Episode 1891 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Kanye Causing Trouble
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Maybe Russia didn't blow Nord Stream intentionally
We need to negotiate with the cartels on fentanyl
BLM brought the country together
Ye says he's going "Def Con 3" on Jewish people
Inner city resistance to education, college
PayPal reverses $2,500 fine policy
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Time to savor, savor, savor.
Good. Some of you are sipping without the savoring, and I don't know, that seems unacceptable.
Well, Saturday Night Live is going into full-throated mocking of President Biden.
Yeah. And...
I don't know, does this mark any kind of a changing point?
I don't think so. But they're making fun of his mental acuity directly by showing clips of him looking doddering and making fun of him getting us close to nuclear war.
So there's still a little bit of a, let's say, a gentle ribbing.
But they're definitely saying some negative things about Biden.
A little bit. A little bit.
Is it the weirdest thing in the world that Biden has maybe pushed us close to nuclear war, but I don't really spend much time worrying about it.
Do you? How many of you are literally worried about nuclear war reaching you?
Let's say affecting you somehow.
Are any of you actually worried?
Because I know some of you are.
A little bit, nah, no.
Worried a little, not me.
Yeah. See, the trouble is, there's no point to it.
And although we imagine that Putin might be unstable, nobody says he's crazy, do they?
I haven't heard anybody say he's, you know, just mentally unstable or something.
So there isn't, I don't see any scenario where he would launch a nuclear attack.
Just don't see it.
Because I think he has enough conventional weapons to wipe out, you know, the civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
If he wants to do bad things, he's got other options that won't definitely kill him.
Well, speaking of Saturday Night Live, makes me think of Pete Davidson.
Which makes me think of Tom Brady and Giselle...
You know, Tom Brady and Giselle, whose last name is not terribly pronounceable by me right now.
But, as bad as a divorce is, what do you think Tom Brady is the most worried about with this divorce?
I'm gonna put it out there that he would be most worried that his ex, Giselle, would start dating Pete Davidson.
I feel like that would be the worst case scenario.
It's like, okay, a divorce is terrible, but there is one thing worse than getting divorced.
Your ex dating Pete Davidson.
Now, Ye would tell you that's no picnic, but Honestly, I worried about it when I got divorced.
I'm like, oh my God, I hope Pete Davidson doesn't know I'm getting a divorce.
I don't think I had to worry about it, but it runs through your mind.
It goes through your mind.
That's all. I'm just saying it goes through your mind.
Well, do you want the biggest mind F you've ever had lately?
Let me just blow your mind.
Are you ready? Now, I feel bad because I read an opinion, I think it was Lawfare blog, but I may be giving the wrong credit here.
I hope I'm not. And there was an argument that the Russian, that pipeline explosion was most likely accidental.
What do you think? And I'll tell you the argument in a moment.
But what's your first impression to that?
It was most likely an accident, right?
Now, your first thought is there's no way that anybody could make that argument, right?
Am I right that you're sure I can't repeat an argument that would change your mind, right?
And now, for the biggest mind-eff you've had all week, I'm going to change your mind and make you think it was accidental.
I read an opinion on this, and I did not think I could be convinced.
But here's the argument.
Number one, it's hard to keep a pipeline maintenance, well, it's hard to maintain.
But it's much easier, I learned, it's much easier to maintain a pipeline that's actively flowing.
Because if it's actively flowing, then anything that could get caught in the air is also moving along.
Basically, nothing gets clogged.
But if you have a pipeline that's not being used, but it's also full of gas, then apparently there are a number of things that can go wrong maintenance-wise, and they're catastrophic.
Meaning that it gets plugged.
So if you wanted to turn it back on again, it just wouldn't work.
Because there are some hydrates, right?
The hydrates or something get plugged in there.
So there's something kind of called the plug.
Now this is a well-known phenomenon.
It's a well-known phenomenon.
Meaning that if you turned off any pipeline of this type, it would get plugs.
Guaranteed. So I don't think there's any chance it wouldn't plug up.
Right? So that's the first thing you can fact check.
Is there any chance it wouldn't get plugged up?
And I think the answer is no.
It would always get plugged up.
And fairly soon.
Like, it wouldn't be a rare thing.
It would be the most common thing that could happen.
Now, here's the second part.
How do you fix it?
If it gets plugged, and you ever want to use it again, and one imagines that Russia would want to have that option, how would you unplug it?
