Episode 1675 Scott Adams: All of the News About Ukraine is Fake But Let's Talk About it Anyway
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Content:
Elon Musk: nuclear energy critically important
70% want increased US oil & gas production
Dems priming public to believe elections rigged
Does President Putin care about NATO?
Fake News Laundering process
Gas price increases
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Welcome to the most fantastic, incredible experience of your whole damn life.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and yes, Life has never been better than just this moment.
Until tomorrow. Wait until you see how good it is tomorrow.
But today is pretty good, too.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or gels, a canteen jug or flask.
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The thing that's going to solve all your problems.
Here's a test. Think of a problem you want solved, and then repeat it in your mind, and then have the simultaneous SIP. Go.
Okay, I did mine.
Now we're going to check back in a few weeks and see if any of your problems got solved by the simultaneous SIP. My guess is no fewer than 60% to 75% of all your problems were just solved.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is science.
Well, a special shout-out to Mark Schneider.
You hear his name a lot in terms of talking about nuclear energy in this country.
Well, he reports that in 430 days, so a year plus, he went from obese to finishing a marathon, which I believe he finished yesterday.
Went from obese to finishing a marathon, right?
He finished a marathon yesterday.
What? And the interesting part is he sort of documented the whole journey.
And he was essentially taking, I guess what he would consider, the best advice on how to turn your life around.
Now some of that came from some of my work, some of it came from other work.
But essentially he just took it a chunk at a time.
Started with a very small goal of running, I think, a mile a day or something, and turned it into a system so that the system just does what the system does.
It's something you work on every day.
I would see his reports.
He'd have a day where he'd go out there and he just couldn't run any kind of distance.
Still a success. The important thing is that his system was he would go do something every day, you know, running-related things.
And if some days he went and his body just wasn't going to cooperate, the system still worked.
Because the system is you keep doing it.
That's the important part.
The important part was not that any given day he ran X number of miles.
The important part was you don't stop.
And by simply not stopping, and by turning it into a system and doing a little bit every day, 430 days to go from obese to running a marathon.
So if you're wondering what's the edge case, like what's the best you can do in a year and a half, well, there you go.
Things you can learn in a year and a half.
There's somebody in my circle of social circle who decided that she wanted to learn Spanish.
And in, I think, something like, I don't know, Nine months or something.
Or six months, actually.
I think in something like six months, she became fluent.
Decided to learn 25 words a day in Spanish and then seek out people to talk with to practice.
And in six months, she's basically fluent in Spanish.
So look at the things that people accomplished during the pandemic.
I mean, I basically started a whole business.
You know, what I'm doing right now, that was a pandemic project.
So when you see some of the great successes that people have had on social and personal stuff, you have a lot of years in your life.
You know, you can make such a difference in one year if you just get serious about it, whatever it is you want.
All right, there's news on nuclear.
Elon Musk has tweeted...
He said, hopefully it is now extremely obvious, if Josh Lysak is watching this, we won't criticize his overuse of descriptive terms, but hopefully it is now extremely obvious that Europe should restart dormant nuclear power stations and increase power output of existing ones.
This is critical to national and international security.
Now, Who has been telling you loudly and for a long time that if you're looking at nuclear energy as just an energy source, you're missing the big picture?
And that it's a security problem.
It's not only a security problem now, Ukraine being the top example, but it's a huge security problem as we go into space.
If you don't have the best domestic nuclear energy program, you're not going to have good nuclear energy in space, either, because you need one to support the other.
And so Elon Musk is now saying what some of us have been saying now for several years, which is you need to consider the homeland security element, or actually international security element, of energy.
And it's not until Elon Musk says it in a tweet that it becomes real, right?
The good thing about Elon Musk is that his credibility at this point is so high that he just tweets something and suddenly the entire national mood will shift a few points.
So now Musk is full-throated in favor of...
Carbon fuels, at least in the short run, for security reasons, and also nuclear, also for security reasons.
So that is exactly the right opinion.
Now, this made me wonder, I said to myself, Scott, suppose, hypothetically, You had been in charge of everything for the last several years.
Let's say, Scott, that your opinion, you personally, your opinion, Scott, of what we should have done had been followed.
Where would we be today?
Well, I told you to, as many of you did, right?
This is not my special opinion or something.
But many of us said, Trump was right about energy independence.
I would have said that.
I've been pro-nuclear for years and years and years.
Would have been completely right about that.
Completely right about climate change being a potential risk, but that we can't predict it because there will be new technologies that will change everything.
Was I right about that?
Was I right that new technologies...
We'll make it possible to know what climate change would do in the future.
Well, there's lots of new technologies coming, including fusion, etc.
But here's another one that's kind of cool.
There are these genetically modified bacterium.
They can take carbon dioxide right out of the air.
