Episode 2009 Scott Adams: Chinese Spy Balloon, TikTok Is In Trouble, Russia Beating Sanctions, More
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Content:
Shoot down the China "weather" balloon?
TikTok & the spy balloon
Twitter Blue, woo hoo!
Russian casualties limit?
Jeb Bush on school choice
What America does better than anyone
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Good morning and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
Yes, we'll be talking about a big old balloon.
Not much else to talk about today, turns out.
But we've got lots to talk about.
Oh, we'll talk about that.
But before we do, would you like to prepare?
Would you like to be primed to make this the best experience you've had so far today?
Maybe your whole life?
Yes!
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a gel or a styrene, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go!
Have you ever stopped to think that the universe has been here for, I don't know, 13, 14 billion years?
And you were lucky enough to be alive at the exact time that the simultaneous sip was invented.
I mean, really, what are the odds of that?
I would say that is more evidence that things are going right for you.
So what about that spy balloon?
Well, let's begin with a question.
What is lost, full of gas, and owned by China?
What is lost, full of gas, and owned by China?
I will accept Chinese spy balloon, Joe Biden or Eric Swalwell.
Any of those answers will be sufficient.
All right, so the big question is, if there's a big Chinese spy balloon over the United States, why don't we shoot it down?
Now, what would be the correct political thing to say.
Let's say you're a Republican.
What is the smart political thing to say?
It doesn't mean it's right strategically, but what would be the right political thing?
Shoot it down!
Shoot it down!
And Trump picked up the free money.
So everybody who picked up the free money, that's somebody you should, you know, give a little credit to.
It's free money.
We don't know the details of why it's not being shot down, and we probably won't.
There's probably some military reason.
Or even if there's not a military reason, we'll never hear the real reason, if there is one.
And so the smartest thing you could do is just say, shoot it down, because you look tough.
Now the critics are saying, China is testing our defenses.
Why don't we shoot it down?
Do those two things make sense?
They're testing our defenses, so why don't we activate our defenses so they can see how they work, and then shoot it down.
I'm not sure we should.
Let me ask you this, what does this mean?
Apparently our military said that as soon as we saw this thing coming, they immediately acted to protect against the collection of sensitive intelligence.
How'd they do that?
They make it sound like there was some kind of, like, the roof was open at their nuclear facilities, and if you flew a balloon over and you looked carefully, you could look right down into the classified documents.
But maybe they closed the roof.
What does it mean?
How exact?
Really?
Jam it?
Now, of course, jamming it is the first thing I thought of.
But wouldn't you need something to be flying around all the time?
How do you jam it?
Or do you just make sure that you don't send any classified information until it's gone?
I would say this whole question of how they took steps and how effective those steps were is sort of a big question.
Now, it's unlikely that they knocked it down.
What would you do If you were the United States, how would you handle it?
Because I'll tell you how I would handle it.
And I haven't seen anybody suggest it yet.
I would tell China to bring it down, or we will.
But I wouldn't bring it down before I gave them an option of bringing it down without violence.
Wouldn't you?
I'd just say, hey, we're going to bring this thing down.
One way or the other.
So it's coming down.
But I think I'd try to force it down.
I think I'd try to negotiate with him to see if he could capture the thing.
Now, I don't think he can.
I mean, I doubt they would want it to be captured, but I would at least try to capture it.
Do you think it has a self-destruct?
I feel like that's, I mean, it would be an obvious thing you would think of, but even though it's obvious, I kind of suspect it doesn't have that.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it's good enough if it crashes.
So we got big questions.
All right.
So one possibility that we're not shooting it down.
I'll give you all the possibilities I can think of.
One is that we routinely do the same thing.
What do you think of that one?
We routinely put balloons and other surveillance over China.
And so we don't really care that much.
Maybe.
Maybe it's just protecting our own assets that spy on them.
Here's another possibility.
I'll bet you didn't see this one coming.
We're better off if they can see everything.
Have you heard of the Open Skies Treaty?
Which wasn't a big success, I don't think.
But this was with Russia.
And the idea was, We would be able to fly over Russia and Russia would be able to fly over us so that we can see if anybody's cheating with nukes.
But you can't really see too much from the air.
But do you think we're worse off or better off if we can see everything China's doing militarily from the air, which we probably can, and they can see what we're doing?
It's entirely possible that we calculated that seeing each other's stuff from the air makes you safer instead of less safe.
That's one possibility.
I'm not saying that that's likely.
I'm just going to run through the possibilities.
One possibility is incompetence, right?
One is incompetence.
They just couldn't get it together.
Maybe it'll happen later, but they couldn't get it together.
That would just be incompetence.
I don't think that's the answer.
One would be that Biden is owned by China.
Maybe.
But the reporting we're getting is that Biden immediately ordered his shot down.
And the military argued against it.
Now, can we believe that report?
Can you believe an unsourced report that Biden wanted to shoot that down, but the military talked him out of it?
That sounds exactly like a lie, doesn't it?
It could be true.
