Episode 1669 Scott Adams: The Endgame in Ukraine Might Not Go The Way You Think
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Content:
SNL mocking masking, boosters
School mask mandates lifting
SOTU tonight expectations
40 mile convoy unmolested?
Ukraine: Winning isn't surviving
A Ukraine surprise?
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Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the only positive thing that's happening in the whole damn world.
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It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. You know, no joke, this was one of the finest sips I've ever enjoyed in my entire life.
You would think to yourself, you know, there can't be one sip of coffee that's the best one you've ever had, but then you enjoy it, and then suddenly you realize, I've been wrong all of these years.
There would be one sip that would be the sip that bound them all.
The sip of all sips, the siptastic.
That's right. And that was it.
I'm glad you could be here for it.
Well, did any of you see the...
There's a clip from Saturday Night Live in which the cast is sort of...
I can't say mocking and masking within the same paragraph.
They're too close. They were mocking the masking.
Yes, they were mocking masking.
It was a lot of masking mocking, as well as booster mocking.
Booster booing.
So there was booster booing, although they weren't really booing them.
They were basically making fun of the social conundrum that people have when they just try to have a social event and somebody brings up any of the pandemic stuff.
And it was really good.
I have to commend them.
It was actually some of the best work.
Honestly, it was some of the best work I've seen on Saturday Night Live in their entire run.
So take a look at that if you get a chance.
Did anybody notice any cyber attacks on any American-used websites today?
Or was it just my Wi-Fi was bad?
I was having troubles with Amazon.
No trouble?
I might have just had a local problem.
Okay. Just me.
Just me. Never mind.
Just rewind and forget that.
Amazon's working, but it was really slow this morning.
I wondered if it had some kind of denial of service problem.
But I guess we're all good, so yay.
California, and I guess a few other states like California, are going to lift their school mask requirement.
After March 11th.
Because, as you know, everything will be different after March 11th.
I don't know. And I think there's at least one district in California that'll keep masking, and some of the schools, I think, can still decide to do it or not.
But... for those of you who were worried we'd always be masked, and I think there were some, is there anybody who thought we would always be masked?
Just perpetually?
Did any of you?
Some of you did, right?
Or at least you were worried about it.
I was never worried about that.
But I can actually see how you would be.
You know, in retrospect, in hindsight, as the masking does disappear, it's going to feel a little bit ridiculous that you ever thought it would be permanent.
On the other hand, to support your view, Almost everything that's happened in the last two years has been ridiculous.
Am I right? So when you say something that sounds ridiculous to my ears, which is that masks will be permanent even after the pandemic's over, to my ears, that just sounds ridiculous.
But you know what else sounds ridiculous?
Everything that happened in the last two years.
So there's just nothing that's too ridiculous anymore.
There's just nothing that's over the line.
You know, Putin going into Ukraine...
I didn't see it coming. I mean, two years ago, that would seem a little ridiculous, I think.
Not to smart people.
Smart people saw it coming for 15 years.
But I was not among the smart on that topic, as it turns out.
Surprise. All right, Biden's going to give a State of the Union tonight.
What are we expecting from that?
Probably... I don't want to get ahead of things, but...
Orator...
Oratory genius, perhaps.
Soaring rhetoric.
Inspirational. You know, I feel as if when I watch Biden speaking tonight, my mind's eye will see eagles flying and freedom breaking out everywhere.
Because he's exactly the kind of leader you need in anxious times.
The kind of leader who inspires confidence.
In fact, one of the ways that you can know that the man is squarely in charge of things is body language.
Body language says a lot.
A lot of people think body language is a pseudoscience, but not me.
Not me. I can read into body language just like a fingerprint.
I can get certainty from body language.
In fact, yesterday there was a video that a lot of people were talking about of Biden walking across the lawn to get to the helicopter.
And some people were making fun of the way he walked.
Now, I'm going to do an impression of the way he walked.
Just to show you that I think you're out of line a little bit.
It might be the simulation winking at us a little bit, but nothing to worry about.
And now, without further ado, I give you my impression of Biden walking.
If you'd like to be able to do this at home, it's not very difficult.
What you want to do is you want to stretch first.
Stretch. Stretching is important for everything, not just Biden walking.
This, a little of that.
Now you're ready for Biden walking.
You want to get into the mindset.
Now remember, Biden is thin and lanky.
So get yourself into your thin and lanky.
Thin and lanky.
Now you've stretched, you've got your thin and lanky on.
Now the last part is important.
Imagine that you're a marionette, sort of like Pinocchio.
And you've got a string attached to your knees and also to your arms.
And so when you walk, you want the string to be picking up your...
