Episode 1780 Scott Adams - The News Is Crazy Today. Come Enjoy The Absurdity With A Beverage

all right it's time to light this candle and then blow it out because you've come to the right place at the right time that's right congratulations and i think this marks the beginning of something amazing for you the beginning of the golden age does it look like it i'll give you that but wow is it going to take off pretty soon it's coming and ladies and gentlemen would you like to get ready for it in the most appropriate way it's called the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cupper mug or a glass a tanker shelves or steiner canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure it's the dope at me at the end of the day the thing that makes everything better it's the oxytocin hit that you needed and it's happening now go oh did i see somebody say skip the sip we have a sip denier sip denier you will not escape everybody circle and destroy no we're just kidding you you can be you can be a conscientious objector to the simultaneous sip because you know the simultaneous step is designed to be manipulative and i tell you that right up front it's designed to be manipulative it manipulates you into enjoying yourself with your permission so if you like enjoying yourself doing the simultaneous step will create a little trigger to tweak your dopamine and maybe even your oxytocin so it actually is a utility thing if you skip it what you're skipping is your own pleasure and i feel sorry for you but it's a free world have you noticed that everything's broken that's because we're we're going to have to destroy everything to rebuild into the golden age but have you noticed that nothing has ever been worse than airline travel why is airline travel i say this all the time but i'm continuously amazed it's so consistent that airline travel is the only thing that gets worse all the time it started pretty good in the 60s and then just got worse every day and now uh some 19 000 flights were canceled or delayed since thursday since thursday how do you cancel 19 000 flights and not have the entire you know airline industry completely useless would you even book a flight if you heard if you knew that 19 000 flights would be cancelled if you knew that was going to happen would you have booked a flight in the first place i don't know what percentage that is do you is that a lot you know without knowing the percentage if i just heard the raw number i'd say well hell with that there's there's no way i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get into that but maybe it's a small percentage i don't know i've got a feeling everybody was felt it um so there were 4 200 u.s flights were delayed and 900 canceled on sunday 900 flights 900 flights is a lot of flights isn't it it feels like everybody would feel that it doesn't feel like that would just be something that a few people were inconvenienced by well anyway i wonder about the united states and its ability to fix things and do things this will be sort of a meta theme for today's live stream why is it that we seem to have lost the ability to do things is that purely imaginary are we actually better than ever at doing things and it just doesn't seem like it or are we trying to do things differently or are we in the process of let's take manufacturing we might be in the process of leapfrogging the need for lots of humans to manufacture things and then ship them across oceans we may be leapfrogging that to be the you know the world leader in 3d printing or something so there's always going to be this destruction period before the rebuilding so maybe maybe everything that looks like is breaking is also exactly what you would see before everything improves let me give you an example with airline travel probably what's going to change airline travel this is my guess is a technological breakthrough would you agree i think a technological breakthrough will change airline travel here are two things that almost guarantee it well three things actually somebody said facial recognition imagine going to the airport and it's all facial at recognition so there's no delay you walk up it sees your face and says yeah you're okay and you just walk right in suppose they figure out how to uh make all airline flight uh let's say independent of the government so there's no tsa so let me give you a technological model that would make a lot of flying you know different so imagine if electric planes become a thing so that's the first thing the first technology is that battery technology has improved to the point where an electric plane is now economical and not just because of the cost of fuel lately but because batteries are getting better still short range is still short range but remember if you got rid of all the regional flying that would you know improve capacity for everything else so imagine if you will that the way that we fly in the future is that the flights are like an uber they're self self-driving with no no pilot it's flown by ai you book it on your app and it's pretty close to you because it's like a multi-copter let's say a multi-blade drone do you know how drones always have i think is it a four is that the right number do drones usually have four independent engines because i think that's the same model that they're building now to fly humans so it would be something like you know maybe one to several people getting in their own little flying plane which is actually now entirely possible no pilot no government no security because it wouldn't even be worth it for us for a terrorist no terrorist would want to blow up a flying plane with six people in it it would be terrorism-free because the target wouldn't be worthy it would be like blowing up a you know a bus on the ground there'd be no point right it's only because planes have so many people in them that they even have any and they're so big that they have any terrorism value whatsoever so with with batteries imagine if you will that you go someplace much more local than your airport because the the copter things can take up you know they can go straight up and you just book it on your app you just walk in you get on it and you go to la from san francisco now it you still can still be hard for the cross country stuff for a while but just imagine it so here's the thing i think that the airline industry is so completely crippled that a competitor like uber the way uber took over taxis because taxis were a broken industry too in my opinion calling a taxi and not knowing if it would really come or when that was really broken and and the whole the whole taxi business couldn't figure it out but then uber did it so so i think there's going to be an uber situation for the sky it'll fix flying um i saw one suggestion it's the best one i've seen for fixing everything because like is that everything's broken and i just saw a suggestion on the locals platform i said that have uh given that we are probably a simulated reality if we live in the simulation the question was asked have you tried turning it off and then on again and i thought i wonder if that would work what if we just rebooted the simulation and i thought well who would do it because you need somebody outside the simulation to reboot it and then the other question is how long do you wait do you ever have this problem with your with your wi-fi or your modem at home you know you have to reboot it so you you know you pull out the plug and then you say to yourself do i really have to wait a minute engineers engineers talk to me have you ever unplugged a thing that you have to you know they say wait 30 seconds or something do you really think you have to wait 30 seconds is that real or is that like using your cell phone on an airplane of course it's not real good look at all the answers people are all over the board on whether that matters yeah i get it capacitors have to drain but you don't think that they engineered them so that turning off the power makes a difference like actually you know it goes back to its ready state i i are you telling me the capacitors can't be drained you know upon turning it off they're not they're not quick draining capacitors if that's a thing so it's funny that your answers are all over the place and that's something we all do don't we do that don't we all unplug things and replug them in and we're all wondering if we've waited long enough i can't tell you how many times i've done that and said okay that didn't fix the problem is it because i didn't wait long enough and i don't think it ever is i don't think it's ever been that when i went back and waited longer and you know unplugged it for longer that was actually the solution i can't remember a time that that made a difference anyway uh here's a mind blower that i don't know enough about yet so james rosen wrote an essay for real real clear news and they're drawing on newly declassified information about the watergate scandal and here's here's sort of the summary i haven't dug into it but i retweeted it so you can do it if you want to apparently watergate was wait for it wait for it apparently watergate was fake news and i think it's actually probably true that it was fake news now not that there wasn't a burglary not that nixon wasn't involved but that the context was that the cia was behind some part of it what and then now we know that so if that's true and and apparently we have this new information that says it's true plus there was some older information that is being taken more seriously but if that's true then everything we understand about that is different and the context would change from nixon is a monster and he got caught and then we got rid of him two nixon was a victim of the deep state that took him out that's a pretty big change they can't both be true or could they well they can't both be true exclusively so think about that the most basic foundational political story in american history you know beyond the civil war i suppose uh the most foundational modern story in american history is probably fake news now how many of you knew that i always suspected but i wouldn't say i knew it but i always wondered if it was real i always wondered and the reason i wondered is because everything today is not real right everything today is not real almost all coverage today is so biased and distorted that you don't even know how they'll write the history of it because it's like there are two histories happening at the same time how would you write that history was was trump a monster or did he have a good first term who writes that how do you decide what the history book says so i always had my suspicions about it but here's the the great thing about this if it turns out that this is true that watergate was largely fake news then this this thing that we're learning is fill in the blanks worse than watergate thank you it's worse than watergate right if watergate was a hoax in large part you know not not the basic idea that there was a burglary that seems to be true but if it was largely completely distorted in terms of what who was doing what to whom and why it is worse than watergate and who would be the people who are famous for writing the story see checking notes it would be the guys who are calling everything trump does worse than watergate i i would like to remind you of something that elon musk tweeted not too long ago and is quite compatible with my own thinking and also compatible with us being a simulated environment and the idea is that reality will tend toward what is most entertaining for the observers not the people in the story but the observers did watergate trend in the direction that was most entertaining by becoming our standard literally the way we describe things as being bad as worse than watergate what would be the most entertaining way to cap that off to find out that watergate itself was never real at least the way it was you know told to us wasn't real it's the most entertaining outcome so there you go i'm going to put together uh maybe a list of how to predict things so this would be one of them so follow the money would be you know the the highest most predictable way to predict the future follow the money uh but one of another one would be that all the news is fake you know that would be one way to predict because the next thing you hear without let me make that prediction the next big story whatever it is and i don't even know what it would be is going to be at least fake news for half of the country i mean maybe the other half gets something closer to real but you could predict it today so predicting