Episode 2150 Scott Adams: Prigozhin Goes To Belarus (Maybe), Was It a Psyop?, RFK Jr. On Nuclear
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Content:
Prigozhin goes to Belarus?
RFK Jr. on nuclear
Was Wagner a psyop?
J6 truthers need therapy
Trump on Hunter's WhatsApp
How to spot an NPC
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
I know, you hoped we would do better by now, but after 15 billion years or so, here we are.
But if you'd like to take this experience to levels nobody's ever dreamed of, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
It's a dopamine, at the end of the day, thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Ah.
I think some of you were front-running me.
I think some of you were doing ah before the sip.
I feel like, gotta work on the timing.
Gotta get that simultaneity.
Alright.
So here's big news in the AI world.
Mid Journey 5.2, the newest release.
It can draw hands.
I've never understood why AI can't draw hands, but I just saw a demonstration this morning of many different hands and they were amazing.
They were sort of perfect.
So for a while I thought, you know, This AI is never going to be able to do what I do as a human artist.
But, well, there you go.
I did see an argument today on social media.
Somebody said that if you use AI to write your marketing copy, it will never be good.
Because marketing copy is about surprising people, and AI doesn't know how to do that.
AI only knows how to do what's been done before, so surprise is not part of its features.
Eh, maybe for now.
I can't imagine that'll last forever.
Alright, I was reading an article in Breitbart by Joel Pollack, and he was talking about California community poll results.
Strategies 360.
And what percentage of people do you think are considering moving out of California?
If you had to guess, 40%.
40% of Californians are considering moving.
Let me put this in context.
40% of Californians are considering moving and, and at the same time, The governor of California is the Democrats' second best guy.
Both true.
40% of the people want to get the fuck out of his state, and he's their second best guy for president.
Biden's number one, of course.
He's the second best guy!
Isn't that amazing?
My head almost can't hold those ideas at the same time.
Yeah.
Well, according to them, according to Democrats, he's the second best guy.
RFK Jr., we'll talk about him.
He might be the actual best guy.
We'll find out.
Yeah, but the reason people want to leave, I guess a lot of them because of state's policies, but a lot of them because it's expensive.
And if you're a Republican, you're three times more likely to want to leave Because of the policies.
But I gotta tell you, every time somebody leaves California, I just think of them suffering.
Because, you know, I've lived in California my entire adult life.
But until I lived in California, I lived in upstate New York.
Do you know how you feel when you walk outdoors in upstate New York?
What's the word?
What's the word you feel when you walk outdoors?
Pain.
Pain.
Yeah.
Some call it cold, but it's just pain.
And what happens if you walk out doors in, let's say, Florida in July?
Florida in July.
How does that feel?
Well, how would you describe that feeling?
Pain.
It's pain.
You could call it humidity.
You could call it uncomfortable heat.
But it's just pain.
It's just pain.
It hurts to walk to the car.
Do you know how often I'm in pain in California because I went outdoors?
Sometimes.
Like when the forest fires are there, it's kind of unpleasant, you know, if the sky's all cloudy.
But mostly, mostly you can walk outdoors with your short-sleeved shirt pretty much anytime you want for a little, at least a little while.
You might not want to stay there, but...
It's really tough to beat that.
It's really tough.
Like for the last month, I would say for a solid month, every single day has been sunny and room temperature.
I think 80 is the highest it's been.
I've been leaving my doors of my house open just all day long because the indoor and the outdoor temperature are the same.
Do you have that where you are?
I don't know.
That's my commercial for California.
It's the weather.
So RFK Jr.
has, let's say, added some nuance to his opinion about nuclear energy.
I had thought he was a little bit negative about it.
But he's giving a much smarter take on it.
Smarter because he's acting like he's open to it if it can be economical and safe.
So his current statement is, I'm all for nuclear energy if it can be made safe and if it can be made economically competitive.
Which is brilliant.
That's really the very best framing for a Democrat.
Because he's basically saying, I agree with everything you say.
Can you do it?
Which is kind of genius.
Everything you say about nuclear, absolutely.
Can you do it?
Show me you can do it.
Show me you can build it cheap enough.
Show me you can make it safe.
And I'm all for it.
It's an excellent framing.
Now, part of his argument is you can't get insurance, which would be an indication that it's not economical.
Because the insurance company would surely want to sell you insurance if you had a business with a reasonable risk.
However, I say to myself this.
I think there are some things that should not be insured by private industry.
And nuclear energy would be the top of the list.
I don't think that a private company really wants to take that chance.
See, they have what's called the reverse IBM problem.
The reverse IBM problem goes like this.
I've told you this story before.
In the 70s or so, when I was negotiating contracts for technology for a big bank, IBM would offer their bid, and I'd look at the other bids from other companies.
