Episode 1659 Scott Adams: I Explain How CNN Made the Biggest Story of the Year Disappear, More Fun
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Content:
China starts up 1st Gen IV Nuclear Power Plant
Canada's totalitarian Gov stomps
Uniting a country vs horse stomping
Kamala Harris defends Ukraine's border
How CNN buried explosive Durham filing
President Putin and Ukraine
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Good morning, everybody, and congratulations on finding your way to the best thing that ever happened.
It hasn't happened yet, but stick around.
When it starts to happen, you're going to be sitting there saying to yourself something very much like this.
Is this the best thing that's ever happened?
It is. It will be.
And all you need is a copper mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind to get it started.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
Black gold, I call it.
And join me now...
For the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it's going to happen now to all of you all around the world.
Go! Now, I don't want to claim that the simultaneous sip could prevent war with Ukraine.
But whatever they're doing now isn't working, so I'm just saying, if you're doing A-B testing, put it in the mix.
Well, here's some gigantic news that is in disguise as small news.
So sometimes the actual news that matters is in technical publications.
Because you can see something coming that's just enormous, but the regular press doesn't quite see it yet.
You know, like crypto would have been several years ago.
Well, here's one of those stories.
China starts up its first fourth-generation nuclear reactor.
This news is actually so outstandingly big, right?
For those of you who follow the industry...
You're probably saying, what?
I didn't even know that was close.
Now let me tell you why Gen 4 is a big deal.
So Gen 4 would be different from the current batch of nuclear reactors.
And what makes it different is, number one, it can't melt down.
It can't. It's designed such that when things go wrong, it just turns off.
Current ones have to have power to the Power to the cooling.
And if you lose the power, the whole thing melts down.
It's bad. But with the fourth generation, if you lose your power, it just turns off.
That's it. And so the primary risk of having a nuclear facility is just erased.
Number two, you can design these things, and I think they did it this way because it's the only smart way to do it, to be modular and standardized and What's the biggest problem with nuclear power?
Getting it approved.
And then the economics, because it takes longer to build it than you think it will, and it costs more, and the cost overruns and everything.
That's all about old technology.
So all of the problems, we're all familiar with them, right?
It's like if you tried to build a nuclear plant in the United States, it's going to take 20 years to get it built and approved.
It's going to be five times cost overrun.
And then when you're done, people don't want to live near it because they're afraid it's going to melt down.
Now, I should say that the current generation of, you know, the Generation 3, none of them have ever melted down.
By the way, did you know that?
Did you know that the technology that we build today, if somebody was building a nuclear power plant in France or something, none of them have ever melted down.
Now, they do have the potential, but we've learned so much from the earlier generations that did melt down, you know, the Chernobyls and the Fukushimas and whatever, that we've learned so much by them that the odds of a new one melting down, it's not zero, because, you know, It's just technically possible.
But very, very low to the point where it's never happened.
Zero. It's never happened.
So the Generation 4 takes something that's never happened in terms of a risk and makes it even less.
So Generation 4 is like such a crossover point.
You know, if you wait for things to crossover, well, it just crossed over.
It just crossed the hell over, I think.
Now, we'll see how long it takes before there are more fourth-generation plants coming up.
In the United States, there are a number of startups that are working on fourth-generation as well.
So you make them small, modular, pre-approved, right?
If they're modular, the government just approves it once.
It says, okay, that's the same one we already approved.
Just do it again.
The economics drop because you're standardized, you're approved.
Everything.
It just fixes everything.
Climate change?
Fixed.
Fixed.
I mean, fixed to the extent that humans can do something at this point.
But this is a lot.
All right, we won't make too much of a big deal about that.
But if this were a sane world, this would be the biggest headline.
By far, it's the biggest thing happening in the world right now.
It just doesn't seem like it because if you're not following this topic.
All right, so Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, apparently they've offered to pay $6 billion to the victims of U.S. opioid crisis.
To which I ask myself, why isn't this the death penalty?
Like, why do we even have a death penalty?
If this isn't included, you know, the one who killed a million people?
Don't you think that addiction will kill a million people?
You know, it might take 10 years to do it or something.