that the next story whatever it is is fake is a pretty good prediction because it would be compatible with the past so other ways are the adam's law of slow-moving disasters the idea that these big problems that seem unsolvable we've had quite a few of them and we keep solving them and we'll probably keep doing it because usually these big unsolvable end of the world problems are a failure of imagination in other words we can't imagine how we'd solve it therefore we say we can't but we also can't imagine anything about the future i mean not accurately you can't accurately imagine the future if you could you'd be magic so the fact that you can't accurately figure out how climate change could be solved for example it doesn't mean it won't be it just means you can't imagine it but you know what else you can't imagine everything else everything else here's another way to predict the future we'll be fine that's one of the best filters on the future because you that that filter understands that the news focuses on you know the most dangerous provocative ideas but if you know that the news is telling you the scariest version then you can say oh we'll be fine now being scared of what's coming is part of being fine because if most of the world were not afraid maybe we wouldn't do what we needed to do to be fine but it's one of those good ways to predict the world so let's see if i can remember them all um so help me out so you got the adam's law of slow moving disasters to predict that we'll figure our way out of stuff there's a oh we'll be fine which assumes that you know we get too much scare in the beginning and we'll be fine we'll figure it out follow the money that always works everything is fake news and am i forgetting any how does adam's law work if we ignore and don't look at things then it doesn't work the the slippery slope fallacy the slippery slope fallacy says things will keep going until a counterforce pops up but it always does that's harder to use to predict the future though because you don't know when the counter force pops up you can only be sure it does all right here's another one another way to predict the future if there's anything that can be hacked and i'll use hacked in every sense not just computer hacking but something you can hack if something can be hacked and there's a large gain potential gain a low risk of getting caught and a lot of people involved over time there's a hundred percent chance the system will get hacked am i right because i i know there's at least one young viewer who mocks me when i say am i right but am i right all right you know who you are um how young um i don't know five six maybe five i i heard i have a fan who's uh very young anyway um suppose you decided to calculate reparations here's a thought i had today and this is just the you know the bad economist in me i tend to think about very geeky things you know people always wonder like what's it like to be me because i have an unusual job and one of the things is you you wouldn't believe the weird you know nerdy thoughts that go through my head here's one if you were going to calculate reparations how the hell would you do it right other people have asked this question but let me ask you this if you were to study the amount that the government let's say spends on its people people who have needs various needs whatever the government provides would you find any difference between the per capita of what we spend on black citizens and have spent let's say for however many years versus white citizens of america would there be a difference and should you and should you include that because you could imagine including it in either direction suppose you found out that in addition to whatever you know systemic racism is lingering from slavery what if in addition to that the average white citizen was getting more from the government than the average black citizen well then you should also say well that's even worse so throw that in the calculation so you can give the black citizens even more because you know you would have a government who not only abused them during slavery but then systemic racism but then for whatever reason was even giving white citizens more money for decades if that was what the numbers told but what if it goes the other way because correct me if i'm wrong don't we give more money to poorer citizens relative to how much they put into the system is that not true or is that one of those things that you assume is true but it's not obviously backwards because sometimes in economics you get that a lot somebody says not true yeah because i think there might be a contrarian view on this but my point is this without knowing that difference could you calculate reparations because if what you're trying to do is say has the united states treated this group of citizens fairly wouldn't you have to conclude all of the unfairness from the beginning of the country on to today and if there was some big difference in the per capita spending or per capita benefit from the government if you calculate it some other way wouldn't that have to be in the the calculation now of course all of it makes it impossible right because you end up with so many assumptions and variables that nobody could come up with the same number so that so you end up if you did reparations you would end up just pulling it out of your ass because there's no better way to do it you couldn't calculate it it just wouldn't be possible and then i've also provocatively said that the correct comparison would be how american black citizens who have a legacy back to the civil war how are they doing compared to the people who did not get captured as slaves and taken to america so with the descendants of the african residents are they doing better or worse than americans because then what do you say you say well you're still doing better than you would have done like so what's the right comparison do you compare black african slaves and their descendants to the black african non-slaves because that would be a logical comparison but it won't get you the right result you know then the societally approved result everything is about what you compare things to and that's one of the reasons that economists can usually agree with each other eventually and non-economists can't because anyway when we talk about the billionaires who want to control the globe how many of you believe that's a good way of understanding the world um okay how many of you think that a fair filter on the world is that there's a global elite and they've got some kind of reset happening and it's the point of it is to take over the the world and they would have the power okay there's something happening here that's really weird that i don't understand your comments are completely out of line with what i'm expecting to see all right i thought i would see 75 yes 75 yeses but i saw 75 percent of those interesting now those of you who think yes what do you make of the fact that most of this audience is fairly similar and um in attitude and your philosophy and yet you're very you would be in a minority even among the group you agree with so the people who think that there's a global elite at least in this audience are the minority even among an audience that's largely agrees with you on other stuff does that bother you does it ever bother you to be in the minority opinion even among the group of people who are on your side in general i don't know that it should i just wondered because that's probably just a how you're personally constructed sometimes it's sometimes people like it i tend to like being a contrarian so i'd probably like it well i'm going to say this about that i don't see it i don't see it so yeah i just don't see the bilderberg group or the world economic forum or anything i just don't see them as doing what people imagine they're doing but imagine let's say they are let me ask you this don't you think the other billionaires have noticed what do you think they're doing about it what what is your understanding of the world if you believe that a certain set of billionaires or elites are trying to grab power for themselves what is it that you imagine that all the other billionaires are doing at the same time are the other billionaires watching and saying yeah you know i'm okay with that if those other billionaires get all the power that's fine because then you know we billionaires rule i don't think it works like that does it if you're one of the billionaires don't you think that the other billionaires are your competition you don't think they're on your side do you do does does musk think that uh uh bezos is his competition or do they think their their buddy is in the elite and is elon musk in the elite what if there is an elite trying to control the world but elon musk is not one of them who are you gonna bet on would you bet on all the elite or elon musk if you assume that he was on the other team if if these teams even exist i don't think they even exist so i don't know how i don't know how the people who think that there's a billionaire elite trying to control the country i don't know how they explain the other elites because if you're telling me that peter thiel is on the same team i don't think so i don't think so at all if you're telling me that musk is part of this global elite i don't think so i suppose anything's possible right anything's possible could be could be fooled by anything but i don't think so so um just consider that if you think the global elites are in control you have to have a your theory should include what are the other billionaires doing about it you know is bill gates in that club or is bill gates one of the people that that club would like to you know take out how would you know uh something something about central banks again i guess that's what i'm supposed to say you can tie it all together by saying there's something i don't understand about central banks so it's probably them it's probably them there's a interesting article i will call your attention to speaking of peter thiel by elizabeth dwaskin who's writing for the new york times and she tweeted that for a month she had been working on a big story about peter thiel and about how he left facebook et cetera and it morphed into an examination of the ambitions to be an architect of the new american right i don't know if that's true do you think peter thiel wants to be an architect of the new american right i don't know that seems a little bit hyperbolic but i think he's one of the people who would like to influence things in this country so um so maybe it's a little bit true but you should read it because there's just sort of an interesting behind-the-scenes look i'll just call your attention to that because it's a longer thing than i want to summarize you know i've got a larger philosophy that says no one understands economics especially economists and that the more you know about economics the less you understand it it's like the people who are sure about economics are the people who know the least about it the more you know the more you go i'm not so sure and unfortunately i'm in the category you know i have a degree in economics and i have an mba and i'm in the category of knowing just enough that i don't think anybody knows anything now i'm exaggerating a little bit but here's one you here's one point of view well i think i'll on my live streams i'll just show you different points of view so i can make this point over time how different people's opinions are about the economy right now and these are smart people you know i'm not talking about your average idiot i'm talking about smart people don't seem to have any grasp of what the economy is about but joey politano tweets if you thought that households needed a negative wealth shock to get spending down in other words if households feel they have less money they'll spend less and that should make inflation go down so he's saying that you that we have that now because crypto's down over 50 stocks are in the bear market uh it's hard to refinance anything because interest rates are up and the housing market is cooling off so is that all you need if if the households stop spending money or they cut back drastically and it looks like the the external shocks that cause that are all there it should be i mean i feel um i'm cutting back on expenses let me ask you how many of you are cutting back on expenses because even that even at my income level i'm actually cutting back substantially on expenses because mine comes down maybe a third so when i think yeah look at all the yeses coming by basically