Episode 1760 Scott Adams: Come Diagnose My Opinions As COVID-Addled Or Brilliant. I Need Help
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
COVID symptoms, Day 3
Jeffrey Goldberg vs debunked Trump HOAX
Elon Musk doubles down on voting Republican
Biden's Ukraine strategy, lose expensively
National debt problem vs Inflation
Canada bans handguns
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Good morning everybody and welcome to either the best show in the history of civilization or an embarrassing COVID-addled brain Demonstration that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
It's going to be one of those two things.
And you, ladies and gentlemen, and everything in between, you are the judges and the juries for this presentation.
This will not be a normal live stream.
No. Today you are the judge to see if my brain fog from my COVID has lifted yet.
You will be the judge because you know who can't tell?
Me. So will I produce my usual superb analysis and clearly demonstrate that my brain is working at 100% or will it be lacking a little bit?
Those of you who have watched me a little while, you be the judge.
Today will be the test.
Now, if you'd like to get this off to a good start, I know you do.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine in the day thing makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and you're about to enjoy it.
Go. Well, catching you up, if you did not know, I tested positive for COVID on Saturday.
Today is Tuesday, and I thought I'd give you an update.
And so, just before I came on here, I took another test to see if I still have the COVID. Does anybody want to look at this test and tell me the answer?
Because I couldn't see it from where it was laying there.
All right. Somebody?
I'm going to show it to the locals people first.
All right, locals. Uh-oh.
Yeah, that's not just COVID. That line is so strong, it's like super COVID. I believe I have now passed into some kind of ultra-COVID situation.
You know, ultra-MAGA was impressive, right?
But ultra-COVID, boom.
That's what I got. Stay away.
Stay away. Stay away.
Now when I want to not spend time around people, instead of making excuses, like, oh, I have to work, or, you know, whatever, I'll just take this out.
This will be like a cross that gets rid of vampires.
Back off. Back off.
20 feet. 20 feet.
So I think this will keep me lonely for a while.
But let me give you the update on the symptoms.
So first day, Saturday, horrible.
Second day, I would say the symptoms were gone 70% by the second day.
But 30% of that was still pretty rough.
It was still 30% of something that sucked.
So day two wasn't too fun.
Day three, it looked like it was another 70% or so.
And here was my experience.
I had a sudden, almost unnatural recovery that happened within a few hours.
Now... Isn't that weird?
So what drug did I take, or what medicine or medicines did I take, that caused me to go from really, you know, head foggy, tired, couldn't move, basically.
And then suddenly, boom!
I didn't have any symptoms at all that I could identify.
What was it? Here's the answer.
Apparently it just does that.
Here's everything you need to know about everything you've ever heard about what works and what doesn't work with COVID. I don't think it matters what you do.
I didn't do anything that should have made a difference.
I took Tylenol, right?
Smoked weed, drank coffee, which I do every day.
So the...
So remember I told you that when I first contracted it, it was obvious it was COVID? I mean, if anybody had been paying attention, it was obvious.
And part of why it was obvious is that I'd never felt anything like it.
It just didn't feel like a normal illness at all.
Because it affected my brain.
I've never had that before.
Have you? Any kind of illness that directly affected your cognition?
And it was pretty bad.
There were simple things that I couldn't figure out.
You should have seen me try to send a text message.
There was a period when it was sort of peaking in intensity.
When I would type a text message and I would look at it, it would literally just be random letters.
They weren't even close to words.
They weren't even close.
And I'd look at them and say, oh, I guess I had been like one over or something.
Sometimes your keyboard hand is like one letter over.
So I'd type it again, paying more attention, and I'd look at it again and be like, still not even close to words.
You wouldn't even know what word I was intending.
I was trying to do searches on Google, but fortunately Google knows how to translate your misspellings to real words.
I think every word I tried to spell was misspelled.
Like a lot. The cognitive part was pretty intense.
But here's my bottom line.
Everybody who took anything on the third day...
Believes that they had a miraculous recovery because of what they did on the third day.
Because I didn't do anything.
And I had a miraculous recovery that didn't look natural.
The fact that all of my symptoms went away within just a few hours, instead of sort of gradually wearing off, nothing like that happened.
The body ache and the symptoms came on within one hour when I got it.
And when they left, it felt like they left in an hour.
Now, nothing about that feels natural.
