisfaction that we finally had a good president in President Biden.
Now, you might know, some of you, that early on in the Trump cycle of the presidency, I think he was still running for president, I had an on-air discussion slash debate, but more of a discussion, with Sam Harris.
in which I was saying that he was maybe missing some of the finer benefits of a potential Trump presidency.
And he was very anti-Trump, and we had a long conversation of that, and, you know, People had strong views about how that went.
People who liked Sam Harris and disliked Trump thought he made a monkey of me.
People who liked me and liked Trump thought I made a great presentation to make my point.
But today it appears that Sam Harris is eating his own words about Biden, and I would love to know...
I don't know if he'll talk about this directly, probably.
I would love to know if he thinks...
Trump could have done better.
Because he doesn't say that, right?
He's showing some remorse about Biden, which is a little different from saying that he wanted Trump to be president.
But let me ask you this.
Is there anybody in the world who doesn't believe Trump would have done the Afghan withdrawal better?
Now, of course, he had an earlier deadline.
He had a May deadline, and Biden got that extended, which was good work.
I would say that was good work.
I think we did need to extend the deadline.
And I think probably Trump would have done the same.
So I'm not sure that that's any point of comparison.
Don't you believe Trump would have done this better?
Even if you thought he was bad in every other way, even if you're a Democrat, a big anti-Trumper, don't you believe he would have done this better?
Because I feel like there's no way to know, right?
It's pure speculation. But it feels like it.
I guess we'll never know.
So yeah, the press conference in which Biden talked about it was a plain embarrassment.
Compare this to the types of embarrassment we had when Trump was president and did press conferences.
Were there any embarrassments when Trump did a press conference?
Yes. Yes, there were.
So this, you know, Biden is not the first president who was embarrassing.
Trump was embarrassing, but what's the difference?
Hmm. What is the difference?
Hmm. Oh, here's the difference.
The thing that was embarrassing about Trump never happened.
It was just reported that it happened.
For example, do you remember the embarrassing time that President Trump suggested you should maybe drink bleach to cure your coronavirus?
Very embarrassing.
And it also didn't happen.
It was fake news.
At least 75% of the country believes they saw it with their own eyes and heard it with their own ears.
And it literally never happened.
It's a long story about why you believe that, but it didn't happen.
Same with the fine people hoax.
An embarrassing moment for the president, right?
President Trump embarrassing the country by saying that some of those neo-Nazis were fine people.
Except, it literally never happened.
You think you saw it.
You think you heard it with your own ears.
You even think you went back and watched it again.
But it didn't happen. It literally didn't happen.
It's just fake edits and stuff make it look like it happened.
So I would rather be embarrassed by fake news about a president than I would rather be embarrassed about the actual frickin' thing that happened.
That's a pretty big difference.
So... Here is my advice for Republicans in this delicate period.
Instead of saying things like, I don't know who's in charge, which doesn't really land.
You know, it's just sort of a talking point.
Well, I don't even know who's in charge of the White House, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Let's change that to demand to know who is making the actual decisions in the White House.
See the difference? Demand to know who's making the decisions.
Because the decision was so bad, you need to know, right?
So instead of asking the question, or instead of just speculating in sort of a critical way that, you know, Biden's not in charge, that doesn't really stick, does it?
I mean, we all feel that, so it's true.
Like, it has an element of truth to it, or at least it feels true.
But But it's way stronger if you demand information.
So instead of just making this general claim and let it lay there doing nothing, just demand a full accounting of how the decision was made so you know who's in charge.
Because I don't think we know who's in charge legitimately.
Legitimately, we don't know who's in charge.
Normally, that would be the sort of thing that I would regard as political talking point.
But I feel this is a special case.
I feel that we actually don't know who's in charge.
Am I wrong? I don't feel that that is a biased political statement anymore.
At one point, you could have reasonably said, oh, you're just being a team player.
Biden's not that bad.
He's getting by.
But I'd like to ask Mark Cuban...
So I don't know, Mark, if you ever watch these live streams these days.
But early on in the campaign, Biden versus Trump, Mark Cuban was a solid supporter of Biden and thought that his mental faculties were sufficient to the job.