It could be true.
But it sounds exactly like a lie.
If you were going to lie, that's how you do it.
So what are the possibilities?
So one possibility is we did not want to activate our defenses so that we don't give anything away.
Another possibility is that we're learning something from it.
Do we have the capability to electronically query it and find out just what it's doing and how it's doing it?
Are we learning about what technology they have?
And we just need a little more time to get a better beat on it.
Are we flying things close to it to take pictures and to get a signal intelligence from closer up?
Are we trying to take it over with hackers?
How about that one?
How about we deactivated the signal from China and we already control it?
Is that impossible?
Is it impossible that the United States already took control of it?
I mean, we wouldn't tell them, would we?
We wouldn't mention it.
It's entirely possible that we're navigating it toward a military base.
And we're just, you know, taking it over Florida or wherever it's going to go.
We're taking it over some military base and then we're going to bring it down.
Now, for those of you who are too dumb to be in this conversation, everything I say is speculation.
So if you pick one of them out and say, you freaking moron, that one that you mentioned isn't the one, I know that too.
I'm mentioning a bunch of possibilities.
I don't really have a favorite among the group.
Now the military is saying they don't want to shoot it down because it'd be a debris field.
It might, you know, injure stuff in the ground.
Does anybody believe that one?
That one just feels like a lie, right?
There's some types of lies that are so obviously a lie that I'm okay with them.
Have you ever experienced that?
A lie so obvious that you're just okay with it.
Oh, I get it.
You're lying to me because you don't want to tell me the answer to that question.
I get it.
I'm good with that.
So, when the military lies to you, and the military lies to you in a way that's just obviously a lie, You have two possibilities.
One is something terrible.
And the other is they're doing their job.
They're just keeping you out of the loop because that's not going to help anything.
Maybe.
Don't know.
So we're in a situation where under normal historical circumstances, let's say this were the 60s.
If this happened in the 60s, I believe we all would have said, oh, there's a pretty good reason the government's not shooting that down.
Wouldn't we?
Because we would be so brainwashed into thinking they had it under control that we'd all say, well, there's nothing to talk about here.
If they're not shooting it down, it means there's no security risk or they've got a big plan.
But after going through the pandemic, what's your first assumption about the government?
It's something sketchy, right?
Do you all feel more comfortable if I acknowledge That we're in an era in which believing the government's story would be ridiculous.
Would you agree?
It would actually be ridiculous to believe their story.
Ridiculous.
We just don't live in a world where that kind of a story could be believable or credible.
It could be true.
I'm not saying it's true or untrue.
That part's unknowable.
But absolutely you can't trust them.
Absolutely.
You cannot.
They're guilty until proven innocent.
All right.
Do you think that the Chinese did this to humiliate the United States prior to what would have been a high-level visit by Blinken, who has canceled his trip?
Do you think it was intentionally a humiliation play?
The only reason I'm going to say no is that it's too on the nose.
It's like a little too on the nose.
Which doesn't mean it's false, right?
The too on the nose rule is not like a law of physics or anything.
But it's fairly reliable.
To me it just feels a little, I don't know, too on the nose, too on the story.
But maybe.
Maybe.
The other thing we don't know is how often they've done it.
And it could be that, it could be Here's one reason our military would be lying to us.
Imagine if we find out that China's been sending balloons over us for decades and we've never responded.
That would make us look pretty weak, wouldn't it?
So that would be one reason that the government would say, oh, we're not going to tell you what's going on here.
Maybe it's been happening for a long time and they don't want to admit it.
Maybe.
Now here's the other possibility.
We can't shoot it down.
What do you think of that?
I have a sneaking suspicion we might not have the technology to take it out.
Because the only thing we have that goes that high is a missile.
Do we really want to launch a serious missile within the continental United States?
Because I'd be worried as much about the missile falling on somebody as the debris from the balloon.
So I'm seeing somebody say, trust me, we can shoot this down.
Here's what I do trust.
I do trust that we have weapons that are designed to reach it.
Will you all take that as a given?
That we do have weapons that are designed to reach it.
Would you accept that?
That doesn't mean they work.
There's sort of a difference between design to do it and confidence of the work.
Because one possibility is... I don't think our airplanes go that high.
I think the only ones that go that high are the spy planes.
And I don't... I think the U-2 goes to 70,000.
U-2 goes to 70,000, the balloons at 60,000.
Are you saying that our regular fighter jets could go to 60,000?
Because I only read just recently that they couldn't.
I mean, like this morning.
Oh, classified maybe?
Yeah.
The new generation can?
Oh, they can, plenty can go that high.
Okay.
Lots of people are telling me that our current jets can go that high.
Interesting.
Service ceiling is 65,000?
All right, all right, well I stand corrected.
Apparently we have tech.
So it sounds like, if that's true, if it's true that our fighter jets can get to that range, then it would be true we could easily shoot it down, right?
But what happens with the missiles that miss?
This is a dumb question.
If a fighter jet shoots a missile in continental United States, oh, they would use guns?