And the answer is you have to depressurize it very slowly over weeks.
Over weeks. And if you want to do it safely, you have to depressurize it from both sides.
So that would mean the German side as well as the Russian side.
Here's the hypothesis.
The hypothesis is, you don't want to add heat to it.
I think that blew up a pipeline once when they tried that.
The hypothesis is that Russia may have wanted to keep the option of the pipeline open and may have tried to depressurize it from one side.
And if they tried to depressurize it from one side, they probably were doing both of them around the same time.
And they may have just blown them both up.
Now, here are the things that you would need to fact check to find out if this is true.
Number one, what are the odds that it would blow up in multiple places around the same time?
Well, let me reverse the question.
The blasts were 17 hours apart.
Who would intentionally do a 17-hour gap between their...
Between their attacks. Because after the first one blew up, people would be looking for the second one.
There would be more scrutiny.
You wouldn't put a 17-hour delay between two attacks, would you?
Like militarily, that wouldn't make sense.
Because the odds of you finding the second one would be higher.
That's one argument. But a 17-hour gap would actually explain a maintenance fix.
Because they might have been working on them at the same time, and whatever problem they found on one might have been common to all of them.
So maybe it was just a difference of when they exploded.
But apparently Russian maintenance is famously not thorough.
All right, so what do you think of that?
What do you think of that hypothesis?
Here's what I would do.
I'm not sold on the hypothesis, but it would explain a lot, wouldn't it?
It would explain a lot.
And even the timing of it doesn't really, is not a coincidence.
Because if you said to yourself, what are the odds that it would blow up at the same time the war is on?
And the answer is very high.
Because that's when it was turned off.
It was the turning it off that made it likely to blow up.
And it was turned off because of the war.
So the moment they turned it off, the odds of it blowing up were high.
So that's the fast argument.
The moment it was turned off, given that they couldn't do the kind of maintenance that they'd want to do on both ends.
They could only do one end maintenance, presumably, because maybe Germany wasn't cooperating.
But the odds of it blowing up were high, not low.
Interesting, isn't it? Now, what'd that do to your brain?
Because yesterday, that was quite a head spinner to me.
I was like, oh, really?
Why did it take me this long to learn that once it's turned off, the odds of it blowing up are high?
I just assumed the odds were very low, didn't you?
Don't you think that the news should have given you this one fact?
And by the way, I'm not sure that what I told you is right.
I read it from one source.
But don't you want to know this one question?
If that kind of pipeline is turned off and not meticulously maintained, what are the odds of it blowing up within, let's say, six months?
If the answer is every expert says the odds are pretty high, then I would say that's what happened.
Who would agree with me?
That if we could get an answer to this, and of course our news sources are useless, because isn't this the one and only question?
What were the odds of it happening naturally?
I've never seen anybody answer that question on the news.
Have you? Have you ever seen a pipeline maintenance person on the news answer the question, could this have blown up on its own if it were closed down, full of gas, and poorly maintained?
Am I wrong that that's the central question and you've never seen anybody even ask it or try to answer it?
You know, I've told you before that I've speculated...
That the most value that we could do here is to tell our media what they're not telling us that we need to know.
Because the stuff they don't tell you totally influences what you think about the story.
And that's the biggest question.
And nobody's telling us the answer to the biggest question.
And by the way, how hard would it be to get that answer?
All you have to do is go to any expert who does this kind of work.
There must be plenty of Americans who have this expertise.
Just put them on the air and say, what do you think?
Could this have blown up on its own?
I feel like the news is so in the bag for the government that maybe the government wants the thought that it was blown up by a military operation.
I think they want that out there.
Because did you notice that, and here maybe Brennan did something good for the country?
I think blaming Russia right away was smart propaganda, even if they thought it was accidental, because maybe they do.
It could be that America knows it was accidental or doesn't know why it blew up.
So the first thing you should do is just go out and blame Russia so you can get it out there first.
In which case that would have been a good play.
Militarily speaking.
Alright, I've decided that conservatives are really the problem for fixing both fentanyl ODs and education.
And here's why.
Because in both cases, conservatives insist that the solution is readily available if we would just take it.
But it's not even a possible solution in both cases.
So conservatives would say, well, if the fentanyl is coming from Mexico, which it is, build that wall, get your border security tight, and problem solved.
So as long as conservatives think there is a solution, they don't need to look for any new solution.
There is one. Build the wall.
