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April 28, 2022 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:31
Episode 1727 Scott Adams: Free Speech, Canceling Student Debt, Elon Musk and More Fun

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: "Canceling" student debt is theft President Trump's ban fromTwitter Biden admin establishes Ministry of Truth? DJI drones sold to Ukraine, helped Russia? Ukraine war end game musing Elon Musk tweets ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
How's everybody today?
Good? Good?
Would you like to enjoy something called the Simultaneous Zip and start your day off in a way that, I don't know, is just the best thing ever?
Probably. Probably you do.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Except for a Russian tank.
We'll talk about that later.
Turns out that Russian tanks are a vessel that maybe not hold your coffee so well.
And would you like to join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better?
It's amazing. Your oxytocin is already starting to rise.
Are you ready for this? Can it get any better?
no it cannot go it feels like a tickle on the neck It's like a sneeze in the forest.
It's like your favorite food when you've been starving.
That's how good the simultaneous zip is.
And believe me, if that is that good, imagine how much the content will delight you.
Well, more than I can even express.
Let's talk about that.
So, I was accused of being insensitive for making the following comment on Twitter.
That now when I see masked people, if they're alone, alone in the car or just walking alone somewhere, obviously just exercising, taking a walk, I no longer think that those are cautious people or immunocompromised.
I kind of think that it's signaling some type of mental illness.
Now, people said, you're unkind.
You're unkind. No, I'm not.
I'm literally showing empathy.
Maybe I don't do it well.
Do I do it wrong?
I'm showing empathy.
I'm not judging them or disliking them.
I'm saying I'm deeply alarmed at how many people are, in my opinion...
My uneducated, non-expert opinion, are signaling an actual mental illness that probably has great consequences in their lives.
Now, I imagine a lot of them are germphobes.
Imagine, just imagine how hard it would have been to be a germphobe, germaphobe, going through the pandemic.
What could have been harder than that?
I mean, that's like...
That's like a disaster that was designed just to torture a certain group of people.
Especially hard. So no, I have only empathy for them, but the shocking part...
So this is not about, hey, you people take off your masks.
That's been done to death.
So I'm not giving an opinion whether they should take them off or not.
That's their business. I'm just saying that I'm alarmed At what looks like the most visible signal yet of mental illness.
Because a lot of mental illness is invisible, right?
Unless you know the person personally, you don't necessarily see it.
You know, they're just walking down the streets and the mentally ill look exactly like everybody else for the most part.
But if they have to put out an article of clothing that indicates they're in that group of people, which unfortunately is gigantic, Who are having serious, life-affecting mental illnesses.
And when you see it visually like this, at least that's what it says to me.
Now, some of you are saying, Scott, Scott, Scott, they just left their mask on because they're walking from one place to another.
No, I'm not talking about those.
I'm not talking about the people in the parking lot at the grocery store or actually at the parking lot, let's say, the doctor's office.
Yeah, I mean, they just walked out and forgot to take their mask off.
But for the most part, I'm talking about people walking for recreation, just away from everybody.
I'm talking about people in their car, alone.
I don't know. I think that that is not a case of people who are immunocompromised, in most cases.
I think that's something else.
Well, here's a new wrinkle in the DeSantis versus Disney thing.
Apparently, there's some kind of clause in their agreement where Disney got this special control over their own territory.
Apparently, if Florida takes over for Disney, they would also take over their debt.
So Florida would have to accept a billion dollars in debt that Disney itself was somehow satisfying.
And so I say to myself, huh, didn't see that coming.
Now, I don't necessarily think that that means it can't work, because if it's a bond debt, then something is servicing it.
So I assume that they would get whatever is servicing it, as well as the debt itself.
So it shouldn't necessarily stop the deal, but it might slow it down, because they have to work that out.
So we'll see. Maybe there is some technical reason why this can't happen that nobody saw until now.
Let's talk about canceling student debt.
Which, by the way, isn't a real thing.
You don't really cancel debt.
When you hear that word, people think, oh, hey, there's an idea.
Why don't you take this thing that's bad, this debt, and just make it go away?
