Episode 1683 Scott Adams - Putin's Health, The Next Governor of California, Lots More

good morning everybody uh welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to you pretty pretty sure it's called coffee with scott adams and aren't you lucky to be here you are you're lucky you're sexy you're smart and damn it you know it and you should but if you'd like to take it up a notch and enjoy the camaraderie the fellowship and other words that sound weirdly sexist for some reason all you need is a copper mug or a glass attacker chalice or stein a canteen charger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid oh yeah we're going to salisbury hill and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure it's the dopamine the other day and it's the thing that'll make everything better it's called the simultaneous sip go yeah yeah coursing through every corp muscle in my body uh powering up all right full power now you don't know what you're gonna get now well let's see what's going on in the world uh china's uh pretty much screwed they're shutting down things because of covet they've shut down life in shenzhen and shanghai and the foxconn company that makes iphones is having to move their business to other locations and well it's looking kinda ugly and here's my question number one do you remember i've been warning you that china's pandemic is ahead of them i did that right can somebody confirm that i've been telling you that china's pandemic is ahead of them not behind them yeah okay i'm saying in the comments you remember i said that i don't remember anybody else saying that in public do you do you remember do you remember anybody else saying uh i think china's problem is ahead of them certainly when omicron came because the idea was that the virus was going to be around forever and the vaccinations don't stop it and the chinese vaccinations especially don't stop it so uh well it looks like sweden's pandemic is behind them yeah i think the west has largely conquered this thing i hope so but um why is it that every single thing that happens in the news has a supply chain impact this can't be a coincidence is it just everything has a supply chain impact whereas two years ago nothing did am i right it just went from everything affects the nothing affects it everything affects it there's something going on that doesn't look completely organic to me i don't know what it is uh could be that we're in the simulation and we're testing supply chains it could be weird coincidence i guess zielenski has picked up on my persuasion not specifically my persuasion but let me explain so zelensky is now uh trying to talk directly to the russian conscripts that are in the russian invading army now i don't i don't imagine his message can reach them too easily seems like they would be protected from many outside messages but he said if you surrender to our forces so he's actually talking about the russian military being defeated militarily and surrendering and what he says is if you surrender to our forces uh that your people will be treated the way they're supposed to be treated as people decently in a way you were not treated in your army literally zielinski is telling the russian army people that they would be treated better as prisoners of ukraine than as military members of their army and you know what he might be right doesn't that ring true because i think the russian transcripts are really being treated as cannon fodder they're being treated as cannon fodder for no gain to them or their country really no gain their their act the russian army wants to kill these guys or put them in harm's way they'll be damaged for life even if they survive you know they'll be ptsd and everything else so the russian army is absolutely abusing their own conscripts and i do think that the ukrainians might treat them better as prisoners of war that's actually literally true that's the damnedest thing isn't it has anybody ever told uh an invading army we'll treat you better as prisoners than you're being treated by your overlords right now and actually and actually could sell that you can sell it because it's true i think i think it's actually true well here's the part i wanted to point out we've all been impressed at how persuasive zielenski has been but then i look for a specific technique if you see technique then you say to yourself where did where did he learn that who taught him that and if you if he's just sort of randomly persuasive then you think oh maybe he's just some kind of a natural or has something to do with the situation he's in it just as automatic but here's the technique this is what i've been waiting for have you ever heard of a thing called making you think past the sale i talk about it all the time it was a trump's main trick he would make you think about how things would be after you've made the decision as if the decision is already made and when he talks to the russian conscripts to the extent that he can actually get his message to them he he talks about how they'll be treated after they surrender do you see it do you see the technique here's how you'll be treated after you surrender that's exactly the right way to say it rather than saying you know you're in trouble your your masters are cheating you poorly he talks about what will happen after they've surrendered that ladies and gentlemen is a tell for professional advice he is being advised by somebody who knows what the hell they're doing i don't know that he knows this stuff by himself you know there's there's no uh information we have that he had some kind of training and persuasion or something maybe he did you know we know he's a good actor we know that he presents well but that's that's a very small part of persuasion just presenting well and speaking well you have to know the technique this this latest thing he's doing which does two things well actually makes you it makes you think past two separate sales two completely different sales one sale is imagining that you've you've surrendered and the other sale is that zielenski is predicting victory direct military victory over russian troops not survival not survival not a deal victory do you think he can uh sell that story do you think there's anybody who will believe the story that ukraine is actually winning or could win and the answer is yes in my opinion half of putin's army might i'll put a mite in there because we don't know what's happening for sure i think half of putin's army is trapped and i think that between nato communication coordination and satellite spotting and weaponry and even training the the ukraine special forces are really really trained i'm being asked if i'm high amazingly no by the way i won't ever lie to you about that if i tell you i'm not high i'm not high i don't really have any reason to to tell you i'm not if i tell you i am i certainly would tell you what i'm not but i'm not in case you wondered um somebody says good time for china to invade russia i don't think so well i'm going to say that zelensi has got some persuasion and help probably from somebody in the foreign intelligence agency maybe one of ours for example and um let me ask you this who did you hear talking about ukraine winning militarily besides me anybody who was the first person you heard say you know i think ukraine might actually win militarily or at least give them such a black nose that they have to leave somebody says you did somebody says none really somebody says the entire msm that's not true the the mainstream media thinks that ukraine should have been swallowed in two days all right yeah now here's what i wonder i think i think i've told you that on some topics i might be persuading and not just predicting i think the cia has picked up on i'm not saying that they're copying me that would be acclaimed with no evidence whatsoever but people who know how to persuade know how to persuade if i were zelinski i would be talking about a outright victory over russian troops even if i didn't necessarily believe it was going to happen i'd still be talking about it because you want to put that in your heads right you want you want at least you want the people who are giving you weapons and support to believe they could actually win otherwise why would they give you weapons if you're just going to lose anyway so if i had ben zielinski i would be handling this part of it exactly this way like exactly and it's it's the i guess it's the precision of this persuasion that makes it look professional there's a certain precision of of the perfectness of his message right now that just doesn't look organic it look i mean it looks it looks like smart people who know how to do this or telling him what to do and he's good enough to be able to do it yeah ask if anything about zelinski is true the only thing i'm sure is true is that he's persuasive i'm sure that's true everything else about ukraine i don't believe i don't believe anything else i'm hearing about ukraine we'll talk about some of those oh here well here's a good example the news was saying today that more than 140 000 ukrainians mostly men have returned from europe to fight for ukraine do you believe that number do you believe that 140 000 people and people are being turned away apparently they're being turned away because there's quote no room like ukraine is all it's all filled up with people there's no room left for more foreign fighters to come in apparently the news says there are 20 000 appeals from foreigners who are ready to come so people who are not even ukrainian by by any ethnic connection people with no ethnic connection to ukraine 20 000 of them have already signed up to come fight because they want to fight against the russian nazis on the ukrainian side i don't believe any of that do you do you really right no somebody says yes but on locals it's on those so the party i don't believe is 140 000.