Well, I guess you take it out of the air probably differently.
But once it's taken out of the air, they can put that CO2 into this modified bacterium or Let's talk in non-scientific terms.
You can bash together the bacteria and the CO2 and we'll turn it into useful industrial chemicals like acetone and isopropanol.
What? And apparently they can do it at an industrial, economically feasible level.
So that's been demonstrated now.
So they have economics...
Solved and the technique solved to suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into a commercial product you can sell.
You want to hear my weirdest prediction?
I'm positive it's going to be true.
My weirdest prediction is there will someday be an industry to mine CO2 out of the air.
Does anybody want to bet against that?
And it's based on this stuff, because I've been reading about this for a few years.
There are a number of chemical processes where you can turn CO2. You'd call it farming, okay?
CO2 farming, I guess.
So I think as soon as there's an industrial viable industry, that the whole climate change thing is going to turn into we need more CO2. If it simply became feasible to suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into something you could sell, a lot of people are going to do that right away because there would be no barrier to entry, right?
You just build the device that sucks it out of the air.
Well, there would be a barrier to entry because it would be probably a big industrial complex to do it efficiently.
But I don't think the technology to do it is going to be that difficult.
So... Look for that.
Look for more of the bacterium solution, because acetone and isopropanol are not the only things you can turn CO2 into.
They're just the easy things they did first.
They could turn in all kinds of stuff.
One of my commenters says, here comes Ego Scott.
Let me pause a moment and speak to you, my troll.
Because I know you like it when I address you individually.
The people who think that when I talk about something I'm good at or something I got right, when their first reaction is that it's ego, those people are losers every time.
If you want to know something that will guarantee you can identify somebody with a loser philosophy, somebody who has no chance of succeeding in life, It's when they see other people talking about what they do well, or saying what they got right, and they have a real negative reaction to it.
Literally a negative reaction to success.
There's nothing that could predict you're going to lose in life than that comment.
Now, you don't have to like anybody's personality or the way they present themselves.
I'm just saying that if another person's ego...
Is what you're responding to, as opposed to the thing they're saying?
Just look at the thing I'm saying.
Is it true or not true that I've been pro-nuclear way before some of the people talking about it now?
That's just true. So if you think that the question that you should focus on in that story, Scott was right about nuclear, if you think the thing you should focus on is my ego, you, my troll, are a fucking loser.
You will always lose in life because you can never see the tree for the forest.
If what you're worried about is your psychological reaction to me being right about some of the most important things in civilization, you have a mental problem.
It has nothing to do with me.
So go deal with your mental problem, and then when you've dealt with that, come back here and make some comments, okay?
All right. Rasmussen says that in the U.S., 70% of the people they polled favor increased U.S. oil and gas production.
I have told you before that if the public agrees on something by, you know, I just picked out of the air 75%, it's going to happen.
But I'm a little concerned that it might not in this case.
Is there something that's different about U.S.? Oil and gas production?
That 70% of the public can't get what it wants?
Get rid of this guy.
Goodbye trolley. And I'm thinking that this administration really can't do that, can they?
This administration can't really just suddenly change direction and increase production of fossil fuels.
Am I right? Can't really do that.
So you have to get rid of the current administration to get what 70% of the country wants, which is increased U.S. oil and gas production.
I think that Biden's administration, especially because of the progressive wing, they can't possibly change direction on this, can they?
If Biden changed direction on fossil fuels...
It would be such an off-brand thing to do.
I don't know. What would Democrats even do with that?
How would you even process it if you're a Democrat?
There couldn't be anything that's more central to the Democrat brand than climate change.
So you have to actually elect a different person to get this result, something that 70% of the country wants.
Yeah, it would be antithetical to their entire worldview.
I rarely, if ever, this might be the first time I've ever said that word out loud.
Antithetical. Yeah.
I just realized I've never said that word out loud.
And the reason is, I would never use that word in public except I was reading it in a comment.
I would use a simpler word because it's not a word that a sixth grader would recognize.
I try to avoid any word that a sixth grader doesn't recognize.
Well, once again, Jonathan Turley, who is one of my favorite writers on all things political, he's talking about the Democrats' big lie.
You know, the Democrats' big definition of the big lie was when Trump and others said that maybe the 2020 election was rigged, and the Democrats and the media labeled that the big lie.
The big lie. But now, as Jonathan Turley points out, Biden and his supporters have a new big lie of their own.
So their big lie is that the various states that are changing their election laws are changing them to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections.
In other words, they're priming the public to not accept the next election.
Based on things they say that are happening now in the legal system.
I mean, transparent things that everybody can see.
But they're saying that those things are going to basically rig the election and so it won't be a fair election when it's done.
Now... What do you think of that?
Because... I can't think of anything more dangerous for the country, can you?
