Episode 1729 Scott Adams: Stories That Involve Elon Musk, Which Means Pretty Much Everything
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Grand Jury finds nothing, Trump cleared
AOC, Elon Musk Twitter banter
Sexual assault in virtual reality
Elon Musk story list
Michael Shellenberger, Diablo Canyon
Ukraine War musing
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
It will be, damn it, if I have anything to say about it.
And so, are you prepared?
Are you ready? For an experience which will connect all people almost as if we are a global mind.
Almost as if we form a superintelligence collectively being channeled through me.
So between coffee...
And this is a shared experience.
Let's do something amazing!
All right, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of Tanker Chelsea Stein the Canteen Junk of Flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day.
It's the tingle on the back of your neck.
It's the thing that makes you feel alive.
That's right. Simultaneous sip.
Go! Oh, that's a good container of beverage right there.
I hope the container of beverage you just ingested was as good as the container of beverage I just ingested.
And if that doesn't get you going, nothing will.
Well, the walls are closing in on Trump.
His legal woes continue to...
Oh, actually, no, nothing's happening.
So it turns out that the latest rumor, so unconfirmed, but it looks like all the...
The Manhattan charges or the grand jury that was going to look into all the Trump financial dealings, they've been looking and looking.
They've been talking to people.
They've been investigating.
They've demanded and they've received documents.
And after months and months of grand jury stuff, the foreshadowing, not yet confirmed, is that it seems increasingly unlikely there will be any indictments coming out of this.
Have we ever seen any President Trump witch hunts before?
I feel as if it was nothing but witch hunts.
You know, I'm not going to say that Trump was an angel all of his life.
And the reason I'm not going to say it is because he told us that directly.
He literally said in public, you know, I'm no angel.
But then he would tell you why he could help you as president.
So if you expected him to be an angel, in however you want to define that, you shouldn't have been surprised if he talks about grabbing people by the whatever, because he kind of signaled that as directly as you possibly could.
And I always thought that immunized him.
A good way to immunize people is to tell people that you have the flaw that you're worried they're going to blame you of.
Because if you say it first, it just takes all the fun out of it.
If Trump had said, you know, I say horrible things in private, you should know that.
And then you find out he said a horrible thing in private, you're like, hey, you said a horrible thing.
Okay, he did tell us that.
And it just takes all the energy out of it.
So may I admit to you right now, I'd like to confess, I say horrible things in private.
Horrible things. Just terrible things.
If any of it were presented to you out of context, you would say to yourself, well, that's the worst person I think I've ever heard of in the world.
But here's the context.
Do you have a friend like this?
Now, this won't apply to all of you, but some of you do.
Do you have a friend who, if you're just alone, could be somebody you've known a long time, usually it is, that the funniest thing you can do is to say the most inappropriate things?
Whatever is the most absolutely uncivilized thing you could say, something you would never say in front of someone else.
And the fun is how awful it is.
Am I right? So I often think if somehow my digital devices are recording every word I say, and somehow it all came back to me, and you played these bits, they would sound worse than anything you've ever heard in your life.
Like, you think you've heard people say bad things on hidden audio?
You should see mine.
Well, I don't know.
You should hear them, if such things exist.
But, yeah, I'll make your head explode.
But I wouldn't say it in public, right?
The whole reason it's funny is because you wouldn't say it in public.
That's the entire energy of it.
It's inappropriate. So, it's tough to see stuff out of context, is what I'm saying.
So here's another big, gigantic story that has been haunting us forever, this whole Manhattan possible indictments of Trump for financial chicanery or whatever, that apparently none of it happened.
None of it happened. What would happen if everybody saw Trump's tax returns and they were just clean?
That would be the funniest thing, wouldn't it?
After all this time, let's just say the entire tax returns became public and everybody was like, oh, this is going to be good.
This is going to be good.
And everybody's like salivating over it and they're like, huh.
Okay, there's nothing there.
Because apparently that's what happened with these Manhattan indictments.
There was nothing there. It's what happened with Russia collusion.
You know, Russia collusion...
Not there. The closest they could find is trying to confuse us after the fact that Russian interference in the election was the same as, or somehow adjacent to Russia, collusion with somebody running for president.
Very different. Very different.
But that was the closest they could get to making that stick, is talking about an unrelated topic.
That's the closest they could get.
So... If Trump were to run for re-election, he would be the most vetted person of all time.
I don't think I would ever worry again that he would be caught in some illegality or blackmailed.
He might be the least blackmailable president now of all time.
Am I right? I mean, then you add to that his age.
At some age, you stop worrying about getting blackmailed.
I was thinking about this the other day.
At my current age, I was thinking, what if somebody blackmailed me, like they really had the goods, whatever that was, and they said, okay, you're going to be so terribly embarrassed, your career will be destroyed if I release this information.
Well, if I were 30, that would be pretty scary, wouldn't it?
Because you're like, oh, my whole life's ahead of me.
I'm going to let this stuff out.
If it happened now...
I feel like I think it was funny.
I'm not positive, and I suppose it would depend on what it is, I guess.
But I feel like I would just laugh.
Because it's hard, nobody's going to take my money away from me.
Or at least, and nobody but the government, I guess.
So I'm not sure what I would have to lose.
It would just make me seem more interesting, even in a bad way, and say, well, okay, I'll take that trade off.
If it makes me seem more interesting.
And by the way, if you ever hear bad things about me, I encourage you to believe all of them, except the illegal ones.
