Episode 1739 Scott Adams: Would Putin Be A Democrat Or Republican If He Lived In The United States?
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
146.2494
Summary
A viral photo of Mark Zuckerberg taking a selfie with his staff fuels alien conspiracy theories, and a new discovery could change the future of energy production on Earth. Plus, a new poll that asks Americans who they think is winning the Ukraine war.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody. And are you lucky? Yeah, because you're here and everybody else isn't.
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Well, you know. And if you're here, you are already participating on the upside, right?
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It's one of the best things that will ever happen in the history of humanity. It's going to happen
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right now, and you're part of it. And if you'd like to take it up to heretofore unknown levels,
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all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a gel or a glass, a vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
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It's the dopamine hit of the day. You can feel your body start to respond even as I prepare.
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As soon as you take this hit, this hit, yeah, a little bit of a dopamine spike, it might last you all day.
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So did everybody see the viral photo of Mark Zuckerberg taking a selfie with his staff?
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I guess the Internet's having a lot of fun with this.
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The caption I thought was the funniest was, Zuckerberg, take your selfie just like the humans.
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It says, Mark Zuckerberg's soulless selfie with colleagues fuels alien theory once again.
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I don't know, it does look like a soulless selfie.
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If anybody was ever an alien from the future, or actually a time traveler, you know, somebody who went back in time, it would have to be Zuckerberg.
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But I'm going to try to take care of that this week.
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Well, here's a new discovery that might change everything.
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It turns out that there's a rare material that you need for a fusion.
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And we didn't think we had much of it, because it exists mostly in space and on the moon.
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And it's hard to get your raw materials from the moon.
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It's hard to get it from China, much less the moon.
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But apparently this thing called helium-3 is ten times more likely, or ten times more abundant on Earth than we thought.
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So that's really good news for future cheap energy.
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We're probably a number of years away from that.
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And by working, I mean they can create more energy than they use for the first time.
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So now it's an engineering problem, and we will have fusion and the solution to everything.
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If you had abundant, cheap energy, it would be very close to the solution of everything.
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Rasmussen did a poll and asked American likely voters, who do they think is winning the war, the Russia-Ukraine situation.
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And I was a little bit surprised at this answer.
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15% won five, say that Russia is winning the war.
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Only 15% of people polled think Russia is winning the war.
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Now, is that because Russia is not winning the war?
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Or is that because that's what the news told us?
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Because I don't know how you could say they're not winning.
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It's really just a question of how much expense they're willing to absorb and how much political and other capital they're willing to put in.
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But I don't think you could necessarily tell anybody who's winning or losing at this point, can you?
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Because like I say, it's going to be a tipping point situation.
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One of the two sides will reach some kind of a tipping point.
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But you never really know which one is the closest to the tipping point.
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So, 25% of respondees said that Ukraine is winning.
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Say Ukraine, which has been completely destroyed, is winning the war.
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Now, I, of course, fall into the maybe 25% this time.
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Because I think I'm like the only person dumb enough to say in public, what if they win?
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You know, for me, it's always been, you know, are you so sure Russia is going to win this thing?
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And let me ask you, do you know anybody who's been talking about this publicly?
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You know, anybody who does this for a living, so to speak?
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Did anybody else say that Russia would have as hard a time as they're having?
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In fact, I was predicting that they wouldn't even attack.
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Because it seemed so obvious that we would be in the place where we are now.
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If you guess right, then you're pretty sure it's because of your genius, not because you guessed right.
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But I was completely wrong that they wouldn't attack.
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But I was completely right that Ukraine would surprise with high-tech weaponry.
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And that the attack would not be easy, and here we are.
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So, but I'm kind of amazed at the effect of the news.
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The news has actually convinced people that Russia is losing the war.
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And maybe they are, in some sense, or maybe they will.
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Then Rasmussen asked, likely, U.S. voters, should the U.S. be involved if there's a wider war in Europe?
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So, apparently, the U.S. has been properly primed.
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But the U.S. has been primed for a major world war.
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And that the population is largely on board with World War III.
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Do you see the impact of propaganda and fake news in this?
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It feels like these opinions are completely assigned, right?
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How long have I been saying that people don't come up with their own opinions?
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You know, Democrats have their opinions assigned to them.
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Republicans have their opinions assigned to them.
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You know, after the fact, we say, I think I thought this through and came to this opinion.
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If you have the same opinion as your team, it was probably assigned.
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I'm going to say this is fake news because it sounds exactly like other fake news.
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He had been Trump's, what was he, defense secretary?
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And he says that Trump, when the Black Lives Matter protesters were surrounding the Capitol, I guess,
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Trump asked, can't you shoot protesters in the leg or something?
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And then Esper interpreted that as the president wanting the military to shoot people in the legs.