Yeah.
I guess they would use guns, huh?
Bullets and then let it float down. - Yes.
Yeah, if you miss, where do those guns go?
Or where do the bullets go?
You know, it does seem to me that they could find an empty enough place to take it down.
We'll find out soon.
All right, here's the biggest story that's not exactly being reported.
So I noted that Bill Maher, I made a joke conflating the spy balloon with TikTok.
And the joke was, you know, they don't need the spy balloon because they already have TikTok.
Then you also saw a number of tweets from, I think, mostly Republicans in Congress who said, you know, ban this and ban TikTok.
Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney said, shoot down the balloon and ban TikTok.
Here's the important part.
TikTok just became a visual story.
Because TikTok's a concept, right?
You think you're a screen, but it's not really a physical thing.
But the balloon is physical.
So we all have the visual.
And if I've taught you nothing about persuasion, it's that the visual persuasion is always the persuasive one.
Talk, talk, talk doesn't persuade people, but you see a picture.
Let's say the picture of climate change with that hockey stick graph, a picture of a dying polar bear.
The reason that climate change has to be turned into some kind of a visual is to sell it.
So you need the graph that scares you and the dead polar bear and the hurricanes and that story.
So quite accidentally, nobody planned this, But the story about the spy balloon is, in our brains, too close to the TikTok story.
Right?
Just a little too close.
So our brains have just combined those into one story.
And I'll bet you'll see more and more of it today.
I'll bet you'll see TikTok and the balloon mentioned in the same sentence a whole bunch of times today.
Watch the coverage on the news today, especially Fox News, and watch how many times TikTok and the Chinese spy balloon are mentioned in the same sentence.
And because we've said the spy balloon must be shot down, there's no doubt about it, that will Let's say spill over, or it will infect our other thoughts about TikTok.
So the urgency of TikTok just took on the urgency of the balloon.
And you could argue whether the balloon really is urgent, but we're treating it like it is.
The public is treating it, and Congress is, is treating it like, why the hell are you waiting?
Right now.
The time to shoot down a spy plane is right now.
Okay, second question.
How long should you wait before you get rid of TikTok?
The argument's the same, right?
If you think it's wrong to let the spy plane just sit up there and slowly transverse the United States, if you're okay with that, well, I can see why you'd be okay with TikTok.
But if you're saying shoot down that, shoot down that balloon, you can't say shoot down the balloon while you don't say shoot down TikTok.
Those two stories just became melted together.
You can't, now you couldn't even pull them apart if you tried.
That's the biggest story.
The biggest story is that those two things just became one thing.
That's really big.
I don't know if anybody else will mention it, but watch for that.
Well, I don't know if you saw in the back, but I did come up with, I was just brainstorming some solutions for taking the balloon out.
What we need to do is maybe try to position Representative Swalwell below the balloon as it's crossing.
This will take a little math, but I think we can do it.
Then you can use a BIC lighter, sneak up behind him, get the timing right, light the lighter, his own natural flatulence will form a missile.
Now, I haven't done the calculations.
I believe this will get you to at least 70,000 feet.
Does that sound reasonable?
Yeah, I think you can get 70,000 feet out of this.
We'll take out that balloon.
Let's talk about something else.
So Twitter Blue is looking like a better deal every minute.
I finally signed up today.
I tried to sign up earlier, but because I was already a blue check for some reason, I couldn't do it until now.
Or recently.
So here are the things that you can do with Twitter Blue.
I sent a tweet and it told me I had 30 minutes to edit it.
This very moment, this very morning, I deleted a tweet because I didn't want to re-edit it.
So I wish I'd remembered that this feature was there.
So I accidentally tweeted about the Chinese spy plane when I meant to say balloon.
So I just deleted it because I was busy, didn't want to retweet it.
But that's exactly one that I would have just edited and kept.
Twitter apparently, I don't know the details, looks like they're going to go big on video.
Oh, you corrected me?
Thank you.
It looks like Twitter's going to go big on video, which they have to, right?
I mean, is there any question that they have to?
Yeah, of course, they have to.
So that's the right move.
The 30 minutes to edit, that's the right move.
The paid subscription so that Twitter doesn't have to depend on advertising so much, that's the right move.
Because you can still use it without the paid features.
And here's my favorite part.
Apparently the Twitter Blue users only will be paid for any advertisements that appear in the comments to their tweets.
I think this is just one of the best monetization schemes I've seen.
Because advertisements in your comments seem much less bothersome, don't they?
Because you sort of have to go to the comments to see them.
I like that.
And I like that the ad won't even be there unless you did a good tweet.
So my incentive to tweet in ways that get people engaged is now it's monetized.
I'm definitely incentivized by that.
So we'll see how that works.
Now, of course, some of these things are a risk to the locals, platform, and some other competing stuff.
But I think they all get better if they compete.
So I think it's just all good.
So, so far, Elon Musk's, let's say, entrepreneurial instincts for Twitter Appear to be right on.
What do you think?