If you hear I did anything illegal, totally did not do that.
Because I actually do try pretty hard to avoid illegal stuff.
But if you hear anything that's just like wildly provocative...
I would encourage you to believe it, even though it's very unlikely it's true.
But if it's fun, you should believe it, if you enjoy it.
So now there's a story about, I guess Hannity was exchanging a whole bunch of messages, over 80 messages, with Mark Meadows about the January 6th situation.
And the big scandal is that Hannity was giving advice to the administration and the president through Mark Meadows.
And I'm watching this and I'm thinking, remind me why this is a story?
What is the part that's news?
Is the news that Hannity and Trump were friends?
Because they both talked about that publicly all the time.
Everybody knew that.
Did anybody think that Trump doesn't listen to people who are exactly the right person to give you exactly the right kind of advice?
Who would you want advice from if you were a Republican president in a tight spot?
Who could give you the best possible advice?
Well, you know, Hannity would be near the top, I would think.
You don't have to agree with Hannity's opinions on anything for me to make this point.
I'm just saying that Hannity's talent stack, as I've pointed out before, Henry's just a perfect example of a talent stack.
Somebody who, if you looked at any individual thing he has a talent at, you know, speaking in public, knowing about politics, whatever, you'd say, oh, that's good.
And sometimes really, really good.
But there's not one of those things that stands out as the best anybody's been at that thing.
He's got a look.
He talks right. He's got the energy.
He just has everything.
So his magic is there are no gaps.
He just has everything. So it makes him very effective.
So if you were going to give somebody's advice in this exact topic, which is how to handle the public opinion of something, I would go to somebody who is one of the best people on the planet in managing public opinions.
Hannity is exactly whose advice I want to hear.
And what kind of advice did he give?
One of them is that he said that Trump should announce he will lead, he said after the six, this is what Hannity said, that Trump should announce he will lead a nationwide effort to reform voting integrity.
Go to Florida and watch Joe mess up daily.
Stay engaged.
When he speaks, people will listen.
And I thought to myself, okay, that's really good advice, isn't it?
That's about as good as...
If you were going to get advice, that's about as good as you could get.
Now, Trump didn't take this advice, right?
Trump decided to be Trump, and maybe there's nothing wrong with that because he's made it work so far.
So Trump decided to be fully combative.
But if I read between the lines, I think Hannity's approach was to basically shift the argument and become the champion of election integrity, which nobody could disagree with.
Basically, it's a high ground maneuver.
Have I told you that the high ground maneuver wins every argument?
It's the one that always wins.
And as soon as you hear it, you're like, oh, okay, damn it.
The argument's over.
That's the high ground. The high ground is not whether the election was rigged or not rigged.
That's the low ground. The high ground is what Hannity showed him.
The high ground is, I'm going to lead a national effort to make sure that the next time this happens, we're all comfortable with the outcome.
National hero. Right?
Trump could have easily transformed this from maybe the biggest stain on his presidency.
Not maybe. The biggest stain on his presidency.
He could have easily taken Hannity's advice and turned it into, all right, I guess we'll never know what happened in 2020.
I have my suspicions.
And people would say, okay, that's fair.
You have your suspicions.
And it's fair that we'll never know.
Yeah, okay. Not everything was audited.
Can't get into the technology part of it especially.
He would have been a national hero.
And probably when the next election rolled around, unless people thought he rigged the election, I suppose they'd spin it that way, people would say, all right, let's run this movie again, and we'll see if the election reform actually changes the outcome.
Let's see who gets 81 million votes this time with election reform.
Now, even if he lost, it would still be legendary, because people wanted election reform as the basic, most fundamental thing to protect the republic.
So, the fact that there's a story that Hannity was giving advice to Mark Meadows to give to Trump, the story should have been, why wasn't Trump listening to it?
That would have been the better story.
Because this is damn good advice, in my opinion.
It's damn good advice.
Maria Bartiroma is getting some similar kind of pushback because apparently she shared some of the questions that she was going to ask the president after January 6th with Mark Meadows, I guess.
And here's the first thing you should know about that.
That's not unusual.
It's not unusual for an interview guest to get questions in advance because it's more about the topic and it's more about preparing somebody to have a good show.
I can tell you that in many cases when I'm interviewed on politics, I get the questions in advance.
And, you know, there's nothing unusual about that.
The reason you do it is to make the show snappy.
What you don't want is a show where somebody asks a question, and then the guest says, uh, you know, I hadn't really thought about that.
You don't want that. So you want to say, I'm going to ask you some tough questions, or not, but you tell them what they're going to be.
And then the person has thought about it, and they give a good, quick response, as short as possible.
It's good for the audience.
It's good for the show. But it's also good for the interviewee.
Everybody looks good. Now, here's a question.
In this case, is Maria Bartiroma an opinion person like Hannity, Where I think Henry's perfectly transparent.
That he's an opinion person.
He's friends with the president.
They talk a lot. Perfectly transparent.
But do you see Maria Bratiroma as opinion or news?
I'm just going to see what your opinion of her is.
Some say news, some say opinion.
Okay, that's the problem. Both.
Yeah, see, that's the problem.
Because now this one gets a little more murky.
But apparently she didn't use exactly the questions that she broadcast because, I don't know if you're aware of this, but even when the person asking the question has a set of questions that are on their notes, that's mostly just so they don't forget a question or don't have any questions left.
