Episode 1780 Scott Adams: The News Is Crazy Today. Come Enjoy The Absurdity With A Beverage
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Watergate was largely fake news?
Calculating reparations
Joey Politano on negative wealth shock
Biden squeezing traditional energy sources
Ian Bremmer on various countries and inflation
Squeezing Russia on resources we need
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
All right, it's time to light this candle and then blow it out.
Because you've come to the right place at the right time.
That's right. Congratulations.
And I think this marks the beginning of something amazing for you.
The beginning of the Golden Age.
Does it look like it?
I'll give you that. But wow, is it going to take off pretty soon.
It's coming. And ladies and gentlemen, would you like to get ready for it in the most appropriate way?
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and all you need is a cupper mug or a glass, a tankard, chalzer, stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of It's the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's the oxytocin hit that you needed.
And it's happening now.
Go! Oh, did I see somebody say skip the sip?
We have a sip denier.
Sip denier. Whoop, whoop, whoop.
You will not escape.
Everybody. Circle and destroy.
No, we're just kidding.
You can be a conscientious objector to the simultaneous sip.
Because, you know, the simultaneous sip is designed to be manipulative.
And I tell you that right up front.
It's designed to be manipulative.
It manipulates you into enjoying yourself.
With your permission. So if you like enjoying yourself, doing the simultaneous step will create a little trigger to tweak your dopamine and maybe even your oxytocin.
So it actually is a utility thing.
If you skip it, what you're skipping is your own pleasure.
And I feel sorry for you, but it's a free world.
Have you noticed that everything's broken?
Well, that's because we're going to have to destroy everything to rebuild into the golden age.
But have you noticed that nothing has ever been worse than airline travel?
Why is airline travel...
I say this all the time, but I'm continuously amazed.
It's so consistent that airline travel is the only thing that gets worse all the time.
It started pretty good in the 60s and then just got worse every day.
And now some 19,000 flights were cancelled or delayed since Thursday.
Since Thursday?
How do you cancel 19,000 flights and not have the entire airline industry completely useless?
Would you even book a flight?
If you knew that 19,000 flights would be cancelled, if you knew that was going to happen...
Would you have booked a flight in the first place?
I don't know what percentage that is.
Do you? Is that a lot?
You know, without knowing the percentage, if I just heard the wrong number, I'd say, well, hell with that.
There's no way I'm going to get into that.
But maybe it's a small percentage.
I don't know. I've got a feeling everybody felt it.
So there were 4,200 U.S. flights were delayed and 900 cancelled on Sunday.
900 flights?
900 flights is a lot of flights, isn't it?
It feels like everybody would feel that.
It doesn't feel like that would just be something that a few people were inconvenienced by.
Well, anyway, I wonder about the United States and its ability to fix things and do things.
This will be sort of a meta-theme for today's livestream.
Why is it that we seem to have lost the ability to do things?
Is that purely imaginary?
Are we actually better than ever at doing things?
And it just doesn't seem like it.
Or are we trying to do things differently, or are we in the process of, let's take manufacturing.
We might be in the process of leapfrogging the need for lots of humans to manufacture things and then ship them across oceans.
We may be leapfrogging that to be the world leader in 3D printing or something.
So there's always going to be this destruction period before the rebuilding.
So maybe everything that looks like it's breaking is also exactly what you would see before everything improves.
Let me give you an example with airline travel.
Probably what's going to change airline travel, this is my guess, is a technological breakthrough.
Would you agree?
I think a technological breakthrough will change airline travel.
Here are two things that almost guarantee it.
Well, three things, actually.
Somebody said facial recognition.
Imagine going to the airport, and it's all facial recognition.
So there's no delay.
You walk up, it sees your face, it says, yeah, you're okay.
And you just walk right in.
Suppose they figure out how to make all airline flight, let's say, independent of the government, so there's no TSA. So let me give you a technological model that would make a lot of flying, you know, different.
So imagine if electric planes become a thing.
So that's the first thing.
The first technology is that battery technology has improved to the point where an electric plane is now economical.
And not just because of the cost of fuel lately, but because batteries are getting better.
Still short range.
It's still short-range.
But remember, if you got rid of all the regional flying, that would improve capacity for everything else.
So imagine, if you will, that the way that we fly in the future is that the flights are like an Uber.
They're self-driving with no pilot.
It's flown by AI. You book it on your app, and it's pretty close to you.
Because it's like a multi-copter, let's say a multi-blade drone.
Do you know how drones always have, I think, is it a four?
Is that the right number?
Do drones usually have four independent engines?
Because I think that's the same model that they're building now to fly humans.
So it would be something like, you know, maybe one to several people getting in their own little flying plane, which is actually now entirely possible.
No pilot, no government, no security, because it wouldn't even be worth it for a terrorist.
No terrorist would want to blow up a flying plane with six people in it.
It would be terrorism-free, because the target wouldn't be worthy.
It would be like blowing up a bus on the ground.
