Episode 1720 Scott Adams: Kamala Harris Loves Space, Elon Musk, Trump Gets Fake Newsed, And More
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
153.01816
Summary
The first black character will be introduced in the coming days, and it will look nothing like the other white characters on the show, except that he'll be colored like all of them except for the fact that he has a shaved head.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and congratulations for making it to the highlight of civilization.
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Some call it a morning ritual, but your brain might want to process it differently.
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You might say to yourself, this is just something you do to have a good day.
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Or maybe you come here for the fellowship, which is a vaguely sexist-sounding word,
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but I don't know what the other word would be, the personship.
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And by the way, I'd like to make an announcement that I've made a decision on pronouns, everybody.
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I had been resisting having pronouns mentioned in my profile or anything,
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So my pronouns are, number one, if you're a member of the media
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and you're speaking about me in any reporting kind of a context,
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Anything else I would find deeply disrespectful.
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I would invite you to use any pronoun you like, just like before.
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I did not come up with this idea, but I wish I had,
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And by the way, would you like to take this experience up a notch?
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And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or sign,
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a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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It's the thing that makes everybody feel better,
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I will use this platform to make an important announcement.
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Bulletin, bulletin, breaking news, breaking news.
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I will be introducing, in the coming days, the first black Dilbert character.
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But I've told you before that the reason I have never introduced a black character into Dilbert
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was, number one, how the heck do I draw that character so it's not going to get me in trouble?
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And the second one is, what kind of personality flaw can I give this character as a white author
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in 2022 writing for a black character that I would add to the Dilbert cast, which I am adding?
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And I thought to myself, there is no way to do it.
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Because if there's one thing I've always known about my career with Dilbert, that at around
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the age 65, sort of that retirement age, you know, traditionally, I'm not planning to retire
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immediately, but, you know, sort of a traditional retirement age, 65, I always said to myself,
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If I'm going to get canceled, I want to go out in a big flaming fireball.
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Well, the worst thing that could ever happen to me, like, this would just be so incompatible
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with my personality, would be just to say, hey, folks, I've had a good run.
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If I'm going to go out, I want to take the whole block with me.
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I'm talking about if I'm going to leave the stage, you're going to know I left the stage,
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Number one, I drew the black character looking like all the white characters, except he'll
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be colored black, because I realized that none of my characters look like people.
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So why the hell did I have to worry that he had to look black, except for, you know, the
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So basically, he'll just have the same features as everybody else, but he'll have a shaved
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So I don't have to deal with hair, because he has a shaved head.
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And I don't have to deal with any kind of, like, facial difference that would, you know,
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I just make him look like every other character in the Dilbert comic, because they don't really
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So, you know, it's not like I'm making some big differentiation between individuals.
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So, and by the way, this was because I asked on Twitter for suggestions, especially a black
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But when I saw some different versions that other people did, I thought, ah, somebody figured
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And then in terms of the personality flaw, do you want to guess what the personality flaw
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The first black character added to the main cast.
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So I don't want to do what Burke Bretha did when he added a black character.
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He made the character a hacker so that the black character would be the smartest person in
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the thing, but, you know, would be a little naughty because it was an underage kid.
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Even earlier, it was a little too gentle, but just sort of you had to do that.
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So here's what I settled on as the character flaw.
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And by the way, did I tell you the character has a name?
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So the character has a name and the name will start to give it away.
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So he's the first black character in Dilbert and his name will be Dave.
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Because on the first day he's introduced, the boss will introduce him as a solution to
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So the boss will say explicitly, hey, we hired Dave because we need to get more diversity.
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So Dave, the first black character, you're never going to know if he's just screwing with you.
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So you can't tell, does he really think that identifying this way is like actually just what he wants?
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And so because it's ambiguous, the staff will be endeared to him because he will be such a pain that he has to management.
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And management just won't know what to do with him because he knows he can get away with murder because he can, just because he can.
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And so he's going to use it to just have the best time with a straight face.
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I ask people for suggestions and, you know, I use them in the strip.
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So I don't want to devalue the value of the input I got on this character.
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And I just think it's funny that his name is Dave.
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And it may or may not be loosely based on my brother, whose name may or may not be Dave.
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And he may or may not be famous for you can never tell if he's telling the truth.
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Well, I'll tell you one story, just so you can get a sense for it.
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I remember my brother visiting me in college because he was, coincidentally, he was dating somebody in that college.
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And he picked up a pumpkin that was in his then-girlfriend's, or the woman he was dating, her room.
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And he lifts it up, and he starts talking about, I forget how it started, but he said he'd been a pumpkin hefter.
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And, of course, she asked, a pumpkin hefter, what's that?
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He goes, well, pumpkin hefter, you know, I'm sort of paraphrasing here from bad memory.
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But I believe he said, well, a pumpkin hefter, I used to work on a pumpkin farm.
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And you couldn't weigh every pumpkin, but you still needed to know their approximate weight.
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And the hefter would pick up the pumpkin, and they'd see, you know, they'd judge its heft.
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And then they would record that and then throw it on the truck.
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And so when he was picking up the pumpkin, he was like, ah, this is about 3.2, 3.4 pounds, whatever he said.