But they kind of ask what they think is a good question when they actually get there.
So somebody like Maria Bartiroma isn't going to ask the exact question.
It's just an indication she's going to be in that area, basically.
And that's what happened. She asked some versions of the questions.
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that, necessarily.
And I wouldn't... I wouldn't be bothered.
And I'm being consistent here because when Chris Cuomo was accused of softball treatment of his brother, the governor, if you recall, I also defended Chris Cuomo because it's transparent.
As long as it's transparent, I don't know if there's a higher standard.
If you know it's his brother...
Are you going to be surprised if a brother gave a brother advice in any context?
That should have been the least surprising news and shouldn't have affected anybody, really.
So I just want to be consistent.
People should be able to talk to anybody they want and get advice from anybody they want.
As soon as you make, oh, this one can't talk to this one unless you've told us, no.
No, anybody can talk to anybody about anything.
That's my standard.
And they don't necessarily have to tell you.
You can talk to anybody about anything, and they don't necessarily have to disclose it, but it's nice when they do.
All right. Have you noticed that every story is about Elon Musk?
I'll give you some examples.
So, AOC tweeted this sort of long, ambiguous tweet.
To which Musk responded.
So AOC tweets, Now, when I read that, I thought she was talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter.
Elon Musk must have thought the same because he tweeted back hilariously, quote, stop hitting on me.
I'm really shy. Okay.
Now, if you see this outside of the realm of Twitter, which a lot of people will, they'll just see this, say, reported in a news item or something, you don't really appreciate how perfectly Twitter like his responses.
His response would be maybe inappropriate in almost any other domain.
In any other domain.
It would be a little weird.
But in this specific one of Twitter, it's exactly right on point.
He's hitting the target right on the head.
Poink! It's a Twitter response.
So I've told you before, and keep watching for this because it's fun to watch, that Elon Musk is very clear about what matters and what doesn't.
And when things don't matter, he mocks them.
And when things do matter, like saving the planet or going to Mars or something, he somehow makes that happen.
So I've never seen anybody who's more clear about what's silly and what's not.
That's just one of his best qualities.
And so, you know, he just makes fun of it.
And then apparently AOC tweeted, but quickly deleted.
I was talking about Zuckerberg, but okay.
And then everybody had to debate whether she deleted it because it wasn't funny enough or didn't want to gauge or was it because it really wasn't about Zuckerberg or...
Who knows?
But apparently...
There's a Zuckerberg version of meeting with at least Peter Thiel, and there's a speculated Musk version in which he probably met with Peter Thiel or did or something as part of deciding about Twitter.
And so I just love this little exchange.
But so Elon Musk is in every part of the news.
We'll keep going on this.
But first, so...
This really happened.
A reporter for The Guardian decided to do a story about virtual reality and so went into one of the virtual reality worlds.
I'm not sure which one it was.
I don't know if it was meta or just a virtual reality world.
It doesn't matter to the story.
What matters to the story is that she was immediately assaulted with racism and actually was groped in the VR environment, basically sexually assaulted in virtual reality.
Now, of course, she was quick to point out that she never lost touch with the fact that it wasn't the real world.
But the problem with, or the feature, of virtual reality is it makes you feel the same way.
As the real world. Knowing it's not the real world doesn't help you nearly as much as it should.
I've told you some of the story about my VR experience.
I put on the glasses and I walked up to a cliff edge so that in the virtual world, if I stepped off, it looks like I would fall to my death.
In reality, I knew I was just in a room in my house and I had no danger whatsoever.
I couldn't make my legs move.
I couldn't walk over the cliff in the virtual reality.
Couldn't make my legs move.
My brain would say, move your legs.
You're perfectly safe.
I would even take the glasses off to make sure I was still in the real room.
Put them back in and say, all right, no.
Couldn't do it. And so when she says she was actually assaulted...
And I guess they cornered her and they were doing stuff with her hands and stuff.
That she felt actually assaulted.
And I think that's real.
That's completely real.
And so, what are you going to do about that?
Do you end up having all the same laws in the virtual reality?
Because the virtual reality just becomes your reality?
Well, just to make it more...
Weird. There's a new invention that allows you to feel things while you're in virtual reality, specifically on your mouth.
And so Giz Motto had an article about this that I'm failing to find in my notes.
Apparently there's a little haptic response thing, and I saw a picture of it.
You've got the VR goggles on, and then there's some kind of sensors, or I don't know if they blow air or what they do, hanging from the bottom of the goggles, and so they're directed at your lips and your mouth.
And the claim is that these little devices that are not touching your mouth, but I think they might direct air or something at your mouth, they'll make you feel as if you're actually kissing somebody, if you're kissing somebody in the VR world.
Now, it did go on to say that you might be able to feel it even internal to your mouth, such as if you had your mouth open, I'd imagine you'd feel something on your tongue or the inside of your mouth because that's where the haptic sensors would be sensing.
You kind of know where this is going, don't you?
All you need to do is put those haptic sensors in your belt, one on your goggles and one on your belt, both shooting down, if you know what I mean.
If you could feel it, just like it's in the real world, We're in big trouble.
Big, big trouble.
Big trouble. So much so that I tweeted, and people didn't understand, that sometimes when you think you know somebody who's socially awkward and they don't have much of a social life, and they never seem to go out, and that's your opinion of them.
It's, oh, this is somebody with a bad social life.
They don't like to go out. But I would suggest to you there's one other possibility.
