In this episode of the podcast, we talk about UFOs, Elon Musk, and the Democratic Party. Plus, we find out if UFOs are real or not. Guests: Alex Blumberg, comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster. Thanks to caller Monica.
00:00:00.000And then we will be back to normal schedule. Won't you be happy? I know I will be. Sleeping is pretty hard on here.
00:00:09.000Now, how about the simultaneous sip? Anybody? Anybody? All you need is a paper cup and a vessel of any kind. Fill me with your favorite liquid, because I like coffee.
00:00:24.000And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine for the day thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. Go.
00:00:38.000Yeah, that's better. And Monica, go take care of yourself. Don't wait for this.
00:00:47.000So, yeah, the baby birds outside that sound like screaming babies is quite a big thing.
00:00:55.000And we're going to talk about the news. I just started looking at it, but it's very newsy today.
00:01:02.000So, Congress is holding a, or did, a presentation about UFOs, which they haven't done since the 60s.
00:01:11.000What do you think? Do you think UFOs are real or just something that's a visual sighting, but there's nothing real there?
00:01:20.000What do you think? How many say UFOs are real? Now, real could be either aliens or some other entity, but are they actually ships?
00:01:33.000What do you think? I'm going to say strong no. Strong no for me.
00:01:41.000And here's why. Apparently, Adam Schiff was involved in this Congressional UFO thing.
00:01:51.000I was sort of leaning pro-UFO until I saw that Adam Schiff might think they're real.
00:01:58.000And then I started thinking, I think this is a setup. There's a little foreshadowing going on here.
00:02:04.000Because it's possible that Russia will be, let's say, taken out of the 2024 election in America.
00:02:14.000Because the war might just occupy them, and who knows if Putin will even be there.
00:03:30.000If you can't get a clear picture, there's no UFO.
00:03:35.000No, if your only picture is a smudge, there's no UFO.
00:03:39.000There's another one that's hilariously, quite obviously, some kind of a fast-forward button on an interface that's just a perfect triangle.
00:11:38.000It's sort of the way he's negotiating, too, that makes it extra spicy.
00:11:41.000So, the Twitter CEO, I guess he felt he needed to do a long thread explaining why it is that they can't easily tell you how many people are spam or bots.
00:11:55.000And so he goes through this long thread.
00:11:58.000I think there might have been 20 tweets or something like that.
00:17:44.000Well, this whole story I told you about, Elon Musk tweeting at the CEO of Twitter.
00:17:50.000Somebody printed a Dilbert comic in the middle of that exchange.
00:17:54.000It was a Dilbert comic in which Dilbert was telling his boss, roughly speaking, if I can paraphrase myself.
00:18:01.000Dilbert was saying that the data is all useless because he can tweak the data with small changes of assumptions and it completely changes the results.
00:18:12.000So since the data is completely dependent on his assumptions, which are just guesses, the data can't be used for anything and it's worthless.
00:18:22.000And the boss replies, don't mention any of that stuff when you show it to the board.
00:18:27.000Now, Elon actually responded to that with a, with a laughing happy face.
00:18:35.000So suddenly I'm in the middle of that.
00:18:38.000And then somebody else printed a Dilbert comic from a photograph of Elon Musk's office.
00:18:43.000I guess he had a Dilbert comic on the wall.
00:18:45.000So suddenly, oh, there's, there's the actual comic somebody's putting on the locals.
00:18:52.000Over on locals you can paste images into the, uh, comments.
00:18:57.000And I gotta tell you the comments are way more interesting.
00:19:00.000Cause they got memes and when I talk about some, something somebody will show everybody else.
00:19:04.000So as I'm talking, it's like they're seeing a slideshow from the other users of what it is I'm talking about.
00:21:01.000I don't, I, I can't tell if that was a comment about my content or my actual look.
00:21:06.000Um, so his statement is that the Ukrainians are about to get massive amount of weapons and it's guaranteed because it's already in process.
00:21:19.000And that modern weaponry will hit these Ukrainians who are fighting for their homeland.
00:21:23.000And basically there's Russian is telling the, he's telling the Russian public that Ukraine is going to win this thing.
00:21:29.000Now, he didn't say that exactly, but he said it.