i think all of us are cutting back our expenses but but let me ask the same question and don't just say yes or no so i'll know which question you're answering so say a little bit more than yes or no but did you also spend more as soon as you got freed from the lockdown like there was a period where you spent more right you had a little little pent-up vacation money a little pent-up entertainment money so didn't most of you go from suddenly spending more and i think i did as well i know i did yeah i definitely spent more like a lot more right after the pandemic sort of loosened up but now i'm definitely into spending less mode by far so are we is it self-correcting so here's one thing i think i know about the economy i believe the modern economy is self-correcting and that believe it or not when the biden administration says inflation is transitory i actually think that's true i actually think that's true it's just that transitory is not defined i think transitory is three to five years would you accept would you accept three to five years as transitory or not i mean that's not permanent i think it's a three to five years because it's going to take that long to you know try to spin up any additional resources and that's even too fast to you know you're not going to build a refinery in three to five years are you but maybe you could get something going but in the meantime between now and the time that we can spin up i love that phrase because it sounds like you can do things really easily we'll just spin up some more factories let's spin up some extra capacity it's easy it's just two words just spin it up don't tell me it's hard just spin it up but if we stop spending inflation should come somewhat under control and then the economy will do what the economy does which is market competition should do exactly what biden wants here's something you're really going to hate biden putting the squeeze on all of the traditional energy sources might actually work because even though i wouldn't have chosen it i would never have chosen hey do bad things to our energy energy situation at the same time the bad things are happening to it anyway you know from external shocks i never would have recommended it but it is nonetheless true that emergencies and crises cause you to act faster and in ways that you wouldn't have otherwise it basically breaks red tapes and log jams so i believe that biden has created accidentally a greater energy emergency than there would have been but i'm not sure it didn't get us to a better place faster we're not there so yeah that's still speculative could we get there but it does seem to me that it is entirely true that if you were somebody looking into investing in let's say a battery farm you know a form of batteries just to store energy you weren't sure that was a good investment sure looks like it now at the moment it looks like a good investment so there's probably a whole bunch of investment that is being unleashed because biden destroyed the traditional energy market so in theory this is all self-correcting in three to five years so i i think i'm gonna die on that hill or hopefully triumph on that hill and raise my flag um remember during the pandemic and it looked like everything was going to go to hell and we were going to run out of toilet paper and what did i tell you what did i tell you at the very beginning of the pandemic when it looked the most scary i told you everything would be fine and basically it was we figured it out we didn't run out of food same thing now same thing now we will figure it out it will be there will be some dislocation currently i have to use a shampoo that i don't like yes i use shampoo shut up and you know so there'll be adjustments like that we might be using our currency for the toilet paper for a while just small adjustments like that but i think we'll figure it out and the reason is that we have we have a self-adjusting economy like we've never had before so when anybody looks at history and says in the past when we had these factors in play you could predict that the next thing that would happen would be x that doesn't work anymore because take june on juneteenth as the model of why history doesn't repeat anymore the reason that juneteenth is a is a holiday is because slaves in two states didn't know that they were emancipated for however many years they didn't know because there was no internet so in the old days you could you could emancipate the slaves and the slaves wouldn't even know it for a long time you can't compare that world to anything in which you have instant communication everywhere and you can everything's fungible you can move pretty much everything to everywhere right so we can adjust and and adjust our environmental standards and create a rare earth minerals where before only china could do it because they had relaxed you know standards but it's an emergency so you relax your standards or you find a better way to do it that doesn't require that so i've got a feeling that all of this stress we're feeling on the system is a lot like the world war ii stress this feels like a world war ii level stress on the system and what world war ii produced after all the tragedy was sort of a you know a clean slate to rebuild so japan germany did well because they unfortunately were so destroyed that they could start from start from something closer to scratch and so i think we're in an extended period of destroying what we have but productively because we have a system that can destroy and then fix without even human interaction as ian bremer pointed out in a tweet that if you look at the various governments of the world that have high inflation right now now these are his interpretations of these governments but people argue the left and right parts but he says we've got a left-leaning government in the u.s with high inflation the uk he says is a right-leaning government with high inflation germany is a census government with high inflation italy is everyone in government with high inflation so his point is that every kind of government gave you high inflation and therefore he says wild gas is not the government now this is an extension of my prediction that i made at the beginning of the pandemic the strangest prediction that i've made probably yet and also perfectly accurate i said before the pandemic like when it was just starting that leadership in different countries would not be the variable that made a difference in the outcomes and that was crazy right i don't think anybody took that seriously it sounded like such a ridiculous prediction that you didn't even have to address it you didn't have to agree with it you didn't even have to disagree with it because it was just ridiculous it was more like absurd and i said it over and over and over again in the beginning and and i was always surprised that people didn't react to it they didn't agree and they didn't disagree it just was sort of just weird and here we are the pandemic's over and you can't tell the difference in terms of leadership decisions there's no difference why did south korea do well was it because of leadership probably not it's probably because they had access to rapid tests maybe a cultural difference maybe because of their isolation whatever but it probably had nothing to do with their leadership right so and here we have another example inflation is high with all these different governments with all these different philosophies of government and probably you can't tell the difference can you tell me that germany's leadership is why they have high inflation but ours is not it just looks like there is a global element to the inflation and that's all there is to it everything's disrupted everywhere so why wouldn't it affect everybody now i did see shannon bream take down a biden administration advisor type for essentially being part of the inflation especially the energy problem and and she did a really good job i tweeted that so check out shannon bream um really giving it to one of the biden apologists i guess i ain't using that word but it seems to fit in this case now here's to his to his credit one of the arguments that um the biden administration is making is that a survey showed that when you talk to the ceo ceos who do investment in in energy that 90 some percent of them said that it wasn't the government that was stopping them from investing and i didn't see shannon bream address that point specifically but i have a feeling that that data probably is not on point meaning that um meaning that i'm not sure that uh that that survey is exactly telling them telling us what we think it is anyway there's a little difference of agreement i'm not sure what is true i'm a little unclear because the propaganda is so thick from left and right and so i can't tell how much is uh right-leaning propaganda that says that biden's responsible for you know cancelling all these oils and gas leases and stuff but they do have an argument that those things are trivial so there's one argument that says that biden caused this by everything from not approving energy projects to closing down energy projects but the counter argument is yeah he may have done all those things but they're so small that they don't really make any difference what do you think because i don't know i i follow the news and as i i said i've got some economic background but i don't know the answer to that question because i follow the news i don't believe the news is giving me straight news on the left or the right on this question do you do you think that the left or the right are giving you the because the right is saying biden made these decisions it reduced future amounts of energy therefore the prices went up it's just you know two plus two is four it's that simple the right says even if he had done everything differently none of this makes a difference in the near term so you couldn't possibly be seeing those decisions in the near term and you know that people are not so smart that the near term really reflects the long term anyway that's not a terrible argument if it's i don't know if it's true so let me be clear i don't know if the biden argument is accurate or true i just know it's a good argument when you hear it you go oh okay that's a good argument so let so let me give it to you and this will be kind of a mind for some of you for those of you who are sure because you believe the propaganda those of you are sure that our current energy costs are substantially and you can determine substantially whatever that means to you how many of you believe that you're you you do have enough information and that is accurate and that you understand this situation and that biden's decision specifically have raised the price of energy today how many of you feel confident that that really is happening i'm seeing a lot of confidence all right i guess i'm contrarian on this one i'm not i'm not now the shannon bream argument is pretty strong the one she made which is she quoted biden saying he was basically going to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and she says why would anybody invest do a long-term billion dollar investments when he's trying to dismantle the thing why would you that's a pretty good pretty good argument right but here's the counter argument to the counter argument even if people had said okay we're going to go ahead and ignore biden even though he says he's going to dismantle us we're going to ignore him and we're going to put billions into investments for new new energies and drilling and new leases and all that would any of that made any difference today no i don't think so so the the democrat argument that even if everything you say about biden is true that he is making decisions that absolutely will change the level of availability of energy and the type in the mix even if that's all true it takes years it takes years do you think that's in the inflation number today some of it probably but i don't know how much and neither do you so let me say this you are in a heavy propaganda topic i don't believe there's anybody even the experts who quite understand the the entire uh uh i want to use the word what's the word from accounting where your your income statement is articulated into your balance sheet what's the word for that there's like a term of art uh you know what i mean accrual now oh there's not reconciling right it is reconciled well damn it there's there's a cool word that i wanted to use there that would have been great yeah well whatever so nobody understands this topic so if you imagine that you do then you might be a victim