Episode 1426 Scott Adams: Freedom and Coffee. Mmm-mm

And it's the best time of the day. Coming to you live from YouTube and from locals. I'm going to be taking some questions a little bit later because it's a slow news day and I'll be taking questions from the locals people. Give them a little advantage for being on the subscription platform. I opened it up today, so if you're. If you wanted to check it out, you would not be behind the paywall. Just for today, testing the live streaming. Hey, would you like to enjoy the 4th of July more than you've ever enjoyed it before? All it would require is the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cup of Margaret, glass of tanker chalice to style, A canteen jug of 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 the 4th of July extra, extra special. Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip, but it's going to happen now all around the world. Go. Now. If you are thinking to yourself, I'd like to take a nine mile run, but I can't do it until the simultaneous sip. Well, time to start running because you just had the simultaneous set. I got a suggestion from a user. I thought it was quite good because I'm wearing two lapel mics. I was doing one about the other, but I think I like the nipple look. So on my left nipple we have the locals listeners on my right nipple. YouTube, that's called fair. So before I take questions from the locals people, and maybe some from the YouTube crowd as well, how's it feel? How's it feel? Now, I'm talking mostly to Americans when I ask that question, but the rest of you, feel free to join in. As you know, today is one of our sacred American holidays, Freedom Day, Independence Day. And I've been saying for quite many months that for me, July 4th would be my personal Independence Day. Our mics in. You said the volume is low on YouTube. Well, that is not the case. The volume is perfect on YouTube. Just check it. Make sure I'm actually plugged in before I say that. Yes, I'm plugged in. And so the volume is low. Some say the sound is fine. Okay, so it's just the trolls. Apparently that's a normal troll thing to come in and say the volume is low just to ruin the live cast. But sometimes it actually is. So it's a really good troll. But I'm going to ignore all the rest of the volume stuff. Okay, so everybody who's saying stuff on volume, don't bother. I'm not. I'm not going to look at it from now on. I really am going to just turn this off if you don't stop. All right? I feel better than I have felt in a long time because I do think, at least in the United States, we got through this pandemic. And it was. I don't know about the rest of you, but by far the worst year I've had in decades. Maybe my 20s weren't so hot, but I think I might turn off the comments. Is there a way to turn off the comments? See? All right. Not sure if that makes a difference or not. So I may have turned off the comments on YouTube because they're. That didn't work. Screw it. Well, anyway, it's Independence Day, and we're feeling really good here in the United States. I hope you are, those of you who are here, because we did something quite remarkable. This whole vaccination thing. I know you're not all fans of it, but there's no doubt that it made a difference at this point. And, yeah, I was trying to hide the comments. I don't see the way to do that. Hide all chat messages. There we go. Oh, there we go. So if you want to. If you want to chat, go over to locals. Locals. Scott adams.locals.com you should find it. All right, so 67% of Americans got at least one dose. CNN is reporting that as Biden falling short of his target of 70%. Does that seem fair to you? Does it seem fair to you that Biden had this target of 70% of Americans getting at least one dose by the holiday, but he only got 67%. Does it feel to you like you should report that as a failure? I'm not the one who is Mr. Pro Biden, but let's see. Having a little problem with this interface, too. Well, at the same time I had the messages for YouTube, the messages on Locals stopped working. All right, so I got a bug there where the jump to recent messages is not working. Wow. Almost everything's not working today. Do you ever have one of those days when literally nothing works? Apparently I'm waking up to that this morning. So 67% seems pretty good to me. If I were CNN, who is supportive of Biden in general, I would report this as success. If Trump had said he would get 70% of people vaccinated by today and he had 67%, I wouldn't call that falling short. Not really. I mean, it's pretty darn good. And one of the things that people forget is that these goals are almost always random. Right. When Biden said 70%, what was that based on? Wasn't based on anything. So my guess is that a lot of people did great work and got it to 67%. And that's pretty darn good. So I would call it a success for Biden. I'm sure Trump would have succeeded as well. So it's not like the biggest success, but it's a success. We should be happy about it. Here's a big development that's just kind of weird. So Christopher Ruffo, who some of you know has