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And everybody was quite impressed at his experience as a pumpkin hefter.
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Now, I happened to be in the room, and so I was supporting the story with details.
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I don't remember what I said, but I might have said something like, I tried to be a pumpkin hefter, but it takes some sort of natural skill.
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But I worked for years trying to match my older brother's pumpkin hefting talent.
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And they had to drop out, you know, because not everybody makes a grade.
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Yeah, if you came in late, this doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?
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But anyway, Dave, the first black character, will have a little bit of a personality like that.
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Kamala Harris was giving a speech about space, and I'd like to read it to you because it's rather moving.
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Yeah, whoever wrote this for her, I don't know.
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Maybe she wrote it herself, but I think somebody wrote it for her.
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And you may have heard that there have been staff defections on the Kamala Harris staff.
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So I'm guessing that the talent pool might be getting a little thinner.
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Specifically, the speech writing talent pool may have, I don't know, may have gotten a little less.
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So here's the stirring oration that she gave about space.
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I think everyone here recognizes how extraordinary space is.
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Whether it is satellites that orbit the Earth, humans that land on the moon,
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or telescopes that peer into the furthest reaches of the universe.
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It spurs our imaginations, and it forces us to ask big questions.
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Now, I took this to heart because I found it moving.
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And yesterday, I was thinking I needed some more bottled water.
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And normally what I do is I drive to my local Safeway, get a few, you know, a few cases of bottled water, put them in the car, drive them home.
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But after I read this, and I found that the space, it affects us all, and it connects us all, I thought I should maybe think again.
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And so before I drove to the store and got my bottled water, I peered into space, and I tried to figure out how it was affecting me and how I would affect it,
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because I'm connected to everybody through space.
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And the last thing I want to do is move some empty space, affect it, which will cause a ripple effect, because emptiness does that.
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And so if you push the emptiness, the emptiness will cause like a domino effect, affecting all of us, connecting everybody.
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And I thought, I could kill somebody just by going to buy water, because the space variable that I had not considered once, not once, I had not even thought about this.
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So now that I've been spurred in my imagination to know how extraordinary space is,
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I will take it into consideration in all of my thinking and all of my decisions,
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because it's so extraordinary and big, also very big, very, very big and extraordinary, that space.
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And not only that, but listen to this, this is important.
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She said, our space capabilities, I swear this is like Dr. King soaring oratory.
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If you don't get goosebumps from this next sentence, you're dead inside.
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Our space capabilities provide for global awareness, global connectivity, and global navigation.
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This is why our administration has proposed the largest single increase in our military space capability in our nation's history.
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If you ignore the fact that she's emptier than space itself, if you ignore the fact that Biden is a few quasars short of a universe or something, I don't know.
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This is actually the right thing to do, because they have identified that space is vital for the future.
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For defense of the earth, defense of the country, economics, everything.
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Just doesn't seem like they're selling it just right.
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Let's talk about Elon Musk being interesting again.
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He was talking about Netflix, and he said the woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable.
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Was it right after he said that or right before it?
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Was he responding to it, or did he make it tank?
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No, I think their numbers made it tank, because they lost subscribers, and they were forecast to gain a few million, and they actually lost.
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But was it, did I not tell you the same thing, basically?
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I've been telling you for a long time that movies are unwatchable now.
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If you're a writer, and you have to service wokeness, it's so restricting that you don't have enough tools to get a proper story going.
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If you could do all the wokeness and still get a proper story, well, okay.
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But if the wokeness makes it too hard to write the story, and I think probably it does, then you just get crap.
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And I think that all movies and TV are now just unmitigated crap at this point.
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It's not even, it's barely an entertainment field.
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And I've got, I have, I think I signed up for almost every streaming service there is, or at least the top six or whatever,
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because I was desperate to find anything I could watch anywhere that would take my mind off the fact that I've drawn Dilbert 11,000 times,
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I just want anything that isn't terrible to be on, and I can't find it.
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All the streaming services, you can run through the ones you want to watch in, what, three hours?
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And then you're done, and then you have to, you forget to.
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And then you go back and look every now and then.
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I go back to the Disney streaming app every now and then.
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Is anybody having the same problem that it's impossible to watch a show because it's so hard to find anything that you would watch,
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It suddenly went from all kinds of stuff to watch to nothing to watch.
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And some of it's because it's crap, but others it's because by making the interfaces all different apps and different ways to find things,
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If I want to go back to watch a movie I just started, which I tried to do, I don't know where to go look.
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I say to myself, oh, I'd like to watch the rest of that movie that was on Netflix.
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And sit down with the food with the intention of turning on your iPad or your TV
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and finding a show you can watch before your food is done.
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So you start eating and flipping through the channels and see if two people can find a show that they would both watch
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Unless you happen to be the two people who will watch anything.
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Well, so I agree with Elon that the woke mind virus is killing the streaming services.
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I guess Tesla announced that they're making robo-taxis.
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And that they're expecting them to be in volume production in 2024.
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So there'd be no steering wheel and no pedals, maybe.
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I mean, I'm not sure anything's confirmed at this point.