00:21:34.000He basically said Ukraine is going to win.
00:21:36.000And he said there's, you can't beat them because they're going to be armed to the teeth.
00:21:40.000There's going to be a million of them and they're fighting for their homeland and you can't beat them.
00:24:22.000Here, here's another thought that I would expect to be on the mainstream media pretty soon.
00:24:27.000Uh, have you ever seen an incumbent running for office without talking about accomplishments and only talking about how the other team is bad and you better elect us so that you don't get that bad stuff?
00:24:40.000And the argument is, you asshole, we elected you and we still got a white supremacist blowing up a grocery store with guns.
00:25:14.000You should have the, the challenger should be a criticizer.
00:25:17.000The incumbent should be an accomplishment person.
00:25:19.000But because Biden has no accomplishments, CNN is trying to give them a boost by talking only about the shooting, which they would say is a gun control problem.
00:25:30.000So they would, that's their narrative against the Republicans.
00:25:34.000And the abortion law thing, which is just another narrative against the Republicans.
00:25:37.000Both of these are Democrat failures, aren't they?
00:25:43.000Because the Democrats wanted to keep abortion the way it was, but it's not.
00:25:48.000So that's a Democrat failure, even though there's nothing they could do about it because they don't have the majority.
00:25:52.000But it's a failure in terms of policy.
00:25:54.000And then the, the shooting happened, you know, a year into Biden's administration, and I don't believe there are any laws that he's passed that would have changed it.
00:26:19.000So why are they blaming this on the Republicans when they have control of everything and they didn't do a damn thing?
00:26:25.000So this is the weakest, the weakest administration I've ever seen, by far, I think.
00:26:33.000I mean, certainly in my life, it's the weakest administration.
00:26:36.000Where if you can literally have the richest man in the world say,
00:26:40.000I think whoever runs the teleprompter is in charge, and even his own side will say, yeah, that's not, that's not too far.
00:26:47.000Even if you disagree with that statement, that whoever runs the teleprompter controls the country right now, even if you disagree, you do not say to yourself, that's taking it too far.
00:27:57.000How is it that with all the people and all the access to the country and all the technology and all the, you know, the size of things that you need to bring in to be bad is, you know, small.
00:28:58.000I feel as though we must be able to catch them all.
00:29:02.000And the only way that's possible is if we're monitoring all communications basically everywhere with our foreign entities, foreign partners.
00:29:18.000I don't believe it would be any possibility that we would be so terrorism-free, relatively speaking, from foreign terrorists, the domestic ones we still have for some reason.
00:29:56.000So here's why we can stop a foreign terrorist.
00:29:59.000Because there's nothing to stop us from stopping them.
00:30:03.000There's no law that says, no, don't stop that foreign terrorist.
00:30:08.000But what happens if it's a domestic terrorist?
00:30:11.000We actually have laws that won't let you do anything about it.
00:30:16.000Because they're going to say, well, it's free speech, legal gun ownership, and we don't put mentally ill people in any kind of institution against their will.
00:30:29.000If it were a foreign person who also happened to be mentally ill, we would lock them up right away.
00:31:20.000I'm saying that I can't think of another explanation.
00:31:23.000But remember, I'm also an author of a book in which I warn you, just because you can't think of another explanation, that has nothing to do with whether there's another explanation.
00:31:36.000It has everything to do with your inability to imagine other things.
00:31:41.000So if you can't imagine any other possibility, it might be a problem with your imagination.
00:49:55.000I mean, I, he may have apologized for something, but it was of his own doing, I think.
00:50:00.000I don't think he's ever been forced to apologize for anything.
00:50:01.000Um, and I think because his audience just goes up, no matter how hard he is attacked, that he's created a good situation.
00:50:13.000So he's, he's as close to uncancellable as you can get, but he's not, right?
00:50:20.000He's as uncancellable as maybe Hannity in the sense that, you know, he's a, he's a big profit source for the network.
00:50:30.000And he's so popular that it would just cause a, you know, can you imagine if either of those two got canceled in some way?
00:50:37.000Now, again, I'm not saying that I agree with their, uh, opinions or politics.
00:50:42.000That's a completely different subject.
00:50:44.000But if, if the two tentpoles of conservative thought, at least popular conservative thought, um, you know, if they got canceled in some way, that'd be a pretty big deal.