Accept that The wall we're building has, you know, gaps in it this big between the slats.
And the total amount of fentanyl it would take to kill everybody in your city would be held in your hand.
So all you'd have to do is hand it to somebody on the other side of the wall.
And say, uh, uh, Bob?
Hey, you know, I'll give you $100,000 if you'll take this little wad of fentanyl and give it to my friend across the street.
There's nothing you can do to stop the shipment of fentanyl that's completely not on the table.
But conservatives have made the argument about the wall.
So as long as you're arguing about the wall, you're not doing anything for fentanyl.
But if you can say you are, then politically I guess you're done, right?
Oh, politically we said we're building a wall, but those Democrats won't let us, so I guess there's nothing you can do about fentanyl except increase some penalties, which, big deal.
If they were serious about fentanyl, they would be negotiating with the cartels.
We would ask them for an ambassador, and we would sit them down with some immunity so that they can actually talk to us, and we'd say, you've crossed the line, and we're just going to pave your whole fucking country, or at least the cartel parts, not the civilian parts.
We're going to take out the cartel completely, militarily, with no limitations on our actions, unless you stop fentanyl right now.
We should at least give them the offer, because they are a business.
We're going to talk about PayPal in a little while.
Why did PayPal do what it did?
It reversed its policy.
We'll talk about that. Because it was a business decision.
It was just a business decision.
We need to give the cartels a business decision.
Here's your decision.
We can play cat and mouse with you with, you know, the old crimes that you're doing.
But if you send one more box of fentanyl our way, the entire military of the United States is going to hunt you down and kill every one of you.
If you're a business, what do you do?
I would think any business would take that seriously and say, all right, from a profit and loss perspective, we should focus on these other things that don't get the entire military in our pants.
If we're not negotiating with the cartels directly, top of government to top of government, meaning the cartel government themselves, we're not serious.
How can you be serious if you haven't even had a conversation?
I mean, really. Does that look serious to you?
The other thing that I would definitely look at is purified alternatives.
And I don't know if anybody's trialing that in a way that isn't stupid.
The way San Francisco did it, I think, was just poorly implemented.
Maybe it wasn't thought out.
But I think there's something to separating people and letting them have the drugs that they want safely.
How about teaching kids not to use drugs?
Well, we know that that doesn't work.
And see, that's another perfect example of why the conservatives are the problem.
Because conservatives believe that you can teach people not to do drugs and that you can build a wall.
I guarantee you those are the two worst approaches.
So if you focus on them, you're the problem.
You think you might be part of the solution because you think those would be good things to do, but they're not.
You need to catch up. You need to up your knowledge about the problem.
If you get your knowledge about the problem up to a high enough level, then you can be part of the productive conversations.
But if you're just saying wall and teach them not to do drugs, you're not part of anything.
Those are not even worth talking about.
They don't have any potential at all.
Yeah, just saying no didn't work.
So that bridge to Crimea that was attacked by the Ukrainians, we assume, the Russians say it's already open.
But I don't know how open it is.
I mean, I would think that if you reduce the effectiveness of the bridge by, I don't know, 40%, that's got to be a pretty big deal, right, if it's the primary transportation thing.
But it also tells me that the bridge is reachable.
Here's a question I have.
Why did the Russians, why were they so confident they could protect that bridge?
There's something I don't understand.
Are you telling me that the United States doesn't have anything that can fly or float to that bridge from some Ukrainian asset?
There's nothing the United States has that we could sell to Ukraine that would get to that bridge.
I feel like there would be like 10 ways to do it.
Right? And I guess the thing I don't know is, how can Russia guard that entire perimeter that you need to guard?
I mean, how much...
Somebody said it was an RC drone boat.
Did anybody hear that? That it was a drone that went under it?
And that's my question.
How could you possibly check every boat that goes under there?
How could you check every car that goes over there?
And was it a suicide attack or some kind of a drone situation?
Yeah. Who is telling you about the war?
Do I have to deal with another one of you?
Excuse me, I'm going to take a pause for the new people.
New people, when we talk about Ukraine, here are the rules.
We all know that all of the information about Ukraine is probably bullshit.
We all know Ukraine is huge liars because it's a war.
We all know Russia are huge liars because they're Russia.
They don't need a reason.
We all know our government is a huge liar.
Are you okay? Can you deal with that?
The fact that we don't know any of this is accurate?
So those are the ground rules.