But, I don't know, somewhere between 100,000 and a million people probably got killed by something that they knew was dangerous.
So I suppose that would always...
Be closer to the category of manslaughter or something like that.
But I can't think of a worse crime than this.
Six billion? I don't know.
Maybe not enough. Have I ever told you that doing your own research is the most absurd thing that people do?
And everybody says, are you kidding?
I did my own research and it worked out great.
You should always do your own research.
It's the smartest thing to do.
Well, here's some research that maybe you did when you came across this, doing your own research.
This research, this was tweeted by Catherine Agninova, and it says that they did a study and they found that the more people think they know about COVID vaccines, the more likely they are to believe misinformation.
And then she goes on, yes, you read that one right.
People who say they are vaccine experts are overwhelmingly more likely to hold misperceptions.
Now, in this context, I believe vaccine expert doesn't literally mean an expert.
I think it means people who did their own research to the point where if you ask them, they'd say, you know, I've done so much research on this topic.
I'm practically expert level.
People who did their own research were the most likely to be wrong.
Do you believe that? First of all, do you believe that the study is telling you something accurate?
Now, since this is exactly what I've been telling you forever, that you can't do your own research, it's just an illusion.
Because you don't know if you did it right.
There's no standard by which you can know if you did your own research right.
You can just feel you did it right.
That's it. The whole reason that science exists is because we easily convince ourselves that we saw evidence that wasn't actually what it was.
That's the whole reason that science exists.
Because humans absolutely, 100% do not have the ability to just sort of research stuff and know it's true.
We just don't have that ability.
But boy, do we think we do!
Now, here's the other way to read this.
Maybe the survey is just bad data, right?
Most of the surveys and studies we've seen in the last two years, at least somebody's going to say there's something wrong with the methodology.
So why would this be different?
But the other thing is, who gets to say what's true about the vaccines?
Is that what you're going to say to me?
You are going to say that, right?
What if... The people who did their own research actually are the ones who were right.
And then when the fact-checkers go to fact-check them, they say, hey, Pfizer told us that you're wrong about this.
But does that mean it's wrong?
In 2022, who's in charge of saying what's true about vaccines?
I don't recognize any authority of that, do you?
Seriously. Who's your fact-checker for what vaccines do or do not do?
There is none. Is there?
As far as I know, there are just two opinions.
One opinion that it's bad, and one opinion that it's good.
But there's nobody that anybody would recognize as the opinion decider.
There's no Supreme Court.
I still haven't seen the Project Veritas video.
That's on me. So if you want to criticize me for that, totally valid.
I promised you I'd look at the Project Veritas video.
And once again, I haven't seen it.
Like nobody tweeted it at me since you brought it up last time.
Anyway. So do your own research, but just know that there's a limit to what people can do when they do their own research.
Canada apparently is lost.
My understanding is that all of the trucks of the Freedom Convoy have been towed away or they left and everybody's been arrested or chewed away.
It's over, right?
Is that correct?
Or is it only over in Ottawa or something?
It looks like the...
Totalitarian Canadian government just went all China.
And, you know, they're regrouping.
A few dozens left.
Well, it looks to me like I don't know if the energy has been taken out of it.
Because the government...
You know, isn't it interesting that there is that video of Trudeau when asked what other countries he admired.
He said, and I agree with him, by the way, That China, because it's a dictatorship, they have some advantages.
That's just true.
Does anybody disagree with that?
I'm not saying it's better to have a dictatorship, all things considered.
I'm saying that they have some advantages.
They can turn on a dime and they can just make people do stuff.
And he actually said out loud in public, Trudeau did, that he admired them for that ability.
And then when he got in trouble...
He did his emergencies act, and he basically just turned into a dictator.
And then he did what he had to do, and it actually worked.
So, you can't say he's not clear-eyed.
He told you exactly what he admired, and then when the situation called for it, he emulated what he admired, and it worked.
I mean, from his point of view, what he was trying to accomplish, it worked.
It looks like it. Now, you know what was the dumbest part about all of this?
The dumbest part about all of this is that this was negotiable, wasn't it?
Am I wrong? Wasn't this exactly the kind of thing that's negotiable?