if you told me that 10 000 came i'd say that could be if you'd heard the number was 10 000 would you believe it i think i'd believe ten thousand i mean even even that sounds high but i'd lean toward believing it at 140 000 no way no way the entire russian army is 150 000 people am i right i mean the entire invading army not not the entire russian army but the entire invading russian army is 150 000 people and you think that 140 000 uh foreign living ukrainian associated people signed up and actually came to ukraine to fight no what's not correct there are 44 million in the country so somebody says they can believe it no i don't believe it i'm not going to buy it all right uh elon musk tweeted and offered to fight putin one on one with the winner getting ukraine perfectly normal day let's see what's happening in the news uh let's see richest man in the world uh oh okay he's uh offering to be the champion fighter for the ukrainian people and he wants to actually have a physical fight with putin and then they'll decide who uh who wins what is musk up to why do you do this this is real by the way i don't know in case you in case you thought i made this up he literally did this must did literally offered to fight putin one-on-one as a champion the winner gets ukraine he really said it and then when somebody asked if he was serious he said yes why'd he do it why'd he do it tell me why you say publicity's done everything the elon does probably has more than one more than one benefit or purpose so i'm you know publicity is part of it but publicity is not what i'm looking for he's always looking for publicity that's just a given because he doesn't have a marketing department at tesla somebody says high ground maneuver close close here's what i think it is number one elon musk is not like us will you accept the first premise elon musk is not like us i don't know what he's like but he's not like us he's better than us i hate to say it but he's better than us that's i mean it's not an accident that he's the richest man in the world uh he's he's he's smarter one of one of the parts of his talent stack which he never gives credit for because he saw engineering you know engineering-centric that you and you think of him that way but he's one of the best persuaders of all time of all time maybe maybe the best i mean it's hard to measure that kind of things you know exactly but you could make an argument he's the best there's ever been because his companies didn't become great companies because he's a great engineer i heard somebody say that somebody said that you should think of of elon as a great engineer and that would explain why his companies are succeeding nope nope i think he might be a great engineer but that would just be part of his talent stack he's not an engineer for one thing he's a he's a physicist i think he picked up engineering as a like a side job or something you know just something he figured out on his own here's what i know that maybe you're not aware of the people who came from the paypal mafia the so-called paypal mafia it was the the folks who were part of that first paypal startup elon musk was one of them uh peter thiel was one of them um hoffman was part of them so they formed linkedin and everything peter thiel did facebook pantera and now elon musk they all came from that same little startup is that a coincidence what do you think is it a coincidence that three people from that same startup all went and did like amazing things do you know what all of those amazing things had in common persuasion everything they did that worked you look at it you say you know i get i get how they could do the engineering but how do they get somebody to buy into it let me ask you this how in the world did a startup get banks to agree with them being like a little electronic bank when paypal was brand new before paypal people were not sending money back and forth digitally to each other somehow somehow paypal convinced people to do something completely outside of their trained nature to to to trust an app with their money that's really hard how'd they do it and then how they how did somebody um build linkedin linkedin was basically just a resume online with you know some social aspects and stuff i don't think linkedin was ever the greatest idea or even an innovative idea but somehow everybody wanted to do it and it became huge so if you look at the persuasion element of paypal linkedin facebook and everything else that these people do from electric cars do you know how much persuasion it takes to sell an electric car or to build a rocket company to go to mars i mean you're talking about unusual levels of persuasion to get any of that to work forget about the engineering which is super impressive how about uber you know uber didn't work because guys were really good at making apps although the app is really good uber works because somebody was persuasive as hell and figured out how to get past all these local ordinances and oh my god a lot of persuasion so the thing that people miss is the persuasive power of successful people they didn't get there just by being good engineers ever it's always persuasion too and that's what i see when i see elon musk offering to fight to putin one-on-one here's my interpretation now of course i cannot read elon musk's mind if i could i'd be building myself some unicorn startups too because i guess i'd know how to do it if i could read his mind but here's what i think when elon musk richest guy in the world knows he's going to get lots of attention when he says something like this challenges putin to a one-on-one fight your brain says two things number one number one that is absurd am i right that's the first thing you think okay that's absurd what's the second thing you do you compare it to what we're doing already and then what it's not so absurd anymore is it if you could literally choose you don't have that choice but if you could to have ukraine fight it out the way they're fighting out men women children being slaughtered and you know dismembered every day or you could settle the whole thing with elon musk having a personal fight with putin and actually i don't know who would win you know because putin's i think elon's got a size and youth but putin has putin i'll tell you who i wouldn't want to ever get in a fight with putin all right putin's basically around my age and about my size i feel like i could handle myself around people my size in general especially my age like if i ever got to fight with a another 65 year old guy who was about my age or my size i feel like i could take him but i don't feel like i could take putin i think putin would dismantle me i'm pretty sure putin is 5'7 somebody says yeah he would go macgyver on you all right so here's what i think is uh is elon's play i think that he is making a ridiculous and absurd offer but doing it seriously so that your brain will compare it to what's actually happening which is even more absurd than what he's offering he's basically juxtaposed an unambiguously absurd thing with the actual news and made you look at the absurd thing in the news and say you know the absurd thing doesn't look so stupid anymore because compared to what we're doing it actually literally no joke would be better for everybody maybe even putin i don't know i mean he might even combat a head might might not be so good for elon elon might get killed but making us think about how ridiculous the war is how absurd it is i feel like that's productive because it's easier to stop doing something that you know is absurd and everybody else knows it's absurd and that's why he did he just introduced into the thinking that war is not just a bad idea it can never be a good idea it's just absurd and yeah i see somebody in the comments saying he's trivializing it now i don't think so i think he's trivializing it as persuasion as successfully it it's a weird little move because it's like a uh it's a chess move that's not a checkmate do you see what i'm saying he's just taking the board and he's and he's just shaking a little bit not a lot he just took the chess board he's like just a little shake and a couple of the pieces just moved into another square but you don't see it yet he's basically softening up the room so that if if decisions need to be made that would normally not be made maybe they can be there because a couple of the pieces got moved it's a very small change to how we think about it but it's real it's real it does make you give a little more absurdity to the current situation and i'm not sure that we had enough absurdity in our opinion of it i feel like we thought the war sort of um we don't like it but that it made sense am i right no matter what you thought of the war or who's wrong or who's right on some level it sort of seemed logical to you like you don't like how we got here but there's a logic to it you know we we we poked the bear the bear poked back they've got strategic you know historical reasons you can kind of make it all make sense in your head can't you you can talk yourself into that we got here logically what elon has done is just rip that all out and just said maybe not maybe we did not get here logically at all maybe we just got here maybe we're in an absurd situation and the only way out is to recognize it the only way out is to recognize it the only way out is to recognize it because the only way out is to recognize it and elon just did that for you now i don't know i don't know how much thinking he put into it like it may not be even close to what i'm saying maybe it was just a joke who knows but ronnie says scott hasn't taken his hand off his lap since he started talking about eulog i i'm not going to hide the fact that i think he's one of the our greatest american patriots you know born in another country but uh you know in a way that makes him a perfect american yeah i i have a complete respect for elon musk so i'm not going to hide that yeah he's ridiculing a ridiculous war i think elon's frame that is ridiculous uh is productive we'll see you all saw the story about the russian on-air news personality who ran out with a protest sign against the war you know don't believe everything you say about the war or everything you hear and i guess