Episode 1700 Scott Adams: Exploring The Rumor That CNN Plans To Start Reporting Real News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
CNN to begin reporting real news?
CNN foreshadowing?
What did the 50 Intel officials get in return?
Whiteboard: Ukraine Drones
CNN Stephen Collinson odd report
CNN didn't want copy of Hunter's laptop?
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That's the sound of me not putting multiple papers on my desk.
LAUGHTER Yes, my printer is still being a problem.
But welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you.
We'll be going to Plan B. Oh my goodness.
Is Plan B not working?
Doesn't seem that it is.
Well, we'll make this work, I swear to God.
Well, that's weird. Apparently I have at least two technical problems happening at the same time.
I hope your day is better.
I just have to do something here.
In order to make the technology work perfectly, it's going to require the collective affirmations of all of you.
And I'd like you to join me now in something called the simultaneous sip, because if I can capture all of the goodwill and vibrations from all of you, it might be enough to make my printer work.
And we're going to test this out live.
All right? Um...
I'm going to queue up my printer, and then I'm going to see if the simultaneous SIP makes it work for the first time.
Are you ready for this experiment?
We're going to have to...
I'll tell you what I'll do.
Since the printer will take a moment to tell me whether it's working or not, this could be exciting.
We'll do the simultaneous sip simultaneously.
All right. Now, before we know the answer, all you need is a cup of margarita glass, a tank of chalice, a canteen drink of glass, a vessel of any kind, filled with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the...
I don't think it's working.
It's not working. But let's have the simultaneous sip anyway.
That's all we need.
Go.
Now, one of the questions you might ask yourself is, Scott, how do you handle the risk of embarrassing yourself in a live setting how do you handle the risk of embarrassing yourself in a live setting to I'm going to go.
And the answer is, I don't really care.
I've noticed over the years that when I have a really good plan and I'm really like, I'm on point and I think I'm nailing it, sometimes people like it, sometimes they don't.
And that I've also noticed that if I'm completely unprepared and everything goes wrong, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not.
It's completely non-predictive.
I'll tell you when I first learned that.
I first learned that.
I did reboot it.
I rebooted it just before I went live.
The first time I learned that preparation doesn't seem to matter as much as you think is when I started cartooning and I only had an hour to make a cartoon before I went to my day job.
And if I didn't do one in that hour, I'd fall behind deadline.
And I found that sometimes I'd come in there and I'd have an idea and I'd have the full hour to develop it and it'd be pretty good.
Sometimes not. And other times, 55 minutes would go by and I'd have nothing.
But I had a rule that I always had to do something.
The same rule the Beatles had, by the way.
The Beatles had the same rule.
If they started a song, they had to finish it.
They couldn't wait until the next day.
They had to finish anything they started.
So I had an analogous rule, which is that I would have to do a comic within an hour, no matter...
How many minutes were left when I decided I had to charge through and finish it?
And I found that the five-minute comics were exactly as popular as the one-hour comics.
There was a difference in the audience.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a lesson.
You don't really know what's going to work well.
Sometimes just winging it, if you know what you're doing, works too.
I... However, I have three backups.
I have my printed copy that's not working.
I have my phone as my backup for the digital copy, which apparently did not sync with my notes from my other system.
A second technical problem.
But am I dissuaded by that?
No. Because unlike you, I have a third backup, which is already fired up, right over here.
So if you have enough devices and enough coffee, you can make anything work.
It's true. Story number one.
Employment looks good, weirdly.
So the new pandemic era, a low of 3.6% unemployment.
That's actually great, isn't it?
So here's the interesting thing.
So this is in the realm of predictions.
I've said to you before that there's one economic measure that if that one is working, you can kind of figure that everything else will work out too.
Maybe a little slower, but if you can get one thing right, it's the most important thing to get right, and that's employment.
Because the difference between having a job and not having a job is a gigantic difference.
It's adding to the system versus subtracting from the system.
So every job is sort of a big increment in goodness.
So at the moment we have actually a really good employment situation, but here's the test to the prediction.
So remember, the rule is...
Sort of Scott's rule, I guess.
I didn't invent it, but we'll say it's mine for now.
That if you get employment right, you don't have a lot of unemployment, everything else will work out.
Now, is that true if you've got pandemics and inflation and Ukraine stirring things up and supply chain problems?
Well, that's the test, right?
This is sort of the ultimate test of that...
Predictive variable.
And I'm going to stick with it.
So I'm going to stick with employment being the most predictive thing.
If the employment numbers had been bad, I would be panicking a little bit.
Going to be honest.
Going to be honest.
