On today's show, Scott Adams talks about Kanye West's recent trip to Mar-A-Lago with President Donald Trump and why it could have been a big deal. Plus, a new story about Kanye s recent dinner with the president.
00:04:43.920So he actually has a very active community of people who will visit you in an aggressive way, in a variety of ways, if you said something that was not to their liking.
00:04:56.440So instead of saying that, I would ask you to do your own research.
00:05:02.020So whatever you want to think about him.
00:05:03.740The only clue I'll give you is if Kanye had two choices.
00:06:04.860We're still in that fog of war phrase.
00:06:06.920There's going to be some more surprises coming out of this.
00:06:09.480But what you need to know is that if Trump had known, if Trump had known who Ye was bringing with him, and I think the reporting is a little unclear, he may not have known and may not have actually been sitting with or having dinner with Fuentes.
00:06:25.980I'm not sure, because there were multiple tables there, so I'm not sure if he even talked to Fuentes, Trump himself.
00:06:33.320So the first question is, was Jared there?
00:06:42.920He wasn't at the table, but that's a good question.
00:06:47.220Now, apparently halfway through the meal, or halfway through the meeting or whatever, Trump was called away, took a phone call, and then came back, and the entire tone of the meeting changed.
00:06:59.140And it was clear that Trump was just trying to get them the hell out of there.
00:07:03.480And I guess Trump said something about Kim Kardashian that was a little nasty.
00:07:10.260And Ye took that wrong, because he was like, uh, that's the mother of my children.
00:21:26.560I think it was just hard to figure out what was going on there.
00:21:28.960And maybe hard to fire the people who needed to be fired.
00:21:32.840But apparently Elon Musk didn't have that problem.
00:21:35.320He's firing anybody who needs to be fired.
00:21:38.180And I guess a left-leaning Twitter account has been finally suspended.
00:21:44.620So a leftist was suspended for essentially death threats against libs of TikTok and Matt Walsh and gays against groomers and some other people.
00:24:25.800Yes, yes, he can replace one whole department just by tweeting, but that's just one department.
00:24:32.140And then you say to yourself, but, you know, those engineers are leaving too.
00:24:36.020And then you realize that Twitter upgraded features is rapidly iterating and is already better and has gotten rid of pedophile hashtags.
00:24:47.660And you say to yourself, okay, okay, it's possible that the engineers who left were not the A-team.
00:24:57.060It looks like maybe the people who were there had fewer people to get in the way, and they just got some business done really quickly in a hardcore way, just the way Musk said.
00:25:06.300So, okay, okay, yes, yes, special case, he doesn't need marketing, and I'll give you, I'll give you that he doesn't need every single engineer.
00:25:15.160But, man, that, you know, what about his debt?
00:25:18.880I mean, his debt is going to crush him.
00:25:20.360I mean, there's no way he's going to pay for all that.
00:25:22.420Okay, if you get rid of half or 75% of your employees, and it is by far the greatest part of your expense base,
00:25:29.220yes, it turns out you could actually make it a cash faucet by doing the things that Musk is doing.
00:25:37.060And probably if business stays good, the advertisers will slowly come back.
00:25:44.900So, okay, maybe it's not a financial mess, right?
00:25:48.560So, yeah, he doesn't need marketing, I'll give you that.
00:25:50.660And maybe he's found a way to make it a little bit profitable, but, you know, how is that going to work when all the engineers are leaving?
00:25:57.560Okay, maybe it was only the bad engineers are leaving.
00:26:01.920Today, this is where it got all the way to today.
00:26:06.560As of today, this is all they have left for their Twitter failure porn.
00:28:25.220So all I see is that he cut the dead weight and he's, you know, redoing the business model and everything looks like it's going to be fine.
00:28:34.700He was actually, Musk was actually mocking people, saying, wasn't Twitter supposed to be dead by now?
00:28:40.160It was, you know, more traffic than ever.
00:28:42.220Well, here's a story that it's a good thing.
00:28:47.420It came out on Black Friday so that it wouldn't get much news coverage.
00:28:52.880But apparently the Biden administration is very close to approving a Chevron deal in Venezuela to pump a lot of oil in Venezuela.
00:29:03.920Now, you might say to yourself, Scott, why don't we just pump more oil in the United States because oil is oil and why wouldn't we just keep the money in the United States and pump our own oil?
00:29:18.740Why would we let somebody who may be a communist, you know, hellhole, why would we help them when we've been sanctioning them?
00:30:06.440Now, I don't know if this is confirmed yet, but there are lots of reports of people rubbing the Venezuelan crude oil on their body to cure COVID.
00:30:20.320Now, this is not, it wasn't a randomized controlled trial, but observationally, I think there was some strong observational data that if you rub, and you have to get it all over your body.
00:30:30.680Some people would make the mistake of, it's like, oh, I'll rub a little of that Venezuelan crude on my back or my chest, and then I'll cure my COVID.
00:30:38.180But no, you have to practically dunk yourself in it.
00:30:42.800You've got to get it all the way under the fingernails.