Just cancel it.
Cancel it's just a word.
Just take out your books and just delete that number.
Why not? Why not?
If it's bad and you can cancel it, why wouldn't you cancel something that's bad?
Right? Am I right?
It's as simple as that.
How about death? Nobody likes death.
Here's what I say. Cancel it.
Why don't we cancel it?
Oh, if you're pro-death, go ahead and argue that point, you fascist.
Not me. I want to cancel it.
How about cancer?
We've been trying to come up with cures for cancer.
Done pretty well, actually. But there's still a lot that are incurable.
Until now, cancel it.
Just cancel it.
How about that? The war in Ukraine?
Looks like an impossible situation, doesn't it?
Not so much.
Not so much. Can anybody guess how I would fix the problem in Ukraine?
Take a guess. Cancel it.
I'd cancel it. Because when you cancel something, it just goes away.
It's kind of brilliant.
Are there any other problems we can just cancel and make them go away?
No, you're not cancelling the fucking debt.
That's not a thing.
You're just transferring it.
You're transferring it from the people who got the benefit and made the decision to take on the debt to the people who paid off their debt or didn't go to college or have similar problems of a different nature and don't need your problem.
That debt goes somewhere.
If the person who borrowed it doesn't pay it back, well then the lender eats it.
I mean, it's sort of a less direct way, but the lender is still going to eat it.
Money doesn't just disappear.
I mean, debt doesn't just disappear.
Somebody loses. And you know for a fact the bank will not be eating the debt.
I'm saying somebody eats all debt.
I don't know who it is.
In this case, I assume it's the taxpayer, right?
How could it be anything else?
Is there any model other than the taxpayer would eat it?
Now, it doesn't mean that they eat it as in...
A normal way. It could be that it's just an asset they thought they have that they no longer have.
So if you say, I have an asset called, people are going to give me a trillion dollars, or 1.7 trillion.
So my asset is, I have this 1.7 trillion dollars that people owe me.
And then suddenly they don't.
You've lost 1.7 trillion in value.
And that's got to be taken into account when you figure out your total budget, etc.
Because that's money that's not coming in.
So, as long as we allow the people who want to do this to call it cancelling a debt, then all the dumb people are going to think, well, that's free.
Why not? Let's get some of that cancellation going.
It's got to change to, you know...
Move the debt to those who did not move it.
I call it a theft. I get that it could be legalized, because the government, if they make it legal, then technically it's not theft.
But is theft in effect, is it not?
It feels like it.
If it feels like theft and walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Somebody said that to me online the other day.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Must be a duck. To which I say, only if you haven't been alive for the last five years would you think that.
Today, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably fucking fake news.
Am I right? The things that look exactly the way they're supposed to be are almost always wrong now.
In the old days, if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, well, yeah, yeah.
I mean, there was a good chance that was a freaking duck.
But in 2022, you could take the DNA of the duck and you still wouldn't be sure.
Because you'd be like, I don't know, who took that DNA? Do we have a chain of custody?
I feel as if the DNA test of the duck might have been rigged.
Right? So there's nothing we believe anymore.
So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it doesn't mean a damn thing.
It means nothing.
Maybe it never did.
But it definitely doesn't mean anything in 2022.
All right. Well, so here's...
Let me do a...
I think it's called a steel man argument.
So here's the argument for cancelling the debt.
You ready? So I'm opposed to it.
But don't you think it's interesting to hear the best argument on the other side?
Would anybody find that offensive?
Because I know we like to play as a team.
Here's the best argument for canceling the debt.
Why? Why did the people take on the debt?
Go. The people who took on the debt, why did they do it?
Did they do it from something called free will?
Did they look at the situation and just like you did and I did in some cases, Did they make a decision, and their decision maybe was different than yours, and now they think they don't want to pay it back?
Is that what happened? Well, here's my argument.
Do you know why children grow up to think that education is important?
Who told them that? The system.
Sure, their parents told them that too.
Who told their parents?
The system. The government.
Education system. The education system tells people that education's good and that they should go get some and they should go to college.
So every one of those people who borrowed money from the government was brainwashed by the government from childhood to borrow that money.