That that is somebody who's really, really good at masturbating.
Like so good, they can do it for hours and it never gets old.
To them, going out might be the least fun thing they could possibly do.
Imagine if you were bad at masturbating.
And somebody said, hey, there's a party.
Or you can do this thing that's tons of fun.
It's going to last you two minutes.
Two minutes of great fun.
Or you can go to this party.
Well, the party sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
Relative to two minutes of a good time, you could have fun all night.
But suppose somebody was really good at it, and they could keep themselves at a place for hours at a time.
Does the party look as good to them?
What happens when virtual reality Makes the staying home alone just way better than going to a party.
And I think probably you're already at the point where for some people going out is the least fun thing they could possibly do.
And where is that going to take us?
Because we're already there.
I mean, we're knocking on that door.
I blocked Kathy Griffin today for being a racist because she called Elon Musk a white supremacist.
And I thought...
Okay. You know, I'm certainly willing to put up with anything that she thinks is a joke.
Like, you know, I supported her with the severed head of Trump under the rules of parody and free speech and blah, blah, blah.
So I didn't think that she should lose anything because of that.
I was very strongly supportive of that as a free speech thing.
And as humorists take chances, they don't always work.
But you don't want them to not take chances.
But calling...
Calling Elon Musk a white supremacist, I feel like that's just because the people on the right like him.
I feel like that's a little too close to home.
Because I like him too, and I have no indication of anything like that.
That just feels so bigoted, essentially against white guys, basically, that I can't pretend that somebody else is the bigot in this story.
It just feels like she's the bigot in the story.
Am I right? It just feels like it's just an anti-white male thing.
Here are the other stories that Elon Musk is associated with.
Just listen to the whole list.
And ask yourself, how is this even possible?
Okay, I get that he's, you know, the richest person and bought Twitter, so that gets you a lot of attention.
But look at all the stories that these topics that he's directly involved in.
Ukraine, right?
He sent the Starlink stuff over there.
The Amber Turd story.
Because they're talking about his dating her.
So the Johnny Depp story, even that he's attached to.
Anything about elections, fake news, Twitter, because they're all sort of collectively one story now.
Anything about income inequalities and that.
Anything about taxes of the rich.
And progressive taxes, he's in that story.
Anything about free speech, because of Twitter.
Now he's weighing in on mental health.
We'll talk about that. Tweeting about it.
So he's in a story about Adderall.
He's in any story about space, climate change, how the country is getting more divided, also because of the Twitter thing.
Self-driving cars.
I mean...
And he believes that the simulation is real.
It's my theory that people who believe the simulation is real can author it.
And the more sure you are that the simulation is actually just software, the more clearly you can see the machinery and the more clearly you can tweak it.
It sure looks to me like he knows he lives in the simulation and he's just playing it like a game.
It looks like he's playing it like somebody who's just a good gamer.
You know, if you found out tomorrow that this is all a game and that we're just characters in it who temporarily don't know what we are and we think we're real, and you woke up and found out that Elon Musk was only, only the best gamer in another dimension.
And he was just an avatar.
But he was an avatar of the best gamer for the game.
So he became the richest person, and he became in every story.
He had seven kids, and God knows what kind of fun he has when he's alone.
Doesn't it look exactly like just a really good gamer playing the game really well?
It's weird how much it looks like that.
You know, I've looked at my own life because I believe I live in a simulation as well.
Like literally. Like actually, literally, no joke.
It's the most likely possibility.
I can't say for sure about that or anything else.
But I treat it like it's not real.
And my experiences just don't seem like they could possibly be coincidental.
It just doesn't seem like it.
I don't know what to think of that.
But those people who have said to me, this is just anecdotal, of course, that as soon as they feel they're in the simulation and they start using things like affirmations to author the simulation, they report that they get good results.
But, of course, that's anecdotal.
So Elon Musk weighed in on this thread.
So somebody named Michael Kersey tweeted this.
This is just the second part of his tweet.
He said, pharmacological dark matter, and he's talking about a phenomenon among important people.
So he's just giving it a name.
Pharmacological dark matter, so basically the stuff we don't know, is invisible heavy amphetamine and other drug use among people playing significant roles in our society.
Now, you've heard me say that, right?
The people who are doing the most moving and shaping of civilization, mostly on drugs.
It wouldn't happen otherwise.
Don't take drugs.
And I mean it.
Don't take drugs. The only time you should is if you're under a doctor's care.
And even then, it's probably too much.
So I'm not encouraging it.
I'm just saying it's a fact.
And ignoring it feels stupid.
It just feels stupid to ignore it.
The fact is...
There's some people, and here's the dangerous part, everybody responds to chemistry differently.
So there might be a drug that simply makes one person rich because it just makes them perform better and they never have a side effect or one they care about.
And then another person, it just kills them.
It just freaking kills them or makes them crazy or ruins their life one way or the other.
So don't take drugs because you don't know which one you are.
You don't know if you're the one the drug is going to kill or the drug is going to help you.
We're just not that smart because, you know, we're all different.
So anyway, so Michael Kersey weighs in on this about the significant role and then...
Then Marc Andreessen, one of the most important voices in the tech world, tweeted this.
He said, everyone thinks our present society was caused by social media.
I'm wondering whether Adderall plus ubiquitous Google searches have bigger effects.
Now, I don't know about the Google search part, but here's one of the most connected people in Silicon Valley.
And then the tech world who would personally know the most important people in society.
