Episode 1404 Scott Adams: A Sip Before I Travel

Well, well, well. What a day today is going to be. Let me tell you about my day before we get to the simultaneous sip. You may have heard that I plan to take a vacation today. I might, but I don't know yet if I'm going to go on the vacation of a lifetime in about an hour and a half or not. Here's my problem. So my destination, just so you know, is Santorini, Greece. Little island off of Greece. Very expensive. Like insanely expensive. So expensive. I would only do this once in my life. Probably would never spend this much money on another vacation. Just, just once I wanted to spend some Dilbert money. It's a prepaid vacation, so the money's already spent whether I go or not. And the good news about Greece is that they allow you to go in if you've had your second vaccination. You don't need to wait the two weeks after the second vaccination. Which is good because it's only about 12 days since my second vaccination. So no problem at all flying from the United States into Greece if you're fully vaccinated. But yesterday afternoon ran into a little wrinkle. Turns out that we have a three and a half hour layover in Germany and Germany doesn't let you in until you've got two weeks, two days short. Can't even fill out the paperwork to get on the plane. So as of right now, I don't know if I'm going to Greece on the trip of a lifetime that I would leave right after this broadcast. So yesterday afternoon, Christina finds the last place in San Francisco that's available to give you a test and a result. A COVID test. Because the alternative is you got to get a COVID test. So if I could get a COVID test and a result that's negative prior to getting on the flight, I can go. I won't be able to know the result of the test for two more hours, which is about when the car service leaves to pick me up. So one of two things is going to happen. By 9am this morning, my time, I will either unpack all of my bags and watch Christina go on the trip of a lifetime, because she might as well go, you know, if I can, if I could go or not, it's already prepaid. She might as well go. But I will either unpack my bags or go on the trip of a lifetime that I've already paid for. No, I'm not taking a private jet. But it's a. It's a hell of a That's a hell of a flight. So I sped to San Francisco, defying possibly some speeding limits, Got my test taken. And if it's not a false positive, think about this. If it's a false positive, which is probably the only thing it could be because I'm pretty well vaccinated. If it's a false positive, I don't get to go. And that's a pretty good possibility. If they lose it or they have a typo on it, I don't get to go. If it's late, I don't get to go. If they forgot to send it into the lab last night, I don't get to go. So I don't know if I'm going on the trip of a lifetime, but I might. In the meantime, let's see if we can enjoy ourselves with this simultaneous sip. All you need is a copper mug or a glass A tank or chalice is tying a canteen sugar 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 hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens. Now go. Want to hear a weird coincidence? So I mentioned on my live stream that I had a trip upcoming, but I didn't say anything about it. I didn't say it was overseas. I just said I had a trip coming. I get a message from Dr. Drew, who I've known for some time through the Internet and interviews on his show, etc. And Dr. Drew said, where are you going? Because I have a feeling we're going to the same place. Now, how weird is that, right? What are the odds that out of the entire planet that he and I would be going to the same place at the same time? It was even weird question, right? Like, why would you even ask? So I told him where I was going, and it turns out we'll be within walking distance. So we're probably going to get together and have lunch. That's right. We're going to the same freaking place on the other side of the planet within walking distance. And he guessed that with no clues. What is going on? How do you guess that with no clues, other than I have a vacation planned? Not only that, but if I get on the flight, it's going to be the same flight, I think. Or at least the flight from Germany might be the same. So that's what's going on. Let's talk about the news. There was a diver off of Cape Cod who was swallowed by a whale and then spit out. You know, I have to tell you that my own religious training went off the rails when I heard about Jonah and the whale. When I heard the Bible story about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish, then spit out some days later. Perfectly fine. I said to myself, you know, I'm not sure I can buy into this religion. And that was sort of the breaking point for me was the Jonah story. But I think I'm gonna have to reassess my entire religious upbringing because there was an actual diver who was swallowed by a whale and then the whale spit him out. Now, technically he wasn't in the whale's stomach, but he was completely within the whale's mouth. I guess the whale was doing this lunge feeding, it's called, where they just open their mouth and go through a bunch of stuff and just eat everything that's in the way. He happened to be in the way. So he had his scuba, not scuba, but diving gear on so he could still breathe while he was in the whale's mouth for about 30 seconds. And the whale breached and spit him out. And he was like. And next thing you know, he was a little shaken, but not stirred. So I don't know if he was praying when he was in there, but maybe a giant fish can eat a person and spit him out. Fine. I don't know. NASA is testing an electric plane. Why? I don't really know why does NASA have anything to do with commercial flight? But I guess they do because they're testing their own electric airplane for use on Earth as part of developing standards for commercial aircraft. So this is sort of a big deal because airplanes are going to be electric and all those airplanes that you hated that are the same technology for 30 years, maybe, maybe we can get a new