It's a better argument than you thought, isn't it?
I'll bet you didn't see that coming.
No, they were literally brainwashed.
I mean it literally. Literally, literally, the way literally is actually supposed to be literally used.
They actually were brainwashed.
Easy to prove.
I mean, you could get any expert to say, what happens when you take young children and consistently tell them that education is good and college is the best of all, and it's so good that you should do anything you can do to get there, because don't even let money stop you, damn it.
It's that good, if you can do it.
Now, of course, not every kid is Ideally suited for a college track.
So those kids were brainwashed, but it didn't matter because their track was not going to go in that direction.
But for those people who were, let's say they had the capability to get good grades and the capability to go to college, at least in terms of scholastic achievement, those people were all brainwashed.
How many of them were told, you know, If you just get a good trade education and learn things that you need to learn on your own, just as good.
Almost none of them.
Do you think there was any teacher in any school that said, look kids, education is highly prized in our society, but realistically, realistically, if you learned a trade, and it was the right trade, and you worked hard, you'd do great. Because lots of people do.
There are tons of people who just do great without a college education.
So who told the kids that?
Was that a message that those kids were getting?
No! They were literally brainwashed.
So when brainwashed people get a loan, whose fault is that?
Is that the fault of the person who got the loan?
Well, you could argue that it's the fault of the system that hypnotized them, and you and I are all part of that system, especially if you're an adult.
If you're an adult, you are supporting a system that brainwashed children into getting loans they can't pay back.
So you do have some responsibility.
But wait, isn't that what the muggers say, too?
They do, don't they?
It's not me. It's society.
I was born into a system that did not give me a fair chance.
So what could I do?
Guess I became a mugger.
So the counter to my argument, my excellent argument that children were brainwashed into getting these, is that unfortunately you can use that argument for just everything.
Everybody's brainwashed into everything, because it's true.
It's literally true.
Again, literally used the way literally is meant to.
Literally true. It doesn't mean there's an intention involved, but the effect is brainwashing.
All right. There's no right answer here.
This is just a power play.
But I do wonder, what would be the benefit of getting this through before an election happens?
Suppose Biden and the Democrats are successful and they get this push-through before the midterms.
Is there any point to it?
What would be the political point of doing it before the election?
Because let's say young people are primarily the ones with these loans.
Have you met a young person?
Name a young person who gets a benefit already...
And then months later, you say, hey, you already got your benefit.
It's really basically the only thing you cared about.
But also, I'd like you to take a day off from work or whatever and go vote.
I don't think they care.
I think once they got their benefit, they're done.
I don't believe that's a reason to vote.
Do you? Do you think people are going to say, oh, the Democrats gave me the one thing I wanted, so I'd better vote for them?
No, they already got it.
I'm not sure exactly how it works politically.
Are you? Because it's not like passing the infrastructure bill or something like that, where you say to yourself, oh, that's an accomplishment.
That's an accomplishment.
Oh, good. You did something for the whole country.
That's good. But if you just give something to somebody and it's a one-time deal, well, then they just have it.
It's no longer part of the decision-making, is it?
I mean, you want the competent leadership, but I think you would just call that a one-off and say, yay, pocket the money and you wouldn't change your vote one bit, I don't think.
All right, here's a statistic I saw.
The three-quarters of the student debt is held by...
Do you know the answer to this?
What demographic holds three-quarters of the student debt?
No, that's the wrong answer.
Women. The answer is women.
So women are three-quarters of the student debt, which means that the Democrats will forgive the debt.
If you were going to predict what the Democratic Party will do, all you have to do is look at what's good for 75% of women.
And I feel like they're just going to be drawn to that.
It's going to be too important.
Maybe they'll forgive the debt for women only.
No white men.
Do you think it's fair that white men also get their debt forgiven?
Seems unfair, doesn't it?
Because I wonder what the racial composition of the debt holders is.
I'll bet it's mostly white, isn't it?
Am I wrong about that?
Is most student debt held by white people?
How come that wasn't reported?