she disappeared so is that the first time that russian viewers would know that there's something wrong if you were watching at home or even if you heard about it and you saw somebody run on tv and basically risked their life because anybody who saw it knows that that person risked their life or at least their freedom somebody risked their life to give you this message would it wake you up or would you say oh that's weird crazy person i wonder if this matters don't you it might matter it could be that we'll look back on this this one brave woman um who risked real literally risked her life to try to right or wrong and boy i have a lot of respect for her although i wouldn't have done it i don't think i would have done it yeah it's almost out of a hollywood movie all right um there's a another story that i you know when i see a story that's so perfectly fits what people on social media were imagining i get real suspicious so i'm going to tell you this story and i want you to say does this look familiar meaning that does the story seem to match exactly what i had said on twitter all right now i'm not going to tell you that like i'm the only person who said this sometimes i tell you that because i think it's useful i think it's useful to track who predicts things correctly first so i know it's annoying when i say did i did i predict that do you remember but i think it's useful because you should you should have the same you know idea of how accurate i am uh in order to you know enjoy this live stream so here's the story from the new york post and it says that citing sources close to the kremlin senior figures in the five eyes intelligence alliance comprising oh well look at this using the word comprising correctly in a sentence i'm always impressed comprising australia canada new zealand and the united kingdom and the united states believe there is a physiological explanation for the russian president's globally reviled decision to invade ukraine so of course a lot of people haven't been talking about it but now we're seeing a story that the intelligence people believe that there is evidence that the sources the unnamed sources highly highly dependable unnamed sources speculated that putin who's 69 could have dementia parkinson's disease or quote roid rage roid rage uh from potential cancer treatments that involve heavy steroid use do you know i swear to god yesterday i was taking a walk and i was thinking to myself huh i wonder if there are any cancer treatments that would give you like anger issues it turns out there are apparently steroids are indicated for some kinds of cancer treatments and that could give you roid rage and actually explain his entire behavior would also explain his puffy face his puffy face and his change in decision making it's all looking a lot like a chemical change in his personality because people know him say he's changed yeah didn't i say that on day one steroids give me a fact jack was i i don't think i was the first but i was i think i was among the first to say that looks like roids that looks like steroids day one right yeah and i oh i did ask about it okay oh good now i'm not gonna claim that i had like some you know the first in the world to say that but i was there early i think that's worth it now here's my fake news uh analysis of this i thought it was true until i saw it in the news do you know what i mean i thought i was pretty confident in my opinion that there's something chemically different about him but as soon as i saw it in the news and the news looks exactly like my tweets i stopped believing it now that's a hell of a thing that i believed my own opinion until i saw it uh being uh confirmed in the news as soon as i saw it confirmed in the news i'm like oh i'm wrong they confirmed it i must be wrong because here's my problem it looks exactly like what an intelligence agency would want you to think like a u.s intelligence agency like a ukrainian intelligence agency it looks a little like uh our intelligence agencies and other countries may have said look they're gonna believe this anyway because people are chatting about it in social media so let's just put it out there like it's probably true because they're already primed to believe it they didn't have to wonder if we would believe it because it had already been tested you see what i'm saying it'd already been tested they knew people would believe it because we already believed it without any evidence whatsoever so they just gave us some fake evidence of you know people who are sources say they think and then it goes to the media and then you think you're there's really a source and then so here's the thing could i have caused this i'm not saying i did but i worry about it is it possible i caused this let me tell you what i know i do know that intelligence agencies watch me do you accept that now i'm not going to tell you how i know but i know because i've been approached by people etc so i know they i know that they're at least i know of at least three intelligence agencies who do have their eyes on me four i know four if four intelligence agencies are watching me and and i've sort of uh tested and advanced the idea that putin looks like he's drugged do you think that they could have gotten the idea to just amplify it i'm not saying that this happened i'm just i just worry about it i worry that i'm giving people ideas without knowing it i have no reason to think i did this i'm not making that claim but i worry about it all right um cnn has a story oh let's talk more about putin so apparently putin is a known hypochondriac do you believe that putin is a known hypochondriac and they think that's why he's so afraid of kovid but somebody else said and i had never said this out loud but i believed it for a while that the reason he's so afraid of kovid is that he has comorbidities i think he's got comorbidities which would suggest cancer or or something bad which would suggest the steroid thing is correct because if you're the head of a country and you've got some kind of medical problem that's going to slow you down they might pump you full of meth and steroids to keep you going because you can't take a day off if you're putin right putin can't take a day off i don't think putin takes sick days am i right i don't think he could take a sick day because weakness would you know be a big risk for him politically so i've got a feeling that he's pumped up with whatever it takes to make him look like he's still functional while he's rapidly declining in some kind of health related problem so that's my that's my current analysis so i'm going to say comorbidity is why he's afraid of kovid comorbidities um there's a new threat in the united states according to cnn they've got a story it's men who are involuntarily involuntarily celibate wait a minute um are incels involuntarily celibate i thought people volunteered i think don't they sort of volunteer because they just gave up on it you know i think it's a sort of a gray area whether they volunteered or they didn't have any choice but apparently uh now the government is worried that these uh celibate men who in many cases have bad feelings about women will become mass murderers of women because they are misogynists and well yeah i get it i get it the incel means involuntary celibate but what i've seen it in in actual popular use it always seemed like people were voluntarily labeling themselves involuntarily celibate does that make sense it looked like there was some free will involved however you wanted to find that anyway do you think that's a big problem for the future in voluntarily celibate men i think it is it it sounds ridiculous right it sounds a little absurd on the surface but i feel like it is and i've often speculated much to my uh destruction the a big problem in the middle east is too many men and not enough women because if the high-end rich men in middle eastern society have several wives necessarily there won't be enough left over for the men the the lower ranked men so in theory there should be all these extra men who have nothing to do but you know kill and be killed because we turn into killers when we're not domesticated basically um well ethan why do you need to say that ethan has decided to inform me that my wife divorced me ethan you're probably aware that i i know about this right i'm kind of up to date ethan and ethan i wonder when you wake up in the morning and you start your day do other people say i'm sure glad ethan is awake because there's a guy who brings light and sunshine into our lives ethan is a person who's always looking on the bright side ethan some some people would say ethan is a uh a worthless piece of a dingleberry on the the ass of life some would say that because his contribution to a conversation was so mind-bogglingly useless and negative that one wonders if ethan will make it through life or is ethan a in-cell who will soon be killing a room full of women i don't know i don't know ethan but it's one of those things all right um what else is going on oh lots of things lots of things are going on uh oil went down 30 percent because oil prices are not real oil is the only thing that doesn't depend on the supply and demand am i right maybe there's something else but i've been watching oil prices forever and one thing that is a guarantee is that supply and demand doesn't make any difference talking about supply and demand makes a difference talking about it but the actual supply doesn't seem to make any difference it's just the worrying about it that changes it so every time somebody worries about it somebody else raises the price if i write a story and say i think x will happen so oil prices will go up what happens to the price of oil prices or what oil price goes up right if people are talking about it going up it goes up if people are talking about it going down it goes down it's not even related to the supply now of course i'm exaggerating because of course in the long run this supply is all that matters but that's never what we see we see all these short-term enormous swings and all of it's just psychology based so yeah oil can go up 30 percent it could go down 30 with no change in in demand and no change in supply so remember all of this is all