Episode 1688 Scott Adams: From Russian Hypersonic Missiles to Fertilizer. I Cover it All Today
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Content:
Whiteboard: Evaluating Studies
50 Intel liars about Hunter's laptop
Russia fires a hypersonic missile
Operational attrition of Russian equipment
Ukraine's resolve to fight to the end or victory
The fertilizer shortage
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Somebody's calling this tantric sipping.
I don't think that's far off.
Well, in the news today, progressive leader Jayapal, she's blaming corporate America for raising gas prices.
What do you think? Do you blame corporate America and their profiteering and price gouging?
Well, here's my take.
If you hear anybody tell you, doesn't matter who it is, Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter who, if anybody tells you that there's one reason for gas prices going up, don't listen to them.
That's a person you should never listen to.
You should not be allowed to talk in public if you think that gas prices went up for the one reason.
There's more than one reason.
Pretty sure there's more than one.
And if you can't speak to all of them, you should just be considered a liar.
And maybe you should get on that list of 50 intel...
Well, we'll talk about the 50 intel liars in a moment.
All right. So, let's see.
So, things that caused gas prices to change.
You got the war in Ukraine.
You've got the uncertainty, which is partly because of that.
You've got the problems with the supply chain.
You've got the Biden administration tightening up on what we can do domestically.
And you've got, you know, green energy forces forever making nuclear less attractive up until now.
So basically, almost everything is wrong.
Essentially, everything...
Let me speak to the comment I'm saying.
Somebody is saying that it all comes down to supply and demand.
In economics, generally speaking, price comes down to supply and demand.
No, it doesn't.
Does anybody who actually has a degree in economics believe that this is supply and demand happening here?
Let me ask you this. Anybody who has a degree in economics, you have to have a degree for just this question.
If you have a degree in economics, do you think the price of oil and gas is being caused by supply and demand?
No, it's not. It's not.
Not in the short run.
In the long run, supply and demand, yes.
Not in the short run. In the short run, all kinds of reasons change prices.
In the short run, somebody's going to say, I will gouge you, because in the short run, I have no competition.
Right? So, I mean, I guess that's supply and demand.
But you have a psychology working and a lack of information.
So what you're really seeing is a lack of information.
Right? Not a supply problem.
So if you have uncertainty about supply, that acts the same as a lack of supply.
Does that make sense? If you have uncertainty, psychological uncertainty about future supply, it affects the price without the actual supply changing.
Do you understand that?
In most, if not almost all cases, the psychology of what's going to happen matches the actuality, right?
So lots of times the psychology and the actual thing move together.
But with the short term and the fog of war and so many big variables in motion at the same time, from pandemic to supply chains to Ukraine to God knows what, it is uncertainty, largely, that's driving prices. Is there anybody with an economics degree who would disagree with my statement that of course supply and demand matters in the long run?
Of course. That's the main thing in the long run.
But in the short run, it's psychology.
Anybody want to disagree?
Yeah, I think everybody with an economics degree just agreed with me, I think.
So as soon as you think it's supply and demand, you're a little bit lost.
You'd be a little bit lost if you think that's all that's going on.
There's a whole bunch of stuff going on.
But it's mostly psychological.
Which could become real.
I mean, if people's guesses about the future are right, then it becomes real.
But they are guesses. All right, I'm going to teach you how to evaluate studies.
Because there's a new study on...
And I hate to go back to this, but it's just a little mop-up.
I swear I'll make it short.
There's a new biggest and bestest study on ivermectin that says it has no impact at all.
How does that make you feel?
Now, I'll talk about the flaws in a moment.
I'm not going to ignore the flaws.
But how does it make you feel?
I'm looking at your comments now, and we'll talk about those.
The comments are, who funded it?
They didn't include zinc.
Was the protocol right?
We'll talk about that. All right.
Let me teach you how to determine if a study is correct or not, because it's also true, if you didn't know this, That the hydroxychloroquine studies largely stopped in 2020 because there was one big data set that said it wasn't working, and then everybody stopped their tests.
But here's how to tell if any studies are effective.
