Scott Adams (22:02)
Now, one of the things I wonder when I read a story like that is how much oil is up there. Because doesn't it sort of also matter how much? Because I'm in favor of opening it for drilling. But in the back of my mind, I'm assuming that it has a tremendous amount of known reserves because I would kill a few caribou for an enormous reserve. But suppose there's only a little bit there. Well, that's sort of a. I would only kill like one caribou for that. Meanwhile, over in Poland, there was a presidential election and A what's being called by Reuters, a pro Trump nationalist has won the presidency in Poland. Somebody named Carol. No, Rocky. And he won narrowly, but apparently he's got that, that Trump vibe about him. So do you think that's actually a Trump effect or is that some kind of a coincidence? Are people really going to just start copying Trump because it works? Maybe. I don't know if that makes the world a safer place or not. How many Trumps can you have in the world? And the funny thing is the. I think he knocked out somebody named Donald Tusk. That's pretty weird. A weird coincidence. Anyway, we'll see if that's the Trump effect if it affects any other countries. All right, so there's a gentleman named Alex Karp who is the CEO of Palantir. So he would be a multi billionaire by now. And he was asked at some event about secrets for success, it looks like, and he said the following. He said, I've never met someone successful who had a great social life at 20. If that's what you want, that's great. But point you're not going to be successful and don't blame anyone else. And then he also says that, you know, picking the right partner in life is important. Now do you buy that? Do you buy that if you had a great social life in your 20s, that your odds of being successful are very low? You know, career wise successful. I have to admit that if people are not just totally humping it in their 20s, it would be hard to imagine that they're going to start humping it in their 30s. But if I look at my own career ARC in my 20s, I was just working regular jobs and trying to get my MBA and uh, basically I was just building up my talent stack. But by the time I reached my 30s, that's when I, that's when I launched Dilbert and I found myself working full time doing a Dilbert comic strip, writing a book, working on licensing projects. It was insane. The, the amount of work I put in was just through the roof. So while I do believe that people in their 20s, if they're not working pretty hard at something, that's a bad sign. But I think there are two things you can work at. One is working directly on that startup or whatever it is that's going to make you rich, but the other is building your talent stack. I think either one of those gets you someplace. So if you were to look at my life in my 20s, it looks more relaxed going to a corporate job, you know, taking all the classes that they offered taking the Dale Carnegie class, learning about technology, learning marketing, learning strategy. So I was learning all those things and I was very aware that I was just building up my skills so that someday I could do my own thing. I didn't think it would necessarily be cartooning, but all of those skills, including the technology stuff directly went into Dilbert. Then there's Marc Andreessen. He was talking about the world of robots in the future. Now this is not directly self help advice, but a little bit telling you the future. So Marc Andreessen, famous investor, if you don't know who he is, says General Purpose Robotics is going to happen at a giant scale in the next decade. Now that's what most of us think, but when it comes from somebody like Andreessen, then it just seems more credible. And he says the US should not try to get the old manufacturing jobs back, which would suggest you should not be waiting to get your manufacturing job back. He says instead, we should lean hard into designing and building robots. Now, I assume we're doing that. I don't know exactly what the government is doing to make it easier to build robots, but as Andreessen points out, otherwise we will live in a world of Chinese robots. Can you imagine how dangerous it would be if you had a full sized humanoid robot that was built in China and its intelligence could be updated and controlled just through the cloud, through China. And if China wanted to overthrow the United States, all it would have to do is activate all the robots at the same time, grab knife off of kitchen counter, stab inhabitants. So yeah, we better start building our own robots, like really fast build those robots. So if you translate this into some kind of, you know, meaningful career path advice, there must be elements of robot building that you could identify as current jobs for human beings. I don't know exactly what that would be because I don't know enough about the robot building world. But I'd be looking hard into what is it that you need to build and sell robots that the robots won't do themselves if there is anything, because that's going to be a pretty big area anyway. According to the Gateway pundit, Christine Christina Layla. So