of the oil changes are just psychology about what we expect and nobody can predict the future so there's more uncertainty which raises the price so uncertainty does always increase risk which increases price but i don't see any reason that it can't plunge the just as fast as it went up how fast does it take people to open up production facilities that used to be not profitable but because the prices are so high they are it doesn't take that long to reopen a well does it somebody says years it takes years to reopen a well that's been capped i would think a month you know without knowing anything about anything i would think a month if if oil were a thousand dollars a barrel you don't think you could drill me a well in a month really yeah that's where this comes in really yeah if let's say oil is a million dollars a barrel you don't think you could drill me some new wells in a month yeah you could yeah you could somebody says three months i'll take three months but it seems to me we must already be massively um starting to ramp up production everywhere in the world i would think so i don't think oil prices could stay high um what do you think about the news that china is helping russia or might help them militarily joel tweeted he said in my opinion the china helping russia's story is largely fake news narrative cooked up by anonymous quote anonymous source jake sullivan who also briefed the media in 2016 about russia collusion he has a demonstrated history of lying to the media to the detriment of national security that's how i say it now i don't know anything about jake sullivan being involved that's a different question certainly there's reason to suspect that this fits his wheelhouse i agree with joel on that but i don't think i believe that china is helping russia's story exactly it makes sense that russia is talking to china and it makes sense that because they have this unlimited partnership their china might step up with a little extra trade or something like that but framing it as china helping russia militarily it's a bit of a stretch it has a persuasion feel to it as opposed to a news feel to it wouldn't you say does it feel like news or does it feel like redefining news to make it into something new feels like reframing the news feels like persuasion feels like but could be wrong we'll wait and see i saw some people following me today on twitter you know twitter tells you who followed you recently and i believe that at least two of the three had followed me forever and they had to re-follow me today and somebody else had said the same thing and this had gone away for months and months for a long time i had not had this issue of people being automatically unfollowed for me has anybody been unfollowed for me automatically um i'm just watching the comments i guess the no's don't tell me anything because most people would be in now somebody said uh yes i have last year yes i had to re-follow when you got a new computer that's weird um so people say yes somebody was it was two years ago yes now there are enough yeses going by that do those look like people are just mistaken because i watched my twitter account reach a certain level and then just plateaued it looks like it's throttled it certainly looks like it i can't guarantee it but it looks for all for all uh all appearances it looks that way twice so somebody had to resubscribe to me twice yeah the names that i saw subscribing to me are ones that i've known and communicated with for years on twitter and they had to re-sign up today because the thing that if it had been random names that i was not familiar with i would have thought oh they got mad at me someday and and blocked me or something and then they changed their mind but these are people i've had no bad interaction with that i'm pretty sure had just always followed me and had to re-follow um here's the most interesting thing that's happening in my opinion did you ever wonder what would happen if a lifelong democrat ever figured out how to design systems that took into account human motivation economics and science what would happen well the democrats have a lot of supporters so just being a democrat should help you get elected like half the time you would win just by being the democrat but what if you had a democrat who is not just going to win because there are a lot of democrats what if the democrat found a way to design systems and solutions that are compatible with all republican thought well that person exists and is running for governor of california michael schellenberger so michael schellenberger is a lifelong democrat who has uh turned independent and there are actually more people registered independent in california than either democrat or republican if you could actually treat the independents as a party and get them to maybe see themselves as a team they would win every election in california it's the biggest group now i don't think that there are real independents i think people are really republican but don't want to say so that sort of thing but there's certainly elaine you know if you if you think it's impossible you're way wrong it's very possible he can win very possible because here's what he's got going for he is a lifelong democrat and as far as i can tell his let's say his emotional empathy are still exactly in that world of trying to make sure everybody has a good chance and a good life but on top of that he's the only person i've ever seen who put tremendous years of effort into figuring out what works you know he's done written books on these topics so he knows what works with homeless and with drug addiction because he looked at all the things that people have tried and he knows that what california is doing is in the is on the category of things which have been tried and fail so he wants to try things that are in the category of things that have been tried and were greatly successful how crazy is that so uh this is really interesting what happens if somebody has the the total skill stack from communication writing political you know knowledge he's an expert on now addiction an expert on homelessness by virtue of having studied it for writing books uh an expert on energy of nuclear power climate change and even forest management so there's not a single topic that matters in california that michael schellenberger doesn't know twice as much as the current governor think about that and this is a demonstrated fact i'm not just saying oh he's smart i think he's just smarter it's not that i'm saying you could just look at the documented life of both people and you can see that schellenberger has done deep dives and super productive activist stuff like talked to congress a number of times talk to other other governments i mean he's persuading governments at the highest level about things that are you know deeply important to the world so he's got his priorities right he's got the skill set that i've never seen honestly let me say this i've never seen anybody enter politics with as good a skill set as he's bringing like the right set of talents that all that all stack just right you take anybody you take uh trump you know i was obviously pro-trump but even trump doesn't have expertise in all these categories right imagine if he did imagine trump with his other skills but also having all the you know the deep dive uh analytical ability of a schellenberger i mean that's an endless possibility but you don't have to imagine that because you can just look at schallenberger because he actually has those skills he he has everything from the persuasion to the communication to insanely high energy i don't know how it gets so much done you need somebody with high energy in politics and yes good hair i always make fun of that you can't really get elected unless you have good hair he has great hair let's not let's not underestimate the hair so there you go keep an eye on california we might be going from a bad situation to a good situation and at least we have a good choice which i don't think we've ever had before and you should follow michael schallenberger if you want to know any solutions for anything from drug addiction to homeless to nuclear energy to crime basically all of it he's done pretty much a deep dive on everything that matters in california so what do you think does he have a chance he is going to have some powerful people behind him i'm 100 behind him anybody who thinks he doesn't have a chance i think you're coming from the political parties have all the power perspective you probably didn't think uh that's interesting you you probably didn't think that he could move the dial on nuclear power didn't you did you think anybody could do that do you think anybody could enter the conversation and just move the dial on nuclear power he did he did that i mean you watched it you watched it in real time i kind of i did the play-by-play for years watching him do his work and he did it musk should endorse schellenberger oh there's an idea yeah imagine if elon musk backed michael schellenberger and did it publicly wow because i don't think there would be even one speck of difference between musk's opinion on political stuff and sheldenberg's i'll bet i'll bet they don't have one difference of opinion because at a certain level of awareness everybody has the same opinion i hate to tell you but at a certain level of understanding of how the world works all the opinions are the same trust me they're all the same at a certain at a certain point could could tesla come back to california now that's a big ask and i think taxes will be the big problem there all right um i am going to uh go do something else and uh i think you'd agree this is the best live stream of all time of all time it's just getting better this is the only live stream in which we intentionally try to change the world and succeed okay maybe others do that too but i don't know about them and that's the same thing so channeling muhammad ali i don't know that reference in this context number 666 my episode 666 was still the best i was normal then before i became abnormal oh it'll be better tomorrow wait you have a question yes it's the best ever the best ever all right that's it for now and i will talk to you all tomorrow on youtube