So let's see.
The Biden walk. Just imagine that you've got marionette strings.
It goes like this.
Oh, oh, I didn't stretch enough.
Didn't stretch enough.
Okay, I'm okay now.
So, there's a name for that walk.
In the medical literature, I think there are at least two different names for it in the medical literature.
One of them is Inspires Confidence.
That's actually the medical name for it.
Inspires confidence.
And leadership.
Leadership. All right.
So here's a mystery, which is probably because of the fog of war.
And the mystery has to do with Ukraine and the Soviet...
Soviet. Whoops.
Not Soviet.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Um... And how is it that there could be a 40-mile-long convoy of heavy military equipment and troops, 40 miles long, on an unprotected highway, heading straight for Kiev?
How do you explain that?
Somebody says 4 miles, but I did read 40.
I did read 40, I'm sure of it.
Well, let me propose two possibilities.
Number one, Russia already has complete air superiority, or almost complete.
You'd need that, right?
Otherwise, you would see lots of attacks already on the convoy.
Or at least they try to blow up the front of the convoy.
At least slow them down, right?
But you're not even seeing attacks on the front.
It's as if no attack is happening.
Now, how do you explain that?
Like I said, the number one explanation would be Russia already has complete air superiority.
The convoy itself has anti-aircraft capabilities.
They probably have an umbrella of their own aircraft.
They've got radar.
They've got electronic jamming for drones.
They probably have everything you could possibly have for defending itself.
And maybe... Maybe that's all they needed, and they can just go in with impunity.
Because wherever you've seen the losses, wherever the Ukrainians got some advantage, they were usually lightly armed, right?
They were up against sort of sitting duck, weak kind of forces, low-end tanks.
So the Ukrainians' resistance got...
You know, all kinds of, we think, good results against weak elements of the Russian army.
But if they pull it all together, can they just completely control the air around where they are anyway?
Maybe. I mean, it seems reasonably likely, right?
So that's one explanation.
The other explanation is way more interesting.
And I'll put this in the context of it doesn't seem like anything predictable ever happens anymore, does it?
Let me say that again.
It doesn't seem as if anything that's predictable actually ever happens anymore.
It's like whatever you can't predict is the thing that happens.
So what would be a thing that would be not predictable, yet consistent?
With everything we've seen up to now.
See, that's the trick. Come up with something that's not predictable, but would also be completely consistent with everything we know about the situation so far.
And it goes like this.
It's a trap.
And it's not just a little trap.
It's a decapitation strike against Putin.
And I think that if you think that Zelenskyy Is performing better than you thought?
Were you surprised?
And why were you surprised?
Because he did make it to the presidency.
So you don't make it to the presidency without some skill, right?
Some intelligence. But then you say to yourself, well, but really he's a humorist and an entertainer.
And maybe that was the only skill that got him elected.
Maybe he doesn't have any depth.
But... Did you know it's not really easy to succeed in entertainment?
I don't know if anybody ever told you that, but...
If you look at my profession, for example, there are a lot of people who are cartoonists who, if a cartoonist speaks out on any topic that's not cartooning, the public immediately says, well, cartoonist, right? I mean, you've seen it with me a million times.
But how many of my cartoonist friends...
Have advanced degrees, for example.
Some of the top cartoonists are literally trained in physics.
Some have law degrees from top schools.
Some of them are Ivy League graduates, etc.
I've got advanced degrees.
So it's actually fairly common for people in the entertainment industry to also be smart.
Not all of them. I'm not saying that cartoonists are smarter than the average or anything like that.
I'm just saying that it's not unusual for somebody to be in the entertainment field and also be bright.
It can happen.
I mean, it can happen.
But the bias about anybody in entertainment is that they can't go too deep.
Now, do a fact check on me.
Wasn't Zelensky's father a military guy?
Was he a general? I may have that part wrong.
But his father was a military guy, right?
And somebody will confirm that in a moment, but I think he was.
Or a grandfather?
Somebody's saying colonel.
Anyway, he has some military genes and influence.
Now, were you surprised that he's done as well as he's done so far?
Probably yes, right? So in terms of the marks he's getting from the world in handling the attack, he's getting pretty high marks.
All right.
So... Here's what could be happening.
And I'm going to do some speculating here, and then people who know what they're talking about will correct me, okay?
What would be the easiest way to attack a bunch of troops, like a full army, an invasion army?
Where would you have the best advantage for attacking them?
Well, it depends on what weapons you have, right?
If you have lots of weapons, maybe the best way to attack them is when they're in convoy form.
They're lined up. In theory, and I was hearing from people who know more than I do yesterday, about how you would attack a convoy.
