Episode 1858 Scott Adams: How Can Republicans Beat Biden's Fear Persuasion? I'll Tell You
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Content:
Reparations for republicans?
Nothing beats fear persuasion
Ideas for election integrity
CNN continues to make viewers dumber
Lithium for all the electric car objectives?
Russia shuts off gas to Germany
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
I made it just in time.
Yes, I was carried away with looking at stuff on Twitter.
Does it sound like a new song?
And yes, my IQ is still 185, according to the internet.
We can get different opinions from different sources, but finally, finally, we're here.
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Go!
Good stuff.
So, here's my question.
Is it too soon for Republicans to start asking for reparations?
Because I feel like there's an argument to be made.
Am I wrong? Are not Republicans being discriminated against and demonized by their president?
Are they not being jailed, in some cases, for political purposes and hunted?
Makes you wonder, what is the standard?
Now, what is the worst thing that's ever happened to the United States...
Not the worst thing. But what is the least worst thing that actually got reparations?
If we say...
So the Japanese internment camps, one of the most horrible things the country's ever done.
Reparations. Now, I don't know that anything that bad has happened to Republicans, except the ones in jail, I suppose...
But where is that line where you can say, you know, you've crossed that line.
Now we've got to talk about reparations.
Let's talk about reparations a little bit.
Because it seems to me that what I witnessed for the last two years, maybe the last year, is Republicans had everything running fine.
Seems like the country was sort of in a pretty good situation.
And then Democrats ripped that all away.
With energy policy and Ukraine, whatever they're doing there.
It feels as if the Republicans had things working pretty well and it was just ripped away.
Now, I'm not serious.
I don't think you can get reparations.
But I think I went down this path because I saw a fascinating little clip from Jack Murphy.
Who's a good follow. If you don't follow Jack Murphy, you should.
But there's a clip of him.
He tweeted around, I guess, I don't know when he was talking about it.
It was in the past, I guess.
But he talked about a way to understand what happened in 2020.
And I love his frame.
And the frame is this.
So the normal frame is that there was something called an election.
And then the two teams, they both said what they could do.
Here's what I could do if you elect me.
Here's what I could do if you elect me.
And then the voters looked at those two competing propositions, and according to the official count, Biden won, according to the official outcome.
Now, here's Jack's take on the same situation.
The Democrats' strategy is to make their own people so uncomfortable that they'll do anything you tell them to make the pain stop.
And the pain was a continuous fear that Trump was going to destroy the world.
And I don't think you and I, if you were not subject to that persuasion, I don't think you and I can appreciate how bad that must have been.
Imagine waking up every day thinking the world is going to burn because Trump's the president.
And, you know, they always say that winning elections is about what you're voting against.
That's one of the wise things you hear.
But also about energizing your base.
So Biden managed to energize his base and give them something to vote against by making them so unhappy with their own lives that they would do anything to make the pain stop.
Now, once you hear that explanation of what we saw, it's hard to lose it, isn't it?
It's just a better framework for understanding what you just saw.
It's the team that can torture their own people the hardest.
That's what it is.
If you put that together, then it's always voting against something, and usually there's a fear involved.
People are not voting for good times.
They're voting to make their fear go away.
So that's our system.
Our system is two leaders who will torture their own supporters to see who can torture them the most.
Because who can ever scare them the most and make their own people the most uncomfortable?
They'll vote the most.
They can get them off the couch.
So we've literally developed a system to see who can torture their own supporters the most, and whoever is willing to do it, they get to win.
They get to be president. Now, you tell me that's wrong.
Am I wrong? What part of that is not 100% accurate?
None of it. That is an exact perfect description of our system.
Whoever can torture their own followers the hardest, they win the election.
Because remember, you're not really convincing the other team.
They're not even listening to you.
You're just trying to get your own people to get off the couch and do something.
That's it. That's the whole game.
Now, I was asked on Twitter this morning, what could Republicans do to beat Biden's fear of persuasion?
Because he's going for, instead of saying, here are all the good things I'll do for you, Biden is saying, watch out for those ultra-mega extremists.
And Trump is who you should worry about, and anybody who follows Trump.
That's fear of persuasion, right?
They're all the neo-Nazis, they're coming for you, the fascists.
So, how do you beat fear persuasion?
Anybody? Anybody?
What is the only technique that can beat fear persuasion?
Not the high ground.
High ground will not help you one bit against fear persuasion.
Because nobody can hear the high ground.
The high ground is just noise if you're afraid.
If you're afraid, you have to solve your fear.
You solve your fear first, and then you can hear the high ground argument.
