Episode 2279 Scott Adams: CWSA 11/01/23, Solving US Debt Problem And More

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. Be that as it may, if you'd like your experience today to go up to levels which nobody could even imagine with the best imaginations in the world, well, then all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank of Chalice's dine, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine. At end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens to have go. Oh, my God. I don't know if any of you have ever tried this. It's something. I don't know. I don't know when it was the last time I ever tried it, but I tried it yesterday and it's amazing. I got almost enough sleep. Has anybody ever done that? I mean, it wasn't like a ton, probably six hours, but six hours is like, you know, that's like nine to me. So I'm like raring to go. Let me edit. My God. You should try sleeping. I really recommend it. I'll tell you my two biggest sleeping tricks. Number one, if I exercise that day, perfect correlation, one to one. Exercise, good sleep, period, no exceptions. Never once, not once in my life has that not worked. Exercise equals good sleep. So you just got to get to sleep on time. That basically, if you've exercised that day, there's nothing except getting to bed on time. That's it. And then you solve the biggest problem in your life right there. Yeah, you could take your melatonin, you could do all those things. But I guarantee you, if you exercise that day, you're going to fall asleep. You don't need any of that stuff. All right, here's some. Would you like some optimistic news? Because it looks like the world's falling apart today. I'm going to give you the optimistic news. A whole bunch of it. Just a whole bunch of optimistic news. And of course, a number of stories about where I'm right about everything. You know, the usual. Well, MIT has come up with a discovery that they can make water evaporate far more efficiently with light than heat. Does that sound like a big deal? Doesn't really big deal. But you know that apparently the light without any heat under only the ideal conditions has to be some kind of edge condition that they can create. The light without heat will evaporate water far more efficiently. Like way more efficiently than heat. Do you know what that means? It could mean that desalinization just became cheap. It could go down by a factor of hundreds of percent. That changes a lot because imagine if you could have water anywhere. What's the biggest limiter to where people can live and how they can grow Food? Probably water as much as anything, right? Climate, of course, number one. But water is going to be the big one. So imagine, imagine if there's a technology in five years where pretty much anybody can live off grid and just have a little device and it makes all the water they want. Now, there are a whole bunch of. There's been a whole bunch of breakthroughs in producing water out of the atmosphere. But so between the atmosphere that they can now suck the water out of, that already exists, and then this thing which might be the desalinate as scale could be that our real estate options just increased by 100, right? There's just more places you could live without having a city bring a pipe to you. So that's one thing. Here's another one that is just. This is just so perfect. You know, this is one of those things that makes you think the simulation is real and that the life we're living is at least partly scripted like a sitcom. You know, there'll be little things that happen that you say, how did that happen? By coincidence. That had to be in a script somewhere. There's no way this happens by chance. Here's another one. Big improvement in steam engines. Now you say to yourself, Scott, why do we need improvement in steam engines? Are you going to be running your car on a steam engine, Scott? No, no, no, no. Turns out the steam engines have been used for I don't know how many decades to produce electricity. So if you've got some big source of energy, like a falling waterfall, it could drive a generator, which could drive steam engines. I don't know. No, that's the wrong example. I think it's nuclear, right? Is it nuclear that drives the steam engines? Yeah, nuclear power. Steam anyway. So if you want to make a lot of steam to make energy from nuclear power, the way we've done it traditionally is with some kind of steam engines using power plants worldwide. But it turns out that technology is from the 19th century. Were using steam turbines from the 19th century. They found a way to run the steam turbines without water. What would you guess is the replacement for the water? That gives it a huge increase in energy production. CO2. Liquefied CO2. I guess you could put CO2 under pressure, liquefy it, and it makes your steam engine or some modified Steam engine, way, way more efficient. It looks like it's all doable, like there's nothing that would stop them from doing it. So here's something that could have a huge impact someday on our energy costs. At the same time, desalinization could have a huge impact. Now, if you've got cheap water or at least ubiquitous, and you've got way cheaper energy, that's a good world, isn't it? Because then all you need is robots and AI. And those are both coming. More on that later. All right, you probably saw that Joe Rogan talked to Elon Musk and made about 10 pieces of news. One of them is that Joe Rogan shot his bow and arrow at the side of a cybertruck and it did not penetrate it. But I'm told if it had been a normal car, that that bow from the distance was pretty close, would have gone right through a door of a normal car, which is kind of impressive. I had no idea that an arrow could be that powerful. But apparently it's as powerful as a gun at a short distance. Now, the interesting thing is that the glass windows are not bulletproof. So as Elon says, you're gonna have to duck if somebody starts shooting at your car. You're still gonna have to duck because it will break the window. Now, they could have bulletproof glass, but it would be so thick that Elon says it's too hard to make it go up and down. So that's not an option, really. I mean, it is an option if you don't want to ever put your windows down. But most interesting thing, in my opinion, that Musk said was about George Soros. And he speculated that George Soros had a troubling childhood. And that might contribute to the fact that at least by his actions, says Musk, it would appear that he hates humanity because his actions are so anti human. That maybe has something to do with upbringing. And to which I say I like the line of thinking, but there's a problem with it, which may be a solvable problem. But why is his son exactly on the same page? Because his son would have been raised in a privileged upbringing. So if somebody's bad childhood is what makes them hate humanity, wouldn't. Is it Alex Soros, the guy who's in charge at the moment, the son of George Soros? Wouldn't the son have had more like an ideal upbringing and have no interest in destroying humanity? He looks like he's having a good time. So whatever the truth is here, and this might be right, I mean, Musk might be exactly right. He just, he's. He's a broken man with a hatred of humanity. But I usually think that's not the case. My best I've told. And by the way, Musk also says he thinks Soros is senile. So I think that's the better explanation. I see a couple of different possible explanations for what