been taking a prominent role in railing against schools teaching critical race theory, the idea being that the teaching itself is just a different form of racism. Nothing against the idea of informing students about our history. No problem with telling people the honest history. It's just the way that it's taught seems to be just another kind of racism and not making things better. So the criticism is that. And one of the biggest pushbacks had been that, you know what? I'm going to have to fix this technical problem, because when I KFC comments, it is just no fun at all. Oh, there we go. All right. That was a user error. So there's nothing wrong with the locals platform. Boom. All right. I guess I was frozen, but now I'm back. Good. Okay. So one of the big pushbacks was that critical race theory was, in fact, not being taught in schools. So we had all these people saying, hey, why are you teaching critical race theory in schools? And the biggest pushback was, that's not happening. Nobody's doing that. Why are you complaining about something? You're just imagining there's no critical race theory being taught in schools? Well, the biggest teachers union, the NEA, represents 3 million public school employees in all 50 states. They have a $350 million annual budget, an army of operatives. I'm just reading from Christopher ruffo's tweet. And 14 operatives in 14,000 local communities, and they've just declared war on parents, according to Christopher, who oppose critical race theory. So they've made it. Apparently their number one objective is to teach critical race theory and also to push back against parents who are opposed to it. So that's your teacher's union. Now, here's what's ironic about this. What's ironic is that the teachers unions are the biggest source of systemic racism. So their entire number one priority is to shift blame from themselves as unambiguously the biggest source of ongoing systemic racism. Because if you were to fix the schools such that anybody could get a good education, let's say you had school choice, and then competition would improve things like it always does. If you didn't have these teachers unions blocking school choice, which is what they do, it's one of their biggest effects. If they didn't block school choice, we would already have the ability to improve. And, you know, the market forces would allow people to take their funding with them to whatever school they wanted instead of funding the school without the kid. And by now, everybody who was born in a bad situation would at least have a good base education, or at least the opportunity for one. And if everybody got a good base education, what would happen to systemic racism would still be here in every bit as much as before. If the only thing you did was change the schools, just the schools would be better. But that's most of the problem. If everybody got a good education, all of the other systemic racism would end up being almost trivial. Well, you know, a great annoyance in life, let's say, but it wouldn't stop you from succeeding. If you're a black American with a good education, you're fine just like everybody else in America. If you got a good education in something useful, some kind of useful thing, doesn't have to be college, could be a trade, but if you've got some useful skill, you're fine in America. So that would be the single biggest thing that anybody could do to fix systemic racism is to fix education. And the number one biggest problem, the teachers unions, is now fighting parents who want to stop this, stop critical race theory, and they've become the biggest example of their own problem. It's just weird. They are the problem, and they're presenting themselves as the solution to it while being obviously the problem. Weirder still, I was reading the Daily Mail, a British publication, and they often cover American news almost like it's local. So if you don't read the Daily Mail, it's very Americanized, but it's a British publication, and they had a story about a major teachers union wanting to teach critical race theory. And I thought it was this story, but I think an identical thing is happening at the same time in Great Britain, where the teachers union wants to teach more about colonization and colonialism and the bad history of racism in Great Britain. So it's happening everywhere. And anybody who thought that critical race theory was not really being taught in schools, well, joke's on you, because it is. All right, I've got the comments off on YouTube because you could only complain about the volume over there. So I'm going to take some questions on the locals platform and. Australia too. Somebody's saying that Australia is having the same situation with critical race theory. And it's really, it's tough to push back about it on it because you'll just be accused of being a racist. So there's all, there's sort of no way to win on this, is there? How many of you had any kind of, any kind of plans today? So we've got a little bit of plans of people coming over and we're all vaccinated so we're all safe. Is a call in function for locals getting