00:50:58.000All right. Um, more Democrats watched Tucker than anyone else. Is that true?
00:51:08.000Uh, what happened to the Matt Gaetz scandal?
00:51:11.000Well, let's go back to that Matt Gaetz so-called scandal.
00:51:16.000Were you expecting by now that he would be indicted?
01:04:23.000Now, part of that also was that the science seemed to indicate that if you didn't drop dead fairly soon from the vaccination, and I didn't, that you probably were way better off and that your risk of dying from COVID would go from really small, you know, something under, I don't know, one or two percent, to basically forget about even thinking about it.
01:04:47.000So, I do worry about a two percent risk of dying.
01:04:54.000You know, with my age and asthma, etc.
01:04:56.000Well, it's hard to estimate anybody's individual risk, but I figure two percent, you know, maybe on the high side, two percent, one percent, on the high side.
01:05:08.000But a one or two percent chance of death is a lot.
01:05:11.000I would avoid all two percent chances of dying.
01:05:54.000So anyway, the point of that was how I personally felt and then people interpreted that as being some kind of recommendation, which it clearly was not.
01:06:02.000Now, the context that other people didn't know is how many times I've said I'm not going to make a medical recommendation.
01:06:10.000And how many times I said every individual is different.
01:06:13.000You just need to make up your own mind.
01:06:16.000If you do that, then you would have seen my tweet as just talking about how I felt at the moment.
01:06:22.000You know, my freedom had been returned before it was taken away again, but it was returned momentarily.
01:09:08.000But I was smug about the thought process.
01:09:11.000I was never smug that getting the vaccination would 100% be the best situation for me and not kill me by accident.
01:09:22.000I was never unaware and I never underplayed that a vaccination that was, let's say, speedily developed would be as safe as one that you had a lot of information about.
01:09:37.000So how could you be smug about a guess?
01:09:41.000I told you 100 times that I didn't know if getting the vaccination was a good decision or not and I put it off as long as possible so there would be as much information as possible of other people taking it.
01:09:52.000And if there had been a way to avoid it entirely and still be able to fly, I would have done it.
01:10:01.000Does that sound smug as I talk to you now?
01:10:05.000I'll tell you what was smug when I debunked your bad arguments.
01:10:10.000Because there were a lot of people who were on my side, in essence, but I had bad arguments to get there and I couldn't handle that.
01:10:18.000So I was definitely smug about, let me tell you, let me give you the mask argument.
01:10:24.000I'm smug that I'm 100% right about masks and always have been.
01:11:03.000We know that the more virus you're exposed to in the beginning matters and we know that the masks don't work because they distribute the virus in many ways and they don't stop it.
01:11:17.000But that distribution guarantees that the person that you're standing right in front of is not getting a full dose of virus as much as it could be.
01:11:28.000Now, no engineer is going to argue with what I just said because they know you can't blow out a candle with a mask on.
01:11:36.000You could try, but the air is going to come out the side.
01:11:41.000If all it does is come out the sides, you're reducing the amount of virus that you're shooting into somebody's face.
01:11:48.000And in those cases, but not in the case where everybody's just sitting in the same room for eight hours.
01:11:54.000If everybody's just sitting in the same room for eight hours, well, maybe the room is just so full of virus by then it doesn't make much difference.
01:12:02.000But for general, you know, communication and relationships, if you could remove the firehose of virus directly into my face, even if I get it, even if I get infected, I should have much less of a illness or death.
01:13:09.000Now, the only people who are going to push back are going to say stuff like, no, or LOL.
01:13:15.000But nobody in the comments is going to give a, like a one sentence pushback where, oh, Scott, you're forgetting this part of physics or something like that.
01:15:32.000Have you ever been in your car and you forgot to bring a fresh mask and there is one in the car from a family member that had just used it?
01:15:41.000Do you ever pick up that mask that your family member used and put it on because it's your only mask and you forgot to bring one?
01:16:43.000If the experts had described it to you the way I just did, about just reducing the plumes, everybody would have said, oh, shoot, I guess they do work in some situations, but I don't want to wear them or it's not enough of a difference.
01:17:00.000But it would have completely changed how you felt about it.