of propaganda right if you imagine you know that biden's decisions changed energy prices in the short term i think we could all agree to change in the long term because he's trying to change it in the long term he said he would and he did things that would change it in the long term so if we could all agree on the long term could you still agree with the democrat argument that you're not seeing it today that's not what's happening today because it wouldn't affect today i know it's a pretty good argument um pew research said that 71 of journalists are concerned about made up news 71 of the people in the business the journalists are concerned about made-up news and that's higher than the 50 percent of u.s adults who say the same thing so if you're a consumer of news half of you are concerned that the news is fake if you're in the business of producing news 71 of you are concerned that it's fake who would be better informed about how much of the news is fake the people who produce it or the people who consume it that's right the people who produce the news are way more concerned about how fake it is does that worry you it should it should that should worry you a lot the people who know the most about it think it's worse than you do the journalists themselves yep you should worry about that all right um don't you think it's kind of hard to fight two wars that are uh like opposites so we're right so the biden administration is fighting the war between uh you know ukraine and russia so effectively we're in that war financially anyway and we're still fighting a war against the climate or at least the democrats are trying to do that and the trouble is that to fight the ukraine war we want to squeeze russia and not use their resources but we need those resources so there are too many variables that are that are working opposite each other so suddenly germany is is going to be using much more coal because russia is going to give them less gas because of the war blah blah so basically the one war makes it impossible to lose to win the other war you know as long as we're doing the ukraine thing we're going to lose the climate war so do we have to pick the war are we are we trying to fight too many wars it's sort of a two-front war that makes it impossible to win on either front i feel like we have to pick one you know either win ukraine which means go crazy on coal as long as it takes to make russia irrelevant i guess and uh or fight the war on the climate and let ukraine go to russia which is what would happen here's an interesting take on again you can see this in my twitter feed that who wins a modern war is who has the most ammunition and that's about pretty much all there is to it that a modern war between you know two modernish armies like ukraine and uh russia that all that will matter is who has the most ammunition because they'll both just keep firing at each other until they're out and i thought that might be the simplest explanation of how to predict how this ends but here's the bad news if you like ukraine apparently russia has really really good resources for creating ammunition as they need it so they had a lot to begin with but they can also make it as they need it the west apparently has enough for a few days and then no ability to make it so the west doesn't even have the ability to fight a war we would just run out of ammunition now that's not as big a deal if you're the united states because you have you know nuclear nuclear-powered submarines and you know so so nobody's going to attack the homeland of a nuclear-powered country with the second amendment but if we got into a traditional war with russia we would run out of ammunition so unless unless we somehow won right away we would just run out of artillery so if you have a war that lasts a long time all that matters is your manufacturing capacity and we're in a war that lasts a long time so that would tell you that russia is just going to chew up ukraine at its leisure and nothing would stop it and i think that's that's the way it look if he were to straight line it and nothing changed that's what it looks like but of course there are always surprises so you can't straight line anything here's something interesting my live stream from the other day was turned into a transcript on real clear politics and then it got tweeted around now when you change this form the spoken form into a transcript sometimes it makes it more powerful because people prefer consuming stuff that way and so it took my uh relatively inert idea about having trump not run for president but create a news platform that would have honest debate on topics but more interesting honest debates and basically control the world through controlling the news because somebody needs to do it and that idea was strong enough that somebody turned it into a transcript and then people liked it more and they're tweeting around now the moral of the story there's a higher level than the story itself is that the person who writes something down is the most influential it's one of the most consistent things you could say the person who writes something down and is good at it has just tons of influence so speech writers actually have a ton of influence over policy because the speech writer writes it and then that the politician says yeah that would sound really good coming out of my mouth and that just sort of turns into their their theme so we see here that uh taking my inert uh spoken word and turning into a written transcript made it actually pretty powerful and now you see people weighing in and um it's i haven't seen much pushback it's probably one of the most popular ideas that i've ever expressed so take a look at it if you haven't seen it yet um so here's another uh tip along those lines so derek sivers siv ers cybers or sippers i don't know he suggests this writing tip and i'm gonna echo his recommendation that you write one sentence per line just for yourself when you're starting to write something longer one sentence per line now you say to yourself well what's the difference between that and just putting it in the paragraph where it belongs and he he tells you this if you write every sentence by itself you don't get to hide it with the other sentences because sometimes you can put a weak sentence in the middle of a paragraph and you and your brain will sort of skip over it you know because the other ones are have more impact but if you're forced to write every sentence on its own line and look at it you can much more easily say you know what i didn't even need to say that because the the other sentences basically covered it the other thing is that when you put them on their own line you can more easily pick out the first word in the sentence and the last because those have more impact so um and those are just you know and then also you can look at the sentence length because you want sentence lengths that you know are variable but not beyond a certain too long point right you can't be too short with a sentence that's impossible you can't be too short one word could be a sentence if you're trying to communicate but you could be too long so these are things that you more easily see if you just break out the one sentence you can see its length compared to the others and some variety some reasons why you don't want a long sentence because the brain brains are not good at following a long sentence but there's no such thing as too short because there are times when one word is all you needed and even though one word is not a sentence often people know what you mean so that's all you need i'm gonna get rid of you all right so that's your writing tip for the day and that ladies and gentlemen looks to be everything i wanted to talk about amazingly and uh i don't know it am i wrong or is this the best live stream you've ever seen in your whole world the other thing i'm going to predict is if um so yesterday i took a ride on a electric scooter how many of you have tried a an electric scooter especially a high-end one this was 500 watts number one it did every hill without a problem now i'm not a you know hugely gigantic human so you know it wasn't a problem for me suppose if you were 300 pounds would be a problem but have you have you read or tried an electric scooter they are so fun somebody says i hurt myself yeah they're really dangerous they're super dangerous the whole time you're on it you're pretty sure you're going to die because they they get wobbly pretty easily but you there's also a pretty fast learning curve so uh here's the thing if you spend a minute on an electric bike or an electric scooter you will know it's the future now i took a ride yesterday on my bike i wonder if i could show you this i know it's terrible holding something up to the camera here but i believe i can show you this so where i live there are miles and miles of bicycle only or mostly bicycle roads so this is this is a long road through wine country in livermore california in which uh there's no cars this is just for bikes or whatever and you you could have the best like just amazing like scenery and you could ride for miles and that's an electric bike it's an electric um you know mountain bike and the the hills just disappear now you ask yourself do you still get exercise and the answer is yes yes a lot because you know you can turn down the uh the boost the assist so whenever i whenever i want to just you know work a little harder i just turn down the boost and when i want to you know level off a hill because i just don't feel like it i just turn up the boost now once you see how wonderful it is to travel this way you can imagine a town in which everything is connected by let's say hilly little very interesting winding tree covered streets that are just for bikes and electric vehicles and you can imagine that almost like a hobbit city using these adus or these little boxable you know instant houses that you take off a truck and you unfold it and it's like a total house for one person you slap on a solar wall solar you know like a tesla battery you can make these little little things off the grid for the most part i guess you need sewage or something but you can get them mostly off the grid and there's now a technology where you can suck water out of the air enough to actually run your home so we're at a point where building an amazing village from scratch where you're not looking at your neighbor but he's just over the you know the little tree-lined hill and if you want to go anywhere to buy some groceries or something you jump on your scooter and the and the the path itself is really fun right you you've had this experience right sometimes going someplace is fun if the actual destination path is just really interesting to look at you don't mind the right at all so imagine making all of your transportation fun and easy it would change everything about your experience imagine your delivery service all by electric vehicle so that there's so many people delivering all the time that the cost of getting a sandwich drops way down because there's always an electric bike going right past the sandwich place to your home and if you're on an electric bike it costs you practically nothing you just drive by hey grab the sandwich drop it into your mailbox boom so if you if you were to build a home a community from scratch you could do it at 10 percent of the cost of current living and it would be so much better just the lifestyle everything about it would be better where is this magic place it's a place that you could build right now with current technology so that's my prediction about where housing is going it's going to be start from scratch build a community and make it electric bike connections or electric vehicles could be carts or any kind of thing and off the grid as much as possible to protect the homeland by the way because you don't want people to be too vulnerable to the grid so you want to get as many americans as you can off the grid entirely so they could withstand a grid attack and there you go now is that optimistic enough did you notice today was all the optimistic stuff did it make you feel better should should it's going to make you feel great in fact you want to take this good feeling with you into the day don't watch the news today maybe you don't want to blow it if you got that good feeling just take it forward and remember you are the authors of your simulation so i have a request on the locals platform for a closing sip it's very rare but today you're gonna get it the closing sip for the simultaneous sip here comes ah so good see you later youtubers