Nothing. I'm not saying that means it was an engineered virus, but I've never felt anything that came on that fast or left that quickly after two and a half days.
So now imagine if I had successfully gotten the Paxlovid drug that I had initially thought about but was too mentally incompetent to make it happen.
Later I changed my mind and decided I'd be better off writing it out.
But imagine if I'd gotten it.
I would have gotten it and taken it just hours before all of my symptoms went away on their own.
Miraculously. What would I have concluded?
Would I have recommended to you that you take Paxlovid?
I would. I would.
Because if I felt that bad for two and a half days, and within hours of taking a particular drug, I felt completely better, You don't think I would recommend you take that drug?
And I would be completely wrong.
I mean, maybe it is a good drug.
I don't know. I'm not a doctor.
Don't take my advice. Whatever you do...
By the way... Yeah, let me stop here.
Make sure you're not taking any medical advice from this.
There's nothing like that happening here.
What I'm trying to tell you is that anything you heard about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, paxlovid, remdesivir, you name it.
Anything you heard...
Where somebody's symptoms, you know, very quickly turned around.
How can you distinguish that from what happened with me?
Now, how many of you had a similar situation where you didn't take anything that should have helped, and you had a very quick turnaround?
Yeah, you see in the comments, in the locals it's a little faster.
Right, you're seeing yeses, right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, right?
So everything that you heard about something that definitely worked, no way to know.
No way to know. All right.
And then, of course, today there's an article, of course, about Paxlovid.
So that's the pill you take, one of the pills you take if you have symptoms.
And it says that you can get a rebound thing and still be contagious after you take it and blah, blah, blah.
All right. So there's that.
I'm glad I didn't take it. I watched the Norm MacDonald special, the one he recorded just in his house before he passed.
And it was disturbing.
It was disturbing because you knew he was so close to his death and that he knew it when he was doing it.
And he had a number of jokes about death.
And I have to admit it was a little jarring.
Now here's a story.
I've told some of you.
You've heard before. And I can tell it because he's passed.
But a few years ago, Norm contacted me.
And apparently he had followed me to some degree.
I don't know. I think he may have read one of my books or something.
And I think he might have seen my live streams.
So he contacted me on Twitter, I think, and asked if I would take a call.
So I did. So I talked to him, and I didn't know...
That he was dealing with a, you know, terminal cancer.
But he asked me about dealing with pain.
So apparently he had some kind of ongoing pain that drugs weren't doing the job for, for whatever reason.
And he asked me if hypnosis would be a potential solution to that.
So I told him what I knew about it, which is some people do get some relief from hypnosis.
It kind of depends, right?
I'm not going to say it's going to work on every kind of pain in every situation.
I don't know that to be true.
But you hear enough reports about people, anecdotally, who feel like they handle their pain, so I thought it was worth trying.
And so because I had that little bit of encounter with them, And then after the fact, I realized how meaningful it was.
I mean, I thought it was plenty terrible that he had to deal with this chronic pain.
I didn't know how bad it was or that it was part of a terminal situation.
So I found it hard to watch, but I recommend it highly because you do see, you know, one of the greatest of all time, Putting out some material you haven't seen before.
And that alone is worth watching.
I also watched Ricky Gervais, his new stand-up special that the trans community is getting up in arms for.
And it's kind of interesting because he says so directly that these are just jokes and that he says things just for effect.
He says that in the act.
You know, he pauses and says, you know, I just say this for effect, right?
It's just to offend you and make people laugh.
I don't mean any of it.
And to me, that should be good enough.
But the fact is that some things do offend people, just the topic itself.
It just feels like you're making it too easy to mock them or something.
So I felt that this was one time that Ricky Gervais was trying a little too hard to be Dave Chappelle.
I hate to say that, but that's what it felt like.
Because remember how impressive it was when Chappelle handled, you know, basically a similar situation?
And he did it, you know, wokeness, let's say.
Wokeness in particular, not the trans issue.
But when Chappelle did his special, it was just sort of a genius.
You know, and it showed that somebody could talk about complicated emotional topics and still make it all work.
And I felt like Gervais wanted to enter that same space, and I guess he did it successfully.
I'd say he did it successfully.
He did occupy the space, and he got away with it by his standards.
But I felt like it was a little forced, that's all.
I felt like he was trying to get into that space more than he was trying to just make us laugh.
So it felt like there was a burden on the writing.