There'd be no point. It's only because planes have so many people in them that they even have any, and they're so big, that they have any terrorism value whatsoever.
So with batteries, imagine, if you will, that you go someplace much more local than your airport, Because the copter things can take up, you know, they can go straight up.
And you just book it on your app, you just walk in, you get on it, and you go to L.A. from San Francisco.
Now, it'd still be hard for the cross-country stuff for a while.
But just imagine it.
So here's the thing. I think that the airline industry is so completely crippled that a competitor like Uber...
The way Uber took over taxis.
Because taxis were a broken industry, too, in my opinion.
Calling a taxi and not knowing if it would really come or when, that was really broken.
And the whole taxi business couldn't figure it out, but then Uber did it.
So I think there's going to be an Uber situation for this guy.
It'll fix flying.
I saw one suggestion, it's the best one I've seen, for fixing everything.
Because like I said, everything's broken.
And I just saw a suggestion on the Locals platform that said, given that we are probably a simulated reality, if we live in a simulation, the question was asked, have you tried turning it off and then on again?
And I thought, I wonder if that would work.
What if we just rebooted the simulation?
And then I thought, well, who would do it?
Because you would need somebody outside the simulation to reboot it.
And then the other question is, how long do you wait?
Do you ever have this problem with your Wi-Fi or your modem at home?
You know you have to reboot it, so you pull out the plug, and then you say to yourself, do I really have to wait a minute?
Engineers, engineers, talk to me.
Have you ever unplugged a thing that you have to, you know, they say wait 30 seconds or something?
Do you really think you have to wait 30 seconds?
Is that real? Or is that like using your cell phone on an airplane?
Of course it's not real.
Look at all the answers.
People are all over the board on whether that matters.
Yeah, I get it. Capacitors have to drain.
But you don't think that they engineered them.
So that turning off the power makes a difference?
Like, actually, it goes back to its ready state.
Are you telling me that capacitors can't be drained upon turning it off?
They're not quick-draining capacitors, if that's a thing.
So it's funny that your answers are all over the place.
And that's something we all do.
Don't we do that? Don't we all unplug things and replug them in?
And we're all wondering if we've waited long enough?
I can't tell you how many times I've done that and said, okay, that didn't fix the problem.
Is it because I didn't wait long enough?
And I don't think it ever is.
I don't think it's ever been that when I went back and waited longer and You know, unplugged it for longer.
That was actually the solution.
I can't remember a time that that made a difference.
Anyway. Here's a mind blower that I don't know enough about yet.
So, James Rosen wrote an essay for Real Clear News.
And they're drawing on newly declassified information about the Watergate scandal.
And here's sort of the summary.
I haven't dug into it, but I retweeted it so you can do it if you want to.
Apparently Watergate was...
Wait for it.
Wait for it. Apparently Watergate was...
fake news.
And I think it's actually probably true that it was fake news.
Now, not that there wasn't a burglary, not that Nixon wasn't involved, but that the context was that the CIA was behind some part of it.
What? And that now we know that.
So if that's true, and apparently we have this new information that says it's true, plus there was some older information that is being taken more seriously...
But if that's true, then everything we understand about that is different, and the context would change from Nixon is a monster, and he got caught, and then we got rid of him, to Nixon was a victim of the deep state that took him out.
That's a pretty big change.
They can't both be true, or could they?
Well, they can't both be true exclusively.
So think about that.
The most basic foundational political story in American history, you know, beyond the Civil War, I suppose.
The most foundational modern story in American history is probably fake news.
Now, how many of you knew that?
I always suspected, well, I wouldn't say I knew it, but I always wondered if it was real.
I always wondered. And the reason I wondered is because everything today is not real.
Right? Everything today is not real.
Almost all coverage today is so biased and distorted that you don't even know how they'll write the history of it because it's like there are two histories happening at the same time.
How would you write that history?
Was Trump a monster or did he have a good first term?
Who writes that? How do you decide what the history book says?
So I always had my suspicions about it, but here's the great thing about this.
If it turns out that this is true, that Watergate was largely fake news, then this thing that we're learning is, fill in the blanks, worse than Watergate.
Thank you. It's worse than Watergate.
That's right. If Watergate was a hoax, in large part, not the basic idea that there was a burglary, that seems to be true.
But if it was largely completely distorted in terms of who was doing what to whom and why, it is worse than Watergate.
And who would be the people who are famous for writing this story?
Let's see. Checking notes.
It would be the guys who are calling everything Trump does worse than Watergate.
I would like to remind you of something that Elon Musk tweeted not too long ago and is quite compatible with my own thinking.
And also compatible with us being a simulated environment.
And the idea is that reality will tend toward what is most entertaining for the observers, not the people in the story, but the observers.
Did Watergate trend in the direction that was most entertaining by becoming our standard, literally the way we describe things as being bad, as worse than Watergate?
What would be the most entertaining way to cap that off?
To find out that Watergate itself was never real.
At least the way it was told to us wasn't real.
It's the most entertaining outcome.
So there you go.
I'm going to put together maybe a list of how to predict things.