[Music]

all right it's time to light this candle

and then blow it out

because you've come to the right place

at the right time that's right

congratulations and i think this marks

the beginning of something

amazing for you

the beginning of the golden age

does it look like it i'll give you that

but wow is it going to take off pretty

soon

it's coming

and ladies and gentlemen would you like

to get ready for it

in the most appropriate way it's called

the simultaneous sip and all you need is

a cupper mug or a glass a tanker shelves

or steiner canteen jugger flask a vessel

of any kind

fill it with your favorite liquid

i like coffee

and join me now for the unparalleled

pleasure

it's the dope at me at the end of the

day the thing that makes everything

better it's the

oxytocin hit

that you needed

and it's happening now go

oh did i see somebody say skip the sip

we have a sip denier sip denier

you will not escape

everybody circle and destroy

no we're just kidding

you you can be

you can be a conscientious objector to

the simultaneous sip because you know

the simultaneous step

is designed

to be manipulative

and i tell you that right up front

it's designed to be manipulative

it manipulates you into enjoying

yourself

with your permission

so if you like enjoying yourself

doing the simultaneous step will create

a little trigger

to tweak your dopamine and maybe even

your oxytocin

so it actually is a utility thing

if you skip it

what you're skipping is your own

pleasure

and i feel sorry for you but it's a free

world

have you noticed that everything's

broken

that's because we're we're going to have

to destroy everything to rebuild into

the golden age

but have you noticed that nothing has

ever been worse than airline travel

why is airline travel i say this all the

time but

i'm continuously amazed

it's so consistent

that airline travel is the only thing

that gets worse all the time

it started pretty good in the 60s

and then just got worse

every day

and now uh

some 19 000 flights were canceled or

delayed

since thursday

since thursday

how do you cancel 19 000 flights

and not have the entire you know airline

industry completely

useless

would you even book a flight

if you heard if you knew that 19 000

flights would be cancelled if you knew

that was going to happen

would you have booked a flight in the

first place i don't know what percentage

that is

do you

is that a lot

you know without knowing the percentage

if i just heard the raw number i'd say

well hell with that

there's there's no way i'm gonna

you know i'm gonna get into that but

maybe it's a small percentage i don't

know i've got a feeling everybody was

felt it um

so there were 4 200 u.s flights were

delayed and 900 canceled on sunday

900 flights

900 flights is a lot of flights isn't it

it feels like everybody would feel that

it doesn't feel like that would just be

something that a few people were

inconvenienced by

well anyway

i wonder about the united states and its

ability to fix things and do things this

will be sort of a meta theme for today's

live stream

why is it that we seem to have lost the

ability to do things

is that purely

imaginary

are we actually better than ever at

doing things

and it just doesn't seem like it

or are we trying to do things

differently or are we in the process of

let's take manufacturing

we might be in the process of

leapfrogging the need for lots of humans

to manufacture things and then ship them

across oceans

we may be leapfrogging that to be the

you know the world leader in 3d printing

or something

so there's always going to be this

destruction period before the rebuilding

so maybe maybe everything that looks

like is breaking

is also

exactly what you would see before

everything improves

let me give you an example with airline

travel

probably what's going to change airline

travel this is my guess

is a technological breakthrough

would you agree

i think a technological breakthrough

will change airline travel

here are two things that almost

guarantee it

well three things actually

somebody said facial recognition

imagine going to the airport

and it's all facial at recognition

so there's no delay

you walk up it sees your face and says

yeah you're okay and you just walk right

in

suppose they figure out

how to

uh make all airline flight

uh let's say independent of the

government so there's no tsa

so let me give you a technological model

that would make

a lot of flying

you know different

so imagine if electric planes become a

thing

so that's the first thing the first

technology

is that battery technology

has improved to the point where an

electric plane

is now economical

and not just because of the cost of fuel

lately but because batteries are getting

better

still short range

is still short range but remember if you

got rid of all the regional flying

that would you know

improve capacity for everything else

so imagine if you will that the way that

we fly in the future is that

the flights are

like an uber

they're self self-driving with no

no pilot

it's flown by ai

you book it on your app

and it's pretty close to you

because it's like a multi-copter let's

say a multi-blade

drone do you know how drones always have

i think is it a four

is that the right number do drones

usually have four independent engines

because i think that's the same model

that they're building now

to fly humans

so it would be something like you know

maybe one to several people

getting in their own little flying plane

which is actually now entirely possible

no pilot

no government

no security because it wouldn't even be

worth it for us for a terrorist

no terrorist would want to blow up a

flying plane

with six people in it

it would be terrorism-free

because the target wouldn't be worthy it

would be like blowing up a you know a

bus on the ground there'd be no point

right it's only because planes have so

many people in them

that they even have any and they're so

big that they have any terrorism value

whatsoever

so with with batteries

imagine if you will

that you go someplace much more local

than your airport

because the the copter things can take

up you know they can go straight up

and you just book it on your app you

just walk in you get on it and you go to

la from san francisco

now it you still can still be hard for

the cross country stuff for a while

but just imagine it so here's the thing

i think that the airline industry is so

completely crippled

that a

competitor

like uber the way uber took over taxis

because taxis were a broken industry too

in my opinion

calling a taxi

and not knowing if it would really come

or when

that was really broken

and

and the whole the whole taxi business

couldn't figure it out but then uber did

it

so

so i think there's going to be an uber

situation for the sky

it'll fix flying

um

i saw one suggestion it's the best one

i've seen

for fixing everything

because like is that everything's broken

and i just saw a suggestion on the

locals platform i said that have uh

given that we are probably a simulated

reality

if we live in the simulation

the question was asked

have you tried turning it off and then

on again

and i thought

i wonder if that would work

what if we just rebooted

the simulation and i thought well who

would do it

because you need somebody outside the

simulation to reboot it

and then the other question is how long

do you wait

do you ever have this problem with your

with your wi-fi or your modem at home

you know you have to reboot it so you

you know you pull out the plug

and then you say to yourself

do i really have to wait a minute

engineers engineers talk to me

have you ever unplugged a thing that you

have to you know they say wait 30

seconds or something

do you really think you have to wait 30

seconds

is that real or is that like using your

cell phone on an airplane of course it's

not real

good look at all the answers

people are all over the board on whether

that matters

yeah i get it capacitors have to drain

but you don't think that they engineered

them

so that turning off the power

makes a difference

like actually

you know it goes back to its ready state

i i

are you telling me the capacitors can't

be drained

you know upon turning it off

they're not they're not quick draining

capacitors

if that's a thing

so it's funny that

your answers are all over the place

and that's something we all do don't we

do that don't we all unplug things and

replug them in and we're all wondering

if we've waited long enough

i can't tell you how many times i've

done that

and said okay that didn't fix the

problem

is it because i didn't wait long enough

and i don't think it ever is

i don't think it's ever been

that when i went back and waited longer

and you know unplugged it for longer

that was actually the solution

i can't remember a time that that made a

difference

anyway

uh here's a mind blower that i don't

know enough about yet

so james rosen

wrote an essay for real real clear news

and they're drawing on newly

declassified information about the

watergate

scandal

and here's here's sort of the summary i

haven't dug into it but i retweeted it

so you can do it if you want to

apparently watergate was

wait for it

wait for it

apparently watergate was

fake news

and i think it's actually probably true

that it was fake news now not that there

wasn't a burglary not that nixon wasn't

involved but that the context was that

the cia was behind some part of it

what

and then now we know that

so if that's true

and

and apparently we have this new

information

that says it's true plus there was some

older information that is being taken

more seriously

but if that's true then everything we

understand about that is different

and the context would change from

nixon is a monster and he got caught

and then we got rid of him

two nixon was a victim of the deep state

that took him out that's a pretty big

change

[Laughter]

they can't both be true or could they

well they can't both be true exclusively

so think about that

the most

basic foundational political story in

american history

you know beyond the civil war i suppose

uh the most foundational

modern

story in american history

is probably

fake news

now how many of you knew that

i always suspected

but i wouldn't say i knew it

but i always wondered if it was real

i always wondered

and the reason i wondered is because

everything today is not real

right

everything today is not real almost all

coverage today is

so biased and distorted

that you don't even know how they'll

write the history of it because it's

like there are two histories happening

at the same time how would you write

that history

was was trump a monster or did he have a

good first term who writes that

how do you decide what the history book

says

so i always had my suspicions about it

but here's the the great thing about

this if it turns out that this is true

that watergate was

largely fake news

then this

this thing that we're learning

is

fill in the blanks

worse than watergate thank you

it's worse than watergate

right

if watergate was a hoax

in large part you know not not the basic

idea that there was a burglary that

seems to be true

but if it was largely

completely distorted in terms of what

who was doing what to whom and why

it is worse than watergate

and who would be the people who are

famous for writing the story

see checking notes

[Music]

[Applause]