good morning everybody

uh welcome

to the best thing that's ever happened

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coffee with scott adams and aren't you

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you're lucky you're sexy you're smart

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oh yeah we're going to salisbury hill

and join me now for the unparalleled

pleasure it's the dopamine the other day

and it's the thing that'll make

everything better it's called the

simultaneous sip go

yeah

yeah

coursing through every corp muscle in my

body

uh powering up

all right full power now you don't know

what you're gonna get now

well let's see what's going on in the

world uh china's uh pretty much screwed

they're shutting down things because of

covet

they've shut down life in shenzhen and

shanghai and

the foxconn

company that makes iphones is having to

move their business to other locations

and

well it's looking kinda ugly

and here's my question

number one

do you remember i've been warning you

that china's pandemic is ahead of them

i did that right

can somebody confirm that i've been

telling you that china's pandemic is

ahead of them not behind them

yeah okay i'm saying in the comments you

remember i said that i don't remember

anybody else saying that in public

do you

do you remember do you remember anybody

else saying uh i think china's problem

is ahead of them

certainly when omicron came because the

idea was that the virus was going to be

around forever

and the vaccinations don't stop it and

the chinese vaccinations especially

don't stop it

so

uh well it looks like sweden's pandemic

is behind them yeah i think the west

has largely conquered this thing

i hope so

but

um why is it that every single thing

that happens in the news has a supply

chain

impact this can't be a coincidence is it

just everything has a supply chain

impact whereas two years ago nothing did

am i right

it just went from everything affects the

nothing affects it everything affects it

there's something going on

that doesn't look

completely organic to me i don't know

what it is

uh could be that we're in the simulation

and we're testing supply chains it could

be weird coincidence i guess

zielenski

has picked up on my persuasion

not specifically my persuasion but let

me explain

so zelensky is now uh trying to talk

directly to the russian conscripts that

are in the russian

invading army now i don't i don't

imagine his

message can reach them too easily seems

like they would

be protected from many outside messages

but

he said if you surrender to our forces

so he's actually talking about the

russian military

being defeated militarily

and surrendering

and what he says is if you surrender to

our forces

uh that your people will be treated the

way they're supposed to be treated as

people decently

in a way you were not treated in your

army

literally zielinski is telling the

russian army people

that they would be treated better as

prisoners of ukraine

than as military members of their army

and you know what

he might be right

doesn't that ring true

because i think the russian transcripts

are really being treated as cannon

fodder

they're being treated as cannon fodder

for no gain to them or their country

really no gain

their their act the russian army wants

to kill these guys or put them in harm's

way they'll be damaged for life even if

they survive you know they'll be ptsd

and everything else so the russian army

is absolutely abusing their own

conscripts

and

i do think that the ukrainians

might treat them better as prisoners of

war

that's actually literally true

that's the damnedest thing isn't it

has anybody ever told uh an invading

army we'll treat you better as prisoners

than you're being treated by your

overlords right now and actually

and actually could sell that

you can sell it because it's true

i think

i think it's actually true

well

here's the part i wanted to point out

we've all been impressed at how

persuasive

zielenski has been

but then i look for a specific technique

if you see technique

then you say to yourself

where did where did he learn that

who taught him that

and if you if he's just sort of randomly

persuasive then you think oh maybe he's

just some kind of a natural or has

something to do with the situation he's

in it just as automatic

but here's the technique this is what

i've been waiting for

have you ever heard of a thing called

making you think past the sale

i talk about it all the time

it was a trump's main trick

he would make you think about how things

would be after you've made the decision

as if the decision is already

made and when he talks to the

russian

conscripts

to the extent that he can actually get

his message to them

he he talks about how they'll be treated

after they

surrender do you see it do you see the

technique

here's how you'll be treated after you

surrender

that's exactly

the right way to say it

rather than saying

you know you're in trouble your your

masters are cheating you poorly

he talks about what will happen after

they've surrendered

that ladies and gentlemen

is a tell

for professional advice

he is being advised

by somebody who knows what the hell

they're doing

i don't know that he knows this stuff by

himself

you know there's there's no uh

information we have that he

had some kind of training and persuasion

or something maybe he did

you know we know he's a good actor we

know that he presents well but that's

that's a very small part of persuasion

just presenting well and speaking well

you have to know the technique

this this latest thing he's doing

which does two things

well actually makes you it makes you

think past two separate sales

two completely different sales one sale

is imagining that you've

you've surrendered

and the other sale is that zielenski is

predicting victory direct military

victory over russian troops not survival

not survival

not a deal

victory

do you think he can

uh sell that story do you think there's

anybody who will believe the story

that ukraine is actually winning

or could win

and

the answer is

yes

in my opinion

half of putin's army might i'll put a

mite in there because we don't know

what's happening for sure i think half

of putin's army is trapped

and i think that between

nato

communication coordination and satellite

spotting and weaponry and even training

the the ukraine special forces

are

really really trained

i'm being asked if i'm high

amazingly

no

by the way i won't ever lie to you about

that if i tell you i'm not high i'm not

high

i don't really have any reason to

to tell you i'm not

if i tell you i am i certainly would

tell you what i'm not but i'm not

in case you

wondered um

somebody says good time for china to

invade russia

i don't think so

well i'm going to say that zelensi has

got some

persuasion and help

probably from somebody in the foreign

intelligence agency maybe one of ours

for example

and

um let me ask you this

who did you hear talking about

ukraine winning militarily

besides me

anybody

who was the first person you heard say

you know

i think ukraine might actually win

militarily

or at least give them such a black nose

that they have to leave

somebody says you did

somebody says none really

somebody says the entire msm that's not

true the the mainstream media thinks

that ukraine should have been

swallowed in two days

all right yeah

now here's what i wonder i think i think

i've told you that on some topics i

might be persuading and not just

predicting

i think the cia has picked up on

i'm not saying that they're copying me

that would be

acclaimed with no evidence whatsoever

but

people who know how to persuade know how

to persuade

if i were zelinski i would be talking

about a outright victory over russian

troops

even if i didn't necessarily believe it

was going to happen

i'd still be talking about it because

you want to put that in your heads right

you want you want at least you want the

people who are giving you weapons and

support

to believe they could actually win

otherwise why would they give you

weapons if you're just going to lose

anyway

so

if i had ben zielinski i would be

handling

this part of it

exactly this way

like exactly

and it's

it's the

i guess it's the precision of this

persuasion that makes it look

professional

there's a certain precision of of the

perfectness of his message right now

that just doesn't look organic it look i

mean it looks

it looks like smart people who know how

to do this or telling him what to do and

he's good enough to be able to do it

yeah ask if anything about zelinski is

true

the only thing i'm sure is true is that

he's persuasive

i'm sure that's true

everything else about ukraine i don't

believe

i don't believe anything else i'm

hearing about ukraine we'll talk about

some of those

oh here well here's a good example the

news was saying today that more than 140

000 ukrainians mostly men have returned

from europe

to fight for ukraine

do you believe that number

do you believe that 140 000 people and

people are being turned away

apparently they're being turned away

because there's quote no room

like ukraine is all it's all filled up

with people there's no room left for

more foreign fighters to come in

apparently the news says there are 20

000 appeals from foreigners who are

ready to come so people who are not even

ukrainian by

by any ethnic connection

people with no ethnic connection to

ukraine 20 000 of them have already

signed up to come fight because they

want to fight against the russian nazis

on the ukrainian

side

i don't believe any of that

do you

do you really

right no

somebody says yes

but on locals it's on those

so the party i don't believe is 140 000.

