Episode 1700 Scott Adams： Exploring The Rumor That CNN Plans To Start Reporting Real News
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, Scott Adams talks about what it takes to be a professional comic, how to deal with a deadline, and how to handle the risk of embarrassing yourself in front of thousands of people in a live setting.
Transcript
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that's the sound of me not putting multiple papers on my desk yes my printer is still
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being a problem but welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you we'll be going to
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plan B oh my goodness is plan B not working doesn't seem that it is well we'll make this
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work I swear to God well that's weird apparently I have at least two technical problems happening
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at the same time I hope your day is better I just have to do something here now in order
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to make the technology work perfectly it's going to require the collective affirmations of all of you
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and I'd like you to join me now in something called the simultaneous sip because if I can
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capture all of the goodwill and vibrations from all of you it might be enough to make my printer
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work and we're going to test this out live all right I'm going to queue up my printer and then
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I'm going to see if the simultaneous sip makes it work for the first time are you ready for this
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experiment we're going to have to I'll tell you what I'll do since the printer will take a moment
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to tell me whether it's working or not this could be exciting we'll do the simultaneous sip
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simultaneously all right now before we know the answer all you need is a cup of margarita glass of
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tanker chalice stein canteen ginger glass a vessel of any kind filled with your favorite liquid I like
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coffee join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the I don't think it's working it's not working
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but let's have the simultaneous sip anyway it's all we need go
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now one of the questions you might ask yourself is Scott how do you handle the risk of embarrassing
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yourself in a live setting to thousands of people and the answer is I don't really care
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I've noticed over the years that when I have a really good plan and I'm really like I'm on point
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and I think I'm nailing it sometimes people like it sometimes they don't and that I've also noticed
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that if I'm completely unprepared and everything goes wrong sometimes it's great sometimes it's not
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it's completely non-productive I'll tell you when I first learned that I first learned that I did I did reboot it
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I rebooted it just before I went live the first time I learned that preparation doesn't seem to matter as
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much as you think is when I started cartooning and I only had an hour to make a cartoon before I went to my day job
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and if I didn't do one in that hour I'd fall behind deadline and I found that sometimes I'd come in there
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and I'd have an idea and I'd have the full hour to develop it and it'd be pretty good sometimes not
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and other times 55 minutes would go by and I'd have nothing but I had a rule that I always had to do
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something the same rule the Beatles had by the way the Beatles had the same rule if they started a song
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they had to finish it they couldn't wait till the next day they had to finish anything they started
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so I had a analogous rule which is that I would have to do a comic within an hour no matter how many
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minutes were left when I decided I had to charge through and finish it and I found that the the five
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minute comics were exactly as popular as the one hour comics there was there was a difference in the
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audience and that ladies and gentlemen is a lesson you don't really know what's going to work well
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sometimes just winging it if you know what you're doing works too I however have three backups
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I have my printed copy that's not working I have my phone as my backup for the digital copy which
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apparently did not sync with my notes from my other system a second technical problem but am I am I
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dissuaded by that no because unlike you I have a third backup which is already fired up right over
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here so if you have enough devices and enough coffee you can make anything work it's true story number
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one employment looks good weirdly so the new pandemic era a low of 3.6 percent unemployment that's actually
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great isn't it so here's the interesting thing so this is in the the realm of predictions I've said
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to you before that there's one economic measure that if that one is working you can kind of figure
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that everything else will work out too maybe a little slower but if you can get one thing right
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it's the most important thing to get right and that's employment because the difference between
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having a job and not having a job is a gigantic difference it's it's adding to the system versus
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subtracting from the system so every job is sort of a big increment in goodness so at the moment we
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have actually a really good employment situation but here's the test to the prediction so remember the
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the rule is sort of scott's rule i guess i didn't invent it but we'll say it's mine for now that if