worked on? Well, you know, the way to do that is to put it through a mixing board and just take the calls from a separate phone. So I could do that with the right equipment, but I haven't figured out how yet. All right. Yeah, well, we do know that pausing the live stream on locals would be a big thing. All right, those of you on YouTube, I, I've hidden the chat so I can't see your comments. Just for today. Fireworks sales band in Oregon. So you're going to the rodeo. Okay. Well, I don't see many questions today. Everybody seems to be in a festive mood. Heading to Cape Cod. Great. Which cartoonist did you admire growing up? Well, I tried to model my life after Charles Schulz. I remember when I was probably six years old, I saw an article, I think it was in Life magazine or Time or something, and it was sort of a story about this famous cartoonist called Charles Schulz. And interestingly being that he was an old white guy and I was a young white guy, I said to myself, that looks like me when I'm older. It actually looked like my future. And I set my sights on being a famous cartoonist. When I was about 11 years old, I gave up on it because I realized at about that time there was only one Charles Schulz and there were billions of people in the world. And I thought, well, what are my odds? So for a while I thought I would play the odds and become a lawyer or businessman or something like that. But eventually when that stuff didn't work out, did I watch the Trump rally yesterday? I did not. Where, where are they even being broadcast? So I don't think they broadcast them on Fox anymore, do they? Or do they? Oh, just on Rumble. Okay. Wow. A lot of comments coming through. So anybody on if you want to see the comments, threat scottadams.locals.com so I've, I've opened up the subscription service just for this. All right. Will Jeff Zucker be held accountable for what? I doubt it. Am I related to John Adams, the president? Not descended from. But I've chased my family tree back to Great Britain. Surprise. With the last name of Adams. So we might have been related at some point. All right. Might have been a cousin or something. Any future interviews? Well, I took a break from doing interviews, so I'm not sure how long that will, like, last. I found that I was doing lots and lots of interviews and wasn't getting my own work done. So I took a little pause from that. How can you keep up the news without polluting your mind? Well, watching this live stream is part of it because you can take a lot of different approaches to the news. You could take a pessimist or an optimist view. I try to take more of an optimist view. So far, the optimist view has worked out. Still pumping at the gym. I did rejoin my gym. So let me give you a little update on my gym. I won't say the name of it because don't want to get them in trouble, but they have very strict rules about wiping down your equipment after you're done. Now, do you know how many pieces of equipment I touch during a single workout in the gym? All I do is go from one machine to another machine. I go to the free weights, I'll do this weight for a while, and then I'll do another exercise with another weight. So I'm just touching stuff the whole time. And the rule is you got to wipe it all down. And so you have to walk over to a separate table, get your materials and your rags and stuff and come back and wipe it down and then take it back to the table and then go to your next thing. How do you think that's going? Have I ever told you that if you're going to design a system for human beings, you better account for human motivation, you better account for how people act. I would say that 10% of the clients are doing everything, anything close to wiping down the equipment. Because it took me exactly one visit to the gym where I tried to do that for a while because I'm pretty much a rule follower. My general approach is, hey, if some, especially a private company, if I willingly join a private company or I want to do business with them and they have a set of rules, I'm always going to follow those rules because I'm voluntarily joining into this process. But these are crazy rules. They don't fit science. I'm vaccinated. We know the virus barely ever travels on the surface, and I usually am wearing lifting gloves anyway for whatever difference that makes. And I'm surrounded by people, right? There are people in the gym, and we know it comes through the air. And I don't have to wear a mask. So what's up with that? All right, so what happened, as you might imagine, is that most of the people who go to the gym just said, you know, I think I would rather be kicked out of the gym than to have to do all this nonsense that doesn't make any sense. So people just stop doing it. And so far, the gym is being enlightened and letting people just be people. So. All right, All right. I've got to go figure something out here, and so I'm going to cut this short. But have a great Fourth of July if you're American. And if you're not, well, you could have a great. You could have a great Fourth of July, too. And I'll talk to you tomorrow.