you may have heard this story, but this one's a really spicy one. So the FBI and Mueller's team, you remember Mueller, apparently they hid Rashi Gate documents using a special coding system that you can use to make things invisible to people who are searching for them. Now imagine. So at this point, I think you know, Bongino and Cash Patel have identified the code that was used to hide all the good stuff. Now, why do you think this is regarding the. The Russiagate collusion? I feel like this is going to be the thing that tells you what all the people did, all the bad people. So right now we sort of have this general idea that the FBI was presented with this idea, you know, that, you know, maybe. Maybe Trump had some Russia connection. But we all know that it was. It was organized via the Hillary Clinton campaign. But I feel like the reason nobody's going to jail for it is there's not quite the paper trail. You would need to prove who did what and when and what they were thinking and what their intentions were and all that stuff. And it could be that this new discovery that there's a secret code where all the good stuff was hidden, we might find out just how bad this was. My only concern is that there's so many things that happen in the news, especially in a Trump world, that the energy has already been taken out of the topic. And the, the people on the left and the. The mainstream media will just say, ah, that was a long time ago. And it would just act like it's not a big deal. And then the political right will be screaming and saying, are you kidding? We just proved that you tried to overthrow the government of the United States or influence an election, which would be sort of the same thing. And we have the names and we've got the exact details, and that's not going to be anything. So that's what I predict. I predict there will be some really spicy things that come out of this, but that the mainstream news will talk about it once, and then it'll act like it doesn't matter. So unless there's a, you know, some kind of prosecution, it will just sort of disappear. Well, Steve Bannon on his War Room show had author of Putin's Playbook, Rebecca Koffler, and she says that we're already in a kinetic war with Russia because Russia would know that that very clever drone attack that Ukraine apparently pulled off to destroy a bunch of Russian bombers, that there's no way that they could have done that without direct U.S. support, at the very least, our satellite images, but probably more than that. And I thought to myself, oh, I'm an idiot. Not once did I think, oh, the United States was obviously involved in that attack. I didn't think that once. And it's kind of obvious, once somebody who's an expert points it out, you go, huh, yeah, actually, there's a pretty good chance that America was involved in that. But then related to that Apparently Russia is deploying Chinese lasers that would be defensive tools for knocking down any drones and maybe missiles too. So there's a video that's been posted on Telegram. This shows a team of Russian military people operating this Chinese drone laser. Now you see what's happening, right? Russia and Ukraine have become a weapons testing area for first the United States and now for China. And Russia and the Ukraine are just sort of caught in the middle. And I also thought to myself, do you know who's preventing Russia from attacking the United States besides perhaps Russia themselves? Probably China. Do you think China that buys 80% of the energy that Russia sells. Do you think they have the power to say, no, you're not going to war. We might test some weapons and we might keep crawling along the way things are going. But she can't start World War iii. I feel like China would have that power now so that we're not even really dealing with Russia. Exactly. I think that China has probably pulled off a total control move because of the biggest customer of Russia and they can bankrupt them anytime they want. So I think we're safer than you think because China would not allow Russia to escalate beyond the point where they're just testing some Chinese weapons. So I think that so called war in Ukraine is just going to keep going as a stalemate. Another guest on the War Room named Boone Cutler, he asked the following question, which is a good idea. What would happen if all those Chinese owned properties, I think most of them are farms that are near military bases in the United States. What if they also have swarms or drones? They're right next to military bases. So they could attack the military base in a minute. So maybe we should look at that. Now I haven't seen any evidence that the land that's being bought, that's near military bases is, you know, being stocked up with weapons. But I would definitely worry about it. I would look into it a little bit. So yeah, let's find out a little bit more about that. Meanwhile, according to interesting engineering in Russia, the kids are going to be taught, I guess it's a mandatory class, they're going to be taught how to operate drones. So they'll all be little drone experts. To which I say isn't that worthless? In