If you ask me about the quality of my sources, I will simply remind you that so far, you should all be fucking listening to me, because I'm the only one who's been right about Ukraine consistently since Russia crossed the border.
I was definitely wrong about them crossing the border.
But since then, I've been the most right.
I'm literally the only person who said I think Ukraine can win this because of American weaponry.
So maybe the other sources should listen to me for a while.
But don't be surprised if 100% of any of the information we see is false.
That should be your baseline expectation that the knowledge is not false.
Not reliable.
All right. So I think that bridge is going to get hit again because I can't imagine that it's not vulnerable.
I just can't imagine we can't get to it somehow.
Here's the good news.
You know, I never would have seen this happening, but it actually happened.
Black Lives Matter brought the country together.
And we're actually all on the same page with that.
Here's what I mean. BLM has two meanings.
Some people hear it and say, oh, the organization.
I don't like that organization because I think they're corrupt.
And other people hear BLM and they say, oh, it's the idea.
Well, I like the idea, so therefore I like it.
I think we've reached the point where there's nobody, black or white, who believes that the organization...
Was valid.
I think all black and all white citizens who were paying attention now understand that the leaders of the organization were corrupt.
Right? So we kind of came together on that.
Secondly, so that's the political part.
I think we all agreed. Politically, it was a corrupt organization.
But, then let's talk about the philosophy that black lives matter.
I've literally never heard anybody disagree with it.
Have you? So I think we're all on the same page.
Of course Black Lives Matter.
As Ye says, it's obvious.
So weirdly, we ended up on the same page.
The organization was corrupt.
The idea of it is fine if you take the political part out of it.
Let's go fix something.
We all came together.
I mean, I didn't see it happening.
I'm totally surprised.
But I can wear the Black Lives Matter shirt completely without any sense of irony or sarcasm or anything, because I can completely embrace the idea.
Because now the political part is sort of stripped out.
Well, let's talk about Kanye.
So, do you think he could go 24 hours without causing trouble?
Well, apparently not.
So yesterday or last night, I guess, he got restricted or some kind of throttling going on on Instagram because he sent a message to Diddy or somebody, and I'm quoting, and I don't know what this means, because this is what Yeh said, that he was going to go Death Con 3 on Jewish people tomorrow.
But that he can't be anti-Semitic because he's black and black people are Jewish.
Now, let me...
Often I have to interpret things for you because sometimes you'll see things in the news and then you'll wait for me to explain to you why it all makes sense and maybe you're missing the point and that maybe it's taken out of context and it's misinterpreted.
So let me explain to you Because nobody else will do it for you.
Let me explain to you what Ye means when he says he's going to go death con three and all Jewish people and black people are Jewish so he can't be anti-Semitic.
What that means is...
I have no idea.
I don't even have a good guess.
I hope it doesn't mean what it looks like.
Can we agree on this?
Can we agree that I hope it doesn't mean exactly what it looks like, because exactly what it looks like doesn't look good.
Doesn't look good. But we're under the 48-hour rule, are we not?
We're under the 48-hour rule, which means he gets to clarify.
And should he clarify in a way where I can say, oh, okay, that's what you're doing, then I'll be fine.
If he doesn't clarify, well, I guess you will get to make our own decisions.
I think you will. I mean, DEFCON 3 is full readiness, not an...
Well, come on. That's not a distinction that matters, that DEFCON 3 is full readiness, not an attack.
I mean, I didn't think he was going to start rounding up people and putting them in camps.
Well, we can speculate what he means.
We can speculate. It could be exactly what it looks like.
But let's just wait.
Let's wait and see. The thing I worry about with Ye is that once he gets some traction on something, it seems like there's There's no such thing as too far.
Which is also why we like him, right?
Because he's unwilling to be bound by other people's requirements of where, you know, that he stay in his lane.
I mean, he may have left the ultimate lane on this one.
He may be testing how far he can go.
So, we'll find out.
It'll be interesting either way.
I saw...
When I said that, you know, we've all come together over the BLM stuff, I also tweeted, you know, can we fix education now?
Because if we can agree that, you know, black lives matter, maybe that's like a little stepping stone toward working together on just something small to get some, you know, maybe some confidence that we can work together.
We meaning the left and the right.
And fix schools. And then I saw a comment from Twitter user Jeremy Kaufman who notes rather provocatively that he says that either outcomes, he's talking about school grades and the differences between black and white outcomes, he says either outcomes differ on average by race Or public school teachers are the most racist people in the country.