Now, I often incorrectly say the high ground wins every argument, but that's every argument where there's no fear, because that's the normal situation.
The normal situation is you're just in some corporate meeting, and you're talking about two options, neither of them are scary.
In that case, the high ground wins every time.
But in the situations, and it's usually political, where you have an actual fear of life and death, nothing beats that.
So right now, Biden has a path to re-election and nothing to stop him.
Because he has the superior persuasion.
By far. By far.
The stuff he's doing is completely unethical.
Completely unethical.
A lot of it is just based on pure lies.
But is it working? Yeah.
Yeah, fear works.
Fear is the apex predator.
Nothing beats fear. The only thing that keeps people from using fear all the time is that you don't want to be a giant dick.
Because when you scare people, they don't like it.
It's very unpleasant to be afraid.
So you have to be the bigger dick to win in a game of fear.
So the person who can push the hardest and bend the boundaries the most, the one who is most, let's say, skilled at hyperbole, is going to be the one who can win.
Now, name one Republican who has not named Trump Who could beat Biden for fear persuasion?
Because you've seen his game, so you know what Biden can do.
And you know what he's focusing on, the mega extremists, as he says.
DeSantis, not even close.
DeSantis is too much of a technocrat.
And I mean that as a compliment.
I mean, if you were going to choose somebody to run your government...
DeSantis is a pretty good choice if that's the type of leadership you want.
But he doesn't scare me.
When was the last time DeSantis scared you?
He says there are these problems, we have these solutions, and it all makes sense, and he's popular, and he's funny, and he's interesting.
But he's not going to scare you.
I can't think of anything he ever said that scared me.
There's only one candidate that can scare you.
There's only one. And his name is Trump.
So here's what we're down to.
As much as I love Tom Cotton, for example, as an alternative, as much as I like his skills, he's not going to scare you like Trump will.
He doesn't have that...
Well, I just don't think he would bend the rules enough to get that done.
So... There's only one way you're going to beat Biden at this point, because he's taking a pure, I hate to say it, but he's taking a Trumpian approach, which is take the best persuasion you can take and just ride it hard.
That's what Trump did.
He just picked the scariest stuff and he rode it hard and it worked.
So Biden's doing the same thing.
And he's got that extra benefit of the media will back him and say the MAGA people are extremists and stuff like that.
So, here's the only thing that will get you a Republican president.
Trump as a candidate.
Now, I'm not saying I want him or don't want him.
I'm not saying he would be the best president or not the best.
There's a lot to be said for a DeSantis, a Tom Cotton.
There are other people you could say, well, they'd be really serious candidates.
But he's the only one who will bend the rules enough to scare you enough to get you to vote.
Nobody else is going to scare you enough to get you off the couch.
He'll scare the fuck out of you if you want him to.
He'll give you just what you need to get you off the couch.
I don't think anybody else can do it.
Now, somebody says wrong.
What's the wrong part?
What's the wrong part?
Yeah, Tucker is pretty scary.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
So I think Trump has the what will I do about it thing already covered.
Because he's been president, so you pretty much know what he's going to do.
Like all the mystery has been removed.
So since you know he has a set of solutions which clearly seem to be somewhat effective before, you know, he was doing better on a lot of things, All he really needs to do is scare you that Biden is coming for your guns and you're raising your taxes and he's going to destroy the whole country.
And I think he can make the case.
So that's what I would look for.
I would look for a battle of fear for this next election.
Question. Do you remember the polls that came out after the 2020 election and Trump was questioning the outcome of the election, but then the polls came out and they asked people, who did you vote for?
So that you could match the actual, you know, who did you vote for with the vote totals.
And then the polls came up with basically the same answer as the election itself.
Do you remember that? And therefore prove that the election was fair, because that's sort of an indirect way to do an audit.
That you can poll people and find out who they voted for, check it against the actual result, they match, boom.
So you're done, right?
Do you remember those polls? You remember them, right?
They were all over the news. No, I don't remember them either.
I do not remember them.
Why? Why is that?
Huh. The most important question in the entire country.
Huh. And yet, there are all these professional polling companies who are in the business of gathering this exact information.
Interesting. It's exactly what they do for a living.
And yet, nobody decided to check?
Did that happen?
Now, do you notice that you were all confused about whether it's happened or not, right?
I was kind of gaslighting you a little bit.
Were you confused a little bit about whether or not that actually has happened or not?
Now, this again is, this gets back to the questions that we're not asking.
If I were a news person, every time the question of the election came up, I would say, look, it's hard to know exactly what happened, but these exit polls support the outcome.