We're having these January 6 hearings under the theory that when politicians and the administration tell you that their system that they are part of is corrupt, it's really destabilizing.
So when Trump says an election was rigged, it's very destabilizing for the country.
Whether he's right or wrong, it's a very destabilizing thing to do.
Here's Biden doing it right now.
The Biden administration is performing the crime that the January 6th people are trying to investigate, like at the same time.
Now, I mean, that's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
But my point is, if January 6th was allegedly so bad because it was a risk to the democratic system itself...
Well, then what Biden's doing is exactly as much risk without the storming the Capitol part.
But that was not really the important part anyway.
It was important in terms of the violence and the crime.
But it wasn't important, the actual storming of the Capitol, it wasn't important in terms of the direction of the country.
I mean, it was a small trespassing crime, basically.
And so violence. Don't want to minimize the violence.
That was real. It's just a separate question.
That's all. So I think Turley is right on point here, that the Biden administration is creating a very destabilizing and dangerous situation.
They're doing it intentionally.
They're doing it with great planning.
They're doing it way in advance.
And I can't think of anything that would be worse for the country than telling people in advance that an election will be rigged.
And they're saying the reason.
And apparently the reason they're giving is completely a lie, which is that these laws are making it harder to vote for Democrats, I guess, and that therefore that's how the election will be rigged.
But the rules that are being contemplated and passed by these various states don't have any of that in it.
You know, there are claims such as it reduces the hours for voting.
But you look at the law and it increases the hours for voting.
Literally the opposite of what Biden's administration is claiming.
The January 6th violence didn't involve Trump supporters, somebody saying, well, I'm not going to...
I don't agree with you on that.
All right, so...
Jake Tapper had a great piece on how the United States has enabled Putin, and other countries have enabled him, by not responding for his past.
His past transgressions.
So when Putin took Crimea, I think the world said, hey, cut that out.
But we can kind of see it's a special case.
There's tremendous Russian strategic importance.
It's a small area relative to the rest of the world.
They're Russian-speaking.
So you can kind of rationalize it away, which I think we did.
And then suddenly Putin's in Georgia.
And you say, well, they are kind of Russian-speaking-ish.
And so you sort of rationalize it away.
And then, you know, I don't have the timing right, but Putin destroys Grozny totally, the city of Grozny, to get at the Chechens.
And we say, well, that's sort of a local problem.
So Georgia was before Crimea, somebody's saying.
But anyway, the point stands...
That he did a number of things that you would expect some kind of world reaction to, but individually the world kept saying, ah, I think we can work with you.
And as Jake Tapper pointed out, that both Republican and Democrat presidents, going back to Bill Clinton, were very, very willing...
To work with Putin and thought they could.
They thought that he was a straight shooter.
But now the news, which I think is fake, is that Putin has always said, if you look at his writings and his speeches, he's always tried to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
And so you should know now that he's definitely going to go for more countries.
In the comments, I want to see your opinion.
Given that Putin would have now absorbed Crimea, Georgia, and let's say he succeeds in Pardov or all of Ukraine, would he go for more?
If he finishes with Ukraine, will he go for more?
Moldova, maybe.
Well, I think Putin has shown that he will go for anything he thinks he can get.
What would you say? I say Putin, by his nature, comes from a long line of leaders who have the same characteristic.
If he thinks it'll work, he'll try it.
I think that's the only requirement, right?
Does it look like it'll work?
If it's going to work, yeah.
Now, the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania...
Would be sort of obvious territories just because of geography.
You know, they're little countries, not much military, and they're right in that little area that the Soviet Union used to own, and it's sort of in the way and has a little strategic value.
So yeah, you can imagine he'd look at those.
But they are NATO. And the smart people are saying he would never attack a NATO country.
What do you think? I think it's weird that everybody is respecting this NATO boundary.
Does that seem weird to you?
Because in war, every boundary gets just obliterated.
You don't want it to, but it does.
But why is this NATO boundary thing, like even Russia seems to be acting like it matters?
I mean, for an obvious reason, because the military alliance would be triggered.
But would NATO just start nuking Russia?
I mean, I'm not so sure that Putin does care if it's NATO. I think he only cares what the reaction would be.
And, yeah, so let's say Article 5 gets initiated, which is, NATO's protection of if anybody's attacked, we're all attacked.
But do you think...
I'll just pick a country.
Do you think if Russia moved troops into Lithuania or Latvia...
Estonia is maybe a different question.
But do you think if Putin moved troops in there that NATO would start World War III over Latvia?
Would NATO start World War III over Latvia...
Most people say yes. But I think you're looking at the credible deterrent thing.
I just don't know that they would.
So the problem is, if Putin has a different calculation than you do, then he would take those things.
Well, it looks like Russia has responded to the credit card companies saying they won't process credit cards for Russia.