appears to be anti humanity actions. The example would be funding prosecutors who don't want to prosecute crime. And my first, my first, this would be just a speculation or it would be a theory, I guess. So it's not based on any facts. There could be some intelligence, some country that has an intelligence group that controls Soros. So maybe he's just controlled by some foreign entity that wants the United States to be destroyed, in which case he's just doing what he has to do for whatever reason to stay alive or to stay rich. Maybe they have some blackmail on him, I don't know. But he acts like somebody who's controlled by an enemy because what he does is so dangerous to America. That's one possibility. The other possibility is that he doesn't exactly know what he's doing and that he has a sprawling empire and he hasn't been paying attention. And when people talk to him, when people talk to him, they say some version of everything's great, your money is going to these great causes, you're saving the world. And then he doesn't read, maybe newspapers that have bad articles about him. So maybe he just never sees the other argument and, and he's told by his people who are receiving his money and want to receive more of it, hey, you're doing great. Do some more of this. And then he gets lots of pats on the back and he feels like he's really helping the world. But maybe he lives such a small world at the moment because he's a certain age, that he just kind of doesn't know what's going on. It seems like it. It seems to me like he's not aware of it. Now that would also explain why his son would not be able to change the boat, because the dad presumably still has his full authority to fire his son. It could be that the son's just waiting for the dad to die and then he's going to reverse some of the worst parts of the father's philosophy. But Alex might know. Again, this is just speculation. I have no way of knowing who's thinking what. But there's either something about blackmail, something about senility, something about what information he receives versus what you receive something like that. But I don't quite buy the bad childhood explanation because it would seem just as likely that the bad childhood would want him to be a celebrity and, and do the right things, unless he thinks he is, which would be the information problem. So we don't know. But it was an interesting speculation and I would love to see somebody set his son down and ask the following questions. What's going on? It looks like your father is trying to destroy civilization. How could you explain it? I'd love to see that interview. That's never going to happen. All right, as Musk pointed out, the two biggest donors to Democrats were George Soros, who arguably looks like he's trying to destroy civilization. No joke. That's like a serious conversation by serious people that he may want to destroy civilization. That's their biggest donor. Now, I don't know that he wants to destroy civilization, but. But it's a serious question. That's pretty scary. Second biggest donor was Sam Bankman Fried, a con man, basically. So those are their two biggest donors. So if you're wondering, hey, why is everything fucked up? Well, maybe it's because the two biggest donors, one is seems to be an evil genius crook and the other one seems to be demented evil genius billionaire. Maybe if you follow the money, it gets you to exactly where we are, which is a completely corrupted government that's of no use to the people. All right. Some new science in the category of you should just ask Scott. You would have saved some time. Turns out two separate studies, one on gratitude and one on empathy. So I guess empathy could reduce depression. That's what one study says. So thinking about other people and caring about them could make you less depressed. Do you know who else knew that? I did. Didn't you all know that? I thought it was sort of obvious. I've always. In fact, I may have told you this in the past before, I guess, all of my Dilbert career, when I was getting more than I needed for myself, whenever I had a bad day, I would just randomly do something awesomely good for somebody else. And I always cheered up 100% of the time. It worked. I just picked somebody and say, you know what? Today's your lucky day. And just made somebody happy, like in some substantial way, and oh my God, it feels good. Yeah. So they could have saved a lot of money in this study. Just ask me. I've been doing it for years. It works every time and I've recommended it to people and when they try, it works every time. You really didn't need to study that. Here's another one. Gratitude can make you healthier. Again, ask me. I could have told you that. In fact, most self help gurus could have told you that, that gratitude is a very healthy mindset. It's going to make everything work better. And it does. So what do gratitude and empathy have in common? Gratitude and empathy. It's about getting you out of your own head and making you think about the well being of other people and the value they have in your life. The gratitude part. So getting out of your own head is the trick for not being depressed. Now, why is there a gigantic mental health problem in the United States at the moment? Well, I would say again, you don't need to do a big expensive study. Let me explain it to you. It's your screens. When I was a child, human beings were human beings. If I watch television, you know, that was just television. That wasn't really my life. It was just a thing. I did something. But if your life is mostly online, your friends are online, everybody's online. Are those people real? Kind of. I mean, you know that they're real people. But do they have the same effect on you in terms of, let's say, gratitude and empathy? As somebody in the real world, My guess is no. My guess is that our social life has turned into a social life in which gratitude and empathy are hard to express because you're just people on screens, the people who are in the room with you. You can have gratitude and empathy just naturally and easily. So it could be something about how much we see people in person that makes sense. And we know that loneliness, of course, works against your happiness. So a lot of it is just very obviously screens. You can see that the graph of mental illness spikes exactly when smartphones came into the market. It's pretty obvious at this point that's what it is. But more generally, having a good attitude about life is good for your health and your mental well being. So no surprises there. Well, it's almost one year ago. God, it seems longer since Elon Musk bought the Twitter platform and now turned it into X. Think about what people said when he bought it. It's the last day of Twitter. Twitter's gonna fail. He's destroyed this valuable asset. What's the latest update? The latest update is it might be cash positive in 2024 and the engagement is higher than ever. And he's driven out the government oversight on the platform, which was essentially not essentially, it was directly government blocking your free speech. And when Musk talks casually about how bad Twitter was when he bought it, and that basically it was a government organ. And he says that the other entities, at least the social media, he says, are just government organs. They can only do what the government tells them they can do. There's no free speech there. So he claims, and I think this is true, that the only place free speech exists is on X. I think