one year won't all the drones be self driving? Why would you put a human in the drone operating position? You know, even if the AI is operating the drone, at the very least the human will be relegated to final decisions. So I think the, the drone will take off, it will decide Because AI is, you know, operating the entire war. The drone will know where to go for maximum impact and the weakest defense and it'll pick its targets and maybe, but not even necessarily. It might show it to the human and then the human says yes or no? Yes, attack that tank. But it doesn't seem to me that you're going to need a lot of human operators for drones in one year. Is that too soon? I think in one year if, if we have full self driving Teslas that are giving civilians rides in cities throughout the United States. You think the drones are going to be operated by humans? Maybe in some specialty way, but doesn't seem like a useful skill in the future. So Jeffrey Sachs, who was on the all in Summit way back In September of 2024, he had some interesting things to say about Taiwan. And I'm not going to say I agree with it or disagree with it, but he makes a good case. He says China, first of all, is not a threat to the United States security, big oceans, big nuclear deterrent and so forth. Second, we don't have to be in China's face. What do I mean by that? He says we don't have to provoke World War three over Taiwan. That's a long, complicated issue. But this would be the stupidest thing for my grandchildren to die for. We have three agreements with China that say we're going to stay out of that and we should. And I have to say the idea of dying because of something about Taiwan, that does seem like a really bad reason for an American to die. Now on the other hand, Taiwan is an ally and we must have made some assurances that we would be helpful. But I wonder to what extent just giving them weapons would be enough. It seems to me that if, you know, in the long run, there's no possible way that Taiwan will remain independent forever. It was, it's not like a thousand years from now. If you came back, Taiwan would be independent one way or the other. The big, the big country is going to overwhelm the little country that's right next to him. So it doesn't seem to me that dying over something that's going to happen anyway, whether you love it or hate it, it's going to happen anyway. He makes a good point. So probably we'll have to pretend that we're doing something useful while letting China have its way is my guess. How many of you show me in the comments have lost a connection to a family member. It could be your own child, could be your parents because of politics. I Just wonder how universal this is, because I was reading a thread on X of people who were talking about losing family members that hadn't talked to them since the election. How many of you are in that category? Oh, my God. I'm seeing a string of yeses go by in the comments. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Incredible. That is so disturbingly dangerous for this country. Wow. So I was thinking to myself, how do you deprogram those people? And the answer is, you probably can't because they've chosen to have no contact with you. But if you could, I would start with the Fine People hoax. And I would. I would also start. I would set it up this way. I'd say, have you ever found out something that just totally rocked your world because you thought it was one way, but then you found out you'd been fooled and it was another way, Such as, let's say, the nutrition pyramid, the food pyramid. Now, if you could get your family member to admit that they had ever experienced believing something was completely true and then learning it wasn't, say, can I show you another one? Just to blow your mind. It won't change your view on politics, but I want you to see how easily you could be led to believe something that isn't true. And then you do the Fine People Oaks, but make sure you found a. The American Debunk website, because it. It'll show you the, you know, the full. The full video to prove what's going on. But then a lot of these people think that the real problem was the January 6th insurrection. And I'm going to tell you the worst argument you can make if you're trying to talk somebody out of believing it was an insurrection. All right, you can't say it wasn't dangerous because people got hurt. So you have to acknowledge that you both agree that the violent part was uncalled for and that those people had to, you know, they had to be dealt with. Now, they didn't go to jail, and even if they were pardoned, they did serve some serious time. But here are the bad arguments. Don't say the Feds were behind it, because that's unproven. As soon as you say, oh, the Feds, it was a Fed erection. No, Fed direction. Not a Fed erection. As soon as you say it was the Feds. Even if it was, even if it was, it's not an argument that would work with a Democrat because they would just reject it as ridiculous. It's like, well, there weren't that many. So whether or not you're sure the feds were behind it. It's a bad argument, so just drop it. The second bad