Episode 1400 Scott Adams： It's My Birthday So Come Say Hi
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
152.94447
Summary
Happy Birthday to me, and it's good to see all of you. You know how many people knew it was my birthday today? And so I looked up a list of famous people to see whose birthdays are shared with me?
Transcript
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Well, happy birthday to me, and it's good to see all of you.
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You know, I was wondering how so many people knew it was my birthday today,
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and I realized that famous people, their birthdays are often publicized.
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And so I looked up a list of famous people to see whose birthdays are shared with me.
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So, here's the list of famous people who share my birthday,
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I'm probably pretty close to the top of this list, wouldn't you think?
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Well, let's look at the list. You got Kanye West.
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Happy birthday, Kanye. Good day for a birthday. Glad I'm sharing it with you.
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Other famous people. Frank Grillo. Never heard of him.
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Tim Berners-Lee. Oh, okay. Nice to have a birthday with a founder of the Internet.
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We got Tori DeVito, Shilpa Shetty, Nancy Sinatra, Julianna Margulies.
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I met her once. Joan Rivers. Wow. Frank Lloyd Wright. All on my birthday.
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You got Bonnie Tyler, Keenan Ivory Williams. Wow.
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Barbara Bush, Griffin Dunn, Gabrielle Giffords, Rob Pilatus.
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There are a lot of famous people with his birthday.
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but someday I'll make it to the top 100 birthdays on my own birthday.
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Would you like to enjoy the Simultaneous Sip Special Birthday Edition?
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And all you need is a cuppermanger, a glass, a tank of chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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Here, the dope ahead of the day, dopamine ahead of the day,
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the thing that makes everything better is called the Simultaneous Sip and I have is now go.
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How do you like that sip of coffee when the temperature is just right?
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Let's talk about all the things that are coming.
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So, I watch with fascination as the evolution toward self-driving cars.
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And thank you, everybody, for the birthday wishes.
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So, there's a company called Cruise that is pretty far along.
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They've got a self-driving car that has just got permitted to operate in California.
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And what's different is this one doesn't require a human operator to take the controls if something goes wrong.
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So, until now, we did have self-driving cars, but it required a human to be in the passenger seat to take over.
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And it looks like this is the first one that's made the next step.
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Now, I don't know if I would be the first one to get in this.
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And I've been watching this driverless car thing.
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And what's interesting is there's a whole bunch of companies that are getting into it.
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And one assumes that someday, I don't know, Apple and Google will have a car, whatever.
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But it's not going to be like one day there are self-driving cars.
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But one of the questions that I wonder about is, what's it like to be a human driver on the highway with some self-driving cars and some human-driven cars?
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Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a big part of driving anticipating what the other driver will do?
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When you come to a stop, let's say a four-way stop, don't you look at the faces of the drivers?
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Because if their face is looking at you, you know they saw you.
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If their face is looking the other direction and they're inching forward, you stop.
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Because you're not looking at the car, you're looking at the face.
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So they've got one disadvantage that humans don't have.
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But also, I can't look at the face of a self-driving car.
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How long will it take me to learn when the self-driving car recognizes me?
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It's almost like the self-driving cars need another, some kind of other option.
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Something that tells you that this other car now has a full understanding of your existence and what you're doing.
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As long as I know the other car knows what I'm up to, I'm okay.
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But until I know it knows where I am and what I'm doing, I don't know.
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You know, I mentioned this the other day, but it's becoming more and more hardened as a reality.
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One history will say, hey, there was a big old pandemic.
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The other history is what some members of the right are forming into their own reality, which is the pandemic didn't happen.
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There was a virus, and the virus was real, and people got it and people died, so that part is not in question.
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What's question is, is anything unusual, did anything unusual happen in terms of viruses?
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Or was the unusual thing only the way we reacted to this one?
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And we're just going to have to live with two realities.
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We will have two completely different histories, one in which the virus never happened as a pandemic, but it happened as a normal, little extra aggressive seasonal virus that we overreacted to.
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How many of you buy into the opinion that the pandemic was largely an illusion and not really much worse than a normal flu?
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I just want to see in your comments if that's becoming a popular view or not.
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There are roughly as many people who think the pandemic didn't exist as there are who think they lived through one.
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How do you reconcile two histories that are opposites?
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It's not like we're talking about something that was hypothetical and it's in our history books.
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You and I, and everyone watching this right now, we just, we're in it still.