So this would be one of them.
So follow the money would be the highest, most predictable way to predict the future, follow the money.
But another one would be that all the news is fake.
You know, that would be one way to predict.
Because the next thing you hear...
Let me make that prediction.
The next big story, whatever it is, and I don't even know what it would be, is going to be at least fake news for half of the country.
I mean, maybe the other half gets something closer to real.
But you could predict it today.
So predicting that the next story, whatever it is, is fake is a pretty good prediction.
Because it would be compatible with the past.
So other ways are the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters, the idea that these big problems that seem unsolvable, we've had quite a few of them, and we keep solving them, and we'll probably keep doing it.
Because usually these big unsolvable end-of-the-world problems are a failure of imagination.
In other words, we can't imagine how we'd solve it, therefore we say we can't.
But we also can't imagine anything about the future.
I mean, not accurately. You can't accurately imagine the future.
If you could, you'd be magic.
So the fact that you can't accurately figure out how climate change could be solved, for example, doesn't mean it won't be.
It just means you can't imagine it.
But you know what else you can't imagine?
Everything else. Everything else.
Here's another way to predict the future.
We'll be fine. That's one of the best filters on the future.
Because that filter understands that the news focuses on the most dangerous, provocative ideas.
But if you know that the news is telling you the scariest version, then you can say, we'll be fine.
Now, being scared of what's coming is part of being fine.
Because if most of the world were not afraid, maybe we wouldn't do what we needed to do to be fine.
But it's one of those good ways to predict the world.
So let's see if I can remember them all.
So help me out.
So you've got the Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters to predict that we'll figure our way out of stuff.
There's the, eh, we'll be fine.
Which assumes that we get too much scare in the beginning, and we'll be fine.
We'll figure it out. Follow the money.
That always works.
Everything is fake news.
And am I forgetting any?
How does Adam's Law work if we ignore and don't look at things?
Then it doesn't work. The slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy says things will keep going until a counterforce pops up, but it always does.
That's harder to use to predict the future, though, because you don't know when the counterforce pops up.
You can only be sure it does.
All right, here's another one. Another way to predict the future.
If there's anything that can be hacked, and I'll use hacked in every sense, not just computer hacking, but something you can hack, If something can be hacked and there's a large gain, potential gain, a low risk of getting caught, and a lot of people involved over time, there's a 100% chance the system will get hacked.
Am I right? I know there's at least one young viewer who mocks me when I say, am I right?
But, am I right?
Alright. You know who you are.
How young? I don't know.
Five? Six? Maybe five?
I heard I have a fan who's very young.
Anyway. Suppose you decided to calculate reparations.
Here's a thought I had today.
This is just the bad economist in me.
I tend to think about very geeky things.
People always wonder, like, what's it like to be me?
Because I have an unusual job.
And one of the things is, you wouldn't believe the weird, nerdy thoughts that go through my head.
Here's one. If you were going to calculate reparations, how the hell would you do it?
Other people have asked this question.
But let me ask you this.
If you were to study the amount that the government spends on its people, people who have needs, various needs, whatever the government provides, would you find any difference between the per capita Of what we spend on black citizens and have spent, let's say, for however many years, versus white citizens of America.
Would there be a difference?
And should you include that?
Because you can imagine including it in either direction.
Suppose you found out that in addition to whatever systemic racism is lingering from slavery, what if in addition to that, The average white citizen was getting more from the government than the average black citizen.
Well, then you should also say, well, that's even worse.
So throw that in the calculation so you can give the black citizens even more.
Because, you know, you would have a government who not only abused them during slavery, but then systemic racism, but then, for whatever reason, was even giving white citizens more money for decades.
If that was what the numbers told.
But what if it goes the other way?
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, don't we give more money to poorer citizens relative to how much they put into the system?
Is that not true? Or is that one of those things that you assume is true but it's not obviously backwards?
Because sometimes in economics you get that a lot.
Somebody says not true.
Because I think there might be a contrarian view on this.
But my point is this.
Without knowing that difference, could you calculate reparations?
Because if what you're trying to do is say, has the United States treated this group of citizens fairly, Wouldn't you have to include all of the unfairness from the beginning of the country on to today?
And if there was some big difference in the per capita spending or per capita benefit from the government, if you calculate it some other way, wouldn't that have to be in the calculation?
Now, of course, all of it makes it impossible, right?
Because you end up with so many assumptions and variables that nobody could come up with the same number.
So you end up...
If you did reparations, you would end up just pulling it out of your ass.
Because there's no better way to do it.
You couldn't calculate it.
It just wouldn't be possible.
And then I've also provocatively said that the correct comparison...
Would be how American black citizens who have a legacy back to the Civil War, how are they doing compared to the people who did not get captured as slaves and taken to America?
So with the descendants of the African residents, are they doing better or worse than Americans?
Because then what do you say?
You say, well, you're still doing better than you would have done.
So what's the right comparison?
Do you compare black African slaves and their descendants to the black African non-slaves?