And that was actually one of the biggest...
One of the biggest points of support for Biden is that, yeah, he looks, when he speaks in public, he looks a little uncertain.
But privately, he's fine.
I don't know if he still believes that, or if maybe there was a rapid decline, whatever.
So I'd love to see Mark Cuban's current updated opinion.
And keep in mind...
I'll say this again.
Mark Cuban is one of the people I consider a smart analyst of public events.
So I'd like to see if he's changed his opinion, because that would be meaningful to me, because I respect his opinion in general on a lot of stuff.
Biden said that he will be hunting down the ISIS-K folks who were behind the attack at the Kabul airport, which killed a lot of people, including American service people.
But when you hear Joe Biden say that he will hunt down ISIS-K, do you say to yourself, will you do it as effectively as you did the withdrawal?
If the context of this is a botched withdrawal, how do you feel about his capability of hunting down ISIS-K in a country that we just got beaten by a bunch of goat herders with...
Well, you know. Do you believe it?
It feels like an empty threat, doesn't it?
But here's the other way to take this.
I'm pretty sure there's a secret agreement going on here somewhere, or more than one.
Do you have that feeling?
Do you feel there's some kind of secret agreement going on?
I don't know what it is, but I'll speculate.
I feel like one of the secret agreements is that we're going to work with the Taliban to kill al-Qaeda and ISIS. Or maybe at least ISIS. Maybe not al-Qaeda.
It could be a split difference.
But I feel like both.
And I feel like who would have a better chance of killing ISIS in Afghanistan?
Who would have a better chance?
Would it be America staying there with what assets we would likely put there?
Or would it be the Taliban on the ground torturing people to get that information about who is left?
I feel like the Taliban could take care of this better than we could.
Because they're not going to cut any corners.
They're going to do whatever is the most brutal way to get rid of ISIS. Because ISIS is their enemy as well.
So, is it possible...
Now, can somebody do a fact check on me?
I need a fact check on this because this is an important point and I'm not confident about it.
Fact check me, please.
True or false, the Taliban does not have international ambitions, meaning the Taliban doesn't want to conquer other countries.
It just wants to be left alone.
Now, it did make a problem protecting al-Qaeda at one point, but at the moment...
I imagine they would see that as a mistake and one that they would not want to reproduce.
And so I'm asking this question.
Have Trump and Biden collectively, because in a sense it was a joint decision over time, have Trump and Biden both made the right move by putting the Taliban back in charge for American interests?
A huge disaster for the Afghan people, I think most of us would agree.
But, well, or is it?
Or is it? If the Taliban can take over so easily, doesn't that suggest that they have more support in the public than we think?
I don't know. I'm not sure about that.
But, anyway, we may have reached a situation where America is better off because the international terrorists, the al-Qaeda's, may be suppressed by the Taliban better than we could have done it.
And I'm just putting that out there as a maybe.
I'm not saying that's true. But you can't really speculate accurately on how any of this is going to go.
It could turn out fine.
Of course, the tragedies that are happening right now are major tragedies.
But in the long run, for American interests...
Taliban in charge might be the best possible outcome.
Because if the Afghan army were in charge, do you think they could take care of ISIS-K? Do you think the Afghan army could have taken care of al-Qaeda?
Apparently not. So the only possible law enforcement we could have over there against these terrorist groups is the frickin' Taliban.
Right? Now, again, I'm way over my...
Let's say competence level talking about any of this stuff.
But it's what it looks like.
And one of the things I like to talk about in the news is what it looks like, even if we don't know what's true.
All right, apparently there are only 1,000 or so of these ISIS-K people in the whole country, and it's pretty hard to find 1,000 people if you're America.
But I don't know if it's hard to find 1,000 people if you're the Taliban and you're on the ground.
We'll find out. All right.
David Sachs, who you should follow on Twitter, a very successful, famous investor in tech stocks and stuff.
But anyway, he said this.
This is one of those things where you see somebody say something, or you hear it, and you say to yourself, okay, that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?
Here's the most obvious point.
For some reason, I didn't think of it until I read it.
And here it is from David Sachs.
I reject the idea that we had to choose between Bagram and the KIA airport.