And if you picked IBM and everything went wrong, which was very rare, because IBM made sure everything didn't go wrong.
That's why people picked them.
But if you picked IBM, nobody would say you were an idiot if anything went wrong, because you still picked the best company.
But if you pick something that's not IBM, this is in the 70s, And it goes wrong, everybody who's going to second guess you says, uh, really?
So you didn't buy IBM and then things went wrong.
Well, you're fired because you should have just bought IBM because everybody knows that's one where things don't go wrong.
Or if it does, they fix it, which they actually did.
Their reputation was stellar.
But it's the reverse problem with nuclear.
Let's say you're an insurance company and you insure a nuclear site and a catastrophe happens.
There's no way in the world you can explain that to the public or your investors.
Your investors will say, well everybody knew it was dangerous, what the hell are you doing?
Even if it isn't, right?
First of all, everybody would act like they knew exactly what the risks were, like as if they did.
So, That's the perfect situation for the government to be the insurer and could even make a profit, I would think.
Don't you think the government could insure all nuclear facilities and actually make a profit on it?
As long as they were at least Generation 3, which has never had a death associated with it.
And it gets built in a timely fashion and whatever.
So it seems to me these are all really solvable problems.
But they're not solved.
I mean they're not exactly solved.
I think the safety thing is pretty much taken care of.
You know the one thing he didn't mention?
What's missing?
All for nuclear energy if it can be made safe and if it can be made economically competitive.
There's something he usually mentioned nuclear waste.
I feel like in the past he's mentioned waste, but people who have been updated to the most current knowledge about nuclear know that that's largely been solved.
All they do is store it on site where it was created.
They just put it in barrels and just leave it there.
Turns out you can put it in a barrel and just leave it.
And everything's fine.
You don't have to transport it.
You don't have to put it in somebody else's backyard.
And wherever your nuclear plant is, the people around there have sort of gotten used to it.
So it's largely a solved problem.
Anyway, it's good to see him evolving on that, or at least evolving his rhetoric.
He did that well.
Did everybody see the meme of him, of RFK Jr.
with his shirt off at an outdoor gym?
How many of you saw that?
It was just everywhere on social media yesterday.
I think I saw it a hundred times.
Alright, so the story there, you have to see the picture.
His chest and arms are so ripped.
He looks like the Incredible Hulk, smaller size.
I think he's like 6'2", though, so he's a big guy.
So his 70th birthday is coming up.
I don't know when, but, you know, he's 69.
He's almost 70, and he's absolutely ripped.
His body looks like a 25-year-old who's been at the gym every day.
And what's funny is, you'd think that that would have no impact on anybody's voting preferences, but it totally does.
The people on the political right were saying, well, there's a man, right?
There's a guy who understands that men should be in shape.
They should be able to handle themselves.
They should take care.
So a lot of the Republicans were saying, oh, shit, we got a role model.
Finally have a role model who appreciates good health.
Which, by the way, is something I've said about Biden.
Because it's always good to say something good.
About somebody that you maybe disagree with on other stuff.
Makes you sound credible.
And I've always said that Biden's a good role model for fitness.
Always kept his weight good.
I think he's a lifelong exerciser.
I've always appreciated that about him.
And Trump is maybe the worst case scenario for personal health.
So another good one is Vivek Ramaswamy.
I mean he's young, so he's got that going for him.
But Vivek's a, he's a gym guy, tennis player.
He's in great shape.
I love the fact that at least some of the candidates are in great shape.
And that helps.
There is a Harvard Professor who is an expert on honesty research.
So worked for Harvard.
Expert on the subject of honesty.
Has been let go because she may have fabricated research data in as many as 135 studies, including the one on honesty.
Okay.
Now I saw a comment from On Twitter, where somebody had referred to her as a Democrat, and somebody pushed back and said, whoa, that's not in the story.
The story doesn't say she's a Democrat.
No, no.
The story doesn't say she's a Democrat.
It does say she's a woman who works at Harvard who lied on 135 studies, potentially.
I don't know what the odds of being a Democrat are in that situation.
But it's not a coin flip, if you know what I mean.
All right.
Well, that was funny.
That's a little story, but it's funny.
Do you ever have this situation where there's a topic that you've been arguing about for days or weeks, and then somebody comes in with a comment that you didn't think of, and it just ruins your whole two weeks?
Because everything you should have said should have just been that.
Right?
So now I would like you to erase from your memory everything I've ever said on the topic of whether RFK Jr.
should have a debate with Dr. Hotez over vaccinations.
Forget everything I've said about it.
And I would like you to replace it with this far superior opinion that I saw on Twitter.
This is a Jeff Pilkington tweet.
Who has some really good tweets, because he's good at seeing both sides of the political situation.