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We're living through it in real time and still a large segment of the population thinks it isn't real.
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Well, I'm in the camp that says something happened and some people were dying and whether we overcounted them or not, it's still in the millions.
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Let's call it a survey because that's what it is.
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A survey about whether more people got the COVID when they were wearing masks or not wearing masks.
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If you haven't seen, for those of you who have not seen it yet, so don't ruin it yet.
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So they did a poll and they said, how much did you wear masks and then did you get coronavirus?
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And they determined, and I won't tell you the answer yet, but what do you think?
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Did the people who wore the masks more often get fewer infections or more of them or the same?
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In the comments, tell me what you think it turned out.
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So most of you have not seen this survey, obviously.
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So one of those conditions, either wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, one of those two conditions doubled your risk of getting infection.
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Was it the people who wore the masks who were safer?
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Or was it the people who didn't wear masks who were safer?
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Because there are a lot of people who think the masks are causing problems.
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The answer is, according to the Ipsos-Axios poll, that people who did not regularly wear masks had twice the infections.
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The people who didn't wear masks were twice as likely to be infected, based on self-reporting, right?
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In the comments, somebody says, this is not a gold standard of reporting, or a gold standard study.
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There's nobody thinks that this passes any kind of scientific gold standard, right?
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So the fact that there's this one survey that does show a really big difference, though.
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If the masking difference showed a difference of, say, 10 or 20%, let's say, hypothetically,
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I'd say to myself, I don't know that you could measure that, really.
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That's too small of a hypothetical difference to be sure there weren't other variables in there mucking up your result.
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So 10 to 20%, I would have said, that doesn't tell us anything.
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Well, you know, let's just say, hypothetically, let's say the polling was done well.
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When I do a Twitter poll, I know it's highly unscientific.
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Because, you know, my followers are not even close to any kind of a random sample.
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And still, if I run a Twitter poll and the results are 10 to 1 in one direction,
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But if it's, you know, a 10% chance, obviously, it means nothing.
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I would say this is not conclusive or close to it.
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And the best way to know that something is true is if it agrees with your prior opinion.
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So this agrees with what I already thought to be true, which is masks are more likely to work than not.
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One of the obvious problems with this is that people don't wear masks for the same reasons and risks are different.
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And, you know, one of the reasons you might wear masks a lot is because you perceive a risk, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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So there's a million problems wrong with the poll, but I'll bet it will hold up.
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If somebody said to you, Scott, you can't avoid making this bet.
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And you have to put all of your money on whether masks made a difference or they didn't.
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I would bet all of my money that it made a difference.
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Now, this is under the assumption that I had to bet one way or the other.
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I would prefer not betting because I'm not that confident.
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You know, I'd need something like 99% confidence to bet everything I have.
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But in this hypothetical where I had to bet, yeah, I would bet that they work.
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Because I have committed to a position early on in the pandemic.
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Do you remember early on when the experts were saying masks don't work?
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And I believe, and by the way, I would love a fact check on this.
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If there's anybody who can give me a fact check.
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I believe, but I can't confirm it yet, that I'm the first public figure to call bullshit on Fauci, et cetera, saying that masks don't work.
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Now, given that I've made such a public commitment to that view that masks almost certainly work, this was my view early on before we had data, it just seems logically that they would.
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Given that I made that commitment, I am no longer able to be objective when I look at, say, a result like this poll, because I want it to agree with me, right?
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Who doesn't want to be right on their birthday?
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Everybody wants to be right, especially on their birthday.
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So you should not take me as a credible source when I tell you, hey, this poll looks pretty credible, because I want it to be true.
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I want it to be true because that makes me feel good and me look good.
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But in terms of you judging my credibility on this question, it should be zero, because I've set up the perfect condition for cognitive dissonance.
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By taking a public stand and putting my reputation behind it, and it's a big question, right?
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Like, people may have lived or died, literally lived or died, on the question of whether they believed masks worked or didn't.
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So, yeah, you should not believe me on that topic, but I'll report what I see on the topic.
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If there's a big study that disagrees with me, I'm not going to like it.
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But I promise you I'll report it so you've heard it.
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You know, I've been reading a lot about China lately.
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You've got a fentanyl problem, a Uyghur genocide problem.
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They've got a stealing IP problem, maybe not too forthcoming on the virus.
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And, you know, when you put it all together, I'm starting to think that China doesn't have our best interests in mind.