it would be the guys who are calling

everything trump does worse than

watergate

i

i would like to

remind you of something that elon musk

tweeted not too long ago and

is quite compatible with my own thinking

and also compatible with us being a

simulated environment

and the idea is

that reality will tend toward what is

most entertaining

for the observers not the people in the

story

but the observers

did watergate trend in the direction

that was most entertaining

by becoming our standard

literally the way we describe things as

being bad

as worse than watergate

what would be the most entertaining way

to cap that off

to find out that watergate itself

was never real at least the way it was

you know told to us wasn't real

it's the most entertaining outcome

so there you go

i'm going to put together uh maybe a

list of how to predict things

so this would be one of them

so follow the money would be you know

the the highest

most predictable

way to predict the future follow the

money

uh

but

one of another one would be

that all the news is fake

you know that would be one way to

predict because the next thing you hear

without let me make that prediction

the next big story

whatever it is

and i don't even know what it would be

is going to be

at least fake news for half of the

country i mean maybe the other half gets

something closer to real but you could

predict it today so predicting that the

next story

whatever it is

is fake

is a pretty good prediction

because it would be compatible with the

past

so other ways are the adam's law of

slow-moving disasters

the idea that these big problems that

seem unsolvable we've had quite a few of

them and we keep solving them

and we'll probably keep doing it

because usually these big unsolvable end

of the world problems are a failure of

imagination

in other words we can't imagine how we'd

solve it therefore we say we can't

but we also can't imagine anything about

the future

i mean not accurately

you can't accurately imagine the future

if you could you'd be magic

so the fact that you can't accurately

figure out how

climate change could be solved for

example

it doesn't mean it won't be

it just means you can't imagine it but

you know what else you can't imagine

everything else

everything else

here's another way to predict the future

we'll be fine

that's one of the best filters on the

future

because you that that filter understands

that the news

focuses on you know the most dangerous

provocative ideas

but if you know that the news is telling

you the scariest version

then you can say oh we'll be fine

now

being scared of what's coming is part of

being fine

because if most of the world were not

afraid

maybe we wouldn't do what we needed to

do

to be fine but it's one of those good

ways to predict the world so let's see

if i can remember them all

um

so help me out so you got the adam's law

of slow moving disasters to predict that

we'll figure our way out of stuff

there's a oh we'll be fine

which assumes that you know we get too

much scare in the beginning and we'll be

fine we'll figure it out

follow the money

that always works

everything is fake news

and am i forgetting any

how does adam's law work if we ignore

and don't look at things then it doesn't

work the

the slippery slope fallacy

the slippery slope fallacy says things

will keep going until

a counterforce

pops up

but it always does

that's harder to use to predict the

future though because you don't know

when the counter force pops up you can

only be sure it does all right here's

another one another way to predict the

future

if there's anything that can be

hacked and i'll use hacked

in every sense not just computer hacking

but something you can hack

if something can be hacked and there's a

large gain

potential gain

a low risk of getting caught

and a lot of people involved over time

there's a hundred percent chance the

system will get hacked

am i right

because

i i know there's at least one young

viewer

who mocks me when i say

am i right

but

am i right

all right

you know who you are

um

how young

um i don't know five six

maybe five

i i heard i have a fan

who's uh very young

anyway

um suppose you decided to calculate

reparations

here's a thought i had today and this is

just the you know the bad economist in

me

i tend to think about very geeky things

you know people always wonder like

what's it like to be me

because i have an unusual job

and one of the things is you you

wouldn't believe the weird

you know nerdy thoughts that go through

my head here's one

if you were going to

calculate reparations

how the hell would you do it right other

people have asked this question but let

me ask you this

if you were to study

the amount that the government

let's say spends on its people

people who have needs

various needs whatever the government

provides

would you find any difference between

the per capita

of what we spend on black citizens and

have spent let's say for however many

years

versus

white citizens of america

would there be a difference

and should you and should you include

that

because you could imagine including it

in either direction

suppose you found out that in addition

to whatever you know systemic racism is

lingering from

slavery

what if in addition to that

the average white citizen was getting

more from the government

than the average black citizen

well then you should also say well

that's even worse

so throw that in the calculation

so you can give the black citizens even

more

because you know you would have a

government who not only

abused them during

slavery but then systemic racism but

then

for whatever reason was even giving

white citizens more money for decades

if that was what the numbers told but

what if it goes the other way

because correct me if i'm wrong don't we

give more money to poorer citizens

relative to how much they put into the

system

is that not true

or is that one of those things that you

assume is true but it's not obviously

backwards because sometimes in economics

you get that a lot

somebody says not true

yeah because i think there might be a

contrarian view on this but my point is

this

without knowing that difference

could you calculate reparations

because if what you're trying to do is

say has the united states

treated this group of citizens fairly

wouldn't you have to

conclude all of the unfairness from

the beginning of the country on

to today

and if there was some big difference in

the per capita spending

or per capita benefit from the

government if you calculate it some

other way

wouldn't that have to be in the

the calculation

now of course all of it makes it

impossible right

because you end up with so many

assumptions and variables that nobody

could come up with the same number

so that so you end up

if you did reparations

you would end up just pulling it out of

your ass

because there's no better way to do it

you couldn't calculate it

it just wouldn't be possible and then

i've also provocatively said that the

correct comparison

would be how american black citizens who

have a legacy back to the civil war

how are they doing compared to the

people who did not

get captured as slaves and taken to

america

so with the descendants of the african

residents

are they doing better or worse

than americans

because then what do you say you say

well

you're still doing better than you would

have done

like

so what's the right comparison do you

compare black african slaves and their

descendants

to the

black african

non-slaves

because that would be a logical

comparison but it won't get you the

right result you know then the

societally approved result

everything is about what you compare

things to

and that's one of the reasons that

economists can usually agree with each

other eventually

and non-economists can't

because

anyway

when we talk about the billionaires who

want to control the globe

how many of you believe that's a good

way of understanding the world

um

okay

how many of you think that

a fair filter on the world

is that there's a global elite and

they've got some kind of reset happening

and it's

the point of it is to take over the the

world and they would have the power

okay there's something happening here

that's really weird that i don't

understand

your comments are completely out of line

with what i'm expecting to see

all right i thought i would see 75 yes

75 yeses

but i saw 75 percent of those

interesting now those of you who think

yes

what do you make of the fact

that most of this audience is fairly

similar and

um

in attitude and your philosophy

and yet you're very you would be in a

minority even among the group you agree

with

so the people who think that there's a

global elite at least in this audience

are the minority even among an audience

that's largely agrees with you on other

stuff does that bother you

does it ever bother you to be in the

minority opinion even among the group of

people who are on your side in

general i don't know that it should i

just wondered

because that's probably just a

how you're personally constructed

sometimes it's sometimes people like it

i tend to like being a contrarian so i'd

probably like it

well

i'm going to say this about that i don't

see it

i don't see it

so yeah i just don't see the bilderberg

group or the

world economic forum or anything i just

don't see them as

doing what people imagine they're doing

but imagine let's say they are

let me ask you this

don't you think the other billionaires

have noticed

what do you think they're doing about it

what what is your understanding of the

world if you believe that a certain set

of billionaires or elites

are trying to grab power for themselves

what is it that you imagine that all the

other billionaires are doing at the same

time

are the other billionaires watching and

saying

yeah you know

i'm okay with that

if those other billionaires get all the

power

that's fine because then you know we

billionaires rule

i don't think it works like that does it

if you're one of the billionaires don't

you think that the other billionaires

are your competition

you don't think they're on your side do

you

do

does does musk think that uh

uh

bezos is his competition

or do they think their their buddy is in

the

elite and is elon musk in the elite

what if there is an elite trying to

control the world

but elon musk is not one of them

who are you gonna bet on

would you bet on all the elite

or elon musk

if you assume that he was on the other

team if if these teams even exist i

don't think they even exist

so i don't know how

i don't know how the people who think

that there's a billionaire elite trying

to control the country i don't know how

they explain

the other elites

because if you're telling me that peter

thiel is on the same team

i don't think so

i don't think so at all

if you're telling me that musk is part

of this global elite

i don't think so

i suppose anything's possible right

anything's possible could be could be

fooled by anything

but i don't think so

so

um

just consider that if you think the

global elites are

in control

you have to have a

your theory should include what are the

other billionaires doing about it

you know is bill gates in that club

or is bill gates one of the people that

that club would like to

you know take out how would you know

uh something something about central

banks

again i guess that's what i'm supposed

to say

you can tie it all together by saying

there's something i don't understand

about central banks

so

it's probably them it's probably them

there's a interesting article i will

call your attention to speaking of peter

thiel

by elizabeth dwaskin who's writing for

the new york times

and she tweeted that for a month she had

been working on a big story about peter

thiel

and about how he left facebook et cetera

and it morphed into an examination of

the ambitions to be an architect of the

new american right

i don't know if that's true

do you think peter thiel wants to be

an architect of the new american right

i don't know that seems a little bit

hyperbolic

but i think he's one of the people who

would like to influence things in this

country

so

um

so maybe it's a little bit true

but you should read it because there's

just sort of an interesting

behind-the-scenes

look i'll just call your attention to

that

because it's a longer thing than i want

to summarize

you know i've got a larger

philosophy that says no one understands

economics

especially economists

and that the more you know about

economics the less you understand it

it's like the people who are sure about

economics are the people who know the

least about it

the more you know the more you go i'm

not so sure

and

unfortunately i'm in the category

you know i have a degree in economics

and i have an mba

and i'm in the category of knowing just

enough

that i don't think anybody knows

anything now i'm exaggerating a little

bit

but

here's one you here's one point of view

well i think i'll on my live streams

i'll just show you different points of

view so i can make this point over time

how different people's opinions are

about the economy right now and these

are smart people you know i'm not

talking about your average idiot

i'm talking about smart people

don't seem to have any grasp of what the