Now, you're probably saying to yourself, well, if it's a peer-reviewed study, I'm going to believe it.
But we don't really live in a world where you can believe a peer-reviewed study.
So I'm going to teach you how to determine if a study is credible.
It's very simple. Does the study agree with my opinion that I've already stated?
If yes, we call that a gold standard kind of a study.
If the new study disagrees with my prior opinion...
That's an example of a flawed study.
So studies that disagree with you have methodological problems, which we'll discuss.
So if you use this guide, I don't think it's ever failed.
There are some kinds of rules of thumb I give you where the rule of thumb is 90% of the time it works, but you have to watch out for that 10%.
This isn't like this.
This is one of the few standards or rules that works every time.
In fact, I've lived a long time.
I've never seen this not work.
This has worked every time.
And if you don't believe me, just ask anybody who's evaluating any study.
Anybody who evaluates any study will agree that this standard works.
It works every time. So when you're looking at the ivermectin study, you might have said something like this.
Scott, no one ever claimed ivermectin worked alone.
You have to put the ivermectin with the other early treatment things to get an impact.
Scott, Scott, Scott, have you never heard of an AIDS cocktail?
It's the combination of things that make them work.
It's not the one thing by itself, Scott.
No, no.
So that's one of the complaints.
Someone said it's not peer-reviewed.
It's not peer-reviewed.
It's only been submitted for peer review.
That means something.
Do you know how much more credibility you will get if it gets peer-reviewed and passes?
What would be the extra credibility from something that's submitted versus peer-reviewed?
What's the extra bump you get after the peer review?
Fucking zero.
Alright, if you haven't been paying attention, let me inform you that the peer review should add something.
It should. I mean, on paper, it makes sense, right?
In reality, nothing.
So if your complaint is that it's not peer-reviewed, you imagine that peer-review adds something.
It should. Like, logically, it should.
But in the real world, I don't think it actually does.
I think it's just somebody who's busy, who looks at the top-line stuff, looks at a couple numbers, and says, yeah, I don't see anything obviously wrong with it.
That's about it. Here's some other complaints, valid enough, that it was only a three-day dose, to which I say, I'm no doctor, but if you couldn't see the difference in three days for a drug which is supposedly,
from its proponents, say that ivermectin is so darn effective that three days would pretty much eliminate it in you, but they saw no difference after three days.
Doesn't mean it's right. I'm just telling you what the study said.
Someone else said that there's a separate study that shows that when you combine ivermectin with antibiotics, you do get a good effect.
So really, Scott, testing ivermectin alone is really not a good test.
You should have tested it with the antibiotics.
To which I say, I'm no doctor.
But I'll bet you I could do a study that showed that antibiotics and potato chips give you a good result.
Does anybody want to doubt it?
If I did a study that said if I gave you antibiotics and potato chips, do you think that you would show a difference?
I think you would. And not because the antibiotics work with COVID, because apparently they don't.
It's because the antibiotics might work on some other problem you have, because a lot of people have other problems.
And if it improves the other problem, some bacterial problems, let's say, it might make your immune system a little bit stronger, and you might get better results.
So yes, testing ivermectin and antibiotics, I'm glad they tested it, but I would expect exactly the same result as potato chips and antibiotics.
That's what I'd expect.
I mean, I haven't tested it.
Now remember... Oh, and then somebody else said it didn't include zinc.
But I don't believe that the proponents of ivermectin ever claimed it required zinc.
And we haven't seen ivermectin being called a delivery system for zinc.
We heard hydroxychloroquine.
So here's a general rule I'm also going to give you.
It goes like this.
If there's something that you think is true on day one, but you don't have any way to test for sure, it just has lots of indications it might be true, on day one, is it reasonable to say, well, I don't know for sure, but let's treat it seriously?
Yes. Yes.
If you have lots of indications that are non-scientific that something works...
And it's important. You know, there's a big problem.
You should take it pretty seriously.
Now, what happens if months and months have gone by and lots and lots of tests and you get to the end of that and there's still no proof?
That extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Now, on day one, when somebody makes an extraordinary claim, can you realistically ask them to produce proof?