So, you know, this is somebody who's been in the room and has the phone number to text pretty much anybody famous, I think, at this point.
And he's telling you that he thinks Adderall may be shaping civilization or things like it.
I'm not saying Adderall specifically.
But you should take that as things like it, you know, amphetamines.
And then Alex Cohen tweeted this.
He said, prescribed psychedelics will replace amphetamines and SSRIs over the next decade, although I hope it's sooner than that, he said.
And then Musk gets into this, and he tweets, I've talked to many people who were helped by psychedelics and ketamine, more people who were helped by psychedelics and ketamine than SSRIs and amphetamines.
And then he added, related to this, he said, and this is not me talking, so I'm just reporting what he said, right?
So these are not my words.
He said, Adderall is an anger amplifier, avoided all costs.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
As Jeff Pilkington pointed out in some tweets, everybody's different.
That's what I said earlier, right?
I'm pretty sure that Adderall has saved lives, But I'm pretty sure it's caused some problems.
I think both of those can be true.
So it's a little bit, let's say, it's a really good example of free speech, both its negatives and its positives.
You don't want to be getting medical advice from Elon Musk.
That might be his weakest category.
I mean, he's insanely smart on a whole variety of things that allow him to do what he does.
But I think the medical part might be the part where you go, yeah, you get a second opinion there.
Usually when Musk says something, I'm usually done.
It's like, okay, I agree with that.
There's nothing else to say. But I think in the medical domain, Let's be glad that there is free speech, because he can say this.
If you looked at the comments, there would be a whole bunch of people pushing back.
And I say, okay.
That's a really good example of free speech working.
Somebody's asking if I'm on Adderall.
I'm not. So I've never been on any kind of long-term stimulant, except coffee.
Or sativa, I guess.
But I've said this before, but in college, I had a few experiences with stimulants.
And I wrote my entire senior thesis in, like, I think it was mostly over a weekend.
And then I was done with the semester.
And it was actually easy, and I enjoyed it.
Think about that. I did a semester of work in four days.
Got a reasonably good grade on it, I think B plus or something.
And I did it in four days and I liked it.
It was completely pleasant.
It was a horrible job, like just the most boring.
It was like in economics.
So it was a senior thesis in economics.
Do you know how boring that was?
And I enjoyed the whole thing.
How many unicorn companies have been created by people who had a little stimulant going on?
How many? Probably a lot, right?
Probably a lot.
And it is one of the great untold stories.
Anyway... Michael Schellenberger, who is running for governor as an independent in California, I understand there was some issue in terms of the paperwork.
I've got to look into that a little bit.
But how would you like to be running for governor, and part of your accomplishments just happened, Which is, Schellenberger was, I think, the loudest, most effective voice for trying to save the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California.
And the reasoning was, it's already there, it's cost-effective, and we don't have any green way to replace it, and we'll just run out of energy if we don't keep it open.
A pretty straightforward argument.
And apparently, the great weight of public opinion moved Schellenberger's way.
Is that a coincidence, or did he cause it?
Because remember, he was testifying to Congress.
He was writing books and articles on it.
He was the most famous voice on this topic.
I think he caused it.
I think he caused it.
So he's running for governor, while the current governor is saying that he's going to look to get some money from the federal funds that was allocated by Biden, and I'll give Biden credit for this, for keeping nuclear power plants open longer than they would have been.
So the governor is looking at implementing the plan that the governor didn't want to do, but Schellenberger convinced the entire country that they need to do it, and now he kind of has to do it.
I would hate to be running against Schellenberger in this situation.
Honestly, I've never seen a more capable politician.
In terms of competence about the actual topics that matter to the state.
It's sort of breathtaking because we've never seen it before.
I'm pretty sure we've never seen this before.
We've had some presidents who were a little wonky, like Jimmy Carter and stuff, but not like this.
Carter didn't have this kind of mastery over the exact topic that the state cared about.
And several of them, from homelessness to drug addiction to, you know, he's talked about forest management.
Basically everything we care about, he has the better solution for.
All right, here's the most provocative thing that I've read lately.
We all assume at this point that Russia will have its way with Ukraine.
In the comments, where are you feeling as of today?
Like, what do you feel today?
Is Russia going to have its way?
Alright, so I'm seeing mostly yeses.
Some people say they'll just take the east of Ukraine, blah, blah, blah.
Alright, now I will remind you that in war, nothing is predictable.
So, among the unpredictable things that could happen, I tweeted this, and I feel terrible because I want to mention the author and the publication.
Because I liked it so much.
But I can't find it in my own tweets for some reason.
Maybe I imagined I tweeted it.
Yeah, maybe I imagined it.
But if somebody sees it, maybe you can tell me in the comments if I did tweet it and you see it.
It was an article by somebody who definitely looked like they knew what they were doing.
It was somebody who had predicted in writing and could show the receipts that the...
The Moskva, that ship would be sunk by the Ukrainian anti-ship missiles.
So that's a pretty good prediction.
Somebody had that specific prediction, and it happened.
And then when I read the article, it seemed to know quite a bit about the whole situation.
So I don't know how to judge military experts, because we've seen so many of them being so wrong about so many things.
But I'll give you his argument...
And I'd love to see how wrong it is.
It goes like this.
We're all focusing on the fact that the fighting isn't this Don Bass and the other name starts with L that I can't remember.
We're taking for granted that Russia already owns Crimea because they got annexed in 2014, something like that.