If the employment numbers were going down as fast as inflation was going up, I'd be spinning in this chair right now.
But when I see inflation going up, I hate it.
I mean, everybody's taking a bad haircut right now, and, you know, you can't all afford it.
So that's bad.
That's really bad. But it's not as bad as unemployment would be.
I mean, not even close. I don't think.
So let's track that and see if that still comes true.
So some more fake news, or is it?
There are reportedly seven hours of call logs missing from the White House.
Call logs. I said call logs too many times because it was January 6th and Trump was doing who knows what because of those missing records.
But it turns out there were no missing records in the sense of deleted.
So nobody deleted anything.
The records are an exact record of what they should be recording.
It's just that they don't record every phone.
That's pretty much the whole story.
So the story went from yesterday.
It's like a Watergate situation with missing call logs at the most suspicious time.
And then it morphed into, oh, it looks like you used some other phone.
Okay. Now, if you were the president or any CEO or any leader trying to, let's say, make sure there's not a digital path to you, wouldn't you just borrow somebody else's phone?
Yeah, so Trump was asked if he used a burner phone, a kind of phone that is not associated with a person.
It's just sort of a short-term phone you use.
Criminals use it. Drug dealers use burner phones.
Cheaters use burner phones, that sort of thing.
So, he was asked and Trump said he didn't recognize the term or he didn't know what a burner phone was.
And then John Bolden threw him under the bus and said, he talked about burner phones with me.
So, is there a story here?
Yeah. Like, this feels like a whole bunch of nothing, doesn't it?
Suppose we know that Trump used some other means of communication Either directly or indirectly.
You know, here's how I imagine it going.
The way I imagine it going is Trump standing next to somebody who has their own phone and saying, can you call so-and-so and say this or that?
I mean, that's sort of the way I imagined it.
Like, I don't imagine that there are necessarily direct phone calls from Trump to somebody that would be incriminating in any way.
But who knows? You know, one of the things that Trump has done so well for years is avoid digital records.
He doesn't use email, for example.
And that's got to work in your favor.
At some level of business, you probably shouldn't write anything down.
At some point, you should only whisper to people, you know, in a secure location.
That's it. Nothing else.
The way Putin probably does it.
All right, so here's my favorite story from...
This is on Fox, Fox website.
So, of course, one of my favorite things about the news is watching the Fox News, CNN, you know, battle with each other and how they frame the other side.
Because it's the one situation where you can be fairly confident that they're not really hiding their bias, which doesn't mean they're always lying.
I'm just saying that they don't do it to inform you.
They do it for competitive reasons.
And so this is hilarious.
According to Fox News, it's talking about how Zucker, the disgraced...
They call him the disgraced ex-CEO. So I think it's funny whenever anybody calls anybody else disgraced.
As if there's anybody famous anymore who's not disgraced.
Everybody's disgraced to somebody.
So does it really mean anything to call somebody disgraced?
I mean, I get it.
I know why they're saying it.
And I would agree with the description.
But it's sort of a little bit overused.
I feel like everybody's a little bit disgraced for one reason or another.
I'm sure I've disgraced myself a few times.
I'm pretty sure I'll disgrace myself again before the end of the day.
Anyway, I love that word in politics.
So here's how Fox writes it.
In an attempt to restore CNN's credibility...
This is making you think past the sale.
So you're supposed to just sort of agree that it's an obvious fact that CNN has no credibility.
So, according to Fox News, in an attempt to restore CNN's credibility...
They talk about the new leader, Licht or Light, I don't know how to pronounce it, is expected to attempt to pivot back to straight news after Zucker allowed the network to take on a partisan, liberal approach that has struggled to attract viewers during the Biden era.
I love how they say it.
Now, who exactly is expecting this?
So Fox News is writing it like these are facts.
If you didn't stop and slow down to read the actual words, you'd sort of accept it as this is common knowledge, that they're a disgraced network, they need to restore their credibility, and the new guy is at least thinking about, he hasn't decided.
LAUGHTER He hasn't made the decision yet, but he's definitely, definitely maybe thinking about reporting real news.
So that's how Fox News frames it.
Oh, that is funny.
Do you remember, as I do, think back maybe a year or two, Do you remember when it was popular to say that anybody would be better than Trump?
Anybody would be a better president than Trump.
And one of the reasons that people would defend Biden, I'd say, you know, Biden's too old.
Forget about his policies.
Can we really have a president that old?
Isn't that unsafe? And people would say, I swear to God, they'd say, anything's better than Trump.
But I'll bet they didn't think they'd get to test that hypothesis, did they?
Turns out...