Or they don't.
Or they don't.
I mean, I would imagine if they didn't, we'd know more about it.
But I just asked that question, and I might have an answer to...
Let's see.
Let me check, because I might actually have the answer to that question.
I asked it this morning. So there was a, Rasmussen had a thread explaining this very thing.
I don't see the date on this.
This was in May.
So May of this year. The question was asked and Rasmussen dealt with it.
How about a poll of likely voters to learn who they actually voted for?
He says, great question.
And we did one in August of 2021.
And he says, first, give a little background.
He goes, according to...
Is this interesting, by the way?
Yeah, if I'm looking down, I can't see the comments.
Okay. So this is, Rasmussen actually did a poll.
I think that's where we're going on this.
I think that's where this is ending up.
According to official sources, there were 158, blah, blah.
So he's saying, assuming these totals were accurate, this gives Biden a 4.5% win over Trump in the popular vote.
So at the moment, we're not talking about the electoral votes.
We're just talking about the popular vote.
So if you polled and found that there was a 4.5% difference between Biden and Trump for all of the votes, That would give you some confidence that the individual states were probably a little bit more likely to be correct, unless they magically cancelled each other out, which would be less likely.
So if Rasmussen polled people and found something like a 4.5% gap, that would tell you that the election was fair and you'd feel pretty comfortable with that, wouldn't you?
Wouldn't you? If Rasmussen polled and found out that the people who said they voted one way or another roughly matched the actual vote, wouldn't you feel better about that?
Now, I know the electoral is a different concept, of course.
Let's see what happened.
So in August of 2021, they asked a simple question, who did you vote for in 2020?
And the results were, and the answer was...
Very close. Basically a tie.
Statistical tie.
Dead tie. And Rasmussen's commentary at the time was, what to make of it?
We're not yet sure.
Joe Biden beating Barack Obama's popular vote totals by this amount of strange belief.
I'm not sure about that.
Because the argument that the vote totals are correct was that the demographics have changed.
The number of extra votes roughly matches the number of extra adults who voted.
I mean, basically, it mirrored the actual population change in the country.
Largely. Now, at least that's the counter-argument.
Has anybody heard a counter to the counter?
Because the argument is too many people voted compared to prior elections.
The counter to that is, yes, but that matches the number of extra people who were, you know, in the country legally and voted.
All right, so as far as I know, The number of people who voted is not the red flag.
Well, let me say it differently.
It's a flag. It's a flag, meaning you need to understand why.
But the explanation for why sounded pretty good to me.
There's just more people in the country.
Because it's easy to forget that in eight years, you add a lot of people to a country.
Like tens of millions of people in eight years.
It's a lot of people. So I don't know if that's the full answer, by the way, but that was the answer given.
All right.
So that's the basic idea.
So I don't know what other pollsters may have asked this question.
I do know that Erasmussen typically is pretty close in their polling before the election to They're one of the closest ones after the election.
When you see how they did, they tend to be one of the best.
So I would assume that that level of accuracy can be extrapolated to the after-the-election polling.
So that's sort of a big unexplained thing, isn't it?
You know, if you were to do this...
So here's the other problem with doing the...
Doing the check this way.
I wonder how many people forget who they voted for.
You ever wonder about that?
It's probably a surprisingly big number.
How many people do you think remember voting and didn't vote?
I'll bet it's more than 1%.
I'll bet at least one person out of 100 says they voted and didn't vote, but actually might remember that they did because they're thinking of a prior election.
Right? Don't you think at least 1% of people have a false memory of voting and didn't vote at all?
How many people answered the question and never had any intention of voting, but they like answering questions?
So they just won't answer the poll.
Yeah, I'm totally a voter.
Did you vote in 2020?
Oh yeah, totally. Totally.
Who'd you vote for? There's a lot of human psychology that goes into knowing whether to trust these numbers.
But it's definitely a flag.
It's a gigantic flag that says, maybe we should look into this a little bit.
So here's a question that I asked.
Would it be legal for citizens to put their own security monitoring video on Dropboxes?
Let's say there was a Dropbox in your neighborhood.
Could you just put your security camera or your blink camera or whatever the hell, just point it out your window and see if you can catch any mules?
I think it's legal because it's a public space, right?
And you could probably even find the cameras that you can charge and, you know, it'll last for like, I don't know, weeks or whatever.
So you wouldn't, you know, you could actually just put a temporary camera.
It just needs Wi-Fi.
So if it's near a Starbucks or something, just pick up the Wi-Fi and put it there.
