Episode 1581 Scott Adams: Things Are Getting Interesting Out There. Let's Talk About it
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
139.12091
Summary
Alec Baldwin continues to defend himself, and Tulsi gabbard has a theory about the best way to get rid of Pandemic Flu. Scott Adams also talks about the recent shooting of a woman in Las Vegas, and why he thinks the government should have done more to prevent it.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams.
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It's probably the best thing that's going to happen to you all year.
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And if I have anything to do with it, I'm going to make this even better.
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Yeah, yeah, it always seems that way, and then I do it.
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Grab your copper, mug, or glass, tank, or gel, or stein, cancene, jug, or flask, or vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with, that's right, your favorite liquid, and I like coffee.
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Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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Well, only the people on Locals will know how I feel.
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So Alec Baldwin continues to claim that he did not have his finger on the trigger when that gun went off on the set of Rust.
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And there's, apparently there's somebody on set who is backing him up on that.
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It says that he had his finger sort of straight, you know, not on the, his finger was like straight along the barrel line.
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Maybe, maybe, maybe, and he claims that he would never point a gun at someone and then pull the trigger.
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So all of you gun owners are happy with that, right?
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As long as you point the loaded gun at somebody's head, but you don't pull the trigger, you're good, right?
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Is that I thought that, you know, despite the tragedy, that we, you know, shouldn't ignore.
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Despite the tragedy, I thought that this would teach people about gun safety.
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You know, I don't know who is advising Alec Baldwin on the PR, but number one, should have said he didn't have his finger on the trigger on day one.
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But, but, but, he should also say, you know, under any other conditions, it would be a gigantic mistake to point a gun at somebody.
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But I thought under these specific conditions, the proper controls had been in place.
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But whatever you do, don't ever point a gun at somebody, because I think we've learned from, from this, that that's not safe enough.
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But I guess that would maybe put him in a little bit of legal jeopardy.
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If he were to make any, any concession toward gun safety.
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So that's a shame, because the public should be learning that it wasn't just the trigger part that was the problem.
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It was pointing it at a human being, or anything that he didn't want to bullet in.
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And then assuming that he'd done enough, because he didn't pull the trigger.
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Well, Tulsi Gabbard is saying something pretty interesting.
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And I'm going to pass it along without an opinion on the medical truth of it, because how would I know, right?
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But Tulsi did a little video in saying that the so-called COVID pill that we're all excited about might encourage variants.
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Have I told you to follow the money critics very well?
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Do you realize we got ourselves into a situation where the only people who can fix this, you know, this virus problem from a scientific point of view have a huge incentive not to?
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They have a huge incentive to beat every variant one at a time.
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They have no incentive to beat all the variants, because that's when the money stops.
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All of their incentive is to beat one variant at a time in a way that guarantees more variants.
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If you had to make a prediction based on their business model, you would have to assume the pandemic would be perpetual.
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Now, I don't know how anything like this could be perpetual.
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You know, you've got two forces that are both, I don't know, predictably impossible not to be true.
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At the same time, the pharma big business model makes it impossible that it will stop.
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Impossible that it can't and impossible that it will at the same time.
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I tend to be optimistic, so I like to think we're going to get out of this one way or another.
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I mean, at some point, you reach something like herd immunity, even with the variants, I would imagine.
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Anyway, more in the, to add to the list of things that Trump did right, that Biden said was wrong, were wrong.
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And Biden had to change his policy to just do what Trump did.
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Now, these, apparently the courts had something to do with this, but Biden is going to keep the Remain in Mexico program.
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Now, I didn't read the article, so I assume that means Haitians who are coming up through the, you know, Mexico-American border.
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But imagine if, imagine if Trump had done this, you know, to expand it to include Haitians.
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It seems like, huh, it seems like the Biden administration is targeting people of color.
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Because first, it was the immigrants coming from Mexico, and then it was the Central Americans, and again, brown.
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And then we've added this next category of Haitians.
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Well, they're not white like Joe Biden, that's for sure.
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Normally, I would just ignore this sort of thing and say, oh, looks like an immigration problem.
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He's tightening it up against all the people who are coming in.
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I'm going to take the CNN, MSNBC method and say that, hey, if the immigrants are brown,
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somebody needs to explain what Joe Biden is doing about the Norwegian illegal immigrants,
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Has Joe Biden said one thing about keeping the Norwegian illegal immigrants out of the country?
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And that's a clear indication that the President Biden has some bias against the shithole countries.
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He doesn't use those words, but I'm sure he's thinking them.
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Because, remember, it used to be that you could report the news based on what people actually said or did.