The Kabul airport.
You keep both assets until the withdrawal is over.
What? Here we're having this big conversation about whether we should have kept Bagram or Kabul.
And then David Sachs says, you idiots, you keep both of them until you're done.
You know why? Because you need two of them.
You need two. Two is better than one.
And apparently the Bagram airport had also a wide perimeter.
It's easier to defend.
So we went from the one that's easy to defend and already had facilities for processing people To one that's impossible to defend because it's in a city center and doesn't have the facilities to process people.
That was a huge mistake.
Huge mistake. There's some of these mistakes that I'm allowing we might find out some information later that would make it not look so bad.
But I don't know what you would find out about this.
To me, I can't imagine any scenario in which David Sachs is wrong.
We should have kept both bases.
Until we're done. Am I wrong that that seems so completely obvious after the fact?
We're all geniuses after the fact.
But obviously, I didn't think of it.
I actually got caught in the...
Have you heard Greg Gottfeld?
He talks about the prison of two ideas.
We like to think like there are two options for everything, because there are two sides.
One side likes this option, the other side likes this option.
Two options for everything. And it blinds you to the fact that there almost always is other options.
And the other option was so insanely obvious, but not until David Sachs tweeted it.
This is the most obvious thing that I didn't think of maybe in my entire life.
It's like, yeah, keep both of them.
All right. Now I'm going to do the impossible.
The country is finally united around our dislike of how Biden has handled this whole situation.
Do you think there is any argument, any argument at all that could be made that would put Biden in a better light given what's happening?
Now you know I'm not a Biden supporter.
Everybody knows that.
But you know what I am?
I'm a president supporter.
Yeah, I can't turn that off.
When Trump is president, I'm a president supporter.
Not just a Trump supporter about some topics, other topics, maybe not so much.
But I'm always a president supporter.
Doesn't matter who it is. Obama, Bush.
Once they're in, it's one thing to fight about it before they get in.
But once they're in, then I'm just an American.
Right? And I just want them to do a good job and such.
So I'm going to do what nobody is doing for our president.
I am going to give him a defense.
Because nobody's doing it.
And I think that just as an American who respects the office of the presidency, forget about the person.
I respect the office of the presidency.
I am going to give him...
The first defense you've ever heard.
It goes like this.
And this defense will only make sense to people who have experience in big organizations.
All right? Big organizations.
If you've ever been in a big organization and you were the head of the organization and you ordered something to happen that was unpopular with the people who had to execute it, what happened?
What happened? Did the people who needed to execute this unpopular order give you all the options accurately?
Because the people at the lower levels are going to try to manage the boss.
Have you ever heard of that, managing up?
It's a thing. It's where the people at the lower level are so sure that the boss is an idiot or they need to make a different decision than the boss is telling them that they will hide information that would help them, they will manage the facts, they will reduce the options and give you only options that look bad for what you don't want to do, what they don't want to do.
Right? Now, before I go on, I want everybody in the comments to look at other people who have experience in big organizations and watch them confirming that this is a normal phenomenon.
It's a normal phenomenon that if people think the boss is making the wrong decision, they will resist in a passive way that you can't quite determine if...
If they're really cooperating, or are they intentionally killing something by doing it poorly?
Now look at the comments.
Because if you don't have experience in big organizations, you don't necessarily believe this is true or common.
What I'm going to add to the conversation is it's common.
That's the important part.
If you don't get that it's common, everything else I say won't have an impact.
I want you to know that it's ordinary, That the boss can't get his way.
Or her way. Now let's put yourself into the Afghan situation.
Do you think that the people on the ground, the military, do you think the military wanted to remove everybody from Afghanistan on the timeline that either Trump or Biden wanted?
Either Trump or Biden.
Doesn't matter which timeline you pick.
Do you think the generals...
Who are looking for jobs in the manufacturing industry, who makes military stuff after they leave Afghanistan.
And they've got other bosses to please, don't they?
They have their current boss, which is the president, but then they also have their five years from now boss, or sooner, that is making weapons, and if you've got a war, you can sell more weapons.
And you can make an argument that it's in the interest of the United States to stay, to keep fighting those ISIS guys and Al-Qaeda.