kind of air travel that's not horrible. I'm going to spend maybe 18 hours on a plane today or unpacking and staying home. One of those two things is going to happen. But I would sure like to have a better way to fly. Maybe these electric planes will be a way to re energize the the fleets. So Bill Maher is getting a lot of criticism for being open minded and not taking aside and just arguing that side, no matter how stupid it is. And he's arguing that progressives have something called progressophobia. I think things. Steven Pinker came up with that. But it's. If you think things are worse now, like more racist or more sexist now than they have been in the past you probably have a mental problem because everything is better now. There's nothing that's worse. Literally everything in that social realm is better. There's no exceptions. And if you think it's getting worse instead of better, you probably have a mental problem. Bill Maher also blasts Biden's idea of free college because he points out, rightly, wait a minute. Why should people who don't go to college or can't pay for people who do, especially when those people may be partying more than studying? How does that make sense? Perfectly fair point. So Bill Maher is becoming a Republican, whether he likes it or not. That's my interpretation. Not. Not his. Of course. Now, I think he would be more likely to say that he's just looking at the issues, and I think that's fair to say. I've told you about the Ivermectin saga, and Brett Weinstein had Dr. Pierre Corian and did a. Did a podcast, Dark Horse Podcast, and it's been banned from YouTube. So YouTube has decided that that conversation between a legitimate medical doctor who has a legitimate opinion could be right, could be wrong. But he's a qualified person talking in public, exercising freedom of speech. But that was removed from YouTube for allegedly violating their community guidelines against, quote, spam, deceptive practices and scams. Which one? It was the discussion of Ivermectin talking about the risk reward of a particular drug, which everybody agrees has not gone through the gold standard test. And everybody understands that we'd like that. That would be way better than anything else. But everybody also agrees that there's plenty of studies of lower quality, which, by and large, by a great majority, seem to point in one direction. Now, you can't talk about that without violating a rule against spam. Well, it wasn't spam. Deceptive practices. What was the deceptive practice? Talking in public and showing your work. Is that a deceptive practice? No, it's not even close to that. Is it a scam? No. Nobody talking on this podcast had a financial interest in Ivermectin. They were talking about it. What exactly was the guideline that they violated? Well, apparently the. It's still up on, I think, Spotify and probably Apple's podcasts, so you can still hear the audio of it, but YouTube's decided that we can't have that. Now, I will tell you that there are also professionals who say ivermectin, the science proves it doesn't work. So just be aware that there are people with equal qualifications who say, no, it's been proven it doesn't work. We have everything we need to know to know it doesn't work. At the same time, other professionals also very qualified saying, oh, yeah, it's totally proven, I mean, effectively proven, because the weight of evidence is so strong. So that's your experts for you. They can't really help you on this one. Hey, how about that Arizona audit, huh? I keep telling you that if you don't hear anything from it, anything important, there's probably nothing there because by now they would know if there were, if a problem was going to happen. Apparently the results are going to come out in less than 10 days. But we would know by now, right? They don't have to count every single vote to know that there's a problem. They would, they would catch that early on. If it's a big problem, it would be obvious early. You wouldn't have to wait till the end. And so I asked the question about that on Twitter and Josh Barnett, who's, I guess he's run for Congress in Arizona, so he's connected to the Republicans in Arizona, it sounds like, and he seems to have some kind of an inside knowledge of what's going on over there. And I asked the question, is it more than a chain of custody problem? Because there is some suggestion that some of the mail in ballots were not documented in their chain of custody. So that you wouldn't know if anything happened in between the time that they were received and the time they were counted. But that wouldn't change the result. Even if it turns out that there's a chain of custody problem, it's not going to overthrow the election. They're still going to say, well, you should have caught that earlier, or something like that. Basically, at this point, nothing's going to change. But I asked if that was going to be the extent of what they found, and Josh Burnett tells me it is not. That is not the extent of what they found. And we'll all find out in 10 days. And he sounds pretty confident that we'll hear something that might surprise us or maybe it won't surprise you. We'll find out. I'm going to be a skeptic on this until something changes my mind. So I'm going to be skeptical and say, I don't think the Arizona audit is going to come up with a smoking gun, because I feel like I'd know it by now. All right. Now, if they're unusually professional and they've kept a secret better than anybody's ever kept a secret, except maybe the Mueller report, they Did a good job of keeping the secret, but of course they were also a charities and it's a, that's a different level of risk. Right. I feel like you could trust professional attorneys and investigators a little bit more not to leak than you could trust a bunch of people who volunteered to do an audit. It's a different standard, I would think of, of risk lawyers having a bigger risk to the reputation. Kim Jong Un is apparently losing weight, quite a bit of weight, I dare say. He looks great in his recent, recent photos. Like actually it looks