Not really, because it's brand new.
But if you've gone two years and nobody can produce anything that looks like proof...
What would you say about the extraordinary claim?
I think it's an extraordinary claim that there would be a widely available drug that everybody could have that would just basically shut down the whole pandemic.
That's an extraordinary claim, right?
Well, would you disagree with me that that's an extraordinary claim?
Whether it's true or false, it's extraordinary.
Right? So an extraordinary claim requires an extraordinary proof.
It's been two years, and nobody's come close, and the most recent best quality proof says it doesn't work.
What would you now give?
I'm going to ask you a following question, and I want you to give it in percentage is.
Right? Everybody who says yes or no is wrong.
Everybody who gives me a percentage might be wrong, but at least you're thinking right.
So given current information, given two years of not being able to show that ivermectin works, tell me what your odds are that ivermectin does work.
And we just haven't proved it yet.
What are the odds that ivermectin does work?
I'm going to read your numbers.
They're from 5 to 50, but you seem to be settling in around a 20% range, most of you.
If I average your numbers, I'm just eyeballing them On the Locals platform, a lot of people are saying 75%, but others are saying 5%.
200%.
100%.
The YouTube people are not being useful right now.
All right. So, I just leave you with this standard, and I'll let you sort of wrestle with this over time.
So remember, the standard is, and I'm not saying the standard works every time.
You know, I probably should say that about everything I say, which is, this won't work every time.
That's just true of everything, almost everything.
All right. I think it's fascinating that we have this list of 50 prior Intel officials who said that the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation.
And now that we know it wasn't, and we know they had no evidence to back their claim, we have an actual list of 50 Intel liars.
How useful is that?
Usually you're wondering who to trust, but how useful is it that we have an actual list of 50 people who put their name on a list to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they will lie to you in public about the most important things?
That's kind of useful.
And you know what's the funniest part?
The first four names on the list of known, credentialed liars are four of the most common people you'd ever see on CNN. Clapper, Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan.
In fact, Panetta was on there yesterday.
CNN had Leon Panetta on there right after he had been proven on a list of 50 documented, gigantic liars.
And remember, the Hunter Biden laptop lie is a special kind of lie.
Because it's so bold.
It's so bold. You can't really...
I don't think you can wonder whether they were just wrong.
Can you? Does anybody think, oh, they were just...
they had an opinion and they were just wrong?
Does anybody believe that?
That would be pretty hard to believe.
I suppose anything's possible.
There are 50 people. There's somebody on that list of 50 who just believed they were right.
But it seems very unlikely that the top four, Clapper, Hayden, Panetta, and Brennan, do you think the top four didn't know it was real?
Really? Really? Really?
They didn't know it was real?
Really? They knew it was real, of course.
And they just lied to the public.
So it is just so, oh my God, it's just so ballsy for CNN to put one of the people on that list ever on the air again.
How does John Brennan ever get on the air again?
These are literally, at least these top four guys, correct me if I'm wrong, but these are the Russia collusion liars, aren't they?
Aren't they the same liars who said Russia collusion was totally real?
How many times do the same people have to lie to us, get caught, in a way that unambiguously you've proven that they lied?
This is really bad stuff.
Compare this kind of lie to anything Trump ever lied about.
Do you see the difference?
When Trump, quote, lies, and often it's in the form of hyperbole, it's a little bit transparent, isn't it?
Like if you see Trump talking about you can't watch television because your windmill isn't turning, is there any actual lie there?
Well, yes. Yes, there's a lie in the sense that clearly Trump knows that the TV doesn't go off when the wind stops blowing.
I mean, not literally.
I mean, he knows that.
So yeah, yeah, you could say that was a lie, or you could say it's hyperbole, or yeah, you could say it's just a joke.
But I don't think that...
I really don't think that Trump's lies...
Have the quality that these lies do.
These lies were a genuine attempt to bamboozle the country on something that really mattered.
I can't think of an example of a Trump lie that had weight.
Let's see if you can.
By the way, I'm just spitballing here because there might be an example.