Why is it that I saw an article saying 75% of it is women, but the same article didn't mention the ethnic breakdown, which seems really, really important?
Would the entire thing be killed if the Republicans point out it primarily helps white people?
It kind of would, wouldn't it?
Yeah. I mean, am I wrong?
If the ethnic mix of student loans is overweighted with white debties, debtors, what do you call them?
Debtors? Well, that can be interesting.
And it's very interesting that we are denied that knowledge when we're given such related knowledge.
It makes it look intentional, doesn't it?
Yeah, debtors, thank you.
It makes it look intentional that we don't know the racial background.
It's weird. All right.
I saw a comment from a Twitter user, Patrick Chauvinik.
And he tweeted this, talking about putting Trump back on Twitter.
And he was pointing out it's not just a free speech issue.
That Trump was booted off Twitter for more than his opinion.
And this is the way Patrick says it.
He says, It is worth noting that Twitter banned Donald Trump from the site in the immediate aftermath of the mob attack he inspired on the Capitol on Jan 6.
It's not as though they just disproved of his opinions.
What do you think of that?
Do you think that Trump was booted off Twitter for his opinions?
Or was he booted off because of inspiring the mob attack on the Capitol?
And does that matter?
Does it matter?
Well, here's what I tweeted back.
I said this is the type of common misinformation that a Musk-owned Twitter could correct, you know, potentially.
So I said, here's a fact check.
It is legal and appropriate to inspire a protest to demand an audit of an election that looked rigged to about half the country.
Fake News calls that an insurrection.
Now, I'm going to say that Patrick Chauvinik is probably somebody who follows the news, but if he followed the news that was left-leaning, He would think that there was an insurrection and that the president inspired that insurrection.
Correct? That would be the common opinion of people who consumed CNN and MSNBC. But it's not true.
It's just not the case.
The cases that Trump inspired...
He inspired a protest, which is completely legal.
It's protected speech.
And the protest was to protect the election because it was such a strong intuition that it had been rigged, and so obviously from the perspective of the Republicans.
Now, I'll agree that the courts have seen no evidence to prove that case.
The courts have seen no evidence.
You may have seen some evidence that you think proves it, but the courts have not.
So that's all I know.
I mean, I don't know if anything happened or not.
I just know that hasn't been proven in the courts, but also that doesn't tell you much.
It's just a true statement.
All right. So, if you were Patrick, you probably did not know that although there were certainly some bad actors in the group, Had anybody ever explained to you that if it had been intended to be an insurrection, it would have been armed, and it wasn't.
I mean, except for some clubs and some random stuff like bear spray, I guess.
If the plan had been an insurrection, there would have been weapons.
And secondly, how do you take over a country by occupying a building?
Whose news source ever explained that to Patrick?
Even if they had weapons, which they didn't, even if they had planned to take over the country for which there's no evidence whatsoever, because 100% of what everybody was saying is, hey, we think the election was rigged.
Can you give us two days to look into it?
And that's what everybody wanted, right?
Now, whether that was legal or not is separate from the fact that they were trying to get it done.
And the entire thing was just completely different from the way the left portrayed it.
And I wonder if an Elon Musk Twitter could help people like Patrick who are so poorly served by their media.
Now I've said this before, the people on the right almost always know the news on the left.
Because it's so pervasive.
The left-leaning news is everywhere.
And the news on the right tends to react to the news on the left.
So you've got a good balance there.
If you watch the right, you tend to at least be exposed to both sides.
But if you watch only the left, they won't even tell you that the Hunter Biden laptop is real.
You're not getting anything like the news.
You're just getting complete bullshit.
Now, that's not to say that the news on the right is all correct.
Nobody would make that claim.
But there's a real difference in how much their viewers are exposed to the opposite arguments.
All right. So, did I see in the news that the Biden administration is creating a ministry of truth?
I think it's a department...
There's going to be a department in Homeland Security to create a disinformation governance board dedicated to, quote, countering misinformation.
Really? Yeah, this is where the people like me who say, don't worry about the slippery slope, there will always be something that pops up to stop things from slipping too far.
Yeah, I mean, things always do go too far, but then they correct.