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you get employment right you know you don't have a lot of unemployment everything else will work out
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now is that true if you've got pandemics and inflation and you know ukraine stirring things up and
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supply chain problems well that's the test right this is sort of the the ultimate test of that
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predictive variable and i'm going to stick with it so i'm going to stick with employment being the
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most predictive thing if the employment numbers had been bad i would be panicking a little bit
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gonna be honest gonna be honest if the employment numbers were going down
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as fast as inflation was going up i'd be spinning in this chair right now
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but when i see inflation going up i hate it i mean everybody's taking a bad haircut right now and you
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know you can't all afford it so that's bad that's really bad but it's not as bad as unemployment would
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be i mean not even close i don't think so let's uh track that and see if that still comes true so some
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more fake news or is it there are reportedly seven hours of call logs missing from the white house
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call logs said call logs too many times because uh it was january 6 and and trump was doing who knows
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what because of those missing records but turns out there were no missing records in the sense of
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deleted so nobody deleted anything the the records are an exact record of what they should be recording
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it's just that they don't record every phone that's pretty much the whole story
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so the story went from yesterday uh it's like a watergate situation with you know missing missing
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call logs at the most suspicious time and then it morphed into oh it looks like he used some other phone
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okay now if you are the president or any any ceo or any leader trying to let's say make sure there's
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not a digital path to you wouldn't you just borrow somebody else's phone yeah i realize you so trump
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was asked if he used a burner phone a kind of phone that um is not associated with a person it's just sort
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of a short-term phone you use criminals use it drug dealers use burner phones uh cheaters use burner
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phones that sort of thing so he he was asked that trump said he he didn't recognize the term or
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he didn't know what a burner phone was and then john bolden threw him under the bus and said he talked
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about burner phones with me so um is there a story here yeah like this this feels like a whole bunch of
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nothing doesn't it suppose we know that trump used some other means of communication either directly or
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indirectly you know you here's how i imagine it going the way i imagine it going is trump standing
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next to somebody who has their own phone and saying can you call so and so and say this or that
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i mean that's sort of the way i imagined it like i don't imagine that there are necessarily direct
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phone calls from trump to somebody that would be you know implementing incriminating in any way
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but who knows you know one of the things that uh trump has done so well for years is avoid digital
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records he doesn't use email for example and that's that's gotta work in your favor as some level of
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business you probably shouldn't write anything down at some point you should only whisper to people
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you know in a secure location that's it nothing else the way putin probably does it
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all right so here's my favorite story from this is on fox fox website uh so of course one of my
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favorite things about the news is watching the fox news cnn you know battle with each other and how
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they frame the other the other side because it's it's the one it's the one situation where you can be
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fairly confident that they're not really hiding their bias which doesn't mean they're always lying
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i'm just saying that you know they don't do it to inform you they do it for competitive reasons
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and uh so this is hilarious according to fox news uh it's talking about how uh zucker uh the disgraced
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they call him the disgraced x ceo so i think it's funny whenever anybody calls anybody else disgraced
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as if there's anybody famous anymore who's not disgraced everybody's disgraced to somebody so does it
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really mean anything to call somebody disgraced i mean i get it i know why they're they're saying it and
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and and i uh i would agree with the description but you sort of a little bit overused i feel like
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everybody's a little bit disgraced for one reason or another i'm sure i've disgraced myself a few times
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i'm pretty sure i'll disgrace myself again before the end of the day uh anyway i love that word in
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in politics and uh so here's how fox uh writes it in an attempt to restore cnn's credibility so that
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this is making you think past the sale so you're supposed to uh just sort of agree that it's an
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obvious fact that cnn has no credibility so according to fox news in an attempt to restore cnn's credibility
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they talk about the new leader uh licked or light i don't know how to pronounce it is expected to
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attempt to pivot back to straight news after zucker allowed the network to take on a partisan liberal