great. Now it's being treated as they don't know if it's good health or bad health, but they're keeping an eye on it. Well, it looks like good health to me. The, the photos of him looking, looking thinner. He looks really healthy. So I know I, I don't think it's necessarily good or bad news. It's just interesting. He's losing weight. All right. Have you noticed that Fox News is running non stop videos of usually people of color complaining about critical race theory? So you're seeing that a lot on the right. Do you see any of those stories on CNN or msnbc? Has either MSNBC or CNN ever? And maybe the answer is yes. So this is actually a question, not a statement. Have they ever run one of those video clips where, where there's a concerned parent, could be black, could be a person of color, some other color, talking in public at say a school board meeting or wherever they're meeting, town meeting and talking about critical race theory being a disaster. I feel like it only is shown on one side of the world now. Beware of anecdotal evidence. So no matter how many individual stories you see of there's a black woman railing against critical race theory, it doesn't mean that most people are against it or even know what it is really. So I wouldn't make too much of anecdote, but I would note that Fox News is making a big deal of it and CNN is not. Now how important would it be to discredit critical race theory? Is it important to the health of the country? Because the news has this weird responsibility, doesn't it? The news is trying not to give you opinion mixed with the news part. CNN doesn't try too hard to do that. But other news does try to, you know, keep the news and the opinion at least a little bit separate. And. It just seems to me that maybe Fox News has decided that critical race theory is bad for the country and other news entities have not. So one thinks it's News and the other thinks, maybe not so much. But I heard a way to frame this critical race theory and Marxism so I could understand it. And I feel like I understand it now for the first time. And I've told you before that I was confused about why it is that conservatives keep saying, hey, critical race theory, it's Marxism. And then I keep saying and. And connect a few more dots. Those are two different things in my mind. They're two different things. Why are they? Why does one lead to? Or why is it similar? I don't get it. So I did hear a good explanation of this yesterday, which is that Marxism is basically class warfare. The idea that the lower class needs to essentially take money, take it, overthrow the power of the existing power structure, the elites, the rich people, and basically flip the power structure so that the people are on top and nobody's rich. So that's what Marxism is. Critical race theory is just another name for that because their focus is on race, but it's still a class because they've equated a race, black people, with a class and underclass. Now, of course, there are plenty of exceptions, right? But it's close enough, at least for a political movement. It's sort of generally close enough that you can get a lot of people to say, yeah, yeah, let's, let's change the balance of power. And the thing you need to, that you need to work on is understanding. Are they parallels? Does one lead to the other? I don't think that's the right way to think of it. I would say that they're parallels that Marxism is class warfare. Critical race theory is class warfare with a twist, which is throwing in the race part. Marxism is just exactly the same thing, except they leave out the race part. So it's a little underpowered. As soon as you add the race part in, it's superpowered. So now you've got this shitty idea, Marxism, which basically ruins everything except that we've got this new brand that's like improved. It's like turbo powered with racism. Because you can't argue against racism, can you? Maybe you could argue that capitalism is better than socialism. You could argue that and you'd have plenty of evidence for it. But can you argue that black people should always be poor? You can't. You can't. So that little extra sauce turned Marxism into a more powerful brand, critical race theory. Now, of course, critical race theory is nothing but racism and a power grab, but it is on top of real things. Yeah, racism is real. I believe systemic racism is very Real, especially the T. Teachers unions ruining the schools so that people can't get a good education if they're lower income. But I think there are real problems. It's just that the critical race theory on top of it isn't really designed to solve those problems so much as a. Create a power change and maybe, maybe create a different set of victims and a different set of winners. I think what's different about critical race theory is, is it's not a win win proposition by design. Right. And, and suppose you took this frame and somebody says, hey, we'd like to teach critical race theory in school. And then you say, you know, I hear why you want to do that. I understand your reasons. But how about we do something that's a win win instead of a win lose? It's hard to argue against a win win. And critical race theory is clearly we win so that you lose. Now, their theory would be it's still fair. It's fair for poor people to win because the rich people have been winning up until now. Or you might change that too. It's fair for black Americans to win for a change because white Americans have been winning for so long. But they're not trying to hide the fact that they want to win at somebody's expense. And as long as you have that, you're going to rip the country apart. You need to find a way that everybody wins. Let me suggest a way. Black Americans and white Americans teaming up to fix education. What 75% of all your systemic racism comes right from that. The fact that the schools can't give you a balanced starting point. Fix that. It's where we all agree. There's nobody black who wants bad schools or bad trade education. There's nobody white who wants bad schools. And yet we have them. We have bad schools. Why not