that's exactly true. There's. The only place free speech exists is on X. And, you know, and that's limited by. You can't go too far, but I don't think that's hurting us. All right. So that's kind of amazing. And I like to take a little bit of every day to just thank Elon Musk for what I believe was primarily a unselfish act. You know, you can always make some argument. Well, you know, you can always say with rich people, well, there's further ego or whatever. I don't know. He's a different kind of cat. It does look like he did this for the world, and it worked. And I do believe that. Well, you know, history is strange because the winners write it and all that, but I think this is one of the biggest events in American history. Musk getting the government out of X. To me, this is on a level with the Boston Tea Party is right up there with the most important things that have ever happened in the Republic. So thank you. Thank you. Elon Musk. He had an interesting explanation of why Twitter became a toilet, and he says it's geographical, that San Francisco has always been sort of an oddball culture, but usually it was geographically constrained. You could go to San Francisco and there would be some weird people there, and then you would go home, and it didn't bother anybody. They could be weird in San Francisco, and you could go to your house and not have any of it. But once Twitter started hiring locally, which everybody does, they turned this niche or niche philosophy into a worldwide phenomenon through their control of the algorithm. And. And that's where it all went to hell. So in the old days, they would have just stayed localized, and nobody would have known the difference. It's a fascinating way to explain it. All these things could have 10 different explanations depending on what frame you decide to look at. But that's a really interesting frame that technology allowed pockets of craziness in this weird way, just because the company was centered there, just become worldwide. It's a good explanation. Let's see. Here's news about TikTok. Apparently, Republicans are renewing calls for a TikTok ban because it turns out that, oh, didn't see this coming. Oh, total surprise. Who could have ever seen this coming? That as soon as something's really important, say the Gaza situation, that TikTok was. I guess this study showed that the pro Israel messages were about one tenth of the scale of the pro or the anti Israel messages. It was enormously balanced against Israel, which is against the United States in this particular case. Enormously, enormously. Now let me ask you, do you think that happened on its own? Do you think the TikTok owning Chinese people said, you know, let's just let this one play out. Oh, wow, surprise. Lots, lots of different people. Like the Palestinian side. No, ladies and gentlemen, it's exactly what I've been warning Congress about for five years. For five years I've been saying, stop talking about the data security problem. That is a diversion. It might also be a problem, but it's a diversion. The real problem is the heat button that China, or TikTok owned by China, can push. One button that is literally labeled heat, which they admit they have, that can boost any message. You don't think they pushed that button? Do you think that China sat there and thought to themselves, you know, if we did push this button, it would be really, really bad for America and they probably wouldn't do anything about it. And it would be perfect crime because nobody knows you push the button and then you think that they had that conversation with themselves and, and decided to not push the button. Is that what you think? Do you think they didn't push the button because, oh, that would be biasing things. No, no, it's exactly what I told you would happen if you allow TikTok. It is the user interface to young minds in America and other places, but the American minds, the young ones under some age, are completely controlled by TikTok. And so China built a user interface for our young people's brains, you know, the future of the world, future of our country anyway. And then they put a button on there and they even told us we have a button that's the user interface to all the young people's brains in America. But, you know, we don't like to push it for any bad reasons. Oh, oh, fine. Thank goodness you have that button that you could simply push and it would change the world in a way that's good for you and bad for your enemies. But you're not going to push it, right? Do you promise? Picky swear, don't push it. That's, that's amazingly, that's the situation we're in. And now there's some Republicans saying, hey, hey, I wonder, I wonder if this is a problem. Oh, I wonder again. May I say they should have asked Scott, for pretty much all of the science and politics. You should have just asked me. I could have told you this was coming. And I also make a further prediction that TikTok has sufficient control of our Congress and sufficient control of the Democrats and sufficient control of our news sources that this won't change. My prediction is Congress will not ban TikTok because TikTok already owns Congress. They lost. That's what it looks like to me. To me it looks like it was a battle and Congress lost. And there's no way they can reverse it because the, you know, the, the tentacles are already around them. All right, I controlled myself and I can't believe I did it. When Matthew Perry tragically died in his hot tub, it took every bit of my self control not to tweet the word fentanyl. I mean, I had to just like pry my phone out of my own hand because it's the obvious. The obvious thing that makes you die suddenly if you're an addict is you got some fentanyl that you didn't know you were getting. But it turns out he had none in his system. There was no fentanyl in his system. So I'm chastising my imaginary self that couldn't control myself. And I said that when it would have been really inappropriate and tacky to say it, but God, I wanted to, so that's bad on me. But we. So we don't know if I had to guess. Well, I won't guess. I guess I'll let the process play out. So I guess there's a little bit of still some mystery of what, what it might have been. Over in Switzerland, they've built what they call suicide pods. It's like a coffin sized pod with a glass top. And you can get in this if you're ready for assisted suicide. And they'll just turn up the. They fill it with nitrogen gas which rapidly lowers oxygen levels, causing its user to die. I assume this is painless, otherwise it wouldn't exist. Now of course, the, the opponents say, my God, this will be abused. Would you agree that it will be abused and it won't just be people who are in desperate end of life situation, but that it would naturally slide down to people who are just having a bad time in life? Yeah, probably. So I'll tell you, I have very mixed feelings about it. Number one, for 30 years I have imagined the invention of this product pretty much exactly the way it exists, except I didn't know what gas would be involved, although I thought it would be used for murder, I thought it would be more of a murder device. Here it will tie your hands and put you in this pod and next thing you know, you'll be dead. So I have mixed feelings about it because on one hand it looks like it will definitely be abused, no doubt about it. But you know what else is abused? Everything. Food is abused. Like the most innocent thing in the world is our food. We all abuse