And now they've got their own entity that's going to work with a Chinese entity to replace the credit cards.
As others have said, will we look back on this as our biggest strategic mistake ever because we allowed China and Russia and their allies to create a functioning alternative currency that would replace the dollar someday?
Have we made it easy for them to destroy the United States?
I don't know.
But I have a question about it.
Have you seen the story about the Russian whistleblower who allegedly had been an analyst in the Russian intelligence agency?
Did anybody see that story?
There was a big threat on it.
There was a number of entities.
Now, the whistleblower is making claims that Putin's out of touch and that Putin The Russian...
Here's some of the claims. And I'm going to tell you in a moment that I think this is fake news.
So my opinion is that all of this is fake news.
But I'll tell you what it is.
It's being reported as real news.
But I don't think the top media entities by size have treated this as real.
Somebody give me a fact check of this.
But this story seems to be in, let's say, the second-tier publications or third-tier and on social media, but it's not on...
I don't think it's been in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
And the claims are that this Russian intel guy allegedly says that the Russian dead could be as much as 10,000, but nobody knows.
And... That Russia has no way out, and they're trapped, and basically it's a whole big old problem.
Now, here's my take.
The credibility is that other people who are in the Russian intelligence agencies have been asked if this looks like a real person who's in the intelligence agencies.
The two people who are in the Russian intelligence agencies whose names we don't know Say that, yes, oh, that's definitely a real person there, just by looking at the writing.
So, would you believe a story that is coincidentally exactly what Ukraine would want to hear?
When Ukraine is creating one fake story after another in the news, that part we know, right?
So that's not me speculating.
We know for sure Ukraine is creating one false, you know, anecdote after another.
And the reason that we could trust this story is that somebody claims it comes from an anonymous source.
Do you trust that?
If that were all you knew, it came from an anonymous source.
No, you wouldn't trust that.
So you have to launder the unanimous source.
So the way they laundered it was to say they talked to two other unanimous sources who said the first unanimous source looks good to them.
Seriously? That's how they laundered this thing.
They said, oh, you can trust it because our one anonymous source was validated by two other anonymous sources and we're not going to tell you any of their names.
That is the most obvious fake news of all fake news.
And it's, you know, I retweeted it.
I don't remember if I said it looked fake, but I retweeted it.
We're in a serious fog of horror problem.
Because the more you think about it...
And honestly, when I read it...
I read the English translation, so there might be some problems.
When I read it, I thought it read as obviously false.
Like, obviously made up.
Like, really obviously.
Like, super obviously fake.
And yet, they sold many of you by saying that they talked to two anonymous people who said it was real.
LAUGHTER Now, if that works, let me tell you, there's a report that I can fly by flapping my arms.
Now, of course you don't believe me.
Why would you believe me?
If I say I can fly through the air by flapping my arms, then don't believe me.
But let me tell you, there are two people who are absolute experts at arm-flapping flight.
I can't tell you who their names are.
But those two people who are experts at flapping your arms and flying...
They both said that I can do it.
So now don't you feel stupid?
Sure, when I said I could flap my arms and fly, well, okay, skepticism might have been appropriate.
I can see that. But now that you know that there are two people whose names I haven't given you who say I can totally fly by flapping my arms, I guess you're convinced now, aren't you?
Aren't you? Not only that, but the person in the media who I told anonymously that I can fly by flapping my arms, and then he wrote a story about it?
Well, now there are two sources.
There's me telling you I can fly by flapping my arms, but don't believe me.
Look at the news. The news says I can fly by flapping my arms.
Yes, well, that's true. I did give the news that story and asked them to publish it.
But it's still two sources.
Two sources is good. Well, they're really one source coming out of two places, but still good.
Apparently, there's a history of Russian mothers, mothers of soldiers, being influential, at least in Afghanistan.
Allegedly, they made a difference.
And now the Russian soldier mothers are getting involved.
And there are reports, again, would you believe these reports are true?
This sounds like Ukrainian disinformation.
But the story is that the Russian conscripts thought they were going on a training exercise and did not know they were going to an actual war.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that the Russian conscripts did not know they were going to a real war?
I'm going to put that in the list of things which I say is very unlikely, but it's being reported as true.
Now, I do believe that the Russian soldiers are not allowed to have phones.
But don't you think that the leaders would know if they're going to war?
You don't think the soldiers had some inkling that when they landed in Belarus that that was close to Ukraine and maybe something was happening there that they'd heard about?
Yeah. Somebody says they think it's true.
I'm going to say it's not impossible to But I would say the odds of it being true are pretty low.
But nonetheless, I would say that the Russian mothers do not know what harm their children are in.
And I would say that we should make sure that they know that.
So I'd love to know what we're doing, CIA-wise, to inform the Russian public of what their government is doing.
Because maybe that's the whole key.