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approach that has struggled to attract viewers during the biden era
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i love how they say it now who exactly is expecting this so fox news is writing it like you know these
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are facts you know if you didn't if you didn't stop and slow down to read the actual words you'd sort of
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accept it as this is common knowledge that they're a disgraced network they need to restore their
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credibility and the new guy is is at least thinking about he hasn't decided
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he hasn't made the decision yet but he's definitely definitely may be thinking about reporting real news
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so that's that's that fox news frames oh that that is funny
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um do you remember as i do uh think back you know maybe a year or two do you remember when it was
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popular to say that uh uh anybody would be better than trump you know anybody would be a better
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president than trump and one of the reasons that people would uh defend biden you know i'd say you
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know biden's too old what about you know forget about his policies can we really have a president that
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old isn't that unsafe and people would say i swear to god they'd say anything's better than trump
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but i'll bet they didn't think they'd get to test that hypothesis did they
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turns out turns out we're testing the hypothesis
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we're literally finding out if anything is is is absolutely anything better than trump
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so you know normally you would think that you would say that as sort of a
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a framing question you don't think that you get to actually scientifically test it
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so we found the the first the furthest thing from something that you can get
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here's something here's biden let's see let's see if anything is better than trump so far
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so far so far i think trump is beating the furthest thing from something but maybe maybe i'm being
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subjective about that maybe um so i've seen a few people speculate and i was having the same feeling
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joel pollack said this uh and i'm seeing some other writers pick up on it that it seems like the
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mainstream media is trying to get ahead of the hunter biden laptop story that they had been
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suppressing and behind until now it seemed like somewhat of a sudden shift as if as if they've
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been informed that something's coming meaning that they need to get ahead of it because it'd be a
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little too embarrassing to have never mentioned it if for example and this is hypothetical if there's
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an indictment coming down it's starting to look like uh foreshadowing doesn't it if this were a movie
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script and you and you saw the uh let's say the protagonist of the movie if you saw them flipping
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through the channels and all the news anchors started talking about this story for the first time and you
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knew you knew that that was unusual wouldn't you see it as foreshadowing definitely it looks exactly like
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it now i don't think it's the same reason i think it's maybe just that they're softening up the public
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for what's coming maybe uh the other possibility is that the decision has come down to get rid of
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biden so that he's not a risk for running because what if what if joe biden said he wants i mean he said
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it publicly but what if he really said he's going to run again what would the democrat leadership do
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if biden who is the president after all what if he said he wants to run again he could make it happen
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could he not i think he'd get the he'd get the nomination i don't know i don't know that the
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democrats could allow that to happen so it looks like the hit has been put on biden himself by the
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democrats am i wrong i i feel like they put the hit on them they have to take him out so that they
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have a chance of you know developing somebody who could be more of a longer-term leader under the
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mold of whoever's molding whoever somebody's molding somebody over there i'm sure of it
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yeah the 25th is knocking you say all right here's a question that i've been wondering you
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you know you we keep hearing about the 50 former and current intel officials who signed the letter
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saying that the hunter laptop thing was russian disinformation when they must have known
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that it wasn't or they must have known that they couldn't know whether it was or it wasn't
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now how do you get 50 people professionals to tell a horrendous lie in public and then sign it
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or or is it worse did somebody like john brennan i'll just pick him as a random name did somebody
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just ask them to do it and then they just did is were all of those officials so afraid of whoever
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asked them to do it that they knew that doing it was good for their careers and not doing it was bad
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for their careers in other words were they blackmailed because that's what that is right now do you have to
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say the words or are they all in the business where they know how things work remember schumer said they've
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got a you know a thousand what a hundred ways from sunday or something to get back at you so do you think