Just imagine how stupid I felt when I read this.
So Jeff says, regarding vaccines and a debate, the reason the left generally doesn't want to debate on this topic is simply because there's no issue with vaccines on the left.
How do you debate something you don't have an issue with?
What is wrong with my brain? - Yeah.
What is wrong with my brain?
How did I not see the obvious?
Are you kidding me?
Of course they don't want to debate.
It would be stupid.
They got everything they want.
The team that already has everything they want, and it's not going to be taken away, why in the world would they debate?
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And here, people like me were like, well, debate is just obvious.
Of course you do.
Why wouldn't you?
It's good for the public.
Everybody likes a good debate.
Everybody likes better knowledge.
Everybody wants to get the right answer.
So of course debate is good.
No.
The team that has everything they want and is not going to be taken away, they're not going to debate you.
Not ever.
So I kept thinking in my mind, my stupid, stupid, stupid mind, I kept thinking that we were this close to having a debate.
Like, oh, any minute, if we just put a little more pressure on, that debate's gonna happen any minute now.
No, no, there's no chance of a debate.
There's no chance.
It can only be bad for them.
They have no upside, because they've already won everything.
They can only lose.
Why would you do that?
Now, how many of you are having the same feeling right now?
That you're feeling stupid, that you thought there would never be a debate?
Don't you feel stupid?
As soon as you hear this better point, all of the other points you've made about it just feel stupid.
I love this.
I love the total mindfuck of finding out how wrong you've been.
It's kind of an interesting experience, just to be that wrong for that long.
Anyway, well, thanks for joining me and being wrong, at least for some of you.
Well, because of this Russian coup that we'll talk about, of course, if it was a coup and not a PSYOP, you know, you know, could have been a PSYOP.
We'll talk about that.
But I'm still seeing today, as I've seen just about every day for a long time, somebody claiming that the January 6th situation was a coup.
Now, prior to this Wagner situation in Russia, it sounded stupid to say that people occupying a building and not taking any weapons out of their pockets, at least guns, that they thought it was a coup.
That that little group of people thought they could conquer the whole country by walking around in a building for a while.
And I thought, well, that's pretty absurd.
And so when people would argue it, I would, of course, point out that it was stupid.
And then they would always say, but, but, but, there were guns nearby.
There were guns nearby.
That doesn't really help your point.
That's not helping your point.
But there were some people there who did want to overthrow the government.
Yes.
Probably in every crowd.
Do you know where else there are some people in the crowd who want to overthrow the government right away?
New Year's Eve.
New Year's Eve when the ball's coming down.
Big crowd.
There's some murderers in there, there's some pedophiles, and there's some insurrectionists.
Guarantee it, because it's a big crowd.
You can be sure all those people are there.
But we don't really say, well, there's that New Year's Eve crowd in Times Square.
That's a bunch of murdering pedophiles.
Well, why don't we say that?
I'm sure there were murderers in the group.
I'm sure there were people who had done every kind of sex crime.
So why don't we say it's a whole bunch of sex crime people appearing and, well, because it would be stupid.
You don't judge the whole by some few people.
We're gonna get rid of the copesters.
Copester.
I'm still getting some people who are defending January 6th as an actual coup.
Now, so here is my point.
So I've held for a long time that people were wrong about their characterization of January 6th.
But after watching the actual, you know, what an actual, at least the beginning of a coup would look like, with tanks and shooting down helicopters and shit, Now when somebody says that they think January 6th was a coup, I feel bad for them.
Like, no joke, I just feel, oh, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that happened to you.
Because these are really victims.
And I mean that not in a political sense, I mean that in a medical sense.
Medically speaking, these are victims.
Because they've been sold something that's not real, and now it's become part of their psyche.
That's a mental problem.
So they've actually been assigned a mental problem by the Democrat press and propaganda machine.
They've actually been assigned a medical problem.
And they accepted it.
All right.
Medical problem, mental problem, I accept.
If you say, if you say so.
All right.
Well, let's talk about this whole Wagner situation and Purgosian and marching on Moscow and turning back and all that stuff.
You probably know all the details.
I don't need to go over the details.
I'm sure you follow the news enough to know that Putin made a deal with Prokhorin to go to Belarus and then Wagner will be, you know, most of it absorbed into the regular military.
And then apparently, I'm not sure this part is true, not sure this part is true, but allegedly Putin is going to fire the two generals that Prokhorin wanted fired.
Do we have a confirmation on that?
Because I'm not so sure about that.
I mean, I read it in the news, but I'm not convinced.
Maybe.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
I don't think it's important.
All right.
So let me give you my best takes, worst takes take.
I'm going to tell you which takes I think are the most insanely ridiculous.
Some of these will be your takes.