work on the biggest problem, education, by far the biggest problem? You're getting everybody trained to have a good job and therefore a good life. And we agree on that. So why would we find the smallest thing we could work on, that we disagree on and focus on that? It's not important. And it's a win lose scenario. And it ignores the important stuff. It's not even close. All right, so if we were serious about fixing race problems, we wouldn't be focusing on critical race theory. That would be the wrong way to go. Representative Chip Roy of Texas is introducing a bill to ban China from buying property in the US I think it might be focused on Texas because he talks about Texas's land, but without seeing the details, I Can't tell if this is intended to be. I think he. I think he intends it to be national. That's just my guess. I agree with this idea because China is such a big country that eventually, even if they don't perform as well as the United States, eventually they'll be bigger because they just have so many people and so much industry. So at some point, they'll have so much money that they can just buy stuff and basically destroy the United States by buying it. You know, for all practical purposes, Trump, I guess the Trump Department of Justice was investigating a leak or the leaks. And I think Adam Schiff, his phone records were looked at, and this is pretty scary stuff. So scary the CNN brought back the worse than Watergate guy to talk about it. Yes, that's right, Bernstein. The worse than Watergate guy was taken Animoth balls and he was wheeled up to CNN to say, Trump's actions go further than Nixon's. He's guilty of crimes against democracy. So Carl Bernstein spit and slobber all over the desk and tells us it's worse than Watergate. Even when he doesn't use the words, he's really saying worse than Watergate. So instead of saying worse than Watergate, where he gets mocked for saying worse than Watergate, he simply says, Trump's actions go further than Nixon's. Huh? What did Nixon do? Oh, Watergate. And Trump's actions go further than Nixon's. He's worse than Watergate. He found another way to say it. And that's your news. Well, Putin and Biden apparently are not going to meet. Well, they're going to meet, but they're not going to have a joint press conference afterwards. Why? Well, there's two reasons. One, Joe Biden doesn't want to stand next to Putin and act like Putin's, I guess, appear. So he doesn't want to give Putin the respect, I guess, or the attention or the, I don't know, national stage of standing next to him and answering questions. That's one. That's one interpretation. Perfectly good one. Possibly true. Here's another one. Maybe they don't want Biden to take unscripted questions with Putin standing next to him. Because if you see Biden trying to struggle with an unscripted question and not be able to do it, literally standing next to Putin, who's handling these questions like he's playing tennis. Poop, poop, boop, boop, boop, boop. It's not going to look good. All right, so I think this is the right decision by Biden because he can't play in that field. He's just not. He's just not capable. And so why do it? Putin was asked in an interview about Biden versus Trump. Here's what Putin said about Trump. He said Trump was talented, colorful. He's an extraordinary individual. Yep. Talented, colorful, extraordinary individual and not part of the establishment. Here's what he said about Joe Biden. Joe Biden's been in politics for a long time. So that's what he said about Biden. Those are all Biden's good qualities. He has been in politics for a long time. Feels like. Feels like not quite the compliment you would have expected. Feels like Putin has a preference. Sounds like Putin likes his. Trump. Not so happy about Biden. But one wonders what we should think about that. Should that make us like Biden better as a president? Because you'd want the person maybe that Putin likes the least, or do you want somebody who could work with Putin, but maybe Putin tries to take advantage of you if you just work with him? Don't know. Don't know. But it doesn't seem that Putin is a big fan of Joe Biden. And that is everything I wanted to tell you before I either get on a plane for an amazing vacation, or if I get a false positive on my COVID test, which I will know in an hour and a half, then I'm not going anywhere. Mark says, please consider organizing a donation camp campaign for Governor Abbott's wall. That would be the Texas wall that Texas is going to try to build on its own. Huh. So I don't think I want to get involved in a fundraiser for a wall. But let me ask you this. I'll leave you with one final question. What's the difference between Jeffrey Toobin and Donald Trump? Go. What is the difference between Jeffrey Toobin and Donald Trump? The answer is Trump is accused of stoking and insurrection. Do I need to finish the rest of the joke? So you're supposed to finish in the rest of the joke in your mind. That's how this one works. Yeah. The difference between Jeffrey Toobin and Trump is that Trump is allegedly guilty of stoking his insurrection. Okay, Okay. I see you get it. Thank you. Thank you. The. The naughtier version is on robots. Read news on Locals. If you are a subscriber to Locals, you will see more of my Jeffrey Toobin humor, because there's just so much of it you can do in the public domain. And I may be doing too much of it in the private domain, but nothing's funnier than Jeffrey Toobin on tv. I'm sorry. And by the way, I'm. I'm pro Jeffrey Toobin, not as a person necessarily, but as a public figure who got caught doing something dumb that I don't think should affect his career. I'm happy that his career is back on track. I think that's the standard we would all want to wish upon ourselves. So let's wish him well, and we'll. We'll be mad at him later when he says things we don't like. All right. And that is what you need to know for today. I will try to do this tomorrow, but there's a time difference. There's some travel. I'm probably not going to be able to, but we'll try. All right. See you soon.