That's what I felt. It's sort of just a weird writer's take on it.
But do I recommend it?
Yes. Yes, I recommend it.
So in terms of things you could watch that would entertain you, yeah, yeah, you should watch it.
Definitely watch it. Here's a hoax update.
So Jeffrey Goldberg...
Who may or may not have ever promoted any hoaxes in his past, tweeted this.
He said, a reminder that on Memorial Day 2017, Donald Trump and John Kelly, his chief of staff, visited the Arlington National Cemetery grave of Kelly's son, a fallen Marine officer.
Trump turned to Kelly and said, quote, I don't get it.
What's in it for them?
So that's what Jeffrey Goldberg says happened in 2017.
Mark Hemingway countered with a tweet of his own saying, a reminder, more than 20 people with knowledge of what occurred with Trump on this trip went on record to say Goldberg's anonymously sourced story is bunk.
Okay. Now, did you believe even for a second that this was true?
I mean, just listen to this again.
Do you believe that Trump would have stood next to a grave...
With Kelly, where his fallen Marine son was, and turned to Kelly and said, I don't get it.
What's in it for them? Does that even sound a little bit like something he would do?
Even if you assume the worst things about Trump are true, he's always been respectful to the military.
Has anybody been more consistent in being respectful to the military...
In all the ways that he can figure out how to do it, right?
I mean, even if he missed a salute here or there, I don't know, maybe he did, but clearly his intentions have been so consistent for years and years.
So it's just a ridiculous hoax, and I can't believe anybody tried to promote that one.
But somebody will believe anything.
All right, when I put out my...
I did a hoax quiz that had 10 popular hoaxes on it, and I invited you to borrow it so you could share it with people who tried to argue with you online.
But if they believe any of those 10 hoaxes, you can say to yourself, I'm not dealing with a clever person here.
And that might be useful.
But I was one-upped by a user who said, 10, here's my list of, I don't know, 25 or 30 hoaxes.
What would be better? What is more persuasive?
10 hoaxes or, let's say, 30?
If I were trying to convince you, let's say a Democrat, that the Democrat side was doing a lot of hoaxing and that it makes a big difference in how they see the world, would I be more convincing with 30 or with 10?
The answer is probably 10.
Now I say probably because I think you'd have to do like a proper scientific study to know which really makes a difference.
Could be that the bigger number influences people.
But I don't think so.
And here's why. If you only do 10, you can make sure that you pick the 10 that are the strongest cases.
If you pick 30, you will necessarily have things that are weaker than whatever your best 10 was.
So your goal would be to have the most number without getting into any weak ones.
Because when I looked at the list of 30, even I said, that's not a hoax.
That's marginal. So I'm completely on the side of the hoaxes being hoaxes, but even I didn't believe the list of 30.
You get that? Like, I'm completely primed to believe that The Democrats are hoaxing everything.
You know, I've seen so many of them.
But even I couldn't believe the list of 30.
The list of 10 is hard enough to believe as it is.
And that's actually part of its strength.
Because you want people to see that there are like eight things on there that even they know are hoaxes.
And then there are two on there that they think were real.
And they're like, uh, oh shit.
If the other eight are fake, maybe these other two are fake too.
So, the laundry list persuasion is one you need to guard against when somebody's using it against you.
Because if somebody has a list, you just sort of think something on that list must be true.
But if you want to be the one who's the persuasive one, then using laundry list persuasion actually, unfortunately, it works.
I'm not sure it's the most ethical thing you could ever do, but it works.
Now, in this case, it's ethical, in my opinion.
Because everything on the list is true, as far as I know.
And the purpose of promoting it is to make the world smarter and better.
So that feels ethical enough to me.
Yes, and has somebody said here, if there's one cat that doesn't belong in your house, you might be able to get rid of it, but if there are ten cats, you're going to have to deal with the root cause.
You know, there's maybe a root problem here or something.
All right. Elon Musk is, you know, sort of doubling down on his voting Republican, but he said that And that he has a reason for why the Democrats may have turned so negative lately.
And apparently some of that negativity is hitting him.
He says that there was somebody who donated lots of money To political action committees posing as charities, and that all that money is causing a lot of negativity to come into the system.
And that the person who donated all that money was Jeff Bezos' ex-wife.
Mackenzie Scott is her last name, I guess.
So Mosk is directly saying that her money...
He has changed things into a bad thing, so much so that he's escaping the Democrats.