Don't get too bad at me.
We're still in the fog of war, right?
So if you've got a bad take today about that, join the crowd.
I'm pretty sure all of our takes are bad.
Can we agree on that?
Can we agree that whatever happened there, we'll never know?
We'll never know what happened.
We will never ever know what actually happened.
There's no way.
There's not the slightest chance we'll ever know.
So would you agree that all of my takes should be bad under those conditions?
Can you agree that all my takes are bad, so you don't have to rumble about it while I'm talking?
Okay.
All of my takes are bad.
But here are the other takes that I think are bad, because I think all of our takes are bad.
Like we're all in the same boat.
Just a bunch of bad takes.
All right?
Number one.
How many of you believe that that's the actual thing that's going to happen?
That Purgosian is actually just going to go to Belarus and live his life similar to the family dog who went to the farm to live out his life.
Didn't die.
No, the dog didn't die.
It went to the farm in the country.
It's living there happily now.
How many of you think he's going to be allowed to take his military, including their heavy equipment, with him to Belarus?
Do you think that's going to happen?
So here's bad take number one, is that what happened was that Putin gave Pugrosian Belarus because Belarus is weak and Wagner is strong and he'll just bring his military there and basically he'll just take over Belarus and then maybe Putin will have a strong partner in Belarus because really Putin and Pugrosian have always been friends and And there was nothing like a real coup that happened.
It was just maybe an op of some kind.
How many of you believe that Wagner will be allowed to take his military to Belarus?
You know that's crazy, right?
It's crazy.
There isn't the slightest chance, not even the smallest chance, that he will take his full military there.
He might need some number of people who are his personal protection.
That might happen.
Maybe there's some scaled down something or other.
But he's not going to be bringing with him the kind of firepower that would take over Belarus.
How many disagree?
Is there anybody who thinks he's going to take over Belarus, or that he's the de facto ruler of Belarus now?
There's not even a chance of that.
Not even the slightest chance of that.
Yeah.
So, all right, good.
So most of you don't believe that.
How many of you believe that the missing $6.2 billion is part of this story?
That that goes a long way to explaining who's doing what over there?
How many think that's part of this story?
I see some mixed bags, some yeses and nos.
I'm going to say I wouldn't rule it out, because I don't know one way or the other.
But here's the smarter take on that.
Money is fungible.
Did you know that?
Like if you gave me a dollar, I could spend it on a piece of candy, or I could buy some gas with it.
Right?
The 6.2 billion dollars is a concept.
It's not an important one.
If the US wanted to bribe somebody, they don't need that special secret budget.
They just use the regular budget.
If the CIA wants to, you know, bribe somebody, they don't need any hidden $6.2 billion.
They got lots of ways to do it.
You know, just lots of normal ways.
So, although it's not impossible that the 6.2 billion that was missing or recently found or whatever it was, it's not impossible that it has something to do with the story, but I would say it's unlikely.
I would say it's unlikely.
Because the American NATO side doesn't need any extra special budget to do anything.
They have all the money they need to do whatever they need, secretly or not secretly.
So they wouldn't need any tricks.
They'd have everything they need.
So I don't buy that, although I wouldn't rule it out.
I wouldn't rule it out.
It just seems that it doesn't make sense in the world of budgeting.
I did budgeting for a living for years in the big corporations.
And that's the first thing you learn, is that the budget items are not real.
They're just conceptual.
So you could take from this budget and put it in that budget, take from this budget, put it in that budget.
So budgets aren't real.
They're just sort of little guidelines.
So forget about the 6.2, there was plenty of money to do anything they wanted to do with or without it.
All right, next bad take is that Putin and Purgosian have reached an agreement.
How many think they've reached an agreement?
Does anybody believe that?
And if they reached an agreement, do you think that either one of them plans to keep it?
Apparently, Russian agreement is an oxymoron.
I think even the Russians might admit that.
At this level, at the political level, or military political level, a promise doesn't mean anything.
A Russian agreement in writing, verbal, nothing.
It doesn't have any zero value.
So the entire story is about two guys that made a Russian agreement.
That's what the press told us.
The press told us, hey, it's all over.
Two Russian guys made an agreement.
That's nothing.
That's literally nothing.
How about the idea that it's over?
Do you believe it's over?
Of course not.
It's not over until one of them is dead.
Because they can't both live.
And it looks like it's going to be Purgosian who's going to be dead.
Of course he's going to be dead.
It might take a month.
It might take two months.
Alright.
But he's dead.
Alright.
So, does it make any sense to you that Wagner made an agreement and that this was the agreement?
The agreement was that they would Get a couple of people fired, but those firings wouldn't really have much to do with them because they wouldn't be in the war anymore.