Trail cams, exactly.
Trail cams. That's exactly what I was looking for.
They're called trail cams.
But that's the specific question, but here's the more general question.
What do you say that our government has failed in their job of, let's say, Convincing us that the elections are legitimate.
I'm not saying the elections are not legitimate.
I'm saying that the job of convincing us and giving us confidence, they just haven't done it.
And here's the question. How much could we do ourselves?
Let's say you didn't trust the Rasmussen polling because it relies on reaching people and asking for human memory.
Let's say you're uncomfortable with how accurate that could ever be, no matter how well you did it.
Let me just suggest something.
Suppose you created an organization.
Maybe they have to be selected...
Maybe they have to be selected randomly.
Probably. But you had a random, really selected group of people.
I'm not sure how you can get the bias out of this, but I think maybe it's possible.
If you get the bias out of it, could you create a sample of people who do vote, remember their vote, and they know they're going to be asked later?
And if you got the right representative sample, and you did it differently than the polling companies do, because the polling companies have the communication channel problem, which is if they're only calling your wired phone, that's just a certain kind of person.
If they only call cell phones, that's a different certain kind of person.
If they only call at a certain time of day, that's a different certain kind of person.
But if you created, if you could do it, Create enough people who volunteered and fit into the model of a randomized group.
So you'd have to have representatives from most of the major groups.
And let's say you had, I don't know how many people would be enough.
5,000? 1,000 is probably enough, but I feel 5,000 would give me a little more confidence.
Now, let's say you just looked at 5,000 in the battleground states, because the other ones don't matter at all, right?
So you made sure your 5,000 were only from the disputed states, or maybe it's 5,000 from each disputed battleground state, whatever the number is to have confidence.
And you say, every election, you people are going to vote, And then we'll just ask you after, did you vote, to make sure that you actually showed up.
And then we'll compare that random number of people who is actually well selected.
Because you could vet 5,000 people way more thoroughly than you could just do a poll every day.
Because when you're doing a poll every day, the amount of checking you can do to make sure you've got a good random sample, it's naturally limited.
But if you could really dig in and find, let's say, 500 patriots, not 500, 5,000, find 5,000 patriots who don't trust their government and are willing to be a private check on the election, is there any reason in the world that that couldn't be created as just a second way to check the results?
Now, the problem is that that organization could be corrupted as well, or they could do their math wrong and act like there's...
No, giving a receipt doesn't help.
So here's something that people don't understand about the election.
I believe that by law, it has to be anonymous.
In other words, when the final vote is in the final database, it can't be paired with a name.
So the final vote can never have a name associated with the vote.
Do you all know that? Because some of your suggestions act like you don't understand that part.
So your name is associated with your vote on the physical ballot.
But there's a process by which that gets separated from the vote tallies, and it gets sent without your name associated, right?
So I don't believe that a receipt would ever give you anything.
The only way it would give you something is if the government allowed you to be their auditor and said, if you sign away your right to an anonymous ballot, you have to sign something that says, I give up my right to anonymity, We will track your vote.
But then you can game that.
Because then somebody would just make sure the ones that are being tracked match whatever fraud they did.
So that wouldn't help you.
At least it wouldn't help you in every situation.
There would still be a way around it.
But maybe it would help you a little bit.
Here's my point. I believe that your government isn't going to fix elections Because they think they benefit by them being crooked.
In other words, it's the game they already know how to play.
They don't want to change the game to one they don't know how to play.
Both sides. Both sides.
So the Republicans want to make sure they keep the Republican districts.
Democrats want to keep their Democrat districts.
They don't really want anything to change.
Right? The last thing they want is to lose their district.
So we can't really trust the government to do it for us.
So the larger question is, is there something that citizens can do on their own?
Maybe it costs some money, but something outside of the government that would act as a type of proxy vote or, let's say, a poor man's audit.
Just to know if you're in the ballpark, right?
Right? You know, I'll tell you again, it doesn't bother me too much.
If we had an election that was, like, really razor-thin margin, and somehow I later found out that, you know, there was some cheating that changed the result, but it was, like, basically an exact tie, but, you know, would it go on 100 votes the other way?
I don't care. In terms of the system, I don't care.
I mean, I care about the outcome, but I don't care about the system.
If the system gives me a dead tie, I feel like the system worked, whichever way it went.
Like, you know, if somebody cheated by one vote and it fell the wrong direction, I don't know, is the country worse off because the majority of one person was ignored?
I don't know. Um...
Rasmussen, speaking of Rasmussen, also did an updated poll on the laptop from hell, and 63% of likely U.S. voters still think that's a big deal, a big story.