Now, I'm not saying they should negotiate with the truck drivers, because why should a government negotiate with protesters, per se?
But they should listen to them.
And they should at least negotiate with the public, shouldn't they?
Shouldn't Trudeau say, look, I hear the public, what we planned to do was X, but the public pushback matters, because we're that kind of a country, where if the public wants something badly enough and they understand the risks, that that does matter. That has to be a variable.
Why couldn't Trudeau have said, you know, we plan to do this until this date, but maybe we could talk about that date?
And what we should look at is a certain metric, and if this metric is reached, let's say a certain number of deaths or something, if this metric is reached, then we can move forward the date of getting rid of mandates.
Or... Or is the vaccine mandate one that can't be moved?
It's just permanent?
Is it? I mean, does it need to be?
Does a vaccine mandate need to be permanent?
I mean, once the Omicron rules and it's closer to a common cold, do you still need the mandates?
Or is that the only thing keeping it under control, they might say?
I don't know. So don't you think that there's something terribly missing in the Canadian process, which I think ended somewhat tragically, I'd have to say.
Somewhat tragically.
Because I think the Canadian reputation is forever stained.
I think they have a lot of division in the public that wasn't necessary.
It just wasn't necessary.
It was a self-created problem.
And, I don't know, we should keep an eye on that and see if we can learn anything from it.
But any government that won't tell you they're flexible on moving a deadline based on changes of the data, or at least tell you what it would take for the mandate to go away, that's not a real government, is it?
That just doesn't seem like governing.
It feels like a dictatorship.
And I get that maybe Trudeau thought he needed to reopen commerce.
I get that. It's not a clean situation when you're the leader.
He does have to balance the interests of the people who just want to go to work with the interests of the people who are protesting and free speech and all that.
So it's not easy.
We should acknowledge that, I guess.
But he did have a choice of going full dictator Versus acting like he was at least working with the competing voices.
And I don't think he acted like he was working with them.
And why is it that our leaders don't do that?
Why is it that our leaders just have to say, I'm only going to do what my side wants me to do?
And that's all you can do now.
That's all anybody can do, is just say, there's just one side, the other side doesn't matter.
By the way, do you know who was relatively good at describing what the other side wanted?
The person who came closest to it was Obama, probably.
Although I think Bill Clinton, maybe.
But it's the strongest thing you can do, is acknowledge the other side.
And I don't know why nobody does it.
In fact, I think Trump should do it more.
Think how persuasive it is to describe the other side's argument before you describe your own.
Have you ever tried that?
So here's your persuasion tip for today.
If you say, here's my argument, and you ignore sort of the argument on the other side, you just give your own argument, it looks weak to me.
And it looks like you're lying to me.
Because if you've ignored the other side's point, well, why have you done that?
If you can't deal with the other side's point, you must be lying, or you know your argument is weak.
If you have a real strong argument, and you should if you're a leader, you should be able to stand in front of the people and say, look, here's what my critics have said, A, B, and C, and I have to admit that there's some truth to all of that.
But you have to weigh that against...
D, E, and F. And in my judgment, and based on all the experts I've talked to, this is a bigger weight and a higher priority than these other things which I acknowledge are really serious business as well.
But a leader has to pick, and with the understanding that nobody can make everybody happy all the time, I'm going to make a leadership decision.
I understand all of your concerns, and I'm not forgetting them.
But we have to move forward now.
Why can't anybody say that?
Wouldn't that be closer to exactly what you want to hear?
Because lots of times you just want to know you've been heard.
And that your side of things is respected.
We never show respect for the other argument.
That's just a huge persuasion mistake.
You should show complete respect for the other argument.
And if you can't destroy the other argument after fully and completely explaining it, saying that you respect it, giving it its full weight, if you can't beat that argument, well, then you should have accepted it.
If you're afraid of the other team's argument, maybe you should follow their argument, right?
So I always think that's just one of the biggest mistakes.
Almost every politician makes that mistake, in my opinion.
It's hard to think of anybody who doesn't.
Can you? Can you think of anybody who does that on a sort of routine basis?
Give me a name of anybody who is at the top of the game who gives credit to the other side's argument.
Well, Jordan Peterson, Cernovich, they're not politicians.