Some people said you attack the front, and that gets you pretty much what you want because it's hard for them to back up.
Some people said you attack the front and the back, And then trap them and then pick them off.
But that only works if you have really good weapons on the other side.
If you're attacking a big convoy with not enough people and weapons, the convoy can still be you because it's still bigger than you are.
So the strategy you use depends on what weapons you have.
And how big you are and how capable your military is compared to the convoy.
Does that make sense? So it's not like there's one strategy.
There's a different strategy depending on the terrain, the strength of the convoy, what they have there compared to you, the distance they're going to travel, you know, all those variables.
The smartest person who answered the question, based on the fact that it sounded right to me, that's the only way I'd judge it, the smartest person said, you just take out the fuel trucks.
That's it. You just take out the fuel trucks and let them run.
And if you see another fuel truck coming, you take that one out.
Because if you take out their fuel...
How long can a tank go without fuel?
So if the distance is long enough, you just have to take out their supply line and just let them bleed themselves, and then you attack when they're out of fuel.
Now, again, there are a million variables, so there's no one right answer.
But here's what I think.
If you have limited-size military...
Compared to your opponents, and that's the case, right?
The Ukrainian resistance is smallish compared to the Russians.
But you had access to the most advanced weapons.
Do you think Ukraine has access to, as of today, the most advanced normal weapons?
Obviously not nukes or weapons of mass destruction.
But do you think they have the most advanced traditional weapons?
Probably. Probably some NATO country has said, you know, we wouldn't normally sell you this stuff, but we'll sell it to you today.
So we don't know this.
And if you think that we wouldn't provide the weaponry for lots of good reasons, you might be right.
But let's just take this, let's just game this out.
There is a kind of munitions, and people who know more than I do now can fill in some blanks.
There is a kind of missile, I believe.
I think it's a missile.
That you can shoo over a battlefield that's full of tanks.
So let's say the enemy has amassed a cluster of tanks.
There's one kind of missile that can separate above the tanks into lots of different kinetic elements and And just destroy the entire battlefield full of tanks all at once with one missile.
Now, would that be as effective on a convoy?
Well, it would do a lot of damage to a convoy, but the convoy is too spread out.
My assumption is that they're going to mass their forces around Kiev.
So is it true that at some point the tanks will be clustered or clustered-ish?
Maybe. So it could be that all that's happening right now is that Ukraine is cleverly letting their entire army in until they cluster.
And then they just take them all out at once.
Now, question number one.
If the United States...
Was fighting this war with our own military and our own weapons.
Would the United States have weapons that could take out an entire battlefield with the right kind of missiles?
Yes or no? Would the United States have that weaponry just for ourselves?
I'm seeing lots of yeses.
Now, if you go to YouTube, you can actually see a demonstration of the actual weapon.
I'm not inventing this.
I didn't make this up.
That's an actual missile, right?
And there's a name for it.
Somebody will tell me the name for it.
But basically, it's one missile that breaks into a bunch of little missiles that just spread havoc and destroy tanks for, you know, a very large perimeter.
Now, let's take it all the way.
If you thought that Zelensky was fighting to not lose...
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Because has Zelensky demonstrated that he would fight to not lose?
I don't think he has.
I think he's demonstrated he fights to win.
And winning, in this case, is taking Putin out.
Winning is now surviving.
Winning is now surviving.
Winning is taking Putin out.
If, and this is a gigantic if, Because the most likely thing is that Russia's army is superior and it's going to do whatever it wants.
That's the most likely possibility.
But since we live in an unlikely world, I'm just going to put this out here.
If NATO has provided certain types of weapons to Ukraine, those weapons could largely destroy the biggest part of the Russian invasion army in 48 hours.
And then what happens to Putin?
Because at that point, the Russian public says, wait a minute, you not only started a war, but you lost it?
That's what it looked like.
You not only started a war, because remember, Putin is playing, I think, I think it's a life and death game for him.
I think Putin knows that if he loses the war, which I imagine he thought would be unthinkable, if he loses, I don't know if he can hold power.
I think some internal coup would probably take him out at that point.
So, do not rule out the possibility that Zelensky is playing the same game Putin is, which is a decapitation strike.
But the way Zelensky would do it is, surprisingly, with unusually good weapons, take out the entire Russian invasion force in 48 hours.
And that might happen this week.
Now, again, again, it's not the most likely.
If we were just to game it out based on common sense and ordinary military assumptions, you would just say, well, the gigantic army is going to beat the smaller army, at least in Kiev.
I mean, if the only thing they're trying to do is take over the capital, you would bet on Russia.
