that first PayPal startup. Elon Musk was one of them. Peter Thiel was one of them. Hoffman was part of them. So they formed LinkedIn and everything. Peter Thiel did Facebook, Palantir, and now Elon Musk. They all came from that same little startup. Is that a coincidence? What do you think? Is it a coincidence that three people from that same startup all went and did amazing things?

Do you know what all of those amazing things had in common? Persuasion. Everything they did that worked, you look at it, you say, you know, I get how they could do the engineering, but how did they get somebody to buy into it? Let me ask you this. How in the world did a startup get banks to agree with them being like a little electronic bank when PayPal was brand new? Before PayPal, people were not sending money back and forth digitally to each other. Somehow PayPal convinced people to do something completely outside of their trained nature, to trust an app with their money. That's really hard. How'd they do it?

And then how did somebody build LinkedIn? LinkedIn was basically just a resume online with some social aspects and stuff. I don't think LinkedIn was ever the greatest idea or even an innovative idea, but somehow everybody wanted to do it and it became huge. So if you look at the persuasion element of PayPal, LinkedIn, Facebook, and everything else that these people do, from electric cars — do you know how much persuasion it takes to sell an electric car? Or to build a rocket company to go to Mars? I mean, you're talking about unusual levels of persuasion to get any of that to work. Forget about the engineering, which is super impressive. How about Uber? Uber didn't work because guys were really good at making apps, although the app is really good. Uber works because somebody was persuasive as hell and figured out how to get past all these local ordinances. Oh my God, a lot of persuasion.

So the thing that people miss is the persuasive power of successful people. They didn't get there just by being good engineers. Ever. It's always persuasion too. And that's what I see when I see Elon Musk offering to fight Putin one-on-one.

Here's my interpretation. Now, of course I cannot read Elon Musk's mind. If I could, I'd be building myself some unicorn startups too, because I guess I'd know how to do it if I could read his mind. But here's what I think. When Elon Musk, richest guy in the world, knows he's going to get lots of attention when he says something like this — challenges Putin to a one-on-one fight — your brain says two things. Number one, that is absurd. Am I right? That's the first thing you think. Okay, that's absurd. What's the second thing you do? You compare it to what we're doing already. And then it's not so absurd anymore, is it?

If you could literally choose — you don't have that choice, but if you could — to have Ukraine fight it out the way they're fighting it out, men, women, children being slaughtered and dismembered every day, or you could settle the whole thing with Elon Musk having a personal fight with Putin. And actually I don't know who would win, you know, because Putin's — I think Elon's got a size and youth, but Putin has Putin. I'll tell you who I wouldn't want to ever get in a fight with: Putin. All right, Putin's basically around my age and about my size. I feel like I could handle myself around people my size in general, especially my age. Like if I ever got to fight with another 65-year-old guy who was about my age or my size, I feel like I could take him. But I don't feel like I could take Putin. I think Putin would dismantle me. I'm pretty sure Putin is 5'7".

Somebody says yeah, he would go MacGyver on you.

All right. So here's what I think is Elon's play. I think that he is making a ridiculous and absurd offer but doing it seriously so that your brain will compare it to what's actually happening, which is even more absurd than what he's offering. He's basically juxtaposed an unambiguously absurd thing with the actual news and made you look at the absurd thing in the news and say, you know, the absurd thing doesn't look so stupid anymore, because compared to what we're doing, it actually literally — no joke — would be better for everybody. Maybe even Putin. I don't know. I mean, he might end up with a head. It might not be so good for Elon. Elon might get killed. But making us think about how ridiculous the war is, how absurd it is, I feel like that's productive. Because it's easier to stop doing something that you know is absurd and everybody else knows it's absurd.

And that's why he did it. He just introduced into the thinking that war is not just a bad idea. It can never be a good idea. It's just absurd. And yeah, I see somebody in the comments saying he's trivializing it. Now I don't think so. I think he's trivializing it as persuasion successfully. It's a weird little move because it's like a chess move that's not a checkmate. Do you see what I'm saying? He's just taking the board and he's just shaking a little bit. Not a lot. He just took the chessboard. He's like, just a little shake, and a couple of the pieces just moved into another square, but you don't see it yet. He's basically softening up the room so that if decisions need to be made that would normally not be made, maybe they can be there because a couple of the pieces got moved. It's a very small change to how we think about it, but it's real. It's real. It does make you give a little more absurdity to the current situation. And I'm not sure that we had enough absurdity in our opinion of it.

I feel like we thought the war sort of — we don't like it, but that it made sense. Am I right? No matter what you thought of the war or who's wrong or who's right, on some level it sort of seemed logical to you. Like you don't like how we got here, but there's a logic to it. You know, we poked the bear, the bear poked back. They've got strategic historical reasons. You can kind of make it all make sense in your head, can't you? You can talk yourself into that we got here logically. What Elon has done is just rip that all out and just said maybe not. Maybe we did not get here logically at all. Maybe we just got here. Maybe we're in an absurd situation. And the only way out is to recognize it. The only way out is to recognize it. The only way out is to recognize it. Because the only way out is to recognize it. And Elon just did that for you.

Now I don't know how much thinking he put into it. Like it may not be even close to what I'm saying. Maybe it was just a joke. Who knows?

Ronnie says Scott hasn't taken his hand off his lap since he started talking about Elon. I'm not going to hide the fact that I think he's one of our greatest American patriots. You know, born in another country, but in a way that makes him a perfect American. Yeah, I have complete respect for Elon Musk, so I'm not going to hide that. Yeah, he's ridiculing a ridiculous war. I think Elon's frame that it is ridiculous is productive.

We all saw the story about the Russian on-air news personality who ran out with a protest sign against the war. You know, don't believe everything you say about the war or everything you hear. And I guess she disappeared. So is that the first time that Russian viewers would know that there's something wrong? If you were watching at home or even if you heard about it and you saw somebody run on TV and basically risked their life — because anybody who saw it knows that that person risked their life or at least their freedom — somebod