I don't know. Is there an example of a Trump lie that's documented as a lie, as well documented as these are, and also was important to the country, like it actually mattered?
Somebody's saying that Trump didn't lie, he exaggerated.
I think 80% of it is sales and hyperbole and exaggeration, yes.
The stolen election.
Trump is not lying about the stolen election.
It's a belief.
And is that different than the 50 intel people who said they are sure that the laptop was disinformation?
Maybe it's not that different.
Because in a sense, the 50 intel people were saying it's their opinion.
But they didn't really present it like opinion, did they?
I don't know. It does seem different.
Here's why it seems different. We do distinguish between experts and politicians.
Am I right? If an expert says the election was stolen, or a lot of experts, you'd say, oh, that seems pretty serious.
If a politician says an election was stolen, you don't give that too much weight, do you?
I think it's different.
So I would say that if you just say lies are lies, and I can see why somebody would have that philosophy, but if you just say all lies are equal, I don't think you're understanding the situation correctly.
These 50 intel people lied in a way that's...
I mean, it's just jaw-droppingly, outrageously dangerous to have people like this have any impact on the country.
Whereas Trump was more entertaining...
His lies usually were funny, and they made a point.
It's a whole different standard.
So Russia fired a hypersonic missile.
I was not fully aware of how good their hypersonic stuff is.
So the Russian military equipment seems to be poorly maintained and maybe not the best stuff.
But I guess they have actually some advantages in hypersonic missiles.
So they've got these hypersonic missiles that you can't see until it's too late, and they're way too fast to stop.
Basically, they're invulnerable.
So they have a missile that, if it wants to carry a nuclear warhead, it's going to get you.
Now, so you've got mutually assured destruction, and Russia used it to take out some alleged arms bunker or something in Ukraine.
But there's a little bit of a disagreement about whether Russia was just proving they have the weapon and could have done the same attack with lesser weapons, or did they actually need that weapon because it was a bunker?
So I saw one expert say, yeah, they probably thought they needed that weapon because it was a bunker and the hypersonic missile has enough kinetic energy to penetrate it.
So you have to penetrate it before you blow up or it's not that good.
Maybe. I don't know.
I'm not so sure that a mother-of-all-bomb kind of bomb wouldn't take in a bunker.
I think it would. I don't know.
I think it would. Can somebody answer that question?
If a mother-of-all-bombs type of bomb is dropped on a bunker, no matter how deep the bunker is, in a reasonable sense, a reasonable wartime bunker, it's going to take it out, right?
Am I wrong? I might be wrong.
Somebody says no, that it wouldn't take it out.
Is that because the explosion would be limited to the surface, whereas the missile would penetrate before it explodes?
They're called, well, we do have bunker-busting bombs, yes.
I assume Russia has those. All right, so that's an open question.
What else we got here?
So I told you about, there was a long thread on Twitter that was excellent from Trent Telenko talking about truck tire maintenance because he was somebody who did this kind of work in the U.S. military.
And he was noting that the tires and the tire maintenance on the Russian equipment seemed poor and that that was going to be a huge problem.
Their equipment would be breaking down.
Well, he's got a new thread.
I'm not going to detail it, but the bottom line is...
Lots more evidence that the Russian army is becoming operationally stuck.
And there's something called operational attrition, which is that your stuff breaks just by being in use, and it's hard to replace it fast.
So this guy, who's an expert on maintenance of big military equipment, He estimated that we might be just a few weeks away from the Russian army just collapsing.
Because their equipment will just be garbage in about three weeks.
Now, part of this is that they are poorly maintained.
The claim here is that the U.S. military is obsessive about maintenance.
We have an entire organization just to do maintenance, and they maintain regularly.
So they're just maintaining, maintaining like crazy.
But the Russian army basically doesn't even have that organization.
They've just got conscripts that are told to change the oil.
I'm exaggerating, but something like that.
So they don't have as a professional a maintenance group, and it seems to be showing.
And it looks like they don't have the ability to resupply, etc.
And at this point, if Ukraine can hold for, I don't know, five or six weeks, Do you think Kiev can hold out for five or six weeks?