I'm talking about an elected politician.
Yeah, Tucker, okay, maybe.
Trump, no. Ben Shapiro.
I don't know about that, but if anybody did, it would probably be him.
I guess I'd have to watch more of his content to see some examples of that.
Tom Cotton, you think?
I don't know. Yeah, so you see how big the opportunity is, right?
The opportunity for somebody to be a uniter, it's just so easy.
It would be so easy to actually get people on the other side to vote for you.
It would be really, really easy.
And the fact that nobody can figure out how to do it when it's roughly as easy as falling out of a chair, that's the level of difficulty.
I just told you the whole deal.
Just show some respect to the other side.
That's it. That's all you have to do to get their votes.
You have to be reasonable, show your work, show respect to the other side, and then move forward.
People... You know, I think maybe...
I guess I just don't know why nobody does that.
Okay. Let's talk about Ukraine.
Kamala Harris is apparently taking the lead.
Would you like to fill in your own obvious jokes about this?
I'll wait. I'm going to have a sip of coffee.
I'll need you to talk among yourselves for a while.
In the comments, please let loose with all of your best.
Kamala Harris is in charge of the integrity of Ukraine's border.
Jokes.
Go.
Okay.
Okay.
Good. Good. Thank you.
That went X-rated pretty quickly.
Now, let me ask you this.
You know, I don't want to go over woke, but isn't it sexist that people make, like, sex-related jokes about the vice president?
Am I wrong about that?
Because I don't think I'm, like, the most woke person in the world or anything.
But that one I kind of feel a little bit.
That feels a little like, well...
I guess we did it with Bill Clinton, though, right?
Yeah. And I guess we did it with Eric Swalwell.
So, yeah, it's fair.
Okay. My judgment is...
I reassess my judgment, and the judgment is fair.
Because it is actually evenly applied.
When I think about it, it's evenly applied.
Alright, here's my favorite story of the day.
How CNN made the Durham filing go away.
And the New York Times is working on this.
This is amazing.
Now, in my...
I'm watching your comments going by and trying to keep my train of thought.
And some of your comments are pretty funny, but I didn't want to call them out because they're, you know, sex jokes and they're gross.
But they are funny. All right.
So you have to see the clip.
I wonder how long it will take me to find this clip of Stelter and who's the other guy?
On CNN, talking about how the right-wing has stopped talking about the false Clinton story.
So it's why the right-wing media stopped covering the false Clinton story.
So now CNN is reporting that the thing they ignored for days and days and they got mocked for, now that they're not ignoring it, they're calling it fake news.
And the reason that they're calling it fake news, we'll go into.
But the report that is fake news is fake news.
And so it's like the double fake news, fake news.
Well, we'll get into it.
So I tweeted this morning, so I should see it at the top of my Twitter profile.
If I can play it for you, you have to see their faces.
When they do what looks to me like maybe not being...
I'm completely honest about this.
I'll see if I can show this to you.
Come on. It's probably going to play a commercial first.
And it's fascinating how it sits there and doesn't play.
Or does it? You really have to see these guys' faces.
I was planning for my business, but all my employees need something.
Wait for the commercial to go.
So let me give you the rundown of how they make this go away.
First of all, they say that the claim was that Trump was spied on.
All right, here it is. John Berman, I think it is.
Well, that's not exactly how the old saying goes, but it sure was on display this week.
A story about the former president and Russian phones and So what I want you to look at is the pained expressions on their faces.
So it's going to be Brian Stelter and this gentleman.
And I don't know if you've ever seen so much torture in a face.
Because it looks to me like they know they're lying.
Now, I don't know that, right?
Because I can't read their minds.
I'm just telling you the impression.
Their faces say, we know we're lying, and we don't like it, but somebody told us to do this.
It looks like something their boss told them to do, and it's going down like they're chewing on a turd.
But just watch the faces.
- America exploded into wild accusations about Hillary Clinton and even the death penalty.
But now poof, the story has mysteriously all but disappeared from those right wing outlets.