If you can find some way to inform the Russian public...
Of what's actually happened.
Maybe it makes a difference.
Lucas Tomlinson, who reports for Fox News, had this provocative tweet.
He said, It's been three days since Pentagon first called the long Russian military convoy outside Ukraine's capital as stalled.
Many now wondering where the Russian soldiers are.
U.S. officials think, quote, Something must be wrong.
Something must be wrong?
Well, yes. A 40-mile convoy that doesn't seem to be moving anywhere during the middle of a war?
Let me tell you, something looks like it's wrong.
Now, some have suggested that they're just waiting until their moment to come in and occupy or something.
Some have said that's the distance that their artillery works, so why would they get any closer?
Well, that doesn't make sense to me.
But... And we know that the Ukraine Special Forces are taking out the supply lines.
But I think if I read between the lines, isn't Lucas Tomlinson asking why there's so much equipment but not that many soldiers?
Is the story that there doesn't seem to be anybody in the trucks?
That they don't appear manned?
Because we haven't seen people walk around.
Now, what happens when the people just try to keep warm by staying inside an idling vehicle?
We run out of gas.
So the soldiers can't really stay in the vehicles idling, because they'd run out of gas.
And they can't stand outside, because it's probably too cold.
So where are the soldiers?
Have the soldiers left?
That's a pretty good question.
Here's a second question.
Is it possible that Putin brought in a whole bunch of old equipment as decoys and built a 40-mile decoy army that has almost no fighting soldiers but a lot of old trucks and shit you didn't need anyway?
Is that possible?
That he's getting the defenses to focus on a bunch of old trucks and equipment and they were never meant to actually attack?
Does anybody do anything that clever?
In my mind, that's too clever, because I think we would have noticed if it were not an operational convoy.
I think we would have noticed, wouldn't we?
They're being attacked by Ukrainian air.
Yeah, code reuse.
There are multiple stories about convoys heading to a capital.
This would be the third story about a convoy heading to a capital, right?
Canada, the U.S. trucking convoy right now, and now these trucks going to the capital.
All right.
And apparently the airspace is not being controlled.
Now, this whole NATO line in the sand that seems to be holding is weird to me because NATO can provide weapons and logistics support.
Why do we think that providing lethal weapons is not the same as being in the war?
Is it because Russia is an arms-producing country?
If Russia were not an arms-producing country whose entire business model has to be, hey, we're not in this war, we're just selling you weapons.
Oh, no. Oh, no, we're not part of the war.
You can't attack us for selling weapons.
We're just commerce.
We just sell weapons. So I think because Russia does that, and they get away with that ridiculous claim that they're not in the war, they're just providing lethal weapons to the war, that we get to say the same thing.
And if Russia were not a big arms-producing and selling country, I think it's like their second biggest industry or something...
Would NATO be able to get away with the same bullshit theory?
No, we're not involved in the war.
We're just giving them all the weapons and training and logistics.
That's all. It does feel like violating the Prime Directive.
That is correct. Yeah, and fentanyl is the same thing.
China's not making you take fentanyl.
No, they're just providing precursors to the cartels.
That's okay. That's not a war.
Even if it kills 50,000 to 100,000 Americans a year intentionally, that's not a war.
We're just selling stuff.
It's the other people, the people buying it, who are making the war.
No, not the people selling it.
It's a ridiculous standard.
How do we drift into such a ridiculous standard?
The standard always should have been, if you give weapons to my enemy, I get to kill you.
That always should have been the standard.
But somehow the world has accepted this standard.
Am I wrong that it's a ridiculous standard?
If somebody hands my enemy who says he's going to kill me, hands that person a gun, and they start shooting at me, I would kill both of them.
Without, I mean, if I could do it legally and I could get away with it, I would kill the person who handed them the gun.
Wouldn't you? If that person knew what the gun was going to be used for.
They're equally marked for death, in my opinion.
In fact, if I got one over on the person who had the gun, like let's say I somehow prevailed, I would just shoot the guy that handed it to him, even if he wasn't coming at me.
I would just say, you just gave this guy this fucking gun.
I'm glad I won the fight and killed him.
And now you're dead.
I would just kill him where I stood if he handed the gun to the guy who shot at me.
Wouldn't you? Who wouldn't?
I mean, you've got the legal problem that it wouldn't be technically self-defense so you'd go to jail forever.
I'd still do it.
I'd still do it.
I'd probably have to, like, find a knife to put in his hand or something, but I'd still do it.
There's no doubt I'd kill him.
I'm pretty sure about that.
Now, that would be a good movie, somebody says.
It'd be the first good movie.
Well, I guess the U.S. is actually talking about banning Russian oil purchases, being the most obvious thing that we should do.
But I wonder, I've got some questions about the economics of oil.
Why is it that the price is going up as opposed to us talking about not having oil?