All right. And Musk says that it's true that Tesla was attacked by Romney in two or three presidential debates, but he says those lines were fed to him by a particular individual in the oil and gas industry.
So Musk knows a lot about what's behind the curtain.
He even knows the person who gave Romney the talking points.
So that's pretty far behind the curtain.
And he says, given the unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me, meaning Musk, and a very cold shoulder to Tesla and SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November.
I love the fact that he's using his own vote as a public political weapon.
Who else could do that?
Imagine if I went public and said, I'm going to change my vote, and the entire world would say, So?
What's that got to do with me?
Go vote any way you want, citizen.
But when the richest person in the world says he's going to change his vote and then shows his work, you know, tells you why, you kind of pay attention.
I feel like he could move the needle.
I mean, I don't know how much, but, like, I know I couldn't or anybody else, but I think he could actually move the needle by saying, if you don't act better, I'll vote for the other team.
Now, what is it that Democrat voters get wrong all the time?
What Democrat voters get wrong all the time is they'll vote for their team no matter what the team does.
I suppose you could argue that Republicans do that too.
But if people are just team voters, we're doomed.
So the richest, maybe one of the smartest people in the world, just showed Democrats how they can retake power.
Stop voting for the people that are screwing you.
Do you know how big a lesson that is?
Stop voting for the people who are just screwing you?
Like they're screwing you right in front of you.
They're not even pretending they're not screwing you.
I mean, they're screwing Musk, like, right in front of his face.
So why would he vote for them?
Now, I love the fact that he's not saying, I love Republicans and I endorse all their policies.
He's literally just punishing Democrats for big assholes.
Am I right? Which is actually a really useful impulse.
Because simply saying stuff doesn't really change things, but he actually changed his vote.
And he's willing to change his vote to vote for a team that has policies that I think, just guessing, he hates.
I'm just guessing. Because I don't think he's a conservative, so don't you think there are some conservative policies, some Republican policies that he probably hates?
But he's still going to vote for them to punish the Democrats.
That is really useful.
If he taught the whole country to do that, just punish your team if they're obviously just abusing you, I don't know, I think we'd come out ahead, wouldn't we?
We'll see. So every time he makes a move, it has a societal impact that's hard to judge.
Good news in indoor farming, and maybe outdoors too.
There's now a really good farm bot, a robot, that can plant your seeds and water it, and it can pick the weeds, and it can fertilize it exactly the right amount.
Basically, every kind of plant will get its own special treatment.
And I thought to myself, I believe that there's a 10x improvement in indoor farming that we're going to see in the next few years.
And all you need to do is be able to build a cheaper structure, the indoor part, so if we can figure out how to make a durable, easy structure, that'd be half of it.
Then the robots will get rid of the labor, because they can work all day long and they can do it perfectly.
They'll get rid of the fertilizers.
They don't get rid of the fertilizers.
They get rid of the pesticides, right?
Because there's no bugs.
I think the robot could probably even squash a bug.
They didn't teach it to do that.
Yeah, it's hydroponics, probably.
So I think the yields, and they'll also, I think, learn to grow better vertically, because they don't have the vertical thing down as well as they could.
So I think there's going to be better mirrors, better lighting, cheaper electricity, fusion, who knows.
But whatever they do, I think there's going to be a 10x improvement in indoor farming, and that will make us a lot safer the next time there's a food shortage.
Speaking of food shortage...
We have two gigantic problems in the world.
One is that wheat looks like it's going to be greatly constrained.
So the supply of wheat will be so constrained that poor countries are predicted to have starvation.
It's a big problem.
Second big problem. Obesity in rich countries caused by...
Caused by too much bread.
Well, you know, other things too, but too much bread.
So if we have rich countries who have too much bread, it's making them unhealthy.
And yet your poor countries who are going to starve because they don't have enough wheat.
Is there no way we can solve two problems at the same time?
Okay, I get it. There's a distribution challenge.
Sure, I get it. But it's such a big problem, I feel like you could make those adjustments.
I'm taking this personal.
I don't mean to take your bread away from you.
Now, somebody said, you can't take bread away from the rich.
They will fight to keep it.
To which I say, well, if it's not on the shelves...
What are they going to be fighting to keep?
I feel as if the biggest category in my supermarket is bread.
Bread-related things.
I don't think we have a bread shortage.
I think we have way too much bread.