So they'd solve a problem that was irrelevant to them because they're no longer fighting that war.
But also, we are led to believe that Purgosian and all of the Wagner people agreed to a deal which guarantees they will die.
That's what we're told.
They agreed to a deal that guarantees their own death.
Because Purgosian is going to be killed in Belarus as soon as he's stripped of his military.
As soon as his military is now surrounding him, he gets poisoned.
Falls off a balcony.
Now what about all those Wagner people who are going to be absorbed into the regular Russian military?
Well, I saw one military person explain it this way.
The regular soldiers When they see the stink of the Wagner on this person, they're going to say, hey, yeah, you're one of us.
Hey, welcome to the unit.
All right, your job will be to check for mines.
No, you won't have any equipment.
Not equipment, just feel around.
Just go out there.
What do you mean you're not going to do your job?
No, you are going to do your job.
Oh, you're not going to go out and check for mines with your bare hands?
Well, boom.
Sorry, guess we gotta kill ya.
So the idea is that the Wagner guys will get all of the most dangerous, worst assignments until they die or revolt or get fragged or something.
So basically they're all dead.
Or wish they would be.
So do you think that Wagner agreed to a deal that guarantees all of their deaths?
I don't.
I don't.
So whatever happened, I don't believe that Purgosian had any intention of keeping his side.
Now, if Purgosian is going to Belarus, we'd probably see some preparations because you'd think it would happen pretty quickly, right?
Has anybody seen Purgosian today?
Is he making any videos?
Do we know where his military is?
I think he's already in hiding, right?
He's probably already hiding.
Do you think he's not already trying to figure out how to kill Putin?
To assassinate him?
Looking for somebody on the inside who might do it for him?
Of course he is.
Of course he is.
I don't think he'll succeed, but of course he is.
Do you think Putin's already planning to have him killed if they can find him and he's probably already in hiding?
And not in Belarus either.
Yeah, he's probably in hiding.
My guess is you're not going to hear from him again.
You may never hear from him again.
He may simply already have disappeared.
He might already be dead.
You wouldn't know.
All right.
So, I do not believe that the Wagner people agreed to go into the kill box.
All right, here's the deal.
If you'll give us what we want, we'll go into the kill box.
Oh, no.
They did not agree to that.
So the next question is, was it a PSYOP?
Was it a psy-op and it was never a real thing?
How many think it was a psy-op?
You have to be brave to say yes to this since you know I'm going to be talking about the worst takes.
I haven't ruled it out.
I suppose it would depend on your definition of a PSYOP.
The people who said it was a plan to find out who the traders are, I think that's the least likely possibility.
Because you wouldn't do this just to find some traders.
There are other ways to do it, like every other way to do it.
You wouldn't do it this way.
Now, I'm not even going to get into the details of why you wouldn't do it this way, but you don't have your most important military person come out in public and say that the reason for the war was bullshit and you don't need to be there.
You wouldn't do that as part of an op.
And the reason you wouldn't do that is you could do other things that might make it look credible without giving away the main narrative that you're trying to protect.
If it were the only way to do the op, then I would say, well, maybe.
It was the only way they could do it, so even though they didn't want to change the narrative, maybe they took a chance because it was just the only way to do it.
But it wasn't the only way to do it.
It wasn't the only way to do anything.
So I can't wrap my head around the possibility that they would give up the main thing that would cause good morale among their troops.
The main thing is that they have to think there's a reason they're fighting.
And Pugosian took away the reason for fighting.
The reason.
They're not protecting Russia.
Nothing was at risk.
There's no reason.
There's no way in hell that Putin and Pugosian said, all right, here's the deal.
You're going to say that the whole reason I invaded this country is bullshit.
And then I'm going to pretend like I'm mad at you, and you're going to do a fake coup.
You're going to shoot down some of our helicopters, but just limit it to seven.
Does any of that sound like that was a real psyop?
Now, add to that the fact that we're hearing the news today, if you can believe the news, Washington Post, that our spies, U.S.
spies, knew that Progrosin was going to act militarily against the government.
We've known it for weeks.
Do you think if we've known it for weeks that he was going to do it, that it was a PSYOP?
That we've known it for weeks?
No.
I feel like we would know if it was a PSYOP if we knew it.
Somehow we had good enough sources that we knew he was going to do it.
We'd probably know everything about it.
Or a lot about it.
All right, so I think the odds that it was a fake coup would be super low.
Super low.
I suppose anything's possible, but super low odds that it was a PSYOP.
I saw Elon Musk mocking that idea with a meme yesterday.
You wake up in the morning, it's another PSYOP.
Although I'm not sure he was mocking it or saying it might have been.
Because remember, you know how parody and reality emerged?
As soon as I said he was mocking it, I realized, no, I can't be sure.