I feel like, shouldn't we be saying it's not about the price, it's about somebody who won't have any?
So let's say in California we pay $8 a gallon some day.
Doesn't that mean that Lithuania doesn't have any gas?
Or whoever is the person who didn't get it because we bought the limited supply?
Doesn't that mean that there will be some poor countries that just won't have gas?
Isn't that the big problem?
We're talking about our inflation over here.
Oh, my gas prices will be higher, which is a big deal.
I mean, it's a big hardship. But isn't the bigger problem that there are going to be poor countries with no energy?
Like none. Because they won't be able to play anything like $8 a gallon.
Right? So I think we're talking about the wrong stuff.
Likewise, when we're talking about the Ukraine war, the media, of course, focuses on all the sexy stuff like the military and the death.
But the Ukraine problem is a humanitarian problem.
Not just the immigrants or the people migrating out, but also how are you going to feed the people who are there?
What happens when the breadbasket of Europe gets destroyed?
So maybe we should be talking a lot more about how we're going to feed people and get some attention on that.
Do you think that the U.S. will ban Russian oil purchases?
Because I guess Europe is talking about it too, and I don't see how Europe can do it.
I could imagine the United States banning it because it's 25%.
I feel like we could manage 25%.
What do you think? I feel like the United States could handle a Russian ban.
25%, and I'll say this based on the totality of life experience plus some economic training.
You can make people handle 25% of anything.
Just a general rule. You can change anything by 25%, and about 80% of the time, people will just adjust.
If it's bigger than that, then it gets harder and harder.
But a 25% adjustment to something with a fungible asset, with lots of moving parts where they can produce more kind of quickly, and they can do things because they have bigger profit temporarily, Are we going to talk about the biolab conspiracy now?
I'm not going to. The idea that there are biolabs in Ukraine and that was part of the story.
No, I don't believe any of that. If I saw anything credible, I'd talk about it, but there's nothing credible yet in that story.
All right. So I think if I had to predict, I'll predict that for political reasons we'll at least announce we're going to stop buying Russian oil.
But I'll bet we'll have to phase it out.
We're not going to say, you know, turn it off today.
I think we'll phase it out, which means it'll take so long to do that it won't really be anything except an announcement.
So I think we're going to say we're doing it, but do it in such a small way that it would be almost like we didn't do it.
That would be my guess.
Because it's more of a political problem than a practical problem.
All right.
What do you say about today's news?
Putin needs a double buffer zone.
Oh, the Iran deal, yeah.
So, since everything is connected, there's some thinking that we can get Russia to be flexible about an Iran deal in a way that they've never been.
If we package it with something they want regarding Ukraine, what do you think about that?
My negotiating technique is that when you get to the point where you can't negotiate a settlement, as in Ukraine, they don't really have a deal that they could agree to, that the way you get to the deal you can agree to is you have to start throwing more things into the deal.
So you start throwing Iran into the deal, you start throwing energy into the deal, you start You know, you just throw everything into it.
And then see if that changes the balance and you can make a deal.
So what I know about the Iran deal sounds like, I don't know, it feels like any deal we make with Iran still lets them build a nuclear weapon.
Am I wrong? Anything that they would agree to would give them at least a secret way to do it.
Sorry, Ukraine will decide the deal, Scott, not the U.S. I don't think so.
Do you think Ukraine will decide on the deal and not the U.S.? Zelensky is a U.S. puppet.
So, in my opinion, Zelensky would agree with whatever the U.S. told him he had to agree to because it would be an existential problem.
Existential meaning he could die if he does the wrong thing.
New York Times, Friedman is asking China, whose side are you on?
Well, that's obvious. Zelensky was elected?
Yes, he was. He's still a puppet.
DeSantos claims Fauci is under federal witness protection now.
That's just hyperbole.
really.
Siberia has a lot of exploitation to have, probably, for minerals.
All right.
Yeah, I'm not going to talk about masks.
I'm done with that. How many people think that there's a global recession coming?
Here's what I would add to your economic concerns.
You can't look at history to figure out what's going to happen next.
Because you can't look at anything pre-internet And predict post-internet.
Actually, let me make that as Scott's rule of predicting.
All right, the Adam's rule of predicting.
Everything you could predict before the internet has to be rethought.
It doesn't mean it's different. But you'd have to rethink every prediction that would have made complete sense before the internet.
You have to evaluate it in the after-internet world.
And here's what I mean.
In the... When was the Great Depression?
39? Some historian...
What was the date? 29, yes.
29. I'm sorry. I confuse it with World War II. So 29 was the Great Depression.
In 29, that was pre-internet.
Now, what's different when you have the internet and you have global everything and everything's fungible, meaning you can move goods around wherever you need them?