Turns out we're testing the hypothesis.
We're literally finding out if anything...
Is absolutely anything better than Trump?
So, you know, normally you would think that you would say that as sort of a...
A framing question.
You don't think that you get to actually scientifically test it.
So we found the furthest thing from something that you can get.
Here's something.
Here's Biden.
Let's see if anything is better than Trump.
So far...
So far, I think Trump is beating the furthest thing from something.
But maybe I'm being subjective about that.
Maybe. So I've seen a few people speculate, and I was having the same feeling.
Joel Pollack said this, and I'm seeing some other writers pick up on it, that it seems like the mainstream media is trying to get ahead of the Hunter Biden laptop story that they had been suppressing and behind until now.
It seemed like somewhat of a sudden shift, as if they've been informed that something's coming.
Meaning that they need to get ahead of it because it would be a little too embarrassing to have never mentioned it if, for example, and this is hypothetical, if there's an indictment coming down.
It's starting to look like foreshadowing, doesn't it?
If this were a movie script...
And you saw the, let's say, the protagonist of the movie, if you saw them flipping through the channels and all the news anchors started talking about this story for the first time, and you knew that that was unusual, wouldn't you see it as foreshadowing?
Definitely. It looks exactly like it.
Now, I don't think it's the same reason.
I think it's maybe just that they're softening up the public for what's coming.
Maybe. The other possibility is that the decision has come down to get rid of Biden so that he's not a risk for running.
Because what if?
What if Joe Biden said he wants...
I mean, he said it publicly. But what if he really said he's going to run again?
What would the Democrat leadership do if Biden, who is the president after all, what if he said he wants to run again?
He could make it happen, could he not?
I think he'd get the nomination.
I don't know.
I don't know that the Democrats could allow that to happen.
So it looks like the hit has been put on Biden himself by the Democrats.
Am I wrong? I feel like they put the hit on them.
They have to take them out so that they have a chance of developing somebody who could be more of a longer-term leader under the mold of whoever's molding whoever.
Somebody's molding somebody over there.
I'm sure of it. Yeah.
The 25th is knocking, you say.
All right. Here's a question that I've been wondering.
You know, we keep hearing about the 50 former and current Intel officials who signed the letter saying that the Hunter laptop thing was Russian disinformation when they must have known that it wasn't.
Or they must have known that they couldn't know whether it was or it wasn't.
Now, how do you get 50 people...
Professionals to tell a horrendous lie in public and then sign it.
What exactly were they getting in return?
Or is it worse?
Did somebody like John Brennan, I'll just pick him as a random name, did somebody just ask them to do it and then they just did it?
Were all of those officials so afraid of whoever asked them to do it that they knew that doing it was good for their careers?
And not doing it was bad for their careers?
In other words, were they blackmailed?
Because that's what that is, right?
Now, do you have to say the words, or are they all in a business where they know how things work?
Remember Schumer said they've got a thousand, what, a hundred ways from Sunday or something to get back at you?
So do you think that people in the intelligence world need to explicitly threaten anything?
They don't need to explicitly threaten anything because they're all on the same page.
So if somebody such as, I'll just pick a name at random, John Brennan, If somebody at that stature were to ask them to do something that they didn't want to do and didn't feel completely comfortable with, would they feel that they had to do it anyway?
And isn't that blackmail?
If you don't explicitly say, I will get back at you...
Is that necessary? Does the crime of blackmail require an explicit threat?
Actually, I don't know the answer to that.
There must be...
There's probably 100 lawyers watching this right now.
If somebody's an attorney, do you need the threats or the blackmail threat spelled out?
Or can it be so clear to anybody who would understand the situation that it still counts as a crime?
Because you've set up a situation where it's very clear that blackmail is in play, even if you don't say it.
That'd be hard to prove, wouldn't it?
Oh, that would be extortion, somebody says?
I don't know about that. Why pay blackmail if there's no threat?
Because there's an implied cause and effect.
So it doesn't have to be a threat.
You could just understand that under this situation, this bad thing will happen to you.
You just have to know it could happen.
That's all. All right.
Give me an answer to that.
So it looks like Russia is propping up the ruble, but here are a couple things that I learned.
One of the reasons that the gas is still flowing from Russia, and Russia hasn't tried to use that as a weapon, is that they don't have pipelines to sell it anywhere else.
So just as Europe is trapped by having to buy Russian energy...
And Russia is trapped for the time being in accepting dollars and euros.
They want to accept rubles.
But they can't because they're mostly operating on long-term contracts that were signed a while ago.
And here's the funniest part.
Apparently Russia has decided to honor the deals during war.