I would say critical race theory and some of that stuff is probably going too far, and it's in the process of self-correcting.
I have to admit, I am actually completely surprised that we got all the way to the Ministry of Truth, where the government will pretend to tell you what is true and what is not.
And I thought, honestly, it just looks like a joke, doesn't it?
Now, how can it possibly work?
And what would they do?
Because if what they do is fact-checking, That's not going to work, is it?
The government is exactly the entity you expect to lie, especially if they're associated with a political party.
If they're associated with a political party, they should be the most lyingest people in the game, history suggests.
So when you take the most lyingest people, I'm playing loosely with language here.
And you say, we'll take the people who are most definitely the biggest liars in the world.
We'll staff it with some people who have a history of actually some sketchy behavior when it comes to the truth, just to make it have no credibility whatsoever.
And we'll put it under the Homeland Security to make it sound scary and important, to make it even sound more evil than anything we've ever done in the history of the United States.
I would be worried about this, except that it's so ridiculous, I don't know how anybody will ever take it seriously.
What I worry about is if it's more than fact-checking.
What happens if they start leaning on private companies?
Because what else is their mission?
Suppose they start leaning on Fox News and say, you know, the...
What do they call them?
The... The Disinformation Governance Board has ruled that Tucker Carlson can't frame the issue that way.
What? How's that going to go down?
What exactly does this entity do?
They're either going to try to persuade private industry to say different things, or they're going to be fact-checkers, and all of that's worthless.
How in the world could this work?
It's sort of mind-boggling.
And I feel like it's just giving something to the Republicans.
There have to be some Democrats who still like freedom.
I have to think that this is the sort of thing that carves off another 1% of Democrats, or Independents maybe.
This is like a 1% deal.
You just lost 1% of your side with this, didn't you?
You don't think even 1% Of the Democrats are looking at this and saying, uh, yeah, I kind of like Democrat policies, but, uh, the Disinformation Governance Board?
Really? Now, you say they're brainwashed, but I say, yeah, 99%.
But I feel like 1%, just 1% would say, ah, that's too far.
Maybe I'm an optimist. Well, here's something interesting.
Chinese drone maker DJI, that's the biggest drone-making company.
So I think by far the biggest percentage of drones is made by this one Chinese company, DJI. So the Ukrainians were using them, but now I guess there's a pullback because there was some glitch in the software that somehow gave Russians...
Some advantage, some information about the drones.
And so, China makes the drones, they sell them to their allies' enemy, that's Ukraine, but they actually work to help the Russians identify something.
So, yeah, it's pretty much exactly the way you'd imagine it would go.
So I guess they're going to pull back from supplying them.
All right, so at this point, the Ukrainians do not have enough shoulder missiles, so they don't have anti-tank missiles enough, because they're not made anymore.
So whatever the world's supply is of those, probably the available ones are already being sucked up.
So they're going to run out of the good missiles, They're going to run out of, I think, the Turkish drones, the good ones, you know, the big ones.
Their Air Force is probably down to not much of anything.
And now their drones, which were really sort of their secret weapon, may also be depleted.
I don't know how many they have, but they're not getting more.
So how does Putin lose this?
And it seems to me that Russia would be able to resupply better than Ukraine eventually.
In the short run, maybe not.
But eventually, I would think Russia would be able to get their supply lines up and running.
So I saw a retired General McCaffrey on Fox, I guess, say that he thinks Russia will basically own Ukraine in 90 days.
So 90 days, Ukraine will be owned.
What do you think? Do you think Ukraine will go in 90 days?
Or do you think there'll be a permanent guerrilla force that'll be so powerful that Russia will always have to just stay in their little bases?
Yeah? I don't know.
Well, if there's one thing you can predict about a war, it is.
What's the one thing you can predict about wars?
They always last longer than you think.
Don't they? And they're unpredictable.
They're unpredictable in general, but the one thing you can predict is they never end when you think they're going to end.
So, who knows?
And I wonder, who's going to pay for the rebuilding of Ukraine?
Isn't it better for the United States if Putin takes it over?
Sorry.