our food until we're like dying from food, eating too much food. So there's nothing we don't abuse. So on one hand you could say, hey, it's going to lead to all these abuses. On the other hand you could say, well, if it's a free country at the moment, this is only in Switzerland, but if it were here, I can easily say, yeah, it's totally going to get abused. So are guns, so is food, so is alcohol, so are cigarettes. All legal, all abused. So the fact that something is abused to the point of death is not a stopper. I mean, if we were going to be objective about it, it wouldn't be a stopper for any product. So would it be abused? Yes, especially if things get worse in the future, economically, etc. But on the other hand, I really, really want this option for myself. Although I don't like the claustrophobia right before you die of being in a little casket. I don't like that part. But I certainly like the option to be able to go out on my own terms. So I got mixed feelings about that. Here's another one. Should have asked Scott climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. Who has long been on the side of, let's say, skepticism, so skepticism. And I don't believe he's saying that there's no connection between CO2 and warming. I don't think he's that kind of skeptic. He's a skeptic on the models. So that's the part I know he's a skeptic about. So I have less, less knowledge about what else he might be skeptical about. But he has, you know, another, I guess he gave a speech or something recently and he talked about all the problems with the models. But here's the one that makes the most difference. Apparently there are several models that people could use to do their additional science and say, if this changed, what would happen? We studied this variable. If you add this variable to the existing model, what happens? I Guess they've got some low, medium and high models that are most often used. The worst case, best case, average case. And which one do you think they usually use to show the effects of their science? If you said they used the worst case scenario, you'd be right. Do you know why they do that? Because if you make a paper or discovery which shows the most cataclysmic eventual outcome, you're more likely to get funded because that makes it more important and you're more likely going to get attention and you're more likely to get promoted and you're more likely to get more grants. So basically the system is designed to incentivize people to always chase the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario could happen, but it's probably the least likely outcome. Somewhere in the middle is the usual. So there it is again. Now, I hate to brag. No, I love to brag. But everybody who ever had any experience doing financial modeling or any kind of modeling of the future, we all knew this. We all knew that all models that predict the future are just financially driven, period. There's no exception to that. If it comes out of a corporation, they're showing you something because they want to make money. If I produced a number as part of my analysis of what the financial long term effect of some decision would be, which was my job, I knew I was just doing what my boss needed me to do to support what he already wanted to do. Like everybody knows that. That's just common knowledge. So did I need to be told by an expert who knows a lot about it? Roger Pielke Jr. Did he need to tell me that the financial models are being gamed and are not any kind of indication of reality? He did not need to tell me that. That was obvious. Super obvious from day one. I've never had a different opinion. The first time I ever heard that there were long term data predictions, I mean, I just laughed. There's nobody who does this work or any version of this work who thinks you can even do that. There's no such thing as predicting the future about anything anyway. So just ask me next time. So the Wall Street Journal has a story that says the rate of babies dying in the US rose significantly for the first time in two decades. Wow. Increasing 3% from 2021 to. Wow. So just recently up to 2022, a big increase in babies dying in the United States according to the latest federal government. So does that sound like real news to you? Do you think it's real news that the rate of babies dying in the US Rose significantly for the first time in two decades. Well, that headline was directly over the graph that shows the rate of death. And the graph showed that it's one of four times recently that it's upticked. So the graph proved that the headline was false. And then there was still an article about it after the graph. Because I don't think I misread the graph. Can somebody confirm? I mean, I just need a fact check on this. This direction is down, right where I'm pointing. Can you confirm that that's down? Right. Am I confused about that? Yeah. Okay, that's down. Now here's the part where I'm confused about. Is this direction up? I think it is. So if they had a graph that had substantial portions of it that were pointing in this direction, is that up or down? I'm forgetting again. Oh, it's up. It's up. And was it in the last 20 years? Yes, all four of the upticks were in the last 20 years. What kind of story is this? Am I confused, or did they literally write a headline that didn't match the graph? Their own data. I don't know what's going on. I'm just actually confused by it. But don't believe data. Don't believe news. Don't believe data. Here's what I think happened. You ready for this? I think it's cognitive blindness where smart people, even groups of smart people, can be blinded to the obvious because there's something else going on. Basically, that's how all magic tricks work. A magic trick takes your brain to the place where you can't solve the trick. Your brain's just working on the wrong problem. Here's what I think, and this is just wild speculation that we've been served up for three weeks now, stories about dead babies because of the Gaza situation, right? Every hour on the hour for three weeks, I've heard about a dead baby. So then some data comes out that says there's an uptick in dead babies in the United States. Could that blind the people involved to the point where they could only see the data as more dead babies because they've been fed more dead babies. More dead babies. Highest rate of dead babies. So many dead babies. All dead babies. Dead babies. Dead babies. Oh, here's some data. Sure enough, uptick in dead babies. Write this story. Write the story. And did they actually write the story while looking at the data that showed that there was no uptick? That was unusual. There is an uptick, but not an unusual. That's actually Possible in the. In the hypnotist world. If you had a hypnotist filter on the world. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm saying it would be perfectly within the normal realm of. Of behavior that somebody would be cognitively blinded and not even notice that the graph didn't match the headline. Now, I'll be embarrassed by tomorrow because by tomorrow the Wall Street Journal will explain why I read the graph wrong. But at the moment, I'm just confused. So you should wait for the other side of this story. This is sort of the documentary problem. You're hearing me make a claim, but you have not heard the Wall Street Journal saying, scott, you're looking at the graph wrong, or maybe you interpreted it wrong or something. So just consider. I could be wrong about this. Wait till you hear the other side, if there is one. All right. I saw a lawyer for some of the January six people, somebody who goes by Shipwrecked Crew on the X platform and is apparently a lawyer with some J6 clients. And he makes this claim. He or she makes this claim. I have two new clients charged with J6 crimes. Neither went inside the Capitol, and there are no allegations of any interference with the police. I'm not aware of any previous cases where defendants were charged just for being present outside the building and watching. If anyone knows of such a case, mention it in the comments. If this is a new standard for the Department of Justice, there are thousands of potential defendants still on charge. Now, question number one. Is this an accurate description of the situation? Well, remember, this is coming from a lawyer who is a proponent for clients. So the lawyer is going to put it in the most minimalistic description of what happened. But let's say that the main claim is true, that they didn't go inside and they didn't interfere with police. What could they have been doing that would get them charged? You can't be in the general area of other people doing a crime inciting because they were saying things. Well, if it's inciting, it's going to be everybody. I'll tell you my interpretation of this is that Democrats mostly are looking for any excuse to increase the number of Republicans they're putting in jail, which I call hunting. This, to me, looks like lawfare hunting, where they're literally looking for Republicans that they can jail to make sure that Republicans stay in line in the future. I think it's not so much about punishing anybody. I think it's about creating a standard of fear so that Republicans will know that if they get anywhere near a line, they're going to fucking jail. Do you know, I consider my biggest risk in my life? I consider my biggest risk being jailed for a crime I did not commit. It's 2023 in America, literally my biggest risk. And there are plenty of things that can be risky, but my biggest risk is going to jail for a crime I didn't commit. That's reality of America in 2023. And if you've watched Mike Cernovich tweeting lately, he would be an obvious target for the bad guys to want to invent a crime and charge him with it. I think they would be sorry if they did that. That would be way more pushback than they understand. But I think we're all at risk at this point. Anybody who's talking about the news and the way the Democrats don't like, I think we're all at risk. That's America 2023. All right. I asked on the X platform, can you describe any way in the world that the national debt could be paid off and we're not running as fast as we can towards certain doom and nobody could do it. But I saw one suggestion that made me think it might be possible. Now I'm going to go to the whiteboard. Whiteboard. I'm going to explain maybe the best case scenario for paying off the debt. Now, there are things that you can do when the debt is small that you can't do when the debt is enormous and growing at an enormous rate. The normal way, if you've got a crushing debt or just debt in general, you either have to create money from nothing, you have to create money from nothing. Or inflate it away. And there are basically three ways. Three ways to get rid of a debt. And by the way, this is my first draft, sort of a first take. So if anybody knows more than I do about this topic, you know, tell me to add something or subtract something, Right? So we're just getting the conversation going. The reason I'm doing this, by the way, is I've seen no serious person describe how you even could possibly. Like, even in the best case scenario, how could we get off of this train to doom, which is the debt? I've heard nobody do it. Have you? Has anybody heard anybody serious describe any scenario where we're not doomed from debt? You haven't heard it. I'm going to give you what I think is the first possibility. I think it's possible, but, boy, would it take some things to go right. I think they might actually but here are the options. There could be some kind of weird crypto trickery. By trickery, I mean something that I can't quite imagine, and I wouldn't know how it works. But the basic idea is that crypto can create an artificial value from nothing, right? So that's the only thing I'm starting with. We've got this huge debt and we don't have the money to pay it. But what if we just invented money? Now you say to yourself, but, Scott, that creates 10 new problems. Maybe, but I'm just saying, is there any play? Not one that I can quite describe, but is there anything you could do that would. One time only. Now here's the key. One time only. Create a bunch of money and pay off the debt. Is there any way to do it? Now, before you say, ha, ha, it's obvious that it won't work, I would. I would bet that you know less than me, not more. If you believe it's obvious there's no way to do it, I can't. I can't take you seriously at all. I'm not saying I know how to do it. I'm saying that crypto literally creates money that people will accept out of nothing. So maybe there's a play there. I just don't know how I would do it. All right, here's the other things. I believe the debt is too big to inflate away, meaning you could. You could try to inflate it away, but remember, it's growing 2 trillion a year. How much inflation would you need to inflate it away? I believe the answer is too much, meaning that that rate of inflation would just destroy the country. Basically, your standard of living would just go to crap now. So can we all agree that inflating it away, if that's the only thing you're doing, won't work? Do you think that's true now? In the past, a smaller debt you could actually inflate away. In fact, that's where. That's where we were at a few years ago. This can't be inflated away. So the other way to go would be a massive improvement in GDP. Normally, our GDP grows, what, 2 to 4% a year? That is nowhere, nowhere near enough to pay down the debt. Not, not even in the same universe. You would need something like, and this is just sort of the Economist off the top of my head, it feels like you would need something like a very rapid 40% increase in our GDP. How many of you would accept that as sort of a ballpark for just Talking about the topic, a 40% increase. Is there anything in the world that would make the economy increase by that rate? War. War is the wrong answer because war creates more debt. Yeah, war creates a lot of activity, but it also creates more debt. Here's what I think, and this is partly a borrowed idea. Suppose you get a President Trump or a President Ramaswamy. I'll just take two Republicans as my example. Both deal makers, both understand capitalism, both know how to get rid of regulations, both know the value of fossil fuels in the short term. So they're basically the right, right people for the job. Imagine them coming in and doing something so radical that the cost of energy drops to almost trivial. Is that possible? Absolutely. You just remove the prohibitions against small nuclear reactors. That's day one. You just say, look, we're not even going to have state standards. There's going to be a federal standard and it's going to be friendly to the industry because we don't have an option now. So you build a bunch of nuclear reactors. Is there a risk? Probably. But it's way better than the risk of just spending yourself into certain doom. If those are your two options, you're going to