economy is about

but joey politano tweets

if you thought that households needed a

negative wealth shock to get spending

down in other words if households feel

they have less money

they'll spend less and that should make

inflation go down

so he's saying that you that we have

that now because crypto's down over 50

stocks are in the bear market

uh it's hard to refinance anything

because interest rates are up

and the housing market is cooling off

so

is that all you need

if if the households stop spending money

or they cut back drastically and it

looks like the the external shocks that

cause that are all there

it should be i mean i feel um

i'm cutting back on expenses

let me ask you how many of you are

cutting back on expenses because even

that even at my income level

i'm actually cutting back substantially

on expenses

because mine comes down maybe

a third

so when i think yeah look at all the

yeses coming by

basically i think all of us are cutting

back our expenses

but

but let me ask the same question

and don't just say yes or no so i'll

know which question you're answering so

say a little bit more than yes or no

but did you also spend more

as soon as you got freed from the

lockdown

like there was a period where you spent

more right you had a little

little pent-up vacation money a little

pent-up entertainment money

so didn't most of you go from suddenly

spending more

and i think i did as well

i know i did yeah i definitely spent

more

like a lot more right after the

pandemic sort of loosened up

but now i'm definitely into spending

less mode

by

far so

are we

is it self-correcting so here's one

thing i think i know about the economy

i believe the modern economy is

self-correcting

and that believe it or not when the

biden administration says inflation is

transitory

i actually think that's true

i actually think that's true it's just

that transitory

is not defined

i think transitory is three to five

years

would you accept would you accept three

to five years as transitory

or not

i mean that's not permanent

i think it's a three to five years

because it's going to take that long to

you know try to spin up any

additional resources

and that's even too fast to you know

you're not going to build a refinery in

three to five years are you

but maybe you could get something going

but in the meantime between now and the

time that we can spin up i love that

phrase because it sounds like you can do

things really easily we'll just spin up

some more factories

let's spin up some extra

capacity it's easy it's just two words

just spin it up

don't tell me it's hard

just spin it up

but if we stop spending inflation should

come somewhat under control

and then the economy will do what the

economy does which is

market competition

should do exactly what biden wants

here's something you're really going to

hate

biden putting the squeeze on all of the

traditional energy sources

might actually work

because even though i wouldn't have

chosen it i would never have chosen hey

do bad things to our energy

energy situation at the same time the

bad things are happening to it anyway

you know from external shocks

i never would have recommended it

but it is nonetheless true

that

emergencies and crises

cause you to act faster and in ways that

you wouldn't have otherwise it basically

breaks red tapes and log jams

so i believe that biden has created

accidentally

a greater energy emergency than there

would have been

but i'm not sure it didn't get us to a

better place faster we're not there

so yeah that's still speculative could

we get there but it does seem to me that

it is entirely true that if you were

somebody looking into investing in

let's say a battery farm

you know a form of batteries just to

store energy you weren't sure that was a

good investment

sure looks like it now at the moment it

looks like a good investment so

there's probably a whole bunch of

investment

that is being unleashed because biden

destroyed the traditional energy market

so in theory

this is all self-correcting in three to

five years

so i i think i'm gonna die on that hill

or hopefully

triumph on that hill and raise my flag

um remember during the pandemic and it

looked like everything was going to go

to hell and we were going to run out of

toilet paper

and what did i tell you

what did i tell you

at the very beginning of the pandemic

when it looked the most scary

i told you everything would be fine

and basically it was

we figured it out we didn't run out of

food

same thing now

same thing now we will figure it out

it will be there will be some

dislocation

currently i have to use a shampoo that i

don't like yes i use shampoo shut up

and

you know so there'll be adjustments like

that

we might be using our currency for the

toilet paper for a while just small

adjustments like that but i think we'll

figure it out and the reason is that we

have we have a self-adjusting economy

like we've never had before

so when anybody looks at history and

says

in the past

when we had these factors in play

you could predict that the next thing

that would happen would be x that

doesn't work anymore

because

take june

on juneteenth

as the model of why history doesn't

repeat anymore

the reason that juneteenth is a is a

holiday

is because slaves in two states didn't

know that they were emancipated for

however many years

they didn't know because there was no

internet

so in the old days

you could you could emancipate the

slaves and the slaves wouldn't even know

it

for a long time

you can't compare that world to anything

in which you have instant communication

everywhere and you can everything's

fungible you can move pretty much

everything to everywhere

right

so we can adjust and and adjust our

environmental standards

and create a rare earth

minerals

where before only china could do it

because they had relaxed

you know standards

but it's an emergency

so you relax your standards or you find

a better way to do it that doesn't

require that

so i've got a feeling that all of this

stress we're feeling on the system

is a lot like the world war ii stress

this feels like a world war ii level

stress on the system and what world war

ii produced

after all the tragedy

was sort of a you know a clean slate

to rebuild so japan germany did well

because they unfortunately were so

destroyed that they could start from

start from something closer to scratch

and so i think we're in an extended

period of destroying what we have but

productively

because we have a system that can

destroy and then fix without even human

interaction

as ian bremer pointed out in a tweet

that if you look at the various

governments of the world that have high

inflation right now

now these are his

interpretations of these governments but

people argue the left and right parts

but he says we've got a left-leaning

government in the u.s with high

inflation the uk he says is a

right-leaning government with high

inflation germany is a census government

with high inflation italy is everyone in

government with high inflation so his

point is that every kind of government

gave you high inflation

and therefore

he says wild gas is not the government

now this is an extension of my

prediction that i made at the beginning

of the pandemic

the strangest prediction that i've made

probably yet

and also perfectly accurate

i said before the pandemic like when it

was just starting

that leadership in different countries

would not be the variable that made a

difference in the outcomes

and that was crazy

right

i don't think anybody took that

seriously it sounded like such a

ridiculous

prediction that you didn't even have to

address it you didn't have to agree with

it you didn't even have to disagree with

it because it was just ridiculous it was

more like absurd

and i said it over and over and over

again in the beginning and and i was

always surprised

that people didn't react to it

they didn't agree

and they didn't disagree

it just was sort of just weird

and here we are

the pandemic's over and you can't tell

the difference in terms of leadership

decisions

there's no difference

why did south korea do well

was it because of leadership

probably not it's probably because they

had access to rapid tests

maybe a cultural difference maybe

because of their isolation whatever but

it probably had nothing to do with their

leadership

right

so

and here we have another example

inflation is high with all these

different governments with all these

different philosophies of government

and probably you can't tell the

difference

can you tell me that germany's

leadership is why they have high

inflation but ours is not

it just looks like there is a global

element to the inflation

and that's all there is to it

everything's disrupted everywhere so why

wouldn't it affect everybody

now i did see shannon bream

take down a

biden administration

advisor type

for

essentially being part of the inflation

especially the energy problem

and

and

she did a really good job i tweeted that

so check out shannon bream

um really giving it to

one of the biden apologists i guess

i ain't using that word but it seems to

fit in this case

now here's

to his to his credit one of the

arguments that um

the biden administration is making

is that a survey showed that when you

talk to the ceo ceos who do investment

in in energy that

90 some percent of them said that it

wasn't the government that was stopping

them from investing

and i didn't see shannon bream

address that point specifically

but i have a feeling that that

data probably is not on point meaning

that

um

meaning that i'm not sure that uh

that that survey is exactly telling them

telling us what we think it is

anyway there's a little difference of

agreement i'm not sure what is true

i'm a little unclear because the

propaganda is so thick from left and

right

and so i can't tell how much is

uh right-leaning propaganda

that says that biden's responsible for

you know cancelling all these oils and

gas leases and stuff but they do have an

argument that those things are trivial

so there's one argument that says that

biden caused this by

everything from not approving energy

projects to closing down energy projects

but the counter argument is yeah he may

have done all those things but they're

so small that they don't really make any

difference

what do you think

because i don't know i i follow the news

and as i i said i've got some economic

background

but i don't know the answer to that

question because i follow the news

i don't believe the news is giving me

straight news on the left or the right

on this question

do you

do you think that the left

or the right are giving you

the

because the right is saying

biden made these decisions

it reduced future amounts of energy

therefore the prices went up it's just

you know two plus two is four

it's that simple

the right says

even if he had done everything

differently

none of this makes a difference in the

near term

so you couldn't possibly be seeing those

decisions in the near term

and you know that people are not so

smart that the near term really reflects

the long term anyway

that's not a terrible argument if it's i

don't know if it's true

so let me be clear i don't know if the

biden argument is accurate or true

i just know it's a good argument

when you hear it you go oh okay that's a

good argument

so let so let me give it to you

and this will be kind of a mind

for some of you

for those of you who are sure because

you believe the propaganda

those of you are sure that our current

energy costs are substantially

and you can determine substantially

whatever that means to you

how many of you believe that you're you

you do have enough information

and that is accurate

and that you understand this situation

and that biden's decision specifically

have raised the price of energy today

how many of you feel confident that that

really is happening

i'm seeing a lot of confidence all right

i guess i'm contrarian on this one i'm

not

i'm not

now the shannon bream argument is pretty

strong the one she made which is she

quoted

biden saying he was basically going to

dismantle the fossil fuel industry

and she says why would anybody invest

do a long-term billion dollar

investments

when he's trying to dismantle the thing

why would you

that's a pretty good

pretty good argument right but here's

the counter argument to the counter

argument

even if people had said okay

we're going to go ahead and ignore biden

even though he says he's going to

dismantle us we're going to ignore him

and we're going to put billions into

investments for new

new energies and drilling and new leases

and all that would any of that made any

difference today

no

i don't think so

so the the democrat argument that even

if everything you say about biden is

true

that he is making decisions that

absolutely will change the level of

availability of energy and the type in

the mix even if that's all true

it takes years

it takes years

do you think that's in the inflation

number today

some of it probably

but i don't know how much and neither do

you

so let me say this

you are in a heavy propaganda

topic

i don't believe there's anybody even the

experts who quite understand

the the entire uh

uh i want to use the word what's the