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that people in the intelligence world need to explicitly threaten anything they don't need to explicitly threaten
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anything because they're all on the same page so somebody such as i'll just pick a name at random john brennan
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if somebody at that stature were to ask them to do something that they didn't want to do and didn't
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feel completely comfortable with would they feel that they had to do it anyway and isn't that blackmail
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if you don't explicitly say i will get back at you is that necessary does the crime of blackmail require
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an explicit threat actually i don't know the answer to that all right there must be there's probably
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a hundred lawyers watching this right now if somebody's an attorney do you need uh the threats
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or the blackmail threat spelled out or can it be so clear to anybody who would understand the situation
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that it still counts as a crime because you've set up a situation where it's very clear
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that blackmail is in play even if you don't say it that'd be hard to prove wouldn't it
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oh that would be extortion somebody says i don't know about that
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why pay blackmail if there's no threat because there's an implied uh cause and effect so it
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doesn't have to be a threat you could just understand that under this situation this bad thing will
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happen to you you just have to know it could happen that's all
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all right give me an answer to that so it looks like russia is propping up the ruble but here are
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a couple things that i learned uh one of the one of the reasons that the gas is still flowing from
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russia and russia hasn't tried to use that as a weapon is that they don't have pipelines to sell it
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anywhere else so just as europe is trapped by having to buy russian energy and russia is trapped
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for the time being in accepting dollars and euros they want to accept rubles but they can't because
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they're mostly operating on long-term contracts that were signed a while ago and here's the funniest
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part apparently russia has decided to honor the deals during war i mean it's literally you know
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economic war on top of military war and the very people that putin's at war with their their
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energy companies are saying oh yeah we're going to honor the deal you know we're not going to just
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change the deal and say you have to pay rubles no no that's a deal and i'm thinking really is that the way
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it works do they follow the contract in this situation i don't know but i guess one of the
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reasons they would follow the contract is that there's no reason to break it and the no reason
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to break it is that they don't have options meaning they can't sell it anywhere else there's no other
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pipelines they can't sell to china because they don't have the infrastructure to deliver it and it
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wouldn't be easy to fix it it would take a long time so so russia is trapped and europe is trapped so
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russia probably wants to use it as a weapon but can't because they don't have alternatives and europe would
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like to use it as a weapon by not buying it but they can't because they don't have alternatives and
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then biden's going to release this gas from the uh the the reserves the emergency reserves that every
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expert everyone says will make no difference at all am i wrong literally every expert says this will make no
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difference at all oh it might it might make a difference if there's an emergency
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if there's an emergency you're going to miss it because he's might use a third of it or some some
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big number and then we'll have to fill it back up at a higher price i mean it doesn't look like anything
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it doesn't look like anything that biden's doing is right does it you know i'm sure i'm a little biased
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there did you know all right we'll check your fake news because the fake news is not all on the other
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side let me say it again you and i may have been victims of fake news too not just other people not
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just other people and here's one that maybe we didn't all know you know we keep talking about this
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uh keystone pipeline did you know that there are two keystone pipelines at least two uh one is
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completely done and working fine so nothing happened with that one recently but the keystone xl is the
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one that was going to be built but hasn't it's not close to per yeah it wasn't even close to being done
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so therefore not when biden closed it down it shouldn't have made really any difference
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that we should see now it could have made a difference in the long run globally a lot of
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it wasn't even going to be domestic so there was you know basically um that story may be overblown
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so for those of you saying hey look what biden did you know if he had kept that pipeline project going
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you know or gas prices would be less or whatever uh but probably not probably not however
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uh energy prices don't move on actual supply and demand as much as the expectation of supply and
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demand which i hasten to say because i know i'm being watched by real economists the expectation of