So, yeah, so Luhansk is the other region.
So we're ignoring Crimea, right, because that's a done deal.
Russia already owns it. Here's the part I didn't know about.
They barely own it.
They do own it.
Their military is theirs, theirs.
But apparently, if you're looking at it from a military perspective, their connection to Crimea is one bridge and one poorly defended area.
And if you take out the bridge, which seems totally doable, right?
Ukraine can take out a bridge.
They've got missiles, drones and whatnot.
And then, apparently, the Ukrainian military is actually pretty good.
They have better equipment.
According to this expert, they win their firefights.
So when it's something like a fair fight, the Ukrainians almost always win because they're better trained and better equipped.
It's only when they're, you know, overpowered by artillery or something that they get crushed.
So... The thinking is that the Ukrainian military could take out not only the thin connection between the main Russian forces and Crimea, they could take out the bridge and then they could just take Crimea because it would probably be poorly defended because the strongest defenders are where the fighting is.
And the fighting is not happening in Crimea.
And I'm thinking, that would be a shocker.
What if Ukraine just tried to hold the line and just keep the main Russian army pinned down and just take Crimea back?
What would that do to the Russian psychology?
It would look like Russia lost the war.
I mean, the war wouldn't be over.
I mean, Russia could maybe just take it back.
I mean, it wouldn't be easy.
But what would that do to the whole balance of everything?
I mean, that would be a great, at least a diversion.
I mean, at the very least, it would be an interesting diversion.
And the idea is that Russia would have trouble equipping and resupplying Crimea, because they could get cut off, but that Ukraine wouldn't, you know, because they have a border there and stuff.
They'd break out the tactical nuke if that happened, somebody says.
Would they? Because it seems to me that a tactical nuke would guarantee that Putin is taken out of office.
What do you think? I would say that right now, it looks like he might be at great risk, maybe 50-50 proposition.
But if he used a tactical nuke, I think that's the end.
Am I wrong? There's no way he could survive it, politically, if not his life.
Because don't you think that there's somebody who's like number two or three in the potential takeover chain that the CIA has already said, you know, I know you're only number fourth or fifth in the potential chain of command, but if the other people disappeared and we made sure that you were well treated, do you think you'd like to step up to the number one job?
I don't know. I think that if a tactical nuke got used, it would be easy to turn people within Russia really close to Putin against him.
Because they would say, okay, this is a clean win.
If I take Putin out under these conditions, I'll even have internal support.
Because I think you could overthrow Putin and still have public support in Russia if he used a nuke.
Or the other possibility is that Russia is now so pro-Putin that they'd say, oh, that's strong.
We like it that you are strong.
Maybe. I don't know how to read the Russian mind.
But it would certainly turn enough people against Putin that he'd be in physical danger much more than he is now.
Now, here, let me throw something into the mix that...
Feels different. So you know the Biden administration is asking for, correct me if I'm wrong, $33 billion more for Ukraine, which is a gigantic step up in military support.
Do you know what that sounds like to me?
It sounds like the administration is playing to win, as in win the war.
It doesn't look like they're playing for a stalemate.
It doesn't even look like they're playing...
To just, you know, push them out of the East or something.
I feel as if the Biden administration feels like they could win.
Because every day that the Russians don't, you know, have some crushing victory on the East is a day that you say to yourself, Maybe that Ukrainian defense is better than we thought.
And the Ukrainian defense isn't going to quit now because the good equipment is just coming in.
And apparently they don't have any manpower shortage.
They had more volunteers to fight than they had equipment to give them.
So if Ukraine doesn't run out of people to fight, and they're getting more equipment, not less...
Does the $33 billion signal that the Biden administration thinks they can win outright?
Because I feel like it does.
Now, I don't think that means that they think it's a sure thing or anything like that.
But I feel like they went from, you know, let's see how we can make this painful for Putin, to let's finish off the Russian army.
I think they want to finish the Russian army.
Or at least, you know, take it down by 50%.
Because Putin's down 25%, right?
I never understood if that's his entire military, 25% degraded, or that was just what's in that area.
I've not heard that clarified.
So... About $20 billion to replace the weapons we gave them from the Army.
Oh, I see.
So we'd be replacing our own weapons with the $33 billion.
Okay, that does look a little different.
Those numbers are wrong.
Which numbers are wrong? The $33 billion?
If all it is is replacing our own equipment, then it doesn't look like a step up, does it?
So give me a fact check on that.
Replacing our own military equipment would not look...
Like a step up. Somebody says, not true.
Are we giving it directly to Ukraine?
All right. Well, I guess we'll look into this.
But the point is, if it's a major escalation, if that's what that budget is telling us, then I think the Biden administration actually feels they can win.
Define win. Put Putin in a power.
Or and or.
Get the Russian military to completely get out of Ukraine.
Completely. Now, of course, nobody wins because everybody lost in this situation.
But that would look like a win to me.
All right. I was asked to tell you about how we're entering the Golden Age.
Well... Someone's asked me why I didn't have kids, and do I regret it?
Let me answer that one first.
I don't regret it.
And the reason was, I just didn't want to bring somebody into the world.
Because there are plenty of people in the world.
And I never felt a need to propagate my DNA. Now, does that make me weird?
Because I feel like there's some kind of basic human impulse that people have to propagate their DNA. But I don't have that.
Because I didn't enjoy my childhood enough that I would take any chance that I could put anybody through that again.