if you told me that 10 000

came i'd say that could be

if you'd heard the number was 10 000

would you believe it

i think i'd believe ten thousand

i mean even even that sounds high

but

i'd lean toward believing it

at 140 000 no way

no way

the entire russian army is 150 000

people

am i right

i mean the entire invading army not not

the entire russian army but the entire

invading russian army is 150 000 people

and you think that 140 000

uh foreign living ukrainian associated

people signed up and actually came to

ukraine to fight

no

what's not correct

there are 44 million in the country so

somebody says they can believe it no i

don't believe it

i'm not going to buy it

all right uh elon musk tweeted and

offered to fight putin one on one

with the winner getting ukraine

perfectly normal day

let's see what's happening in the news

uh let's see richest man in the world

uh oh okay he's uh offering to be the

champion fighter for the

ukrainian people

and he wants to actually have a physical

fight with putin and

then they'll decide

who uh who wins

what is musk up to

why do you do this

this is real by the way i don't know in

case you in case you thought i made this

up he literally did this must did

literally offered to fight putin

one-on-one

as a champion the winner gets ukraine

he really said it and then when somebody

asked if he was serious he said yes

why'd he do it

why'd he do it tell me why

you say publicity's done

everything the elon does probably has

more than one

more than one benefit or purpose so i'm

you know publicity is part of it but

publicity is not what i'm looking for

he's always looking for publicity that's

just a given because he doesn't have a

marketing department at tesla

somebody says high ground maneuver

close

close

here's what i think it is

number one

elon musk is not like us

will you accept the first premise

elon musk is not like us

i don't know what he's like but he's not

like us

he's better than us

i hate to say it but he's better than us

that's i mean it's not an accident that

he's the richest man in the world

uh he's he's he's smarter

one of one of the parts of his talent

stack

which he never gives credit for

because he saw engineering

you know engineering-centric

that you and you think of him that way

but he's one of the best persuaders

of all time

of all time

maybe

maybe the best i mean it's hard to

measure that kind of things you know

exactly but you could make an argument

he's the best there's ever been

because his companies didn't become

great companies because he's a great

engineer i heard somebody say that

somebody said that you should think of

of elon as a great engineer and that

would explain why his companies are

succeeding nope

nope

i think he might be a great engineer but

that would just be part of his talent

stack he's not an engineer for one thing

he's a he's a physicist

i think he picked up engineering as a

like a side job or something you know

just something he figured out on his own

here's what i know that maybe you're not

aware of

the people who came from the paypal

mafia

the so-called paypal mafia it was the

the folks who were part of that first

paypal startup

elon musk was one of them

uh peter thiel was one of them

um

hoffman was part of them so they formed

linkedin and everything peter thiel did

facebook pantera

and now

elon musk they all came from that same

little startup is that a coincidence

what do you think

is it a coincidence that three people

from that same startup

all went and did like amazing things

do you know what all of those amazing

things had in common

persuasion

everything they did that worked you look

at it you say you know i get

i get how they could do the engineering

but how do they get somebody to buy into

it

let me ask you this

how in the world

did a startup get banks to agree with

them being like a little electronic bank

when paypal was brand new

before paypal people were not sending

money

back and forth digitally

to each other

somehow

somehow paypal

convinced people to do something

completely outside of their trained

nature

to to to trust

an app with their money

that's really hard

how'd they do it

and then how they how did somebody um

build linkedin

linkedin was basically just a resume

online with you know some social aspects

and stuff i don't think linkedin was

ever the greatest idea or even an

innovative idea

but somehow everybody wanted to do it

and it became huge

so if you look at the persuasion element

of paypal

linkedin

facebook

and everything else that

these people do from electric cars do

you know how much persuasion it takes to

sell an electric car or to build a

rocket company to go to mars

i mean you're talking about

unusual levels of persuasion to get any

of that to work forget about the

engineering which is

super impressive

how about uber

you know uber didn't work because guys

were really good at making apps

although the app is really good

uber works because somebody was

persuasive as hell

and figured out how to

get past all these local ordinances and

oh my god

a lot of persuasion so the thing that

people miss is the persuasive power of

successful people they didn't get there

just by being good engineers ever

it's always persuasion too

and

that's what i see when i see elon musk

offering to fight to putin

one-on-one here's my interpretation

now of course i cannot read elon musk's

mind

if i could

i'd be building myself some unicorn

startups too because i guess i'd know

how to do it if i could read his mind

but

here's what i think

when elon musk richest guy in the world

knows he's going to get lots of

attention when he says something like

this

challenges putin to a one-on-one fight

your brain says two things number one

number one

that is absurd

am i right that's the first thing you

think okay that's absurd

what's the second thing you do

you compare it to what we're doing

already

and then what

it's not so absurd anymore is it

if you could literally choose

you don't have that choice but if you

could

to have ukraine fight it out the way

they're fighting out

men women children being slaughtered and

you know dismembered every day

or you could settle the whole thing

with elon musk having a personal fight

with putin and actually i don't know who

would win

you know because putin's i think elon's

got a size and youth

but putin has putin

i'll tell you who i wouldn't want to

ever get in a fight with

putin all right putin's basically around

my age and about my size

i feel like i could handle myself around

people my size in general especially my

age like if i ever got to fight with a

another 65 year old guy who was about my

age or my size i feel like i could take

him

but i don't feel like i could take putin

i think putin would dismantle me

i'm pretty sure

putin is 5'7 somebody says yeah

he would go macgyver on you all right so

here's what i think is uh

is elon's play i think that he is making

a ridiculous and absurd offer but doing

it seriously

so that your brain will compare it to

what's actually happening

which is even more absurd

than what he's offering

he's basically juxtaposed an

unambiguously absurd thing

with the actual news

and made you look at the absurd thing in

the news and say you know

the absurd thing doesn't look so stupid

anymore

because compared to what we're doing it

actually

literally

no joke

would be better for everybody

maybe even putin i don't know i mean he

might even combat a head might might not

be so good for

elon

elon might get killed

but making us think about how ridiculous

the war is how absurd it is

i feel like that's productive

because it's easier to stop doing

something that you know is absurd and

everybody else knows it's absurd

and that's why he did

he just introduced into the thinking

that war

is not just

a bad idea

it can never be a good idea it's just

absurd

and

yeah i see somebody in the comments

saying he's trivializing it now

i don't think so

i think he's trivializing it as

persuasion

as successfully

it it's a weird little move because it's

like a uh it's a chess move

that's not a checkmate

do you see what i'm saying

he's just taking the board and he's and

he's just shaking a little bit

not a lot

he just took the chess board he's like

just a little shake and a couple of the

pieces just moved into another square

but you don't see it yet

he's basically

softening up the room

so that if if decisions need to be made

that would normally not be made

maybe they can be there because a couple

of the pieces got moved it's a very

small change

to how we think about it

but it's real

it's real

it does make you give a little more

absurdity to the current situation

and i'm not sure that we had enough

absurdity

in our opinion of it

i feel like we thought the war sort of

um we don't like it

but that it made sense

am i right

no matter what you thought of the war or

who's wrong or who's right

on some level

it sort of seemed logical to you

like you don't like how we got here

but there's a logic to it you know we we

we poked the bear the bear poked back

they've got strategic

you know historical reasons you can kind

of make it all make sense in your head

can't you you can talk yourself into

that we got here logically

what elon has done is just rip that all

out and just said maybe not

maybe we did not get here logically at

all maybe we just got here

maybe we're in an absurd situation

and the only way out is to recognize it

the only way out

is to recognize it

the only way out

is to recognize it

because the only way out

is to recognize it

and elon just did that for you

now i don't know

i don't know how much thinking he put

into it like

it may not be even close to what i'm

saying maybe it was just a joke who

knows

but

ronnie says scott hasn't taken his hand

off his lap since he started talking

about eulog

i i'm not going to hide the fact

that i think he's one of the our

greatest

american patriots you know born in

another country but uh you know in a way

that makes him a perfect american

yeah i i have a complete respect for

elon musk so i'm not going to hide that

yeah he's ridiculing a ridiculous war i

think elon's frame that is ridiculous

uh

is productive

we'll see

you all saw the story about the russian

on-air

news personality who ran out with a

protest sign against the war you know

don't believe everything you say

about the war or everything you hear