In the long run. I mean, they might level it to do it, but you'd bet on them, right?
So, and somebody's saying, could we do any of those things without air superiority?
I would think that those missiles that destroy all the tanks in the zone, probably, if you shot enough of them, it's going to get past any air defense, right?
I would think. All right, so that's the biggest question to me.
At the very least, I guess the alternative to that is that the reporting is all wrong.
We're at a date. If...
Wake up, people.
Russia is defending itself.
Says Chuck Haney.
Wake up, people. Russia is defending itself.
Okay, that's what's happening.
Chuck. All right.
Consider the success of the colonies against the British.
Yeah, I mean, every analogy fails because that would be the last war, right?
We don't know what's going to happen in the next one, or even this one.
You know, I keep thinking that Putin will someday be called the dumbass of the Donbass.
I just feel like somebody's going to be called the dumbass of the Donbass.
It doesn't quite make sense, but...
I like how it sounds. Well, the financial restrictions are in place, and Russia's going to have a tough time.
J.P. Morgan thinks that their economy, Russian economy, might contract 20% quarter over quarter.
But they also say there's gigantic variability.
It's not predictable.
So how would you like to be a Russian citizen who has been completely cut off from the news, or at least accurate news, Maybe just like us, we don't know if it's worse, frankly.
And suddenly your economy is tanking, and you do notice that, and you can't get cash from your bank, and you do notice that.
Are you going to start asking some questions?
Will the Russian public rapidly educate itself?
Because they have access, right?
They have access to the Internet.
Not everything is banned.
So will the Russian public figure out what's going on here, like, really quickly?
Because the only way we can talk to the public in Russia is through the economy, isn't it?
I feel like we found a way to communicate with the Russian public through interest rates and inflation.
It's like, hey... Read the inflation.
We're sending you a little message here.
Hey, why does my vodka cost so much this week?
Well, maybe somebody's sending you a message because you can't get it the normal way.
I also wonder, in a world in which everybody can communicate, I'm not wrong that I can pick up a phone and call anybody in Russia that I want to, right?
I'm not wrong about that, am I? Don't phones...
Connect to Russia? And it makes me wonder, at what point could people in the United States or Ukraine or anyplace else just start calling Russian citizens?
I guess we can't speak the language, so it would be a problem.
But isn't the information getting through just by family members who live in other countries?
I feel like the information would be getting through by now.
And, you know, they wouldn't have enough...
The Russian public wouldn't care enough until it starts costing them money.
And that started today, I guess.
Ish. Shell Oil is pulling out of a Russia deal with Gazprom.
Crypto is rising because the Russians are starting to put money in crypto to protect it.
Their interest rates are up.
So we don't know how long we can sustain this.
But Putin really has a timing problem now, doesn't he?
There is a theoretical amount of time that Ukraine could hold out that would end Putin, wouldn't it?
Because it would just be too much of a strain on the Russian economy.
So it seems to me that there's going to be some Russian leader who says, look, hey world, if you'll take the sanctions off, we'll get rid of Putin and we'll get out of Ukraine.
There's probably...
I would bet you there's some oligarch or Russian military person who's already having conversations with NATO or the United States saying, hypothetically, I'm just going to float this idea.
If something were to happen to Putin, say, falling down the stairs, and hypothetically, my friend...
Alex and I became the new heads of Russia, just theoretically, hypothetically, just spitballing here.
Would that work out for you guys?
Would you drop the sanctions?
I feel as if somebody's going to make that conversation.
Because do you think that Putin is the only person in Russia who had ambitions for power?
I doubt it. There must be a few people over there who want some power.
All it would take is one of them talking to somebody in the CIA and saying, look, if you'll agree to these things, I'll agree to take him out.
You've just got to cover my ass once I take him out, because all hell's going to break this.
You know that conversation's happening.
It's got to be. All right.
If Putin were to hold Ukraine...
You know, conquer it and hold it in some purely military fashion.
How long can he do it?
So imagine the Russian economy being on the ropes, and then in addition to that, he got himself into a second Afghanistan.
See, here's the problem.
Putin is thinking about the birth of the Soviet Union.
Putin is thinking about the part of Russian history, it sounds like it's a little bit cyclical, where they're gaining land and influence.
What he should be thinking about is that Ukraine is his Afghanistan.
Now, I'm sure it's occurred to him.
But in a way, Afghanistan, some say...
It was one of the reasons that the Soviet Union fell, right?
Do I have that wrong? Don't the historians say that Afghanistan was some big part of why the Soviet Union fell apart?
Can you give me a confirmation on that?
I see people saying yes.