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I guess, actually, Elon Musk did confirm that, I guess.
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And he said there'll be a number of other innovations around it, which are quite exciting.
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Because when you read this, you think, oh, it's another story about, you know, maybe autonomous cars.
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You probably won't have to worry about this in the future.
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This is one of the biggest stories of all time.
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Number one, if you're as big as Tesla and you want to enter a new market so that you can keep growing,
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you have to take over gigantic markets or else there's not enough in the market to grow your company
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So if you're a trillion-dollar company, it doesn't help you much to buy a billion-dollar company
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or get into a market where you can only make a billion dollars.
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So he has to go after enormous markets, enormous ones.
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Now, the self-driving market, I think, is that one, right?
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It's the only thing that looks like it could be bigger than individually-owned cars.
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Because over time, don't you think self-driving cars will take over for regular cars?
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But suppose we got to a place where we had mostly autonomous cars.
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Well, besides solving climate change, do you know how easy it would be to get from one place to another
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And then maybe sometimes you can share one or it just comes when you want it
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and it knows what all the streetlights are doing so it never has to stop for a light
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because it knows where the other autonomous cars are
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so they can just cross each other at, you know, slow speed.
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So you basically, it changes the entire energy structure of the planet over time,
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Now, you say to yourself, how is Elon Musk or anybody going to sell this to Congress
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because there's going to be a regulatory hurdle here, right?
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Elon Musk could clear that regulatory hurdle fairly easily.
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And I'm not sure anybody else could, but I think he could do it easily.
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He walks into a room and people think he can do what he says he's going to do, right?
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So we'll limit the things until we have more data.
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So we're asking only approval for a pilot in a certain place.
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And I guarantee you that deaths by automobiles will go down substantially
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Let's say there's no regular cars on the highway.
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Actually, I guess it would have to share the road to be a good test.
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Because I'm pretty sure he can sell it based on drunk driving deaths alone.
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I'm going to eliminate drunk driving deaths eventually.
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And he's the only entrepreneur I've ever heard say that his product will probably kill people.
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Now, not a specific product, but he basically said going to Mars will end up in people dying.
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And we're going anyway because it's that important.
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That is a really unusual thing for an entrepreneur to say, like directly.
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I think Elon Musk is the only person who would be credible enough to stand in front of Congress
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and say autonomous robotaxis will kill some people.
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They will also save tens of thousands more per year because no drunk driving, at least wherever these cars are.
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In the short run, it doesn't save much because they're just feathering into the mix.
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In the long run, it eliminates one of the biggest causes of death.
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And forget about drunk driving, just automobile accidents in general.
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So do you think Elon Musk could not sell the honest story that the robotaxis will kill people?
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We're going to do everything we can to make it not happen.
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Can you imagine Congress turning down that proposition, assuming that he sells it in a clean way,
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and then he goes to Twitter and just starts dissecting anybody who said no to it?
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I don't know that anybody else could, but I think he would.
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Think about how far these our best entrepreneurs are thinking ahead.
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Jeff Bezos is building, you know, it seems funny that Bezos would do Amazon.com,
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and then he's doing his own, you know, rocket-making company, Blue Verizon.
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But you know someday he's going to deliver Amazon packages to off-world locations, right?
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Amazon will absolutely deliver to other planets.
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That Bezos, like, these guys are so far ahead of the curve
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so maybe that's all the reason that Bezos needs.
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But Amazon is going to have to compete with companies
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and I think the self-driving cars are not just going to be the autonomous cars,
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but I think it's going to be no steering wheel situation.
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that his entire business would go out of business in, I don't know,
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15 years or whenever autonomous cars become the thing,
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that will put his current company out of business, in a sense.
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Because once everything is a robo-taxi, you don't need to buy a Tesla.
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So the size of these bets and how many decades in advance they're thinking
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It's honestly just thrilling to watch people operate at this level
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And I guess she's got her lawyers to send him a cease and desist letter,
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basically warning him away from calling her a traitor,
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to anybody who has served in the military or is serving,
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and anybody who just sort of doesn't like stuff like this,
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that would rise to the level of a treasonous lie
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That is a hell of a thing for a sitting senator
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She was a politician, so, I mean, that has to be factored in.
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At the moment, she has not announced she's running for anything.
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that she's going to take legal action, meaning writing a letter?
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and then getting the press to act like it's a legal action,
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I don't think it has any legal anything, right?
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I just don't know what he thought he would gain by that.
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but the fact that supporting free speech in 2022
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How would you like to be running for election as a Democrat
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while knowing that if somebody comes out in favor of free speech,
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I mean, can Republicans win any harder than that?
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and people are just like, oh, that's sort of just a Republican thing.
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The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department
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that struck down federal mask mandates on public transportation.
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The New York Times is going to say, oh, that's what you're doing.
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I'm not sure on what grounds they're going to do it,
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is to literally say you should defund the Justice Department.
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Because you should actually call in the director and say,
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and just explain why they have so many resources
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I want him to explain what they're going to not do
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Wouldn't you like to see the Senate bring them in,
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and it doesn't look like your budget is being used
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Now, this is such an indictment of the fake news
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because anybody who saw the actual interference,