And a lot of people think that a big number of people think it changed the results of the election.
So... I saw Molly Hemingway say that the FBI had changed the last four presidential elections.
Does that sound right? That the last four presidential elections were, you know, the FBI had its finger on the scale.
But what's interesting is that, you know, once it was anti-Hillary, when Comey talked about the emails, once it was, you know, anti-Trump.
So, what's going on?
I'm not even sure they're all on the same side.
Do you ever wonder if what Comey did was trying to help Hillary Clinton and it backfired?
Have you ever considered that?
Because he tried to get the news out even though it was close to the election.
It might have been worse if it came out even closer to the election.
Because I think he got it out in time to discount it.
To have it just no longer be a shocking new thing.
I don't know. It's hard to know what he had in mind.
Oh, Dan Bongino has said this for years.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it would make sense.
The story would all fit together then.
That doesn't mean it's true. You know, at the time...
And I think I have to reassess this.
At the time, I thought that Comey was just doing it because it had to be done.
It was something the country needed to know.
And he thought, you know, Jesus, we don't...
No, he didn't say that.
But he probably thought to himself, I can't let the country find out after the election that we knew all this.
So... You know, he had an argument for why he had to put it out.
But if we assume they're all political creatures, then it was nothing about the country and it was everything about Comey's own career, I guess.
All right. Biden had some kind of a rally or speech in which he was screeching in his usual Dementia Joe way that he had beat pharma.
And then everybody cheered.
We beat pharma.
What? What?
No, I guess he means that Medicare can negotiate prices?
Is that it? Did it have something to do with the legislation pharma didn't like?
Because I'll give him that.
I'll give him that.
Because I think he did maybe do something that would be good for prices.
Maybe. Maybe.
But if you look at the bigger picture of how many billions they've funneled into Pharma and how much they trusted them, I don't know that they beat Pharma so much as Pharma beat the shit out of us.
If you were scoring the fight, Pharma versus the citizens of the United States, who do you think got the biggest victory?
I don't know. I think it was a technical knockout.
I think Forma won.
CNN continues to make viewers dumber.
And it just boggles the mind that CNN viewers don't know you can't prove a negative.
Or at least they act like they don't know it.
It's hard to know what they really believe.
But here's something that could be said about the 2020 election.
That I think would be completely accurate and without bias.
It goes like this. We have no way to know if the 2020 election was fair or not, but no court has found any evidence that would say there was major fraud.
Fair? There is no way to know that some undiscovered thing didn't happen, because it would be, by definition, undiscovered.
How do you know what you don't know?
There's no way to know the things you don't know.
That's why they're the things you don't know.
The only thing you can say is, we found no evidence that we could act on.
That's fair. But instead, here's how CNN says it.
They basically say it's a false claim.
That the election was rigged is a false claim.
How do they know it's false? They know it can't be proven.
They know it wasn't proven. They know there's no evidence that would change the result.
They know that no court ruled anything of any substance.
And I know that I personally haven't seen anything that would overturn the election.
Personally, I haven't seen it.
But can you say, therefore, that it's a false claim?
You could say it's unproven.
But somehow the CNN viewers let them get away with this.
And I think this is one of these things that their new CEO needs to maybe put a little thumb on.
Because I'm perfectly okay with CNN saying that so far all of the claims made about the election have been bullshit.
Because I told you that was going to be the case.
I said at least 95% would be bullshit.
And so far, it looks at least 95%.
But I feel like CNN just makes their viewers dumber by asserting that they know something didn't happen just because they don't know if it happened.
Scott, the suppression of laptop most certainly proves its government involvement.
I don't know why you're yelling at me in caps about that.
Yeah, any voting security attempt will be labeled as racist.
Well, everything that Republicans do gets labeled as racist.
So there's some guy who owns a lithium mining company.
He says there won't be enough lithium for all the electric cars.
There is enough, apparently there's enough lithium in the world, but the rate at which they can mine it is nowhere near fast enough to get to the number of electric cars that is the plan.
Are you worried about that?
How worried should you be that an expert in lithium...
It says that even though there's enough lithium in the world, the physical mining of it, you can't wrap it up that fast.
It just takes a long time to get a mine going, I guess.
So, what do you think about that?
Here's a reframe for you.
I'm going to call it the, you could call this the Elon Musk reframe, in a way.
Although, don't blame him for it if you don't like it.
It goes like this.
I often imagine that my actual reality is like a video game.
I'm in the video game and I have a mission or some kind of quest, but I have to find weapons and energy along the way.