So he believes there's only two explanations for why, and they showed some data.
I don't know how credible the data is, but it's suggested that poor white kids do about the same as rich white kids in school.
Do you believe that? First of all, is that even true?
Do you think poor white kids do roughly this?
On the SATs. Just on the SATs.
Do you think they do roughly?
That doesn't sound right.
But whether that's right or not, my point is going to be slightly off that.
My point is this.
How do you separate schools the way they are now from culture?
And I'll give you a specific example.
I came from a small town which was, you know, lower income kind of a place.
Very small town. 2,000 people in my town, 40 people in my graduating class.
Small town. So my, you know, the education that I got from that small town was not the greatest in the world.
But I got to college.
Now, when I was born, practically from the time I could understand language, my mother was telling me that I was going to go to college no matter what, and that that would be my ticket to a good life.
And also, that if I got rich, I'd give her some money.
I'd help her out, because she always wanted to be rich, but didn't have the option.
So she thought, well, I'm going to make sure you kids go to college, and if one of you makes it, maybe you'll share some of it.
Which I ended up doing, actually.
So let me ask you this.
Do you think being told you're going to go to college and succeed from birth made a difference in my path?
Of course it did.
Of course. I didn't even know there was anything else to do.
I didn't even think failure was one of the options.
I never once thought about not going to college.
Not once. I don't think I ever made a serious thought that I would, well, maybe not go to college.
Not once. Now, take my mother and plop her into the inner city of You know, worst place you could be, and make her a black mother instead of my mother.
And she's got a black kid, and she says, from birth, you're going to college.
But my school is terrible, and the people are bad, but you're going to college.
Does it work? I say no.
I say it wouldn't work.
I say it wouldn't work.
You know why? Because my mother's one influence wouldn't be enough to overcome my environment.
It was enough to overcome my environment.
Sort of not really a college-bound community, but nobody was against it.
Nobody in my town ever said, maybe you shouldn't go to college.
Maybe you should do these drugs instead.
Maybe you should join my gang instead of going to college.
There was no counter-narrative.
So even though the narrative that my mother gave me might have been somewhat rare within my town, there was nobody on the other side.
So I had a clean highway.
To me, I mean, my highway was greased all the way.
It was like, here's your path, and it's all downhill.
The only thing you have to do is get on it.
It's like 100 miles of straight highway.
It's all downhill. Just be on it and you will succeed.
And so my mother told me where the road was.
Everybody in my town agreed.
Everybody. No exceptions.
And they said, it's just right here.
Everybody. The road's right here.
Everybody. Well, just get on this road.
And then I walked over and I got on the road.
And then my town pushed me, because they did.
They gave me a little boost, and I rode down that road for 100 miles, just like they said.
Exactly like they said it would work.
It worked. Now, I believe if you took that same mentality and moved it to the inner city, it wouldn't work at all.
Do you know why? Because as soon as the kid gets to school, he's going to get a counter-narrative.
Oh, were you trying to act white?
Oh, what are you, nerds?
You should join this group.
Girls don't even like you.
You're never going to get laid if you act like that.
So, if you say to me that black Americans have done worse in their schools than white Americans have similar incomes, I say to you, but not similar culture.
If you give them similar culture, well then you've got a test.
Then you can find out what you're dealing with.
But we don't have anything like that.
There's no way to know.
Have you ever heard that Nigerian immigrants earn more than people born in this country?
Has anybody ever told you that?
That's one of those things you hear and you go, what?
If you had any racial bias in you, and you hear that statistic, you go, wait, what did you say?
Nigerian immigrants make more, on average, than the average American.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Why? Presumably because they don't have a cultural speed bump.
My guess, and I'm just guessing, is that they might have maybe the people who self-select to come over here, are people who have had education as a priority and didn't have anybody telling them it wasn't a good idea.
Probably. Just guessing.
Yeah, a lot of them are doctors and engineers, which is, you know, how they can get here in the first place, right?
So I would say that the biggest thing that we need to fix education is, wait for it, separating culture from education.
Boom. You need to do the education in a way that it is somehow insulated from the negative effects of people who just are not on the right path.
And there's no way to do that with the current school system.
So your options are, you know, homeschooling, good luck with that, if you've got low income.
Or options, you know, vouchers or whatever.
So probably creating a competitive situation would be the main thing.