He might actually think it was a psyop.
I mean, I don't know.
I'd be surprised if he thought that, but hey, maybe.
All right, let's see.
Other bad takes.
Russia is done for.
So here's the take I was seeing on social media.
Russia's done.
You know, the government's going to fold, the country's going to collapse.
To which I say, what?
I didn't see anything like that.
To me it looked like the strongest military in Russia took a run at something that was at least threatening to be a coup, and Putin squashed it with a few threats.
Now I saw a report that didn't have any sources, so I don't believe it, but if you were Putin, wouldn't you have the names of all the family members of at least the leadership of Wagner?
Wouldn't you know where their grandma lived and where their cousins and their kids lived?
And don't you think they were all rounded up?
Don't you think Putin said, hey Prokhorchin, Are your generals there?
Are your colonels and everybody there?
All right, I want to read the names of their family members.
And then he just reads the names of their family members and their addresses.
All right, let's see.
This is Colonel Victor blah blah.
Let's see, your wife is blah blah blah.
Your sister is.
Your brother is.
Your father is.
And then you just give them all their addresses.
That's the end of the coup.
All you have to do is give them their names and addresses, so you know that Putin knows exactly where they live and who they are.
And they turn around.
And I think that's probably what happened, honestly.
I think probably that they actually... Given that, you know, there's a possibility that they actually agreed to go in the kill box, the only reason you would agree to go in a kill box is to save your own family.
Right?
To save your own family, you actually would agree to go in the kill box.
That's the one time you would do it.
So it certainly looks like that.
I'm only speculating, I can't know.
But it looks like Putin just said, if you leave now, everybody gets to live at least temporarily.
If you take one foot into Moscow, I'm going to start killing your family.
One at a time.
I think that got him to turn around.
Now, I don't think they, I don't think Pugosian has agreed to go to Belarus, really.
I think he's going to run.
But, you know, it bought him time just to act as if he was.
All right.
There's a take that says that Putin didn't handle it well.
He didn't do a good job of managing the coup.
That's not what I saw.
I thought Putin handled it like the best dictator ever.
When Progrosin's troops rolled into Rostov-on-Don and they got no resistance, do you think that was because all the people there were on their side?
Or was it just a bunch of Russian military people, and when the public sees Russian military in the context of having a war with Ukraine, they just treat them as heroes?
And maybe that was it.
And maybe the military was ordered not to engage.
If what Putin did was tell everybody to not engage, Or at least not engage much.
I think there was some helicopter action there.
But don't engage much until they get to the border of Moscow because they're going to get crushed if they enter Moscow.
So you can kind of let everybody else just stand down.
Let them be totally exposed.
In order to get to Moscow there was apparently huge amounts of open space where you can't hide.
So basically, Putin could have just kept them outside of Moscow, and then picked them all off from the air, with no real risk.
I mean, he'd lose some assets, but he'd certainly get it done.
So, Putin was never even in a little bit of trouble.
When I was looking at it early in the coup, I said, you couldn't know who would win.
But that was based on one variable that we didn't know about.
The one variable is how many people would join the insurrection.
If, and there was no way for me to know from my perspective, if it turned out that a whole bunch of lower generals were totally in on this deal, well it might have worked.
But if they were not, it didn't have any chance.
So basically the only way it could have worked was mass defections of pretty high-ranking people.
And maybe Rogozhin thought he would get some.
Maybe some people promised just to play both sides of things and then didn't come through.
Maybe.
But what it looks like at the moment is that there was never any risk.
When I heard the number of troops that Wagner had to attack Moscow, it would be something like, I don't know, 1% of what you would need?
Did anybody see the actual numbers of what you'd need to take a city like Moscow?
The numbers you would need?
I think they came there with like 1% of what they would need to get it done.
It was somewhere in that neighborhood, like a ridiculously not even close number.
So unless the population joined them, which didn't happen, there was nothing there.
And I'm not even sure the Russian people were ever concerned about this.
Did you see the pictures of the Wagner group?
They were on the sidewalk with their machine guns.
I think they were just moving into Rostov-on-Don.
And then there was a cleaning lady, a street cleaning lady with a broom, who's standing like 30 feet behind the people with the machine guns, and she's just doing her job of sweeping the street.
And all of the other Russians were just sort of hanging out, taking pictures.
Nobody took it seriously.
I don't believe there was anybody in Russia who thought that Russians were going to kill each other.
And then they were right.
I mean, minus some helicopters, apparently.
But once the Russian military was on the ground with a bunch of civilians, the fact that the civilians treated them like it wasn't a coup may have actually stopped the coup.
Because this is one of the tricks I teach you if you get in trouble.
You just don't accept the frame of the person who's giving you the trouble.