Because that would be a logical comparison, but it won't get you the right result, the societally approved result.
Everything is about what you compare things to.
And that's one of the reasons that economists can usually agree with each other, eventually, and non-economists can't.
Anyway, when we talk about the billionaires who want to control the globe, how many of you believe that's a good way of understanding the world?
Okay.
How many of you think that a fair filter on the world is that there's a global elite and they've got some kind of reset happening?
And the point of it is to take over the world and they would have the power.
Thank you.
Okay, there's something happening here that's really weird that I don't understand.
Your comments are completely out of line with what I'm expecting to see.
Alright, I thought I would see 75% yeses, but I saw 75% noes.
Interesting. Now, those of you who think yes, what do you make of the fact that most of this audience is fairly similar in attitude and your philosophy?
And yet you would be in a minority even among the group you agree with.
So the people who think that there's a global elite, at least in this audience, are the minority, even among an audience that largely agrees with you on other stuff.
Does that bother you? Does it ever bother you to be in the minority opinion, even among the group of people who are on your side in general?
I don't know that it should, I just wondered.
Because that's probably just how you're personally constructed.
Sometimes people like it.
I tend to like being a contrarian, so I'd probably like it.
Well, I'm going to say this about that.
I don't see it.
I don't see it.
So, yeah, I just don't see the Bilderberg Group or the World Economic Forum or anything.
I just don't see them as doing what people imagine they're doing.
But let's say they are.
Let me ask you this.
Don't you think the other billionaires have noticed?
What do you think they're doing about it?
What is your understanding of the world if you believe that a certain set of billionaires, or elites, Are trying to grab power for themselves.
What is it that you imagine that all the other billionaires are doing at the same time?
Are the other billionaires watching and saying, yeah, you know, I'm okay with that.
If those other billionaires get all the power, that's fine, because then we billionaires rule.
I don't think it works like that, does it?
If you're one of the billionaires, don't you think that the other billionaires are your competition?
You don't think they're on your side, do you?
Does Musk think that Bezos is his competition?
Or do they think they're buddies in the elite?
And is Elon Musk in the elite?
What if there is an elite trying to control the world, but Elon Musk is not one of them?
Who are you going to bet on?
Would you bet on all the elite Or Elon Musk, if you assume that he was on the other team, if those teams even exist.
I don't think they even exist.
So I don't know how the people who think that there's a billionaire elite trying to control the country, I don't know how they explain the other elites.
Because if you're telling me that Peter Thiel is on the same team, I don't think so.
I don't think so at all.
If you're telling me that Musk is part of this global elite, I don't think so.
I suppose anything's possible, right?
Anything's possible. Could be fooled by anything.
But I don't think so.
So, just consider that if you think the global elites are in control, your theory should include what are the other billionaires doing about it.
Is Bill Gates in that club?
Or is Bill Gates one of the people that that club would like to take out?
How would you know? Something, something about central banks.
I guess that's what I'm supposed to say.
You can tie it all together by saying, there's something I don't understand about central banks, so it's probably them.
It's probably them. There's an interesting article I will call your attention to, speaking of Peter Thiel, by Elizabeth Dwoskin, who's writing for the New York Times.
And she tweeted that for months she'd been working on a big story about Peter Thiel and about how he left Facebook, etc.
And it morphed into an examination of the ambitions to be an architect of the new American right.
I don't know if that's true.
Do you think Peter Thiel wants to be an architect of the new American right?
I don't know. That seems a little bit hyperbolic.
But I think he's one of the people who would like to influence things in this country.
So maybe it's a little bit true.
But you should read it because there's just sort of an interesting behind-the-scenes look.
I'll just call your attention to that.
Because it's a longer thing than I want to summarize.
You know, I've got a larger philosophy that says no one understands economics, especially economists, and that the more you know about economics, the less you understand it.
It's like the people who are sure about economics are the people who know the least about it.
The more you know, the more you go, I'm not so sure.
And unfortunately, I'm in the category I have a degree in economics and I have an MBA. And I'm in the category of knowing just enough that I don't think anybody knows anything.
Now I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But here's one point of view.
I think on my live streams I'll just show you different points of view so I can make this point over time.
How different people's opinions are about the economy right now.
And these are smart people.
I'm not talking about your average idiot.
I'm talking about smart people who don't seem to have any grasp of what the economy is about.
But Joey Politano tweets, if you thought that households needed a negative wealth shock to get spending down, in other words, if households feel they have less money, They'll spend less, and that should make inflation go down.
So he's saying that we have that now, because crypto's down over 50%, stocks are in the bear market, it's hard to refinance anything because interest rates are up, and the housing market is cooling off.
So, is that all you need?
If the households stop spending money, Or they cut back drastically.
And it looks like the external shocks that cause that are all there.
It should be...
I mean, I feel...
I'm cutting back on expenses.
Let me ask you. How many of you are cutting back on expenses?
Because even at my income level, I'm actually cutting back substantially on expenses.
Because my income's down maybe a third...