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supply and the actual supply are kind of a blended concept in economics you get that so it's it's a finer
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point uh yeah i'm not sure it's useful for the general public but the the actual supply and the
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expected supply don't really have much of a difference when you're pricing stuff
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um okay you're welcome see i can adjust i can adjust so that adjustment is based on specific feedback
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that i thought was useful and so when biden does things like uh any kind of energy project in public
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what should be your first um thought hey people might expect less energy in the future so it changes
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expectations changing expectations has an effect on effectively what we call the supply
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and so collectively the things that biden did are signaling a lack of supply in the future
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so it's not an actual supply change it's a uh an expected supply change and that could change the the price
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so where trump did everything right psychologically
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biden is doing everything wrong psychologically if you believe that wrong
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means producing less energy domestically all right um i have a theory that all wars are going to be drone
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wars from now on meaning that um the thing that will matter is how well your drones are performing
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and how many you have and that that will be the dominant weapon because it has to be right
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it kind of has to be you have to think there's a limit to manned aircraft right there has to be a limit
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to how many human aircraft there can be because as the number of unmanned aircraft goes up they're all
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they're all vulnerable and there there's no way that ground-based anything is going to compete with
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drones if you have enough of them so you know of course there are ways to jam drones and blah blah blah blah
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but ultimately there's going to be a somebody's going to take out the jammer and then the drones take
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over blah blah blah so to me it seems that drones are going to be the thing that predict who wins
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which also means economy in some ways or who who's supporting you with their own economy
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and here's my take on ukraine going to the whiteboard um as some number of drones some number
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whatever that number is ukraine wins meaning that let's see if i can get you a better picture here
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meaning that the only thing that is going to predict what happens with ukraine next is how many drones
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um have been delivered and how many of them can be you know actually used and we don't know that
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number do we why is it that we don't know that number isn't that the single most important thing
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because if they have enough drones of the right kind yeah and i'm talking about the small suicide
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drones i'm not talking about the uh i'm not talking about the big ones the turkish ones that are very
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expensive i'm talking about the small ones if they have enough of them um
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they win right they win in the sense that at the very least russia can't um can't conquer them now
00:28:10.680
there's news that there was a uh russian uh let's see uh i think it was a fuel depot attack within russia
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you know so over the border from ukraine and that the ukrainians did a helicopter attack
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in the homeland of russia now there's a lot in that story number one
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if they're going after fuel that's more indication that it's a war of uh starving the army right denying
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them food and ammunition and fuel now do you think you can do that with drones and helicopters
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if you get the big stuff so i think isn't there sort of a an 80 20 rule at play here
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that you don't have to eliminate all the fuel you have to eliminate some percentage of it right
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you don't have to eliminate all the food just there's some percentage you have to eliminate that
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they would just stop the army wouldn't because it would just distract them they just have to eat
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so how many drones would it take to keep an army from retreating because here's what i'm most um
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curious about does the lenski seem like the kind of guy who would take a draw you know would he go into
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a battle and say i'll take a tie is there anything we've seen in his personality his career the way
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he presents himself is there anything about him that says i think i'll i'll play for a draw
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i don't think so so i'm at least open to the possibility that he's after putin and the way he's
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going to do it is by destroying the russian military in ukraine and i think he can actually do it
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it and all it takes is some number of drones because so here's the argument the argument is
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this if ukraine can take out big fuel depots and obviously they can because i would think a fuel depot
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is the most vulnerable thing there could be well what could be more vulnerable to drone attacks and
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helicopter attacks than a fuel depot a fuel depot seems like it'd be the ultimate target so if you
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take out the big ones can russia adjust enough with you know workarounds and small ones i mean they may
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be you know three fuel depots away from stalling the entire army in ukraine making it impossible to get