So what happened? - What happened? - See the chief media correspondent, Look at his face.
legal filing but to get from there to here what happened there's always a little germ of truth here a little germ of truth last week with special counsel john durham who's been investigating the origins of the fbi's russia probe he submitted a vague technical filing here's the cnn headline about it saying special counsel durham alleges clinton campaign lawyer used data to raise suspicions about trump okay so a little bit of a story a germ of a story
but it was suddenly blown up by right-wing media as if trump had been proven right that he was spied on that there was a crime of the century lose face editorial board saying trump really was spied on donald trump himself said in a statement at a stronger time in our history the death penalty will be applied to the criminals here this was trump's victim being proven right even though that was not true at all this went on for days and days in right-wing media and so until john has started to fizzle So then they go on.
But let me break down how they try to make this story disappear.
It's really diabolical.
So first he says there's a gerb of truth, but that there wasn't spying, basically.
So here's how they break it down.
So first they debunk the claim that the Clinton campaign paid for the data.
But that really wasn't important.
So who paid for the data was never really an important part.
The important part was, you know, who got it.
And so they make it sound as if, since the data was not obtained by, quote, spying, that that doesn't count as spying.
And that the tech company wasn't who they paid.
But none of these are important to the story.
So the things they're debunking are all the things that are sort of tangential but not really terribly important to the core of the story.
But they make it act like the germ of truth isn't the important part.
No, the germ of truth is the whole story.
That Clinton paid some lawyers to go get some data that they would use to frame Trump.
Now, the accusation in the Durham filing is that they knew they were framing Trump with fake data.
That's the important part of the story, that the Clinton campaign paid somebody who got some data and that collectively they knew it was fake data, and they tried to change the course of the country and the election by using fake data.
But here's...
Watch how they dance around the core of the claim here.
All right, so first they go about how the data was obtained and who paid who, which was not terribly important.
The important part was that they intentionally used fake data to try to frame a guy who was running for president.
And then they say, CNN claims, that all the data came from before the Trump era.
In other words, before the Trump administration.
So therefore the story's all fake, right?
Because the data that was gathered was before Trump was even president.
That's what they tell you.
Here's what they leave out.
Why in the world was Clinton's lawyer asking only for Obama-era information?
And why would they use only Obama-era information...
To frame Trump. Well, either it included information from Trump Tower, which was before Trump was in power, in which case it would be completely relevant, right?
Completely relevant to the story.
Because they were trying to prevent him from becoming president.
So it's very relevant that it was an Obama-era data, because that's when they were trying to prevent him from being president.
So they're acting as if the fact that they gathered the data when he was running for president isn't important.
Not only is it important, it's the whole fucking point, is that they were trying to prevent him from becoming president.
That was the whole point.
So when they sell you that the data was from a different presidency, that is complete misdirection.
Of course it was from the other presidency, because they were trying to stop Trump from being the president.
All right. I mean, the boldness of this is just breathtaking.
And then how do we know that all the data was from the Obama administration?
How do we know that? Did John Durham tell us that, based on sources that were probably under oath?
Nope. Nope.
It came from a guy who was involved in gathering the data.
A guy not under oath, a guy not under oath, says that the story is fake.
But he wasn't even talking about the right thing when he said that.
Okay. So CNN never directly debunked the main claim.
The heart of the story is that the Clinton campaign used fake data obtained through the lawyers that they paid to intentionally frame Trump and change the course of history.
Like, that didn't count.
No, no. What counts is, who paid for the data?
No, that didn't matter.
That was completely irrelevant.
Yeah, and then the CNN uses, points to the New York Times with its old news trick.
So they try to use the trick, the New York Times, by saying, no, no, this is an old story.
But it's not. Because it was never an old story that Durham just filed.
In other words, the fact that Durham filed the story means that some credibility has been added as well as the whole narrative of why it was happening.
But the way the New York Times tells the story is we already knew there was some sketchy data suggesting Trump was communicating with Russia.
So they say, this is an old story.
But when they say it's an old story, what they're talking about is not the true part of the story.
They're talking about the fake part.
Yes, the fake part of the story was reported before.
The fake part.
The fake part where that data meant something.
That's the part they reported.
They reported the fake part.
And now they say, well, that's old news, because we reported it.
No, you didn't. You reported the fake part.