So when I think, yeah, look at all the yeses coming by.
Basically, I think all of us are cutting back our expenses.
But let me ask the same question, and don't just say yes or no so I'll know which question you're answering.
So say a little bit more than yes or no.
But did you also spend more as soon as you got freed from the lockdown?
Like there was a period where you spent more, right?
You had a little pent-up vacation money, a little pent-up entertainment money.
So didn't most of you go from suddenly spending more?
And I think I did as well.
I know I did, yeah.
I definitely spent more, like a lot more, right after the pandemic sort of loosened up.
But now I'm definitely in a spending less mode, by far.
So... Are we...
Is this self-correcting?
So here's one thing I think I know about the economy.
I believe the modern economy is self-correcting.
And that, believe it or not, when the Biden administration says inflation is transitory, I actually think that's true.
I actually think that's true.
It's just that transitory is not defined.
I think transitory is three to five years.
Would you accept three to five years as transitory?
Or not? I mean, that's not permanent.
I think it's three to five years.
Because it's going to take that long to try to spin up any additional resources.
And that's even too fast to...
You're not going to build a refinery in three to five years, are you?
But maybe you could get some going.
But in the meantime, between now and the time that we can spin up...
I love that phrase because it sounds like you can do things really easily.
We'll just spin up some more factories.
Let's spin up some extra capacity.
It's easy. It's just two words.
Just spin it up. Don't tell me it's hard.
Just spin it up. But if we stop spending, inflation should come somewhat under control, and then the economy will do what the economy does, which is market competition, should do exactly what Biden wants.
Here's something you're really going to hate.
Biden putting the squeeze on all of the traditional energy sources...
Might actually work.
Because even though I wouldn't have chosen it, I would never have chosen, hey, do bad things to our energy situation at the same time that bad things are happening to it anyway, from external shocks.
I never would have recommended it.
But it is nonetheless true...
That emergencies and crises cause you to act faster and in ways that you wouldn't have otherwise.
It basically breaks red tapes and log jams.
So I believe that Biden has created, accidentally, a greater energy emergency than there would have been.
But I'm not sure it didn't get us to a better place faster.
We're not there. So, yeah, that's still speculative.
Could we get there? But it does seem to me that it is entirely true that if you were somebody looking into investing in, let's say, a battery farm, you know, a farm of batteries just to store energy, and you weren't sure that was a good investment, sure looks like it now.
At the moment, it looks like a good investment.
So, There's probably a whole bunch of investment that is being unleashed because Biden destroyed the traditional energy market.
So in theory, this is all self-correcting in three to five years.
So I think I'm going to die on that hill, or hopefully triumph on that hill and raise my flag.
Remember during the pandemic, and it looked like everything was going to go to hell and we were going to run out of toilet paper?
And what did I tell you?
What did I tell you?
At the very beginning of the pandemic, when it looked the most scary, I told you everything would be fine.
And basically it was.
We figured it out.
We didn't run out of food. Same thing now.
Same thing now. We will figure it out.
There will be some dislocation.
Currently I have to use a shampoo that I don't like.
Yes, I use shampoo. Shut up.
So there'll be adjustments like that.
We might be using our currency for the toilet paper for a while.
Just small adjustments like that.
But I think we'll figure it out.
And the reason is that we have a self-adjusting economy like we've never had before.
So when anybody looks at history and says, in the past, when we had these factors in play, you could predict that the next thing that would happen would be X. That doesn't work anymore.
Because... Take Juneteenth as the model of why history doesn't repeat anymore.
The reason that Juneteenth is a holiday is because slaves in two states didn't know that they were emancipated for however many years.
They didn't know because there was no internet.
So in the old days, you could emancipate the slaves and the slaves wouldn't even know it for a long time.
You can't compare that world to anything in which you have instant communication everywhere.
And everything's fungible.
You can move pretty much everything to everywhere.
So we can adjust and adjust our environmental standards and create rare earth minerals where before only China could do it because they had relaxed standards.
But it's an emergency.
So you relax your standards or you find a better way to do it.
It doesn't require that.
So I've got a feeling that all of this stress we're feeling on the system is a lot like the World War II stress.
This feels like a World War II level stress on the system.
And what World War II produced, after all the tragedy...
Was sort of a clean slate to rebuild.
So Japan and Germany did well because they, unfortunately, were so destroyed that they could start from something closer to scratch.
So I think we're in an extended period of destroying what we have, but productively, because we have a system that can destroy and then fix without even human interaction.
As Ian Bremmer pointed out in a tweet, That if you look at the various governments of the world that have high inflation right now...
Now, these are his interpretations of these governments, but people argue the left and right parts.
But he says we've got a left-leaning government in the US with high inflation.
The UK, he says, is a right-leaning government with high inflation.
Germany is a centrist government with high inflation.
Italy is everyone in government with high inflation.
So his point is that every kind of government...
Gave you high inflation.
And therefore, he says, wild guess, it's not the government.