I think in this world, we adjust to inefficiencies so fast that it makes the odds of a complete economic meltdown almost zero.
So in other words, right now, because gas prices are high, you should assume that the people in the Hunt oil company in Texas...
Just made a huge amount of energy, you know, mean investment in drilling and producing oil.
So probably the entire oil industry just went to, you know, DEFCON 10 and is just doing everything it can to figure out how to produce more energy.
Likewise, you're going to see more stuff in nuclear, you're going to see more stuff everywhere.
So I think that the existence of the Internet...
It allows us to do something that would be greatly destabilizing in a pre-internet world, but will not be as destabilizing post-internet.
Because the internet tells you where the problems are, and then it directs resources toward it that never existed before.
Pre-internet, if somebody wanted to hire somebody and somebody wanted a job, it was hard to match them up, unless you lived in the same town.
But after the Internet, every opportunity can be matched with the solution, no matter where the solution is and no matter where the opportunity is.
So in my view of the world, the risk of a depression post-Internet is very small, unless something knocks out communication and then all bets are off.
So communication alone, and the fact that we can ship anything from anywhere to anywhere, should keep us from the worst-case scenario.
All right.
The Western finance system may be going downhill.
The finance system, too, has that same self-healing element to it, I think.
That as long as you have massive communications...
Everything that breaks gets healed fairly quickly.
You know, I often write about this, that civilization seems like a fetus that's being developed, and it seems like the Internet is sort of the central nervous system or the communication path for the entity which is all humans on Earth.
So once that communication path is in place, humans create an almost godlike power because all of our strengths are combined and we can coordinate all of our strengths.
It's almost godlike, but the internet allows it.
Consider the negative wealth effects, though.
How can Zelensky be a US puppet and a master persuader?
Easily. Those are not even in conflict.
It's not a coincidence that Zelensky has entertainment skills, proven entertainment skills, and he's, you know, he's the person that you see now.
He literally is an actor.
So, did you see the scene where he was talking to the journalists, and instead of standing behind the podium, he grabbed a chair and he sat on the edge of the stage and shook hands with them?
Now, That's what an actor would know how to do.
If you were doing a movie and you wanted to show a scene where the leader was a person of the people, what would he do?
The person of the people in the movie would walk past the podium and grab a chair and sit on the edge of the stage and reach down and start shaking hands with the audience.
In this case, the journalists.
It looks exactly like a movie.
And in fact, Ukraine looks like it's in its third act right now.
So the fact that this has such a movie structure to it really should open your eyes a little bit about the nature of reality.
Because the number of times that reality follows this three-act movie structure, I don't think it's a coincidence.
I mean, it could be selective, you know, bias on my part.
Could be. But it sure looks consistent.
All right.
As a wise man once said, politics is Hollywood for ugly people.
He's a good actor.
He is. All right.
Now, do you believe the theory that the reason that Putin has miscalculated is that his people won't tell him the truth?
In other words, people who work for him are afraid to tell him his ideas are bad.
How many of you think that that's a thing?
I don't think it's a thing either.
So the media is reporting That Putin is so isolated he doesn't know that even his own people think something's a bad idea.
I don't think so.
I think Putin is completely plugged in.
And I don't think that his...
In the real world, the person who's the best advisor to the leader is the one who does tell him when he's wrong.
Let me test this against your understanding of things.
Leaders do have sycophants and yes-men, right?
They have people who disagree with them.
That's certainly the case.
But isn't it your experience that leaders almost always, almost always, have some trusted advisors who do disagree with them, and they require them?
Now, of course, if you're a dictator, I suppose you'd say, nobody disagree with me, I'll execute you.
But it wouldn't be good for the dictator, would it?
Anybody who's as smart as Putin, and no matter what you say about him, he's not dumb.
Anybody who's as smart as Putin needs somebody on his team who can tell him when he's wrong, and he would want that.
So I don't believe he's getting bad information.
Now, you heard the same thing about Trump from Democrats, right?
Didn't you hear the same thing about Trump, that Trump would only be told things he wanted to hear or else he'd get real mad?
Total bullshit. Total bullshit.
Trump, probably similar to most people, would love to hear a better opinion that disagrees with them.
Everybody likes a better opinion.
People don't like equal or bad opinions that disagree with them.
But everybody likes a better opinion that disagrees with them.
They can hate it and love it at the same time because everybody wants the better opinion.
So they might hate the fact that they have to move from their old opinion to the new one, but they still want the good opinion.
Unless they're literally crazy.
Fourth political theory is the bad advice.
I don't know what that means. And I would say my own experience with Trump, when I got to meet him and chat with him in the Oval Office in 2018, my own experience was that he was absolutely listening carefully to what I said.
And he wasn't telling me what to think.
He literally asked my opinion.
Actually, here's a good example.