I would say his instincts, so far, are right on.
Yeah.
Now, that's not to say he won't have some missteps, because that's how it works, right?
He's moving fast and breaking things and correcting.
He said he was going to do that.
He told us directly, I'm going to move fast, break things, correct it.
And then he did, right in front of you.
This is one of the greatest lessons in entrepreneurial Strategy and managing and thinking that you'll ever see.
Because you don't get this much transparency normally.
Like his thought process has been, you know, public the whole time.
It's amazing.
He also won his lawsuit.
So there was a lawsuit when he had teased about taking Tesla private.
But then that didn't happen and people made decisions about it, I guess, and sued him.
He won.
Unanimous trial victory.
Just a clean win.
So good for him.
It's one less thing to distract him from his work.
Did you catch that the number of jobs, employers added over half a million jobs to the payrolls in January?
Do you know how big that is?
If you don't follow jobs, you might not recognize how big that is.
That's really, really big.
That's like crazy big.
How many people expected that?
Well, you know who didn't expect it?
Economists.
Right, so the Labor Department, well, so the Labor Department reported it's over half a million.
But according to the Wall Street Journal, far more than economists expected.
So the forecasters surveyed by the Wall Street Journal had estimated 187,000 jobs would be created, or filled I guess, or created, I guess created jobs.
And unemployment's down to three point something.
That's amazing.
That's really good.
But here's my first point.
Our best economists could not predict jobs one quarter in advance.
Or one month.
One month.
Our best economists in the world could not predict jobs, something pretty basic, even in the ballpark.
They weren't even in the ballpark.
So how do you think they're doing predicting the other stuff?
Do you believe any of their other predictions?
All right.
What is the consensus at the moment, especially based on these numbers?
What is the consensus for what 2023 will look like economically?
It looks like it's going to be either the softest recession, We'll definitely be struggling with the inflation for a while.
But it looks like it's a mild recession.
Now, do you remember my prediction for 2023?
How many people remember my prediction?
When everybody was saying it's going to be a bad, bad year.
I was Aryan, was I not?
I believe I was... I don't know.
Did anybody else say it was mild when I was saying it was mild?
And the reason I said it would be mild is the Adams law of slow-moving disasters.
That we're really good at quickly adjusting to stuff.
And I reckoned that what was different about the pandemic is that we would still come back with all the demand and skills that we had before.
So the pandemic didn't really break something.
We just had to go back and use the stuff we already had.
So it seemed to me that we could quick adjust Because all the assets were in place.
That's the part that takes a long time.
It looks like maybe we are.
Maybe we are.
And do you remember also, what is the number one economic number that I've told you to focus on?
If I told you you'd only, if you could, yeah, jobs.
Look at employment.
So that's my rule of thumb if you don't want to learn a lot about economics.
If the employment is good, employment level and jobs, you can make everything else work.
Just as sort of a general rule.
Now, nothing is an absolute, right?
I suppose anything can go wrong.
But if you get the jobs right, you have a solid base for tweaking everything else over time.
And that's what I saw.
What I saw was that the jobs looked like they'd stay strong, and therefore I predicted a mild A recession.
So it looks like that might happen.
All right.
It looks like China is helping Russia beat our sanctions and get tech equipment and chips and stuff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but are our sanctions weak if we can just sell it to some third party country and then they just sell it to Russia?
Because that's what's happening, right?
Just other countries buy stuff from other countries and it goes through a few countries and then it ends up in Russia.
So China appears to be part of this process.
But the Wall Street Journal reports that Russia basically might not be having problems.
We thought maybe this tax sanction thing would really cause their economy to struggle.
Maybe not.
Maybe all they need is, you know, China and a few other friendly countries and they're fine.
Maybe.
We'll find out.
So it doesn't look like sanctions are going to be the BL end-all.
That's interesting.
I'm missing something here.
Oh, here it is.
ChatGPT.
I saw an individual on Instagram, I think, who was saying he had a sneak preview.
I guess he might have been a beta tester for an AI app that would be associated with this ChatGPT.
Now, you all know ChatGPT.
It's the huge, big, sexy AI that people are playing with.
The app, if I understand it correctly, would be connected to the internet.
I don't have all the details because it's not announced yet.
Yeah.
So it'd be an AI app for your iOS device and presumably your other ones too.
And you can just have conversations with it.
Could you imagine having an app on your phone that you could just talk to and it could go off and do things?
Now I'm going to blow your mind.
You want your mind blown?
What's the worst thing about having AI on your current phone?
Let me tell you the worst part about having AI.
Hey, I want to use my phone.
Oh, that's right.
Password.
Okay.
Password.
Okay.
I got to open my app.
Open the app.
Okay.
It's auto-filled with that last app I was searching for.
Delete that last app.
Open the app.
Okay, it's asking me now for a password.
I'll send that to my other phone.
Send it to my other device.
Check my other device.
Put in the code.
Open the app.
All right?
Now, that's your experience, right?
How much would you use an app if you had to do all that?