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out and what happens when they can't leave and they can't eat i think i think ukraine just starts
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starving them and picking them off there there may be a play here that zelensky is actually going to
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try to take over russia and actually just run the whole thing because i know it's crazy it's crazy but
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think about this if zelensky could destroy the russian military don't you think putin's gone
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how would he survive that if he actually destroyed it and i think he actually could now destroy it
00:31:30.840
doesn't mean literally again it means trapping it in the country and just keeping it there it's it's done
00:31:39.320
if it can't get out it's as good as dead it wouldn't have any purpose
00:31:52.440
i'm i'm probably not the military expert you need to be listening to can we agree on that can we agree
00:32:01.320
that for military uh military predictions i'm not really the one you should be listening to
00:32:08.920
all right we can all be on the same page in that now you understand that i i've confessed this before
00:32:16.760
that um i speak with more confidence than maybe you know my internal process
00:32:24.520
um is matched to because part of it is presentation so don't confuse the presentation which i do
00:32:31.160
confidently with my opinion of what's actually going to happen which is more of a statistical thing
00:32:37.000
statistically speaking i'd give this five to ten percent but that's bigger than you would right
00:32:46.520
i think you'd give it zero percent and i'm saying there's something happening here that makes me think
00:32:52.680
this all right let me let me defend the ten percent number one how hard is it with your opinions how
00:33:00.280
hard would it be to trap them in country to trap the military now that they're already degraded
00:33:05.800
and we know exactly the limited ways they can get out right if the roads are taken out or mined
00:33:13.400
or the ukrainians have enough drones to stop whoever's in the front of anything
00:33:19.000
i and they can take out the energy i think they can stall them
00:33:25.080
now somebody says the threat's a threat of nukes well i wonder about the strategy of not making the guy
00:33:30.200
who's trying to kill you angry i mean i get it i get it that if putin is pushed into a corner he might
00:33:37.000
use tactical nukes but i don't think so because i think using tactical nukes would end him for sure
00:33:44.040
wouldn't it or it would reduce his chances of survival and we don't actually think he's crazy do we
00:33:50.920
i mean yeah he'd have to be literally crazy to do that i think and i don't think we think he's
00:33:56.520
literally crazy that was more propaganda speaking of propaganda this is really interesting little
00:34:03.080
out of uh context here but uh stefan collinson who usually writes about trump and how bad trump is and
00:34:11.400
i always think of him as cnn's uh paid propagandist because he's an opinion an opinion writer so it's
00:34:19.240
it's fair to do what he does right it's just opinion and it's you know it's presented that way so so
00:34:25.480
i think that's fair as long as he's presenting it as opinion and he does but he's changed um
00:34:33.240
here's well let me just tell you what he said today it has nothing to do with trump
00:34:36.600
but just keep in mind that on cnn in my opinion so this is just my opinion he's sort of their go-to
00:34:44.200
propaganda guy you know go write some bad stories about trump sort of thing but now he's saying that
00:34:50.520
western intelligence agencies are waging a psychological war over ukraine he says directly
00:34:57.640
with russian president uh putin an expert at the genre who is now effectively taking a dose of his own
00:35:03.800
medicine sorry so stefan collinson is talking about how the western intel people are using as much
00:35:11.080
misinformation to get at putin as putin is using misinformation to get at us so they're playing
00:35:18.360
the same game and he says the united states and its allies are painting a picture of a bogged down
00:35:23.880
demoralized and dysfunctional russian military taking disastrous losses on the battlefield and are
00:35:29.640
simultaneously conjuring a vision of growing political tension inside the kremlin they claim
00:35:36.440
the russian leader is isolated poorly advised and lacking real intelligence on just how badly the war is
00:35:42.600
going now correct me if i'm wrong but did not stefan collinson just say and i don't think i'm over
00:35:51.640
interpreting this am i did he not just say that the message that is known to be he's characterizing it as
00:36:00.600
disinformation matches exactly cnn's um reporting on the war so is he not basically saying that cnn is part of
00:36:13.640
the disinformation campaign because what cnn is reporting is exactly what the intel people are telling
00:36:21.560
them which is hey we've got this secret insider information that uh putin is not getting good
00:36:27.480
information inside as if we know that as if we know that right and it's it's kind of weird meta
00:36:36.920
self-referential thing that's confusing me so the cnn guy whose job it is again in my opinion is to
00:36:46.040
write opinion pieces that are completely biased is writing an opinion piece in the context of fox news
00:36:54.440
saying that cnn may be trying to report straight news and collinson is reporting something that looks to
00:37:01.640
me like straight news and the straight news is that all the news people have been lying to you
00:37:08.440
because intelligence people have been feeding them bs which surely they knew surely surely the media
00:37:17.320
companies knew that they were getting propaganda surely the media companies know that when somebody says
00:37:24.440
hey we've got some information from uh putin's uh bathroom like he was scribbling a note while he was
00:37:32.200
on the toilet and we saw the note and it says that he's not getting good information from his generals no
00:37:38.200
we didn't no we didn't we the people who are in the media professionally who have done this for years
00:37:47.400
they know that when you hear in the context of war when you hear that there's trouble inside putin's inner
00:37:53.320
circle they know that's not real but did they report it to you as though it were not real did they report
00:38:00.920
it to you as something that is obvious propaganda it could be real but that you should judge it as
00:38:07.800
probable propaganda i don't believe they did if i'm wrong please correct me but i believe the media
00:38:15.480
reported these as if it was a report that you should take with some you know not a grain of salt necessarily
00:38:22.280
right so is it true what fox news is saying that cnn is going to start uh being straight with the news
00:38:33.080
and and actually tell you what's really happening
00:38:44.680
here's a question that i wonder about why have there been no ukrainian drone attacks in moscow
00:38:51.960
now when i say in moscow i mean not against civilian targets but there must be you know
00:38:57.160
government buildings that you could explode with a small suicide drone now you might say to yourself