argument is, you know for sure the election was stolen. You might be right that the election was stolen. But since there's no proof that any Democrat would ever accept, it's a terrible argument. Now you just said to yourself, how are we going to argue against January 6th being an insurrection if he just told us that all of our obvious arguments are terrible arguments? Well, you can use a good one. Here's a good argument. Now, it will take a few explainings for the person that you're working on to understand that you're in completely solid territory. It goes like this. The only thing you need to know is what the non violent protesters were thinking when they entered the Capitol. What were they trying to accomplish? And then point out that nobody's ever done a TV show or even a podcast in which the protesters are brought in and they ask the following question, why were you protesting? What were you trying to accomplish? Now, I believe the answer would be, in every case, it looked to us like the election was stolen. So we were trying to slow things down to see if we could check it so that we could save the Republic. Now, you may have just said to yourself, Scott, you just said, don't use the argument that the election was stolen. Here's the tough part. I didn't. What I said was that the protesters might believe that based on the fact that it broke pattern. So it broke pattern in terms of, you know, those last minute votes for Biden and the fact that there were so many of them. And it's, it's off historical pattern. It broke pattern in the bellwether counties or precincts. So it broke pattern. Now that is not proof that anything was stolen. The only thing you need to know is that the protesters believed it didn't look like a credible election. You don't have to argue whether it was actually stolen. If you argue whether it was actually stolen, that's the end of the argument. Because a Democrat will be like, all right, go away, go away. There's no evidence it was stolen. I'm not going to listen to the rest of it. But if you can get them to understand that it's not about what you or they think, it's about what the protesters thought. So if the protesters thought it was a perfectly fair election and they were trying to delay it or stop was an insurrection, that's what I'd call it, right? If they believed that the election was fair and they did what they did anyway, Trying to delay the certification, well, that's a little bit insurrectiony, you know, not really effective because they didn't have any chance of succeeding. But if they believed right or wrong, this is important, right or wrong. If they believe that the election did not look credible, then having a delay to make sure it was credible would be saving the Republic. It would not be an insurrection at all. So that might be a little too complicated, but that would be the only clean path to convincing somebody who was willing to listen that that was a hoax. It was no insurrection. It was patriots trying to make sure that we got the right result. All right, so the other day, I wittily pointed out that Democrats only did two things wrong in the last several years. The two things they did wrong were all of their candidates and all their policies. Now, of course, I was saying that for humorous intent, but then other people said, but what about their messaging? Now, I think that candidate and policies covers messaging, too. But just to put a little light on that, here's the comparison in messaging, where Bernie and AOC were saying things like, we have to stop the oligarchs. Trump was saying, we're going to enter the golden age. Which one of those is better messaging? Stop the oligarchs or come with us. We're going to enter the golden age. Those are not close. That is the worst message ever. How about this one? Equity. We want to have equity, or we want common sense? Which one's stronger? We got to fight for equity so everybody gets the same payout no matter what they put in. Or we've got to fight for common sense. Again, these are not close. It's not like you're like six of one, you know, half a dozen of the other. As soon as you hear them, you go, oh, I like the golden age and I like common sense, but stop the oligarchs and give me equity. It just doesn't resonate. But then you've got Tim Walsh, who's teaching Democrats how to code talk like a real man. And lately he said that a good strategy would be to bully the shit out of Trump. What? Bully the shit out of him? That's the messaging from the Democrats. Oh, my God, that's bad. Anyway, and then the last story that I have for you, which I think is a very important one, is that China now has a negotiator for the trade deals. And believe it or not, President Xi hired somebody named He. I'm not making that up. H e. That's his first name. So she hired he to get them a good trade deal, I guess. He's a tough negotiator, so we'll see how that goes. All right, that's all I got for today. And you say hi to the locals people privately after this. And the rest of you, thanks for joining. Always appreciate it. And I'll see you again tomorrow, same time, same place. All right, we'll be private and.