You never reported the real part or the alleged real part that's in the filing.
But if you didn't do what I did, I did my own research, because you know that works pretty well, pretty well.
If you didn't do what I did, which is hunt down these links and read them and try to understand the whole thing, you would think, by listening to CNN or reading the New York Times, you would think that the story went away.
And that never happened. I mean, the people on the right did stop talking about it, but because there was nothing else to say, it just sort of ran its course.
There was no new information.
Now, you tell me, is it not completely obvious to you that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats have colluded with CNN and the New York Times and MSNBC, Directly colluded, as in actual conversations, not just knowing what everybody should do, but actually having conversations to make the story go away.
Is this not obviously a coordinated change of the narrative?
It is, right? It's very obvious.
And all of these people involved with this have outed themselves as Democrat operatives, haven't they?
So you should watch a story like this and then, you know, remember the names involved.
Because these are the ones you can never trust again.
You can never trust anybody involved in these stories again.
No matter what they ever say in the future, just remember they said this.
They made the biggest story of the last ten years go away.
Intentionally. Obviously.
So... That, to me, is amazing.
And it's further amazing that it succeeded.
Because, you know, some people like me will talk about it, but that's it.
It's kind of done. And if this live stream got any viral pick-up, if this started to trend, and it won't, but if it did, do you know what would happen?
Somebody would write a fake story about me, And they would say, it's a complicated story, but what you have to understand is the cartoonist doesn't realize that the data came from before Trump was even president.
And then all the people who listened to it would say, I can't believe he didn't even do his research.
The most basic thing of when did the data even belong to, the cartoonist, do not listen to him.
He's an idiot. And anybody who saw that criticism would believe it was a valid criticism.
They wouldn't know that the criticism actually made no sense.
You wouldn't know that.
The criticism would sound way more credible than a clip of me talking.
It wouldn't even be close.
Especially if some credible organization said it.
So just think about it.
Just the ability...
I do subscribe to Project Veritas, but somebody asked me if I subscribe to it.
I do subscribe, so I get the emails, but my email is just a rat's nest.
I don't really find things in my email.
That's not a thing for me.
I feel like...
Can I make you a promise?
Or a prediction, I guess.
So here's a prediction slash promise.
It's very likely in the next year you're going to hear some terrible things about me.
Does anybody think so?
Does anybody think you're going to hear some terrible things about me in the next year?
I can pretty much guarantee it.
Now, Here's my promise to you.
If it's funny, I'm not going to deny it.
I want you to hear this clearly.
If you hear anything about me that's just some wild accusation, if it's funny, I'm not going to deny it.
Because I'm a great fan of Richard Gere.
Do you remember the Richard Gere story?
If you're a certain age, you'd remember this story.
So actor Richard Gere, allegedly, there was a story that he stuck a gerbil up his rectum and had to go to the hospital to get it out.
And it was related to some strange sex practice or something.
And the best part of the story, by far the best part of the story, is he never denied it.
Now, personally, I don't think there's any chance it's true.
I think there's zero chance it's true.
Zero. But the fact that he wouldn't deny it Just made me love him forever.
Like, I just love that.
And I think it might be related to his philosophical journey.
You know, he's a...
What is he?
Zen Buddhist or something?
I don't know. But I think he just sort of accepted it as just part of his life now.
So, if here I did anything illegal, I'm sure it's untrue.
But if here I did anything with a gerbil...
I encourage you to believe it if it's the most entertaining thing that happened that day.
All right, and that is all I have for today.
And go forth and prosper.
It's kind of early. Should I stay and answer some questions?
Oh, I should tell you that I, if you don't know it, I put another micro lesson on the locals subscription sites.
I've got over 200 of them now.
And each of them is, you know, two to four minutes to teach you an actual life skill.
You know, something that could actually make a big difference in your life.
And I try to do it in two to four minutes.
Now, most of them are Persuasion-based.
So I'm either reframing something to get a quick advantage.
That sort of thing. Oh, Ukraine.
Did I miss my Ukraine notes?
Oh. Yeah, let me talk about Ukraine a little bit more.
So Kamala Harris is there, and that's terrific.
But NATO is all unified.
Now, here's the thing I'm not sure that Putin realizes.