I mean, it's literally economic war on top of military war.
And the very people that Putin's at war with Their energy companies are saying, oh yeah, we're going to honor the deal.
We're not going to just change the deal and say you have to pay rubles.
No, no, it's a deal. And I'm thinking, really?
Is that the way it works?
Do they follow the contract in this situation?
I don't know. But I guess one of the reasons they would follow the contract is that there's no reason to break it.
And the no reason to break it is that they don't have options.
Meaning they can't sell it anywhere else.
There's no other pipelines. They can't sell it to China because they don't have the infrastructure to deliver it.
And it wouldn't be easy to fix it.
It would take a long time. So Russia is trapped and Europe is trapped.
So Russia probably wants to use it as a weapon but can't because they don't have alternatives.
And Europe would like to use it as a weapon by not buying it.
But they can't, because they don't have alternatives.
And then Biden's going to release this gas from the reserves, the emergency reserves, that every expert, everyone, says will make no difference at all.
Am I wrong? Literally every expert says this will make no difference at all.
Oh, it might make a difference if there's an emergency.
If there's an emergency, you're going to miss it, because he might use a third of it or some big number, and then we'll have to fill it back up at a higher price.
I mean, it doesn't look like anything.
It doesn't look like anything that Biden's doing is right.
Does it? You know, I'm sure I'm a little biased there.
Did you now... All right, we'll check your fake news, because the fake news is not all on the other side.
Let me say it again. You and I may have been victims of fake news, too.
Not just other people. Not just other people.
And here's one that maybe we didn't all know.
You know, we keep talking about this Keystone pipeline.
Did you know that there are two Keystone pipelines?
At least two. One is completely done and working fine.
So nothing happened with that one recently.
But the Keystone XL is the one that was going to be built, but it wasn't even close to being done.
So therefore, when Biden closed it down, it shouldn't have made really any difference that we should see now.
It could have made a difference in the long run.
Globally, a lot of it wasn't even going to be domestic.
So there was, you know, basically, that story may be overblown.
So for those of you saying, hey, look what Biden did, you know, if he had kept that pipeline project going, you know, or gas prices would be less or whatever.
But probably not.
Probably not. However...
Energy prices don't move on actual supply and demand as much as the expectation of supply and demand, which I hasten to say because I know I'm being watched by real economists, the expectation of supply and the actual supply are kind of a blended concept in economics.
You get that? So it's a finer point.
I'm not sure it's useful for the general public.
But the actual supply and the expected supply don't really have much of a difference when you're pricing stuff.
Okay, you're welcome. See?
I can adjust. I can adjust.
So that adjustment is based on specific feedback that I thought was useful.
And... So, when Biden does things like any kind of energy project in public, what should be your first thought?
Hey, people might expect less energy in the future.
So it changes expectations.
Changing expectations has an effect on effectively what we call the supply.
And so... Collectively, the things that Biden did are signaling a lack of supply in the future.
So it's not an actual supply change.
It's an expected supply change, and that could change the price.
So where Trump did everything right psychologically, Biden is doing everything wrong psychologically, if you believe that wrong means producing less energy domestically.
All right. I have a theory that all wars are going to be drone wars from now on.
Meaning that the thing that will matter is how well your drones are performing and how many you have.
And that that will be the dominant weapon because it has to be, right?
It kind of has to be. You have to think there's a limit to manned aircraft.
Right? There has to be a limit to how many human aircraft there can be, because as the number of unmanned aircraft goes up, they're all vulnerable.
And there's no way that ground-based anything is going to compete with drones if you have enough of them.
So, you know, of course there are ways to jam drones and blah blah blah blah blah, but ultimately, Somebody's going to take out the jammer, and then the drones take over, blah, blah, blah.
So to me, it seems that drones are going to be the thing that predict who wins, which also means economy in some ways, or who's supporting you with their own economy.
And here's my take on Ukraine, going to the whiteboard.
As some number of drones, some number, whatever that number is, Ukraine wins.
Meaning that...
Let's see if I can get you a better picture here.
Meaning that the only thing that is going to predict what happens with Ukraine next is how many drones have been delivered and how many of them can be actually used.
And we don't know that number, do we?
Why is it that we don't know that number?
Isn't that the single most important thing?
Because if they have enough drones of the right kind, and I'm talking about the small suicide drones, I'm not talking about the big ones, the Turkish ones that are very expensive.
I'm talking about the small ones.
If they have enough of them, they win, right?
They win in the sense that, at the very least, Russia can't...