Maybe the reason that it looks like an emergency but we're not treating it like one is that it isn't one.
Maybe people just adjust what they eat and everything's fine.
I don't know. Maybe. Maybe you just eat more vegetables.
The CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, says that the open office plan for cubicles or non-cubicles, I should say, is dead.
And that the old way of the open floor plan with these meeting rooms that everyone's waiting in line to get in and no one can find the meeting room, all of that is, I think, a thing of the past.
So people will be trying to redesign the office of the future, and it might include coming in for a week every quarter to, you know, bond.
I don't know. Does it feel like the cubicle is dead?
I mean, I tried to kill cubicles for 33 years, but it looks like it took COVID to do it.
Now, cubicles will probably always...
Because they're cheap.
As long as they're cheap, they're just still going to be used.
There will be some cool, high-tech companies that try other things and then give up on them later.
It seems to me that Biden, his strategy for Ukraine is now clear.
For a while, it was a little murky, but now it's clear.
And I would call it the Afghanistan strategy.
It's basically the same as the Afghanistan strategy, which you could call losing expensively.
Losing expensively.
So it's two parts. There's the losing.
But there's also spending way too much money to do it.
Now, winning would look like winning economically.
That's what a good outcome would be.
But if you're losing and you're spending way too much money to do it, that's sort of the Afghanistan strategy.
So at least we know what he's up to.
And I think we can say at this point that...
Here's another example of wanting versus deciding.
You know how we were trying to decide what is it that Putin really wants with Ukraine?
Does he want the whole country, or does he want the region he's consolidating now?
And it always seemed like both, didn't it?
It was like, well, he sort of acted like he wanted the whole country, but maybe that was a fake-out.
Maybe he never did. Maybe he just wanted the other stuff.
But I think here's a better way to look at it.
It's the difference between what you want and what you decide.
I believe Putin decided to take over those territories he's taking over right now.
Meaning that once he had decided, there was no price he was unwilling to pay.
It looks like it.
It looks like he would be willing to pay any price to take over those territories.
So that looks like a decision.
And as I told you before, if he ever decides he wants any part of Ukraine, he's going to have it.
Because he will be able to take however much pain it takes, and then he'll just have it.
It looks like that's what he's doing.
Any amount of cruelty, any amount of loss of life from the Russians, any amount of military degradation, any amount of sanctions, apparently he's just going to do it.
But did he think the same way about all of Ukraine and Kyiv?
I don't think so.
I think all of Ukraine is something he wanted, But he had not decided on it.
And that when it looked like it was hard to get, he said, well, okay.
It kept their army pinned down, and so it did his job.
We'll just take the part we care about.
So I think the wanting versus deciding frame helps analyze that one.
Here's the most optimistic, stupid thing you've ever heard in your life.
You've got a big problem with national debt, am I right?
National debt's through the roof.
You'd like to solve that, don't you, wouldn't you?
You've got another big problem.
Inflation. Inflation.
Gigantic problem. You'd like to solve that, wouldn't you?
Do you know what solves national debt?
Inflation. You could inflate it away.
Now, don't get me started on Why that's a bad idea?
Yes, that's a low IQ take.
Now, it's both literally true that probably the only way to get rid of a debt this big is to inflate it away, but you want to do it with a reasonable level of inflation.
You don't want to do it with runaway inflation.
That doesn't give you the win you wanted.
Everybody okay with that?
That you want some inflation, Because we'll probably never be able to pay it down.
You want the value of those dollars that we borrowed just to reduce over time because everything inflates, even if it's just 2% to 4% a year.
But if you're up to 8% a year inflation or something like that, that's a little too fast.
A little too fast. All right.
Oh, my God, this is the left-wing Robert Rubin nonsense.
I just said, don't take it seriously.
Is somebody taking it seriously?
No, I'm pretty sure that you want a small amount of inflation if you ever want to get rid of your debt.
But a big amount would be a bad idea.
All right. Canadians, it looks like they're proposing this legislation to cap their guns, meaning that you wouldn't be able to buy another handgun or any gun, I guess, if you're a citizen.
They can keep the ones they have, but you wouldn't be able to get anything else.
You wouldn't be able to import it, you wouldn't be able to get it anywhere else.
Now, people are going to say, well, if Canada can do that...
Why can't the United States?
Does anybody want to answer that question?
If Canada can do this, why can't the United States?