All right, so here's my defense of Biden.
Goes like this.
Biden... And by the way, you could replace Trump.
You could actually replace Biden and Trump, and you get the same outcome.
This is my speculation here.
Biden or Trump, but it was Biden.
Biden says, we're going to get out of there by this date.
And then the generals give him shitty options.
Well, if you do that, this is going to blow up.
If you do it this way, this will go to hell.
The Taliban will take over.
We'll be embarrassed.
We're going to lose all our weaponry.
Everything's going to fall to hell.
But hey, hey, if that's your order, Mr.
President, we'll start doing it.
If that's what you tell us, we advise against it.
But if that's what you're telling us, we'll start doing it.
And then what do they do? They start botching it.
They slow-roll it.
Have you ever heard that term? Slow-roll?
That's what people do in a corporation when they don't like what the boss told them to do.
Oh, they do it, but they slow-roll it.
Okay, now let's say you're the boss, and you realize that a slow-roll is being played on you.
What do you do? In the comments, those with experience, inform the rest of the people what you do.
You're the leader, you're the CEO, you're the president, and the people below you won't follow your order.
They're slow rolling.
What do you do? Fire everybody.
That's one way to go. Fire everybody.
But what do the next people do?
Probably slow rolling again.
I'm not even sure that would work.
And it would take a while and it would be disruptive and all that stuff.
What's the other thing you can do?
What is the other thing you can do?
Do it anyway. Have you ever seen a leader do this?
All the generals come in and say, if you do this, everybody's going to die.
It'll be the worst thing in the world.
And you know your generals are fucking with you.
What do you do? You tell them to do it anyway.
They tell you the whole world will fall apart if you order us to do this.
But you know they're fucking with you.
They're slow rolling you.
Here's what you do. You tell them to do it anyway by that date and you tell them that if their head's on the ground it's their fucking fault.
And then you'll fire them.
Do it anyway and if you fuck up then I'll fire you.
But, I'll tell you what I'm not going to do, is I'm not going to let you tell me what's going to happen.
You can tell me you'll do it incompetently, but you're going to fucking do it.
Because what's more important is getting out.
And if you can't give me a good way to get out of Afghanistan, if you incompetent motherfuckers who are trying to make this happen, if you won't even give me a good option to get out of Afghanistan, you're going to take the bad fucking option.
And you're going to get out of Afghanistan.
Because let me tell you the thing that's not going to change.
The decision. We're getting out of fucking Afghanistan.
You can do it right or you can do it fucking wrong.
But we're getting out of Afghanistan.
That's leadership. Did that happen?
Maybe. Maybe.
We don't know, right?
Because we don't even know who's in charge.
But if you said to me, what would leadership look like?
It would look like this.
It would look like a botched, disgraced move.
And we might find out someday that his generals were the problem.
And we might find out that he overrode the generals and said, look, this is a leadership decision.
A shit ton of people are going to die, no matter what.
No matter what. Every path, a shit ton of people die.
So the leader says, we're going to take care of the United States, and a shit ton of people are going to die.
Let's take it as a given that every path has a shit ton of people dying.
You can't avoid that part.
So you might as well do what's good for the United States, and you know what that is?
Get the fuck out of Afghanistan.
Messy. If it's the only option you're going to give me, fucking generals.
If you generals will only give me bad options, I'm going to take the bad fucking option.
But I'll tell you the option I'm not going to take is you're in charge.
Because you didn't get elected.
You did not get elected.
If the only way I can get out is messy...
We're getting out messy. Deal with it.
That's leadership. I don't know if that happened.
But you can't rule it out based on what we've seen.
So the big question I would have is, was the military slow rolling him?
Right? If I were an investigative journalist, this is the question I would be digging into.
Was anybody slow rolling him?
Maybe not. It could be everybody was just doing their job as best they could, and the president botched it, and nobody told him he was botching it.
Because here's the part that doesn't make sense, is why the military wouldn't have stopped him from making such a big, obvious mistake.
Because they could have.
They could have, right?
If the president says to the generals, hey, generals, I've got an idea.
Why don't you send the troops out into certain harm for no particular benefit?