All right. So that's the idea you want to put in Putin's head.
You want to put it in his head that this is his Afghanistan.
And if the Western press just started reporting that, you could make it clear that winning would be losing.
You know what I mean? The best way for Putin to hold power already is to lose.
Is that too far? So let me say that again.
If you were to game it out, you're Putin, and you're playing this chess game, And you're starting from today.
So the history doesn't exist.
You're starting from today. What is Putin's best way to hold power?
If he keeps Ukraine and wins the war, Ukraine will bleed him dry and probably end his rule.
If he loses, he might be able to gracefully lose, keep a couple of provinces, and claim that something good happened.
And maybe hold power. So I think he's already in a position where his best play is losing.
Because if he wins, he can't hold it without bleeding himself to death and turning it into the fall of the Soviet Union, by analogy.
Well, here's the weirdest story.
How many of you are familiar with Nick Fuentes?
I want to see what level of awareness his name has.
Give me not just the yeses, I want to see the noes.
How many would say no?
All right, so it's a mix of yeses and noes.
People who are listening to this are probably more keyed into social media and stuff than other people.
All right, I'll just tell you what other people say about him, which is, let's say...
So this is what the press says about him, and I forget where I read this.
It might have been...
It was either on Fox or CNN. I forget which one.
But they say he has been labeled a white supremacist by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Anti-Defamation League.
And he has been banned from most major social media platforms for his white nationalist rhetoric.
All right, so the thing you should know about him is that...
That's his reputation.
And he organized this gathering of people on the right, I guess.
What was it called?
Let's see. America First Political Action Conference.
So Nick Fuentes organized that.
And he actually got representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar to attend.
I think one of them was recorded.
And I'm thinking, and of course, the usual outcry that you would expect.
And I'm wondering, what exactly were they thinking?
What exactly is going on here?
I don't even have a commentary about it.
My commentary is, what?
Is it fake news?
Somebody says they weren't.
Chuck, you believe the...
I've got...
Most of my comments are for one troll.
Oh yes, and right, and Fuentes was, last week he wrote on the messaging app Telegram, this is a quote from Nick Fuentes, I am totally rooting for Russia, while also referring to Putin as, quote, my czar.
Now, I don't know.
I don't even know what to say about this story.
Like, this is one of those stories where you just read the story and you just go, I don't know.
I don't have anything to add to that.
That story just sits there like just what it is.
And you just use your own opinion on it.
I don't even know what to say about it.
What is the simulation telling us with Ukraine?
Well, the simulation loves a three-act movie.
The siege of Ukraine, in theory, should be the third act.
If we haven't already seen it.
And the third act, if it's like a movie, which would indicate that the simulation likes three-act plays, which I think it does, then somehow Ukraine would survive the siege by the entire Russian military.
And it could be because the real story is that there might be some weapons that are already there, or some weapons showing up.
But I have a tough time believing that the Russian army is not going to suffer some insane casualties, no matter what, regardless of what kind of weapons there are.
All right. Has the Biden administration done anything to instill confidence they are capable of winning?
Well, we're not in it.
The Biden administration can't win this war.
We're not in that war. They can't win the war they're not in.
All right. Everybody's in this war, in a sense?
Yes. All right, the State of the Union today, I think they're writing and rewriting it.
I don't know what they have to talk about.
Do you think they're going to go to the Trump is a racist well?
Because I feel like that's all he has lately.
That's all Biden has.
It's just his old talking points that have been discredited.
All right. So, there's nothing going on except Ukraine, and there's no news about Ukraine that you can trust, so it's a little hard to talk about the news like that.
Now... A lot of people are saying, why is it that COVID went away at the same time that this war started?
Does it mean that all of our big problems are artificial?
And the answer is, somewhat.
The way the news covers things is certainly artificial, because it's driven by the business model of the news.
It's not driven by events, per se.
So, yeah, it can look like We go from one emergency to another and that they're almost timed or scheduled.
But it is true that we simply stopped talking about the last thing because it was boring and the new thing was more interesting because finally it was something new and it wasn't damn masks.
And, you know, I certainly understand everybody who is tired of the topic.
I get it, but it was the topic, so...
China is sanction-proof.
They don't have to be sanction-proof to keep them away from Taiwan.
That was the comment I was just reading.
I think Taiwan just might be unconquerable because of being an island and modern equipment.
But we'll find out.
We may find out.
All right, that's all I got for today, and I don't want to blabber on, as you know I can, unless you have any cool questions for me.
It's going to be a short one today.
Explain why we aren't drilling.
Good question. But it has to do with money and politics, and that's all it is.