Now, of course, you could do your voice commands, but it still takes like 10 seconds.
If I have to wait 10 seconds for the app, I'm not using it.
But suppose, suppose your phone was designed from the bottom up, and it was only an AI interface, and it was always on, and you could just talk to it.
If you saw your phone, maybe use your watch or something that talks to your phone, but you just say, can you make me a reservation as close as you can get to 7pm at whatever's a good restaurant in town?
Now, I guess Google actually can do that for you, can make a reservation.
But imagine AI taking on all of that.
I would just use it as my friend, and I would talk to it all day long.
I can't imagine not talking to it.
Because I always have curiosity when I'm driving.
Do you?
Every time I drive, I want to be Googling something.
I'll be driving along, and like today, I had a question about How many casualties would Russia have to suffer before it was unsustainable?
And I thought, I wonder if there's some kind of rule of thumb about casualties.
Like if you get to some percentage and you're an attacking force, you know, you'll give up.
But maybe if you're a defending force, you'll take, you know, more casualties.
So I thought, I wonder if there's some rule of thumb.
But I always think of these things when I'm driving.
And then I can't search them, then I forget them later.
So if I could just be in my car and go, you know, hey, ChatGPT, you know, look this up for me.
And then it just starts talking to me and asking if that's the right answer.
And I say, no, I was really looking for this.
This is going to change everything.
I don't think, I don't think anybody, including me, has grasped What the next year is going to look like.
Let me call out these NPCs.
For those of you who would like to point out that I'm a boomer, may I add this comment?
You're worthless.
You're freaking worthless.
I'm pretty sure we all know my age.
We all know what that implies.
And I'm pretty sure that nothing I said is Boomer specific.
All right.
If the best you can do is make a comment about my age, you're really not smart enough to be on this live stream.
You should just go away.
Just go do something easier.
Something more to your level of Capability.
If that's all you got.
Oh, he looks like he's a boomer.
I think he's talking about smartphones, and now he's a boomer.
Well, he's also a boomer.
Hey, has anybody noticed the last 15... Stop it.
Almost cursed, but did not.
Almost cursed, but did not.
Did not.
But...
If you would just take a moment over on YouTube, this is more of a YouTube problem.
On YouTube, could you just take a moment and look at the other comments?
Do you see how many of them are using the word boomer?
You can have some confidence that they've covered it.
It's covered.
You don't need to say boomer again.
See if you can hold back.
Try it.
Use all of your willpower.
To not be boring and predictable.
All right, thank you.
Speaking of Ukraine, how many casualties would it take before the Russian public gives up on it?
So, reportedly, there are close to 200,000 Russian casualties that would be killed or wounded just in the Ukraine conflict.
There are somewhere around 2 million Russians in the military.
200,000 casualties out of 2 million.
Now remember, that's not 2 million fighters.
It's closer to a million something, maybe a million five fighters.
That's a pretty big percentage, isn't it?
Pretty big percentage.
Yeah, it's more than decimated.
But, you know, they're sending fresh troops in there and, of course, it's a dictatorship and probably the Russians themselves don't know how many people are dying.
But at some point you can't miss it.
And it looks like maybe there are half a million or so Russian fighters in the Ukraine conflict.
But if 200,000 out of half a million were injured or killed, how much...
Ukraine says more like, no, 130,000 is how many they added.
So I was fooled by that at first.
So they talk about adding 130, but that doesn't account for the ones that are already there.
So I think it's closer to 400,000, something like that.
Thanks for taking the high road.
Russia says 7,000, yeah.
Well, I guess that's my question.
To me, it seems like Russia might be pushing up against some kind of rule of thumb that says if you lose this percentage of your army, you better pull back.
It sounds like World War II casualty rates so far, right?
But remember, that casualty rate is just going to climb, right?
Because there aren't that many new Russians.
They can't send in as many as the Ukrainians are killing.
If it's already at World War II casualty levels, which is probably true, we might be zooming past that level.
Vietnam was 50,000 dead.
How many casualties though?
What were the Vietnam casualties?
50,000 dead, right?
59,000?
I think that's dead.
What is the casualty number?
Still counting?
Oh, that's terrible.
Yeah, still counting.
Okay, so I have that.
But yeah, I think it's if you're the attacking force, probably you can take fewer casualties.
All right.
And that, ladies and gentlemen.
Oh, just one more thing.
Jeb Bush has a An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, where he is talking about how great the move toward school choices.
I guess Florida's been a leader in school choice for a long time, ever since Jeb, so I give him credit for that.
But he said there's a 2022 Real Clear Opinion research poll found that more than 72% of parents supported school choice.
Including 68% of Democrats and 82% of Republicans and 67% of Independents.
That feels like the cleanest political issue you could ever have.
Is there any other political issue where even the other side, two-thirds of them, are on your side?
I can't think of one.
So if the Republicans can't make that work, I don't know why you can't.
How in the world can a Republican lose a national election?
You'd have to say all the wrong things.
The only way you could lose is by sabotaging yourself.