and i guess she disappeared

so

is that the first time that russian

viewers would know that there's

something wrong

if you were watching at home

or even if you heard about it

and you saw somebody run on tv and

basically risked their life

because anybody who saw it knows that

that person risked their life or at

least their freedom

somebody risked their life to give you

this message would it wake you up

or would you say oh that's weird crazy

person

i wonder if this matters

don't you it might matter

it could be that we'll look back on this

this one brave woman

um who risked real literally risked her

life

to try to right or wrong and

boy i have a lot of respect for her

although i wouldn't have done it i don't

think i would have done it

yeah it's almost out of a hollywood

movie

all right

um

there's a

another story

that

i you know

when i see a story that's so perfectly

fits what people on social media were

imagining

i get real suspicious

so i'm going to tell you this story

and i want you to say

does this look familiar

meaning that does the story seem to

match exactly what

i had said on twitter

all right now i'm not going to tell you

that like i'm the only person who said

this

sometimes i tell you that because i

think it's useful i think it's useful to

track

who predicts things correctly first so i

know it's annoying when i say did i did

i predict that do you remember but i

think it's useful

because you should you should have the

same

you know idea of how accurate i am

uh in order to you know enjoy this live

stream

so

here's the story from the new york post

and it says that citing sources close to

the kremlin

senior figures in the five eyes

intelligence alliance comprising

oh well look at this using the word

comprising correctly in a sentence i'm

always impressed comprising australia

canada new zealand and the united

kingdom and the united states believe

there is a physiological explanation for

the russian president's globally reviled

decision to invade ukraine

so of course a lot of people haven't

been talking about it but now we're

seeing a story that the intelligence

people believe that there is evidence

that the sources the unnamed sources

highly highly dependable unnamed sources

speculated that putin who's 69

could have dementia parkinson's disease

or quote

roid rage

roid rage

uh from potential cancer treatments that

involve heavy steroid use do you know i

swear to god yesterday

i was taking a walk and i was thinking

to myself huh

i wonder if there are any cancer

treatments

that would give you

like anger issues

it turns out there are

apparently

steroids are indicated for some kinds of

cancer treatments

and

that could give you roid rage and

actually explain his entire behavior

would also explain his puffy face

his puffy face and his change in

decision making

it's all looking a lot like

a chemical change in his personality

because people know him say he's changed

yeah didn't i say that on day one

steroids

give me a fact jack

was i i don't think i was the first but

i was i think i was among the first to

say that looks like roids that looks

like steroids day one right

yeah

and i oh i did ask about it

okay oh good now i'm not gonna claim

that i had like some you know the first

in the world to say that but i was there

early

i think that's worth it

now here's my fake news

uh analysis of this

i thought it was true until i saw it in

the news

do you know what i mean

i thought i was pretty confident in my

opinion that there's something

chemically different about him

but as soon as i saw it in the news

and the news looks exactly like my

tweets

i stopped believing it

now that's a hell of a thing

that i believed my own opinion until i

saw it uh being uh confirmed in the news

as soon as i saw it confirmed in the

news i'm like oh i'm wrong they

confirmed it i must be wrong

because here's my problem

it looks exactly like what an

intelligence agency would want you to

think like a u.s intelligence agency

like a ukrainian intelligence agency

it looks a little like

uh our intelligence agencies and other

countries may have said look they're

gonna believe this anyway because people

are chatting about it in social media

so let's just put it out there like it's

probably true because they're already

primed to believe it

they didn't have to wonder if we would

believe it

because it had already been tested

you see what i'm saying it'd already

been tested

they knew people would believe it

because we already believed it without

any evidence whatsoever

so they just gave us some fake evidence

of you know people who are sources say

they think

and then it goes to the media and then

you think you're there's really a source

and then

so here's the thing

could i have caused this

i'm not saying i did

but i worry about it

is it possible i caused this

let me tell you what i know

i do know that intelligence agencies

watch me

do you accept that

now i'm not going to tell you how i know

but i know

because i've been approached by people

etc

so i know they i know that they're at

least

i know of at least three intelligence

agencies who do have their eyes on me

four i know four

if four intelligence agencies are

watching me

and and i've sort of uh tested and

advanced the idea that putin looks like

he's drugged

do you think that they could have gotten

the idea to just amplify it

i'm not saying that this happened i'm

just i just worry about it i worry

that i'm giving people ideas

without knowing it

i have no reason to think i did this i'm

not making that claim

but i worry about it

all right

um cnn has a story

oh let's talk more about putin so

apparently putin is a known

hypochondriac do you believe that

putin is a known hypochondriac

and they think that's why he's so afraid

of kovid but somebody else said and i

had never said this out loud but i

believed it for a while

that the reason he's so afraid of kovid

is that he has comorbidities

i think he's got comorbidities

which would suggest

cancer or or something bad which would

suggest

the steroid thing is correct

because if you're the head of a country

and you've got some kind of medical

problem that's going to slow you down

they might pump you full of meth

and steroids

to keep you going because you can't take

a day off if you're putin right

putin can't take a day off

i don't think putin takes sick days

am i right

i don't think he could take a sick day

because weakness

would you know be a big risk for him

politically

so i've got a feeling that he's pumped

up with whatever it takes to make him

look like he's still functional

while he's rapidly declining in some

kind of health related problem so that's

my that's my current analysis

so i'm going to say comorbidity is why

he's afraid of kovid comorbidities

um

there's a new threat in the united

states according to cnn they've got a

story

it's men who are involuntarily

involuntarily celibate

wait a minute

um

are incels involuntarily celibate

i thought people volunteered

i think

don't they sort of volunteer because

they just gave up on it

you know i think it's a

sort of a gray area whether they

volunteered or they didn't have any

choice

but apparently uh

now the government is worried that these

uh celibate men

who in many cases have bad feelings

about women will become

mass murderers of women because they are

misogynists

and

well yeah i get it i get it the incel

means involuntary celibate but what i've

seen it in

in actual popular use

it always seemed like people were

voluntarily

labeling themselves

involuntarily celibate does that make

sense

it looked like there was some free will

involved however you wanted to find that

anyway

do you think that's a big problem for

the future

in voluntarily celibate men

i think it is

it it sounds ridiculous

right it sounds a little absurd on the

surface but

i feel like it is

and i've often speculated much to my uh

destruction

the a big problem in the middle east is

too many men and not enough women

because if the high-end rich men in

middle eastern society

have several wives

necessarily there won't be enough left

over for the men the the lower ranked

men

so in theory there should be all these

extra men who have nothing to do but you

know kill and be killed

because we turn into killers when we're

not

domesticated

basically um

well ethan why do you need to say that

ethan has decided to inform me that my

wife divorced me

ethan

you're probably aware that i i know

about this right i'm kind of up to date

ethan

and ethan i wonder

when you wake up in the morning

and you start your day

do other people say i'm sure glad ethan

is awake

because there's a guy who brings light

and sunshine into our lives

ethan is a person who's always looking

on the bright side

ethan

some some people would say ethan is a

uh a worthless piece of a

dingleberry on the the ass of life

some would say that because his

contribution to a conversation

was

so

mind-bogglingly

useless and negative

that one wonders

if ethan will make it through life

or is ethan a

in-cell who will soon be killing a room

full of women

i don't know i don't know ethan

but it's one of those things

all right

um

what else is going on

oh lots of things lots of things are

going on

uh oil went down 30 percent

because oil prices are not real

oil is the only thing that doesn't

depend on the supply and demand

am i right

maybe there's something else

but i've been watching oil prices

forever

and one thing that is a guarantee

is that supply and demand doesn't make

any difference

talking about supply and demand makes a

difference

talking about it

but the actual supply

doesn't seem to make any difference

it's just the worrying about it that

changes it

so every time somebody worries about it

somebody else raises the price

if i write a story and say

i think x will happen so oil prices will

go up

what happens to the price of oil prices

or what oil price goes up right

if people are talking about it going up

it goes up

if people are talking about it going

down it goes down

it's not even related to the supply

now

of course i'm

exaggerating because of course in the

long run this supply is all that matters

but that's never what we see we see all

these short-term

enormous swings

and

all of it's just psychology based

so yeah oil can go up 30 percent it

could go down 30 with no change in in

demand and no change in supply

so remember all of this is