take a little extra risk on your nuclear development because even if you get a meltdown on a small reactor, it's going to be way less problem than spending yourself into oblivion. So given that energy is such a large portion of our total expenses, if you could just subtract that from our expenses, suddenly everybody has more money. That's a reverse inflation pro GDP thing. Now it's not just that it reduces your current expenses. If you could take energy from its current current level to closer to zero, then there's a whole bunch of businesses that become economical that could not have been done before because they would be too energy intensive. One of them would be desalinization, right? Imagine the number of companies that would immediately go into the small nuclear reactor plus desalinization business. I mean, that alone would be a trillion dollar business and it wouldn't be practical until you have that power source. So imagine drilling like crazy, getting rid of regulations, building nuclear building. Elon Musk says if you built a 100 mile by 100 mile solar facility, you could power the entire United States. Does anybody want to check his work? Does anybody want to take a chance that he got the numbers wrong? I don't think I'm going to go down that, that path. And actually I do think there's an argument there. If you listen to some of the critics, they'll say you can't get there with solar, but I'd like to have that conversation. But I'd also like to see robots build facilities because the robots can do cheaper. So if you've got cheap electricity and energy, suddenly robots are way more practical because the cost of your robot is probably going to be half energy cost and half material cost at some point. If you could take the half of the energy cost closer to zero, suddenly I'm buying two robots. Elon Musk said that he thought the Tesla robots that already can be taught skills you can already teach him to fold the laundry and stuff, that he might sell more of those than anything else he's doing. Bigger than Tesla, bigger than SpaceX. I don't know if it'd ever be bigger than SpaceX. So robots plus AI plus cheap energy creates an industrial type revolution greater than anything we've ever experienced. Yet there are probably two candidates who could give this world to you, and they're both Republicans. There is no chance that a Democrat could ever pay off the debt because Democrats are limited in their options. They're not going to remove regulations, they're not going to do anything that hurts one blade of grass in the environment, and they're not going to do anything that their base reflexively doesn't like, such as nuclear power. So there's no way that a Democrat can get you to anything that's not total doom. And there is a way, and I think it's a stretch, honestly. None of this is easy, none of it's predictable, but it's there. It's there. Yeah. We could all have solar roof tiles and be powering our own homes and making our own water. The only thing left is good waste treatment, which I think will turn into some kind of like laser beam that turns all of your waste into CO2 that gets used in a steam engine or something. But that's coming. That's coming. All right. Is this the best explanation of debt repayment options you've ever seen? It is, isn't it? I saw one person say, no. If there's somebody who did a better job of explaining the options, can you send me a link? Because I've never seen one. I've never seen anybody get close. Now, when you say it's not the best description, is it because the crypto part, which part are you complaining about? Just the crypto part, because the rest is very ordinary. Everybody would agree that we can't inflate it away. Everybody would agree that more GDP would work. Everybody would agree that more energy would be good. Everybody would agree that robots are good. So it's really the crypto part that you don't like, right? Crypto equals tulips. Well, here's something I think you don't understand about crypto. The United States could make any crypto immediately valuable by saying they would accept it for tax payments on day one. They can make any crypto valuable because the only thing that makes a crypto valuable is somebody's willing to take it as their payment. If the United States says we'll accept it for tax payments, you're there. Day one, it has permanent value and it won't become less. Or I guess it could. So for those of you who think the crypto option is magic and crazy, you might be right. But you cannot deny that it is a way to create money out of nothing. It might have some other problems with it. All right, well, I thought I'd take a run at that. Remember, this is a first draft. One of the things I think I can add as value to the public conversation is when the public is not being served. I think I do a good job of explaining what we haven't been told. I always think that's my greatest value is that I do a good job of telling you what they haven't told you and how that's important. And you better find that out. So with the debt, we are letting all of our politicians off the hook. Let me ask you this question. This is going to blow your fucking mind. Watch your head just explode. Watch this. Number one, would you agree that our debt problem probably is our biggest one. Would you agree with that? First of all, you see some no's because you might have some other things that you think are bigger problems. Well, if you think no, then that would suggest, you know, that there's some way to pay it off, but you don't. So there's one problem we have where we can't conceive of a solution. There's a bunch of problems we have that could become really bad, but we can totally conceive of solutions. For example, the border is open. Can you conceive of a solution? Let me see. Close the border. Yes. We might have a world war. Can you conceive of some way to avoid it? Yes. Negotiating and the usual stuff. Yes. Now, I would agree with you that some surprise thing like a nuclear war could happen. Suddenly anything could happen. But there's only one thing we have where the straight line is to doom, and that's the debt. The debt, because it's going up 2 trillion a year. If the debt were just stable, then I wouldn't worry about it. We've just inflated away. But it's also going up 2 trillion a year. So it's unsustainable and growing quickly. That's definitely the biggest risk by far. That's the biggest risk. That's my opinion. Here's the part that's going to blow your mind. Now remember all the news you've watched and try to remember anytime that a top politician was asked this question, how would you handle the debt? I don't remember once. I can't think of it once. Can you? Do you know why they don't ask that question? They don't ask it on the right and they don't ask it on the left. Do you know why? Probably because the reporters don't understand the topic. Your average reporter would not really quite understand how debt works because some people make the mistake of saying national debt is like personal debt. If anybody makes that analogy, like if you bought this house and the interest rate was this, and you had made this much money, what would you do? That's not the right model. Anybody who thinks that a mortgage of your house is a good thing to learn about how to handle the national debt, you should immediately stop talking to them because they don't understand the basics of anything. So you've got reporters. If they're not the business reporters, the regular generic