Go. Well, let me jump in with my answer while you're giving your answers.
Because they live next to the United States.
If Canada were ever, let's say, attacked by a tyrant who wanted to occupy the country...
It would take 10 minutes for the United States to flow 200 million guns into Canada.
They'll never be short of guns.
Canada will always have all the American guns they want to use.
Because we're not going to let Canada go under.
Have you met us?
Canadians. Let me talk to you directly.
Canadians. You might think that Americans are kind assholes.
Kind assholes sometimes.
You're not wrong. You're not wrong.
Well, we're kind of bastards. Yeah, we're kind of bastards sometimes.
We're a little selfish.
We're cruel. We're bigoted.
We're racist.
We're sexist. We're a lot of things.
It's all true.
But Canadians, if your ass gets in trouble, call us.
Seriously. Call us.
We're going to fucking save you.
Every time. Every time, right?
So you don't need guns that much.
I mean, at least for that one specific use, you don't need guns.
Now, you might be feeling unarmed against criminals and stuff like that.
That's not arrogant.
Is it arrogant to say that America would come to the rescue of Canada if that were ever important?
No, because Canada would do the same thing.
Can the Canadians imagine any scenario in which the United States was seriously at risk from an outside force and Canada would not mount its maximum military effort to jump into the fight?
Of course not. It's just automatic.
Canada and the United States are just linked and that's not going to change.
We're just linked militarily.
So, it's not arrogant to say that if Canada ever got in trouble, the United States would be there in a heartbeat.
That's just common sense.
Because it would work both ways.
So, anyway.
Rasmussen has a poll that says 76% of people, this is the people who very much support it and kind of support it, support some kind of red flag rules for guns, meaning that a citizen could petition the court, I guess, to have someone else's gun taken away if there's evidence that that person is a high-level danger with a gun.
76% of the public supports that.
Do you? Now, let's take for granted that any law can be abused.
So if you say the reason you don't agree with it is because the law can be abused, that would be a reason to not agree with any law.
Because every law can be abused.
We have laws against rape.
Has anybody ever been falsely accused of rape?
Yeah. I mean, almost everything can be abused.
But So, do you say that you shouldn't have a law because it might be abused?
That's not a good enough reason.
I mean, you'd have to be able to measure the size of the abuse.
Well, how about this?
If you think it's a good idea, you're wrong.
And if you think it's a bad idea, you're wrong.
Why? Why? Can anybody answer the question?
So there's my opinion. If you think that the red flag rules are a good idea, you're wrong.
If you think they're a bad idea, you're wrong.
Why do I say that?
Because you can test it.
Thank you, Anthony. Anthony, if you can test it, you're having the wrong debate.
The debate is, where do we test it?
That's it. Unless you want to go full constitutional and say...
You know, it's a red line.
Don't test it. But if you want to know if it works, find some place that wants to test it.
Find out. You don't have to debate it.
Just test it. All right.
And so, therefore, I don't have an opinion.
I don't have any opinion on it, because it can be tested.
An Israeli cybersecurity company...
It says that Twitter has 12% bot-related traffic at least.
Now, the way that they calculate it, I think, is a little bit up to debate because they don't have internal Twitter numbers.
They're just looking at external sites that originated from Twitter.
They think they've got it figured out.
But I feel like the asking price for Twitter is going to go down.
Meaning that, correct me if I'm wrong, because I haven't done a merger of this size, but when you make a deal for a certain dollar amount, and then there's a disclosure period, right?
Where you find out if you're really buying the thing you thought you bought.
If you dig in and find out the number of bots is way different than what you thought when you made your offer, then you would have cause to renegotiate.
You say, okay, we've already said yes, but now we've found that this asset is not as valuable as we thought, so let's decrease it by 12%, and I'll decrease my offer by 12%, or whatever the numbers are.
The offer price will go down, not the asking.
Okay.
Right, the offer price will go down.
Did I say something else?
Yes, the offer price will go down.
Maybe. So we'll see if that happens.
So somehow the EU, the European Union bloc, of them have decided to, on Monday I guess just yesterday, decided to cut around 90% of all Russian oil imports over the next six months.
And they currently import 25% of their oil from Russia.
Now is 25% so much oil that they can't get that from other sources?
I feel like 25% is about the amount you can get over.
In other words, it's not so much oil that you can't find other sources in six months.