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But today, it's quite common to judge people based on what you're pretty sure they're thinking.
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Well, the media disinformation machine is going nuts.
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And I like to remind people that if their worldview, which sometimes I call a frame, you know, your way of looking at a topic,
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if the frame you're using to examine a topic does not predict, maybe try another one.
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Because a view of reality that predicts what will happen next is probably the good one.
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But if it predicts, that's about as good as you can do.
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And he said, zero people have been charged with insurrection.
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How did your filter on reality square with that prediction?
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My prediction was, I didn't see any insurrection.
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I saw people who were, you know, lightly armed with small clubs and stuff.
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But I didn't see anything that would look like an attempt at an insurrection.
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It looked like people trying to stop what they believed was an insurrection.
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So my filter said since there was no insurrection, nobody would be charged with it.
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And there's no trigger for cognitive dissonance.
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Cognitive dissonance gets triggered when your worldview doesn't match what you're observing.
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Now, I got a tweet comment on this from a user on Twitter, Invisible Gorilla, who showed an article that said, quote,
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Legal experts have stated that insurrection is borderline impossible to prove in court.
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And thus, this prosecutorial tool has largely been left on the shelf.
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I think that's a general comment, not just about this situation.
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But so I guess insurrection is almost impossible to prove in court.
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Do you know what would make it even harder to prove in court?
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Well, I'm no legal scholar, so I'll need a fact check on this.
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But could I say that insurrection would be harder to prove in court if it never happened and everything involved was on 50 million videos?
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Again, I'm not a legal scholar, so I think that when it doesn't happen, it's a little extra harder to prove.
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I saw a tweet from Ian Bartesas today referring to an article written by General Hayden.
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General Hayden was a retired four-star general.
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And he was also the director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
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And before that, director of National Security Agency.
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And in his article, as pointed out by Ian, who read the article and pointed me to it,
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he refers to the Charlottesville hoax as if it's real, claims with no evidence that the journalists and scientists are truth-tellers.
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The CIA is telling us that the journalists and scientists are the truth-tellers?
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And then also, he called rioters protesters, you know, the riots from the summers, who clashed with police.
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Now, this is the ex-head of the CIA, who is still calling this an insurrection and still saying that Charlottesville, you know, that I assume that he's referring to the president's comments about Charlottesville, which are part of the hoax.
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And could you have a more clear signal that the CIA is not on the side of the American public?
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And I feel as if ex-heads of the CIA should not talk in public.
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There should be rule that says they just can't talk in public.
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I mean, it's probably totally unenforceable, but we're unconstitutional.
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Because whatever tiny bit of trust you had in the CIA, it has to go away after this.
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And he's a bold-faced liar who's clearly working against the interests of the country, if I'm to believe this.
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And by the way, this is not him being quoted so much as, you know, based on an article he wrote.
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And, you know, it's one thing to not trust the CIA entirely, but this is different.
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This is so bad, it's almost that you can't hold it in your head.
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Remember I told you that the best hypnotist could operate right in front of you and you wouldn't be able to see it?
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Because if your imagination can't include it, it's just sort of invisible to you, psychologically invisible.
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The CIA is so corrupt, based on this, you know, one ex-head of the CIA, who was pretty recent,
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I'm reading it, I'm looking at it, and in five minutes I'll forget about it and think about something else.
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It's like I can't put it in my head and keep it there.
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Because it's too outside my imagination that the CIA is literally an enemy of the people,
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or at least was, you know, as far as this guy goes.
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And it looks like that continued under Brennan, etc.
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So, I just don't even know how to process this.
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Yeah, your brain can't handle this, it's too big.
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I can feel it happening to me, and I still am powerless to resist.
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How many situations are there now that Trump was unambiguously right about?
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By the way, did you see the DCCC, some Democrat group, tried to tweet a graph that showed that
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Biden had reduced gas prices by releasing the reserves, except they gamed the y-axis so
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that a two-cent reduction, which could have been totally random, by the way, a two-cent reduction
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And they actually had the temerity to tweet that fucking thing, which got caught immediately,
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you know, immediately spotted by a number of people, including the Panda Tribune.
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And I think it was based, there's some suspicion that it was based on a parody, that somebody
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It looks like they couldn't tell if it was parody.
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Have you seen data that says that the CO2 level has stayed constant for the last 10 years?
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Is that considered scientifically valid at this point?
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I saw a Michael Schellenberger article that mentions that.
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Now, that's not enough to lower the temperature.