reporters, they don't know how to ask the question or they wouldn't understand the answer. Because here's the answer a politician would give you. Mr. Politician, let's say, Mr. Republican, how are you going to pay off the debt? Well, we've got to get these omnibus spending bills under control. And then what does the reporter say? Well, how will you do that? Well, you know, we'll try to break them up, the speaker of the House, blah, blah, blah. And then the reporter goes to the next question. Do you think that breaking up our bills into individual spending bills is going to solve the national debt? Not even close. It's not even in the, it's not even in the zip code of a solution. It's is simply better than what we were doing. It's a small tweak to improve the quality of the budgeting. It's not going to solve the national debt or even close. And nobody serious believes it would. But I'll bet you the Republicans get away with saying that. I'll bet the reporter stops asking questions when they say, oh, we've got to cut our budget. There's no way to Cut the budget enough to pay off this debt, you have to cut it like 70% or something. You'd have to give up the military. Right. You're not going to cut the budget enough at all. So we have reporters who don't know how to ask the question. Would you agree with that? Our reporters do not know how to ask the question. And you have politicians who on the Democrat side apparently have never been asked. Let me say it again, I don't think a Democrat's ever been asked. What would they say? Because Democrats can't say we're going to reduce social services. And if they say we're going to reduce the military, well, just ask them to show you the math because that doesn't work out either if you want to actually have a national defense. So we have a reporter problem. Primarily, the reporters refuse to know what is the important stuff. So with TikTok, they don't know the influence is the important thing, as opposed to data security. So because our reporters can't tell the story right, it gives Congress a way to ignore it. Because our reporters don't tell the story right. Right. It gives them a free pass. If nobody's reporting it correctly, they just can ignore it. That's what they do with TikTok. So nobody reports the national debt story accurately or even close. Nobody knows how to even ask the question of a politician. And if they did, they would allow the politician to get away with. Oh, yeah, yeah, we gotta. We're gonna have to have a national conversation about the spending. What? How's that gonna help? Yes, we're gonna have to cut one of these big expenses. It won't help. Yeah, it's a complete abdication of responsibility by the press and it allows the politicians to just kick the can. So here's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see Vivek come up with a specific plan, even if it's a long shot for solving the debt. And I think he could make his story Vivek, Good. That would say what we're doing with energy and what we're doing with new tech and robots and AI and quantum computing. And he's going to have to make an argument that we need a second industrial revolution. We need to bring our manufacturing back from China in the smartest way. You know, not in a complete way, but in the smartest way, so that we're manufacturing the things that we care about, pharmaceuticals in particular, and we need to figure out how to build our own chip factory so we're not depending on the one Taiwanese factory, by the way, do you know the story that the biggest chip maker is it Taiwan Semiconductor in Taiwan? The one that we're totally dependent on, the entrepreneur for that tried to build it in Texas and was rejected. He couldn't build it in Texas, so he went to where he could build it and he went to Taiwan. Man. Is that on us? That is so, so on us. God, what a fuck up. That's like the fuck up of the last 200 years. Letting that guy go start the big essential chip company in another country that we have to protect. I guess it couldn't have been a more fucked up situation. If it had gone to any other country, it would have been suboptimal. But it went to Taiwan. Right? I mean, it might have gone to Gaza. Like, is there any other way we could make that more fucked up? So there are a lot of things that a Vivek could make a good story for a solution. Trump could do it too. Trump likes to keep things a little simpler. So I don't know that this is his ideal approach. And he's. And, and Trump also is a little less facile about the new technology. So, you know, Vivek is going to understand the AI plus quantum computing changes everything. Trump might have heard that story, but I doubt that would become part of his narrative. It's a little bit more futuristic than Trump usually talks. But to be fair, when Trump talks about building these new cities from scratch, I think that the new technologies plus the new cities could be the biggest boom in building and industrial everything. Could solve housing by bringing the cost down. There's just a whole bunch of ways that Trump could use a real estate focus to fix the economy. But he would fix energy first. Trump would fix energy because that's a big part of the building and construction puzzle. Yeah, Trump is actually very good about talking about, you know, the golden future, but I don't know if he could quite get AI robots and quantum computing right. Vivek could. There's a reason I'm biased or young. Right. It makes sense to be a little biased toward the young at the moment. Speaking of that, do you know that the politicians who are driving up our debts, the most powerful politicians, are the ones who are about a year away from being dead themselves. If you are a year away from being dead, do you think you should be in charge of driving up the debt for the United States for the next hundred years and you're going to be dead in a year and you're in charge of deciding what the Rest of us will do for the next hundred years. Now, I saw some pushback on that because I said it on X and the pushback was, but Scott, all of these ancient people, they've got kids, they've got grandkids, of course they care about them, so they care about the future as much as anybody does. To which I replied, have you met people? Let me explain something about people. They really do make selfish decisions and they really do follow the money, even if it's bad for their grandkids. That's people. Now I'd love to tell you that there are people making the grandkid decision and there are, but I don't think that's what drives the politicians. I think they say to themselves, I could try to solve an unsolvable problem and fail, which is how to get the debt down. Or I could just vote for one more omnibus bill and I'm going to be dead in a few years anyway, you know, it's never going to come back to bite me. And then they'd say, well, grandchildren will work it out. Life's never been easy. Grandkids will work it out one way or the other. So I think it does make a big difference that the people voting on the debt are 100 years old. I suggest the following Fix that the only members of Congress who can vote on debt, long term debt, have to be under 50 years old. And if you're over 50, you can't vote on debt or any kind of spending bill. Then I would say public, you are free to elect anybody you want. If you'd like your representative to be over 50, just know that your state will not be involved in any of the budget decisions. They can talk about it, but they don't get to vote. Because