But if there's somebody who's already having a tough childhood, and I could help them have a better one, That feels like that's an easy win.
To me, that would be satisfying.
But to bring somebody into the world and then have them have a bad life, I couldn't handle that.
I'm just not built that I could ever handle that.
So I take the sure thing of definitely helping humanity extend the light of consciousness, I guess.
So he says, what a load.
There's somebody who thinks that I'm either lying.
Do you think I'm lying to you or lying to myself?
Could be the one, right?
I guess there's no way for you to know, is there?
But the thing I thought about the most is that I'd rather support the people who are already here.
That's how I thought of it.
It could be that that's a rationalization of some sort.
That would be... Pretty normal.
But your child wouldn't have a tough life.
Yeah, no, I don't think...
We're not talking about a tough life in terms of economics.
If it were just economics, I wouldn't have worried.
But in terms of, you know, mental health and that sort of thing.
I'm also worried about climate change ruining the world.
I just look around, I don't see a lot of happy people.
Now, here's the Golden Age part.
I'm pretty sure that we're about to wake up, or we are waking up now, to this whole what drugs to put in your body and whatnot.
And maybe the pandemic helped with that, because it sort of changed how we see the medical community, changed our opinion about maybe having to make our own decisions and not depend on the experts so much, which could be good or bad.
I guess that could go both ways.
But, yeah, I think a big...
I would go with Elon Musk's thing, that the ketamine, maybe, and of course, don't take any recommendations from me.
I'm just saying that these are things that are being talked about.
I'm not recommending them at all.
And the psychedelics, I do think, have the potential to be civilization-changing.
Absolutely. And because they don't cost much.
Let me ask you this.
Imagine everything that we do now to make the world a safer place.
We've got the United Nations, and we've got the hotline to the Kremlin.
So we've got all these systems and things to make things safer and avoid war, but we still have the damn wars.
So I guess those systems are better than not having them, but they're not really getting it done.
But imagine this. This is purely speculative and it's just a mental experiment.
Imagine that if instead of all that stuff, whenever there was a dispute, or even before there was one, the heads of state would get together and do mushrooms together.
That's it. And then replace everything else with just that.
Now, of course that will never happen.
Of course it will never happen.
I'm not suggesting that's even remotely possible.
I'm just saying if it did, it would probably end war.
Do you think, I mean, honestly, if you just imagine, you know, it doesn't work if your leader is 100 years old.
So forget about Trump, he won't take a drug, and forget about Biden, he's too old.
But imagine DeSantis.
Who I imagine is anti-drug.
So again, this wouldn't happen.
But at least he's young enough.
So imagine a President DeSantis someday doing mushrooms with a President Putin who's 70 or so and not that old.
And they just bond and see the world differently.
And the next thing you know, just war is a lot harder.
It doesn't make sense suddenly.
Because it would be so much easier to say, you know, wait a minute.
Are you saying that if Russia and the United States simply had to just make friends the same way that Germany benefited by being friends with the US and Japan benefited and basically everybody, every country that said, hey, can we be your friend has benefited substantially.
Can you imagine sitting in a room and having the right kind of You know, right kind of, let's say, chemical incentive, and you just look at Putin and say, why are we even doing this?
Do you want to be the greatest leader that Russia ever had?
And Putin would be, well, I thought I already was.
He'd say, okay, okay, but do you want to continue being the greatest leader that there ever was?
And Putin would say, how do you do that?
He'd say, end war.
End war and go to space with us.
How about that? How about end war?
And help us go to space.
And we'll get some good asteroids.
We'll mine some stuff. We'll free your economy to do what it can do.
We'll share our technology with you.
It'll be awesome. You'll be the best leader that Russia ever had.
You'll quadruple your GDP. There'll be statues of you everywhere.
And you will have ended war.
I'm telling you, the golden age...
You just have to accept it.
It's right there. It's right there.
The hard part is getting people to just pick it up.
It's like, here it is. Here's all of your solutions.
All of your solutions. We have all the answers now.
Here they are. People are like, I don't know.
I don't trust those solutions.
So here's where the golden age, I think, is going to happen.
I think that the energy shock will cause us to be pro-nuclear in a way that we had to be.
So our energy thing is now on a course for full correction.
It's going to be slow.
But it's now on a very definite course toward full correction.
It's going to be nuclear. Energy will go nuclear and through Tesla-like activities it will be also electric.
I'm sorry, solar. So it's going to be solar and pretty much just solar and nuclear.
So I would say those two things solve climate change, or at least they're likely to be enough to mitigate the worst problems as long as we're also mitigating things as we go.
It's not the only stuff.
So that's better. What about the pandemic?
Horrible, horrible thing, right?
But don't you think we got a lot better at handling the next pandemic?
Like, a lot better?
And I feel like, even though you think these new vaccinations are killing people, some of you think that, I feel like what we learned from that could create a platform for everything from vaccinations for cancer to vaccinations for all kinds of stuff.
Or we'll find out there was some problem with it.
Can't rule that out.
I'm giving you the optimist view.
Then look at the Ukraine-Russia war.
Does it forever end the idea that it's a good idea to attack your neighbor with tanks?
Apparently not. Well, I mean, you know, up till now, I guess Putin still thought it was a good idea to attack his neighbor with tanks.
And at this point, don't you think this will always be the cautionary tale?
It's like, okay, all right, it doesn't work.
I think Afghanistan, as bad of a situation as it was, at least it will always remind us of what kinds of things not to do again.