Because it's looking like they can.
But if they hold out for five or six weeks, the entire Russian army will start becoming immobile.
It won't have supplies.
It won't be maintained. It just won't be able to move.
The roads will be bombed. So as soon as the Ukrainians have them completely trapped in country, here's what I predict.
That day after day, the Ukrainians will, you know, being quite aggressive and having great weapons, they will surround and destroy one mechanized unit after another until Russia can't handle the pain anymore.
Now, I think the Ukrainians have already discounted all destruction of their country.
That's what I think.
Now, there's no way to know this.
I'm just making a...
A mental leap and a lot of mind reading.
But I believe that the Ukrainians have sort of factored into their decision that they will lose every building and infrastructure in Ukraine.
And they're still going to fight.
Am I right? I mean, I could be wrong about this, but it feels like The Ukrainians have just said, okay, the thing you're going to do to us is kill a lot of us and destroy everything that we own.
Is that right? And Putin would say, that's damn right.
If you don't surrender, I will kill a lot of you and I will destroy every building in your country and every infrastructure.
And the Ukrainians just said, bring it on.
They just said, bring it on.
And I think they meant it.
Now, as Naval pointed out not too long ago on Twitter, that motivated defenders with really good supply lines are unbeatable.
As long as you have supply lines, and somebody's willing to keep supplying it indefinitely, and you're motivated, you just can't be beaten.
Because you can't kill everybody, and there's still going to be plenty of people who will pick up a shoulder-mounted thing and keep fighting.
So I think the thing that Putin miscalculated is how much pain the Ukrainians were willing to take to get what they want.
Am I right? The big miscalculation, I think...
Aside from how well the Ukrainians would be equipped, I think that was a miscalculation.
But the other miscalculation is that the Ukrainians, they don't seem like regular people to me.
And it could be that the propaganda is catching up with me.
I think that's happening.
But it looks like the Ukrainians would fight to the last brick.
It looks like it. I mean, if the only thing they're doing is sending that message, that they're going to fight for the last brick, That's pretty good persuasion.
But they certainly sent that message.
Here's the biggest thing I'm worried about and have been for a number of years, even before the Ukraine thing.
There is a big problem with a shortage of fertilizer.
So, and I've known about this for maybe seven years or so, that the world was running out of fertilizer materials and we didn't have a way to fix it.
Now, I usually employ the Adams rule of slow-moving disasters.
And I say, yeah, we think we're going to run out of fertilizer, but somebody will figure out how to make more.
We'll figure it out, because we have enough time and everybody sees it's a problem.
But then you have a war, and the war happens to affect the fertilizer development or manufacturing in one country, and it's a pretty big deal.
So suddenly, you took a problem that was already a sort of brewing big problem, and you add a war on top of it, and shoot, you add a fertilizer, and then everything falls apart.
Fertilizer kind of holds the world together.
And I tweeted, now this is not a solution, but it's the sort of thing that can happen.
There's a company that's taking CO2 from generators, you know, capturing it at the source, at the waste source, and turning it into sustainable fertilizers.
So you can actually turn CO2 into fertilizer.
Now, it didn't say they could do the same thing by sucking CO2 out of the air.
And I think you'd get more of it that way, but maybe you get more of it just attaching it to the stack, you know, the smokestack or whatever.
I don't know. But in the case of an emergency, which I believe we've entered, fertilizer-wise, and I don't think that this company, let's see, what's the name of the company?
CCAM Technologies. I don't know that they've proven they can do it economically, but they have proven that They have proven they can turn CO2 into fertilizer.
Now, what would happen if our two biggest problems solved each other?
That might be happening.
Wait a minute. If you put CO2 on plants as fertilizer, does that just reduce...
Are you going to end up just releasing the CO2? Alright, so here's the question.
Could you solve the fertilizer problem and the climate change problem at the same time?
Could you? Can you suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into fertilizer?
I'm starting to think you can.
Now, I don't know if you could do it economically, but if the world runs out of fertilizer, then the economics change completely.