150,000 casualties in Vietnam.
That's a number somebody just put up there.
150 sounds right.
It's about triple the number of kills.
So Russia has a smaller population than the United States.
So as a percentage, they've already exceeded the level that made America shut down a war.
Is that true?
Give me a fact check on that.
So here's the statement I want you to fact check.
That the United States shut down the Vietnam War At a certain level of casualties, but that's relative to our population.
If you adjust for population, Russia is already past the point that the American public shut down a war.
Is that true?
And that was over 10 years, right?
Our casualties were spread over 10 years, whereas Ukraine is pretty small.
No, that would not be an analogy, exactly.
I mean, I get what you're saying, but it would be more like looking for a rule of thumb, which might not exist, right?
So as an analogy, it's weak, but as a point of research, It might be useful to find out if there's any kind of, you know, psychological limit that's universal.
Because I have a feeling that people have a fairly similar view of how much is too much in a given situation.
Like it would depend on the situation.
But I think we would... Here's the proposition.
If you took anybody from any country, and you simply described a situation, you go, okay, there's this war, The people that you love are dying at this level, and the war is for this reason, and who started it and who didn't.
If you explain that to, like, any human beings, my hypothesis is they would have a weirdly similar view of what was too much.
What do you think?
I don't think some people would say, we will fight till every person is dead.
And I don't think anybody would say, you know, that's already too much.
I think people would end up in the same general zone of what is too much.
Just a speculation.
There's no science to that.
Yes, and as somebody said about the Vietnam vets, their casualties are still happening based on lagging health issues.
Okay, there's a long comment there.
All right, that's all I got now.
So, You can't compare one country to any other country.
Well, that's the speculation.
The speculation or the hypothesis is that if you break down the question into just a clean question, this many people of your side is being killed for this purpose.
I think that the cultural part would be less important than you think.
I think you would find that people are kind of similar.
That's just hypothesis.
Might be wrong.
That's why you test it.
Other cultures aren't so weak.
Now, see, that's where we differ on our speculation.
You might be right.
But I think, well, let me say this.
If you were comparing two modern economies, I'll bet they would be closer to each other.
Than, say, a modern economy and, you know, something not.
There might be a difference there.
All right.
Do you believe that America is weaker, like, psychologically?
How many of you believe America is weak?
Here's what I think.
We might be weak in some specific ways compared to how we were.
But we certainly have a lot more toys.
We have more weapons.
We're certainly better at it, killing people, I would think.
So my guess is that we're more badass than we've ever been.
But the most... I think I love it about American culture and character.
The one thing America does better than anybody, and I won't take an argument on this, I will accept no pushback on this, the one thing Americans do better than everybody else is criticize ourselves.
Productively.
Productively.
You can't even do that in Canada.
Right?
If you go to Canada or Great Britain, you can't even say the same things you can say in America.
And, you know, it got pretty dicey over here.
But America, we will beat ourselves up so much better than you'll beat us up.
Right?
Good luck beating us up more than we beat ourselves up.
Like, we beat ourselves up for practice.
So that's also why we can tear down our institutions and rebuild them faster.
Because we love saying stuff sucks.
Oh, that sucks.
Let's get rid of it.
We're actually talking about dismantling.
Just hold this in your head.
Imagine any other country on earth.
Doesn't matter if they're a dictatorship or democracy.
Imagine any other country on earth and just hold this thought in your head.
We're having a serious conversation in America about disbanding the FBI.
Just hold that in your head.
Where else?
Where else do you have a serious conversation about that?
Now, I don't think it's going to happen, right?
That's a different question.
But that's a serious conversation, right?
And the ATF, that conversation, right?
Tell me any other country where that's a serious conversation.
Only here.
We will take on anything.
We are completely unafraid about criticizing ourselves.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the United States will rule, as long as that's true.
As long as we're tougher on ourselves than other people are on us, and that's definitely the case, we're pretty much unstoppable.
There's definitely some kind of a testosterone change that's happened.
We all agree on that, right?
I mean, science has proven there's lower testosterone in men.
Much lower.
Agree?
Yeah.
So that's definitely something to be worried about.
But I don't think it's translated yet into our national effectiveness.
Because the people who joined the military... Well, let me ask you.
Do you think our military is a bunch of pussies?
I kind of doubt it.
Oh, you think so?
Really?
No, I don't think so.
I think that our training process gets rid of anybody who can't kill.
That's too much of an absolute.
But I think that the process itself guarantees you end up with killers.
Maybe I have too much confidence in brainwashing.
But I think you can brainwash almost all of them to turn them into killers of some type.
You know, they might be killing with a drone instead of a bayonet, but you could make them all into killers.
And the ones that you can't, you would know fairly soon, and you would watch them out.
So I'm not really worried about that.
I'm not really worried.
Yeah, and they might be support forces and everything else.
You know, I would be...
The one thing we never run out of in America is people willing to kill our enemies.
We always have plenty of them.
I don't think we're gonna run out.
You can sit me down and show me, all right?