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Because that baseline amount would, according to the scientists, still raise the temperature
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So you'd have to take it down to closer to zero to actually change the temperature from
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And then the second part is the financial part of it.
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And it's starting to look as if the financial estimates of climate change destruction are just
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Because it turns out we're really good at adjusting.
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Let me give you one of the best, let's say, models for understanding the world that there
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A long time ago, when, let's say, my parents wanted some entertainment, they would gather
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What did all the smart people predict about television?
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The most obvious prediction you could make is that a television would make radio obsolete.
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And there's a new car produced, you know, every second.
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So then there was talk radio and political talk on radio.
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So every time you predict that something's going to go out of business pretty soon, it's
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When I started cartooning in the late 80s was when I first tried to get into it.
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It was already becoming obvious that newspapers would die.
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And every five years, I'd say to myself, well, it's not going to last another five years.
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And as of today, 33 almost years later, there are still newspapers.
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The simplest thing that you could have predicted is that newspapers would all go out of business.
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So it turns out that the reason they still exist is that they were cash cows in the first
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They could just reduce how much of a cash cow they were until they were negative.
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But once they reached the point of a break even, or negative, you think, well, it's done
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And then hedge funds started buying newspaper chains.
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But hedge funds are good at cutting costs where the original owners maybe were, for emotional
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or personal reasons or relationship reasons, couldn't do it.
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So the hedge fund will come in and say, I'm going to sell your building because it's worth
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But still, I feel like that's still not enough financial reason to take over these little
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I don't think that the hedge funds are taking them over just for money.
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And I'm going to put out a hypothesis that even, I'm not convinced about it, but here
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I think billionaires and big, rich hedge fund owners want to be in the game.
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And they know they have to own some media to be in the game.
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It could be that owning a media entity gets you sort of a ticket to hang out with other
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It's just an expensive way to buy a ticket to the show.
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And if you're hanging out with the other media moguls, you really do kind of know what's
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But if you had enough newspaper chains, who reads newspapers in 2021 and 2022?
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Do old people buy a lot of products and therefore the advertising in newspapers would be a good
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And when they do, it's the ones they used to buy anyway.
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They're not influenced by advertising the way young people are.
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So, old people also vote at a higher percentage than other people.
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So, suppose you could control a newspaper in a geographic area and the only people you
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Could you move an election that would be otherwise close just by having the old people consume
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But I also don't know another reason that the hedge funds would be buying newspapers.
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Because, you know, I've got an MBA and I can't see how it makes sense economically.
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But, so, I made a prediction-ish on Twitter that if the Mississippi abortion case tightens
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up abortion, that it would be a turn in the tide against Republicans, that it would activate
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Now, I got pushback from that from a highly rational source.
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Rich, quote, the people's pundit Barris, who goes by people's, peoples, with no apostrophe,
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He said, quote, I'm highly skeptical of the assertion that a Supreme Court ruling against
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Roe would result in political blowback favoring Democrats.
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And he goes through a thread with a number of reasons, which he summarizes as the pro-choice
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So, people are a little more nuanced than they used to be.
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Even the people who are in favor of abortion are also in favor of limiting it in ways that
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other people would largely agree it should be limited.
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So, the argument is that there are not enough Democrats who would care about this topic
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because it either wouldn't affect them personally, or it just doesn't look that different from
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Or, and then also that the places it's likely to change would be deep red states.
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And this will be a good test to see if I've taught you anything.
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So, this would be adding to what I already said on Twitter.
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So, you know, Rich, the people's pundit Barras, gives very good reasons.
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So, he gives data that's fully in context and makes sense to me, and he gives reasons
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why a rational person could look at this situation and say to themselves,
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I'll worry about my economics and my COVID and, you know, nuclear war.
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But, eh, you know, abortion's just, eh, it's not going to change that much.
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It doesn't matter what the reasons in the data are.
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It only matters what the fake news machine will do with it.
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And the fake news machine would use this as jet fuel.
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How do you turn something that's no big deal into a big deal?
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You say, it's part of a pattern of Republicans taking away bodily autonomy from women.
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Because as soon as you've made the point, and the fake news can simply make this narrative stick,
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Republicans are taking bodily autonomy away from women.
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Which, you know, I'm sure this ruling is about that.
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It doesn't matter how much autonomy was taken from anybody.
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The reasons and the facts will have nothing to do with this.
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It will be, can the fake news get X number of Democrats all riled up
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about loss of bodily autonomy to the evil Republicans?
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So, and then, now factor in that most votes are not movable
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The vast majority of people are going to vote their team
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You're only talking about a narrow sliver of people
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but I do think it changes the bias quite a bit.