When I met with Trump, he asked my opinion on a specific thing, and I disagreed with him.
I disagreed with him. Did I have any problem?
No. No.
It was actually just an interesting conversation.
Because my disagreement came with reasons.
I gave my reasons.
He gave his reasons.
And by the way, when we disagreed on the topic, Trump was right.
So the thing we disagreed on...
He was right. Because he predicted in 2018 that Biden was going to be his big problem competition.
And I thought it was going to be Kamala Harris.
So he was totally right.
But I would say he gave me full attention and respect and listened carefully when I made my case and then told me his opinion.
So I didn't get anything like a sense that disagreeing with him would be any kind of a problem.
You've just got to be able to support it.
If you can't support your opinion, you always think the boss is an idiot.
Right? I mean, I made a whole cartoon based on that kind of dynamic.
If you believe that you're smarter than your boss and your boss doesn't take your advice, you think the boss is an idiot.
But that doesn't mean your advice was good.
Maybe your advice was bad.
Maybe you're the idiot and you can't tell.
All right. Well, companies and countries use the same template against Trump that they used against Putin.
You mean the boycotts and stuff?
Any leader who does something bad enough is going to get boycotted, sure.
Oh, I've told you that one piece of content about the meeting before.
The reason that I told you that piece of content is that Trump was right.
Normally you wouldn't want to talk about any conversation you had with the president.
That's just sort of a standard assumption.
You don't talk about what you talked about with the president.
But I made an exception because he was just right.
I mean, he wouldn't mind, right?
If somebody said, you know, that cartoonist guy, he told us what you said, but he was right years before it happened and unambiguously right, so I don't think he'd complain.
All right.
I think that's all we have to say for today.
it.
Yeah, how many of you saw that John Daly thing where he had a phone call with Trump just recently, and he put the phone call on...
On the speaker? And then somebody recorded it and then they played it?
If you were Trump and you would call John Daly and he did that to you, would you ever talk to John Daly again?
Seriously. Would you ever talk to John Daly again about anything?
I would erase him from my life that day.
I would never have another contact with John Daly.
And by the way, If anybody takes anything that you've sent them privately and shares it, anything, never talk to them again.
That's my rule, right?
And, you know, I follow that rule.
If somebody shares a private thing from you, never, ever talk to them again about anything, period.
They're dead to you forever.
In fact, nobody should ever talk to John Daly about anything.
Let me go a little stronger on John Daly.
What he did to Trump isn't just a bad thing he did to Trump.
If you were friends with John Daly and you saw him do that to Trump, who presumably was a friend, would you be that asshole's friend?
That is the biggest asshole move you'll ever see.
I mean, that's asshole squared right there.
Yeah, it's a security risk, too.
Yeah, it's John Daly, the golfer.
So Trump, you know, knows famous golfers, of course.
But man, to me, I mean, I would never even shake that guy's hand.
What John Daly did to Trump is so disreputable.
Like, if I were introduced to him in public, I couldn't even shake his hand.
Like, I would be disgusted by that guy.
I mean, that's as low as you can go.
You know, your friend calls you, and you're selling out your friend as you're talking to him.
You don't go lower than that.
That's as low as you can go.
Any chance he'd ask Trump's permission?
No, there's no chance of that.
Maybe he told him that's what he was going to do.
It didn't look like it. When I shake hands with Obama, he sold our country.
I would always shake hands with a president, even an ex-president, because in that case you really are talking about the office, even if it's an ex-president.
So yes, I would.
It's polite to let the caller know if he's on a speakerphone.
Yeah. It's not just polite.
It's way past polite.
Somebody's saying that it's polite to tell somebody if they're on the speakerphone.
It's way past polite.
Like, that should be a requirement of social existence.
If somebody's impolite to you, you might still talk to them later.
But if somebody puts you on the speakerphone and doesn't tell you, Actually, that happened to me recently.
That actual thing happened to me recently.
I was on a speakerphone and didn't know it.
And I'll never talk to that person again.
I will literally never talk to that person again about anything for any reason.
And they know it. And by the way, that person is aware of it.
And before that, I had a substantial connection.
But you do that once, and that's it.
There's no second chance for that fucking shit.
Am I right? Who would give somebody a second chance after they did that?
Let me ask you that.
You don't give anybody a second chance.
Yeah, no way. Even if you didn't say anything terribly damning, and I didn't, but even if you didn't say anything terribly damning, you'd never talk to that person again.
You shouldn't. Somebody said I would if they were family.
Nope, not me. Not me.
Somebody said that they would speak to them again if they were family.
To which I say, no.
No, that's a forever problem.
If somebody in my family did that, I would never speak to them again.
but nobody in my family would do that.
All right.
I think I'm babbling. And I will talk to you on YouTube tomorrow.
I think you'll agree this is the greatest live stream you've ever seen.