I tweeted this earlier.
I'm not sure that Putin realizes that if he were to take Ukraine in a bloodbath, that everybody would see that as a Hitler version 2.0.
You wonder if he sees that, right?
Because, you know, Russia has this weird...
Kind of role where they're, you know, Putin is an evil murderer, but on the other hand, people sort of like him.
Am I right? Putin has the weirdest reputation of any dictator.
Oh, he's definitely a brutal murderer.
Oh, but he's kind of cool too, also.
I don't know anybody else who's ever pulled that off.
Am I right? There's nobody who's ever pulled that off ever.
Brutal murder?
Yeah. Can we do lunch?
Sure. All right.
We'll invite you over to the UN. Well, you know he just brutally murdered some critics.
Yeah, you know, but also he's kind of cool.
Who else could pull that off?
And I'm not praising him.
I'm just amazed that anybody could do that.
How the hell did he do that?
So I don't know that he realizes that that's all at risk now.
Because if he does to Ukraine what he's threatening to do, or it looks like he's going to do, that just turns him into Hitler.
And at that point, the world is going to turn Russia into North Korea.
Meaning that he's about a week away from having North Korea's economy.
Because I think the world will just shut him down.
Now, he can sell fuel to China...
But how happy would Putin be if his only customer is China?
How happy would you be if you became China's bitch?
Not happy. Not happy.
Because China would own him at that point.
Because China can get fuel from other places, but what if Russia can only sell to one place?
You know what I mean? If they can only sell to one place, and their entire economy will depend on them selling to that one place, that one place owns them.
That's when the customer owns the seller.
He doesn't want to be in that position.
So the position that he's a week away from is a North Korea complete economic isolation.
And I don't know if he sees that coming or not.
Who knows what he's thinking, right?
We know he's smart, so he should see it coming, but he's acting like he doesn't.
So I'm still going to keep with my prediction that he's bluffing.
Now, I realize how unlikely that seems because he's showing every sign of invasion according to our intel.
But you know our intel are all liars, right?
You know that our intel can't be trusted.
So what the United States is telling us about that situation, you should not trust at all.
At all. Am I right?
Yes. Is there anybody who would trust U.S. intelligence?
What it's telling anybody at this point?
No, that's what we've learned.
So we don't really have any information that would reliably tell us there's going to be an invasion.
And you have to wonder why Ukraine is acting the other way.
Now, I think this is what might be going on.
I think Ukraine and Zelensky...
I think Zelensky might be playing good cop to Biden's bad cop, and it might be intentional.
Because think of the small window that they have to fit through.
You've got to be ready for war, but not lose automatically by panicking and shutting down your whole country.
So Ukraine needs to be business as usual until it can't.
Because if they can't be business as usual, then they've already lost, right?
Then Russia basically will control Ukraine just by threatening them.
So if the threat alone is as effective as the war...
Then Ukraine loses if they accept the threat as real.
So it could be that Ukraine is playing good cop, bad cop, so that Biden can say the scary stuff, Zelensky can tell his public to stay cool, keep the economy running, keep everybody fed as long as possible, because maybe there's just nothing you can do about it.
What's he going to do?
If they're afraid that Kiev will be...
Should they drain the city?
If they do, then Russia already won, right?
If the civilians leave, then Russia already won.
They just, oh, well, everybody's gone.
Let's go take that city. So it could be that the reason that Ukraine and the United States have almost opposite messages is that it's intentional.
It could be completely intentional.
That they both know that the other one is going to be the bad cop and one's a good cop.
Can you see any other way that it would be smart to play it?
Because it could be that Zelensky also thinks that the attack is coming, but if he says it, his public will panic.
If Biden says it and Zelensky doesn't, then they get the best of both worlds, which is, I hate to say it, But the people who stay in the cities and just work, they're human shields.
Because if Putin bombs a populated city that's just business as usual, he is Hiller.
And that never will change.
Because it's not like bombing Chechnya.
Like, frankly, that was sort of off the grid a little bit for a lot of people.
But we're watching Kiev...
He's not going to be able to bomb a bunch of peaceful citizens and level a city, minding its own business.