Can't conquer them. Now, there's news that there was a Russian, let's see, I think it was a fuel depot attack within Russia, you know, so over the border from Ukraine, and that the Ukrainians did a helicopter attack in the homeland of Russia.
Now, there's a lot in that story.
Number one...
Number one...
If they're going after fuel, that's more indication that it's a war of starving the army, right?
Denying them food and ammunition and fuel.
Now, do you think you can do that with drones and helicopters if you get the big stuff?
So isn't there sort of an 80-20 rule at play here?
That you don't have to eliminate all the fuel.
You have to eliminate some percentage of it, right?
You don't have to eliminate all the food, just there's some percentage you have to eliminate that would just stop the army, wouldn't it?
Because it would just distract them.
They'd just have to eat. So how many drones would it take to keep an army from retreating?
Because here's what I'm most curious about.
Does Zelensky seem like the kind of guy who would take a draw...
Would he go into a battle and say, I'll take a tie?
Is there anything we've seen in his personality, his career, the way he presents himself, is there anything about him that says, I think I'll play for a draw?
I don't think so.
So I'm at least open to the possibility that he's after Putin, and the way he's going to do it is by destroying the Russian military in Ukraine.
And I think he can actually do it.
And all it takes is some number of drones.
So here's the argument.
The argument is this.
If Ukraine can take out big fuel depots, and obviously they can, because I would think a fuel depot is the most vulnerable thing there could be.
What could be more vulnerable to drone attacks and helicopter attacks than a fuel depot?
Seems like it would be the ultimate target.
So if you take out the big ones...
Can Russia adjust enough with workarounds and small ones?
I mean, they may be three fuel depots away from stalling the entire army in Ukraine, making it impossible to get out.
And what happens when they can't leave and they can't eat?
I think Ukraine just starts starving them and picking them off.
There may be a play here that Zelensky is actually going to try to take over Russia and actually just run the whole thing.
Because, I know, it's crazy.
It's crazy. But think about this.
If Zelensky could destroy the Russian military, don't you think Putin's gone?
How would he survive that if he actually destroyed it?
And I think he actually could.
Now, destroy it doesn't mean literally.
Again, it means trapping it in the country and just keeping it there.
It's done. If it can't get out, it's as good as dead.
It wouldn't have any purpose.
So, yeah, so let me allow the following.
I'm probably not the military expert you need to be listening to.
Can we agree on that?
Can we agree that for military predictions, I'm not really the one you should be listening to?
We can all be on the same page on that.
Now, you understand that I've confessed this before, that I speak with more confidence Then maybe my internal process is matched to.
Because part of it is presentation.
So don't confuse the presentation, which I do confidently, with my opinion of what's actually going to happen, which is more of a statistical thing.
Statistically speaking, I'd give this 5% to 10%.
But that's bigger than you would, right?
I think you'd give it 0%.
And I'm saying, there's something happening here that makes me think this...
All right, let me defend the 10%.
Number one, how hard is it, with your opinions, how hard would it be to trap them in country, to trap the military, now that they're already degraded and we know exactly the limited ways they can get out, right?
If the roads are taken out or mined, Or the Ukrainians have enough drones to stop whoever's in the front of anything.
And they can take out the energy.
I think they can stall them.
Now, somebody says the threat's a threat of nukes.
Well, I wonder about the strategy of not making the guy who's trying to kill you angry.
I mean, I get it.
I get it that if Putin's pushed into a corner, he might use tactical nukes.
But I don't think so.
Because I think using tactical nukes would end him for sure, wouldn't it?
Or it would reduce his chances of survival.
And we don't actually think he's crazy, do we?
I mean, he'd have to be literally crazy to do that, I think.
And I don't think we think he's literally crazy.
That was more propaganda.
Speaking of propaganda, this is really interesting.
Little Anne of... But Stephan Collinson, who usually writes about Trump and how bad Trump is, and I always think of him as CNN's paid propagandist, because he's an opinion writer, so it's fair to do what he does, right?
It's just opinion. And it's presented that way.
So I think that's fair as long as he's presenting it as opinion, and he does.
But he's changed...
Well, let me just tell you what he said today.
It has nothing to do with Trump.
But just keep in mind that on CNN, in my opinion, so this is just my opinion, he's sort of their go-to propaganda guy.
You know, go write some bad stories about Trump sort of thing.
But now he's saying that Western intelligence agencies are waging a psychological war over Ukraine.
He says directly with Russian President Putin, an expert at the genre, who is now effectively taking a dose of his own medicine.
Sorry. So Stefan Kaldeson is talking about how the Western intel people are using as much misinformation To get at Putin as Putin is using misinformation to get at us.