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Now, what do we know about Trump's decision-making process?
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Because I'm willing to accept that Trump said those words.
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Actually, I'm willing to accept he actually said those words.
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Everything we hear about him behind closed doors is he always tosses out a Republican idea just to see what happens.
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So he tosses out an extreme idea that usually comes from some Republican, you know, person just to see what the response is.
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So you don't think that there were some Republicans somewhere who were saying,
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Yeah, but it sounds like the sort of thing that he says on every topic.
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You know, can we lob a missile into the cartels?
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The pattern is he asks the question about the most extreme response.
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And then as Esper's described, the Esper and I guess a few of the aides walked him back from the idea of using the military at all, all the way to not using the military.
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Well, what is the problem if Trump throws out an extreme suggestion and then his advisors say, no, the extreme doesn't work, but we'll walk you back to what might work?
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Imagine if he had never even floated an idea that's the extreme version.
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You have to float the extreme version, don't you?
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You put out the extreme and then you make people argue for the middle ground.
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I mean, I don't see how people are, like, oblivious to the fact that he made his advisors work to sell their opinion and that he bought it.
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If you make your advisors work for it and then you accept their recommendation because you saw the work, okay.
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Because apparently the way they talked him back was through a pretty rational, you know, cost-benefit analysis.
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And then once he heard the cost-benefit analysis, he said, okay, we'll do that.
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The problem is people telling other people internal conversations.
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This is a story about Esper being a bad person, meaning that he's talking about private deliberations, which included brainstorming.
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If you're talking about a private brainstorming conversation in which the point of it is to throw out, you know, throw out all the ideas and just see what the reaction is.
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If that stuff is what you're leaking, you're a fucking asshole, really.
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Because it's clearly an attempt to make it look like it was more of a serious idea than it was.
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So he's basically throwing the president of the United States under a bus to sell a frickin' book.
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And by the way, this has nothing to do with Trump or Republican or Democrat.
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I would say exactly the same thing if we were talking about a Democrat.
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If somebody is talking about the brainstorming conversations and trying to sell that out of context,
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Anyway, apparently now we have fake news, of course, everywhere.
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But now there's something called fake job acceptance,
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where I guess the job market is so hot and so hard to get good employees these days
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that the Wall Street Journal is reporting the incidence of so-called ghosting,
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of accepting offers and then saying that you'll start and then not showing up is at a record high.
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So people are accepting jobs and just not going because they get another job usually
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Eh, I might be back on Monday, but then again I might not.
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So I don't know what to say about this except everything is fake now.
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You know, it's a fake news, fake, you know, you throw in your own fakes, whatever.
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How many people do you know who are working remotely and have two complete jobs
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and the employers don't know that they're working two jobs?
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In the comments, do you know anybody personally?
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Been thinking about it, giggling, what a great idea.
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the fact that there are lots of people who say yes
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So I don't even know if that's a bad thing, is it?
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Because think about a typical full-time employee.
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Do you ever get more than 50% productivity out of an employee?
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Because it seems like after you do the important stuff,
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everything else is a meeting or something less important.
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I feel like you could do the important stuff for two different jobs
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fairly easily if you skipped all the unimportant stuff,
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I mean, imagine the people who are commuting 90 minutes a day.
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look, you can bank the 90 minutes so you can use that for your second job,
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but also we'll take, let's say we'll shave 20% off of your main job,
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Then you have almost enough to sell it to the new employer.
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Finland is getting close to requesting joining NATO,
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which would put a NATO member on Russia's border with an 800-mile border.
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And apparently Finland has been using U.S. equipment for years,
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And they have actually an unusually strong military.
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I guess you have to if you're on the border of Russia.
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So what has Putin decided will be his attack on Finland?
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Well, if you don't like me, you're some kind of a Nazi.
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So in this case, the argument is that Finland, I think,
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So he's going to call Finland a bunch of Nazis.
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Sweden is also considering joining Finland at some point,
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and it seems like they'd have a good shot at it.
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if the whole reason we're having a war with Ukraine
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Why would we do more of the thing that caused the war?
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Is it because we think Putin is so beaten down by this war
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Because pushing Putin is what got us in the war, right?
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Didn't we sort of push him into attacking Ukraine?
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So are we going to push him into attacking Finland?
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that he wouldn't have the will to attack anybody else?
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You know, I like the idea that was floated about,
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That there should be some other kind of organization
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if you really, really didn't know the difference.
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I feel as if delaying it would make a difference
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because you don't want to give Putin too much of a loss
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or else he can't negotiate his way out of it, right?
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You don't want it to be too embarrassing for Putin
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So I provocatively tweeted the following question.
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Now, he is trying to get the abortion rate down,
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so that sounds a little more Republican that way.