Now, I imagine that they would not have made this agreement if they didn't know they could work it out, or at least they didn't have a plan.
Yeah, gas is the big issue, as somebody's saying.
Oil is not the big issue, it's the gas.
Because that's a little harder to source.
The North Sea is running dry, somebody says.
And Hungary can still pipe that.
So it makes you wonder why it took so long.
And one of the lessons that you learn and relearn all of your life is that things that seem essential often are not.
Have you ever been in a company with a key employee who if that one employee left, everything was going to go to hell?
And then that one employee left.
And everything was fine.
How many of you have been in that situation?
The key employee left and everything was fine.
Yep. Yes. Yes.
Yep. And look at all the yeses going by on locals.
Right. So...
I feel like this is another example of that.
If you tell me that, no, no, no, we cannot find another source for 25% of our whatever, unless it's rare earth materials and you have to do it in a week, I'm going to say, I feel like you can always cut things by 25%.
It doesn't even matter what the category is.
Not always, right? But like 95% of all situations in the world, you can cut 25% off it and hardly notice.
You'll make adjustments. All right.
Let's talk about Putin's health.
So that's in the news again.
I would like to remind you of my record of...
Determining people's physical health by looking at them.
The first time I did this publicly that I can remember was, as I said, in the 2016 election, that Hillary looked sick.
Does anybody remember me saying that a lot?
That Hillary looked sick or drunk or something.
And then she did collapse at the 9-11 event, and there was some kind of health issue that I don't think has been fully disclosed.
And would you say that I was correct in 2016 when I said she looks unhealthy?
Correct or not correct?
And she had that cough that was weird.
It seems correct.
She had walking pneumonia or something, and maybe I saw it.
But I think I was saying it even before the pneumonia kicked in.
Alleged pneumonia. So that was my first one.
I'd give myself a yes on that.
Correct. Then I also said, when Biden was running, wait a minute, as many of you did, he's clearly mentally incompetent.
And then I heard from somebody who knew him personally and was in the room with him recently and said, you know, you're totally wrong, Scott.
I recently talked to him in person.
He's fine. To which I said, eh, I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And as of today, wouldn't you say I was right?
That he's not mentally capable?
And that I think he's declined even in the last year, in a way that's obvious to most people.
So I think I'm two for two.
Would you allow that score to stand, two for two?
And now I say that Putin is sick.
Now, I'm not going to say he's terminal.
I suppose we're all terminal.
But there's something wrong with that guy.
So I'm going to try to go for three for three.
There's just something wrong with that guy.
Don't know what it is. Could be his meds.
Maybe it's not a bad problem, but his meds are causing him to act differently or something.
I don't know. Well, we'll see.
Surprisingly, the DeLorean is back.
Do you remember the DeLorean with the gullwing doors and back from the future sort of thing?
And I guess the founder of the original DeLorean got busted for selling cocaine to finance his car or something like that?
Was that the story?
Anyway, it's coming back as an electric car.
And it has two doors, still has that gold wing thing.
And it would compete with a Tesla, for example.
But the design is really, really good.
So one of the things that the DeLorean did well is it looked cool.
That's one of the things that Musk got right with his original, his first electric car.
It looked cool. But I'm not sure that the Tesla design in its current form People buy because of the outside design.
Let me ask you, how many of you think that a regular Tesla, let's not talk about the truck because that's more of a high design situation, but how many of you think that the ordinary Tesla has a look where you look at it and say, "Hmm, got to get some of got to get some of that." So it's a mixed bag.
A lot of people are saying it's ugly, but other people are saying they like it.
Yeah. So some people are saying it's nice.
Some people are saying meh. Now, at one point I said to myself, huh, I wonder if this was a rare mistake.
Because you could have made it more like a DeLorean, more sports car-ish.
But on the other hand...
There is a very large percentage of the public that won't buy something that's too flashy.
So I've got a feeling that if you want to sell cars to regular people, you have to make them regular ordinary.
I think we're too into our lifestyle and the way we present it.
You can't take people who want to be under the radar and give them a cool car because they're not going to want it.
So I've got a feeling that the DeLorean will limit its audience to the high-end performance audience because the average mom and dad just want trunk space.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the conclusion of my prepared remarks.
And I would like now a medical rating if you're joining me late.
I'm on the third day of the COVID, still testing positive.
Just tested myself before the live stream started.
And so I'm infectious as a mofo, but I don't have any obvious symptoms that I can feel.