Now this is an extension of my prediction that I made at the beginning of the pandemic, the strangest prediction that I've made probably yet, and also perfectly accurate.
I said before the pandemic, like when it was just starting, that leadership in different countries would not be the variable that made a difference in the outcomes.
And that was crazy.
Right? I don't think anybody took that seriously.
It sounded like such a ridiculous prediction that you didn't even have to address it.
You didn't have to agree with it.
You didn't even have to disagree with it.
Because it was just ridiculous.
It was more like absurd. And I said it over and over and over again in the beginning.
And I was always surprised that people didn't react to it.
They didn't agree, and they didn't disagree.
It just was sort of just weird.
And here we are.
The pandemic's over, and you can't tell the difference in terms of leadership decisions.
There's no difference.
Why did South Korea do well?
Was it because of leadership?
Probably not. It's probably because they had access to rapid tests, maybe a cultural difference, maybe because of their isolation, whatever.
But it probably had nothing to do with their leadership.
And here we have another example.
Inflation is high with all these different governments, with all these different philosophies of government, and probably you can't tell the difference.
Can you tell me that Germany's leadership is why they have high inflation, but ours is not?
It just looks like there is a global element to the inflation, and that's all there is to it.
Everything's disrupted everywhere, so why wouldn't it affect everybody?
Now, I did see Shannon Bream take down a Biden administration advisor type for essentially being part of the inflation, especially the energy problem.
And she did a really good job.
I tweeted that.
So check out Shannon Bream, really giving it to one of the Biden apologists, I guess.
I hate using that word, but it seems to fit in this case.
Now, here's...
To his credit, one of the arguments that the Biden administration is making is that a survey showed that when you talk to the CEOs who do investment in energy...
That 90-some percent of them said that it wasn't the government that was stopping them from investing.
And I didn't see Shannon Bream address that point specifically.
But I have a feeling that that data probably is not on point, meaning that I'm not sure that that survey is exactly telling us what we think it is.
Anyway, there's a little difference of agreement.
I'm not sure what is true.
I'm a little unclear because the propaganda is so thick from left and right.
So I can't tell how much is right-leaning propaganda that says that Biden's responsible for canceling all these oils and gas leases and stuff.
But they do have an argument that those things are trivial.
So there's one argument that says that Biden caused this by Everything from not approving energy projects to closing down energy projects.
But the counter-argument is, yeah, he may have done all those things, but they're so small that they don't really make any difference.
What do you think? Because I don't know.
I follow the news, and as I said, I've got some economic background...
But I don't know the answer to that question because I follow the news.
I don't believe the news is giving me straight news on the left or the right on this question.
Do you? Do you think that the left or the right are giving you the...
Because the right is saying, Biden made these decisions.
It reduced future amounts of energy.
Therefore, prices went up.
It's just, you know, 2 plus 2 is 4.
It's that simple. The right says, even if he had done everything differently, none of this makes a difference in the near term.
So you couldn't possibly be seeing those decisions in the near term, and people are now so smart that the near term really reflects the long term anyway.
That's not a terrible argument.
I don't know if it's true.
So let me be clear.
I don't know if the Biden argument is accurate or true.
I just know it's a good argument.
When you hear it, you go, oh, okay, that's a good argument.
So let me give it to you, and this will be kind of a mindfucker for some of you.
For those of you who are sure, because you believe the propaganda, those of you who are sure that our current energy costs are substantially...
And you can determine substantially whatever that means to you.
How many of you believe that you do have enough information and that it's accurate and that you understand the situation and that Biden's decisions specifically have raised the price of energy today?
How many of you feel confident that that really is happening?
I'm seeing a lot of confidence.
I guess I'm contrarian on this one.
I'm not. I'm not.
Now, the Shannon Bream argument is pretty strong, the one she made, which is she quoted Biden saying he was basically going to dismantle the fossil fuel industry.
And she says, why would anybody invest, do long-term billion-dollar investments, When he's trying to dismantle the thing.
Why would you? That's a pretty good argument, right?
But here's the counterargument to the counterargument.
Even if people had said, okay, we're going to go ahead and ignore Biden even though he says he's going to dismantle us.
We're going to ignore him and we're going to put billions into investments for new energies and drilling and new leases and all that.
Would any of that make any difference today?
No, I don't think so.
So the Democrat argument that even if everything you say about Biden is true, that he is making decisions that absolutely will change the level of availability of energy and the type in the mix, even if that's all true, it takes years.
It takes years. Do you think that's in the inflation number today?
Some of it, probably.
But I don't know how much, and neither do you.
So let me say this.
You are in a heavy propaganda topic.
I don't believe there's anybody, even the experts, who quite understand the entire...
I want to use the word.
What's the word from accounting where your income statement is articulated into your balance sheet?
What's the word for that?
There's like a term of art.
You know what I mean.
Cruel? No. Oh, there's not reconciling.
It is reconciling.
Well, dammit, there's a cool word that I wanted to use there that would have been great.
Yeah, well, whatever.
So, nobody understands this topic, so if you imagine that you do, then you might be a victim of propaganda.