00:39:05.880
scott scott scott it's not easy to get a ukrainian and a drone into russia to which i say can you really
00:39:14.520
tell the difference between the ukrainian and a russian there are no ukrainians that speak russian
00:39:21.080
really well i'm pretty sure there are pretty sure there are and you can't get a drone that would fit
00:39:29.080
and it literally would fit in a suitcase literally would fit in a suitcase and you can't get one of
00:39:34.760
those and one ukrainian within two kilometers of moscow to take out i don't know their polit
00:39:43.560
bureau or something or at least put a bomb there because all it would do really it wouldn't you know
00:39:48.440
ideally it would kill no civilians it would just make news don't you think that these citizens of
00:39:54.520
russia would start asking questions if government buildings start blowing up in moscow and i'm trying
00:40:00.840
to think why isn't that happening i'm not recommending it so again sometimes my my tone
00:40:07.640
gives you a misleading sense of my opinion my opinion is i don't know again i'm not a military expert
00:40:16.040
but it seems to me yeah if the only risk is the risk of nukes i don't think that would do it do you
00:40:25.160
do you think uh blowing up a few government buildings in moscow would cause putin to nuke anything
00:40:31.240
i don't think so i don't think so at all now again we also don't know right so do you want to take the
00:40:41.080
risk maybe not maybe not but if they're if zelensky is willing to do a helicopter attack in russian
00:40:51.000
territory which he just did actually the second time if they're willing to do that are they somebody
00:40:59.000
says false flag i don't know if you take out a depot that big as a that that would be the worst
00:41:04.920
false flag if you're going to pick a false flag that would be the worst one you could pick
00:41:21.480
um the the hunter uh laptop story is funny jack pasavik uh has tweeted a number of times
00:41:32.680
that uh i don't know it's been some some long number of months since he offered the full copy of
00:41:39.640
hunter hunter's uh laptop you know a copy of the drive to the media including jake tapper at cnn and nobody's
00:41:47.720
ever nobody's ever taken him up on it what's that tell you now don't you think they'd at least want to
00:41:56.120
look at it even to report that it's fake don't not don't even care don't don't even want to get a copy
00:42:10.440
i i also saw a glenn greenwald article about matt gates and how long has it been since the matt gates
00:42:22.280
allegations it's been a while right a year over a year right so it's been over a year and the only
00:42:32.200
part of the story that's been verified is the part of the story that matt gates sent which is that they
00:42:39.400
were being blackmailed that's now verified fact there have been no charges against matt gates it's been
00:43:01.400
you know you watch uh one person after another get taken out and you wonder who's next right
00:43:12.040
if you look at the landscape of all the people who were sort of um making a lot of noise for trump
00:43:17.400
in 2016 most of them seem to have been taken out by now now a lot of them made it easy sometimes they
00:43:26.040
make it easy but wow yeah jim jordan there's a hit piece on him as well i mean i don't know i don't
00:43:33.480
know what things are true and what are not so i i neither i neither condemn nor defend anybody who's
00:43:40.840
been accused of things i have no idea what they did or didn't do uh i'm just noting that they all have
00:43:46.680
hit pieces and they were prominent supporters of trump um now apparently i don't know if you knew this
00:43:59.800
but uh the ukraine i don't know if the ukrainians are part of this or just the uh the allies trying
00:44:07.160
to come up to some way some way to make a non-nato deal uh for ukraine so there'd be some kind of
00:44:15.080
security guarantee but it would not involve nato and i was trying to come up what would be the perfect
00:44:21.720
name for a uh let's say a security guarantee situation in which russia had already vetoed
00:44:31.640
nato as being that entity so it'd have to be something that's no no it's not nato no no it's
00:44:39.480
not nato it's something like it so i would call it nieto nieto not nato it's the one that was uh hey
00:45:00.680
i'll leave you a moment to uh savor and relish that pun and you're welcome you're welcome
00:45:08.120
oh lord all right is there anything else that i have not covered is there any story
00:45:18.280
and please don't ask me about disney i don't know if there's anything i've cared less about than the
00:45:23.480
whole disney blah blah blah i don't care i don't know why now um i was a little surprised that uh you
00:45:34.680
were all here on time um it's a little surprising because once congress uh rolled back that whole
00:45:44.040
daylight savings time thing yesterday you know once they moved the clocks back last night i thought
00:45:49.800
today i'm going to wake up and like half of you aren't even going to show up at the right time
00:45:54.760
but apparently um many of you are on top of it and you adjusted your clocks last night
00:46:02.280
so that you would be on time for this and for for work
00:46:20.920
i don't quite know how to take that but i'd like to put this horrible thought in your mind
00:46:25.800
everybody reminds you of an animal you just haven't figured out which one yet and once you see it you
00:46:39.800
i uh i once described somebody as a uh a monkey in a human costume
00:46:47.240
and uh and by the way it was a caucasian human i was mocking just to see you don't think there's a racial
00:46:56.760
element to it because it wasn't and uh once you hear it it's all you can see it's all it's all you can
00:47:15.480
corona dropped off the map didn't it yes it did
00:47:22.040
all right so uh let's let's do a uh a vote here now remember reality can never be settled
00:47:31.320
apparently even science can't settle reality for us
00:47:38.840
and now we're sort of at the other end of it i think
00:47:42.200
was alex berenson mostly right or mostly wrong go alex berenson now remember he was banned by social
00:47:51.880
media for a lot of uh contrarian opinions in the comments was he mostly right or mostly wrong
00:48:07.480
mostly right mostly right and what would be some examples of what you think he was mostly right about
00:48:17.080
what would be an example of something he was mostly right about lockdowns not working
00:48:46.680
who do you think was the most accurate um predictor
00:49:04.280
on the on the locals uh network there's only two answers people are saying themselves and sometimes me
00:49:16.520
uh joe rogan alex jones the youtube answers are completely different
00:49:28.360
so that's the difference between the subscription network and the open network
00:49:31.960
yeah well you know here's the thing we're gonna have to we're gonna have to make do with the fact that it cannot be settled
00:49:42.360
is that that is so unsatisfying to me it's terribly unsatisfying
00:49:48.360
that it can't be settled i would i would say that my record is the best by far
00:49:53.400
because i'm pretty sure everything that alex berenson got right i got right
00:50:02.040
i'm pretty sure i can't i can't think of uh oh we disagreed on masks but not we didn't disagree on mandates
00:50:11.560
so i agreed that if they worked they didn't work well enough i mean once once we got past the first