00:30:45.020You've got to, because the COVID, the COVID can get in and out, you know, from the smallest hole.
00:30:50.340So you've got to completely cover yourself with crude, and so far there's, I don't know if you've heard this, but there has not been one COVID death in Venezuela from someone who covered their body with crude oil.
00:31:19.000If a lot of people had covered themselves with crude oil and then also died from COVID, I'd say, well, I'm not going to trust that as a COVID cure.
00:31:28.280But zero people have covered themselves entirely with Venezuelan oil, died of COVID, I'd say that's, well, that's science.
00:31:42.920At the same time, weirdly, apparently there's this massive oil refinery that got approved 30 miles off the coast of Texas that would add 2 million barrels per day of export capacity for the U.S.
00:31:58.760Now, if you're following your energy stories, you have Biden not allowing Americans to drill more oil, but maybe approving the Venezuelans to create oil, but we're building a massive export refinery to export the massive amount of oil that we can't drill for.
00:32:56.320And they were too strong militarily because they were strong economically.
00:33:00.000And I think that between the fact that our energy companies would like that business and the fact that Russia was getting too strong, but they had one point of failure.
00:33:10.700Russia's one point of failure is they had one business, one main business.
00:33:15.980So some people said Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons.
00:33:21.160That's sort of all they are, a military and an energy business.
00:33:23.800Well, if you can't beat them militarily, you can take them out of business, and then they can't fund their military.
00:33:30.840So I think what you're seeing is a long-term, you know, maybe a neocon play to simply take Russia off the geopolitical map.
00:36:48.140I'm not even sure anybody saw it coming.
00:36:50.200But I do, more and more I'm convinced that the Russian military is at the point of total collapse.
00:36:55.640Now, that might not be enough for Ukraine to take back territory.
00:37:00.500But it looks, you know, and before you say it, yes, I understand all of the reporting out of the area is suspect.
00:37:08.820Nobody believes anything out of the area.
00:37:10.460But if Russia were not at the point of collapse, I would expect them to be doing offensive moves, wouldn't you?
00:37:21.760Can you imagine the Russian military being still effective but only playing defense?
00:37:27.640And actually, I believe somebody was mocking them for saying that their only successes that they've claimed lately are how quickly they retreated.
00:37:40.920That Russia actually reported as a success how rapidly they retreated from a Ukrainian onslaught.
00:37:52.680So, if you don't hear about any Russian offense except taking out energy plants, that all sort of suggests that their military just stopped working.
00:38:05.620They might not have any offensive capabilities at all except, you know, shelling and drones and stuff.
00:38:13.200The Russians don't engage in winter offensives.
00:38:46.440You know, the bathroom is outdoors probably.
00:38:49.260And every day, like every day, there's a drone that comes over and drops the equivalent of a hand grenade into every little group of you standing around.
00:39:02.700Those are the videos we're seeing now.
00:39:04.540Now, I don't know how many drones they have that can drop a hand grenade or a little bomblet.
00:39:16.340Like, if you're being shelled, that's pretty scary.
00:39:21.320But you hide until the shelling stops.
00:39:23.700So, if you have a good hole, you're thinking, well, I'll probably not be killed because I'm in this hole and I know the shelling's happening.
00:39:30.540But if you don't know, anytime you walk outside, if this little hand grenade is going to drop from the sky, that would be super, super scary.
00:41:59.840We could be on the verge of some complete dominance by America in a way that we've never seen before.
00:42:08.900At one point, we used to think America was the one superpower, but, you know, at least two others have some, they've got some nukes that we have to worry about that are not on our side.
00:42:20.560But I think we're going to go back to, I think we're going to go back to America as the only superpower.
00:42:25.360Because it looks like China's in big trouble.
00:43:38.120I don't know any reporting or metric that says what percentage of our total manufacturing is ending up in China and whether it's even flowing in our direction.
00:43:50.140Don't you think that's like a super important number?
00:45:42.280Does it make sense to you that we move our chip manufacturing to Taiwan?
00:45:46.860I mean, I realize we don't have a lot of options, but wouldn't that be the worst place to move them?
00:45:54.100Like if you said, all right, entire world, entire world, where would, if we need to, you know, have less reliance on China for those chips, and we want to take the chips out of China, where would be the worst place in the world to put them?
00:46:15.100Well, how about in the worst place in China?
00:46:16.100Well, how about in the place that China plans to conquer in a year or two?
00:46:54.700Oh, do you know my favorite nemesis, Chen?
00:46:58.580Chen, so Chen, I forget his last name, tweets on, he's on Twitter, and he's always listed by Twitter as associated, like a government-associated news media or something.
00:47:15.660And so that, so every time he tweets, everybody gets his tweet, sees that he's, according to Twitter, maybe associated with the Chinese government and therefore not just an individual tweeting.
00:47:49.980And mostly what he does is he adds context, and the context is often true.
00:47:56.600So when America is criticizing, you know, China for something, he'll just drop in some context about America to show that we're now so clean.
00:48:06.080And usually I read it and I go, eh, yeah, well, that's a good point.