You know what I'd also like to see?
Somebody had this idea.
Damn, I wish I could give credit.
But the idea looked like this.
Instead of giving somebody a, let's say, a voucher or something to go to school where they live, you give them a scholarship to move.
Think about it.
So you treat education as relocation.
How's that for a reframe?
We don't have an education problem, we have a relocation problem.
Because if you took the kids who are clustered in the bad culture, and you could pick them out and put them, you know, individually into stronger cultures, in theory, the stronger culture would start to work on the kids and do its thing.
So it could be that relocation is what education requires.
Scott needs to read the bell curve.
I know all about that.
I know all about that. Here's my argument.
My argument is that that's a red herring.
It wouldn't matter what the science says.
That our American responsibility is to give everybody their best shot.
And that's it.
And we're not giving everybody their best shot.
Not even close. So until you're even close to giving everybody their best shot...
I hear your argument, but I just don't think it's relevant...
To the biggest issues. And I would argue this also.
Here's my argument against the bell curve.
So the bell curve, in case you're not aware, this would be a racially, let's say, racially provocative theory about differences in IQs among races.
But here's what the racists get wrong every time.
Because people want to take that as an explanation of everything we see.
Here's what's wrong with that.
Anybody who says that white people are smarter because white people invented a bunch of stuff, how much did you invent if you're a white person?
It doesn't really matter if there's some portion of your group that you identify with that killed it, if it's not you.
Does the fact that Ben Franklin invented stuff, how does that help me?
I mean, it helps us all because we have, you know, inventions.
But, like, what's that got to do with me?
It kind of doesn't matter.
That there are differences among people because it's sort of bumpy differences.
And I'm not one of those...
I'm not Einstein.
Does it matter that Einstein was smarter than just about everybody and he was also white and, you know, if you want to throw in Jewish and German or whatever you're promoting today.
Does it matter?
Like... Because you're not Einstein.
You're not... He's just a different person.
I don't know how I can take credit for that, for some completely different person.
All right. I guess I haven't been cancelled yet.
Still on here? By the way, YouTube made some kind of change that removed the monetization for a while.
Allegedly, I can monetize it still, but it removes the interface for doing that.
I hope it's fixed by today.
I was wondering yesterday if that was aimed at me or some kind of a bigger thing.
Did we already talk about PayPal?
Or did I think about it?
Did I talk about PayPal? Yet?
Not yet. So yesterday, you know that the story was that PayPal had some upcoming language in their user agreement that would have allowed PayPal to fine its users $2,500 for spreading misinformation.
For spreading misinformation.
Now, they've already said that that was a mistake, and that language was not intended to be there, and they've already reversed it.
Now, a lot of people cancelled in the meantime.
I tweeted that, you know, seriously, you need to cancel your account if that's real.
But even after they said it wasn't real, allegedly, a lot of people still cancelled because it did show their intentions, if you will.
Now, can I give you a Dilbert lesson?
Oh, I see it here.
I'm going to give you a Dilbert lesson.
You ready? If you do not have experience with big corporations, what is the most commonsensical thing you assume?
Do you not assume that in a big corporation there are probably multiple lawyers and multiple managers who reviewed all this and said yes?
How many would agree with that?
That it must have been intentional, because there's no way there weren't a bunch of people who saw it and said, yes, we want that.
Yes, yes, all of you.
Everybody who says yes is wrong.
All of you who think that multiple people saw that language, you're all wrong.
Now, I'm not saying I know what happened.
I'm saying I know how big companies work.
And let me tell you, I used to have that job.
If you didn't work that exact job of being the one who reviewed the lawyer's language, you don't know how this works.
Let me explain it to you.
One lawyer, and only one, exactly one lawyer, is given the job of writing up the new terms.
The one lawyer throws in everything they can think of, because that's how you do it.
You throw in everything, just in case.
And you know that nobody's going to read it.
Typically. Nobody's going to even read it.
That's why your software agreements, you know, the shrink rack agreements when you open software, those agreements say stuff like, we'll take your firstborn child, we'll make you change your name to Microsoft, we'll adopt your cat and take it from you.
I mean, just crazy shit.
And it all got approved, and we all signed it.
So, in that context, where lawyers always put crazy shit in their boilerplate, one lawyer put crazy shit in it, and it was really long.
And then it was given to somebody for approval.
Probably one person.
There was probably exactly one person who had to approve it.