all of the oil changes are just

psychology about what we expect and

nobody can predict the future so there's

more uncertainty which raises the price

so uncertainty does always increase risk

which increases price

but i don't see any reason that it can't

plunge

the just as fast as it went up

how fast does it take

people to open up production facilities

that used to be not profitable but

because the prices are so high they are

it doesn't take that long to reopen a

well does it

somebody says years it takes years to

reopen a well that's

been capped

i would think a month you know without

knowing anything about anything

i would think a month

if

if oil were a thousand dollars a barrel

you don't think you could drill me a

well in a month

really yeah that's where this comes in

really

yeah if let's say oil is a million

dollars a barrel

you don't think you could drill me some

new wells in a month

yeah you could

yeah you could

somebody says three months i'll take

three months

but it seems to me we must already be

massively um

starting to ramp up production

everywhere in the world i would think

so i don't think oil prices could stay

high

um

what do you think about the news that

china is helping russia

or might help them militarily joel

tweeted he said in my opinion

the china helping russia's story is

largely fake news narrative cooked up by

anonymous quote anonymous source jake

sullivan who also briefed the media in

2016 about russia collusion he has a

demonstrated history of lying to the

media to the detriment of national

security

that's how i say it

now i don't know anything about jake

sullivan being involved that's a

different question

certainly there's reason to suspect

that this fits his wheelhouse i agree

with joel on that

but

i don't think i believe that china is

helping russia's story exactly

it makes sense that russia is talking to

china

and it makes sense that because they

have this unlimited partnership

their china might step up with a little

extra trade or something like that

but framing it as china helping russia

militarily

it's a bit of a stretch

it has a persuasion

feel to it as opposed to a news feel to

it wouldn't you say

does it feel like news

or does it feel like

redefining news to make it into

something new

feels like reframing the news

feels like persuasion

feels like

but could be wrong we'll wait and see

i saw some people following me today on

twitter you know twitter tells you who

followed you recently

and

i believe that at least two of the three

had followed me forever

and they had to re-follow me today

and somebody else had said the same

thing and this had gone away for months

and months for a long time i had not had

this issue of people being automatically

unfollowed for me has anybody been

unfollowed for me automatically

um i'm just watching the comments

i guess the no's don't tell me anything

because most people would be in now

somebody said uh yes i have last year

yes

i had to re-follow when you got a new

computer that's weird

um

so people say yes

somebody was it was two years ago

yes

now

there are enough yeses going by

that do those look like

people are just mistaken

because i watched my twitter account

reach a certain level and then just

plateaued

it looks like it's throttled

it certainly looks like it

i can't guarantee it but it looks for

all for all uh

all appearances it looks that way

twice

so somebody had to resubscribe to me

twice yeah the names that i saw

subscribing to me are ones that i've

known and communicated with

for years on twitter

and they had to re-sign up today because

the thing that if it had been random

names that i was not familiar with

i would have thought oh they got mad at

me someday and and blocked me or

something and then they changed their

mind but these are people i've had no

bad interaction with that i'm pretty

sure had just always followed me and had

to re-follow

um

here's the most interesting thing that's

happening in my opinion did you ever

wonder what would happen

if a lifelong democrat

ever figured out how to design systems

that took into account

human motivation

economics

and science

what would happen

well the democrats have a lot of

supporters

so just being a democrat should help you

get elected like half the time you would

win just by being the democrat

but what if you had a democrat who is

not just

going to win because there are a lot of

democrats

what if the democrat found a way

to design systems and solutions

that are compatible with all

republican

thought

well that person exists

and is running for governor of

california

michael schellenberger

so michael schellenberger is a lifelong

democrat who has uh

turned independent

and

there are actually more people

registered independent in california

than either

democrat or republican

if you could actually treat the

independents as a party

and get them to maybe see themselves as

a team

they would win every election in

california it's the biggest group

now i don't think that there are real

independents

i think people are really republican but

don't want to say so that sort of

thing but there's certainly elaine

you know if you if you think it's

impossible you're way wrong it's very

possible he can win very possible

because here's what he's got going for

he is a lifelong democrat

and as far as i can tell his

let's say his emotional

empathy are still exactly in that world

of trying to make sure everybody has a

good chance and a good life

but on top of that he's the only person

i've ever seen

who put tremendous years of effort into

figuring out what works

you know he's done written books on

these topics so he knows what works with

homeless and with drug addiction because

he looked at all the things that people

have tried

and he knows that what california is

doing is in the is on the category of

things which have been tried and fail

so he wants to try things that are in

the category of things that have been

tried and were greatly successful

how crazy is that

[Laughter]

so

uh this is really interesting what

happens if somebody has the the total

skill stack

from communication writing

political

you know knowledge

he's an expert on now addiction an

expert on homelessness by virtue of

having studied it for writing books

uh an expert on energy of nuclear power

climate change

and even forest management

so there's not a single topic that

matters in california

that michael schellenberger doesn't know

twice as much as the current governor

think about that

and this is a demonstrated fact i'm not

just saying oh he's smart i think he's

just smarter it's not that

i'm saying you could just look at the

documented

life of both people

and you can see that schellenberger has

done deep dives and super productive

activist stuff

like talked to congress a number of

times talk to other other governments i

mean he's persuading governments at the

highest level

about

things that are

you know deeply important to the world

so he's got his priorities right he's

got the skill set that i've never seen

honestly

let me say this i've never seen

anybody enter politics

with as good a skill set as he's

bringing

like the right set of talents that all

that all stack just right

you take anybody you take uh trump

you know i was obviously pro-trump

but even trump doesn't have expertise in

all these categories right imagine if he

did

imagine trump with his other skills

but also having all the you know the

deep dive

uh analytical ability of a

schellenberger i mean

that's an endless possibility but you

don't have to imagine that

because you can just look at

schallenberger because he actually has

those skills he he has everything from

the persuasion to the communication

to

insanely high energy i don't know how it

gets so much done you need somebody with

high energy in politics

and yes good hair

i always make fun of that you can't

really get elected unless you have good

hair he has great hair

let's not let's not

underestimate the hair

so there you go keep an eye on

california we might be going from a bad

situation to a good situation

and at least we have a good choice which

i don't think we've ever had before

and

you should follow michael schallenberger

if you want to know any solutions for

anything from

drug addiction to homeless to

nuclear energy to

crime

basically all of it

he's done pretty much a deep dive on

everything that matters in california

so

what do you think does he have a chance

he is going to have some powerful people

behind him

i'm 100 behind him

anybody who thinks he doesn't have a

chance i think you're coming from the

political parties have all the power

perspective

you probably didn't think

uh

that's interesting you you probably

didn't think

that he could move the dial on nuclear

power didn't you

did you think anybody could do that

do you think anybody could enter the

conversation and just move the dial

on nuclear power

he did

he did that i mean you watched it you

watched it in real time i kind of i did

the play-by-play for years watching him

do his work and he did it

musk should endorse schellenberger

oh there's an idea

yeah imagine if elon musk backed michael

schellenberger and did it publicly

wow

because i don't think there would be

even one speck of difference between

musk's opinion

on political stuff

and sheldenberg's i'll bet i'll bet they

don't have one difference of opinion

because at a certain level of awareness

everybody has the same opinion

i hate to tell you

but at a certain level of understanding

of how the world works

all the opinions are the same

trust me they're all the same at a

certain at a certain point

could could tesla come back to

california now that's a big ask

and i think taxes will be the

big problem there

all right

um

i am going to uh go do something else

and uh i think you'd agree this is the

best live stream of all time of all time

it's just getting better this is the

only live stream in which we

intentionally try to change the world

and succeed

okay maybe others do that too

but i don't know about them and that's

the same thing

so

channeling muhammad ali i don't know

that reference

in this context

number 666 my episode 666 was still the

best i was normal then

before i became abnormal

oh it'll be better tomorrow

wait you have a question

yes it's the best ever the best ever all

right that's it for now and i will

talk to you all tomorrow on youtube