So these civilians, they never accepted the frame that there was a coup.
They just, it was just business as usual.
Which to me is the most funny thing about it.
Because it's as if the population knew it wasn't real.
Really?
Isn't that the feeling you got?
I never got a sense that there was any Russian citizen who was ever worried even a little bit.
So it was never close to actually being a successful coup, because the one thing we didn't know about just wasn't true, that a lot of people would join him.
So let's see, what else is a bad idea here?
Do you think that Putin gave too much?
Some people say Putin is weakened forever because even though he stopped the coup, and even though he banned the guy or he'll kill him soon, that he did fire the two people that the guy wanted fired, Prokhorchin wanted fired, and therefore he caved and now he's weak.
Do you buy that?
I don't.
Because nobody in Russia cares if he fires his generals.
How many generals has he fired?
Just since the Ukraine war started, he's fired like six top generals or something?
Four to six?
It was just a Tuesday.
Firing his two top war generals is just a Tuesday for Russia.
Happens all the time.
I don't think it had any impact on anything.
Do you think that NATO is thinking to themselves, well, we thought he was strong, but he fired those two generals?
Now we've got our chance?
No.
No, nothing has changed.
It changed absolutely nothing.
It's just something for people in the press to talk about.
You have to sound smart.
Oh, he's degraded his power.
There will be other challenges to him.
No, who's going to challenge him?
He just squashed the Wagner group.
He squashed the Wagner Group with a phone call.
That looks pretty strong to me.
You can stop a coup with a phone call.
Alright, here's CNN's take.
Oliver Darcy.
Now, I always like reading Oliver Darcy, because there's some people you think are not even trying to be independent thinkers.
They're really just on the party line, and they're not going to budge.
So he's one of those.
He says, one notable thing about this rapidly developing international story, talking about Russia, since Elon Musk took a sledgehammer to Twitter's verification system, the platform is far less useful during breaking news events.
And so, people are depending on traditional newsrooms for verifiable information.
Was that a year experience?
Was your experience that you had to rely on the platforms for your good information?
I listened to Mario's Spaces that was on for like, I don't know, hours and hours during the thing.
And they were looking at all the different sources.
So they were saying, oh, there's a report from this source, or there's a report from Telegram.
Now, they were very clear to say which sources were dependable.
And it turns out most of them were not.
OK, I just saw a comment that's making me crazy, but I'm going to ignore it for a moment.
So my experience was the opposite.
So when I knew that something was going on, I immediately turned on CNN, and they were talking about the submarine.
So I went to Twitter, and I started getting good information.
And I thought, well, by now, CNN has caught up.
So I went to CNN, and it was a commercial.
So I said, all right, commercial.
So I'd go back to social media.
I'd get all this new information and stuff.
And I'd say, OK, by now, CNN has it.
So I'd go back.
It was a submarine.
Goodbye, happy accidents.
instance.
Goodbye, you.
There's just some people who tried to get blocked, so I'm giving them their way.
Good for you.
You're all gone now.
All right.
But I would say, I would say that once CNN and Fox News and the rest caught up, that I did catch up with them, news.
But I don't think they had any news that I hadn't seen already.
So I would say CNN was not really additive on this situation.
All right, Trump is doing his Trumpy thing, talking about Hunter's so-called bribery alleged scandal.
And he read the WhatsApp message from Hunter.
And he did a mock, acting like he was impressed that Hunter Biden was tougher than he thought, because, you know, the message he was threatening the Chinese guy if he didn't pay him money.
Oh, he's tougher than I thought!
Now, Newt Gingrich thinks that the Biden potential bribery allegations almost guarantee a Republican president, and it would be Trump.
What do you think?
Do you think that the Biden revelations will make any difference to the election?
Because I don't.
I don't think it'll make any difference at all.
And it's always the same reason.
Either the Democrats won't hear about it or won't believe it.
But they will believe that Trump is the devil incarnate because they were told so.
So I don't know that any of this matters anymore.
I think we're in a post Post-factual world, at least in terms of politics, where I don't think the truth or the facts really matter too much to anybody at this point.
All right.
How many Democrats do you think are aware of Hunter Biden's WhatsApp messages?
So there's a big story on the right-leaning universe.
I kind of wonder.
I think it might be zero.
You know, close to zero.
Not zero, but very low.
I mean, you always have Jake Tapper.
He probably knows.
Yeah.
All right.
I saw somebody asked the question, how can you spot an NPC?
A non-player character.
So if we're a big simulation, If this is a simulation in our reality, that means that some of the characters are not players, they're just sort of scenery NPCs.
How can you identify them?
I may have told you this trick before, but they don't have stories.
That's the way I identify them.
They can't tell a story.
If you went to me and said, Scott, tell me a story about the time you succeeded at something.