Is the general going to follow that order?
No, because it's too obviously stupid.
The general is going to say, other generals, what are we going to do about this?
Better talk to somebody.
That's not a good idea.
But here is this situation where it looks so obvious to all of us, Keep both of the bases open, or at least Bagram, and get the people out before you do blah, blah.
It's so obvious to us, but there were no generals who it was obvious to.
It feels like slightly more likely, based on the little bit we can know about the fog of war that was going on, it feels to me a little bit more likely that they were slow rolling in.
And he did the only thing a leader can do.
You've got two bad choices, and he took the better of the bad choices.
Just tell him to do it anyway, and we'll eat the consequences, which are, in fact, tragic.
All right. That was my defense.
Now, remember, I'm acting as a patriot.
All right? So I'm not taking sides right now.
This is just pure American patriot giving a legitimate defense...
To my sitting president.
No matter who he is.
So I think he deserves a defense.
And I don't know that he could make that defense himself because he'd be calling out his generals, etc.
He probably couldn't make that argument.
Now, again, I don't know if it's true.
I can't assert that it's likely even.
But it feels like it. All right.
We all know that we should follow the data and follow the science, right?
Here are the three worst pieces of advice you'll ever get.
Number one, follow the data.
Number two, worst piece of advice, be yourself.
Always be yourself.
Bad advice. And number two, three, trust the experts.
Worst advice of all time.
Those three things. And you know what's interesting about all three of these?
It's the most common advice we give in the world.
The most common advice is be yourself.
Do you know, if I were myself, I never would have taken a shower in my life.
I would insult people I saw.
I'd be having every disgusting habit.
I wouldn't work hard.
Don't be yourself.
That's crazy.
Try to be better than that.
Try to improve.
Because being yourself would still be a baby.
Didn't you improve? Did you grow up?
Did you get a job?
How about being better than yourself and making that your standard all the time?
Like, is there anybody here who got good enough and you're like, well, I've achieved my full standard of life.
I guess I can be myself now because I'm as good as you can get.
Keep growing, yeah, as I see in the comments.
Keep growing. That's better advice.
But follow the data.
Here's why that's stupid advice, as I've said before, because you can't.
You don't have that skill.
That would be like me telling you, make sure before every decision that you use your psychic powers.
That's good advice, right?
Use your psychic powers to see the future before making any decision.
That sounds like sound advice.
Ah, except we don't have psychic powers.
Follow the data.
Follow the facts.
That's sound advice. Real good advice.
Follow the data. Except we don't have those skills.
We don't know how.
Here's what happens when you follow the data.
You don't agree on ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, masks, lockdowns, vaccinations, or climate change.
In other words, every important decision.
Following the data, and also believing the experts, got us to a point where we don't agree on anything important.
So can you follow the data?
Is that good advice? When we can see plainly it doesn't work for any topic.
There's not a single frickin' topic...
In which following the data helps.
And once you realize that, well, maybe that's a little freeing.
But let's compare that.
So what would you do about a world in which you can't follow the data?
I would suggest that we should have some kind of informal data following experts.
People who are not experts in the fields that these studies are at, But they're experts at looking at data.
They could be economists or statisticians or whatever, some scientists.
But I would love to see some independent, not fact-checkers, not fact-checkers, because fact-checkers aren't smart enough.
They're just journalists researching stuff.
But I'd like to see data-checkers.
A small group of people, let's say a dozen people, who have the kinds of jobs where you could trust that they know how to look at data, at least.
And I want all of them to look at all of our data and say, all right, U12 data specialists.
And I'll say Nate Silver, all right?
So I'm going to throw Nate Silver in there just as one example.
Now, I know you're going to say, hey, he got something wrong, or you don't like him for one reason or another, but that's the type of person you want.
You want somebody with that kind of background.
And I would argue that Nate Silver is pretty objective.
As objective as people can be these days.
So that would be my first thing, is that instead of fact-checkers, we need data analysis experts to just tell us if the data is reliable or not.
Just reliable or not reliable.
That's it. Not a fact-check.
Just reliable or not reliable.
And let me give you an alternative, which I don't understand.