So they're playing the same game.
And he says, the United States and its allies are painting a picture of a bogged down, demoralized and dysfunctional Russian military taking disastrous losses on the battlefield and are simultaneously conjuring a vision of growing political tension inside the Kremlin.
They claim the Russian leader is isolated, poorly advised, and lacking real intelligence on just how badly the war is going.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but did not Stefan Collinson just say, and I don't think I'm over-interpreting this, am I? Did he not just say that the message that is known to be, he's characterizing it as disinformation, matches exactly CNN's reporting on the war?
So is he not basically saying that CNN is part of the disinformation campaign?
Because what CNN is reporting is exactly what the Intel people are telling them, which is, hey, we've got this secret insider information that Putin's not getting good information inside, as if we know that.
As if we know that, right?
And it's kind of weird, meta, self-referential thing that's confusing me.
So the CNN guy whose job it is, again, in my opinion, is to write opinion pieces that are completely biased.
He's writing an opinion piece in the context of Fox News saying that CNN may be trying to report straight news, and Collinson is reporting something that looks to me like straight news.
And the straight news is that all the news people have been lying to you because intelligence people have been feeding them BS, which surely they knew.
Surely, surely the media companies knew that they were getting propaganda.
Surely the media companies know that when somebody says, hey, we've got some information from Putin's bathroom, Like he was scribbling a note while he was on the toilet, and we saw the note, and it says that he's not getting good information from his generals.
No, we didn't. No, we didn't.
The people who are in the media professionally, who have done this for years, they know that when you hear in the context of war, when you hear that there's trouble inside Putin's inner circle, they know that's not real.
But did they report it to you as though it were not real?
Did they report it to you as something that is obvious propaganda?
It could be real, but that you should judge it as probable propaganda.
I don't believe they did.
If I'm wrong, please correct me.
But I believe the media reported these as if it was a report that you should take with some, you know, not a grain of salt, necessarily.
Right? So...
Is it true what Fox News is saying, that CNN is going to start being straight with the news and actually tell you what's really happening?
I don't know. Here's a question that I wonder about.
Why have there been no Ukrainian drone attacks in Moscow?
Now, when I say in Moscow, I mean not against civilian targets, but there must be government buildings that you could explode with a small suicide drone.
Now, you might say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, it's not easy to get a Ukrainian and a drone into Russia.
To which I say, can you really tell the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian?
There are no Ukrainians that speak Russian really well.
I'm pretty sure there are.
Pretty sure there are.
And you can't get a drone that literally would fit in a suitcase.
Literally would fit in a suitcase.
You can't get one of those and one Ukrainian within two kilometers of Moscow.
To take out, I don't know, their Politburo or something?
Or at least put a bomb there. Because all it would do, really, it wouldn't, you know, ideally it would kill no civilians, it would just make news.
Don't you think that the citizens of Russia would start asking questions if government buildings start blowing up in Moscow?
And I'm trying to think, why isn't that happening?
I'm not recommending it.
So, again, sometimes my tone gives you a misleading sense of my opinion.
My opinion is, I don't know, again, I'm not a military expert, but it seems to me, yeah, if the only risk is the risk of nukes, I don't think that would do it.
Do you? Do you think blowing up a few government buildings in Moscow would cause Putin to nuke anything?
I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
Now, again, we also don't know, right?
So, do you want to take the risk?
Maybe not. Maybe not.
But if there...
If Zelensky is willing to do a helicopter attack in Russian territory, which he just did, actually the second time, if they're willing to do that, are they...
Somebody says false flag.
I don't know if you take out a depot that big.
That would be the worst false flag.
If you're going to pick a false flag, that would be the worst one you could pick.
All right, um... Here's some interesting things.
Or are there?
The Hunter laptop story is funny.
Jack Posavik has tweeted a number of times that, I don't know, it's been some long number of months since he offered the full copy of Hunter's laptop, you know, a copy of the drive, to the media, including Jake Tapper at CNN. And nobody's ever taken him up on it.
What's that tell you?
Now, don't you think they'd at least want to look at it, even to report that it's fake?
Don't even care?
Don't even want to get a copy?
I don't know. Now, I also saw a Glenn Greenwald article about Matt Gaetz.
And how long has it been since the Matt Gaetz allegations?
It's been a while, right? A year?
Over a year, right? So it's been over a year, and the only part of the story that's been verified is the part of the story that Matt Gaetz sent, which is that they were being blackmailed.
That's now verified fact.
There have been no charges against Matt Gaetz.
It's been a year.
So what do you make of that?
Yeah, he got canceled hard. - I don't.