More than one person might have seen it, but only one person had to approve it.
I would like to give you now my impression of me when I had that job.
Because it used to be my job to improve it.
I'd look at the lawyer's boilerplate for agreements I was negotiating for corporations, and the lawyer would give it to me, and then I would look at it, and I would decide if it were okay.
And if it were okay, I'd tell my boss, and my boss wouldn't read it, of course, because it was my job.
And then the boss would just say, whatever.
And here's me looking at the lawyer's boilerplate.
May I give you my impression of me approving my lawyer's boilerplate?
Sure.
That's probably what happened.
Okay.
If you've been there, you know how it really works.
Right? Now, is there anybody who's been in the job To confirm to me, that's how it really works.
One lawyer just put everything in there, no matter how ridiculous it sounded, and one person whose job was to approve it didn't read it.
Do you think I read everything my lawyers gave me to approve?
No way. Your brain would explode.
Do you think I read everything my lawyer gives me to sign today?
Nope. Do you think I check my taxes?
When my accountant gives me my taxes, it's this thick.
Do you think I'd check it?
Well, the answer is I do.
I actually do. Because I have lots of experience with financial stuff and documents.
So I actually do flip through it, and I found errors.
Not big ones, but I found things that I thought, hey, you know, this should have been a little different.
Now, I'm unique because I've done that for a living, so I can look at my taxes and I know what I'm looking at.
But generally speaking, most of the legal agreements that I sign I haven't read.
I have not read. Did you read your prenup?
Yes. Yeah, the prenup I read.
I read the prenup all the way through.
That would be the exception.
But certainly, like boilerplate things.
See, a prenup is not a boilerplate.
You have to make a distinction between agreements that are specific and agreements that are sort of generic.
The PayPal thing was a generic boilerplate thing, so that's the way I explained it is the way that works.
People don't really read them.
But if you're doing a real agreement for like a specific thing, yeah, people read that.
I would definitely read that.
There was no excuse for including this language.
No excuse from a management perspective.
But you have to understand that the lawyer was just doing the job of a lawyer.
The lawyer wants to give their company every option just in case.
Just in case there's some Nazi using PayPal, they want to be able to say, well, we can't ding you for being a Nazi, but you spread some misinformation so we can get you for that.
It was just to give them options.
I can't say it was the best lawyering in the world, but it wasn't outside the realm of normal lawyering.
It was pretty normal, actually.
Managements must take responsibility.
Yes, they must. And they did.
They did take responsibility, actually.
They said it was a mistake.
So, there's that.
Do you know what they didn't say?
We will never do that.
That's what they didn't say.
Here's how the apology should have worked.
Had they done the Steve Jobs pattern much better, the Steve Jobs pattern would have gone like this.
First you acknowledge the harm.
Oh, we're sorry, we didn't mean to cause this trouble.
So first you acknowledge that you hurt people.
We didn't mean to damage your trust.
Sorry about that.
Next thing you do is you say, you're going to fix it.
Then you know what the problem is, you're going to fix it.
But here's the thing, and they did that.
They said, we've already fixed it.
But here's the thing they got wrong.
They should have come out and said, we will never do that.
We will never kick you off the service for misinformation on another platform.
If they'd gone the extra...
And maybe even say we reprimanded the lawyer or somebody got fired.
If they'd said we fired whoever wrote that, even if they didn't, that would have gone a long way.
Think about how you would think of the story if you heard they fired that person the minute they found out.
You would feel differently.
Because then you would say, oh, okay, management is definitely not on that page.
But there was that one employee.
But as soon as management just says, oh, we changed the language because we got caught, then it looks like it was management's decision, doesn't it?
So that was a mistake.
If they believed they would never do that, they should say, it is our intention, we would never do that.
So many of you have already cancelled PayPal.
Yeah, I think they noticed.
They definitely noticed.
Alright, is there any other story I forgot today?
Anything else happening? Oh, Naval says Putin would use a tactical nuke if he was close to being replaced, and the U.S. thinks they can.
Well, I don't know that the U.S. is going to try to replace Putin, because that seems dicey.
I mean, Russia is going to have to do what Russia does.
I do think that, you know, Naval has to be taken seriously any time he says anything.
But the odds are still overwhelmingly in favor of no nuclear holocaust.
I didn't see the Masters Kelly debate.
Game theory said it was reasonable.