00:50:18.040
you know initial phase so i think he was wrong about the science of masks but right that they
00:50:24.040
didn't make enough difference in the real world the way people actually acted
00:50:31.640
yes on locals people actually pay for my opinion as is being said on locals right now
00:50:37.080
and so they're more likely to think that they're paying for something that has value
00:50:42.360
so cognitive dissonance would cause people on a subscription network
00:50:45.960
to believe that you were more right than you actually are right that that bias should be
00:50:52.520
something you're actually feeling if you're paying for it
00:51:02.920
so a number of people say that i make every kind of prediction and then i can uh and then i can confirm
00:51:09.720
a right so how many would agree with that characterization of me that i'm someone who makes all kinds
00:51:15.800
of predictions i guess maybe on both sides of issues so then i can then i can claim i'm right
00:51:24.840
what would be an example of that i'm seeing enough yeses that i'm taking it seriously
00:51:29.960
but what would be there there are lots of yeses but lots of nos um what would be an example of that
00:51:36.200
there probably isn't i have to ukraine well but ukraine i took the i took the l on ukraine
00:51:47.240
that doesn't count if if i explicitly take the l then you can't say how do you how do you criticize
00:51:54.840
that if i make a clear prediction then say i was very wrong
00:51:59.080
i mean don't don't you know take yes for an answer
00:52:12.280
yeah you know i think it's fun to talk about having a prediction that's wrong
00:52:18.360
but that the reason you made it was still the right reason it just didn't work out
00:52:22.120
i mean i think that's fair that that's not really flip-flopping all right um
00:52:31.640
oh that one yeah that the the skirt one that's that's a longer conversation but that's probably the
00:52:41.240
best one that's probably the best example i'll give you that one all right uh and now ladies and gentlemen
00:52:52.120
i was lambasting berenson well i still disagree with him on all the things that i disagreed
00:52:59.320
when i lambaited when you say a lambastism i don't think that's true no i have said
00:53:05.000
from fairly early on i think you can confirm that i said that the alex berenson's are valuable
00:53:12.760
and that you need them like they could be right and they could be wrong but you need you need those
00:53:17.880
rogue doctors the mccullows and all that so i don't know if they're right or wrong
00:53:23.320
i'm not qualified pretty sure you're not either but um you definitely need the pushback that's like
00:53:33.880
oh does uh i'm being asked if michael schellenberger has a chance uh to win as an independent in california
00:53:42.200
and the answer is nobody else would so so let me let me be let me give you the the best answer i
00:53:53.320
can give you could michael schellenberger win what looks like you know an against all odds win of being
00:54:00.680
an independent and win in california and the answer is nobody else could nobody else could so if you're
00:54:08.280
saying to me scott you know nobody could do that i'll agree 99 99 99 with you nobody else could but
00:54:17.560
nobody else could have moved the needle on nuclear energy either
00:54:23.000
hear what i'm saying he he's already done things that didn't look possible so if somebody does things
00:54:29.800
that don't look possible yeah when do you bet against them all right and remember california is pretty
00:54:36.600
thirsty for solutions and you've never seen a more specific solution oriented candidate i'm pretty
00:54:45.720
sure somebody can correct me on that but for a major office say governor has there ever been somebody as
00:54:53.320
a prescriptive somebody who's literally written books describing the solution multiple books and
00:55:01.320
describing solutions specific to san francisco in in the latest book san francisco so we've never really
00:55:10.120
seen this now my understanding is that the way the california elections work uh is that there are so many people
00:55:18.440
registered as independent that if you actually got a good bite of the independence you would make it into some
00:55:25.320
kind of a runoff so because of the way our system works because of the dire hole that we're in
00:55:33.560
because there's never been a candidate who has a bona fide left-leaning history but settled on solutions
00:55:42.760
that are sort of you know just the ones that work so you could you could say he's the first democrat who
00:55:49.560
understood how anything works but you don't get elected that way but that's sort of what i think
00:55:56.440
he is like i've always said the ultimate candidate would be somebody who embraced democrat ideals
00:56:05.480
but republican techniques like systems because the thing the democrats always get wrong is the human
00:56:11.960
motivation but on top of that sometimes they get the science wrong too and he fixes both of those things
00:56:20.120
so the the schellenberger approach to basically everything is what do we know already works what do we know
00:56:29.400
doesn't work let's do more of the things that work that's it and who's on the other side of that exactly
00:56:39.000
right like what what's the counter argument to doing things that we can pretty well confirm work
00:56:45.640
and avoiding the things we can pretty be sure of don't work i don't know now the thing he does that
00:56:53.800
maybe will limit him is while he has a you know a serious history of caring about you know the planet
00:57:03.080
you know very left-leaning ideals that's how he started you know an activist in that um in that area and he's
00:57:11.080
definitely very concerned about the homeless and the you know the disadvantage because again that's
00:57:15.800
another huge focus of his work so who has been that focused on the on the problems and the the
00:57:24.680
victims who's been that focused on them at the same time has had practical solutions
00:57:31.000
exactly nobody so here's the problem with predicting
00:57:34.600
if you predict from the past you always miss a schellenberger if you predict from the past you
00:57:43.240
always miss a trump because the past never produced a trump if you always judged from the past you
00:57:50.520
couldn't have a joe rogan because nobody ever just started their own show with a camera and a microphone
00:57:58.280
and and suddenly they were the biggest media platform in the world or the country i guess
00:58:04.760
so you miss you miss all of the interesting stuff if you use the past to predict the future it just
00:58:11.800
doesn't and the whole history you know history repeats is a really limited mindset
00:58:17.960
you don't want to get trapped in that yeah it doesn't repeat but it rhymes exactly
00:58:25.320
oh yeah rush limbaugh was another person you couldn't predict that who would have predicted
00:58:42.440
and that by the way is all i have to say for today i think
00:58:45.960
i think this was by far uh the highlight of your experience today and i hope it gets better
00:58:54.200
because that would be amazing i mean imagine starting from this plateau and even getting better
00:58:59.880
come on come on and yes i want an entire day without talking about the slap and i think that
00:59:08.600
is a sign of the golden age youtube i'll talk to you tomorrow