But I'll just ask an honest question.
If Ukraine, let's say, wins in the sense that they stay independent, who's going to pay to rebuild them and then rearm them?
Isn't that us? It's us, right?
Because who else is going to do it?
Ukraine doesn't have money, and we're not going to just leave them there as rubble, because if we leave them as rubble, they'll just get reattacked.
Putin will just take a year and go back and do it again, because it's just rubble by that time.
So it seems to me that if the United States and Europe win, meaning Ukraine survives, that's going to be really expensive, and what will we get in return?
What do we get in return?
I can't think of anything.
Can you? I can't think of anything.
So, now let's say that Russia conquers Ukraine and owns it.
Who pays for rebuilding Ukraine once Russia owns it?
Russia. Well, you know, the part about the wheat is the cheapest part, because that's just like tractors and...
Tractors and roads and grain storage, right?
So I don't think that's like the big expense.
The big expense is 8 million people.
I mean, the whole economy is broken, basically.
So I hate to bring this up.
I hate to bring this up, but the United States is better off if Ukraine loses at this point, because there's nothing left of Ukraine.
And And if Russia broke it, they've got to buy it, right?
Yeah, you broke it, you bought it.
So, would the United States and Europe be better off if Russia is crippled by its conquest of Russia, I'm sorry, of Ukraine, even though Putin would get what he wants, wouldn't it basically make Russia an ineffective fighting force for a long time?
Because they just wouldn't have the money.
And I think there will be a long-term move toward squeezing them out of the energy game.
So I feel as though the United States may have cynically played an unusually effective game here.
If our goal was to degrade Russia and just take them off the page, if that was the goal, Then it looks like well played.
But if that was not the goal, well, then it was just a gigantic mistake.
So I think we have to start asking a tough question, which is, is the United States better or worse off if Ukraine loses?
And I'm not saying that I don't have empathy for the Ukrainians, but I also don't know what's good for them.
I just don't know what's better for them at this point.
Well, I saw on CNN that Russian tanks have a little problem, which is they're very explodey.
So there's a design flaw in the Russian tanks, say the experts, Where a minor hit on the tank will explode the munitions and then the munitions will blow the turret, you know, two stories in the air and obviously kill the people who are within it.
So it turns out that a tank is the least safe place to be if you're in the Russian military because any kind of a serious hit of the tank makes it explode on its own.
And I guess the US tanks don't do that?
I mean, I don't know how you protect munitions in a tank, but I guess there's a better way to do it, and they do it the bad way.
So Russia might be losing a lot of tanks, but do they need all those tanks to control Ukraine?
Scott doesn't like CNN.
He loves it, they say on the comments. - Yes.
Just the T-72s.
I heard that even the newer Russian tanks have the same design flaw.
The old ones and the new ones have the same design flaw.
That's what I read this morning.
Alright. Somebody's mentioning Elon Musk.
He should buy Dominion software next.
That would be interesting. Alright, let's talk about Twitter.
Do you believe that at Twitter people are quickly changing the algorithms and stuff so that nobody finds out what happened?
Do you think that's happening? But you don't think that that would be easily discoverable?
That it had happened?
I did hear an insider report From Twitter that suggests there's some sabotage going on.
But I don't know what that means.
Has anybody heard anything like that?
From insiders? There must be plenty of people on here who know somebody who works at Twitter.
Have any insiders said there's any sabotage going on?
Um... Yeah, I'd be surprised if there were not any.
Rumors, yeah. I don't know what that would look like.
I suspect that might be overblown.
It sounds like the sort of thing people talk about doing but don't do.
Because it's just too easy to discover.
I can't imagine it'd be worth it.
When Clinton left office and his staff took all the W's on the keyboards.
Yeah. I mean, maybe little stuff like keyboards and stuff.
All right. Let me get rid of this commenter.
Let me just make a general comment.
For people who want to talk about my personal life, here's the thing you need to know.
When people get married, it's usually because they both want to.
And when people get divorced, it's usually for the better.
It's because something wasn't working.
It's not bad news.
It's not something that needs to be fixed.
It didn't need to be fixed before.