I don't know where it's going to be.
I have to go find it.
So I don't know how to finish the adventure.
I only know that there's some chance that I can find what I need to finish the adventure.
I think this is one of those cases.
Would you say, oh, let's not have any aggressive goals for electric cars because we don't know how to get there?
That's sort of a loser approach.
We shouldn't try because as of this moment we don't know how to get there.
Because that was true of the moon shot, right?
The 1969 moon shot.
When Kennedy said we're going to the moon, he didn't know how.
He said, we're going to figure out how.
This to me looks like one of those cases.
We don't know how we would get enough lithium in time, but all that we'll figure it out.
So I'm going to put this on the category of things I'm not going to worry about.
I think we'll figure it out.
I mean, I don't know how to solve it.
Now, I'm hoping that's true also with fertilizer.
Now, by the way, whether I worry about it or not won't change what happens.
They should stop pushing electric cars until we have enough electricity.
I don't agree with that.
I don't agree. In the old days, do you remember the old saying, measure twice, cut once?
Probably you all learned that when you were a kid.
If you ever did a project with a male parent, probably you heard that too many times.
Measure twice, cut once.
What does Paul Graham...
Who would be one of the premier experts on startups.
What does he say about measure twice, cut once?
What would he say about that?
He would say that's old thinking.
That's sort of pre-internet thinking.
We currently have a situation where it's easier to go out and try something and see if it works because the cost of failure is low, especially if it's software.
So you can just go out and try a quick, dirty version of something and see if anybody responds.
If nobody responds to the approximate version that's not quite finished, they're not going to respond to the finished one either.
So you're better off just pushing ahead and see if you can figure it out in the modern world.
Whereas in the past, where there were more resource constraints, you had to kind of know in advance.
But let's say the electric car market starts heating up and there's not enough electricity.
What would naturally happen?
Well, the economist in me says that the sources of electricity that were too expensive before suddenly become economical because the demand for electricity would become so great Price would go up, and then suddenly the person who didn't want to build, I don't know, the solar facility or whatever, they say, oh, now it makes sense, because I can charge so much more for electricity.
So I've got a feeling that this is not unusual for leadership.
So one of the things that California got criticized for, and you're going to hate this, You're going to hate this.
Some of you might want to just turn off the live stream before I even say the next thing I'm going to say.
You're going to hate this so much.
Like, you're really going to hate this.
Newsom's right. Newsom's right.
To push the electric cars before we have enough electricity to power them.
That's the right play. Because he's forcing people to figure out.
And the market likes money.
So he's creating a situation where they can make money by figuring it out.
And I believe they will.
I believe they will.
Yeah. Now, here I'm drawing on, you know, years of management, observation, and experience, and here I'm agreeing with the Paul Graham version of the world, but I don't want to blame him in case I'm misstating his opinion.
Don't blame Paul Graham for anything I say, okay?
Just blame me. And I feel that in the new world, you start first and then figure it out.
Do you think Elon Musk knew how to build a rocket to get to Mars when he started putting his money into it?
No. Do you think he knew how to build an electric car before he built one?
No. No.
Do you think he knew how to put up the...
What do you call it? The Starlink network of satellites before he did it.
Oh yeah, he probably knew that one.
But by the time he had Starlink, I think that one you could just work out on paper and you'd know exactly what you're getting.
Because I think they knew how to make small satellites.
So he really just had to figure out the rocket part.
So that one actually he probably had a pretty good idea what was going to work out with that.
The car was already electric when Elon joined Tesla.
Well, it was, but it wasn't marketed and successful.
I think Elon would say the same thing in his own words, which is that inventing an electric car was only a part of the process.
Getting people to the psychology of wanting to own one So you could start building on the economics of volume was the hard part.
And so he solved that by having the coolest electric car that would go crazy fast.
So if you were a car person, you'd be like, oh, there's a car that goes that fast?
Oh, I gotta have one.
So he worked on the psychology of buyers in a way that nobody had figured out how to do.
Look what the Prius did and others.
They built the ugliest little car that nobody wants to try to get you all to own cars like that.
Seriously? That's like completely ignoring everything you know about human psychology.
We're going to make it real embarrassing to drive this little Prius.
And by the way, even with that approach, they sold a ton of Priuses.
The Prius was a gigantic hit.
But it didn't get you all the way to electric cars.
To go all the way to electric cars, you needed the Elon magic, which is working on the brain.
So what he invented was a way to reprogram your brain about electric cars.
That's his best invention so far.