I'd have several.
Tell me about a time you were embarrassed.
Several stories.
Tell me about a time you nearly died.
Several.
Several stories.
You can give me almost any topic and I can give you a story.
But have you met people who can't tell you a story?
So you say something like, alright, tell me a story about something that you really enjoyed.
Can't...
Well, I can't... And they just can't do it.
And my speculation is, it's because they didn't have any history.
That if you're a player, you can tell the story because you're just recounting something that happened to you.
But if you're an NPC, you don't have a history.
Nothing happened to you.
You were just walking around like scenery the whole time.
All right, well, I just put that out there.
If you see somebody who is unable to recount a story of their own life, you should be suspicious.
No, that's different from not liking to tell stories.
If you are capable of telling a story, but you don't like it, you're still a player.
All right.
I don't think anybody has agency, but that's just me.
Ladies and gentlemen, is there a story I missed?
Is there anything I should be talking about that I'm not?
What are you talking about, Scott?
Just Google NPC.
You'll see what's going on.
You disagree. - Three.
Yeah, Adam Rich, actor from Eight is Enough, died from fentanyl overdose.
I'm getting a little bit tired of the fentanyl overdose stories.
Scott finally woke up.
I can never tell if you're being serious.
Foreign policy speech?
No.
Do you think about Candida?
I don't know what that is.
Wagner admitted to election meddling in 2016.
Well, we knew that there... So Progression owned that troll factory, which was a total hoax.
So we were told that Russia was interfering on social media.
But then if you actually look at the memes, Some of them are pro-Hillary, and some of them are pro-Trump.
So first of all, it's not even clear they had a specific agenda.
Secondly, if you look at the memes, they're so weak.
They're so weak, the memes, they had no impact on anything.
And I didn't even see any of them.
So there's no chance he had an actual impact.
But interfere, he did.
I mean, he attempted to interfere, so you could call that interference.
But interfering in any way that mattered?
No.
There's no evidence that any of it mattered.
Some people think the stuff growing on your tongue controls your actions.
Alright.
Could steroids hurt your voice box?
I don't know.
I need to see his speech.
Do you think Progrosian was dumb enough to kick off a bad coup?
Thank you.
No.
I think that Progrosian believed that he could pull it off, and then something changed.
Because remember, in a coup, I mean, you can plan, but things are going to happen.
And I think the part that didn't materialize is people taking his side.
So I think that's the part that didn't materialize.
Just a guess.
So no, I don't think that, I don't think the fact that the coup didn't look like it could work, at least on paper, doesn't look like it could have worked.
I don't think that means it was a PSYOP.
Because again, it would be the dumbest PSYOP anybody ever did.
It just means there's something we don't know about it.
See what I, my speculation is that Putin rounded up their families.
And I think that that may have been just a blind spot.
Maybe Pergrosian just didn't see that happening.
By the way, this is the same argument for why the Second Amendment is important, despite the fact that the military of the country has bigger weapons.
Because if there were ever some kind of dictator takeover, and it was supported by some military group of Americans, the first thing Americans would do is round up their families.
They're not going to fight directly against the military.
They're going to go get your cousin, and your brother, and your mother, and your grandmother, and then they're going to shoot them one at a time until we get the country back.
That's what's going to happen.
Now, I can tell you that'll happen because I'll probably be an underground leader if that happens.
And that's what I would order.
Those would be my orders.
Round up their family.
As horrible as that is, it's war.
You do what you gotta do.
So, yeah.
You wouldn't kill their families?
Well, then you will be killed yourself.
You always have a choice.
I'd threaten him.
I wouldn't kill him.
You thought it wasn't war anymore?
Yeah, I would still say that Ukraine is over in terms of a war.
I think it's largely over.
I think both sides want to negotiate, but they're just, you know, trying to get a little extra leg up.
I think the Ukrainians are still probing the Russian defense, see if there's any holes there.
Do you think that having Prokhorin gone will have a big effect on the military effectiveness?
You do?
I'm going to say no.
Because first of all, Prokhorin was an offensive force and the Russians aren't looking to be as offensive, you know, except artillery and planes and stuff.
It looks like they're more of a defensive Military.
And I'm coming to the belief that the Wagner Group was more PR than effective.
That because Prokhorchin got the most attention, we came to see them as the fiercest fighters making the most difference.
There's no real proof of that.
There's no real proof.
And 100% of what top Russians say is always a lie.
So where do we know these Wagner groups were the extra special bad ones?
I don't know.
I think Pogrosian told us.
So I'm not sure that they were ever as bad or as effective.
I don't think they were ever as effective as it was presented.
And I think that you could take them completely out of the war, which just happened.
They basically got completely taken out of the war and there'll be no difference.