If you imagine you know that Biden's decisions changed energy prices in the short term, I think we could all agree to change it in the long term.
Because he's trying to change it in the long term.
He said he would, and he did things that would change it in the long term.
So if we could all agree on the long term, Could you still agree with the Democrat argument that you're not seeing it today?
That's not what's happening today, because it wouldn't affect today.
I don't know. It's a pretty good argument.
Pew Research said that 71% of journalists are concerned about made-up news.
71% of the people in the business, the journalists, are concerned about made-up news.
And that's higher than the 50% of US adults who say the same thing.
So if you're a consumer of news, half of you are concerned that the news is fake.
If you're in the business of producing news, 71% of you are concerned that it's fake.
Who would be better informed about how much of the news is fake?
The people who produce it or the people who consume it?
That's right. The people who produce the news are way more concerned about how fake it is.
Does that worry you?
It should. It should.
That should worry you a lot.
The people who know the most about it think it's worse than you do.
The journalists themselves.
Yep. You should worry about that.
All right. Don't you think it's kind of hard to fight two wars that are like opposites?
So the Biden administration is fighting the war between Ukraine and Russia, so effectively we're in that war financially anyway.
And we're still fighting a war against the climate, or at least the Democrats are trying to do that.
And the trouble is that to fight the Ukraine war...
We want to squeeze Russia and not use their resources.
But we need those resources.
So there are too many variables that are working opposite each other.
So suddenly Germany is going to be using much more coal...
Because Russia is going to give them less gas because of the war.
Blah, blah. So basically, the one war makes it impossible to win the other war.
As long as we're doing the Ukraine thing, we're going to lose the climate war.
So do we have to pick the war?
Are we trying to fight too many wars?
Sort of a two-front war that makes it impossible to win on either front.
I feel like we have to pick one.
Either win Ukraine, which means go crazy on coal as long as it takes to make Russia irrelevant, I guess.
Or fight the war on the climate and let Ukraine go to Russia, which is what would happen.
Here's an interesting take on...
Again, you can see this in my Twitter feed.
That who wins a modern war is who has the most ammunition.
And that's about pretty much all there is to it.
That a modern war between two modernish armies, like Ukraine and Russia, that all that will matter is who has the most ammunition, because they'll both just keep firing at each other until they're out.
And I thought, that might be the simplest explanation of how to predict how this ends.
But here's the bad news, if you like Ukraine.
Apparently Russia has really, really good resources for creating ammunition as they need it.
So they had a lot to begin with, but they can also make it as they need it.
The West apparently has enough for a few days, and then no ability to make it.
So the West doesn't even have the ability to fight a war.
We would just run out of ammunition.
Now, that's not as big a deal if you're in the United States, because you have nuclear-powered submarines.
So nobody's going to attack the homeland of a nuclear-powered country with the Second Amendment.
But if we got into a traditional war with Russia, we would run out of ammunition.
So unless we somehow won right away, we would just run out of artillery.
So if you have a war that lasts a long time, all that matters is your manufacturing capacity.
And we're in a war that lasts a long time.
So that would tell you that Russia is just going to chew up Ukraine at its leisure.
And nothing would stop it.
And I think that's the way it looks.
If you were to straight line it and nothing changed, that's what it looks like.
But of course, there are always surprises.
So you can't straight line anything.
Here's something interesting.
My live stream from the other day was turned into a transcript on Real Clear Politics.
And then it got tweeted around.
Now when you change this form, this spoken form, into a transcript, sometimes it makes it more powerful.
Because people prefer consuming stuff that way.
And so it took my relatively inert idea about having Trump not run for president...
But create a news platform that would have honest debate on topics, but more interesting honest debates, and basically control the world through controlling the news, because somebody needs to do it.
And that idea was strong enough that somebody turned it into a transcript and then people liked it more and they're tweeting around.
Now, the moral of the story, there's a higher level than the story itself, is that The person who writes something down is the most influential.
It's one of the most consistent things you could say.
The person who writes something down and is good at it has just tons of influence.
So speechwriters actually have a ton of influence over policy because the speechwriter writes it and then the politician says, yeah, that would sound really good coming out of my mouth, and then it just sort of turns into their theme.
So we see here that taking my inert spoken word and turning it into a written transcript made it actually pretty powerful.
And now you see people weighing in.
I haven't seen much pushback.
It's probably one of the most popular ideas that I've ever expressed.
So take a look at it if you haven't seen it yet.
So here's another tip along those lines.
So, Derek Sivers, S-I-V-E-R-S, Sivers or Sivers?
I don't know. He suggests this writing tip, and I'm going to echo his recommendation, that you write one sentence per line just for yourself when you're starting to write something longer.
One sentence per line.
Now, you say to yourself, Well, what's the difference between that and just putting it in the paragraph where it belongs?
And he tells you this.
If you write every sentence by itself, you don't get to hide it with the other sentences.
Because sometimes you can put a weak sentence in the middle of a paragraph.