You know, you watch one person after another get taken out and you wonder who's next, right?
If you look at the landscape of all the people who were sort of making a lot of noise for Trump in 2016, Most of them seem to have been taken out by now.
Now, a lot of them made it easy.
Sometimes they make it easy.
But, wow!
Yeah, Jim Jordan, there's a hit piece on him as well.
I mean, I don't know what things are true and what are not, so I neither condemn nor defend anybody who's been accused of things I have no idea what they did or didn't do.
I'm just noting that they all have hit pieces and they were Prominent supporters of Trump.
Now, apparently, I don't know if you knew this, but the Ukraine, I don't know if the Ukrainians are part of this or just the allies, trying to come up to some way to make a non-NATO deal...
For Ukraine. So there'd be some kind of security guarantee, but it would not involve NATO. And I was trying to come up, what would be the perfect name for a, let's say, a security guarantee situation in In which Russia had already vetoed NATO as being that entity.
So it'd have to be something that's, no, no, it's not NATO. No.
No. It's not NATO. It's something like it.
So I would call it NETO. NETO. Not NATO. It's the one that was, hey, that's not bad.
Nieto. I'll leave you a moment to savor and relish that pun.
And you're welcome. You're welcome.
Oh, Lord. All right.
Is there anything else that I have not covered?
Is there any story?
And please don't ask me about Disney.
I don't know if there's anything I've cared less about than the whole Disney blah, blah, blah, blah.
I don't care. I don't know why.
Now, I was a little surprised that you were all here on time.
It's a little surprising because once Congress rolled back that whole daylight savings time thing yesterday, once they moved the clocks back last night, I thought, today I'm going to wake up and like half of you aren't even going to show up at the right time.
But apparently, many of you Are on top of it, and you adjusted your clocks last night so that you would be on time for this and for work.
What? Oh, it's April Fool's.
April Fool's. Somebody says, my spear animal is a tortoise.
I don't quite know how to take that.
But I'd like to put this horrible thought in your mind.
Everybody reminds you of an animal.
You just haven't figured out which one yet.
And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
I once described somebody as a monkey in a human costume.
And... And by the way, it was a Caucasian human I was mocking, just so you don't think there's a racial element to it, because it wasn't.
And once you hear it, it's all you can see.
It's all you can see after you get that in your head.
Corona dropped off the map, didn't it?
Yes, it did. Alright, so let's do a vote here.
Now remember, reality can never be settled, apparently.
Even science can't settle reality for us.
So, we've gone through the entire pandemic, and now we're sort of at the other end of it, I think.
Was Alex Berenson mostly right or mostly wrong?
Go. Alex Berenson.
Now remember, he was banned by social media for a lot of contrarian opinions.
In the comments, was he mostly right or mostly wrong?
I'm saying mostly rights.
Mostly. Mostly rights.
Mostly rights. And what would be some examples of what you think he was mostly right about?
What would be an example of something he was mostly right about?
Lockdowns not working?
We all thought that.
Masks don't work.
Natural immunity is good.
Masks weren't effective during Omicron.
Vaccination leak.
Lab leak. Interesting.
All right. Who do you think was the most accurate predictor, let's say predictor, during the pandemic?
Who was the most accurate predictor?
On the Locals network, there's only two answers.
people are saying themselves and sometimes me.
Joe Rogan, Alex Jones...
The YouTube answers are completely different.
Trump, Tim Pool.
Only one person on YouTube says me.
That's the difference between the subscription network and the open network.
Well, you know, here's the thing.
We're going to have to make do with the fact that it cannot be settled.
That is so unsatisfying to me.
It's terribly unsatisfying that it can't be settled.
I would say that my record is the best by far.
Because I'm pretty sure everything that Alex Berenson got right, I got right.
I'm pretty sure.
I can't think of...
Oh, we disagreed on masks, but we didn't disagree on mandates.
So I agreed that if they worked, they didn't work well enough.
I mean, once we got past the first, you know, initial phase.
So I think he was wrong about the science of masks, but right that they didn't make enough difference in the real world, the way people actually acted.
Yes, on locals, people actually pay for my opinion, as is being said on locals right now.
And so they're more likely to think that they're paying for something that has value.
So cognitive dissonance would cause people on a subscription network to believe that you are more right than you actually are.
That bias should be something you're actually feeling if you're paying for it.
Oh, the number of deaths.
Yeah. So a number of people say that I make every kind of prediction and then I can confirm I'm right.
So how many would agree with that characterization of me?
That I'm someone who makes all kinds of predictions, I guess maybe on both sides of issues, so then I can claim I'm right?