It doesn't need to be fixed now.
So while I appreciate that you have interest in it, don't assume there's a problem that needs to be fixed.
That there's no basis for assuming that.
Don't assume that we're not both happier.
Don't assume that everything isn't fine.
And remember, by the time that you hear about anything, it's already old news to the people involved.
So by the time anybody not close to me heard about any of this, it was already something that we'd processed for a long time.
So I'm fine.
I'm actually in a real good place.
And I think she is too.
I don't know. We don't really communicate.
But I think she's fine.
I think I'm fine too.
So there's not really a problem to solve here.
So you don't need to be obsessed on that.
that you can let that go.
Okay.
I see your questions and I'm not going to respond to them.
Just assume everything's fine.
It's fine. Or will be.
Yeah. I don't think either of us are suffering any loneliness.
I don't think any of us will be fine.
All right. That's right.
Salisbury Hill. And...
Let's talk some more about Elon Musk's tweets.
What did he tweet? I feel like I wrote it down and I lost it somewhere.
Oh, he tweeted, next I'm buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in.
How much do you love him?
He just keeps making me love him because he doesn't take seriously things that should not be taken seriously.
And he does take seriously the things that are most important, like saving the planet and extending consciousness into Mars and space.
He takes those things pretty seriously.
And then free speech? Yeah, I don't think anybody's taken free speech more seriously than he is.
But when it comes to the criticisms of how seriously any of this should be, I like the fact that he doesn't take any of it seriously.
The stuff that doesn't need to be taken seriously.
That is just so refreshing.
Because what we're used to is people being serious about non-serious stuff and not being serious about really serious stuff.
He's literally the opposite of everybody on Twitter.
Am I wrong? Because he takes seriously the big, big, big stuff like AI. I mean, he's talking about artificial intelligence, you know, being dangerous and bringing humans to off worlds.
I mean, that's the big, big stuff.
The important stuff.
And then, you know, somebody's joke on Twitter and this little stuff.
Eh. He just thinks it's funny.
That's exactly what you would want to emulate.
He had some other funny tweets, and the thing that is really blowing my mind is how many people he's responding to.
Have you seen that yet?
So he's responded to Mike Cernovich directly.
He's responded to a number of people that you probably follow.
And they're not the biggest...
Biggest accounts in the world.
I mean, Cernovich is one of the biggest accounts in terms of influence.
And I just love how personal he's made Twitter.
Because you feel like he's the richest guy around, right?
In the world, in the country, whatever it is.
So he's the richest guy.
He's doing the most important things.
But you could just tweet at him And there's a pretty good chance he'll respond, at least this week, because he's having fun with it, apparently.
And it's just sort of amazing.
Just watching it is just mind-blowing.
But you want to have your mind blown again?
Remember, Elon Musk is a promoter of the idea that we live in a simulation.
He's probably the best example of it because he lives it like it's a simulation.
It's like whatever he wants done, he just makes it happen and the simulation seems to give it to him.
Am I right? But here's something that I always say about the simulation.
It has code reuse. It uses the same characters over and over again and the same themes over and over again.
What are the odds that the two biggest stories in the news...
Would be Elon Musk and whatever he's doing today and Johnny Depp.
Those are the two biggest stories?
Seems like. At least the ones that involve personalities.
Johnny Depp and Elon Musk.
And they both dated Amber Turd.
What are the chances of that?
That the two people who are seeming to control our consciousness at the moment both dated the same person?
That amber turd? That's weird, isn't it?
Am I right? And apparently there's a name for this, Eskimo Brothers.
Ha, ha, ha. Have you ever heard that term?
I had to look it up.
So it's like an urban dictionary slag.
So Eskimo Brothers means when basically anybody sleeps together just for warmth.
So it could be your brother, it could be your brother's wife, it could be anybody.
So like anybody will sleep together together.
If you're cold enough. So the Elon Musk and Johnny Depp are Eskimo brothers because they both slept with the emperor turd.
Anyway. They're turd brothers.
Yeah. That's pretty funny.
So is there any story I missed?
I'm not going to look that up.