word from accounting

where your

your income statement is articulated

into your balance sheet

what's the word for that

there's like a

term of art

uh you know what i mean

accrual now

oh there's

not reconciling

right it is reconciled well damn it

there's

there's a cool word that i wanted to use

there that would have been great

yeah well whatever

so nobody understands this topic so if

you imagine that you do then you might

be a victim of propaganda

right if you imagine you know

that biden's decisions changed energy

prices in the short term

i think we could all agree to change in

the long term

because he's trying to change it in the

long term he said he would and he did

things that would change it in the long

term

so if we could all agree on the long

term

could you still agree with the democrat

argument that you're not seeing it today

that's not what's happening today

because it wouldn't affect today

i know it's a pretty good argument

um

pew research

said that 71

of journalists are concerned about made

up news

71 of the people in the business the

journalists

are concerned about made-up news

and that's higher than the 50 percent of

u.s adults who say the same thing

so if you're a consumer of news

half of you are concerned that the news

is fake

if you're in the business of producing

news

71 of you are concerned that it's fake

who would be better informed about how

much of the news is fake the people who

produce it or the people who consume it

that's right the people who produce the

news

are way more concerned about how fake it

is

does that worry you

it should

it should that should worry you a lot

the people who know the most about it

think it's worse than you do

the journalists themselves

yep

you should worry about that

all right um

don't you think it's kind of hard to

fight two wars that are

uh like opposites

so we're right so the biden

administration is fighting the war

between uh you know ukraine and russia

so

effectively we're in that war

financially anyway

and

we're still fighting a war against the

climate

or at least the democrats

are trying to do that

and the trouble is that to fight the

ukraine war

we want to squeeze russia and not use

their resources

but

we need those resources

so

there are too many variables that are

that are working opposite each other

so suddenly germany is is going to be

using much more coal

because russia is going to give them

less gas because of the war

blah blah so basically the one war makes

it impossible to lose to win the other

war

you know as long as we're doing the

ukraine thing we're going to lose the

climate war

so do we have to pick the war

are we are we trying to fight too many

wars

it's sort of a two-front war

that makes it impossible to win on

either front

i feel like we have to pick one

you know either win ukraine

which means go crazy on coal as long as

it takes to make russia irrelevant i

guess

and

uh or fight the war on the climate and

let ukraine go to russia which is what

would happen here's an interesting take

on

again you can see this in my twitter

feed

that

who wins a modern war is who has the

most ammunition

and that's about pretty much all there

is to it

that a modern war between you know two

modernish armies like ukraine and uh

russia

that all that will matter is who has the

most ammunition because they'll both

just keep firing at each other until

they're out

and i thought

that might be the simplest explanation

of how to predict how this ends

but here's the bad news if you like

ukraine

apparently russia has really really good

resources for

creating ammunition as they need it

so they had a lot to begin with

but they can also make it as they need

it

the west apparently has enough for a few

days

and then no ability to make it

so the west doesn't even have the

ability to fight a war we would just run

out of ammunition

now that's not as big a deal if you're

the united states because you have you

know nuclear nuclear-powered submarines

and you know so so nobody's going to

attack the homeland of a nuclear-powered

country with the second amendment

but

if we got into a traditional war with

russia

we would run out of ammunition

so unless unless we somehow won right

away

we would just run out of artillery

so

if you have a war that lasts a long time

all that matters is your manufacturing

capacity

and we're in a war that lasts a long

time so that would tell you that russia

is just going to chew up ukraine

at its leisure

and nothing would stop it

and i think that's that's the way it

look if he were to straight line it and

nothing changed that's what it looks

like but of course

there are always surprises so you can't

straight line anything

here's something interesting

my live stream from the other day

was turned into a transcript on real

clear politics

and then it got tweeted around

now when you change this form the spoken

form into a transcript

sometimes it makes it more powerful

because people

prefer consuming stuff that way

and so it took my uh relatively inert

idea

about having trump not run for president

but create a news platform that would

have honest debate on topics but more

interesting honest debates and basically

control the world through controlling

the news

because somebody needs to do it

and that idea was strong enough

that somebody turned it into a

transcript and then people liked it more

and they're tweeting around now

the moral of the story there's a

higher level than the story itself

is that

the person who writes something down

is the most influential

it's one of the most consistent

things you could say

the person who writes something down

and is good at it

has just tons of influence

so speech writers actually have a ton of

influence over policy

because the speech writer writes it and

then that the politician says yeah that

would sound really good coming out of my

mouth and that just sort of turns into

their their theme

so

we see here that uh taking my inert uh

spoken word and turning into a written

transcript made it actually pretty

powerful and now you see people weighing

in and

um it's

i haven't seen much pushback

it's probably one of the most popular

ideas that i've ever expressed

so take a look at it if you haven't seen

it yet

um

so

here's another uh

tip along those lines so derek

sivers siv ers cybers or sippers i don't

know

he suggests this writing tip and i'm

gonna echo his recommendation

that you write one sentence per line

just for yourself when you're starting

to write something longer

one sentence per line now you say to

yourself

well what's the difference between that

and just putting it in the paragraph

where it belongs

and he

he tells you this

if you write every sentence by itself

you don't get to hide it with the other

sentences

because sometimes you can put a weak

sentence in the middle of a paragraph

and you and your brain will sort of skip

over it you know because the other ones

are have more impact but if you're

forced to write every sentence on its

own line and look at it you can much

more easily say you know what

i didn't even need to say that

because the the other sentences

basically covered it

the other thing is that when you put

them on their own line you can more

easily pick out the first word in the

sentence and the last

because those have more impact

so

um

and those are just you know and then

also you can look at the sentence length

because you want sentence lengths that

you know are variable

but not beyond a certain too long point

right

you can't be too short

with a sentence that's impossible you

can't be too short one word could be a

sentence if you're trying to communicate

but you could be too long

so these are things that you more easily

see if you just break out the one

sentence you can see its length compared

to the others

and some variety

some reasons why you don't want a long

sentence because the brain brains are

not good at following a long sentence

but there's no such thing as too short

because there are times when one word

is all you needed

and even though one word is not a

sentence

often people know what you mean so

that's all you need

i'm gonna get rid of you

all right

so that's your writing tip for the day

and

that ladies and gentlemen looks to be

everything i wanted to talk about

amazingly

and uh

i don't know it

am i wrong or

is this

the best live stream you've ever seen in

your whole world

the other thing i'm going to predict is

if um so yesterday i took a ride on a

electric scooter

how many of you have tried a an electric

scooter especially a high-end one this

was 500 watts

number one it did every hill

without a problem

now i'm not a you know hugely gigantic

human

so you know it wasn't a problem for me

suppose if you were 300 pounds would be

a problem

but have you

have you read

or tried an electric scooter

they are so fun somebody says i hurt

myself yeah they're really dangerous

they're super dangerous

the whole time you're on it you're

pretty sure you're going to die

because they they get wobbly pretty

easily

but you there's also a pretty fast

learning curve

so

uh

here's the thing

if you spend a minute on an electric

bike or an electric scooter

you will know it's the future

now i took a ride yesterday on my bike i

wonder if i could show you this

i know it's

terrible holding something up to the

camera here

but i believe

i can show you this

so where i live

there are miles and miles

of

bicycle only

or mostly bicycle

roads

so this is this is a long road through

wine country in livermore california

in which uh there's no cars

this is just for bikes or whatever

and you you could have the best

like just amazing

like scenery

and you could ride for miles and that's

an electric bike

it's an electric um you know mountain

bike

and

the the hills just disappear

now you ask yourself do you still get

exercise and the answer is yes

yes a lot

because you know you can turn down the

uh the boost the assist

so whenever i whenever i want to just

you know work a little harder i just

turn down the boost

and when i want to you know level off a

hill because i just don't feel like it i

just turn up the boost

now

once you see how wonderful it is to

travel this way you can imagine a town

in which everything is connected by

let's say

hilly little very interesting winding

tree covered

streets that are just for bikes and

electric vehicles

and you can imagine

that

almost like a hobbit city using these

adus or these little boxable

you know instant houses that you take

off a truck and you unfold it and it's

like a total house for one person

you slap on a

solar wall solar you know like a tesla

battery

you can make these little little things

off the grid for the most part i guess

you need sewage or something but you can

get them mostly off the grid

and

there's now a technology where you can

suck water out of the air

enough to actually run your home

so we're at a point where building an

amazing

village from scratch

where you're not looking at your

neighbor

but he's just over the you know the

little tree-lined hill and if you want

to go anywhere to buy some groceries or

something you jump on your scooter

and the and the

the path itself is really fun

right you you've had this experience

right sometimes going someplace is fun

if the actual

destination path

is just really interesting to look at

you don't mind the right at all so

imagine making all of your

transportation fun and easy

it would change everything about your

experience imagine your delivery service

all by electric vehicle

so that there's so many people

delivering all the time

that the cost of getting a sandwich

drops way down because there's always an

electric bike going right past the

sandwich place

to your home

and if you're on an electric bike it

costs you practically nothing you just

drive by hey grab the sandwich

drop it into your mailbox boom

so if you if you were to build a home a

community from scratch

you could do it at 10 percent of the

cost of current living

and it would be so much better just the

lifestyle everything about it would be

better

where is this magic place it's a place

that you could build right now with

current technology

so that's my prediction about where

housing is going it's going to be start

from scratch

build a community

and make it electric bike connections or

electric vehicles could be carts or

any kind of thing

and

off the grid as much as possible

to protect the homeland by the way

because you don't want people to be too

vulnerable to the grid

so you want to get as many americans as

you can off the grid entirely

so they could withstand a grid attack

and there you go

now is that optimistic enough

did you notice today was all the

optimistic stuff

did it make you feel better

should

should

it's going to make you feel great

in fact

you want to take this good feeling with

you

into the day

don't watch the news today maybe

you don't want to blow it

if you got that good feeling

just take it forward

and remember you are the authors of your

simulation

so

i have a request on the locals platform

for a closing sip it's very rare but

today

you're gonna get it

the closing sip for the simultaneous sip

here comes

ah

so good

see you later youtubers