Also making you think that going to Mars is not only practical, but it's necessary.
Just think about that.
Elon Musk persuaded the entire, at least the country, if not the world, that going to Mars is both practical and necessary.
That did not exist until Elon Musk told us those are both things.
Oh yeah, I can do it, and it's absolutely necessary for human survival that we go to the stars.
And he's right. He's right.
All right. How many of you know what the Monroe Doctrine is?
Do you all know what the Monroe Doctrine is?
So Monroe, one of the founders...
It had the doctrine that says, you Europeans, you can't conquer any countries over in the Americas.
It doesn't matter if it's North America or South America or Central America.
You Europeans...
At the time, they were just thinking Europeans.
They weren't worried about Asia.
But let's extend that.
The point was, no foreign country taking over one of our American clients, if you will.
Because at the time, I think America felt like it was sort of dad to everything over here.
So we had some power over them, even though they didn't like it.
But Putin just put out his Putin-Monroe Doctrine.
That basically says that Russia has some kind of responsibility or rights to the Russian-speaking, ethnic Russian people, even if they're in neighboring countries.
Do you see any problem with that?
Putin is claiming some responsibility for other countries, which means trying to control those other countries.
Now, there's some history to it, so it's not like it's something you just made up.
You know, Russia has always tried to dominate its neighbors.
But, kind of dangerous.
It's kind of dangerous.
I don't see how this could be more dangerous.
So keep an eye on that.
Apparently, Russia has turned off the Nord Stream 1 pipeline completely, and they're basically just trying to freeze Germany.
Now, is there any history in the world of countries that tried to destroy Germany and then it worked out in the long run?
I feel like trying to destroy Germany from a historical perspective, that's how you get Hitler, right?
Now, I don't think there's much chance of Germany producing another Hitler anytime soon, but...
Correct me on my history, but wasn't it the World War I treatment of a defeated Germany that caused the rise of Hitler?
Or is that an accurate history, or is that just sort of the version the winners gave us?
Is that accurate? Does anybody say that's not accurate?
Okay. So here we have Russians basically treating Germans in a way that I feel like Germans...
Let me explain Germans for you.
Because I've got enough of that blood in me.
I've got some bunch of British and Irish and Scotch and Welch and Dutch and German.
But I think it's about half German.
And... Germans are the most helpful, friendly, give-you-the-shirt-off-your-back kind of people you could ever have.
Until you really piss them off.
Am I right? Shirt off their back.
They will help you so fast.
Anything you want.
I remember this story. When I first moved to San Francisco, I had this tiny little in-law apartment that only had one room and a bathroom, basically.
And my landlord, who lived in the larger building above, he was a German immigrant.
And he had the very German attitude.
And one day I told him that I had rented a dumpster And I just wanted to inform him that it would be, you know, parked outside for a day or two, because I had some garbage to get rid of, and I had a lot of it.
And I said, hey, I'm only going to use part of this dumpster, so if you'd like, if you have any stuff, just throw it in the dumpster too, and, you know, it's free.
I already paid for it.
Do you know what my German-born landlord, his response to that?
Just take a guess.
What was his response to me offering him a free service that he wanted?
Like, he wanted the service.
He had stuff to throw out. He couldn't handle the fact that I was paying for it.
Couldn't handle it.
Because he had a lot of money, and he knew I could barely afford my apartment.
And so for me to barely afford my apartment and pay for something for him, couldn't handle it.
Couldn't I handle it?
But I'm half German too.
So we did a lot of this.
I don't even remember how we finally resolved it.
But we got in a fight about, not a real fight, but a disagreement about who was going to be nicer to the other.
Now, that was such a German interaction.
Such a German interaction.
And so I'm watching Russia say to Germany, hey, Germany, what are you going to do if I poke you?
If I poke you? Nothing.
I won't watch this. I'll poke you a little more.
How about that? Oh, you're complaining a little bit.
You're complaining a little bit. That's nothing.
I'll poke you a little bit. There's a point...
Let me explain to you.
There's a point at which Germans stop being friendly.
You don't want to reach that point.
You really, really don't want to reach that point.
And Putin's getting pretty close.
Now, again, I think the modern view of Germany is that it's like a big puppy dog that's been defanged.
Right? You know, oh, they're not going to cause any trouble because of their history.
Well, but who has pissed them off this much before?
Now, maybe they say we brought it on ourselves to some extent or something.
But I would be really careful about how hard you push Germany.
I'd be really careful about that.
Because that could sneak up on you.
I guess Russia is buying Iranian drones and millions of North Korean artillery shells.