So this is one of those weird things that I think is maybe confirmation bias on my part, possibly.
But I'll throw it out here and let you follow it just for fun.
You know that all the smart people always say, follow the money.
If you're going to predict who murdered somebody, well, find out who had a financial advantage.
If you're going to find out who did any bad thing, find out who had a financial advantage.
So following the money tends to be very predictive.
But it's way more predictive than it should be, because it even seems indirectly predictive.
Let me give you an example.
If somebody murders somebody to get the insurance, that's a direct correlation between the money and the action.
But there are all these situations where it's a little less direct, and they still predict, which is the fun part.
Let me give you an example.
If vaccinations have booster shots, will the pharmaceutical companies that control the data we see about vaccinations, will they make more money or less if booster shots are a good idea?
More money. And indeed, it looks like the data is telling us that booster shots are going to really help.
So could money have predicted that we would need booster shots and we'll need more than just the next one?
Yes. Money would predict that, even though, I'll bet if you dug into it, it would be really hard to find anybody who said, yeah, we're going to do this for more money.
I think you'd find lots of people making independent decisions that in their minds they think actually make sense.
But why is it that follow the money is so predictive?
If all of those other variables are in there, why is that one variable so darn predictive?
Let's give you another one.
Could you have predicted that we would leave so much equipment behind in Afghanistan?
Well, the people who are leaving it behind and therefore wasting money are the government.
The government doesn't work for money.
It just taxes you.
So the government doesn't mind too much how much money it spends relative to you and I spending money.
But the people who make this military equipment...
Would really like us to leave it behind, so we'll have to buy new ones if we need it.
So there would be a gigantic financial advantage for the makers of military equipment if we left it behind.
And there wouldn't be anybody who would have a financial disadvantage if we left it behind.
So the money predicts that we would have left it behind.
Even though every bit of your common sense says we wouldn't.
Right? All of your common sense says we would not leave all of that behind.
But if you followed the money, it suggests we would.
And that's what happened.
Is that a coincidence? Why is it that even when you can't tell what the mechanism is that connects the money to the decision, it's still consistent?
Let me give you another one.
Could you... Could you predict that Black Lives Matter would stop their protests when Biden became leader?
Probably, because probably they would stop getting as much funding, because whoever was funding them needed them to do their thing for political reasons.
And so were all of the things that Black Lives Matter protested fixed?
No. If you looked at all the reasons that we think Black Lives Matter did what they did, that's all still there.
And yet the protest stopped.
But if you use money to predict, and you said to yourself, wait, they'll get money during the political process because they're helpful, but after the political process and the election's over and Biden wins, they're not helpful anymore.
In fact, they'd be unhelpful.
So the money would stop.
And then they would stop protesting.
And that's what happened.
Did you see the OnlyFans, the fan site where you can go on and do little videos and people will pay you for them?
Um, They started and made their fortune with porn, or adult stuff, and they said they were going to ban it, and then they reversed their ban, and now they say they're going to do it again, and they're going to let the porn back on there.
Was that predictable? Yeah.
Follow the money. As soon as they said they weren't going to do it, didn't you and everybody else in the world say, what?
They're getting rid of their primary business model, and they're just going to give it to somebody else?
Because somebody else would just do it, right?
If they stopped doing it, somebody's going to say, well, that's the best part of your business.
I'll just make a business and just do that.
And so they reversed it.
Now, one of the stories about that is a former ICU nurse who makes $200,000 a month On OnlyFans doing adult entertainment.
And what would that predict?
What does it predict if an ICU nurse can make $200,000 a month on OnlyFans?
Well, one of the things it predicts is that there will no longer be any hot nurses.
Still be a lot of nurses, but you should expect there will be fewer of them.
And none of the hot ones.
All the hot ones.
You're going to go to OnlyFans and make $200,000 a month.
Now I know. Here's what you're going to say to yourself.
Scott, people are not going to whore themselves out just for money.
Because nurses are people who care about people and they want to help.
By nature, they're people who want to help people in need.
Well, you just wait a couple of months and see how many hot nurses you see.
I predict zero.
All right, we'll see. The officer who shot and killed Ashley Babbitt on the January 6th, bad stuff that happened at the Capitol, he has now made himself known.