And your brain will sort of skip over it, you know, because the other ones have more impact.
But if you're forced to write every sentence on its own line and look at it, you can much more easily say, you know what?
I didn't even need to say that.
Because the other sentences basically covered it.
The other thing is that when you put them on their own line, you can more easily pick out the first word in the sentence than the last.
Because those have more impact.
And then also you can look at the sentence length.
Because you want sentence lengths that are variable but not beyond a certain too long point.
You can't be too short with a sentence.
That's impossible. You can't be too short.
One word could be a sentence if you're trying to communicate.
But you could be too long.
So these are the things that you more easily see if you just break out the one sentence.
You can see its length compared to the others and some variety.
Some of you say this is why. You don't want a long sentence because the brains are not good at following a long sentence.
But there's no such thing as too short because there are times when one word is all you needed.
And even though one word is not a sentence, often...
People know what you mean, so that's all you need.
I'm going to get rid of you. - No.
All right. So that's your writing tip for the day.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, looks to be everything I wanted to talk about.
Amazingly. And I don't know.
Am I wrong? Or...
Is this the best livestream you've ever seen in the whole world?
The other thing I'm going to predict is if...
So yesterday I took a ride on an electric scooter.
How many of you have tried an electric scooter, especially a high-end one?
This was 500 watts.
Number one, it did every hill without a problem.
Now, I'm not a hugely gigantic human, So, you know, it wasn't a problem for me.
Suppose if you were 300 pounds, it'd be a problem.
But have you read or tried an electric scooter?
They are so fun.
Somebody says, I hurt myself.
Yeah, they're really dangerous.
They're super dangerous.
The whole time you're on it, you're pretty sure you're going to die.
Because they get wobbly pretty easily.
But there's also a pretty fast learning curve.
So... Here's the thing.
If you spend a minute on an electric bike or an electric scooter, you will know it's the future.
Now, I took a ride yesterday on my bike.
I wonder if I could show you this.
I know it's terrible holding something up to the camera here, but I believe I can show you this.
So where I live, There are miles and miles of bicycle-only, or mostly bicycle, roads.
So this is a long road through wine country in Livermore, California, in which there's no cars.
This is just for bikes or whatever.
And you could have the best, just amazing scenery.
You could ride for miles, and that's an electric bike.
That's an electric... You know, mountain bike.
And the hills just disappear.
Now you ask yourself, do you still get exercise?
And the answer is yes. Yes, a lot.
Because you can turn down the boost, the assist.
So whenever I want to just work a little harder, I just turn down the boost.
And when I want to level off a hill, because I just don't feel like it, I just turn up the boost.
Now, once you see how wonderful it is to travel this way, you can imagine a town in which everything is connected by, let's say, hilly little, very interesting, winding, tree-covered streets that are just for bikes and electric vehicles.
And you can imagine that almost like a hobbit city...
Using these ADUs or these little boxable, you know, instant houses that you take off a truck and you unfold it and it's like a total house for one person.
You slap on a solar wall, solar, you know, like a Tesla battery.
You can make these little things off the grid for the most part.
I guess you need sewage or something.
But you can get them mostly off the grid and There's now a technology where you can suck water out of the air, enough to actually run your home.
So we're at a point where building an amazing village from scratch, where you're not looking at your neighbor, he's just over the little tree-lined hill, and if you want to go anywhere to buy some groceries or something, you jump on your scooter, and the path itself is really fun.
You've had this experience, right?
Sometimes going someplace is fun if the actual destination path is just really interesting to look at.
You don't mind the ride at all. So imagine making all of your transportation fun and easy.
It would change everything about your experience.
Imagine your delivery service all by electric vehicle so that there's so many people delivering all the time That the cost of getting a sandwich drops way down.
Because there's always an electric bike going right past the sandwich place to your home.
And if you're on an electric bike, it costs you practically nothing.
You just drive by, hey, grab the sandwich, drop it in your mailbox, boom.
So if you were to build a home, a community from scratch, You could do it at 10% of the cost of current living and it would be so much better.
Just the lifestyle, everything about it would be better.
Where is this magic place?
It's a place that you could build right now with current technology.
So that's my prediction about where housing is going.
It's going to be start from scratch, build a community, And make it electric bike connections or electric vehicles.
Could be carts or any kind of thing.
And off the grid as much as possible.
To protect the homeland, by the way.
Because you don't want people to be too vulnerable to the grid.
So you want to get as many Americans as you can off the grid entirely.
So they could withstand a grid attack.
And there you go. Now, is that optimistic enough?
Did you notice today it was all the optimistic stuff?
Did it make you feel better?
It should. It should.
It's going to make you feel great.
In fact, you want to take this good feeling with you into the day.
Don't watch the news today, maybe.
You don't want to blow it.
If you've got that good feeling, just take it forward.
And remember, you are the authors of your simulation.
So I have a request on the locals platform for a closing SIP. It's very rare, but today you're going to get it.
The closing SIP for the simultaneous SIP. Here it comes.