Somebody says climate change is bullshit, so they don't need any more fertilizer.
Okay, I get it. I get your joke.
Now, so I'm not going to predict that this is the solution to everything, but it's the kind of ways that you can go from doom to a good situation, and a war can get you there.
If there were no war, I doubt we'd put as much attention into turning CO2 into fertilizer.
So it could be that the war in Ukraine solves climate change and also solves the fertilizer shortage.
In my opinion, possibly the two biggest problems in the world.
We could have solved them both, right?
I mean, it's possible.
I don't think the economics would be easy to work out, but it's possible.
Oh, interesting.
So John Carroll is saying that he has a farm where he basically fertilizes the plants with the animal waste, and it all works out.
Maybe that's the trick.
Maybe the trick is to get the animal farms and the plant farms closer together.
I don't know. Maybe that's a lot of the trick.
All right. I think it was Ian Bremmer suggesting that maybe Biden should go to Kiev.
Because there were three NATO leaders that went to Kiev.
Kiev, Kiev, Kiev.
And are you surprised that anybody can go into Kiev?
How the hell do you get there?
How in the world could you get a president of the United States into the middle of a war zone, into a surrounded city?
Fly. I get it.
You fly. He's not going to walk.
But is that safe?
Use a green screen.
Here's my opinion. I do think Biden should go to Kiev, but he's not the only one.
I think Jussie Smollett should go to Kiev.
I think that all of the criminals in Seattle should go to Kiev.
I think there are actually lots of people I'd like to see that go to Kiev, but not anybody that we want to save.
Nobody that we want to save.
Biden? Sure.
You know, I'm starting to think that cyber war is overrated.
How could we be this far into the Russia-Ukraine situation and not seeing any serious cyber attacks?
What's going on here?
Is it possible that we're better at defending against cyber attacks than we thought?
Maybe especially during a war.
Maybe they watch it closer. Or is somebody holding out on the good stuff?
Or are there cyber attacks that are working and we're not hearing about it?
Now, I know that Anonymous, the hacker group Anonymous, has been doing a lot of denial-of-service attacks on Russia.
But they had one notable success.
Some hacker, or hackers, hacked into a Russian TV network and put on a short video clip that replaced the normal programming to tell people what's really happening in Ukraine.
So a hacker actually got control of, I think it was 20 minutes of live airtime.
How do you do that?
That sounds like something with an insider, doesn't it?
I don't think you could do that without an insider.
How in the world could you do that?
That just doesn't sound like something a hacker could do.
I think I'm going to go further and say there's no way that that happened externally.
I think that was an internal thing.
In other words, somebody involved with the station must have pushed a button.
I don't think you could hack that into being.
But maybe. Maybe.
They did that to one of Giuliani's broadcasts too.
Was Giuliani's broadcast on a network?
Was it on a network?
Or was it on like a streaming service?
Yeah, I guess I have some questions.
Where's Q and what does Q say?
Fox News audio keeps cutting out in Canada.
Interesting. That one was proven false, as somebody says.
Oh, is it proven false that somebody hacked the TV station?
Because... Yeah.
Because I don't feel like that story is too credible.
Even though it actually happened, I think.
We do have information that it was hacked, but I don't think it was necessarily anonymous.
So, am I wrong that maybe the cyber attacks from Russia either are not being...
They're not happening or they don't really work.
The chef is back in Ukraine.
Oh, is he? The chef was the oligarch who was very close to Putin, right?
And he had the troll farm.
I think that's who the chef was.
But I don't know if he's really in Ukraine.
That's just a comment. All right, um...
Servant of the people. All right, that is...
Let me check my notes.
Checking notes. That's about all that was happening today.
And is there anything else I missed?
So who shut down the East Coast pipeline last year?
Now, those were blackmail hackers.
And so here's a question I have.
If you're a blackmail kind of a hacker, where you're trying to shut down something and blackmail, and we know that happens, and we know that they get into serious stuff, how long does it take that kind of attack to develop?
In other words, do you have to develop sources within the company?
Could, in the context of war...
And let's say you had two months to do something.
Could you figure out how to hack something major in two months?