Michael Byrd, Lieutenant Michael Byrd, very experienced.
He says he thinks he did the right thing.
He thinks he saved a lot of people.
One element to this story that's important is he's black.
He's a black man.
Who a lot of people think shot a white woman without good cause.
People think this. I'm not saying that in my opinion, but people think that.
Now, if these races were reversed...
Do I even need to finish the sentence?
You can just stop after you say, if the races were reversed...
And then you just fill in all the rest of the things I was going to say because you're going to hear everybody say that...
But I would like to tell you about...
You should always follow people's predictions and see how well they do so you know if you should follow them in the future.
I believe I'm the only person I heard who said I didn't believe he would be charged with a crime.
Let's fact check that.
Did any of you hear anybody else say in public, you know, a public person, did you hear anybody else say that you didn't think that guy would be charged with a crime because it wasn't one?
Because it didn't look like one.
Did anybody else say that?
Because to me, I didn't see any crime there at all.
Individuals may have said it, I see in the comments.
But did anybody in public say that?
Besides me. Somebody says Michael Tracy, maybe.
We don't have confirmation on that, so that's an open question.
All right. I see people asking questions whether Robert Barnes questioned that or not.
Well, this is how you test your bubble.
If you were in the bubble or you were on a side, you saw that and you just immediately took a side.
I try not to be in the bubble as much as possible.
I don't think anybody can completely avoid it.
But I just didn't see a crime.
I saw somebody who avoided...
Potentially more danger and protected the Capitol and had no idea how much extra violence there might be.
And it was tragic.
And I don't, you know, of course I don't want anybody to have died.
But I didn't see a crime.
So I'll just say that.
If you did, you did, but I didn't...
China is, I guess they've vaccinated 2 billion people so far, and they're using coercion.
Part of their coercion is the social credit.
Now, it's not the type of coercion being used in China to get people vaccinated.
It doesn't seem to be the same everywhere, but in one region, they're using it to damage your social credit score.
I feel like more of that's going to come on, right?
I feel like more of that's coming.
And I wonder if China has a competitive advantage over the West because they can force people to do stuff.
How much of a competitive advantage will that be?
All right.
So... And apparently they also will, in China, deny you access to government services and corporations are putting pressure on people, etc.
And things are going to get ugly there.
What I wonder about is if the Chinese public will resist.
Now, if I were doing a persuasion war against China, what would it look like?
What would you do if you were, let's say, an intelligence agency...
In another country. And you wanted China to do as poorly as possible, including the coronavirus, even if you thought it would come back to bite you in the ass later.
But you wanted them to do poorly, what would you do?
What rumors would you start?
Well, you'd start rumors that the vaccination they use in China is dangerous.
Right? Because I would be surprised if China is not promoting that rumor here.
Don't you think? Don't you think China might be behind a little bit of the ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, you know, vaccinations that hurt you kind of stuff?
Maybe. They might be.
And if they're not, why not?
Because it would be the obvious play.
And so the question is, are we doing the same thing to them?
If not, why not?
Let's see.
Just looking at some of your...
Lots of propaganda.
Did you hurt your middle finger?
Yes. Unfortunately, if you smash a finger on the nail side, you get the bruise under the nail.
And it takes a year for that to grow out.
I've had other nail injuries.
It hurt when it happened.
Oh, a micro lesson on how to know if you're in a bubble.
Not bad. The micro lesson that I have queued up that I haven't recorded yet is how to brag without looking like a jerk.
Because we live in a world in which telling people that you have some skills is really good for you.
But if you tell them directly, you look like a jerk.
So how can you brag without being a jerk?
Because bragging has utility.
It makes people respect you more.
If they hear it in the right context, not if you brag.
So, I will be teaching only the subscribers on the Locals platform.
One more micro lesson.
And they will have hundreds of micro lessons by the end of this year.
I think hundreds, or at least many dozens.
And they will have superpowers.
And if you listen to the people on Locals talk about it, you'll see that they are gaining superpowers with each of these.
Two to four minutes each, and it gives you a brand new skill that you didn't have in just two minutes.