But Ukraine didn't look like Afghanistan.
They looked like such different places that maybe the lesson didn't transfer.
But now you've got an industrial country, you've got a backwards country, and neither of them could be conquered by the Soviet Union or Russia.
That should mean something.
If you couldn't conquer either kind of country, and they're so different, maybe the whole country-conquering thing isn't for you.
All right. What else is good?
So we're going to solve energy.
I think we're safer from pandemics.
And I think war looks less likely.
I think the biggest problem is inflation.
All right, let me give you the ultimate economic safety thought.
Are you ready? Most of you have some concern, I would think, about inflation and GDP going down and maybe food shortages and everything else.
Most of you are starting to have a little anxiety about that, right?
Gas prices. Not a little.
Maybe a lot. So some of you are having a lot of anxiety.
I'm having anxiety about it.
And I'm rich, relatively speaking.
I can't even imagine how this would feel if I was just squeaking by.
This would feel like insanely bad.
But let me give you the one positive thing that I can give you.
I've told you before that economics is real complicated stuff.
I have a degree in economics and I'm confused half the time.
But there was one rule that I always looked to that tells me where things are headed.
There's just one metric.
If you get that one metric right, all the other things can work themselves out.
But if you get the one thing wrong, nothing can work itself out.
Do you know what the one thing is?
Employment. Employment rate.
Not even raises, not even cost of living adjustments, not unions.
Just the pure number of people who have jobs compared to the numbers who want them.
And the fact that we have labor shortages now.
So we could actually use more workers.
Even immigrants are in demand.
Apparently, with all the immigration we have, it's still hard to get the harvest picked, I think.
So we're actually understaffed.
I don't know of any situation where you had close to full employment where you couldn't work out the other stuff.
You know what I mean? And here's the math of why that is so important.
The difference between an unemployed person and an employed person is a gigantic drag on the rest of the people.
If somebody is employed and they're taking care of themselves and maybe adding something to the taxes, then that's taken care of.
But if they're unemployed, not only are they not adding, but they're subtracting.
You have to pay them to live or they die.
So one unemployed person is really, really expensive compared to almost any other problem.
So if you get that one thing right, the other stuff can be really painful for a while, but the odds of it working out in the long run are real good.
So when you're seeing people who seem to be the most knowledgeable and experienced about economics, and they see all the things you see, you know, they're seeing the inflation, they're seeing the, you know, it might get worse.
They're seeing everything.
Supply chain problems, you know, China problems, blah, blah, blah.
They see all that, but they don't look like they're panicking, do they?
Have you noticed that? There's no tone of panic, even though all the metrics are sort of awful.
Because that one thing is right.
The jobs. And I think the people who know the most are sort of just looking at that one and saying, you know, probably much like I do, say, okay, as long as that one thing's okay, at least our foundation is in good shape, right? The foundation is strong.
Then you can work out the rest.
Mushrooms is tulips.
Yeah. I see what you're saying.
Labor participation.
Yes, that's a big one as well.
Total employment is still below pre-pandemic, but it's still good.
How do we fix BlackRock buying all the single-family homes?
The solution for housing is better housing.
Not building the same kind of homes and reselling them over and over again.
There is definitely a way to build a home for 10% of what it costs to build a home.
I think that's going to be another part of the golden age.
I think that if you got rid of zoning and you turned it into a kit...
I've talked about this before, but imagine designing homes In which all the parts are an even amount.
In other words, a room in this house, house of the future, could be 10 by 12, but it could never be 10 by 12 feet and 2 inches.
And the reason is so you'd never have to cut anything.
So if you're putting in the floor, you buy one-foot squares, and you put in as many as you need for the squares, and nothing gets cut, And maybe it's a kit form so everything snaps together so you could unsnap it and move a wall if you needed to, etc.
Now, I think that's where it has to go.
It's just that nobody has a business model to make money from making that.
The old Sears kits, so I know there's some historical examples, but those kits I believe you still had to cut, didn't you?
Or not? I think those were...
If you imagine what we could do now compared to what they could do in those days, I imagine that we could make a kit that would be way better.
Just way better. And then if you make the homes with...
So here's how I'd do it. I'd design perfect rooms, and then you could design a house that used as many of those preset rooms in whatever configuration they fit, And then you can build almost any kind of a house, but you never have to cut anything.
You just get a kit and snap it together.
So I think that's where it needs to go.
The tough part would be...
I mean, I think you could even do the plumbing.
In fact, I'll bet you could make a house that's self-aware.
Imagine a house that comes as a kit, and each part has a camera in it.
So every part you put becomes alive, and it can see around itself.
And then it attaches to some brain, so the house could see a leak in your wall before you knew it was there.
But it could also tell if you'd assembled it correctly.
So you put the new component on, and it becomes alive, because it's like electrically connected to everything else, and it can see around, and suddenly the house knows if you put the thing in the right place.
So you put the new piece on, and the house goes beep, beep, beep.
It doesn't belong there. You're like, oh, darn, it's backwards.
Put it on, it goes beep, and it knows you did it right.
So if you made all the components alive, the house would help you assemble itself.
And it would always be watching for any defects, and it would warn you ahead of time.
All right, just an idea.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the best show ever.
I think I delighted and entertained you.
Probably some of you are about to start one of the best days ever.
And I think that you would agree...
That today is the beginning of the rest of your life.
No, it's true. I read it in a greeting card once, so I know it's true.