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CNN reports that, I guess now we have a recording of a 2019 phone call in which Rudy Giuliani was, according to the CNN headline,
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this is how they said it, Rudy Giuliani cajoled and pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Biden.
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Now, the reporting on this is very interesting because it suggests that CNN knows how investigations turn out before they're started.
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It is because it turns out that CNN has done this with the election audits.
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CNN is already reporting the result of the audit that didn't happen yet, or at least it's not complete yet.
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This is really happening right in front of you.
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CNN is telling you the outcome of an audit before the audit's over.
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They're accepting it as if that makes any sense.
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Now, it would certainly be fair for them to say, based on everything we've seen and reported,
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we're not expecting that the audit will come up with any surprises.
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Based on everything we've seen and reported so far,
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we have no reason to believe that the audit will kick up some surprises.
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But when you say it's baseless, you're kind of suggesting you know how it's going to turn out.
00:18:13.240
They did, I would say, similar things with the Russian collusion.
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Obviously, the Mueller investigation was ongoing.
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But it seems to me that CNN reported it as a fact all along, before it was done.
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And now this Ukraine investigation that never happened,
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but somehow CNN knows what the result would be for the investigation that never happened.
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So these are three clear, I think, clear examples of where CNN knew the result of an investigation
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Now, I'm not saying that Fox News doesn't do their own stuff you can criticize, right?
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But I'm saying this specific trick, where they know the outcome of something before the end,
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But I can't remember any time that Fox News has ever told us the outcome of a study
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It turns out that criminal organizations, mafia types, have been using an encryption technology
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in which you would take a phone that had been crippled for all other purposes except for
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this one encrypted app, and it could only talk to people who also had a crippled phone
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So it was like a really special, super-secret encrypted thing that's better than, you know,
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Telegram, it's better than Signal, it's better than WhatsApp, because those are just, you
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But in this one, you had to have an actual special phone that could only talk to the other special
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Except law enforcement has had that encryption broken for a long time, and they've been watching
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the entire criminal enterprises revealing all of their secrets for a long time until they
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just did a big roll-up and arrested a bunch of people.
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Now, technically they're encrypted, in the sense that encryption happens in a, you know,
00:21:14.460
If you were on the ski slope in Wyndham, New York, you saw my house, because you just looked
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Here's why there's no such thing as a safely encrypted app.
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My goodness, you, Jin Jian, you are way too nice.
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I certainly appreciate it, but I'm not worth it.
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So there's no such thing as a really encrypted app, and here's why.
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As soon as the human being gets it, it's no longer a secret message.
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It's a message that some damn person can tell anybody they want.
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Because the moment you think your messages are secret, you're fucked.
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Because the person on the other end is not encrypted.
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Actually, I don't know the answer to that question.
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How do you know that insiders haven't already gone
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to the developers for whatever app you're using
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If you don't give us a backdoor to your encrypted app,
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we will shut your operation down one way or another.
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that your app developer had a secret conversation with the FBI?
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So you would be a sucker to use encrypted apps.
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Because an encrypted app is exactly where people
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Now, it might not be that your neighbor can read your encrypted app,
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but your neighbor wasn't reading your other mail either.
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Your neighbor wasn't getting into your text messages.
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The people who can't get into your messages at all or don't care
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So this example of the mafia super secret encryption
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that should tell you everything you need to know
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Don't write anything down in any form if it's bad.
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but it looks like it wasn't in the news this morning.
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and somehow clawed back that money that was paid?
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So how did the FBI get a hold of the secret passcode,
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are supposed to be all secret and secure, right?
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if you had already known you had a hacker group,
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So you don't need to penetrate the Bitcoin itself,
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But you might be able to get their entire network
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when they're typing in their passcode or something.
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Can somebody who's a little more technically astute
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they could certainly get a hold of their passcode
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I think they would have to go after the people,
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would be protecting themselves from being hacked.
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because she does not know how to talk in public.
00:30:08.100
But you need to answer that question directly, right?
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the number of days she hasn't visited the border
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if you can't answer a simple question like that.
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Let me give you the correct media answer, okay?
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people are concerned that you haven't visited the border
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and yet you're in charge of making sure Central America
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So yes, I'm definitely going to visit the border.
00:31:55.500
But I do think that for the benefit of the public,
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the most obvious question you'll ever be asked?
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for somebody who's likely to run for president.
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But he really is doing one right thing after another.
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So there's something called the Confucius Institute,