I don't know what you would show me.
Yeah, and we might be fighting entirely with robots pretty soon anyway.
I mean, that makes sense, doesn't it?
Why would we fight with humans if we can fight with robots and drones?
We wouldn't.
Killing an attacker is a different mindset.
Yeah, anybody could do that.
Well, any man could.
Most women could, too, as well.
If somebody's attacking you, sure.
When will the coffee mugs be available again?
We don't have a plan for that, but if demand If demand is sky high, I'm sure we can make it happen.
Scott's imaginary fentanyl dealers in China?
Well, here's my thing on China's fentanyl dealers.
We know they're not trying to stop them.
It is not my belief that fentanyl can be stopped.
So that's not why I would be hard on China.
I would be hard on them because they're killing us.
I don't need a better reason.
They're intentionally killing us.
So we should go kill all of their dealers.
If they're not going to shut them down.
So what the dealers do is they... China does change the laws to make it illegal.
But then the dealers will modify the fentanyl a little bit, the precursors.
They'll modify the precursors so that they're just slightly technically outside of the control of the government.
But the government knows that.
The Chinese government knows that they'll just tweak it and keep going.
So it's not like they're really trying to stop them.
If they're really trying to stop them, it would be different.
So if China is killing us, you kill them back every time.
You don't say, well, I've got an argument.
I don't think it'll stop the fentanyl.
No.
I'm not saying you should kill their dealers to stop fentanyl, because it really wouldn't make that much difference.
You should kill them because they're killing us.
You kill everybody who kills you.
No exception.
As soon as you say, oh, well, there's an exception.
You can kill us under these circumstances.
No.
No.
You can't kill us under any circumstances.
There is no right time.
You can kill us.
You will be killed if you do that.
And we should be putting assets into China to directly take out their dealers.
And we should not even apologize for it.
We should actually say, yeah, we did that.
That was us.
Thank you very much.
That was us.
We took care of that for you.
It's too bad China couldn't do it themselves.
It's embarrassing, isn't it?
It's kind of embarrassing to be China, isn't it?
If we take out their dealers, and maybe we have, we wouldn't know.
It's possible we actually have.
But if we take out their dealers because they couldn't, I would publicize that.
I would not hide from that.
I would not make that a clandestine operation.
I would put that on the front page of the newspaper.
Yep, we took out your precursor dealers.
It's too bad you couldn't do it.
Yeah, I would push that right in their face.
I wouldn't hide that for one second.
Because they're not going to trigger a war over that.
They're just not.
That's a free punch.
We could send American assets into Chinese soil, Kill their precursor manufacturers, tell them we did it, show them the pictures, tell them how we did it, when we did it, and tell them we're going to do it again.
We could do that.
And there would be no military risk to that.
I mean, they'd try to retaliate in their smaller ways, but it wouldn't be a full war.
And I would also make sure that we told the world, we don't think that stops fentanyl.
That's not why you do it.
That's not the only reason you do it.
We did it because you're doing this to us.
That's it.
Trump could do that.
The raw materials are the produced things that Scotts likes.
Yeah, and I don't have any problem with legal precursors sold to legal people.
Only 15% of the modern infantry has fired their weapons, somebody said.
Thank you.
That sounds right.
You know, there are some situations where killing is exactly the right answer.
Does anybody disagree with that?
You don't want to do it, you know, too willy-nilly, but there are some situations where murder is exactly the right answer.
Unfortunately.
I mean, we don't like it, but that's just the fact.
All right.
Yeah, technically it wouldn't be murder.
It would be murder in China, but it wouldn't be murder to us.
It would be killing.
Why do we kill those who cannot control the thing for which we kill them?
You need a better example.
Yeah, innocence can kill, that's true.
So it was negative 106 degrees in Mount Washington in New Hampshire.
Negative 106.
How long can you stay alive in negative 106?
Like a minute?
That's like walking outside the space capsule.
Scott doesn't criticize Biden for fentanyl.
Why not?
Frank?
Frank?
Are you serious?
There's somebody who's watching me who's concerned that I haven't bitched enough about fentanyl and the government not doing enough?
Seriously?
Seriously?
You know that's practically my middle name.
All right.
You're really running out of insults.
Here's the best insult that Raymond could come up with for me.
They took an intellectual heavyweight, Stefan Molyneux, off YouTube and offer Scott Adams, an intellectual bantamweight from California.
Have any of your friends or family ever told you how much you suck?
Like, you're really a garbage human being.
Imagine coming onto a live stream and what you wanted to add was just a personal insult that wasn't even related to a topic.
Not even related to the point.
It's just, I'd like to go make a personal insult to somebody I don't know by comparing him to some other person.
Now, honestly, you should analyze your life.
Why was that the best thing you had to do at this moment?
There was nothing else that was better to do, more useful, productive.
Learning something, for example.
Helping somebody.
Was that the best you could do today?
That was all you had.
Now, and do you do this the rest of the day?
Do you leave here and then say, huh, I think I'll target some other people for generic insults?