I mean, the city itself is minding its own business.
He's not going to get away with that.
So in some ways, Zelensky is keeping the city populated because they're human shields.
It makes it effectively impossible for Russia to attack.
And it's kind of clever.
So where at first I was thinking there's some kind of massive incompetence going on here...
That Ukraine is saying the opposite of what Biden is saying.
I was like, this is really messed up.
There's something wrong here.
What's going on?
Are they not sharing the intel?
What's broken? But the longer this goes, the more I think that's intentional and it's a good cop, bad cop setup.
Does anybody disagree?
Once I describe it this way, you can see that any other action would have been worse.
If Zelensky had panicked, they would have already lost because they would have shown that Russia can just threaten them into closing down their own country.
That would be losing.
Right? If he drains the city, then Russia can just walk in and take it.
And they don't even kill any civilians.
That's the ideal situation.
So I think this is a game of brinksmanship like we've never seen before.
Now, let me finish my prediction.
I think that Putin probably is smart enough to know that if he bombs a civilian city, a vibrant civilian city, that is minding its own business, the city itself is, that his economy will never recover from that.
Never. And I think he knows it.
Wouldn't you know it?
Don't you think that the show of solidarity from NATO and just the, I guess, the hugeness of the situation really does suggest that we would close his economy forever?
Like, actually forever.
At least as long as Putin's alive.
I think we would close his economy forever.
And then what problem does Putin have instantly?
Don't you think that Putin has to keep the oligopolis rich?
Don't you think that the billionaires in Russia are sort of like, you know, almost like the shadow government?
If the billionaires lose all of their money, how long does Putin remain in power?
Now, we assume that Putin owns the billionaires, not the other way around.
But if the billionaires start losing all of their money because of Putin...
They're gonna take him out.
They will. Because billionaires aren't gonna sit by while they lose all of their money.
That's not gonna happen.
They're gonna take him out.
And I think he knows that.
Or at least they try.
So I think...
That Putin's trying to get as much as he can by frightening Ukraine, and Ukraine might be playing the smartest psychological game I've ever seen.
Or they're just dumb, and they don't have good intel.
Both totally possible right now.
Based on what we're seeing, this is either brilliant or really incompetent.
Would you agree those are the only two choices?
Given the difference in what Ukraine is saying versus Biden, it is only massive incompetence or super smart.
Super smart. Does anybody have like a third option?
I'm open to a third option.
Ukraine is not one country.
I think that's a good... That's a good observation.
Ukraine is not like one country.
So there's probably some kind of partial annexation or control or something that's going to happen, right?
So I'm going to say that Putin is not going to do a full-scale military takeover of the entire country of Ukraine.
That's still my prediction. I think that making it look in every way like he is going to do it is just part of the persuasion.
But that if he did it, he could never survive the Hitler 2.0.
The economy would be crashed.
So, that is my prediction.
But that doesn't mean he wouldn't try to get some control over some key part that's already Russian-speaking.
Scott, you're reading far too much into a make-believe situation.
Well, I think my whole point was that it's make-believe.
Doesn't that make Biden look dumb if he calls an invasion imminent and it doesn't happen?
Nope. No, because Biden has the entire mainstream media to say what I'm going to say right now.
How clever it was for Biden to play bad cop.
Right? It's easy.
You just say he cleverly played bad cop until...
And by the way, let me add this.
Are we not seeing the fake flag attempts that Blinken and Biden told us we would see?
Aren't we seeing them exactly the way they called it out?
I think that was really smart.
I think Trump would have done the same thing, actually.
But wasn't that smart?
Because we are seeing the fake flags and everybody's going, oh, there's that fake flag you talked about.
False flag. Right?
I feel like that was actually a really strong play by the administration.
I give them credit for that.
Yeah. I don't know.
I'm not going to rule out the possibility that something smart is happening.
But I will tell you, in my opinion, Trump would have handled this without this fuss.
I think Trump would have handled it in some better way.
I don't know what that would have been, but I don't think he would have taken such a traditional path, because he never does.
Yeah, all right.
Well, that's all I got for now.
I don't think I forgot anything else, but I'll go look at that Project Veritas video, and I'll try not to forget this time.