So here's the question.
Could you detect my brain fog?
Go. Locals are saying no.
What do you say, YouTube?
Could you detect my brain fog?
I'm seeing some yeses.
Seeing some yeses.
How many of you think that the brain fog detection could be imaginary?
A lot of yeses.
A lot of yeses.
Yes, you appear to be unreasonable.
How many think that?
Is there anybody else who thinks that I was more strident or unreasonable today?
Kind of subjective. Would it make any difference if you knew that I'm also heavily under the influence of marijuana?
I got this new batch recently that has the highest THC concentration I've ever experienced.
39%. Now, if anybody's familiar with the field, 39% is shocking.
I didn't even know that was even possible, frankly.
30% will sort of blow your socks off.
If you're not really experienced, you don't want to go over 30%.
So I didn't know what I was going to get at 39%.
But it's definitely different.
It definitely is quite a charge.
Yeah, I don't think the fog is made up.
So internally, I feel like I may have some fog, but I can't tell yet in terms of my performance.
You don't look well.
Well, I'm not. Did I just tell you?
I've got a terrible disease.
Apparently it's not that terrible.
Maybe COVID blocks caffeine absorption.
You know what? So Jen says, maybe COVID blocks caffeine absorption.
Now, I don't think that's true.
We probably wouldn't have noticed it.
But it feels exactly like that.
It feels exactly like I didn't have coffee.
That's what it feels like.
So you're saying you're better isn't necessarily true.
No, my internal sense of how I feel is completely better.
I do have...
I would call it maybe like a pressure or something on my brain.
Things look different, for sure.
Yeah. Anyway, it's kind of fascinating.
I would just encourage you not to believe any story of somebody who had a miraculous recovery from COVID because they took anything.
Because apparently the symptoms just do go away all at once when they go away.
So you're going to blame or credit whatever you were taking 10 minutes before they went away.
And you will be wrong.
You always get a brain fog when you have a cold or a fever.
You know, honestly, it's been 30 years or more since I had anything that was like a bad cold or a flu or anything like that.
So I didn't even know what it felt like to be sick.
I'd literally forgotten what it felt like to feel bad.
I mean, I guess that's the good news.
All right, I don't feel depressed, because I've heard that some people have symptoms of depression.
So I don't feel that.
And here's the weirdest part.
I think it cured my attention deficit disorder.
Now, I don't have actual diagnosis of that, but there's a time of the day when I just can't concentrate.
I just can't concentrate.
And yesterday, I did an experiment.
I said to myself, I wonder if I could just sit in the chair, just sit here, and be satisfied.
Do nothing else. Just sit here in the chair.
And this is something I've tried lots of times before.
Because I wanted to see if, you know, maybe I could get into meditating again.
And I thought, well, I'll just try to sit here and just be happy.
I've never been able to do it until yesterday.
Yesterday I had the weird experience, which I reproduced a number of times during the day, of saying, what if I just sit here?
Just sit here. And I would just sit there, and I was totally happy.
I've never experienced that before.
Never. Now, I think...
Yeah, it was outside.
One was outside, but not every time.
Once was outside. Well, I'm always high, but that doesn't make a difference, because I've done the experiment in every condition.
So I know that doesn't make a difference.
So my natural brain cycles are running at...
I don't know how to compare it to anybody else's, right?
Because everybody has their own subjective thing going on.
But my subjective experience of what happens in my head is that when I wake up in the morning, my clock speed of my brain is just right.
And I can get a lot done, I can concentrate.
By the middle of the day, there are so many things happening simultaneously in my brain...
That it's hard to do anything.
There's just too much crashing in at the same time.
You walk outside.
If I open this door and walk out, I will be met with three new variables.
Somebody needs something.
I found out a new thing.
The phone rings. That sort of thing.
The dog throws up on the ground.
So we're overwhelmed with all this complexity.
And yesterday I just sat there and didn't think of any of it.
Now, I assume that's brain damage.
I don't think that's like a cure.
I think it's brain damage.
But I'm hoping it's temporary.
So I'm going to try doing some cartooning today.
The writing. The writing's the hard part.
And I'm going to see if anything I write today is funny.
That'll be the test.
So we'll see. Alright, this, ladies and gentlemen, was the best show you've ever seen in your life.
I think you'd agree. And I'll keep you informed on my recovery, or non-recovery, as it goes.