What would be an example of that?
I'm seeing enough yeses that I'm taking it seriously.
There are lots of yeses, but lots of noes.
What would be an example of that?
There probably isn't.
I have to... Ukraine.
Well, by Ukraine, I took the L on Ukraine.
That doesn't count. If I explicitly take the L, then you can't say...
How do you criticize that?
If I make a clear prediction and then say I was very wrong, I mean, don't, you know, take yes for an answer.
VP, Vice President...
Yeah, you know, I think it's fun to talk about having a prediction that's wrong, but that the reason you made it was still the right reason, it just didn't work out.
I mean, I think that's fair. That's not really flip-flopping.
All right. Oh, that one.
Yeah. The skirt one.
That's a longer conversation.
But that's probably the best one.
That's probably the best example.
I'll give you that one. All right.
And now, ladies and gentlemen...
I was lambasting Berenson.
Well, I still disagree with him on all the things that I disagreed when I lambasted him.
When you say I lambasted him, I don't think that's true.
No, I have said, from fairly early on, I think you can confirm, that I said that the Alex Berensons are valuable and that you need them.
Like, they could be right and they could be wrong, but you need those rogue doctors, the McCulloughs and all that.
So I don't know if they were right or wrong, I'm not qualified.
Pretty sure you're not either.
But you definitely need the pushback.
That's a creative tension.
Oh, I'm being asked if Michael Schellenberger has a chance to win as an independent in California.
And the answer is, nobody else would.
So let me give you the best answer I can give you.
Could Michael Schellenberger win what looks like an against all odds win of being an independent and win in California?
And the answer is nobody else could.
Nobody else could.
So if you're saying to me, Scott, nobody could do that.
I'll agree 99.999% with you.
Nobody else could.
But nobody else could have moved the needle on nuclear energy either.
Hear what I'm saying? He's already done things that didn't look possible.
So if somebody does things that don't look possible, when do you bet against them?
And remember, California is pretty thirsty for solutions.
And you've never seen a more specific solution-oriented candidate.
I'm pretty sure.
Somebody can correct me on that.
But for a major office, say a governor, has there ever been somebody as prescriptive, somebody who's literally written books describing the solution?
Multiple books.
And describing solutions specific to San Francisco in the latest book, San Francisco?
So we've never really seen this.
Now, my understanding is that the way the California elections work Is that there are so many people registered as independent that if you actually got a good bite of the independence, you would make it into some kind of a runoff.
So because of the way our system works, because of the dire hole that we're in, Because there's never been a candidate who has a bona fide left-leaning history but settled on solutions that are sort of just the ones that work.
So you could say he's the first Democrat who understood how anything works.
But you don't get elected that way?
But that's sort of what I think he is.
I've always said the ultimate candidate would be somebody who embraced...
Democrat ideals, but Republican techniques, like systems.
Because the thing the Democrats always get wrong is the human motivation.
But on top of that, sometimes they get the science wrong, too.
And he fixes both of those things.
So the Schellenberger approach to basically everything is, what do we know already works?
What do we know doesn't work?
Let's do more of the things that work.
That's it. And who's on the other side of that, exactly?
Right? Like, what's the counterargument to doing things that we can pretty well confirm work and avoiding the things we can pretty be sure of don't work?
I don't know. Now, the thing he does that maybe will limit him...
Is while he has a serious history of caring about the planet, very left-leaning ideals.
That's how he started, an activist in that area.
And he's definitely very concerned about the homeless and the disadvantaged because, again, that's another huge focus of his work.
So who has been that focused on the...
On the problems and the victims, who's been that focused on them, at the same time has had practical solutions?
Exactly nobody. So here's the problem with predicting.
If you predict from the past, you always miss a Schellenberger.
If you predict from the past, you always miss a Trump.
Because the past never produced a Trump.
If you always judged from the past, you couldn't have a Joe Rogan.
Because nobody ever just started their own show with a camera and a microphone, and suddenly they were the biggest media platform in the world.
Or the country, I guess.
So you miss all of the interesting stuff if you use the past to predict the future.
It just doesn't.
And the whole history repeats is a really limited mindset.
You don't want to get trapped in that.
Yeah, it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
Exactly. Yeah, Rush Limbaugh was another person.
You couldn't predict that. Who would have predicted the rise of Rush Limbaugh?
You wouldn't. All right.
And that, by the way, is all I have to say for today.
I think this was by far the highlight of your experience today.
And I hope it gets better, because that would be amazing.
I mean, imagine starting from this plateau and even getting better.
Come on! Come on!
And yes, I want an entire day without talking about the slap.