Yeah, I agree that if we were trying to replace Putin, that a tactical nuke might shake the box.
I don't think it would be his best play.
All right, Florida Surgeon General, what's that?
Tweet removal?
I don't know about that. Does anyone know how Putin feels?
Well, Putin just turned 70, so it was his birthday.
So I guess the Crimea Bridge got attacked on Putin's birthday.
Do you think that was a coincidence?
Was it a coincidence they attacked the bridge, which apparently had great symbolic importance, on his birthday?
Coincidence or no?
I say not a coincidence.
Right. Right.
Not a coincidence, because it's personal.
The attack on his birthday does suggest a specific person was behind it, but I would only be speculating. - I'm not kidding.
I don't think so, but maybe.
All right. Who gains from the attack on the bridge?
Ukraine. What do you mean, who gains from an attack on the bridge?
Oh, yeah, let's talk about the Vindman connection.
All right, let me take you back to Trump's perfect phone call with Zelensky.
And Alexander Vindman.
Do you remember the story that Ukraine asked Alexander Vindman, an American, to be their head of defense, right?
Can you fact check me on that?
Vindman, an American, was offered by Ukraine, a colonel, to be their head of their entire military, was he not?
Now, he didn't take that, of course.
But imagine if he had.
Just imagine this.
If Vindman had taken the job, number one, would he have done so well?
Because Ukraine is overcompensating.
But here's the other thing. Have you not been wondering who is advising Biden?
Haven't you been wondering who is it who is behind the curtain who is the most influential person on Ukraine within the Biden administration?
I feel like it's Vindman.
There's something about Vindman that I don't quite understand, which is how did an American colonel even get the offer to be the head of their entire military?
How is that even a thing?
And what it makes me wonder is if Vindman doesn't have more game than we know.
In other words, was he effective enough that the Ukrainians actually knew that he would be a good head of their military?
I mean, why would he even make that offer?
Could it be, because they knew Vindman was so connected to the Biden administration somehow, That he could get more funding and more American support.
So maybe having Vindman was really just a way to have more fundraising guarantee from America.
Maybe. But something tells me that Vindman has more to do with this whole story than we fully know.
Yeah. Maybe.
So, I don't know. Could be.
All right. Yeah, I don't see in Vindman that whole head of the army leadership capability, but I don't know.
There's somebody advising on Ukraine, and he probably knows more about them than most people.
Oh, somebody said follow the money, and I wanted to remind you.
I always tell you that follow the money works even when it shouldn't.
And I have a different way to explain that, because that's not convincing.
It's not persuasive. So what I mean by that is that sometimes it's obvious what follow the money means.
Like, oh, the people who would make the most profit seem to be in favor of this, so obviously it's because of the profit.
So sometimes it's obvious.
But then there are other times when there clearly doesn't seem to be any monetary impact.
And then by coincidence...
Reality will still follow the path where somebody made a profit.
And you say to yourself, well, that was probably just a coincidence.
Here's my new theory.
Follow the money as a cheat code for understanding where the simulation is going to go, but not necessarily because of it.
See, that's what I'm adding.
If you think that you can follow the money because it's just a cause and effect, maybe.
And most of the time it is.
But what if it's also a cheat code that just tells you what's going to happen even when you can't see any cause and effect where money should even be part of it?
But money's always part of it.
There's nothing big that happens that doesn't have some monetary...
Impact on somebody.
So try this just for a fun experiment.
So this is an experiment to see if we're in a simulation.
Every time you have to predict something, figure out where the money situation would flow, and then make your prediction based on the money, even if you're pretty sure that's not why anybody's making the decision.
And see how often you're right.
So again, it's not because of cause and effect.
Money causes things, although it usually does.
But even when you can't see the cause and effect, money will still predict.
It's a cheat code.
Maybe. It looks that way.
So just keep an eye out for that.
That's what makes economics fun.
You're right. Exactly.
All right. Do you know much about the current Alex Jones case?
I don't.
I do not.
Follow the fuel.
Yeah, that's the other way to do it.
So, as I was saying yesterday, that energy, your energy availability, and whether you're a buyer or a seller, determines your economics.
Your economics determines your homeland security.
If you just followed energy, it would explain everything over time, probably.
You know, more than even money.
Because money and energy end up being the same thing.
Yeah. Irrefungible.
Alright, that's all for now.
We did cover PayPal.
You missed it. And I'm going to say goodbye to YouTube for now.