Somebody gave me something else to look up.
I don't think I'm going to look that up.
But I'm going to tell you what it was.
Upper deck? What does upper deck mean?
Dammit, I've got to look it up now.
I know something filthy.
That's why I've got to look it up. Okay, upper deck.
Is this going to be terrible?
Wait a minute.
I'm looking at your comments, but does that really...
Uh...
Alright, well, we'll let that go.
I'm going to assume that what I'm seeing here in the comments is probably true.
I don't know why that's so funny. - Oh, my God.
That just comes out of me.
Definitely don't look up rusty trombones.
Do not look that up.
Do not look up rusty trombone.
Let me warn you.
That's just a warning.
And trust me, if you don't already know what it means, don't look it up.
Or a dirty Sanchez.
All right.
I feel bad because I know I just made a bunch of you look up horrible things that you'll not have in your minds.
Well, that's on me.
Alright, is there anything else we need to talk about today?
Let's have a gratuitous, simultaneous sip.
I'm going to look at your comments for a moment, shall we?
I'm from Florida.
Trust me. Okay.
Oh, Elon Musk also tweeted that Truth Social was a terrible name and that it should be called Trumpet.
And the problem is that, you know, I don't think Trump wanted it to be like A Trump-branded thing, because I don't think that would necessarily have helped him.
So I disagree from a branding perspective, but I agree from a naming perspective that Trumpet would have been a better name.
My goodness.
Who wants me? Okay.
Yes, it's time for bagels.
War winners are invariably stronger after the war.
Okay, we have a comment that the winners of wars are invariably stronger after the war.
Well, let's test that.
So invariably means historically.
And so let's take learning from history.
Is it true that the winners of war, no matter how degraded they get when they win the war, will end up ahead having won the war?
I would agree that that would be the long-term outcome because Ukraine seems to be valuable enough that eventually Putin will be out of office or maybe we'll forget what horrible things he did and Russia will re-enter the economy at some point And probably come out ahead.
I think I would agree with that.
So I'm going to agree with it on a concept level.
But I'm going to argue about the timing.
Because I think as long as Putin is there, or somebody who's Putin-esque, I guess, I think that they will be economically...
Degraded in a way they would not have been had they not won the war, had they not entered the war at all.
So I'm going to argue that they will be worse off for as long as Putin is there, but I would agree with you that having Russia and Ukraine together probably makes a stronger Russia in the long, long term.
Let's say the 30-year term, I agree.
In the 20-year future, If Putin stays, I think Russia's worse off.
But who can predict such things?
All it would take is a reversal on the sanctions, and then nothing's predictable after that.
You forgot China's role.
I didn't forget it.
I'll put Zelensky in charge of Russia.
No, I don't think that'll fly.
Because I think...
Yeah, that's not going to fly.
Russia would be fine because they have resources the world needs badly.
True. That's what keeps them from being completely dissolved.
But... Will not the Ukraine situation cause people to work twice as hard, maybe ten times as hard, to have alternative sources to Russia's resources?
I say yes.
So I think that Russia may have the ability to sell, but yeah, I suppose...
I guess for decades there's going to be a market for all the energy they can produce.
Maybe only the richest countries will be the ones who have alternative sources.
They have their own energy and food.
That is correct. So apparently Russia is pretty self-sufficient.
But if you take away their energy trade, it's not the same country.
Countries will work to avoid NATO's fears of influence.
Will they? I don't know.
Not according to Peter Zandt.
What does Peter Zandt have to say about what?
I'd be interested in that.
The ruble is up.
Yeah, so the ruble's hanging in there.
When your printer doesn't work, it's your network that needs to be reset, not the printer.
Sometimes. That is correct.
Yeah, I usually can identify when it's the network problem, and I will do both.
But that's a good point. I should reset my Wi-Fi just as one of the things to try.
All right, well, I've run out of things to say, clearly.
And although this was a highlight of your day and maybe civilization itself, I think it's time that we...
Take this to a conclusion.
And I don't know that you could be happier.
Could you? No, you couldn't be.
You couldn't be happier.
Best thing ever. All right.
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