Now, is that foreshadowing?
All right, so what Europe is going to be lacking will be energy.
But at least energy can be produced in different ways.
I think they'll survive the winter.
And then there'll be enough time to start adjusting and getting other sources.
But if you see Russia trying to operate without modern technology, they don't have chips and they can't trade to get the good stuff anymore, if they have to rely on Iranian drones, which have been pretty sketchy, and I don't know what the quality of North Korean artillery shells is, but doesn't that tell you they're in a lot of trouble?
Now, the news from Ukraine, which is completely not credible, by the way.
Anything that comes out of Ukraine is not to be believed.
But the news that they're telling is that they're counter-offensive in Kherson or wherever is, you know, having small gains.
You know, they're degrading the Russians and getting ready to make some move there.
Now, I don't know if any of that's true.
That's the least credible thing that comes out of a war zone, is our team's winning.
I'm pretty sure the Russians think they're winning, too.
But I'm surprised we got to this point where what we're talking about is the Ukrainian counterattack.
When was the last time somebody said Russia has gained more territory?
How long has it been since Russia gained territory?
I feel like there's a momentum shift, right?
Now, I think that the counterattack might be a little bit fake.
Meaning that Zelensky is so good at managing public opinion that once the news of Russian territorial gains is stopped, he needed a counter-narrative to say, oh, if it's not going to be in the news that Russia is winning, we better create some news that we're winning, and people will give us more money because it looks like we're winning.
So mostly I think the counter-attack is a fundraising technique.
I don't know that Zelensky thinks he can recapture anything.
I think he just says, hey, we're making progress.
Give us some more money and we'll make some more progress.
So it just looks like fundraising to me.
Surprisingly, Surprisingly, a poll of a European opinion of the Ukraine situation is that they're very supportive of the economic sanctions on Russia, which means that they won't have energy themselves, meaning it'll be too expensive for a lot of them.
But 7 out of 10 in the EU are in favor of...
Military supplies to Ukraine.
And 78% of citizens support the sanctions against Russia.
I mean, that is really strong support.
That is really strong support.
So, if you have that much support...
It looks like the Europeans have decided that Russia is not going to kill them.
They're going to take whatever level of, let's say, inconvenience and discomfort it requires.
Have I ever, of course I have, told you the difference between wanting something and deciding?
It's one of those critical differences.
Because once you detect in somebody a decision, you can predict that they will succeed.
But if you only see them having a strong desire for something, it could go either way.
Decision is really predictive.
And it looks to me like the Europeans made a decision.
Am I wrong? I saw some people are from Europe watching.
If there are any, I know there are.
But the Europeans who are watching right now, would you say that Europe has decided that they're going to power through this?
And they're going to take Putin down by forever taking him out of the pipeline.
Right? So, if you're from Europe, identify yourself.
Massive protests in the Czech Republic.
Yep. Yep.
You're from Europe, but what's your opinion?
Massive protests.
Yeah. Yeah.
But is it safe to say that Europe doesn't just want, you know, Putin to do poorly?
It looks like they've decided.
They've just decided that he's not going to have that market anymore.
I think you can now predict how that goes.
I think you can predict that Putin's withdrawal of energy will not have the political impact he hopes.
It looks like Europe decided.
Because you don't see that much agreement about pretty much anything.
All right. And that is the exciting show for today.
Lots of suffering for many winters.
I don't know. I think this is a two-winters situation.
I don't think it's a many-winters situation.
I think it's a two-winters.
But I'm not positive about that.
We'll see. Yeah, I think that our ability to adjust to big shocks is about a two-year...
These days, we're just so good at adjusting.
Everyone says they can take the pain until the pain starts.
Well, that's true. Will the USA help?
I don't know. Just...
Printing unlimited money?
Yeah, we need mass production of microprocessors.
I think Elon's money is in fusion, though.
I might be wrong about that.
But I think Elon is a generation ahead.
Where you expect him to be, I guess.
Six million elderly Germans live alone.
Mm.
You know, the number of people living alone is really a gigantic problem.
You know, there's a trend of seniors living with college students.
Have you heard that? Like one senior and one college student, because the senior can provide the cheap housing, and the kid, the young person, can provide some services and stuff.
To me, that's the best.
I've actually considered that model.
I was actually thinking of getting a college student roommate.
Just to have somebody around who has a different set of skills and schedule than I do.
Because my problem is, the only way that anybody would know if I died in my house was if I didn't do the livestream for two days in a row.
If I missed it once, you might just think I had a sick day.
But if I missed it twice, they'd probably do a health check at my house.