I can't think of anything that would make you less useful as a human being.
I have a feeling that your entire life is just one worthless encounter after another.
Like, about with your family, they all think you're worthless.
Just a guess.
But based on that small encounter, probably nobody likes you.
That's my guess.
And if somebody's acting like they do, they're probably just lying.
They probably hate you behind your back.
Because I can tell just from that one comment, you're a piece of crap.
A really bad human being.
And you shouldn't be here.
You should go somewhere where bad people hang out.
I don't know where that is.
Somebody says, I get why your ex left you.
Do you think my ex would have disliked what I just did?
You have never met my ex.
No.
I think my ex would have enjoyed this.
And of course I don't talk like this to people who are not ridiculously worthless pieces of crap.
So I only talk like that to people who have earned it.
They've earned it.
But you've heard it.
Your daughter-in-law passed her citizenship test yesterday.
today.
What's her name, James?
We'll give her a little hand.
I love it when people pass their citizenship test.
You know, there's almost... There are very few things that make me feel more patriotic.
Do you get the same feeling?
So, congratulations.
To your daughter-in-law.
Was it daughter-in-law you said?
Congratulations.
I just love it when somebody passes their citizenship test.
Because the first thing is you have to recognize they know more about this country than the citizens.
Have you ever tried the citizenship test?
I have.
It's not so easy.
It's not as easy as you think it would be.
I have a pretty good general government knowledge, but I wouldn't get them all.
I would not get them all.
Now, I do think some of the questions are a little unnecessary, but they do cause you to study all the other stuff.
I just love it when people want to be an American enough that they'll go through that process and then they pass it.
And then I say, welcome aboard.
The legal immigrants were 100% on board.
The illegal ones, We have some conversations about some different opinions here.
All right.
Marianne is your name?
What's that?
Scott, are you on a test replacement?
What's a test replacement?
I don't know what that means.
Oh, you mean testosterone replacement?
No, I'm not supplementing testosterone.
I just had my levels checked.
I'm happy with everything.
All right.
Except my vitamin D was a little low, so I'm boosting that a little bit.
I was already boosting it, but giving it a little bit extra.
All right.
Maybe the balloon is full of migrants.
What is the balloon?
What's your BP doing?
I have to check it.
I think it's fine.
Is your vitamin D low because you never go outside?
Well, actually that's not true.
I go outside every day to get vitamin D. So let me tell you a new thing that I've been doing when it's not raining too hard.
So every morning after I'm done with this and I get cleaned up, I take the dog to the park.
That's just my favorite park.
And I do my outdoor nature thing.
So apparently if you spend 20 minutes in nature, it sets you for the whole day.
Have you ever heard that?
It really does seem to work.
I can say that those days when I go, just stand in the park for 20 minutes.
And I also do the Andrew Huberman breathing technique.
Where you do the two inhales through your nose and then exhale through your mouth.
And it totally relaxes me.
So I do breathing exercises and a nature hit at the same time I'm walking my dog.
So I get all three things at the same time.
It definitely, now I haven't tried the barefooting.
I'm curious about that.
You know what that is, right?
It's called something grounding or something.
Where you, if you're barefoot on actual dirt, And the Earth.
Somehow that's supposed to make your body feel good.
I need to try that.
The only reason I don't try that is I don't like getting my feet dirty.
But I can say for sure that 100% of the days that I've walked on a beach was a good day.
Colonel McGregor.
I saw a bunch of people say Colonel McGregor, but I don't know that story.
What's happening with Colonel McGregor?
Was he the one that talked about the balloon?
I don't know the reference there.
Colonel McGregor.
Barefoot's always best.
Yeah.
Phil McCracken.
All right.
So here's something you probably didn't know.
So I live in Northern California, and in theory, we get more sunlight than most places.
But in the winter, even in Northern California, we don't get anywhere near enough vitamin D from the sun.
Did you know that?
I could pretty much, you know, have my shirt off all day, and I don't think I'd get enough.
Because it's the quality of the sun.
If the sun is not, you know, pretty much equatorial and you're running around with your shirt off, you're not getting enough.
So that's the reason the Swedes, well, that's one reason, the Swedes supplement, because there is no situation where they get enough ever.
But even in California, I think there are only, I remember I saw this statistic a while ago, but maybe only two or three months, even in Northern California, Where the natural sun would give you enough vitamin D if you spend some time in it.
I think it's only three months of the year.
So if you think that you live in a sunny place or you're out in the sun, if it's the winter, it kind of didn't count.
The winter sun is practically worthless for vitamin D. Did you know that?
that?
Mary McCocketer.
It's the angle of the sun.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
All right.
Special shoes for grounding.
I'm not sure I believe that.
That the shoes ground you.
I mean, I'm not sure I believe the grounding works, but I'll try it.
I think I'll try the grounding thing.
Just see.
I'll put that on my list.
All right, that's all for now.
I'll talk to you on YouTube later and I'll stick around for the subscribers on Locals.