Or, here's my question, or do the blackmail ransomware hackers, do they just try to hack everything they can until they find something?
Because they're not really hacking government stuff.
They tend to be getting into private stuff, right?
So... They aren't targeted.
Yeah. Right.
So if you have every company and every system in the world to choose from, and you try to attack as many as possible and you get lucky and you get into one, the law of large numbers is, of course, if you're trying to attack everything that exists, you're going to find some weaknesses.
But if you're Ukraine and you know you're going to get cyber-attacked on your electrical grid, just to pick an example, couldn't you protect that completely?
If you knew it was a target, an imminent target?
Probably you could. Somebody says no.
I guess it would depend on the vulnerability, right?
It would depend on the vulnerability.
But at the very least, you'd think they'd have some kind of a system that would wipe out its own software and reinstall it if it had a problem, or something like that.
Ransomware works by phishing, mostly.
Interesting. So the phishing, if ransomware works by phishing, the idea that you send fake emails to employees and ask them for their, you know, ask them for their credentials to hack into something, I think that's what we were talking about.
That would require a length of time, because you might not get that kind of thing on the first try.
It might take you two tries.
So it probably doesn't work so well in the context of war when you're working on one target and you're in a hurry.
The fishing thing doesn't seem like that works fast.
It worked on Podesta, yeah.
But that wasn't also a...
Podesta didn't have, you know, credentials to the infrastructure, you know, the electric grid.
It was just an email credential.
All right. That is all I have for today.
I'm pretty sure that this changed your life in a positive way.
And now that you have this standard for knowing how to interpret scientific studies, you're in good shape.
Because before, you were just wandering blind in the desert.
But now, if the study agrees with you, that's good science.
And I'm going to go do some other stuff.
Important things. And I would like you to enjoy the beginning of the Golden Age.
I actually do think this is the beginning of the Golden Age.
Let me summarize that for a moment.
The war in Ukraine, as awful as it is, should be...
The takeaway from this, I think, is going to be that you can't attack an industrialized country.
Because if you do...
You're not going to win. It's going to blow your economy up and the economic sanctions will take you apart.
I do think you can still attack a lesser developed country and get away with it.
But I don't think you can attack a Ukraine or anything like it.
And I think that this is going to prove it.
That's good. That's really good.
In the same way that dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was incredibly bad for the people who got bombed and for maybe humanity's soul, but it probably kept us out of some other nuclear wars because people got to see just how bad these weapons were.
So the Golden Age interpretation...
Is that the Ukraine war will be horrible for now, but will prove, maybe forever, that that kind of war can never work.
That's good. What happens if our shortage of fertilizer, because of the war, increases the energy put into taking CO2 out of the air and turning it into fertilizer?
That'd be really good.
Oh, I never went through the networks.
Somebody said the hacker attack was kind of overrated.
That makes sense. Here's some other good news.
It is entirely possible that crypto becomes more powerful because of the forces that we've seen recently.
That could be good, especially the blockchain stuff.
It could be that we now know how to handle pandemics in the future, one of the biggest risks to humanity.
Could be in much better shape now.
That's good. It could be that not only do we learn how to take CO2 out of the air and fix climate change, but it turns into valuable products, etc.
And so... It seems to me that everything bad that's happening now is a clear incentive for the good thing to replace it.
Take, for example, NASA was a mess.
And then we get in a war with Russia, and Russia would no longer be seen as a good source for sending stuff to the International Space Station.
But there's SpaceX. There's Elon Musk.
So his business gets a pop.
That's good, too.
So it seems to be that although the news looks pretty darn bad, every one of those bad newses, every one of those bad pieces of news is very closely matched with a probable solution that would be beneficial to society forever.
So if we can get past the inflation, which won't be easy, and we can figure a way past the fertilizer, I think everything else is going to work out.
And those two things I think we can fix.
Or at least we can weather them.
I live in a time when we could put a helicopter on Mars.
It's true, we did.
And so, I say to you that we're in a pretty good place, but we're not quite there yet.
So, that is all I've got for today in that upbeat thought.