letting people who won't be here to pay the debt decide how much debt you have is a stupid system. And if you think that have them having grandkids is going to save you, that's not how people work. They just don't. I wish they did, but they don't. So that'll never happen, but might be the only way to survive. There's a new study that says two of the things that predict a marriage lasting There are two factors psychologists found. One is that the man has high verbal intelligence. Does that surprise you? If the man has high verbal intelligence? What goes along with high verbal intelligence? Is there anything else correlated with that besides long marriages? I see the suggestion a huge penis, but I don't think that's what I was going for. Well, I don't know. Let's see if there is anything else about the second thing that suggests a long marriage. See, the second thing is that the man in the marriage is able to buy new and more expensive car. Cars. That also signals longevity. So what would having the ability to buy new expensive cars have in common with a man who has high intellect and verbal abilities? Could it be that money makes people stay? The person with the high IQ and the high verbal ability probably has a good job. That's what that gets you. If they're able to buy new cars, probably got money, good job, and women like to be in stable situations. Of course, everybody does. But the researchers said at least the car part has something to do with signaling higher social status. Money, the car is just a signal of money. It's not the car. Although women do like women do see their mate and the mate's car as their accessories. By the way, this is one of the best ways to think about this. I know people and I used to be one. How dumb I was when I was young. I used to think that I would not be judged by the quality of my automobile. I know, pretty stupid. I used to think women aren't going to care. They're going to care about my wonderful personality, my, my empathy, my conversation style, my ability to engage things. You know, maybe my, my clever thoughts. Yeah. My haircut. Yeah. My. I thought those are the things with that would really influence women. But it turns out it's your car. It's your car. Yeah. I've told you the story of how I learned that the hard way. When I was in my 20s, I guess I had the worst little you'll never get laid car in the world. I mean, I'm not even going to describe it, but it was sad. Nobody would ever get in that car and think, you know, I sure want to have sex with the owner of this car. I guarantee you nobody ever had that thought. So one day when things were going a little bit better in my career, this was before Dilbert, but my corporate career was advancing on time. And I bought a very old BMW, but it was still a BMW. And one day I pulled it into the parking garage. It was brand new and I wanted to get the opinion of some other people. And my neighbor had a couple of girls who were twins who happened to be hanging out in the the parking lot. And I knew them pretty well because they lived right across the hall. And I said to them, they noticed the new car and they said something. I said, all right, what do you think of the car? And they're like, oh, we love it, we love it. And I said, do you think that women will like me better because I have this car now. Remember, these are like nine year old twin girls. And the nine year olds said, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Like their eyes got big. It's like for sure, no doubt about it. And I'm thinking it starts that early. The nine year old girls are completely aware that if I don't have a good car, I'm not going to get any action at nine years old. They knew that. And once you understand that your car is a reflection of the woman who's in it, like she's not going to want to be painted with the embarrassment of your automobile that the paint is falling off. But if you got a good car, it's like a good accessory. And same for how you dress and how tall you are and if you have hair and all that stuff. Yes, people are shallow, but you'll get used to it. All right, what is it that links the various groups on the left, the pro Palestine people, with the climate people, with the gay rights people with the indigenous rights people, et cetera? Apparently it's some kind of intersectionality. And I was reading some tweets by Michael Nana, but one thing they have in common, all of those groups that you would think would be completely different groups is a victim narrative. And the oppressor is always the same person. It's always, you know, somebody white. So everybody who is not a white person with money thinks that all of their groups have in common. If only, if only those white people would do something differently, things would be better for all the rest of us. So that's what they have in common. So to say that they are illegitimate would be an understatement. All right, I guess the US Is telling Qatar, Qatar to give up the Hamas leader who lives in luxury in Qatar. I would like to suggest the following technique for getting that guy. I think Israel and or the United States in conjunction should say to Qatar, this guy is dead. The only thing you have to decide is where he is when it happens. We're going to kill him in Qatar if we don't have a choice and we're going to do it on Tuesday. I think that's the way you have to play it. Because as long as Qatar thinks that this is a point of negotiation or that maybe it won't happen, they're going to act that way. You have to take away from them any notion that this guy isn't going to die on Tuesday. You have to say, Tuesday he dies. The only question that we're asking you is where you want him to be. If you want him to be in one of your nicest high rise buildings, we are going to take him out there and it's going to be Tuesday and there will be casualties. Now, I know, Cutter, you're going to have to do everything you can to punish us back in whatever way you can, and we're going to take that punishment. But the only thing that's not going to happen is he's going to be alive on Wednesday. The only thing we can guarantee you is he's going to be dead. You only get to decide where it happens and when, not even when you get to decide where. So we'd like you to give him up. But if you want to just walk him out to the desert where we can kill him, that would be great. But if you want him to be in one of your very expensive high rises in the middle of your main city, we'll do that too, on Tuesday. On fucking Tuesday. I don't see any other way to handle it. Do you? Now, this is something that you couldn't do under any other context than the October 7th horrors. After those horrors, everybody knows you're not kidding, right? If they thought you were bluffing, they'd play it that way. Do you think Israel's bluffing? Would you think Israel was bluffing if they said, we're going to take out two stories of that building and we're going to do it on Tuesday and there's nothing you can do about it, and whatever you do to us, we'll take it? No, they would mean it. And I think they could do it. So that's the way I'd play it. I wouldn't act like maybe Qatar has a choice. They only have a choice of where. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the best live stream you'll see today. We'll talk lots more about other stuff at other times. I hope this was useful to you. And what, have MBS make the call? Yeah, maybe. All right. Thanks for joining YouTube. I'll talk to you tomorrow.